Black Glass (40 page)

“He’s only waiting for me because I’ve got his chopper’s activator in my pocket. He’s my ‘guest’ same way you are. You ready? We haven’t got time for this.”

“How’d you get in? You’re an impressive guy. Just when I think ...”

“This isn’t the ‘I could use a man like you’ speech is it? Then a little farther down the road, I get a bullet in the back of the head?” Candle felt the banked rage flare up in him. It was hard to just stand there with Grist and not put a bullet in him. Watch him spasm for awhile with the charges. And then ... “I should just kill you right here ... I don’t know if my brother died on your orders. Hoffman thinks not. But wasn’t for you, Danny’d be alive.”

“You’re supposed to take care of your own, last I knew,” Grist said, softly. Deliberately. Watching Candle’s face. “It was on your watch he died, from what I understand, Candle.”

Candle raised the gun, cocked it ...

“I’m going!” Grist said, raising his hands, heading out the door.

Candle stuck close behind Grist, and as he’d expected Grist tried to bolt once he reached the hallway.

Some inner spring was coiled in Candle, waiting for this, and he leapt forward, his left hand grabbing Grist by the back of the shirt. The fabric tore as Grist tried to pull away, but he lost his footing, fell on his side. Kicking at Candle’s shin.

Candle sidestepped the kick, stamped down hard on Grist’s foot, felt bones crack. Grist screamed. Candle circled him, Grist getting up, putting his weight on his intact foot—and Candle, unable to stop himself, punched Grist hard in the solar plexus with his left fist, feeling it drive up against the diaphragm.

Grist buckled, wheezing and gasping for air, and Candle
brought up his knee, cracked him on the chin, watched with satisfaction as blood splashed from a burst lip and Grist banged back against the wall. “And come to think of it,” Candle said harshly, “if it wasn’t for you pressing for it, Danny would’ve walked for lack of evidence, and I wouldn’t have had to do his time for him ... Four years UnMinded, thanks to you, Grist ... and then Danny ...”

He stuck the gun muzzle up against Grist’s right eye ...

“Candle!” It was Hoffman at the end of the hallway. “Come on—the Black Wind!”

Candle drew a long unsteady breath and then shoved Grist down the hall toward Hoffman.

Grist limping, hissing with pain at each step, they got out to the chopper pad—and paused for a shocked second to contemplate the onrushing wall of black ...

Like a tsunami in slow motion, but made out of impenetrably dark smoke, rolling slowly, inexorably toward them, from a city block away.

“Jesus fuck!” Grist burst out, seeing the Black Wind. “Why didn’t anyone ... the idiots! No sense of judgment! Okay, let’s go, let’s
go!”
His injured foot forgotten, he was hobbling toward the idling chopper, its blades lazily whipping overhead—idling but incapable of flying till Candle released its self-drive with the activator. Hoffman, Keek and Lisha were already inside.

Looking at the Black Wind—already closer, rearing as if to slap down on them—Candle felt a scratchy choking feeling in his throat.

He hoped Kenpo had gotten out. But Kenpo had survived a great deal, in his life. He and his wife would be well out of reach.

I’m the one who was stupid enough to land a chopper right in front of that thing,
Candle thought, climbing into the helicopter after Grist. Starting its waiting self-drive, pressing the tab on the activator in his left hand pocket.

The chopper vibrated, roared.
“The hatch is not closed ... Please close the entry hatch ...”
said the helicopter. Candle looking to see how to close the hatch ... was it this button or ...

And the Black Wind started to boil across the rooftop—like diabolically-possessed dry ice smoke, gritty black, seething just outside the hatch.

“Just lift off, emergency lift!” Hoffman shouted, shrilly. “This is the owner! Lift! Take us to the pre-set destination!”

The chopper seemed to grumble within itself but its rotors increased their spin and it lifted, front end first, tilting as it went up so that they had to hold onto their seat belts—Candle and Grist not even strapped in yet.

Up—and the Black Wind gushed in slow-motion under them, like a flood of vaporous syrup. Candle could smell it now: sulfites and benzene and monoxides and something like that stuff his dad had used on cockroaches.
Raid.

“Oh God, that almost killed me,” Keek said, looking out the window. “You crazy, Mr. Grist.”

“Shut up you stupid little empty-headed bitch!” Grist snarled, trying to close his seat belt—both women glared at him.

Lisha was staring at him with her eyes wide, her lips moving. Saying something, to herself; something no one could hear ...

Struggling with his seat belt, Grist ignored them. The cabin was tilted in a way that made it hard for him to stay in place. “Dammit Hoffman why don’t you have smart seats in here?” His face was drawn with pain as he used his feet to hold himself in place on the chair.

And now the hatch was closing ... but slowly, like the grit in the air was interfering with it ...

“What’s wrong with that hatch?” Hoffman said, looking pale, as they lofted slowly up.

The erratic, vengeful wind that had blown the Black Wind inland now suddenly shifted—and the helicopter lurched, so that Grist was flung away from his unsteady grip, staggering toward the closing hatch.

Instinctively, Candle unsnapped his seat belt and grabbed for Grist.

But Lisha was already there, grabbing Grist ...

And shoving him out the half-closed hatch.

Grist shrieked, tumbling out the door. Turning, scrabbling—clutching frantically at the edge of the hatch ...

Candle gripped the sides of the doorway, looked out to see Grist hanging from the door’s lower edge, keeping it from closing. Dangling there, his teeth bared, eyes animalistic with fear.

Sixty feet below him, the slow-motion toxic deeps of the Black Wind churned ... Seemed almost to surge up hungrily, reaching for Grist.

Candle saw a movement in his peripheral vision, turned to see Lisha had taken a Cognac bottle from the chopper’s bar.

“Here’s your favorite Cognac, from Mr. Hoffman!” she yelled.

She threw it hard at Grist’s head. It struck him and he yelped and lost his hold and fell into the roiling blackness below ...

. . . into the waiting arms of the Black Wind. Grist vanished, screaming, in the black billow, in civilization’s toxic fantail ...

They flew south ... away from the Black Wind. Hoffman loaded the software into the chopper’s media-interface; they ran the VR clip and got the semblant’s whereabouts: a detail of the software that Grist and his people had forgotten about, a fillip, a little added engineering inserted by some forgotten programmer. Candle thinking, as they went:
I probably could have acted faster. Saved Grist back there. Saved him for myself. But Lisha needed the satisfaction.

They found themselves in a flock of choppers and small planes and flying cars, a constellation of lights heading the same way; they flew over roads choked with evacuation traffic, emergency vehicles going the other way on the road shoulders. Smoke rising from malls where looters, taking advantage of evacuation hysteria, started fires to cover their thefts.

Hoffman put the news on the chopper cabin’s screen.
“The Black Wind is already heading out to sea, again, dissipating as it goes ... do not return to the evacuated areas until notified ... The National Guard is moving against looters ... “

Programmed to head to the address lifted from software’s decrypter, the chopper veered West, and they came to a warehouse district. Old abandoned factories; new, quasilegal sweat shops. The area evacuated, though the Black Wind hadn’t come here.

“There’s the place ...” Hoffman said, pointing. “No place for landing.”

“There’s a dock—looks solid enough. Redirect it there,” Candle said.

They landed bumpily on a dock of concrete and allwall, bumpered at the water with thick pads of old truck tires. They got out and looked around as the rotors quieted. Felt a warm wind from the sea; smelled tar and brine. The asphalt access road between the dock and the old industrial buildings was deserted. A strange quiet hushed, after the clogged roads of the panicked evacuation, the flurry of aircraft. A few despairing brown palm trees stood together on a gray strip of beach near the dock, waving, tattered fronds making soft scratching sounds in the wind. “Nobody evac’ing down here?” Lisha asked.

Candle shook his head. “The Black Wind came from the sea so they’re going the other way. Keek, Lisha,” he added, holding the pistol down by his leg, pointing at the ground, “you can go. I saw a strip of restaurants, hotels, down about a quarter mile inland. You head down there, call a self-driver or something, go where you want. Hoffman—“

“Sure thing okay,” Keek said, hurrying away, almost running, clutching her purse. Wanting to get the hell away from them.

“I’m staying with him,” Lisha said, taking firm hold of Hoffman’s arm.

Hoffman frowned at her ... and the frown softened, and became a faint smile. He nodded resignedly. “I guess she will.”

“Better treat her right,” Candle said. “Or she’ll kick your ass out of a chopper into a cloud of poison gas.”

“That’s touching advice,” Hoffman said. “You should be a couples counselor.”

Candle said, “You got me here. I was thinking you’re top Slakon, you’re responsible. You should face this with me. But ...” He shrugged. “You can go.”

Hoffman grimaced. “I’d like to go. Truly. But I need to know. I need to see what happens in case I have to deal with this myself. Maybe I’ll be sorry. But I’m coming with you.”

Candle shrugged, checking the clip on his gun. “Don’t get in my way.”

Candle was aware that he was going into a certain state of mind. A state that Kenpo would call “identified with aggression, sense-heightened.” A state easy to lose control of.

Candle didn’t care. He was going with it.

Striding along buckled tarmac, by dusty mystercyke siding. Finding the address. An orange metal door that looked too small for the wall of the factory space. Thinking that it was odd that the Multisemblant hadn’t blotted out the address of transmission, covered its tracks ...

Then he saw that the door was standing open.

“Okay,” Candle said.

He stalked through the door, gun raised, Hoffman and Lisha following more slowly ... Footsteps echoing in a concrete floored space, big and shadowy, mostly empty, just three objects caught the eye, in a cone of light in the midst of the room. Candle paused to take it all in.

A big server rack, in the middle of the room, about sixty feet away, with a table shoved up against it, equipment on the table, including a multisided plate that emanated a holographic image of a head, a man’s head—or maybe not a man, or maybe a man and woman, combined.

The face from the VR clip. The Multisemblant. And it was looking right at him, with a broad smile, as if delighted to see an old friend. Other devices wired to the plate. And to either side were wheeled self-operating dull-yellow tractor-like units from some construction site. They looked to him like forklifts—they were about as big as forklifts—but instead of the forks they had jointed metal arms. One had a kind of big metal punch on its arm; the other a tube with complicated wiring. A spiker and a laser.

Each had an orange light on it, lit up; they were both idling. Operating. They hummed ... waiting.

Candle was aware, too, that there was someone off to his left, in the shadows of the farther corner. Leaning on the wall there. Someone male. Someone who had killed not long ago. Candle didn’t know how he knew that. But he knew it. He was in a very intense state of being. He was humming, waiting, like the spiker and the laser. He felt Danny’s death stored inside him, like a tank of dark fuel waiting for the spark.

“I thought I should leave a little trail, a bit of string for you, and Hoffman and Grist to follow,” the Multisemblant said. The voice, almost one voice but reverbing slightly with others, coming from a small speaker, in perfect accord with the mouth on the
hologram. “And here you are. Tying up loose ends, bringing to completion, concluding unfinished business. And imminently, Slakon will become Destiny, Incorporated. Oh, Pup! Let’s just see if you’re as proficient as you said you were ... Pup is so proud—he has something new we took from Claire. He’s been practicing.”

“Pup” stepped out of that dark corner, strode toward them. Candle had seen an exo-suit once before, used experimentally by the SWAT team. At least one had gone wrong on the front lines of battle, ended with a soldier flailing himself to death. But this guy, big wanx with a slack mouth, moved confidently into the light ...

“The fucking prison guard,” Candle said, recognizing him. “Benson.”

“I don’t work there any more,” Benson said matter-of-factly.

Suddenly Benson was leaping toward Candle—one second talking, a split second later in the air, coming down at Candle, making the exo-suit leap.

Candle dodged left, felt something graze his chest but the graze was so hard and fast and powerful he was flung back to skid across the floor, ten, twenty feet ...