The Living End (19 page)

Thanks to the obituary in the
Oakland Tribune
, I had a date for Bob Payton’s funeral service. That helped me narrow down the records as I pulled a pair of fat green accounting ledgers from the cabinet and laid them out on the desk. The ink scribbles had faded over the years, but that didn’t stop me from finding the person who had paid for Bob’s final resting place. His name was Erik Krause, he’d paid in cash, and his address was a boat slip at the Berkeley Marina.

Twenty years was a long time to stay in one place, especially for a hunted man. Still, it was the best lead I had to go on. It’d have to do.

I left the way I’d come in: crouched behind the pews in the dark, waiting like a spider for the guard to trudge through on his endless rounds. I could have let myself out, but then he’d have noticed the door was unlocked when he came back around. It was cleaner to wait until he passed me by, his clunky footsteps fading into the pews, and then dart out the chapel door leaving everything the way I’d found it. I jogged across the graveyard and clambered over the fence. I had one more stop before heading home.

• • •

I
t was a quarter past midnight by the time I reached the marina, but I wasn’t tired. Silent boats bobbed on the tranquil waters of the bay, their sails furled, skeletal masts pointing like fingers toward the starry night sky.

Yellow lamps lit the way along the weathered concrete walk. The stone was stained from decades of sea spray, and I tasted salt and mildew with every breath. Toward the end of the line, as I closed in on the slip, another kind of light caught my eye: thread-thin lines of raw magic twisted into a warding spell, pulsing emerald green in my second sight. They coated the dock like a spider’s web. Or a net woven from razor wire.

The boat tied to the pier was more of a barge, a boxy thing with shuttered windows and more spells laid on the deck. Calligraphy decals on the back gave the boat’s name:
Second Chance
.

I stood at the edge of the dock, alone in the dark, and held up one finger.

With a focused thought and a puff of breath, a luminous spark of power jumped from my fingertip and drifted away. It floated like a puffball on a summer breeze and brushed against the farthest edge of the warding spell. The threads of magic rippled, shivering like the taut strings of a violin all the way back to the boat. I stood and waited.

The man who emerged from the boat’s cabin might have grown a snowy-white beard and changed his name, but the passage of time couldn’t hide the sliver-thin scars that covered his haggard face and shaking hands. He wore a tattered bathrobe and slippers.

“Dr. Payton,” I said, not moving. I kept my hands empty, palms slightly turned his way. “My name is Daniel Faust. I’ve come a long way to see you.”

He looked like he was about to protest, insist he was Erik Krause, but then his shoulders sagged. He knew it was over.

“Are you here to kill me?” he asked.

“Probably not,” I said.

“Come aboard, then.” With a wave of his hand the warding threads slid back, making a clear path for me between their webs.

I climbed aboard the
Second Chance
and followed him into the cabin.

“Wasn’t hard for me to find you,” I said. “Other people could find you too.”

“They’ve had twenty years to try. Either they believe I’m dead, or they know I’m just a broken old man. Why bother?”

The cabin was cramped but homey, with a little kitchenette and an old vinyl couch. A stuffed lizard stood watch over his laptop desk next to a small shelf of books. Occult grimoires stood shoulder to shoulder with texts on quantum engineering and advanced calculus, thrown together with no apparent rhyme or reason.

“So,” he said, hobbling over to the kitchen nook, “if Ausar didn’t send you, who did?”

Even though a tuft of tangled white hair dangled over his eyes, I could still see how his gaze narrowed as he turned to face me. His left hand dipped under the counter, reaching into a drawer. He kept his eyes fixed on me.

If you’re reaching for something innocuous, like a new coffee filter or a spoon, you tend to look directly at it. If you’ve got a stranger in your home and you’re reaching for a silenced pistol on the other hand, it’s probably someplace you’ve taught yourself to reach by feel alone.

“Your creations sent me,” I said. “The smoke-faced men.”

His hand froze. It came back out of the drawer, empty.

“Coffee?” he asked.

“If it’s not a bother.”

“Not at all,” he said and put on a fresh pot while we talked.

“I need to know what you were trying to do, you and Nedry and Clark. What you were
really
trying to do. They’ve got new patrons, and they’re picking up where you left off twenty years ago.”

Bob sighed and leaned against the counter. He rubbed his leathery forehead.

“The first thing you have to understand,” he said, “is that ninety-nine percent of Ausar Biomedical was a perfectly legitimate company. Then there was us. The terrible trio, we called ourselves. We were recruited by a rogue faction on the board of directors and compartmentalized from the rest of the company, set to a special and very specific task.”

He sat down at the little desk and powered on his computer, waving for me to pull over a vinyl-padded chair from the kitchenette. I sat at his shoulder as he typed. He showed me pictures, scanned in from old Polaroids, dusty and faded. An aerial photograph of a dig site. A cordon of security tape and men in dark glasses. A stairway carved into rocky ground, leading down into the dark.

“They found it in Mexico,” he said. “A tomb where there shouldn’t have been one, carved with glyphs matching nothing in Mexican history. No, not a tomb. A
tunnel
. Eventually we found a second, identical one in the French Alps.”

The vision of Lauren descending into the darkness, in Nepal, flashed behind my eyes.

“They were filled with plant life,” Bob said as his eyes went distant. “Impossible life, nothing anyone had ever seen before. We could only explore so far. Anyone who went past a certain point in the tunnel…was lost to us. The board of directors was aware of certain secrets. They needed specialists, and they found us. Nedry was an expert on quantum sorcery. Clark’s expertise was occult biochemistry. As for me? Warding and containment.

“You must understand, Mr. Faust, that this is not the only world that exists. Like the petals of a snowflake, other dimensions weave and lace around our own, sometimes touching our planet, sometimes violently drilling through it. The tunnels were ancient relics, the doomed efforts of some long-dead sorcerer to create a permanent bridge between our world and another.”

“What other world?”

He didn’t answer at first. He got up, took a pair of mismatched mugs down from a cabinet, and poured two cups of coffee. He held one out to me. His hand trembled.

“The Garden of Eden.”

“W
e focused on theory at first,” Bob said. He cradled his mug with both hands as he sat back down at the desk. “Using what we could learn from the tunnels’ energy, we developed means of glimpsing into other worlds. Our efforts were slipshod and random, but what we saw…it was beyond imagining. Worlds of ice, and the things that wriggled and swam beneath that ice were the size of cities. Worlds of screaming glass. A world that was nothing but a windowless mansion of endless rooms, and in each dusty room lay an abandoned porcelain doll. Eventually, with a fusion of magic and technology, we built the means to see what waited on the other end of those tomb-tunnels.”

“What did you find?” I said.

His hands tightened around his mug.

“A sword. Twenty feet long and blackened by fire, lying forsaken in an overgrown field. Beyond it, a garden, wild and dense. Not just with plants, no, with…hybrids. An impossible mingling of plant life and human flesh and organs. The garden was abandoned, Mr. Faust. Left to its own devices, left to plummet into a Darwinian nightmare, and every creature springing from that poisoned soil either a predator or a parasite. We watched entire species rise and go extinct in the span of hours. We should have known. We should have known, right then and there, to dynamite the damn tunnels and leave it all alone. The garden wasn’t
for
us.”

“You’re right,” I said. “You should have.”

“Life, though. Aah, that’s the thing. We were in the business of saving lives, weren’t we? And here we had a source of abundant life and unstoppable fertility.”

I set down my mug.

“Viridithol,” I said, my blood running cold as I pieced the story together. “You reckless, dumb sons of bitches. You put samples of plant life from
another fucking dimension
in a drug and
fed it to pregnant women
. And you were, what,
surprised
when the kids came out looking like that?”

“It was a tiny sample,” he said, shaking his head. “Just…just the tiniest fraction, given to a small portion of the test group. We thought we had it under control. We were trying to help people.”

“Well, I guess that makes up for everything then.”

Bob stared into his coffee. “We never should have called it Eden. That was hubris. It made us think we were dealing with something benign, something positive, when the truth was right in front of our faces. Whatever the Garden had once been, now it was seething with corruption. Abundant life. It makes me laugh, in retrospect. Mr. Faust, did you know that there’s a medical term for abundant life? For cellular life bursting out of control and running wild.”

The smoke-faced men had asked me the same question.
What’s another word for life abundant?

I shook my head. “Don’t know it.”

“Of course you do,” he said, taking a sip of coffee. “It’s called cancer.”

He turned to the laptop and pulled up a file of scanned pages. Florid handwriting filled every inch of each parchment sheet, in French.

“Everything changed when we found the journals,” Bob said. “Have you ever heard of a man named Gilles de Rais?”

I just nodded. He didn’t need to know how or why.

“Mountaineering in the Alps, de Rais discovered the second tunnel,” Bob said. “He was already an accomplished sorcerer, insofar as we can gather, and he began having visions of the Garden. He felt it calling to him, promising him the power of a god.”

“Is that before or after he started killing kids?” I said.

“The visions triggered the killings. He was convinced that he could steal a human’s life force, drain their soul dry, and use that power to turn himself into the Garden’s conduit and master. It was very trial and error, though. Several hundred victims worth of trial and error.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, “that and he really liked murdering people. None of that good old scientific detachment.”

“Exactly,” Bob said. My sarcasm was lost on him. “As we traced his steps, the results from the Viridithol test trials came in. I had misgivings about, well, all of it. I wanted out. Nedry and Clark and the board of directors wanted full steam ahead. That’s when I created my little insurance policy.”

“The smoke-faced men.”

He nodded. “In our early work, we came across a world of absolute silence. An Earth stripped bare of resources, of life, of anything at all, crumbling under a cold and black sun. Lonely creatures walked the wastes, creatures born of entropy. The antithesis of life itself. I created an experimental bridge in my laboratory, coaxed two of them across, and showed them the samples from the Garden. They were on it like bloodhounds. I felt confident that they’d do their best to destroy any further attempts to breach the Garden’s walls. The antimatter to the Garden’s wild matter, you could say.”

“Problem there,” I said, “is you didn’t keep track of them. The name Lauren Carmichael mean anything to you?”

He shook his head, brow furrowed. “No. Should it?”

“There weren’t two tunnels. There were
three
. She found the third on a dig in Nepal. Your boys showed up to save the day. See, first they pushed Lauren into slaughtering all the witnesses, except for one.”

Bob blinked. “I…didn’t intend for them to hurt anyone. That wasn’t the idea at all.”

“Second, instead of taking Lauren out, they pretended they were on her side and spent the next two decades trying to con her into triggering the apocalypse. You said it yourself, Doc: they’re creatures of entropy from a dead world. Did it occur to you, even for a second, that they might not stop at the end of your leash? That they might maybe, just
maybe
, want to turn this planet into a lump of charcoal so it’d feel more like home?”

He didn’t have to answer. The shame on his face told me everything I needed to know.

“Your old buddies Nedry and Clark hooked up with a senator,” I said. “They’re getting funding from him and Lauren, along with cash laundered from Ausar’s old offshore accounts. I don’t know Senator Roth’s angle, but Lauren was hot to get her hands on Gilles de Rais’s work. She wants to follow in his footsteps. His plan, taking control of the Garden—you think it could have worked?”

Bob shook his head. “No, not at all. For one thing, de Rais was thinking too small. He killed his subjects one at a time, spread out over years. If you need an explosion of life energy to power a ritual, a single mass sacrifice is the only way to go. The ancient Greeks did it with cattle; they called it a
hecatomb
. De Rais’s approach was like trying to fill a bucket by adding a single droplet of water once every week or two. It evaporates.”

Now I knew what had happened to the missing homeless people, the ones that weren’t being experimented on at the clinic. Lauren must have been warehousing them somewhere, collecting victims for her grand finale. At least that meant they were probably still alive. I just had to find them before the clock ran down.

“Then there’s the attunement issue,” Bob said. “You would need to bring your body and spirit in alignment with the Garden’s…vibrations, for lack of a better word. Simply digesting samples from the tunnels wouldn’t work. You saw what happened to the Viridithol babies, and we’re talking about a much greater amount. It’s a catch-22. In order to survive the ritual, you’d have to take so much of the Garden into your body that you’d inevitably mutate and die before the ritual even began.”