Eternal Life Inc. (28 page)

44

The Day after the Night before

Roger woke up and groaned. He wondered where he was. Wherever it was, it hurt. His body was stiff and cold and…wet. In fact, he was soaked to the skin. He tried to open his eyes, but they were so gummed up the lids had trouble coming unstuck. When he finally blinked them open, he was rewarded by rays of bright morning sunlight that felt like someone driving red-hot ice picks through his eyeballs and pinning them onto the back of his skull.

“Oh, screw this,” he moaned. As he moved his arm to cover his face, his hand hit an empty bottle and sent it spinning across the ground. Roger opened one eye. “Floor,” he corrected and watched the bottle roll across the polished oak parquet floor and under a sofa. He carefully raised his head and looked around. He was lying in a puddle of rainwater, half in and half out of the open sliding doors to the terrace.

His mind started coughing and sputtering out thoughts like a rusty, old motor. He must have been trying to get in out of the rain when he passed out. The last thing he remembered was talking to Harry, trying to make him understand that he never meant to hurt or betray him. But Harry wasn’t really there, and it didn’t matter anyway.

He thought of Susan…“Oh shit!” he shouted, and sat up too fast. The world rocked and rolled and his head was filled with a thousand bright pieces of exploding shrapnel. He squinted at his watch and cursed. He ignored the pain in his head and the stiffness in his body and managed to get up. Then he stumbled back into the house with the wet, terrycloth robe slapping against his bare shanks. He had to meet Jericho and Diana in an hour and hadn’t even begun to get ready.

He took a stim-tab, shaved and showered, took another stim-tab and began to feel half-way human again. He pulled on a thin body stocking of spider-spin armor and on top of that new khaki brown, whipcord trousers and matching shirt. Absently, he slipped on the elegant leather-tooled shoulder rig he always wore. It contained one of the newest R-pistols that weren’t even on the market yet, a deadly little equalizer and status symbol all in one.

Diana had told him that where they were going they would not be able to take a grav-car, so he had better make sure he had hiking and camping gear and provisions for at least a week in case they had to rough it. He’d had a couple of outdoor types at Eternal Life pick up a pair of hiking boots and throw together a camping pack that he hoped would cover his needs. When he got home last night, he had dropped it in the front hall, planning to go through it later to make sure they hadn’t missed anything, but a bad case of bad memories got in the way.

He snagged a light all-weather jacket from the closet and walked down to the front hall wondering why he came back here last night. There was nothing for him here but a world of pain. Maybe because this was where he and Susan had been happiest, he thought. This island, this house had been their dream. They planned and built it together. Maybe he returned to try to capture a tiny piece of the dream to take with him into the unknown. If that was the case, it was a dismal failure.

He stepped into his brand-new, heavy-duty hiking boots with the price tag still attached and shouldered the pack without even looking inside. Just then, his wrist phone beeped. He glanced at the display. A heavily encrypted number…Jericho. They’d agreed on this in case of an emergency. He tapped in the key and the display cleared and Jericho’s face appeared. “I’m on my way,” Roger lied.

“Change of plans,” Jericho said. “My place,” and cut off.

They were supposed to meet at Chueh’s. The old Tong
Godfather was going to arrange for them to slip out of the city undetected. Roger wondered what had gone wrong and headed for the underground garage. On the way he stopped off in his private armory and picked up a pulse rifle and an automatic fléchette mini-gun. He figured if things were already going wrong, he might need all the help he could get.

After the fiasco at Eternal Life yesterday, the wolves had been totally pissed off at him. They blamed him for Harry’s escape. They told him to kiss off any hope of seeing Susan again. They were taking her back to Las Vegas with them. Maybe, if she was lucky, they would let her be a pleasure slave in one of their temples.

When he learned that Diana was going to attempt to get into Las Vegas to rescue her sister, it was like an answer to his prayers…except Diana wasn’t answering prayers. She took one look at his out-of-shape, overweight body and bloodshot eyes and said she didn’t want him, didn’t need him, and wouldn’t take him. He begged, bribed, threatened, and demanded.

She said he was in no shape to follow her where she was going. At best he would slow her down, at worst he would get her killed. He told her she could leave him anytime he couldn’t keep up. She said it might not only be a matter of keeping up. Where she was going, he might not be able to follow. It was as simple as that, whatever that meant.

In the end, Jericho interceded on his behalf, pointing out that two had a better chance than one and that if Harry didn’t turn up, Roger was the only other candidate they had. Candidate for what was never explained, and he really didn’t care as long as it got him to Las Vegas.

Then Jericho surprised him by saying that he, Roger, was someone Diana could count on to guard her back, and besides, he had a fleet of some of the fastest, best-armed grav-cars in the Empire. At least he wasn’t lying about the last part, Roger thought, as he walked down the row of grav-cars in the garage.
He even had a couple of vintage ground cars with old internal combustion engines that had been lovingly restored.

He stopped before a small red roadster. It was the fastest, most maneuverable, and for its size the best armed grav-car he owned. It was spider-spin armored against most impact weapons and, like all his cars, had the finest military software upgrades money could buy. This one, though, had a few extras that might have raised eyebrows even in the Imperial Security Service.

The Tongs and the imperial police patrolled the seas around New Hollywood and kept them relatively free from pirates, Slavers, Seraphim, and other scum, but once you went beyond the boundaries of their protection, you were on your own. Before Roger met Susan, he frequently used the little roadster for illicit trips into the roadhouse fleshpots and gambling casinos in the criminal no man’s land bordering the Sinks.

He could probably find most of what he was looking for in the brothels, casinos, and pleasure gardens of the District, but they couldn’t give him what he really wanted. What he really wanted was the dangerous, forbidden thrill of once more walking on the wild side of his past, outside the laws and circumscribed boundaries of his life in New Hollywood. Out there, on the boundaries of the Sinks, anything could happen and usually did. He’d killed men out there, men who were trying to kill him for his flash car and pig skin wallet.

Out there, he could allow himself to be himself, to relive his hard scrabble life on the wild side before he came to New Hollywood. He had grown up dirt poor in one of the old Seraphim eastern provinces, back up in the hills, bordering the Quarantine. It was a hard, violent, precarious existence. He had killed his first man before he was twelve. It was a mutie, trying to rape his mother. By the time he was fourteen, he was on his own, his mother and father dead, their homestead burned to the ground. He’d tracked down the Jacker gang that did it and killed three more men.

After that, he fled westward with a price on his head and bounty hunters on his heels. He left their bones on his back-trail until, at last, no one followed him anymore, and he came to New Hollywood. He was sixteen years old, hard and feral and determined to claw out a place for himself at the top of all the wealth and glitter at the center of the Empire.

And when I finally got it, it was never enough, he thought. There was always a gnawing emptiness that couldn’t be filled, that drove him back to the wild side roadhouses on the borders of the Sinks with their promise of bare knuckle violence and life on the edge.

Then he fell in love with Susan, another man’s woman, and it changed his life. He rubbed his hand lovingly across the glossy, smooth front fender of the roadster. The little car was fast and deadly and had gotten him out of more than a few dangerous scrapes but since Susan, it had mostly gathered dust.

He climbed in and started it up. The hum of the oversize grav-coils was deep and even. He applied lift and slid smoothly out of the garage and out onto the lift pad. Before taking off, he reprogrammed the finish from bright red to automatic camouflage that would blend into any background.

Five miles from Jericho’s island compound, he picked up a warning signal that he was entering restricted, private airspace. He identified himself and continued toward the island that was nothing but a long, overgrown ridge sticking out of the sea. Jericho’s house was built into the side of the ridge in a classic twentieth century construction of wood and glass that seemed a natural part of the landscape.

The old man was waiting for him on the landing pad set in the middle of a large pond at the base of the ridge. A waterfall poured from the top of the ridge, past one of the house’s large picture windows, and into the pond. Roger followed Jericho across an arched wooden bridge, onto a vine covered wooden deck and entered the house.

Roger knew that the house was only the tip of the iceberg and that buried beneath the ridge was one of the largest, best-equipped research facilities in the world. Very few people knew about it. Jericho kept a low profile and had sworn Roger to secrecy before he showed him. Roger always played his part perfectly, treating Jericho in public with the kind of offhand contempt that infuriated Harry. He wondered if Harry knew Jericho’s secret. He doubted it. Even friends would be kept on a need to know basis as far as Jericho was concerned, and Harry definitely didn’t need to know in Roger’s opinion.

Jericho led him down a long corridor edged with a floor-to-ceiling, diamond glass window that looked out on the pond. They went up a spiral staircase of chrome and unfinished redwood planks and entered a spacious living room with another floor-to-ceiling diamond glass window. This one gave a magnificent view from the top of the ridge and out across the sea.

The room was furnished in mid-twentieth century American style; right down to one of only three Jackson Pollack’s to survive the Crash. The painting hung above a black, low slung, leather sofa that faced the window. A coffee table of unfinished driftwood planks, resting on chrome mountings, stood before the sofa. There was a coffee service on the table and to one side Diana’s open electronic notebook.

Roger noted its battered appearance. It looks like it’s seen better days, he thought…lots of better days. It must have been over twenty years old. He wondered, in passing, what use she had for an antique like that.

He turned and looked at her. She stood with her back to him, staring out the window, a cup of coffee in her hand. She wore a pair of scuffed hiking boots, faded jeans, and a washed out, gray flannel shirt. The butt of what looked like an ancient Colt .45 Peacemaker stuck out of a worn leather holster strapped low on her hip. The walnut pistol grips were black with age. She turned.
The flannel shirt was open at the throat, and Roger noticed that she was wearing an insulated spider-spin body stocking underneath. He felt a little like a clothing store dummy in his factory pressed cords and the price tag still dangling from his new boots.

“You’re late,” she said, not criticizing but simply stating the fact. Then she seemed to see him for the first time. “You look terrible,” she said.

“That’s better than I feel,” he said. He wondered what would happen to her cool composure if he told her that the reason he was late and looked so terrible was that he had gotten blind, stinking drunk last night and if it was up to him, he’d rather stay that way the rest of his life. Probably not a good idea, he decided.

“What did you do to your hand?” she asked.

“Accident,” he said as he took a seat on the couch. Diana turned back and stared out the window. Jericho offered him coffee and then told him that Harry had gone missing in the Sinks. “He went there to meet Susan,” he said.

“Son of a bitch!” Roger ran his fingers through his sparse ginger hair. “Why the hell did he have to do that?”

“From what I’ve been able to piece together,” Jericho said, “I think he thought she was in some kind of trouble and asked for his help.”

Roger thought of what the wolves had done to Susan the other night, how she must have looked to Harry, and how Harry had reacted to him. “He must have thought I beat her up,” he said.

“Or maybe she told him you did,” Jericho suggested.

“You didn’t tell him?”

“That the wolves had taken her?” Jericho shook his head. “No, he didn’t stick around long enough to hear.”

“So the wolves got him too,” Roger said.

“We don’t know,” Jericho said cautiously. “Chueh went down into the Sinks with a division of Tong soldiers to get him out and got into a fire-fight with Seraphim militias. The last I heard, it’s turned into an all-out war down there. Apparently, the Seraphim
have some kind of new weapon that can bring down grav-cars by stopping their engines. It sounds like the same thing the Norma-genes used to bring down that imperial search and rescue party in the Quarantine last year. According to Chueh’s last report, his Tongs were taking a beating and were in retreat.

“We don’t have much time,” Jericho said, pacing restlessly back and forth. With his long thin legs, hunched shoulders, and undertaker suit, he reminded Roger of a big, black stork. “All hell’s broken out in the city. It looks like an attempted coup. There’s a lot of fighting around the Imperial Palace and even the Eternal Life building.”

Roger nodded. “Yeah, there would be,” he said and thought of all the wolf-possessed whom he had allowed to infiltrate the building in the last months. Even the coup didn’t surprise him. He had met enough rich and powerful wolf-possessed to suspect something like this might happen.

“Chueh saw it coming,” Jericho said. “Before he left the city last night, he sealed off all the entrances to the Silver Slipper and his garden. No one gets in or out. Then he dropped us off here, before heading into the Sinks. He left a squad of Valkyrie to guard the place…