“We left you a compensation envelope on the hearth. I think you’ll find it generous.” She opened his liquor cabinet, which creaked as the hinges strained against warped wood. “Huh? I thought there were a couple extra bottles of rum here. Guess you’ve been busy drinking since last I checked.”
“Pretty hard to drink when I’m fucking tied up.”
“Must’ve been May then. Whatever, I’ll comp you for them.” She pulled a pair of bills from her wallet and left them in the cabinet before closing it back up. She then turned a final time to their captive host. “Alright, here’s what’s going to happen. We’re going to leave, and on our way out we’re going to call the police. They’ll come and untie you, and for your trouble you can tell them whatever you want, since as of right now this family doesn’t exist, capiche? And no need to worry: after tonight, you’ll never cross paths with any of us again.”
He snarled up at her. “Good.”
“Alright then.” She walked back toward the foyer and Spinneretta obediently backed up to make space for her. “Sure you have everything? Where’s May and whatshisname?”
“They’ll be around,” Arthr said, looking over his shoulder. “I think they’re still getting ready.”
Annika grumbled. “Thought I told her seven on the dot.”
It was then that Spinneretta heard a loud clattering from upstairs. It sounded as though someone had tripped and fallen on the floor, but the heavy footsteps contradicted that thought. May flew around the corner of the stairway, and at once Spinneretta was stricken by the look of panic on her mother’s face. “Ralph is gone!”
“What!?” Annika replied.
May almost tripped as she rushed down the stairs, holding a scrawled note in her hand. “He left this,” she said, holding it out to Annika, who snatched the bit of paper away from her and read it aloud.
To all:
I can see clearly now. I’ve been a fool all this time, and I won’t let it destroy me anymore. I’m going back to face them. I don’t expect I will see any of you again. I love each and every one of you. I’m sorry I couldn’t be a good father. I just hope I can right that wrong.
Ralph
A dim pallor overtook Annika’s face. “Oh my God . . . ”
“Back to face them?” Arthr said. “Does that mean that he . . . ?”
“He must mean he went back to Grantwood,” Spinneretta said. She wrapped her spider legs around her chest. “To the Golmont Corporation. To NIDUS.”
Annika let the note fall from her hands and snapped about. She shoved Mark and Arthr out of her way and tore out the front door. She sprinted down the steps, and before she knew what she was doing Spinneretta abandoned her bags and gave chase. The chilly evening embraced her as she flew out onto the patio and down the stairs. Her parents’ car was gone; in the place it had been parked, there was only bare earth and grass. Down the hill, the moonlight revealed that the walls of the old shed had been smashed apart, and tools lay strewn about the ground. She began to panic, and she looked to Annika—who had already discovered the garage.
The door of the garage attached to Kyle’s house had been left wide open. Inside, Kyle’s car was tilted, held up by a jack. A slick of oil covered the floor, and a cut length of hose protruded from the gas tank. Annika began to shake her head. “No, Jesus, no!”
The others had filtered out through the front door. Her mother stumbled, barely holding herself up on Mark’s shoulder. “He’s gone,” she said. “He went back. He went back, this is terrible.”
The salty air seeped into Spinneretta’s spiracles. “We have to do something. If he’s gone back there, then that means that he could be in big trouble!”
Mark crossed his arms and gritted his teeth. “I hate to sound cold,” he said, avoiding eye contact, “but given everything that’s going on we cannot afford to go after him.”
Spinneretta’s mouth fell open. “You’re not actually suggesting that we just leave him to go off and die, are you?”
He closed his eyes, and Spinneretta could taste the conflict in the clenching of his jaw muscles. “I am sorry, but given what’s at stake here, going after him is definitely not an option.”
“No,” Annika said, shaking her head. “It is an option. The only option.”
Mark’s eyes shot open again. “What?”
“I don’t think you get how bad this is, Mark,” she said, clearly shaken by the turn of events.
“Again, not to sound callous, but—”
Annika cut him off with a desperate cackle. “No, no, no, no. You don’t get it. We’ve just arrived on Worst-Case Scenario Island. Ralph saw the documents I was preparing. He saw the names on the bullshit identities, he saw them.”
Mark’s expression gradually morphed to one of shock. “Wait a moment. Are you saying that—”
“If he’s going to the Golmont Corporation, then he’s taking that information with him in his brain. If they get those, those mind-control spiders on him, then they’ll know everything he knows.” Her voice was unsteady, wavering. “They’ll know about the new identities, and then it’s only a matter of time until another pair of bounties is posted for Ms. Hallström and Mr. Carter. It’s too late to start over.”
Spinneretta looked up at Annika, and for the first time she saw weakness in the woman’s eyes. Even if she thought Annika was a complete bitch, on some level she had depended on her for strength. At times infuriatingly optimistic, Annika had kept alive the hope that everything would work out. Now, that unshakable conviction was shattered. She was trembling. Seeing her like that struck fear in Spinneretta’s heart. All the tentative hope she’d harbored began to collapse around her.
“So,” Mark said, cautious, “what do we do?”
Annika looked up at him, eyes wide, defeated. And then a snarl crept across her lips. “We have to go after him.”
He flinched. “Go after him? Are you serious?”
Annika started toward where her silver sedan sat parked, her good hand fishing for her revolver. “Get in the damn car,” she called back. “I’m going to need your help, Mark. Those Vant’therax are bad news, and as amazing as I am, I can’t take them all if it comes to a fight, not with another goddamn Conduit alive and kicking.”
His whole body tensed. He passed his gaze over the rest of the family and then Spinneretta. He then followed Annika without another word.
A deep breath of salt vapor filled Spinneretta’s lungs. “I’m going, too.”
Annika snapped her head over her shoulder. “Jesus Christ, don’t tell me you’ve caught the stupid, too. The whole point is to protect you, not give you to them on a brass platter!”
“And just what do you think is going to happen to us if you two fail?” She marched down the hill toward them, conviction stoked by the cold breeze. “If you go after him and you fail, then we’re even worse off than if nobody went. The more people that go, the better our chance of coming out of this alive.”
Annika fumbled with her key in the Ford’s door. “Newsflash: you’re just a kid. What do you think you can do?”
Mark answered for her. “Spinneretta can take care of herself. She wouldn’t be a burden on us.” The detective stared, dumbstruck, as he continued. “I watched her beat a man twice her size in a fist fight. I saw her fight heroically against those Leng cats back in the Web. She may be small, but I think she’s right about being able to help.”
“And don’t forget about me!” Arthr yelled, striding down the hill with Kara behind him. “This is our dad we’re talking about!”
“Yeah!” Kara said. Cinnamon leapt from the girl’s ankles to her shoulder and crackled a noise of agreement.
The three spider children stood in a loose circle around Annika. She regarded them each with a desperate eagerness to dismiss them. But after a long moment, she clawed her fingers and raked them across her brow. “God damn you,” Annika hissed. She threw a glance twenty feet up the hill, where May stood trembling with damp eyes. “I know this is a mistake. I just know
it is. But if even Mark is agreeing to it, then I know things are bad. Hurry up and get in the car before I change my mind.”
Chapter 33
Lethean Jail
It had been a surprisingly easy task. After parking in his usual spot, Ralph had taken one of the side entrances into the Golmont building. Current events made the front door unusually hazardous, he’d reasoned, and so the safest course of action was to make himself as invisible as possible. That precaution may have been extraneous, he now thought, for he hadn’t found a single soul waiting inside the Golmont building. He resisted the urge to call out for familiar names; that would have been foolhardy, and he didn’t even have time to chat should anyone emerge when beckoned.
And so he made his way toward the restricted south wing, dragging his feet. He found himself reminiscing about his time at the Corporation. Though less than a month had passed since he’d last been here, the fogs of confusion that inundated his path made those memories recede further. When he came to the great fire door, the one that for as long as he could remember had been sealed shut and watched by two security guards, he was surprised to find the area vacant of all life. He’d always thought the use of armed guards strange. Rumors said it was to protect hazardous chemicals stored deeper within the facility. There were warehouses, or so he had been told, that contained massive volumes of acid and industrial reactants. Some of these chemicals, it was said, were so dangerous that they were required by federal law to be guarded at all times, lest some teenage junky make off with a barrel of hydrochloric acid and snort his brain into a chunky stew.
In all his time working at the Corporation, he had never been through that door. But nor had he seen any evidence that suggested the rumored warehouse actually existed. It was high time to see what secrets awaited behind that iron curtain, for he was now certain that it hid his objective. The battery of servers for Golmont Internet Services could only have been beyond. Buy why? Separation of church and state? He was on the cusp of cracking that question.
Standing at the fire door, Ralph felt a pang of loneliness. He cast his eyes about him, ensuring there was nobody around to stop his entrance. He approached the panel at the side of the blast door. Nervous, he pressed the inviting black and red button down with his thumb, and a piercing buzz cried out from somewhere overhead. A few seconds of that buzzing passed, and then a pneumatic hiss accompanied the grinding of metal gears and plates. The blast door began to open, groaning against its own structure as he pressed the button hard into its housing. Beyond, Ralph could make out a long, metallic tunnel. The segments of the blast door stopped moving, and the harsh groaning settled with a resounding clack. Ralph took a deep breath, held it, and started beyond the door. That elusive server room couldn’t have been far.
An alarm blared through the command center, rousing Dirge from his daydreams of tearing apart another of the Marauders and snacking on its crunchy sinews. The siren was low, almost churning as it ground against his ears. He’d never heard this particular alarm before. “What is that?” he thought to the others.
An inarticulate growl rumbled through the network. “Nemo,” Kaj thought in reply. “Answer the question.”
From his position upon his cross, Nemo made a weary attempt at speech. Dirge thought he looked like he was trying to remember. “The door,” Nemo thought to them. “The door. To underground.”
“What? An intruder?”
Nemo nodded, though only Dirge was close enough to see it. “Yes.”
“That’s impossible. What about the guards?”
“The Marauders,” Nal thought. “Two should have been at post.”
“Are they asleep on the job? There were no reports. One of you, check the footage.”
Dirge, being the closest to the surveillance-slavery machine, gazed upon the black screens on the wall. Only a few of the useless security devices were still operating. The cluster that remained were all close together, looking down at the corridors and rooms that made up the top layer of the lower complex. He began to growl as he saw the intruder’s form on the first camera. “It’s the father of the Fifth.”
The consciousness that bound the Vant’therax came alive with anticipation. “Shall we have the meat bags take care of him?”
“No,” came Kaj’s stern thoughts. “We need him alive. Our piety has been rewarded. He will lead us to Nexara.” The mental equivalent of a violent grin came upon him. “Let the puppets take him.”
Nemo’s mind tensed, and the vibrations of that shock were felt by all the Vant’therax. Dirge took a certain sadistic pleasure in the way his heart began to race—as he was certain Kaj did as well. “Yes,” Dirge thought. “Let the exalted one show his hand.” A peal of laughter rattled through the brain-web. “Call them here, Nemo. Call them, and drag him down to the Hives below.”
Dirge felt the resistance in Nemo’s mind as the boy attempted to defy the order, but it soon dissolved into tepid compliance. His mind reached out, running itself over the lines of control leading to the Nothem embedded in the brains of the police. The swirling mental force seized the thoughts and emotions of those men and women. A moment later, Dirge felt the command propagate through to each of the puppets as Nemo summoned them forth from town.
“Procuring the memories of the father of the Fifth is now the most important thing,” Kaj thought. “Soon, he will be no more than another fly in our web. And then, Nexara will be ours, and with her our promised souls.”
In town, the scattered spiders answered the call. The pilgrimage of cursed servants began.
Night had fallen by the time the Ford sedan reached the outskirts of Grantwood. “God damn everything,” Annika growled, her foot glued to the pedal. “I’m sure I could find some way to blame this on you if I tried hard enough, Spinzie.”
In reflex, Spinneretta dug her spider legs into the upholstery. “Shut up and get us there. At least have the courtesy to be a fucking bitch after we’ve dealt with this.”
“Oh, let me guess, Spinzie’s going to insist we bring him back alive, too?” A mocking laugh followed. “Do you even understand what this is? This isn’t a rescue mission, this is suicide. This is what NIDUS wanted, and now we’re just handing it to them for nothing. If you three had stayed at Kyle’s and made a break for it, we at least wouldn’t be handing them their ultimate goal gift-wrapped with a bow on top.”
“What are you complaining about?” Spinneretta snapped. “This is all your fault. You agreed to this, and now you get to deal with it!”
“If anything we should’ve left Kara,” Arthr said.
Annika hissed. “Last I checked, you spent all of our last fight unconscious while your sister took out the trash. No, if we’re going into hell’s mouth, I want Kara to have my back. I trust that girl. You? Not so much.”
“This isn’t helping!” Kara screeched. “Argue about nothing later!” The Leng cat in her lap clicked a staccato refrain that seemed to be agreement.
Spinneretta huffed and sat back in her seat. Her spider legs—and her fingernails—were cutting into the pleather seat covers. Her jaw was tight. The shadows of cars and trees streaked by outside the windows. The speedometer read ninety, and it was not fast enough. In the passenger seat, Mark was still glaring off into the distance. His neck was strained, and his hands clawed at the fabric of his jeans.
“Damn everything,” Annika said under her breath. She growled at the approaching turn-off and threw the car into the right lane, a maneuver that crushed Kara and Spinneretta against Arthr. “Hold on, we’re taking these turns without braking.”
Obeying the command, the spider children in the back seat grabbed onto their handles and seat belts, bracing for the wild ride as Annika took them through the back roads leading up to Grantwood proper. The Ford screeched around the bends of the road. The trees lining the path up to the foothills clawed at the night sky and cast a deeper dark across the broken pavement. Solitude permeated the thickets as they sped around corners and bends.
After a few tense m
inutes of automotive parkour, the road began to straighten, and the grade of the ascent leveled off. The slopes on either side rose skyward, and the forest thinned as the city limits approached. The first signs of dreadful civilization appeared. The abandoned husks of two cars sat beside the road, wrecked and covered in broken glass, visible for only a moment as the headlights beamed past them. A few moments later, they passed what had once been a hastily constructed checkpoint set up along the road. That they passed through it without incident was a relief, until Spinneretta caught a closer glimpse of that checkpoint out the rear windshield. A sole uniformed guard lay crumpled over the checkpoint’s railing. A swarm of flies billowed about the corpse. Spinneretta shivered, averting her gaze from the rapidly receding image and trying to block it from her mind. What could be expected in the rest of Grantwood if this was what had befallen the police force?
Even though Ralph had never been there before, the server room brought back a certain elegant nostalgia when he found it. The room seemed to stretch for leagues in every direction, and the huge server racks aligned within its massive grid were reminiscent of a rotting city skyline. The wires that fed from surge protector to machine cluster were caricatures of the power lines that fed an electricity-addicted society.
Ralph walked down one of the rows of machines, looking wearily to and fro. The scrape of the axe-blade trailing behind him had become a distant melody. It was something of a miracle he’d found the place without wandering the halls like a lost tourist. He recognized the headless hardware. UNIX machines. As above, so below.
He came upon the terminal on the farthest side of the server cluster. It was offset from the usual grid, marking its importance as a director of the slave machines within its network. The terminal was blinking at a steady pace, though the lines of output were frozen in time. Ralph leaned over the embedded keyboard and stared at the output of the terminal.
User agent strings and diagnostics crawled down the screen like creeping ivy. No input had been processed for a short while. At the very bottom, Awaiting context match blinked in that same monospaced font. Then, before his eyes, a few more lines of numerical data were spat out with a fresh timestamp.
Helixweaver (The Warren Brood Book 2) Page 40