The Living End (26 page)

“Meadow Brand,” I snarled. “She uses illusions to disguise her puppets as humans. That’s how she gets them close to her targets.”

“I-I know,” Roth whispered. “I’ve seen her do it.”

We jogged to the basement door. Down at the bottom of the stairs, silhouetted in the light of a slowly swaying bulb, a second mannequin lay shot and dead.

“Come on,” I said. “She has to be close to control these things, but she won’t stick around for long.”

He froze as we approached the kitchen door. “Wait, how do you know that’s all of them?”

“You know how Brand operates,” I told him. In fact, I was counting on him knowing it. “She always goes for the overkill, and she doesn’t send two puppets when she can send ten. If she had more to throw at us, she already would have.”

Roth nodded, getting it. We ran out to the driveway just in time to see the Wardriver speeding away with a screech of tires.

“There she is!” I shouted. I dropped to one knee, brought my gun up in both hands, and shot at the van, pulling the trigger until the hammer clicked down on an empty chamber. I cursed and stood back up, shoving the worthless gun back under my jacket.

Roth watched me, eyes wide as his brain tried to catch up with his eyes and ears.

“You…you saved my life,” he said.

“Told you I would.” I nodded at his rental car. “Come on. Let’s get out of here before she sends reinforcements. We need to talk.”

The key to stage magic is playing on assumptions. You don’t need elaborate stages and thousand-dollar props to perform a good trick—you just need an audience ready and primed to be fooled. I had figured that Roth knew all about Meadow Brand through his partnership with Lauren, and that he’d have seen her mannequins in action along with how she used illusions to disguise them—for a little while, at least—as dead-eyed human beings.

That was all I needed.

My gun? Loaded with blanks. Made for a nice loud bang and a smoky sizzle, but the “blood” from Bentley’s and Corman’s wounds came courtesy of squibs and dye packs hidden under their shirts. Back in the Wardriver, Caitlin and Pixie used the hidden cameras we’d placed to keep track of the action, setting off the squibs in time with my shots.

We’d placed the “dead” puppets in the guest bedroom and the basement before Roth even arrived. Meanwhile, Bentley hid in a side closet, and Corman—dragging a garbage bag of junk down the stairs to simulate the sound of a tumbling body—just ducked around the corner and out of sight. It was so simple it was almost complicated.

Roth was so rattled he didn’t even notice the one giveaway: the broken windows were both smashed open from
inside
the house.

As we pulled out of the development and onto the main road, I saw the van parked on an unlit cross street. Once we were out of sight, they’d double back to pick up Bentley and Corman and yank out the cameras. As for the broken glass, the red-dye-stained carpet, and the bullets in the walls, I figured Nicky could send me a bill. I’d be sure to get right on that.

We drove for ten minutes in a direction close to random. I wasn’t sure if Roth kept turning to throw off an imagined tail, or if he was just too scared to plot a course, and I didn’t care either way. I owned him now. I spotted an all-night diner and pointed for him to pull in under the yellow neon sign.

“Here’s good,” I said. “Time for us to have a little chat about your former partners, and what we’re going to do about them.”

W
aylon Jennings crooned from the speakers of a jukebox as we slipped into a booth lined with yellow vinyl and hard plastic. The diner smelled like fresh hash browns and black coffee from a day-old pot.

“Two eggs, scrambled,” I told the sleepy-eyed waitress. “Side of white toast, and a Coke.”

“Nothing for me,” Roth said.

I slid the laminated menu in front of him.

“Eat something,” I said. “It’ll help your stomach settle.”

“Really,” he said, “I can’t.”

I sighed, picked up both menus, and handed them to the waitress. “He’ll have what I’m having, but a cup of decaf instead of the soda.”

Once she disappeared, I studied Roth from across the Formica table.

“How long did you think it’d be, before Calypso noticed you were trying to live forever?” I said.

Roth looked pained. He shook his head. “It’s not a violation of my contract. I checked. I read it a hundred times. I’m not in default, he can’t collect.”

“If he could,” I said, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. Relax. He’s not mad. Thinks it’s kinda funny, truth be told.”

Roth slumped back in the booth and closed his eyes. “Funny? None of this is funny. I never should have signed that damn contract, never should have heard him out—”

“But you did,” I told him, “and that’s ancient history now. Done. Writ in stone. All you can change is how long you get to live now, and how much luxury you get to ride in. See, we’ve got a bigger problem.”

“Lauren wants to kill me.”

“Bigger than that. You’re not in violation now, but you’re going to be. Real soon.”

He sat up straight. “How do you figure?”

“Lauren. She’s becoming a goddess, with your help. Once she does, once she starts flexing her muscle over the entire planet, do you really think there’s going to
be
a United States for you to lead? That means you’ve deliberately made a clause of the contract unfulfillable, which means you broke the deal, which means your soul is forfeit, and you go straight to hell.”

I didn’t know if that was true, based on what little time I’d had to skim the fine print. It didn’t matter, though. All that mattered was that he believed me. From the fresh panic in his eyes, I’d hit a home run.

“She promised me,” he said. “She promised me she could get me out of this jam if I helped her.”

“I don’t care. Neither will Calypso. The best thing you can do right now, the
only
thing you can do, is help me stop Lauren. She goes down, everything goes back to normal, which means you’re alive and well and on your happy way to the White House,
Mr. President
. No harm, no foul, and we can all forget about this mess.”

The waitress came back with our plates. I sprinkled a little salt and pepper over the scrambled eggs and unwrapped a red plastic straw. Roth stared at his food like he didn’t know what it was for.

“What can I do?” he said. His hands lay dead in his lap, limp and helpless as the rest of him.

“Start from the beginning. How did you get mixed up with the lab rats from Ausar?”

He shook his head and let out a bitter little chuckle.

“You mean, how did they get involved with us,” he said. “I was on the Ausar board of directors. I’d originally wanted to use the company to push longevity research. Then we found the tunnel in Mexico, and it was off to the races.”

“Who else was on the board? Were you all clued-in?”

“Clued-in?” he said, tilting his head. “Oh! You mean did we all know what we were dealing with? No. Just a few of us. Everyone else was kept at arm’s length. Nedry, Clark, and Payton were assigned to a black-books account and given facilities off the main corporate campus. Everyone knew they were working on the Viridithol project, but the actual details were kept quiet, and all the published papers were filled with garbage data. It was a very tight operation. Very smooth.”

“Until you started feeding plant cuttings from another dimension to pregnant women,” I said.

He reached for a packet of sugar and dumped it into his coffee. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“That wasn’t my fault,” he said. “The researchers promised me they had it all under control. Not long after, Payton got cold feet and grew a conscience. He would have exposed us. Exposed everything.”

I swirled my straw in my glass of Coke. Ice cubes bobbed up and down in the drink like tiny icebergs.

“It wasn’t their idea, was it?” I said. “Nedry and Clark.
You
were the one who ordered Payton’s murder.”

“You would have done the same thing in my shoes. Come on, this wasn’t about the deformed kids. He was going to tell the entire world that we’d found a gateway to the fucking Garden of Eden and draw the media a map to get there! You know, don’t you? You’ve seen the horrible shit that’s on the other side of that tunnel. You can imagine how many innocent people would have died trying to ‘return to Eden.’ Yes, I had him killed, and if I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t change my mind. Bob Payton
had
to die.”

I was tempted, for one perverse heartbeat, to tell him I’d spoken to a very alive and well Payton two nights ago. I kept it to myself, though. Payton could live until I was sure he’d sent the smoke-faced men back where they came from. After that, his survival would be highly negotiable.

“After the Viridithol scandal,” Roth said, “the whole thing collapsed. We’d had the foresight to stash as many assets offshore as we could before the government came and kicked in the door. That was the end of the story, until I met Lauren Carmichael.”

I scooped up a forkful of scrambled eggs. Greasy, salty, cheap, and perfect. Just what you want to settle a rumbling stomach, late at night after a gunfight.

“Let me guess,” I said. “She came to you looking for help with bringing the feds down on Nicky Agnelli. You wanted to know why. You started digging and discovered you had common interests. Namely, she was trying to build Gilles de Rais’s machine, while you, Nedry, and Clark already had access to his notes and could finish the puzzle. The peanut butter to Lauren’s chocolate.”

Roth sipped his coffee and nodded. “It’s funny. She was so suspicious at first, thinking I wanted to usurp her position and be the one to activate the machine. I finally convinced her that I don’t want to be a god. I just don’t want to die. Besides, I’m more than happy to let her take all the risks. There’s also the…changes.”

“Changes?”

He glanced away for a moment, staring out the plate-glass window at the desolate parking lot.

“She’s been taking Nedry and Clark’s serum for weeks. Viridithol-2, created through an extract from white blood cells oversaturated with the original drug. It’s not killing her, but…she’s nothing I’d call human, Mr. Faust. Not anymore.”

“She’s attuning herself,” I said. “Making her spirit and flesh friendlier to the Garden’s energy, getting ready for the final step. How long do we have?”

“Days? Hours? The mutation is exponential. She’s waiting like an expectant mother, waiting for the power coursing through her veins to tell her she’s ready. The Enclave is finished. I’m almost certain they have all the sacrifices prepared and ready, and Nedry and Clark have been working around the clock. I’m not involved. I can’t be. My job now was just to sit back, keep paying the bills, and wait. Given that she tried to murder me tonight…I guess all the bills are paid.”

“Where do I find her?”

He nodded vaguely toward the distant lights of the Strip, a grimy scarlet smear against the diner window.

“The Enclave, behind more defenses than Fort Knox. You won’t get to her. You wouldn’t want to, even if you could.”

“You let me worry about that,” I said. “Nedry and Clark are there with her?”

“At all times.”

“What about Meadow Brand?”

He shook his head. “I thought she was out hunting
you
. Lauren was furious—I guess you set a demon loose in her house or something? She said that killing you is now Brand’s full-time job. I haven’t seen Brand since, but she’s supposed to have a part to play in the big ceremony. If you ask me? Before tonight, if I believed Lauren was going to stab anybody in the back, it’d be her. The woman is a raging psychopath. I think Lauren invited her to the final ritual just to keep an eye on her and make sure she didn’t ruin anything.”

“That might still be on the agenda.”

“She’ll be impossible to find now,” Roth said. “She took a shot at both of us, and we’re still alive. Brand isn’t stupid. She’ll hide.”

“Even so, I have to try and track her down. You don’t have any way of getting in touch?”

He took out his Blackberry and scrolled through his contacts list.

“Just an emergency phone number,” he said. “She screens her calls, though. Won’t pick up for anyone but me or Lauren.”

Meadow’s number was the same one we’d taken off her invoices from Y&M Woodworking. I pretended to copy it down anyway. It was Roth’s number I was saving.

“Last question,” I said. “Xerxes. Who do they answer to?”

“Angus Caine is
my
man. I write the paychecks, I give the orders. Don’t ask me to send them up against Lauren, though. I’d be throwing their lives away.”

“I’ve fought Lauren before,” I said.

“That’s right.
Before
. Before the treatments. You haven’t seen her lately. No, even if I asked, Caine’s too protective of his troops. He’d never allow it.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I don’t need them to. I am going to ask you to do one more thing for me, but not just yet.”

This was the hard part. Cutting him loose. I had to get rid of Roth in a way that would take him out of the fight, keep him loyal, and guarantee he kept believing his former partners were trying to murder him. I bit off a chunk of toast and chewed it over.

“Y
ou’ve got to leave town,” I told Roth. “Tonight. By now, Lauren knows that you know she’s gunning for you. She’ll take steps to defend herself, and that includes sending Meadow out for another go. Next time I won’t be there to save you.”

“I should confront her,” Roth said. “Not in person, I’m not stupid. I mean I should call her. Demand some answers.”

“What, because your pride is stinging? Fuck pride. You survived the attack, and that’s all that matters. Calling Lauren is the
last
thing you should do. She’ll deny everything, blame it all on Meadow going rogue, and do everything in her power to track you down and finish you off. Don’t give her an inch.”

The best kind of lie, as always, is the one nestled inside a wrapper of truth. If he did make the mistake of calling her, Lauren would definitely deny everything. She’d deny it because she was innocent. Either way, the story would hold.