The Thirteenth Skull

by Rick Yancey

  It was around five o’clock and nearly dark. They dumped me on the bed and the lock went snick. I listened to the absolute silence—if you can listen to absolute silence.

  Dr. Mingus had a funny accent, thick and slushy. Tiny beads of spit hung on his sliver-thin lower lip as he talked.

  This will go easily enough, if you cooperate. We’ll take some measurements, run a few nonintrusive tests, sample a bit of your blood . . .

  Beneath the château, behind a sealed metal door, at the bottom of a flight of stairs was a medical complex. Operating rooms. Examination rooms. A room with a gleaming white CT scan machine. And other rooms I didn’t get to look in, though I may have been inside them, because Dr. Mingus gave me a shot that put me under, I’m not sure for how long, but it seemed like a very long time. I don’t know what he did to me while I was out. I just know when I came to he was just beaming, like a little kid who had found a special surprise under the Christmas tree, and I was feeling like a scooped-out pumpkin from a different, darker holiday.

  In cabin thirteen, I buried my face in the pillow.

  I am a genetic engineer, Alfred. Do you know what a genetic engineer does?

  Needles extending from syringes the size of my wrist. Vials of dark, arterial blood—my blood—rows of them, each with a different colored label: Spec Ops . . . GDT . . . Sofa . . . That last one confused me, but it was about the tenth he drained out of me and my vision was pretty blurry by that point. Sofa? What the heck was Sofa?

  This is very exciting. The most significant development in the field in my lifetime. In anyone’s lifetime, Alfred! You are at the center of the most astounding breakthrough since Watson and Crick cracked the code!

  Dr. Mingus injected me with something that made me feel very good, sleepy, and floaty. His wide face swam in and out of focus as he leaned over me. I was tied to a gurney and they were wheeling me toward the room with the big scanner.

  This will not hurt, Alfred, but you must remain very still while we image your brain. Have you ever had a CT scan before? It’s not painful.

  As I lay inside the scanner I think I heard Nueve’s voice and the name “Sofia,” but I told myself I was dreaming or hallucinating, but it reminded me of Samuel. He was my guardian and he had sworn to protect me. Where was he? And who was going to protect me now?

  After the scan, I looked up into Dr. Mingus’s face and whispered, Am I done?

  For today. Tomorrow we have a few more tests. I’m going to need some tissue samples. Tell me, Alfred, have you ever had an operation?

  They were going to put me under, open me up, and take samples of all my major organs. Dr. Mingus was particularly interested in my heart . . . He was going to slice out a piece of my heart.

  You are blessed, Alfred Kropp. Do you believe that?

  As he slid a needle into my groin.

  A gift to all mankind . . .

  As he shined a blinding light into my eyes.

  The power of life, yes?

  Like some horrible Halloween mask, his face. Wide and flat and blank. He barely had any eyebrows and his eyes were black, death-dark eyes, like a shark’s. The only expression I saw in them the whole time reminded me of a kid I knew in Ohio who enjoyed burning ants with a magnifying glass. The truly scary thing is there’s a lot of Dr. Minguses running around in the world, but I had the Dr. Mingus-iest of them all. He didn’t just like his work and he more than loved it. Like Nueve, he was his work.

  The power of God himself . . .

  The pillow on my bed smelled of lavender. Spit ran out my open mouth and I breathed that in, the smell of spit, the smell of lavender.

  They brought me into the last room, the worst room, where a dentist’s chair was anchored to the floor. The two goons dragged me across the tile floor and my toe scraped across the metal drain cover in the middle of the room. They threw me into the chair and tightened straps across my arms and over my ankles. Dr. Mingus swung the chair around and brought his face very close to mine. His breath smelled very sweet, as sweet as cotton candy, and my stomach rolled.

  One last test for the day, Alfred, more for my own benefit than science’s, for I am curious and I will confess a little skeptical. Like a Missourian, I wish to see it with my own eyes.

  He stepped away and I saw Ashley standing between the two stone-faced goons. They were holding her arms out from her sides. I was still pretty dopey from the shot, and at first I thought I was hallucinating. What I was seeing couldn’t be what I was seeing.

  Dr. Mingus stepped between me and Ashley, but I could see her face over his shoulder—she was at least a head taller than him—and I could also see what he held in his right hand.

  A scalpel.

  I jerked in the chair. The straps yanked me back. Mingus’s shoulder hunched and pivoted forward as he shoved the scalpel into the middle of Ashley’s chest.

  Then he pushed the blade straight down toward her belly button. Her knees buckled, but the two guys kept her on her feet.

  Mingus stepped away. Ashley’s chin dropped to her chest. A swirl of blond hair and the drip-drip-drip of her blood splattering on the cold tile, forming rivulets that ran toward the metal drain, and I remember thinking, Oh, that’s why there’s a drain in the floor.

  Mingus turned to me.

  Show me the gift.

  Candy-breath, whispering.

  Show me the power of God!

  He cut a four-inch-long groove into my palm, threw off the straps, and flung me out of the chair. The men holding Ashley stepped away, and she crumpled to the floor as if in slow motion, coming to rest on her side, curled up like I was curled up now on my little bed in my little cabin, breathing in lavender and the smell of my own spit.

  I crawled to her.

  Her eyes were open, but I saw no spark of life in them.

  Then a voice I had heard before whispered inside my head, Beloved!

  My vision clouded. I was seeing her through a white film, a mist of shadow and light.

  My beloved . . .

  Something familiar and warm had come to me—or was it always there? I had felt it first in Merlin’s Cave, a being at once intimate and alien, so familiar but at the same time so terrifyingly different. The Sword of Kings, the gift passed down by heaven’s hands, was in this world but not of this world, my father had told me, and so was this presence around me now, between me and Ashley, joining me to Ashley.

  Lying beside her, I pressed my bleeding hand into the gaping wound in her chest, and with my other hand I smoothed the blond hair away from her face.

  In the name of Saint Michael . . .

  I couldn’t feel the floor beneath me. I was floating in the white cloud. I was still in that room but also in a different place, a place where Mingus and the OIPEP Mafia couldn’t go. A still place that didn’t touch any other place on earth. A place with no center.

  Prince of Light, hear my prayer.

  Her eyelids fluttered, black butterflies, and her hands gripped my wrist. Our blood mixed. I could feel the beat of her heart.

  She was going to live.

  03:04:27:51

  I dreamed I was sitting on a hilltop with an old man. We leaned against an ancient oak tree, watching workmen on the promontory below stack great white stones, one on top of the other, and when one stone slid into place more workmen filled the cracks with mortar.

  I asked the old man what they were building.

  “Camelot,” he answered.

  The castle was rising three hundred feet above an inlet filled with jagged rocks and razor-sharp outcroppings of stone. I could hear the crash of surf and, just beneath it, a high-pitched wail, like a swift current hidden beneath calm water.

  “I’ve been here before,” I told the old man.

  He nodded. “So have I.”

  “Who’s that crying?” I asked.

  He smiled at me. “It is I.”

  Then he reached up and unzipped his face. The flaps of skin fell away. He pulled out his skull, white at first, like the stones of
the castle beneath us; then it turned clear as glass. Only the eye sockets remained dark, filled with a shadow that no light could chase away.

  “Touch.”

  I woke up soaked in sweat, still lying on top of the covers in my jumpsuit, my wounded hand throbbing beneath its bandage. Someone was in the room with me. I saw his hiking boots and, resting between them, the end of his black cane.

  “Ashley,” I whispered.

  “Far from it,” Nueve said.

  “I know you’re not Ashley, you jerk. Is Ashley alive?”

  “Why wouldn’t she be? She’s been touched by an angel.”

  I lunged toward him. His cane swooshed through the air and I felt the tip of the knife poking into the soft flesh beneath my chin.

  “Inadvisable, Alfred.”

  “You won’t kill me. I’m a Special Item now.”

  “Dr. Mingus believes he may have more than enough material to accomplish our goal. Like most scientists, he possesses an optimism bordering on arrogance. One might say, however, that that is precisely what arrogance is: optimism taken to its extreme. What? You’d rather not discuss philosophy?”

  “You tricked me.”

  “You asked to be extracted from the civilian interface and Camp Echo could not be farther from it.”

  “You know what I mean. You were never going to give me a new identity.”

  “My mission was twofold: the immediate concern of obtaining the Great Seal and the long-range one of protecting a Special Item of vital importance to international security.”

  “My blood.”

  He smiled. “You know what I am, Alfred.”

  “That’s right. You’re a jerk.”

  “I am the Superseding Protocol Agent.”

  I knew what he meant. What I wanted didn’t matter. Even what his boss Abby Smith wanted didn’t matter. Only the mission mattered. I wondered how that worked. Normally a boss can tell you what to do or not do, but a SPA didn’t have to follow those rules. And if that was true, then what rules did he have to follow? I thought I knew the answer, and that made my heart speed up.

  “Where is Abby?” I asked.

  “As I told you in Knoxville, you should avoid asking questions to which you already know the answers. It creates the false impression of stupidity. Director Smith has returned to headquarters to plead your case personally before the board. The director suffers from a certain sentimentality coupled with a startling naïveté about the dynamics of our organization. The true power of OIPEP, Alfred, does not lie with the director. It lies with the board, and he who controls the board, controls the Company.”

  “What about Ashley?”

  “What about her?”

  “She’s my extraction coordinator. You’re not going to extract me now, so what’s going to happen to her?”

  “That, Alfred, you will never know.”

  I looked at him. He looked back. He had no expression except one of mild curiosity.

  “You have had thoughts of escape,” he whispered. “You may put away such fantasies. You will never leave Camp Echo.”

  It took a second for that to sink in. Even after my “examination” by Dr. Mingus the day before, I figured at some point they would take me to the island in Abby Smith’s PowerPoint presentation. I assumed at some point they would be finished with me. My heart rate kicked up another notch.

  “You’re not dumping me on OIPEP Island?”

  “You’ve taken your last dump. Tomorrow morning Dr. Mingus will perform one final procedure: a frontal lobotomy. Do you know what a lobotomy is?”

  “I think it’s where they cut off part of your brain.”

  “Precisely. The thinking part. The human part.”

  “You’re gonna make me a vegetable.”

  “It’s quite painless.”

  “Really? Is that how yours went?”

  He smiled. He picked up a small black box sitting on the little table beside the bed. “Do you recall the good ship Pandora?”

  “Yes.” The Pandora was an OIPEP jetfoil where I had first met Samuel and Ashley, the boat that had taken us to Egypt after Mike Arnold stole the Seals of Solomon.

  “It was on that ship that your dear friend, your surrogate father, Samuel St. John, the former Operative Nine, first extracted your wondrous hemoglobin—without your knowledge or consent, I might add.”

  “Right, to stick in the bullets to fight the demons. I already know that.”

  “Yes, but there is something you do not know. While you were under anesthetic, before you awoke in your cabin aboard that most excellent vessel, he also ordered the insertion of Special Device 1031.”

  He waited for me to ask what a Special Device 1031 was. I didn’t.

  “How does your head feel right now, Alfred? Does it hurt? Have you been suffering from headaches since you returned to Knoxville?”

  He didn’t wait for me to answer. The black metal box turned over and over between his hands. I saw two buttons, one blue, one red, and some kind of numeric keypad beneath them.

  “Do you remember, after we rescued you from the clutches of Jourdain Garmot, asking me how we found you, since he had assured you Vosch had not been followed?”

  This time he did wait for an answer. The silence drew out. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the little black box.

  “You put something inside my head.”

  “Not I. Samuel St. John did. Aboard the Pandora. I believe we covered this. Special Device 1031 is no bigger than the eraser of a pencil, Alfred. It has been implanted near the corpus callosum, the structure that connects the two hemispheres of your brain.”

  “It’s a tracking device?”

  “That’s one of its functions, yes. It has another. Inside Special Device 1031 is a tiny pellet, no bigger than the lead of our metaphorical pencil.”

  He scooted forward in his chair and held the black box about a foot from my nose.

  “The blue button arms the pellet. The red button begins the detonation sequence. Thirty seconds.”

  “And the keypad?”

  “A failsafe. If the correct code is entered before the thirty seconds expire, your headache is nothing that two hundred milligrams of ibuprofen can’t handle. If not . . .” Now whispering: “Boom.”

  I watched as the pad of his index finger mashed down on the blue button. The red one lit up.

  “You will cooperate, Alfred.” His finger now hovered over the red button. The red light lit up the grooves of his fingerprint. “And abandon any foolish notion of escape.”

  He pressed the button. The number 30 popped up in the display window right above the keypad. It seemed to switch to 29—then 28—then 27—faster than a normal second lasted.

  “It may seem cruel—even diabolical—but it’s really quite humane. Your head will not literally explode, like you’re imagining right now. It really takes very little explosive to kill a human being. The only outward sign usually noted is a distinct reddening of the eyes, as blood pours into the ocular cavities.”

  15 . . . 14 . . . 13 . . .

  “The code,” I whispered. “Punch in the code, Nueve. I know you won’t do it.”

  He went on like he didn’t hear me. “Although some test subjects did bleed profusely through the ears and nose . . .”

  8 . . . 7 . . . 6 . . .

  I lunged for the box—like that would do any good. He scooted back into the chair and his fingers flew over the keys.

  I couldn’t see what numbers he punched, but the red light went out.

  I fell back gasping. My imagination was working overtime; I thought I could really feel it in the middle of my brain, the tiny explosive pellet, red hot and pulsing.

  I closed my eyes and tried to catch my breath. His voice had no playfulness when he spoke again. It was as hard and sharp as one of Dr. Mingus’s diamond-bladed scalpels.

  “There is no place on earth you can hide. Run from us, and we’ll find you. Try to have it removed, you’ll die. Defy us, and we’ll literally blow your brains out. No heav
enly being holds your fate in the palm of his hand, Alfred Kropp. I do. I am your guardian now and, like the angels themselves, I am above the laws of men. Beyond remorse, beyond pity, beyond judgment, beyond all moral consideration. From this moment forward, if you wish to pray to anyone, I suggest you pray to me.”

  03:04:01:20

  I lay on the bed for a few minutes after he left. I knew I wouldn’t be alone for long.

  It was probably a good idea bordering on a great one, while I still had a little privacy, to figure a way out of Camp Echo.

  I gave myself a little pep talk.

  “Okay, okay, the main thing is don’t panic. This isn’t so bad. You’ve been in worse situations. Fighting against a sword that can’t be beaten. Battling sixteen million unkillable demons in the middle of the desert. Falling from thirty thousand feet without even a freakin’ parachute. This is nothing. This is cake. Held hostage by ruthless secret agents. Separated from civilization by hundreds of miles of hostile, unfamiliar terrain. A tracking device implanted in your skull. And a bomb that literally blows your brains out with a touch of a button . . . Is that it? Is that the best they got?”

  I sat on the edge for a minute or two, holding my head in my hands, rocking back and forth, as if to restore equilibrium to my flip-flopping thoughts.

  “What is the mission? What must be done? That’s what Samuel would say. What’s the thing-that-must-be-done? Samuel, where are you? You’re going after the wrong guys. Jourdain just wanted to burn down my house, take all my money, and kill me—these Company guys really want to mess with me.

  “Forget about him; forget about Samuel. Samuel isn’t here. Abby isn’t here. Ashley’s here. What are they going to do to Ashley? Kill her. But why would they kill her? Because she knows. She knows the plan and she’ll rat them out to Abby. But Ashley’s not dead yet. If she was, Nueve would have told me. He’d enjoy telling me.