Kill Switch

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Wow. And that’s what your dad wants?”

  “I wish. Right now he wants to use the side effects. The null field and some other stuff. I don’t know that he even believes in the omniverse.”

  “But you do?”

  “Yes. I think I came from one of those other worlds. Somehow. I don’t know how. But I believe it. And I think my god is not the god of this world, but the god of some other universe, and I can feel him calling me home.”

  King took a sip, thought about it, took another, and handed the bottle back. “That is some deep, deep shit.”

  “I know. It’s the fundamental belief in my personal faith.”

  “Um. Sure. So what’s the problem? Why not just finish the machine you built here and go the fuck home?”

  “I wish. The problem is that in order for the God Machine to cycle high enough to open the door, the power has to be very precisely regulated through a network of crystals. Gemstones.”

  “Like the ones you have to check out of Stark’s office every morning.”

  “Yes. But having the gems doesn’t solve the problem. The sequence of channeling power through the crystals is the key. There is only one way to do it to allow the God Machine to cycle up to full power. Use the wrong sequence and as soon as you rev above a low idle there are catastrophic errors.”

  King grinned. “Like when you blew the ass off this place?”

  “Like that, yes.”

  “Have you figured it out? Do you know the sequence and are just keeping it from your old man?” asked King. “I mean … have you actually solved it?”

  Prospero turned and took a long, hard look at his friend. “Why are you asking me this?” Fear suddenly leapt up in Prospero’s heart. “Oh my God … please don’t tell me you’re in on it.…”

  “In on…?” Then King stopped and smiled. “You think I’m a snitch for Stark? You think I’m a snitch for your dad?”

  Prospero was too frightened to say anything. He felt lost. Totally lost. He wished he still had the stone carving of his god, but Stark had taken that from him on his first day at Ballard.

  King nodded. “Yeah, I can see how shit-scared you are right now. You’re paranoid as fuck and I don’t blame you. Your dad—your own dad—sold you out and he’s keeping you here as a slave. That’s some rough shit. And you’re a cash cow for Stark. Your dad must be shoveling gold at him.” King shimmied closer. “Now, you listen to me, man, and you listen good. I don’t give a high-flying shit about much. I hate my family and I hate everyone in this shit hole of a place. I’d burn it to the ground if I had somewhere else to go, and yeah, that’s fucked up because I don’t have anywhere else to go. You want to know how many times I laid in my bunk and thought of killing myself? I could do it, too. There are a lot of ways to do it right and I know them all. Here’s the thing, though; you want to know why I haven’t hopped the night train? You want to know the only goddamn reason I’m still alive and still want to be alive?”

  He leaned forward and poked Prospero in the chest.

  “You. Laugh if you want to. Make fun of me, or do whatever, but it’s true. You are the only friend I’ve ever had. That’s sad, too. Cry me a river, but there it is. Since you came here it’s been you and me. I don’t like anyone else and I sure as shit don’t trust anyone else. You and me, Prospero. A couple of rejects kicked to the curb by everyone who is supposed to give a damn. Sad, sad story. Someone should make a movie. Girls would cry buckets.”

  He poked him again.

  “Now, you want to start thinking I’m with them? Really? Me? Holy fuck, Prospero, you want to go and do that to me?”

  There were tears in King’s eyes.

  “You’re my brother,” he said, almost snarling the words. “You’re the only one who ever gave a shit about me and you’re the only one I ever or will ever give a shit about. We live out in the storm lands, man. Don’t cut me loose now. Don’t let me drown. Fuck … I’d die for you.” He caved forward and pressed his forehead against Prospero’s. “I’d fucking die for you.”

  It took a lot for Prospero to move, or to want to move, but he did. He lifted his aching arms and wrapped them around the weeping boy’s shoulders. He held him.

  And it occurred to him that he had never held anyone like this before. Not even his mother.

  King kept repeating what he’d said.

  “I’d die for you.”

  After a long, long time, Prospero whispered something to him. A statement and a question. A counter to King’s promise.

  “I don’t want you to die for me,” he said. “But would you kill for me?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  SCRIPPS MEMORIAL HOSPITAL LA JOLLA

  9888 GENESEE AVENUE

  LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 7, 7:41 A.M.

  The following morning Sam told me that Rudy was stable and resting. Church had arranged for the top orthopedic surgeon in California to fly in and do the repair work, but the prognosis was that Rudy would likely need more work later. Sam said that he heard them talking about a total knee replacement. That was the leg Rudy had smashed in a helicopter crash a couple of years ago. A replacement was inevitable, so they’d schedule it as soon as his other injuries were healed.

  The neck sprain was bad because neck sprains are always bad, and they were keeping him heavily sedated while they assessed it. His nose was a mess and he’d probably need to get some work done on that, too. I felt absolutely horrible. Rudy was my best friend. He was a gentle person and a far better man than I’ll ever be. No one had a clue as to why he’d gone crazy. Sam said that the blood tests they’d taken all came out negative. We were waiting on results of a CT scan and other tests.

  Except for Sam, I was not allowed to have any other visitors. The DMS lawyers had to earn their retainers by keeping me from being arrested. You know the expression “cluster-fuck”? Yeah, well this is pretty much going to be the gold standard example of that henceforth.

  I tried to pump Sam for news about Gateway, but he parried my questions by claiming ignorance—which was probably bullshit—and by saying that Mr. Church planned to debrief me personally. That meant that he was probably told to play dumb, and you can’t trick information out of Sam Imura.

  The only good news was that they decided to let me go home. Or, maybe it was that they were happy to get rid of me. I’m a terrible patient. Lots of bitching, yelling, threats, escape attempts. I don’t make life easy for anyone and the staff seemed happy as hell to wheel me down to the front door. Pretty sure the orderly thought long and hard about shoving my wheelchair into traffic.

  Junie was there, waiting for me at the curb. She came running to grab me, hold me, damn near squeeze the life out of me, showering my face with dozens of small kisses, tears in her eyes. Ghost was with her and he barked very loudly and bounded around like a puppy until I gave him a big hug and a kiss on his furry head. From the haunted look in Junie’s eyes I could tell that she knew some of what had happened. Maybe not the Gateway stuff, but about the flu and about Rudy. I heard her whisper to Sam and heard him tell her that Rudy was stable.

  “Stable” is a nice word but it’s often used as a lie, a comfort pill.

  Sam drove me home, with Junie holding me in the back of a DMS SUV and Ghost staring at me from the front shotgun seat. At home, I had to lean on Junie and Sam to make it from car to elevator and elevator to bed. After Sam left I used a cane left over from a previous injury to thump my way onto the balcony. The Pacific was a gorgeous blue and there were spouts from whales migrating north. Seagulls and pelicans floated on the breeze. Junie made coffee and kept feeding me high-protein foods. I’d lost weight and energy and she was doing her level best to fatten me up and bring me back to life.

  It was working, too. I felt better as the day went on and by the following day the cane went back into the closet. Let me clarify that … I felt physically better but my head and my heart still hurt.

  Rudy. Damn it.

  The tough part was trying to
fill in the blanks of everything that had happened while I was out. And a lot had happened. I got some of it from Junie, and Sam had doled out a few thin slices of news, and some of it came from my secretary, Lydia-Rose, who kept calling every five minutes to make sure I hadn’t wasted away and died.

  Top and Bunny were okay. Both of them had come out of it sooner than me. Bunny was back in the gym as soon as he could walk, and when the physical therapists asked him to do ten reps he did twenty. He’d already put back a lot of the weight he lost. Lydia was taking very good care of him. Bunny and Lydia had maintained a relationship for years that was technically against DMS protocols. But since I’m his boss and I broke that same fraternization rule within two weeks of signing on I was not about to throw stones. Top and I gave him a big-brother chat once, and he told us to go fuck ourselves, so there was that. Since moving to San Diego he and Lydia had bought a cottage on the beach in Encinitas. Cute little place. Never would have figured Bunny for having a green thumb, but he does the gardening. He taught Lydia how to surf and she taught him how to dance. Love, baby. It keeps the old world spinning.

  Top was another matter. He’s not as young as Bunny. He was almost ten years older than me and I was eight years older than Bunny. None of those had been easy years for Top. He’d been marked by our war. Marked by bullet and blade, fang and claw. And now by disease. He was back to work at the Pier, but on light duty.

  I kept trying to get Church on the line but he was always busy. Lydia-Rose and Sam had both been evasive about why. Something was going on and they had clearly been instructed not to tell me. Maybe it was because Church didn’t want to overload me before I was well enough. Or maybe not. I learned that he was at the Pier, and so I informed Junie that I was going into work the next day.

  We had a big fight about that. Shouting, throwing of things. Some tears. Some very careful make-up sex.

  In the morning she gave me the car keys she’d hidden. Along with a paper sack filled with protein bars, vitamins, and lots of other healthy crap. She made me swear, hand to God, that I wouldn’t toss it in the Dumpster in the parking garage.

  That night, while we were lying there, naked and sweaty and entwined, I found out that Junie was dealing with problems other than her drowsy and frequently irritable boyfriend. Someone had broken into FreeTech, the company she runs. Church set the company up and hired her to run it, and mostly she takes some of the less lethal technologies the DMS confiscates from the bad guys and mad scientists we fight and then repurposes them for humanitarian aid around the world. Funny how there are useful side effects even from evil science. Crazy old world. In any case, when Church sent me to San Diego to open the Pier, he moved the headquarters of that company out here, as well. Junie now has seven hundred employees in forty-six countries, but only a handful of them know the source of these radical technologies.

  Junie told me that two nights ago—the night I woke up—two of her most trusted employees, a scientist and a lieutenant who was second in command of FreeTech security, brought big canvas laundry carts up from the basement, loaded them up with computers and reams of technical papers, and rolled them out of the building at around three in the morning. The two thieves had since vanished.

  “What did they get?” I asked.

  “A lot of research,” she said, “but nothing we don’t have backups for. It’s just so scary that they came in at all. Why would someone steal that stuff?”

  “Anything from the Majestic program?”

  She shrugged. “Sure, a lot of our stuff originated there, but none of it’s labeled ‘Majestic.’ There are no direct links to the overall program or to M3. All we have in our records are the things we’re doing with that tech.”

  “Don’t you have some of the Majestic stuff on your computer?”

  “Well, of course I do, but my computer is always with me. I never leave it at the office unless I lock it in the safe. Same with Toys.”

  I grunted. Toys—aka Alexander Chismer—is a former career criminal, terrorist, and enabler of terrorists who has inexplicably become Mr. Church’s pet project. Church is apparently convinced that even someone with as many crimes on his soul as Toys can find genuine redemption. It makes me wonder why Church cares. I once suggested to Rudy that Church has so much blood on his own hands from things he did in the years before he started the DMS that maybe he needs proof that redemption is possible. Rudy offered no comment. He’s Church’s therapist, too.

  In any case, Toys was put in charge of an obscene amount of money and charged with the task of making sure that it was used for the betterment of mankind. The money was stolen from Hugo Vox and the Seven Kings. How Church obtained it and why he risked giving it to Toys is beyond me. On the other hand, I have seen Toys in several situations where he could have done the easy thing or the wrong thing and instead he chose to put his life on the line to try and accomplish the right thing. Last year he saved the lives of Junie, Circe, and Circe’s unborn baby. So, right now I have a no-murder policy in place for Toys. It is subject to change.

  He is the financier beyond FreeTech and is Junie’s confidant in that enterprise. He’s one of the very few people who have access to some of the information once contained in the Majestic Black Book.

  “Where does Toys keep his data?”

  “He has a laptop he brings home with him, but it’s one of the Xenomancer units built by Bug. Totally secure. And he has to contact Bug to get access whenever he logs on. It wasn’t at FreeTech that night,” Junie said. “So really, they didn’t get much that they could use.” She laughed. “It’s weird, but I’d uploaded my old podcasts once when I was upgrading my computer. I backed up everything to my office hard drive and never deleted that part of it. I … well, I listen to them sometimes. Those were copied, too. How weird is that?”

  When I met Junie she was running a very popular conspiracy theory podcast. UFOs, secret societies, hidden agendas, shadow governments. Like that. Nonsense stuff … except that all of it was true. Junie was born into the Majestic program and raised by foster parents who worked for Majestic Three. She knew whereof she spoke.

  “What’s Church doing about it?”

  “He put some people on it, but as far as I know they haven’t found anything yet. I’m just glad no one was there to get hurt,” said Junie, but she had tears in her eyes. “I just can’t understand why they’d do something like this. I know them both. We’re friends. They don’t have criminal records, there’s never been a complaint about them, and I’ve certainly never had to reprimand either of them. It makes no sense at all.”

  We talked it through but there was nowhere to go with it. Like everything else in my life lately it was an inexplicable mystery.

  Around midnight I got a call from Sam to say that Rudy was awake and lucid, but that he did not remember anything about what happened. Nothing. His last memory had been of driving to the hospital to see me.

  “Did you talk to him?” I asked.

  “I did. He’s deeply troubled by what happened,” said Sam. “I’ll stay here at the hospital until they transfer him to a private room. The big man told Circe what’s going on and she’s sitting with Rudy now.”

  “Look, Sam,” I said, “when you see Rudy next … tell him how sorry I am. Please. Let him know.”

  Sam sighed. “Cap, you want to know what Rudy told me tonight? He asked how you were doing and told me to tell you that he’s sorry. He said that he sends his love.”

  We were silent for a long time.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  “I know.” Sam hung up and I clung to Junie for a long time as my heart broke and broke.

  In the morning, I got dressed without help and over breakfast I caught up on the news. No one had yet stepped up to take responsibility for the disaster in Houston. Even the most radical right and left pundits had begun to question whether this was, after all, a terrorist attack. There was no evidence of any kind of explosion, no strange devices found at the scene. All they could find was wreckage
and dead bodies.

  I didn’t buy it, though. No way in hell. Houston was only the most recent bizarre and destructive power failure.

  Well, just call me paranoid. And you know that old line from Catch-22. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.

  The next morning I drove to the Pier.

  I still felt like crap, but it was time to get back to work.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  THE PIER

  DMS SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE

  SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 8, 6:02 A.M.

  Junie wanted to drive, but I insisted that it was no longer beyond me. And I was right. This morning I’d come awake with real energy. The high-protein diet, the massages, the meditation, the good loving with an astounding woman—all of that did wonders for me. I felt alive again. And with the vigor came anger and a fiery determination to figure out what the hell was going on.

  I arrived at the Pier with Ghost as my wingman. Wing-mutt. Whatever. We hit the Starbucks drive-through. Venti Pike for me, couple of egg and sausage sandwiches for the fur-monster. Like old times.

  The Special Projects Office is a big building built onto the end of an old amusement pier, hence its nickname. Our engineers dug into the bedrock under the seabed, too, so we had plenty of room for offices, labs, a massive fitness center, an even bigger training hall, storage, a garage, and more. I’d moved some of my most trusted staff out here from my old shop, the Warehouse, in Baltimore. We had 209 people working at the Pier and I’d been dreading a welcome-back party of some kind. I was wrong, though. The place was empty except for a few of the support staff.