"Shut up and open the heel on my right boot. I'll get us out of here, and you can go to Mexico, or lay down and die, whatever the hell you want." Storch didn't like the way his own voice sounded, now. Wheedling. He felt like one of those desperate animatronic pirate convicts on the Pirates Of The Caribbean ride at Disneyland, trying to coax the little dog with the keyring in its mouth to come closer before the burning stockade collapsed. It wasn't a position Storch had ever thought he'd be in.
"Lay down and die," Sperling repeated, as if he was saying, he'd like to go to Hawaii and spend the rest of his life drinking coconut milk and shagging hula girls. "What I wouldn't give to be dead right now."
"That can be arranged, too," Storch said. "If you open the heel on my right boot, I'll give you the quickest, cleanest death you could ever ask for." What the hell was he saying?
Sperling sat there, balled up and hating himself for an unguessable time. Storch didn't like himself a whole lot either, at the moment, and couldn't bring himself to sweeten the offer anymore. He almost thought Sperling had gone to sleep for awhile and set to trying to wriggle free of the cuffs. If he dislocated the wrist of his bad hand—
A hand touched his ankle. Storch kicked out at it, an impotent gesture that did nothing more than rattle his shackles a little. The hands returned, fumbling at the heel of his boot. "I can't figure it out—it's useless…"
"Goddamit, feel along the back, there's a catch. Push it in and pull out the wire."
"What good's wire going to be?"
"Do it."
The hands clumsily fiddled around with his foot for what felt like hours. Storch suffered the hands touching him for as long as he was able, then hissed, "Let go, asshole, if you can't—"
"There. Is this what you wanted?" The clammy hands touched his, and the spool of cutting wire was pressed into his palm. He could feel Sperling hovering over him, feel his sour breath on his face and smell the rank flop-sweat oozing from his yellow pores. "Get the fuck away from me, will you? Can't concentrate."
"Sorry," Sperling mumbled, and backed away.
Cursing his numb fingers, he pulled one end of it out and wrapped it around the linking chain between the cuffs. It was considerably blunter since he'd used it on the cargo container, but in about five minutes, the chains jingled and fell away. Instantly, liquid fire poured into his arms. Storch suppressed a shriek as his circulation resumed, wiggling the arms, like floppy dead things that had been stapled to his torso by an inept meatball surgeon. After a time, when the pain subsided, he sat up and started to work on his leg shackles, but the tool was almost useless after cutting through the chain that bound them to the handcuffs. Now his legs sang grand opera for awhile and he used the time to slide the steel bar off the chains and pull the little stabbing knife out of his left boot. The T-shaped handle fit into his fist so that the three inch blade stood out between his index and middle fingers. It was hardly lethal in and of itself, but in Storch's hands it was more than adequate for cutting vital plumbing.
Storch stood, getting his sea-legs, breathing deep and slow until the last agonizing tingle of sleep flowed out of his limbs. In the darkness, he could barely make out the hunched ball of Donald Sperling, now regarding him with a black spot in the bottom of his face that had to be his slack, open mouth.
"How many of them are there?" he asked Sperling, and the man's mouth clamped shut. "Two," he said after a moment. Just two? Who did these stupid assholes think they were dealing with, here? Storch had never been overly proud of his killing skills, and he'd always abhorred bragging: There's those that do it, and those that talk about it. But sending two people for him, to knock him out with gas and truss him up in his sleep? And it worked! This new outrage pushed him over the top. These people's faces would not haunt him, and if they did it would be a sweet dream indeed.
"What're you going to try to do?" Sperling asked. Storch didn't like that one bit; not do, but try to do. Don Sperling was a hell of a cheerleader.
Without answering, Storch turned and moved to the front of the cell. A sliding pass-through port was in the middle of the front wall. Storch noticed it was unlocked. Evidently, his captors didn't think any more of Sperling's will to survive than he did. Crouching beside the door, Storch braced himself. The knife in one fist and the bar clenched in the other, he took one more deep breath, held it, and threw the door wide open.
The light, as dim as it was, hurt his eyes. A wash of black tarmac and indigo sky, and the dots and dashes of dashboard panel lights blurred together, but Storch lunged into the midst of it, swinging the bar like a caveman defending his woman from sabertooth tigers. He swung left first, felt the bar connect with something hard that yielded to the force of steel and became soft as a trashbag full of mashed potatoes.
There was no scream, only a twinned intake of breath, as of some mild surprise along the road, a realization, perhaps that they were lower on gas than they thought they'd be. He swung the bar to the right now, got stuck as the bar seemed to be mired in something where the driver was supposed to be. He let the bar go and stabbed out at the passenger with his knife, right about where a throat should be. Something received the knife, alright, but it didn't feel like a neck. It gave like butter, but beneath it Storch could feel something unyielding pressing back through the knife-something that moved, and took his knife away.
Storch blinked, his retinas finally contracted to where he could make out more than blobs of light and shadow. And he saw what was happening.
The driver was a teenaged boy, couldn't be more than fifteen or sixteen, lean and lanky, but still too short to be more than a pair of knuckles and some buzzcut hair to anyone driving past. He was looking at Storch with what passed for mild irritation, but Storch couldn't get that far. He was still staring at the bar he'd swung at the boy, the bar that was still embedded in the side of his skull. Even as he bit his upper lip clean through, squinted and looked again, he still saw the skull knitting itself back up around the bar. Saw black, bladdery masses surge up out of the fissure like clotted oil and pull the sides together. The bar popped back out with an audible ptui, and Storch saw something that looked all too much like a black and pink tongue loll out of the boy's smashed cranium and pull the edges of skin together, like some monstrous cartoon oyster tucking itself into bed.
Only then did it occur to him to look back at the passenger, who could have merrily shot and stabbed him ten times over while he was ogling the freakshow in the driver's seat.
A heavy-set middle-aged woman with tightly curled brown hair, she looked like a secretary, except that she, like the boy, wore a black tracksuit. She was also looking at him, paying no mind whatsoever to the ragged hole Storch had punched in her jugular vein. A fan of blood had sluiced down her track suit, but now the hole was closed over, although her neck was marred by an unsightly, shiny bulge; those cartoon tumors again, already hard at work.
"Please go back to your seat," the woman said in a scolding, shushing voice, like a typing teacher at an all-school assembly.
"You're going to cause an accident," the boy added.
The voices made Storch shiver, and he was halfway to getting up to obey when he realized what was so weird about them. They spoke with the same voice, and it didn't sound right coming out of either of their mouths.
He threw himself into the cab and snatched the keys out of the ignition. He backed away, but he didn't get to his bench. He hopped drunkenly in the leg shackles and slammed into the back wall. The van was still running, and speeding up.
They were somewhere on the interstate, probably on the 5, from the flat brown featureless country he'd glimpsed between eyefuls of the insane fucking shit in the cab.
"That was stupid," Sperling offered. He was still sitting there on the bench with his skinny little arms around his legs, looking like the unacknowledged fourth monkey that followed SEE NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL and SPEAK NO EVIL: HAVE NO FUN.
"Shut up, maggot. I didn't—" Storch left off getting defensive with Sperling, but h
e couldn't get his head on straight. His fingers fumbled through the odd assortment of keys on the ring, but he wasn't seeing them, wasn't hearing the woman climbing out of the cab.
He'd expected something unpredictable, but probably bad, to happen, but what he'd seen whipped his internal probability curve clear out of sight, sent all predictive outcomes, based as they were on a lifetime of make-believe warfighting, right off the board. He was standing there, leaning against the rear doors, trying to replay what he'd seen in his mind so it didn't make him want to go screaming into catatonia. He thought of a stupid quote some hack British writer had written of Saddam Hussein during Desert Shield, one that had made the whole squad laugh until their prostates burst: "Who he kills dies," the hack said of the ol' Saddamizer, and the self-evidence of it was hysterical at the time. But suddenly it seemed like a logical thing to say. Because suddenly there were people in Storch's world who didn't die when you killed them.
"See? I told you," Sperling whined. "Now are you happy?"
The fat lady was climbing through the pass-through door, and it was a very tight squeeze, but Storch didn't doubt she'd get through. People who could seal up a punctured throat could do lots of weird stuff.
Storch found the key to the shackles and twisted it in the lock. His feet swelled with liquid fire. He rolled over and tried to find the lock for the cargo door, but of course there was no such thing on the inside of the van.
He did not look back. He did not panic. He ticked off the state capitals in his head as he turned and retrieved the cutting wire from his boot, dropped it between the door until he saw it slip behind the bolt that held them shut. He caught the bottom end and yanked hard, then started frantically sawing through it. The wire was way too blunt now. He looked over his shoulder and saw the passenger climbing ponderously to her feet, swaying like a tourist at her first hula lesson as she stalked toward him.
"You really mustn't leave yet, Zane. Donald's told you a few things, but we have things to teach you, as well. We know you, Zane. You have in you the potential to be among the very best of us…" The woman opened her arms and reached out to him, as if she were expecting him to break down and hug her. Storch almost did. Any other course of action made his head throb, as if he were trying to kill himself by disobeying. He pushed his shoulder feebly against the doors, the lock only half cut through.
"God, I think even I could've done better than that," Sperling said to himself. It wasn't enough to make the throbbing stop, but it kept him from noticing it long enough.
He stepped into the hug and pivoted even as the arms closed around his shoulders. At the same time, his left leg swept both the fat woman's legs out from under her and she was tumbling, dragging them both toward the floor. Storch heaved her up on his hip as he completed the pivot, so that they were both falling at the rear doors. With a heave and two steps, he hurled them both into the door so hard it knocked the wind out of them both. The bolt cracked with a dull ping and both doors flew open. Icy wind sucked the dank air out of the truck, ripped at clothing, ears, eyes. Storch braced himself for what was to come next. Gripping two fistfuls of the fat woman's track suit and the great, flaccid teats underneath, he brought his right knee up and drove it into her belly, forcing his weight against her to throw her over the edge. He screamed in her face, a high, wordless ululation of pure killing joy.
She didn't budge.
She smiled at him, her blue-gray eyes uncannily like those of someone he'd seen before… "Come with us, Zane," she said, and he was letting her go when Donald Sperling loomed over his shoulder and shoved him as hard as he could, and they were both falling out of the truck onto Interstate 5 at upwards of eighty miles per hour. Storch exulted in the momentary glimpse of surprise that leaked through that leaden grin. He planted his knees against her body and prepared to slam into the tarmac. If he timed it right, he could soak up about half of their speed on the woman's body on the first impact, then roll to the side in a judo fall that would distribute the rest of the impact across his ass and arms.
The first impact reminded him how little he really knew about physics. The woman hit the road with a sickening splat, and her torso settled under him with a chorus of crunching. He bore out most of the initial shock in his taut arms and legs, but his left knee slid off her and touched the road. His jeans vaporized against the concrete, and the flesh over his patella slid off like a greased sock. Then the road really bit into the woman's back and yanked out from under like a world-sized carpet. She bucked upright and knocked heads with him so hard he saw stars and heard a bell toll amidst the rest of it. Veering away from the burning of his knee, Storch was tossed off the woman and over the broken white line into the passing lane. He managed to keep tightly rolled up, but at each contact, the road took a bite out of him: his ass, his back, his knees, his scalp.
He rolled to a stop finally, two hundred feet from where he'd hit the road. Getting up was currently out of the question, so he tried to triage himself. He was pretty sure he'd hairline fractured his left arm and had multiple semi-critical roadrashes, but remarkably well-preserved for a first-time highway body-surfer. He was laughing at that when two pieces of information bore themselves in on him in rapid succession.
The van screeched to a stop in the lane to his right, not a hundred feet from where he'd come to rest, and the driver was getting out. He was holding the bar.
A Peterbilt with an open trailer full of sand bore down on the whole scene, its horn blasting monolithic indignance at what was happening in its lane. Swerving out of the right-hand lane to avoid the parked van, the truck jerked into the passing lane, but not before it clipped the woman, who was—no shit—sitting up. For numerous obvious reasons, the woman hadn't taken the fall as gracefully as Storch. In fact she appeared to have tumbled end over end, because her face was a casserole and her lower half was turned 180 degrees from its previous orientation. Even over the air horn and the wind and the oceanic roaring of shock in his ears, he heard her shriek in that voice that wasn't hers: "YOU WILL SEE THE RADIANT—" and then the truck cut her off, quite literally. She snapped back face-down on the road and vanished beneath the onrushing chrome grille and the blinding headlights that were headed for him next.
Storch tried to get to his feet, but they weren't obeying. Oh God, was he paralyzed? Maybe it's God's will, killer. He whipped himself over on his stomach and jerked his body so it lay straight and parallel with the path of the truck, and the horns and the lights came and swallowed him up in darkness—
—and he took his hands off his head and saw the truck passing over him like a spent tornado, heard the squealing of its brakes as the trucker, probably insane with panic, fought to bring the truck to a halt without jackknifing.
It passed over him and he struggled to lift his head. The truck came up wheel-to-wheel with the van, and the driver hopped out and ran towards him with a weird, stilted gait, screaming, "What the motherpusnutsfucking shit is going on out here? I didn't see a goddamned thing." And he was looking off in the direction of the woman he'd hit, who was now on her feet again, two hundred plus pounds of roadkill on the march. He backed up again, reaching for the step-up, to climb back into his cab.
"Wait!" The young Radiant Dawn driver called mildly, "we have to exchange insurance."
Storch belly-crawled up the length of the truck, watching the driver's left foot climb up onto the step. He reached out, screamed "Wait!" and grabbed hold of one booted foot, tugged for all he was worth. The driver jerked free with a girlish scream, but in his awkward position, he stumbled and fell on his ass beside Storch. Storch shivered and dropped the trucker's leg, which clanged on the tarmac between his legs. "What the fuck are you?"
"Help me," Storch gasped. "They're gonna kill me…"
"What—" the driver sputtered again, but he seemed to be getting farther and farther from grasping the situation. As he reached for his prosthetic leg, Storch saw his arms, where his flannel shirt was rolled up. Alongside a tattoo of a harem girl wearing only a veil, was
a written legend that had once sent Storch and his squadmates into hysterics for days. DESSERT RAT, it said. But it was supposed to be DESERT RAT. Only the Ranger Battalion that worked with the SAS in the Gulf were ever that stupid. "Ranger," Storch gulped. "I was a Ranger…"
"Which battalion?" This question, in this context, should've seemed like a sure sign the truck driver had lost it. But it wouldn't have seemed absurd to someone who'd been a soldier.
"Ninth, '85 to '88, under Colonel Anfanger, only guy on the base, didn't know his wife was a raging dyke. Get me outta here, they're…kill us both…"
"Shit, whyn't you say so?" the ex-Ranger trucker yelled and hauled Storch up by one arm. The van driver was coming around the front of the truck now, tapping the bar across his palm as if he'd just confiscated it from an errant child, but intended to return it. Storch fought to pull his legs into the truck, gave way gratefully as the trucker shoved him across into the passenger seat, climbed in behind him, and put the truck in gear.
24
Special Agent Martin Cundieffe stepped out of his rental car and crossed the lawn towards the School Of Night in the middle of Colma. The sun was already high in the morning sky, but the mist from the miles of overwatered cemetery lawns all around them wrapped the necropolis in a pall of silvery gray. As he looked over the line of ambulances, coroner's wagons, police cars and newsvans arrayed all around the house as if preparing to lay in a siege, he was reminded once again, of ants. All the uniformed functionaries streaming in and out of the big, elegant mansion, packing up bagged evidence, taking photographs, shuttling gurneys laden with shrouded forms out to the wagons. He noted with interest that the local authorities had come up short on ambulances, and had pressed a dozen hearses into service.
Cundieffe wasn't overly bothered by cemeteries or mass suicides. His office in LA overlooked the Veteran's Cemetery across Wilshire Boulevard, and he had studied the files on the Branch Davidian and Heaven's Gate incidents extensively to prepare himself psychologically. Other agents scoffed, said you'd never be ready the first time you experience something like that. He wasn't quite surprised to find that it didn't faze him at all.
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