Nexus

by Ryan W. Aslesen

  Even knives could present a problem while traveling. He already wore his Boker in an ankle sheath. His Ka-Bar might be overkill on this mission, yet he found himself packing it anyway. Might come in handy. I can wear it at the small of my back under a sport jacket if need be.

  As in Florida, non-lethal weapons could prove crucial to success, as gunplay tended to be frowned upon in the civilian world, sure to bring down the law on them in a hurry. He found a can of pepper spray and a stun gun that was, alas, not as powerful as the baton he’d lost in Florida, but it might do in a pinch. He had wanted to find a Taser, preferably an X26, but neither of the two gun shops he hit had them in stock. He made a mental note to acquire one whenever he got back home. He also packed the same low-vis plate carrier he’d worn to Swift’s house and planned on living in it for the next few days.

  What am I missing? He paused and thought for a moment. Comm gear. He found the earpiece radio he’d purchased a while back for working in the civilian world. Though it was a few years old now, he figured it would synch to whatever frequency Leet normally used. If not, I hope she has a spare I can borrow.

  His eyes lit on the handheld, waterproof GPS unit he’d never returned to the CIA after his mission to North Korea. He packed it as a fail-safe in case they got lost in the middle of nowhere.

  He decided to bring $25,000 for miscellaneous expenses, drawn from Swift’s safe. Ben could provide no upfront funds for expenses since the mission was off the FBI’s books for the moment, but he’d promised to reimburse Max when Farber was delivered. Leet, being a special agent, would have her own expense account. Between them, he didn’t envision running out of funds.

  He looked over the remaining items to ensure he hadn’t forgotten anything. “That should about do it.” He sealed the backpack and stepped out of the locker.

  Max took one last glimpse at what he was leaving behind as he pulled down the door: MG34, antique flintlock pistol, nearly all of his personal weapons and field gear, and $750,000 in cash. This storage facility advertised as the most secure in the DC metro area; the place even had armed security. He didn’t sweat having his possessions stolen, but he did wonder what would happen if he never returned. He’d harbored such ominous forebodings at the beginning of missions since his days in the corps as a married man, when his death would have devastated his family. That, at least, he no longer worried about, his only benefit as a widower, yet thoughts of death still haunted him every time he headed off to work.

  You won’t be missed. Some collector cleans up, I suppose. He thought of the TV show where abandoned storage lockers were auctioned to the highest bidder. For an investment of a few thousand dollars, some lucky schnook might retire in style to the high life.

  It won’t come to that, he assured himself as he departed. It’s not time. I have too much left to do. These thoughts awakened others, eventually conjuring one of the most unreliable words in the English language: destiny. I’ll have their names and, after that, their heads. He wouldn’t let a few stooges trying to steal a computer program stand in his way. For the love he still bore his family, he would fulfill his destiny.

  My final mission. And after their heads roll, then I can die.

  CHAPTER 6

  If hangovers could truly be compared to dog bites, then Max had merely been nipped by a chihuahua. He considered himself lucky. If he’d kept up with Ben, he would have been mauled by a pit bull. As it stood, his bite would require nothing more than a double Maker’s Mark, which he poured over a couple of rocks at the bar in the rear of the private jet’s cabin. He required no stewardess when flying alone; such pretensions were for people with bottomless pockets and towering egos. Merely avoiding commercial air travel, with its seat-kicking children and lengthy security lines, was good enough for him. He also enjoyed the added benefit of privacy.

  He returned to his seat, a throne of leather, chrome, and teakwood, and settled down to sip his whisky, listening to the muted whine of jet engines laboring out in the freezing atmosphere. In addition to taming the dog, he hoped the bourbon might lull him to sleep. He had almost six hours to kill before arrival in San Francisco, and though he didn’t feel the slightest bit tired, he had to consider the three-hour jetlag. He needed to be completely alert from the moment he touched down. The prescription sleeping pills in his pack were not an option at the moment, too strong for a nap of only a few hours, their sole purpose to knock him senseless so that he might sleep an entire night free from PTSD dreams. Hopefully the whisky would suffice to help the dead stay dead and the past stay past.

  He faced an empty leather chair as wide and luxurious as his own. It’s better this way. In past missions, he departed with traveling companions who hadn’t lived to catch the return flight. They knew the dangers or claimed to at any rate. His last mercenary team, hardened veterans of both the military and government agencies, certainly knew. Max left them all in Alaska, some on the spacecraft and others on the frozen earth. All physical traces of them had disappeared when the ship exploded in a powerful nuclear fireball.

  His last traveling companion, an investigative reporter named Iris Keller who went by the nickname Heat, might have stayed home if she’d truly known her chances of survival. Martyrdom, for all its allure to idealistic fools, held little appeal to her during the final hours of her life, which she had spent on the run from Gideon Wilde’s rented soldiers and reptilian creations. Dying in the name of truth, as if anyone gives a screaming shit about that. Could anything have been more wasteful?

  “Yeah, living a lie, silly,” answered an amused female sitting in the seat opposite him. Heavily tattooed, she sipped a double martini and beamed at him, the muted cabin lighting dancing off her numerous piercings and neon-blue hair. “But I don’t live that way, remember?” Heat raised her glass in salute and declared, “I am the Voltaire of our time!”

  “And you still died,” Max said.

  She laughed, a ghostly tinkling of wind chimes. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

  With a start, Max noticed the coins covering her eyes, a pair of freshly minted Morgan silver dollars, Lady Liberty facing outward.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Heat continued. “I’ll always be with you.” Max couldn’t help but stare at the coins as she leaned in closer and seductively whispered, “Isn’t that what you want?”

  No, I don’t. Now fucking go away! He knew what was happening, where he really was. Wake up! Get out of this before it’s—

  The blackness behind his closed eyelids turned a brilliant vermilion. He opened his eyes on a tropical vista of endless azure sky above a deep cobalt sea, a silhouette of gray coastline far in the distance. The only thing missing from this paradise was a beautiful woman to share it with, though he realized in the next instant that he’d brought one along when he looked down and saw Heat—the top of her bobbing head, anyway, her hair now dyed jet black—as she sucked vigorously on his cock, which tingled and threatened to explode at any moment.

  She broke off in the middle of her business to gaze up at him with her silver dollar eyes. “You’re right, Max. It’s all part of the game.” She took him in her mouth once more and resumed as a metallic squawking assaulted Max’s ears. He didn’t give a shit about the noise, however, even as it intensified—all of his nerves seemed to radiate from his crotch.

  The trombone bleats of gibberish continued; the blow job did not. Max opened his eyes, looked down as the noise filled his head with a deafening racket that churned his brain.

  Pleasure turned to pain in a heartbeat, when he saw the red smear on the fly of his swimming trunks and noticed the blood pissing from the stump of his cock. All of the injuries he’d ever sustained—combined—couldn’t match his pain in that moment. He cried out in agony and fright, yet made not a sound, his vocal cords brittle, paralyzed, dry rotted.

  Even as he silently screamed, he looked down upon Heat, whose black hair had grown long and lustrous, shining with healthy radiance and the gleam of fresh blood.
She gazed upward, no longer Heat, but CIA operative Juno Rey, who chewed loudly and smacked her lips as she merrily munched on the remnants of his member like the ghoul that she was. She gulped down the remainder of his manhood with a strained swallow, then said with a smile, “It’s only business, Max.” Narrow vertical slits slashed her golden eyes, so much like those of the serpents he’d encountered at Swift’s house.

  Max tried to push her away, only to find that his limbs had grown rigid and immobile. The squawking grew frantic and threatening, a raucous crescendo crashing about in his skull that quickly eclipsed all other sounds.

  The nonsensical noise then coalesced into spoken words that Max didn’t wish to hear. He’d left sun and sea behind, and now stood in the kitchen of his old house near Minneapolis. “We lived here,” he said aloud, bewildered.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” demanded his wife, Janet.

  Max looked upon her in relief. He not only had his cock back, but also his wife to use it on. He couldn’t fucking wait. Sure, she’d gained a few pounds since David had come along, yet it hadn’t wrecked her womanly shape, that perfect hourglass he’d fallen for way back in college. If anything, the slight amount of extra meat on her bones enhanced her figure. She hadn’t changed a bit since the last time he’d seen her, still fair-skinned and brunette, with brown—No, look again. Her eyes were no longer brown, but rather two marbles of gleaming onyx with not a white to be seen.

  “I’m waiting, Max.” She impatiently tapped her foot as she leaned against the countertop.

  “We live here!” Max responded. No past tense about it! As for her eyes, well, he would worry about that later.

  “No shit, really?” She laughed at him. “Correction, David and I live here. You live in a war zone somewhere in the Third World.”

  Reason with her. Tell her the truth! Janet had always been level-headed until… “Not for much longer. I had it out with Banner the other day, told him I’ve had enough of this shit. He says he’ll put me on an anti-terrorism team here in the states. I’ll never be far—”

  “You’ll still be gone all the time! New York or New Guinea, what’s the fucking difference? David still doesn’t get a father, and I still don’t get a husband.”

  “Look, you’ve got to believe—” He cut off his words when he noticed her sobbing.

  “I… I’d like to believe that you’ll be here. But it’s always a lie. You said you’d take David to the park last week after school. But where were you when the school bus showed up?”

  “You know where I was.”

  “Venezuela! Where else would my globe-trotting, adrenaline-junkie husband be? Got to go where the action is, right? Why work a normal job like the rest of humanity? You’re happier shooting people for a living than you are with your own family. We’re supposed to be what you fight for, but you’d rather just fight.”

  Max opened his mouth to protest yet uttered no words, his mind a blank slate but for two disturbing thoughts: Is she right? Is that true?

  “We’re just not good enough for you, I guess. So how many other women have you fucked during your crucial government missions?” She asked in the offhanded tone of a stranger inquiring about the weather.

  “Never!” Max shouted. “I would never do that to you, Janet; I love you!”

  She quieted, stared him down. Her black eyes seemed bottomless, twin portals to the netherworld. “Then prove it, prove that we come first. Call Banner right now, tell him you’re sitting this one out.”

  “Janet, I can’t do that, not yet, but soon enough—”

  “Then why are you still here? You have to go on another mission. By all means, don’t let us hold you back!”

  “All right, I’m staying,” Max announced, iron in his voice. “You’re right, I can’t go this time.”

  “Really? And what the hell’s stopping you? Surely not us?”

  “It is you. If I leave, you’ll both be dead when I come home.” He knew this to be true, only he didn’t know how he’d acquired such knowledge.

  Her laughter began haltingly, a couple of snorts that developed into a chuckle that soon morphed into a full-blown fit of guffawing.

  Max could take no more. He crossed the kitchen in two long strides, seized Janet by the arms and shook her. “Stop it! I know—”

  “And who’s going to kill us, Max?” She laughed some more. “Is it Burt Jarvis? Wait, why am I asking you? Ten years later and you still don’t know who fucking killed us! Professor Plum, Miss Scarlet…? It’s all too much for you. You never did see the big picture.”

  “’Cause he’s fucking worthless!” shouted a voice from behind him. Oh, hell no! That rasping, nicotine-ravaged voice he’d neither hoped nor expected to hear ever again added, “Just like his limp-dicked father!”

  Max rounded on his mother, not with the intention of confronting her, but rather to kill her. She stood there for the taking, just as he remembered her: high hair bleached blond and reeking of hairspray, pancake makeup, whorish turquoise eye shadow, sneering around a cigarette burning between pink lips. She held a wine cooler, of course, one of the dozen or so she drank every day.

  He noticed all of this in an instant as he pivoted and threw a right with every ounce of power and momentum he could muster. Some dreams do come true! His fist caught her square in the face. Sparks of burning tobacco showered the kitchen like a fireworks display. The satisfaction he felt when he knocked out her teeth and split her nose in half couldn’t be measured. This instant of revenge had a je na sais quoi all its own.

  Blood fountained into the air, lots of it, and all of it black, devouring all light as it covered the floor, the walls, Janet, the entire world in stygian ink…

  Max treaded slowly and cautiously through pitch blackness. Despite the all-consuming dark, he felt somewhat at home in his plate carrier and helmet, a full combat load on his back, his trusty HK416 in his gloved hands. He switched on the flashlight mounted on his rifle. The white LED beam traveled unimpeded into infinity, lighting nothing in any direction, even when he pointed it at his feet. Nothing there. But he had feet, even if he couldn’t see them, and knew that he walked on something other than ether. His footfalls rang against a hard surface, less metallic than steel yet more resonant than wood.

  The sound gave it away. I’m on the spaceship.

  Dull lights of amber and orange, the glow of alien electronics, gradually illuminated the area and confirmed his suspicions. The reactor control room.

  He saw her, back turned to him as she opened a door and stepped into the airlock to access the reactor. His breath caught in his throat as he watched her. So beautiful… Men had fought wars over lesser women than the one who called herself Dr. Alexis Rogers, who was in every sense—body, mind, origin—out of this world. Angel or alien, he needed her now.

  And now she was leaving him behind again. “I hope our paths cross again in another life,” she said before slamming the door shut.

  “Wait!” Max shouted, running the few steps to the airlock door. “I’m coming with you!” He threw open the door, passed into the airlock, and peered through the window on the second door. Already far away, she was busy with the holographic computer controls on one of the reactor towers, her brown ponytail beginning to curl and smoke from the intense heat in the reactor room, her skin turning red and starting to fissure.

  Max closed his eyes for a moment, wiped them clean, and waited a moment before trying to peer into the intense brightness again. She’d moved out of sight by that time. What? Where is she? Is the energy too much, even for her?

  A shadow moved in front of the door, blocking out the light. His vision went black; his eyes couldn’t adjust fast enough. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, tried again to see. With great difficulty he identified her face, features shaded by the brilliant light now pouring from the reactor. She had her hands pressed against the glass. Her flesh had cracked, but her eyes were still brown, still penetrating. He could feel the reactor�
�s heat even through the barrier. She smiled at him.

  “I’ll always be with you, Max,” she said, her voice still bewitching and mellifluous.

  He then watched in dumbstruck horror as she burst into flames; hair, clothes, skin, all gone in a blink, leaving behind only a grinning, burning skeleton.

  “We all will!” she uttered, a voice and a promise from hell. She then burst through the window, showering him with glass shards and exposing him to blast-furnace heat.

  Max’s scream cut off abruptly when she wrapped fiery fingers around his throat and squeezed…

  He awoke, choking in his seat. His drink had slipped from his hand to spill on the floor. But he recovered quickly, perhaps the only advantage of suffering regular and recurring nightmares. At least he could accept them for what they were when he awoke to the real world. But he knew he wouldn’t be falling asleep again anytime soon. He checked his watch: 1703. Great. Only five more hours to kill.

  Resigned to remaining awake, he opened his laptop to review Ben’s file once more. Instead he found himself staring at the screen, his thoughts anxious and unsettled. He spent most of the next few hours pacing the cabin, until the pilot announced their final approach into San Francisco.

  ***

  Max entered the wi-fi café in downtown San Francisco where he was to meet Special Agent Leet, who had chosen the busy rendezvous point for safety reasons. When on the run, it was best to stay with the herd, even if they didn’t have your back. Dozens of possible witnesses could deter all but the most intrepid attackers.