Kill Switch (57 page)

The impetus washed me hard into a second bulky creature.

I thrashed and spun, filled with mingled terror and wonder, to see that I'd collided with a much smaller whale. Maybe sixteen feet long with no trace of barnacles or mottling. A newborn.

A shadow fell across my face and I saw Big Mama turning toward me. Or rather toward the thing that was swimming between her and the newborn. I'm no ichthyologist but I'm pretty damn sure this was not the place I wanted to be. There was a great surface turbulence and her flukes broke from the water and rose above me. Ten feet across and more than massive enough to smash me into chum.

I dove and swam the opposite way from Big Mama and Junior. I wanted no part of maternal rage. I wanted no part of any of this. Pretty sure I was going to smash my
Free Willy
DVDs if I ever got the hell out of this.

I swam as hard as I could and didn't care which direction it was, so long as it was away from them. No idea where Top and Bunny were and, truth to tell, right now I'd have fed them to the whales if that's what it would take. The sun above me was hot but the water felt frigid and no matter how hard I swam it felt like I wasn't moving. Behind me I could hear the explosive spouting of the whales. Sounded so damn close. I knew that gray whales eat mostly crustaceans. They weren't like killer whales. But they were supposed to be very defensive. One of my friends in San Diego told me that the grays used to be called “devil fish” because of how aggressive they got when hunted. So I tried to telepathically assure Big Mama that I was the furthest thing on planet Earth to something that might want to do harm to any member of her species.

I swam.

And prayed.

And swam.

And prayed.

Until …

The seas grew quiet around me.

I didn't slow down. Not right away. Panic owned me.

Guess it's fair to say that I stopped swimming when I didn't die. Sounds stupid, but not in the moment. My muscles were burning with lactic acid, my lungs seared by salt water and exertion, my brains scrambled. Also, in the absence of a modern sequel to
Moby Dick,
the realities of my situation were beginning to float to the top of my brain.

We didn't catch our bad guy. Someone blew up our boat. We were fifty miles away from the nearest land. And by “we” I meant me and the voices in my head, because when I stopped and looked around at the top of each rolling swell, I didn't see another person.

Not Top. Not Bunny.

No one.

 

CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE

PACIFIC OCEAN

SOMEWHERE WEST OF SAN NICOLAS ISLAND

TIME UNKNOWN

I floated.

Drifting. Drowsing. Dreaming.

Trying not to die.

Several times I rode a swell to its highest point, cupped my hands around my mouth, and called out.

“BUNNY!”

“TOP!”

“ECHO, ECHO!”

Loud as I could.

The wind took my shouts and shredded them over the tops of the waves. Each time I sank down and had to fight back to the surface.

After twenty minutes, maybe more, I found a seat cushion from the Picuda. Burned, soaked, but still afloat. I snatched it and hugged it to my chest and nearly wept. Spent the next ten or fifteen minutes emotionally bonding with the cushion. It was my best friend and I loved it. We bobbed together in the salt water as I oriented myself and went through my options. The math was against me.

I was maybe forty miles west of Oceanside. Maybe less, but that's a long damn swim at the best of times. Which this wasn't. I had no idea if the tide was going in or out. Layer that on top of the fact that I'd gotten the living crap beaten out of me. Everything from mid-chest down was waterlogged and turning into a frozen prune. Everything from the chest up was broiling. No hat, no sunglasses. No food. No drinking water. What was that line from Coleridge?
Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.

I think I yelled some curses at the ocean, the water, the salt
in
the water, the waves, the sky, the puffy fucking clouds, and the universe as a whole.

Drifting, drifting.

Thinking about the man who did this to me.

Thinking about how much I wanted to kill him.

Thinking about how he'd probably killed me.

Trying to make sense of it. That he was Esteban Santoro was beyond doubt. So, how did that explain his sudden change of body language and accent? Had someone at the Dreamwalking project taken over Santoro, too?

My gut told me I was right about that, although I didn't really understand it.

The same thing had obviously happened to Top and Bunny. If they were alive, if they survived this, how would they ever be able to get past it? Someone had made them commit wholesale murder. Innocent civilians. Children. It was their hands who held those guns, their fingers on the triggers.

Living past a thing is not the same as surviving it.

I drifted.

What had happened to me? I couldn't feel the presence of anyone in my head. Not really, and remember I have some experience with sharing the real estate inside my skull. I hadn't turned my gun on the crowd and I hadn't shot myself.

So what
had
happened? What had turned me into a clumsy, ineffectual nothing in that fight? What had slowed my reflexes and turned me into a punching bag?

What indeed?

If it wasn't the psychic possession of Dreamwalking, then what was it? Until now I'd been blaming it all on the fact that the Killer aspect of me had either gone to sleep or gone away. Now I wondered.

Was he gone because someone had gone into my mind and killed him? Or, was he in some kind of psychic cage, shackled, of no use to me? And did that mean without him my usefulness as an operator was nil? Worse than nil?

The sea and the salt spray offered no answers.

I floated and tried to coax the Cop forward to analyze the details, to make sense of it the way he always makes sense of things.

I wished Top and Bunny would find me. Or me them. Where were they now? Had Top and Bunny paid for their actions by going down, down, down into the watery deep? If so, despite what had just happened, this world had lost two of its heroes. Actual heroes. The best of the best. Which means that Santoro had done what no one else had managed to do. Not walkers or berserkers, not mad scientists or ancient cults, not hired killers or soldiers of foreign flags. That rat bastard had killed Top Sims and Bunny.

I did not want to weep; I couldn't spare the moisture. But the tears came anyway. Anger followed soon, though, and its heat burned those tears to dry salt on my face.

Questions, questions everywhere and not an answer to be had.

Above me the sun fell in slow defeat over the walls of the world, dragging behind it a beggar's cloak of shameful darkness.

 

CHAPTER NINETY

PACIFIC OCEAN

SOMEWHERE WEST OF SAN NICOLAS ISLAND

TIME UNKNOWN

Night.

Black and wet and cold.

The sky above me was ablaze with more stars than I could ever remember seeing. I could see the soft, pale sweep of the Milky Way. There were constellations I knew and others that in my semidelirium I believed had been created just for me. To mark the event of my death.

How's that for an ego trip?

I blame it on the beating Santoro gave me. My head felt like it cracked open and fiddler crabs had taken up residence. Not sure how many hours I was out there with only a burned seat cushion and my own questionable thoughts for company. My imagination conjured an endless string of worst-case scenarios for what Santoro was going to do with all the technology he stole. He could start a war. Or wars. He could unleash plagues. He could disrupt the power grids. He could open the door to terrorist attacks that would make what Mother Night and the Seven Kings did pale in comparison.

I could have stopped him. I should have been able to. It played out wrong. Why?

Consciousness came and went, and each time I went out of my head I went all the way out. Back into the kind of dreams I'd had after being exposed to the God Machine. The kind of dreams I had when I was in my coma.

So strange, and yet so goddamn real.

In one dream …

I was back on the dock, but instead of fighting Esteban Santoro I was duking it out with a man I'm sure was a complete stranger to me. I'd seen him before. He was taller and more heavily built than Santoro, but with a face that was totally obscured as if covered with smoke. He fought with superb skill, top of the line, with blood on his hands and black ice in his soul.

“You're a joke, Ledger,” he told me as he smashed down my guard and pummeled my face. “Maybe you were good once upon a time, but now you're only a worthless thug.”

That dream ended when he grabbed my hair and chin and snapped my neck. I heard it break and felt myself die.…

I woke from that to find myself in the water again.

But the water was suddenly ice cold. No, it was worse than that. The water was absolutely freezing. Insanely cold, and it stabbed into me like knives. I cried out in fear and pain, thrashing to get away from where I was, impossible as that sounds. The light had changed, too, and off in the distance I saw huge mountains rising above me. Not the green and brown coastal mountains of Southern California. Somehow, impossibly, this was a massive mountain range of solid ice.

Incredibly high, blue-white in the pale sun of some nameless day. And deep inside the ice, revealed only by some trick of the light, was a wall. Or walls. Towers, too, but in strange shapes. Gigantic cones and cubes the size of cathedrals. Towering stairs too vast and grand to have been constructed for humans to climb. And even though this was buried behind walls of ice, I could see figures move.

Shapes.

Things.

And wafting toward me over the freezing waves was a plaintive call from some animal I could not name. It cried nonsense words.

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

Over and over and over and …

Something dark and mottled rose suddenly out of the water. Not a whale this time. No, this was more like a tentacle, but one that was too big to comprehend. It rose and rose, taller than a building, taller than a mountain, tearing upward through water and sky until it blotted out the sun. Ice water sluiced down its length, raining killing sleet over me.

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” came the call. Not from it, but because of it. Maybe calling to it. Begging it for something I could not, and never would, understand.

Then the tentacle fell.

Toward me.

Over me.

Smashing me down once more into the icy waters.…

A dream.

Only a dream. I floated now in waters that, while cold, were not the lethal waters of the arctic or Antarctic. It was dark again. The stars above me were the ones I expected to see. Needed to see. I listened for that plaintive voice and heard only the faintest of echoes.

“Tekeli-li … Tekeli-li…”

My wakefulness, though, was no more securely anchored to those waters and those stars than was my sanity. Blackness wanted me so badly, and it claimed me over and over again. There were other dreams. All strange, all violent. I wanted to dream about Junie, about being in her arms, about holding her warm body to mine, about clinging to her. But she could not find me in those dreams. Only pain and horror and strangeness knew where I was.

So I drifted and dreamed, dreamed and drifted.

A few times I heard that same strange voice again—more animal than human—crying out in an unknown language. It kept repeating Tekeli-li. And in one deep, deep dream I crawled out of the water onto a coastline that was muddy and choked with slimy weeds. The message of that voice persisted and I yelled at it to shut up, but the words that came from my own mouth were equally strange.

“Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.”

And then a thousand voices rose up out of the darkness to echo those words. “Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.”

Beneath me, the very mud on which I knelt began to shift as if it was the skin of something vast that had been called to wakefulness by the content of that chant. That … prayer.

I screamed myself out of that dream.

And then I stood in a corridor in a subbasement. Not sure how I knew that, but there was no doubt. A subbasement built years ago.

I walked along the basement, beneath rows of fluorescent lights. There were doors on both sides of the corridor, and I stopped and looked into each one.

I found laboratories with equipment I didn't understand.

I found one room filled with TV monitors and advanced computer equipment. There was a security guard sitting on a folding chair, his chin on his chest, eyes closed as he slept. He wore a comical peaked hat made from shiny aluminum foil. On a table beside him were dozens of similar hats. All made from aluminum foil. Above the table was a printed placard that read:

Playroom Security Notice

All Employees Must Wear Protective Skullcaps

During Dreamwalking Exercises.

This Means You!

I looked around. It was a room—a big room—which was lined with rows of coffins. Only they weren't really coffins. Funny things to have in a place called the Playroom. They were capsules of some kind. On a small metal stand beside each one was a miniature version of the God Machine, exact in every detail except that it was no bigger than a camp stove. The machines hummed quietly and on their faces a row of tiny gemstone chips flashed on and off in a random sequence. First the diamond, then two flashes of the ruby, then the topaz, the diamond again, the emerald. Over and over, and I stood watching, transfixed, almost hypnotized, lulled to the edge of sleep. In my mind, though, a voice that was not my own whispered, “The pattern is wrong. The more they dream this way, the greater the neurological damage. We've lost so many dreamers already.”