Ground Zero rj-13

by F. Paul Wilson

  The fireball dissipated quickly but smoke and flame roiled from the doorway. He fought his way back against the heat and peeked inside. The entire apartment was ablaze. A man who looked a lot like Harris was duct-taped to a chair. The chair lay on its side. His eyes were open but seeing nothing. He showed no signs of life, and no way Jack could get to him through that inferno.

  Vaguely he heard fire bells.

  Time to go.

  He found his cap, jammed it back onto his head, and ran for Weezy. Doors were opening up and down the hall.

  “Fire!” he yelled. “Get out! Get out!”

  He almost collided with a little old lady in a wheelchair as she rolled out into the hall ahead of him.

  “Oh, dear God!” she cried, staring at the flaming doorway between her and the elevator. Her voice sounded faint and far away. “What do I do?”

  As Jack stopped and looked around, Weezy reached him and clutched his arm. She looked ready to go into shock.

  Options . . . push the old lady’s wheelchair past Harris’s apartment, but who knew if the elevators were working. A lot of them automatically shut down with a fire alarm.

  She was thin and frail looking. Only one thing to do.

  He turned Weezy and pushed her toward the EXIT sign. “Go!” Then back to the old woman. “Come on, lady,” he said, lifting her out of the chair. He slipped one arm under her knees and the other around her back. “Looks like you’re going for a ride.” A thought hit. “You don’t happen to have a dog, do you?”

  “No, why?” Her words were faint.

  “Just asking.”

  He got her into the stairwell where a mute, stricken Weezy held the door for them and they all started down.

  “Wh-wh-what happened?” the lady said, clinging to him.

  “Explosion of some kind.”

  She touched his cheek. “You’re burned.”

  “Not surprised. I was in the hall when it happened. Knocked me off my feet.”

  And the truth shall set you free.

  “What caused it?”

  “No idea. Maybe some terrorist was making a bomb and it exploded.”

  A little disinformation couldn’t hurt.

  “Oh, dear God! A terrorist? In our building?”

  “I hear they’re everywhere. Then again, someone could have left the gas oven on, then lit a match.”

  “We’re all electric.”

  “Terrorist, then.”

  They had the stairwell pretty much to themselves for a few flights until someone slammed onto a landing above and pounded down the steps. A sixtyish man, heavy but in good shape, lurched up behind them.

  “Let me by, dammit!”

  He shouldered Jack and his burden aside, and bumped Weezy against the wall as he raced ahead of them.

  “Asshole,” the woman said, then louder, “You always were an asshole, Frank!”

  Jack’s burst of anger dissipated as he laughed. “You tell him, lady.”

  Firemen were already on the first floor when they reached it.

  He leaned close to Weezy. “Don’t go out the front. Find a rear exit.”

  With a deer-in-the-headlights look, she nodded and moved away.

  Jack kept his head down as he hurried past the firemen and out the front entrance. He saw an EMS wagon and an ambulance at the curb. He left the woman with them. She was profuse in her thanks and wanted to give him money, but all he wanted was out of here.

  He looked around. The car with the two men was gone. A crowd of residents and people from the neighborhood had gathered to gawk at the smoke roiling from a blown-out section of windows on the eighth floor.

  He joined the crowd for half a minute, then eased away, walking half backward, trying to look reluctant to leave.

  He found Weezy waiting outside the car. He pressed the unlock button on the remote and they both got in.

  “What happened?” she said, blinking back tears.

  “Explosion.”

  “I know that. What about Kevin?”

  Jack got the car rolling as he tried to think of a gentle way to put it. He came up empty, so he settled for simple and direct.

  He shook his head and said, “Goner.”

  Weezy began to cry. The sound tore at him.

  “What have I done? What have I started? This is all my fault. I brought him into this. If I’d just minded my own business—”

  “I think the bomb was meant for you.”

  That stopped the sobs. She looked at him. “What?”

  “I think Kevin was already dead.” No need to mention that he appeared to have been tortured. “That bomb was set for the next person to come through the door.”

  “But how could they know it would be me?”

  Jack pulled over to let another fire truck howl by.

  “Maybe he told them.”

  “Kevin? He wouldn’t do that!”

  Looked like torture was going to rear its ugly head anyway.

  “Maybe he was persuaded.”

  “Ohmygod! You think they tortured him?”

  “Who can say? Maybe they knew he didn’t have many friends and that if anyone came through that door it would be you.”

  “And it would have been if you hadn’t—how did you know?”

  “Didn’t. Just took precautions.”

  She was staring at him. “Oh, Jack, look at you. Your skin . . . it’s scorched.”

  He leaned right so he could see himself in the rearview. The left side of his face was reddened with a first-degree burn and the tips of the hairs in the left side of his beard were singed.

  “I’m okay.”

  “That was good of you to carry that old woman out.”

  Well, he couldn’t very well leave her up there to cook, especially since he’d been the one who’d triggered the explosion.

  “Maybe I’ll finally get that Boy Scout badge I’ve always wanted.”

  “Don’t diminish it. That was very gallant.”

  The way she was looking at him made him uncomfortable.

  “Gallant, hell. She made good cover for me.”

  True, but he hadn’t realized that until he’d hit the first floor and saw the firemen.

  Weezy folded her arms across her chest. “Right. You’ve become Mister Hard Guy.”

  He forced a smile. “And don’t you forget it.”

  17

  “Do we have to do this here?” Hank said as Drexler set the glasses on the table.

  He glanced uneasily at Darryl’s still form stretched out inside the Orsa. It looked like some monstrously oversized transparent coffin, and made him feel like he was at a weird wake.

  “Most certainly,” Drexler said. “No place could be more appropriate.”

  At Drexler’s request he’d moved a couple of chairs and a small folding table down from the basement—a little tight getting through that trapdoor—and set them up about a half dozen feet from the Orsa. Drexler arrived moments later carrying two odd-shaped wineglasses and a bottle of Poland Spring.

  Hank pointed to the water. “That’s your ‘special drink’?”

  “Don’t be silly.” Drexler alighted on one of the chairs. “Please turn off the lights.”

  “We’re going to sit in the dark?”

  “Not quite. I promise you illumination sufficient to our needs.”

  Shrugging, Hank walked over to the light switch by the stairwell and flipped the toggle. He expected to be plunged into darkness, but instead a faint blue light suffused the subcellar.

  The Orsa was glowing.

  He stared at it as he returned to Drexler at the table. It hadn’t been glowing this morning when they first arrived. The light didn’t seem to radiate from any point within, but from the very substance of the thing. The only reason had to be . . . Darryl, who now looked more than ever like a fly in an ice cube.

  “Sit down,” Drexler said.

  He dropped onto the other chair and watched the man. His air of repressed excitement only compounded the weirdness factor.


  “All right, I’m sitting. What next?”

  Drexler pulled an envelope from his jacket pocket and removed a pair of sugar cubes and a strange slotted spoon. From another pocket he produced a silver flask.

  This was getting interesting.

  “Some hard stuff, ay?”

  Drexler’s lips twisted. “You have no idea.”

  He opened the water bottle and set it aside. Then he removed the cap from the flask and poured maybe three inches of clear green fluid into the globular base of each glass. He placed a sugar cube in the slotted spoon and held it over one of the glasses as he poured a thin stream of water over the cube. Hank watched fascinated as the green liquid turned a cloudy pale yellow.

  “What the hell?”

  “A hundred years ago we would have been at the tail end of the absinthe era in France.”

  “Absinthe. I’ve heard of that. Makes you crazy.”

  “Rubbish. Propaganda put forth by the winemakers who were afraid of the competition. In nineteen hundred the French consumed twenty-one million liters of absinthe. It was so popular that five o’clock became known as ‘l’heure verte’—the green hour.”

  He added another sugar cube to his spoon and moved it to the second glass, with the same effect.

  “My father taught me the technique. He found absinthe most entertaining and was quite a connoisseur. Quite a man, actually.”

  “Was he in the Septimus Order too?”

  He nodded. “My family has an unbroken string of membership back as far as anyone can remember.”

  “Was he an ‘Actuator’ too?”

  Another nod. “He accomplished many great things for the Order. One might even say he helped change the course of history. Before he died he passed his vast store of arcana to me. He also passed me his cane and his private stock of absinthe. This is a custom blend from that collection.”

  Hank snorted and shook his head. “Hell, I barely knew my daddy. He only came by now and then. But I’m pretty damn sure he didn’t drink anything like that.”

  Drexler had fixed up two glasses. He didn’t really expect Hank to drink that stuff, did he? Obviously he did. He lifted one and held it out.

  “Bitte.”

  Bitter? Was he warning him about the taste?

  He took the glass, saying, “It’s not going to make me go crazy now, is it?”

  He said it jokingly, but he was concerned. He’d stayed pretty straight and clean since this Kicker Evolution got rolling. Used to do weed regularly and a little crank now and then, an Oxy or two when he could get them, but he’d cleaned up once Kick found a big-time publisher that wanted to put him out in front of the public. He was the face of the Kicker Evolution now. He had a good deal going, the best deal imaginable, and he wasn’t going to let anything screw it up by landing him in jail.

  He was on a mission to change the world, to get everyone dissimilated, make everyone a Kicker.

  Kickerworld.

  Then what?

  He had no idea. And that worried him at times.

  “I’ve been drinking it since I was fifteen,” Drexler said. “Do I seem crazy to you?”

  “No.”

  Might have made him into one weird-ass dude, but Hank sensed he was not the least bit crazy.

  “Then here.”

  Hank took the glass and checked out the cloudy yellow liquid. He swirled it but it didn’t stick to the sides. He sniffed it. Not much of a smell.

  “To the end of history,” Drexler said, raising his glass. He clinked it against Hank’s, then sipped. He tilted his head back and swallowed. “Ahhh. Wonderful.”

  Hank didn’t drink—not just yet.

  “ ‘End of history’? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “A stolen phrase. I use it in my own sense. We are nearing the point when, as the Secret History of the World is revealed, we will see the end of history as you knew it—or thought you knew it. Then the reality to which the world has been blind through the millennia will be made manifest.”

  Hank stared at the liquid. One sip and already Drexler was talking crazy. How powerful was this stuff?

  He took a sip and the burst of bitterness rocked his tongue. He looked for someplace to spit, didn’t find one, so he swallowed. The back of his tongue tasted like sweet dirt. He’d never tasted sweet dirt, but if such a thing existed, that was how it would taste.

  “That’s like licorice mixed with—I don’t know.”

  “That’s the wormwood. This blend has extra. Come. Drink up. I wish to show you something.”

  Hank set the glass back on the table. “I’ll pass.”

  “No-no. You must drink it. The wormwood will open your eyes to things that you cannot otherwise see.”

  “What is it—like LSD?”

  “Not at all, not at all. It has a unique property I discovered quite by accident.” He pointed toward the Orsa. “And it has something to do with our friend over there.”

  “Darryl?”

  “No. The Orsa itself. You will see it as you have never seen it before, as only a privileged few have seen it. It is a . . . revelation, one I promise you will cherish because it concerns the future of you and your Kickers, and even your father’s Plan.”

  Hank stiffened with surprise. “What do you know about that?”

  “Everything.”

  “Can’t you just tell me?”

  He shook his head. “No. You must see. Drink up and you will see—literally.” He took another sip from his glass. “Come, come.”

  Hank looked at the glass, then at the Orsa. Nothing else was making much sense right now. Might as well go with this and see what Drexler was talking about.

  But he’d be damned if he was going to sip it.

  He grabbed the glass and tossed down the contents in one bitter, convulsive swallow.

  “Oh, my,” Drexler said. “This is going to be quite entertaining.”

  18

  “How do you think they found him?” Weezy said as they tooled south on the turnpike.

  Jack considered that as he drove.

  Eddie wanted Weezy to stay with him and Jack thought it was a good idea. Weezy had argued against it, saying she didn’t want to be out of the city. What if she needed to consult with Veilleur about something in the Compendium? Jack thought she’d be safer in Jersey, and she could hop a train in to Penn Station any time she wanted to. She’d finally given in.

  So he’d shot the Verrazano, crossed Staten Island, then taken the Goethals Bridge to the New Jersey Turnpike. The plan was to meet Eddie at the service area near exit twelve.

  “They could have known where he lived all along, or could have followed him home from the hospital yesterday.”

  Jack had thought he’d been a little too cocky about no one being able to tail him.

  “Aren’t you worried? Isn’t it risky using your own car like this? I mean, what if someone took down your license plate numbers. They could trace you through the DMV.”

  Jack smiled. “I hope they try. Good luck if they do.”

  “Oh, I see,” she said, nodding. “Fake tags.”

  “Well, yes and no. Ever hear of Vincent Donato?”

  “Vinny Donuts? Sure. Who hasn’t?”

  “This is his car.”

  Her eyes widened. “You know Vinny Donuts? Well enough to borrow his car? Get out!”

  “Okay, not his car itself, but exactly like it, right down to the plates and registration.”

  “Now why on Earth—?” She stopped and grinned. “Oh, I get it. Anyone who tries to track you down through the car—”

  “—will wind up dealing with a notoriously ill-tempered mobster.”

  She clapped her hands. “I love it. It’s so sneakily brilliant.” She turned toward him and stared. “Just what are you, Jack? What do you do that makes it necessary to drive around in a clone of a Mafiosomobile?”

  He shrugged, uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation. If it were anyone else, he’d give her the brush-off. But this was
Weezy.

  Besides, she’d seen him kill three men this morning. She already knew plenty.

  “Remember my telling you about those stunts I used to pull as a kid—you know, Toliver’s locker and Canelli’s lawn? Well, I’m still at it, only I get paid for it.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “I hire out to fix things.”

  “Things? What sort of things?”

  “Situations.”

  “And how do you fix them?”

  “Depends. I do custom work.”

  “Please don’t tell me you’re a hit man.”

  He knew she was thinking about the recent gunplay. He forced a laugh.

  “No. I’ve lost count of the number of times people have tried to hire me to kill someone, but no, I don’t do that.”

  “But you have . . .” She seemed afraid of the word. “I’ve seen you.”

  “I do what’s necessary, Weez—to protect myself, people I care about, or a customer.”

  “But you never hesitated, even for a second, and you didn’t look the least bit shaken or upset afterward—not the slightest sign of remorse or regret.”

  “I’ve had regrets.” He thought of Hideo back in May. “But those guys? How do I feel bad about stopping someone from killing us? No regret there.” He smiled. “Is this where I start to sing ‘My Way’?”

  She didn’t smile back. “I just can’t help wonder what happened to the sweet boy from Johnson, New Jersey. The kid we all called Jackie when we were little.”

  He stared through the windshield.

  “Shit happened, Weez. A whole load of shit happened.”

  “But—”

  “Let’s find a topic other than me. Like, how about them Mets? Some slump, huh?”

  Weezy said nothing for a while and Jack concentrated on the road. He had the cruise control set at sixty-five and kept to one of the middle lanes. His New Jersey driver’s license was the best money could buy, and was supposed to be able to pass muster against a DMV computer, but he’d rather not put it to the test. So he drove carefully, avoiding any moves that might draw attention.

  Lack of an official identity made for safe driving. Everyone should try it.

  Finally Weezy heaved a sigh and said, “Okay. New topic: I have a big favor to ask.”