Gods of Manhattan (12 page)

Stacey stiffened, the sweat glistening on the back of his neck. Unconsciously, he raised his arms. "Please, I - I got a family! I got a grandmother with, with lumbago, she needs me - I got two! Another with the consumption! She needs me too! I'm needed in this world!"

Crane chuckled dryly.

"
I'd hate to deprive your 'grandmothers' of your continued affection, Detective. The information. Tomorrow, without fail, as soon as your shift ends. Do we have an understanding?
"

Stacey nodded, and Crane took a perverse delight in noting the dark stain spreading across the front of his tan suit trousers.

"
Don't turn around.
"

Harry Stacey didn't turn around.

He remained, with his arms raised and the front of his trousers coated with his own urine, for six minutes and fourteen seconds, until finally the two pneumatic blondes who Parker Crane would spend the evening entertaining in various ways exited the ladies toilets and asked him if he'd had a stroke.

On his way out, with the girls in place on his arms and another coming along for good measure - a statuesque redhead, the daughter of a Wall Street financier, who believed in seizing each moment as it came or some such philosophy, Parker Crane turned back and met the gaze of Doctor Hamilton. There was no emotion in that gaze. It reminded Crane of nothing so much as a dead fish on a slab, but all the same, he found something in it unpleasant. Threatening, almost.

"Can I help you?" he said, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice.

"Parker Crane, the fashion photographer." Hamilton thrust out a hand, which Crane didn't take. "A pleasure to meet you. I'm..." He seemed to be searching for the correct words. "...an admirer of your work. I think you've made quite a valuable contribution to the culture of this city."

Something in the phrasing bothered Crane. "What do you mean?"

"What I say. I've watched your career with interest. In fact, I think we may have a mutual acquaintance..." His eyes narrowed, speculatively, though his expression did not betray the slightest hint of what he was thinking.

Crane stood for a moment, before one of the blondes - Mandy? Sandy? - tugged his arm, giggling. "
Par-
ker, we want to see your place. You said you'd show us your etchings..." They dissolved into tipsy giggles and led him away towards a waiting hansom. As he walked out through the great double doors of the Astoria, Crane turned to look back at the strange man who'd accosted him.

But Doctor Hamilton was gone.

Later, in his palatial room, Parker Crane lay back on silk sheets soaked with champagne and the sweat of beautiful women, ears filled with drunken laughter and soft, wet noises, and mused that none of this seemed real to him. Occasionally, all of the luxury, these endless dalliances and pleasures of his other self, his fake self - all of it disgusted him. Yes, there was a release there, a form of pleasure, but it was nothing compared to that feeling in him when he pulled the trigger and removed evil from the world. True pleasure came from the barrel of a gun.

The thought amused him as he allowed sleep to steal over him.

In the hospital, Monk Olsen breathed through a tube. He would not die tonight, but his healing would be long and slow.

In the basement of the hospital, Doctor Miles Hamilton gently carried a vial of blood - the bulk of Doc Thunder's generous donation to his friend - down to the cold room where such perishables were kept, placing it in a chilled metal box in which it could remain fresh - a box to which only he had the key.

In the brownstone, Maya slept, and dreamt of a man in a red mask, and murder, and all the secrets of the past returning to haunt the future. Occasionally, she dreamt of home, and smiled.

Doc Thunder did not sleep at all.

Chapter Six

Doc Thunder and The Omega Machine

"I hate this thing."

Maya scowled as she adjusted the copper headband so that the contacts - small discs of sponge soaked in brine - rested against Doc Thunder's temples. His hands were strapped down to the arms, and another strap ran across his chest, with still more securing his legs. "To prevent convulsions," he'd said, "from the effect of the galvanic stimulation on the body."

The chair was linked up with copper wire to an odd device consisting of an array of magnets, which, when set to spinning in a certain configuration, would create an induction effect and charge the wires with pulses of pure galvanic force - 'omega energy', as the Doc had dubbed it. The shifting colours of the sunset streamed through the window, cascading over the massive, squat machine, reflecting from the shiny copper and burnished steel, making the apparatus look strange and otherworldly, like something out of a scientifiction chapbook.

Monk had once asked him if the 'omega effect' could be used to power a machine, like a steam engine - power a car or a robot, maybe. "Too dangerous," the Doc had said. "Omega energy can kill a normal man, and that's the first thing they'd use it for. Executions. If I can make it safe, I'll give it to the world. Until then, the Omega Machine will be the only one of its kind on this planet."

On Doc's signal, Maya would throw a switch mounted on the omega generator, closing the 'omega pathway' and sending pure omega energy from deep within the guts of the machine down the wire and through the chair. At which point, it would pass through the brine-soaked contacts and straight into the Doc's brain.

On a lesser man, the effect would be fatal, but on Doc's enhanced body, the 'omega effect' charged his synapses, opening up new doors of perception and allowing his conscious mind access to the subliminal, unconscious parts of his brain. Essentially, it boosted the power of his mind by a factor of ten or more and allowed him to make intuitive leaps that previously would have been unthinkable even to him. There was only one drawback.

If he was left too long in the Omega Machine, it would kill even him.

And nobody knew how long 'too long' might be. It could be as short as a few seconds or as long as ten minutes. But once his mighty heart ceased to beat, it would be beyond Maya's power to compress his chest. If his breathing stopped, Maya would not be able to reinflate his lungs any more than she could have reinflated a crushed metal can. CPR just didn't work on Doc Thunder - that was an unpleasant truth he'd lived with all his life.

"I hate it." Maya scowled, though it didn't mar her beauty. Then she laughed, without humour. "It's funny - when you risk Monk's life, I threaten you with death. So what do I threaten you with when you risk your own?"

She looked at him for a long moment, then, a sudden, strange, considering look crossed her lovely features.

Doc's voice was soft, gentle. "Don't go."

Maya smiled, caught. "I was just thinking about the Forbidden Kingdom. My home." She smiled, sitting down on his lap, reaching around to gently stroke the back of his neck with a fingernail. "Intrigues and betrayals. An endless succession of high priests and viziers - either sinned against or sinning. The number of times I had to intervene to break up some conspiracy or other... goodness knows what they've done without me." She leant to kiss him, probing for a long, delicious moment with her catlike tongue, and when she finally let his lips go, her eyes were considering, as if the kiss was an evaluation.

Doc tried to smile. "I'm sure they haven't done anything too..." He tailed off, the words sounding hollow and ridiculous in his own ears. She continued looking at him, head tilted to the side, and he stayed silent, not wanting to betray the sudden panic he was feeling. He'd nearly lost Monk - his best friend, his bedmate - and to lose Maya, too, to let her slip away from him, to be alone again, as he'd been before...

Eventually, he spoke. "Would you... would you really go back to that? I know the danger didn't mean anything to you, but you were so... bored..."

Don't let her be bored,
he thought.
Please. Don't let her be bored of me.

She smiled, reaching down past his belly, stroking, teasing, like a cat toying with a wounded bird. His muscles flexed against the straps, and she laughed. "No. I'm not bored. But... there are dangers here I didn't have to worry about at home. Worse than death. Worse than boredom, even."

She leaned in, her lips brushing his. "Are you going to break my heart, Doc Thunder?" Her lips blocked his reply, that tongue darting and delving in his mouth, her scent in his nostrils as the firm shape of her breasts and the weight of them pressed into him. She broke the kiss suddenly, looking at him with an air of cool consideration as she picked up the rubber bit-gag that would keep him from biting off his own tongue.

"Must I break yours first?"

He opened his mouth to speak, to tell her she was wrong, to ask her to stay with him, but she forced the gag in his mouth and secured it before he could. For the best, maybe. Maya Zor-Tura was not a woman who enjoyed the company of beggars. "Are you ready?" she said, crisply, padding over to the large switch mounted on the casing of the humming machine, the handle coated in rubber to prevent omega discharge.

Doc looked at her for a moment, then nodded.

She threw the switch and -

head full of lightning

sdrawkcab gninnips yromem

something in the past

-
the flashes in his mind started to spark and crackle -

clue to discover

long-forgotten adventure

buried connection

- the first galvanised insights coming fast, in a rush -

thinking so quickly

that it becomes something new

not thinking at all

- a kaleidoscope of colour in his head, strange scents and audio hallucinations -

thousand days ago

something changed something went wrong

why think remember

- zoning in on a specific memory, something his subconscious had been screaming at him in the night for three years or more -

lomax was involved

lars lomax anti-scientist

implacable foe

- why Lomax? He hadn't thought of Lomax since he'd died -

hamilton as well

hamilton changed after that

why think remember

- Hamilton had been there, in the airship, over the Amazon, what was the meaning behind that -

go into the past

memory unlocks the clue

think and remember

- think and remember -

Maya watched as Doc jerked and thrashed in the straps, teeth biting into the bit-gag, eyes bulging as the omega energy tore through his brain. When he was ready, when he had the answer he needed, he'd tap out, hammer the arm of the chair with his palm, signal her to turn off the omega field. If he could.

She wondered if this was the time she'd watch him die.

Think and remember.

The insights, the flashes and sparks in his mind, had calmed as they always did, leaving him in a trance state, feeling the pain and strangeness of the electric current flowing through his synapses, and in that twilight world of semi-consciousness Doc Thunder remembered Lars Lomax, the most dangerous man in the world.

The twisted bald super-genius who had sworn to kill him a thousand times, the evil scientist whose self-declared purpose was to burn the whole world and raise his own civilisation in its ruins, the ultimate foe, the one man who on his own had caused more trouble than Untergang and N.I.G.H.T.M.A.R.E. and E.R.A.M.T.H.G.I.N. and every other organisation he'd ever fought put together, bar the Hidden Empire. Lars Lomax - the enemy of Earth. The name that froze the blood in the veins of law enforcement agencies the world over.

In some ways, Lomax had been a worse enemy over the years than even Heinrich Donner, the man Doc Thunder despised most in all the world. Strange, then, that they were so alike in their iron commitment to changing the world for the better. Lomax genuinely wanted to raise mankind to the stars, to make everyone in the world into a Doc Thunder, and if they'd only managed to work in unison, maybe that could have happened. Maybe they could have saved the world together.

But Lomax hated him.

Lars Lomax had hated him for his physical superiority, his perceived arrogance, his reluctance to destroy the status quo rather than change it slowly from within. Doc Thunder could never find it in him to hate Lomax back. He'd tried to save him, tried to bring him around, to persuade him that it didn't have to be that way, that there was a way that they could both get what they wanted without destroying each other. But that hatred had only grown, the terrible flaw in an otherwise brilliant personality. A single crack that turned this mirror-image of America's greatest hero into the world's greatest threat, that made Earth's would-be saviour believe that the only way to save the global village was to destroy it.