“I know, Doc. I know.”
“Well, as far as I see there are only two ways to get in: either in the trunk of my car, or over the electrified wall. Both of those ways get you on the property, but neither of them puts you inside the building. Security is pretty tight and I can’t very well carry you in my briefcase. That is to get in. As to getting out… I haven’t the slightest idea.”
I asked him a few serious questions — how many guards at the check-in, how tall is the wall and so on — before letting him go.
“Please sleep a few hours,” I told him. “We will make a decision and call you around six.”
“We?” he asked. “Who’s we? You and that friend of yours? I hope you understand I can only take one of you inside the trunk.”
“Thanks, Doc. I’ll keep that in mind.”
“I hope he doesn’t have a stroke before then,” Paul remarked, when I disconnected. “Although he’d probably be better off for it. No matter the outcome, chances are the poor guy will hug the cold one in the end. Wonder why he’s helping you.”
“Seems people just like to help me,” I said with a pointed look at Paul. He grinned.
“Besides,” I added. “Me and you will likely hug the same cold one.”
“That’s the spirit,” Paul cheered. “Plan for the best, but prepare for the worst.”
“Maybe the fed will get us through this somehow,” I offered after a pause.
“Sure,” he agreed enthusiastically. I glanced at him.
“You think we should just make a run for it?”
“Not if you care about the girl.”
“How is it going to help her if I die?”
“How is it going to help her if you run?”
We were both silent for a minute. Paul sighed.
“Maybe the fed will get us through it somehow.”
I rose to my feet. The TV came to life. Some obscure actor, who looked like that guy I’d dropped at my ex-wife’s house, was working a confusing soap commercial. It featured cows and latex rather prominently. That one would never make it to my show, I thought. And then I thought of Jennifer, and whether or not I would be planning a rescue right now, if it was she who had been kidnapped. Yes, I would be, was the answer. But I would be doing it out of guilt, not love.
“It’s going to be another hour before Brome gets here,” I said. “If you want to shower, go ahead. I’m thinking to take a bath.”
“Showering is overrated,” Paul said. “You have a spare toothbrush, though? I hate the morning taste in my mouth.”
“Yeah, in the bathroom cabinet.”
“I’ll brush after you’re done.”
I turned to go.
“Hey, I knew this guy who was drunk and decided to take a bath in the middle of the night,” he called after me.
“Oh yeah?” I said over my shoulder. “Let me guess. He fell asleep and drowned?”
“Not exactly,” said Paul. “He fell asleep and took a dump.”
Things must be funnier at two in the morning. Or they are funnier when you think you have about five hours to live. Either way, I was still giggling when I entered the bathroom. I did decide to go with the shower, however.
As I stood in the shower, giggles long gone and thoughts of Iris making the water cold, a strange voice began to speak to me. Strange, because it was my own voice, only someone else was talking.
“It’s a trap,” it said.
I opened my eyes.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s a trap,” I heard again, but now faintly, through the noise of running water. Absently, I turned the water off.
“It’s a trap?” I echoed.
“It’s a trap,” my voice repeated. “Dr. Coughlin is a phoney.”
“How do you know?”
“Are you talking out loud? Try and think the words instead. Otherwise I get a terrible static,” the voice complained.
Embarrassed for no reason, I stepped out of the shower box and wrapped a towel around my hips. My hand cleared a window in the mirror’s fog. Staring in it I formed the words in my mind: Who are you?
“I am the employer of the late Lloyd Freud,” a reply came like a tap on the inside wall of my stomach.
So it was I who hired him?
“I just said it was me.”
And you are a separate personality inside my body.
“No, I am not.”
How are you in my head, then?
“I tuned into you.”
What?
“Don’t worry about that now. I’ll teach you later. If you make it.”
“This is insane,” I said and rubbed my face. I must have thought it, too.
“Just relax and take it as it is,” the voice said. “I will help you, but I can’t stay in your head for too long.”
Why, is it too tight?
“Humor is good. It helps. Now listen. Coughlin is with them. The only reason they kidnapped Iris and Dr. Young is to get to you. I have a few ideas why they still want you, but nothing concrete enough for you to bother with at this time. Just assume they want you.”
You’re telling me I shouldn’t try to rescue her.
“Not at all. You should try. Just not the way they want you to.”
What other way is there?
“I have to break away. I am sending you help. Good help. Don’t make a move until he gets in touch.”
The voice in my head was gone. Still wrapped in the towel, I went back to living room. Paul was lying on the couch, watching the news.
“You know, you can turn it on even with the feet up,” he said and looked up at me. “Can I go brush my teeth now or did you leave something in the tub?”
“Something happened,” I said dumbly. Paul sat up and glanced around. “I just had a conversation with a voice in my head.”
“You do that often?”
“I wasn’t talking to myself. Someone else was talking in my head. He said he was Lloyd’s employer.”
“What else did he say?”
“That it was a trap.”
Before Paul could respond, the doorbell rang. After a wide-eyed moment, I went to open it, holding the towel together with my right hand, as though nothing in the world would have protected me better. Paul fell behind me, gun ready. Or rather, gun in hand.
“Who is it?” I called.
“Brome,” the speaker in the door said.
The fed, in civvies-civvies this time, stepped inside like a cat, eyes noting my towel, Paul’s gun and the room behind us all at once. He nodded and looked me square in the face.
“It’s a trap,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“It’s a trap,” Iris said. Her coat was gone, and a sleeve had been ripped off her sweater. A cut on the punched upper lip, and the back of her head, where her hair had been pulled upwards, both hurt like hell. Had she worn eye-shadow, there would have been smudges around her eyes. “It’s a trap,” she repeated. “For him.”
Dr. Young nodded and wheezed, blowing air through the nostrils coated in caked blood. A broken nose was the sum of his injuries, because Dr. Young had been reasonable enough not to resist. But as he crouched in the corner of the gray windowless room that had been revealed to them with the removal of blindfolds, his hand kept returning to touch his nose every thirty seconds or so. Iris suspected the old man had never had his nose broken before.
“I should have known better than to return to the church,” Dr. Young said, probing the side of his nose carefully with a pinky. “Then again, I should have been more persistent with your friend, also. I cannot fathom what’s got into me. How I failed to foresee something this obvious…” He sighed, then suddenly looked up at her in wonder. “A trap for Mr. Whales?”
Iris sat on the floor in the opposite corner, scraped bare knees under her chin. Heels of her black boots stamped the two hems of her red skirt to the floor. “Of course,” she said, a note of irritation in her voice.
“No, no. I am afraid that hypothesis is a little
farfetched. There were one or two other targets for a possible trap on my mind, and I have assumed you were talking about the same personages, which is why I permitted myself that expression of accord. But a trap for Mr. Whales, with us as bait? Please, don’t get me wrong, Ms. Iris. We’ve certainly been through several exciting episodes together, and I thought Mr. Whales displayed his fondness of you rather unambiguously, but…
“No. If I were to venture a guess of my own, I would say Mr. Whales is presently two doors down the corridor.”
“And it’s either Freud’s employer or whoever killed that… one of them they are trying to bait,” Iris finished.
“Assuming they are not one and the same… entity, which I personally doubt, precisely.”
Dr. Young touched the tip of his nose and seemed to attempt to examine it with his eyes. Having failed he sighed again.
“No matter now. I doubt very much this trap will be sprung. They are overestimating—”
“Why would they keep us together and Luke separately?” Iris interrupted.
Dr. Young shrugged. “For any number of reasons, really. To make the trap more elaborate, to see who would be the first choice in case there would have to be a choice…” Abruptly, he halted and directed another wondering gaze at her. “But that is not the real question that is on your mind, is it?”
“Why am I here?” she asked.
Dr. Young leaned back against the seam of merging walls, his hair merging with the wall’s gray, and stared at her silently, as though he was just then seeing her for the first time. His fingers levitated almost imperceptibly slowly to touch the blood on one side of his nose, glided over to the other side and hovered there for a long time. For a much longer time, in fact, than the answer to the question required. Iris held his gaze steadily, but inside her a vague anxiety was rising.
When he finally spoke, it wasn’t the question itself that startled her. She had heard that same question several times over the course of the previous week from Luke. It was the sound of his voice in an empty prison cell after a long silence. It startled her the way a champagne cork might startle, as you wait for it to pop.
“Who are you, really, Ms. Iris?” Was what Dr. Young said. Iris drew back slightly and leaned forward again, as the phrase registered and she realized that unlike Luke’s, Dr. Young’s added “really” seemed to imply something.
So instead of a reply she stared back at him until he looked away and sighed again and shrugged, saying, “Perhaps you’re right. Although I can hardly see of what use—”
The door slid open silently, but they were both immediately aware of the additional space beyond it. Two white-uniformed guards walked in. One pointed at Iris.
“You’re coming with us.”
“Where are you taking her?” Dr. Young demanded, rising.
“With us. You’re staying here.”
There was no point fighting, but Iris had a hard time controlling herself nonetheless. She rose to her feet, and the guards, one of whom had a black eye from her elbow and the other a patch on the cheek from her nails, stiffened and glowered. There would be no surprising them this time. She glanced at the old man.
“See you soon, Dr. Young,” she told him.
He nodded, face comforting, eyes hopeless.
Outside the cell two other guards joined the first pair, leaving another two to guard the door. The four assembled in a tight box around her. The door slid shut and they began to move along a curving hallway. Neither shoving nor blindfolds this time. Somehow, Iris did not think that was a good sign.
* * *
His fury was not an emotion any more than a storm’s fury would be. And like a storm’s fury, his would seem chaotic and purposeless to half-breed creatures that called themselves “human,” simply because human emotion of fury was such. Because all of human emotions were such. Nothing but a hindrance. When humans realized it, they began to build tools and machines, like the elevator, on top of which he presently waited, emotionless, driven by purpose, to do things they could no longer do themselves.
Sobak built tools too. They also built Seekers.
He watched the wavering, dancing forms of the three humans through the walls. Another Sobak creation. Moving back and forth, sitting down, standing up, bending, straightening, waving their arms. Blind to his presence. Blind to everything, including the fact that the only quality separating them from animals they called “monkeys” was the ability to imagine themselves standing higher on the imaginary evolutionary ladder.
Like monkeys, humans copied from others.
He had watched their attempts at Seekers even since the war ended. Pathetic. He had broken several himself. Easier than a kaluuk. Easier, because a kaluuk had no emotions. No one could break a Seeker. A Seeker could be destroyed, as the traitor had shown, but never broken. A human wouldn’t see the difference.
The three shapes began to move towards him. They advanced through the hallway, talking in hushed, terrified voices. The elevator came to life and descended a floor, fast and silent, as a Seeker would. When the doors opened only a brief moment later, all three humans showed fear, their most common trace. It subsided when they walked into the tiny space under him. Had he not been a Seeker, he would be amused.
The elevator started down. There was a trapdoor in the ceiling of the machine. He could come down on top of them without ripping the roof off. He could slide in and sink his fangs and claws in their flesh, tearing the life out of all three before they had the chance to scream. He wanted it. His fury demanded it. An elevator is designed for one purpose — to move cargo between floors of a building. A Seeker’s single purpose is to seek and destroy humans. Those may seem like two separate tasks, but to a Seeker they are one. If a Seeker is sent to find a human, then that human is dead. That is a given.
He peered at one head in particular. The fear fog around it reappeared and began to grow thicker rapidly.
Had been a given, until he and his partner failed their mission. Now his partner was destroyed and he punished. He was sent back to find the human whom they had failed to eliminate. And he was ordered not to kill him.
He felt the fury rise within him, as though it was flexible as an emotion. But he was not human. He would not move. Before a Seeker was taught how to despise a human, a Seeker was taught to obey. They would keep their lives. For now.
The descent halted. Doors opened. As they did, his target launched his body through, twisting his neck and stumbling. His companions caught up before he collapsed on the concrete floor of the underground garage. They talked for some time, then walked away hurriedly. He watched them impassively now, fury controlled.
They would get in a car, he knew. A car would not help them evade him. He waited as instructed, giving them several minutes of a head start. He had been told not to get too close after they leave the target’s home. A traitor could be near by and on alert. If he followed later, slowly and carefully, he would detect the traitor first. The traitor might have destroyed a Seeker, but he was not a Seeker himself.
The humans drove away. Soon it was time to follow. Suddenly, the elevator started and began to rise. He slid inside through the trapdoor and considered stopping the elevator and pulling the doors open. Instead, he slammed through the floor and fell several stories down. Sending twisted and torn doors flying across the parking lot, he started after his prey.
They called Seekers the Lower Caste, because all Seekers knew was to seek, kill and obey. Humans also thought themselves superior to the machines. How many of them looked under their feet before entering an elevator?
The city was dark and empty and white, and the trace lay thick and clear. He followed it at the pace of the car, instructed not to close in until the targets reach the beacon. Had he not been a Seeker, he would soon note the familiarity of the targets’ destination. He would suspect foul play. But a Seeker was not taught to suspect.
Only when the same gray building he and his partner had once started their hunt from appeared in front of him d
id he understand that he had lost the human again. The car was parked inside the fenced yard; the trace disappeared in a tangle of leaping, flashing fakes that surrounded the building in a ball, with threads leading in every direction. He would find the right one, there was no doubt about that, but it would be too late.
He circled the building twice ands stopped, facing the planet’s pole. In the grayness in front of him, a short distance beyond the city, was the beam of the beacon. Without disturbing the fresh snow, the Seeker started towards it, fury rising.
* * *
Brome wasn’t enjoying the ride in the shotgun seat not just because there was an actual shotgun strapped between the front seats of a civilian vehicle, but also because the vehicle was a “Yukon” and riding shotgun in it reminded him of Brighton.
“What was that all about?” he asked the driver, who had folded almost in half to fit behind the wheel.
“Just a precaution,” Vernon Gulli boomed. It sounded reassuring, but explained little. In the back seat, Whales, pale as their future, and his friend did not speak. They hadn’t seemed the least bit surprised to find the bartender of a gay bar waiting for them at the rendezvous point. Nor had they been surprised that the rendezvous point was Whales’s girlfriend’s place. To tell the truth, Brome wasn’t sure if he had been surprised by any of it. What he did know was that he was irritated. Illegal weapon and “Yukon” aside, the case of telepathic conversation relayed to him by Whales seemed a bit too crazy even in light of recent events. Especially now, after the “elevator episode.”
He looked at the TV star in the side mirror.
Whales had fallen apart as soon as they left the apartment. Got hysterical in the elevator. Cried. Now he was visibly better, although still pale, but Brome wondered how much of an effort it took the man to put up that brave face. He didn’t want to find out too late. Their mission was likely to be suicidal to begin with.
The giant bartender drove them slowly, as more snow fell, rising over the curbs. There was not a soul outside. Apparently, he was taking them back to the bar.
“When Luke said there would be help, I didn’t know what to think,” Whales’s much steadier friend Paul said leaning forward. “Seeing you, I feel a little better,” he told the bartender. The giant guffawed.
Project Antichrist Page 19