The Killing Floor Blues (7 page)

Back in Hive C, up on the fourth tier, I knew the Prof’s cell before he led me inside. It was the one that glowed in my second sight.

The tiny chalk mark on the threshold was aflame with power. I didn’t recognize the symbol, but I could taste its intent, like the memory of ginger on my tongue and the scent of sandalwood incense. A warding sigil. Three more dotted his cell, one for each wall, the white glyphs tucked into hard-to-spot places. While I counted sigils, he reached under his bunk and dragged out a plastic storage tub.

“You’re a magician,” I said, keeping my voice low.

He paused, turning his head to grin my way.

“No, magic is tricks and lies. I peddle the truth. Only truth, but nobody ever believes me.”

The stench that roiled out when he popped the plastic lid, something like three-day-old roadkill on a hot Nevada highway, nearly knocked me flat. Prison wine. I recognized the makings of a crude still for fermentation, cobbled together with cast-off containers and plastic tubing.

“Problem is,” he muttered, shuffling to his desk and picking up a dusty plastic cup, “nobody wants truth. It’s a hard sell. I was a traveling salesman once, before I found my true vocation. Did you know that?”

“Buddy,” I told him, “I don’t even know your name.”

He barked a delighted laugh.

“Buddy. My name is Buddy. My parents were avid fans of the blues, quite avid. Here, hold this cup.”

I obliged him, but I wasn’t sure why.

I thought the stench from the makeshift still couldn’t get any worse. He took a Ziploc bag from the container, fat with viscous, strawberry-colored goop, and proved me wrong the second he opened it. I raised an eyebrow as he poured out three fingers of the nasty stuff, splattering into the cup.

“So, uh, what’s in this, exactly?”

“This and that.” He winked and sealed the bag back up. “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. No, not blue. Pink.”

“Thanks, but I’m really not thirsty. So about that phone—”

“I know, I know, you want to talk to your—” He paused, furrowing his brow and tilting his head. “Cait…Caitlin. And you’re afraid for Jennifer, so very afraid, though you’re trying to tell yourself everything’s fine.”

“I get it,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I did. “You’re a psychic. A mind reader.”

Buddy slapped the plastic cover over his improvised still, frowning as he waved a fluttery hand.

“I hear the machinery of the
universe
,” he said. “So many thoughts, so many voices, crowding everything out of my head. They tried to put me on pills once. Just made it worse. Nothing stops the transmission. I’m Radio Free Buddy.”

Poor guy. I’d seen the unlucky ones like him before. Natural talents who never got the training they needed. It was easy to dig too deep, push the senses too hard, and end up a burnout or a head case.
There but for the grace of Bentley and Corman go I
, I thought, thinking back to my own misspent youth.

Still, he could come in handy. It’d be easier to clear up the mystery of Hive B and get back in good graces with Winslow and his gang if Buddy had any talent for remote viewing.

“I don’t have a phone,” Buddy said, “but I have a
connection
. My sister, she’s singing out across the lines. You need to hear her. Drink.”

I eyed the pink glop. I’d swallowed some pretty dubious concoctions in my day, either for occult purposes or just in the pursuit of a good time, but this was a little extreme even for me.

“Hey,” I said, reaching to hand the cup back to him, “look, not that I don’t appreciate the offer, but I’m going to take a pass—”

“Lauren Carmichael,” he said.

That froze me.

“My sister,” he said, squinting as if listening to a voice I couldn’t hear, “says you think it’s over. But you don’t understand. Everything Lauren Carmichael did and all that she became, everything you
think
you stopped…it was nothing but a
side effect
.”

I should have been able to put it all behind me. Lauren Carmichael was dead. I should know—I’d helped kill her. I’d put her, her followers, and her whole rotten legacy to the torch. I should have been able to sleep easy after that.

Sometimes, though.

Sometimes, if I heard her name, or if I was lying awake in the still hours of the night, I was suddenly right back there again—back in that place I never wanted to go.

Flat on my back on a blood-soaked carpet, paralyzed, my aura shredded, her hands on my body. Forcing her toxic energy inside me, one quivering inch at a time. Hearing her gasp of pleasure as she finished her work and let go.

I should have been strong enough to fight her off. I should have been strong enough, after it was all over, to shrug off the memory and let it go. And I hated that I couldn’t. I hated that it was so easy to slip back to that place in my mind, feeling filthy and worthless all over again like it just happened yesterday.

I’d killed Lauren Carmichael, but I couldn’t kill her ghost.

Maybe this would bring me one step closer.

“Buddy,” I said, lifting the cup to my lips and trying to ignore the stench.

He looked at me, a question in his eyes.

“If this is a trick,” I told him, “I
will
kill you. Understand that.”

“No tricks.” He nodded, his shock of hair bobbing. “No treats either, sorry. Only truth.”

I held my nose and drank it down.

The slime tasted like a rotten animal carcass smells. It coated my tongue and got stuck in the back of my mouth, my gag reflex fighting me as I forced myself to swallow. Blood roared in my ears as the drink hit my stomach, the cell beginning to spin, the ground falling away from my feet and chunks of concrete raining down as the ceiling wrenched itself open to let in a stream of molten light.

Then I was gone.

*     *     *

Home again.

I stood in the middle of South Las Vegas Boulevard under a burning midday sun. Raw desert heat washed over me, stealing my breath, turning distant parked cars into mirages.

Not parked. Abandoned. Crashed. One of the busiest streets in the world was a graveyard of broken-down, rusted, and burned-out shells. Dead taxis and capsized rental cars. I stood alone in the wreckage.

The last living man in Las Vegas.

The Karnak, once a pyramid of glass thirty stories tall, was nothing but a shattered, twisted skeleton of steel girders burned black. Its closest neighbor, a resort built to look like a fantasy castle, had been through a siege: what walls remained were charred and half-battered to rubble. In the other direction, the Taipei Tower—Caitlin’s home—stood skewed on blasted foundations and poised to fall.

A page from the
Las Vegas Sun
blew past my feet, carried on a stray gust of hot wind. I snatched at it, too slow, and only saw the single-word headline before the breeze carried it under the smoldering husk of a taxicab.

GOODBYE
.

Rattling, squeaking wheels turned my head. A stoop-shouldered woman puttered up the sidewalk, her tangled hair poking out from under a dirty lace shawl, pushing a shopping cart piled high with empty cans and clutter. She stopped. As she raised her head, I realized she could pass for Buddy’s twin.

“You aren’t the Thief,” she croaked.

“So I’ve been told.”

“Then who are you?”

I took a step closer, showing her my open hands, trying to be reassuring. She didn’t seem to be afraid of me, though.

“I’m Daniel Faust.”

“I didn’t ask your name,” she said. “I asked
who are you?
Not the same question at all. A reasonably bright dog can learn his own name. Do you even know who you are?”

I gestured at the wreckage. “Is this the future?”

She snorted, waving a wrinkled hand at me.

“How could it be the future if it already happened? Don’t think about past or present. Forget about time, boy, it won’t help you. Think
sideways
. Look
closer
.”

She pointed to my left, at the broken Ionic columns and flame-scorched steps. I looked up at the marquee and frowned.

“This is the Monaco,” I told her. “I’ve been here a hundred times. So why does the sign say—”

“This isn’t your home,” she said. “It’s mine. Call me Cassandra, if you’re needing a name. Not the one I was born with, but it suits me these days.”

Graffiti caught my eye, spattered across a leaning wall. A crescent curve like a sideways moon spray-painted in neon purple, lined with uneven squares. Chaos inside symmetry. It took me a minute to realize I was looking at a picture of smiling teeth.

“He’s the man with the Cheshire smile,” Cassandra said, following my gaze, “and rest assured, he is the reason you’re here.”

“Did he do all this?” I turned toward her.

“This?” She looked into the distance. Faint plumes of black smoke licked the cloudless sky. “This was only the beginning. Some people had a very good idea, though, my brother tells me. They couldn’t kill him, you see. He just keeps coming back. He’ll
always
come back. So they trapped him. Snared him in a land of smoke, under a black sun. Sealed away and left to rot in the darkness.”

Her words fired a memory in the back of my mind. My confrontation with Bob Payton, the rogue engineer who had conjured the smoke-faced men—the same creatures who nearly tricked Lauren Carmichael into triggering the apocalypse. He’d been giddy, telling me about the other realms he and his partners had plumbed.

“In our early work, we came across a world of absolute silence. An Earth stripped bare of resources, of life, of anything at all, crumbing under a cold and black sun. Lonely creatures walked the wastes, creatures born of entropy. The antithesis of life itself.”

And he’d opened a doorway from that world to ours. Just for a minute.

“Unintended consequences,” Cassandra said, her chapped lips spreading to flash a broken-toothed smile, “will fuck you raw, every time. Remember the old woman who swallowed the fly?”

“Cassandra, who is he? The man with the Cheshire smile. What’s his real name?”

“I told you already, those are two different questions. And he plays with names. Sometimes he comes as a friend, sometimes a lover, always with a smile. Sometimes he plays at being a god, but that’s all smoke and mirrors—”

“Please,” I said, “tell me his name.”

“I just
told
you his name, if you’d
listen
. He’s the man with the red right hand, the unweaver, the unmaker. He’s the last word on the last page of the last book, and he does
not
believe in happy endings.” Cassandra raised her chin, her voice strident, echoing off the ruins. “He came here to test us, to judge us, and
we were found wanting
.”

She turned away. Her head sagged.

“We did everything wrong this time around.
Everything
. He barely had to lift a finger to win. Tragedy never visited the Paladin’s doorstep, and she ended up a backwoods sheriff’s deputy; that one needs pain to drive her ambition. The Scribe met his death at the bottom of a vodka bottle. The Witch never found her Knight; they’re supposed to be unstoppable, united…but only for a little while. I could go on: the Thief, the Killer, all the others…”

She looked back toward me. Her eyes downcast.

“And as for the Prophet,” she said with a bitter little laugh, “she was just an old bag lady with a shopping cart full of cans. And nobody listened to her until it was much,
much
too late.”

“If you need a name to hang on his smile,” Cassandra told me, “call him the Enemy. For that is his nature and his role to play.”

I turned in a slow circle, staring up at the broken skyline, trying to wrap my head around the sheer scale of destruction. “And how do I stop him? How do I stop this from happening?”

“You don’t. You can’t.”

I looked back at her. I blinked.

“I don’t believe in no-win situations, Cassandra. There has to be a way—”

She held up a hand and shook her head, her tone almost gentle.

“The very fact that you’re here, standing in the Thief’s shoes, means the Enemy has already won. He’s changing the rules. Perverting the natural order of things. I fear he’s found a loophole.”

“A loophole? In what?”

She strolled up the sidewalk, leaving her shopping cart behind, and waved for me to follow.

“A very, very long time ago, a time old as language itself—as old as wisdom —a story was told. A very
special
story. A mark was made upon the wheel of worlds. And so these souls return, again and again, cursed to play out their parts. Bound to meet their dooms or their triumphs, and woe to any mortal drawn into their tale. Only the Paladin, the chosen one, can defeat the Enemy.”

She shook her head at me, smiling sadly.

“And you are
not
the chosen one, Daniel Faust. You’re merely a man. Here by the grace of cosmic accident and bad luck. Your best hope is to scurry out of the way, like an ant dodging the footfalls of elephants.”

I stopped in my tracks. I grabbed her arm and made her stop too, turning her toward me.

“I don’t believe in ‘chosen ones,’” I told her. “I don’t believe in fate, and I sure as
fuck
don’t believe in rolling over and dying when I can fight instead.
Tell me how to beat him
.”

She studied me for a long minute, looking deep in my eyes.

“Perhaps,” she said, “all hope is not yet lost. I understand my twin is imprisoned. Another of the Enemy’s machinations, no doubt.”

“That’s right.”

“The Prophet’s voice must be heard,” she said. “For there to be the slimmest chance of success, his truth
must
reach the right ears. Will you be his liberator?”

“Wait,” I said. “I thought you said
you
were the Prophet.”

“I was, the last time around. But this story is over—this
world
is over—and the mantle is his to bear.” She paused. “Mine to bear, technically.”

“So you and Buddy…are the same person?”

She spread her hands. “What you’re seeing has already come to pass. I’m told we met in the prison yard. Will meet, for me. Met, for you. See? Time complicates things. Throw out your clocks. Learn to think sideways, while you’re liberating the Prophet’s voice.”

“Just to be clear on this: you’re asking me to bust Buddy out of prison?”

She nodded, grave. I took a deep breath and let it out as a sigh.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll find a way. Somehow.”

“But understand this: by whimsy or spite, the Enemy has swept you up into his grand design. If you thwart his plans, he
will
come for you. Your death will not be a merciful one.”

“He’ll have to find me first,” I said. “I’ve got a little magic of my own.”

She chuckled at me.

“And there you fail. You see, your magic can only change what things are. His magic can change
why
things are.”

Thump
.

The ground shook under our feet. A single, sharp jolt, and a booming sound that reverberated through the ruins. Then another.

Thump
.

Cassandra sighed. She looked up to the shattered skyline.

“My final prophecy,” she said. “I always knew I was going to die today.”

Thump
.

Then I glimpsed it. The shadow of a shape, just out of sight behind the leaning corpse of the Taipei Tower. The shape that slowly lurched forward, making the ground shiver with every thunderous step.

A shape at least thirty stories tall.

“Come on.” I tugged at Cassandra’s shoulder. “Come on, we have to
run
—”

“We?” Her voice was placid. Tired. Resigned. “I told you, this is my home, not yours. You’re not even really here. You’re just watching from afar. A voyeur at the end of the world next door.”

She pulled her shoulder away.

“Now go,” she said, turning her back on me. “I’m meant to die alone. We must all fulfill our part of the story. As we shall, again and again, until the last world dies and sets us free.”

*     *     *

I lay on the concrete floor of Buddy’s cell, flat on my back, head throbbing. Driblets of his foul concoction on my lips, the aftertaste coating my fuzzy tongue like a layer of paint. Empty plastic cup in my outstretched hand.

Buddy crouched over me, wide-eyed.

“I don’t remember how I got here,” I mumbled.

He offered me his hand. “The same way you left.”

I got to my feet, legs wobbly, and spat into the stainless-steel toilet. It didn’t help. Buddy took the cup from me and pressed a warm can of Coke into my hand. I popped the tab and chugged it down.

“Did she explain?” he asked.

I wiped my hand across the back of my mouth.

“Too damn little, but apparently you’ve got an important message to deliver.” I gave him the side-eye. “Do you, uh, know what the message is, and where it goes?”

“I will.” He tapped his ear. “The machinery of the universe will tell me. Radio Free Buddy is on the air, twenty-four seven.”

“I don’t suppose the ‘machinery of the universe’ has a plan for getting you out of here?”

He tilted his head, listening to voices I couldn’t hear. Then he nodded, smiling bright.

“Yes,” he said. “
You
.”

Everybody’s a comedian.

Bad enough I had to find my own way out of the Iceberg, but now I had a tagalong. A tagalong who might be vital to saving the world. A world that, just an hour ago, I didn’t even know was in danger.

That was assuming, of course, I could believe anything I’d just seen. Assuming that it wasn’t some elaborate hallucination caused by an overdose of bad prison wine. For that matter, “Cassandra” might have been more lucid than Buddy, but she didn’t seem much more sane.

Still, I couldn’t deny what had happened to me. Somebody had carved me out of my life and shoved me inside a prison, thanks to a mind hex that affected not only me but, well,
everybody
. There was power, and then there was
power
on a scale I’d never seen before. Cassandra’s claim that I’d been swapped out with “the Thief,” whoever the hell that was, made as much sense as any theory I could come up with on my own.

Didn’t explain why Fleiss wanted to take out a hit on me, but I’d solve one problem at a time.

Speaking of problems, my original plan—prove I never got a trial, post bail, and flee the country—had just gone down in flames. I could get myself out that way, but that’d mean leaving Buddy behind. There was only one way to save my skin and get Buddy where he needed to go.

A good old-fashioned prison break.

“Buddy,” I said, “you and me, we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

*     *     *

Funny thing was, I was okay with it. Trouble had a way of sharpening my senses, putting me on top of my game. And I had plenty of trouble to keep me occupied.

As evening fell, I found myself shuffling along in the chow line, chewing over the problem. It was better than chewing the food. I was so wrapped up in plotting that I almost missed the change in temperature. I was still catching dagger-sharp glares from the Cinco Calles and their buddies, but now they weren’t the only ones. A few of the whites—some of Brisco’s guys and a handful of strangers—gave me the side-eye and dropped into low murmurs as I walked by.

Westie cleared a seat at the table for me, but he didn’t look up from his food.

“Tell me something good,” I said, setting my tray down beside his.

“All out of good news, friend. Brisco spent most of the afternoon in deep consultation with a gentleman of the Latin persuasion. Word is, talks didn’t go so well.”

“The Calles want me that bad?”

“Far as they’re concerned,” he said, “every day you’re breathin’ their air is an unforgivable insult. The Calles are having some kinda leadership shake-up on the outside. Raymundo is up for parole in a few months. He puts you on ice, that’s a feather in his cap once he rejoins his brethren in sunny Las Vegas.”

I dragged a plastic fork along a gray lump of mashed potatoes. I didn’t have much of an appetite.

“Makes sense,” I said. “Killing me, and getting away with it, will make him look like a guy who can get things done. Somebody who isn’t afraid to spill a little blood. What’s Brisco think?”

Westie shrugged. “Brisco doesn’t want a war. And his general course of action, when it comes to problems, is to do whatever makes said problem go away. As quietly as possible.”

“You think he’ll hand me over to the Calles?”

“Not a chance, friend. The prisoners who take this white-solidarity business seriously would skin him alive for it. But just because he’s not handing you over…”

He let the thought trail off.

“Doesn’t mean,” I said, “he won’t stand aside and let them take a shot at me. ‘Oops, sorry, they shanked him when we weren’t looking. It couldn’t be helped.’”

Westie twisted his lips into a bitter smile.

“Now you’re thinking right. Watch your arse, Dan. Raymundo will make a move on you, and soon—it’s not
if
, it’s
when
.”

When I’d finished choking down dinner, I fell in with a ragged crowd of men heading back to Hive C. All my shade of pale, most of them Brisco’s boys.

I’d never felt so alone in a crowd.

Back in my cell, I caught Paul up on current events. He sat on his bunk, a dog-eared paperback by Voltaire nestled in his lap, and sighed.

“You’ve got options,” he said, “but ultimately it comes down to a choice of evils. There’s voluntary segregation, for instance.”

“Voluntary?”

Paul nodded. “Sure. Any prisoner who feels threatened has the right to request voluntary segregation.”

“How’s that work?”

“You know Ad Seg? The hole? Solitary confinement? That’s where they stick you. Hell, you can do your whole sentence in solitary. Pros: you won’t get stabbed. Cons: you’ll probably go insane from the isolation.”

“Not an option,” I said. “What else have you got?”

“Kill him first? Not easy to pull off, considering Raymundo never rolls with less than three of his, er, ‘homies’ to play bodyguard, but you seem like a resourceful gentleman. Of course, then the banger who takes his place will have to kill you to avenge Raymundo, and so on down the line.” He wagged his paperback at me. “Vengeance is an endless cycle. Tragic, really.”

That idea had some merit. Not sure how I’d pull it off, though. I set it on the back burner.

“Of course,” Paul added, “you could also…not be here when the attack happens. Those questions you asked me about people breaking out of the Iceberg. Those weren’t hypothetical, were they?”

I caught the glint in his eye.

“Paul?” I asked. “By any chance, would you be interested in getting out of here?”

“Hmm.” He glanced at his bare wrist, as if checking an invisible watch. “Well, I’ve got nothing else to do for another…forty years or so. So yes, Daniel, yes I would.”

“Forty more years? Christ, what’d you do?”

Paul smirked. “Less than you did, according to
your
rap sheet. But to answer your question, I’m a bad, bad man. A bad, bad man who made the mistake of trusting a public defender with a heavy caseload. I may have committed a tiny little murder, but there
are
such things as mitigating circumstances, you know?”

“If we do this, you’ll be a fugitive for the rest of your life. You okay with that?”

He stretched his arms over his head and stifled a yawn.

“My wife divorced me. She’s made it clear I’ll never see my little girl again, and I’m
pretty
sure my tenure at the university’s been revoked by now. It’s not as if I have a whole lot from my old life to cling to. So. You have a plan?”

“I’m working on that,” I told him.

Later, I lay awake in my bunk, staring at the eggshell paint on the wall and listening to the restless sounds of the prison after dark. They were less jarring than the night before, and it was that much easier to close my eyes and slip, if not into sleep, into an uneasy waking dream.

The alien maggot inside my skull, the gift from the King of Worms, squirmed across the meat of my brain. I could see it when I closed my eyes, its black, rubbery skin still reflecting the light from distant stars. Its hunger growing.