Kill Baxter (35 page)

‘From the eighties. Army kids on guard duty did this,’ he says. ‘I think we’re near the old bunkers.’

We follow the tunnel to where it ends in a thick, rusting steel door with the Forked Tongue sigil painted on it.

‘Dwarven black ops?’ I say.

‘Project Staal. I used to hear about this place when I was on the Border,’ Ronin replies. ‘This is where Basson and the Legion did their dirty work.’

I push the door. It creaks as it opens and we step into a lab filled with old vats, jars and hastily destroyed equipment. The floor is a mess of shredded documents and burnt files.

‘They wanted to get rid of all this stuff when the government changed,’ Ronin says.

We look around. A mouldy old South African flag adorns the wall, along with gold-framed photos of stern-looking uniformed men with moustaches.

‘C12,’ he says, picking up a half-burnt document and pointing to the letterhead. ‘What MK6 used to be called.’

‘MK6 used to be called something else?’

‘Yeah, genius. The MK designation is from Umkhonto we Sizwe. Hardly something the old fascists would have used.’

He sits down in an old swivel chair and takes another swig from his hip flask. His eyes are hard as he kicks some of the files from the desk.

‘What’s the matter?’ I say. ‘Are you freaking out again?’

‘Memories from the old days. Really bad memories. It’s weird how you can start to pretend that none of this shit existed.’

‘Project Staal,’ I say, leaning against the desk. ‘What was it?’

‘I don’t know much about it. Way above my pay grade. I know it was linked to Basson’s weapons project, but it was mostly run by the Dwarven Legion.’

I shift through shredded documents and find a few untouched pages. It features diagrams of the biology of bok-people, detailed notes about horrific experimentation, and a single grainy black-and-white photo of a bok-boy just like Klipspringer. He has been opened up, his torso splayed open and his organs visible, but his innocent eyes are wide with horror. He is still very much alive.

A sour, sick feeling creeps down my throat. ‘They’re still doing this?’

‘I don’t know, sparky. I’ve heard rumours …’ Ronin says.

I read from another page. ‘“The Hidden are a fundamental threat to safety and stability. Learning to exploit their vulnerabilities is essential.”’ I look up at him. ‘This is sick. I’ve given up being needlessly good, but this is way beyond good or bad. This is plain evil.’

He sighs and nods. ‘I know.’

‘So why haven’t you done anything about it?’

‘Like what? Let Lefkin win?’

‘No,’ I reply. ‘He’s just using this as an excuse to kill people.’

‘Listen to me,’ Ronin says. ‘The Legion is rich beyond comprehension. They have mercenary armies in all the major conflict zones in the world. The superpowers
depend
on them. Stopping them will take more than saying, “Like hey dude, this is like way uncool.”’

‘Then what will it take?’

He claps me on the shoulder. ‘That’s what I like about you, sparky. You’re barely into being an apprentice and you’re not satisfied with fighting a Crow shaman. You want to take on one of the most powerful organisations in the world at the same time.’

‘Well, what can I say? I’m an overachiever.’

He nods. ‘You’re right. What they’re doing is wrong. There are agents … not all of them, but some who want things changed.’

‘OK,’ I say. ‘That’s a start.’

‘A start we can build on if we stop Lefkin.’

I nod.

‘Don’t look so depressed,’ he says. ‘We could still get killed.’

We wade through the debris in the old bunker. The lab branches off into a series of offices, apartments, and an old apartheid-era nuclear fallout shelter. I’m peering through dirty reinforced glass into a room plastered with nudie pics and posters from eighties magazines when the fatdragon pulls itself through a huge vent in the lab and grins at us with glee.

We turn and run, but the dragon wriggles after us like a viper.

‘No, no, no …’ I scream, feeling its toxic gassy breath on me. It’s too late. We’re slurped up. My jacket is caught on one of its glass-shard teeth and I thrash and kick, screaming soundlessly to try to escape the horror of it all. Nope.

I tumble after Ronin into its gullet and cringe into a little whimpering ball as its oesophageal movements push me through its wet and gooey insides. I scramble blindly for my gun but I can’t move my hands through the stinking froth of its stomach. I gasp and hold my breath, not sure whether to be more afraid of being digested or of drowning.

Neither should have been my primary worry. There’s a sudden retching sound and I’m sucked upwards and spat out on to a hard concrete floor. I lie shivering, soaked in sewer fat and unable to see anything around me.

‘Ronin!’ I scream. ‘Ronin, I can’t see.’

Something grabs my head and wipes at my glasses, revealing Ronin standing over me shaking fat from his hands.

‘Well, we found the place,’ he says, flicking his wet hair out of his face.

We’re standing in a blue-carpeted corporate office. There’s a fax machine, a water cooler, and a giant whiteboard filled with motivational messages. FOLLOW YOUR PASSION AND YOU’LL NEVER WORK A DAY IN YOUR LIFE, I read before I’m dragged across the floor by strong hands. I manage to headbutt one of my assailants, but three more overpower me, force me into a chokehold and manhandle me into a glass-fronted boardroom. I’m knocked to the floor with a swift kick to my patella. Next to me, Ronin is being forced to kneel by a sizeable group of goblins. Hands reach into my jacket to relieve me of my weapons, and my mojo bag is pulled from my belt. They even take the dead rats. Ronin swears as an assault rifle is jammed against his temple and the Blackfish is torn from his hands.

A figure in a blue pinstriped suit, a starched white shirt and a thin black tie sits in a leather chair at the head of the board table, his hands behind his head. He is wearing a huge crown of teeth.

‘Welcome to the office,’ Lefkin says. ‘Can I get you anything? Tea, coffee?’

‘How about a shower and all the disinfectant you have?’ I’m still trying to scrub the fat from my face.

Lefkin smiles, his twisted beak and half-human face curling into a rictus of triumph. ‘Hygiene should be the least of your worries.’

‘What happened to your cloak and staff?’ I croak. ‘I like that look better.’

He waves a hand. ‘That was theatrics. People expect that sort of thing from the Muti Man.’

‘This from a guy with a crown made of teeth,’ I say.

He laughs. ‘Muti is muti.’ He holds one of the dead rats taken from my belt. ‘Sacrifice is part of magic. You are only just beginning to learn this.’

‘Oh fuck off,’ I say. ‘Don’t start with this you-and-I-are-alike bullshit.’

‘You misunderstand. I don’t think we’re alike at all. You’re human. That makes you completely foreign to me: an alien, a parasite. But it doesn’t mean I don’t understand you. The egregore is nothing but humanity amplified. When I was captured and brought to this place, I realised something about my tormentors, the men and women who attached me to probes and killed my Crows in front of me to test whether we feel the same way humans do. I realised that it’s not some kind of moral bias that stops people from doing evil, but rather a certain social pressure. To maim, kill, dismember only requires encouraging the natural human to come out.’

He gets out of his chair and walks across to Ronin. He reaches down and grips him by the throat. ‘Let me tell you this, agent. We feel just as vividly as you do. Monitoring me as a Crow child was killed in front of me convinced them of that.’

He turns to me. ‘So I’ll offer you a deal. Kill yourself and I’ll let him go.’

‘Don’t give him a fucking thing,’ Ronin shouts, struggling against the hand at his throat.

I force myself to look Lefkin in the eyes. ‘I’m not going to kill myself.’

‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘I think you are.’

He weaves his fingers together in an intricate pattern and then points at me.

‘What are you doing?’ I croak.

‘Something you would have learnt to do if you’d had a decent teacher,’ he says, and crooks a finger at me in a beckoning motion.

I feel a force sucking at my psyche. An incredible pressure hits me in the temples and I collapse with a gasp. The room flickers in and out of focus for several seconds before I lose consciousness.

‘What the hell?’ I say, looking around the pagoda.

Psychosexual Development and my beige-jumpered True Self are staring at Lefkin in horror.

‘I dragged you into your own psyche.’ Lefkin shrugs. ‘It’s not difficult when you know how.’

‘He can’t be here,’ Tyrone says. ‘Baxter, he really can’t be here. This is your mind. Unless a part of you asks him, it’s fundamentally impossible for him to—’

A part of you asked me in,’ Lefkin says. ‘Well, technically it was someone who was press-ganged into being a part of you. He wasn’t happy. I promised to help him.’

We turn as a unit to Cabales.

‘
Cabales?’ Tyrone says. ‘You?’

Cabales straightens himself up and faces us. He speaks in perfect English. ‘This is not my mind. I have been away for too long from my family. I need to go back.’

‘Cabales.’ Tyrone grips his afro with both hands. ‘You can’t go back. Don’t you get it? You detached from your body during that ayahuasca trip. You died. We took you in because you had nowhere else to go.’

Cabales turns to Lefkin. ‘Tell them what you told me. Tell them that it’s a lie. You can send me back.’

Lefkin laughs and puts an arm around my True Self’s shoulders. ‘No. He’s right. I used you. You helped me to remove all the psychic defences necessary so that I could take complete control of his psyche. Not even the stupidest of amateur magicians do that.’

Cabales wails and clutches at his face.

Lefkin grips Norris by the throat and gives me a wink. ‘No need for us to hang around.’ He jerks his head and the pressure slams into my temples again.

I roll on to my back and look up at the boardroom ceiling.

‘What happened?’ I say. ‘What did you do to my True Will?’

‘Oh, I have him.’ Lefkin looms over me. ‘I have him nicely locked away. I put this question to you. Why bother? Why bother with all of this? Even if by some miracle you defeat me, if you carry on along this path, you’re in for a world of living in the shadows, of fighting things most people have never heard of, for no thanks, no praise. You’re not a hero, Baxter. Anybody can tell that just by looking at you.’

I’ve been in this situation before, of course. If I’m honest, I gave up the most powerful objects in the universe for Esmé. How pathetic is that? And if giving up world domination wasn’t good enough for her, well then, I doubt flowers and chocolate were going to do it.

Lefkin is right. I’m not cut out for this world. ‘Kill yourself,’ he says and offers me Legba. I take the handgun. My head is split, but for once all parts of me agree on a singular course of action.

His voice in my head is unstoppable.

I place the barrel of the handgun in my mouth. I have lost everything and there’s no real point in going on. Karma is a bitch. Karma doesn’t care that I wanted to change my ways. Karma doesn’t believe in good intentions.

I have failed miserably at being good. I couldn’t even get that right. I’m the same nasty piece of work that I’ve always been, except now I can’t be happy with it. What has been felt cannot be unfelt. Even having saved the world doesn’t make me feel good about myself. Perhaps it’s something you get habituated to; each new world-saving moment has to be bigger and better than the last to give you that same dopamine and serotonin kick. Maybe heroes are just junkies.

I’ve killed everything in this life worth living for, so the only thing left to do is kill Baxter. They say suicide is a selfish, egotistical thing to do. It suits me perfectly. It all seems so clear now. This is going to be great. The steely taste of the gun. The explosion. The oblivion. I can’t wait.

Lefkin has Ronin’s face in his hands and is forcing him to watch. ‘What are you feeling, agent?’ he says. ‘Is it fear, anger, maybe indifference? Maybe you just don’t care.’

I catch a glimpse of Gigli slinking in the door. He’s filthy, injured and tired, but he has a maniacal grin on his piggy pink face that makes me smile.

‘You find this funny?’ Lefkin asks.

‘Kinda,’ I say.

Gigli leaps and crashes into Lefkin, locking his jaws around his wrist and shaking him from side to side.

Ronin tackles the nearest goblin and wrests the gun from his hands. He rolls and takes out several more goblins. I’m momentarily released from the thrall Lefkin has me in, though I can still feel him in my head.

Lefkin throws Gigli from him. The Draken catapults head over tail and slides across the floor. Lefkin stands up and I swing the gun round to draw a bead on him. The forces of chance align, and I fire, putting a haphazard pattern of bullets in his back. He topples forward on to one knee, but pushes himself back up. He’s tough, but he doesn’t have the same immunity to injury as a normal Crow. He’s hurt.

He stumbles forward and rips the crown from his head. The fatdragon coils around him and Lefkin puts the crown into its mouth. ‘Don’t let them have it,’ he shouts. ‘Never let them have it.’

The fatdragon, the crown in its mouth, turns and disappears down a tunnel. Lefkin is helped up by the remaining goblins. They fire on us, and I’m forced to cower behind a row of desks. I hear Ronin returning fire, and a scream rips through the air as someone or something goes down.

I peek around the corner with Legba in my hand and see Lefkin and a goblin disappearing down another tunnel. I sprint out from behind the desk and fire after them. Ronin appears at my shoulder and we stand at the crossroads where the tunnels meet and look down each one. ‘Get the crown,’ I say to Ronin. ‘I’ll go after Lefkin.’ He hesitates for a second and then sprints after the fatty tail as it disappears into the sewers.