by Tim Kring
“I—I didn’t know.”
BC wanted to hit her then, to wipe the look of pity off her face, but he wanted to hit himself even more. Wanted to turn and run from the room with his clothes clutched to his chest like a spurned lover. But it wasn’t Naz who had rejected him. It was he who had rejected Naz. At any rate, his body had. His body, which never failed him in any other situation—be it boxing or gathering evidence at a crime scene or holding up a suit of clothes and making them look like a man—this body had rejected Naz’s flesh like a finicky cat turning up its nose at a saucer of cream. Before he could do anything, though, Naz turned around. Oh, she was a consummate professional. She could make the bones of her skull and shoulders seem as soft and alluring as her cheeks, her lips, her breasts. But even BC knew it was all just for show now.
“If you would help me with my zipper, Mr. Gamin.”
It could have been the zipper on a body bag for all the tenderness BC showed. The violet fabric parted, revealing the white silk desert of her slip. Naz turned, steadied herself with one hand on his implacable shoulder, and stepped out of the dress, which BC held by both collar and hem, as though it were a flag that couldn’t touch the ground.
She was clothed only in her slip and stockings now. BC held the dress in his arms for a moment more, then, without looking, he tossed it over the camera.
In a flash Naz was on him.
“I’m going to press the trouble button.” The coldness of her hiss shocked him, but it also brought him back to his senses. “They’re supposed to send up both men. Chul-moo, the majordomo, and Garrison, who works—”
“The surveillance booth,” BC finished for her. “And the third man?”
“I didn’t know there was a third man.”
BC scanned the room, then, still in his skivvies, headed toward the bed.
“What are you—”
A faint crack cut Naz off as BC wrested the ball off the top of one of the bedposts. He tossed it to Naz, then wrenched off a second for himself. It was about the size of a croquet ball and made of solid walnut, but using it would mean getting close to Chul-moo’s sinewy arms, not to mention Garrison’s gun. That left the mysterious third man, if he showed himself. And Song, of course.
“I don’t know if I can hit a woman,” BC said to Naz.
“Leave her to me,” Naz said. Her knuckles were so white around the ball that BC was surprised it didn’t shatter in her grasp.
Childress, TX
November 14, 1963
The arrayed faces in the filling station stared at Chandler with a combination of fear and revulsion. He stared back, unsure of what to do. He glanced at his car. It was farther away than he’d realized. Somehow he thought running would only make things worse.
“M-mister,” Emily said. “Did you do that?” She pointed to the empty air over the intersection.
Without thinking, Chandler changed his face. It was an instinct. He didn’t know where it came from. But in the fraction of a second that it took him to turn back to Emily, a stranger’s features floated up from the depths of his mind and covered his own. He couldn’t see it himself, of course. But he could see it in the eyes of everyone looking at him: the sharp chin, the tiny smirk, the eyes, amused and scared at the same time.
Melchior’s friend from the orphanage. Caspar.
Chandler pushed the image into the minds of everyone in front of him in the hope that it would erase his own face from their memories. He saw them wince, and thought he could probably do more damage if he wanted to, but he had no desire to hurt them. Leave! he told them, pushing the word into their minds as hard as he could. Go away!
Instead of leaving, Jared Steinke got out of his old Dodge pickup and opened the handmade toolbox straddling the bed. Chandler saw what Jared was going for even before he pulled it out: a double-barreled shotgun, fully loaded. Jared had been planning on getting a head start on pheasant season, which officially opened Thanksgiving Day.
“Jared,” his mother screamed from the passenger seat—he’d been taking her to the hospital in Wichita Falls to get her diabetes checked—“Jared, get back in this car right now!”
Joe Gonzalez, seeing the shotgun in Steinke’s hands, turned and trotted toward the filling station office. It might’ve looked like he was running for cover, but the pistol beneath the cash register burned brightly in his mind.
Jared Steinke raised the shotgun to his shoulder.
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want—”
He was squeezing the trigger when the ravens swooped down on him and he jerked the rifle up just as it fired. The glass of the Phillips sign exploded in a shower of sparks.
Chandler hadn’t seen the new Hitchcock movie, but Emily had, and it was her mind that gave him the ravens. He made just a pair at first, but then he added a dozen, two dozen more. A cloud of birds spiraled down on Jared Steinke like an avian tornado and Jared stumbled backward but refused to drop the shotgun. The pain as the ravens’ daggerlike beaks and razor-sharp talons slashed his skin felt so real that Chandler was surprised Jared wasn’t actually bleeding.
Now Joe Gonzalez was running back out of the office, pistol in hand. He fired at the ravens attacking Jared Steinke, who was standing right next to the number three pump. On the third shot he nicked the hose and dark gas began spewing over the concrete.
“Mae,” Emily said to her sister, “if you want your baby to live to be baptized, you best drive now.”
Jared Steinke, as frightened by Joe Gonzalez’s shots as he was by the ravens, began firing wildly. The first shot caught Dan Karnovsky full in the chest as he was getting out of his Buick. The second shot blew apart the number one pump, and more gas began spewing onto the concrete. Already an area the size of a backyard swimming pool had been transformed into a black mirror, reflecting Joe and Jared and Jared’s mother ducking out the driver’s side door of Jared’s truck and scampering across the glassy surface of the gasoline like Jesus walking on the water. Chandler saw none of this. He was concentrating on the ravens, trying to drive the crowd away. His head ached with the effort, and he could feel the sweat running down his spine.
There was a cough and a backfire as the engine of Mae Watson’s Chrysler caught. Gasoline sprayed from beneath her tires as she sped toward the filling station’s exit.
“Go, sis!” Emily hissed at her sister. She had seen The Birds seventeen times. She knew how this scene ended. “Go, go, go!”
Chandler felt her panic, pushed it into everyone’s mind even as he felt his own mind wavering. It was too much. Energy was draining from him like the gas pouring from the pumps—not just the power to conjure and hold his hallucinations, but the simple strength to stand. The ravens were flickering in and out like a rolling picture on an old TV, and he knew he couldn’t keep them going for much longer. He could feel the chemicals burning up in his body like a V8 with the pedal pushed to the floor. It was a matter of seconds, not minutes, before he ran out of gas, and who knew how long after that he’d be able to stay conscious.
Janet Steinke was halfway across the parking lot when Mae Watson’s Chrysler, still spitting up a fine mist of gasoline, passed underneath the shattered Phillips sign, which was shooting out the occasional spark like a dud firecracker. A moment later the air turned orange as the mist ignited. In another moment the gas on the concrete caught, and the pool was transformed into a lake of fire.
Joe Gonzalez was just out of reach of the flames, and he turned and ran for the shelter of the office. The Steinkes weren’t so lucky. Mother and son caught fire almost instantly. Janet Steinke tripped and fell and lost consciousness, thus saved the horror of feeling the flesh burned off her bones like the charred husks of barbecued corn, but Jared was too hopped up on adrenaline to pass out. The flames engulfed his gasoline-saturated clothing, and in seconds he’d been transformed into the living manifestation of the image that Chandler had placed in the sky less than a minute before. Only then did Jared start to run.
He ran straight for Chan
dler, the shotgun still in his hands. When he was halfway across the burning gas the last two bullets in his gun exploded, but by then all the nerves in his skin were dead and he didn’t feel it. His lips were gone, his nose, his eyelids. His eyes had started to melt, so he couldn’t see anything. Not with his eyes. But in his mind—in what was left of it—the image of Satan’s demon burned brighter than the flames engulfing his body, and he ran straight for it.
Chandler stood there and watched him come. All he’d wanted to do was test his power, and now—now two people were dead, and a third about to join them. And him, too—he was going to die if the flaming form of Jared Steinke managed to reach him. But all he could do was stand there and watch death hurtle toward him just as BC had.
BC? Who was BC?
He was saved by the explosion. The flames seeped into the underground tanks, and a fireball blew the pumps and the four cars and the canopy that covered them fifty feet into the air. The shock wave picked up Jared Steinke’s body and threw him over Chandler like the angel of death he so resembled, and knocked Chandler ten feet back on his ass. The column of fire shot more than a hundred feet in the air, looking for all the world like a miniature atomic explosion. Red flames and black smoke etched concentric rings in the colorless Plains sky.
For a long time Chandler lay there, unsure if he was dead. The only minds he was able to feel were Joe Gonzalez’s, running more or less due east away from the station, and Wally O’Shea’s, the driver of the Ford that’d crashed into the pasture, who was hightailing it in the opposite direction.
He staggered to his feet. His head was throbbing and his body hurt almost as much. He felt like he’d just tried to stop the entire offensive line of the Yale Bulldogs, which wasn’t a particularly good football team (neither was Harvard’s when you got right down to it), but still. He was aching. He set off slowly down the road toward his car, spots dancing in front of his eyes as he struggled to keep them open. So much for the caffeine pills. He was so tired it was painful, but it was a bit of a blessing, too. Otherwise he’d have had to contemplate what he’d done.
He’d killed three people.
Not directly, maybe. But if he hadn’t been experimenting with his newfound abilities, there was no doubt they’d still be alive.
All his life he’d run in the opposite direction from his uncle’s world, his uncle’s wars, because he didn’t want anyone’s blood on his hands, and now three people were dead because of him. He was a soldier, willing or not, of the United States of America, which happened to be the enemy as well. His general was named Melchior, and so was his adversary. And Chandler was going to find him and kill him and rescue Naz, and then—
And then he was going to kill himself, and save the world—save himself—from whatever it was he’d become.
Washington, DC
November 14, 1963
A knock, a rattled doorknob. The sound of a bolt thumping into its housing. The door opened halfway, and Chul-moo bounded into the room.
“Miss Nancy? Where—”
The newel ball smashing into the side of Chul-moo’s head made a muffled crack like a tree branch breaking inside a thick shroud of ice. Even as the boy crumpled to the ground, the door smashed the rest of the way open. Naz, who’d been standing behind it, was sent flying. Her hand cracked against the wall and the ball fell from her fingers and disappeared beneath the bed. Garrison stepped over Chul-moo’s form, his revolver already drawn, then stopped when he saw who he faced.
“Nancy?”
His voice was confused, but then a light went on in his eyes. He whirled, just in time for BC to smash his own newel ball into Garrison’s forehead. The guard seemed to freeze in place, his fingers still holding his gun, until BC whaled him a second time, and he fell on top of Chul-moo.
BC dropped the ball, was reaching for Garrison’s weapon when a voice came from the hallway.
“Back away from the gun.”
He looked up. Song stood just outside the door, pistol in hand and aimed at his head. She advanced as he retreated, retrieved Garrison’s weapon and tucked it into the waistline of her skirt like a demurely dressed Annie Oakley. Before she could do anything else, though, Naz spoke.
“You bitch.”
Loathing dripped from her voice like venom. BC could feel the hatred roiling off her in palpable waves. Song actually shuddered, as if she’d been struck.
“Nancy?” Song turned halfway, trying to look at Naz without losing sight of BC. “I don’t understand. You volunteered. You—you insisted.”
BC couldn’t figure out what was happening. A despair as great as any he’d ever felt had gripped his brain and body. It was like his father’s death and mother’s death and his demotion from Behavioral Profiling to COINTELPRO had all been mixed with liquid nitrogen and poured into his veins, freezing him in place. If he’d had a knife in his hand, he would have stabbed himself, just to end the suffering. Just like—
Just like Eddie Logan.
He stared at Naz. Her hands were balled into fists, and she took tiny steps toward Song, heedless of the madam’s gun, which was trained directly, if unsteadily, in her direction. Despite the whiteness of her slip, she seemed like a demon from hell. Her hair had come loose and radiated out from her head in inky waves, and her eyes were two dark coals burning into Song’s body.
BC turned to the madam. Whatever he was feeling, it was obvious she was feeling something a hundred times worse. Her normally taut body had gone slack and the gun dangled from her twitching fingers. She pressed her left hand against her temple.
“Stop it,” she begged. “Stop it, please, stop it!”
In the depths of his own blackness, BC recognized what he was feeling as the same terror that had gripped him at Millbrook. He’d thought the fear had come from the disorienting hallucination radiating from Chandler’s brain, but now he realized the feelings, if not the images, had been coming from Naz—
—who was trembling, he saw, nearly as much as Song. Sweat beaded her face, and she grabbed a chair back for support. Whatever she was doing, however she was doing it, it was costing her dearly. BC knew he had to act.
“Here!” he yelled, staggering to his feet. He needed to draw Song’s aim. She jerked in his direction, squinting in an effort to concentrate, but BC was faster. He knocked her wrist to the side as she squeezed the trigger and a hole appeared in the floor.
BC fixed Song in the eye. “I apologize, ma’am,” he said, then decked her with an elbow to the—
But Song wasn’t there. In the half second it had taken BC to move, she’d recovered, ducked, and now he felt her heel in the small of his back. He went reeling forward and sprawled on his stomach. He rolled over to see Song bringing the gun up to aim.
“No!”
BC and Song whirled in Naz’s direction, just in time to see Naz’s arm flash. The wooden newel ball was a blur in the air until it slammed into Song’s temple and she fell to the floor.
Sounds of commotion were coming from the rest of the house, but Naz’s screams were louder, as she fell on Song and began beating her with her fists.
“If he’s dead, I’ll come back for you! I’ll make you suffer in ways you can’t even imagine!”
“Miss Haverman!” BC pushed through the waves of fury rolling off her to grab one of her wrists. “We need to go.”
Naz looked up wildly, her teeth bared in a snarl, and BC fell backward as if he’d been struck. Then Naz’s eyes cleared and her face softened.
“Agent Querrey?” She seemed surprised to see him in the room, in his underwear. Especially that underwear.
BC shook his head. “It’s just Mr. Querrey now.”
Naz shook her head dazedly. “I’ll get your pants.”
They dressed quickly. BC checked the hall for the third guard, but all he saw was an open door to one of the bedrooms. A half-naked man peeked out, saw the gun BC had taken from Song, and ducked back inside. BC motioned to Naz, and they went for the stairs.
He heard Naz’s
“Oh!” just before a blow caught him squarely between the shoulders. He slammed against the spindly banister, which broke beneath the impact, and he fell half a floor to the stair treads and rolled the rest of the way down. He had the presence of mind to hold on to his pistol, which turned out to be a mistake—he squeezed so tightly that it went off and a bullet whizzed by his ear. He dropped the gun just as he smashed into a pedestal table at the bottom of the stairs. An enormous vase flew into the air, narrowly missing BC’s head before smashing into the floor.
His attacker was on him before he’d stopped moving. Like Chul-moo, he was Asian, but full grown: tall, muscular, and very, very fast. He seemed to fly down the stairs, grabbing a pair of broken banister railings as he went and brandishing them like swords.
BC felt a momentary surge of relief—at least the man didn’t have a gun. Then the guard began hitting him with the railings—in the legs, the torso, the arms, each blow stinging as sharply as a whiplash. The guard caught him with a blow to the side of the head and then a foot slammed into BC’s ribs, sending him flying back over the table.
The guard leapt after him, but slipped on the pieces of broken vase all over the floor. It was the closest thing to a break BC had caught. He grabbed the fallen table by its central leg and held it in front of him like a shield. It vibrated beneath the guard’s blows as BC attempted to shoo him back like a matador facing down a bull.