Technomancer (20 page)

“Bad how?” I asked.

“What?”

“The world you walked into first. You said it was bad. What was it like?”

McKesson stopped and looked at me with guarded eyes. “All glaring, blue-white light. Like heaven maybe, except hot and uncomfortable. I think I might have gone mad out there, if I’d stayed much longer. The ground was reflective, like ground glass or diamond dust.”

“Sounds enchanting.”

He snorted. “It might have been with goggles and a gallon of sunscreen. What was really upsetting was the rip itself. It wasn’t in the same location on the other side, you see. That happens sometimes. I had to travel for miles across—I don’t even know how to describe it. The place was like an endless beach of blinding tiny mirrors. I came back with a severe sunburn. Radiation burns, the docs told me. My own primary care physician reported me to some Department of Energy people, suspecting I’d been playing with unshielded uranium or a similar substance. Maybe they still think that. I’ll get skin cancer in another decade, they told me. Sometimes, when I wake up, I taste metal in my mouth and my bones ache…and I know why.”

I hadn’t considered the possibility of a radiation dose. I decided to change the topic.

“What about these Gray Men?” I asked. “They’re coming through at will now, killing people in weird ways. Have they always been able to do that?”

“That’s all new. Usually, we get some kind of beast wandering through—not people like us.”

“Beast? You mean like a monster?”

McKesson shook his head. “No rubber suits. Just their idea of animals, I suppose. Natural enough on their side. I mean, if you opened a path to another time on Earth, you might get dinosaurs trotting out of it, right? Is a dinosaur a monster, or just another animal?”

“I suppose that depends on whether or not you’re selected for dinner.”

The ambulance showed up a few minutes later. McKesson waved them toward the landlady. He gave them the impression he was a cop arriving on the scene and I was the discovering witness. When the paramedics were busy going
through the motions with the corpse, he beckoned to me. I followed him. Together we walked out to his car, which was parked out on the street.

“We can take off,” McKesson said. “The old lady is their problem now.”

I found myself glancing over my shoulder at the dead woman in the breezeway. I wondered if I would end up like that someday. Maybe it would happen in an alien desert under three strange moons.

McKesson climbed into his car and pressed the lock button, just in case I got any ideas about climbing in with him.

“Now disappear quick,” he said, “or you’ll be stuck when a patrol car shows up.”

I didn’t disappear. Instead, I leaned near his driver’s-side window and kept talking. “We didn’t find Holly.”

“She’s gone, and I have to get going too. My best advice is to forget about her.”

“I can’t do that.”

McKesson checked his watch. “I’ve got to go.”

“What? Are you late for a wedding or something?”

He twisted his lips. “Police business,” he said.

“Just show me your watch for one second.”

He made no move to do so. In fact, he scooted his sleeve down over his watch, so I couldn’t see it at all. At that moment, I became certain he was heading to the site of yet another event.

“You’ve detected another rip, haven’t you? Somewhere else?”

McKesson shook his head and stared through his windshield. He put on his seatbelt.

“You might want to step back, sir,” he said out of the side of his mouth. “I don’t want to run over your toes.”

I had no idea where McKesson might go next, but Holly’s apartment was clearly a dead end now. I recalled that when searching for a kidnap victim, the odds of finding them were the highest in the first half hour after the crime. If McKesson knew of another rip showing up, I wanted to be there to check it out. It was the only lead I had.

“Come on,” I said. “I’ll listen. I’ll even follow your rules this time.”

“I don’t need a partner, Draith.”

“These things are appearing all around me anyway. You’re going to end up coming back to wherever I am. Why not let me check them out with you?”

For some reason, that argument got through to McKesson. Maybe because it was true. He hit the unlock button and I ran around the car, half expecting him to pull away before I could get to the passenger door. He didn’t. I climbed in, and we drove off together down the dark streets.

McKesson and I drove through the city, following his watch. It pointed downtown, and after circling around the southern end of the Strip a few times, he and I looked up. Our eyes met. We’d both figured it out at the same time.

“Why the Lucky Seven, again?” McKesson groaned. “Rostok’s going to be pissed.”

“Will he come out and scold you?”

“No, he never comes out of his domain. Most of them don’t. He’s like a spider in there. But he has plenty of goons to do his complaining for him.”

Thinking of Bernie Kinley, I had to agree. That man definitely qualified for classification as a “goon.” I craned my neck out the passenger window and stared up at the towers. They formed two oblong shapes, thrusting upward side by side, looking like a giant tuning fork aimed at the sky. At night, the building was more attractive. I liked the way the walls ran with green lights.

McKesson parked his car, and we crossed the asphalt toward the eastern tower. I thought about the location of other recent rips. I could see a pattern.

“They’re chasing me, aren’t they?” I asked.

“The Gray Men? Maybe.”

“No, not maybe. I was at Holly’s place yesterday. About a dozen hours after I left, they kicked in her door. Now they are popping up at the towers, where I spent most of today. They are one step behind me.”

He turned his head to look at me. “You think a rip is going to open in Mrs. Townsend’s room again?”

I nodded. “A strong possibility. Only Jenna’s not there—I moved her, fortunately. She should be safe.”

McKesson began to trot. “If we get there first, they won’t be able to come through,” he said.

I ran after him, and we raced to the elevators. McKesson paused to call their security. Two unsmiling men showed up and handed the detective a keycard pass without comment. They followed us up to the eighteenth floor, but stayed in the elevator lobby. I could tell they were annoyed. I recalled Bernie telling me that they preferred to handle security issues on their own, but they clearly had their orders to cooperate with McKesson.

We entered Jenna’s old room just as the space inside began to warp. I saw right away there was going to be a problem: the warping had begun in the region of the sliding glass door. The slider and the curtains were rippling. I heard the glass rattle and shiver, as if there were a storm outside.

McKesson gave a nasty laugh when he saw it. “If they don’t pay attention and come through into that, this is going to be great.”

It wasn’t great. A figure stepped through, wearing normal clothing. A hood covered his face. His hands were
covered by black leather gloves with the fingers cut away. Those fingers weren’t gray, I realized with a shock.

The moment the figure was firmly in the room, the sheet of glass that formed the sliding door exploded in a gush of blood. Stricken, the man staggered and pitched onto the table where Jenna and I had consumed a bottle of century-old wine the night before. He quivered and died, his body winged by blades of glass and shreds of fabric from the curtains.

“You missed, buddy,” McKesson said to the corpse. He nudged the body until it slipped off the table onto the carpet. “What the hell is this? A frat boy?”

I inspected the dead man, grimacing. We were clearly not dealing with a Gray Man. He was quite human. He had a growth of black beard, cut short and bristling. His hazel eyes stared up at the ceiling above us. There were strange tattoos on his neck that looked like tentacles trying to crawl up out of his shirt.

“Damned amateurs,” McKesson grumbled. “How the hell did he step out to wherever he was and then get back here again?”

I peered into the smoky space that filled the balcony. I couldn’t see much. It was dark on both sides of the opening. The darkness, plus a lack of caution, had killed our suspect.

“I’m going through,” I said.

“Are you crazy?”

“Yeah, but I have to take a look. Someone is sending rips through wherever I’ve just been. Holly might have been taken by this guy—or his friends.”

“You are stepping out again for a stripper?” he asked. “On a maybe?”

“No one else is coming through to our side. Maybe there is no one else over there. Or maybe there is and I’ll find out
who’s trying to kill me. Clearly, it’s not just the Gray Men who are involved in all this.”

“Whatever happened to following my lead?”

“Look, they’re going to keep trying for me. Are you coming or not?”

McKesson shook his head. “Hell no,” he said. “But you go ahead. When they tear you up and toss you back, I’ll put a bullet in your brain out of compassion.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said, and I stepped out.

The far side was pitch black, but I could tell I wasn’t out in the open desert this time. I was in a room of some kind. The sounds were different, as were the smells and the temperature of the air. All the purring background city sounds had vanished. It was cooler now. The air seemed still and dank. Disoriented and fearful, I dug out my cell phone and used the pale blue radiance from its screen to illuminate the room around me. I knew I could be literally anywhere—but so far I didn’t sense anything dangerous.

I took a step or two forward, feeling my way. My eyes were still adjusting a moment later when I heard a heavy
whump
sound behind me as if something had been thrown. I whirled with my .32 automatic in my hand, held my fire as I looked down to see a man-shaped form had slumped behind me onto the floor, right where I’d appeared a moment earlier.

It wasn’t moving. I kicked it over onto its back. Then I knew.

It was the dead guy with the glass in his chest. McKesson must have tossed him through the opening after me, erasing evidence as usual.

“McKesson, you bastard,” I muttered.

“Who’s there?” called a quiet voice. A female voice.

I turned slowly. I could see more now, as my eyes had gotten used to the gloom. I walked toward the voice with
my gun out. I held the cell phone up, but it went into sleep mode. I fumbled with it, and when it lit up again, I saw her.

Holly was sitting on the floor. She was shackled to a structure of some kind. I took two steps more toward her, and she squirmed in fear.

“It’s me, Holly,” I whispered. “Quentin Draith.”

“Get me out of here before they come back,” she hissed at me.

“Who are they? The Gray Men?”

“I don’t think so. They’re some kind of freaks. They like to cut up meat. I think they’ll cut us up too, if we stay here.”

The cultists
, I thought to myself. I used the sunglasses to remove her bonds and helped her to her feet. I saw the place where she had been sitting. There was a row of shackles there, indicating the spot had been used to chain people up before this. I saw one other object, and squatted down to pick it up. It was a shoe. A black, brightly polished shoe. I looked it over carefully.

“What the hell are you doing?” Holly demanded.

“I think I know who this belongs to,” I said, holding up the shoe. “Robert Townsend.”

“Who the hell cares about a shoe?”

“Just carry it for me, OK?”

Holly did it, but she clearly thought I was crazy. I didn’t care. If that shoe matched the one Jenna had packed up, it was worth carrying out of this hole.

I led her back toward the spot where I’d come into this place. I took a moment to look around. Clearly, we were underground. There were drains in the concrete floor, and they looked as though they’d drained away years’ worth of blood.

I soon found the spot where I’d stepped into this place. The body of the man I’d seen come into the hotel room a
moment ago was there, cooling on the floor. But I didn’t see the vortex.

“How do we get out of here?” Holly asked.

“It was right here,” I said, feeling around in front of me like a blind man. The cell phone kept going to sleep every few seconds, casting us into total darkness. I shook and cursed it every time.

“What was here?”

“Do you know this guy?” I asked.

“What?”

I toed the body at our feet and aimed the light down toward it. Holly gave a little whoop of fear.

“He might be one of the guys who grabbed me out of my apartment,” she said. “Did you kill him?”

“No, he killed himself. But when you saw him a minute ago, didn’t he step into a smoky region? An area that looked like a heat shimmer?”

I brought the cell light to her face. She looked terrified and baffled at the same time. “I haven’t seen him since I was dragged here,” she said.

Then I finally got it. Hadn’t McKesson said they’d “missed”? Well, maybe they’d screwed up in more ways than one. There was no rip down here for me to find. This spot was a one-way chute from the hotel room to this dungeon. I had stepped through, and McKesson had tossed the body through after me, but there was no way back. The pathway the cultist had used to enter the hotel room started someplace else.