CHAPTER 40
Garrison Vessler had tried to fall asleep, couldn’t, and sat up in bed, groping for the TV remote. He scanned through the channels quickly, paused for a moment on a naked, curvaceous blonde, and finally settled on a documentary on the Discovery Channel about the habits of scorpions.
Hotel rooms had really begun to sicken him. The group hadn’t ever been like this before. It hadn’t ever been this complicated. Nothing like when it all first started, what—just seven years ago? It felt much longer than that.
Vessler realized he was hungry, and paged through the phone book he found in the drawer of the night table. An ad in the Yellow Pages for an all-night pizza delivery place caught his eye, and he reached for the phone.
His cell phone sat beside it, and with a small start Vessler realized he hadn’t turned it back on since that afternoon. Damn Stamford, and damn his own aging brain. He picked up the cell, hit the POWER button, and checked his messages.
The first one made his heart stand dead still in his chest. It was Scott’s voice, high and breathless, and it began with, “Listen to me.”
Garrison Vessler listened with total attention for just over five minutes.
By the end of the message Scott was sobbing and, still with the phone to his ear, Vessler was almost fully dressed.
He was tying the laces on his left shoe when he heard a muffled sound from next door. When something heavy slammed against a wall in Stillwater and Wong’s room, Vessler jacked a round into the chamber of his .45 and glanced at the door to the outside. His skin grew slightly cooler as he weighed his options.
The decision was made for him as five bone-white tendrils punched through the thin connecting door between his room and the agents’. His eyes narrowed to slits, Vessler concentrated hard, even as the door cracked and pulled away from the frame.
As the last few scraps fell away, a fine mist, foglike, began radiating from Vessler’s body, and drops of frigid water collected on his skin. His heartbeat accelerated.
“Knock knock,” a young man’s voice said, and Simon Grove’s widely grinning face popped around the corner. Vessler fired twice at the face, which vanished as swiftly as it had appeared, and then sent three more bullets through the hotel room wall where he thought Grove might be.
He took a tentative step forward, and Grove blurred into the room.
Damn he’s fast, Vessler thought, and fired again, then again, but Grove bounded around the room like a crazed monkey, and before he could pull the trigger once more the young man crashed into his chest, knocked him backward onto the floor. Three tendrils manacled his gun hand and pinned it to the carpet.
“This is easy,” Grove said, and giggled. His face began to distort, and the tendrils of his free hand started to spiral together. Just before his mouth became something that could no longer produce speech, he said, “I don’t know what Brenda was so worked up about.”
Vessler’s breath, which he’d been holding, came out in a smoky white plume at the mention of the name, and Grove paused, puzzled. It had just started to register on him how cold Vessler’s skin was when Vessler reached up and touched the spiral horn-blade, very lightly, with the fingertips of his free hand.
Instantly Grove’s hand froze solid to halfway up the forearm.
For just a moment both men held perfectly still as the horn turned a strange blue-gray.
Then Grove flung himself off Vessler, clutching the frozen tendrils and howling. Vessler covered his ears as Grove’s scream gained volume and the mirror above the dresser cracked. Grove barreled toward the door, slammed into it, and jerked it open with a hand that had suddenly reverted to normal. His other hand stayed fixed, the horn-blade frozen and beginning to web with fine cracks.
The muzzle blast of Vessler’s gun filled the room, not quite as deafening as Grove’s howl but still thunderous, and the bullet blew Grove’s hand into tiny frozen fragments. Most of the pieces ricocheted off the walls and floor, but a few sliced into Grove’s face, and Vessler imagined that he saw the instant when the boy’s last bit of humanity disappeared. Vessler immediately jumped to his feet, ejected the clip, slammed in a new one and fired three more shots, but Grove blurred again, and the shots passed through the open doorway and buried themselves in a Chrysler parked outside, triggering a car alarm.
Vessler paused, uncertain. He couldn’t see where Grove had gone...
...but before he had time to think about it, Grove exploded up from behind one of the two double beds.
The dead-white fingers lashed out like whips. The .45 smashed out of Vessler’s hand and flew clattering under the dresser, and Grove lunged for him again.
Vessler knew he wouldn’t be able to get cold enough to do anything worthwhile for another half hour or so, and after that probably not for a good four or five hours, but he was far from helpless, especially against someone so thoroughly untrained as Simon Grove, augmentation notwithstanding. As Grove came forward, Vessler sidestepped and drove his right elbow into the back of Grove’s neck. The distorted chin cracked into the corner of the cheap motel dresser, and spiny teeth shattered and flew from the grossly distended mouth.
The double impact would have rendered even the toughest of men unconscious or, at the very least, no longer willing to fight. Grove rolled over, shook his head, and got to his feet again with an agitated hiss.
Vessler sprinted out the door.
His car was at the far corner of the lot, and he breathed out heavy relief as he slapped his thigh and felt the lump of keys in his pants pocket. As soon as he left the glow of lights he threw himself full length on the pavement and rolled sideways under a van.
Behind him Grove exploded outside. A young woman two rooms down opened her door and looked out, gasped, and immediately closed and locked the door again.
On his fingers and toes, with his body almost flat to the concrete, Vessler moved sideways again, this time underneath a Pathfinder. He emerged on the far side of the vehicle and glanced up. From two aisles over, where he’d disappeared between the cars, he heard a horrible squeal of rending metal, then saw a car door arc out over the lot with its hinges twisted and mangled. Glass shattered as the door landed. Grove seemed to be tearing the cars apart in his search for Vessler, scraping his way up the aisle like some sort of steam-driven machine. He still howled, though whether in rage, pain, or both Vessler couldn’t tell.
Vessler got to his knees and very gingerly took out his car keys, clenched in one fist so they wouldn’t jingle. Grove’s search was disorganized. He seemed to be thrashing blindly about rather than following any kind of pattern, which, Vessler thought, made him only slightly less dangerous.
On all fours now, Vessler crept down the length of the line of cars and prayed that Grove’s hearing wasn’t augmented, or that if it were, that he wouldn’t be able to distinguish anything over all the noise he was making himself.
Vessler raised his head and saw the Town Car parked at the end of the line. He’d left it right next to a Ford coupe, but in the past hour the Ford owner had left. Now the Lincoln sat by itself, a gap of roughly eight feet between it and the next car. He didn’t know if Grove would see him cross the gap or not.
His heart whirred in his chest as he touched the "DOOR OPEN" button on his key chain. Vessler gathered his legs under him, pressed the button, and the Lincoln’s door unlocked with a muted thump.
Immediately the sounds of Grove’s frenzied search cut off, but Vessler had already reached the car and jerked the door open.
He had one leg inside when he risked a glance over his shoulder and saw Grove barreling toward him across the parking lot, bounding over car roofs, his hands distended and reaching out.
Vessler slammed the door shut and locked it as he cranked the engine. He jammed the car into gear and left two broad streaks of rubber on the pavement as it tore out of the parking lot. The road outside the motel was a four-lane divided highway, and Vessler accelerated all the way across, weaving through cars on both sides of the median as he powered over the narrow strip of grass.
Vessler’s stomach knotted and rolled as he tramped down on the accelerator. His skin rose in millions of goose pimples as he began to let himself feel a twinge or two of tentative panic.
Simon Grove hadn’t looked much like his yearbook photo.
As he sped away from the lights of the motel, the glimpse he’d gotten of Grove coming after him finally registered. Grove had been reaching out with those bizarre, grotesque hands.
Hands. Plural.
The hand he’d frozen, the one Vessler saw fly apart, had reached out after him along with the undamaged one. Regrown from the stump in seconds.
His own hands covered over with a cold sheen of sweat unrelated to his augmentation. After about ten miles he started scanning the side of the road for a pay phone.
Twenty minutes later he spotted a likely-looking phone booth at a gas station and parked the Lincoln in front of it. He left the engine running, went to the phone and punched in a long series of numbers.
The phone rang while he stared back down the highway. Vessler didn’t realistically think he’d see Simon Grove charging down the center line toward him, waving those freak-of-nature fingers, but...better cautious and alive than confident and dead.
The line clicked, and a smooth female voice said, “Garvin and Associates.”
“Let me speak to Marketing.”
A minuscule pause. “I’m sorry, sir. No one in that department is available.”
He heard keys tapping.
Vessler still stared down the highway, but his eyes stopped focusing. The hand holding the phone spasmed slightly. He tried not to drop the handset.
“Marketing.” Then again, “Marketing. Connect me with Marketing, please.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
His eyes closed. “No one in Marketing is available?”
“No, sir. I’m sorry.” More keys tapping. “Sir? Please hold for Management.”
Muzak started playing.
He hung up—and immediately pulled the handset back off the hook, propped it against his shoulder, and stared at the keypad.
And did nothing.
He held the phone against his ear for a few seconds longer, index finger hovering over the buttons, before he acknowledged to himself that there really weren’t any other numbers he could call.
As soon as he hung up again, the phone rang. That would be “Management,” and they’d have his ass.
“Stamford, you bastard,” Vessler breathed.
He could imagine how it looked. An uncatalogued augment, one he might have been able to take in before but had chosen not to, had just killed two ranking agents. Had almost killed him. And only hours before a full status report and project audit.
He went to the car and slumped onto the hood as the ringing continued.
“You bastard. You and Jorden. You finally got me.” He bent over, tried not to be sick. How could he have slipped this far? How could he have let so much get past him?
You’re getting too old, that’s how. Too old and too slow.
With clenched teeth Vessler ignored the phone, got back in the Lincoln, drove back across the narrow median strip, and headed for a used car lot he remembered passing earlier.
AUTHOR'S NOTES FOLLOW IN THE COMMENT SECTION.
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1 comments:
My brain is mush tonight. No intelligent comments. Maybe later!
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