Scarlet Dream (19 page)

Kane's blue-gray eyes flicked from Winnie to Brigid and back. The elderly woman sat there quite calmly, not making any sudden movements the way the other one— Ellie or Maitresse Ezili or whatever she was called—had when Kane had challenged her by the upstairs rooms. Reluctantly, Kane lowered his pistol. “You've never steered me wrong before, Baptiste,” he said. “And you had better be damn right this time.”

A moment later Grant followed his partner's lead, commanding his Sin Eater back to the wrist sheath beneath his coat with a flinch of his tendons. “So, how do we do this, then?” he asked.

“Three distinct beings, each carrying a fractured thread of Lilitu's personality,” Brigid mused. “What we really need to do is to find a way to pull these three people together into one being again.”

“Impossible!” Papa Hurbon retorted. “These are separate aspects of a most wonderful spirit. You cannot simply…fuse them together.”

Kane fixed the voodoo priest with a stern look. “This ain't your goddess, buckaroo. This is just some crazy alien whose only real desire is to enslave the human race, crushing us under her heel.” Glancing at Winnie, the ex-Mag added, “No offense, ma'am.”

Winnie smiled, saying nothing. She seemed somewhat bemused by the whole conversation.

Then Brigid spoke up, her words coming slowly. “No, what he just said,” she began, looking at Hurbon, “that's it. We'll fuse them together again.”

“Care to repeat that for the slower members of the class?” Kane asked.

“Fusion,” Brigid said. “The cold-fusion generator at Redoubt Mike, the one that had been moth-balled when the mat-trans prototype was switched for a different power source. If we could open that up somehow and—” she gave a sideways look at Winnie, but the old woman seemed to be oblivious that she was being spoken about “—join them back together.”

“You mean place—” Kane began and stopped himself, too.

“You don't need her,” Hurbon interrupted, realizing how both Baptiste and Kane were tiptoeing around mentioning the need to use the aristocratic old woman who was really Ezili Freda Dahomey. “Voodoo works with pieces that represent the whole, so you'd just need some part of her.”

Kane glared at him. “What, so suddenly you're all for this?”

Hurbon met the ex-Mag's fierce gaze. “Ezili Coeur Noir is out of control,” he said, “and if what you and your companions say is true then we—which is to say I—am
very much in danger. Now I love her and will worship her until the day I die, make no mistake, white-bread, but I sure as hell want that day to be a long, long way off.”

Kane looked over his shoulder then, down the corridor to where the plump form of Maitresse Ezili remained struggling within the invisible binding. “Are you able to keep that one busy?”

“Not forever,” Hurbon admitted, nervously fiddling with the little doll in his hands.

“What about Ezili Coeur Noir?” Kane asked. “You have anything in your bag of tricks that can stun her temporarily so we can hold on to her for long enough to try this fusion thing?”

Papa Hurbon reached into his saddlebag once more and produced another doll, this time wrapped like an Egyptian mummy in ribbon of the purest white. What little could be seen of the doll showed it was thin, with yellow eyes and dark skin on its face like a lizard's. It looked like Ezili Coeur Noir, and it also bore a striking resemblance to Lilitu, albeit with her skin blackened. “I made this to hide myself from her,” he said. “While the doll is wrapped in white she won't come near me.”

Kane looked at the strange fetish, realization dawning. “That's why the undead can't see this place, isn't it? That's why they won't come near. Because your little dolly there repels them.”

“It blinds Ezili Coeur Noir to my presence,” Hurbon confirmed. “Little wonder that her servants are confused.”

Grant checked the corridor, shaking his head. “Now, I understand guns a whole lot better than I understand dolls,” he said, “but I'm starting to wonder if we don't have us an arsenal here that could take on the gods.”

“Well, one goddess at least,” Kane agreed.

Sitting at the table, Brigid seemed to be doing some
swift calculations in her head. “I don't have the expertise to pull this off,” she finally admitted. “The fusion generator works by meshing atoms together using hydrolysis, but how we might apply the same principles of attraction to a personality…I don't know.”

Across the room, Kane fixed Brigid with a serious look. “Baptiste,” he said, “we have access to the smartest living scientific brains on the planet. Speak to Lakesh, speak to Philboyd, get Bry on it—whoever. If anyone can get this working, it's you.”

“You're asking me to remotely coordinate a dozen scientists to engage an energy system deemed too unstable for use,” Brigid said, “so that we can try to bind a false goddess back together into one functioning psyche.”

“Who's not mad,” Kane added. “Remember that part—that's crucial.”

Brigid narrowed her eyes in disdain. “You really have no conception of the impossible, do you?”

Kane smiled his cheery, lopsided grin. “Not yet.”

Brigid explained her idea to Lakesh via Commtact.

“I'll be honest,” she said, “it's not really a plan, just a concept for one.”

In the Cerberus ops center located in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana, Lakesh nodded his head sagely as Brigid's familiar voice piped out from the speaker at the communications desk. “It is, however, one with intriguing possibilities,” he mused. “Cold fusion was discarded as a viable energy source in the 1990s because of the difficulties involved in stabilizing the procedure. Indeed, for many years scientists argued that it was pathological science, which is to say that it produced false-positive results.”

“But we utilized the cold-fusion generator to engage the Louisiana redoubt's mat-trans,” Brigid said, “so we know that the sequencer there works.”

“Indeed,” Lakesh agreed. He felt a little rejuvenated having taken a three-hour nap, but he had been woken as soon as Brigid's query came through to the ops center. Now, the head of the Cerberus operation sipped at a cooling mug of tea in an effort to revive himself as the other core members of the ops room bustled around, making notes off of Brigid's suggestions.

The ops center was manned by a number of top-notch scientists, so-called “freezies” who had been placed in suspended animation at the end of the twentieth century
and hidden on the Manitius Moon Base, to be revived about two hundred years later in the world of the outlanders. Lakesh, too, had been a well-respected scientist in his day, specializing in physics and cybernetics. His early work with the mat-trans units had been considered ground-breaking for its time.

With a snap of his fingers, Lakesh caught the attention of Brewster Philboyd, who sat at the monitoring desk, nervously polishing the lenses of his black-framed spectacles with a cloth. “Brewster, what is the status of Mike's reactor right now?” Lakesh asked.

Brewster tapped a brief sequence into his terminal as he responded. “The cold-fusion reactor at Redoubt Mike is currently powered down,” he confirmed. “We curtailed its output five minutes after CAT Alpha arrived on site.”

“What if we leave the reactor powered down, Brigid?” Lakesh offered. “The security locks would disengage and you could access the core with the applicable maintenance codes. Once the access hatch was open, you could lead your prey there and thus trap your problem inside. At that point, we could reengage the system and—”

“Negative,” Kane's voice came over the Commtact link. “This is Lilitu we're talking about. Right now she's a pumped-up, out-of-control psycho goddess. We might be able to trick her into the reactor but we wouldn't have a chance of containing her long enough for you to get the thing operational.”

“Just how powerful would you estimate she is right now in her current form?” Lakesh asked.

“She's bringing the dead back to life with a touch,” Kane argued. “I saw her holding a file of papers, and they were literally deteriorating at her touch. Paint blisters at her approach, flies die when they near her. We're talking some really serious mojo.”

“So you think she could atrophy the casing around the cold-fusion reactor before we could power it up?” Lakesh asked, unable to keep the surprise from his voice.

“If you mean, could she rot it with her touch,” Kane said to summarize, “I'd go with a distinct maybe.”

“Kane's right,” Brigid agreed. “We're going to need the reactor operative when we lead her inside. It's…” Brigid's voice trailed off.

“Brigid?” Lakesh prompted after a moment, wondering if the radio connection had been somehow severed.

“Still here,” Brigid said in her chirpy voice. “I was going to say ‘it's our only chance,' but I honestly don't know that this will actually work. We're proposing to unlock an admittedly dangerous system of energy creation to use to imprison a would-be goddess of death. I wonder if we're not creating more trouble here than we're solving. It seems a hell of a risk.”

Lakesh took another sip of his steeping tea before he answered. “Risks are what make life interesting, my dear,” he reminded Brigid.

Over the loudspeaker, Lakesh and Brewster heard Brigid take a deep, steadying breath. “Okay,” she said, “so can we get the thing live and open in time for us to get Ezili Coeur Noir and her other physical manifestations inside?”

“We can override the security protocols from here,” Lakesh suggested, “but getting the access paneling open will be an on-site job. Someone there will have to do it.”

There was a momentary silence over the comm network then, as a decision was reached one thousand miles away in a dilapidated mansion house in the Louisiana bayou.

“Okay, we have us a volunteer,” Kane said.

“Excellent,” Lakesh replied. “We'll start working on
the security system at our end, and I'll amass a brain trust to look into the possibility of igniting the reactor once those protocols have been paralyzed. We'd need to employ a specific output to do what Brigid has asked, of course, which may require a little theoretical experimentation at our end. I have Donald already working up a computer simulation model that should be able to give us some insights in about—Donald?”

At one of the plain desks of the room, the dour-faced Donald Bry was working at a computer terminal, his fingers playing furiously across its keyboard as he brought up a schematic of an energy reactor. At the call of his name, he looked up from his frantic programming work. “I've found a reactor simulation in our database which we can adapt, but it will take a day to jiggle it to represent the cold fusion system.”

“Eight hours minimum,” Lakesh reported over the Commtact.

“Scratch that,” Kane replied. “Remember that Red Weed virus we spoke about earlier? Remember I saw a batch of it being mixed while we were inside the redoubt's main hangar. I'd estimate we have maybe three hours to clear this thing before the Red Weed goes live.”

“Heralding the cessation of all life on Earth,” Lakesh concluded, speaking as if to himself.

Brewster Philboyd glanced up from the communications array with an expression of concern. “Dr. Singh?”

Without answering, Lakesh strode across the large room until he stood at the foremost point, where all of the terminal operators could see him. “Listen up, people,” he announced, projecting his loud voice. “We have a critical situation here, and it's all hands to the pump. I require a full analysis of the prospective effects of cold fusion on a living body, both human and Annunaki. I also need a
working theory of how we might combat an outbreak of a genetically modified and very virulent strain of anthrax. This needs to be done now—I require your answers in one hour.” With that he clapped his hands, and the staff gathered themselves into teams to work out their theories.

Then Lakesh turned to Donald Bry. “Donald, you may as well abort the simulator program,” he regretfully explained.

Bry brushed his hand through his tousled copper curls. “I'll start on breaking the security protocols instead,” he said, his enthusiasm not dampened.

Then Lakesh was back at the communications station, advising Kane's field team that they were on the case. “We'll report back in one hour,” he assured Kane. “Just figure out what you need to do on-site and if you require anything else from us.”

“Well, if you've got any luck going spare…” Kane began flippantly.

“I'll send it along, old friend,” Lakesh assured him before curtailing the Commtact link.

Around the hectic operations room, clusters of like-minded scientists were drawing up flow charts and diagrams as they began to brainstorm ideas. Lakesh looked around, proud of the way his people rallied when asked. Once this crisis was over—
if
it ever was over—he would have to thank them personally.

In one corner of the ops room however, close to the doors, an ex-Magistrate called Edwards rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand. “All this science geek stuff is giving me a headache,” he muttered to Domi.

Edwards was a tall man whose broad shoulders seemed to strain against the confines of his white jumpsuit. His right ear had a nick in it where it had been caught with a bullet almost a year before.

Along with Domi, Edwards had been tasked to guard the ops center, but he felt the driving need to get some fresh air, having been cooped up in the bunker for almost three days. His headaches had been getting worse over the past few weeks and he wondered if he may be coming down with some sickness.

Quietly, Edwards slipped out of the busy room and made his way along the vast arterial corridor toward the accordion-style doors that served as the redoubt's exit. While the science boffins were busy with their theories, Edwards figured he would take a few minutes to himself, out on the rock plateau overlooking the Bitterroot Mountains.

Outside, the afternoon sun beat down, barely a cloud in the sky. Edwards smiled as he took in the magnificent vista, and a strange tune came to mind. As he tried to recall the tune, he could already feel the weight of his headache beginning to abate.

Nearby over a hundred pairs of eyes watched as Edwards walked out onto the rocky plateau, humming a few bars of the tune that seemed to be caught in his head. Edwards took another step out onto the rocky plateau, taking in a deep lungful of the fresh mountain air, entirely unaware of the watchers observing him.

After a moment, still humming the strange tune that was stuck in his head, Edwards turned and strolled slowly back to the open entrance to the redoubt. As he did so, one of those sets of eyes flashed bright as molten lava for just an instant, so brief that an observer would have thought that they had imagined it had they not been looking specifically for it.

 

M
EANWHILE
, one thousand miles distant at the House Lilandera, Papa Hurbon was cooking something up in the kitchen.

Hurbon had produced a small stub of a chalklike substance and, with Grant's help, had eased himself to the floor where he sketched out an irregular circle on the ruined tiles. The chalk was in fact farine, the flour used in voodoo ritual, and the corpulent priest pressed it against the rotted tiles of the floor to create the specific markings he knew by heart within that circle.

“What are those marks supposed to be?” Grant asked as he pushed the table back a little to give Hurbon more room.

Brigid scooted her chair to follow, for she was busily sketching something of her own in a little notebook she had retrieved from her pants pocket. She wore a pair of glasses now, perched at the end of her nose. Brigid was slightly far-sighted.

“They are called
vévés,
” Hurbon explained. “If we are to enter into battle with the
loa,
we must pool as much strength as we can.”

“Seems reasonable,” Grant acknowledged, feeling like a fraud. He had grown up in the strict regime of Cobaltville. To him, this hocus-pocus seemed anything but reasonable—it felt as if they had stepped back one hundred years, to the days when superstition had ruled the old Deathlands, before the Program of Unification had brought rationalism and enlightenment to the world.

Hurbon drew a large symbol that took up more than half the kitchen's floor space. The symbol looked a little like a surrealist sailboat to Grant's eyes, with a triangular shape at its bottom and a base line and mast above that.

“This is the
vévé
for Ogoun,” Papa Hurbon told him. “He is warlike, but he truly represents authority, and I believe that is what we will need in this quest. Authority over the rogue
loa
who challenge the natural order of things. Authority over the queen of all things dead.”

Moving like a crab across the cold floor, Hurbon continued sketching for a few more minutes while Grant watched. Hurbon's strokes with the marking flour were bold and sure, creating designs he had doubtless drawn a thousand times before. When he was finished, the floor looked like a spider had gotten loose with a stick of chalk. Scribbled symbols were all over, forming a loose circle that congregated in the center of the room.

Outside the house the shambling figures of the undead began to shuffle with more direction, as if becoming alerted to something new in their presence.

While Hurbon had been working and Brigid continued making her own notes, Kane went to check on Maitresse Ezili. She seemed almost as if she had been frozen, her mouth stuck in a silent scream that showed off her pearl-white teeth. As Kane neared her, the woman's yellow eyes flickered toward him, watching his movements.

“You want out, don't you?” Kane taunted. “Meanwhile, we're trying to figure a way we might be able to fix all this.”

He took another step closer to the constrained woman standing in the center of the hallway. “See, you're not complete, you're half a person.” Kane pointed back to the kitchen and told her, “Baptiste in there—she's book-smart like you wouldn't believe. She says you're an ego without an id or a superego, you've become detached from them somehow during a messed-up rebirth. That's what's made you so crazy, trapping people into this little love factory. Baptiste says that if the ego is the rider then the id is the horse, whatever that means. I guess she's really saying that you aren't going very far while you're in pieces like this, you're just trudging over the same little furrow.”

Maitresse Ezili glared at him with her lizard's eyes, the fury burning deep within them like a curse.

Fearless, Kane brought his own face close to the woman's. “Oh, sure, you feel that way now but you'll thank me when it's all over,” he told her. “If it makes you feel any better about this, the last time we met and you were whole, you almost killed me. Maybe you'll get better at it next go around.”

With that, Kane strode back to the kitchen, leaving the magically incarcerated form of the Annunaki goddess-turned-voodoo-
loa
alone in the dilapidated hallway. “Don't expect me to cut you a break, though,” he added before disappearing into the kitchen.