by Blake Banner
THE OMICRON KILL
Copyright © 2019 by Blake Banner
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ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
EPILOGUE
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ONE
Lambda, Mu, Nu, Xi…Omicron.
I wrote the names down on a paper napkin, and then the symbols: λ, Ϻ, Ν, Ξ…Ο. O-mega and O-micron. Big O and small o. Did it mean anything?
Outside, the desert was an endless, shapeless glare of heat, sand and scorching sun. Inside, the bar was still, cool, dark and quiet. My beer glass, standing on the dark, high-polished wood, was empty, the inside stained with dry froth. Further down the bar, the bartender was leaning by the pumps, staring at his phone, occasionally poking the screen.
“Get me another beer, will you?”
He lifted one elbow, sniggered at his cell, read a little more, then sighed. He set down his phone and shuffled over to the pumps. As he set down the beer beside me, he glanced at the napkin. “What’s that y’writin’ there? Remind me of the symbols…” He paused, waiting for his brain to catch up with his mouth. “What was that place? …Roswell, just a little ways from here, where they found the UFO. I juss read a book ’bout it. Had symbols juss like that.”
I studied him a moment. His beard reached his paunch in the two prongs of a long fork. He was bald on top but had a long, scraggly ponytail down his back. I shook my head. “Letters from the Greek alphabet. Lambda, Mu, Nu, Xi and Omicron,” I said.
“Huh… This book…” He leaned his elbows on the bar and stared across the empty saloon at the desert outside. “Says all the most powerful politicians and royal families and all that shit, they’s all smart dinosaurs that learned to shape shift and look like humans. And that’s who rules this world. That’s why they’s so cruel. Reptiles is all cold-blooded.”
I gave a small laugh. “It’s a nice theory, but in my experience the most depraved, predatory, cruel and cold-blooded species on this planet is us. Look around you. You’re not seeing lizards living in their millions in the cities, it’s all humans.”
He gave me a curious look and nodded. The door opened onto the blistering afternoon and four men walked in making noises about beer and heat. They were big, hard guys, used to working cattle in an unforgiving desert for a living, who rode longhorns and broncos for sport. They were men I had a basic respect for, but not a lot in common with. I didn’t pay much attention to them. Three went over to a booth and the fourth slapped his hand on the bar and said, “Gimme four of your coldest beers there, Gastank!”
As he moved away, I said, “And give me a whiskey chaser when you get a chance, will you?” and turned my attention back to the paper napkin.
I could feel the newcomer staring at me. I ignored him, but after a moment he spoke. “You mind waitin’ till he’s finished serving me before you give him your order, pal?”
I turned to look at him a little more closely. I figured six one in his boots. His T-shirt revealed a strong torso and powerful arms. His neck was thick and his freckled face had two pale blue eyes, though there didn’t seem to be an awful lot going on behind them. I guessed he just wanted to be respected. I nodded. “Sure.”
I turned back to my Greek letters, in particular Omega and Omicron, but his voice broke in on my thoughts.
“See, I think it’s disrespectful.”
I turned to look at him again.
“If I’m talkin’ to Gastank here, makin’ my order, and you butt in makin’ an order of your own. See? That is a lack of respect toward me.”
Gastank sighed. “Let it go, Jesse. Man didn’t mean nothin’ by it. We was just talkin’, he didn’t butt in.”
“You should shut your mouth there, Gastank. Man can talk for hisself. You can talk for yourself, can’t you, mister?”
I calibrated him a little more carefully. He’d be slow and telegraphic. He’d waste a lot of energy. I was pretty sure he’d charge like a bull and go for a take down. There was a warmth in my belly I recognized as adrenaline, and I was surprised to realize I was hoping he’d attack me.
I gave my head a small, sideways twitch and spoke quietly. “This isn’t a problem for me either way. I meant no disrespect by ordering a whiskey chaser. But if you want to take it that way, that’s your problem, not mine.”
He looked over his shoulder at his buddies, who were watching him and looking bored. “Does that sound respectful to you? That don’t sound like a sincere apology to me.”
I sighed and turned back to my napkin.
His petulant voice broke in again. “Don’t you look away from me when I’m talking to you, you goddamn pussy.”
I knew then there was no way out. I was going to have to neutralize him. I felt a stab of excitement in my gut that I didn’t like, but accepted anyway. I climbed off the stool and turned to face him. “Why don’t you put your estrogen back in your ovaries, Jesse, pick up your beer and go and sit quietly with your pals.”
He obviously knew what estrogen and ovaries were, and wasn’t down with gender fluidity, because his freckled cheeks flushed and he reached for the scruff of my neck with his left hand, while he drew his right back for a massive cross. If it had connected, it would have taken my head off. But for that I’d have had to wait around while he put the punch together and delivered it.
Instead, I snatched hold of the baby finger of his left hand and bent it back against the joint. He could feel it was about to snap and went up on his toes. His eyes and mouth opened wide and he went, “Ah… ah… ah…” a lot.
I took hold of his wrist in my left and bent the finger harder, pressing gently down. He started to bend at the knees. I looked over at the booth, where his pals were standing up. I shook my head and they paused. Jesse was kneeling now, st
aring at his finger, still saying, “Ah… ah…”
I said, “Right now, from here, there are eight simple ways I could kill you with a single move. There are three simple ways I could dislocate your arm and too many ways to break it for me to go through them all. The number of ways I could put you in hospital with broken bones and fractures runs into hundreds. And you know what’s worrying me, Jesse? I actually want to do it. Now, you came looking for trouble with me, and you found it, and it was more trouble than you reckoned on. There is no shame in that. So, why don’t you go on over to your friends and drink your beer, and leave me in peace to enjoy mine? You’ve had your warning, Jesse. Next time I’ll break your shoulder.”
I let him go and he staggered to his feet. His face was flushed red and for a moment I thought he was going to come at me, but his friends surrounded him and led him back to the booth, taking their beers with them. I returned to my stool, looked at Gastank and said, “How about that whiskey chaser, Gastank?”
As he poured it, he was watching me from under his eyebrows. “That was a pretty neat move. What was that? Kung Fu or somethin’?”
I shook my head, still trying to focus on the napkin. “Path of least resistance.”
He nodded and corked the bottle, with his mouth slightly open. “Like Zen…”
I smiled. “Something like that, yeah.”
He nodded a lot, like he understood, said, “Neat,” and walked back to his cell phone. But what he’d said had started me thinking.
Zen: jhana in the original Pali language. It was a state. It was a state which you achieved through meditation, in which you experienced a kind of timeless, shapeless sense of simply being; being now. And this state was expressed in ancient Greece with the sound ‘Ou’, meaning entity, being, existence. O-micron, meant small being, contraction, or small existence. Whereas O-mega, meant big being, expansion, or major existence.
I sipped my whiskey, felt it burn and realized I hadn’t eaten since five that morning. I made a mental note to eat something, and wondered why it mattered that Omega and Omicron were like opposites of each other. Either way, Omega, the organization, was broken, crippled, all but finished.[1]
All but.
I had spent the last six months drifting across the southern States, with no fixed purpose, not ready to go back to Weston, not ready to go home, and somehow not ready to accept that Omega was finished. Though for over six months they had give no signs of life.
Omicron. They had contracted in on themselves.
If Omega was big and expansive like the sun, then what was Omicron? A seed? More to the point, I told myself, who? Who was Omicron? In the Omega cabal of men and women with too much money and too much power, who liked to form secret societies, manipulate world power, and give themselves quasi-mystical names drawn from the ancient Greek alphabet, who was Omicron?
Whoever he or she was, they were based in South America. Assuming, I told myself, as I sipped my whiskey again, and this time enjoyed the burn, assuming that Omega III, which controlled Latin America, had not collapsed along with Omegas I and II.
I knew I had his name somewhere. I had a full list of the names of the members of Omega. I had one copy at my house in Weston, and I had given another copy to Jim Redbeard in Los Angeles, less than six hundred miles to the west. I drained my glass of whiskey and waved it at Gastank to refill it.
Jim Redbeard, the philosopher-cum-Viking master of chaos who had helped me bring down Omega II in Europe. He would know whether Omicron was significant. He would probably also advise me to let it go, go home and take up fishing.
Gastank shuffled up and refilled my glass. I said, “You can leave the bottle.”
He hesitated a moment. “I don’t want no trouble in my bar, mister.”
I eyed him a moment, feeling unreasonably irritable. “You won’t get any, if you leave the bottle. You got any food here?”
“In about an hour,” he said with a twist of resentment in his voice. “Carmen comes in ’round six. She’ll cook you whatever you want.”
“I’ll have a beef burger and fries when she gets in.”
He went away and I sat staring at the glare outside the window. I had the idea of cycles nagging at my mind, cycles of time. But I couldn’t pin down why. I had picked up somewhere that ‘O’ or zero somehow symbolized eternity, infinity or great cycles of time. But I had never had time for philosophy, much less mystical BS. I could just about stomach the Zen I had learned while studying martial arts, and that was mainly because they advised you, “Don’t think, do.” That was my kind of philosophy.
But you need to know your enemy and understand how he thinks, and there was no doubt in my mind that Omega, whatever was left of it, was founded on mystical principles; mystical principles that were rooted in ancient Greek philosophy. Somebody, somebody connected with Omega, had spouted something at me about cycles of time being associated with the letters of the Greek alphabet. Was it Ben? Ben had had a taste for that kind of thing—they all had—but it had not been him. It had been after I’d killed Ben[2]. So it must have been Timmerman.
Then it came to me. We’d been on the train, traveling from Paris to Madrid, and he had told us, me and Njal, that Omega was not an organization. He’d said it was a protocol. Each protocol, he’d said, covered a period of social and technological development, and we were at the end of protocol twenty-three, Psi.
I pulled a pack of Camels from my pocket, shook one free and poked it in my mouth. Gastank looked at me and shook his head. “Hey, man, I can’t let you do that…”
I gave him the dead eye. He sighed and walked away. I didn’t light up.
Njal had asked him what protocol Psi was. What had he answered? I turned my ancient, battered brass Zippo around in my fingers, reaching back with my mind. He’d said it was the time when the technology for mass production and mass distribution expand and stabilized free markets. I had no damn idea what the hell that meant. I poured myself another shot and sipped it, allowing my mind to go back to the train again. Njal had asked him what came after Psi. Timmerman had told him that after Psi came Omega. Omega was the end. When technology surpassed human understanding.
The end. So if Omega was the end, what the hell was Omicron?
Jim Redbeard would know. If he didn’t know, he could work it out.
It was nearly six, the light was fading outside the window and I was surprised to see the level of whiskey in the bottle had dropped. I could hear noises coming from the kitchen and realized I felt sick with hunger, I had drunk too much and my head was not clear. Worse than that, I had a pellet of hot anger building in my belly, and I didn’t know why.
A loud hiss from the kitchen, followed by the smell of singed meat and onions, told me Carmen was cooking my burger. Gastank was further down the bar serving drinks. The place was filling up. Jesse and his pals were still in the booth.
I said: “Hey, Gastank, get me another beer, will you?”
He pulled it and put it in front of me. “This one’s on the house. Now, don’t you think you’ve had enough? How ’bout you eat your burger, drink your beer and go home to sleep it off for a bit? I’ll look after your whiskey for you.”
I frowned at him. “What’s your problem? I’m not disturbing anyone, I’m not causing a ruckus, I’m just sitting here having a drink.”
He sighed. “You ain’t causin’ a problem, but Jesse’s pals are comin’ in soon, and you really riled Jesse, the way you humiliated him in front of his friends. You’d be smart to leave sooner than later.”
“I’ll have my burger, and my beer, in peace. Then I’ll pay you what I owe you and go on my way.”
He sighed again, a little more deeply.
I smiled a smile that couldn’t have been nice to look at. “Don’t worry, I’ll pay for any damage, too.”
He went away. The door opened behind me and people came in. Gastank came back after a while with my burger. He gave me a pleading look which I ignored and he left. The first bite of the burger made me fee
l better. But as I took a pull of the cold beer and a second bite, I was suddenly aware, through some sixth sense, of Jesse getting to his feet and crossing the room toward me. A couple of seconds passed and the room started to go quiet. I glanced at Gastank and smiled at the expression on his face. I stuffed the last piece of burger in my mouth, took my time chewing it and then drained my beer.
After that, I turned on my stool to see Jesse standing, staring at me.
“You and me got unsettled business,” he said. “We gonna settle it right now.”
All my training and all my instincts told me to walk away, but right then that pellet of anger and frustration in my gut was stronger than my instinct and my training; and it told me that people like Jesse get away with being assholes too often.
I shook my head. “I have no business with you, Jesse. If I bruised your…” I smiled and labored the words, “…little finger, like I told you before, that is your problem, not mine.”
His cheeks colored. “You better get off that stool, mister, an’ face me like a man, or I’m gonna haul your ass off it and bullwhip you till you weep like a girl.”
“You and your friends?”
“I figure I got this.”
I looked over and saw that his pals had all stood up. There were six of them and they were all grinning. I nodded. “OK,” I said. “Come and haul my ass off my stool and bullwhip me. I think your friends would be amused by that.”
His frown said he didn’t understand what was happening, but he was going to pile right in and whoop my ass anyway. He came at me as I knew he would, with both hands reaching for my collar. I let him do that and when he had a firm grip, I slammed my left forearm down hard on his elbows, forcing him forward, and smashed the heel of my open hand into his jaw. He let go of my collar and staggered back a couple of steps. He was strong and he could take it. That was fine by me. I was in no hurry. I had some anger and frustration to work off. I climbed off the stool and walked to the center of the floor. Somebody locked the door. Everybody else gathered around. It didn’t feel like a lynch mob. It felt like sport.