They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy (34 page)

At the center of t
he room, surrounded by all this crazy stuff,
stood Ibn Meghar, head of the goddamn Shining Beacon
Coalition
. Sprawled out
at
his feet were two
dead guys
, one with a watermelon-sized hole in his chest and the other a pinch-
faced
weas
e
ly motherfucker whose head was several feet to the right of his body.

Blood ran do
wn Meghar's indigo tribal robes. It
dotted his thick black beard. A red notebook hung in the air
in front of him
without him
having to touch
it
. He turned
its
pages with the power of a brain that had
busted
tsunamis and toppled dictators.

Then he
cleared his throat. "I can hear you breathing," he announced loudly in perfect English.

Well,
fuck.

I raised Rosemary's badge as a shield against the most powerful
Post-Human
on the planet
, trying to sound like a fucking cop
. "I was working with DeltaBlue to take these guys down," I
said, lowering the pitch of my voice and pushing the words out so I didn
't sound nervous.
"But i
t looks like you got it covered.
" I fucking hoped the fucking psy-blockers were keeping him out of my
fucking
head.

A smile crossed his face with a glimmer in his eye. "God damn, Moses, you made it in here?
How you like my new proxy?
"

It felt like a
ll the blood drained out of me when I realized just how amazingly fucked I was.

Unf
ucking This Dog

"I'll be damned," Bob said from Meghar's mouth, "I did not have you figured for the 'never quit' type. Are you still looking for Tracey? Because she's in the room out there; you can have her now." He snorted something powdery from a metal cylinder that he put back in his robes because why the fuck not get absolutely blasted while controlling a guy who could probably annihilate eighty square miles with his
mind
?

He telekinetically jerked Rosemary's billfold
out of
my hand to glance it over. "
Here we go.
The infamous badge. Who is this
girl
?"

"She's nobody. I stole it," I replied. "How the hell did you grab Meghar?"

"Silvy's been probing at him for weeks waiting for his defenses to crack.
T
hirty-six straight hours of him clearing ships off the Mauritania
Coast
later
, here we are." He flung th
e badge right back into my hand. "This thing has a memory aura of lies and empathy all over it. Lee didn't even check the damn name on it before he threw
away
everything we gave him, did he?"

I pocketed the
badge
.
"What've you got going on in here
, Bob
?"

"You
know you
nearly got him killed with your
lies
," Bob said.
"
We had to inflict some consequences. I've got a video around here somewhere if you want to see it
. I hope those daughters of his don
'
t mind a daddy who doesn't have a functioning speech center
anymore
."

He was t
r
y
ing to distract me
,
trying to
make me feel guilty
.
Fuck all that, though. Not this time.
"What about Tra
cey?
" I asked him.
"What did you have her on
?
Is she going to make it?
"

On a table crowded with papers, notebooks, dirty paper plates and plastic eating utensils, a glass with a bulge at the bottom slid over to a bronz
e and glass absinthe dispenser.

"So the Red Ghost is dead," Bob informed me, ignoring me again to run the conversation.

The dispenser's handle squeaked by itself and filled the glass with the cloudy white drink.

"He was the first one they got in the raid. Surface to air missiles I think is what they used. That's what they sounded like. They're invoking Smythe's Law, so they can just kill anybody that resists because of the casualties you people might inflict. You and that gypsy rabble outside."

A plain table of aged, gray wood dug itself out of a mound of scrap and trash, floated over the equipment in the room and came to rest between me and Bob. Two bench seats toppled over a tower of boxes and crap with a crash and settled on either side of
it.
Bob sat down on one
bench
, the absinthe dispenser shut off, and the bulging glass shot straight to hi
s hand without spilling a drop.

"Have a seat," he invited. "I'm twenty-six jumps to forty. You'll have to catch
up. You ever had tantric sex?"

The double homicide on the floor
was starting to look
less disturbing
compared to this
conversation
.
Fuck, I was getting a headache.

I ran my fingers through my
short
hair.
"
Nah,
I just use a rubber."

I had to keep him talking so he didn't trigger whatever crazy shit he had set up
to go
. He was trying to distract me,
I knew that,
but if he was as high as his glassy eyes looked, I could distract the shit out of him the same way we used to kill an hour of science class in high school by asking the teacher to explain how a helicopter worked.

I pointed to the glass. "That's not the, uh, what do you call it, the Bohemi
an method for absinthe, right?"

His eyes lit up. "So you know something about it. No, it's the French ritual. Fire from that Bohemian nonsense kills the flavor. Anybody that tells you otherwise is a fucking idiot. I had it once like that, and it tasted like swill and duck shit." He chuckled. "Never again."

I sat on the bench seat across the table from him. "Where'd you get this table?
Looks old.
" I just threw whatever shitty small-talk I could come up with at him. With quick hand movements to keep his attention.

"I made it," he said, sipping the absinthe. "The wood was repurposed from an old barn, so, fittingly enough, I used it for a farmhouse style table. It's held up pretty well over the years. You're still wanting to kill Tracey, right? That's what you came here fo
r?"

I just told him, "I don't know. That's really the la
st thing on my mind right now.
So
tell me how all this stuff works.
"

Bob downed the rest of the absinthe like it was nothing and looked the place over from floor-to-ceiling, one end of the room to the other. "Well, there was a good chance we'd corrupt the universal structure just by trying this. We haven't so far, but just don't breathe too hard on anything in here." He laughed way too fucking much at that. "But the jewels are still hanging dutifully in the net reflecting our white
ascension
infinite-fold. You ready for it?"

I moved my hands around some more to get his eyes following. "I don't know, I'm still not sure about--"

"Watch this," he cut in. He gestured to the two bodies on the floo
r. "That's Earle and Two-Stroke. That's them,
"
he said excitedly. The guy was bombed, man.
He raised them both up with Meghar's power and started one of them humping the other from behind like a jackrabbit. "That's Two-Stroke in the rear. Earle's catching." His intense eyes stared right at me, shifting from my left eye to my right eye and back, searching them. "You don't think that's funny?"

Jesus.

"It'd
probably be funnier if I knew them better," was all I came up w
ith.

Bob shattered the absinthe glass to pieces
on the table
.

"Fuck
, man
!"

"Shhh," he said. The shards
hung
in the air, unmoving. "Watch this."
Each piece
broke and divided, then divided again, then divided again and kept dividing until what was left was too small to see. "This is the thing right here,"
Bob
told me, intensity and just balls-out conviction in his voice
. "This is it. I
take it all down, I put
all these
infinitesimal
pieces back together and I can make the glass again. Or I can make something better." He did another hit of powder. "That's what this all is. And you helped, yes
,
you did. Despite your efforts to come into our operation
after we brought you here
and take a crap on the rug, you helped. Those specs you and Tracey and Lee got for me in North Dakota saved a helluva lot of time."

"That's what that stuff was?" I tried to say matter-of-factly.
I knew we had helped the fucker. I knew it. Fuck, Tracey.
"What were they specs for? Did you kn
ow I worked in a factory?" I just had to
keep him fucking talking.

"My EM field generator," he answered. "Like the one in the bunker that fired the radio pulse." He stomped his foot on the floor. "Got one under our feet right now. Whereas that one you all set off was a single pulse, this is a constant pulsing, wave after wave output. Waves again, you see?"

Shit, shit, shit. He was going to kill everybody with this bullshit, just like
it had killed Will and Red
.
Fucking crazy bastard.

"Do you have anything to drink that's not absinthe?" I asked him. Earle and Two-Stroke kept humping in the corner of my eye. "And can you make them stop doing that? That shit's making my headache worse."

They fell to the floor in a disgusting heap, and Bob unsuccessfully tried to hide a smile with his hand. "I don't have anything else to drink, no. Don't feel sorry for those two. Don't waste the precious mental energy. They were necessary evils made unnecessary by time and divinity. Although, truthfully, I'm glad somebody is here for this, and especially a
skeptic,
and especially a condescending prick one like you."

I
almost
gave him a middle finger on pure reflex.

He went on, "The thought of doing
this alone was a little nerve-w
racking, but now I've got a
real
Post-Human doing it too, so we've got a whole new scientific experiment angle on it.
We'll see if it goes both ways like Earle did.
"

"Uh huh," I nodded. "So Psycho Silvy, is she around here?"
Where the fuck was a cop when you needed one?
Jesus, man, raid this building already.

"Off-site," he said simply. "What did Ja-Rilla smell like when you burned h
im? Did it smell like a human?"

What he had said
and what he was doing
finally sank in
to my thick skull
.

"Wait, what the fuck do you mean you've got a Post-Human 'doing it' now? Are you talking about me?"

"Where'd you get the psy-blockers?" he asked me. "I can't get in there and Silvy says she can't either. Why take them?" The fucker had a smile on hi
s face. He was playing with me.

I threw heat at him. "What the fuck is happening right now, man?"

"You should see your face right now."

"The fuck's going on, Bob? I will burn you to shit right now."

He clicked his tongue at me. "I'm sure, I'm sure. In this body, I'll just bet you can.
Right now, y
ou're getting wash
ed over by the quanta-godwaves
, boy. I'm surprised you can't feel it. I can see all the colors sifting through the gulfs between your particles and the quantum foam ebbing at your feet."

I forced a laugh. "The fuck are you on, Bob? Jesus."
But t
he sensation of something huge perched right behind me or above me watching everything I did was enough to make me keep looking over my shoulder
, and my headache had been getting worse
. "You're fucking with me. You didn't turn anything on."

"There's no trigger," he said. "This whole set-up is the interface with the source. It's been running a constant tributary of exchange between us and reality
this whole time
."

Mother
fuck
. He had been stalling me as much as I had been stalling him. He
wanted
to be sitting around in there because the shit was already going.
Fuck.