Max Quick: The Bane of the Bondsman (Max Quick Series Book 3)

by Mark Jeffrey

  “Um. That’s bad,” Sasha said.

  “And it’s still in motion,” Enki continued. “It’s still a work in progress. The hunger of the Archons for more and more is without bottom. Through the Bondsman, they will tear at the fiber of the universe until nothing is left but a haze of non-being and darkness.”

  “And that’s even worse,” Ian said. “Just when I thought it couldn’t possibly get worse. Are you done yet?”

  “No,” Enki said. “After that, they will turn us into them. We will be Archons as well. And because nothing is left to burn, they will starve, and we with them, since we, too, will require more and more fear and hatred.”

  “Awesome,” Casey said. “Just … awesome. And you were the one who didn’t want to do anything about him.”

  “I never said that!” Enki roared. Then, more quietly: “I just want to make sure we do no harm first. That we don’t make things worse unintentionally. The Archons are supernaturally intelligent: do not suppose for a moment that they have not shaped our paths in such a way that what we believe to be the correct course of action in reality, only serves their ends further.”

  “Like the Machine,” Ian said quietly.

  “Like the Machine,” Enki agreed.

  And at that moment, they passed something high up on a stalk of metal that looked very much like a miniature version of the Machine.

  “Crikey!” Ian exclaimed. “Speak of the devil …!”

  “Yes …” Enki mused. “Archontic amplifiers. Take what’s bad, make it worse. Throw it back out there and create a feedback loop of awful that keeps getting bigger and louder.”

  Maurice roused himself momentarily to wipe drool from his chin. He yawned. “Hey. Are we there yet, man?”

  AS THE MILES went by, and Maurice continued his napping, more and more of these ‘miniature Machines’ appeared with greater and greater frequency. With one particularly packed thicket of them, there was a sign that Casey noticed that pitched them as ‘Our Glorious Bondsman’s Power Generators’.

  “They’re trying to convince everyone they’re like wind farms or something,” Casey remarked with disgust.

  Soon after, the signs for City 29 started to appear, and then soon after that, they found themselves amidst the tall buildings of the city itself.

  In some ways, it looked like a normal city: New York, in particular came to mind. But the people walked in a more orderly fashion, in single files as though following unspoken, strict rules — and they were clearly all depressed. Not a single smile or laugh. Just a clockwork of bodies moving about. And no color — everyone wore gray. The men all wore hats. It was a perfection of uniformity.

  But the billboards and advertisements were the oddest part. Casey immediately recognized much of the imagery used came directly from The Dream. The girl imprisoned in the glass box appeared in several ads, for example. But when this was not the case, the imagery was likewise striking, strange, occult. There were a lot of pyramids, and black suns, Egyptian or Sumerian-looking dress. A cigarette ad featured a well-dressed man smoking in a desert with a tornado in the background, as if this would be his last cigarette ever, so he’d better enjoy it.

  There was a milk ad with a child, buried, meant to look like he was sleeping because of the comfort of the milk — but why was he underground? Why did he look like rigor had already set in? Why were his closed eyes sunken and his skin pale?

  “We must be careful with food here,” Enki remarked.

  “Food?” Casey said. “All of these creepy ads — and food is what worries you right now?”

  “Yes,” Enki said. “Food. We need it to live. We put it in our bodies. And the Bondsman undoubtedly produces it in such a way as to influence us, deaden our natural abilities, numb us to our potential.”

  “Like … magic food?” Ian asked fearfully. He’d encountered such things back with the Serps.

  “Yes. Exactly like that. Words, information, buried in the structure of the food, the DNA — meant to infect us subtly. A virus, to use a computer analogy. But not an obvious one.

  “And the same goes for these billboards, these ads. It is best not to stare at them. They, too, are meant to influence and program. They appear odd to you because you are not from this world. You see their oddness on the surface. But to anyone who has grown up here, that is just a milk ad. That is just a movie ad. The oddness is on a subconscious level.”

  “Do they contain … a virus also?” Ian asked. “Like, a visual one?”

  “Not exactly,” Enki explained. “They contain symbols, ancient esoteric symbols I recognize — and some new ones, like the girl in the glass box. But all of them correspond to archetypes in the deep subconscious shared memories of everyone here. You see almost no color in this world — it is drab gray and olive — except in the ads. Did you notice that? Colors excite the subconscious. They seem to be reserved for use by the Bondsman. Colors permit an image to be deeply absorbed instantaneously, getting past the old guard-dog of your conscious mind, influencing you before you even think about anything at all. You have no chance to form Words in your defense, to orchestrate a protest inside your own mind! You cannot even think, No, before an image with colors and archetypes slips comfortably into your mind and makes of itself a home there … and grows.”

  “So this is all about control,” Sasha said. “Obey. Submit. Be miserable. Love the Bondsman.”

  “No,” Enki said.

  “No?” Sasha, Ian and Casey all said at once.

  “No. Rather, it’s about using ads and films and music and movies to shape your consciousness — the consciousness of everyone — to participate in the formation of the Bondman’s world. And I mean the material world, the concrete world. That’s how he’s doing all this — everything you’ve seen so far: the weather, the colors, the strange animals. He’s not perverting reality — we are. Alone, one man is not powerful enough. Not me, not even Max. So the Bondsman is making us do it. Everyone in this world. All of our minds together are creating the material world around us … but he’s shaping our thoughts, amplifying them with those Archontic Machines. He’s telling us — subconsciously — what sort of world to make.”

  “That’s … incredible,” Ian said.

  “It’s pretty much exactly how Books work though,” Sasha said. “But on a much huger scale.”

  Enki nodded. “Now you have some idea of what we’re up against. It’s not just the Bondsman — though he is the lynchpin that holds all this together, whoever he turns out to be. Rather, the whole world itself is a runaway train — a framework that’s been implemented, one that is up and running. If we do bring the Bondsman down, it will only be the beginning of our task. We will have to bring that framework down as well.”

  THE ARRIVED at a place called — to Casey’s dismay — The Rosewood Arms. Enki chose it at random before realizing the name would remind Casey of Johnny Siren, her dead father.

  When Enki approached the desk, the employee regarded him somewhat disdainfully — Enki was dressed in a now tattered version of his Saville Row green suit, and he looked somewhat wild and unkempt, with his white hair and beard a tangle wreathing his head like a dirty cloud.

  But when he presented Cassandra Veerspike’s card, the man stiffened with fear and snapped to attention and became all ‘Right away sir!’ and ‘What can I get you sir?’. His fawning continued and was extended to Casey, Ian, Sasha and even the dirty hippie Maurice.

  Casey found herself momentarily lost in the spectacle of the city street around here. The area they were in resembled Times Square — with a V and a very tall, giant series of screens attached to the building at its apex. Although Enki had warned against the fascination and enchantment that the Bondsman’s ads would invariably soak her consciousness with, she was not able to completely stop her staring. One pattern emerged from the swirl of images around her: clocks. Everywhere, there were clocks and clocks and more clocks. Time. Time was pounded into your mind. Why was that?

  Finally, she swung her ey
es down to the people moving across the street. And they landed on Cody Chance.

  She blinked. She was hallucinating. She had to be.

  What?

  It was Cody — but dressed up as some sort of plain-clothes policeman. He was giving a dressing down to another man — who cowered fearfully: in the Bondsman’s world, a mere ticket was probably a very serious thing.

  What.

  Cody Chance suddenly finished — and jumped on his motorcycle before Casey could come out of her stunned surprise. She was just opening her mouth to yell his name when he gunned the engine and sped away.

  “THERE IS NO way that it was actually him,” Sasha said to Casey.

  But Casey Cyranus didn’t want to hear that. She turned away from her friends. If they would not believe her, then they were not the friends she needed right now.

  “I asked Enki if it were possible,” Ian added softly. “Just in case. But he agrees with Sasha. Cody Chance never really existed. Well. Not out here in the real world, anyway.”

  “Why not? What exactly is the ‘real world’?” Casey exploded, eyes brimming with tears. “I mean, we’ve all been in Books. We’ve been to Isle of the Dreamtime. So what’s so different about Arturo Gyp? Why was that supposedly not real? I’m sorry, but that town was just as real as this, right here, right now. Sasha? Right? Do you agree?”

  Conflict filled Sasha’s simmering brown eyes. Slowly, she nodded. She didn’t want to encourage this delusion of Casey’s. But she had no choice but to agree. “Arturo Gyp was pretty real.”

  “And what about these?” Casey drew one of the Red Roses, her magical weapon. “We have actual objects from Arturo Gyp with us right now. How can that be? Unless this is proof that Arturo Gyp — and everyone and everything in it — is real.”

  “That’s different,” said a new voice. It was Enki. He stood there, looking tired and old for the first time in awhile. “Those guns did not originate in your dream. It is true that you dreamed about them. But they —”

  “Oh, stop it!” Casey yelled. “Just stop. I don’t want to hear some stupid windbag explanation. I’m sick of them. It wasn’t a dream! The Red Roses and the White Roses are the proof. Sash and I are the only ones who can use them. And that’s because Logan White-Cloud gave them to us.”

  “It was I who gave them to you as well,” Enki reminded her.

  “And how did you get them?” Casey asked.

  Anger flashed in Enki’s eyes. Casey was startled by the sudden change that came over him. For a long moment, he quaked, as if recalling intense trauma or anger. “I have not told you the tale of my return to sanity. This is partly because I do not know it all myself. But this much is sure: the price of sanity was the forgetting of many things. Much was sealed off from my mind. It was not a bargain. No. It was in fact the very means by which I returned to sanity: the forgetting itself allowed my mind to return to itself again.”

  “So … you have amnesia,” Ian said.

  Enki nodded slowly.

  “You have … a secret. Something you’re keeping from yourself.”

  Enki’s eyebrow shot up.

  “You don’t find anything … I dunno … familiar about that,” Ian concluded.

  “The circumstances are entirely different,” Enki replied defensively.

  “Are they,” Ian pressed.

  Enki faced him squarely. “Let us be blunt. You’re asking if I am under control of the Archons. Or if I am being manipulated by them, as Max was.”

  Ian nodded. “Yes.”

  “I’m not,” Enki replied simply. “And before you protest, before you ask ‘how can I be sure when I have a hole in my memory?’ I will simply say that there is a certain feel to their machinations. There is a … a … smell, if you will. Simply put, I would know. I would feel their hand, were it present. It is not. You must simply trust me on this.”

  “And you have to trust me also. It was him,” Casey said, eyes burning hot, furious and proud. “It was Cody Chance. I know it was.”

  A WEEK PASSED at the Rosewood Arms.

  Enki had managed to find a black market in the city, and found that they were some natural organic foods — untainted by the Bondsman’s Archontic manipulations — that were available, for a price. But expense meant nothing with Cassandra’s card, so they were able to eat cleanly.

  After a day, Enki gave the Veerspike card to Ian and sent him out to get food from then on. “You’re the one with the armor,” Enki reasoned. “If you get into trouble, you’ll stand a better chance of getting through it than the rest of us. But don’t lose that card!”

  Casey spent most her time glued to the window, her eyes on the throngs below. Rivers of people poured along the sidewalks. The men all wore the grey uniform of the Bondsman’s world, the Sam Spade hat and tie; and the women, a grey wool skirt and suitcoat. The calendar claimed that the year was 1977, but in some sense, it wasn’t. This 1977 lacked the color, the music, the freedom of the original.

  The streetlights changed. The little people-rivers flowed, orderly, along their appointed paths. No one strayed from the crosswalks. There was not a single hint of anything contrary, anything counter.

  Across the street, a clock on a brick smokestack ticked up to the noon hour exactly.

  A Sky Chamber drifted lazily in the clouds behind it.

  The Bondsman didn’t just control this world. He infested it. He infested these people, right down to their very bones. They were mechanical because he was mechanical. They were a hive of insect-persons, buzzing along, busy busy busy. Always on to the next meeting, the next appointment, they next assignment. Tick tock.

  They may as well have been dipped in gold.

  There was no heart anywhere down there. No bravery. No —

  Wait.

  There. Finally! A rebel. A hint of boldness!

  One of them had turned against the crush of bodies. He stood for a moment like a man who had just awakened. Grey suits flowed around him as if he were a rock in a stream. Then, purposefully, deliberately, he went against them. He defied them. He strode in the midst, unafraid.

  Bondsman be damned, his steps said.

  Casey’s heart leapt. She knew that walk! It was the dopey, bow-legged cowboy shuffle she had come to love.

  Cody Chance.

  And I saw someone who looks like you today …

  Casey sprang from the window. With one fluid motion, she grabbed her gun belt and strapped it in place. In three heartbeats, she was through the front door, with Sasha and Ian screaming after her.

  Quickly, Sasha caught up and grabbed Casey by the arm.

  Casey spun, eyes burning with pain, Red Rose drawn. “Don’t,” Casey said.

  Sasha looked down at the eldritch weapon in shock. You wouldn’t.

  “No, of course I wouldn’t,” Casey whispered. “But I’m very serious. You need to back off.”

  “Let her go,” Enki bellowed from hallway. He was playing chess against Maurice — and incredibly, losing badly. “She has the Red Roses — she can defend herself. But Casey, please, wear this.” He tossed her his long overcoat. “Conceal your weapons. The Bondsman does not permit guns.”

  Eyes dripping onto her cheeks, Casey nodded gruffly. She returned the Red Rose to its holster and vanished down the stairwell.

  SHE’D LOST HIM.

  By the time she’d gotten down to the street, Cody was gone. Desperately, she whipped her head this way and that, looking for him, eyes stabbing the crowd.

  But he was nowhere to be seen.

  A billboard of the Bondsman stared down, mocking her.

  No. This was not going to happen. She would not allow it. She was going to find him.

  Pushing through the mindless masses, she climbed up on the base of a streetlight. People eyed her like she was a madwoman, but she didn’t care. These people were dead inside, but she was alive, more alive now than she’d been in weeks —!

  Where was he? He was just here! He couldn’t have gone far …

  The sound of a
motorcycle gunning its engine caught her ears.

  She whipped her head around just in time. It was him! It was the same bike, with a sparkling deep red gas tank and a cage twisting silver chrome nestling a monster engine. He twisted the handgrip and growling thunder filled the air. At the sound, the Bondsman’s zombies jumped in their shoes.

  She couldn’t actually make out his face beneath the helmet. Like the Bondsman, he was masked. But she knew …

  “Cody!” Casey yelled at the top of her lungs. She couldn’t help herself. “CODDDDYYYY!”

  But her words was shredded by the grumble of the motorbike. She was shouting into a hurricane.

  The motorcycle took off, and bolted down the street.

  Casey jumped down and drew the Red Roses. Bondsman be damned! But the mob blocked her way, oblivious. She didn’t have time for this!

  She fired two shots into the air. That got their attention: everyone froze. “Make a hole!” she shouted. When no one moved, she pointed the guns in the direction she wanted to go. Instantly, the sea of bodies parted with terrified gasps. The guns were magnets, and the people were iron filings with similar charges: they repelled.

  She ran. She ran harder than she had ever run before in her entire life. Within moments, her lungs were bleeding pain. The veins at her neck threatened to pop. Her calves felt like they would split up the middle. And her feet felt like pulsing hamburger stuffed into boots.

  But none of that mattered. Only Cody Chance, speeding away on a motorcycle, mattered.

  FORTUNATELY, HE didn’t go very far.

  He quickly toed the kickstand down, parked the bike and entered a brownstone.

  Casey’s heart kicked like a stag. She actually knew where he lived! She hadn’t lost him! She could hardly believe it. True, this was the Bondsman’s world. But by some miracle, Cody Chance was in it as well.