The Fifth Descent of Lexi Montaigne

by R. S. Darling

  “Tomorrow,” Lexi whispered. Vortex was right it seemed, which gave her less than three full days to travel over 750 miles, locate Arfion—which was not on any map, and Gramps’ coordinates were faded to misinformation—and somehow destroy Dorl.

  Her current theory (and she had only stumbled on this one somewhere near Summit) was that Dorl was going to use the fallout of Wormwood to annihilate cities, possibly even nations.

  “Highly implausible kitty-boy,” she said, then remembered he was gone, and almost cried.

  Lexi needed time to discover Dorl’s pattern, preferably somewhere safe. But who could imagine such a place? Do I even deserve safety after what I’ve done?

  The only way to overcome fear of the darkness, the dungeon quoted, is to become part of that darkness.

  Beethoven lingered over the speakers, the dancing violins of the first movement taking over the staccato trumpets in a familiar way. But there was something in the sound of the clanging brass and the screeching violins that failed to soothe her like they used to. Lexi pressed the off button. “Ugh, annoying, jeez.”

  All her life Beethoven had been there, comforting her, exciting her, calming her. Now he was obnoxious. Downright overambitious.

  The plows were out in force despite the mere membrane that was the snowfall along the interstate. In the absence of the news (and Beethoven), silence hung thick and greasy in the air, Lexi’s thoughts wading through the fryer that the cab had become. She watched the lines in the road whoosh by like Morse code, her mind wandering back to scenes of death and mayhem. In between the blood and the flames the single, strangely prosaic recollection of Universal Psychology struck her.

  “How long since I worked on it?” The sound of her voice after fifty miles startled her.

  * * *

  The city and county of Denver faded. At a truck stop just off the interstate in south western Colorado Lexi ingested a three-inch thick sandwich comprised of meat that tasted suspiciously like the stench of the men around her. The peppers and sauce designed to inspire heart attacks only compounded the filthy masculine taste.

  Perhaps it would be best if you did have a heart attack now.

  “You’ve got mail,” the metallic voice of Leslie’s computer woke her an hour later. Reaching out from the cocoon of the parka in the Dakota, she opened the e-mail from Vortex. Read quickly, the words melting into balls of jumbled black letters as their meaning sunk in: “Been tracking SCIA to keep my skills sharp. Mistake. They are coming. They have access to all U.S. satellites and they will find you, soon. Do not sleep and do not fail. If they reach you, Dorl will succeed. He is not what he seems. Even SCIA is clueless. Run. Run now!”

  Lexi looked around. Suspicious characters were everywhere: The man leaning against his trailer, the woman talking on a slim cell phone and the two men in long leather jackets black as the polar night. Were they there before? She could not say with any certainty. Her world was compressed into lines of code on a computer screen. One word would announce her location for God knew how many Federal Divisions. CIA, NSA, SCIA, FBI, SOL? She could feel the walls closing in. There was nothing to regret more than having taken that old oak box from Gramps.

  It was Pandora’s Box.

  The Dakota started obediently, the wipers washing aside a collection of flakes, the all-season tires spinning just a half dozen revolutions before melting the black ice. Everything was automatic. Once again she prided herself on the ability of her schizoid personality to bury deep the emotions which cripple normal people.

  At a station in Mach Colorado, a few dozen miles east of Utah, she purchased some NoDoz pills and filled her stomach as she filled the tank.

  “I will not sleep,” she vowed to the ebb and flow of Echoes on 91.5. Her heart quickened with excitement, with the resumed hope she had found. As a psychologist, it occurred to her that the pills might have something to do with her unnatural euphoria, but what did it matter?

  She scrawled little notes and half-ideas chronicling the path to recognizing the Pattern, knowing now where to begin: Tesla’s Teleforce. It seemed as clear now as the Midnight Sun in the Arctic Circle that Dorl would not have bothered to assist Tesla unless he knew he could complete and harness the technological wonder that never was.

  If only you had realized that earlier, perhaps—

  “Shut up!”

  Chapter 29

  It was half past 8:00 and the dying day had yet to expire. Glazed eyes glared out at the snow-powdered road shrinking to a single granule on the horizon.

  Utah.

  Sleep should come and then deep, blessed REM, but her eyes were still wide by the pills she had bought back in . . . she couldn’t remember. Lexi turned her head to the passenger seat as Sarah McLachlan’s Answer chilled the radio. A song for funerals. There was a time when solitude had been a lust to be pursued and attained. But now it was depressing, being alone. The world had changed. Friends and lovers and more had died.

  There is a place in Sevier County Utah; a rural diversified place much like Batavia for its inability to decide if it is a town or a city. Lexi parked outside a motel there, notable only for its unabashed conformity to a thousand other such prosaic stopovers. According to Lewis’s map she was now as far from Boulder as she was close to Las Vegas. Sin City was the closest metropolis to Arfion—again, according to Lewis’s map—making it her quasi destination.

  She found some cash and shuffled to the front desk of some no-tell motel in Sevier County Utah, a faux wood slab with a paneled façade. Slapped a greasy Jackson greenback against the counter. “Need a room for one night.”

  The man stared. She stared back, wondering if he was as dim as his eyes suggested: they were too close, giving him a perpetual cross-eyed look. His lisp did nothing to dispel the initial impression of idiocy. “O’ course,” he took the money, gave her change and a key.

  “Wouldja care fer some room service? We’ve a fine selection a whole wheat bread, practercly fat free.”

  Why did he say that?

  She nodded and made for the truck, throwing the close-eyed man sharp looks over her shoulder. On grabbing her bag Lexi glanced inside Satan’s carrier. “Ready for a nice warm room, kitty-boy?” She stared in wide-eyed confusion for a moment; panic crept. She wondered where on the road Satan had fallen out. How could I be so neglectful? A frantic search for Satan.

  And then the memory of the forest arrived. When did all my memories become bad ones?

  She turned to head for her room but stopped when her eye caught the glitz of moonlight off a zipper in the truck bed. She reached over the yellow rails and hoisted Lewis’s bag. It was heavy with the weight of his world, his secrets, his death. It came with her to room #11.

  The room was a box painted in creams and blues. The bedspread looked like something a rainbow would throw up.

  But there was something in the colors, in the pattern of stitches weaving in and out of the pleated assortment of material. “Like the Tower,” and the images finally melded together there on the bed. He has been weaving a tapestry of weapons. And the SCIA is supporting him. This theory tore loose even the idea of breath from her lungs and she slipped into the rainbow vomit, dropping the Company bag and her own with a thud.

  Later, fingers caressed keys, raven hair crowned her head and letters flashed snow-white against the sky-blue screen. Why was Vortex taking so long to e-mail back?

  Lexi grunted, stood, entered the bathroom to take a shower. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Hands ran along a diminutive waist, trying and failing to squeeze taut flesh. She had always been thin but this was something else.

  “Self-mutilators often also suffer from one or another eating disorder.” Times like this she really hated possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of all her flaws. She tried to turn away from the vacant stare that refused to blink, the eyes limned by crimson veins and heavy with the aftershock of insomnia. And there was blood. Scarlet circles stained her pants. There was a heavy, almost black line circumventing the b
ottom half of her breast, blatantly marking her blouse. No wonder close-eyes had stared.

  After a shower the tinny voice of Leslie’s computer said: ‘You’ve got mail.”

  Vortex’s response was terse to the point of rudeness, but the address to some special weapons designer seemed somehow chipper. Specifically the line, ‘He specializes in theoretical weaponry and he hates the government’. In the final line Vortex warned her to never contact him again. There was no emotional response—she wasn’t even sure what she should feel.

  Lexi looked at her list delineating Dorl’s pattern, circled her note ‘it will be something useful to SCIA’.

  Sunday emerged from Saturday’s afterbirth. Wormwood was so close now that its threat could be seen even in daylight. Lexi stood staring up at the cloudless dawn, watching, waiting for it. Wormwood moved without preamble, the tail a coruscating whirlwind and the comet itself outlined by a fuzzy comma. Her breath fogged the immediate space before her. Lexi smiled.

  Indeed, she’d always like this type of air, this invigorating slap-in-the-face chilliness that always managed to clear away her mental cobwebs.

  She reloaded the cab and took the 76 southwest to make for a farm outside Elsinore in the depths of the Badlands: a farm which supposedly boasted a man uniquely qualified to help her perceive the framework of the Pattern. This ‘theoretical weapons specialist’.

  As she fled, blue and red lights filled her mirrors. Police surrounded the motel.

  “That was close,” suspecting the police were now chasing her also, probably because of that suspiciously large inferno she and Lewis had left behind in . . . Iowa? She couldn’t recall

  What should have taken fifteen minutes took the better part of an hour. Locating the farm was made difficult by unlit and nondescript roads. Under the dawns light (and Wormwood’s corona) a line of street lamps rose in the desert another mile south, well off the worn path of the interstate.

  She drove down the sandy path slowly, fearing the front suspension might give.

  Entering the territory of a weapons specialist in the early morning without so much as a phone call was not likely to invite pleasantries, but she found herself oddly hopeful. The front tires slammed into the wheel wells on the other side of a rut, making her flinch. “I’m sorry,” she apologized to the thirteen year old truck.

  At the end of the driveway, discernible only by the fact that it had more ruts than the ground around it, Lexi parked and got out. There were no vehicles in sight, but the round roofed structure to the left was more than large enough to accommodate a pair of semi’s and their trailers. The building was lit up from the inside, light spilling out.

  She took a few tedious steps towards the round-roofed structure. Was this plot of land riddled with bouncing Betty’s and besmirching Bob’s, ready to cut her open?

  Twenty feet from the door, she froze. A gaunt man appeared in the entrance. Grease slathered his frame. Lexi imagined that if she wrung him out, there’d be enough lube to keep Big Ben running in tip-top shape for another decade.

  Grease Man aimed a shotgun at her chest with the steady gaze of a man familiar, even intimate, with such weapons. Lexi covered her mouth, stifling a squeal. She’d expected nothing less than Rambo, or perhaps Batman, but this tall glass of dirty water pointing a simple Pa Ingalls shotgun seemed somehow far more intimidating.

  “One more step and I blow your fuckin head off,” the man hacked.

  Lexi didn’t move, despite the humor in hearing a cliché spoken by this man with a straight face. “Sorry, I was expecting . . . someone else.” Surprise bloomed as she took two steps forward in blatant disobedience. Why am I not afraid?

  “Well I wasn’t expecting anyone, so clear out now.”

  “Vortex said you could help me.”

  He wavered when she uttered the code name—his body no longer tense, his aim wavering. She stole two steps closer until she was now within ten feet of the tall man.

  “How do you know Vortex?”

  Closer now, Lexi could spy blackened fingernails at the ends of unnaturally long and slender digits. It looked as if the man had an extra knuckle on each and he was bent over like a question mark, his face like a Woodrow Wilson caricature. Here was a man, Lexi surmised, who hunched over a bench twelve, thirteen hours a day, glasses dangling from a filthy black strap in the middle of his concave chest.

  She placed a hand on his gun, lowering it and offering her right hand simultaneously. “Vortex helped me, sent me here. He said you’d help me understand something.”

  Grease Man took her hand in his, swallowing it up completely. “I’m Westin.”

  Reassured, Lexi continued. “I need to know if there is even a chance that someone could have succeeded in creating Tesla’s Teleforce.”

  The man stared dumbly down at her. He opened the heavy steel door to his workshop and gestured her inside. The smile on his face, though toothy and cartoonish, gave her a comforting assurance. He led her to a table designed for giants and which was flanked by chairs so tall she had to climb to be seated. He leaned forward, telescoping to her face, “Not only is it possible, it has already been done.”

  Beethoven’s Fifth was playing softly (as soft as the Fifth can be played) as Westin craned back in his chair. Lexi listened to the music. Beethoven didn’t offer the repose she had once attained from him.

  “Who made it?”

  “The business man that’s been collecting liquid mercury, tungsten in powder and ingot form, sulfur hexafluoride and a dozen other rarefied elements,” Westin answered. “Vortex noticed the electronic transfers and asked me what the chemicals might be used for.” He folded his arms, really just bones outlined with membranous flesh. He capped off the absurd image with a goofy grin.

  “The business man?” Lexi wondered. “What, he made a Teleforce with these chemicals?” Beethoven finished as only Beethoven can, punctuating an abrupt silence with thundering brass.

  “Course not. He made a Cyclotron,” Westin answered as though it were common knowledge what was done with liquid mercury and sulfur hexafluoride. “With the amount he’s assembled somewhere in Nevada, I calculate he can and probably already has created a collider capable of generating energy equivalent of 200 GeV/m.” His voice was rising. “If he’s smart as me, he’ll have attempted to create a linear accelerator capable of plasma wakefield acceleration which would essentially create laser light. If he uses a standalone pulse to . . .” he stopped when he noticed Lexi’s vacant gaze.

  “Sorry,” she muttered. “I failed science fiction one-oh-one. Want to try that again?”

  Westin stood up, evidently too excited by the prospect of sharing his theories to remain seated. “Essentially he has taken Tesla’s Teleforce and modernized it. There was never any flaw in the design. It’s just that vacuum tubes are no longer necessary and too fragile anyway, at least in commercial use.” He looked down at her, his stick arms animated, and sighed. “I think he has taken Tesla’s directed energy weapon and atomized it. Think of a pop gun compared to the Fat Boy. If this businessman in Nevada has constructed what I believe he has, then he will have a weapon on his hands capable of eliminating whole cities in seconds with no aftereffect. No nuclear fallout, no smoke and fire, just pure vaporization.”

  “Like cauterizing a wound,” Lexi offered in muted tones. This can’t be real.

  “If the wound is a city he doesn’t plan on vacationing in, then yes.” Westin finally lowered his arms—the marionette at rest. He exhaled and imbibed a can of Jolt.

  While wondering where he’d even found a can of Jolt, Lexi mused on the possible implications. It sounded just like the sort of weapon the government would want in its arsenal. Has Dorl been working for SCIA this whole time?

  Westin was saying something at the borders of her hearing, whispers from another world. She stood and asked him to repeat himself.

  “I said, would you like to see a miniature design of the Teleforce?” rubbing his crablike hands together.

  “I
guess so.” How long have you ached to reveal your genius, Westin?

  Westin led her to the back where a thousand square feet of floor space was consumed by technological wonders surrounding what Westin explained was the frequency stabilizing table, upon which sat the wonder of wonders: a Teleforce device.

  Chapter 30

  1959–Batavia

  “—and then I flew to Prague where I met your mother.” Virgil explained to five year old Michael, who was sitting in his lap on the old tawny wing-back chair.

  “You are not teaching him about the men-under-fedora’s, are you?” Kristyna moaned from the kitchen. She came in, took Michael, dandled him on her knee. Watching Virgil run gnarled fingers through his hair, she asked, “How are your hands today?”

  Feigning ignorance, Virgil started petting Plato 3, a kitten he’d bought just days earlier. Kristyna’s voice eventually reached him. He knew she could read it in his eyes: he still needed answers about the man called Dorl. “I have to go in early today. There’s a conference and I need to make up for the absent officers.” He stepped over Plato 3 and kissed the part in his wife’s hair. He left.

  The tiny mirror of his green 1956 Dodge Pickup looked smudged as he mowed down Main Street. He cleaned the smudge but sat up straight when the mirror revealed the elongated front end of a black Cadillac. “I’m being followed?”

  But why? It’s been almost six years since I hunted Dorl.

  He had seen the occasional mystery man, sure, the lone black-clad agent who usually ended up being a suit from some car dealership. But in six years no one had followed him, at least, not that he had noticed, and he had been watching. Why now? Had the Tower made a move that somehow implicated Virgil?

  He arrived at the station under the steely gaze of the sun.

  As Virgil was hanging his coat and homburg on the brass gallows inside, Captain Colson assaulted him. “We need to talk. In my office, now,” the Captain turned and stomped back up the steps, presumably to his office.