Splotches of red shined on the clean white walls. Walter let his head roll to one side, and on the floor ...
I must be hallucinating,
he thought.
From the painkillers.
Still, what he was seeing as his brother dutifully pushed the wheelchair down the hall was ...
Lots of dead people?
Everyone on this wing of the hospital was dead ... or at least that’s what Walter, in his dimming vision, was seeing. Everyone. Every doctor, nurse, patient. Every janitor and every security guard. Everyone in the waiting room, too, lay sidled over, dead.
There was blood everywhere, as if the walls had been deliberately painted with it, and also the floor—it shined beneath a fresh wet shellac of crimson.
“I’m hallucinating, Colin.” Walter even chuckled at the impossible imagery. “The painkiller’s really whacking me out.”
The wheelchair rolled steadily onward. It was soothing, comforting. “What do you see, Buddy-bro?”
“It looks like everyone here is dead.”
“It doesn’t look like it, Walter. It is. Everyone here is dead.”
Walter’s lips bumbled as his wobbly faculties tried to cogitate the information. “But that-that-that’s not possible ... Is it?”
“Sure is. I didn’t want to fuck around, you know? I need to get you out of here without any hassles. Easiest way was to just kill everyone here.”
More bumbling. “Huh-huh-how did you—”
“I did it by burning a thurible full of baby’s blood while reading an incantation from the forbidden book called the
Fourth Testament of Albigerius.
He was a Carthaginian sorcerer who could have out-of-body experiences in Hell and bargain with the Devil to give him secrets and spells. I recited one of his unholy rites. It’s called an Exsanguination Spell, Walter. It made everybody’s blood come out of their bodies at the same time.”
Walter chuckled at the ludicrousness, though the chuckle lost some of its tenor when the automatic doors to the front lobby opened and Walter saw a lot more blood and a lot more dead people.
“Oh, no, this can’t possibly be real.” Walter felt sure, eyeballing the gore. The atrocity was, somehow, stunning. It looked as though the walls had been washed down with a fire hose, only the fire hose expelled blood instead of water.
Two more automatic doors slid open. Walter was rolled out into a warm, starry night which felt utterly serene, yet his confusion kept snapping his sleepy eyelids back open. The lights around the hospital glittered; everything seemed perfectly still and quiet. Down the front entrance walk to the circular court where patients were dropped off. One of Colin’s long black brand-new limos sat waiting. He’d bought a bunch of fancy cars since hitting the state lottery but lately he seemed to prefer being driven around in this. The driver’s door popped open and out stepped the driver: a tall dark-haired woman with voluptuous curves. She wore knee-high black boots, black-leather slacks, black vest over a white long-sleeve satin shirt, and a cute little black driver’s cap. Colin liked flamboyance. The woman said nothing as the wheelchair approached. She smiled slyly, dark eyes like cut gems.
“Walter, meet Augustina. She doesn’t say much, she just looks good and drives my ass around. Pretty hot stuff, huh?”
Walter groggily nodded. In all that had happened, though, he really wasn’t concentrating on the girl.
“Her name isn’t really Augustina. I named her that when she came over.”
“Came over?” Walter managed.
“I thought it would be kind of nifty to name her after the saint who cut his cock off because he thought sex was a perpetration of evil.”
Walter drifted further away. The words sounded like echoes in his head now. When Augustina opened the back limo door, an automatic lift lowered out. Her vested bosom bloomed before his face when she leaned over and eased the wheelchair onto the lift. In another second, Walter was being drawn into the car.
A few more moments of perplexion. Walter could barely talk anymore. “This-this-this doesn’t feel right, Colin. What-what-what’s happening?”
The door gently thunked closed. The car’s motor could barely be heard when they drove off into the night.
“Cool stuff, Buddy-bro. That’s what’s happening. All kinds of cool stuff. And you’re part of it. In fact, you’re the key player.”
Walter could make nothing of what his brother had said. Something else kept bothering him and it was hard to focus on what it was, but eventually he snagged it as his mind and senses faded further from the drugs.
“Colin? Did you say something earlier? Did you say we have a lot to talk about?”
A cork popped. Colin had just opened a bottle of Kluge champagne. “Uh-hmm,” was his response to the question. He took a sip of the champagne, then spat it out the window. “What is the big deal with champagne? Tastes like rotten club soda—Jesus!” Aggravated, he lobbed the bottle out of the car.
There’s someth¡ng
else,
there’s something
else... Walter remembered the man who’d been killed by the drunk driver, and he remembered what he’d seen and heard in the snack bar rest room last night.
“Did you say something about destiny?”
“Your destiny awaits, Buddy-bro.” Outside, the stars swam by in the window. “It’s time for you to embrace your destiny...”
(II)
Colin owned the entire top floor of the Strauss Building in downtown St. Petersburg, overlooking Tampa Bay. That’s what Walter’s eyes opened to when he began to regain consciousness—the low moon glowing over the bay. A gentle breeze off the water revived him. He winced; his head ached.
It took several moments to re-sort all that had happened. He wasn’t sure what was real and what was imagined. He was still in the wheelchair—someone had put him out here on the balcony to look at the bay—but when he tried to stand up, he couldn’t, still too shaky from the painkillers.
“Buddy-bro!” Colin’s voice called from behind. “I see you moving out there. How you feeling?”
“I’ve been better,” Walter grumbled under his voice. His arms felt weak as he grabbed the wheels and began to turn the chair.
“Augustina? Give him a hand, will ya?”
The buxom shadow slipped outside. The loveliest scents drifted off the tall woman’s hair. But when Walter’s eyes adjusted, as she came around to the other side of the wheelchair, her form seemed ghostlike and white. That’s when he discerned that she was naked now.
Walter shuddered when her hands smoothed up his chest, then over his cheeks. A cooing sound faintly drifted around his head, like a caress itself, and then he was turned around and wheeled slowly back into the suite.
Walter squinted; the expansive room off the balcony was done up in dark wood paneling and large, ornately framed paintings. Maroon carpet hushed the chair’s wheels. The entire room seemed to flicker darkly, tiny shadows licking up the wood-grain walls. There were no electric lights here, just dozens of tall black candles.
Colin was standing knee deep in a churning hot tub. “Want some of this?” He held up another bottle of champagne : Perrier-Jouet. “It’s six hundred bucks a bottle. Can you believe that?
Six hundred bucks
for a bottle of hooch?”
“Colin,” Walter reminded, “we’re not even old enough to drink.”
“When you win a hundred million in the lottery, Buddy-bro, you’re old enough to do any fuckin’ thing you want.” He took a slug off the bottle, winced, then spat it out in a bubbly spray. “Jesus Christ, that’s worse than the other shit I was drinking.” He winged the bottle, like a bowling pin, out the open sliding doors where it sailed over the balcony and disappeared.
Walter just looked at him. “Colin. What’s going on?”
“Lotta cool shit, brother. And I’m gonna tell you all about it right now. Everyone has their destiny, you know?”
Walter, by now, was starting to get scared by that word.
“Some people have a modest destiny, some people have a great destiny. But your destiny ... is monumental.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Relax. We’ve still got a little time to screw around, I guess. Till midnight, I mean. Kind of hokey if you ask me, but midnight really is the Witching Hour. It’s all about faith, Walter. Belief in myth is just another form of faith.” Candlelight flickered over Colin’s face. He smiled sharply. “And faith is power.” He hitched up his baggy swim trunks. “Entities of power reward the faithful—with
more
power.”
I guess my brother’s
gone
off the deep end,
Walter thought.
Give an eighteen-year-old
kid
a hundred million dollars and look what happens.
But at least Colin had gotten his dream. Walter hadn’t, had he? Colin got his riches, but Walter never got Candice.
“Augustina, hon? Grab that caviar, will ya?”
Walter hadn’t even noticed that the tall nude woman had left the room.
How could I have missed that?
he wondered. It was as if she’d vanished, and here she was now, coming out of the kitchen, holding something. Walter’s eyes bugged. He wasn’t looking at what she was holding, he was looking at her. The visual image of her embellished nudity struck him like a punch in the eye.
“Oh, the tatts,” Colin realized. “You’ve never seen them.”
Walter saw them now, and perhaps that revealed a lot. Augustina slunk into the room, still totally nude, and with a body curvaceous and lusty as a Penthouse Pet. The straight black hair shimmered, dancing at her shoulders, and her perfect breasts jutted. But even the impeccable body wasn’t what Walter was staring at. The flawless white skin looked almost checkerboarded with raven-black tattoos from the tops of her feet to her throat. The tattoos weren’t squares, though. They were upside-down crosses.
“Slick, huh?” Colin remarked.
“What?” Walter finally spoke up. “She’s a Satanist?”
“No, no, Buddy-bro. Augustina’s not a Satanist, she’s just a little toy that I was given, a little doll to play with.
I’m
the Satanist.”
Colin grinned further. The woman smiled too, right at Walter, her eyes dark as volcanic glass.
“I want an explanation,” Walter began, still unable to get up from the wheelchair.
“What’s the rush?” Colin glanced at a ticking pendulum clock with a moon-face. Elaborate hands ticked toward eleven-thirty. “We still got a half hour, so let’s chow down on this fancy grub.”
Augustina ran the tip of her tongue over her top lip as she opened a hockey-puck-sized tin of caviar on a plate. “Try some, Walter,” Colin offered.
“No, thanks.”
“Oh, well. This stuff cost five grand. It’s from Iran, supposed to be the best.” Colin ignored tiny platinum caviar spoons, electing instead to dip two fingers into the mass of shiny black eggs. He sucked the caviar into his mouth, winced, then spat it out. “That shit tastes awful! Boy, am I a sucker.” He lobbed the can through the open doors, over the balcony. “I guess you can’t buy class, huh?”
“Colin, what’s going on?”
Augustina stepped into the hot tub; she stood behind Colin and rubbed his shoulders but she was looking right at Walter. “No, you can’t buy class, which I guess means you can’t always have what you want. You have to maximize what you do have, though, right? You have to take advantage of it. Everybody’s born with something. Augustina, for instance. She uses her beauty for her own gain. And you, Walter, you’ve got the brains, and you were well on your way to using them to your best advantage. But me? What have I got? I’ll tell you. I’ve got ambition.”
Walter couldn’t figure out what his brother was getting at.
“That’s it. Ain’t got looks, ain’t got smarts, ain’t got charisma, and I sure as shit ain’t got class. So I gotta go with what I’ve got.”
“Colin, this is a really weird scene...”
Colin and Augustina both stepped out of the hot tub at the same time, coming around toward Walter from opposite sides.
“But sometimes we fuck up, don’t we?” Colin continued. “Like those fuckin’ Enron assholes, for instance. They had it all but now they’re in jail. And another example—you. All that potential, all those brains, and you almost blew ’em all over the dorm room, and why? Because of a girl. Well, I’m not gonna fuck up, not me...”
Augustina came around and stood behind the wheelchair, while Colin stood in front of Walter in his ludicrous swim trunks. Did the candlelight in the room actually darken? Colin’s voice seemed to darken with it. “You almost queered everything, and you don’t even know it; it wasn’t supposed to happen this soon. I made a deal—how do you think I won all that money?”
“What?”
“You and I both have a destiny. My destiny is to see to it that you fulfill
yours.”
“This is really creeping me out, Colin! What are you talking about!”
“I’m talking about infinity, Buddy-bro. I’m talking about immortality and things that never end. There are secrets not of this world. I know all about them. I found a way to read some of the secrets.”