Daniel Faust 03 - The Living End

by Craig Schaefer

  I kept my voice soft. “I took the rap for killing Ben, and I didn’t mind, because it was for a good cause. I’ve done a lot of shitty things in my time, and I’ve done them for worse reasons. But this…you want me to talk Melanie into sending herself to hell?”

  I turned to face her.

  “No, Emma. I won’t do that. Because I’ve still got some fucking self-respect left.”

  She rose from the couch. The box of tissues fell to the floor. She walked toward me, slowly, hands balled into fists and fresh tears welling in her eyes.

  “Then let me help. With stopping Lauren.”

  “No,” I told her. “You want to take a chance at turning your daughter into an orphan? Leave this to me. You go home. Go home, be with Melanie, and stay with her.”

  “Then you do something else for me,” she whispered hoarsely, forcing the words out. “You do whatever it takes, and you kill Lauren Carmichael. I can’t lose Melanie. Not for eternity. Please, don’t let her take my baby from me.”

  “I promise,” I said.

  That much I could do.

  Emma turned, flustered. “I should go. I have to prepare, have to get notifications out—”

  Caitlin reached out and clasped Emma’s shoulder. Her eyes were hard as emeralds and her lips a tight, bloodless line. I realized, looking at Emma’s face, that this was the Caitlin she needed right now. Not her friend, but the prince’s hound, in complete control. A bastion of cruel authority to hold back the storm.

  “Hell prevails,” Caitlin said.

  Emma took Caitlin’s free hand and raised it to her lips, kissing the curve of her pale fingers. Caitlin stared impassively, nodded once, and saw her to the door.

  I hoped that when she turned around again, her mask of ice would thaw. If anything, after she clicked the lock and met my eyes, she was colder than before.

  “I had to make a difficult decision tonight,” she said.

  “So basically just like every other night?” I asked, trying to find a smile.

  “Don’t be flip. Not now. Daniel, do you understand what the scope of Lauren’s power will encompass, should she master the Garden? She will rule over life and death itself.”

  “Right. She’s going to kill everybody. We know that.”

  “You think?” she said. “Will she be that merciful to her enemies? After all you’ve done to stand in her way, what do you think she’d do to you, given her whims?”

  I suddenly thought back to the New Life clinic. That poor mutated bastard, bloated with black tumors and cannibalized by cancer, dying in unimaginable agony.

  Except I wouldn’t die, I thought. She would NEVER let me die.

  The sudden chill in the room must have shown on my face. Caitlin nodded.

  “There are more hells than mine,” she said.

  Thirty-Five

  “I ’m not backing down,” I told Caitlin.

  “I know,” she said and took my hand.

  She led me into the bedroom. I wasn’t sure what she had in mind, until she pulled back her gray silk pillow. A dagger lay underneath. It was a short, nasty little blade with a jagged edge and a handle of bone.

  “I thought about killing you tonight,” she said.

  I took a step back, toward the open door. “What? Why?”

  She crossed the distance between us and took hold of my shirt collar.

  “Because I keep what is mine, and you are mine. Because I don’t want to take any chance of losing you to Lauren’s revenge, cut off forever between two severed worlds. Because,” she said through gritted teeth, “I love you.”

  She let go, shoving me back, and turned away. The anger in her words grew, her voice breaking as she tried to hold it in.

  “And that’s why I can’t do it. Because if…if that’s what I feel for you, if it’s really love, then I have to trust you. And I have to trust your choices. And these are feelings…these are feelings I was not created to deal with, and it is not fucking fair!”

  “Hey,” I said.

  She turned around. Her bottom lip quivered, trapped between pearly teeth.

  “I think you’re doing a pretty good job,” I said.

  She gave a tiny shrug and stared at the carpet.

  “Thanks for not killing me.”

  Her gaze lifted to meet mine. Maybe she’d expected me to reject her when she told me what she was feeling. Maybe part of her had wanted me to. I tried to make sure she didn’t see anything in my eyes but understanding. What I saw in hers was a spark of hope.

  “Don’t mention it,” she said, sounding tired.

  “Besides,” I said, “I promised Emma, so you know, now I have to win. That woman holds grudges like crazy. Do not want to get on her bad side.”

  Caitlin sat down on the edge of the bed. She tugged my hand, pulling me to sit beside her.

  “I can’t be there when you face Lauren,” she said. “My prince’s orders. Thanks to Case Exodus, my job is to watch from a distance, sound the call to action if you fail, and leave this world. Immediately and forever.”

  I reached up and stroked the curve of her cheek. She gave me a little smile.

  “Be prepared for a boring night,” I said, “because I’m not going to lose.”

  “You have to promise me one thing,” Caitlin said.

  “Name it.”

  “Whatever happens, no matter what…don’t let her take you alive.”

  I couldn’t hold back a shiver, thinking of that thing at the clinic. Wondering what worse nightmares Lauren could conjure up with the power of a goddess at her fingertips.

  “Don’t even worry about it,” I said. “I’ve gotta get some sleep. Okay if I crash here tonight?”

  She reached over and untucked my shirt, undoing the buttons one by one.

  “You say that like you have a choice.”

  • • •

  I woke up on an airplane.

  The lighting was all wrong, like I was a bug inside a chunk of amber, and there was nothing outside the porthole window but smoke. The smoke roiled in thick black clouds.

  “I’m sorry about this,” Bob Payton said, sitting next to me.

  I squinted, trying to focus. It was a full flight, but everyone around us was sound asleep.

  Asleep. Dreaming. You’re dreaming.

  “I didn’t have any other way to reach you,” he said. “You have to come to New York, right away.”

  I tugged at my seat belt. It didn’t budge. There was no reason for the latch not to work. It just didn’t want to.

  “I don’t have time for this,” I told him.

  He leaned in and grabbed my arm. His eyes were manic.

  “I caught one. One of the smoke-faced men. Trapped it.”

  “What part of ‘no time’ are you not understanding?” I said. “There are bigger problems to deal with—”

  “That’s the point! I did more than trap it. I can weaponize it.”

  That caught my attention.

  “Against Lauren?” I said.

  “Against the Garden and anything touched by it. Unchecked life meets concentrated occult entropy. Boom. Or more likely, a faint hissing sound as it just…boils away. Come to New York.”

  “Why New York?” I said. “What’s there?”

  “Our laboratory, the off-site facility Ausar set up for Nedry, Clark, and me during the Viridithol experiments. I needed some of my old equipment. The old girl’s in lousy shape, and I had to bring in a portable generator for power, but it’s good enough for my work.”

  “I’m up against the wall here,” I told him. “Flying across the country and back is going to cost time I can’t afford to waste. You are absolutely, completely, one hundred percent certain you can do this?”

  He took a deep breath and nodded. The mania in his eyes faded to steely determination.

  “I want to make amends,” he said. “This is how. Just come as soon as you can.”

  The smoke cleared outside the window, ripping apart to show the skyline of New York City directly b
elow us. Then the plane’s nose wobbled, tilting like the first car of a roller coaster at the top of its peak, and veered straight down. The plane plummeted from the sky.

  I clutched the armrests, gravity forcing me back into the seat, my heart pounding as we went into free fall. A crowded city street lined with cars came racing up to greet us with the speed of a cannonball. I didn’t have the breath to scream or time to think. At the last second, I caught a blurry glimpse of a street sign and a string of numbers. An address.

  Then I slammed into the ground at four hundred miles an hour.

  I shot bolt upright in bed. My skin was clammy, slick with cold sweat. The scarlet letters of the bedside clock read 3:18. I stumbled into the hallway. Caitlin was already awake, sitting at the glass kitchen table and puttering on her laptop. She glanced over, her eyebrows lifting.

  “Go back to bed,” she said. “You need more sleep.”

  “No time. Bob Payton dreamwalked to find me. He might have something. I’ll explain in a minute, have to get cleaned up.”

  No sooner had I cranked up the twin heads in Caitlin’s shower, filling the chamber with billowing steam, than the frosted glass door swung open and she joined me inside.

  “If things are that urgent,” she said, holding up a loofah, “you can tell me now. Turn around.”

  “He snagged one of the smoke-faced men. Says he can turn it into some kind of weapon.”

  Caitlin’s hand slid over my back, followed by the plush, wet touch of the soapy sponge, milking away the tension in my shoulders.

  “Can he do it?” she asked.

  “He thinks he can. Look, he knows I wouldn’t have any qualms about killing him. He’s putting his neck on the chopping block, reaching out to me like this. If he didn’t think he could deliver, he wouldn’t have done it.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “If all goes well, I’ll be back by sundown,” I said. “I know Pixie needed a little time with the recordings we made of Roth’s voice, to get the next part of the plan ready. I also need somebody to rent the motel room for that part, and basically to make sure everybody’s on call when and where I need them. I know you’re busy planning for Case Exodus, so I hate to ask—”

  “Yes, I’ll keep everyone on task while you’re gone,” she said, purring in my ear. “I’m very good at cracking the whip.”

  That was how I ended up back at the airport before dawn, drinking black coffee from a recycled paper cup and listening to the come-play-me chimes from a bank of slot machines in the concourse. Vegas’s farewell to the tourist traffic, suctioning out the last of their pocket change before kicking them back home. Every minute I spent here was a minute lost forever. I blew on my coffee and tried not to pace.

  Five hours and five minutes to JFK International. That was 305 minutes for Lauren to get closer to the prize, while I sat crammed into an economy-class seat somewhere over the endless American heartland. All I could get was a window seat, and every bump of turbulence brought back the memory of my dreaming death-dive. They showed a movie on the flight, some romantic comedy I remembered seeing commercials for a few months back and promptly forgetting, and I dozed my way through it. Snatches of canned dialogue and laugh lines washed over the cheap plastic headphones and slipped through my groggy thoughts, none of it making much sense.

  We touched down on the tarmac with a heavy thump and a mechanical howl as the jet braked hard and fast. JFK was like a microcosm of New York itself: hard and brusque and impatient, under skies that looked like chunks of broken slate. I skipped the crowds at the baggage claim and headed outside, bracing myself against a sudden gust of cold wind. The weather was somewhere in the mid fifties, with rain on the horizon, and I hadn’t even thought to bring a jacket. The air outside tasted like burnt diesel.

  I didn’t have to wait long for a cab. I gave the cabbie the address I’d seen in Bob’s dream, and he looked back at me through a sheet of knife-scarred Plexiglas.

  “Yonkers, huh?” he said in a thick Jersey accent. “Y’know that’s a seventy, eighty-buck ride, right? Lot cheaper to take the airtrain up to Jamaica Station, then hop the blue line.”

  “I’m in a hurry,” I said.

  “Suit yourself,” he told me and gave the meter box a fat-fingered slap to start it running.

  The address turned out to be in Northwest Yonkers, in a long and lonely stretch of decommissioned factories with their dirty noses pressed to the Hudson River. The taxi rumbled over broken train tracks and splashed through mud puddles on the torn-up remnants of old parking lots.

  “You, ah, sure you got the right address?” the cabbie asked.

  I was sure. It wasn’t what I saw—it was what I felt: an electric tingle in the air that had nothing to do with the black thunderclouds on the horizon. There was magic here, old and rich and powerful, setting my teeth on edge. The numbers that flashed before my dream-eyes hung on a red brick wall, under a concrete plaque reading “MacKenzie and Sons Shipping, Est. 1891.”

  “This is the place,” I said. “Right here’s fine.”

  He stopped the cab, and I counted off bills from my wallet.

  “You know,” he told me, “you can get out here, but coming back’s another story. You ain’t gonna find a cab within a mile of this place, especially after sundown.”

  I slipped the fare through a slot in the plastic window, plus an extra twenty.

  “Don’t worry, I’ve got an exit strategy,” I told him. I got out, and the cold wind ruffled my hair as the taxi drove away.

  A big orange CONDEMNED sticker covered the wire-grid window on the warehouse door. A padlock lay on the broken concrete at my feet, snipped open with a pair of bolt cutters. Bob had let himself in.

  I let myself in, too.

  Thirty-Six

  Klieg lights dangled from the warehouse scaffolding, their power lines running to a portable generator that chugged and coughed like a heavy smoker running a marathon. Harsh white beams rained down on the warehouse floor, casting stark illumination against rusted vats and shelves lined with broken equipment and cobwebs.

  Bob Payton had traded his tattered bathrobe for a lab coat and shaved his frosty beard. His cheeks were a mess of uneven stubble and old scars. He looked to the door and waved me over, toward a table where he’d set up a teapot on a hotplate.

  “You’re here. Good. Right on time. Here, drink this.”

  He sloshed three fingers of pale herbal tea into a dirty coffee mug and held it out to me. It smelled like sweaty socks and mint.

  “What is it?” I said, wrinkling my nose.

  “Green tea mixed with ground datura seeds.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t get messed up right now. No time.”

  “A very, very light dosage,” he said. “Please. You’ll need it to see what I’ve done.”

  He had a point. I held my nose and gulped it down in two swallows. It had an aftertaste like cold medicine, bitter and filmy on my teeth. Bob flitted away like a bird, jittery and fast, huddling over a workbench.

  “Aren’t you going to drink any?” I said.

  “What? No. For one thing, taking datura orally is incredibly dangerous. You should never do it. It can wreck your stomach lining.”

  “But—I just—”

  He looked back and pointed at his dilated eyes. The back of his hand was coated in ink, scrawled with occult glyphs that ran under the sleeve of his coat.

  “Second, there’s not enough in there to touch me,” he said. “Like I said, very light dose. I have to ingest very large quantities of hallucinogens to get where I’m going. And I have been. For two days straight. Haven’t slept a wink.”

  “For somebody who’s tripping balls right now,” I said, “you are remarkably lucid.”

  “I went to college in Berkeley in the sixties. Trust me, I can swallow down a fistful of Quaaludes and lead a discussion on the themes of Sartre. Angle that standing light my way, would you please?”

  I tilted the lamp toward his bench. Bob had a va
nity mirror propped up against the wall and a fountain pen in his hand. He leaned his head back, dipped the brassy nub of the pen in a vial of black ink, and carefully traced more glyphs along the skin of his throat. I couldn’t place the symbols. They looked a little like Sanskrit, but that was out of my wheelhouse.

  “Seals of protection,” he explained. “Like I said, warding and containment is my specialty. I know how to keep my skin intact when dealing with creatures not of our world.”

  “I thought the smoke-faced men were buddies of yours. They called you their father.”

  In the mirror, he gave a pained smile. “That was before.”

  I gazed across the room. In the center of a block of bare concrete, white chalk marked the curves of a binding seal, a pentacle inside two concentric circles lined with writings in ancient Hebrew. Five white candles, halfway burned down, stood at the points of the star. There wasn’t anything inside the circle, at least nothing I could see.

  The side effects of the tea crept up behind me, in the shape of a slowly growing headache and a sudden wave of nausea that made my guts clench.

  “You’re feeling it,” Bob said, looking back at me through the mirror as he dipped his pen in the inkwell. “Sorry. This isn’t exactly a recreational drug. Shamanic experiences are rarely joyrides.”

  “What I’m feeling,” I said, “is hungover and pissed off. This isn’t even worki—”

  I watched as the tip of Bob’s pen touched his throat and left a squiggling black worm in its wake. The glyphs on his skin were alive, subtle but squirming, wanting to break free of the flesh and fly. I watched him in rapt silence, my eyes tracing the faint trails of light that ebbed from the motions of his fingertips.

  “Still with me?” he said.

  Strange question, my brain said. How could anyone be with anyone? We’re born alone. We die alone. It’s better that way. You disappoint fewer people.

  Still, the air between us rippled, and I thought I could pick out the currents of our breaths flowing between our bodies. How many other people’s breaths did I have in my lungs? How many of their molecules were in my body? Weren’t we all together, basically?