by English, Ben
He kept walking. “Trade secret, my dear!” Mercedes laughed. She felt very warm.
The old man crossed the gray street and slipped into the passenger side of a waiting limo. The driver chuckled and accelerated away from the train station. It was the same bright-eyed waiter that had advised Mercedes to take the train in Seattle. There was a paperback book on the dashboard, another by Fletcher Engstrom. The passenger picked it up. “You really read this stuff, Alonzo?”
“Somebody’s got to keep you from starving to death, pal.” The short man concentrated on the road ahead. “So, was she worth it?”
Jack Flynn pulled the last of the rubber makeup and about 40 years away from his face. “Yeah, she’s great. As–as incredible as ever. I’m afraid I still love her, Alonzo.”
Alonzo swore under his breath. “Here we go,” he muttered.
Now, let’s take a few steps back –
Book I
Gargoyle
The only cure for grief is action.
–George Henry Lewis
To sing, to laugh, to dream,
To walk in my own way and be alone,
Free, with an eye to see things as they really are,
A voice that means manhood–
To fight–or write. To travel any road
Under the sun, under the stars, nor doubt
If fame or fortune lies beyond the bourne–
Never to make a line I have not heard in my own heart.
You ask why, my dear, against one singer they sent a hundred swords?
Because
They know this one man for a friend of mine!
–Cyrano de Bergerac
Home
San Francisco Peninsula, California, USA
8 PM
Think big, then think little. That’s what his father told him.
The sky hung red, dead motionless in the sunset over the San Francisco Bay. The plain man kept his back to the dying light. Fog sloped into the grooved hills as he drove further and further south of the city on Highway 101, a muted smile on his face and stark secrets on his mind.
It had been three years since he’d driven himself anywhere, and a decade more since Alex Raines last came all the way home, but he knew what lay ahead as sure as he felt gravity bind him to the earth. Ramps and freeway patterns might change, but the man behind the wheel followed a pattern set deeply enough in his own heart and mind that he knew he was far, far past making a mistake of any kind.
Blinking hazard lights a few miles south of San Francisco International pulled at him as well, and before he knew what he was doing he found himself pulling onto the shoulder and killing the engine. A shabby, sad-looking car sat halfway on and halfway off the shoulder.
He checked his watch. Time enough.
“Are you alright, ma’am?” he asked the startled middle-aged woman alone in the dented Altima. “I’m Alex.” He offered his hand and she cracked the window open. They looked to be almost the same age.
“The police’ll be along shortly,” she said, eyeing his clothes and face. The passenger side and rear of the car were filled with brown paper bags full of ice cream. From somewhere under all the dairy, a small dog squeaked. Alex saw her cell phone, saw the dark display screen, and knew she was lying. He knew the designer of that phone; more to the point, he knew the design, and that particular brand of phone always stayed lighted if the battery held a sufficient charge. He decided a white lie of his own might balance things out.
“I used to work on this kind of car,” he said. “If you pop the hood, I might be able to help.” She held to her suspicion. Raines sighed, grinned, and fished a key ring out of his pocket. “Here,” he said. “Why don’t you hold on to my keys while I take a look.” She hesitated for a moment, then accepted the keys through the cracked window, and released the hood.
Raines chuckled to himself as he rounded the front of the car. Couldn’t blame her, really. The world these days was getting more and more and more frightening. Trust had to be earned, even by the trustworthy. He found a penlight in another pocket and clicked it on. Raines freely admitted himself a gadget junkie, and actually had another, brighter light with him-- he’d built his own, with a brilliant microlamp hardwired into the case—but it was attached to the keys he’d surrendered. At least he had a Swiss Army knife in his pocket.
Truth be told, Raines could have diagnosed the engine in the dark, practically by touch, but he didn’t want to spook the woman, and from the looks of all that ice cream, Raines wasn’t the only one on a timetable.
He was glad for the distraction. Raines had been almost hoping for a blown tire of his own, anything really, as long as it held an opportunity to fix something mechanical. He was good at that kind of thing, and it was the kind of small, manageable victory in which he always took joy. His rented sedan was disappointingly sturdy.
A snapped belt. Raines sighed, and checked over the engine again, pulling the dipstick and checking for bubbles in the oil. Too simple.
“Ma’am? It’s just one of your belts.” He held up the frayed rubber for her to see. “I hope you don’t think me too forward, but I could give you a temporary fix.”
Her expression softened somewhat, but the wide brown eyes still didn’t trust him completely. Raines couldn’t blame her, given the circumstances.
“It looks like you are coming from the store; I wonder if you might have bought a pair of ladies’ stockings?” She had, and Raines rejoiced. Luck or God smiling down, and all that. The stockings in question were thick enough to do the trick. “I can get you a fix good for ten miles or so, but see you drive straight to the shop tomorrow and get this properly replaced.”
“I’ll have one of my boys look at it first thing,” she said. A trace of a Louisiana accent, and he was starting to win her over.
Raines measured the stockings by eye and by touch, knotted them expertly and snipped the ends clean with the scissors blade of his knife.
“Go ahead and try it now,” he said, and the engine roared to life. Her alternator sounded like it had about two weeks left to go, and he told her so.
“My, but aren’t you clever,” she said, smiling for the first time. Her name was Angela Weidermeyer, and Raines decided she was a warm person after all, mostly untouched by what a dangerous, nasty place the world could be. She produced a tiny poodle dog and he shook its paw.
“That’s a lot of ice cream you’ve got there,” he said.
“A little something for my boys. I was sure it would all melt before anyone stopped to help.” She didn’t admit that her cell phone was dead, and Raines didn’t bring it up. He listened instead to the good-natured relation of her night’s trials and minor victories. Putting the bits and pieces together, Raines gathered that she ran the Eleven o’ Clock Club, a small home for runaways and children seeking legal emancipation from their parents, and had just gotten a license of some sort from the state. This was all very nice, but he could feel the weight of time beginning to press, and he altered his posture and responses accordingly.
“Oh, but I’ll talk your ear off, you give me half a chance. Thank you so much.” When she tried to offer him money, Raines steadfastly refused, but still stood awkwardly, rooted to the spot. “Is there something else then, dear?”
He stood sheepishly in the light fog, traffic brushing by a dozen feet away, and said, “You’ve still got my keys.”
She laughed and handed them over, then he waived her on her way when the freeway cleared. Moments later he was back in his own car, slicing south again through thin traffic.
Raines picked up his own phone and pushed a single button. “Update, please” he said, checking his watch. Still three hours until sunrise in the United Kingdom. “Good, now: There’s a woman named Angela Weidermeyer who lives somewhere on the peninsula. Runs a service for children who get away from their parents, or who request emancipation. Tomorrow she is to receive a new Lexus and a passenger van. Take special care with the stereo and theater systems, as if these were for your
own children. One million and eleven dollars are to be deposited in her business account at precisely eleven o’clock. Bear in mind,” he added, “this is to be strictly anonymous. She didn’t recognize me, and as far as anyone is to know I’m still touring factories outside of Prague.”
Raines disconnected the call, and concentrated on his driving. Traffic wasn’t as bad as he remembered. He doubted he’d find another stranded traveler, though fixing their car would prove depressingly easy as well. Pistons to microchips, he could fix any part of any vehicle he had ever seen, given a few simple tools.
He loved to fix the broken things around him.
He made this discovery at age nine, when his parents forced him to come to this horrible place, made him fit in with the miserable children who only spoke English. With no friends, Raines spent his youth taking things apart, breaking them down as far as they would go. Finding their inner operating principle. Thinking big, and then thinking little.
He remembered now he enjoyed driving. Usually a bodyguard or one of the secretaries escorted him, but a single night alone was something Raines promised himself years ago--decades before anyone ever heard of Raines Dynamic. Ages before the money. What a journey it had been.
He left the freeway for Redwood City. West on Whipple Avenue, past Pizza Hut and Jiffy Lube and a dozen other monuments to the long-standing inertia and mediocrity of the old neighborhood. The streets at this hour should have been busy, but were vacant, swept clean.
All too quickly, he arrived at the house on the right, nearly unchanged. A stucco two-story, with brick at the corners and a cedar-shake roof. He’d forgotten there were two chimneys. The hedge had grown, despite his strict orders to the gardeners, and Raines wondered what other orders the caretaker staff had ignored. No one had dared take down the basketball hoop his father had nailed above the driveway.
Basketball was supposed to be fun. The kind of thing American fathers do with their American sons. It was the one action in the man’s life that had been free of rigorous logic, and Raines remembered feeling a strange tinge to his curiosity towards the father buried somewhere within the scientist, perhaps hope at last. But they never played basketball.
As Raines stepped onto the walkway leading to the front door, a car door behind him opened. He turned to find a startled-looking young man, a sharp-dressed fellow with eager eyes, charging across the lawn.
“Mr. Raines? Mr. Raines, is that you?” The youth was beside himself. Behind him a girl emerged from their car. She was using a cell phone, which would not do.
Raines reached in his coat and tapped one of the many devices he habitually carried. Immediately, the young woman jerked her head away from the phone, as if shocked.
“Mr. Raines, thank—ah, sorry. This is such an honor.” The young man looked like he wanted to either shake hands or actually hug. Raines palmed another of his gadgets and switched hands before extending an open hand.
“Are you a student?” The girl paused at the sidewalk, obviously still stunned by her phone shorting out. She was pretty, much like the girls had been when he himself was in graduate school, like this unsure boy stepping from foot to foot before him.
“Heather, this is him, this is really the guy!” She smiled vaguely. The boy frowned at her, embarrassed. “He was on the cover of Newsweek last month. Mr. Raines, it is such an honor to meet you, sir!” He pumped Raines’ hand. To the girl he added, “The new engineering wing is named after him.”
As if on cue, the floodlights over the garage and front porch came on, and they all heard the sounds of the front door unlocking.
“Is this a smart house?” the young man asked.
“One of the first I ever built,” Raines admitted. “Experimented on, really. Before I learned how to make things really small.” Technical staff from one of the companies under the Raines Dynamic umbrella came by once a week, not only to dust but to run system diagnostics as well. It wasn’t unlike the master to come quickly and unannounced to any part of his kingdom.
“Yes sir! Remember Heather, he spoke to our class last fall at Stanford? The billionaire,” he added, sotto voce.
“Thank you. I remember the speech. How did you manage to stay awake?” The boy laughed, a little too loudly. Glancing up and down the street, Raines added, “and how did you know I would be here tonight?”
“Oh sir, I drive past your house every night. The dean pointed it out to me my very first week. I want to continue your work, sir. I’m one of your scholarship students.”
Raines smiled. “You’d be Robert Hampton, then, wouldn’t you?”
The youth was dumbstruck. “You actually know my name?”
“Of course.” His secretary had mentioned the name nearly a year ago. Ah, and now the young lady was coming into the light. Yes, she was prettier than he originally thought. Blond, fairly athletic, but not much facial expression. Intense sensations might help her discover new ways of expression. Raines could work on such a canvas.
He touched another device in his coat. “We’ll have cappuccino for three in, say, two minutes?”
The young man was beside himself. All the way up the walk he sputtered about his physics classes and nanotechnology theory; undergraduate stuff, pedantic. Barely a child in the wading pool, thought Raines. To think he’d almost fallen into a life of teaching these whelk. “Are you an engineer as well?” He asked the girl.
She responded no, that she was pre-med. For her part, the girl didn’t seem to know who he was, or for that matter, have decided how to act around a rich, rich man. She allowed herself to be led up the stairs at her boyfriend’s elbow. So much the better.
Thanks to another of the devices he carried, the house’s security system recognized Raines and deactivated the front door as they approached. Lights winked on through the downstairs foyer, and music began to play softly. The furniture was twenty years old, but well cared for.
“This is nice,” said the girl, as Raines closed the door. The boy was asking some question or another about microscopic power supplies and heat transfer when Raines, smiling, pressed a device into the inside of his arm.
The meaty sound of his body hitting the parquet floor caused her to turn, and Raines brushed a hand, featherlight, over her neck as well. Heather started to scream, and Raines allowed this. The outer walls were soundproof. Heather backed away, then twisted and fell against the wall, clutching at herself. Under her skin, her muscles writhed and coiled. “Bobby!” She screamed again. “Bobby!”
“You really shouldn’t have recognized me.” Raines pocketed the injection device, trading it for a tablet computer, and turned his attention to the boy. The youth had managed to turn himself over on his side, and blood ran freely from his face. He’d most likely broken his nose during the fall. The girl sobbed behind them, and whimpered when she saw the boy’s greasy, white face. “Cold,” he said, and then only his eyes moved freely. The girl turned and tried to run, but her body only obeyed her halfway. Her limbs tensed and relaxed, then tensed again. She jerked in the air like a marionette, screaming all the while. She kept screaming even after her body went completely slack and collapsed at the base of the stairs. She took in great, gasping lungfuls of air, and wailed for help.
The computer readout jumped. “Interesting,” said Raines. He watched the display for several seconds, then removed the young man’s wallet. Behind him, the girl continued to scream.
Confusion and fear and panic, delicious panic shone brightly on her features. Her breath rasped. “Please. Please don’t hurt him.”
Raines propped the boy up so he could see everything.
Her change was progressing. The devices were moving through her almost as quickly as they’d taken the boy. Raines tapped out a few commands on his computer, and made a few modifications to the program, and watched it run.
“You’re pre-med? You should take some satisfaction in tonight, my dear.” He gestured with the computer. “The information I’m collecting on you right now will one day make it possible for
tiny, tiny machines to cure specific anomalies in the human body. Because of you, other people might just live forever.”
She closed her eyes and shuddered.
“There’s something wonderful in you right now, moving through your circulatory system. Think of the way Alka-Seltzer dissolves in water. Getting smaller and smaller, riding your blood, then riding the electric currents and tides within your cells. But you’ll stay awake. I wanted you to experience this fully.”
“You put something inside me,” she said.
“Many thousands of tiny, tiny things, actually. By now they’ve started building a nest near your brain stem. It’s easy for them to do. They have no natural predator.” He could just turn them off, but Raines saw no need to burden her with unnecessary hope.
“Why can’t I move?”
Raines considered the many ways to explain the effect. There must be a context that she would understand. “Have you ever become weak after being tickled?”
She stared at him.
“Lost your strength after you’ve laughed very, very hard? It’s called ‘cataplexy’—a sudden loss of muscle strength caused by an extreme emotional response. The delivery agent blocks the neurological pathway that causes your muscles to contract.”
Raines nodded dismissively to the corpse on the floor. “I could have just shut you off, like Bobby.”
“Don’t you say his name,” she seethed. “I don’t care how much you hurt me.”
“Hurt you? No.” Raines tapped the screen and a few moments later she moaned, then gasped, then groaned again with her whole voice.
“I’m going to take you past the limits of what you thought you could feel.”
The girl wailed again in the throes of reckless ecstasy, and bit her lip against what Raines guessed was pleasure. Raines sat down to wait and observe. Her body would ride out the bliss sooner than she thought. She made little animal sounds deep in her throat, and her face and neck perspired enough to puddle against the floor, mixing with blood from her lip.