Kill Switch (27 page)

“What are they safeguarding?”

“Use by the unenlightened,” said Bell. “Prospero's words. He said that they were put there so that only a true believer could solve them. He said that other people like him have built God Machines before and that they were able to go home. Funny thing is I did some research on it and the kid may be on to something. There's a really good chance that Nikola Tesla built one. It fits, too, because right after that there was a rash of people who had some of the known side effects. Unusual kinds of dreams, visions of fantastic places. Almost a one hundred percent chance the entire surrealism art movement started because of the effect of the ‘god wave.' That's Prospero's name for the energetic discharge of the machine when it's in idle mode. Are you following any of this?”

“I am following all of it, Mr. Bell,” said Priest. “And it's very useful. It corresponds to some of what I've discovered while researching provenance of the Unlearnable Truths. And I think I can add to what you know. You say that the surrealism movement in Europe was a possible side effect? I'm almost certain that Mr. Tesla may have built two God Machines, the second one being here in the United States. The sudden and dramatic explosion of a very specific kind of dark fiction and fantastical art in the twenties and thirties is not only similar to the surrealist movement; those stories are where we see mentions of these books.”

Bell considered that. “That fits. I'm more than halfway sure the Russians tried to build one in Poliske in Ukraine. A full-sized one, too. That's probably why Chernobyl blew up. And the Nazis almost certainly did. Their Thule Society, those freaks. God knows that might explain a lot. For all I know the Ark of the Covenant might have been one. At this point I'm keeping an open mind. So, this isn't new, Mr. Priest. It's a matter of Prospero being the only person we know of who is able to build one now. He can't finish it, though, without a code hidden in certain passages and spells in those goddamn books. So, crazy as it sounds, we need to get the rest of them for him.”

“Some of them may have been destroyed,” said Priest.

“I don't want to hear that. Maybe there are copies. Find out.”

“This is getting expensive, Mr. Bell.”

Bell gulped some scotch. “No kidding.”

“I have to ask … but is it worth it?”

“Christ,” said Bell, “I hope so.”

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

ARKLIGHT SAFE HOUSE

UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

BUDAPEST, HUNGARY

TWO WEEKS AGO

The force of the blast plucked Harry Bolt off the carpet and slammed him into the wall. He rebounded and fell hard, his head ringing with the blast, eyes stinging with smoke, and flesh screaming from where a dozen splinters had stabbed him. Violin was on her knees, face twisted in pain, one hand clamped around a splinter as thick as a pencil that was buried in her chest above her left breast. Red blood boiled out around the wound and ran over her fingers.

Harry looked up to see glowing red lines bobbing through the pall as dark figures clogged the shattered doorway.

“Move!” he bellowed as he launched himself from the floor and tackled Violin as the first barrage of bullets ripped through the smoky air. They fell together, but she pushed herself away and with her free hand swept her pistol from its holster. As the first of the men entered the room, she shot him in the face.

Harry clawed his own gun free and rose to a kneeling position, bringing the gun up in both hands, and fired. The doorway was packed with men. Missing was impossible, even for Harry. He aimed for center mass on the next man in line, missed but hit him in the shoulder. The impact spun the man, jerking him backward toward the shooter behind him. It caused a chain-reaction collision as the men behind bumped into the man he'd shot.

The smoke eddied as the men pushed through, and Harry saw that these were not the Brotherhood. They were dressed differently, in dark suits with white shirts and sunglasses. They looked like Secret Service men, though that was impossible. Some kind of government goon squad. If that was the case, then they might be official agents and not actual murderous bad guys. That thought stalled him because he did not want to murder Hungarian cops.

Violin had no such qualms.

Even with a chunk of wood buried in her chest, she rose and fired, attacking them as they tried to untangle themselves. She went for headshots only, and pressed her attack because Harry's poor aim had created a momentary advantage.

There were five men in the entrance.

She killed them all.

Ten shots, two into each man.

They died.

All of them died.

Harry knelt there, horrified and dumbfounded, his gun nearly forgotten in his hands. Violin ran outside and then came hurrying back.

“The street is clear but there may be more,” she barked. “Be ready to move.”

Without waiting for him to reply she ran upstairs and returned seconds later with an oversized suitcase. Harry knew what had to be inside it. He could almost feel the cold power of that damn book.

She also had a medical kit tucked under her arm and let it fall in front of Harry. “Grab that,” she said, pain flickering across her face. “We'll need it. Come on.”

She paused long enough to scoop up her small laptop and tuck it into an oversized pocket on her left pants leg. Then she ran from the house.

Harry Bolt stood up slowly, blinking from the smoke, his ears still ringing.

“What…?” he asked the room. But there were only dead men to answer.

Then he heard a thump from the rear of the house. The crack of wood, the crash of breaking glass. There were more of them.

He turned and ran.

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

SCRIPPS MEMORIAL HOSPITAL LA JOLLA

9888 GENESEE AVENUE

LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA

SEPTEMBER 5, 11:41
A.M.

How do you know if you're asleep and dreaming that you're awake or if you're actually awake? After all the things I'd seen and felt, all the places I'd been, I did not know.

Maybe it was the pain that woke me. I became gradually aware of a leaden heaviness in my limbs and a pervasive ache that went all the way to the bone. In dreams I'd felt pain, but it was always big pain. The sear of flames, the white-hot burn of a knife across flesh, or the volcano heat of a bullet buried deep in my skin. Those were phantom pains or distortions of remembered pain.

This felt real.

It was not as intense, but it did not flash on and off like dream pain.

I hurt. My body was wrong and the pain owned me. It weighed me down like chains even as my senses came awake.

I opened my eyes, surprised that I had been asleep and not dead. Really surprised, actually. I was surprised I still had eyes to open.

The room was different.

It wasn't the little biohazard cubicle. It wasn't an intensive care unit, either. This was bigger. Less threatening, less dire. More normal.

If “normal” was a word I could ever apply with any accuracy to my life anymore.

It was a hospital room. A real hospital, too. It had the look, the smell.

I lay there and tried to understand what was going on.

Where was I?

What was left of me?

And … what were those things I saw? Was I able to go somewhere else, or were they simply bad dreams?

How does one tell?

Well … you ask.

I turned my head and saw that I was not alone.

A woman was curled into a leather chair positioned beside my bed. She had a blanket pulled around her, covering her to the nose. Her eyes were closed and for a long time I lay there and watched her breathe, watched her sleep. Saw the spill of curly blond hair rise with her chest, saw the down-sweep of lashes against the sun-freckled cheeks. Saw the woman I loved more than any person on this planet.

Junie.

I didn't want to wake her. She looked so peaceful and if she woke, would it be to the news that I was, in fact, dying?

Or would waking release her from the dread of believing I was already gone?

Such questions to fill the mind of a man who thought he was dead and in hell. Actual filled-with-monsters hell.

I rolled onto my side as far as tubes and wires would allow. There was no muscle tone left as far as I could tell and even that simple action was like bench-pressing a Volvo. But it brought me marginally closer to her. I reached over to her, lightly—so, so lightly—touched her hair. Whispered her name.

“Junie…”

Her eyelids fluttered.

And opened.

Junie looked at me with fear, with wonder.

With joy. She flung off the blanket and surged up from the chair, bending over me with equal parts passion and need and care. Being gentle with me, as if I was a fragile and easily breakable thing. Which I was.

I was almost nothing.

But I was alive.

We
were alive.

And this was definitely not hell.

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

SCRIPPS MEMORIAL HOSPITAL LA JOLLA

9888 GENESEE AVENUE

LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA

SEPTEMBER 5, 3:52
P.M.

I kept falling asleep and waking up. Kept dreaming wild dreams in between. Sometimes it seemed to me that I was dreaming even though I was awake. Or thought I was. The room stayed the same, though. There were flowers on the table and half a dozen get-well cards taped to the walls.

The hard lines of what was happening and what I thought was happening had grown fuzzy while I slept, and it was almost as if my long sleep was reluctant to let me go.

“It's okay, honey,” said Junie. “Don't force it. Don't fight it.”

When I looked at her, she was not Junie. She was a corpse, withered and burned. The shadowy man with the blurred face stood beside her chair. The only part of his face I could see was his mouth. He was smiling, smiling. Big white teeth.

“You're a self-righteous thug, Ledger. I'm going to take it all away from you. Everything you have, everything you love. All of it.”

“Who are you?” I croaked.

He reached up and dug his fingers into the gray swirl of nothingness that was his face and slowly peeled it off, revealing it to be a mask.

The face beneath the mask was my own.

I screamed.

And woke up.

“It's okay, Joe,” said Junie. Again. Exactly the same way, except this time when I looked at her she was alive and whole, and she was alone.

I blinked and I was alone. Her chair was empty and the light falling through the window was gray.

“Please.” Not sure whom I was talking to or what I was asking for.

There are times, when my inner psychological parasites are at their worst, that I wonder if any of my life is real. Maybe I never survived the trauma of my teen years, when my girlfriend Helen and I were attacked by a gang. I was beaten nearly to death and she was brutalized in other ways. Maybe I never lived past that day. Maybe this is all some kind of purgatory. Or maybe my body survived but my mind snapped. There's a lot of evidence for that; I could build a case. After all, the things I've seen and done since possess the qualities of nightmares. Zombies, vampires, mad scientists, secret societies, clones, genetic freaks. Has the world gone mad or was I batshit crazy? Or some combination of both? Doubt of that kind is a terrible thing. It holds a match to the high explosives of paranoia and then everything you believe in, everything you trust, goes boom.

“It's okay, Joe,” said Junie's voice. I turned toward her once more, blinking tears from my eyes. Except it wasn't Junie. It was Rudy Sanchez.

My friend.

My shrink.

Fellow veteran of the wars. A fellow traveler on the fun-show ride that was the Department of Military Sciences and the fight against terrorism in all its many forms.

“R-Rudy…?” I asked, doubting this. Doubting him.

“Good morning, Cowboy,” he said.

“Am I alive?” I asked.

He smiled. “You are. And thank God for that.”

I looked around. It was the same room but something was different. The flowers on the table looked older. There were more cards taped to the wall.

“Where's … where's Junie?”

“I sent her home to get some sleep,” said Rudy. “She was completely exhausted. She's been here every day.”

Every day. Not sure what that meant. Not yet.

“Top? Bunny…?”

He nodded. “They made it through. Thank God for that, too. They'll be fine.”

Made it through. It was meant to be comforting, but somehow it wasn't.

“The rest of the flight crew is fine, too,” he added. “They didn't get it as bad.”

Get it.

It.

I licked my dry lips. “What … happened?”

Rudy took too much time girding his loins to deliver bad news. I know him, I know his face, so there was no chance he was going to say something I wanted to hear. He pulled his chair closer. He looked haggard. Unshaven and unkempt, and Rudy was always a meticulous man. The kind of guy who would take time to trim his mustache and comb his hair before leaving a burning building. Not now, though. He looked like he'd been mugged with enthusiasm, dragged by his heels through an alley, and kicked awake by homeless people. He smelled of sour sweat and too much coffee.

“Joe,” he said, laying a hand cautiously on my shoulder, “you've been in a coma. You understand that?”

“Yeah, yeah, I'm sleeping-fucking-beauty. How long?”

“Two weeks,” he said.

That hit me really damn hard. Two weeks? Gone. Simply erased from my life.

I said, “Tell me.”

He did. It was the flu. Not just any flu, not SARS or MERS or anything like that. This was what you might call “old school.” The simple truth was that Top and Bunny and I were infected with the Spanish flu. Yeah. That one. Or at least a mutated strain of it. The disease that swept Europe, Asia, and North America in 1918 and '19. During that outbreak over five hundred million people were infected, and of those one in five died. Eighty to one hundred million people. Dead. It remains as one of the worst pandemics in human history, with only the Black Plague having verifiably killed more people.