Soft Apocalypses (11 page)

“Uh, my name’s Raymond Greene, and I used to work for Groshawk Investments. I was only there eleven months. I got a job there right out of college. I thought I had it made, but....” His voice faltered.

“Did you get caught in the embezzlement scam Hobson was running?” Martin asked gently.

“Yes,” Raymond replied, looking profoundly depressed. His glasses were slipping down his nose, and he pushed them up with a long forefinger. “And I know this makes me sound like a liar or an idiot, but I had
no
idea what was going on. Those papers they found ... they had my signature on them, but I know I never saw those docs before the trial. And that money that showed up in my bank account ... I had no idea. It’s like I got set up, but there’s no reason to set up a guy like me, so my own lawyer didn’t even believe me.”

“Well, my lawyer’s pretty good, not to mention open-minded; maybe I can get him to look at your case,” Martin said.

“You’d do that? Wow, thanks, bro. Sir, I mean.”

Martin smiled. “Always glad to help out a fellow in need.”

“What, um ... what about you, sir? I mean, I know they convicted you and all, but was the prosecution telling the truth?”

“Parts of it,” Martin replied.

“What about the hedge fund? Was it
ever
legit, or was it a Ponzi from the start like they said?”

“It started as a legitimate thing,” Martin lied. “Things just ... got out of hand. It’s hard to give up on that kind of money; you just keep hoping the tide will turn before it’s too late.”

Martin hadn’t needed anything as flimsy as hope. He knew going in exactly what would happen; he’d started the scam to feather his nest against the impending economic collapse Jay Gould’s ghost had foreseen. His reputation had been ruined and he’d been sent to prison, but he’d achieved his ultimate goal. For every dollar the feds had confiscated, there was another ten hidden as well-protected caches of precious metals and weapons around the country.

“Sixty billion is a lot to walk away from,” Raymond agreed. “And you had, what, four hundred million in liquid assets?”

“About that, yes.”

“So why didn’t you ... you know, disappear?”

The young man’s shyness finally seemed to be falling away. It was about damn time, Martin figured. The timid didn’t belong on Wall Street, and Martin hated to think the kid had taken a good job away from someone more competent, even if the ship
was
going down.

“I mean, people have killed themselves over the money they lost. There are angry mothers and fathers and husbands and wives out there. Angry mobsters, too, I heard.” Raymond leaned in close, lowering his voice to a whisper. “When I was on the prison bus, I heard some talk about how there’s a hit out on you. And you have to have heard that, too. So why didn’t you run?”

“That’s a little complicated,” Martin said.

A few hours after Martin got his congestive heart failure diagnosis, he went down into the secret cellar to talk to Jay. It had been a while since he’d consulted his silent partner. Once he’d poured a half-pint of fresh blood (courtesy of a local med tech on his payroll) into the golden skull, the skeleton’s ruby eyes lit up with the faint smoky fire that let him know Mr. Gould was awake and ready to talk.

“You told me that there was only a 10% chance my heart would start to fail,” Martin said, his arms crossed.

“I’m sorry that mortality is touching you so soon, but a 10% chance is not the same as a zero chance,” the skeleton replied. Its thin voice seemed to be nowhere and everywhere.

“What am I supposed to do now?”

“Stick with the plan you’ve set in motion. Only now, your goal will be securing your daughters’ futures. You’ll need to step aside as your father did and pick one of them to introduce to me.”

Martin shook his head. “I’m not ready. I don’t want to step aside, I don’t want to go to prison, not even for a day. Surely—surely Japan or Switzerland have better treatments, better access to fresh hearts.”

“You’ll be apprehended in any country with a decent medical system. And you’ll die in any that don’t. Medicine will have a cure for what ails you, but not for another ten years. And there’s a 40% chance they’ll
never
have a cure if the collapse comes. I feel your pain, Martin, really I do ... a shot of cheese mold extract would have kept me from dying of consumption, but the doctors in my day couldn’t figure out something as simple as that.”

“What can I do, sir? Is there
anything
I can do?”

“You can reverse course and come clean to the authorities, if you want. It’ll cost your family their fortune, but the fraud we’ve engineered has added 15% to the probability that the nation will collapse. If you reverse the economic damage, things may stabilize. And then, you have a 60% chance of pleading down to probation if you pay back all the money, and if that happens you’ll be very likely to die in your eighties, as your father did. Comfortable, once again a respected pillar of the community, forgiven of your sins in society’s eyes, provided you can resist the temptation to sell me off.”

Martin almost said “I wouldn’t sell you,” but clearly Jay knew what lay in the basement of his heart. It did no good to lie to his deathly confidante.

“So I come clean and maybe get thirty more years of living,” Martin mused. “What’s thirty years?”

“To many, it is a lifetime,” the skeleton observed.

“But in the grand scheme, it’s nothing,” Martin replied, pacing. “All my money, all my power, gone, like
that
. And then what? To be mostly forgotten in fifty years, entirely forgotten in two hundred?”

“I don’t know what lies beyond,” Jay replied. “I surely tasted it before I was bound to these bones, but I cannot remember whether I took my leisure in Heaven, suffered in Hell, or simply waited in darkness.”

“I can’t count on a happy afterlife, not after everything I’ve done. Is there any other option for me here? Is there a way ... to continue?”

The skeleton was silent for a moment. “I do know of a way you could become immortal, but be warned that it involves great sacrifice and the blackest of magic. Among other debasements, you will have to spill the heart’s blood of your close kin, and then do worse. One of your daughters would do.”

Martin flinched. “I couldn’t murder one of my babies. They’re spoiled little brats like their mother most of the time and I’ll be damned if I want to hand my companies over to them ... but I could never hurt either one of them.” He took a deep breath. “Would anyone else fit the bill?”

“As a matter of fact, yes; there are others, and one in particular who can best be put to use....”

“On second thought, maybe the question of why I didn’t run away isn’t so complicated after all,” Martin said to Raymond. “Ultimately, I knew that trying to escape to another country wouldn’t work out so well for me, whether there’s a bounty on my life or not.”

“What are you going to do to protect yourself?” Raymond asked.

“Nothing,” Martin replied.

In response to Raymond’s shocked expression, he replied: “Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not suicidal—I love life and being alive.
Love
it. Maybe I’m not quite as indulgent as my father. He loved his drink, and he loved his women, right to the end. He was still tomcatting around in his seventies, and he even fathered a son the rest of us never knew about. You, in fact.”

It took a moment for Martin’s words to sink in. “W-what? You mean I’m—”

“My half-brother. Exactly! Nice to finally meet you, half-brother!” Martin clapped him on the arm.

Raymond seemed dumbfounded, so Martin continued, speaking fast as a salesman. “It might seem like an amazing coincidence we’d encounter each other in prison, but let me tell you, I took great pains to make sure we’d meet right in this very cell. All told, I must have paid out two million dollars in bribes to prison officials, FBI agents, forgers, and the recruiting director and your bosses at Groshawk, all so we’d be able to spend a little quality time together.”

Raymond’s mouth hung open, and for the first time, Martin saw a definite family resemblance: two of his lower front teeth overlapped crookedly, just as his father’s had.

Martin reached into his towel stack and quickly pulled out the silver dagger planted by the bribed unit manager and—in a motion he’d practiced a thousand times over the past year—he slashed the scalpel-sharp blade across his brother’s throat. Raymond’s hands went to his neck as his carotid artery began to jet out, but Martin didn’t flinch, didn’t pause, simply shoved the kid down onto the concrete floor and quickly began smearing the magic symbols with bloodied fingers, chanting the words Jay had taught him, and when the symbols were complete and Raymond was twitching and gurgling horribly, there wasn’t a moment to lose. Martin ripped open Raymond’s scarlet-soaked shirt and carved into the taut flesh of the kid’s upper abdomen to get at his heart from beneath. He grabbed the slippery pulsing muscle with his fingers, and his own heart was straining, aching sympathetically in his own chest when he finally managed to cut and tear the organ free. He shouted the last of the incantation, and took a bite of his half-brother’s still-shuddering flesh and swallowed it like a chunk of unusually tough carpaccio.

The ritual was done, and the guard outside was shouting for help, fumbling with the keys, and when they finally got inside Martin screeched at them like a madman and flung himself at their knees. They hit him with their batons, and another primed his Taser and shot the electrified darts into Martin’s back. The sudden current overwhelmed his weakened heart, and he felt himself sinking down, down into blackness.

When Martin came to, his bones hurt so much it seemed like they were on fire. He was able to hear before he was able to see, and when he tried to blink to clear his blurred vision, he discovered he couldn’t move.

“Ask it a question,” a young voice said.

“Shush! It needs tribute first,” said another.

Something warm and delicious was pouring into him from the top of his head, and for a moment he could imagine it was a fine cocktail going down his throat, and not a cup of hot salty gore trickling through what was left of him, tarring the shining cage of bone that enclosed the dusty nothingness where his heart and guts used to live.

His ruby eyes focused, and he saw a muscular, battle-scarred young man standing before him in a motley of salvaged leathers and rough homespuns. A few other feral-looking youngsters lurked behind. Martin instantly knew everything about this hard youth: barely out of his teens, he’d already slaughtered a hundred men, but along with his sociopathic blood-lust he had a cunning intelligence. More important, his belly was fired with a thirst for power beyond the ruined section of Pittsburgh he’d staked out as his own kingdom. The boy knew he was still just a gangster, but his aspirations weren’t yet sharpened to their deadliest points.

“Skeleton,” the youth ordered. “Tell me about the future.”

The doors of perception opened inside Martin’s enslaved mind, and he saw the cities on fire and the streets running red with the blood of the boy’s foes. The speck of humanity that remained inside Martin cursed Jay Gould and wept at these visions, but the rest of him, the part that had wanted more and more and more, was grimly pleased. He’d see the race through until the bitter end, even if he was just a consultant.

“As you wish, Lord John,” Martin replied. “What part of the future unwritten did you want to see?”

“All, skeleton,” the boy replied. “Give me everything.”

The Cold Blackness Between

Mary Keller was exhausted but elated when Karl’s eyes finally flickered open. He rose up a little on his one good elbow, the plastic sheet crinkling beneath him.

“Mary?” he rasped. “Where’m I? Throat ... hurts. Feel like ... crap.”

She smiled. His voice was rough, but it worked. His head had been torn off when he lost control of his motorcycle and wrapped it around a tree up in the mountains. She’d not been sure she’d gotten his vocal cords reconstructed properly.

“Rest now. You don’t need to worry about a thing. You just need to get your strength back.”

She leaned down over the antique feather bed and kissed his still-cold forehead. At least the sleet that had slicked the roads that night had also meant he’d been wearing his helmet with the visor down. He hadn’t gotten anything worse than a bloody nose when his head went skittering down into the rocky ravine.

Shattered bones, punctured lungs, crushed organs and severed spines she could handle; damaged brains were hard. It was like trying to put custard back together. If she’d had to bring him back from a crushed skull, chances were she’d end up with a zombie on her hands that was only the barest revenant of the man she loved.

“What happened?” he asked, his eyes already fluttering into the sleep of the living.

She kissed him again, then straightened up and re-checked the position of the I.V. needle in his arm. Her hands were trembling; it was definitely time for breakfast. The saline-and-glucose drip was still three-quarters full. She’d put two units of O-negative blood into him during the night. He needed far more than that, but even if she’d replaced all his blood, he’d still be more dead than alive. It would be several days before his system recovered from the shock. For now, it was most important that she not let him dry out while she slept.