The Eternal World

by Christopher Farnsworth

Simon had taken them all down the wrong path. Max had let himself think it didn’t matter how long the journey took, because they were functionally immortal.

  Only when he saw how little Water remained did he remember that “functionally” immortal was not the same thing as actually living forever. There were no guarantees. Any one of them could die at any moment, despite the great gift they had been given. They had all wasted so much of their time.

  Simon had wasted so much of their time.

  So Max went to the cheap motel where he’d hidden Aznar and told him the truth. Then he and Aznar went to the others and told them as well.

  Things moved rapidly from there.

  They went to the basement and divided up the last of the barrel. (Did Simon think Max really wouldn’t notice the combination on the vault? Another insult.) Aznar drank his share of the Water immediately. He said he’d need all his strength for this.

  Sebastian and Peter looked to Max to lead them at first, but he was too heartsick. He stayed quiet and meek, and Aznar shouldered him aside to fill the empty space.

  That was fine with Max. He realized that some part of him must have been planning for this all along. Max kept Aznar alive all these years because, in his heart, he knew he did not have the strength to do what must be done: to push Simon aside if things ever got dire enough.

  Aznar was not really strong enough to lead, but he was cruel and hateful enough to take Simon’s place anyway. He would act out of revenge and spite and malice.

  Max would have to live with that because Simon could not be allowed to continue on this course. Suicide was one thing. That was a personal choice, and as repugnant as Max found it, he would not have stood in Simon’s way if he’d chosen it. But he was deciding on death for all of them. He was murdering them all as surely as if he held a gun to their heads and pulled the trigger. It was painful to admit, but there was no longer any time for self-delusion. Max had trusted Simon for half a millennium. He had waited patiently for Simon’s great plans to come to fruition. He had believed that Simon would find a way to solve any problem.

  Now he knew he’d been wrong for centuries.

  Simon had gambled and lost. There was no longer any time. They should have chained Robinton to a stool in the lab and forced him to work. They should have killed Shako years ago. They should have searched harder for a new source of the Water. There were so, so many things that should have been done.

  They were facing a very final deadline, and they were left with only one option: recover David and force his formula from him. Max knew he still loved Simon too much to be the man who would knock him from his throne. He would not let Aznar kill him, no matter what else happened. But neither would he let Simon fail them all again.

  They were simply out of time.

  THEY TOOK SIMON OUT of the room, chained hand and foot. Simon wasn’t struggling anymore, but they knew better than to trust him. They would bundle him down an empty corridor, to a waiting elevator, where a well-paid team of discreet security professionals would take over.

  Max sat alone in the boardroom for a moment.

  “You should have told me how much Water was left, Simon,” he said to the empty room. “You should have trusted me.”

  Then he got up and went to join the others.

  The time for regrets was over. And so was Simon’s reign.

  The Council of the Immortals was under new management, starting now.

  CHAPTER 31

  PUERTO TRIUNFO, COLOMBIA

  CARLOS BELIEVED IN the power of myth. He allowed everyone to think he traveled the world, skipping from one safe house to another, never sleeping in the same room twice. To his underlings, rivals, and enemies, he was the man who could be literally anywhere.

  Carlos sincerely doubted he would inspire such fear and respect if they knew most of his world consisted of a couch and a flat-screen TV.

  He lived in the same villa outside Cartagena, Colombia, where he had spent much of the past two hundred years. It had been renovated and rebuilt a dozen times, so that now it was a fully modern palace with thirty-six rooms, a helipad, and an Olympic-size pool. Not that Carlos had seen much of it. He lived full-time in his own bedroom on one of the upper floors.

  He had once been the skinniest and fastest of the conquistadors, his body like a knife blade honed by his constant fencing practice. Now he weighed close to four hundred pounds. He had been a blurring-swift terror in a fight, able to duel three or more opponents at once. Now he lumbered from the couch to the bathroom to the bed. The Water had kept him alive despite literal decades of gluttony, but it couldn’t keep him thin.

  When he was a boy, there was never enough to eat. He was well-off by the standards of the time. He never starved. He never suffered from the famines and shortages the same way that the peasants did. (Sometimes Carlos reflected on how much things changed. “Peasant” used to be a simple statement of fact. Now it was an insult.) But he was always hungry. There was never enough food to be truly full. To be truly sated. He was so skinny because he burned with nervous energy. It made him fast, but it also left him feeling empty much of the time.

  To him, the greatest wonder of the new world was how much there was to eat. All it cost was money. It would have shocked and amazed these soft moderns to learn that once there was a time when it didn’t matter how much gold you had if there was a bad harvest. There were limits back then. There were things money could not buy.

  Not anymore, though. He could have anything he wanted. Food from literally all over the world, any kind of meat or fish or sweet or cake. All it took was money. And he had plenty of that. People gave it to him in bales that filled shipping containers for the powder he harvested from the coca fields. It still seemed like a sin to him, to waste all that good land on drugs. But not so much of a sin that he turned it back into farmland. After all, nobody would pay him nearly as much for corn.

  So, without any restraints on his time or his appetites, he stayed home and ate, while his myth did the hard work of maintaining discipline in his empire, in the world.

  That was enough for Carlos. He had seen the world. He’d seen enough of it.

  When Simon first told them, “I have a way you can live forever,” Carlos leaped at it, like they all did. It wasn’t until much later that he realized no one ever asks themselves why they would want to live forever. As a young man, with a limited imagination and not much more experience, he thought it would be an endless pursuit of pleasures—a constantly renewed menu of all the little joys that make life worth living. But he found, after the first century of his life ticked over, even pleasures could grow dull.

  While some of the others, like Simon, were happy to keep running in place with the endless changes of days and weeks and years, Carlos found it all too tedious. There was just so much trivia. What clothes to wear with the changing fashions. What language to use, as the influence of nations rose and fell. (He’d once spoken French for diplomacy, German for business, and English as little as possible. He was not going to learn Mandarin now, not at his age.) He’d traveled by ship, by train, and by airplane, and endured the thousand little indignities that seemed to survive no matter how advanced the methods of transport.

  To live forever, you have to have something to live for, Carlos realized, far too late. Simon lived for his dream of a conquered world. Max lived for Simon. Sebastian lived for the next woman, Peter the next challenge, and each sustained his brother in the low times. Aznar lived to kill.

  As for Carlos, all he wanted now was to be comfortable. Aside from a few trusted lieutenants and his servants, no one knew how fat and slow he’d become, distorted and made grotesquely huge by a constant train of food brought to him on serving platters day and night.

  Of course, there had been one occasion when one of those trusted lieutenants thought all the flab had made Carlos soft. The man’s name was Emilio, and he arranged for a hit squad to
enter the villa and kill the bodyguards he hadn’t been able to bribe.

  Carlos had heard the gunshots from below while watching “The Slugger Attack” at 3:00 A.M., snared from Taiwan by his satellite dish. If he’d been watching Die Hard or Lethal Weapon—they were his favorites—he might not have heard a thing. But he had the sound down low because he didn’t understand the language anyway.

  He heaved himself from the leather couch as fast as he could. Which was not very fast. His brow popped with sweat at the unaccustomed exertion, and he’d made it only a few steps toward his gun cabinet when the door burst open and the first assassin rushed in.

  The hit man’s eyes were wild and he immediately fired a three-round burst from the H&K he carried, hitting Carlos right in the chest.

  He probably thought he’d just killed the king, which was why he let out a whoop and raised his arms—including the one with the gun—into the air in triumph.

  Only Carlos had not fallen down.

  Carlos’s bulk was wrapped around a still-small frame. The bullets had plowed into an ocean of flesh without hitting anything vital. The Water went to work at once, closing off blood vessels and rebuilding damaged tissue.

  By the time Carlos got his gun, the bleeding had almost stopped. The assassin gaped the entire time, unable to believe the evidence of his own eyes. Carlos aimed carefully and fired twice with a long-barreled Magnum .44. (He also loved Dirty Harry movies.)

  He hit the assassin in his legs, shattering both, knocking the man to the floor.

  The would-be killer was slipping rapidly into shock and would have bled to death, but Carlos didn’t allow that to happen. Emilio’s other hired guns made their way up the stairs just in time to see Carlos finish clubbing him to death with his massive fists.

  Carlos again heaved himself to his feet and faced the gunmen. They looked down at the fragments of their companion’s skull on the tiled floor.

  Then they looked at the wound on Carlos’s chest, which finished sealing itself shut right in front of their eyes.

  They screamed like children. Carlos had to admit he was quite pleased and flattered by the sound.

  They fired their weapons indiscriminately, pure panic causing them to spray bullets around the room like water from a hose. They managed to hit him only twice more before he lined up his shots and fired, killing them all.

  Carlos moved slowly but steadily to the locked safe where he kept the Water. He left bloody fingerprints on the combination dial but got it open without too much trouble. The jug— perfectly sealed to prevent evaporation—sat in a specially cooled chamber behind the heavy door. He cracked it open and took a long swig: more than six months’ supply in a single gulp.

  But he could still hear men moving through his home. The slight squeak of a leather sole on the tile of his staircase. The next group would be a bit more careful. Which meant Carlos had work to do.

  He went through the house methodically, an H&K in one hand and the jug of Water in the other. In the end, there were twenty-three hired men who died that day. He was shot eleven more times, most of the bullets burying themselves harmlessly in his fat, although one stray ricochet smashed him in the temple, causing a bloom of blood and bone.

  He found Emilio in the kitchen, hiding in the walk-in freezer. He also found the bodies of the household staff, who had been killed first, presumably to keep any of them from warning him.

  Carlos dragged Emilio out of his hiding spot, then kneeled to face the man, who cowered on the floor, babbling apologies and begging for his life.

  Emilio, even while begging, could not take his eyes off the wound on Carlos’s head. The ricochet had penetrated his skull and the sinus cavity beneath it, but went no deeper.

  It itched. Carlos dug around inside with a finger. After a moment of probing, he removed the deformed fragment of lead. He examined it, then tossed it away.

  The jug was almost empty. Carlos drained the last of it, and the bloody corsage on his forehead began to disappear.

  Emilio trembled silently as it was replaced first by a new piece of smooth white skull, then by pristine, unwrinkled flesh. Then he began to wail.

  Carlos slapped him once with his fat, open palm, just to shut him up.

  He asked only one question: “Do you understand now?”

  Emilio nodded so hard Carlos feared his head would snap off.

  “Good. I don’t want to have to have this conversation again.” He waved a hand toward the bodies lying all over the Saltillo tiles, the once-pristine furniture. “Now, get rid of this garbage before it stinks up my house.”

  Emilio leaped up and ran toward the first body.

  Carlos, meanwhile, tottered toward a nearby chair. “But first,” he said, “bring me something to eat.”

  Emilio looked relieved and then confused. “Sir?”

  “You’re the cook now. And you’d better be good. I’m starving.”

  Today, if anyone ever so much as grumbled about Carlos’s leadership, there was always Emilio, the cook, standing there in the kitchen, willing to tell anyone who’d listen about the demon hidden behind all that fat. Emilio held him in almost religious awe now. The thought of another betrayal was too frightening, too impossible, for him to ever seriously consider again. Because how do you kill a man who won’t stay dead? How do you ever escape the wrath of a man like that?

  The answer: you can’t. Because he is not really a man at all.

  For everyone outside of Carlos’s immediate circle, there was the power of myth. And for everyone inside it, there was the truth, which was far more powerful.

  No one had tried to knock Carlos from his throne since.

  CARLOS YAWNED AND STRETCHED and scratched. He pressed the remote, which rang a buzzer in the kitchen, signaling that he wanted more food.

  No response. No one came hurrying up the stairs to take his order.

  He pressed another button on the remote, which turned on his intercom. He called for his guards.

  Again, no response.

  Now he was forced to move. He was not afraid at this point, only irritated. He hated to interrupt the Gilligan’s Island marathon to have to kill a bunch of people.

  He lumbered down the stairs, his .44 in one hand and an Uzi in the other. They looked like toys in his big paws.

  On the first landing, he found his guards, lying there with their throats cut. He stepped in their blood and kept going down.

  On the main floor, he found the front door wide open. He was not so foolish as to call for the guards on the perimeter of the house now. He knew they were already dead.

  He heard something from the kitchen.

  Tracking sticky red footprints, he walked in that direction, the guns held in front of him.

  He did not have the agility to leap and roll gracefully into the room. He just kept walking, depending on his bulk to survive the first few bullets as he had in the past.

  Carlos prepared to sweep the room with both guns, emptying the chambers at the first sign of movement.

  Instead, he froze.

  Shako sat at the kitchen counter, holding a combat shotgun with a barrel that looked as wide as a coffee cup. She held it aimed at his head.

  There were some wounds that even the Water would not bring you back from, and having your head removed by the slug from a Street Sweeper riot gun was one of them.

  Carlos lowered his guns but did not drop them.

  He saw the other two men with Shako. The first was his cook, Emilio, who was trembling, tears running down his face, as he stirred eggs in a bowl furiously.

  The other, a young man, sat at another stool with an omelet fresh from the skillet on a plate in front of him. Carlos could still see the steam rising from it.

  It took Carlos a moment to recognize the man from his pictures. It was David Robinton.

  “Hungry?” Shako asked. “Emil
io wanted to send you something when you rang, but we convinced him the walk down the stairs would do you some good.”

  She spoke in Spanish. If Robinton understood, he didn’t show it. Carlos replied to her in the same tongue.

  “Shako,” he said, by way of greeting. “You look the same.”

  “You don’t.”

  He ignored that. In English, he said, “Dr. Robinton. You should really try the omelet. Emilio makes them with peppers and cilantro grown right outside in the garden.”

  The scientist didn’t respond to that any more than he did the Spanish. He showed no interest in his food. Carlos suspected the guns killed his interest in breakfast and conversation.

  He switched back to Spanish. “Are you here to kill me, Shako?”

  She looked disappointed. “I’ve known where to find you for years, Carlos. It’s not like you move around much.”

  “True. So why are you here?”

  “We have a proposition for you. How would you like to live forever?”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “Simon’s supply of the Water is almost gone. We are offering you the only alternative.”

  “There’s always your supply.”

  “Mine is almost gone as well. But fortunately Simon found the one man who could create a replacement. Simon lost him. I have him now.”

  Carlos looked at David carefully. He did not appear to notice the proprietary way Shako spoke about him. “And he’s willing to do what you say?”

  Shako smiled. “What do you think? Stay with Simon, and he can offer you only death. If you want to go on eating your way through the years, you’ll join us.”

  “And what do you require of me?”

  “Drop the guns,” she said, “and we’ll talk.”

  A genuine smile crossed Carlos’s face for the first time in decades. He felt something he thought long dead inside him: curiosity. At the very least, this should be worth missing Gilligan.

  He dropped the guns.

  DAVID WAS SURPRISED TO find that a drug lab actually made a fairly decent genetics research facility.