Eternal Life Inc. (23 page)

“Are you saying he walked out on the astral plane in his body?” Harry asked in disbelief. “How is that possible?”

Chueh waved the question aside. “It’s another story, Harry, and it’s not mine to tell,” he added cryptically. “What I can tell you is that when he came back, he prophesied the coming of the Anubis again.”

“Again?”

“Leave it alone, Harry. Jake Lloyd prophesied the coming of the Anubis and the probable enslavement and destruction of humanity. Probable is the key word. According to Lloyd, the dice are loaded heavily against humanity and the only things that might tip them in our favor are Lloyd’s two daughters and a creature called the King of the Dead whose very existence goes against all probability. That means he shouldn’t exist at all.”

“I don’t understand,” Harry said.

Chueh shook his head. “Neither do I, Harry,” he said. “Neither do I.”

“But according to Isis, the Anubis believe in him too,” Harry said.

Chueh nodded. “Yeah, it turns out their seers keep finding signs of his possible existence all over the alternate timelines branching out of the quantum field, and they’re scared spitless. They’re as mad as hatters of course, but the high priests take them seriously and, if the priesthood believes them, the Anubis believe them.”

Chueh eyed him searchingly. “Jericho says the Anubis think that you may be the King of the Dead.”

“I’m no King of the Dead,” Harry said and grinned. “Believe me I’d know if I was.”

“Jericho’s not so certain,” Chueh said. “No one has died and come back as often as you. In some people’s eyes that makes you a good candidate for King of the Dead.”

“I’m no King of the Dead,” Harry repeated, this time without
the grin.

“I didn’t think so either,” Chueh said. “With your background you weren’t my first candidate, nor my second, or even my third for that matter. Then you pulled that trick with the neural whip today, and I decided to talk with Samuel Kade…Another thing I should have done a long time ago.”

“You talked to Kade about me?” Harry said, feeling somehow betrayed by his former teacher.

“He agrees with Jericho, you’re special. No one has ever progressed as fast or as far in such a short time. Kade says you’ve gone beyond him and don’t even know it. Apparently, I should have paid more attention and listened to Jericho.”

“I’m not King of the Dead,” Harry said emphatically.

“Jericho tells me they tried to capture your ka three times and failed. I don’t think that happens too often, do you?”

“I’m not King of the Dead,” Harry said irritably. How many times did he have to repeat this?

Chueh leaned back and watched a flock of geese cutting a perfect ‘V’ across a powder blue sky filled with fluffy, puff-ball clouds. “No one goes through so many resurrections without being changed by it,” he said without looking at Harry. “Unfortunately, it didn’t look like you were being changed for the better. In fact, you seemed to become more dissolute and irresponsible for every resurrection you went through. When Jericho asked me to let you enter my garden, I did it more to humor him than that I saw any real potential in you, but now…” he shrugged. “Who knows?”

Harry shook his head in stubborn denial.

“No one can resist a neural whip, Harry,” Chueh said with disarming reasonableness. “Maybe that’s the key.”

“To what?”

Chueh shrugged. “Perhaps to our partnership. Now tell me what these wolves really look like.”

36

Down in the Sinks

Harry listened to the rain drumming on the roof of the car. A lightning flash left nightmare afterimages of broken towers and rubble-strewn waterways. A second later a cannonade of thunder rolled over the ruins of old LA. It was eleven o’clock. It had taken him almost two hours powered down, picking his way through back alley ruins, and avoiding open waterways to get here, hidden in the shadow of a broken freeway off-ramp a hundred yards from his rendezvous.

He checked the car’s sensor dials and monitor images for what must have been the hundredth time in the last ten minutes. The sensor systems were top of the line, almost as good as Marta’s. He felt a twinge of guilty regret at being forced to leave her with Chueh’s technicians, but there was nothing else he could do.

When the technicians started a deep-sweep AI analysis of Marta’s core personality, they hadn’t counted on her being a self-evolving individuality without any slaver restrictions. They soon discovered that she had been customizing many of her own deep structures and altering core programs in her personality matrix. This, coupled with the fact that she had already been highly customized with military and security up-grades, made intrusive analysis extremely complex and time consuming. In fact, it sounded like it was going to take all night and probably part of tomorrow, forcing him to take another vehicle.

Chueh’s associates had a large selection to choose from, everything from C-class military battle-wagons to long-haul Dumbo freighters, all hidden in a massive series of artificial caverns beneath the warehouse complex. Harry finally settled on a low-slung picket-runner, a little smuggler built for speed and
maneuverability. Like Marta, it had been stealth modified with radar absorbent finish, low heat signature, and shielded grav-units.

Unlike Marta, though, its interior was cramped and uncomfortable, basically a bucket seat, controls jammed between dashboard sensor screens and two massive spin-generators that drove the little picket-runner faster than a speeding bullet. The only left-over space was a little cavity where a miniscule passenger jump seat had been ripped out. Whatever the picket-runner smuggled must have been something with high value and low volume. Something like black ice maybe?

Harry leaned over the detector screens and studied the monitor. The low-glow off the monitor painted his face a ghoulish green. The picture of the partially collapsed building stood out sharp and clear, a computer enhanced composite of all the information his sensors were picking up from side-scan radar/sonar to infrared night vision, x-rays, magnetic resonance imaging, bio scanners and advanced gravity/motion detectors. The sensor systems were what finally sold him on the car.

So far, though, they had picked up zilch. The building faced a broad expanse of open waterway and looked like it had once been a two story apartment block. Part of the concrete facade had collapsed leaving empty black squares overgrown with curtains of Spanish moss, clinging vines, and tropical ferns and flowers. A small forest of coconut palms and banana bushes grew on top of and out of the broken roof. All courtesy of nature’s new millennial reclamation project, Harry thought.

Idly, he fingered the medallion that hung from a golden chain around his neck. It was an ancient, bronze, Chinese coin, with a square hole in the center surrounded by embossed Chinese characters. The coin had a blue-green patina of age and was about the size of an old American quarter. It was banded in gold. Chueh had given it to him before he left. He told Harry that the Tongs had allies in the Sinks and if he got in trouble, the
medallion would identify him as a friend. He told Harry that anyone going down to the Sinks alone in the middle of the night needed all the friends he could get.

Harry looked at his watch. Time to get moving. He wanted to be in the building before twelve. He fed a trickle of power to the grav-units and slid slowly through the shadows. He stayed powered down, floating only a fraction of an inch above the surface of the water. He knew he’d be a sitting duck if he tried a frontal approach across the open waterway. Instead, he turned into a narrow tunnel of collapsed concrete columns and slabs of broken paving. Outside the lightning flashed, jabbing jagged blue fingers through the dark rain.

He worked his way down the street and around behind the building, staying in the detector shadow of rubble as much as possible. He didn’t question why he was being so careful…so suspicious. After what happened down here the last time, he had a right to be careful, but he knew it was more than that. It was still Susan and that something that didn’t fit and that he still couldn’t put his finger on.

In the end, though, he knew it didn’t matter. He’d have come down here anyway. He owed her. It was a debt that could never be repaid. Driving slowly through the darkness, listening to the rain, with the ruins of Old LA all around, he couldn’t help remembering that night seven years ago when he held her in his arms in the cold, dark water begging the Goddess to please make it okay again. And when his prayers were finally answered and he got Susan back, he’d screwed up all over again.

He could whine all he wanted about how terrible his contract with Eternal Life was and how much pain and horror it had put him through, but in the end it was still his own choice and could never excuse the way he treated Susan, the drunken rages, the public scenes, and finally the unforgivable, serial infidelities.

Oh, Eternal Life tried to hush it all up. They didn’t want any hint of scandal to dull the bright fairytale image they’d built up
around the marriage. But it just got too much for Susan, and Harry couldn’t blame her. He never blamed her. It had all been his fault, his drinking, his stupidity, his weakness that finally drove her into Roger’s arms.

And that was why he was here, he thought. That was why he would always be here, no matter what his suspicions, no matter what his doubts. He owed her, pure and simple.

Besides, once Susan showed him what Roger had done, those deep purple bruises on her neck, her blackened eyes, the gash on her cheek, once he held her in his arms and felt her shaking with fear and with tears in her eyes, there was no way he could have said no.

He thought of the good advice he’d given Diana, how guilt was a blind alley, how you couldn’t keep taking responsibility for another person’s life. Well, he’d always been better at giving advice than taking it, he thought with a sour smile as he brought the little picket-runner to a halt against the back of the apartment block.

He scanned the back of the building. It looked pretty well intact except for a gaping hole in the glass brick wall of what looked like a back stairwell. He scanned the stairwell and then nosed the picket-runner into the gap beneath the stairs.

Before popping the bubble roof and getting out, he did another scan. Mounds of overgrown rubble, like miniature tropical islands, littered the shallow back-alley sea. The detectors picked up a gigantic sewer rat scuttling along a fallen wall across the way but otherwise, on a night like this, there was little sign of life.

He reached up and ripped away the Velcro straps that held the rail-gun strapped to the ceiling. He usually kept the rifle in a hidden compartment in Marta’s door panel. Now, he checked the charge and rechecked the load. The magazine in the butt held two hundred ball bearings. They would accelerate through the magnetic field of super-conductor coils wound around the gun
barrel and exit at speeds great enough to transform them into projectiles of massive, destructive force, capable of blowing man-sized holes through Ferro concrete walls six feet thick.

He wondered briefly if maybe he wasn’t exaggerating a little, taking a weapon like this along to meet his ex-wife. Then he remembered that rocket trail in the night, the searchlights probing the dark waters, and the sound of Seraphim gunboats coming after him, and also checked the modern copy of an antique Glock 18 slug thrower he carried in a shoulder holster under his jacket. He’d left his iconic Chief’s Special in Marta’s glove box in favor of the Glock that had more stopping power, an extended 18 round magazine, and could shoot fully automatic as a machine pistol. Be prepared, that’s my motto, he thought.

Finally, he set the car on automatic with instructions to continue scanning and warn him of anything out of the ordinary. The AI in the picket-runner was severely limited with lobotomizing slaver circuits that left little room for independent thought or decision-making. This may have been desirable when all you were doing was running contraband through the Sinks, but Harry would have preferred Marta’s self-reliant competence covering his back.

Well, as Marta would say, that’s the way Niagara falls, Harry thought, and pulled on the night goggles that hung around his neck and popped the bubble top. Something plopped into the water from a nearby grove of overgrown rubbish. Harry caught a momentary glimpse of a sleek round head and two large faintly luminous eyes disappearing beneath the rain pocked surface.

A seal? No, too big, almost man sized. How had his detectors missed it, whatever it was? He thought of the stories he’d heard as a kid, of old experiments gone wrong, of soldiers genetically modified to fight in the watery ruins of coastal cities during the Tribulations, of genetic change run wild, of sea monsters that were hunted down and destroyed along with all the other mutants during the race purity witch hunts at the end of the
Tribulations. Even today there were persistent rumors coming out of the Sinks…

Harry scanned the back-alley sea, but there was only the sleeting rain and the wind blowing through tropical foliage, all colored low-glow green in his night goggles. He pulled up the collar of his leather jacket, tipped the bill of his baseball cap low over his goggles, and climbed out. His feet crunched on broken glass from the shattered tiles lining the stairwell.

Slowly, he worked his way up to the stairs. From what he had seen during his reconnaissance, the whole first floor was under water. Whatever was going to happen would happen upstairs. Water sheeted down the inside wall. The stairs were slick and slimy, covered with generations of mold that grew up the walls and hung in wet, slippery strands from what was left of the banister. At the top of the landing, the rotting splinters of a caved-in door clung to one rusty hinge.

He heard the sound of a minor waterfall and, when he looked inside, he saw water pouring through a hole in the ceiling down at the far end of a long narrow corridor. The water streamed towards him down the center of the floor and disappeared down another hole that gaped like an open wound a few feet inside the door. Slimy green chunks of concrete clung to bent, twisted steel, reinforcing rods that had been blown up and back by the force of what must have been an explosive charge fired from below in some long forgotten battle.

He looked down the hole to the surface of the sea and once again caught a glimpse of those round luminous eyes looking up at him. A flare of lightning burst across the water and momentarily overloaded the night goggles with white light nothingness. When his vision cleared, the creature, whatever it was, had disappeared.

The hole in the floor covered almost the whole width of the hall, and Harry tested his footing on the rotting concrete as he grabbed hold of a twisted reinforcing rod with one hand and
gingerly stepped across the opening with the rail-gun in his other hand. He suddenly slipped on the slimy surface and lost his balance. He started to fall onto one of those rusty, spike-sharp points of torn, bent-back reinforcing rod. Instinctively, he let go of the rail-gun and grabbed for the rod to prevent impaling himself. He cut his hand on the rusty steel and cursed as the gun fell through the hole and disappeared with a dull plop into the sea below.

“Goddamn, son of a bitch!” he muttered as he pulled himself up past the hole. He looked back down but there was no sign of the rail-gun. He should have used the shoulder strap. He shook his head in disgust. What the hell did he think he was doing running around down here, armed to the teeth and tripping over his own feet like some half-assed Rambo warrior? He looked at the shallow bleeding gash the rod had cut across the palm of his hand. He sucked at the wound in his hand spitting out blood and whatever infections it had just picked up and then used a trick he learned from his ka to stop the bleeding and close the wound.

It was crazy coming down here all alone, he thought. What did he expect to do against gangs of Seraphim, pirates, or Slavers if Susan’s little deal went sour? He’d counted on that rail-gun to give him extra leverage if he needed it, but now…

He should have asked Chueh for help. The old man had given him plenty of opportunity. But no, he had to come down here and John Wayne it all alone. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, he thought. Yeah, and this man’s gotta fall on his ass and lose his gun before he even gets started.

He couldn’t help smiling at his carping tirade as he did a slow geriatric shuffle down the slime slick hall. “Pathetic!” He grinned. “What a klutz!” he added jacking up the sarcasm. “A block-busting loser!” he giggled with malicious glee. “Can’t even walk and carry a gun at the same time!” He put his hand over his mouth to stifle a derisive whoop. Then he leaned back against the wall chuffing down silent laughter.

He could feel the laughter draining the tension from his body. He hadn’t realized how tightly wound he was until he felt the tension letting go in little hiccups of laughter. He gave a long, slow sigh of relief. What now? he wondered.

Forget the R-gun, he told himself. At least he still had the automatic in the shoulder holster under his jacket, and don’t forget the little Daisy derringer Chueh had insisted on giving him. “You never know when you’re going to need an ace in the hole.” The old man had grinned and told Harry to hide the Daisy in his boot. Neither weapon was going to do any good against heavily armed battle-wagons but, at close quarters in a building like this, they might give him an edge. We’ll just have to make do with what we got and hope we don’t need anything heavier, he thought and started down the hall again.

Four doorways gaped open off of it. Harry pulled out the Glock, racked the slide, and fed a slug into the chamber. Then he peeked into the first apartment. There were a few rotting splinters of wood hanging from rusty hinges where the door had been. The floor inside had caved in when the façade collapsed, and he looked down at the open waterway through tangled mounds of overgrown rubble.