Hellraisers (9 page)

“Where is he?”

Herc's growling voice stopped them both dead. He towered over them like a parent over two frightened children, looked for a moment like he was about to cuff them both around the head.

“Tell me you stuck him, at least.”

“Yeah,” said Hope. “I got him.”

“Well thank heaven for small mercies.” Herc grunted, shaking his head. “Two fully charged Engineers against an injured lamb, what is the world coming to? Go, clean yourselves up.”

Pan followed him across the room, wincing every time she put weight on her broken leg. The wounds had healed, the bone knitted back together, but it still felt like she had razors sewn into her flesh. The scan had shown she was all clear. Her heart had a new layer of scar tissue—“The scars are the only thing holding it together,” Betty had joked—and her left lung would probably never fully inflate again. She was alive, though. She was still here.

“Problems?” she said when she was close enough. Herc was standing by the window, big hands clutched behind his back. He was staring at the street thirty stories below. Pan swallowed the sudden rush of vertigo, squinting down to see that traffic had ground to a halt. A crowd had gathered, surrounding a naked shape sprawled on the ground. Among the bloom of yellow taxis was a blue-and-white cop car, lights flashing. Two officers pushed through the onlookers. Now that her eyes had adjusted to the blazing sunlight, Pan could see it was Marlow, writhing around on the street, legs and arms paddling like he was trying to swim upside down. She almost smiled before she remembered herself.

“Look at him go,” she said. “How much did you give him?”

“Enough,” said Herc. Then, a heartbeat later, “To floor a goddamned bear.”

He snorted, and the laugh spilled out of her before she could clamp her teeth shut. They coughed together, both of them trying to cover up their giggles. Man, was it good to laugh, though. In this line of work, you never knew which joke was going to be your last. That thought made her remember Forrest, laughing at some joke about a penguin the night before the mission. Had he known he'd never laugh again? She swallowed loudly.

“I'm sorry, Herc,” she said, croaking out the reluctant words. “About yesterday, about what I said. I…”

I what?
An apology wasn't going to bring the boy back to life. It wouldn't bring any of them back. They were down there now, drenched in the eternal fire of hell. Couldn't she hear them screaming?

“Suck it up, Pan,” he replied, watching her out of the corner of his eye. “There's no room here for sorrys, not anymore. You do what you do, you are what you are.”

A kid,
she thought, suddenly feeling her age, not even old enough to drink and yet here she was driving events that could change the world.

Or end it.

How long had it been, now? Four years? Almost. And how different would things have been if Ostheim had never sent Herc to her cell that day, if he'd never offered her the chance to start again? She'd be locked up tight, thirty years at least. Maybe even death row.

That's what happened when you took a life.

“We need you,” Herc said, seeing the expression on her face. “Not many people can do what you do, remember that. We need you.
They
need you.” He gestured out of the window with a broad sweep of his hand. “Things are heating up, Pan. The Circle's attacks are growing bolder. They don't give a crap about the rules anymore. Something big is coming. So stop apologizing and get back in your ice cube.”

Herc was right, things really had been heating up. And they were paying the price, too. Eleven Engineers dead this year alone. She used her fist to smudge away the breath from the glass. The cops were trying to heft the kid up from the road but he was squirming and flopping like a landed fish. Everyone had their phones out, snapping away happily. Even in the deranged carnival that was New York you didn't often see a half-naked guy drunk off his face trying to fight off the police.

“This is gonna be everywhere,” she said. “Twitter, Instagram, you name it.”

Herc shrugged, and she looked at him.

“
The first law,
” she quoted. “
The world must not know.
Funny way of going about it.”

“Desperate times,” Herc said.

She looked down again to see the cops manhandling Marlow into their car. It swept away, siren bleeping.

“You better go get Ostheim on the comm,” Herc said when it was out of sight. “We're gonna have to move soon.”

“No rest for the wicked, eh?” she said, snorting another laugh, this one with absolutely no humor in it.

“No rest for them, no rest from them. What'cha gonna do.”

“What about the other Engineers?”

“Truck and Nightingale are en route,” Herc said, checking his watch. “The jet should land in a couple of hours. Hope and Bullwinkle have ten days left on their contracts, nothing to worry about.”

Unless Ostheim leaves it to the last second again,
she thought but didn't say.

“I need to get back to the Engine,” she said, feeling the familiar itch in her gut, her bones, her soul. It was always this way. Once the Engine got inside you it was an addiction. You couldn't go without it for long—even when it almost cost you everything. She scratched at her skin, hard enough to hurt, to take her mind off the ache. “I need to make a new contract, I have to be there.”

“Not up to me, Pan. It's Ostheim's call.”

And Ostheim was the last person she wanted to talk to. She'd failed her last mission and the aftermath had destroyed a hospital. She'd pretty much broken every rule in the book and her employer wasn't going to go easy on her.

“Don't look so worried, kid,” Herc said. “Cover-up team is in full swing. The world won't know. Ostheim's already planted evidence that it was a Middle Eastern terrorist cell; the video'll be on CNN within the hour.”

“You think the kid will talk?” she asked. Herc turned to her, cracking his knuckles. His burned, scarred face twisted into something that was probably a smile.

“He'd better,” he said. “This whole operation is counting on it.”

Pan frowned. “What?”

“Nothing.” Herc coughed, scratching at an invisible fleck of dirt on the glass.

“What operation?”

“Operation, um, Live Bait, I guess is the best way of describing it.” He must have seen the look Pan threw at him because he shrugged. “Ostheim's idea, not mine. Anyway, it's not like you actually liked the kid.”

True,
Pan thought. But not liking him was one thing, and throwing him to the wolves was something very, very different.

 

0.37%

“Oh sweet merciful Alabama cheesecake, would you look at this—it's off the chart.”

The detective held up a Breathalyzer printout, shaking his head so hard his thick gray eyebrows looked in danger of falling off. Marlow was so exhausted he could barely keep his head up, feeling like he'd downed a whole crate of Jim Beam. He'd puked three times already, twice in the back of the cruiser, apparently, again inside the holding cell. He didn't really remember how he got here, only something about an elevator, tall buildings, then he'd been facedown in his own drool. He'd been expelled from school, way back, but everything between then and now was just salt in water, impossible to see but leaving a nasty taste in his mouth.

“Kid, you have to be the drunkest skunk I ever seen. Point three-seven blood alcohol level?”

They were sitting in a small interview room, Marlow's hands cuffed to the table, one wall filled up by a mirror that was actually a window. The entire room was filled with a haze of booze and BO. The fat old detective dropped the printout on the table, looked over his shoulder at the uniformed cop behind him. She was in her thirties, maybe. Cute.

“You ever seen anyone this drunk, officer?” he asked her.

“Not outside of St. Patrick's,” she replied. The detective sat back, rubbing his hairy chest through the opening on his sweaty shirt. He coughed, reached into his pocket as if going for a cigarette, then pulled his hand back and stroked his white-flecked lips instead. Marlow shifted uncomfortably in the orange jumpsuit they'd given him. His head was starting to pound, a demolition ball swinging between the two sides of his skull.

“Since when,” he started to say, then coughed, trying to clear his throat. The paramedic who'd accompanied them to the station had given him a couple of puffs on an inhaler when he'd asked for it, but his windpipe showed no sign of reopening. “Since when has it been illegal to be drunk?”

The detective smiled, showing a row of crooked, tobacco-stained teeth.

“Oh, it ain't illegal to be drunk, kid,” he said. “If it was, then I'd be locked up every Friday night and not let out until Tuesday morning.” He laughed at his own joke. “But you, you were drunk
and
disorderly. The old Double D.”

“I—”

“Criminal damage to a city vehicle,” said the detective, counting off on his chubby fingers.

“Come on—”

“Assault on a police officer.”

“I puked on him, I didn't—”

“Conspiracy to deploy a terrorist weapon on the city of New York.”

This one shut Marlow up like a punch to the gut. He sat there, his jaw just about hitting the table.

“Conspiracy to
what
?”

“That's what I want you to tell me, kid,” the detective said, craning forward as much as his belly would allow. “Back in the cruiser you had a hell of a lot to say for yourself.”

“I did?” Marlow said, trying to think back. He couldn't even remember being in the car. “Look, I can't—”

“‘Touch me again,'” the detective said, lifting another sheet of paper and reading from it, “‘and I'll kill you.' There's more after this, but I don't really want to have to read it in front of Officer Settle here. You've got quite a mouth on you, kid.” He cleared his throat, scanned down the page. “Aha, this is the interesting bit. ‘You want to say that again, you
bleeping bleep
? I'll tear you a new
bleep
hole like I did to those things back in the hospital. I'll shoot your
bleeping bleep
off and make you eat it, I'll blow up your car and your house and your dog. I did it before, just today, I'll do it again, just you wait, you horse—
bleeping bleep
.'” The detective gently laid the paper down, clearing his throat. “There's quite a bit more, all lovingly transcribed by the officers who carted your drunken ass off the street. But the gist of it is pretty damn clear. You were there, yesterday.”

“Yesterday?” Marlow said, his head reeling. He lifted his hands to rub his temples but the cuffs snapped tight, rooting them to the table. He swore under his breath. What was his mom gonna think? She'd have been waiting for him last night. She'd be worried sick.

“That tells me all I need to know,” said the detective. “How the thing that surprised you was the date, and not the ‘there.'”

“The what?” he replied, trying to get his brain around the conversation. “Where?”

“Where indeed,” the man said, dirtying the water even further. Marlow lowered his head until his chained hands could reach it, massaging his temples. There was something in there, now that he thought about it, a place full of fire, of screams, of gunshots, of exploding cars, of monsters. But that couldn't be right. He pressed his fists against his eyes until his vision was a snowstorm of color.

“The hospital, right?” he said a moment later, looking up. “Staten Island. The parking garage.”

The detective and the cop shared a look, the woman's hand straying down to her holstered weapon as if to check that it was still there. When the man looked back at Marlow there was nothing nice or welcoming left in his expression.

“So, you
were
there.”

“I…”
Tread carefully, Marlow,
said his brain. “It was a bad day. I was trying to buy something to drink.”

“Tell me something I don't know.”

“I live on the island. I'd just … just been kicked outta school. Was planning on drowning my sorrows, y'know? Then I heard the explosion.”

“You weren't there when it went up?” the detective asked.

“No,” Marlow said, his thoughts becoming clearer. “No, I was inside a store. Clerk had a shotgun, I grabbed it. Thought it was, I don't know, terrorists or something.”

“And?”

“And…”
And what? Girls coming back from the dead? Walls and floors that moved.
“Look, this is going to seem weird.” He coughed, both of the cops leaning in close. “The parking garage was full of … There were these things. They were alive, but not … Look, you kinda had to be there.”

“You wanna start making some sense, kid?”

“They were … monsters,” he said, the word out of his mouth before he could stop it. And it was like a locomotive, dragging everything else behind it. “They were made of stuff, like walls and cars. But they looked like … like animals. They had claws, and teeth. I fought one that was part of a truck, and some floor maybe. So there were other people there, dressed in black like soldiers. I think they were dead, apart from one, this big old dude, like really ugly. He had a gun, he was shooting these things. And a girl too, she was … Well, y'know, she was pretty cute, but she had a crossbow, and she was…”

He realized the detective had raised a hand and his words slowed to a halt. The man released a spluttered sigh.

“You for real?” he said.

“Yeah, I'm telling you the truth.” Marlow sat forward, hands out as far as they could go. “Seriously, it's what happened.”

“Mr. Green,” the man said, and Marlow was shocked to hear his name. With no wallet on him, or phone, how did they know? “I'm not gonna waste your time anymore, and I'd appreciate it if you didn't waste mine. You've been with us before.”
Ah, that was how.
He'd been arrested a couple of times before, nothing major, just being tanked up and loudmouthed. “Both times off your trolley. You're getting into some bad habits.”