Apocalypse to Go (40 page)

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“Are you hunting the leopard man?” His voice was a pleasant tenor.

“Among others, yeah. Has he been giving you trouble?”

“He’s murdered three of us.”

I remembered the corpse in the meat locker that I’d mentally labeled as chimpanzee. Obviously, I’d been wrong. Miss Leopard-Thing traded in human flesh, all right. My stomach twisted.

“He comes from under the goddess,” the messenger said. “He must have a tunnel.”

“Is there a door?” Spare14 stepped forward.

“We’ve never been able to find it. If we had, we’d have blocked it.”

“Quite so. Well, if we can, we’re going to put a stop to it today.”

“One way or another,” Ari put in. “Thanks for the tip-off.”

The little person smiled, then turned and slipped back into the foliage. His hands in their leather gloves parted the brambles as if he were swimming the breaststroke. I heard a rustling, a footfall cracking a twig, then nothing, yet I could psychically tell that he was still moving away from us.

“A tunnel, again,” Dad said. “That must be where the gate is. I think we’d best hurry.”

He led us to a terrace that still stretched level and solid, thanks to the stone wall that contained it. More broken statuary lay among the weeds. The remains of rusted filigree marked the location of the once-white benches. I nearly tripped over a huge marble head, stained with rust and bird droppings.

“This doesn’t bode well for Diana,” I said.

“Oh, she’s not done too badly,” Dad said. “You’ll see.”

Since he’d scouted it out, Dad took us straight to the statue. Near the concrete foundations of the long-gone mansion, Diana the Hunter in her tunic and tall boots stood on a high plinth. She was about to draw an arrow from her quiver. A hunting hound stood on its hind legs beside her, caught in the middle of a joyous leap. Her marble gleamed, clean and polished. Someone had clipped the grass all around the plinth. Someone had laid offerings at her feet: decaying roses, candle stubs, a chipped white bowl coated with the red scum of evaporated wine. “The little people’s goddess,” I said.

Dad walked over to the statue. He paused and looked up at her as if asking permission, then laid his hands on the base. When he swore under his breath, I knew he was confirming Ari’s bad feeling. I remembered the blonde girl again, slipping out of Mission House. If she was a fast walker or had a vehicle, she would have reached the Axeman in plenty of time for him to escape.

“Someone’s used this gate recently,” Dad said. “In the past quarter hour, I’d say, but that’s just an estimate.”

“I suspect we know who it must have been.” Spare14’s voice ached with frustrated fury. “I just hope he didn’t take the hostages with him.”

“Let me just see about that,” I said.

I walked a little way away from the group around the statue. A normal Search Mode: Personnel for Michael told me immediately that he existed on this world level and nearby. Ari hurried over to join me.

“I’ve picked up Mike,” I said. “I think he’s down under Playland.”

“Good. That’s one of them.”

I held up my hand for silence. When I sent my mind out in a call for Javert, I felt him answer. He was jetting through open ocean, heading for Seal Rock, while Davis followed along onshore in the milk wagon.

“I’m waiting for Javert,” I said. “When he’s close enough, I’m going to try overriding the StopCollar to find Sean.”

“Is that safe?”

“Of course not! Is it safe for you to go charging into Playland with that rifle in your hands? Are you going to do it anyway?”

“Of course I am.” He hesitated, then shrugged. “Very well. You’ve made your point. Proceed as planned.”

I felt Javert come online, psychically speaking, that is. He told me that he’d achieved a good hover despite heavy surf. The moment that we joined minds, I felt a surge of water Qi flooding into my aura. I sat down on the ground, leaned against a tree to support my back, and drifted into trance. I drew up Qi from the earth until the view before me danced and shimmered like a drug hallucination.

GO! Javert said.

At first the SM:P threatened to overwhelm me. I felt as if I were falling a long way down toward water, the same water that would turn hard and smack me senseless when I belly-flopped.

UP!

I flew. Skimmed the water, arched up into the sky. Below
me the earth spun and dipped. I sent out my mind for Sean and felt him clearly. My physical mouth opened without my conscious decision. Reflexively, I spoke aloud and told Ari what I was seeing.

“He’s in a tunnel beneath the statue. He’s caught there. Get Dad to walk him out before he suffocates.”

BACK TO BODY! SPY KNOWS!

I followed Javert’s orders and let myself glide down. I felt my body envelop me, warm and comforting as I came out of the trance. I heard Ari yelling the information at my father and returned my attention to Javert.

GOOD! I GO SOUTH. WAIT OFFSHORE.

Hey, I didn’t expect you to wait on the beach.

Javert rippled with laughter and took himself off-line. When I staggered to my feet, Ari caught my arm and led me back to rejoin the squad at the statue. Spare14 stood with a pistol in one lax hand and stared at the Diana figure. The two police officers kept glancing around them, turning this way and that, utterly gob smacked. Dad had disappeared.

Dad reappeared—not precisely out of thin air, but close. One moment, no one stood at the base of the statue, but the next, he did. One officer yelped; the other stepped back fast. Dad had one arm around a weeping, shivering Sean, still half-naked, still bound by the white gold collar around his neck.

“What happened?” Ari said. “Does he know where the Axeman is?”

“He’s not going to be able to give us a coherent story,” Dad said, “until we get this damned collar off him.”

Ari reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a glass tube. “Code Twelve,” he said. “Activate.”

A green line pulsed along the edge of the tube. Spare14 made a choking sound.

“Where did you get that?” Spare14 said.

“Davis gave it to me the morning that O’Grady arrived,” Ari said. “No one ever asked for it back.”

Spare14 started to speak, then merely sighed. Ari held one hand up under the collar. When he touched the metal with the tube, as before it seemed to leap off its victim’s
neck into Ari’s waiting hand. He handed Spare14 the collar and, this time, the code tube as well.

Sean sat down on the grass in a motion that just barely missed being a faint. Dad and I knelt down to either side of him. Dad stripped off his denim jacket and helped Sean put it on.

Sean steadied himself and gasped out the words, “Where’s Mike?”

“I sensed him under Playland,” I said.

“What the hell? Why doesn’t he just walk out of there?” Sean leaned against Dad and kept on shivering. “He knows they don’t have me anymore.”

“I don’t know why,” I said. “I don’t have that much overlap.”

Sean shut his eyes and took a deep breath. “I just found him. Nola, this sucks. He’s got a gun. He’s hunting Scorch, and Scorch has a gun, and he’s hunting Mike. Hide and seek with guns.” He opened his eyes wide. “Mike’s looking for something, too. I don’t know what. Something important.”

Ari knelt down in front of Sean. “What about the Axeman? Where is he?”

The two patrolmen and Spare14 crowded close to listen. Spare14 took out his communicator, ready to pass on the intel.

“I don’t know,” Sean said. “Some other world. Look, Mike had everyone convinced that he’d gone Blue. He was glorying in it, he said, being rich and important. He wasn’t just the youngest O’Grady any more. The girls were all fighting over him, too. Nola, can our baby bro swagger! Even I believed him, but maybe that was just that fucking collar.”

“Sean!” Dad snapped. “Watch your language in front of your sister!”

“Sorry.” Sean flinched. “So this morning, the spotted dude kept saying something was wrong. Not about Mike, I mean, but the situation. Danger from wolves, Claw said, whatever the hell that meant, but the Axeman took it really seriously. When the news came back that the cops were planning a safe house raid, the Axeman figured that Hafner knew what was going on. He started getting some stuff together so he could bail.”

“You’re telling us he’s escaped.” Ari sounded quietly enraged.

“Yeah. Mike pulled a number on him, though.”

Ari swore in English, this time. Dad cleared his throat loudly. “Sorry,” Ari said. “Go on.”

Sean did. “The Axeman lied to his guys. To his gang brothers, for crying out loud! He sent them down to defend the houses. ‘I’ll be coming after you,’ he said, ‘with some more gunners.’ I heard him. He was lying through his teeth. But they went, the jerks. He told some other guys to go upstairs and keep watch for cops.”

“Upstairs is above ground?” Ari said.

“Yeah, in the ruins. So that left him, me, Scorch, Mike, and the girls. Not the hooker girls, they live in the safe houses. The gang member girls. Ash—that’s the girl Mike liked best—she’d been down in town trying to get a snitch killed. She came running back. That’s when we knew you were on the move, Nola. This black-haired bitch ensorcelled the knife man, she said. Mike and I knew it had to be you.”

I squalled but kept it short.

Sean went on, “So the Axeman said that’s it. We’re leaving through the gate.”

“Where is Michael?” Dad said to me. “Should I go after him?”

“No,” Ari snapped. “Too dangerous.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Dad said.

They glared at each other while I ran a quick SM:P and found Mike, furious but alive, still underground, still searching. “I can’t pin him down exactly,” I said. “He’s moving through too wide a space.”

“Yeah, it’s big, the complex, I mean.” Sean continued his story. “Mike tried to get him to leave me behind, or at least take the collar off me, but the Axeman was a little too smart for that. So we all start up the tunnel to the statue. Scorch keeps shoving me along at the rear. So Mike opens the gate. The Axeman and the girls go through. Mike tells Scorch to go through, but he won’t unless I go first. So Mike shut the gate. You should have heard Scorch howl.” Sean paused for a twisted grin

“But,” he went on, “It wasn’t funny when Scorch pulled a gun. I had just enough brain left to turn around and knee him in the balls, and Mike grabbed the gun. Scorch got away. He ran back down the tunnel. Mike ran after him. He yelled something at me about the collar, getting something for the collar, but I couldn’t figure out what he meant. I started down after them, but I heard someone fire a shot, and the ceiling started falling in. The gang dug the tunnel themselves, the jerks. It’s just dirt, no beams, no nothing. So I went back up to the top and sat down to save oxygen. I knew you were on the way, Nola. Dad, you’re just the biggest bonus in the world. I thought I sensed you, but I couldn’t believe it. I was praying the air would last.”

“And it did,” Dad said. “I’ll thank all the saints for that.”

“Me, too,” Sean said. “All of them. In alphabetical order.”

“If the tunnel’s collapsed,” Spare14 said, “we can’t use it for access. Damn!”

“Quite so,” Ari said. “We’ll continue with the operation as planned. Sean, how many men are left in the complex? Those guards you mentioned.”

“I don’t know for sure. With the collar on, I couldn’t make much sense of anything. Maybe three, maybe four.”

Spare14 had been relaying information into his communicator while Sean talked. He turned to Ari. “I just spoke to Chief Hafner. The raids went well. The safe houses are under police control. Oh, and there was no sign of the Maculate among the dead.”

“Very well.” Ari smiled with a twitch of his mouth. “Maybe we can rectify that down in Playland.” He turned to me. “Can you find Claw?”

I concentrated hard on an SM: Personnel. I’d seen Claw once, dashing down our front steps. He’d also eaten my doppelgänger, and because of that, I could place him as a bundle of energy, a pulse moving along Geary Street.

“He’s moving this way, as fast as he can.” I paused and felt his energy more clearly. “He’s desperate. There’s something he wants real bad. I wonder if his transport orbs are still down in the hideout?”

“A good guess,” Dad put in. “He may have made the same mistake I did.”

“Sean,” I said. “What’s the underground like?”

“Well, for starters there’s one huge room. It was part of Playland once. There are still walls and weird stuff down there, mirrors and games and stuff. One way down is this long metal slide. But there are stairs, too. When they brought us in, I was still trying to fight the collar. I couldn’t tell where the hell I was.”

Dad murmured, “I know what you mean,” and laid a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“And then there’s other underground rooms,” Sean continued. “I guess where they fixed the machinery, the original Playland workers, I mean. The rooms look like workshops and storerooms. But the gang dug out some more hallways and rooms. They did a lousy job of it, too.”

“It’s a confusing mess. That’s what you’re telling me.”

“Yeah. I’d better go with you.”

When Sean tried to stand up, his legs gave way under him, and he sat down hard. I read his Qi as dangerously low and caught Ari’s attention.

“The collar’s drained him. He’ll need time to recharge.”

“I can go with you.” Sean struggled up to a kneel.

“No.” Ari pushed him back down with one hand. “You’ll only be a liability.”

“Quite so,” Spare14 said. “I’ll stay here with Sean and guard. Do you want these two officers to go with you?”

“No,” Ari said. “We need to move fast and quietly.”

The patrolmen looked vastly relieved.

“Very well,” Spare14 said. “And Scorch and the others might try to dig a way out through the tunnel. We’d best be here to greet them if so.”

“True.” Ari glanced at my father. “O’Grady, do you want to stay here?”

“Hell, no, not if you’re taking Nola down there.”

“And you’re not leaving me behind,” I broke in. “I’m not a finder like Sean, but Mike’s my brother. I can keep track of him.”

I turned and looked at my father, daring him to argue. He looked back, seemed to be considering an argument,
then said, “I wouldn’t expect anything different from you.”