The Karma Booth

by Jeff Pearce

  Yes, he remembered things, but they were all moments from his old life. The voices of Krio in the market; the smell of diesel oil at the garage and stale takeout food on the mechanic’s bench before he and a friend drove over to their commander’s office at the Murray Town barracks. The war. Of course, he remembered the war.

  Wet, squishing sounds now. He didn’t look. There would be regurgitation. And there was a mild pounding in his head.

  The end had come with the stink of male sweat and the concussive wave of bullets, like a weight slammed into his chest. The last sounds in Edward Brewah’s ears had been cries of alarm over his injury and more shouts to go after the escaping criminal. The thug was one of the last of “Mosquito” Bockarie’s RUF butchers who amputated limbs and slaughtered children. Get him. Get him now.

  Then there was whiteness that blanked out everything, and the squeak of limbs falling and sliding against thick glass. His arms. His legs. Whole. He recalled the sudden shame over losing control of his bladder and the feel of his warm urine down his leg. He was crawling on a dirty, cold floor for a few seconds before men in lab coats rushed to lift him onto a gurney.

  Before that day, Edward Brewah had believed in the Lord and in his only son, Jesus Christ, and so he could not hate his wife for recoiling from him when he came through their door. He had not asked for this great sin to be done. The army would let her keep his death benefits, and the kindly old white foreigner—who had so much better manners than the American scientist—had spoken to the army.

  Orlando Braithewaite, he discovered, was a billionaire and a man of great influence. He arranged for Edward Brewah to get an honorable discharge from the army with a modest pension and a new job as a security guard at Connaught Hospital downtown.

  Then Orlando Braithewaite was gone and so was the American scientist. Edward Brewah was left with the baggage of his questions, such as Will this feeling stay? The detachment. The lack of joy or even casual pleasure that he somehow knew intuitively belonged to anyone coming back. It was wrong to return this way. But it hadn’t been his decision.

  He could make a new decision. But suicide was a mortal sin.

  Teeth again. And the pain in his head that told him something would never reach its climax.

  When the civil war was over in Sierra Leone, there were thousands dead and two million displaced, and Edward Brewah in his first life realized he had spent half of it with a rifle in his hand, trying to put an end to evil things. He had woken up many nights screaming over the severed limbs he’d seen left in a ditch, and the rapes he’d interrupted with the butt of his rifle slamming into a villain’s head. Rapes plural. Boys without souls, stoned on drugs beyond all instinct of self-preservation, running in a legion-of-scarecrows charge that insisted you fire. His wife had helped him banish these nightmares. He had thought their child was an unspoken declaration of new hope.

  His son was entitled to a happy life.

  He watched the eternal blue beyond the port. The sucking changed to clamping and more gnawing. The migraine reasserted itself, but he sighed and focused on the blue.

  “Survivor’s guilt,” said a voice in English, except it had a peculiar accent to it; not like a British person’s English or the kind spoken by the occasional American mining executive who flew in.

  Brewah looked up. He didn’t recognize Viktor Limonov but somehow he knew him. The tall Russian was back in a signature polo shirt and jeans, favoring high-top desert boots, because he could dress as he liked in this small corner of Africa where no one cared about the UN and war crimes. The thin mouth grinned pleasantly, and the husky dog blue eyes inspected Edward Brewah and betrayed no shock or revulsion at what was happening.

  “You feel guilty because you live,” observed Limonov. “I’m sure you had the same guilt after the massacres and after the war ended, but you didn’t have a way of expressing it.”

  “True,” said Edward Brewah warily.

  Gnawing again. He had no name for the thing but it, and it was forever hungry. With its scrotal sac of a head and its disgusting beak-like maw, its many beads of eyes stared up at him as it fed on the stump of his arm. It slurped and gnawed until it regurgitated a mess of half-digested tendons and flesh back into his lap, as if it needed to feed invisible young. These bits oozed and coalesced back into the formation of his new hand and forearm. He wasn’t disgusted the first time this had happened because even then he knew he was creating it, even while he was responsible, too, for creating the slug thing that crawled and slimed and pushed its way into a freshly ruptured gash in the back of his head… never fully entering.

  These things repeated themselves like a manic-depressive’s endless monologue. Feeding with vulture tenacity, violating without climax.

  “It’s rather disgusting what you do,” commented Limonov, and Edward Brewah was annoyed at the arrogant way the man scratched his chin with the backs of his knuckles. “But then I suppose you want it to be wet and mixed up with biological fluids and meals for carrion. Guilt is a gorging, isn’t it? But it’s also a stain. And the way you violate yourself! The Americans talk about a—what do they call it? A… a skull-fuck! But you really do it!”

  Brewah put it away. And he stopped the headache. “What do you want?”

  “It’s what you want,” said the Russian. “I can help you.”

  Edward Brewah sat still. He hadn’t felt fear or apprehension when he died the first time, but now he began to tremble. “There was a girl in Germany who understood this loneliness. You murdered her—that one I felt. And there is a man in Texas who does not carry the sense of drifting like some others…and me. He is perhaps living fully awake for the first time, but you want to kill him, too.”

  “No one here on this plane of existence is fully awake, I promise you,” sneered Limonov. “Not them, not you. Not even me, as that girl in Germany pointed out. And you…! You who wasted your second life with your self-indulgent masochism!”

  “Squandered…”

  Limonov shrugged. “Yes. Others squander it, too, but you make me sick more than the others. They’re merely bored, and I can appreciate that. Now you… Ugh.”

  “There is a Heaven and a Christ!” said Brewah, getting to his feet, knowing he would have to fight in a moment.

  “I might have met him,” answered Limonov, stepping closer. “If I did, you can trust me, he bleeds like the rest. Of course, he would say, ‘That’s the point.’ Your kind is always so clever before you go. Do you have a witticism for me?”

  “They’ll know,” insisted Brewah in a shaky voice, backing away. “The teacher is strong. So is the artist in Pennsylvania. If I know of them—”

  “They can know you, yes,” said Limonov impatiently. He took out his knife and swung it into a wide vicious arc. “People say, ‘We’re all connected,’ and people always say that as if it’s a good thing.”

  Brewah jumped back, escaping the blade, but he stumbled and fell against a tower of piled cinderblocks. He took a deep breath and concentrated. He had never focused this hard before, but it seemed to work. The flesh of emotion and tissues of sympathetic outrage grew and presented themselves on Limonov’s skin like reddened hives and malignant growths.

  And then the Russian was fine. Grinning at him as if his effort had been a practical joke. Viktor Limonov stood unchanged, this monster who had sold weapons to Foday Sankoh, Bockarie, Augustine Gbao and others in his country during the war. And yet he was clearly not of this earth.

  “That’s a very good tactic,” chuckled Limonov. “The boils, the growths. Maybe I’ll use it on the next one. My turn. Let’s see now! I think you go too easy on yourself with your migraine…”

  Edward Brewah concentrated, and his skin was smooth and without blemish as he anticipated what the Russian would try to do. Nothing grew, and nothing attacked, not it and not the slug from his own torment. But he had guessed wrong about Limonov’s intentions.

  He tasted music. He stared in horror at Limonov as the cyanide octaves and melodic botul
ism seared his throat and lungs, making him sputter and choke and fall to the ground, helpless. He should have realized it before because he hadn’t felt the strange boy like the others, not the Texan or Mary Ash or, the most mysterious of all, the beautiful Englishwoman. The boy was dead, and Limonov had got what he needed as toxic chords choked off his breath. Edward Brewah wept. It was over. He’d failed. And now this enemy was stronger.

  Edward Brewah died weeping. He knew the guilt would stay hungry forever.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In Tim’s hotel room in Paris—which had become their base of operations—he and Crystal sifted their email reports. They offered a grim breakdown of the Karma Booth victims being murdered by Limonov. Benson sent along CCTV footage of Gudrun Merkel in Berlin, and it was clear she had done nothing to defend herself. And Crystal’s network of sources in Africa reported that Limonov had bribed his way through customs into Freetown to reach Edward Brewah.

  “He’s hunting them,” said Tim.

  Crystal frowned at her laptop. “It doesn’t make sense! Viktor Limonov is the king of the mercenaries. He brokers weapons. He goes out and wages wars as a soldier of fortune. If anything, he should be accessing Swiss bank accounts and laughing his ass off in a country with no extradition treaty.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” muttered Miller, sitting on a couch in a corner in front of the TV. When the two glanced over at him in surprise, he looked up sheepishly. “Sorry! It’s just… Think about it. Psycho mercenary guy’s gone through the Booth. I mean if Mary Ash and Geoff Shackleton come back with abilities…! That must be how he’s tracking ’em—”

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” warned Tim. “Limonov wasn’t a victim resurrected. Yes, he beat the Booth when they tried to execute him, but he didn’t walk out as some kind of god. Everything we’ve learned so far suggests he’s still a human being. Thanks to his shady connections and his arms sales, he’s got contacts all over the world, including India. We know he boarded a private Cessna jet to get back into Europe. He’s human, Andrew. He’s got to be.”

  “You’ve got nothing to base that on!” complained Miller. “You just want it to be true.”

  “Yes, I do,” Tim conceded. “You’re the science guy. Isn’t it better to reserve judgment until we have more information? I do think you’re right about one thing. He shouldn’t be able to even know the Booth victims, let alone be able to track them down all over the world.”

  “Especially Gudrun Merkel,” added Crystal.

  “We didn’t even know about her,” said Miller.

  Tim sighed. They were right. How could Limonov know about a young woman who was a resurrected victim when she might not have even known herself? Though given that certain authorities in Germany had known, it was possible that word had leaked out.

  “He was an arms dealer,” said Crystal. “You said yourself he has shady connections.”

  “What are you thinking?” asked Tim.

  “A hunch. I don’t want to say any more until I speak to a few friends in London. But trust me, Tim, if I’m right, his ‘how’ is a very mundane, familiar how. I’d like to know more why he’s going after them.”

  It got worse. It wasn’t only Limonov going after them. A day later, Weintraub sent text messages to let them know the resurrected victims weren’t safe in the United States either.

  The three-year-old blond boy who was once Daniel Chen had been sitting in a local playground three blocks from the home of his new foster family in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Gary Weintraub had chosen the family himself because he was a friend of the oceanographer father and the mother who was a software firm accountant. The couple had a seventeen-year-old daughter who was in her first year of university in Charlotte and had taken care of an autistic nephew for a couple of years (so they had experience with special needs children), plus they were affluent enough for a full-time nanny who could take the boy on outings like the one to the playground.

  No one could have prepared these surrogate parents for what happened.

  The little boy usually sat on the lowest rail of the jungle gym and never actually climbed it. The other children left him to himself most of the time, though one afternoon a two-year-old girl giggled and ran to her mother, chanting, “Bells, bells!” And if Gary Weintraub and Timothy Cale had been there, they could have explained to the little girl’s mother what the boy had done.

  Children tasted the music and somehow knew, but their parents simply dismissed what they were told with the knowledge that their sons and daughters were being precious.

  No one could agree on a physical description of the suspect, except that he was a big man, unshaven with greasy, lank hair. But all the witness accounts said that he had pulled up in his Honda car, not even bothering to park properly, and had got out with two large Dobermans on leashes. He stopped and quickly, efficiently, unhooked the leashes from the animals, and to the stunned horror of parents there, the dogs ran in greyhound gallops into the playground. The dogs had deliberately zeroed in on the toddler.

  A woman screamed. A father rushed over in a selfless effort to save the boy, and one of the dogs sank its jaws into his arm. He yelled in pain and staggered back.

  What was stranger still was how the little boy turned to face the dogs, and as one savaged the heroic father, the other actually retreated for all of a moment. The animal vomited onto the grass. Then it was snarling and slobbering as if it had got its hideous second wind, having purged itself of whatever sudden poison had overwhelmed it, and by now the other dog had joined in. It was no longer interested in the father cradling his bloody chewed arm. The two of them set on the little boy the way they would tear open a rabbit—

  All the while, the screaming, hysterical nanny, a woman of thirty-five from El Salvador, was held back by the man who had driven up in the car. She had the strength of the traumatized and desperate, but the man… He was like a brick wall, preventing her from risking her own life for the child. Hair. Blood. Torn flesh and tiny limbs. It was too awful, and she was on her knees, sobbing when his thick, callused hand slapped her, knocking her unconscious. The man went back to his car in long, easy strides and he actually whistled for the dogs to get in.

  As Tim and Crystal left their latest briefing with the French police, he reminded her about the snow leopards hunting down the two survivors of the village on the Nepal border. She nodded slowly, gathering his meaning.

  “From what we understand,” Weintraub’s new text read in the scientist’s typical rushed style, “the boy was attacked two days before Edward Brewah. So impossible for Limonov involvement.”

  Not quite true, thought Tim. There was the terrifying possibility that Limonov had allies for whatever sick game he was playing.

  “I think it’s time you let me in on your hunch,” he said to Crystal.

  “I’ve spoken to my mates back in London,” she answered. “They reminded me of something that happened at the Pentagon a while back, sometime in—”

  But before she could finish, her cell rang. It was Miller, telling her that he needed to see them both down at the lab facilities borrowed from the French.

  “Can it wait until tomorrow?” asked Crystal. “It’s going to be a nightmare to get over there at this time of day.” She covered her phone with a palm and whispered to Tim, “His lab’s near the Parc des Princes, and there’s a football match on tonight. Did you know they dumped him over there?”

  Tim shrugged. “I was told it was the best facility they could offer.”

  Tim could hear Miller through her cell, sounding increasingly desperate for them to come.

  “Andrew, hold on,” Crystal told him. “Andrew… Andrew… All right, all right, we’ll be there as soon as we can!”

  As expected, it took them a good forty-five minutes to beat the rush hour traffic and the soccer fans driving in to see the Saint-Germain football club. At the lab facility, an irritable security guard led them in, and they were taken to where Miller waited, sneakers pushing against t
he edge of a worktable as usual. His face was ashen. Their American genius sat with his hands laced close to his mouth, trying to solve a new puzzle that he alone understood.

  “Well, what is it?” asked Tim. “You sounded like you were having a nervous breakdown or something.”

  “Maybe I am,” replied Miller. “It’s not possible. I’m sorry I dragged you both down here—someone must have fucked up. I’ll get Sims to review everything back in White Plains. It’s impossible, it’s completely—I must have misunderstood something or—I can barely think anymore!”

  Tim didn’t know him well, but he did know the young scientist didn’t admit easily to making mistakes. “What did you find?”

  “It’s wrong. Doesn’t matter, it’s wrong—I’ll have someone else review everything.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Okay. Look. Back in White Plains, they did full DNA profiles of victims and executed criminals. Complete physical work-ups, CTs and MRIs. Every one. Weintraub insisted we do full brain scans before Emmett Nickelbaum ever got pushed through. Jesus, we had Mary Ash’s profile even before she came back. And I finally had a chance to go over the results on different subjects and… Well, to do some comparisons.”

  “Okay then, what did you find?” Tim demanded.

  Miller didn’t answer. With no response forthcoming, Tim reached across the worktable and scattered the pages in front of him.

  “Come on, what? Is this it? What did you find?”

  Miller looked more and more agitated. He pulled out a tattered Kleenex to polish his spectacles while he rocked in his chair. “We must have screwed up…”

  “Come on, Andrew,” sighed Crystal. “What are you getting at?”

  “Hey, I know how to read a fucking axial MRI. I went to Johns Hopkins, and I got the student loan payments to prove it! I’m on half a dozen peer review groups for—”