“Point is, we don’t know what’s going on,” said Stavros. “And we have to be open to that notion—that we don’t know. That’s what I was trying to say earlier and failing miserably, I guess.” He stared apologetically at Lauryn.
Megan reached up and stroked the side of her mother’s face. “You look so sad, Mom.”
Lauryn’s eyes found her daughter’s. Both seemed on the verge of tears. The events of the last few days rapid-fired in Lauryn’s mind: the horrible counseling session with Mark, the apartment in the storm, Mouth and Cackler, finding her mother’s putrefied arm, the fight for survival on the roof. Mark’s sacrifice. She thought of Bradford and the others from the prison who died under the vengeful hand of Marsten and his fellow psychos.
Her heart sank into her stomach, overwhelmed by it all. Something broke inside the mother as her daughter offered her comfort, as it had when Megan hugged her amid the wreckage on her mother’s street.
“Please don’t be sad,” Megan said.
Lauryn forced a smile that looked out of place on a face so twisted with pain.
“I’m not sad,” she said. “I’m lost. With everything that’s happened….” She gestured uselessly at the store around them and the devastation beyond. “With your father … being gone.” Lauryn spat the word out, and with it, the core reason for the wound burning inside her. The stoic façade of the trained officer broke in half and the tears began. Lauryn slowly sank to her knees, and Megan followed her down, her arms encircling her mother to protect her.
“It’s all right, Mom,” Megan soothed, stroking Lauryn’s hair. “We’ll figure it all out together. All of us, we’ll do it together, okay?”
Lauryn sobbed against her daughter’s shoulder, saying, “Maybe we can’t know what’s happened. Maybe it’s beyond us, all this saving the world crap. Maybe we should just hide and wait until the army or police or someone…” Her voice sounded almost hopeful, as if by denying their destiny in the present crisis, its burden might pass from them.
“I don’t believe that,” said Stavros, kneeling next to them. He placed a hand lightly on Lauryn’s shoulder. “I think we’ve met for a reason. Maybe to right something I did wrong. I don’t know. But there’s a reason.”
“Where I come from, we survive by sticking together,” said Colt. He knelt opposite Stavros next to them. “There wasn’t a choice. Not a choice that included living, anyway.”
Lauryn turned to face the boy. “Ganging up on me, are you?” Some of the hopelessness had left her voice. Some of the take-shit-off-no-one was back.
“Mom,” Megan said. “I know where we need to go. And I know we need to go there together.”
“Yeah,” said Stavros with a rare lilt of levity. “And you’re the only goddamned Amazon we have.”
Lauryn laughed a little through her tears.
“Mom.”
Looking up at her daughter, Lauryn wiped her nose.
“Dad died saving me. Maybe this was why. Maybe this was the purpose in that. Maybe we’re meant to help him,” Megan said, nodding at Stavros.
At first, Lauryn’s face began to surrender again to grief. The racing thoughts returned, perhaps her own psyche’s way of trying to convince her to hide and let someone else carry the weight of the future for a little while instead. Then something Bradford said during her training rang in her mind, clear as a bell.
“You can’t do it all yourself, but you can do your part.”
He’d been referring to her duty should an emergency situation arise at the prison. Lauryn remembered Bradford’s patient smile as he taught her the ropes, and the realization came to her that he’d done his part … and died doing it.
No, she wouldn’t hide and wait for someone else to take up the task. She owed it to Bradford, to all of them, to finish their work. To stop whatever the hell it was that was happening here. And she knew Megan was already committed to that course, guided by her supposed clairvoyance. Say Lauryn sent the others packing and walked in the opposite direction, hauling Megan by force if necessary along with her. Without shackling the teenager to her side 24/7, she’d never be able to prevent Megan from pursuing the others when Lauryn wasn’t looking. She knew Megan too well.
So, there it was then. Decision made. If Megan was determined to go, at least they’d go together, so Lauryn could protect her.
She squeezed Megan’s shoulder and flashed her a semi-smile that would’ve looked more at home on a hopeful face. Turning to Stavros, she said, “How do you plan to do it?” To his questioning look, she clarified, “To control Marsten. Get him back in your lab, I mean.”
Stavros’s face was stoic. “He’ll be docile enough during the autopsy.”
Lauryn regarded him for a moment, understanding the implication. So killing Marsten, Bradford’s murderer—his mutilator—was part of the scientist’s plan?
No sacrifice too great for the advancement of science. The thought was icy cold.
She rose to her feet, the others looking up at her.
“Saving the world it is, then.”
* * *
It was slow going on Interstate 45.
Marsten and his fellow bikers rode an exit or two ahead of the convoy to verify the route. When they came upon a stretch of road too choked with cars to pass, the Maestro sent one of the others back to direct the buses onto a feeder road. More than once they turned off into a neighborhood and looped through suburban streets until they’d passed the blockage.
Sometimes it seemed like they were crawling toward their destination, two streets forward and one street back, but at least they were finally moving. The Maestro wondered how they must’ve looked to the good citizens hiding in their homes, peeping through their window shades at first the bikers, then bus after bus, as they passed by.
He’d even toyed with the idea of knocking on a door or two and introducing the people to their new lives under the Lady’s regime. But the column was moving slowly enough as it was, and Simpson kept pressing about the need to get to the precious traffic control center before the National Guard did. There’d be time for fun later, Marsten reminded himself.
That got him thinking about next steps. What to do after taking TranStar? Simpson was right about one thing—if it truly allowed them to control the traffic network, then keeping the cops and army at bay while Id released her Black Hand across the Bayou City would be much easier. If less fun.
Although his knowledge of this new reality was less than perfect, he knew the world was one with many others now—one stop along an intergalactic network of dimensions and realities across a multiverse of existence. All coming under the control of the Lady’s Master, He Who Is To Come. He Who Has Come, Marsten corrected himself. The Master of Realities bestriding the causeways of the universe, tapping each world with a sharp talon, joining all realities into one.
Marsten couldn’t wait to meet the new boss. Truth be told, for all her power and moist carnality, Id’s limitations bugged the hell out of him. Oh, he was as entranced by her voice as anyone, as unable to refuse her service when requested. But she seemed unable or unwilling to operate in sunlight, halving their effectiveness both as a recruiting force and a conquering army.
Id was an extremely impractical demi-god.
Maybe the new guy isn’t so sun-shy, he thought.
Marsten paused his ruminations as he exited the neighborhood labyrinth they’d entered to bypass the choked stretch of interstate. With I-45 in front of him, he brought his hog to a stop and waited for Simpson to catch up. The buses, Marsten knew, would be a block or two behind him. Maggie was already ahead, scouting the next phase of The Southern Trail, as Marsten thought of it. He wasn’t sure where Cackler was, but he was sure he didn’t care.
Simpson. Maestro watched him round the corner two blocks back in the manicured subdivision.
That one had changed. For a while, Marsten wondered why Professor Herr Stavros had even included him in the experiment. True, Simpson was on death row like the rest of them, and true, S
impson had been there, in part, because of the particularly gruesome way he’d dispatched his wife and her cuckolding sex partner. The Maestro smiled, recalling Simpson’s story.
On the run from California, Simpson had returned to Texas to find his estranged wife being plowed by one of the guys maintaining the street in front of their apartment complex. Simpson became unhinged, so his legal counsel argued, and committed the crime of double murder in the heat of passion. And while that was partly true, the carefully considered and executed method of his retribution upon Debra and her hardhat-wearing stick-in-the-box convinced the jury that while Simpson might’ve been psychopathic, he was also in his right mind when he did the deed. Well, right as his mind could be, anyway.
Simpson divined a fate apropos to the man’s chosen trade of filling potholes and, as Simpson put it, housewives. He hadn’t simply walked in on them, flown into a rage, and killed them in bed. He’d walked in on them, backed slowly out of the room before they noticed, and prepared his method for meting out justice.
For a week. A solid week.
On the night of the chosen deed, Simpson had let the two of them enjoy one last taste of stolen sin before he charged into the bedroom, knocked them out, tied them up, and hauled them to a remote location. They’d awakened to find themselves, bound and gagged, naked one on top of the other—Simpson was careful to put the wife on top, because that’s how she liked it—on the uncomfortable and unmattressed set of box springs upon which they’d committed their carnal crime. He’d set the box springs in an eight-by-six-foot hole in the ground and talked to them. Just talked to them.
They didn’t really listen, he’d told Marsten, preoccupied as they were with screaming around the ball-gags in their mouths, and eventually Simpson had simply shrugged and given up trying to speak his peace. Saying his goodbyes and fake wishes for a merciful afterlife, he’d backed a concrete-mixing truck up and started its drum revolving over the screaming twosome. Then, as they struggled, their bodies rubbing against one another in a futile attempt to free themselves—Simpson smiled smugly, Marsten remembered, when he related that particular detail—he’d watched the concrete slurry its way around them until it filled up every hole and crevice. Until it got sucked into their nostrils and solidified the spittle drooling around their ball-gags.
For a minute or two after the liquid concrete covered them, their gray shapes continued to move. Air bubbles formed and farted. And whenever he told the story, Simpson always compared their slowing struggles to how the people of Pompeii must’ve looked as the ash of Vesuvius hardened around them. He’d sat and watched for a while until well after the gray sludge stopped its slow-motion struggling. Then he’d run like hell till the Rangers caught him in Refugio.
It was hard to sell that to a jury as a crime of passion by a psyche broken by betrayal.
It’d been a while since Marsten had thought of the story. But it was good, he thought, to remind himself why Simpson made such a fine specimen for Professor Herr Stavros’s little worms-in-the-brain experiment. Simpson was a runner, yes. But before he ran…
Marsten realized he’d have to watch him a bit more carefully as Simpson rode to a stop beside him. The man had a way of lulling you. Of making you forget he was in the room. Right until he dumped enough liquid concrete on you to plug up your body cavities.
“What’s with the Cheshire Cat grin, Maestro?” Simpson asked. “You look like you just remembered the funniest joke of all time.”
Marsten smiled without laughing, his deep baritone competing with the mechanical drumbeat of the idling motorcycles. “I don’t know about ‘of all time,’ but yeah, just remembering an old, funny story. It’s good to churn up old thoughts sometimes, Simpson. Keeps you on your toes, you know?”
Simpson gave him an appraising look. A look that said, I have no idea what you’re talking about, but it sounds dangerous, so I’ll play along. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess so.”
Marsten shrugged. “Don’t mind me, now. Go on ahead and find Maggie. Keep the buses moving. We’re burning moonlight.”
“Yeah, yeah sure.”
The Maestro gunned his throttle a little.
Simpson looked back at him curiously, and Marsten sneered beneath that eye that shone its sightless spotlight upon him.
“I meant, sure … Maestro.” The smaller man tapped the clutch with his toe and moved out toward I-45 again. Marsten watched him go, a wary smile targeting Simpson’s back.
Chapter 10: Tuesday, night.
The worms were wiggling again.
Marsten could feel them as he straddled his bike, Maggie on his left and Simpson on his right. Together they stared at TranStar. The squirming worms tickled his gray matter, and his stretched left eyelid trembled as they twisted.
It made Marsten nauseated inside his own head. He’d rejoiced when the worms left, when the dreams of the little girl and the axe had turned once again into his dreamories of that night when he’d slaughtered the squealing little shit and her entire family. Now, he wondered if the little girl would return too. Take his axe from him again. Spoil his sleep with dreams of butchery, where someone other than he was the butcher.
He stared straight ahead at their target and tried to focus.
The advanced riders had reached the traffic management center sometime after midnight. With its red-and-tan brick, the outside of the three-story building looked like the side view of a mountain sliced in half. The bands of glass windows along each floor glowed. TranStar was a beacon in a dark city on a warm night. Power was working here, at least. The other industrial buildings nearby stood quiet in the dark of the witching hour.
Probably on its own generators, reasoned Marsten.
He peered through the iron-rail fence securing the center from Katy Road. The gate was open, he noticed.
How convenient.
The convoy would be coming down the road on the final leg of their journey any minute now, led by Cackler on his bike. The orange fog was already billowing away from their hogs’ exhaust pipes.
“How many do you reckon there are?” asked Simpson.
Marsten grunted. He’d already counted fifteen cop rods and half a dozen motorcycle units parked out front. But even with the building lit up like a Christmas tree, he couldn’t see around the far sides from their present location. He wanted to reconnoiter before moving in.
“Guess you were right,” said Marsten. “Even the cops decided this was the place to be.”
“Let’s get started!” said Maggie.
Marsten gave her an appraising look. As always, she was enthusiastic. He thought of her earlier ministrations and decided it was one of her more endearing characteristics. When it wasn’t annoying the shit out of him.
“Keep your pants on, Maggie Mae.”
For a change.
Marsten’s left eyelid seemed to have a life of its own. And the wiggling was turning into whispers. The silent slathering of the worms as they slicked their way across the surface of his brain.
Shush-shush. Shush-shush.
The mist swirled thicker around them. The light shining out from their objective was hazy now. Marsten flexed his forehead to calm the involuntary muscle spasms and listened hard for the approaching engines of the buses.
“Simpson, you ride around the perimeter of the building. I want to know how many other cops are around.”
“What does it matter?” demanded Maggie, petulant. “We’re five thousand strong!”
Marsten shone his evil eye on her. He noticed she didn’t look away immediately. That was different. Lately, she was starting to remind him of Juggs. Getting too big for her bitches.
“Yeah, Maestro—why don’t we just storm it?”
“Because,” said Marsten, turning to Simpson, “you said yourself—the National Guard is coming. A few cops? We could march from one end of that place to the other without stopping to take a piss. But until we know it’s just a few cops, I don’t want to go charging in there.”
They felt her arrive, felt h
er presence, like a humming transformer stroking their souls. A blanket of expectation descended around them.
“That surprises me, Maestro,” said Id, touching down in front of them. “You have never struck me as one to hesitate.” The syrup in her voice sent a chill through Marsten. He became aware of the bike’s idle speed, tickling his inner thighs. The vibrations thrummed upward, teasing his testicles.
The Maestro stared at her perfect form, enchanted as always. He wanted to tell her what she wanted to hear. Instead, he told her what he wanted to say.
“I’m not hesitating, Lady,” he said. “I’m being careful.”
“What’s the difference?” asked Maggie.
Marsten turned on her again, raising his left hand. Maggie gunned her bike and moved out of reach. She halted behind the protective power of Id, who raised an eyebrow at Marsten.
“Now that is the Maestro I know,” said the Lady approvingly.
A chorus of air brakes exhaled behind them as the buses parked along Katy Road.
“I’ll make a circuit around the building,” said Simpson. “Can’t hurt.” He gunned his bike and gave the other three a wide berth.
Marsten glowered at Maggie, who glared right back, the right side of her face flushed with victory. He thought he could still see his handprint there. The Maestro took it all in: Maggie’s body language, so stiff and brave next to their patron goddess. He found that ironic, given Maggie’s loathing for Id, her almost pathological jealousy of anyone with a vagina taking any interest at all in Marsten.
Almost?
The in-psyche joke made Marsten smile. The worms giggle-wiggled.
“Are you ill, Maestro?” Id’s voice stroked his ears. She seemed genuinely concerned. “You don’t seem yourself.”
Marsten thumbed off his motorcycle, popped the kickstand, and dismounted, never taking his gaze from Maggie. He unfastened his axe from the bike. Id’s nearness inundated his senses, and it was all he could do to stay focused. Her yellow mist rode into his nostrils, and he found her scent—part grave, part sex—especially hard to ignore.
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