Authors: Max Allan Collins
“You all right?” Alec asked Max.
“I feel good . . . You two?”
Mole said, “This is fun. If I had a frickin' smoke, my life would be a song.”
Joshua said, “I'm alive, too, Little Fella.”
“Stay that way, Big Fella,” she said. “Let's get upstairs then—I'll take the point . . . Mole, you ride drag.”
Nodding, they fell into line and paraded up the stairs, their eyes everywhere—another wave of guards, coming up behind them, would be a bad thing . . .
There were six bedrooms on the second floor and, Max supposed, probably an equal number on the third floor, though she had never been up there. Using hand signals, she sent Mole and Alec on upstairs, while she and Joshua checked the rooms on this floor, starting at the end farthest from Lyman Cale's bedroom.
They found nothing—no further guards, no guests, no Franklin Bostock—and had just arrived outside Lyman's door when the other two came down from the third floor and signaled that they had struck out up there as well.
They fanned out, Max in the lead again, Alec and Joshua on either side behind her, Mole off to one side, watching their backs.
Max opened the door. Stepped in.
Lyman Cale still lay in the bed; if possible, he seemed even smaller, as if he'd shrunk further, a withered rind lost in a white nightshirt, cables coming in and out of him, keeping Logan's uncle alive, technically at least—as the surrounding monitors and gizmos attested.
Franklin Bostock—again in a black blazer, white shirt with no tie, and gray slacks—stood on the far side of the bed near Cale's head. He appeared calm, and their entry into the room seemed to barely register on him.
Alec and Joshua came in and spread out again behind Max.
“Thought you'd be back, Ms. Guevera,” Bostock said, his voice detached, even cold.
But Max's voice was frigid. “Ray White.”
Bostock looked up at her, unimpressed. “What of him?”
“He was an eleven-year old boy.”
Bostock shrugged. “You know what they say about omelets.”
“Is that what the boy is to you?
Was
to you? A bro-
ken egg?”
“You're a soldier, Ms. Guevera. All wars have their casualties. I imagine you've cut quite a swath through my men, coming this far.”
“Wars? Casualties?” She took a menacing step forward. “Those things I know about . . . I also know about atrocities. Why? Why an innocent child?”
She took another step, and a small caliber pistol revealed itself in Bostock's hand.
And it was pointed at the head of Lyman Cale, not that that comatose figure had any realization of it.
“Take another step,” he said, “and there will be another casualty in this war.” A smile spread, like a terrible rash, across his bland face. “You might make it before I blow Lyman's brains—what's left of them—all over this pillow. But I doubt it.”
She just stood there.
Bostock's eyes met hers. “You're still considering it, though, aren't you? Go ahead. Make your move—you may find me a more formidable adversary than you might imagine . . . And then you can explain to Logan Cale how you got his uncle killed.”
The thought of what had happened to Seth because of Logan flitted across her mind, and in that moment what this sadistic son of a bitch had just said triggered an epiphany in Max.
Logan wouldn't have intentionally put Seth in danger—not any more than Logan would have done with her, when she accepted missions. It was always her choice, and it would have been the same for her sib. And the truth was, Seth liked taking risks even more than Alec or Zack.
Max understood why Logan had lied now. That is, she understood his act of omission, not commission . . .
If this situation went sideways, as it very well might at any moment, there would be no way in hell she could ever explain to Logan, no way she could bear to tell him, if she were to cause him to lose his uncle, the last relative of his on the planet who had ever seemed to care about him . . .
Bostock's voice grew sharp. “Your two playmates—on their knees. Hands behind their necks.”
She could feel Alec and Joshua looking at her, and she turned to them, nodded once, and they complied, dropping as if in prayer, elbows winged as hands locked behind heads.
“You seem to think you're going somewhere,” Max said.
Bostock nodded. “Out of here, for a start.”
“How exactly?” Max crossed her arms. “You really think we're just going to let you through? Or are you gonna haul ol' Lyman out of bed and yank those tubes out of him and use him as a hostage? I'd pay to see that.”
Bostock turned a bit and trained the pistol on Max. “Ms. Guevera . . .
you're
my hostage. And I think you'll comply—after all, accompanying me will be your only chance, however faint, of rescuing Logan Cale.”
“And why is that?”
“Because I'll be taking you to where he's being held.”
Max froze. “Then . . . you knew White's plan all along! You were
part
of it.”
Bostock said, “Familiars do get . . . familiar. We share many things with each other—it's a brotherhood, after all.”
“Yeah, like Cain and Abel.” She shook her head. “If you knew what White was up to—that he planned to use me to get Ray back—why did you interfere with it? Why kill that boy?”
The man's eyes flared. “What, and allow Ames White to consolidate his power with the Conclave? I don't think so.”
Her head was spinning. “How could a kid like that consolidate White's power?”
Bostock sighed, as if he were dealing with a child. “Ames White had hopes and dreams for his son—and there is a small but powerful faction among the Conclave who took the youngster's potential seriously. Others of us considered that boy weak—his mother an ordinary who betrayed us, his father a failure, the whole family nothing but a negative influence to our goals . . . Let's just say I removed a small problem.”
She let out a bitter laugh. “So, for all your posing . . . you and this Conclave are really no better than the ordinaries, are you?”
Bostock looked baffled, and offended.
“Petty jealousy,” she said. “Nothing more than petty jealousy cost that boy his life.”
“Petty?” The word seemed to explode out of Bostock. Suddenly the calm bureaucrat was a seething demon. “It was White's family that burdened the Conclave with you transgenics in the first place! White's father—this Sandeman, you consider him
your
father don't you, all of you?—Sandeman lost his nerve, and now we have you mutated rabble to deal with. That family must be made to pay!”
Max frowned. “What is the Conclave's obsession with Sandeman and the transgenics? . . . What possible threat could we be to you and your twisted goals?”
In an instant, Bostock was the calm bureaucrat again. “You don't know?” He seemed amused—quietly so. “You really don't know?”
Max's hands went to her hips. “What don't I know?”
Bostock's upper lip curled, and his words dripped venomous contempt: “Anything. You . . . don't . . . know . . .
anything
.”
“I'm crushed, Franklin,” she said. “And here I thought you held me in such high regard.”
The gun still trained on her, he shook his head. “You have no idea how important you are . . .”
“Now I'm
important
?”
“. . . and you've just delivered yourself to me all tied up in a Christmas ribbon. But you are dangerous. Perhaps too dangerous to serve as a hostage . . .”
He pointed the gun at Max's head now, eyes tightening.
Alec and Joshua both started to rise, but Max patted the air, telling them to keep their position.
“If I'm so valuable, so important,” she said, easing a half a step toward him, “why kill me?”
“Your death is inevitable—it's just a question of where and when . . . though it must be soon.”
“I need to die . . .
soon
.”
“Yes. You see, killing you represents victory, Max. May I call you ‘Max'? ‘Ms. Guevera' is too formal for us now, don't you think? . . . Your death means we win.”
“You know, I always knew you snake-cult kids were a wacky bunch.” She edged another few inches. “But maybe you can explain why the death of a mutant like me could be so important to a movement that dates back thousands and thousands of years . . .”
His laugh had a hint of hysteria in it. “You've really never figured it out? . . . And Sandeman never
told
you?”
“Never met the guy. He was kind of a deadbeat dad, ya get right down to it.” With each exchange now, she was narrowing the distance between them.
“A pity,” Bostock said. “He might've had some fatherly advice for you. He might have told you to be more careful.”
She squinted at him. “Am I in the same conversation? 'Cause I am definitely not following you, Franklin.”
His arm straightened, the gun aimed squarely at her forehead. “You're going to die, that's a given . . . but considering all the grief you've given us, perhaps you do deserve to know just how badly you failed.”
She moved another half step.
“That's far enough,” he said, punctuating the sentence with a gesture of the pistol.
She halted. “
How
did I fail?”
He smiled, almost fondly. “Max, Max . . . you were the one . . .
the
one!”
“The . . . one.”
“The
chosen
one, the new messiah!”
“Me. I'm Jesus.”
“Yes. And how sad to die so close to one's birthday.”
The guy was raving; even for a snake-cult practitioner, Bostock was 'round the bend. Max wasn't sure how much longer she could stall . . .
“Then maybe after you kill me,” she said, “I'll be back in seven days . . .”
“I don't think so. This is a Christmas tale, Max . . . not Easter. So here's a gift: your ‘father,' White's real father, the fabled Sandeman, he got Manticore pulled out from under him by a clandestine organization inside the government.”
“That much I know.”
Bostock went on as if she hadn't spoken. “But before he left, before Colonel Lydecker and the others took over, he made one special child. You, Max.”
“Well. Maybe my daddy
did
love me.”
“In his way I'm sure he did. He did something very special for you, Max—he spared you any junk DNA . . . You're the only person—ordinary or transgenic or even Familiar—on this entire planet who is like that. Even all the other Manticore freaks, like pretty boy here, and Jo Jo the dog-face boy . . . they have
some
flawed DNA. But not yours.”
“And this makes me the Messiah how?”
Bostock frowned at her, as if he was dealing with an imbecile. “You
still
don't see the bigger picture? A pity Sandeman didn't put a few more grains of IQ into that test tube.”
She just looked at him. With a Christmas fruitcake like this, what was there to say?
Bostock, his voice hushed, asked, “Do you know about the Coming?”
Oh boy.
“. . . The Coming?” she said. “Y'know, considering I'm the Messiah and all, you'd think I would . . . but why don't you fill me in.”
Bostock's eyes showed white all around. “The Coming is the end for most . . . but the beginning for our people. Thousands of years of breeding have gone into preparing us for survival from the Coming.”
“You still haven't told me what the Coming
is
.”
He raised his chin and the eyes had a wild cast. “When the comet comes, it will signify the end of the old . . . and the beginning of a brand new world.”
Ames White's words echoed in her mind:
I want Ray to wake up Christmas morning in a brand new world.
“This comet,” Max said, “when . . .”
Bostock gestured to the ceiling . . . the sky . . . with his free hand. “It's visible once every 2021 years—that means this year. The last time was—”
Abruptly, Alec entered the conversation: “The Christmas star of Bethlehem . . .”
Bostock bowed, just a little. “Very good, young man.”
Max swallowed. “And, uh . . . how exactly do I become the new messiah, out of a comet passing over the planet . . . two thousand years after the last messiah was born?”
He held the pistol steady on her, his gaze as steady as it was crazed. “Hard for me to believe you've had no signs . . . that Sandeman didn't find a way to tell you.”
The markings!
Over the last year, runes that had started popping up on her flesh—new, instant tattoos unwantedly decorating her body, markings Logan had tried to translate, with no luck.
Bostock was wrong—Sandeman
had
found a way to let her know! She just hadn't figured it out, till this moment . . .
“With the coming of the comet,” Bostock was saying, in a hushed voice worthy of church, “there will be a release of a biotoxin. It will wipe out the ordinaries—all those too weak to fight, too weak to be part of the new, pure order.”
No need to stall him, she thought. Bostock was a zealot—he loved the sound of his own voice expressing the “sacred” beliefs of his cult.
“Only luck has prevented the catastrophe from repeating itself,” he went on, using the bully pulpit that was the gun in his hand. “The comet is on an elliptical orbit that has brought it close enough for the biotoxin to reach Earth only once before—what do you think wiped out the dinosaurs? That time around, the ice age destroyed the toxin.”
Max asked, “And this time around?”
“Christmas Eve—midnight, when the twenty-fourth becomes the twenty-fifth . . . that will be the next time the comet passes this close to the planet.”
Alec said, “Close enough to drop off the biotoxin.”
“Yes,” Bostock said. “Death to the dinosaurs that walk the earth today—the ordinaries. The weak. Life to the Familiars. The strong.”
Alec asked, “Which makes Max the Messiah how?”
“She is the only person on Earth completely immune to the virus.”
Max said, “Because of Sandeman.”
“Yes,” Bostock said. “Even those of us with our special breeding face a small risk, as do the transgenics, but all of us—Familiars and test-tube mutants alike—should emerge unscathed. You, on the other hand, Max—there's no ‘should' about it.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Because I'm the ‘Messiah'?”