“Don’t look like that, love,” he said gently, brushing a finger over her cheek. His eyes were serious, but not worried. “Nothing is going to go wrong—I already promised, didn’t I? This is just for luck. You know that if you go to a lot of bother, you’ll never need anything. It’s Murphy’s Corollary for Crises.”
She wanted desperately to argue, but she didn’t. As much as she hated the idea of Damien assuming the role of executioner and facing these creatures alone—and knew she would have a difficult time closing a dark door on the horrors of this night—Damien was correct. Heaven help them both! In spite of the danger, Dippel and his monsters had to be hunted down and destroyed. And she and Damien had to do it without outside help, if that was at all possible. Even if no one in authority ever asked difficult questions about the physical state of the corpses already scattered about—and the coroner would have to have lost all sense of sight and smell to miss how different these bodies were—they would surely want to know who had shot them.
Of course, that did rather beg the question of what they were going to do with all the bodies when they were finally exterminated, but Brice wasn’t going to ask about that plan. One horrible thing at a time was all she could manage.
“Okay, if it’s to be done, best it be done quickly,” she said, misquoting Shakespeare. “The sooner it’s over, the better for both of us. Let’s go steal a laptop, and then you can show me this fancy bathroom.”
“Thank you, love,” Damien said softly.
“Don’t thank me. I still think it’s wrong to split up and it’s bloody unfair that you should have to face the monsters alone.”
He nodded. “There’s an old Chinese proverb. It asks: Who must do the difficult thing? The answer is: He who can.”
Brice exhaled slowly and then nodded assent.
If people will stop at the first tense of
“aimer”
they must not be surprised if one finishes the conjugation with somebody else.
—Byron ( from a letter dated January 13, 1814)
Sorrow is knowledge, those who know the most must mourn the deepest, for the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.
—Byron
We die only once, and for such a long time.
—Molière
Brice sat on the counter in the most sumptuous bathroom she’d ever seen and did her best to find a way to contact the NYPD on the portable computer. It had taken her and Damien a while to find one at Cyber QT that wasn’t locked into a docking station and protected by a password.
Her cyber search wasn’t going well. You could submit an e-mail and someone would eventually get back to you—they promised. But there was no mention of when. For some reason, it seemed that most people didn’t choose to report all emergencies via e-mail. If they needed the police, they generally needed them
right now
. Likewise, the fire department seemed to feel that most people would prefer to phone in their emergencies. She could contact the utility company, but only if she had her account number and knew the name of the party she wished to e-mail.
Frustrated and unable to stop worrying about what Dippel might be doing, Brice decided that she needed to think about something else. Something engrossing. Naturally enough, she ruminated on her new and perhaps fragile relationship with Damien Ruthven—who had once been Lord Byron.
Lord Byron!
Only now he wasn’t, because he had let a homicidal doctor perform some mad experiment on him, the result of which was that he was now peculiar. Not quite human. A person forever in disguise.
“You don’t mean that. He’s human,” she whispered to herself, to the judgmental voice inside, hoping that she truly didn’t think otherwise. Brice didn’t usually use religious vocabulary to describe her feelings, but a few notions kept coming up in moments of terror that were uncomfortably close to the spiritual dogma she had long ago rejected. It bothered her. She didn’t like discovering that, in an emergency, she retreated to these shady places in the landscape of her psyche, ugly quagmires of old religious training where one might get stuck and even drown.
Judge not, lest ye be judged?
Exactly.
What would she have done if she were sitting—or, more accurately, lying—at the edge of her own mortality while her brain besieged itself with violent seizures? On the one hand, there was almost certain death. On the other, a chance at life—albeit one so different that it defied all known laws relating to human lifespan. What would she have done?
If she had had the power, wouldn’t she have used it the night her husband died? If she could have saved Mark, wouldn’t she have done the same thing, whatever the long-term effect?
And Damien hadn’t known what the outcome would be. He only thought he was curing his epilepsy
.
Okay. Maybe that was true the first time. But what about the times after that?
Brice rubbed her forehead.
What? He should surrender and let epilepsy claim him now?
Look at it another way. Weren’t scientists the world over experimenting with similar things? With their work in medicine, weren’t they all seeking to prolong life? To cure disease? To end suffering from illness? How was what Damien did any different than Brice herself taking antibiotics or vitamins or having had her appendix out when she was twelve?
And, bottom line, could she really wish that Damien wasn’t here? That they had never met?
“No! God, no!” She was just afraid and lashing out.
Brice shifted restlessly, pulling her robe tighter. The extra ammunition Damien had pressed upon her tinkled against her borrowed gun.
There was no denying that Dippel was a perversion, an absolute monster, an absolute abomination in the eyes of nature and probably in the eyes of any divinity. True. But was that his fault? Sometimes experiments went awry, didn’t they? He could just be a victim.
And what did all this mean in regard to Damien? That was the key question here, wasn’t it? Would Damien eventually become a monster? Would his continued existence pervert him like it had seemed to pervert Dippel?
Brice thought for a while, but decided she was at a dead end. She couldn’t know if Dippel had always been a little off, and that was what had led him to this line of work; or if, just as likely, it was the work that had finally twisted him.
Of course, even this wasn’t the very bottom line. What was bothering her was what Damien had suggested—that she might also be able to make the change. She could, perhaps, extend her life. Be with him for centuries.
Brice glanced over at the mirrors that surrounded her. One look was enough. Even in the computer’s dim light, she could see that the skin beneath her eyes was painted with bruises. She looked tired. And old. At least, older than she ever had. How would she feel when these changes were permanent? When her hair grayed and her skin became lined? When she grew weary, and he remained young and healthy and vibrant? Would he be repulsed by her? Would he leave her rather than stay and see her ravaged by the diseases of old age? He had already sustained so many losses—could she ask him to endure another?
And yet, what would their life be like if she did make the change? Could any relationship sustain itself for centuries? What would happen if she did this thing—and then she and Damien eventually grew apart? Or what if she did this and felt changed inside? Unclean. Evil.
A part of Brice, a part she didn’t want to deal with just then, recognized that whatever she decided, she had already left her old existence behind. She might return to her cozy little house with its warped door, but her life—that safe little hollow of blissful ignorance—was over. The ocean of human experience was deeper than she’d ever thought. And monsters swam there. She’d never be able to pretend otherwise again.
And to think that she’d once spent her time worrying about the IRS and global warming!
Unhappy, and more than a bit confused, Brice looked down at the portable PC she had “borrowed” and started typing in a made-up account number for the utility company.
Just in case.
The barometer was falling again; he could feel it clouding his brain. The next wave of this unnatural, endless storm was about to hit.
Damien hated war; he always had. But at one time he had felt that war was the only answer in certain situations. Of course, sometimes it still was the only answer, but he loathed it now more than ever. Even, or perhaps especially, if his foe was the man who had extended his life.
It helped somewhat to think of this as a game—a deadly game, but one which could be won with intuition, experience, ruthlessness and a bit of luck. He didn’t let himself think about the fact that he was tired of holocausts, that a man shouldn’t be asked to see or participate in more than one in a lifetime. What happened now was a conflict he couldn’t avoid.
This war was also different for another reason. It was personal. He wasn’t here out of idealism, fighting an unknown enemy for some higher principle. He was here because his life—and Brice’s—were being threatened by someone in his past.
Damien had never gone to war for gain—personal or political. Always it had been to help people. Unfortunately, too often the
help
that came in military form left the very people you were trying to assist sitting in smoldering ruins. Such
help
meant death and destruction and lost as many lives as it saved. So, for Damien, deciding on a way to help the needy grew increasingly more difficult. Technology had only upped the ante. It was why he had moved into spying, rather than actual fighting. But even then, he could not escape the knowledge that there were consequences to his actions that affected innocent people. He didn’t drop bombs, but he told others where they should be placed. He didn’t invade villages, but he told generals where to send the dogs of war.
And sometimes innocent people got hurt because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Like Brice.
“Damn you,” he whispered—and he was speaking not just to Dippel, but to all the tyrants who had sought greatness with a sword.
Damnation. Did he believe in eternal punishment? He believed in hell. War had finally taught him to accept that there was such a thing. It wasn’t the hell of the theologians who had educated him as a child. Their claims of spiritual damnation had never seemed as terrifying as earthly bombs, mustard gas and the napalm he had seen. But he now believed that hell existed, and what was most fearsome was that it would last a very long time.
A smoke detector flashed annoyingly, throwing Damien’s shadow against a sterile white door. It made him recall the cafeteria on that floor, and so Damien jogged to the right.
He didn’t like the Memuria cafeteria. The place was aesthetically offensive. It was a stark white room filled with brushed-aluminum tables and plastic chairs, and had one long wall of vending machines whose humming gave him a headache. These things didn’t interest him. But the attached kitchen, and its potential collection of knives and cleavers, did.
Probably, everything would be locked up, but he was certain he could get in. He had to. He was low on ammunition, and with his new experiences that showed his foes were tough to make
dead
dead—he could just hope to make them dead enough to be sidelined—he couldn’t afford to pass up any potential equipment.
Damien pulled on handle after handle on cupboards and drawers, even tearing one off. Nothing—every cabinet was locked tight and no one had thoughtfully left keys or a pry bar lying about. The only knives were plastic ones nestled in a tray next to equally useless spoons and forks.
He did find two metal forks in the sink. Not much use as weapons, but he pocketed them anyway. The door to the old telephone exchange might well be locked, but as long as no one had replaced the antiquated lock, he would be able to bend the forks’ tines into useful tools for picking it. Mac would approve.
Mac. There was the war again. He couldn’t escape his memories tonight.
Yet Damien smiled a little as he headed for the stairwell. He hadn’t thought about Mac in ages. It was Mac—Colonel James McCallum—who had seen to Damien’s unorthodox training in the last war. Colonel McCallum had been a man ahead of his time. He was one of the first to realize that spying on other nations could not remain the hobby of gentlemen, and that while gentlemanly honor was a lovely and noble thing, the skills of thieves, pickpockets and assassins had their place in this new quiet kind of warfare.
The two of them—the colonel and Adrian Ruthven, as Damien had then been known—had spent many long nights sitting at the scarred wooden table inside the colonel’s tent, the apparently older man guiding Damien through a course in lock picking and eventually a more advanced one in safecracking. Every failure had brought out a fresh wad of pipe tobacco that was stuffed into Mac’s old briarwood pipe, every success a shot of singlemalt whisky from his family distillery.
It was shameful how often these skills had been of use to Damien even after he left the army.
“Thank you, Mac,” he whispered, laying an ear against the stairwell door. “You may, yet again, save my life.”
No sounds came from the other side, but something smelled wrong. There was a certain sharp odor…
Damien lay down and looked under the door. In the blinking red light of the stairwell smoke detector, he could see a faint shadow as fine as a thread hovering over the floor at the top of the stairs. A less suspicious person might have dismissed it as a stray cobweb.
“Dippel, you nasty, nasty creature,” he said softly. “Where did you learn such tricks?”
Damien rose to his knees and eased the door open. He looked at the line of filament that was tied to the pin wedged in the stairs’ ornate railing. It was a simple thing, this common fragmentary grenade, but it would have done the job if he had wandered into it.
“A bit out of your normal style, Doctor. You’ll regret this,” he whispered, for it must have been Dippel who rigged the trap. The zombies didn’t seem intelligent enough, and Damien had found no sign of any other humans left in the building.
The nice thing about this abandoned gift was that it didn’t care who its master was. Nor did it care when and where it exploded. It would work equally well for everyone, and would do just as good a job dropped on a zombie as it would on a poet in a stairwell.
Damien worked quickly and carefully, freeing his deadly discovery. His hands were steady but he was quick to drop the thing into a pocket. He found the metal device repulsive, and he wasn’t sure if there was any danger from the heat of his hands making it unstable.
“ ‘The benefit of training learned in desperate situations,’ ” he said, quoting Mac to the air. “ ‘Nothing like impending death to supply a man with much-needed inspiration.’ ”
His words were light but his mood was not. Damien had his fury under control, but he was still very angry—enraged at the death Dippel had wrought on innocent men in Damien’s employ, infuriated by the fear he had seen in Brice’s lovely eyes when he found her huddled on the roof, preferring to freeze to death rather than face the monsters inside. He was also very angry at having Damien Ruthven’s life upset years ahead of schedule—especially now that he had found Brice and wanted time to explain himself to her so his existence wouldn’t seem so unnatural.
He hadn’t said anything to Brice, but it could be that Damien Ruthven would have to disappear. It was a contingency he always planned for. He had gotten good at slipping away from tight situations, leaving no finger- or footprints behind.
But Brice had never faced a situation like this. He had watched her carefully while he described what his life was like, and he could see that she’d been appalled. Damien liked to think that she would go with him and eventually learn to be happy. But a part of him feared that she would never agree.