Arise (Book Three in The Arson Saga) (13 page)

Chapter Seventeen

The computer device in
Krane’s hands had been beeping for several seconds, signaling their proximity to the host.

A narrow plume of smoke escaped from a weak-looking chimney belonging to a cabin that must’ve been constructed in his father’s day, perhaps earlier. Chilled air and falling snow quickly suffocated the slow, twisting breath. A few window shades danced back and forth just then, and it caught his attention in a strange, almost happy way. Someone inside had caused the shades to stir.

Lamont’s hand gradually dropped from the steering wheel when the car came to a halt. Krane studied how the mongrel’s eyes seemed to wander and how every lame intake of oxygen came across as little more than a whimper. Lamont’s head swayed from side to side, as if he no longer knew which way was left and which right. He toyed with his manufactured plastic teeth, and the very action caused Krane’s neck hairs to stand, tickling the growth they surrounded.

The growth was a third eye, he had come to realize; it was the thing that allowed him to glimpse a future for which he desperately hungered. He sealed his natural gaze and forced the new, tender flesh apart. A rubbery cocoon peeled back, revealing the blemished prescription. This marked the second time Krane had used the muscle, and doing so remained a challenge; the first had happened accidentally.

He tried governing the eye, using his mind to dictate what it should do or impart to him. But the eye imparted nothing. Lamont was distracted by the bullet wound, uttering oath upon oath, threat after threat. The doctor fought hard to tune him out, hoping to focus somehow on what might follow should they invade the home. Straining, he pushed every thought to the limit, crunched his teeth. Still nothing.

Krane tilted his head back and loosened the muscle until the eye once more retreated into his neck. Then he wiped a drop of clear liquid from where the opening was, looked at his fingertip briefly, and cleaned the residue off on his pants, annoyed that the enhancement had not wholly bent to his will.

“What now?” Lamont moaned. “You’re gonna…run in there with your toy gun…and expect that mutant to just go quietly?” The rag being used as a tourniquet was considerably stained.

Krane concealed the revolver and stepped out of the car, not bothering to reply. Wind and snow breathed through his hair as he began to walk. It was a struggle. How close could he get before a blood vessel popped on account of the throbbing in his leg? How near to the entrance would he be before Adam discovered their arrival and raised his hand to destroy, assuming all powers by now had been fully restored and his heart now beat with a rhythmic boom? There was great risk tracking him here. They’d come across the abandoned Firebird on the side of the road. Adam was intelligent, intelligent enough to escape him, but Krane was beyond confident that his own intelligence far exceeded it. Still, there was no shaking the lingering turbulence which sought to make a red paste of his organs. It didn’t take a genius to know there was no safety in this. No DATA team fitted in knock-off SWAT uniforms would come to his aid. Not this time. But he had no choice. Adam belonged with him, no matter what shape his body was now in.

He took three steps in snow that came up to his shins. Jutting out of the white blanket, he noticed a thick branch long enough to act as a staff. He could use some stability. And the fact that it had been lying there—perhaps for days—could not be coincidence. When the doctor reached for the branch, the small, fleshy enclosure tucked against the back of his neck once more peeled open and revealed the eye. Again, without his control, a vivid picture radiated across his subconscious. In the vision, Lamont choked and bled profusely into the snow, like some vanquished, forsaken seraph. Krane couldn’t tell the cause, but when the shaking stopped, Lamont’s gaze went blank.

Krane leaned heavily on the branch and wheezed, bewildered by what he saw. The eye returned to its former position, tucking into his changing skin, nearly hidden. He glanced behind him to find Lamont getting out of the driver’s seat. Defiance painted a strong mask for him to wear, his glare laced with venom.

Why hadn’t he been able to see more? Why did the eye only respond when
it
saw fit to respond? Could he not control something that was indeed a part of him? Dissatisfied, Krane inched closer to the door, to the entrance, toward a near future that only offered half of the story.

You suspect death might visit me first, but it will be you, Lamont
, he thought as the agent drew nearer.
I will survive this endeavor. I will be
…

“Not another step,” a voice said. It belonged to a woman, along in her years, he surmised. She cocked a shotgun from behind the cabin’s front door. In spite of the determined command, he couldn’t help but detect a certain kind of trepidation and worry attached to her words.

“You sound troubled, ma’am. My name is Doctor Emanuel Krane, and you will let me in.”

“I don’t want any trouble. I like to keep to myself. Now, I don’t know how you wound up here, but how’s about we forget ya ever did, and you just beat it?”

“I mean you no harm. I’ve c-c-come for what is mine, nothing more.”

“Really? And you thought now, in the middle of a freak winter storm—that’s the best time to come lookin’ for somethin’ you
think
belongs to you?”

Krane despised the pedantic, childish tone she used.

“217! We’re here for you! Come out and face us!” Lamont’s voice splintered. He could barely yell without ensuring more pain.

“Is your boyfriend always this cordial?” the woman mocked. Krane heard a slight chuckle as she issued the words. She had grown much too comfortable with the situation. He needed to rectify that.

Pulling out the revolver and holding it at his side, he said, “Give them over to us, a-a-an-and we’ll let you li-l-l-live.”

“Well, isn’t this interesting? It s-s-seems I underestimated your charms. Tell me a secret; did you have a colorful childhood? I imagine you got teased a boatload in g-g-grade-grade school, champ.”

Even Lamont, lit with fury, snickered at the snide joke. It drove needles under Krane’s skin.

“I know they’re here. Last warn-warn-w-warning. Give them over to us, and you have my w-w-word that we will let you live.”

“Your word, huh? And what’s that to me? I don’t know you. Last I checked, we weren’t friends. Hell, you’ve never even bought me a drink.”

“Don’t make this more c-c-com-complicate-ated than it needs to be.”

“Seeing as this is our first little rendezvous and all, I want you to know there’ll be no tongue. There, now that we’ve gotten the crude stuff out of the way, let me be frank, if I may. What I’m wond’ring is this: who’s to say your boyfriend, upon having some violent epiphany, won’t waltz in here brass-balled and get all trigger happy once ya get what you want?”

A sliver of the branch dug into Krane’s wrist, and the skeleton flared his nostrils.

“See it from my point of view, boys. If I let you vampires in, there’s nothing stopping this friendly conversation from turning all levels o’ icky.”

Lamont grunted. “I’m itchin’ to…waste…this broad.”

“Now, that wasn’t nice. You gonna let your other half talk to me like that? I was bein’ polite.”

“Quiet,” Krane hissed, swinging in frustration at his mumbling counterpart. Resting most of his left-side weight on the branch, the doctor held the revolver up with his right. He imagined the faceless woman could see, though he didn’t know where she stood behind that door or from which angle she viewed them. With a snarl, he tossed the gun. It landed somewhere several feet away.

“Whatchu thinkin’, Doc? Don’t be a fool.”

Krane motioned for him to keep still and silent, and silence ensued.

“Do we have a truce?”

Another pause. It felt like years until, finally, she spoke again. “Speak
friend
and enter, amigo. Let’s get on with it.”

Krane limped up the porch steps, Lamont grudgingly at his side, and opened the door slowly. When he saw the woman’s cheek blush with delight, and the shotgun raised high, a panic flooded his chest. But by then the time for second-guessing had passed. Before his next breath, her finger kissed the trigger.

Lamont’s gut absorbed the majority of the blast, but some of the black pebbles from the explosion rippled through Krane’s ribs as well, and he lost balance, tumbling down onto his rear. The unexpected shot thrust Lamont backward. His body rolled over each porch step, until his jaw smacked the snow, fragments of the ruptured door draping his limbs. Never before had a human shell appeared so feeble. His hands scraped the callus, white powder, attempting to flip over. Blood trickled out the corner of his mouth, painting the snow. A scarlet river formed beneath his spine and spread slowly.

“Might wanna have a real doctor take a glance at that. Come into this house again, and we can talk some more. But I can’t promise I’ll be as nice.”

“She’s a lunatic,” Krane said with a curse. He scurried across the creaking floorboards, emasculated. This old maid had both shot and outwitted him. He’d kill her and dance over her corpse if it was the last thing he did. But where was the blasted gun? He couldn’t see it, and there wasn’t time to waste. Lamont’s Colt .45 had fallen out of a holster when the shotgun round had mercilessly ripped into his gut.
Lucky.
Krane managed to snatch it up quickly without drawing attention.

“She…did me…good, man,” Lamont wheezed, lightly placing his fingertips inside the massive craters now a part of his stomach. “Old, stupid broad…I’ll be a son of a b-b…”

Lamont’s voice trailed off. Krane wondered how long the agent had before the devil came to collect. Trembling, the dying hound dove one hand into his coat pocket in search of a wad of tobacco. Once he found the container, he flipped open the lid and scooped up a decent chunk, tucking the mushy substance behind his lip, pointlessly satisfied.

Furious and impassioned, Krane aimed the handgun at the old witch, who sat nauseatingly content in a rocking chair with a cup of something hot on a side table, scanning the area for her target. But he must’ve been a ghost to her. He beamed, not focusing on Lamont or the fact that greedy, metal fragments wrestled with his innards every time he exhaled; instead, alert and aware that his future could be altered with one wrong move.

But every throbbing sensation might as well have dissipated when he pulled the trigger for the first time, sending a misguided bullet into the woman’s shoulder. She dropped the shotgun with a curse. He had aimed for her midsection, so his mind calculated it as a miss, but at least he’d knocked her off guard. Watching her cry out some man’s name—Herb, it sounded like—added pleasure to the inflicted wound.

“Cheap shot,” she seethed, scrambling for the weapon.

Krane fired again, and this time, the bullet caught a thigh. Over the course of the last few seconds, he thought it better to cause the pain to spread and infest rather than allow her the privilege of immediate escape.

“It doesn’t ha-h-have to be this hard, does it, ma’am?” he asked, picking up the twelve-gauge before she had the chance.

“Might consider putting that baby down, short-stack; it ain’t for kids.”

“You
will
show me respect.”

“Or what? You’re gonna hurt me? I’m shakin’ in my boots.”

He grabbed her face and squeezed the wrinkled cheeks together, analyzing her like some flimsy specimen.

“Why did you come here?”

“To reclaim what is mine. I’ve already told you.”

“You can’t own human beings, or have you forgotten what century it is? Those children don’t belong to the likes of you.”

“Children? Ahh, there is so much more behind the veil that you do n-n-not know. Adam… He’s so much more than you can imagine.” Krane winced when the stinging in his side intensified. “What, I wonder, did they tell you about me?”

“Enough.”

“Really?” Krane’s eyelid flinched. He knelt down and ran his finger across her lips and jaw, and flicked her nose for sport. “You are quite an ugly, rancid old hag, aren’t you?”

“Big words for such a small man. What right do you think you have manipulating children for your own means?”

“Right? No right. But God abandoned our race long ago, I think. Left us here t-t-to toil and plot and rule as w-w-we saw fit. I once thought as you did, believe me. But the world is not what it once was. It is ch-cha-changing, and changing fast. She will become, as I am.” Krane stretched his neck and pulled the woman’s hand toward his new eye. She fought him, struck his face, but he didn’t retaliate. Instead, he forced her to touch it, to feel its wonder.

“See? Can’t you see how be-b-beaut-beautiful it is?” He found himself getting excited when she stroked the outline that existed a few centimeters beneath his occipital bone.

“What is it?”

“A sign of my becoming. A si-s-s-sign of what will be.”

“You’re gonna turn us, ain’t ya? You’re gonna make humans…somethin’ else?”

“It’s already begun. Perhaps you were t-t-too old to see the serum’s effect in your body, but others will. Others are even now existing with certain alt-al-alterations, modificat-ate-ations.”

“Adam! You bastard! You…puny runt!” Lamont’s throaty roar disturbed their diatribe for a blink.

“It’s not your place to play God,” she added.

Krane grinned. “Isn’t it, though? One must ascend to the abandoned throne. The poor, small-thinking creatures of Babel aspired toward power and control. They f-f-failed. The Romans, with all their victories and knowledge and might, constructed an empire they be-b-bel-believed to be impervious, and they were wro-wr-wrong, for it too has crumbled and will turn to ash. Our new order—
my
new order—will transcend the kingdoms of men and even the realms of heaven itself. There is no more s-s-skept-skepticism in my blood. No more blind acquiescence in my flesh, only a fever that will not relent, a truth that knows not h-how-how to fail. My species will be stronger. Fast-F-F-Faster. Superior. Those, like you, who cannot or will not become, we s-sh-shall relinquish.”