The God Hunter

by Tim Lees

  There was silence. Silence, and Thoms’s attentive gaze, his charming smile. But behind his lenses, his eyes were cold and hard.

  “No,” he said, still smiling. “No—­not kill, I don’t think. Not something this important.”

  Anna had been leaning on the door frame, listening, and now she said, “I have question. Dr. Thoms? Picture on house. Lincoln, yes? President Lincoln?”

  Thoms gave a brief nod of acknowledgement.

  “Reason for this? I am only curious, you understand. Lincoln is, I think, from Illinois, not here, yes?”

  His hands came together, his eyes swept over her, and his smile grew sweeter still.

  “Lincoln freed the slaves,” he said at last.

  “Ah yes?”

  “The powers we have here,” and he spoke very clearly now, as if he wanted to be sure she understood, “will set us all free.”

  “Or kill us first,” I said.

  Thoms didn’t argue. But then, I realized, Thoms didn’t argue over anything, with anyone. Instead, I ran up smack into that pleasant little smile, the smug, self-­satisfied, intoxicated grimace of a would-­be saint.

  Anna had seen where we were going here, and seen it before I did. Nowhere. The only place we’d ever go with Thoms. So I took my lead from her; I cooled my temper and resigned myself.

  “I think,” I said, “we’ve taken up enough of your most valuable time, Dr. Thoms. Thank you so much for seeing us.”

  I stood. I smiled politely. He made soothing little noises in his throat, invited us to drop back any time. I took a sideways glance down at his notebook. I’d assumed it was a record of our conversation, but it wasn’t. It was the same few words, over and over, covering the whole page. It took a moment till I worked out I was looking at a scientific classification.

  Homo divinus Thoms, it said. Homo divinus Thoms. Homo divinus Thoms. Homo divinus Thoms. Homo divinus Thoms . . .

  I glanced back as I left the office. Thoms had settled in his chair, the smile still on his face. His eyes had drifted up inside his head somewhere, only the whites still showing.

  “See the problem? See it now?”

  Shailer’s voice was low and urgent.

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “Some dickhead who’s as stupid and as egotistical as you. I see it, all right.”

  “Chris!”

  I pushed past him, strode ahead. I’d no idea where I was going. Anna said, “I think we must leave now. I think we must be gone.”

  “Too right.”

  Ten yards on, there was a door. EMERGENCY ONLY, in big red letters. Well, this was an emergency. I’d vouch for that. I shoved the bar. The door stuck, juddered, finally scraped open.

  A voice said, “Sorry, bro.”

  I had a glimpse of green fields, trees, the compound fences far beyond; and much, much closer, a large man in a pale brown uniform, his hand just inches from a leather holster of impressive size.

  I apologized most humbly, shut the door, and shrank back in the gloom.

  “You see?” said Shailer. “See? See? See?”

  CHAPTER 50

  THE TELEPATHIC ENGINEERS

  “Section Four.”

  “Twelve seventeen.”

  “Section Five.”

  “Ten forty-­three.”

  “Section Six?”

  “Two thirty-­seven.”

  Call and response, checking the gauges on the monitors. Except they weren’t checking the gauges on the monitors. The younger man lay sprawled, his feet up on a chair, a cap pulled down over his face. The older man, calling the numbers, leaned against the wall, his eyes tight shut.

  Shailer hurried us along, out into the corridor. We were underground here—­concrete walls, doors every few yards, and yellow crash rails set at knee height in six-­ and twelve-­foot sections. There were sounds, constant but obscure—­clanks and creaks, the whirr of engines, the sound of water flowing—­somewhere overhead.

  “They do it all the time,” he whispered to me. “It’s a game. They think the . . . well. The presences increase their psychic powers.”

  “Do they?”

  “There’s no clear evidence. Not yet. But if it proved to be a side effect, it would be very . . . advantageous.”

  “And radiation,” Anna said. “It makes you fly like bird, like plane. Like Superman.”

  “You really just have no idea how important all this is, do you?”

  She tipped her head back, mockingly. “Like bird, like plane!”

  “Christ! Do you speak English, even? Are you completely blind to all the options that would give us? Not just in business, but in law enforcement, international relations, military—­”

  “Man of Steel!”

  I said, “Look. It doesn’t really matter if it gives you magic powers or not, does it? Because according to you, this whole place is due to go sky-­high, and us along with it. So whether anybody actually turns a profit is a bit fucking irrelevant, you know?”

  “It’s my job . . . to take a long-­term view.” He gestured at me, thrust his hand towards the ceiling, tugged at his earlobe. He winked. He frowned. He mouthed words, silently, a great, slow-­motion mime of someone chewing at a wad of gum.

  “You think we’re being listened to?” I said.

  He flapped a hand for quiet.

  “Bugged,” he whispered. “Down here specially. TV, too. See the cameras?”

  He pointed. Little beads, set in the corners of the ceiling, one here, one there. A clanging in the pipes alarmed him all at once; he glared at them suspiciously.

  “Is problem?” Anna said.

  He frowned, as if this were a hard question to answer; then suddenly dismissed it.

  “Water—­from the river. It’s used for cooling. The containment fields—­the machinery—­they generate a lot of heat.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m sweating cobs, myself.”

  Anna said, “Show us exit door. We will be gone.”

  “That’s what I’m telling you. You can’t get out. Don’t think I haven’t tried! It’s a lockdown. You’ve seen it—­they’re all guarded. They’ve gotten orders. Someone’s gotten orders. I don’t know. There’s nobody in charge here anymore. There’s nobody to talk to, nobody who’ll listen and can get things done. It’s a nightmare here . . .”

  “I want to see them.”

  “Who?”

  “The gods. Seven, in particular. We’re old friends.”

  Now Anna frowned at me. “We need to leave.”

  “Take us there,” I said.

  “Later. Later, perhaps. I’ll ask . . .”

  “You yourself,” said Anna. “You have seen them, yes?”

  “Not quite, though I’ve been close enough. You can feel them, long before you actually get down there. When you’re close . . .”

  “They do not let you see them.”

  “I’ve only been here for a ­couple of days. They have—­they’re kind of paranoid about things, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. They’re—­you know.” He tapped his head.

  She said again, “Fact, then. They do not let you see them.”

  “Not true.”

  “Truly true! They do not let you see your own project. Mister Deputy Director. You are not allowed.” She leaned her hip against the wall and sniffed. “Or prove. Take us there.”

  “It’s a top-­secret facility,” he said. “I can’t just—­”

  “She has a point,” I said.

  “I can do it, but it might take time. To get the paperwork all sorted. The permissions. I need to win their trust. I can’t—­”

  “Time,” she said. “Time we do not have.” She spoke jauntily, gleefully. “Time, we are all out of, yes?”

  “Will you fucking shut up? You don’t understand this, do you? You think you do, and you hav
e no idea. The pair of you. You don’t understand me. That’s the first thing. I had my whole career planned out. I’m the youngest Registry officer ever to hold a deputy post. Ever. And that means—­that means years ahead of me. I was going to change the world. Start the new Industrial Revolution. Go into politics. Found a charity. All kinds of things. And now—­”

  “And now,” said Anna, “you are going to die.”

  Her face was sharp, her nose an arrowhead; her eyes as blue as steel.

  “Don’t say that,” Shailer said. “Don’t say that.”

  So she said it: twice, three, four times.

  She seemed to be enjoying herself, as best she could.

  CHAPTER 51

  TRAPS

  I had a plan. Not a good one, but a plan; a chance to do something instead of sitting about, waiting for the end. Whether it would work, I had my doubts, but it made me feel a little better in the here and now, at any rate.

  I found three flasks in the storeroom. Small; an old design, but functional. Those, and the one that I’d brought with me, the one from Seddon. So I started asking around to find out who could use them.

  That was not so good.

  There were ­people who knew how to empty them. ­People who could tell you lots about containment fields—­far more than I could—­and maintain them, day to day, hour to hour . . . Static fields. That’s all. There was no one here who’d ever been involved in capture. They didn’t need it. Christ—­the way that Shailer talked, soon there’d be nobody who could do it, anyway.

  So I started looking elsewhere.

  I bypassed Thoms. That went without saying. I went to Willis, called him “sir” and “Captain,” used phrases like “protective measures,” “hostile acts,” and “preempt.” I once referred to the whole plan as an “operation.” But at least he knew where I was going with it. He knew, and, unlike Thoms, he actually approved.

  I told him Seven B would almost certainly seek access to the House—­that’s what they called it: the God House. Like a paddock in a zoo. I’d hoped he’d let me see the place, only he didn’t. The entrances were all down on the lower levels, and safely inaccessible. In his view, anyway.

  “Locked,” he told me. “Guarded.”

  “Only till it’s not,” I said.

  Willis said, “We stop him out here. We stop him ’fore he even gets himself inside. We clear?”

  “Won’t happen.”

  “Oh,” he drew himself up. “It’ll happen.”

  “And if it doesn’t . . . ?”

  Capture is an art. It’s instinct, more than anything; it’s things you can’t be taught, that can’t be written down, things that, if you’re lucky and you’ve got the knack, you pick up over time, and from experience.

  What I was planning now would bypass all of that. No nuances. No subtlety. No chance to get the angles right. Even with somebody to operate them, it was still a big, big risk.

  Willis caught on fast. He said to make it “like a tiger trap,” so the victim would just blunder in without suspicion. I doubted Seven B did anything without suspicion, but I saw the sense of it. He loaned me a ­couple of guys to help, and probably to stop me running off, as well. I laid the first flask at the front door. Two at other entrances. We dug up turf. We raised paving stones and laid the wires beneath. It was a shoddy job, without precision, without artistry. Like trying to mend a watch while wearing gardening gloves.

  It was the activation really worried me. Maybe, given time, I could have rigged them up to motion sensors, but as it was, it would all be down to human intervention. Someone standing there, working the switches. And I didn’t know how that would go.

  I tried the Registry folk, first of all. They’d done training, or they should have, if only for a few weeks . . . Why were they all so ignorant? So stupid? More than that, why didn’t they care?

  So I left them. I showed Willis the control console. I showed a handful of his men.

  “You get the subject in the field. Between the cables. You switch on here. And then . . .” I looked at the gauges, dead now, and remembered all the times I’d had to make adjustments, fine-­tune this or that, compensate for one thing or another.

  Remembered all my years out in the field.

  “You might get lucky,” I said.

  Only with the final flask, the one that Seddon gave me, did I get to go down, into the belly of the beast, close to the House itself.

  It was hot down there. The walls were sweating. Everything was gray and yellow, from the breezeblocks to the dented yellow crash barriers and bolsters at the fire doors. I ran the cables vertically this time, around a door frame, taping them in place. The doors were held back by magnetic clips, hiding the wires on the walls. On the ceiling, we taped over them. We lifted tiles from the floor, gouged out the cement, ran the cables through the grooves, then glued the tiles back over them with some stinking paste out of a tub. An awful, ad hoc job. No subtlety, no art. You’d see it if you knew that it was there. Or you’d see something. If you’d time. If you stopped and looked around. Water gurgled in the pipes. There was a smell—­a harsh, electric smell, like when you switch on an old fan you haven’t used all winter and the dust that’s settled in the motor starts to burn.

  Willis watched me constantly, head on one side. Every time I looked up, there he was, his rangy body propped against the wall, hip jutting, holster on display.

  “You see something you like?” I said. “Sir?”

  “Just thinking.”

  “Someone has to.”

  “This thing, huh? Looks like you. Talks like you. I’m wondering how it’s gonna feel to put a bullet in you.” He let that hang a moment. Then said, “You, or—­yeah. Like I said. Some fella looks like you.”

  He held his fingers up, like a kid playing at cowboys, closed one eye, went, “Pow.”

  “Yeah, well. Make sure you know the difference, will you?”

  “Hey. Don’t worry, man. Relax. I’m going for the kill shot. I get it wrong, you’ll never even know what happened.”

  “Great . . .”

  The work lifted my mood. Whatever doubts I had about the quality, at least it kept me busy, and I felt I’d done something—­a bit to shift the odds and push the balance in our favor.

  After which, as these things do, the whole scenario went straight to hell.

  It started about noon, or soon after. A ­couple of the guards reported some activity beyond the wire—­not just the usual hymn singing and sermonizing. “Sounds like a riot,” one of them said. Security staff were instantly dispatched to take a turn around the inner fence, but they came back none the wiser; Pilgrim City lay out of sight on the far side of the ridge, and whatever sounds they’d heard were silent now.

  Anna chewed a peanut butter sandwich, jaws moving mechanically, eating because she had to eat, no more.

  “Religious ­people,” she opined. “They fall out. I know this word. This word is ‘schism,’ yes? ‘Schism.’ ”

  She’d pronounced it “shism.” I corrected her.

  Then someone shouted, and we all went to the windows.

  There were figures on the far side of the wire. They’d come down from the rise. Others hung back in the trees. It was hard to work out what was happening. My first thought—­that they were trying to force an entry—­was soon dispelled. They ran about, this way and that, erratic, clumsy—­this was panic. You could see it in their movements, their frantic gestures. They were scared. A ­couple tried to climb the wire, fell back, and after that, they fled into the trees, out of the open ground.

  The gym was hubbub. ­People crowded at the windows, even when the incident was over.

  Willis drew his gun.

  ­“People!” His voice cut through the din. He held the gun up like a flag. It was an oddly compelling item. “We stay. We maintain lines. And anyone who tries to leave the com
pound, I will personally shoot! Now is that clear?”

  Anna whispered to me, “It is Seven B. He is here.”

  “No—­no.” Shailer frowned, craning for a view. “Not yet,” he said.

  “It’s him,” I said.

  “Too early.” Shailer nodded to himself, as if tapping some special knowledge only he could grasp. “At his previous rate of passage—­this is calculated—­he’ll reach us in the morning. By then, he’ll be exhausted, so there’ll be more delay. He’s burning up his power too fast. This is something else—­like Anna said, they’ve had a quarrel, I don’t know. But it’s not him. Not yet.”

  Anna tipped her head back.

  “You,” she said, “are going to die.”

  “Shut up.”

  “It is decided. You are going to die. Here. Soon. Yes?”

  She had a nasty little grin upon her face.

  I said, “Where are your connections, anyway?”

  He didn’t answer me.

  I told him, “Phone your friends. Just call them, have them get you out of here. Us, too. Simple, right?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “So you keep saying.”

  “You ­people—­” He squirmed.

  Anna said, “Yes. High-­rank, executive-­style friends. Where are they? Have them send helicopter, private jet, whisk us all away and safe. Why do I not see them here, rush to rescue?”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “She has a point,” I said.

  “Don’t you get this?” His face was red under the salon tan. “It’s my fucking friends who fucking put me here! I did—­I did everything for them. Everything they asked. And then, the first time anything goes wrong—­”

  “They need a scapegoat. Welcome to the club, eh?”

  But he was off; he could no longer contain himself. It was the injustice of it all that seemed to overwhelm him, the sheer unfairness and maltreatment he had undergone. His history, as he saw it, was one of huge endeavor, slavish toadying and ser­vice to the company—­and in return for what? A string of promises that weren’t fulfilled. I reminded him that deputy director, O&D, was no small post, especially at his age. But even that seemed to have lost its savor, of a sudden.