The God Hunter

by Tim Lees

  I nodded.

  “What’s my name?”

  “Sir . . .”

  My voice was small.

  “You will stand up when approached. You will show respect at all times. You will stand up. Clear?”

  “Clear. Sir. Yes.”

  “If a security officer gives you a command, you will obey at once, without pause, hesitance, or query. Orders from security staff directly supersede all other orders or directions, including those from all other facility personnel. Orders of higher-­ranking officers supersede orders of lower-­ranking officers. Sergeants supersede privates, and so forth. Meaning I am at the top of this tree, and my word is the law. Now is that fully understood?”

  I glanced around. There was amusement on a number of faces—­all Security. They looked like ­people short of entertainment. Too bad I was filling in.

  “You will refrain from all intoxicants. If any person offers you intoxicants, you will immediately report to me or one of my staff, naming the individual in question. Do you agree to do this thing?”

  “Uh.”

  He repeated the line, at treble volume, so I said I did, sir, yes.

  “Do you sleep well?”

  “Not recently.”

  “You will endeavor to get eight hours of sleep a night.”

  I said I understood and looked forward to it. Shailer coughed. I added, “Sir.”

  “We are at war here, soldier. We are under siege.”

  “Sir . . .”

  “Do you have any information that may be of use to the facility or to any members of the security staff, either professionally or in a personal manner?” He rattled this off like a machine gun. “Are you prepared to divulge that information?”

  “I’ve said what I know. I don’t know what else I can do . . .”

  “They say you look like him.”

  Slower, more considered.

  “Yes. Sir.”

  “They say you’re not him.”

  “No.”

  “I don’t believe them.”

  “No . . . ?”

  “I don’t believe them. What don’t I believe?”

  Jesus Christ, I thought.

  “That . . . I’m not him. Which I’m not,” I added. But he scowled at me.

  “I don’t believe because I don’t trust anyone I have not personally and by myself handpicked. And I will tell you now, I will serve you notice: if you ever give me reason to believe you are in any way allied with hostile forces, or in opposition to the aims of this facility’s Security team, you will not live long enough to hear about it. Got that?”

  “Yeah. I think that’s pretty clear, yeah.”

  “What do you call me?”

  “Uh?”

  “What is my name, boy? My name?”

  “Captain Willis . . . ?”

  “My name,” he said, “is Sir. Do not forget.”

  It was a show; a little morale boost for the troops. This dawned on me after a while. I was a ringer for the monster. So he would face me down before them all. A small, symbolic victory. A little piece of home theater.

  I picked my lunch up off the floor.

  “Lunch,” said Willis as he walked away, “is on the house.”

  “Lunch,” I said, “is all over the house.”

  “What I mean, soldier—­is go get yourself another one! You hear?”

  Shailer crouched beside me, vaguely attentive to the mess. But he didn’t help clean it up, just leaned close and whispered in my ear.

  “See what I’m up against. You see?” He spoke too fast, too urgently. His spittle flecked my cheek. “Don’t let on. Smile, nod. Look pleased. Don’t let them see you know.” He pulled his lips back from his perfect, capped white teeth. “Smile,” he muttered through the grimace. “Come on, Chris. Do it for me, huh?”

  CHAPTER 48

  SHAILER’S STORY

  I fetched another lunch. We sat back at the table.

  I said, “Where’s Anna?”

  “Anna’s fine.”

  “I didn’t ask you how she is. I need to see her.”

  “She’s around. She’s gotten friendly with Security. They’re all alike, those guys—­cops, military. It doesn’t matter where they’re from. We don’t have to worry about Anna, Chris. There’s more important things. I don’t know where to start—­”

  His smile was stiff as cardboard, and the words just seemed to creep around it, like they belonged to someone else.

  He said, “They were bastards to me, Chris. You won’t believe. Just total bastards.” He glanced quickly right and left. “I mean—­Jesus, I’m deputy director, O&D. Deputy fucking director! And they spoke to me like I was—­I dunno. The office boy or something. Do this. Do that. ‘If you intend to keep your job.’ One of them actually said those words! It was—­it was humiliating. So, so humiliating.”

  “These are—­what? Your New York friends? The guys who turned up at the precinct house?”

  “They didn’t give me time to think!” His face was in an awful rictus. He looked like a bad ventriloquist. “You’ve got to get me out of here. For pity’s sake! We’ve all got to get out, before, before he gets here. Seven B. We’ve got to get out now.”

  “So?” I leaned back, watching. “Deputy director, like you said. Just ask nicely, eh? Please let us out. All right?”

  “Jeez. If it was that easy . . .”

  I was halfway through my omelet before he managed to say more.

  “They’re crazy here, Chris. All of them. They hide it, but it’s true.”

  “They don’t hide it that well,” I said.

  “Smile, Chris. You’re not smiling enough. Don’t look suspicious, huh?”

  “I’m smiling. I’m ecstatic. Go on.”

  “It’s—­well. It’s not generally known, but there were problems here. Not the containment fields, that’s pretty much the same tech as the flask, you know? That’s fine. But we had . . . secondary effects. We weren’t prepared.

  “Several staff suffered—­psychotic breakdowns, I guess you’d call them. Now, we’re talking very, very clever ­people here, OK? And some of them, well, you’d have to say they probably weren’t firing on all cylinders to start with. And you take some guys like that, you put them in a place like this, and, uh . . . I guess things go wrong.”

  “Hm. I guess.” I gestured at him with my fork. “The gods, right?”

  “It wasn’t what they did. It wasn’t like that. But we’d spent so much time, so much effort, just to keep them in their cells. We never thought about the closeness. The proximity. So many here, together. This has never happened, not in all of history. We’re the first to do it.” He shook his head. “We couldn’t have known.”

  “You could have guessed.”

  The twitch in his eye was back.

  “But we acted. I acted. Steps were taken. We cut down on the shift times. No one stayed even a minute longer than they had to. We paid motel bills. Travel. I saw the rosters. It was me, personally, I OK’d them, right? And the meds. Clozapine—­it’s an antipsychotic. I authorized it. I found out what was going on, and I took care of it. I tried. What else was I supposed to do?”

  I didn’t answer that.

  “You know that they’re alive, don’t you? Not like us, but . . . linked to us in some way. Part of us. I got here—­oh, day before yesterday, and already I can feel them, crawling through my head . . . I haven’t slept. I’m too scared. When you sleep, they say you dream of them, and that’s when they grow strong. They’re stronger all the time, Chris. We drain the power, but it’s still just going up and up. We can’t stop it. Ever since those ­people came, the shantytown . . . They’ve been gathering for weeks. I’ve seen reports. It’s like a feedback loop. They sing, they pray, whatever else they do. And down there,” he glanced towards the floor, “d
own there, they feel it. And they grow.”

  “Interesting.”

  “And Willis.” His voice was so hushed I could hardly hear. “He’s got us all on lockdown. Nobody goes in or out, which is a problem in itself, ’cause some of these guys, they’re getting . . . flaky. He thinks he’s got a plan. He—­Christ. He thinks he’s at the Alamo or something. I told him, I said, Seven B will hit us like a nuclear missile. I said that. And he just put his head back and—­he laughed. Sit tight, he said. Keep the perimeter—­”

  “You worked it out yourself,” I said. “He doesn’t always kill. Seven B.” I shrugged. “He didn’t kill me.”

  “There’s time. They’ve calculated the trajectory, the speed. He’s not a man, Chris. He’s not going to be slapped down by a few big guys in uniform. No way. And he’s mobile. We don’t know how to deal with that. We’ve never seen that. He’s going to tear this place apart to get to Seven, and anyone who’s standing in the way, anyone who tries to stop him—­”

  “It’s going to be bad,” I said.

  “I called it in. I phoned the office, I said, I don’t know what I’m doing here, I said. We’re going to die, I said. You need to pull us out. I told them. I—­”

  “Hey. Smile.”

  “Fuck you.” He put his hand over his face.

  “You phoned it in. So let’s assume they know what’s happening. What’s their advice?”

  “Advice? Jeez! Oh—­liaise between the different groups. Formulate a plan of action. They don’t know anything. They don’t know anything at all!”

  “I think they do.” I pushed my empty plate aside. “If things go well,” I said, “either you solve the problem, or the problem doesn’t happen. Either way, that’s good, right? While on the other hand . . .”

  He looked at me between his fingers.

  “On the other hand, if everything goes straight to hell, then it’s a perfect press release: Sad death of high-­ranking Registry official in brave attempt to avert disaster. You know? High rank’s important, by the way. It shows they took it seriously, so they sent an appropriate . . . now what’s the word? Ah yes. Sacrifice.”

  “They wouldn’t.”

  “You get it now, though, don’t you?” I half-­rose from my seat, staring him down. “You bloody ought to. ’Cause it’s what you did to me in Budapest, you little shit.”

  “Chris!”

  “You want to argue?”

  “It’s nothing like that! It’s not a bit the same!”

  “Smile,” I said. “Keep smiling.”

  “I had plans. So many plans. And, and—­plans for you, too, Chris. I knew you’d come out on top. And—­we’re almost there now. Almost! When I think how far we’ve come, what we’ve achieved—­” It took a moment, then suddenly, he did smile—­a real smile, shaky, even just a little sad, but genuine, nevertheless.

  “You think of all we’ve done.”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “If we can just get through the next few days. If we can just survive. If this place can survive. Imagine it—­the power of God, in every home, in every city in America. You think of that. What will it be like? Can you picture it? Can you? Honestly?”

  And his smile got wider and wider, and it stayed there on his face for far too long.

  CHAPTER 49

  THE DIRECTOR

  “Now,” said Anna, “here is problem. Perpetrator is experienced, has been restrained before. As officers on arms pull down, he takes big step—­” She demonstrated, arching her leg up in a high, unnatural stride. “This happens very quickly. He does not drop. Now perp is dragging officers. Perp is in control. What next?”

  “Kick his legs out.”

  There were three men with her, all in the regulation light brown shirts, all attentive to the little class that she was running. Or attentive to her, anyway. She barely came up to their shoulders, but she’d an air of confidence, a physicality I’d grown inured to being close to her these last few days. I saw it again now and stood back, watching.

  She turned on the ball of her foot and nodded to the man who’d spoken, a big Hispanic with an earpiece.

  “Possible. Yes. Good. Possible too, I fall on ass in process. No, in my view, smart move is always use a wall. Wall, furniture, even streetlamp—­any object. Fixed object. Can be floor, floor work is good, but if not floor—­anything that does not move.”

  “Yeah. Well, that’s good, that’s good.”

  “We train in this,” she explained. “I trained with Philadelphia PD. Good ­people.”

  “Gotta be good in Philly. Tough town.” This from a tubby man who looked like he could drop you just by bowling into you.

  The third, whose head was shaved, was keen to talk of his experiences. “We had this guy—­I won’t say who. Crazy guy, we couldn’t get him down. There’s four of us. Wound up moving with him. Holding in, close. Tight. Tried to bite us, but we didn’t back off.”

  “Tactically wrong, to back off. Always.”

  “Right. So we made this kind of moving cage around him, the four of us. Kept him there till we got a chance—­”

  It was a very technical discussion, and they were all four deep in it, working out the finer points. Then Shailer strolled into their midst and said, “Anna! Come on, girl!” as if he’d been calling to a dog.

  Her brows went down. She glared at him, only when she saw me standing in the doorway, her face changed. She brushed past him, ran towards me, and I swear, her face lit up, it truly did.

  “Chris! You are well! You are here! Are you hurt? Are you damaged anywhere? Chris!”

  She put her arms around me. It was a brief, comradely embrace, but worth the wait.

  Shailer coughed impatiently.

  “We don’t have very long,” he said.

  “You,” she told him, “you have no time at all. You understand?”

  “And, let’s see . . .” Dr. Thoms put his small, childlike hands together and smiled up at me. “You’ve an affinity with him? With Seven B?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Shailer.

  I said, “No” again, and Shailer improvised, spinning notions out of thin air, as was his gift and habit.

  “We don’t know the full extent of it, or how it works, but there’s a definite affinity between them. Isn’t there, Chris? Definite.”

  “Uh.”

  I looked at Anna, shrugged.

  “And not just physical,” said Shailer. “It probably goes right down, you know, right down to the brain pattern, the way of thinking—­the whole lot. Plus, and this is really interesting, Chris here is the only man to meet him and escape unharmed. Isn’t that right?”

  “He knocked me out.”

  “Yes. But he didn’t actually harm you, did he? That’s what I’m getting at. He didn’t harm you.”

  “There were hundreds of ­people must have seen him. I saw him at the zoo. He’s been walking round Budapest for years—­”

  “Chris, Chris.” Shailer touched my knee with an unwelcome familiarity. “There’s no need for this modesty. We’re interested in data here—­hard facts. This man before you—­well, I don’t want to say genius. But the project would still be on the drawing board if not for him.”

  Dr. Thoms nodded, clearly pleased by this. He was a small, bald man with glasses and a pointed chin; he wore a white lab coat, very crisp and clean, which, for a director’s post, struck me as an affectation. He’d a yellow notepad on the desk before him, and he scribbled on it intermittently throughout the conversation. There were stacks of documents piled very neatly all over the floor. But nothing personal; no photographs, no pictures of family, no plants, no ornaments of any kind.

  “If—­when he arrives—­Chris can talk to him. He can probably be reasoned with. We’ll maneuver him into position, then set up a containment field, or—­” />
  “Electric shock worked last time,” I said.

  “I’d rather,” Thoms said, “see this settled peacefully.”

  “Of course, of course,” said Shailer.

  “He is unique.”

  “He’s ambulatory. That’s . . . unusual,” I said.

  “He’s a new creature. A hybrid. Homo divinus, possibly.” He wrote on the pad in front of him. “Part man, part god. A long tradition there—­Hercules, Dionysus . . .” He smiled. “Jesus Christ.”

  “He isn’t Jesus,” I said.

  “The point is,” said Shailer, “he’s proved dangerous. He’s killed—­a dozen? More. And we expect he’ll kill again. He needs to be contained. By force, if need be. We have to be prepared. That’s our priority.”

  Dr Thoms pursued his own views. “He speaks English, though? He can be questioned?”

  “He seems to understand, yes.”

  “He can be reasoned with.”

  “No. No, he can’t.” I leaned forward, very close to Dr. Thoms. He had a faint smell, a mix of cheese and disinfectant. “What you call Seven B speaks English, and as far as I can tell, he has a high level of cognitive function. What he doesn’t have are sympathy and ethics. His values are entirely different. Different, all right? Different appetites. Different drives. Shailer’s right. We’ve got to contain him. Kill him if we have to. But stop him, trap him—­yes. You’ve got flasks?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. We need to work fast. He’ll be here in—­I don’t know. A day, maybe. Tomorrow. No later.”

  “Well,” said Thoms, and he smiled again. “A day. That’s good. That’s very good.”

  “It’s not good. It’s the worst news on the planet. But if we can hold him here, then . . .”

  “Oh, certainly. We must talk with this prodigy. Oh yes.”

  He smiled a long, slow smile.

  “We need to kill it,” I said. “Or whatever these things do instead of dying.”