“She thought he was in the building when she set it on fire?”
“That’s right. Her old lover Mike would have been burned alive, the most terrible death I can personally think of. Lucky for him we got to him first, rather than leaving him to the tender mercies of his once-beloved Tomoe. You’re too much of a romantic, Holder. And a sexist too, I might add. Women have motivations other than romance, you know. In Tomoe Johnson’s case, she’s a fanatic and rather a ruthless leftist. Or she was, until you got her killed.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with it,” I insisted.
“As I said, Holder, this is the second time. Mind you, I have never really trusted you, and I never would have. The fact remains, you are just not smart enough to outwit me under any circumstances. No matter what I’m planning, Gavin Holder would always be the last person to know or understand. And now here we are. The glorious culmination of all my plans!”
Chapter 45
I should never have come back to the compound in the first place. That much was obvious, but it hadn’t been obvious to me because I didn’t realize Kohl would launch his attack that quickly. I should have bailed out on the road, made my way to the nearest FBI office and talked them into getting a warrant to raid the Quod Corporation.
But it was too late for that now. My plan had failed, the rocket had launched the satellite into orbit as scheduled, and Kumar wouldn’t be doing any favors for me now because he was being tortured by the Ja Lama. The Sōhei Faction would die with him, and Vitalius Kohl would decapitate the Federal government and then go on to wage some war of his own, for purposes I had never understood and would never understand. Not because he had never explained himself though. He did that all the time.
“So many years,” he mused. “So many lifetimes! Have you ever read any Baudelaire?”
“What’s that?” I asked, confused.
“Charles Baudelaire, the French poet. A famous decadent, a singer of hymns to Satan and love poems to the whores of Paris.”
“Yeah, a little. In college. Why?”
“I have more memories than if I had lived for a thousand years… am I right? That’s how it feels. This has been coming for a long time, Gavin. A long time!”
“What has been coming for a long time? Quod Glasses?”
“Still playing innocent then? Very well. I’ll make sure you get your own personal pair of Quod Glasses. You’ll see for yourself. You’ll see what everyone else sees. When it happens. It won’t be long now!”
“What won’t be long now?”
“I see what you’re doing. You think this is the scene where the villain taunts the hero and fully explains his entire plan, allowing the hero to stall for time before doing something clever and snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. Truth is upheld, and good is restored!”
“As usual, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you do. Of course, you do, Gavin. Of course, you do.”
“Eeeeeeeee,” said Mother. “Eeeeeeeeeee.”
“Yes, Theresa,” said Vitalius. “I quite agree. But Gavin does not because he’s too ill-informed to know what we’re talking about. Or so he would have us believe.”
“I don’t know as much as you think I do,” I said. “I have no idea what your plan is, other than to release a cutting-edge new brand of virtual reality headset with no content except horrible accidents and atrocities. Which, frankly, is the single stupidest business plan I have ever heard of, but it’s not my business because it’s not my money.”
“Not your circus, not your monkeys? Yes?”
“Exactly. Not my circus, not my monkeys. But you say it’s all about to start. Okay. All the customers who got the pre-sale are sitting there in front of their computers with their headsets on, just waiting for the amazing virtual reality content to download enlightenment straight into their brains. And when they just see a bunch of people burning down villages and getting mangled in car accidents, they’ll want their money back. And they’ll sue you for what you did to them of course. But that’s only to be expected. The thing I don’t understand is why you’re getting so excited about it. As far as crimes against humanity go, Hennington was a hell of a lot bigger than this. This is sophomore slump.”
“You truly hate me, don’t you Gavin?”
He almost sounded disappointed.
“I always have,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I betrayed you. I have no options except with you. I’ll stay in the game as long as you do and then I’m done. I understand why you don’t trust me, but the fact is I have served you loyally. And I always will. The devils in hell hate Lucifer, but they still serve.”
“Oh, well said. Well said! A bit purple, though,” said Father.
It might seem like I was poking at him, but I was actually throwing a Hail Mary pass. I had gotten by all along by presenting myself as resentful and cynical yet fundamentally loyal. If I backed down from that now, I wouldn’t even have the slim chance I still possessed. There was only one thought in my mind, though. Get out. Get out while there’s still time!
“So, this is your end game,” said Father. “Throw some sarcasm at me, convince me yet again that I have tamed you completely, then slip out and complete your mission. Which is either on behalf of your old bosses at the FBI or your new friends in Tomoe Johnson’s deluded outfit. Or is it somehow both of them at once?”
“I don’t have to stand here and be insulted by you,” I said with disgust and turned as if to leave. Of course, the door was locked. This was nothing more than another bluff, intended to get Kohl to let me out that door and out of the underground bunker and as far away from this place as humanly possible. Get out! I thought. Get out!
“What do you say, Theresa?” asked Vitalius Kohl, the man whose lies and manipulations had blocked my every move or twisted it to his own purposes again and again. I remembered what Tomoe had told me that day in the brothel. If you’re allowed to do anything, it will be because Father allows you to do it. If you are blocked in anything you try to do, it will be because Father didn’t want you to do it. If you die in the end, it will be because Mother decided you must die.
“Hkkkkkkkk,” said Mother, drawing one finger across her throat.
“That settles it then. Farewell, Gavin!”
The door opened, and Greg Voss stepped through with his gun pointed straight at my head.
“Yes, sir?” he said. I didn’t know how he knew what had just been decided, but it didn’t really seem to matter that much. The last grains of sand were currently dropping through the hourglass.
“Take Gavin here to the Ja Lama, and make sure he watches the main event on a pair of Quod Glasses before His Holiness starts carving.”
“Yes, sir!” said the mercenary. Kohl’s satellite was about to drop the Rod from God, and I’d be watching the horror on a pair of Quod Glasses when it happened.
Chapter 46
I only remembered that I had attempted to escape when I opened my eyes to a murder happening right in front of me. I was in an alleyway somewhere at night, but I didn’t seem to be down at street level. Instead I seemed to be up higher somehow – maybe looking out a window?
The streets were dark, and slick with water from the rain. I stared down at an alley, where a homeless man in a wheelchair slept wrapped in a sleeping bag and several coats. Three young men in leather jackets walked up to him, swaggering slow and cruel. They all had baseball bats, and as I stared down at the scene completely powerless, one of them hit the man in the head as if he was swinging at a baseball. The homeless guy’s head jerked back at the impact, like it was a baseball trying to soar away across the outfield except that it was held in place by his neck. And then they all started hitting him.
The world shifted, and before I could even process what I had just seen it became something else. I was in a car crash, but once again I was not down at street level. I was up higher somewhere, perched on an overpass or hanging from something although I couldn’t tell what. Two cars
on the highway had struck head-on, and one of them was consumed by raging flames in which black shapes like human bodies writhed and twitched. On the tarmac outside the car, a child’s lifeless body lay sprawled in a long slick of dark blood.
Another shift. A burning house, surrounded by other burning houses. Soldiers marching through, and people trying desperately to run from the flames. Dead bodies everywhere. More shooting, more dying.
Another shift. A mass shooting in a shopping mall, the killer grinning in a weird glassy-eyed way while he racked his shotgun.
Another shift. A bank robbery somewhere. A ski-masked bank robber calmly executing a security guard while all the other hostages screamed and screamed.
It kept on going, and all along I was more confused than horrified. I had just tried to take Greg Voss’s gun away from him, and Greg had rewarded me for my impudence by cracking me hard in the side of the head with his handgun. So why was I jumping crazily through all these worlds, and why was I never at street level in any of them?
“Hold on a moment,” said a voice. “This worthless monk must adjust the settings.”
The Quod Glasses came off, and it was only then that I realized I had even been wearing them. The Ja Lama stared down at me, made a few adjustments on the headset, then moved to put them back on.
“Hold on a minute!” I said.
“You don’t have a minute, Mr. Holder,” said the monk. Or the false monk to be more accurate. “You need to see this.”
“I need to see the big event. That’s what Kohl said. There’s no reason for me to see all that other horrible shit!”
“It’s just like being trapped in the hell worlds, isn’t it? Never mind, you wouldn’t know. Your job is simply to wear the glasses, to see what the world has to show you, and then, yes. You’re right. The big event.”
“And then what?” I asked. I was trying to figure out what I could about my situation, but what I discovered was not encouraging. I was strapped to a gurney, and the straps that held me seemed more than sufficient to keep me from doing anything. The gurney was right next to a metal table, on which there were various surgical tools all lined up and ready.
“Then this poor betrayed monk will torture you, of course. Mahakala’s judgment against disloyalty. Your comrade Kumar told me everything.”
“What do you mean by everything?”
“I mean everything, Mr. Holder.” He suddenly dropped the “this poor monk” stuff. “The Big Circle Boys are not sophisticated, but the interrogation methods of the Red Guards are still… effective. More than effective enough. He told me about this Sōhei Faction, how he joined them and when he joined them and who their members are. Or were. I very much doubt there are any of them left. Except for you. We will determine that presently after you witness the glory of the big event.”
Not everything, then. He might have talked, but he didn’t tell the Ja Lama everything. Good man.
“What did you do to him?!” I asked, trying to sound as hysterical as possible. The monk laughed, grinning down at me from his position of absolute power over life and death.
“You really want to know? I’ll show you.”
He went to the back of the gurney, but his back was turned for a moment while he got in position. I flexed my wrist to the left, felt my fingers brush against something cold and metallic. One of the Ja Lama’s torture tools from the little table. I couldn’t avoid cutting myself, but I scooped it up and hid it against my wrist. The Ja Lama turned to look at me, seemed to be questioning something, then grinned again.
“Come on,” he said. “He’s over here.”
He pushed the gurney and wheeled me from one end of the room to the other. And the whole time, he was grinning.
“Kumar!” I said. “Kumar, is that you over there?”
“I don’t think he can hear you,” said the Lama. “I keep him in the fridge.”
He walked past me again, and I heard the sound of a fridge door opening.
“See?” he asked me and wheeled the gurney around to the side so I could turn my head and look. The last of the Sōhei Faction, Maria Guttierez, and Kumar Richards. Maria’s mouth was open, her eyes bulging out in fear and horror. Kumar’s mouth was closed, and the expression on his face looked sadder than anything else. Like he had always known he’d end up as a decapitated head in someone’s refrigerator.
“What did you do with the bodies?” I asked.
“What do you care?” said the Ja Lama. “The heads aren’t good enough for you?”
“You can go ahead and put the glasses back on. This is even worse.”
“Whatever you say,” said the Ja Lama. The horror resumed.
The first strap was the hard one. With the Quod Glasses on, I couldn’t see anything except whatever random horrors it was showing me. Mob violence, house fires, a shootout between rival drug gangs. I could barely move, and I had to try to cut through a strap by just slowly working the knife blade back and forth against it with blood-slick fingers. But the pain helped. Every time I almost lost myself in the scenes in front of me my hand would throb, and the sudden shock of intense pain would bring me back to myself. I almost dropped the knife more than once, because the blood was slippery and my fingers were increasingly numb. But I got it done, and the strap finally came apart and freed my wrist. And not a moment too soon, as I was about to see a woman get stoned to death by an angry crowd.
I raised my left hand up and pulled off the glasses, and the Ja Lama cried out “what are you doing over there?” and came running over. He leaned over me as if to grab the headset, to force it back over my eyes again and drop me back into his hell worlds. That’s when I stabbed him in the neck.
Chapter 47
The Ja Lama’s face was staring right down into mine, so when I stabbed him in the side of the neck, it was a literal bloodbath. Blood burst out of him and poured down over me, and he made this little astonished sound I will never forget. His right hand flew up to the wound as if to stop the flow, but I stabbed him again twice in quick succession, and his eyes got very large. He made a sound like “nnnngggg” and then slumped over, and I pushed him off of me as well as I could. He tumbled down to the floor, and I went to work on cutting the other straps that still held me to the gurney.
My left hand was damaged, increasingly numb and cold, but I persisted. By the time I got myself free and off of the gurney, I knew I wouldn’t be able to use it for much of anything. If I got a gun, that might not matter.
Switching the knife to my right hand, I went to the door and called out “Help in here!”. The door swung open, and I stabbed Greg Voss directly in the chest three times. He started shrieking, but I shoved him to the floor with a hard shoulder bump. He had dropped his gun, but he was trying to reach for a back-up weapon with one hand while holding the other up to his wounds at the same time and wiggling crazily around on the floor like a desperate eel.
I dropped the knife, grabbed his gun off the floor, and shot him three times just as he got his backup gun into play. He slumped down dead, and I got that weapon too. It was a small revolver, and the other one was a .45. I put the .45 down for a moment so I could tuck the revolver in my pocket, but one of the other mercenaries came running around the corner with a NATO submachine gun. I fired the revolver three times, and the man staggered backward and slumped against the wall. He looked winded but not harmed, and I realized he must be wearing a bulletproof vest. He raised his submachine gun and pulled the trigger, but I took careful aim and shot him in the head at almost exactly the same time. Bullets sprayed across the room, but the gun pulled up in a diagonal line, and most of them missed me completely.
Most of them, but not quite all of them. Pain exploded in my left shoulder, and I dropped the revolver and fell to my knees. I almost blacked out for a moment, but the knowledge of how little time I had was enough to get me back up on my feet. I tucked the .45 in the small of my back and picked up the submachine gun.
This wasn’t a Tommy gun with a huge ammunition drum. It w
as a much smaller weapon and could be emptied in a matter of seconds on full auto. But it was still an asset, so I held it out in front of me as I ran for the elevator.
Three more mercenaries, advancing down the hall in a CQB formation. I opened fire as I advanced, and they ducked into the bar rather than playing Chicken with automatic weapons.
“What’ll it be Frank, the usual?” said the automatic bartender, and one of the mercenaries shot the thing. Kumar would’ve been happy to know it was finally dead, but I didn’t get much time to savor the moment. One of the mercs popped out and fired a burst in my direction, and I had just enough time to flatten myself against a wall and avoid his fire.
I couldn’t win this. Only one of the mercenaries could fire on me at any one time, but they were much more highly trained than I was and they effectively controlled the hallway from their position in the bar. I retreated around the corner and tried to find a different way to the elevator.
I surprised a mercenary, running to join his comrades but not realizing he would run right into me. I emptied my clip into him, and that seemed to do the job despite his bullet-proof vest. I dropped my weapon and just kept running, not daring to pause even long enough to take his. I turned another corner, and just as I was pulling the .45 out from its place in my belt, I nearly ran straight into Vitalius Kohl.
“Father!” I said, and raised my gun to fire. He wasn’t surprised, and he didn’t delay for a fraction of a second. Instead, he moved, stepping sideways and then darting in at me. My gun went flying, and he cranked my right arm so hard I stumbled halfway to the floor as a white-hot bolt of pain shot all the way up to my neck. Blood from my left hand splattered down on the white floor, a strangely fascinating pattern of bright red dots. I suddenly realized that I must be in shock.
“No problem, Gavin,” said Father. “We can do it this way.”
But I didn’t stop. The man was strong, unbelievably strong for someone his age. But I was desperate, and I knew for a fact that I was running out of time. I suddenly thrashed and ripped my arm from his grasp while falling sideways and rolling. The three mercenaries I had just been fighting with came down the corridor, and Vitalius stared down at me with the most extraordinary look of joy on his face. He looked like a saint.
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