Godiva and Alice were both looking at me expectantly. Me?
“So,” I started, then “Well,” followed by “Uhm.” Catskinner, naturally, had nothing to add.
Godiva flashed me a smile and looked back to Alice. “The obvious place to start is the Manchester nest.”
Alice folder her hands. “Okay,” she said in that way that means “tell me more.”
Godiva leaned forward. “First, there's no question of how James knew about them—he got the information from Dr. Klein. We don't want to advertise your involvement right away.”
“I drove the van through Morgan's fence,” Alice pointed out.
“True,” Godiva conceded. “But are we sure he knows that? It was a busy couple of minutes there.”
Alice nodded for Godiva to continue.
“Next, it's a sitting target. They're too big to move and too strange to hide. I mean, I know about them, and I'm nobody.”
I was going to object to that, but she was still talking.
“They're well connected, which is part of being on the high profile side of low profile. This is an intelligence gathering exercise as much as anything else. Everybody knows them and they know everybody.”
“Don't you think Morgan will see it as an obvious move, too?” Alice asked.
“Of course he will. But how much is he willing to invest in protecting them? Warn them we might be coming? Yeah, that doesn't cost anything. Offer them some extra gear in exchange for favors to be named later? Sure, that strengthens his position no matter what. But he's not going to go out on a limb for them—they're too easy to replace. Expendable.”
I was confused. “So, if they are expendable, why attack them?”
Godiva smiled at me. “Well, information, like I said, and because it is an obvious move. Every move tells your opponent something about your overall strategy, the more obvious the move, the less you reveal.”
“We have an overall strategy?” That was news to me.
“Harass Morgan's interests until he's forced to respond by coming out into the open where we can kill him,” Godiva said.
That did sound familiar, particularly the killing him part. I nodded.
Godiva looked back at Alice. “Now, what can you tell us about the nest?”
It turned out to be quite a lot. She told us there were at least sixteen nestlings, maybe as many as twenty. She had pictures of about a dozen of them—ordinary looking people, for the most part, in their twenties and thirties, but with a universally distant look in their eyes, as if they were all listening to something no one else could hear.
“Now, you say they are all . . . possessed by a single outsider. Like a hive mind or something?”
Alice nodded. “What one knows, they all know. One creature with thirty-two eyes and thirty-two arms.”
“And it, or they, can do what Catskinner can do? That fast, that tough?” Not good.
Alice shook her head. “The Nest doesn't have that kind of deep connection with the host bodies. It's like the difference between driving a car by sitting in it and using a remote control on RC toys—in this case, a whole bunch of RC toys. They'll be coordinated, but no one host is going to be any more than human—less in a lot of ways.”
That made sense. I nodded.
meat toys. no more than obstacles.
Yeah, I get the picture.
Alice had an architectural plan for the department store, although she cautioned us that the nest was sure to have extensively remodeled it in ways that would be impossible to predict. “Remember, it's not built for humans, it's built for the outsider that uses humans as its hands. Don't expect it to make sense.”
Like any part of this plan made sense. “Look,” I interjected. “I'm really not sold on this whole thing. Can't we just leave him alone and trust him to leave us alone? Why do we have to go picking a fight?”
Godiva chewed her lip. “Maybe. It's possible we can negotiate a truce, but we'll need to be able to negotiate from a position of strength, and that means we need more information than we have.”
I looked to Alice. “You've got plenty of information. I mean”—I waved my hand around the office, the books and papers—“you've been studying all these groups.”
She nodded slowly. “I've been studying them from the outside. All told, there's maybe a thousand people in the metro area that I have reason to believe are involved with outsiders. There could be five times as many that I don't know about—or twenty times as many. It's taken me ten years to learn what I know.”
“And what's that?”
A sigh. “Mostly that I wish I didn't know as much as I do.” She leaned back in her chair. “Look, you don't owe me anything, either of you. If you want to just walk away, I won't try to stop you. I think it'd be a mistake, but I won't try to stop you.”
“Morgan never leaves his shop,” I pointed out. “What if I leave town, go to California or Florida or someplace?”
“Morgan has contacts all over the world. He knows who you are now, and he'll sell that information. Adam Chase is a very valuable commodity in certain circles.”
“a very hazardous commodity.” Catskinner pointed out.
“Agreed,” Alice said. “But consider that Dr. Klein was able to immobilize you. The same capabilities that make you dangerous make you valuable, and there are those who would spend a great deal of effort to find you and try to control you, or kill you. I know you want to go back to the way things were, but I don't think that's an option.”
Godiva put her hand on mine. “Like it or not, you're on board, and you're an important piece. We don't know just how important, not yet. That's one of the things we have to find out. You can play your own game, or you can be part of someone else's. But you can't just resign—they'll kill you.”
I chewed that over for a while.
“Okay,” I said, “so what's our move?”
Chapter Twelve
“time is a machine for manufacturing endings.”
Manchester road, once you get out of the city, is pretty much all strip malls and box stores. I was beginning to see how the outsiders kept their activities secret—it wasn't so much invisibility as obscurity. Human beings see what they want to see, and nobody wanted to see a vast conspiracy of extra-dimensional aliens (or whatever they are). At least, sane people didn't, and the crazy people were easy to recruit.
The address Alice gave us was behind a scrim of ragged trees shielding it from the road. I almost missed the turnoff into the parking lot. It was angled both back and down and I had to slow down to a crawl. Fortunately no one was behind me. The lot continued to slope down, and the top of the building was nearly at the level of the street.
It had been a big department store in better days. The sign across the top read “Happy Lucky Products” in faded gold letters. There was the glow of neon in the window, but aside from that, the place looked abandoned. The other signs were weathered to illegibility and the parking lot a mess of frost heave and straggly grasses. There were cars in the lot, however, a half dozen of them. Some of them could have belonged to shoppers, but I suspected that most of them belonged to the nest.
I parked away from the other cars, on the side of the building. Again I felt that sense of isolation from the human world, as if the busy street just across the lot might as well have been on the other side of the universe.
We got out of the van and Godiva followed me to the door. Catskinner's vigilance was making me feel twitchy—he wanted control of my eyes. I wasn't ready to let him take over though. I wanted to check out the nest for myself.
The big front windows were full of movie posters in foreign languages, a lot of tough guys with guns and swooning girls with ripped dresses. It made me feel like a crowd of particularly anti-social shoppers were watching us.
“Do we just go in?” I wondered aloud.
Godiva shrugged. “Might as well.”
The closer I got to the door the more agitated Catskinner became.
it is not safe here.<
br />
I sighed. He was probably right. I stopped walking. Let me do the talking? And don't kill anyone unless you have to?
agreed.
Usually when I let Catskinner take over I let myself sort of fade away. This time I deliberately stayed aware of what was going on around me. There was the familiar sense of distance from my body as Catskinner walked me up to the door, but I wasn't just a passive observer. Whatever happened here, I would be part of it.
I could tell that Godiva sensed Catskinner take over, and I tried to turn to face her. After a moment, Catskinner moved my head so I could see her.
“It's okay.” I said, and my voice sounded strange in my ears. I wasn't hearing it though the bones of my skull, I realized, but only with my ears. “I'm still here.”
My body walked to the door and my eyes scanned the area all around it. Catskinner didn't focus on objects the way I did. My eyes seemed to be registering the shape of the empty space as if it was more important. Maybe for him it was.
Beside me Godiva took a deep breath, but Catskinner didn't turn to her, he just pushed on the door—I could feel how careful he was not to break it—and walked inside.
It was dark inside, or at least darker than the bright sunlight outside, and then it wasn't. All at once the store went from dim to bright. Instinctively I tried to glance at the overhead lights, but my head moved slowly side to side and didn't look up. Catskinner had adjusted my eyes, I realized.
The inside of the store was one big room, but it didn't seem to be as big as it should have been from the outside and I guessed part of the space was walled off.
Music was playing, bright and cheerful and little relentless. A young girl's voice in what I guessed was Japanese. To me it sounded like she was singing “oochi boochi woochi” over and over again.
People. A man in a polo shirt and jeans pawing through a rack of CDs or DVDs—Catskinner kept my eyes moving too quickly to get a good look.
A middle aged woman, Asian and thin as a rail, in a white blouse and standing, I realized as my eyes slid past her, behind the counter.
Another woman, wild mass of auburn hair, black tank top showing pale skin, idly spinning a rack of jewelry, gold and silver sparkling against white plastic.
Catskinner walked me to the counter, my head still swiveling back and forth like a scanning camera. I caught a quick glimpse of Godiva walking beside me. Another man, young, in a black leather jacket, looked up from poking through a display of T-shirts to watch us go past.
Three customers, one employee? I asked in my head. It was hard to keep track without being able to move my head for myself.
four, was all he replied.
We reached the counter. The Asian woman looked harmless, but Catskinner stiffened and I felt his awareness ratchet up to red alert.
Well. “Hello,” I said. Again my voice sounded like a bad recording.
I realized I also sounded like an idiot, but that wasn't Catskinner's fault.
The woman looked at me for a moment, waiting to see if I would say anything else. When I didn't she asked, “What brings the butcher to our door?”
The butcher? Oh, yes, that would be me, or Catskinner, really. “I've come to talk about Keith Morgan,” I said.
I heard the front door open and close. five, Catskinner said in my head.
The counter woman was still looking at me. Yeah, okay, I said I was here to say something about him, I probably should think of something to say.
Godiva rescued me. “We want you to stop doing business with him.”
The woman glanced at her briefly, then back at me.
“If we do this, you will not kill us?” Another door—not the front one, but behind the counter someplace—opened and closed. six and seven, Catskinner told me. I could feel that he was keeping track of everyone else in the store, but I wasn't sure how, since he kept my eyes focused on the woman we were talking to.
“Uh . . . yeah, that's the basic idea.” I tried smiling at her, but it didn't work very well.
“Agreed.”
Agreed? Was it really that simple?
“Okay, good.” I said. I tried to look over at Godiva, but Catskinner wouldn't shift his attention.
Godiva leaned forward. “You're willing to stop trading with Morgan, just like that?” She seemed surprised as well.
The woman's attention shifted to Godiva. “You and Keith Morgan are in conflict. It is in our best interest to avoid that conflict. We have sufficient stockpiles to last until the conflict is ended, at which time we can negotiate with the survivor.”
Reasonable. Cold, but reasonable.
“I also want to know who else Morgan trades with,” I said.
The woman looked down at the counter. There was a newspaper there, not in English. Chinese, if I had to guess. She picked up the paper and started paging through it, just as if Godiva and I weren't standing right in front of her.
“And how is that in our best interest?” someone asked. A male voice, and I was suddenly facing him. It was the guy in the polo shirt who had been looking through the DVDs. Not a customer, I realized, but part of the nest.
“It will keep me from killing you,” I pointed out.
Everyone in the store was looking at us, and I realized that there were no customers. They were all part of the nest.
The redhead in the black tank top spoke up. “My hosts are replaceable. My relations with the others of my kind are more difficult to repair.”
I couldn't think of any way to argue with that, and Catskinner still wasn't letting me look at Godiva. I could hear her sigh, though.
“What would be in your best interest to tell us?”
“Goodbye,” said the young man in the black leather jacket, from where he stood by the T-shirt display. He didn't make any move to usher us out though. He just stood there, unnaturally still. I was beginning to see how unnerving Catskinner must seem to ordinary people. Now that the nestlings had dropped their pretense of humanity they stood like a collection of manikins.
“What about those of your kind that you don't have such a good relationship with?” I pressed them. “Don't try to tell me that everything from the great beyond is sweetness and light and you all just love each other to death—I know better. Something out there gave Morgan the idea to kill Victor.”
“We don't know who.” From the one who had come in the store when I was facing away from the door, a white haired, round faced man in a black suit.
“No, but I bet you know somebody you wouldn't mind me leaning on. Give us a name, and we'll go away. Otherwise—” I still didn't have a clear plan for otherwise, but it turned out I didn't need one. Catskinner spun me around again and I saw the Asian woman holding out a slip of paper from behind the counter.
“MacNuth,” she said. “MacNuth Intermodel Freight Forwarding. On Hall street.”
“What's their connection to Morgan?” Godiva asked.
“That's where he keeps money. Cash in large amounts. We have made deliveries for him,” from the redhead.
“Good. Thank you.” I tried to turn, instead Catskinner stepped neatly backwards, my head scanning back and forth. Godiva backed up as well, nodding thoughtfully. We walked to the door and they didn't say another word. They just watched me, seven faces with the same blank expression.
Well, they'd already said goodbye.
Catskinner walked me backwards three more steps and then withdrew, pouring out of my body. I sagged, nearly stumbled, feeling suddenly weak. Godiva put her hand on my arm.
I shook my head. “I'm okay.”
“He takes a lot out of you,” she said, concerned.
I nodded. “Yeah. I just need some food.”
Then a man walked around the corner of the store with a gun in his hand.
Chapter Thirteen
“as plants are food for animals and animals are food for men, so must men be food for angels”
He was a big man, with a dark crewcut and a dark suit and looked just like what he yelled at us, which
was “Federal agent!” then “Keep your hands where I can see them.”
Catskinner bristled, but the gun was not actually pointed at us and I was able to keep him from taking over. My body was already drained. I didn't want to stress it any more unless I had to.
“Okay,” I sighed. “What do you want?”
He was holding his gun to the side, pointed down. He held up his other hand in a stop gesture. “First, my partner is behind your van. He's also armed. We have a pretty good idea what you can do, and we aren't taking any chances. We just want to talk.”
i can kill them both.
Before one of them shoots Godiva?
. . .
I thought so. Let them talk first.
“Okay. I'm listening.” Beside me Godiva was very still.
“I'm Tom White. My partner back there is Corbett Russwin.”
“Okay.” I wasn't planning on introducing myself.
Godiva was looking back at the van. “Hey,” she called out. “You—Russwin—get out where we can see you.”
I glanced back. The man who stepped around the van looked pretty much like White, except his crewcut was blond. He had a gun in his hand, too, and his was also pointed at the ground. Godiva started walking to the van, guiding me with her hand on my arm.
“We just want to talk,” White repeated.
“We'll talk in the middle of the lot,” Godiva countered. “Where we can all see each other.”
“Fair enough,” Russwin said agreeably. He backed up.
Godiva followed him, and I followed her, and White followed me. We went across the lot like that, a game of slow motion follow-the-leader. There was a big white sedan parked away from the other cars, pointing out. Russwin backed up to it and leaned on the hood, his gun in plain sight, pointed at the ground.
Catskinner's Book (The Book Of Lost Doors) Page 10