Out of the Black (23 page)

There was a loud crash as the door burst open and slammed against the wall. Three men in suits burst in, guns drawn.

***

Ping opened the door and crossed back into the bedroom. The bed was still rumpled, his clothes still in pieces by the nightstand. It was the same yet different. Now this place held a quiet significance, the peace of the tomb of the revered dead. Now it was a piece of a larger monument to a fallen giant. If you believed Dek, and Ping did, then this room's last occupant had been born before Ping's great great grandparents... and had lived until two days ago. Now the dead giant's sword rested in Ping's jacket pocket.

It seemed somehow quieter, though he was sure it had been perfectly quiet before.

Ping approached the bed. He knelt and looked beneath. Like a hotel bed, the frame went from the bottom of the mattress directly to the floor, not allowing anything to be slid beneath. He rose and followed the edge of the bed around to the other side. There he knelt again. This time he was rewarded by a recessed handle and a keypad built into the base of the bed.

He entered the code Dek had given him and was rewarded by a lock accept tone. There was a muted thunk as a fairly substantial lock disengaged. Ping pulled the handle.

A meter-wide drawer slid out. The top was clear armor glass. Through the glass, Ping could make out several boxes, and formed receptacles for four weapons. Three of the receptacles were filled.

The empty space was obviously for the collapsed sword in Ping's pocket. There were two pistols and a compact fletcher. He lifted the glass and reached for the pistols. Light, functional- not the same make as his ruined pistols, but they would do. He found four fifty-round magazines of two-millimeter ammunition. He slid one into each pistol, and spent a few moments transferring the weapons' locks to his lock rings. He heard the ready-tone, then stowed the pistols in his holsters. He left his warped guns in the drawer. The extra clips went in his jacket pockets.

Next,ancexamined the fletcher. The weapon was perhaps half a meter long with a pistol grip in back and another collapsible handle under the barrel. It fired 10mm shells containing twenty-five 1mm fletchettes. There was a thumb switch on the pistol grip near the trigger that selected the firing dispersion. At low dispersion, they would hit within a 10cm diameter at five meters, at high dispersion, they would hit within a one-meter diameter at the same range.

He found a two-shoulder harness for the weapon. He mounted one clip of ammo in the weapon, and put two more in the harness. He set the weapon and harness on the bed and examined the other contents of the drawer.

The first box was a miniature fireproof safe, which was odd because the drawer was itself a fireproof safe. He hesitated before opening it; he wasn't sure if Dek had intended him to grab the weapons and leave Roy's privacy otherwise intact. He weighed this concern against the chance that anything else here might help keep them alive.

The lid lifted to reveal memorabilia. Ping lifted a small pewter cross. It was crudely constructed... it looked old.

Ivo looks across the yard of the St. Petersburg Home of the Innocents. The wind cuts through his heavy wool cloak and the coat beneath. The smell of the city is held somewhat at bay by the frigid air. Around him, children in inadequate coats play. He will assuage his guilt by sending coats and blankets here later. What he intends will be divine or monstrous, but only time will tell.

He wouldn't need to be here if power didn't corrupt- if he weren't so desperate.

Apart from the others, one boy sits. His pudgy fingers toy with a small amulet of some kind. Curious, Ivo moves closer. His shadow falls across the boy of perhaps eight. He looks up with small, innocent eyes.

Monstrous, Ivo thinks, approximating a friendly smile, "What's your name, child?"

"
ooooh!" the boy says, removing the cross, smiling with an intensity that seems to use every muscle in his round face. "Mmmmh!" His small hand stretches up. Ivo takes the crude pewter cross; stares into it for a moment.

The boy stares up at him: proud, smiling, cheeks red from the cold. Monstrous.

God help me, he thinks, smiling down at the boy now entirely enveloped in his shadow.

Ping fingered the broken metal where a loop once held the cross to a chain. Part of the loop remained, a half circle, terminating in two rough ends. Looking at the cross, he felt an inexplicable connection to the dead immortal.

He returned the cross to the box. There were several plastic rings that looked like gumball machine prizes, quite a few pictures, and a plastic-encased picture of a young man in aggressive looking clothes with confused-looking hair.

Ping picked up the picture. As he did so, he realized it wasn't just a picture. It was some kind of case, flat and about the size of his hand. After several gentle prods, the case opened to reveal a plastic disc clipped into the right side. In black letters across the refractive surface of the disk "Vanilla Ice" was written. Ping had no idea what this might imply. There was a short message handwritten in loose script on the inside of the cover:

Clearly outside the joke, Ping closed the plastic case and returned it to the box in the drawer.

Ivo is across the street with Kaspari, up in the thirtieth-floor presidential suite of the hotel. They have concluded the second day of some kind of Savant confab with six of the other old ones. They'll probably be here for the rest of the week, so Dek and Roy have slipped out to get food; fuel for tonight's movie-fest. On the menu is the obligatory 'Blade Runner', but tonight they are leavening the experience with 'The Matrix' and 'Cool as Ice', a movie that always makes them laugh until they hurt. At least now Roy's stopped shaving lines in his eyebrows and haircut- that was hard to live with.

Dek endures Roy's Vanilla Ice fixation with calm determination. He's desperately hoping that this is a phase, and not a long-time tradition. For now, he laughs a lot, both with and at Roy. You'd think the centuries would make him more outwardly mature, frumpy even. Not Roy. Dek hopes he will take life as casually when he's Roy's age.

They enter the 24-hour convenience store and begin to load up with bizarre snacks. They are perhaps fifty percent loaded when a group of loud kids enter. They are big, athletic types, larger and older than Dek. Dek thinks they are probably in college, but he's not sure. It seems to Dek that the kids are play-acting for each other. Each is trying to outdo the others with their badness, or bravery, or stupidity or whatever they call their willful rudeness. Behind the counter, the clerk looks nervous. The air seems to thicken with the potential for violence.

Of course, at sixteen and full of power, Dek is feeling somewhat excited by this. He steps toward the rude college kids, intending to ask them to cool out... and just see where that leads him. He hasn't gone a step when he feels a firm hand on his shoulder.

"
That wouldn't be fair, huh bro?" Roy is smiling down at him, love in his expression, as always. He's always the frustrating voice of reason. Except when it comes to music and eyebrow fashion.

"
What?" Dek asks, knowing perfectly well that Roy has guessed his intentions. He smiles sheepishly when Roy's only answer is a knowing and persistent stare.

"
Circus peanuts." Roy points. Why does he have such an intense love affair with the ridiculous?

"
...the Retard." One of the loud kids finishes, looking right at Dek with his bad-boy grin.

Dek can't really say he's sensitive to the insult. You have to look hard now to see the telltales of his birth defects. Brightness, purpose, clarity... these the substance of his life now. Still, he'd like to step forward... just to see where this could go.

"
Dek..." Roy halts him with a look. After a few seconds of silence, he continues, "At times like these, I like to think... 'what would Vanilla Ice do?' It helps to guide me."

"
He'd brandish a weapon and get sued!" Dek hisses in an exasperated whisper.

"
Yep... and look how happy that made him." Roy said in his best Ward Cleaver voice. "See? Does the 'Nilla not hold the key to all true wisdom?"

"
You are my Yoda." Dek shakes his head in defeat.

"
Don't you forget it little bro!" Roy claps him on the back and steers him toward the circus peanuts.

They are insulted three more times before they leave the store loaded with snacks, feeling better than when they arrived.

It was one of the best movie nights yet.

Ping shuffled through pictures, letters, ticket stubs, postcards from odd locales- the small keepsakes of four centuries of life. There was a black and white picture of a woman with big hair. On the lower right corner, someone had written in black ink: "You're just the cutest lil' guy, but take it easy on the java. Sweet dreams --Patsy Cline."

Ping knew Patsy: beautiful voice, impeccable timing. He was now only dimly aware of his initial purpose of looking for survival-related items. Now, he was lost in a quirky nostalgia for the life of this stranger.

He flipped through perhaps five more pictures, stopping finally on one of Roy, holding a little pudgy boy on his knee. The boy had the telltales of Downs Syndrome in his face, but it was his open-mouthed smile and the pleasure it implied that drew Ping's eye. They were both smiling, Roy was pointing to the camera and glancing down at the little angel on his lap. Then he realized that it was Dek on Roy's lap, and a sweet ache passed through him. Then the sweetness passed, leaving only sorrow in its wake. Dek had lost everyone. Everyone except his adopted father, Kaspari.

Of course, he might have lost Kaspari too. They would hopefully know soon... whenever Dek got back.

He had gone to find him, rescue him possibly.

"Good luck, my friend." Ping said softly, closing the safe.

***

After the initial jump, Hawthorne didn't move; she knew the intruders had the drop on them. Mendez, lacking somewhat her finesse, or perhaps having a more pessimistic view on the intruders' intentions, went for his gun. Immobile, fascinated, Anne watched. He was fast! In one fluid movement, he dropped his Mega Slim Quick shake and drew his gun. The gun left its holster and extended toward the men at the door; his finger was already squeezing the trigger when the half empty shake can hit the floor.

Not fast enough. The intruders clarified their intentions somewhat by drilling Mendez twice. Ironically, Mendez's shot went wild, striking the ceiling, but Anne didn't think the guys at the Bureau were going to tease him about it. The two high velocity needles put him down hard, coloring the wall behind him red.

Hawthorne kept her passive game plan intact, but there was now fear available for view in her eyes, if not in the set of her face. At this opportune moment, Anne's x-deity, Fear, put in a final plea for her renewed oblations- half price paralysis, bonus regret.

Anne wasn't buying. She realized that she had a game plan too, or at least the new bee-juggling part of her did. She was moving. She came out of the chair, twisting away from the door, grabbing the back of her chair, swinging it like a thirty year old high school freshman swings a poodle-skirted co-ed in a sock hop movie. With a start, she realizes that both her legs are in the air. She's twisting, spinning with the chair through a 360-degree orbit, the ballerina she had desperately wanted to be as an awkward third-grader.

Her left foot reaches out for the floor and she lands, more panther now than ballerina. The chair leaves her hands as her right leg comes down before her. One of the invaders leaves the ground with a sickening chair-body crack. Bet he didn't think he'd be killed by a plastic chair when he woke up this morning, Anne thinks, already moving forward. She doesn't run directly toward the invaders, but at an angle that requires them to swing their weapons a few more degrees to track her. The dead man and chair still fly through the air, now heading earthward. Anne reaches the wall in mid stride, leaning away as her extended foot connects with the wall about a half-meter up. Anne pushes gently, but the wall still cracks. Her other leg comes up, and she runs along the wall, feet tearing into the sheet rock with each stride, finally finding purchase in the studs behind. She adjusts her gait to catch the recurring pattern of studs behind the shattering sheet rock. She doesn't have much time here, as her momentum into the wall is almost spent.

But she doesn't need much time- she's already above her prey. Trailing a plume of gypsum dust, closer to the ceiling than the floor, she realizes just how much trouble these poor killers are in. Their guns track her, firing, adding damage to the drywall, but no one can touch the bee juggler.

And then she's on them. Her assault comes from a thirty-degree elevation as she leaps off the wall above the doorframe. Her arms tangle with the first invader as she flies over him in a somersault. She lands on her feet, throwing him through a too-tight arc that is punctuated by three distinct cracks as the bones in arm, shoulder, and neck give before her torsion. The rag-doll hits the floor in what sounds like three separate impacts.

The last invader is still tracking toward her, firing. He's about five degrees off target when her left hand wraps around his gun. She jerks the gun down and outward and the finger in the trigger guard breaks twice. The gun fires one last time as the finger breaks, tearing a divot out of the floor. Her right hand is tracking along the killer's wounded and recoiling arm. The impact is a knife hand that slides over his raising shoulder and hits where his jaw and neck meet. She feels the horrifying crunch through the hardness of her hand, and then he's in a heap at her feet.