Resurrection Express (25 page)

Like another angel.

There’s something I have to tell these people, but I can’t remember what the hell it is. Something important. About Bruce Willis, I think.

Something about an action movie.

•  •  •

I
calm myself as we leave downtown behind and plunge into the heart of . . . somewhere. My eyes are fogged, my face and hair soaked with sweat and water. Doesn’t feel like my clothes are wet, which seems odd at first, but I don’t pay attention to that for very long. I’m concentrating on storefronts and clubs racing
by on either side. A time-lapse blur. The voice of the woman, telling me to stay with her. It seems like a million years later when we pull into a driveway in some neighborhood that feels like it might be in the center of a whale and everything is slow, slow, slow now. Sheets of molasses coming down hard, trying to pin me to the earth as they hustle me out of the car and walk me to the rear of a house that looks huge and old and wooden, but I can’t be sure. My feet stick to the ground and I have to pull them up with a lot of effort. Finally, I just stand there in place . . . and someone has to grab me and fly me through the air. Wind in my eyes as that happens. Cool breeze and air-conditioning. A soft bed to land in.

Where the hell am I now?

Someone wearing white looms over me, asking a question in some alien language. I think when I try to open my mouth and answer the question, my lips are stapled together. Something cool jets into my heart. Someone moving over me.

Receding back.

Down and down.

Backwards across the universe.

To the end of everything.

So this is what the edge looks like.

I’m looking right at it.

The woman’s voice calls me back. I struggle to find it and I swim like hell. My father is here, too. The Sarge stands right next to him. Tells me not to look.

God is laughing at me.

Don’t look.

•  •  •

I
feel it for the whole five hours it takes for me to detox. I never pass out or go under. They won’t let that happen. Someone is always with me. But none of these people have faces.
Sun creeps into the room I’m in, slotted through old-fashioned blinds. I can see trees outside, just a little hint of green, the chirping of birds. Somehow I can feel it when the woman comes in to watch over me. She forces me to drink lots of water. Sometimes she gives me fruit juice. Food is right out of the question. And I can feel Franklin, too. I want to know what’s going on, but I can’t ever make my mouth work. I hear someone say something about it being too late, that I’m a vegetable now. But that’s not true. I made it back from the edge hours ago, days ago, weeks ago. Years ago. I’m smarter than the average bear. I play video games better than anyone else. Really, I do. These people saved me from maniacs. The bad guys are on all sides of us now. They are the enemy of my enemy’s enemy. I want to tell them all these things but I have to undo the staples on my lips first. Have to pry my mouth open. Have to do it soon.

•  •  •

“W
ho are you?”

Those are the first words I say to anyone. I say them to the woman sitting next to the bed. She was reading to me from a book about sniper guns just now. She is beautiful in the way that plain women are beautiful, in the way hard women are beautiful. She reminds me of my mother.

She smiles when she hears my voice.

“My name’s Marcie. You’re in our house.”

“You’re very pretty. Are you his wife?”

“Whose wife?”

“Franklin’s.”

She makes a funny thing happen with her face. “I’m Bob’s business associate. We own this house, along with some others.”

“You’re all war veterans. He told me about you.”

“Did he now?”

“Thank you. For saving my life.”

“You don’t have to thank us, friend,” says another voice from across the room. “You have to
pay
us.”

I almost smile, because this time the joke is funny.

Franklin comes through an open door I never noticed and has a seat on the other side of me. He’s got his cowboy hat on, a white one, and he’s duded-up real fine with a jacket and string tie, silver stars flashing on white collars. He tips his hat and smiles at me. “You remember what we agreed on, right? You’re good for it?”

“Yeah.”

“I hadda walk right off my shift at Jenny’s place to bail your ass out, partner. The lady here thinks we should charge extra.”

I almost forgot. Bouncing drunks at the titty bar.

“Wait,” I tell him. “This place might not be safe. I can’t be sure what I said to those people. I might have told them—”

“You’ll be good for a while. Don’t worry, I made sure the package is secure. Just like you told me to.”

And he showed up just when I said. That was our arrangement. If I don’t call in within twenty-four hours, come and get me.

Smart us.

But . . .

“It can’t be safe here. She was asking me questions about the stuff. About who I’d talked to. I was completely out of my mind. They’ll show up at the club looking for you.”

Marcie closes her book and looks at me hard. “What kind of shit did you just involve us in?”

I roll my eyes at her. “The kind of shit that involves a billion people killing each other in a very public place, lady. Or didn’t you notice we just walked out of a war zone?”

“It wasn’t that bad,” she says. “I’ve seen worse.”

“I’m telling you, something big is going on. Did Franklin tell you he was working for them, too, a few days ago?”

She looks at him hard. “Must’ve slipped his mind.”

Franklin almost shrugs his shoulders, but doesn’t.

All in a day’s work, I guess.

“Do you people have Internet here?”

“Yeah,” Franklin says. “What about our money?”

“It’s taped to my leg. And I have extra, stashed. If you can help out with some more legal advice.”

“Man, we nearly got
killed
back there,” he says, like he never signed up in the first place, like I never told him how dangerous it was going to be. “Two guys I know real well bought it in that lobby. People who lived here.”

“You didn’t have to bring your friends.”

“It’s a damn good thing I did. Otherwise, we’d all be dead.”

“More money for you, then,” I tell him, remembering what he said before. About being in the Gulf War. “Feel like making some more?”

He pushes back his hat. Scratches his forehead. The woman shrugs.

“What did you have in mind?” Franklin says.

•  •  •

A
fter I tell him what the plot is, he says he has to run it up the flagpole and see who salutes. I roll up my pants and peel my walking-around money off my leg. On any other day, tearing off all that duct tape might actually hurt.

But today?

Shit.

Franklin hands me a pair of scissors and I open the package. Twenty grand in cash and a photograph from a digital camera, folded in half. The photo Jenison gave me at our third meeting. I look at it a second, then hand it to Franklin, telling him that’s my wife and that I have to find her. He considers my words with a half grunt, his eyes narrowing against the fuzz and the grain of
the image. Shakes his head, like he’s telling me he has no idea who those people are. Doesn’t matter. I need these guys for their guns, not their smarts. I hand him fifteen thousand dollars in cash, and top it with another four. I tell him to think of it as a down payment.

He says we’ll have to see. Gotta run it up the flagpole first.

I don’t tell him about Jenison. I don’t tell him about what Jenison told me. That terrible story about the dog crawling in his own blood. It wasn’t just about the dog. She was telling me something else, about all of us.

We are all crawling in our own blood.

We are focused only on our own dead game.

I remember that part really clearly, even though my mind was half gone when she said the words. I also remember her telling me it’s not about nukes. Nukes are impractical. What was she saying? What the hell was she really trying to tell me?

Don’t look, son.

It’s the face of God.

I don’t say any of this to Franklin. This is strictly need-to-know. A serious table with serious stakes. But I have an advantage: one of the players is David Hartman. He knows what’s really going down. Why they want to break the mainframe that controls Cheyenne Mountain—and why it’s not about nukes.

And David Hartman might still have my wife.

That makes this a no-brainer.

•  •  •

F
ranklin brings me some fresh clothes that look like they’ll fit pretty well. Jeans and a black beefy tee, striped flannel workshirt. Typical twentysomething slacker uniform. What to wear when you wanna blend right in on the corner.

He shows me to a bathroom, just around a sharp corner on the second floor of the house—which is huge, built in the fifties, with creaky stairs and floorboards and dirty rugs that smell like marijuana.
The wallpaper is peeling off, revealing a skeleton of rotten stucco and wood struts. This place is nestled in a pretty remote location just on the outside of the Bellaire subdivision, past the Galleria. A place for people with sad pasts to hide out from whatever. The bathroom is a tiny thing, but it has a shower. Franklin leaves me to it.

He keeps the stack of nineteen large in his hand the whole time.

When I am alone, I peel off a second skin soaked with blood and sweat and I wash three days’ worth of running scum down a tiny drain in a narrow stall with a glass door. The steam smothers me, makes me feel like a ghost. My feet seem like mirages, way down beyond a woozy shimmer. The water is hot. My head begins to pound. I feel Toni, closer than ever in this fog. Screaming my name now. Almost there.
Almost
 . . .

I grit my teeth and the rage sparkles somewhere.

Sparkles like the hot water.

It wants to show me her face.

It almost comes . . .
almost
 . . . but the wave crashes back.

Not ready yet. My mind is too fried. The buzzing becomes an afterburn as the rush leaves me. I almost sink to my knees. But I hold myself up.

Have to hold myself up, man.

Don’t lose it now.

The face of Alex Bennett—Alex
Gange
—fades into view, shimmering in the fog.

I can’t look at her, either.

She only smiles at me, but I can’t look at her.

I want to tell her I’m sorry, but I can’t. I want to tell her this is all my fault, but it isn’t. I want to apologize because I failed her . . . because I failed her father . . .

But what could I have done?

Alex . . . Axl . . .
I’m sorry.

She doesn’t hear me because she’s dead.

•  •  •

T
he basement staircase is just past a locked steel door hidden in a hall closet. Down the stairs, in the center of the subterranean chamber, Franklin snaps on a hanging bulb over racks of ordnance. They have everything down here from slingshots to grenade launchers, all in neat rows, the rifles and pistols shiny and polished, the slick surfaces swimming in beads of dull light. A couple of concrete safes, too. That’s probably where they keep the C-4. You could start a miniature revolution with this gear. Their intel center is fairly respectable, too. Maps on the walls, a couple of dry erase boards with names and dates on them. A watercooler and a full-sized refrigerator. Modded laptops with satellite interface, a couple of big machines with king-hell memory and maxedout dual processors. He tells me someone named the Weasel put the rig together and to play nice with it or I’ll get my ass kicked. When he says that, my head goes light for a moment, and I picture a couple more cells in my brain flaming out. I sit down in the chair in front of the computer system and rub my temple.

“You better take it easy for a few days,” he says. “They had you on some heavy drugs. You almost died.”

“I don’t have a few days.”

“Four grand rents this basement for a while. You should take it easy.”

“I have to work. There’s not much time.”

“Suit yourself. There’s a cot in the corner. Marcie will be down to make sure you’re treating the place nice. Help yourself to whatever’s in the fridge. There’s a shitter over there.”

He aims a finger toward the far end of the chamber, where I see a dirty toilet under a stem lamp. Old issues of
Hustler
and
Playboy
scattered around like tattered snapshots of dead bodies. Reminds me of T-Jay’s old prison cell.

“One of your guys used to live down here?”

He almost nods.

“I’m . . . sorry about that.”

“We’re all sorry for something.”

Profound, man. I think the last time I heard someone say that, it was in an Indiana Jones film. Almost makes me wonder what the hell I’m doing here with these losers.

I should run away from this place. I shouldn’t trust anyone. I’m taking my life in my hands by even sitting still for more than a few hours.

So what do I do?

I look right at him and say I’m sorry again.

This time he doesn’t reply at all.

•  •  •

I
lie down on the cot for a moment, as Franklin gets a snubnosed revolver from the rack. Smith and Wesson. Checks the spin chamber, full load. Clicks the safety and stuffs it into a shoulder holster.

“Gotta go see a man about a horse,” he says. “When I get back, the rest of the guys will be here and we’ll see about helping with your problem.”

“You can’t go back to work at the club. Jenison’s people will be looking for you.”

“I’m not going back there. I’ve gotta pick up your package.”

“That’s risky. We should stay low.”

“I don’t wanna be involved with this any longer than I have to.”

“Maybe we should just leave it hidden for now. These people are like cockroaches. They’re everywhere. I’m starting to think they have government guys involved with them. If that’s true, they’ve got eyes in outer space that can watch us wherever we run.”

“You know how much money it takes to adjust the lens on one of those satellites?”