Talon of God

by Wesley Snipes

  He’d been a soldier ever since, serving first under Tito, and then joining the Serbs when the civil war broke out. He’d served the Croats, too, and the UN when they’d come in. His gun had belonged to whoever could pay, and it shot whatever target got him the most money. Women, children, his own men—it made no difference. He’d already learned that money was the only real power in the world—the force that made good men kill and bad men do far worse. It was literally the currency of life, more precious than blood.

  Yet as his mercenary operations expanded and his wealth grew, he began to realize that there was yet another tier. A place above what money could buy. A world inhabited by men like St. Luke, those so rich and so powerful, the price it took to buy them off didn’t exist. From the moment Korigan glimpsed even a piece of it, he knew nothing else would do. It was the ultimate victory, the final goal for a man who’d dedicated his entire life to chasing and hoarding power, forever out of reach.

  Until now.

  “I see you like that idea,” St. Luke said, his blue eyes flashing as he took in the hunger Korigan knew must be plain on his face. “You’ve always been an ambitious man, Commander Korigan. I’ve always liked that about you. Our ambition is all we truly own in this life . . . and I’m now going to let you in on a bit of mine.”

  “I’m honored,” Korigan began, but St. Luke cut him off with a single raised finger.

  “I didn’t invite you for your honor,” he said, shooting Lincoln Black a conspiratorial smile. “I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that we’re working on something . . . very special here in Chicago. Something beyond the usual narcotics trade. I brought you to Chicago because I needed to see if you could handle it, but I called you here tonight specifically because I want you by my side as we move to the next step. But what I want and what you can give are two very different things . . .” He trailed off, looking Korigan over like he was trying to find his weakness. “Tell me, Commander, how far are you willing to go?”

  To join you at the top of the world? “As far as I have to.”

  St. Luke’s smile widened to a grin. “I was hoping you’d say that,” he said, turning to walk over to the corner of the room. He waved his hand as he went, and the painting-covered wall slid sideways to reveal a brushed steel elevator. St. Luke stepped inside as the doors slid open, motioning for his guest to follow. Heart pounding with anticipation, Korigan obeyed, stepping into the hidden elevator as fast as he could without running. Lincoln Black followed at a more relaxed pace, slinking into the elevator like this was all old news.

  When they were all inside, St. Luke pushed the single button on the command console, and the doors snapped shut, sealing them inside seconds before the elevator dropped like a stone.

  4

  Unclean Spirits

  And when he had called unto him his twelve disciples, he gave them power against unclean spirits,

  to cast them out, and to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of disease.

  —Matthew 10:1

  The elevator stopped as quickly as it had dropped, the doors sliding open to reveal a hallway very different from the one above. There were no paintings here, no debauched guests, no servants. Just a harshly lit cement-floored hallway stretching off into the distance, its walls lined with iron bars holding back the dark. It was so unlike everything else he’d seen so far, Korigan didn’t actually realize what he was looking at until he saw something move in the dark.

  “Is that—” He stopped, swallowing against the sudden dryness in his throat. “Is this the zoo?”

  St. Luke chuckled beside him. “So you’ve heard about my collection?”

  Of course he’d heard. Every human trafficker and warlord in the world knew about Christopher St. Luke and his preferences. The billionaire famously paid top dollar for the odd and inexplicable. Korigan himself had sold him a pair of albino conjoined twins he’d stumbled across in Africa just a few years ago. But knowing that St. Luke must be keeping a private human freak show somewhere in his empire and actually walking through it were two entirely different things, and even Korigan—who’d walked through the worst of what war could do without blinking—felt himself begin to shake as St. Luke strolled over to the closest set of iron bars.

  “I’ve always had a passion for the odd and inexplicable,” he said as he scraped his neatly trimmed nails over the metal. “Even in this dull modern age when all the unknown lands are already discovered, the world is still so much bigger, so much stranger than the human mind can imagine. There are so many mysteries, so many things we don’t, can’t, maybe even shouldn’t understand.” He dropped his arm and turned back to Korigan. “Some men find that frightening, but I choose to celebrate it and, when possible, learn from it.”

  He lifted his hand, beckoning Korigan closer. After a moment’s hesitation, Korigan obeyed. As he got closer to the bars, though, he saw that the darkness behind them wasn’t darkness at all. It was an illusion caused by the glass wall just inside the bars, which had been carefully tinted to appear dark, probably so that whatever was inside couldn’t see when it was being observed. From the elevator, the glass looked like a flat black nothing. But when you were standing right in front of it, you could see straight through into the cell beyond, though that didn’t mean Korigan knew what he was looking at.

  “What the—”

  He turned away and rubbed his eyes, telling himself to get a grip. But when he looked again, he saw exactly the same thing: a ten-by-ten room with walls that appeared to be crawling. He was wondering if it was another optical illusion when he realized it wasn’t the walls that were crawling. It was what was on them.

  The entire cell was filled floor to ceiling with wasps. They crawled over every surface except, for some reason, the glass right in front of St. Luke and Korigan. But while they swarmed over every other inch of the cell, they especially seemed to favor the far right corner where a giant lump of insects were climbing into and over what looked like a rounded hive. On closer inspection, though, Korigan realized he was wrong again. The thing in the corner wasn’t a hive at all. It was a person. A man.

  And he was moving.

  After that, it was a hard fight not to be sick. Korigan had seen a lot of horrors in his life, but he’d always had a special hatred for insects. The only thing that kept him from sprinting back to the elevator was the fact that St. Luke was still standing beside him, watching him intently like he was waiting for Korigan to crack. But while it had never been for such high stakes, Korigan had played this game before, and he knew better than to show any sign of weakness. In the end, the only trace of his inner panic was a slight waver in his voice as he calmly asked his host, “What is that?”

  “An experiment in the limits of human endurance,” St. Luke replied proudly, tapping the glass behind the bars. “Mankind is capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for. But the only way to know how much more is to push. That’s what I do here, Korigan. I push limits.” He lifted his eyebrows with a smile that sent shivers down Korigan’s spine. “Would you like to see the rest?”

  Korigan would have been happy if he never saw anything like this again in his life. These were Dr. Mengele–level atrocities, and even Korigan had his limits. But he hadn’t reached them yet.

  “Tell me, Commander, how far are you willing to go?”

  “As far as I have to.”

  He wasn’t sure what game St. Luke was playing: if he was actually proud of the things in the cages, or if this whole zoo tour was just another test. Either way, Korigan was determined not to lose, so he buried his fear and nodded to his host, matching him grin to feral grin.

  “What else you got?”

  This answer seemed to delight St. Luke more than anything else Korigan had said. His host was practically bouncing as he started down the hall, showing off cage after cage of horrors. In one, a pair of twin teenage girls were methodically slaughtering and dismantling a goat, arranging the pieces in a disturbing mosaic across the bloody floor of the
ir enclosure. In another, a seemingly normal young man sat crouched with his hands over his face, hiding from the walls of his cell, which was entirely covered in broken mirrors. Yet another held an old man who was naked save for a cloth around his waist and a chain around his neck where he’d been tied like a dog to a post in the cell’s center. In his hands, he held a pot of something black and viscous that he was using like finger paint to write enormous, complex messages on the wall in a myriad of languages. Having studied several, Korigan recognized Greek, English, and Coptic. Before they passed out of view, he also spotted his own name scrawled amid the rest, which had to be the creepiest thing he’d seen all night. Or, at least, it was until they reached the double doors at the hall’s end.

  Up until this point, the path through the zoo had resembled a prison hallway. Once St. Luke pushed open the doors, though, Korigan could see that the room on the other side was much larger, a modern-looking underground lab complete with bright white walls and techs in full-body hazmat-style lab suits hovering around banks of computers. The sudden switch was enough to make Korigan jump, but while they were clearly at the more modern end of St. Luke’s experiments, even this space was obviously no ordinary lab.

  Half of the equipment—the computers, centrifuges, lab tables, chemical hoods, sample fridges, and so on—looked like it could have come from any hospital. But the rest of it, the strange objects interspersed between the normal ones, defied explanation. No two were the same. Some were tiny, some giant, some were made of metal, others of stacked brownish-white tiles that looked disturbingly like bones. But while Korigan didn’t understand any of it, he recognized the rusty, reddish-brown stain that covered their moving parts.

  Blood was everywhere, actually. Even the normal lab equipment was splashed with it, the white and steel surfaces splattered, old and new drips overlapping like the room had been repeatedly sprayed with blood and then haphazardly wiped down, but never actually cleaned. The smell certainly lingered. The rusty, musky scent of dried blood was so thick in the air down here, even Korigan found it hard to breathe. But unnerving as an underground lab soaked in blood and filled with strange artifacts was, the stained equipment was nothing compared to the six-foot-tall black cube sitting at the room’s center.

  From a distance, it looked like it was made of matte black glass. As he got closer, though, Korigan saw that the cube didn’t actually have walls at all. It was just . . . dark. A box of deep shadows cast by nothing, and that didn’t make sense at all. You couldn’t just have a cube of dark. And yet, there it was, standing in front of him like an ink stain in the air. It had no physical borders, no walls, just a clear, invisible line that the light from the banks of fluorescents overhead simply could not—or would not—penetrate.

  Given the other, more obvious, horrors they’d passed by to reach this place, a box of dark should have been the least of Korigan’s worries. But hard as he’d learned to be, Victor Korigan was above all a practical man. He valued money and steel and leverage, things he could touch and hold and wield. Things that had purpose. He had walked over corpses and felt nothing, because corpses he understood. But the sheer physical impossibility of that thick, inky darkness, that shadow from nothing, scared him more than all the blood in the room combined.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  The whisper made him jump, and he whirled around to see St. Luke standing right beside him. “It’s awful,” he said, the words tumbling from his lips.

  He regretted the admission of weakness at once, but surprisingly St. Luke’s smile grew bigger. “It is, isn’t? That’s what makes it so compelling to me.”

  “What is it?”

  St. Luke’s smile turned sly. “I can’t tell you all our secrets,” he said, walking over to a metal lab table where the masked techs had laid out a grid of shoebox-sized white specimen containers marked with blood-red biohazard symbols. “For now, let’s just say that that black box is the alpha and omega of my operation here, and the reason for this.”

  He removed the lid from the closest box and reached inside, pulling out a two-inch-long glass vial filled with a sickly green, viscous liquid that glowed like emerald fire under the lab’s bright lights. “You know what this is, of course?”

  Korigan had never seen the green slime before, but he wasn’t stupid. “That’s the drug,” he said, turning all the way around so he wouldn’t have to look at the terrifying box of darkness anymore. “The one that’s been making junkies go crazy.”

  “It does a lot more than that,” St. Luke said, putting the vial back in its box. “But this was just our first attempt, and as you saw from today’s experiments, far too strong. But we learn from our mistakes, and I think you’ll find the next version is far more up your alley.”

  He opened the next biohazard box on the table, reaching inside to pull out not a vial, but a normal-looking plastic baggie filled with dull gray-black powder. “This is our finished product,” St. Luke said, tossing the baggie at Korigan, who caught it just in time.

  Korigan frowned at the bag of powder in his hands. “Is it a drug, too?”

  “Not specifically,” St. Luke said. “It’s called Z3X, and it was developed to be an . . . additive of sorts. By itself, it does nothing, but when mixed with other drugs—amphetamines, opiates, hallucinogens, uppers, downers, even cannabis and alcohol—it acts like a booster, multiplying the effects of whatever drug it’s taken with.”

  Korigan’s face broke into a smile. For the first time since he had arrived down here, things were starting to make sense. This was business, and business he understood. “I always wondered how you were able to sell so cheap here in Chicago and still turn a profit, but now I see. This lets you give your customers the same high for less.”

  It was brilliant. With an additive like this, you could give a cokehead the same high while only having to fork over half as much actual cocaine. It was exactly the sort of ballsy, game-changing move he’d expect from a man like St. Luke, but the billionaire was shaking his head.

  “No, no, no,” he said angrily. “You’re missing the point. This isn’t about money. Look around. Does it look like I need more money?” He scoffed. “Money’s so easy, even a third-world thug like you can get rich if he’s willing to do things no one else will. But this is bigger than money.” He held up the baggie of Z3X. “This is about control.”

  He finished with a grin, but Korigan was still bristling over the thug comment. He didn’t need anyone, not even St. Luke, to remind him where he’d come from. But as much as he wanted to teach the rich man a lesson, that wasn’t why he was here. Pride got you nowhere in life, and Korigan had learned long ago to swallow his if that’s what it took. “What kind of control is there that you can’t buy?” he asked, his voice perfectly cordial, like he hadn’t even heard the insult. “Everyone has a price. Whether you buy it with that powder, blood, or money doesn’t matter. The end’s the same.”

  “That’s where we’re going to have to agree that you’re wrong,” St. Luke said, looking him in the eyes. “There are more ways to control a man than leverage, my friend. Debts can be paid, addictions can be broken, lives can be saved, but you can never escape what’s in here.” He tapped his fingers against his forehead. “Who we are inside, the person we become when our backs are to the wall, that’s what Z3X unlocks.”

  Korigan was getting frustrated. He could deal with a certain amount of mockery from St. Luke, but he hated the feeling of being so far out of his element. “How? Is it a psychotropic?”

  “You’ll see,” St. Luke promised, holding out his hand to take the baggie of Z3X back. “For now, though, all you need to know is that we’re moving ahead with our final production push.”

  “Final push? I don’t understand. You just said the green slime was the first experiment that led to Z3X. How can there already be so much out there if you just tested it today?”

  “I already told you,” St. Luke said dismissively. “The incidents today were a test for you. We’ve been working on this
for months now. Today’s experiments were just a way to use up old stock and test my tools at the same time, and I’m happy to say both were a success. You’ve proven you can handle what I throw at you, which is good, because I’m about to toss you one hell of a bomb.”

  He moved closer, grinning at Korigan with a smile that made the former merc step back. “I know you, Korigan,” he said quietly. “You clawed your way up from nothing, became the rich and powerful man you are purely because you were willing to do what others weren’t. There are many who call you a monster for that, but I’ve always thought if you weren’t willing to be a monster, then you weren’t really trying.” He glanced over his shoulder at the table full of white boxes. “This Z3X isn’t just a drug. It’s a change. With it, I intend to turn this city into something greater, and I’m reaching the point where I can’t do it alone.”

  Those were words he’d been waiting a long time to hear, and Korigan took a deep breath. “What do you need me to do?”

  “Steer the ship,” St. Luke said. “I’ve set everything up. Z3X is already coursing through Chicago’s drug-addled underbelly, but there still has to be a push. A kick that can launch this city into my control.”

  Now they were talking. “You mean a military coup?” Korigan grinned wide. “No problem. My men—”

  “No, no, nothing like that,” St. Luke said quickly, shaking his head. “Quite the opposite. I had the mayor make you police chief because I need you to keep order, not break it.”

  Now Korigan was really confused, but before he could ask another question, St. Luke held up his hand.

  “I brought you into this because you’re famous for keeping your command no matter what happens,” he said. “That’s what I need from you now. The Z3X is already everywhere, but it’s all for nothing if I can’t activate it. The green slime was just the beginning. Soon, this whole city is going to be tearing itself apart to reinvent itself into the Chicago I want. That’s what I mean by control: the ability to take an entire population and push it to the limit. All the groundwork is already laid, but it will still take time to build up to the critical mass I need. While that’s happening, I need to know that when push comes to shove, you can keep the Z3X flowing. That means my factories in the city stay open, my pushers keep operating unharassed, my name and the name of the drug stay out of the papers, and the Feds don’t get involved until it’s far too late. And it all happens as if it’s just another day in the office for you. I need your composure. I need you to control the city. Do that for me, Victor, and I’ll give you what you’ve always wanted.”