A brief walk around the front of the house confirmed all the windows were boarded. The yard was empty and overgrown. Climbing hydrangeas threatened to consume the house. The gate at the end of the driveway was chained and locked with a padlock. His hopes for an untouched basement lab rose, but he cut them away as he would one day prune back the hydrangeas.
As he thought about gardening, a tremor of self-doubt shook Amadeus. Who was he to take on one of the richest (and craziest) men in the world? He wasn’t even twenty yet! What did he know except how to make little machines and prize-winning science projects? But hadn’t he been learning, first from his father, from Gravity, and from his own experiences?
No one had made him the leader. He hadn’t asked for this responsibility, but it had fallen in his lap and, like a bad case of herpes, it wouldn’t go away on its own (according to Grassal). He wasn’t sure he was the right man, but he was the only man. Besides Ross and his dead father, who else knew as much about the demon gates? Who else could prevent the gates from being used? The government obviously wouldn’t be much help. And as far as they were concerned, Amadeus had gleefully gone on a worldwide murder spree. If he asked for their help, he would die when his prison cell was overrun by demons. To silence the voices of doubt, he turned his head to the side and jarred his body, hopping, as if he were trying to get water out of his ears.
With a spare lawnmower blade retrieved from the miraculously untouched garden shed, Amadeus pried the boards off the basement window and crawled in. The house was dark, but some light filtered through cracks in the board, and he found his way to the circuit breaker box. When he flipped the main switch, nothing happened. He tried again and remembered the new battery cluster his father had installed last year. Amadeus turned on the cluster. The power level read five percent, but the day was sunny, and it should charge within a couple of hours. No worry there. At this point, he only needed light to illuminate the lab. Before he hit the mains, he disconnected anything that could connect to the internet. With the power back online, computers whirred to life, their green and blue lights flashing and winking. The overhead lights showed the aftermath of the attack.
Oscilloscopes, calipers, and electronic components lay on the floor. The workbench had been turned over. Amadeus looked closer at the computers. Though they were running, all the monitors showed a BIOS screen; all the data storage had been removed. The gunmen or the police had taken them all. So many years of work, gone. At least he had his copy.
Now his father’s opposition to Tivooki Systems seemed even more prophetic. While his colleagues had called him old fashioned and paranoid, he ranted about centralized control, even at one point said that if Ross wanted to, he could bring the world to a standstill. People said this wouldn’t happen; too much money at stake, too many internal corporate safeguards. Would his father be happy to know he was right?
Amadeus looked around for blood and other evidence of the attack. Many bullets were fired, but here were neither shell casings nor blood. Either the police had cleaned things up or…no, they had killed his father. He couldn’t have made it through the attack. The mess was cleaned up. That was all. Without a doubt. His father was dead. He could feel it in his bones, in his heart.
Outside, darkness crept in like a thief. Amadeus performed a quick sweep of his own house. Everything was almost as they had left it. A thin layer of dust covered everything, and the faint smell of mildew hung in the air. Broken glass still sat in the hallway, shattered like Amadeus’ youth. On the dark mahogany mantle above the hearth, he lingered for a minute looking at pictures; his parents’ wedding picture, a candid shot of the three of them taken somewhere in Maine, and a press photo of his father accepting a prestigious award from the Academy of Sciences. These photos seemed out of place. This wasn’t a home anymore; it was a memorial. He didn’t want to accept it, but now, looking around, he had no choice. He was still angry, but his life would go on. At least for a little while.
Amadeus’ stomach growled; he had eaten almost all the energy bars and cans of tuna during his return trip. In the kitchen, the bowl of fruit had rotted away. When he opened the refrigerator, the stink of rancid meat made him queasy. Pulling his shirt over his nose, he threw it all into the trashcan, tied the bag tight, and set it outside. In the cabinets, he found plenty of dried squid, as well as canned peaches, pears, and precooked spaghetti. This last, his father had said wasn’t food, but Amadeus insisted they include it on their regular grocery delivery list. He ate some syrupy peaches and cold spaghetti and felt better.
Back in the basement, under the only lights in an otherwise cave-dark house, Amadeus set to work. Using the schematics, he made a parts list. He found an old analog cordless phone among his father’s collection of scrounged, obsolete devices. He plugged it in and left it to charge. After he thought enough time had passed, he tried the receiver. A rapid, faint clicking so fast it sounded like one continuous tone. Flashlight in hand, he went into the crawlspace and found the kipium in a box of plumbing supplies, right where he had left it. After an hour, he had scrounged all the parts he needed. Between the kipium, the spare parts, and the schematics, he had almost everything he required build a demon gate. He still needed two glass spheres so, pulling a baseball cap over his face, he made trip to the nearby Mega-Mart and purchased two plasma lamps.
Late into the night he soldered, scrounged, screwed and bolted parts together, ignoring the fatigue that crept in like the sunrise. He worked fast, talking to himself, cheering himself on, grumbling when he couldn’t find some part. Just before four in the morning, after he nearly pierced his hand with the drill press, he realized it was time to for sleep. He imagined he was too wound up to sleep, but no sooner had he laid down on the cot his father kept for “inspiration naps” than he woke up in the dusty morning light, feeling sad and refreshed.
*
He had dreamed he stood on a stage before a crowd of millions. Everyone was shouting at him but he couldn’t understand a single thing they said. They sounded angry and confused. He said to them everything would be okay, but this made them angrier.
Amadeus replayed this dream in his mind as he stood in the kitchen savoring yet another can of sickly sweet peaches. He wanted to impart some meaning to the dream; that he was trying to help all these people (and himself) was obvious, but something about the dream struck him as incongruent. What was it? As he swallowed a peach, he realized it: In his dream, he felt no fear. All those eyes on him and he felt not a single shred of anxiety. Instead, he felt calm, competent and, for the first time in a long time, in control.
With the imagined eyes of the world upon him, he went back to work. By lunch time he had welded the external frame together. He turned the last screw to secure the circuit board and double-checked that the spheres were watertight. With a digital multi–meter he tested all the connections. Everything checked out. He set his phone to record video and, with the control box in his hand, turned the dial and sent power to the gate.
It worked. An orb of light grew in the center, just as they had in the videos his father left. This he had expected. He hadn’t expected the smell, the rotten meat and sulfur, but this didn’t surprise him. When the orb grew larger, howls and moans filled the air. Amadeus felt his skin prickle as his brain told him he wasn’t meant to hear such sounds. He told his brain to quiet down.
When a gnarled claw reached out of the gate, Amadeus turned off the switch on the control box. The orb and the claw remained. He tried again, flipping the switch on and off. Nothing happened. The claw became an arm. The stink increased. Soon the creature’s arm lashed out at the air. The demon howled like a teapot on the boil. This one was different than the others. This demon had a head with many eyes and a spade-shaped crimson beak. A black tongue lolled out the side. The demon pulled itself out farther.
The control box still didn’t work. Amadeus ran to the gate and, just before the demon got its back legs out, began pulling wires from one of the pillars at random. Suddenly the light disappeared and the demon s
creamed as it fell to the floor. Amadeus covered his ears, but too late. The howl assaulted his eardrums. Amadeus couldn’t hear anything but high-pitched ringing.
When the gate closed, the demon’s hindquarters were severed. It pulled itself along with its front legs, snapping, howling, and off–balance, pulling itself toward Amadeus, all beak and fury. His mind shut off and his body took over as he grabbed a fire extinguisher from the bottom of the workbench. He raised the extinguisher high and smashed it down onto the demon’s skull. The clunk on the head had no effect on the demon except to piss it off further, if that was possible. The demon swiped at his legs, but Amadeus jumped back.
Amadeus tried again, this time harder. Under the weight of the extinguisher, the demon’s head hit the concrete floor but pulled itself up. Amadeus realized bludgeoning wouldn’t work. He looked around the lab before he remembered the civil war saber outside the door. As he started to back away, the demon lunged at him and took a swipe at his calf. Amadeus felt something tear. He fell and scampered backwards, pushing himself with one leg.
The jeans on his left leg were shredded and bloody. Amadeus didn’t feel anything until he stood up. When he put weight on his left leg, white light appeared at the edges of his vision and he felt dizzy. He imagined what would happen to him if he fell; that propelled him out of the lab and away from the demon. He limped outside, grabbed the saber from the wall. Its curved blade glinted under the fluorescent lights of the basement. He held the grip with both hands.
The demon crawled towards him, trailing black blood and what Amadeus guessed were intestines. Just when the demon’s head passed through the door frame, Amadeus pulled the door shut, trapping the demon’s head and a foreleg. Leaning on the door, holding it shut with his body, he slammed the saber down on the demon’s neck. It howled and snapped at him. Amadeus hacked again and again. Each hack and chop brought more blood, more howling. At first the demon fought with tremendous energy, its talons moving at electric speed, but soon it became clumsy. Finally, with one last, two-handed swing, Amadeus brought the saber down into the nape of the demon’s neck. The demon twitched for a moment then fell still. He had severed its spinal cord. Amadeus crumpled to the floor, gasping for air. He drew his legs up and began to rock back and forth, waiting for the adrenaline to give way to pain.
*
Amadeus poured alcohol over the laceration on his leg, washing the blood and unattached bits of tissue away. The wound was on his calf and shaped like a cat’s pupil, narrow, five centimeters wide, one or two centimeters deep. On the kitchen table sat a pair of latex gloves, two more bottles of rubbing alcohol, an industrial-sized first aid kit, and his mother’s old sewing basket. He examined the wound again. More bits of skin, fibers from his jeans, and some black flecks still remained. With sterilized tweezers he picked everything out, dumped iodine on the wound, and smeared a tube of clotting agent over the whole mess.
He needed stitches, but a hospital would be hazardous to his health and dangerous to his plans. He dipped some thread into the alcohol and put it through the eye of the needle. Holding the needle with pliers, he sterilized it over the gas flame of the stove. He pinched the flesh together and stuck the needle in one side and out the other. He screamed as the thread rubbed against the inside of his skin. Tears streamed down his cheeks and when he screamed, he could only hear his voice in his head. Until that point, he hadn’t realized how limited his hearing was.
Fighting every pain-avoiding instinct he possessed, he pushed the needle through to the skin on the other side. He repeated this eight more times until the wound was closed. He cut the thread. By the time he finished, he could barely hold the bottle of alcohol as he doused the wound again. He covered the stitches with gauze and wrapped tape around his leg. The world grew blurry.
He focused on slowing his gasping breaths, tried to figure out why he hadn’t been able to shut off the demon gate, but logical thought eluded him, he knew only searing sensations, an approaching darkness, and his fight to keep his eyes open…a fight he soon lost.
Amadeus awoke on the kitchen floor sometime the next day. His head hurt almost as much as his leg. An overturned bottle of isopropyl alcohol lay beside him. Pulling himself up to a sitting position, ignoring the pain, he checked his work. A small red cloud of blood had appeared on the gauze, but the clotting agent seemed to have done its job. He shifted his body until he was on his knees, then he managed to stand up. At first he was unsteady, but once he figured out the ways he could move his wounded leg, he was able to get around easy enough. As he pulled himself up, he realized he had been reckless, had underestimated just how dangerous this work was. He had hurried, had neglected the methodical, meticulous caution and attention his father had (almost) always used. He couldn’t make such mistakes.
With the help of a high dose of pain pills, he returned to work. He added a simple fail-safe switch on the right post of the demon gate and on the control box. To figure out why the control box hadn’t worked, he decided, was a diversion from the main task at hand, that of confirming that the Gate Crasher would do just what he expected. Clearly, he already had a working demon gate. The throbbing wound on his leg reminded him with every beat of his heart.
So he started on the Gate Crasher. Charged kipium emitted a sine wave, his father had noted, during and after electron bombardment. This caused the interference with cordless phones. The closer the phone came to the kipium, the higher the frequency and shorter the wavelength of the interference. Amadeus confirmed this and smiled, thinking that if this worked it could go down as simplest counter-terrorism tool ever created.
Holding the phone to his ear was okay, but he knew there had to be a better way. If he could record the frequency of the interference in more than one location, he could create a sound map and triangulate the source of the interference. If only Grassal were here, he could throw together some code and make this work. He would send him a message later.
Even if Amadeus had the ability to do this, he couldn’t; using the GPS software on his phone would be like waving a red flag at a herd of angry bulls. Some of them were bound to come charging for him. The sound map would have to wait. As long as the phone could actually act as a simple homing device, everything else was just details, but he needed to work fast. Activating the demon gate may have already alerted anyone who was paying attention; they could even be on their way here.
A parabolic dish was optional, but Amadeus guessed would increase the range to at least two kilometers. In the kitchen, he found a big plastic bowl he and his father used as a popcorn dish. He drilled a hole in the bottom and slid the antenna through the hole. His final product looked like some child’s idea of a space ray gun, complete with duct tape.
Before he turned on the demon gate a second time, he ran a line with a power switch outside the lab room. This way, if another thing decided to crawl through, it would be locked inside. He didn’t have time to deal with it. Once he confirmed the Gate Crasher worked, he was finished here. He hadn’t even bothered to carry the stinking body of the dead demon out of the house. Amadeus checked the remaining memory on the phone; two hours available of high-definition video. He filmed the dead demon and provided some voice-over to explain his experiment. Documentation would help later.
With the lab door closed and barricaded with a heavy air compressor, he sent power to the demon gate and put the phone to his ear. He heard a steady tone. Inside the lab, in the center of the demon gate, the dwarf star appeared. He provided voice over for the video recording.
“The sound just barely comes through. Since I’m pressed for time I can’t make a soundtrack. Listen.” He held the phone up to the computer’s microphone. “We’re right beside a demon gate. I just started it. Let’s hope I can finish before things go crazy. That tone you’re hearing, that’s a high-frequency wave with a really, really short wavelength, a sine wave all smashed together.” He hobbled upstairs and went outside. The tone separated to a rapid-fire clicking.
“Now I’m about
twenty meters away. As I get further from the gate, the frequency decreases and the wavelengths get longer.” He hobbled farther and farther from the house, alternately holding the phone to his ear and to the microphone, aiming his makeshift parabolic dish at the house the whole time. “When I aim the dish away from the gate,” he pointed it in the direction of the Pachyderm, “the signal gets weaker.”
At a painful distance of one kilometer, he guessed he heard about ten clicks per second. When he reached the Pachyderm, the sound came at two clicks per second. He guessed (correctly, he later learned), that the frequency of the interference increased exponentially as the user came closer, and that a little over two kilometers was the maximum range for cordless phones. The experiment, he decided, was a success.
Back in the house, he heard a familiar, howl coming from the basement. He left the Gate Crasher clicking away on the kitchen table and hobbled down the stairs and flipped the kill switch for the gate. The lab door had remained shut but two demons were snarling and slamming against the window. They smeared drool against the glass as they growled sneered. They looked just like miniature versions of the Manhattan Monster. Amadeus held the camera up to the window to get some footage. He kicked the beaked demon he had killed last night.
“See this dead-ass demon? It’s missing half its torso and it nearly ate my leg. This is what we’re up against. But now we know how to stop them, to prevent their entry into our world.”
Carrying the Gate Crasher, the phone, and a backpack full of canned peaches and spaghetti, Amadeus set off for the Pachyderm. He would make his plans from the sky. At least his enemies couldn’t fly.
45
While flying west, Amadeus ran several scenarios through his head. His basic premise was that demon gates would be placed in major metropolitan areas throughout the world and activated at about the same time; the leak had implied as much. Clearly Amadeus couldn’t be in all these places at once. He needed helpers, thousands of them. He had proof of concept and, thanks to the video, credibility. Once they saw and heard his story, people would believe him. He would find help.
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