Remote (12 page)

But he wasn’t being interrogated.  He was being brainwashed.

He was a little surprised there weren’t little screens in front of his eyes flashing images of corpses and words like OBEY, but he guessed they wanted to soften him up, first.  Keep him on his feet and awake for a few days before turning him into a zombified assassin. 

Well, fuck
, he’d thought. 
Good luck with that
.  Goliath was legendary in certain circles for cocaine or amphetamine binges, staying up for a week or more at a time.  He knew exactly what was coming, it was a storm he’d ridden out more than once.  In fact, though he couldn’t say he exactly enjoyed it, it was kind of addictive in and of itself:  the delusions, the paranoia, the hallucinations.  Taking a ride on the crazy train, descending into Hell for a while.  It was about the only time Goliath got to feel fear any more, and what was
any
thrill without a little fear?

The first forty-eight hours had been a piece of cake.  By the third night his kidnappers had added a little something to the IV drip to keep him going—he could feel it in his blood—and he laughed for half an hour straight. 
Like finding an extra hundred dollar bill in your pocket when you’re heading out the door for Tijuana.

By the fourth night they’d switched on those eyescreens he knew were in the helmet.  They started out just showing him flashing lights, but they were obviously some kind of advanced, super-spy brain probe shit; before long they were pulling images right out of his mind, mixing real memories and his actual thoughts with bizarre nightmare scenarios. 

By then he knew it wasn’t the CIA he was dealing with.

It was the Mantises—the
Praying
Mantises, the ones that worshipped the Godfucker.  Goliath had learned about the Godfucker one night when he was high on acid and PCP, when he’d stood in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere and screamed until the stars turned scarlet and bled.  The Godfucker was the biggest, baddest force in the whole universe, a cosmic destroyer who kicked the living shit out of weakass deities like Allah or Yahweh or Vishnu.  He was the personification of payback, the revenge of every single living thing that had ever been fucked over by the Powers That Be. 

You didn’t pray to him, though--not unless you were suicidal—because he’d kill you just for knowing he existed.  That was why the Praying Mantises were so dangerous.  They were evil little pricks, who would burrow under your skin and then start sending messages to the Godfucker.  If he noticed these messages he’d think they came from you.  And then you were
fucked
.

He’d worked it all out, though afterward it hadn’t been quite as clear and even contradicted itself on a few points.  He’d laughed it off as a paranoid fantasy, and not his first. 

But now . . . now it all came back, and this time it was as bright and sharp as a needle in his eye.  It was the Mantises that had him, that wanted to brainwash him.  They were going to saw apart his brain with their serrated forearms, then put it back together in a new way.  He’d be one of them, able to turn invisible or into a bug, able to burrow under other people’s skin and cause their destruction by praying to the Godfucker.  He’d have many mysterious powers.

It was on day eight that the Godfucker himself had appeared to him.

 “GORDON FREDERICK MASON, ALSO KNOWN AS GOLIATH, ALSO KNOWN AS THE SAD MOTHERFUCKER WHOSE LIFE DOESN’T MEAN
SHIT
!”  a voice had boomed.  It had cut through the constant thrash metal like thunder rolling over the chatter of a crowd.  The image that appeared had been that of a tarantula a thousand feet tall, with the head of one of his ex-wives.  “I AM THE END OF ALL THAT IS.  YOU ARE THE DYING FART OF AN AMEOBA LIVING IN A FLY’S ASSHOLE.  ARE YOU READY TO ABANDON ALL THAT YOU KNOW AND JOIN ME?”

And Goliath had said, “Fuck
you
.”

***

 “I’m not going to call the police,” Remote said.  “And neither are you, of course.”

Jack didn’t reply.  He crept down the hall, improvised club hanging from one hand.  He hadn’t had time to notice before, but the hall was lined with several more cases set into the wall like the one in the foyer, fronted with more shatterproof plastic panels.  Some of them were empty, some were not: the nearest one to Jack contained a foot-high figure of a mustachioed strongman in a leopard-skin toga, hands gripping a rod bracketed with two cannonballs.   On the other side of the hall, a row of dancing girls frozen in mid-kick lined a stage, illuminated from below by tiny floodlights. 
Some kind of wind-up toys
, Jack thought.  They looked like antiques.

“A canvas bag with a few frozen peas in it isn’t much of a weapon.  I have considerably more effective means at my disposal.”

He can see me.  Concealed cameras, probably in the ceiling.
  Jack didn’t waste time trying to find them; pinhole cameras would be easy to block but difficult to locate, and he’d never be able to know if he’d gotten them all.  He had to keep moving—his only chance laying in either escaping or finding and neutralizing Remote himself.

“Since we’re on my home ground, we’ll be playing by my rules.  First rule—don’t shut me out, all right?  You can tell I know exactly where you are, so there’s really no need for silence, is there?”

“I suppose not.” Jack reached the end of the hall, arrived back at the central foyer where he’d started.  He looked up at the skylight, noted that the wrought iron bars covering it were more than just ornamental.  There was a narrow window he’d missed before, a few feet away from the front door; it was made of shatterproof plastic and gridded with white-painted iron bars.  Jack peered through it, saw the stony black bulk of a large boulder to one side and snow-covered pines to the other.

 He walked over to the inset trophy case and took a good look at it for the first time: it held an entire tableau, a medieval army attacking a castle.  Miniature archers lined the parapets, wires guiding tiny arrows down to the chests of their enemies; the catapult at the back of the field was poised to counter with a boulder launched at the ramparts.

“Would you care to clarify the reason you’re here?” Remote asked.

“I’d just like to ask you a few questions.”

A bark of laughter.  “Coming from anyone else, that would sound innocuous.  Why don’t you just ask me now?”

“I forgot to bring my notes.”

“Then you’ll have some difficulties when we finally meet.”

“It
is
a problem. . .”

“Well, we’re both problem-solvers, aren’t we?  Let’s put our heads together and see what we can come up with.”

Music abruptly blared, something orchestral with lots of horns.  Jack started, then looked around quickly.  It could be that Remote was just trying to shake him up, but Jack thought it more likely the noise was being used as a distraction—or to cover up something Remote didn’t want him to hear. 

Like the sound of a door opening.

***

 “Fuck you,” said Goliath, “and the gonorrheic horse you rode in on.  Fuck your entire family, and anyone else you’ve ever fucked.  Fuck your optometrist.  Fuck the song that was playing on the radio the second your were conceived, fuck the defective condom that unleashed you on the world, fuck the roofie your hunchbacked, brain-damaged father slipped your retarded warthog of a mother.  Fuck your
spleen
.  Fuck every pathetic loser whoever hung out with you because you made even
them
look good.  Fuck your kindergarten teacher.  Fuck every single goddamn thing in the known universe even
close
to your favorite color.  Fuck every porn star you’ve ever jacked off to.  Fuck your street, your city, your country, your continent, your planet, your solar system, your galaxy, your universe, and the million fucking alternate realities on either side of it.  Fuck everything you know, everything you’ve done, and everyone you’ve ever met.  Fuck every motherfucker that’s ever used the same
toilet
you have.  Fuck your
mailman
.  Fuck everyone who’s ever spoken to you, written to you, or looked at you for more than two seconds.  Fuck the guy that designed the toilet plunger you like to stick up your ass, fuck the guy that sold it to you, and fuck the entire plumbing industry while you’re at it.  And
fuck
sea urchin sushi, too—that shit’s just
wrong
.”

The relentless thrash music had suddenly stopped.  There was a deafening, cosmic silence.

“OKAY, THEN,” the Godfucker had said, and everything had swirled away into darkness.

***

It wasn’t so much a door as a panel in the wall of the foyer, and it had only slid open four feet or so.  Jack recognized what rolled out of it immediately.

It was a bomb-disposal robot. 

It was a surreal moment.  The robot stood about three and a half feet high, with a wide, flat base, thick rubber treads on either side.  It had a square column mounted in the middle of the base, with a long, telescoping arm jutting from the middle of that.

The arm had a shotgun mounted on it. 

He didn’t have time to goggle.  The arm was already swiveling toward him, a small targeting camera slung to the underside. 

Jack sprinted down the second hall.  His only chance was to stay ahead of the robot; its field of fire was too large to evade by dodging, at least in these cramped quarters.  If he could get around it he could disable it, but it had been too far away for him to try.

The hallway was longer than the one that had led to the kitchen.  He could hear the robot behind him, electric motor whirring as it trundled along.  He didn’t know how fast it could move, but it only had a few feet to cover before it rounded the corner and had a clear shot at his back. 

His bare feet made almost no sound on the thick shag rug.  Behind him, the whirring stopped and a whining noise started.  The robot had stopped and was now aiming.

Jack was almost at the end of the hall when the robot fired.  The blast caught him just above the base of his spine.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

“Christ, I’m bored,” Nikki said.  “Hey, you wanna get drunk?”

Parkins looked at her veiled face with eyes that now seemed more confused than panicked.  “What?”

Nikki pulled up one of the lawn chairs she and Jack had found in the basement when they’d moved in and sat down.  She had a bottle of tequila in one hand, and two paper cups between her fingers. “Drunk.  You know, the past tense of drinking.”

“Wouldn’t that be drank?”

“Drink, drank, drunk.  Whatever.  Point is, it could help pass the time.  Unless, of course, you have a pressing dinner engagement.”

He gave her a half-hearted smile.  “No, my social calendar is pretty much open.  But I don’t know how good an idea it would be.”

Nikki laughed.  “Listen to you. What are you afraid of, Stockholm syndrome?  Think I’m gonna win you over to our cause and you’ll wind up robbing banks with me, maybe change your name to Parkins X?”

“Uh—no.  Can’t say I see that happening.”

“Oh, I get it.  You think it might be poisoned or drugged, right?”

“Well—“

She unscrewed the top of the bottle and poured herself a drink in one of the paper cups.  She lifted her veil just enough to clear her mouth, then downed the shot.  “There.  See?  And think about it for a second—if I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.  And if I wanted you drugged, believe me, you’d be drugged—remember the hypo we gave you before?”

He eyed her cautiously.  “Okay, I guess that makes sense.”

She poured another shot and extended the cup.  After a moment, he took it.  Nikki refilled her own.  “Here’s the rules.  If I’m gonna get hammered, you sure as hell are.  So keep up, or me and my tasty bottle of tequila take a walk.”

He stared down at the cup like it held poison.  Nikki sighed.  “Let me guess.  You’re not much of a drinker?”

He frowned.  “I was in a frat, okay? I don’t have a problem with booze.”

“Then look at it this way, frat boy.  You weigh more than I do.  You drink me under the table, maybe you can turn it to your advantage—figure out a way to escape or attract attention.  But you can’t win if you don’t play, right?”

He gave her a tight little smile.  “Okay, then.”  He downed the shot, then gasped.

“Easy, cowboy.  It’s tequila, not cyanide.”  She downed her own, and poured herself another.  He hesitated, then held out his cup for a refill.

“There you go.  I’m gonna take my time with this one, let you catch up.  You don’t have to shoot it—I’m in no hurry.”

He took a smaller sip this time, then winced.  “Ah.  That brings back a few memories.”

“Good or bad?”

“Blurry.”

“Yeah, ta-killya’s like that.”

They sat in silence for a moment.  “Am I ever gonna find out what this is all about?” Parkins asked.

“Probably not.  But you’ll have a nice long life to wonder about it.  Make a helluva story for your kids.”

“My kids.  Fuck, I miss them.”

“Don’t get weepy on me, all right?  I’m trying to get a nice buzz going.”

“Sorry.  I just—what I did was so stupid.  This is all my fault.”

“Well, yes and no.”  She took another sip.  “Don’t beat yourself up.  Like I said, you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Couple minutes either way, we might have snatched someone else.”

“I shouldn’t have been out there in the first place.  I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.”

Nikki chuckled.  “
You
weren’t thinking at all.  Your dick was doing that, and your balls were giving him directions.”

He gave her a rueful smile.  “Yeah.  Guess I was.  It’s just that my wife and I—well, our sex life isn’t that great, not lately.  So I thought—“

“You thought you’d get a little relief.”  She shrugged.  “Hey, I can relate.  I got more respect for a family man that goes to a professional than the one who decides to bang his secretary on the weekends and see how far he can string her along.  I’m not judging you, okay?”