by Tim Lees
“Angie—” I reached out, touched her. I wanted to say, don’t do this. I wanted to say, get out, run. I wanted to say, find someone else. It’s not your job. Just go.
She’d slung a couple of the cable bags over her shoulders, a flask around her neck. I saw the curve of her back. I saw her rise up on her toes and fingers, like a sprinter ready for the off.
What I did say—I said, “Start by the desk. The line should be OK to there. Bring it back this way. Try for an S-shape. Fold double, if you can. Put the flask—oh, shit, shit.” I saw the way the god stretched out, no longer fettered by the fields. “Put it in the open floor, near the middle as you can. But don’t go near the god, Angie. Don’t look at it. It’ll get into your head. Try not to think about it—”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “You give me all the easy jobs.”
Again, Benedict said, “I can keep them busy,” and for the first time, it struck me—was he asking for permission? Was he asking my approval?
“Twin bro,” Gotowski said.
I told Angel, “Go! Go on!”
I thought that I was talking just to Angel. But maybe I was saying it to Benedict, as well.
Gotowski squared up. But then something happened. He was looking straight at Benedict, who simply lounged back and returned his gaze.
Gotowski’s mouth grew slack. He blinked. Then he stepped away, beckoned the bald man up.
“Here—here.” With his hand, he urged the guy up closer. “He’s yours, bro. I’m giving him to you. OK?”
Angel was off, across the floor, running. She’d the bag in one hand, the flask around her neck. Her feet slipped. She skidded. The flask went clattering across the floor. She went down, somehow turned, rolling on her belly, stretching for the loose cables I’d left there. I pulled myself into a sitting position. The big guy made a grab for Benedict, and locked his arms around him in a bear hug. I was trying to see the other cables, trying to check the circuit. I had barely trained her, just shown her the ropes, that’s all. I said her name under my breath. I pushed myself against the wall, tried to pull myself onto my feet—
The god Assur turned slowly over us. A constant motion, growing all the time, folding in upon itself in endless convolutions, on and on. I watched it for a moment and I had to look away; already I could feel it pull me in, a maze in which my own thoughts, my very sense of self, might be lost and disappear forever.
Benedict stood. The bald man clung to him. His head was thrown back. His eyes and mouth gaped helplessly. I saw the muscle tense in Benedict’s cheek, the wind rippling his hair. There was a sound of something ripping—a sound like an old sofa bursting, I remember thinking. Angel was on her knees, linking the cables. The god was much too close to her. Much, much too close. Gotowski yelled. He was screaming at the long-haired man, telling him to go and stop her, but he wouldn’t. Frost covered my clothes. White piping formed along my shirt, on the edges of my shoes. I strained my eyes, trying to check the cables, the connections. I could barely keep my feet. Things went hazy and I blinked, blinked again. There was pain in my chest. I wanted to just drop onto the floor, curl up, be gone.
I couldn’t do that.
I needed just a few more minutes. A few more . . .
A long, rubber-covered cable snaked across the floor near my feet. Its other end was outside, somewhere, out through the hospital doors, out into that other world, where it was summer still, where there was help that now I knew would never get here.
I dropped back to my knees. I threw myself forward, caught the cable, pushed myself to the control box.
It wasn’t that hard. In normal circumstances. I’d done a hundred, a thousand of the things. I’d done retrievals year on year on year.
I couldn’t get the cable in.
My hands wouldn’t work. I could see it—I could actually see it going wrong, right in front of me, three times, four times.
Gotowski came at me. He must have known what I was doing. I saw him and I hunched up, over the control box. He came at me and suddenly I saw Angel, right behind him. She had the flask in both hands, and she raised it up, and swung it like a baseball bat.
There was a long, long moment, wondering if it would work. Angel plugged the line in, the system powered up, and I made the few adjustments I was able to. It was such an ad hoc thing, so jerry-rigged; yet outside, time began to flow again: Woollard and Shailer, moving as if underwater, pushed their way towards the big glass doors. Their mouths opened with almost comic slowness, like a long sequence of yawns. I turned to the control box and I rammed the sliders up to full.
Nothing happened. The god reared over us. Angel’s hand seized mine. Then—slowly at first, like a flame catching a newspaper—a weird nimbus began to creep along the creature’s outer edge, a purplish light moving faster and faster, deeper and deeper, eating down into the substance of the thing, and the flask began to rattle on the floor where she’d placed it, and I heard her shout—a single, great, exultant cry.
Time flowed again. The flask was full. The monitors were high.
The god was gone.
Epilogue
Designed by Experts
They say that time does many things, mostly that it heals, but if so, it wasn’t trying to rush the job. Two weeks on, and I still ached. I’d got off lightly, I suppose, all things considered: a couple of broken ribs, a fractured tibia, internal bruising, and the rest. The cuts along my arm had opened up again, for good measure. Apart from that, it really wasn’t bad. Not bad at all.
I had come back to the Beach House to see Shailer, for what I hoped would be a final meeting. He was determined to be cheerful about everything; the mask of corporate optimism had descended now and seized him thoroughly. He wore a neat white shirt and a bright floral-pattern tie, the point of which he had explained to me: “You have to create a picture of yourself in people’s minds, Chris. Something that stands out. Pattern recognition for the human face is actually surprisingly poor, when it comes to distinguishing one person from another. I know that may seem strange, but . . .”
I checked my watch. I was due at Angel’s in an hour.
“Everything’s rolling again. See, Chris? Everything’s all right.”
We were standing in the compound. No visitors, as yet, but once more, there was a god in place.
He said, “It’s not Assur.”
“I can see that.”
It hung in the air where Assur had been: shadowy, a little vague, like ripples of light reflected off water. It was soft, cool, almost hypnotic in its rhythms. Now and then the movements shifted, changed direction, hinting at some complex, half-seen pattern: circles, spirals, waves.
He said, “In view of what we now know, what we found out . . . we thought Assur needed a more in-depth investigation. There’s so much potential, Chris. Astonishing potential. Too much to be used as a . . . a power supply. I mean, just think of it! While this fellow,” he jerked a thumb at the containment fields, “is pretty run of the mill. You know the kind?”
“They’re none of them run of the mill.”
“It’s actually a local. One of your colleagues hooked it at a church in Morgan Park. It’s small—won’t exactly light the city, like we’d planned—but it’ll keep a few blocks going, till we find something better.”
“Assur . . .”
“Is well taken care of, Chris. Don’t worry.” He grinned, made to clap me on the shoulder, then thought better of it. “Sorry. Still hurts, huh?”
I nodded. I said, “Assur is . . . in Newark?”
“No, no. He’s somewhere nice and safe. Isolated.”
“It’s still dangerous.”
“People are dangerous, Chris. God knows, all your awful injuries—you should have gotten that idea, all right.” He put his head on one side, watching me. “You’re looking a lot better, by the way. How do you fe
el?”
I said, “The shields weren’t strong enough.”
“The system was designed by experts. You checked it out yourself. Gave it a big thumbs-up, as I recall. Experts, Chris. Sometimes, these things—”
“There’s no such thing as experts,” I said. “We only think we know. We don’t. And as for your Mr. Benedict—”
“He’s back in L.A., and remains in a consultancy role. Like it or not, Chris, and I recognize you have a certain . . . personal attitude here, but he’s the best source of information we could have. And that’s that.”
“You know he’s got his own agenda.”
“Chris, Chris, Chris.” He clicked his tongue. “Everybody’s got their own agenda. That’s business, right?” He smiled. He clapped his hands. Then he said, “I suppose you’re aware that your friend Angel’s put in for Field Ops, aren’t you?”
I nodded, suspicious of the non sequitur.
He said, “I expect you’d like some time together? Work a couple of jobs or something?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He shook my hand, promised he’d call me, and headed off towards whatever business he had waiting. L.A., Seattle, Vegas . . .
I wasn’t sure if I’d been bribed or threatened.
Knowing Shailer, it was probably both.
In those long, solitary days, I worked my way through Angel’s CDs, everything from Schoenberg and John Adams to Tuareg thrumming and some weird, Indonesian thing that sounded like birdsong. The more abstract, though, the more I liked it. I could tune it in, or tune it out, depending on my needs.
I took long, slow walks around the neighborhood, letting the sun knit my flesh together, heal my bones, calm my mind.
It gave me time to think.
Gotowski, I knew all about. Too much, in fact. The others were just nobodies. Minor players, petty criminals at best. Not one of them had killed, not till the god arrived, and gave them strength, and will. But I could bet they’d wanted to. Every single one of them. Probably many, many times.
Only two—longhair and Gotowski—had survived. Woollard asked me for some help in the interrogation, or at least, some help interpreting their answers, but I declined.
Conflict of interest, and all that.
One night Angel came home, and she told me, “I know where they took Assur.”
“Really?”
“Not the location, not exactly. But there’s something doing the rounds on YouTube. It caused a big fuss in the office. And then everyone shut up.”
“Nice.”
She got the thing on screen without much trouble. It was a view across a lake, or perhaps a wide river. There were woodlands on the other side, pine woods. A group of deer were drinking at the water’s edge. I didn’t think much of it till the male looked up, his antlers like sails, bigger than anything I’d ever seen in any zoo.
“It’s somewhere in Canada. That’s what it says.” She played it through again. It was only a few seconds long. “No one’s seen a deer like that in—I don’t know. A million years.”
“Or just a few weeks back.”
“Yeah. Just a few weeks . . .”
She poured us a glass of wine each.
Later, I asked her, “Is it good, the thing we do?”
“You can ask that about any job.”
“I know. But I’m asking about mine. I always thought it was. I thought it was a good thing.”
“Then it’s a good thing,” she said.
“OK.” I sipped the wine, nodded. “You really think that?”
“Yeah.” She looked at me over her glass. “It’s a good thing,” she said again. “Until the time comes when it’s not.”
Acknowledgments
Thanks are due once more to editor extraordinaire Rebecca Lucash, not only for her work on the manuscript but also for her quick response to queries, and tactful handling of the usual authorial breakdowns, panic attacks, and rampant paranoia. Thanks, too, to everyone at HarperVoyager for their continued work and enthusiasm. Thanks to the HV authors’ group for support, and for sharing both trials and triumphs. Good luck to you all! And thanks, especially, to my long-suffering wife Charity, for help and support beyond measure, and for still trying valiantly to accept the notion that, when her husband is lounging around, or spending the afternoon in a local café, he is actually “working.” Or so he claims.
About the Author
TIM LEES is a British author living in Chicago. His short fiction has appeared in Postscripts, Black Static, and Interzone, among many other publications. He is author of The God Hunter, the collection The Life to Come, nominated for a British Fantasy Award, and the novel Frankenstein’s Prescription, described by Publishers Weekly as “a philosophically insightful and literary tale of terror.” When not writing, he has held a variety of jobs, including teacher, conference organizer, film extra, and worker in a psychiatric hospital.
His blog is www.timlees.wordpress.com.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
DEVIL IN THE WIRES. Copyright © 2015 by Tim Lees. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition May 2015 ISBN: 9780062358837
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062358844
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