by Timothy Zahn
Finally, after three minutes of waiting, there was a flicker of light from above. Razz looked up to see the restaurant’s lights go off, then on, then off again.
And they stayed off.
Razz smiled to himself. So Cutter had figured out the rest of the plan. Good. “Okay,” he said, dragging Monique over to the foot of the stairs. “I can’t say it’s been fun, but—”
Without warning, he lifted the knife from Monique’s throat and flipped it at the light bulb above them.
And as the bulb shattered and the light flared into darkness he shoved Monique toward Ari and grabbed the jar.
He was halfway up the stairs, gripping the jar with one hand and the handrail with the other, before Ari and his men even sorted out what had happened. There was a sudden flurry of shouts and the sounds of scurrying feet. A single gunshot shattered the silence, and in the faint reflected light from the muzzle flash Razz saw Cutter standing ready above him over the trap door.
With a supreme effort Razz heaved the jar up toward the other, nearly dislocating his shoulder in the process. Cutter caught the jar and lifted it up out of the shaft. With his burden gone, Razz grabbed the rails with both hands and all but threw himself up the rest of the stairs.
Just in time. Another shot hammered across his ears, and he felt the puff of wind as the bullet passed his legs. He lunged the rest of the distance through the opening, nearly getting his feet crushed as Cutter slammed the trap door shut behind him. “Table,” Cutter snapped, stepping onto the door to hold it closed.
Razz nodded and ducked around the bar. He grabbed one of the tables, hauled it back, and dropped it on top of the trap door. “One more?” he gasped.
“No time,” Cutter said. Grabbing the jar, he headed across the restaurant. “Got a car hot-wired around the corner. Come on, move it.”
Thirty seconds later they were speeding down the empty street, Cutter hunched over the wheel, Razz clutching the jar and feeling the tension slowly draining away. It was nearly over. All they had to do now was drive to the airport, wake the pilot sleeping in the back of their plane, and then settle in for a nice, uneventful flight back to Paris. The Collector would give them his usual cold-fish thanks, and they’d once again be free of him. At least for awhile.
“You might want to get the scroll out of there,” Cutter suggested as he squealed the tires around a corner. “Be a damn sight easier sneaking that into Paris under your jacket than the whole jar.”
“Sure thing,” Razz said. “You want to pull over for a few minutes?”
“What, here?” Cutter snorted. “Like Ari’s not already got the phone lines burning from here to the Med and back.”
“So you’d rather I poke around the Collector’s scroll with a knife while we’re driving?”
“Yeah, yeah, don’t beat it to death,” Cutter growled. “I guess there’s no point taking stupid chances. We’ll get it out at the airport.”
“That’s the plan,” Razz agreed. “Speaking of stupid chances, you’d better slow down before we run into a Limey patrol that’s actually out patrolling.”
“Not a problem,” Cutter said, and in the reflected glow from their headlights Razz saw him grin suddenly. “Take a look behind you.”
Razz craned his neck. Lying on the back seat, half covered by a blanket, were a pair of gleaming Tommy guns. “Let me guess,” he said. “You grabbed Ari’s car?”
“Or someone from his group,” Cutter said. “Kind of an extra gob of spit in his eye, huh?”
“Pretty much,” Razz agreed. “You know, I’m thinking we may not want to set up a black market here after all.”
“He’ll get over it.” Cutter shrugged. “Or he’ll get dead. Either works for me.”
“Yeah. We’ll see.”
#
Two days ago, it had taken them an hour to get from the airport to Bethlehem. This time, with empty streets and Cutter’s lead-foot driving technique, it took half that.
“I’ll go wake up the pilot,” Cutter said, pushing open the car door. “You get that scroll out.”
“Got it,” Razz said, peering through the windshield. The airport wasn’t as deserted as the town had been, but it seemed quiet enough. More importantly, Cutter had picked a parking spot within an easy walk of their plane but also with enough open space around it to keep anyone from sneaking up on them without being spotted.
A sudden flash of pain flamed from the brand on his left shoulder, the glow briefly adding a pale red-orange light to the car’s interior. “Damn him,” Cutter gritted out as he and Razz simultaneously grabbed their shoulders.
“He’s never been the patient sort,” Razz growled as the pain subsided. “Get going. And watch yourself—there’s always a chance Ari’s boys guessed where we were going and beat us here.”
“Don’t worry,” Cutter promised grimly. Reaching into the back seat, he picked up one of the Tommy guns. “Here—you’ll need this,” he added, tossing his sleeve knife onto the driver’s seat. With the gun barrel resting on his shoulder, he headed across the field toward their plane.
Pulling out his penlight, Razz set the jar on the floor between his knees and picked up Cutter’s knife.
He was still sitting there, staring dully at the smashed shards of the jar littering the floor and his legs, when Cutter returned. “He’s running the preflight,” the other said, coming up to Razz’s window. “You got the—?” He broke off as he spotted the debris. “What the hell?”
“He got us, Cutter,” Razz said, not looking up. His earlier rage had dissipated, leaving behind a curious deadness. “The damn smug Zionist. He got us.”
“What are you talking about?” Cutter demanded. “What did you do to the Collector’s jar?”
“That’s the point, isn’t it?” Razz said bitterly. “This isn’t the Collector’s jar. Ari switched out the real one for a fake.”
“What? How? The damn thing was never out of our sight.”
“It was never in our sight, you idiot,” Razz snarled, glaring up at him. “Don’t you see? He wasn’t getting ready to steal the jar when we broke into Mukhtaar’s place. He’d already stolen it!”
Cutter’s mouth was hanging open, a look of complete bewilderment on his face. “But then…what the hell is this?” He gestured to the shards.
“What do you think?” Razz bit out. “It’s a substitute. A fake. Something to make Mukhtaar think something else in his shop had been the target. Probably Ari was planning to grab a handful of coins or something on his way out. No, that other kid—Ephraim—already had the real jar when we came charging in. That’s why Ari ordered him to leave, and that’s why he obeyed without arguing. Everything else was just Ari stringing us along to give the kid time to get the jar to wherever it was supposed to go.”
Cutter muttered a short string of curses. “Fine,” he said. “We’ll just go back and get it.”
Razz shook his head. “Not a chance. Ari will be long gone by now.”
“Then we hunt him down,” Cutter said. “However long it takes. We hunt the bastard down—”
He broke off as their brands once again flared with the summons. “I somehow don’t think the Collector is going to have the patience for that,” Razz told him.
“Then he’ll just have to find some.” Cutter nodded toward the back seat. “Bring the other Tommy gun, will you?”
“And if he won’t give us more time?”
Cutter exhaled softly. “He will,” he said softly. “One way or the other.”
Razz felt his eyes narrow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Cutter said. “Just get the gun and let’s go.”
#
The Collector sat motionless for a long minute after Razz had finished. “So you’ve failed,” he said, his voice somehow even more emotionless than usual. “You were told the price of failure, were you not?”
“We haven’t failed,” Razz said quickly, trying to filter the desperation out of his voice. Cutter still h
adn’t told him the details of his supposed plan for getting free of the Collector, and so far the other was still just standing there, not moving or speaking.
Considering the Collector’s current move, whatever Cutter had in mind had better be good.
“What else would you call this except a failure?” the Collector demanded, his eyes glittering. “No, gentlemen. You do my bidding; you continue to live. That was the deal. You’ve broken it.”
“We can find Ari, and we can get the scroll,” Razz insisted. “We just need a little more time.”
The Collector shook his head. “There is no more time.”
“But we can do it,” Razz insisted, taking a step toward the big desk, feeling awkward and clumsy with the unfamiliar weight of the concealed Tommy gun dragging at his right shoulder beneath his long coat. Cutter had insisted both of them bring their newly acquired weapons to the meeting, though Razz couldn’t imagine what he intended to do with them. Back at the very beginning, when the Collector had first transformed into his unearthly squid-like form, Cutter had gotten off a few rounds before one of the tentacles had snatched the gun from his hand and casually tossed it across the room. As far as Razz had been able to tell, those .45 slugs hadn’t done a single bit of damage to the creature.
Unless Cutter thought a rapid-fire barrage from the Tommy guns might make enough of a difference. Razz really hoped that wasn’t the plan.
“No,” the Collector said flatly. “The scroll is gone, and with it the locations of the artifacts I want. Even worse, your ham-handed actions will have alerted my enemies that the scroll has been found.” His eyes flicked around the office, an almost wistful expression on his face. “And I was just getting comfortable here in Paris.”
His eyes turned back, the wistfulness gone. “No, gentlemen. You have failed…and the price of failure is death.”
His face began to shimmer; and abruptly, the human-looking body exploded outward into its nightmare form of tentacles, multiple eyes, and a round, thorn-rimmed mouth. The tentacles reached out—
“Hold it!” Cutter snapped, flipping aside his coat and bringing up his Tommy gun.
The writhing tentacles paused, probably more from astonishment than fear. Razz took advantage of the lull to bring his own machinegun out and into position. He still didn’t know what Cutter had planned, but whatever it was he was ready to back him up.
The big eye in the middle of all the little eyes swiveled back and forth between the two men. “You’re not serious,” the Collector said.
“Deadly serious,” Cutter ground out. “Here’s the new deal. You let us have all the time we need to get your damn scroll, or you let us go free and clear—and alive—and find a couple other chumps to do your dirty work.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then your precious little collection gets littler,” Cutter said.
And to Razz’s horror, Cutter turned his Tommy gun toward the shelves lining the walls and opened fire.
The Collector might have howled. Razz was never certain whether he’d actually heard the unearthly sound over the roar of Cutter’s machinegun or whether the shriek had been entirely inside his own head. But whichever it was, it froze Razz’s blood in a way that Nazis and Resistance fanatics never had. Reflexively, his trigger finger spasmed, and suddenly he was fighting for balance as his Tommy gun pulsed in his grip, spitting out its own path of destruction through the neat rows of souvenirs.
Cutter’s plan had probably been to destroy only a couple of the cheaper-looking artifacts and then stop with a warning that rest were now being held hostage. But if that was the scheme, he never made it to the second step. The Collector’s tentacles snaked out again, faster than Razz had ever seen them move before, faster than he had imagined such ungainly things could move. An instant later the Tommy guns had been ripped from their hands and he and Cutter were wrapped in suffocating coils of unworldly flesh. “You want time?” the Collector bellowed with a fury that chilled Razz straight to the bottom of his soul. “Then you shall have it. All the time in the world. All the time in eternity!”
Razz’s brand flared again, but this time with a level of agony far beyond anything he’d ever experienced. Gasping with pain, he looked down at his shoulder.
The brand was glowing, but not with the familiar fiery red-orange of a summons. This time the glow blazing through his clothing was a ghastly purple-black. Even as he watched, more black began to ooze out of the brand, spreading down his arm and up across his shoulder blade and collarbone toward his neck.
The last thing he remembered was the sense that he was being burned alive…
#
The sky was starting to lighten toward sunrise when he finally drifted back to consciousness.
He opened his eyes and looked around. He was in an unfamiliar alley, though from the aromas and sounds he guessed he was still in Paris. There was a figure lying a few feet away, also starting to stir. Its back was to him, but he recognized the coat as the one Cutter had been wearing. The garment looked undamaged, which seemed odd given that Razz’s last memory had been of intense heat.
He rolled up onto his side and started to sit up, and as he did so his hand touched something hard and cold. To his mild surprise he found that it was his Tommy gun, also apparently undamaged, lying beside him. He picked it up for a closer look.
And as he lifted it, his eyes focused on his hands.
It took him two tries to get his mouth to work. “Cutter,” he croaked. “Cutter, wake up.”
“Yeah, I’m here,” Cutter muttered. His voice sounded as strained and broken as Razz’s. “Where the hell are we?”
“Never mind where,” Razz countered. “What the hell are we?”
There was a frozen moment of stunned silence. “Oh, my God,” Cutter breathed. “Oh, my God. We’re—what the hell is this? Leprosy? Is it leprosy?”
“I don’t know,” Razz said, gazing at the mottled, pasty white that his skin had become. “But it’s—my God,” he broke off.
Because even as he stared at it the whiteness was changing. Boils were appearing—small ones—growing bigger as he watched, bursting and leaving an even more horrible decaying gray flesh behind. “It’s spreading, Cutter,” he said, his voice trembling. His tongue felt odd as he spoke—could what was happening to his hands be happening inside his mouth, too? “It’s getting worse. It’s getting worse right now.”
“Damn him,” Cutter said. “Damn him to hell.”
“Never mind him,” Razz snarled. “What about us? What do we do?”
“I don’t know about you,” Cutter said. Sitting up, his back still to Razz, he fumbled for the Tommy gun that had been left at his side. “But I’m not gonna sit here and fall apart. It’s been fun, Razz. See you in hell.”
Before Razz’s frozen mind could realize what was happening, Cutter put the gun barrel in his mouth and fired a single round.
Razz clamped down on a startled yelp as pieces of Cutter’s skull flew past him. What in the name of hell?
But as he looked again at his hands he wondered if maybe Cutter was right. The Collector had warned that failure meant death, but Razz had never envisioned anything like this. Taking the quick way out would at least rob the creature of some of his ghoulish satisfaction—
“Damn.”
Razz jerked his eyes back to Cutter. The man was still sitting there, still upright and apparently still alive. Not only alive, but the shattered section of skull was already healed over.
Razz’s first reaction was one of relief and hope. An instant later, the true horror flooded in on him.
They couldn’t die!
And then, Cutter turned around.
It was all Razz could do to keep from screaming. His partner’s face was the same ghastly puckered and blistered gray-white as their hands, his cheeks shrunken, his lips pulled back from his teeth in a snarling death’s-head grimace. A walking, decaying battlefield corpse, yet somehow still alive. Only his eyes still held the spark of humanity, and
they too were starting to glaze over.
And it was clear from the look in those eyes that Razz’s face looked exactly the same.
“What do we do?” he whispered. “Cutter. What do we do?”
For another minute they sat staring at each other, the dead looking upon the dead. Then, Cutter stirred and peered off toward the eastern sky. “Sun’ll be up soon,” he said. “We can’t walk around Paris looking like this.”
He stood up and took off his coat, suit jacket, shirt, and undershirt. His arms and chest looked as bad as his face and hands. “Here,” he said, tearing his undershirt in half and tossing one of the pieces to Razz. “Tear it into strips and wrap them around your head.”
Once upon a time, Razz thought dully as he started tearing the material, the thought of putting Cutter’s undershirt on his face would have been too disgusting to even imagine. Now, it hardly even registered.
Two minutes later they were ready. Or as ready as they were ever going to be. At least now they merely looked like horribly disfigured burn patients wrapped in bandages instead of walking corpses. “All the time in the world, huh?” Cutter growled, stooping and picking up his Tommy gun. “Fine. We’ll use that time to find Ari and get that scroll back. And when we do—” He smiled, a horrible, grotesque thing. “We’ll use to make him take this curse off us.”
“Another deal,” Razz muttered. His tongue was definitely feeling different.
“Another deal,” Cutter agreed thickly. “But this time, we’ll be the ones on the dealing end.” He attached the gun to its shoulder strap and tucked it into concealment beneath his coat. “Get your gun, and let’s go figure out how we’re going to get back to Palestine.”
A minute later, they were walking down the ever-brightening street. Midway down the first block they passed an early-rising citizen and his small dog, and though the dog shied away with a whimper the man simply looked at their bandaged faces and turned quickly and guiltily away.
They would get by, Razz decided blackly. They would be feared and shunned, but they would get by.
Midway down the second block, Cutter abruptly stopped and spat something onto the street. He stared at it for a second, then continued on. Frowning, Razz paused for a closer look.