Marah Chase and the Fountain of Youth

by Jay Stringer

  But now he was just a sidekick?

  Go kill. Go fetch.

  What was next, roll over and let her scratch his belly? Something was wrong. She now looked at those stupid white pods the way she’d been looking at him.

  He reached the clearing where he’d shot Chase and—

  She wasn’t there.

  Nash was no amateur. He’d been killing people for three decades, for one paycheck or another. He’d been the world’s most feared hit man. This wasn’t like a movie, when nobody ever checked a person was dead before turning their back on them. She’d been fucking dead. He’d watched the light go out, then checked for a pulse. And… dammit, he hadn’t checked Hass. He’d done the damn movie thing. But Hass’s arm had been hanging off. And look, his blood, pints of Hass’s blood, was still pooled here in the clearing. How the hell…

  “I always wondered.” Chase stepped out into the clearing. She had both of her Blackhawks in their holsters but was holding a Glock. “What would happen, me and you? We always talked around it. You know Conte has a pool on us, on who would win?”

  Nash lowered his hands, slowly, inch by inch. If she kept talking long enough, he’d be okay. He was a better shot than her, and a faster draw. He just needed to keep her talking.

  “I always figured we both knew,” he said.

  She smiled. And she looked great. It had to be the water. Lauren had been right: the water could bring people back. Chase looked ten years younger.

  “You’re bigger than me,” Chase said, holding up her spare hand to tick off points, raising her fingers one by one. “You’ve got more experience than me.”

  “I trained you.”

  “You trained me. Back at Eades’s house, you had me. If she hadn’t come back, I’d be dead.”

  Nash grinned. “That would be twice I’ve killed you.”

  “Look good for it, though, don’t I?” She started counting again. “You’re a faster draw than me. And we both know you’re a better shot.”

  “Sounds like you should call Conte to bet on me.”

  “Didn’t you feel like you cheated?” Chase took a step forward. Her eyes flicked to his hands. She knew what he was doing. Soon it wouldn’t matter, though. He was close enough. He could draw faster than she could shoot, he was sure of it. “I offered a straight fight. Isn’t that what you always wanted? Go hand to hand, see if you could really beat me?”

  “We both know how that would go.”

  Chase shrugged. She lowered her gun, practically daring him to draw.

  “I got one thing you don’t, though,” she said.

  That caught Nash’s interest. “What’s that?”

  “Friends.”

  Movement to Nash’s right. He turned as Hass stepped out of the bush. Damn. He’d known he was making this mistake even as he was making it. He tried to draw, but Hass was already pulling the trigger. Chase, too.

  Nash fell back. Something solid hit the back of his head, and the world went off onto a funny angle, dimmer round the edges. Why was everything shaking?

  Hass knelt over him and nodded. “I took your advice.”

  Hass lifted Nash’s guns out of their holsters, slipped them into his own belt. Nash couldn’t move. His arms weren’t doing a damn thing he told them to. He willed them to move. To wiggle. Anything.

  His vision was kind of gray now. The color was bleeding out.

  Chase leaned in. She touched his chest, fiddling around with his clothes. What was she doing?

  “I never owed you a damn thing,” she said.

  She held something up. The pins off the grenades strapped to his belt. Chase and Hass ran. Nash tried one last time to move.

  On the plus side, he didn’t feel the explosion.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Chase and Hass made it to the top of the path, coming out onto a large lake formed by the dam across the waterfall. The cracks had spread, and more water was escaping through, down to the pool below. Chase wasn’t sure how much longer that wall would hold. Ahead of them, in a clearing beside the lake, Lauren Stanford was standing between two large black crates held above the water by metal arms sticking out from two white carrier pods. She was stripped down to her bra and shorts, and her hair was wet.

  And beyond them, was that a giant crocodile? It was clearly dead, the top of its head a bloody pulp, but just look at the size of it.

  Lauren was talking to herself. Fast and loud. She didn’t look up as they approached.

  “Going to work. This is going to work. They killed him. They killed August. But this is going to work.”

  Hass turned to Chase and tilted his head.

  Finally, Lauren turned to face them. She raised her gun, now appearing cold and in control. “Don’t move.”

  Chase and Hass stopped. Chase had her own guns holstered at her side. Both empty, but Lauren couldn’t know that. She had the Glock she’d used on Nash in her right hand. Hass had his own three visible guns, plus the two he’d taken from Nash and slipped into the waist of his pants at the small of his back. They had a firepower advantage over Lauren. She had to recognize that.

  “You killed him, didn’t you?” Lauren said. “I heard the explosion. That was him. I know it was.”

  Lauren was playing it cool, but Chase could hear the frayed edges to the words. She was barely holding on. Whether it was Nash, the earthquake, or something else, she was coming undone.

  “That’s been coming for a long time,” Chase said calmly, not moving. “You and us? Doesn’t need to go that way.”

  Chase went down on her knees, put her Glock on the ground, and eased out the two empty Blackhawks. Placed them down. She gestured for Hass to do the same, and he did, but he made no move to touch the guns hidden behind his back. Chase didn’t even know what she was aiming for here. She had no intention of playing nice with Lauren. But it seemed like calming down the unstable lady with the automatic weapon was a good idea. She didn’t want to have to come back from the dead a second time. That would be annoying.

  “Let’s talk,” Chase said. “Talking is good. Honestly? Had enough violence to last a lifetime. I want to get down off this mountain and go live. What you say?”

  Lauren’s face cracked into a terrifying smile. The door was really ready to fly off the hinges. “You want this place to yourself, don’t you? You can’t. It’s mine.”

  Chase noticed the pile of wet clothes by the nearest pod. Looked again at Lauren’s wet hair. Her skin seemed to glow with youth. It was a familiar feeling now that she’d seen it on herself and Hass.

  “You’ve been in the pool?”

  “ ’Course I have.” Lauren let out a short laugh that rose to a peak, then died off. “That’s how I know it’s mine.”

  Chase and Hass had each reacted differently to the water. Chase felt like she’d been shown a large gaping hole inside that the water promised to fill. Hass seemed to have come out of it with confirmation of something he already knew. And now, Chase figured, they could see how a psychopath responded.

  Chase rose slowly and took a single step forward. “Lauren, listen. The water. It does something. Believe me, I know, I’ve been in. It’s the best feeling. But then it does something else; it messes with our heads.”

  “You think I’m crazy,” Lauren said. She used the gun to point to Chase and Hass each in turn. “You still going to think that when my family owns the whole fucking world?”

  “So that’s the play?” Hass was still back where he’d crouched to put the gun down. He stood up now but didn’t move forward. “Collect the water? Be in control of who can drink it. Sell it.”

  “Water is the future,” Lauren said, an echo of Chase’s conversation with Mason. “Wars will be fought over it soon, if we let it happen. But if one player in the game already owns this—”

  Family.

  The word popped back into Chase’s mind. But Lauren didn’t have any family left.

  Hass was still drawing Lauren’s attention. “You’re going to collect the water in those?
” He pointed to the black boxes. “Are you getting it out with these jet pack things?”

  Click.

  Chase had it now. She closed her eyes, and for just a moment, she was back underwater, in that moment of rebirth. The peace. The happiness. The bliss of the warm water’s touch. She opened her eyes, took one more step forward.

  “Your parents.”

  Lauren whipped her head around to Chase, a different look in her eyes. Almost belonging. Understanding. “Yes,” she said, tears forming.

  Hass hadn’t caught up yet. “What?”

  “You parents are in the boxes,” Chase said.

  “They’ll be with me again soon.”

  “No, listen—”

  “And then they’ll see I was right. They’ll love me. They’ll thank me. And we’ll own this water, and we’ll own the world, and they’ll see it was always me.”

  “Lauren.” Chase couldn’t believe she now felt something for this woman. This evil Nazi cult leader who’d killed her friend and ordered the death of Conte’s son. But right now, she was just a weird, fragile child.

  Chase took another step forward, within touching distance now. “I know you want that. I understand. But this water…”

  “NO.”

  Lauren raised the gun. She fired. If she’d been aiming at either Chase or Hass, it had been a terrible shot, because the bullet went off high, somewhere into the trees, but it was enough to bring a fiery focus back to Lauren’s face and to make both Hass and Chase decide on no more moves.

  “Don’t patronize me,” Lauren said. “Poor little girl misses her parents. You know who I am? You know what I can do? I don’t even need a gun to kill you. I make a phone call, and hundreds of people will do it for me. Your British friend? There’s a whole state waiting to get her, soon as the lights go out. And you think it’s just England? You think the American government doesn’t know every move my family makes? You think they’re not in on it?”

  “All I’m saying—”

  “Your journalist? The real poor lost little girl? I threw her out of an airplane.”

  All right. Enough playing nice. New rule: when someone showed Chase who they were, she was going to believe them. When someone deserved her trust, they would get it. But when you’re staring a Nazi in the face…

  Chase jumped. She was on Lauren in seconds, already grabbing at the wrist holding the gun. A shot went off, and the bushes to their left whipped as the bullet went through them. They struggled in the dirt. Chase got on top and landed a punch. Lauren’s struggle eased. Chase punched again, and this time Lauren started to cry.

  Chased grabbed the gun and climbed to her feet. Hass was standing there, waiting.

  “You didn’t want to help?” she asked him.

  “It was basically mud wrestling,” he said with a sheepish grin.

  Lauren sat up, pulling her knees together, her head down, and continued to cry. She was saying something over and over that sounded like It’s not fair.

  Eventually she sniffed and looked up at Chase, anger burning through the tears. “I want them back.”

  Chase felt one more pang of emotion. Chase’s own parents had gone out in bad weather one night to deal with a problem, and she’d never seen them again. She would’ve given anything she had to bring them back.

  The rumbling sound came again, and then the ground started to shake. It looked like even the mountain peak, high above them, moved for a second. This was worse than the previous quake. The cave at the far end of the lake started to crack. A chunk fell from the ceiling. With a large crack, part of the dam finally gave way, letting the waterfall pick up speed. The level of the lake dropped by a few feet, fast, as it ran out into the ancient riverbed.

  “No. No. No. No.”

  Lauren was on her feet, using the distraction to brush by Chase. She pressed buttons on both of the black boxes. The bottoms opened with a hiss, vapor willowing out around the edges. Two frozen bodies fell into the water. Lauren jumped in after them to plant her feet and hold the bodies in place, stopping them from drifting toward the waterfall. Chase stared at the corpses, fully dressed in a tux and a dress, covered in a dusting of fine ice crystals. They must have gone into the freezer in those clothes. Their skin was pale, with streaks of white and red blotches. Lauren had kept her parents like joints of meat.

  “They’ll be mine,” Lauren was saying, over and over. “They’ll be mine. They’ll be mine.”

  Chase shared a look with Hass as they backed away from the water’s edge.

  Sure, Chase had come back. But she’d been gone for only a couple of minutes. If she’d even really been dead. Whatever had happened, Chase was sure, the rules would be different for Lauren’s parents. They’d been dead for three years. Eden or no, that wasn’t a thing you came back from.

  And anything that did come back would not be right.

  She thought again of the gravesite. Of Gilmore burying his friends out in the normal dirt, beyond the reach of this place.

  Dead is dead.

  Past is past.

  Chase stopped backing up. She wanted one last go. Moving forward, until her feet splashed at the water’s edge, she reached out to Lauren. “Leave them.”

  Lauren was standing ten feet away, as far as she could go without losing purchase, still holding her parents in the water. Chase tried not to look at them. She focused on Lauren’s face. The fury. The defiance. She was beyond reach, in every sense.

  There was another rumble. This one didn’t break out into a quake, but somewhere farther up the mountain they could hear a hissing sound. Was it Chase’s imagination, or was there now a red glow showing in the shadows of the cave?

  She ran to Hass. He was already kneeling down to fuss with one of the drone devices.

  “We need off,” he shouted. “Now.”

  He was pressing buttons on a control panel. There came a beeping in response, followed by the sound of a battery powering up. Chase turned to start working on the second drone. She tried pressing all the same buttons. Eventually, she got the beeping, but the charging sound was quieter, slower to build.

  And it was now overpowered by a different sound. Guttural. Something deeply alien, coming from a human throat. She turned to see that one of the two bodies, one of Lauren’s parents, was moving. Her mother, judging from the dress. Her skin was re-forming, her body recomposing. Now another noise, the same wailing. The father was moving. Expanding, fleshing out.

  All Chase could do was watch as these things turned into people, on either side of Lauren Stanford, who was also watching.

  Their faces formed, young and vibrant, complete now. But the groaning didn’t change. They sounded like babies in adult form, with no words to form. Chase recognized the looks on their faces. She could feel the same tug as them. The water. The belonging. The possessiveness.

  “Mommy,” Lauren cried, smiling, hugging her mother. Then she turned to draw her father in. “Daddy.”

  Chase could see what Lauren couldn’t. They were not Lauren Stanford’s parents. Whatever the water had done to these bodies, it hadn’t pulled the same trick on their minds. These were two large, mindless creatures, who both wanted to sink back into the warm water.

  Lauren tried to guide them back to the shore.

  Chase shouted, “No,” but couldn’t think what she could say to change what was going to happen.

  The two creatures roared and hissed. Growled. Pulled away from Lauren and started wading deeper into the water. Lauren turned back, shouting, crying, asking them to stay, trying to reason with them. She grabbed her mother by the arm and reached for her father, and in that instant they snapped, two creatures being attacked in their own home. They clawed at Lauren, tearing at her arms, her flesh, pulling her with them, under the water.

  The shaking started again, worse than before. The dam gave way completely, the water rushing over the edge and down into the valley. And over the rumbling, over the shaking, there was a long hiss, then some horrible, huge sound of sliding. Chase looke
d up the mountain, toward the peak, still ten thousand feet above them. The glacier was moving. But how could the glacier move? Only if it had melted. A whole sea of water was coming this way, bringing everything in its path with it. Trees. Ice. Rocks. Dirt. A wave heading straight for them. And it was moving fast. Thousands of feet were being made up in seconds.

  Move.

  Chase ran to the second drone. Tapped the buttons. How the hell did this thing work? Hass was already strapped into his. He rose off the ground unsteadily, veering from side to side. He reached down for Chase, and they gripped each other’s wrists as he operated the drone with his other hand. Up. Up. Up. Through the trees, brushing through the rubbery leaves. Chase reached up, grabbed the harness Hass was strapped into, and slipped one arm in the opposite way. Then she let go of his wrist and slipped the other one in. She wrapped her legs around his, pulling herself to him. As they cleared the trees, she turned to see the alien landscape of the valley disappear, blotted out by the green canopy.

  They weren’t high enough. The wall of water would still reach them. Hass continued to climb and now swung around, pushing forward, down the mountain. Behind them the water roared like nothing Chase had ever heard, eating everything in its path. For a moment, they were racing directly over the path of the ancient river, as trees fell like dominoes on both sides, ripped up and swallowed by the water. Chase caught sight of a Mngwa, leaping, running, trying to get away. She found herself shouting for it to run. Then she lost sight of it, as a cloud of dust swooped in over the water and started rising toward them. Hass veered away, westward, around the mountain. And then he said the new most terrifying words in the English language.

  “I think the battery is dead.”

  He was right. Even through all the other noises, she could hear that the engine had cut out. The rotors were still spinning, but thanks to her impromptu flying lesson in Ethiopia, she knew that was just the wind going though them, making them turn. They were gliding and, as soon as momentum went against them, they would be falling.