Firewalkers

by Chris Roberson

  “So how will you be able to tell the difference?” Joyce asked. “What’s to stop you from shooting someone that isn’t possessed by mistake?”

  “We use these.” Izzie straightened up, and held out both of her hands, a glass vial resting on each palm.

  “Oh, right,” Daphne said, “isn’t that the . . .” She trailed off for a second, searching for the name. “The ilbal? Patrick got that out of the Reaper evidence, right?”

  “Wait,” Joyce said, her eyes widening. “You’re not thinking about taking that stuff are you?”

  Izzie nodded.

  “Nicholas Fuller thought this was the ‘key’ to seeing the Ridden for what they really were. With any luck, it will work for us, too.”

  “So that’s the plan?” Daphne sounded skeptical. “Tool up, take some weird jungle drug, and go in guns blazing?”

  “That’s the plan.” Izzie held up one of the vials to the light, and saw the fine powder glinting within. She had wondered what she would see when she took it. Now she’d get to find out.

  “You know how crazy that sounds, right?” Daphne said, resting the box of shells against her hip. “And even if we should somehow manage to survive, what then? Two FBI agents go rogue and shoot up an office building. How exactly are we supposed to explain that? ‘Sorry, officer, we had no choice, they were all possessed by an alien mind from another dimension’? We’d be lucky if the worst they did to us was lock us up in a home for the criminally insane.” She paused, and then added, “I mean, if you’re going, I’m still going with you, but let’s be honest about our chances here.”

  “What about wearing a mask?” Joyce suggested, hand on her chin thoughtfully. “Fuller wore one, right? And so did that Freeman guy back in the thirties, if his journal is anything to go by.” She turned to Izzie. “Probably even the same one, right?”

  Izzie bounced the vials on the palms of her hands as she thought it over. She wished that Patrick had brought Fuller’s mask from the station house as well as the ilbal, though she admitted to herself that it would have been harder to smuggle a silver skull face mask out than it had been to sneak out a couple of tiny glass vials. But Freeman’s journal suggested that the mask was made from silver in part as a defense against the Ridden, and they could use all the help they could get.

  “Maybe,” Daphne cocked her head to one side, a thoughtful expression on her face. “Patrick told us that when Zotovic’s people renovated the Pinnacle Tower that they were really cagey about anything they changed beyond the front lobby, right? So we don’t know for sure what kind of surveillance or security camera system they’ve got set up in there. But something to obscure our facial features isn’t the worst idea, assuming we manage to get out of there in one piece.”

  Izzie shook her head, impatiently.

  “We’re wasting time that we don’t have. That Patrick doesn’t have.” She pocketed the two vials, and then took the cardboard box of shotgun shells from Daphne’s hands. She bent down, and proceeded to load the shells into one of the shotgun’s empty magazines.

  “Okay, you’re right.” Daphne came to crouch beside her, and went to work loading another. “I’m just a little worried about what comes afterwards, is all.”

  Izzie spared her a quick glance, giving her a sympathetic look.

  “Let’s worry about what happens afterwards when we know that there’s going to be an afterwards,” Izzie said, a tight, mirthless smile tugging up the corners of her mouth. “For the moment, let’s just worry about what happens now.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Patrick was surrounded by darkness, but he knew that he was not alone. There were things moving there, even though he couldn’t see or hear them. Then he realized that the darkness itself was moving, and that he was wreathed in living shadow. He remembered what his great uncle had told him as a boy, about the time that Pahne’i had gone down beneath the earth and wrestled for eight days with the living god of shadows, and was suddenly convinced that he was down there now. Patrick could feel his heart pounding in his chest, and his stomach roiled as if there was a fire burning deep inside of him. He tried to open his mouth to speak, but found that he couldn’t breathe. He reached out, hands grasping nothing, struggling to take a breath, until . . .

  Patrick jolted awake, gasping for air.

  He was in a dimly lit room, arms and legs strapped to a metal chair. He had been stripped to his t-shirt and boxers, and the metal of the chair was cold against his skin. He could feel cold tiles beneath the bare soles of his feet. As he struggled to catch his breath, he tried to remember where he was, and how he had gotten here. His last memory was of the dead man with the hole in his forehead talking to him, and then a sudden burst of pain.

  They must have knocked him unconscious, and brought him . . . where?

  Patrick craned his neck to look from side to side. There was a wall of windows on the far side of the room, through which he could see the night sky and the tops of skyscrapers. There were light fixtures set amidst acoustic tiles in the ceiling overhead, but they were dark, the only illumination in the room what little light was shining in through the windows, giving everything the room a faintly bluish-grey tint. And aside from the chair to which Patrick was strapped, there was little else in the room to see. There was an empty chair facing him a few feet away, a waist-high table off to one side, and set up high in a corner was a security camera, its lens trained on him. If he turned his head as far as he could in either direction, in the corner of his eye he could just make out the outline of a closed door behind him, a thin trickle of light leaking out from the gap underneath it. He tried to shift the chair, but found it was too heavy to budge with his wrists and ankles secured.

  There was a dull ache at the side of Patrick’s head, no doubt from the blow that had knocked him unconscious. His mouth felt parched, his lips cracked and his throat burning with thirst. When he blinked, his eyelids scraped over dry eyes. He felt more dehydrated than he would have expected, assuming that he’d only been out of it for a matter of hours. The air in the room must be arid, he realized, leeching the moisture right out of him.

  He felt a sharp spasm of queasy nausea in his gut, and his dry tongue was stung by a foul taste. One of the Ridden was nearby.

  Patrick heard the click of a knob turning behind him, and then light spilled into the room as the door swung open. He turned his head to see, squinting in the glare, but only got a glimpse of movement before the door slammed shut and the room was once more plunged into darkness.

  It took a moment for his eyes to readjust to the gloom, as he heard footsteps circle around him, and the sound of the metal chair across from him scraping across the floor.

  “You’re finally awake.”

  Patrick could make out the silhouette of a man sitting facing him, framed against the skyline in the windows beyond. The man gestured to the camera high up in the corner.

  “I’ve been keeping my eyes on you. A few of them, anyway.”

  The man reached into his pocket, and when he pulled it back out his hand was filled with light. It took a split second for Patrick to realize that the man was holding a smart phone with a lit screen, and another second to recognize that it was his.

  “You’ll be glad to know that your friends are worried about you.” Lit from below, the man’s face looked more sinister than it did in the publicity photos Patrick had seen, but still recognizable as Martin Zotovic, the founder of Parasol. He waggled the phone in front of his face. “I took the liberty of logging in with your thumbprint while you were unconscious. Just wanted to do a little digging around, you understand.”

  Zotovic put the phone on the waist-high table, screen facing up and still lit.

  “You and your friends have had a busy week, haven’t you?”

  Patrick felt queasy, his head spinning. He remembered the sensation down in the subbasement of the warehouse a few nights before, when a horde of Ridden had attacked them. The feeling of wrongness that gripped him now was even stronger than
he’d experienced then. But there were no blots on Zotovic’s face or arms, and dressed in a plain black t-shirt, jeans, and running shoes, with a faint shadow of stubble on his sharp chin, he looked like any other young tech millionaire. Even so, Patrick thought he could see something lurking behind the man’s eyes, and couldn’t escape the sense that he and Zotovic weren’t the only people in the room. There was something else in here with them. Or rather, something else in them.

  “You’re one of them, aren’t you?” Patrick’s voice croaked in his ears as he spoke, the first words he’d uttered since he regained consciousness. “Ridden.”

  A humorless smile creased Zotovic’s face, flashing white teeth.

  “‘Ridden,’ huh? That’s old school. I prefer to refer to those of us who have willingly taken part in the Merger as ‘Shareholders.’” The smile widened as he tapped his chest. “With me being the Majority Shareholder, of course.”

  Zotovic talked more like the tech mogul that the media portrayed him as being than as someone being controlled by an inhuman intelligence, Patrick thought. But was it Zotovic who was looking out at him through those eyes?

  “What do you intend to do with me?” Patrick asked through clenched teeth.

  The smile on Zotovic’s face turned down into a frown.

  “That’s up to you, really,” he said. “There are several options on the table.”

  Zotovic leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, his fingers laced together.

  “When you and your friends first came onto my radar the other day, my first thought was that I should just take you off the board. Your friend Agent Lefevre managed to avoid getting run over, but I knew it was just a matter of time before you slipped up. That was before I discovered the full extent of what you’ve been up to. Of how deep you’ve been digging.”

  Zotovic raised his hands, and rested his steepled fingers against his chin.

  “Your captain over at the 10th Precinct thinks that you’ve got a screw loose, did you know that? The mayor was pressuring him for an update on your ‘Ink’ investigation, and the captain mentioned the toll that the detail as taking on his officers. Specifically, the mental strain on a respected lieutenant, judging by what he written on a dry erase board in the station house.”

  Patrick’s eyes widened involuntarily. So the captain had been in the community room, and had seen the work that he and Izzie had been doing. But how did Zotovic know that?

  “I don’t have a line on internal police communications yet,” Zotovic went on, “but I’ve been able to read every email that passes through the mayor’s inbox for the past year. Most of it is useless nonsense, but it’s amazing what you can find if you dig through garbage long enough.”

  Zotovic tapped his fingertips against his chin for a moment, regarding Patrick.

  “I realized that I couldn’t eliminate you until I found out how much you knew and, more importantly, who else you’ve told. I’ve been working on this rollout way too long for someone to come along and throw a monkey wrench into the works at the eleventh hour.”

  ‘Rollout?’ Patrick wondered.

  “So I sent some minority shareholders down to your place last night, to bring you here for a little chat. It was tricky getting in there, with all of those damned squiggles all over the place, but I didn’t build a multibillion dollar company from nothing without learning a thing or two about persistence. And then at the last minute Agent Lefevre pulled that nasty trick with the ring of salt?” Zotovic shook his head, tongue tsking. “That was bad sportsmanship, friend. I had them dead to rights.”

  Zotovic sucked a sharp breath in through his teeth.

  “That stuff hurts.” He unlaced his fingers and waved one hand by the side of his head. “Messes with me, in here. It jacks up the Merger. And that can’t be allowed.”

  Patrick could see the muscles in Zotovic’s jaw tightening, a brief flash of anger passing across his face, before his features settled back into a semblance of calm good humor an instant later. It was as though just remembering that moment had caused Zotovic to feel it again, if only for the briefest moment. But he was talking about something that had happened to the shambling Ridden in the alley behind Patrick’s house the night before, when Zotovic himself hadn’t been nearby.

  “You cops are getting too close to the operation as it is,” Zotovic went on. “The trials are just about through and we should be ready for the rollout soon, but if you jokers keep stumbling through my manufacturing sites and locking up my distributors, we might have to delay the launch date, and that is not happening. Not again.”

  Patrick remembered the intercepted emails that they had read, Parasol employees who were part of the Ink trade discussing a coming “launch date” and product testing. Part of him burned to ask Zotovic what the hell he was talking about, but it seemed that part of the reason that he was even still alive was that Zotovic wasn’t sure how much he knew, and tipping his hand at this point might not be the wisest course of action.

  “The last time we made it this far, that damned private investigator came in and made a mess of things before I could go public, even after I offered to make him a shareholder, and it was decades before anyone made it down into that hole again so I could start over. And the time before that, with the idiot writer for the pulps? That was a disaster. But to be fair, that was kind of my fault for letting too many minority shareholders call the shots, and those weren’t really Big Picture guys.”

  Zotovic had to still be in his late twenties, Patrick knew. Yet he was talking about things that had happened decades before he was born as if they had happened to him personally. This suggested who he was not talking to, even if it didn’t clear up who, or what exactly was doing the talking.

  “But that won’t happen again.” Zotovic sat back in the chair, chest puffing up with pride. “This time I’m calling all of the shots. No more middle men. Just me.”

  He held his hands in front of him, palms down, fingers splayed and wriggling.

  “For a while I tried to diversify. Spread myself out. Brought in new talent and shared the responsibilities evenly. Not just one majority shareholder, but as many suitable candidates as I could get down into that hole.”

  Zotovic lowered one hand, and held the thumb and forefinger of the other a short distance apart.

  “And I was this close to moving forward when that damned professor started taking shareholders out, cutting them off from the Merger.” He shook his head. “I should have dragged him down there and brought him onto the team when I had the chance. But before someone was able to stop him he had worked his way through every shareholder but one.” Then he tapped his chest.

  Clearly when Zotovic said “I” he didn’t mean the man sitting before him. Zotovic was a body that the voice speaking was wearing. Patrick was talking directly to the loa itself. So why was an extradimensional intelligence talking like a Silicon Valley wunderkind about to take his startup public with an IPO?

  “I suppose I have you to thank for that, don’t I, Lieutenant Tevake? That was the first time I encountered your name, when you and Agent Lefevre took the professor down. I considered reaching out to you at the time, making you one of my minority shareholders, but I was still in the development phase of the product at that point, and didn’t have a space for you on the team.” He grinned, without any warmth. “But to be honest, you wouldn’t have been a good fit for the Merger back then, anyway. I needed people who carried the right kind of memories in their heads, the knowledge of how to code the priming visuals into the software, and the engineering experience to take care of the hardware of the delivery system. I thought of you just as a badge and a gun who chased down killers in the street. Imagine my surprise when I found out that you were investigating the distribution side of my business, all of these years later.”

  Priming visual? Patrick thought. Then he remembered the conspiracy videos that he’d watched the day before.

  “The encoded data in the applications,” he said in a low voice
. “The subliminal visuals in the code.”

  “So you had worked out that part. I thought you might.” The thing that was wearing Zotovic nodded, looking impressed. “Last time around I used large two-dimensional representations to prime the candidates, with a spoken component to engage the frontal lobe, reworking the structures of their minds to aid with the Merger. But that required a considerable amount of time and attention, forcing candidates to sit and stare at a wall while chanting for hours at a time. This time I decided it would be more efficient to put the priming visuals in a place that people would be staring at for hours at a time, anyway.”

  “Their phones.”

  The thing shrugged, a gesture of mock humility.

  “Just inserting a piece of myself into a person’s brain isn’t enough. I can gain control in the short term, but it’s a brute-force method that rapidly exhausts the usefulness of a shareholder. They tend to start decaying at a fairly rapid rate, and when the nervous system breaks down and the muscles start to rot, they’re not much use to me anymore. But with the synaptic structures aligned in just the right way, I can take root in only the parts of the brain that I need to maintain control, and keep a shareholder in operation indefinitely. Even after their death.”

  Patrick heard the sound of the door knob turning behind him, and once again the room was bathed in light from the hallway beyond. The thing that wore Zotovic like a suit stood up from the chair as footsteps passed on either side of Patrick.

  “I think you know these minor shareholders,” the Zotovic thing said, as two men came to stand beside him. On his left was the man with the bullet hole in the middle of his forehead that had spoken to Patrick earlier that night, the thick sludge of blood crusted brownish black in a trail down his face. On his right stood Tyler Campbell, the dead drug dealer whose autopsy had started this whole thing off only a few days before. The Zotovic thing looked from one to the other and then back to Patrick. “I’ll do most of the talking—their vocal cords aren’t working so great anymore, and the speech centers of their brains are pretty much toast—but I can use the extra hands for what comes next.”