Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief (30 page)

Another rumble came from overhead. For an instant he crazily thought it was an avalanche or the roof coming down on them.

But it was the garage door, coming down to seal them all in.

The tow truck turned its wheels and, instead of cutting Bernal in half against the workbench, shot out of the garage, scraping its cab roof against the descending door.

Patricia pulled herself free, taking advantage of Bernal’s moment of distraction. She hit the ground and rolled, just making it under as the door hit the concrete.

“Dammit!” Charis hung from the doorway to the house and thumbed the control. The door rumbled up again, to reveal a silent, empty drive. The last remnants of the mist puffed out into the night.

_______

“She’s going to
 kill them!” Charis slumped in the bed of Spillvagen’s truck, a wad of blood-soaked paper towels pressed to her face. “Those guys are sitting at Cheriton Airport expecting some kind of FedEx package, not an active AI accompanied by a killer. We have to save those poor bastards.”

No one had a phone, and Patricia’s house did not have a landline. They were alone in the woods.

The last time it had backed up, Hesketh had smashed the side of Spillvagen’s truck, creasing the wheel and driving a length of fender into the tire. The engine would start but would not continue to run. Spillvagen now sat in the cab, hands on the wheel, staring down the gravel drive.

Outside, Charis’s tire was still flat. The spare was also flat. She’d tried to blame Greenpeace for that as well, but Bernal thought there was a limit to what they could be held responsible for. It had been an official Social Protection vehicle for quite some time now. That Social Protection did not actually exist didn’t get her off.

Bernal felt panic himself. The image of Oleana and her Wisconsin buddies facing Patricia pulsed in time with the pain in his skull. He searched through the tangle of crap on the smashed workbench, with no idea what he was looking for. There had been a flash of something, during all the excitement, something he had noticed ... but he now had no idea what.

He took a deliberate breath. “We have to think.” 

“Think? There’s no time. We have to do something.” He found one thing of use in the mess. “Do this, then.” He tossed Charis a tube of Super Glue. “Glue your cuts shut. We’re out of paper towels, and you’re making a mess.”

She caught it clumsily, with her left hand. “What, no duct tape? What the hell are you looking for there?” 

“Please don’t ask me that. That airport thing is a distraction. A decoy. I’m sure of it. But... we need to figure out where Hesketh and Patricia are actually headed. How Hesketh really hopes to escape. Talk about something else. Please. Going the wrong way faster doesn’t get you to your destination.”

Charis ran the glue tube down her cheek and pinched the cut closed with thumb and forefinger.

“You saved my life when you knocked on that door, boy. I haven’t thanked you for that yet. So, thanks.” 

“You’re welcome. What the hell were you doing here, though? I had no idea.”

Charis made a face, then winced and prodded the shiny line of the drying glue. It seemed to be holding, for now.

“I was just tying up a loose end. And almost got tied up myself. They found Madeline Ungaro’s body.”

Bernal froze in his search. “Where?”

“Sunk to the bottom of the oil sump at Ignacio’s. I hear they almost didn’t check there. That’s a big toxic-waste disposal problem, huge paperwork, DEP guys, Feds from the EPA, all sorts of people had to get involved. All official Bowler victims were identified. They were really looking for Muriel’s head. But there Madeline Ungaro was, weighted down under it all. Dead since the night Muriel disappeared, her head still firmly attached.”

All this time, Bernal had half thought, even hoped, Madeline was alive somewhere, that she had slid smoothly out from under as she always had before. “That sounds like a loose end getting tied off.”

“I guess it should have been. But here’s the thing. Earlier, Patricia had told me that, among other things she had seen shipped off by Ignacio, presumably to Kazakhstan, was a big welded box. She was careful to be a bit vague, but her description matched that of the thing you had seen in the back of the Ziggy Sigma van. I liked that, it matched up with everything else. When you called and left me a message that it hadn’t been Ignacio who hired those gals, Prelate and Vervain, to find the headtaker, but, instead, your loony buddy Spillvagen, I felt like erasing it. Who needs alternate explanations when everything is nice and clear?

“But it bugged me. Why had she said she saw the headtaker at Ignacio’? when it was clearly somewhere else? What had she actually seen? Had she seen anything at all? So I dropped by. To check up on her, tell her that Madeline’s body had been found, just the usual gossip kind of thing, before I headed for the airport to meet our Wisconsin buddies.

“So we chatted, and I brought it up, kind of an ‘oh, by the way, I just want to make sure I understood’ thing. I didn’t have any notion that she was a killer, but I guess she figured I was smarter than I turned out to be or maybe that she just couldn’t take the chance that I’d figure it out. So she went to take me out, right then and there. Crazy, huh? I mean, she’s a tiny gal. I kind of outweigh her. But she’s 
muy
 fast. I might have ended up dead if you hadn’t stopped by. You interrupted her. She shoved me in the closet, dropped that weight on my head, and left me there to choke my life out in her dirty underwear.”

She paused. “I must say though, it was almost worth it, to hear your seduction technique. Very smooth.”

Despite the gravity of the situation, Bernal found himself blushing. He directed his attention to an old thermal fax machine. Its buttons were surrounded by the gray of sweat and skin cells, and it still bore a handwritten sticker telling people how to remove a paper jam. A wire harness ran from it to a SQUID very much like the one in Ungaro’s lab, this one dangling from a welded frame by a tow truck chain.

Hesketh had certainly had a more sophisticated comm setup back at Ignacio’s yard. It had had all sorts of connections, been able to control the yard’s carts. And those connections had been used by Muriel, too. Then it had been forced to hide out here at Patricia’s, and she had been reduced to a high-tech equivalent of mind reading: pulling electrical potentials out of the cryogenically frozen brains and translating them into instructions spit out by a fax machine.

“It was Madeline’s work inside that thing.” These were Spillvagen’s first words, though he did not take his hands off the steering wheel of his useless vehicle or his eyes off the empty driveway. “Had to be. Muriel’s head. It was wired in, set up, each frozen nerve tract in its proper position to interface correctly. It wasn’t some kind of plug-and-play setup.”

“Probably the last thing Madeline did,” Charis said. “Before Patricia Foote killed her.”

“She must have made that choice.” Spillvagen shook his head. “To help her creation survive, even if it meant her death.”

“It probably meant her death anyway,” Charis said pragmatically. “No matter what she did.” She looked at Bernal. “You may want to think about things, but—”

“I think this fax machine is how Hesketh communicated with Patricia while it was in here,” Bernal said.

Bernal leafed through the curling thermal sheets scattered on the floor. Sometimes a sheet would have a single instruction, like “Wash the blade in boiling water and replace it in its location.” Sometimes there would be tiny scrawled words packed all across the page. Most of them were jumbled nonsense, like “bird beard bard bored,” with tiny bits of instruction interspersed, sometimes in separated words and even letters. Patricia had clearly had to piece them together. Sometimes there was a sheet that was fairly clear, like the one the Enigmatic Ascent crew had found after Patricia had recovered Hesketh from the ditch below Charis’s yard.

“Did Hesketh say anything of interest?” Charis said.

“It’s not what Hesketh said that’s interesting. It’s what Muriel said, pretending to be Hesketh.”

So, all along, Patricia had found ways to receive instructions from her master, her deity. Ever since it had recruited her from Green Valley. She’d done what she was instructed to do, glad, at last, to have a structured life and to be obeying someone who cared about her. When Muriel regained consciousness within Hesketh, she had found ways to piggyback her own instructions, her Satanic Verses, on what Hesketh was telling its acolyte. Those false instructions had seemed to come from Hesketh but really came from a part of its own processing that it had only intermittent control over: Muriel’s brain. Patricia had had no way of authenticating these communications. If she had been used to getting commands from Hesketh through a certain channel, and a new command came through that channel, it was something she had to listen to. Muriel had taken advantage of a lack of error checking.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the fax the Enigmatic Ascent crew had found, the one Len had given him at the car wash. A bar code indicated transshipment to the cosmodrome at Tyuratam, next to a picture of something that looked like a nebula, with something that looked like a bar along one side.

With that as a guide, he found it in the mess of stuff that had fallen to the floor: a metal strut, cracked and slightly bent from impact, amid some hex nut boxes. It had somehow matched his memory of the nebula image. Sometimes, just by chance, you actually saw things clearly.

He held it up. It was clearly the same as the strut that appeared in the picture, partially obscuring the nebula. Presumably something had been wrong with this one. It had already been cracked when the truck hit and bent it. Patricia, with precise requirements, had rejected it and replaced it with another.

He walked over to the car with the fax sheet. “Norbert, can you identify this location in the sky? It may be where Hesketh is heading.”

“I don’t know if identifying that would help anything,” Spillvagen said. “Even if it’s heading in this direction, it will be, let’s say, quite some time before it gets there.”

“Just take a look.”

Spillvagen frowned at it. Then his face smoothed. He chuckled. He laughed. That startled him, and he came out of his funk. “The easy answer is, the Horsehead Nebula. But that’s just a little joke. Who knew?”

“What?” Bernal was irritated. This was no time for screwing around.

“Who knew that our cowgirl had freckles? Remarkable detail. I’ve never found out who the artist was. One of the unsung geniuses of our era, really.”

With that as a clue, the picture snapped into focus. This wasn’t any kind of astronomical photograph. He was looking at a small part of the Near Earth Orbit cowgirl’s leg, right at the fringe of her short skirt. The Horsehead Nebula was on her skirt, and the blobs next to it were freckles and fine hairs, right beneath the curve of her butt. The strut was part of some structure just out of the image.

“That 
is
 where Hesketh is headed,” Bernal realized. “Oleana, Magnusen, and Len might be waiting for it at the airport, all set up, ready to trap it, but that’s not where it’s going.”

“Where? The diner? I doubt even a malign artificial intelligence could stomach the food.”

“The diner. Near Earth Orbit.” Bernal thought about all the work Patricia had done up there in the fake spaceship and the associated machinery. Those damn HVAC units had taken an incredible amount of maintenance. “That has to be how it’s planning to escape. We don’t have any time. This is where we have to go. To stop Hesketh and save Muriel.”

“Bernal.” Spillvagen grabbed his wrist. “Don’t take for granted that Muriel’s still alive in there.”

“Why not?”

“I disconnected and reconnected her. Fast and under pressure. That’s no joke. And if we do somehow get her out of Hesketh, where will we put her?” He craned his neck and looked behind his pickup. “That headtaker is completely lunched. I have no idea if we can get it operational. It’ll take hours, even if we can.”

“We’d have been dead if I hadn’t done that!” Bernal found himself yelling. “Are you saying it’s my fault? That if Muriel—”

Spillvagen released him. “I’m saying you should be ready. Spiritually. Emotionally. However you need to be.” 

“Are you standing by to assist me?”

“I don’t think I’m the best choice.”

By this time, Charis had climbed out of the truck’s bed and was standing over them, glued and ready for action. “He’s just trying to give it to you straight. You don’t have to be grateful, but stop yelling at him.”

“Sorry, Norbert.” Bernal spoke as calmly as he could. “You did everything you could.”

He found himself thinking of Naomi Wilkerson. He told himself that it was because that printer might have chattered again, leaving one last message from Muriel. Naomi was the only person who might have more information directly from the source. He knew she was sitting there, waiting.

But even as he thought that, he knew that wasn’t why Naomi came to mind. There might certainly be a message from Muriel, and if there was he had to have it, but what he needed from Naomi was something different.

A message from a still-living Muriel was one thing. The last words of someone who was now dead was something else altogether.

“You think that damn rocket on top of the diner is real?” Charis said. “What kind of sense does that make?” 

“How much sense does any of it make?” Bernal said. 

“Oh, now there’s a compelling argument.”

“Are you disagreeing with it?”

“No. I just wish you could at least try to make it seem sensible. But you’ve given us a reasonable proximate goal. I’ll buy that the airport is probably the last place we should go. Now, how do we get to Near Earth Orbit?” Bernal turned to Spillvagen. “Norbert. Go out on the road and wave.”

“At who?”

“Who do you think? Someone who’s always got you under observation. I only hope she’s still sober enough to give us a ride.

Bob the waiter stood out behind Near Earth Orbit, on break, smoking a cigarette and squinting into the darkness, trying to discern the plots being hatched out there, when Yolanda drove them all up. She was sober enough, but irritated at acting as a taxi service. And she claimed Bernal had run down her phone battery talking to Naomi.

She slowed her car to a stop an inconvenient distance from the diner, killed the engine, and leaned her seat back, as if ready to take a nap.

Patricia’s tow truck stood by the diner’s back door, dark and silent. Bernal didn’t have time to feel relief at having been right about where she was headed. There was too much else to do.

“That paella made me puke for days,” Yolanda said.

“Order the burger!” Bernal and Spillvagen said together.

“Hey,” Bob heard them, but did not seem offended. “Bernal. Somebody’s waiting for you.”

Bernal stared up at the diner roof but couldn’t see anyone up there. “Who?”

“Older lady, orange hair. Ordered some french fries, but hasn’t eaten many of them. Maybe she’s saving them for you.”

Naomi wasn’t supposed to be here. He had called her as soon as he talked Yolanda out of her cell phone, and Naomi had answered instantly, as if waiting for his call. A one-line message had come in from Muriel.

She had asked him where Muriel was, and he had refused to tell her. He didn’t want her anywhere near a killer like Patricia. She would have to do without the spiritual solace of being near Muriel. She hadn’t pressed him.

Bernal cautiously strolled over to the diner. He couldn’t see anything on the roof, but a ladder stood against the wall.

Naomi stood in the rear doorway. She was heavily made-up, with long curled eyelashes, and her red hair gleamed as if lacquered. On a hanger in her hand, blowing gently in the night breeze, was Muriel’s blue summer dress.

“Muriel said, ‘Leave it up to me,’ ” Naomi whispered. “She wasn’t about to go into a long explanation, even if she had time. What she understands is no longer what we understand.”

“What are you doing here?” Bernal said. “How did you find us?”

Naomi smiled gently. “If you want to hide your destination, avoid having a harpy screaming in the background about ‘never getting food poisoning under that damn cowgirl’s ass again.’ ”

Yolanda had been protesting their destination, Bernal realized. He’d filtered her out, intent on Naomi’s low, calm voice. But Naomi had paid attention to everything.

“You should leave,” he said. “It’s dangerous here.”

“I’ll stay out of the way. But whatever you were planning, however you were going to rescue her . . . leave her. Let her do what she has to do.”

“And the dress?” Bernal said. “Did she ask for that?” 

“No. This is for us. For you and me and whoever else is watching. I wanted to see her there, one last time. Just as I did when I realized she was not dead. Please don’t make fun of me.”

“I won’t,” Bernal said. He remembered the scent she’d brought into Muriel’s room. She had a gift for making the dead seem real. He took the hanger with the dress hanging from it.

“Bob,” Charis said. “What did Patricia take up with her?’' With her wounds stuck together with superglue, her face had an oddly makeshift look, as if Patricia Foote had put it together from spare parts.

Bob looked up at the cowgirl and rocket ship. “She got me my cooljuice! In some weird high-tech cylinder arrangement. Some other gear too. She’s always putting gear up there. Between you and me, I think she steals it from work and resells it. But I’m glad I got my Freon. It’s really been stressful, thinking about the summer coming up and all.”

“I got news for you, Bob,” Spillvagen said. “That wasn’t contraband Freon Patricia Foote hauled up there.” 

“Really?” Bob said. “What was it then?”

“An artificial intelligence based on cryogenically frozen human heads, originally intended for planetary exploration but unfortunately turned to serial murder during beta testing.”

“Sure,” Bob said. “What are you taking up with you to deal with it?”

“Oh, this?” Bernal said. “A blue cotton summer dress.” 

“Rayon,” Naomi said. “It’s rayon.”

Bob took a puff on his cigarette, but did not seem to have any further questions.

_______

Curved sheets of
 smooth inner thigh rose above. Now that he looked, Bernal saw how detailed the sculpture was, with tiny gold hairs that started as the curve of muscle moved the front of the thigh. And there was the Horsehead Nebula on the skirt’s seam. No one could see these things, not from the highway, not from the parking lot. Only standing here, right next to everything, could you feel like a tiny homunculus confronting the cowgirl’s massive femininity.

The lower two-thirds of the decorative rocket that the cowgirl rode had panels removed. Where you would have expected to see supporting struts, and maybe a bird’s nest or two, was a dense network of pipes, pumps, compressors, and wiring. The nozzles at the end led to massive combustion chambers.

Beyond a tangle of HVAC equipment both real and fake, lay the cylinder that contained Hesketh, on a sling that looked like an emergency stretcher. A pair of electric motors would reel it up into the rocket’s belly and shut the curved panels behind it. In another world, another life, Patricia would have been an engineer or an artist who worked big.

“Careful, dammit,” Charis said behind him. “Stop right there. Don’t you see that?”

She picked up what looked like an old TV aerial off the gravel roof and reached past him.

There was a snap and a thunk.

“What. . . ?” Then Bernal saw it. Charis had yanked on a black thread stretched across the opening between two pieces of equipment. A tension spring had fired darts through where he would have been. Two of them had bounced off a large AC enclosure and fallen to the roof. They were vicious spikes with fins made from razor blades.

“Got to give it to her,” Charis said. “This gal works fast.”

Patricia must have picked the technique up from her crossbow-building boyfriend, Merrick.

“Wait here.” Charis faded into the darkness, moving with absolute silence.

Bernal tried to absorb everything about his surroundings. Here, leaning against the waste stack vent, was what looked like an electrical panel. On top of that was a transformer box with a small toggle switch on it. The little silver lever was easy to miss. But he was positive that it was the main launch switch. When they made the movie it would be much larger and impressive looking, bright red with an OSHA-approved grip, but here it just had to close a control circuit that didn’t carry a lot of amps. He reached for it. It was what Muriel had asked him to do: initiate the launch sequence and let her take care of the rest. He wouldn’t have to go any further into whatever nightmare Patricia had created ahead.

But he couldn’t. He just couldn’t. If there was still a chance to save her, he had to take it. He held Muriel’s dress by the hanger, letting it billow out in the predawn breeze. It was like she was with him. It was like she was there.

He turned to call for Charis—and felt a sharp blade bite into his neck. For an instant, he felt as if he were right back in Ignacio’s yard.

He didn’t move his head and couldn’t even swallow.

He was afraid his Adam’s apple would shred against the blade as it went up and down.

Patricia didn’t say anything, though he could feel her hot breath on his cheek and the trembling of her muscles. She had to reach up to do it, but she knew what she was doing. Her only communication was to push the sharp edge until he moved. He stumbled toward Hesketh.

“You don’t need to do this, Patricia,” Bernal managed. “There’s still time to stop.”

“Her head has to come out,” she whispered. “I was going to put Missy Madeline’s in its place, just for fun, but I lost track of it. Yours will have to do.”

“But. . .what for?” He felt like an idiot, trying to come up with persuasive reasons for her not to kill him, but he couldn’t stop himself. “I won’t be frozen, my brain will be completely useless.”

“Hesketh doesn’t need your brain. No one needs your stupid brain. I just need the weight of your head to make sure the center of gravity stays in the right place.”

It was the only remotely funny thing he’d ever heard her say.

“Why Madeline? What did she ever do to you?”

“She had it all,” Patricia said. “But she didn’t understand anything. She didn’t get it. Hesketh needed someone. It found me. She tried to tell me she wanted to be inside it, to please make her part of Hesketh. Instead, I used her to make sure your friend was in there. Stupidest thing I ever did. I need to get her out.” She looked up at a sound Bernal could not hear. “Your buddy is good and stuck now. I picked up a crowd-control grenade that came through the yard. I kind of miss Ignaz, you know? He had so much cool stuff. Now, please shut up and let me get done with this.”

She turned him, facing into the night and the wind. And, for an instant, she hesitated. Afterward he would remember that hesitation as the tenderest reaction anyone had ever had to him. A cold-blooded serial killer had paused before killing him because he meant something to her.

Context is everything.

He lifted up Muriel’s dress and let it slip from the hanger. The light fabric blew over his shoulder and into Patricia’s face.

She raised her hand to pull the fabric away and loosened her grip. He dove forward and pulled himself free.

Patricia moved, instantly, to interpose herself between Bernal and the thing she most wanted to protect, Hesketh. For a moment he stood facing a demon with a head of blue flame, and then she managed to get the dress off. She waited for him to come get Muriel.

But he had learned his lesson. Muriel had told him to leave it up to her, and he was going to.

He turned, dodged around the air conditioners, and jumped for the control.

He flicked the toggle switch.

_______

He had to
 hand it to Patricia. She could build a functional device. The motors hummed to life. The cylinder of Hesketh rose smoothly off the roof and up into the rocket’s belly.

Compressors grumbled as they spun up in the rocket overhead.

“Charis!”

“Over here. Careful, these damn things are sticky. I don’t need you stuck here too.”

She’d been trapped by something similar to what she had used to capture the Hesketh decoy that night under the powerlines. Adhesive bands had stuck to her jacket and pants, binding her to a rocket-supporting strut.

She’d already shrugged off her shirt and was struggling out of her tight jeans. Bernal reached out a hand to steady her.

“Thanks,” she grunted. “But you have to guarantee you won’t look. Muneer wouldn’t like it. And it might strike you blind.”

“I’ll take my chances,” Bernal said. “Is that a thong?” 

“Man, you are really pushing it.”

He’d expected Patricia to be right after him. But, with the start of the launch sequence, she had moved to play her role on the ground, to make sure her creation made it.

With a sharp snap, the engines ignited. The flames glowed blue like rangetop burners. For a moment Bernal wondered if they had all been wrong, if the thing really was nothing but an extremely detailed fake, no realer than the cowgirl. Then the sound grew louder.

They sprinted for the ladder.

_______

Spillvagen goggled at
 Charis as she came down in her underwear.

“Where’s Patricia?” Spillvagen said.

“Don’t worry about her,” Charis said.

Bob stepped out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a cloth. He craned his neck at the cowgirl. “What the hell?”

“Better run for it, hairnet boy,” Charis said. “Your kitchen is getting flambeed.”

“Anyone else in there?” Bernal said.

“Nah. I run the kitchen at this hour. But I should make sure—”

“Run!”

They made it to the far end of the field. Bernal turned to scan the roof. An erect figure stood there, flickering in the waves of heat from the exhaust, looking up at the rocket, and Hesketh. Was that a blue dress floating overhead? It was too dark for Bernal to be sure.

The main fuel flow came on. The engines roared, then thundered. The sound rose exponentially. Flames poured out across the roof of the diner. The entire structure shook.

Then the roar became intolerable, and the engines flared. There was an explosion. Flames everywhere, smoke, thunder.

For a moment, Bernal thought the rocket had just detonated on the roof, unable to detach itself from the tangle of gear to which it was connected. Then the nose of the rocket pushed its way out of the mass of flames and, moving faster and faster, tore its way out from between the cowgirl’s legs and blazed up into the sky. The thunder of its passing echoed from the hills.

Pieces of cowgirl flew everywhere. Her head came off and bounced once on the parking lot and her shattered visage landed on a car, leaving one complete, untouched baby-blue eye staring up into the sky. A booted leg formed a triumphal arch. Fragments of star-spangled shirt skidded across the asphalt.

For a moment the rocket rose smoothly.

Then, as clearly as if an invisible hand had come down from the sky and grabbed it, the rocket rotated and dove straight for the ground. The fuel tanks detonated, spreading flames across the fields.

Muriel had imposed her will.

Hesketh was gone.

So was she.

_______

Bob stopped, openmouthed,
 gazing at the flaming remains of what had once been his place of employment.

“Airliners sometimes drop giant chunks of green shit-filled ice from their lavatories,” he said, mostly to himself. “They don’t like to talk about it and pay off big for those incidents, in exchange for getting it hushed up.” But his heart wasn’t in it.

Bob sat down on a guardrail, facing away from the huge tower of smoke that rose from the flames, snapped his washcloth, folded it neatly, put it on his knee, and watched the half moon as it slowly sank and vanished in the lightening sky.