All the Devil's Creatures (39 page)

“Get on that boat, tramp. If you have one of those golden embryos aboard, you’d better hand it over. Otherwise we’re going to sink your friend into this bloody swamp and you’re going to show me your way in. I’ve got a big-pharma rep willing to pay a fair sum for that technology. I’ve come too far to lose it now.”

Marisol glanced at Bobby and saw that he had fully gone under, his breathing more labored. “Alright,” she said, pointing to a space beneath the boat’s console. “Yes, we did manage to grab one of the embryos. It’s right down there in that compartment. Just let me get it, and then please let us go.”

The Prince nodded and Marisol boarded the boat. She bent down and began messing with things, looking busy. Then she said, “The latch is stuck. It’s right in here…”

“Oh for God’s sake.”

The Prince leapt into the boat, causing a precarious rocking back and forth.
I didn’t expect it to be this easy
. And as he steadied himself, waving the gun toward the water by his side, Marisol lunged, driving her head home into his scrawny torso. The Prince buckled up and went over the side of the boat and would have fallen into the bayou had he not hit a pier post and bounced back on board. He grabbed her as he fell forward and then they both tumbled over the other side and into the black water.

They wrestled for the gun. Marisol held tight to the Prince’s wrist, keeping the weapon pointed into the air. She could feel the sandy bottom beneath her feet—maybe five feet down. She was stronger than him, but he had two inches on her—just enough to keep his nose above the surface. She knew she would tire soon and take in water, and then he would overpower her. She brought a knee up, aiming for his crotch, but could not accomplish a solid blow through the murk. The bastard sputtered but kept hold of the gun.

Then she heard sirens. A car door slammed. Boot heels ran on the pier’s weathered planks.

“Drop that weapon or I’ll shoot you both, goddammit.”

Marisol looked up to the pier and saw Sheriff Seastrunk standing there silhouetted in the noonday sun with his weapon pointed down at them. She released her grip on the Prince’s wrist and pushed herself back through the water, praying the sheriff would shoot him before the Prince could shoot her. She needn’t have worried; the Prince was not so bold—he kept his hands in the air and dropped his gun into the bayou.

•

Geoff drew Marisol’s gun and held it to his side, at the ready. He felt a controlled, impassioned anger as if winding himself up for a killer closing argument: “Why don’t you tell me what this is all about. Then we’re getting the hell out of here—you have a date with the F.B.I., you sick sack of evil.”

“Don’t be foolish, young man. The Congressman might be dead, but I still have friends in the highest reaches of your government.” A brittle, terrifying chuckle. “The one you call the Prince, your ally who led you to my door—

“He’s no friend of mine—”

“I have known all along that Semitic swine planned to betray me—to sell our science to the drug companies where it might benefit the great unwashed, the degenerate masses. We’re saving a bunk for that swarthy Brutus on a certain Caribbean bay.”

Echoes of T-Jacques again, worried he’d wind up dead or in Gitmo. What elements of officialdom might still be involved in Moth Wing, wittingly or not? From obsolete Cold Warriors toiling in shadowy crannies of the nation’s security agencies, to corporate chieftains and the warped scions of degraded old families, right down to a rogue unit of the Texas Rangers—not working to further the Doctor’s plans in any organized fashion, but following orders by habit from dark forces who answered to men like Duchamp. Corrupted soldiers propping up the Doctor’s minor but demonic empire—an empire he had built through the his sinister intelligence, his aberrant longevity, and the sheer force of his hate.

The Doctor laughed and flipped a switch on his desk and Geoff felt the gun grow hot as a cloud of smoke emanated from a vent along the far wall, engulfing his hand up to the wrist. When the heat became too painful, he dropped the weapon and it clunked onto the Persian rug, dissolving in the smoke. The smoke did not dissipate but returned to the vent—leaving the small pile of reddish dirt the gun had become.

“Nanoparticles,” the Doctor said, with something approaching a dull gleam in those dead eyes. “Hyper-corrosive. My engineers designed those particular molecules to seek out gunpowder and reduce the metal containing it to its elemental structure. A rather peaceful and charming method of arms control, don’t you think?”

Geoff felt fear but pushed it away with an absurd thought that the gun’s dissolution seemed like something from an old cartoon. He considered the possibilities, started to piece things together. “You people, the Moth Wing scientists, you harnessed nanotechnology and engaged in genetic engineering to create the kind of living metal of the disc outside, the razored dragonflies.”
Maybe just for the hell of it; maybe for more nefarious purposes. But that still doesn’t explain Joey, his powers.

The Doctor smiled and it was like a horrible fault opening across the front of his face.

“And the boy—you’ve done something to Joey.”

The child looked straight ahead, eyes distant and jaw slack as if entranced.

“He is a powerful young man.” The Doctor said, turning his gaze to the boy. “Aren’t you?”

“
Jawohl, mein Vater.
”

“We have a connection, here, do we not?” The Doctor pointed to his shiny, hairless temple.

“
Jawohl, mein Vater.
”

“Willie,” Geoff said. “Snap out of it. He’s got Joey under some kind of hypnosis.”

But Willie only shook his head and wept.

“No, Mr. Waltz,” the Doctor said. “Young Josef, named for my late protégé, is coming into his own.”

The Doctor’s laugh turned Geoff’s stomach.

“No rough beast, this child,” the old Nazi said. “Our boy is the perfected Aryan—vanguard of the master race all right-thinkers have sought for so long. We destroyed or repaired all traces of degenerate genes upon conception—nanotechnology and genetic engineering, as you suspected. To give rise to flawlessness personified. And then we went further. He is self-repairing, as you have seen.”

Geoff started as the old man danced a little jig beside his desk. “Not bad for a 118-year-old, no? I have put that technology to use in my own body. But Josef, ah Josef—he is so much more. We were able to go into the genetic structure of the brain itself, from conception. We have unlocked mental powers about which we could only speculate before. Telepathy, telekinesis, not to mention super-intelligence—Josef! 813 times 1609.”

The boy spoke in a soft monotone. “1,308,117.”

That sick laugh again. “Just a little parlor trick to give you the idea.”

Geoff felt his rage and fear threaten to wash away in a tide of pure scientific fascination. “The embryos—they look brainless. Surely not like Joey—”

“Of course not. The clones are mere vessels for self-repairing organs, which we had just begun to sell to a chosen few. Both to finance the project’s end-game—” a disgusting wink to Joey—”and as part of the grander design.”

The Doctor’s leer toward Joey snapped Geoff to. “What do you want from him?” He nodded in the direction of his client, who stared at the floor. “And what’s Kincaid got to do with it?”

“The old fool provided a test-surrogate, nothing more. Josef is mine. And he will rule the world. Congressman Duchamp—quite a devolution from the elder members of the line, but good stock nonetheless—and his associates, all similarly situated titans of the globe, did not know the details of the project. Beyond the organ-trading, that is. But they knew the general outlines. The women of their class will give birth, as surrogates, over the decades to other fine Aryan specimens like Josef—”

“
Their class?
You’re talking about eugenics. Worse than eugenics, using twisted technology. That’s pure evil.”

“Eugenics—a loaded term in your society, I know. The so-called American Century has enshrined in Western culture the Christian slave morality Nietzsche warned against. ‘Be mediocre!’ A debased, utilitarian ethics. But you, Herr Waltz: you strike me as a rational man. A man of science. I suspect you must see the beauty, the necessity, of our project?”

T-Jacques in a New Orleans bar:
That’s what they’re out to destroy, Mr. Waltz. Everything that swings.

“No. You lie.”

“These first-generation members of the master race will excel in all they do, until they come to rule the world. Soon, there will be no need for the common humans around them. That population—let’s just say that flawed, imperfect humanity as we know it will die out gracefully, Mr. Waltz. Ushering in a new era—the world as one, peaceful and ordered. This is the next step in human evolution.”

The Doctor gave him a wry grin. “How can you—a cultured man—seeing the stupidity, the sheer unattractiveness, of the American masses with their folds of flesh and their short pants and their t-shirts bearing decadent slogans—how can you question our project, so near culmination? For, Mr. Waltz,” the Doctor looked to the ceiling and recited: “‘All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the
Ubermensch
: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment.’”

“Stop quoting Nietzsche at me, you Nazi bastard. You people got it all wrong—worse, you twisted science and humanism to justify your evil. Just like other terrorists twist religion. But true humanism celebrates life—it doesn’t seek to destroy it.”

Even as he formed his argument against the Doctor’s contorted logic, Geoff felt the pointlessness of attacking the ravings of this madman. He saw the Doctor’s dreams of a global holocaust too farfetched, too attenuated, to worry him now.

For the old monster was dying. The Doctor’s eyes revealed that he did not accept this—that he believed he had achieved immortality. But Geoff could smell the truth, an odor coming off him like discarded meat in midsummer.

No—his only concern was for the boy. The Doctor had hold of Joey by way of mind control or some such. Geoff would not leave this place alive without breaking that spell.

And Willie, in some way, had been part of all this.

Geoff stepped to his client and took him by his shoulders. “You, Willie. What did you know about this? What have you done?”

Willie still did not look up from the floor. When he spoke, his voice had grown even more distant. “I did it for Sally. Lord, she wanted a little one so bad. Her doctor said it would be a miracle if she ever conceived. That rotten ol’ husband of hers wouldn’t pay for fertility treatments. Then a clinic opened up in town—offering treatments cheap. But still too much for my daughter. So I sold some silver and took her up there. Within a week the place had closed down, so I just figured it was some fly-by-night rip-off. But then lo and behold, she was expecting.”

The Doctor looked smug as Willie recounted the tale. “Yes, we worked on a dozen patients during that week. Only Josef took. We will raise him and harness his abilities. He is destined to become the American president, and then our plan—a true final solution—will unfold.”

The Doctor extended an arm and Joey stepped to it. They stood together now, and, despite the century between them, Geoff saw a resemblance—in the aquiline nose, the full lips. But beyond the familial—as if the boy were no mere descendant but rather an idealized replica of the ancient German.
Save me
, the boy’s message had read. But he had also pushed them away, had led him to this sociopath he called father.
A mind divided
. Geoff wanted to reach out to the goodness in the child, but as he watched Joey stand beside the Doctor, he began to fear that the boy alone could save himself.

“I don’t know how I came to know,” Willie said, sobbing. “But Joey—he started changing. To see things. To do things with his body and his mind. Somehow, I knew this … horrible man was coming—”

The Doctor’s laughter lent a chill to the air. “‘Somehow,’ you say? Don’t be naïve—our young
Ubermensch
has led you all along, haven’t you Josef?”

But the boy only stood there, tacit.

“Let me surmise that you began having dreams, Mr. Kincaid,” the Doctor said. “Or at least intuition. You knew he must return to me.”

“I did.”

“And you led each other here. As his body and his mind matured, reaching their full potential—they took hold of you, did they not?”

“Yes.” He turned to Geoff, sobbing. “I thought I could stop it. Didn’t know what it was, but I thought I could stop it—the nightmares that were coming from this place. I showed Dalia Bordelon the way in—thought a scientist like her could figure it all out. Use your law to kill it. Save me and Joey. Or … save me from Joey.”

Geoff fought back an urge to slap him. He knew that his client’s weakness and his errors stemmed not of malice but from fear.

The Doctor placed a skeletal hand on Joey’s shoulder. “Enough talk. It is time to begin your future, my Josef, my new and perfected Adam. It is time for humanity’s great leap forward.”

He took a key from his pocket and fit it into a lock set into his desk. He turned the key and flipped another switch and a siren sounded and the walls began to shimmer. As if thin streams of water fell in front of them. Like the disk outside. Like Joey’s eyes.

“Let us leave this place, my boy. I have set its destruction in motion. We have ten minutes.” He glanced at Willie and Geoff as he started to turn. “But not these two. Hold them here.”

Then Geoff met the boy’s strange gaze; a great invisible force poured from those eyes. He sensed no motion and knew Willie was frozen as well. Joey’s powerful mind held them there, paralyzed. And the child started to leave with the Nazi, the sick and twisted scientist of death.

“No Joey.” When Geoff spoke, his voice sounded like a record playing on a slow speed. “Don’t go with that monster. He’s got your brain in a vice. Fight it. He’s pure evil. He’s not your father—not really. Let go of his grasp. You may be special. You may have abilities I can only dream of. Use them for good. Look at me. You called to me because you know what’s good and what’s right.” Joey had begun to turn away, to leave with the old man. Janie’s image—pregnant, laughing—floated across Geoff’s mind. “Look at me. I want you to picture your mother’s eyes. Look into
her
eyes. Follow her … son.”