‘Do you feel old now?’
‘Physically, no. But I’ll be honest with you, Charley: I do feel tired.’
‘Yeah, but … I mean … it must still be kind of awesome, right?’
‘In the sense of inducing awe, I suppose it is,’ Abe said. ‘But take it from me, handsome. Being young is a young person’s game.’
It was probably some form of textbook narcissism that caused Ben to apply Anabeth’s observation to himself, but having been accused of being a textbook narcissist, maybe he couldn’t help it. It just seemed so unbearably silly now to think that up until two days ago, he’d been hung up on turning forty soon. Feeling stuck. Embarrassed with himself. Like he’d fouled up his best days, and now they were behind him forever. Often, the thought had occurred to him that he should be working on a time machine instead of the world’s ten-millionth new overdrive pedal; part of him would do anything for the chance to go back and do a few things differently. Now he remembered something she’d said this morning – It was me who couldn’t grow up – and he wondered: what would Anabeth Glass give for the chance to move forward?
‘So let me see if I have this straight,’ Wasserman said from his spot in the corner. He was sitting up a little straighter at last. He still looked like day two of a heroin detox, but his eyes now seemed comparatively alert. ‘You’re claiming to be my grandmother.’
This gave Anabeth a chuckle, which she seemed to need. ‘Well. Great-great-great-great-grandmother, technically. But yes.’
‘And I’m supposed to believe that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s impossible.’
‘You’re here, aren’t you?’
‘What does that mean?’
‘That some part of you must believe the impossible already.’ She looked at Wasserman with such genuine warmth and affection that Ben almost envied the guy a little. ‘Circumstances aside, it’s the delight of a very long lifetime to share your company, Reuben. How I wish I could have met Eli, too.’
Wasserman sat quietly, staring straight ahead.
‘You’ve done him proud, you know.’
Now Wasserman pushed himself up against the wall, swaying unsteadily on his feet. Without a word, he shambled around the bed and into the bathroom, closing the door behind him.
Field Agent Constance West stood amidst the gritty rubble of brick, glass, framing lumber, and corrugated steel siding that had, up until this morning, comprised the administrative office and two perfectly good vehicle bays of a small-town volunteer fire station.
Ten feet away, her partner, Field Agent Simon Battis, plugged one ear with a knuckle while he spoke into his mobile phone. When he was finished, he pocketed the phone and said, ‘That was Washington. We’re on with the Joint Chiefs in forty minutes.’
‘So I gathered.’ West extended her hand. ‘Smell my finger.’
Battis grimaced as he approached. ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’
West stripped her gloves and tossed him the evidence pouch. It seemed like an unnecessary formality, at this point; she didn’t need a molecular analysis to know that the sample she’d just recovered matched the ones they’d taken down in Kansas, then a timber stand in Brownville, then a cow pasture in Peru. Anyone with a nose could have made that call.
Battis glanced at the pouch, equally unimpressed. He didn’t even remove his shades. ‘Where?’
‘Severed electrical conduit.’ She pointed. ‘Right there. Took a nice little plug out of him.’
‘Him? What makes you think of it as a him all of a sudden?’
‘Big, smelly, likes to smash things … gosh, I dunno.’
‘Sexist.’
‘Fair point,’ she said. ‘Took a nice little plug out of it.’
‘We could just go home,’ Battis said. ‘This thing keeps leaving pieces of itself behind, at this rate it oughta be whittled down to nothing in, what? Five, six more decades?’
‘Unless it grows back as it goes.’
Battis sighed. He looked to the north, then to the south. Local law enforcement at this latest site had dwindled to crowd control and the last of the tech teams. Meanwhile, beyond the cordon, in the parking lot of the Food 4 Less down the street, the crowd of townsfolk and media crews had only grown.
West balled up her gloves and sealed them in a biohazard pouch. ‘I say we keep working backward from here. Run down the initial dispatch.’
Battis jerked a thumb over his shoulder, opposite her suggestion. ‘It’s traveling that way. Apparently.’
‘Suppose we catch up with it. Then what?’
‘You just wrote my pitch to the Joint Chiefs.’
‘Perfect,’ she said, thinking instead of the one and only Anabeth Glass. She was around here somewhere. West would have bet her pension on it. Leave it to the boys to run straight for the guns when all they needed was to find the right girl. ‘That makes it your turn to drive, then.’
The first annual Tops-Optional Sandbar Volleyball Invitational had just gotten underway when it started raining fish from the sky.
In sunny daylight, no less. Barely a wisp of a cloud overhead.
It was completely bizarre. One minute the guys from Theta Delta were serving 0–5 to the girls from Alpha Sigma Phi (all of whom, disappointingly, had chosen the ‘tops-on’ option for tournament play, most of them even going so far as long-sleeved Under Armour against the crisp October afternoon). The next minute, river carp the size of lapdogs were hitting the sandbar all around them: flopping, twisting, gills flaring, mouths gawping for air.
‘What the …?’ Tyler Crabtree yelped, just as a fat one hit him between the shoulder blades with a wet, fleshy smack, driving him to his knees.
‘The coolers!’ somebody shouted. ‘Use the coolers!’
Then it was chaos, everybody shouting, screaming, squealing, running in circles, tripping over themselves and each other, kicking up sand. The calmer heads among the group began pairing up as if trained for this very scenario, dumping the coolers, raising them over their heads like portable shelters and then huddling underneath, two to an Igloo.
Meanwhile, the fish kept falling: thudding into the sandbar, splashing back into the river, thonking off the empty coolers, tangling in the volleyball net. Jordy DeFord stood agape, feet plugged into the cold sand up to his ankles, thinking: Somebody needs to be Tweeting this.
About that same time, Jordy recognized that the fish weren’t actually falling after all. Rather, they appeared to be voluntarily hurling themselves out of the Platte River like wriggling, silvery torpedoes. He’d actually heard of this: some invasive species of Asian carp flinging themselves into fishermen’s boats up and down the nearby Missouri River, where the Platte eventually emptied. But he’d always thought they were just … well. Fish stories.
But now he was seeing it first-hand, with his own two eyes: an approaching wave of kamikaze jumpers that split off in a flapping V around this wide, undulating sandbar in the middle of the wide, shallow Platte, where the Theta Delts and the Alpha Sigs had gathered for one last off-campus fling before the weather turned. It was almost as if these crazy fish were performing some kind of synchronized routine.
Or running away from something, Jordy thought.
Then he saw it.
Something.
Something coming up. Up from out of the deeper water. Now breaking the surface, following the river bottom like a man climbing a long flight of stairs.
No, Jordy thought. Not a man.
More like some hulking, primordial, sludge-born prototype of a man. Now trudging up on to the far end of their sandbar, shedding river water as it lumbered forth.
And that’s when Jordy DeFord stopped believing his eyes and started shrieking.
TWENTY
They proceeded in silence, west and then north, for twelve short miles. The hatchling hadn’t been so far off, Frost thought petulantly, even hampered by the mechanical shortcomings of a base model Lincoln Continental with $75k in high-tech modifications. But he was
forced – reluctantly – to acknowledge Lucius’s point:
When mining the ancient magic of the cosmos, one mustn’t mistake tunnel vision for a tunnel.
From I-29, he saw the motel sign in the distance on their left. Frost took the upcoming exit, which fed them on to US-30 amidst the westbound minivans carrying families, the gleaming new SUVs and rust-eaten rattletraps carrying citizens of all ages and incomes, the semi-trailer trucks carrying doomed livestock to its unceremonious, unimportant end. All of them struck Frost as versions of the same basic vehicle.
They saw police flashers as they approached the Super 8. Within the next half-block, Frost could see a handful of men in uniform all gaggled around a familiar charcoal van with a red stripe and a crunched front end.
Lucius said, ‘Looks like the place.’
Gone, Frost noted with gratitude, was the belligerent, self-sorry tone in the injured man’s voice. Lucius Weatherbee might not have been his old self quite yet. But it was work time, now, and he was back on point. In fact, it was Lucius who first looked right while Frost was still looking left.
‘Boss?’ he said.
Across the highway, opposite the law enforcement convention currently in progress, sat a shabbier establishment: the River Bend Inn and Suites, according to the sun-faded sign in the empty parking lot. Across the same parking lot trudged a lone figure.
Lucius came to attention in the passenger seat. ‘Isn’t that …’
‘Reuben Wasserman,’ Frost finished for him. ‘In the flesh.’
Wasserman – eyes downcast, shoulders slumped – appeared to be shambling toward the embankment leading up to the roadway itself.
‘The hell’s he doing?’
An excellent question indeed.
Anabeth gazed toward the closed bathroom door and sighed. ‘Poor thing,’ she said. ‘He’s had a rough twenty-four hours.’
Ben, who could claim better days himself, found himself somewhat less than concerned with Reuben Wasserman’s. He sort of blamed the kid for all this, he recognized. Yeah, OK: that wasn’t fair. Don’t shoot the messenger, et cetera. But he felt entitled to be mad at somebody.
‘Frost,’ he said. ‘Who is he?’
‘My trainee, once upon a time. He believes that I betrayed him. That the Order betrayed him. But that’s sort of just Malcom being Malcom. And it’s a whole other story.’
‘What I mean is, how does he fit in?’
‘Malcom believes he can harness the creature.’
‘To do what?’
‘We’d have to ask Malcom, but here’s what I can tell you for sure: since his dismissal from the Order, he’s been freelancing underground as a … a sort of supernatural arms dealer, I suppose you might say.’
‘Supernatural arms dealer.’ Ben nodded along, thinking: Sure, why not? ‘And that’s a thing?’
‘Malcom’s always fancied himself an innovator.’ She checked her phone. ‘Fortunately, he’s been occupying himself somewhere on other side of the world since the Arcadia dig began, so he’s been a step behind the times until now. To be honest, many in the Order believed he might finally be dead.’
‘I guess they were mistaken.’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time. Knowing Mal, he probably has bidders already lined up from here to Crimea to the Levant.’
‘Bidders for what? I thought you said the creature was made for only one thing.’
‘That’s why he needs us,’ she said. ‘You to draw the creature out, and me to control it. It doesn’t take a military mind to imagine the weapon it might make.’
Ben waved a hand dismissively toward the bathroom. ‘Then what does that make him?’
Abe looked at him. The depth in her eyes just then seemed unfathomable to Ben, and he instantly regretted his tone. There were those, he imagined, who might have construed it as callous. Perhaps indirectly bordering on textbook narcissism.
‘A lowly emissary,’ she finally said. ‘With limited power to affect change on his own.’
Ben nodded. ‘Sorry. It’s been a long day.’
‘Which makes him stronger than he realizes,’ she went on. ‘Upholding tradition. Keeping the memory of my Silas alive. Remembering his example. Passing it on. That’s the water carrier’s job, now.’ Abe shrugged. ‘Finishing his work is mine.’
‘That’s why Frost grabbed him up first. Reuben.’
She nodded. ‘Reuben is Malcom Frost’s way of drawing me out. And letting me know the stakes of the game.’
‘Do what he wants or he kills the water carrier.’
‘With Malcom, “kill” is a pedestrian concept, but yes. But it’s not just Reuben in danger, I’m afraid. It’s every living Wasserman. My bloodline. Which includes an infant, soon.’ Her eyes gained a wistful twinkle. ‘Reuben’s sister Sara and her husband are about to have their first. He’s soon to be an uncle.’
‘I see.’
‘I swear I can’t stay off their Facebook page.’
‘He’s your creature,’ Ben said. ‘Frost.’
Anabeth tilted her head. ‘I hadn’t thought of it that way. But in a sense I suppose so. One of them, anyway.’
‘And he didn’t follow us to Christine’s.’
‘No.’
‘We beat him there.’
Another nod. ‘Right to the end of Bloody Bill’s line.’
Ben glanced at Charley. Charley stared at the floor.
‘And all the more leverage for Malcom,’ she added. ‘Just in case.’
‘In case what?’
‘In case you turned out to be a stubborn, uncooperative, mule-headed so-and-so, I suppose.’ She smiled. ‘Thank goodness we don’t need to worry about that.’
Ben adjusted his position on the uncomfortable air unit and sat with that a moment. He decided that Anabeth, intentionally or not, had lied to him again; she’d told him her story, and he still didn’t understand everything. In fact, he had just as many questions now as before. They were just different questions, that was all.
Starting with basic logistics:
‘If the goal was to correct a hundred and fifty year-old mistake, why finagle a job at my company just to babysit me for part of every workday?’ Ben asked her. ‘Why not hang around the Arcadia dig site until the creature woke up, then nip all this right in the bud?’ He thought about it a moment. ‘Actually, why wait for somebody else to dig the thing up in the first place? And where is this Order of yours, anyway? They can’t be bothered to send a little backup?’
‘These are all intelligent, reasonable questions,’ she said, checking her phone again, ‘and they show me you’ve really been listening. But right now I’m begging you: can we please turn our focus back to how we’re going to get …’
‘This rock of yours.’
‘The Shepherd Stone?’
‘This Shepherd Stone,’ Ben said. ‘That turns the thing off?’
‘There are rules involved,’ Abe answered, ‘but basically yes.’
‘That sounds like basically maybe.’
‘To put it in terms of your computer analogy, think of it like an override code. If entered correctly, I should be able to take control of the system.’
‘But that also overrides your … situation.’
She grinned. ‘It’s OK. You can call it a Gypsy curse.’
Whatever they called it, here at last was the one thing Ben felt he truly did understand: in looking out for them, Anabeth Glass wasn’t just fulfilling a duty.
She was conducting a kind of suicide mission.
‘And you’d trade immortality,’ he said. ‘For us.’
‘Try menstruating for a century and a half, then come talk to me.’
‘Ugh,’ Charley said, looking instantly horrified with himself. His face flared crimson. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.’
Anabeth chuckled. ‘Don’t give me too much credit, that’s all I’m trying to say. I like you both very much, please don’t misunderstand. I couldn’t bear to see either of you harmed. But I’d dearly love to
know what it feels like to break a hip one day.’
‘Besides complete and total cooperation from this moment on,’ Ben said, ‘what do you need from me to help you make that happen? That also came out wrong.’
‘I gleaned your meaning. Do you want the honest truth?’
‘All the way.’
‘I haven’t completely figured that out yet,’ she said. ‘But step one is to retrieve the stone.’
‘Retrieve?’
‘For starters.’
Ben patted his own thighs, signifying the cargo pockets of Anabeth’s paintball pants. ‘You mean you don’t have it?’
‘I did.’
‘Where is it now?’
‘I’m not sure I quite know the best way to tell you that.’
‘Honest truth, remember?’
‘You might want to brace yourself.’
‘Abe.’ He felt himself growing impatient. ‘Trust me. After everything we’ve been through today, whatever it is, I can take it.’
Anabeth took a deep breath. ‘Remember that rock I threw this morning?’
‘Lucius,’ Frost said, extending his right hand as he steered with his left. ‘The glove compartment, if you wouldn’t mind.’
They crunched across the gritty, littered parking lot of the River Bend Inn and Suites, setting a course to intercept this latest in a long line of indescribably hapless water carriers. Lucius grunted in discomfort as he leaned forward in his seat, popping the glove box as requested. Then Frost felt the cool, pebbled handgrip of Aberdeen’s dart pistol in his palm.
Wasserman had almost reached the embankment by the time Frost braked the Lincoln to a caterwauling stop directly in his path. The car’s last working window slipped free of its mechanism as he pressed the button to lower it down, dropping with a thud and a shatter somewhere inside the door. Wasserman finally looked up. His eyes registered nothing for a moment, then flew open wide.
‘Reuben,’ Frost said cheerfully. ‘Thank goodness we found you. You look unwell.’
‘Oh, shit,’ Wasserman said.
‘How on earth did you manage to get all the way up here?’
‘Room 103,’ he said, pointing over his shoulder. ‘OK? They’re all in there. You found ’em.’
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