“It’s time,” he said quietly. “Ten minutes until ETE.” I looked over my shoulder and raised my eyebrows questioningly. “Sorry. Estimated time of ether-disruption.”
“Scientists.” I snorted. “Geeks.”
“Supergeek, actually, and proud of it,” he corrected, and tapped his watch. “Jackson …”
No more putting it off. Taking a deep breath, I transferred the keys to my other hand, stripped off the right glove, and then cradled the hunk of metal again, this time against bare skin. The mill was already verified; now it was time to read Charlie. There were the usual bits and pieces of him floating about in the keys. Driving for groceries. Taking Meleah’s puppies to the vet for shots. Cruising in the rain with Elvis wailing about wild horses and hound dogs. The flotsam and jetsam of daily life. The normal results of a reading. Unconsciously, I relaxed and enjoyed the warm weight of a puppy in my lap and the sounds of the King shaking the speakers.
Then it started.
At first, it was almost indistinguishable from the backdrop of the memories. It was just another emotion.
Lost. I’m lost. It was so faint and muted that I expected to see Charlie pull a map from the glove compartment. Just a mild annoyance. Maybe he’d stop at a gas station and ask for directions.
It was because I forgot. For a moment, I forgot what had happened the day before at the caverns. The talent was banged up a bit thanks to reliving Charlie’s death, bent but not broken. Emotions were hazy TV viewing instead of living 3-D, and Charlie wasn’t feeling the kind of lost that a map could do a damn thing about.
Trees. Water.
How do I get in?
Where’s the door?
Where’s the door?
Where is me?
Where, where, where, where, where, where …
“Shit,” I muttered, shoving the keys into my pocket and looking around wildly. As if I’d be able to see anything.
“What?” Hector demanded.
“He’s here,” I said instantly. “He’s looking for a way in. He’s lost. He’s looking for a way home. He’s looking
here
.”
Hector was on his cell phone immediately, but the caverns were easily an hour away. They’d never get there in time. I started toward the mill at a run to warn the others. We had a team of six: Hector, me, and four others. And one of us was about to get real ornery real quick.
The mill didn’t have the history Carlson Caverns did, but it wasn’t all kittens and frigging rainbows, either. Hundreds of years before the phrase “going postal” was around, there’d been a similar one in these parts: “gristed.” Or, to be more precise, “done got himself gristed.” This one hadn’t been a legend needing my confirmation. This had been in the papers of the day. One of the mill workers, I had no idea what his name had been, had flat lost his mind, tossed his coworkers off the roof, then chopped up their bodies with an axe and fed the pieces down the hopper to be milled, a.k.a. gristed. By the time someone found out what had happened, whatshisname—really, what the hell
was
his name?—was chopping off pieces of himself to feed to the hungry mill.
There were no axes here, though. That was a good thing. It’s hard to chop up people without the proper tools, any homicidal maniac could tell you that. Reasonable, logical, but it didn’t stop the screaming from starting.
I hesitated for a split second, then ran on. How bad could it be? Three of them were scientists loaded down with their geeky equipment. The remaining guy was a soldier, but he was unarmed as a safety measure. Everyone was. Not even a penknife among us.
And yet the screaming went on.
As I continued toward the mill, I could hear the grass-muffled pounding of Allgood’s feet behind
me. He pulled even with me as the first person was thrown off the roof. I skidded to a stop and could feel my jaw slacken as the man tumbled through the air, white-coated arms windmilling and mouth stretched wide in a scream. He hit the ground with a highly unpleasant thump and a bounce. He was still twitching, though, when he came to rest; the fall was only a little more than two stories. I liked to think that was an excuse for what I said next, but it probably wasn’t.
“Geeks falling out of the sky. If that’s not a sign of the Apocalypse, I don’t know what is,” I said, awed.
Hector swore and ran into the mill. I didn’t follow, not yet. Instead, I shaded my eyes and peered at the roof, because a little information goes a long way toward not having to realize firsthand that you can’t fly. I didn’t know for sure who was up there—I tended to label the scientists as geeks one, two, and three and the soldier as goon one. Geeks and goons didn’t need names—or so I’d thought. This was geek number two on the roof and unfortunate geek number three on the ground. The guy on the roof doing the tossing, his name was … Damn. His name was … Bob, I pried out of my brain, triumphant.
“Uh, hey, Bob,” I called up. “Can you just, I don’t know, not throw anyone else off the roof for a minute and listen up?”
A cloud crossed the sun, blocking the glare, and I could suddenly see him perfectly. Raging eyes, saliva
cascading over his chin, and his mouth twisted in a hoarse scream. Because he was the one screaming. Without a second’s pause, it went on and on and on. It was the kind that rips throats to bloody shreds and minds to the very same. The worst part was that I didn’t know if it came from Bob himself or the recording playing in him. It reminded me of an old commercial:
Is it live or is it Memorex?
But he didn’t stop or listen. He bent and dragged another form into sight. The goon. I could see blood in the blond hair. Bob hadn’t been able to find an axe, but he’d found something to use to whack his coworkers over the head. A length of wood, maybe. It seemed that when the recording loop within him couldn’t reenact the event exactly, it stuck with the spirit of it: death. Lots and lots of death.
Bob grunted as he moved the soldier over the peak of the roof. Grunted, screamed, grunted, screamed some more. Insanity incarnate. I’d only seen one thing in my life more disturbing than this.
A well and a drowned little girl.
Tasting bile, I tried to hold on to the casual tone. “Bob …” No. That wasn’t who he was now. Jim, Joshua … what the
fuck
had been that guy’s name in the file I’d skimmed?
“Jacob!” I said triumphantly. “Jacob, I know you can hear me. I need you to listen to me, okay?”
Jacob Messersmith was long dead and had nothing to do with this current mess, but a certain pattern
etched into the fabric of reality didn’t know that. The energy, alien and trespassing, flowed along that pattern like water filling an empty riverbed—it brought to the pattern a very limited facsimile of life. An imitation of it. But imitations don’t always know that about themselves. Computer programs are a good example. Jacob didn’t know that he didn’t exist, and Jacob recognized his name.
The screaming stopped. He stared at me, his hands tangled in the dark green T-shirt of the soldier, one heave away from moving forward with his task. “Jacob.” He said it in a voice thick and gravelly. It sounded as if his throat was choked with stones and blood, and it was as far from human as you could get. “Ja-cob.”
But that made sense, because he wasn’t human, was he? He wasn’t even a he.
It
was nothing … nothing that
thought
it was something.
“Jacob, you look like you’re having a bad day. Want to talk about it?” That was me, a shrink to a paranormal rerun. It didn’t get much more screwed up than that. I wasn’t even sure I could talk to a pattern. Did it have enough information imprinted in those violent moments to be able to respond beyond killing? Was there an imprint of Jacob’s mind-set, his emotions and thoughts? Or only his actions?
“Jacob,” I repeated when the doughy face stared down at me blankly. “What’s going on? What’d these guys do to piss you off?”
“Jacob.” There was blood on his lips—from the
screaming, I thought. “Jacob.” The limp form of the soldier bobbled in his grip. “
Gott. Gott
tells Jacob.
Gott erklärte mir
. God tells me. They are against me. They plot. They would murder. They are demons. God tells Jacob to be his right hand. To smite the fallen ones.”
Great—not just an animate pattern but an animate,
schizophrenic
pattern. I had no hopes of reasoning with him. How do you reason with a DVR player? I could only hope to distract him, to make the disk skip, so to speak, to give Hector—
And there he was. On the roof behind Jacob-Bob. He’d left the scientist part behind, and now he was all soldier, loose and tense all in one.
“Jacob,” I called again hurriedly. “Demons. Tell me about the demons.”
“The fallen ones.
Gott
says smite the fallen ones,” he mumbled, the blood streaking his chin as he hefted the unconscious soldier. “
Gott
took their demon wings. They can no longer fly. They can only fall.” And with a horrible smile, he started to toss the soldier.
But Hector got there first. With an arm around Bob’s windpipe, he choked him out, quickly and ruthlessly. With his other hand, he caught the soldier before he tumbled over the edge of the roof. Which was good for me. It saved the awkward decision of do you try to catch the poor bastard or do your damnedest to avoid being hit by his falling body. Instead, I was able to check the guy already on the ground. Both of his legs were bent at brutally
ugly angles, but he was still breathing, and, considering, that definitely put him in the “came out ahead” column for the day.
Then I went into the mill to look for geek number one. I found him in seconds. The blood on Jacob’s mouth hadn’t been from the screaming after all.
Christ.
It took several minutes for us to get the geek and the goon off the roof, our feet slipping and sliding on dangerously decayed wood. As we grunted and yanked at the limp bodies, Hector said, “Charlie?”
“Jesus, I’ve been busy, okay?” I muttered, but I dug my still-naked hand in my pocket and closed them around metal. Dogs, Elvis, rain …
Nothing else.
“He’s gone,” I answered. “Sorry.” And I was.
Although, truthfully, the rest of us seemed to do much better when Charlie wasn’t around.
“Do you drink?”
Hector stood in the doorway of my “room” with a six-pack in his hand. “I wasn’t sure if it would affect your …” He circled a finger to finish the sentence.
“My mojo? My happy hoodoo?” I indicated the desk chair. “Screw it, and bring it on. Tonight I’d drink paint thinner if it was in a nice enough bottle.” I did have the occasional beer while Houdini snuffled around my feet for a sip. It didn’t affect my abilities. I could drink myself deaf, dumb, and blind, and it still wouldn’t have mattered. I’d done it once or twice before, when I was young, stupid, and a little less able to deal. All it did was make the psychic movie a little fuzzy around the edges. It didn’t dull it enough to make drinking a hobby or a necessity. And I wasn’t going to be like those drunken losers who’d hung around the house when I was a kid. The old man included. Mom had tried, but if there was an asshole in the tristate area, she’d fall head over heels for the bastard.
But there are always exceptions, and with what I’d seen today, I was all about exceptions. I accepted an already opened beer from Hector as he twisted off the cap to his own. “Isn’t drinking on duty against the rules?” I took a cool swallow.
“That’s the advantage of being ex-military. If I get caught, the worse they can do is fire me.” He took a long swallow of his own before rubbing his forehead with the heel of his hand. “So … what did we learn today?”
“That reruns are for shit.” And that I missed my dog, my home, my nonhomicidal secretary. Abby had never once tried to throw anyone off a roof for God. Okay, there was the Bible-thumper or two who regularly vandalized my poster. Jacob gave me bad ideas. It would be ironic, considering this situation: toss a man
of
God off a roof because absolutely no one told you to. I was sure God’s hand would ease him to the ground as gently as a feather.
“And that Charlie isn’t necessarily going to be drawn to the places with the most violence. Maybe he can sense things only so far, geographically speaking. Maybe he’s just drifting here and there, and wherever he happens to pass …” I shrugged and took another drink.
“Does he know?” The question was as abrupt as Hector’s thumb was methodical in peeling off his bottle label. “Does Charlie know what he’s doing? Does he know what’s happening?”
I could finish the rest of that without his words.
Because he couldn’t. Charlie couldn’t know, because Charlie wouldn’t cause death and terror. His brother wouldn’t believe that of him. Couldn’t. And Hector was right.
“No.” I shook my head. “He doesn’t know. I’m not sure he even knows he’s Charlie anymore. All he knows is being lost. He’s lost, and he can’t find his way, but I’m not sure there’s any reason behind what he does. Where he goes. What spot he chooses. There’s just lost and a sense of banging futilely at a closed door.” I rested the bottle against my knee. “I’m sure you see the downside to that.”
“We can’t predict where he’ll go. We can’t have the equipment waiting. If … when we finally catch him, it will be a matter of sheer luck.” Hector leaned back in his chair. It wasn’t relaxation, which I wasn’t sure the man was capable of, it was exhaustion. “But the timing is still within parameters. We can’t predict where, but we can predict when. And now we know: evacuate all possible locations for the ETE except one. Eventually we’ll catch him.”