by John Farris
Bertie sank nervelessly to the floor as if her brain were being sucked deep into a whirlpool.
“You won’t get her,” she murmured, her last coherent thought.
She never saw him smile.
4:54 A.M.
His name was Hector Rosario, and he came from a little place in backroads Guatemala called Joatomala, where he’d spent all but the last six years of his life before joining the ever-growing Latin American migration north to the States. Now he worked night maintenance at Concordia Hospital. He had learned reasonably good English. He was forty-five years old but looked ten years older. He had a wife who earned good money as a chambermaid and three children who attended Vegas public schools. Hector had little formal schooling himself but he was an intuitive man with a quiet way of observing everything that went on around him. In addition to being handy with tools, Hector had certain talents that distinguished him. Hector was descended from a long line of warlocks. Thus, he was accorded the leadership of an ever-expanding community of Hispanic expats, the majority of whom were steeped in occult tradition.
Hector was on his break in the employees’ break room in a basement area of the hospital, snacking on beef jerky and drinking a Sprite, when he had a strange nerve-prickling sensation. His hands shook. More alarming, there was a shudder in his mind, as if a stealth intelligence had entered with no fuss and was getting acquainted.
Ay Dios!
Because supernaturalism was the way of his forebears and still a fact of life in the villages back home, Hector had always been comfortable with the juxtaposition of such influences and the Catholicism that he faithfully practiced. Now he bowed his head and grasped the gold crucifix around his neck, praying inaudibly. No one else in the room paid Hector any mind.
Only a few moments passed before it became apparent to Hector that the possessing spirit was both supernal and extraordinarily loving, not a threat to his soul. Hector had a vision of the Holy Father in a showering gold radiance that settled on him like a rich cloak, humbling and calming him. Tears flowed down his cheeks, but his trembling subsided.
“What do you want of me, Holy Father?”
—Just think of me as a Caretaker, Hector. We must work together for a little while. No harm will come to you.
“As you wish, Holiness. But why are you in Las Vegas?”
—Soon, possibly within twenty-four hours, there is going to be a great battle here, an epic battle between good and evil. The city may well be destroyed in the process.
“Dios mio!”
—In fact, it has begun already. There is a Presence in this hospital—
“The Evil One?” Hector began to quake again.
—Not at full power. They’re a matched pair. But the Presence within is very dangerous, and we need to expel it quickly.
“I—my family—”
—As soon as we’ve seen to the present emergency, you must use your authority as a community leader to organize an exodus of all your people from the city.
“But, with all respect, sir—if time is growing short—there are as many as two hundred thousand Latinos in Las Vegas! Not counting tourists. And what of the rest of the population?”
—Hector, if you lived here or were attending a convention and noticed a couple of hundred thousand other people lighting out across the desert in all directions with whatever they could throw into their SUVs, what do you think would be your first impulse?
Hector said with a sickly grin, “To follow? Ah, yes, I see. And I do have authority with my own people. But to reach so many, and quickly, a miracle is required!”
—It’s called the Internet, Hector. Now let’s get ourselves going. We’re needed upstairs.
Mordaunt allowed Bertie sufficient freedom of mind and motion to dress herself and walk without help. Which she did, performing mechanically, eyes open, emtionless. In the sitting room of her hospital suite she saw the two Blackwelder bodyguards whom Mordaunt had brain-locked; she had no memory of who they were. No comprehension of their fate. Full recovery from brain-lock was impossible. Partial recovery took many months.
The night nurses on duty had suffered the same fate at the whim of Mordaunt. The entire floor at nearly five in the morning was very quiet, except for the remote beeps of monitors in other of the luxury units.
“I have a limo waiting downstairs,” Mordaunt said in Tom Sherard’s voice. But Bertie had only the dimmest memory of what Sherard had sounded like. Of their life together at Shungwaya in Kenya. Of the man he’d been, the love she had had for him.
They were a few steps from the elevator when the doors opened and Hector Rosario walked out.
Mordaunt stopped suddenly and Bertie, feeling the rage, the animus that possessed him, shied away.
Tom Sherard and Hector Rosario, surrogates for Deus Inversus, the Darkness of God, and the purest representative of Supernal Light in the galaxy, entities with powers beyond the scope of any human to imagine, studied each other.
Sherard, tall hunter, made a guttural warning sound.
Hector, squat, graying, sad-eyed, said in Spanish, “You are turning up much too often these days, Evil One.”
“And you have strayed too far from Rome. Las Vegas is my sanctuary. Its people are my people.”
“Yet a young woman barely tutored in the Art of the Light defeated you here.” Tom Sherard’s shoulders hunched. Hector smiled slightly. “What does that tell you about the condition your powers are in?”
The guttural rumblings became a full-throated growl.
Hector sighed, then heard himself say as his chest tightened from a heart swell of contempt, “Oh, piss off. Release the Hunter, release the girl, who is of no use to you, go back to playing the Dark God on the mountain in this neon Gomorrah. No one else needs it or wants it.”
“No,” Bertie said hoarsely.
They both looked at her, Mordaunt angered by the slippage of his control that allowed her to speak at all. Then they both glimpsed the brief coherent warning that had surfaced in her conscious mind.
Sherard let out a roar that shattered glass cabinet fronts and light boxes at the nurses’ station.
Then Hector’s eyes filled with a light directed at Sherard’s pale eyes. The light blinded him like the noonday sun and sent him helplessly to his knees, the heels of his palms pressed tightly to the orbits of his eyes. But even that wasn’t enough to keep the light from his brain. His body convulsed.
“Enough!” Mordaunt shrieked.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Hector said, and the light intensified. Sherard collapsing, writhing.
Hector pulled Bertie to her feet and backed with her to the elevator. They left Sherard, and Mordaunt, on the floor holding his head, sheathed in the brilliant light that had surrounded him like a celestial cocoon.
“That will hold him for a little while,” Hector said to Bertie, whose eyes were closed. She was breathing harshly. “But soon he’ll go in search of Eden’s doppelganger. Miss Nkambe, I know you’re in considerable pain, but can you talk to me?”
“I’ll . . . try. Oh God, why . . . did it have to be . . . Tom?”
“Do you know where the dpg is?”
“No.”
“Does Eden?”
“I . . . don’t think so.”
They reached the main floor. A guard yawning by the entrance looked them over, frowned, crossed the lobby floor toward them.
“Hector, where’re you going with her?”
Hector looked him in the eye. The guard did a puzzled double take, blinking, and stood very still.
“Roberto, we’d like to borrow your car. Matter of fact, why don’t you drive us?”
“Of course, Don Hector. A donde vamos?”
“I’ll let you know in a few moments.”
The three of them left the hospital and walked toward the employees’ parking lot.
Hector said to Bertie, “I know that Eden is with her new friend, the artist. Do you know where he lives?”
“No.”
�
�His name, then?”
“Cody . . . uh, Old. No, Olds.”
They got into Roberto’s car. “The address of Mr. Cody Olds,” Hector said.
“Yes, jefe.” Roberto was a cop during the day, desk job in Metro Traffic. He made a phone call, and had Cody Olds’s address and phone number in under two minutes.
“Arriba,” Hector said, looking back at the main hospital building. He was in the front seat with Roberto. Bertie was lying face-up in the backseat, knees up, groaning softly.
“I’m so sorry, my dear,” Hector said to her.
“What . . . are we going to do? What can we do, once Mordaunt finds Gwen?”
“Make sure he doesn’t.”
“Is that . . . a plan?”
“No.” Hector looked at Roberto. “Speaking of plans, is there one for the orderly evacuation of Las Vegas in an emergency?”
“Yes, Don Hector. Coordinated with FEMA. Because of the, you know, the proximity of Yucca Mountain.”
“That’s good news. The evacuation of the city must begin today.”
“For what reason?”
“The reason, I believe, will appear in the skies, and no further explanation will be required. The important thing will be to prevent devastating panic.”
5:35 A.M.
Over a second cup of black coffee she needed to keep from falling asleep on her feet, Harlee Nations said to Gwen, “Here’s my deal. I will set up the meeting between you and Eden when I have lunch with her this afternoon. When you’ve negotiated with her and she’s said the magic word that deprograms you or whatever—”
“Releases me.”
“By the way, how can you be so sure that, when you’re close to her, she can’t regain control? What I’ve seen, she’s one very strong-willed girl.”
“Dr. Woolwine has seen to that. Eden and I are on different wavelengths right now. No control is possible. As for strong wills—would you like another look at Delilah?”
“No, thanks. Once was enough.” Harlee closed her eyes for a couple of moments. She trembled from fatigue. “And my end of the deal, Eden Waring is mine. Not yours, not Dee-Dee’s.”
“Jest not with my name,” Delilah said surlily.
“Okay, sorry. But I get to cut her throat. Agreed?”
“We are sworn. Yet think on’t. Is blood your art? Poison speaks slyly, but with an oath of doom.”
“Fuck that. I want to watch her bleeding in her own lap. And now I need to go to bed before I pass out. Somebody wake me at noon.”
6:45 A.M.
Anyone want more coffee?” Cody asked of the other four people meeting in his spacious RV, which was parked anonymously with half a dozen similar vehicles and some eighteen-wheelers at a truck stop off I-15 south of the Las Vegas airport. Cody’s environment-friendly little Prius was in tow behind his RV.
They all declined. The strategy meeting involving Hector, Roberto, Bertie Nkambe, and Eden Waring had been going on for an intense twenty minutes. Cody felt like, and was, an outsider. There was nothing he could contribute.
He sat in the driver’s seat next to the Fetchling named Flicka, whom they had picked up at the bungalow on the grounds of the megaresort Bahìa. She didn’t look at or speak to him, only stared, as if in an Eden–induced trance, at the rush-hour traffic northbound. Windshields flared as the sun rose. The sky was a dusted-over shade of blue. Inbound traffic at McCarran was picking up.
It was inconceivable to Cody that a metropolitan area of this size could, had to, become a ghost town, like the old boom-and-bust mining camps throughout the West more than a century ago. But Roberto obviously had intimate knowledge of the computer program containing the master evacuation plan for the city. Not only that, he could put it into play and with a few keystrokes render the program irreversible behind the mother of all firewalls. Traffic signals would be locked outbound-green on all major roadways. Incoming flights to McCarran, Executive, North Vegas, and Nellis airfields would automatically be rerouted. TV and radio stations would broadcast nothing but emergency instructions. Hospital evac teams—local, state, federal—would begin removal of the sick and helpless. Casinos would go to lockdown. Looters would be shot with tranquilizer darts. So would anyone else with notions of riding out the storm.
Even with the inevitable attempts at looting, the evacuation might not erupt into chaos. Luck was a large factor. And luck might well depend on what was going on over the heads of the already-spooked evacuees, all of them fearing the worst.
Cody didn’t scare easily, but he was scared now. Doomsday scared. And the hell of it was, the two ordinary-looking men and attractive young women who were in charge of one version of doomsday were totally lacking in evangelical fervor. Over coffee and Danish in his luxury motor home they were having a coordinated, quietly efficient discussion about means and ends. Cody heard Hoover Dam mentioned a couple of times.
The exotically lovely Fetchling next to him had begun breathing heavily and chewing her lower lip, drawing blood. After they had marched her into the RV and spent fifteen minutes alone with her in the master bedroom, the girl had emerged wobbly and with drained-looking eyes.
Cody rotated his chair and alerted Eden to the change in the Fetchling.
Eden came limping forward from midcabin. She looked at the agitated Flicka, then placed a hand on her forehead. Flicka quieted immediately, her head falling back on the contoured seat.
“How did you do that?” Cody asked Eden.
She shrugged as if mildly embarrassed. “I don’t know. Cody, you don’t have to stay with her. You could join us.”
“Wouldn’t have much to contribute to the powwow. I don’t have any special talent for setting the world on fire.”
Eden thumped him lightly with a fist, then kissed him.
“Neither do I. But that’s not going to happen.”
“According to your dreams, Vegas is a candidate for holocaust. Tee-total destruction, as my daddy would say.”
“I suppose the definition of destruction could be stretched to include a place where nothing lives but evil, nothing visits but the wind. A shunned place for a thousand years, or as long as human memory endures. That would be the good that comes of all this.”
“The bad part?”
“Simple. We lose.”
Hector was taking a bathroom break. Bertie was lying quietly on a sofa big enough to accommodate her six-foot frame. Roberto began speaking urgently to his wife on his cell.
“I’m not big on losing,” Cody said. “Whatever it is I can do to make this thing work out in our favor, you let me know.” He nodded to Flicka. “What’s her story?”
“Well, you know about Fetchlings. Flicka had information that was useful. Some luck on our part. When Mordaunt went missing—”
“Thanks to you.”
“—Almost all of the Malterran hierarchy from around the world came running in a panic to Las Vegas for a meeting.”
“To elect another Mordaunt?”
“I haven’t met any of them, but I doubt if there’s a Malterran who remotely qualifies as Deus Inversus. They’re just bad, evil people. The important thing is, almost all of them are still around, out at Mordaunt’s Snow Lake Ranch. We have to make sure they stay here. A nice long sojourn with their Prince of Darkness.”
“Eden—is there anything you can do about Tom Sherard?”
There was pain in Eden’s eyes.
“Oh God. I don’t know, Cody. Tom is—he’s probably lost to us.”
“Along with Gwen?”
“The hell with her,” Eden said. “She wants her independence? She can have it. Gladly. And spend the next millennium right here with those we’re about to send to Judgment.”
6:54 A.M.
The entity known as Mordaunt returned to full consciousness in the emergency wing of Concordia Hospital well before Tom Sherard, the persona he had co-opted, had any power of movement. Still under the protection of the Supreme Light of the Universe, his body was virtually in suspended animation.
It was a risk Mordaunt had always taken while walking the earth in human form. He could transmogrify flesh on a whim, change a mouse into a were-hawk, but not if that flesh was steeped in the Light that nullified his dark powers.
For now, while detectives roamed the hospital trying to learn what had wrecked an entire floor and left four other people in deep comas, Mordaunt could only wait for the Light to wane, the sleeper to awaken. He amused himself with the chronicles of an adventurous life he found in Sherard’s brain, and more recent memories of Eden Waring, whom he had possessed just a few days ago.
Mordaunt felt no anger that the one whom he also coveted had lain with another man. No sense of loss. Pragmatically he accepted the fact that he’d badly misjudged Eden and her burgeoning powers. It only made him want her all the more.
And there would be another time.
8:20 A.M.
Well off the road in an unpopulated area of southernmost Nevada, they left Cody’s recreational vehicle and walked a third of a mile uphill to a promontory above a dry lake. It was still chilly at this elevation, but windless. The sky was flawlessly blue.
“Why are we here?” Eden asked Hector.
“We’re going to make some weather.”
Eden and Bertie looked at each other. The walk had been hard on Bertie. She winced at the idea of more exertion, mental or physical.
“I think I should just watch.”
Hector smiled sympathetically. Cody set up a camp stool for Bertie, opened a thermos of orange juice. She drank half, nodded gratefully.
“I’m better.” She asked Hector, “What kind of weather?”
“Potentially frightening, but harmless. To set the stage for the great exodus from the city.”
“They’re probably going to be grateful for this, down there in California and Arizona,” Cody said.
“I think he means fireworks,” Eden said to Bertie with a rueful grin. “No floods. No whirly stuff.”
Cody whistled softly to himself. Eden looked to Hector for guidance.