Demons (38 page)

“It’s all right,” came the other man’s voice from near Ira’s feet. He sounded as if he had his back to Ira—carrying the stretcher from the front. “Let him rave. He would, as a prisoner being transferred to a madhouse.”

All this in the gray mist, the limbo place—he still didn’t want to open his eyes. He couldn’t bear to see.

He heard them talking to a sentry. An explanation was whispered in English to someone. There would be a delay of perhaps half an hour before they could be allowed to leave, because the sergeant with the authority to let them go was off somewhere eating.

But in time they would transfer him to a mental hospital. Who knew what cruelties they would inflict there? Brain-wrecking drugs perhaps.

His rage made him forget his earlier, dazed passivity. Ira struggled to get free of the blanket, to roll off the stretcher—shouting without words—and then he felt a hand take his and gently squeeze. He knew that hand, that small soft hand.

It couldn’t be her, really, could it? He might have looked to see if it was her. But if he did . . . he knew what he’d see: only the translator. And Nyerza, his betrayer.

Enemies.

Strangers.

Traitors.

Better to keep his eyes shut, hold this stranger’s hand, and pretend it was Melissa.

San Francisco Airport

Exiting the 797, Stephen was dazedly surprised to find a limousine driver waiting for him, holding a sign with his name on it. “You waiting for me?” Stephen asked him. “I’m Stephen Isquerat.”

“Yes, sir,” said the young Asian-American driver. “West Wind sent the limo for your convenience, with their compliments.”

Stephen shrugged. “Lead on, then.”

He’d told West Wind he was quitting, and yet they were sending limos for him. Maybe they were hoping to get him to change his mind.

Let them try. He wasn’t going back there. The dead animals floating in that pond, the nightmares they’d sent him into, in another world—and in his own. He wasn’t going back. But there was no reason he shouldn’t take advantage of a free ride. Maybe it was Winderson’s way of saying no hard feelings.

Stephen didn’t really care. He was just trying to get from point A to point B without breaking down; and that meant he had to believe in the world as it was supposed to be.

It wasn’t easy, because of the way people kept turning into ghosts all around him. Or spirits. They were spirits, all these people: spirits in designer sneakers and loafers, spirits in sports coats and raincoats, spirits with luggage swinging in their hands, spirits speaking on cell phones, spirits watching television shows in the gate area as he came out. That feelinghe’d had, drifting unseen through that New York office building, had never completely left him. These people were in ordinary human bodies, to be sure, but it was as if they were
riding
the bodies instead of
being
the bodies—carried within them, trapped in forms that were making all the decisions about where to go and forced to ride along willy-nilly.

This point of view was sickening. It made everything seem ephemeral, dreamlike, insubstantial. Only once did he see a man who looked solid, unghostly: a middle-aged Oriental, perhaps a Tibetan. The tote bag he carried looked like Tibetan craftsmanship. The man seemed to sense him, then turned and stared at him. Did he nod just slightly? Then he moved away, moved more purposefully in some indefinable way than the people in the crowd around him, though each no doubt had a destination. It was as if this Tibetan were more
here
than the others.

And then he was lost in the crowd.

Walking beside the limo driver, Stephen felt as if everything might melt away at any moment, and the only thing that kept the whole world in place was a
thought
. A Big Thought that was thought by something unknown. But if whatever was thinking that Big Thought stopped thinking it, then all this would go away, melt into a sea of chaos, a sea of energy.

They went down a moving-stairs device used for transporting spirits from one deck of temporary material to another: a crowd streaming down an escalator.

It was with relief that he made it out into the morning, overcast but shiny from a recent rain. Here he could breathe cool air and feel a breeze on his cheeks and hands as he waited for the driver to fetch the car. The chill felt real.

“The white zone is for loading and unloading only.”

A silvery stretch limo pulled up, its electric engine eerily silent. The young Asian driver got out, came around, and opened the door for him. “Here you go, sir,” the driver said, smiling; the smile was locked away in his mouth, and he didn’t communicate with his eyes at all.

Stephen got in the back, a little reluctantly. He hadn’t asked for this. It felt close in here, smelling of leather and cigar smoke and—gardenias? He hit the switch to roll the window down, let the cool air shock his cheeks. “You’re not cold, sir?” the driver asked, as they pulled away from the curb, jockeying with the taxis and shuttles.

“No. I need the fresh air this morning.” Stephen found himself staring out the left side window at ruins. There’d been a restaurant there once, hadn’t there, when he was a teenager? One of those circular restaurants on the edge of the airport. The shattered walls, marked off with yellow tape, looked muddy; the ground around them was covered with weeds grown through an ice field of broken window glass. And on one of the remaining walls were what looked like big, deep claw marks. “They tearing something down over there?” Stephen asked, to keep his mind busy.

“Yes, sir, they’re finally clearing that away. Supposed to begin rebuilding it next month,” the driver said. “That’s what I heard. It’s been there for nine years. The demons, the crazed people, they did so much damage at the airport, it’s taken a long time to get it all fixed up. It only just got back up to full capacity like a year ago.”

A tram full of passengers went by—a box of ghosts on wheels, it seemed to him. He shuddered, thinking of the sea of energy, the mountain that stood on its own peak, the face.

Oh God, where did I go?

He wanted to sob. He seemed to see that terrible, frightened, hollow-eyed face staring at him again. Those disconnected pinwheels, like propellers and not like propellers, hanging in the sky. That face—a raggy, threadbare version of his own soul.

A sob escaped him. When the driver looked at him in the rearview mirror, Stephen tried to turn it into a cough.

He noticed a rack of miniature bottles and glasses, under the window that separated him from the chauffeur. “Little bit of a croup. You think it’s okay if I have a drink from this bar here? I mean it’s sort of early, but it eases this, uh, cough.”

“It’s there for your convenience, sir.”

Stephen opened a miniature whiskey, then another and made himself a double in a small brandy glass. He drank half of it down quickly, grateful for the familiarity, the mundanity of it soothing. Some of the lingering ghostliness retreated.

He began to think about the prospect of getting another job. He could find something. A lot of people had died nine years ago. There weren’t really enough qualified people around. Most likely it would be much more entrance-level than what he’d had at West Wind. Or maybe he could pull a little investment money together, get back into online trading. Most of the lines were back up.

Dickinham had stared at him and said only, “Uh-huh,” when he’d caught Stephen heading out, carrying his grip, and Stephen had told him he was quitting.

Psychonomics? Had the process really projected him out of his body? It had been some kind of hypnotic experience, he told himself. A vision in a trance. A training tool of some kind, enhanced by his own morbid imagination.

Or it had been real. After all, the experiences he’d had as a boy now seemed to have been real.

But it didn’t matter. Either way, he wasn’t going back there.

They drove onto the freeway, but they were scarcely a mile toward the city before the limo took an exit onto a side street he didn’t know. “Shortcut to another freeway?” Stephen asked.

The driver shook his head. “No, the hospital is right here. It’s the new one by the airport.”

“The hospital?”

They pulled into a parking lot and drove to the emergency room doors of a very modern hospital, a big building with sweeping curves of tinted glass, balconies tufted here and there with deck gardens. The breaking sunlight purpled on its rain-wet surfaces, reminding Stephen of the wings of a fly.

Winderson was there, standing under the Emergency sign, wearing an unbuttoned trench coat. Behind Winderson stood a big black man with wavy, greased-back black hair, sunglasses, and a black suit and tie. He wore a headset, and his hands were folded in front of him.
A bodyguard,
Stephen thought. Tongan, maybe.

But maybe not a bodyguard—maybe it was just a guy hanging out here, and Winderson wasn’t really here, not physically. Maybe this was a hologram.

Then the CEO opened the door of the limo himself and bent down to speak softly to Stephen, who hurriedly put the whiskey glass away.

“She’s up on the sixth floor, Stephen. It’s faster to go in this way. They know me by now.”

“Who’s up on the sixth floor?”

“Jonquil! She was admitted just a day ago. Didn’t anyone tell you?”

Ashgabat

The sergeant had taken thirty-five minutes. They waited with Ira in a sweat-reeking little holding room near the doors to the outer world, and Melissa wanted to scream from tension, sure that at any minute those who had incarcerated Ira would notice he was gone. She prayed they, too, were at their meal.

Araha had induced a kind of quiet in Ira somehow. Ira had slipped into semiconsciousness and now lay rocking slightly from side to side on the stretcher, lips moving soundlessly.

Then a uniformed guard with a pocked face and a slack mouth gestured to them from the doorway. They followed him to the checkpoint booth.

There were two sentries at the booth beside the exit doorsof the state security building. They only glanced at Melissa inher veil and the head-to-toe garb of a devout Muslim woman; but they stared at Ira, then for long, muttering moments at Nyerza—there weren’t many blacks in Turkmenistan state security and even fewer so tall they had to stoop to pass through the doorway.

Melissa and the others had agreed on a story ahead of time, and Melissa knew what Araha was telling the sentries, with much ironic gesticulation: that Nyerza was a security consultant from Nigeria, where this American on the stretcher had worked with the environmental terrorists. They’d had a Turkmen soldier helping carry the stretcher but the fool had disappeared, was loafing somewhere, so this dignitary volunteered to carry one end. Can you imagine? There will be a report on the slacker—one Amu.

The sentries chuckled—they all knew at least one Amu. Their sergeant took a second look at the papers.

We have a chance,
Melissa thought. The papers of transferral were, after all, legitimate, having been obtained by Araha’s contact in the government—legitimate, except that the name of the authorizing officer was fabricated. And it wasn’t uncommon to transfer prisoners to a mental hospital, for holding until they were needed again.

Melissa’s heart thudded and the fear was magnified when she found herself wondering if she were committing a sin against humanity—risking herself, members of the Conscious Circle, who were all too rare and all too important—just to rescue her husband. It was selfish. And if they were caught, Marcus would be left alone with strangers in this foreign land.

But then, Marcus was not Marcus. She forced that thought down, because with everything else, it was just too much to bear.

When would they be done looking at the papers?

Then the sergeant shrugged and said something in his own language. He pressed a button. The door buzzed, declaring itself momentarily unlocked. Nyerza pushed through, trying not to hurry, he and Araha toting the stretcher.

Their contacts—two tall, turbaned men in long coats—were waiting with the truck outside, Marcus with them. They were Turkic Sufi dervishes who sometimes worked with Araha. Brave men but both had been unwilling to enter the building, so Nyerza had been forced to be a stretcher bearer.

Marcus looked up at Melissa as she got into the back of the truck. Before the Fallen Shrine, he would have rushed to her arms, seeing his mother back, safe from danger. But now he only smiled encouragingly.

Their contacts gave them truck keys and good wishes, and hurried off down a side street.