There was free-flowing top-shelf booze, and there were Viennese chocolates and Cohiba Robustos. Platters of short-rib sliders and sashimi. Kale salad with bacon–blue cheese vinaigrette and fresh oysters on spoons. Invisible as stagehands, the least sinister of René’s rented men circulated and cleared, dressed in servantwear with mandarin collars, the better to hide the menacing tattoos. The more colorful of the men—and certainly Dex—were best kept from view.
Pretending to leaf through a Wall Street Journal, René observed from a divan at an avuncular remove. This was his place, the perennial outsider lingering just past the reaches of the social glow. Or as he preferred to think of it, Oz behind the green curtain. Aside from the occasional appreciative nod to their host and benefactor, the kids ignored him.
The boy with the soul patch and the tribal earrings—Joshua—had graduated to drinking Johnnie Walker Blue out of the bottle. That could prove problematic.
René didn’t want him too dehydrated.
He was a burly kid, broad-shouldered and thick-thighed, young enough that his muscle propped up the fat, held it firm. He’d already sweated through his guayabera. Inexplicably, he’d decided to plug into a bling-bling set of cushy headphones and was dancing with his reflection in the tall windows, a sort of airplane flight pattern that involved tilting his arms this way and that, a landing approach with no end point.
The laughter reached a manic pitch, warmed with booze and friction. David pressed the girl with the slender neck up against the bar. With an expert flip of his hand, he popped the top buttons of her jeans and wiggled his hand inside. She threw back her head in a manner that suggested more rehearsal than spontaneity. The other boy was on top of the girl on the couch, trying to snap a selfie, and she was cackling, pushing at the balls of his shoulders, her fingers splayed. It was self-conscious without the benefit of shame, as if they were enacting a scene they’d all studied, a commercial for unlimited cell-phone minutes.
That was the problem with young people nowadays. Give them their very own Pleasure Island and they all reach for a script.
Youth is wasted on the young, sure. But it needn’t be.
René let the top of the newspaper crinkle down. Across the parlor, low-lidded and clearly bored, David looked back at him over the girl’s shoulder. She hooked her arms around his neck, swaying with the action of his hidden hand, whimpering. She had one of those names that didn’t use to be a name—Kendall or Cammy.
Her movements grew more sluggish. Her blinks became longer. As her legs buckled, David clasped her around her waist and lowered her to the floor.
Over by the windows, Joshua now lay on the rug where he’d fallen, the Beats headphones shoved down around his neck giving off tinny hip-hop. The tangled couple on the couch had passed out mid-selfie. All that faux youthful abandon, fading down into a Rohypnol stupor.
René rose.
One of his narco-butlers had already fetched Dr. Franklin, who entered now loose-limbed and unshaven. As he surveyed the tableau, his eyes attained a surgeon’s clarity behind round rimless lenses. He straightened out of his slouch. Instant sobriety. Despite his habits he was a man who could find the foundation in a hurry when he had to.
Two of the men rolled the girls onto stretchers. Dex entered. With a faint whistle of breath, he hoisted Joshua up off the floor and flopped him over his shoulder. David took hold of the other boy’s biker boots and dragged him along after the others as if pulling a wheelbarrow. René watched them pass, the kid’s arms windshield-wipering the floor behind him.
René felt the Need stirring inside him, awakening to the possibility of a meal.
“Ready?” Dr. Franklin asked.
René swept an arm magnanimously. “After you.”
Following the convoy of unconscious bodies down the hall, Dr. Franklin snapped on one latex glove and then the other.
21
In Trouble
A buzzing pulled Evan from sleep.
Was it in his body? The sheets? No—under the mattress, vibrating him through the fabric. The princess and the epileptic pea. Groggily, he lifted his ten-ton head from the pillow, trying to regain his bearings.
The buzzing came again.
The RoamZone? It couldn’t be.
He rolled off the bed, his knees striking the floor, hands digging the phone out from its hiding place between mattress and box spring.
Sure enough, light leaked through the shattered façade. The caller’s number flickered, carved up by dozens of hairline fractures. The TALK icon at the bottom floated in the sole section of unbroken glass. He held his breath, thumbed the icon.
He held the phone to his ear.
It took him a moment to recall the script, to remember the words he was supposed to say when he picked up. He forced them out through the drug-induced grogginess. “Do you need my help?”
“Yes.” The voice of a boy, high-pitched and scared.
Evan knew he was clear of the hidden camera, but he turned his back anyway, leaning against the bed. He pressed his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose, blinked hard around them.
“Where did you get this number?” Evan asked.
“A girl gave it to me. She said you help people and stuff.” The boy was whispering. He sounded somewhere around ten years old.
“What’s her name?”
“Anna something.”
“What’s she look like?”
“Dark hair. Patchy, like it’s falling out in places.” The whisper grew more hoarse, more urgent. The boy’s words were distorted ever so slightly. A speech impediment? “Look, can you help me or not?”
“I can.”
“I don’t know how much time I have till they catch me. I stole the cordless. I’m under the couch. I’m not supposed to make calls.”
“What’s your name?”
A hesitation. “I can’t … I can’t tell you. I’ll get in trouble.”
The kid’s quick breaths were audible even over the crackle of static.
“If they catch me with the phone, it’ll be bad.”
Evan listened to the kid’s articulation. Not a lisp. He closed his eyes, his brain still gummy from the sleeping gas. It took a moment, but he put it together. “Someone beat you up.”
“So what?” the kid said, his words blurry across a swollen lip. “I get beat up all the time. Please come. Please help me.”
“Where are you?”
“You should see how they keep us here. Like cattle, all lined up.”
“Where are you?” Evan asked again.
“Are you coming to get me?”
Evan looked around, the dead-bolted door, the caged balcony, the gas-breathing vent. He took stock. First: Escape. Second: Rescue Alison Siegler. Third: Help the kid.
“Soon,” Evan said.
“Then I don’t … Then I can’t risk saying yet.”
“Who else is there?”
“Other boys.”
“Where are you from?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
“Do you have a family? Parents?”
“I don’t … I don’t know. It’s been so long.”
“How long have they kept you?” Evan asked. “How old were you when you were taken?”
“Oh, shit. I can’t—they’re coming. I’ll try ’n’ call back. Will you help me? Will you?”
“Yes. I will get to you.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
The broken phone cut out. Evan stared down at the shattered shards held together loosely in the cracked casing of the RoamZone.
He shoved the phone back into its hiding place and crawled into bed. He imagined Alison Siegler, locked in her container aboard a ship halfway around the globe. Did she have enough food? Enough air? He thought about a little boy also waiting for his help, his words blurred over a swollen mouth: You should see how they keep us here.
Evan’s blinks grew heavier.
Two dogs, ten guards, one sniper, Dex, and
counting.
He’d have to kill a lot more of them tomorrow.
22
Divine Right
Propped on a brace of pillows on a regally upholstered gurney, René drew in a deep lungful of air as the needle sank beneath his flesh. This was his favorite moment, when the fix first flowed into his body and set the world quivering with potency. Everything turned vibrant, the colors saturated even down here in the bowels of the chalet. Every sensation felt enhanced—the oxygen in his lungs, the hum of adrenaline hurtling through his veins, the creamy sheets caressing his bare skin.
The rush hit his arteries, a surge that rocketed him to his feet. The catheter in his arm couldn’t slow him. He seized the IV pole and dragged it beside him, one stubborn wheel giving off a squeak.
His finest bequeathment, an AB blood type, served him exquisitely. Having both key antigens and neither constraining antibody made him a universal recipient. Anyone could give to him. Few could receive from him. He was a taker. He hadn’t merely resigned himself to this fact; he embraced it as divine right.
Sure of foot, his back ramrod-straight and unaching, he threaded through the youthful bodies lying prone and unconscious on their gurneys. Through the dim light, he moved erect and proud, an ageless sovereign lording over his minions.
All was right in the Great Chain of Being.
He swore he could already feel the pyrotechnics exploding through him. His aging tissue rejuvenating. Tired muscles mending. New neural connections sprouting in his hippocampus. His heart, his brain, even his cartilage reviving. His memory fortifying. Liver cells generating. He felt swollen with vitality, with youth, with timelessness.
Even his sense of smell grew more keen. This was no trick of the mind. From across the basement lab, he picked up a trace of dewy perfume on the slender neck of David’s girl.
Kendall was an AB type, too, unlucky dove. She would receive from him tonight, and that would cost her. Each of the guests had to be replenished, and there was no use wasting valuable O neg from the freezer when she could take what had to be drawn out of René to make room for the new.
From time immemorial man had searched for the fountain of youth. From Herodotus’s recitations to Ponce de León’s hapless wanderings, it had cast a mythological shadow across the ages. Silver chalices and bubbling springs.
Who would have thought it had been right in front of everyone all along?
Someone just required the audacity to take it.
If you considered it, really considered it, this was a move befitting a Cassaroy. Rather than forging through enemy fire to claim some godforsaken battle-torn hill, René had fought his way through social mores and human limitations to stake his flag in the virgin terrain of an age-old fantasy.
Passing among his unsuspecting acolytes now, he brushed against dangling bags of blood, as bright and cheerful as Christmas decorations.
That was when he heard a groan behind him. He halted. Turned. There was movement in the bed where there was supposed to be none.
And then Joshua sat up.
The kid was not supposed to come to for another few hours. Dr. Franklin rarely got the dosing wrong, but the bigger the fellow, the more unpredictable the anesthesia. All that mass, it seemed, gave the boy the tolerance of a water buffalo.
It was awful when they woke up in the middle.
They got so confused.
It wasn’t just the whir of the processing machines, the hum of the medical refrigerators, the white-noise rush of the benchtop centrifuges, all of it amplified off the basement walls. Nor the smells, the sharp tang of rubbing alcohol, the nail-polish reek of iodine, the hospital-room whiff of PVC tubing and dried sweat. The sights weren’t what did it either—not the needles plunged into their flesh, the blood piping from their veins, their acquaintances laid out in neighboring beds, dead to the world. Not the scrape of the sanitized pillowcase at their nape. Not the taste, old pennies at the back of the tongue.
It was the vertiginous sense of dislocation.
They were no longer in the world as they knew it. No, this gave them a glimpse of The World As It Really Was.
Might is right. Eat or be eaten. Accrue resources or starve. Repeated again and again and again, because all ten thousand years of civilization had been built upon mankind’s desire to deny this fundamental truth.
René tried to protect them from reality. They were supposed to pass out full-bellied, drunk, and happy. Never know the difference. He was greedy, sure, but not inhumane.
No sense spooking the livestock on their way to the abattoir.
And yet now Joshua was certainly spooked.
He reared up from his gurney, tubes snaking around his bulging arms, IV poles crashing over.
René unhooked his own IV bag and dashed away, using Kendall’s gurney as a shield. He was too charged to feel fear, but a dark excitement gripped him. Tingling electrified his body—his gums, his arms, the skin of his lower back.
Joshua’s head pivoted, fixing on René. Even across the gurney, René registered the wounded rage and stripped-bare terror lurking behind the dilated pupils. It gave him a heady, almost sexual rush. He wondered if this is what his ancestors had felt charging through the fray, shrapnel grazing their cheeks.
Joshua lunged at René, sending the gurney skidding. Dead to the world, Kendall rolled to one side, smashed beneath Joshua’s weight. Scrambling toward them, Dr. Franklin tried to hit the kid with a syringe full of Versed, but with all the flailing he couldn’t get to the port. Joshua clawed across the unconscious girl, his churning legs propelling the gurney until René was backed to the wall, Joshua’s straining fingers inches from his face.
That was when Dex stepped in.
However big the boy was, he looked like a puppet in Dex’s hands. Dex lifted him in a choke hold. There was a crackling sound, and then Joshua poured limply from Dex’s arms onto the floor.
Silence reasserted itself in the basement.
Joshua lay still, one dead palm pressed to the concrete.
This was not a substantial problem. Come morning René would generate some excuse to cover for the boy’s absence. He’d peddled such excuses before. If the others showed bruising from the needles, he would instruct David to tell them that in their drunken state they’d played around with heroin one of the kitchen workers had brought. Not to worry—what happened at Chalet Savoir Faire stayed at Chalet Savoir Faire. And that’s what would happen. The best way to ensure silence was to bury the truth beneath shame.
From over by the door, David coughed out a note of disbelief, hugging himself around the waist, his arms trembling. Dr. Franklin leaned against a cabinet, flushed from the scare.
René, too, was breathing hard, though not from fear. He’d never felt more alive. He looked down at the IV bag compressed in his fist, now depleted. In all the excitement, he had rapid-bolused the final unit into his arm. All that fresh young blood bathing his stem cells, turning back the clock.
With a furrow of his shiny forehead, Dex looked past Joshua’s slumped body at René. He seemed unclear which mouth the present circumstances called for.
René pointed to Dex’s right hand.
Dex raised the smile, folded it across his mouth.
Yes, that looked appropriate.
It was, after all, a happy occasion.
23
Destroying Angel
When Manny and Nando came to get Evan for his walk, he took some extra time to layer his clothes, donning two shirts and two sweaters. They’d brought both breakfast and lunch on the room-service cart earlier, making Evan stand against the wall with his back turned until they exited. The new procedures were effective. They maintained their spread now as they guided him down the halls and stairs to the foyer, one shotgun aimed at his face, another at his kidneys.
Manny gestured at the front door, his gold caps sparkling. “You get your yard time now. Just like in the prison.”
Evan said, “Trade you two cartons of cigarettes for a shiv.”
&
nbsp; Manny looked at him, puzzled, then jerked his gun. “You go.”
The doorknob felt cold enough to stick to Evan’s hand. When he stepped onto the porch, the cold flew straight through the layers of clothes and tightened his skin. He stomped his boots, blew a breath that clouded and faded away, a ghost that couldn’t be bothered.
Over by the barn, David corralled three of the partyers into one of the G-Wagons. The kid with the gauge earrings must have either left last night or was already in the vehicle behind the tinted windows. The three kids in view looked wan and weak, no doubt atrophied from first-rate hangovers. One of the girls in particular moved creakily, clinging to David, her legs barely strong enough to push her into the back of the Mercedes. Her face was gray, her lips bloodless. She coughed weakly into a sleeve-covered fist. David helped her gingerly into the rear seat, closed the door, then paused for a moment with his back to the van, his head tilted up at the sky, his lips trembling.
He seemed upset. Conflicted.
He lowered his gaze, noticed Evan noticing him. But he didn’t look away, not even as he blinked back tears. Finally he walked around to the driver’s seat and drove off.
From the porch Evan watched the vehicle head up the gravel road, and then it was just him and the cold. From here on out, the math was simple. He had to mark the position of every one of René’s hired men. Then kill them.
The skinny guard in the tower leaned on the railing, eyeing Evan. Evan waved. The guard did not wave back. Across the way, three narcos were gathered at their post by the barn. Evan envied their heavy black coats. The scorched pot hung over the fireplace, and their heads were bowed as they shoveled food from bone-china plates. The Dobermans idled beside the men, pointed at him, rumbling.
Evan gestured at the forest inquisitively, and one of the narcos waved his fork in response: Be our guest.
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