The Brotherhood of the Wheel (36 page)

“The curtains, Jimmie, the curtains!” Max screamed as she tried to struggle with the shadow beast that was like fog to her touch but was more than capable of touching her, biting her. Heck snapped out of his daze and spun to meet the two hounds as they hurled toward him. Jimmie grabbed at the edge of the thick canvas curtain and pulled with all his might. The shadow hound was on top of him; its breath was dust and ice. He snarled into the beast's face and wrenched. The curtain popped, then tore free, and sunlight poured into the room. The pack howled in pain and rage—a sound that chewed on every nerve. The howl faded quickly, as each shadow dog became a plume of odorless black smoke, the sunlight knifing through the clouds, scattering them on the air.

“I take back everything bad I ever said about Builders,” Jimmie said, struggling to rise, wincing with pain. “Thanks, Max.”

Max smiled and scrambled to help Lovina to her feet. “You okay?” the professor asked.

“I'm alive, thanks to you,” Lovina said with a groan. “How did you do that, the laser thing? How did you know that would hurt them?”

“I didn't,” Max said. “It's a toy for my cat, Pyewacket. I had it in my bag, and I thought if they're cohesive darkness, then maybe cohesive light would … you know, affect them.”

Lovina laughed. “Smart,” she said. “And all that stuff you said to him?”

“If what he was saying is true,” Max said, “then the universe is in terrible danger.”

“The universe?” Lovina said.

Max nodded. “The whole universe.”

Jimmie limped over to Heck. “You okay?” the trucker asked. Heck nodded. He pulled a sheet over Mark's face. A crowd of hotel guests were sheepishly beginning to peek inside the room. The gunshots had done the trick. Several had out cell phones to video or take pictures, and others were calling 911. There was a rumble of a motorcycle in the lot below.

“Yeah, sorry I flaked out,” Heck said. “I let the asshole get to me.”

“It's okay,” Jimmie said. Aussapile looked at everyone. “Pedal to the metal, people—we're taking this son of a bitch down. No way in hell is he getting away.”

 

SIXTEEN

“10-80”

The Pagan, the Master of the Hunt, drove his black 1945 Harley-Davidson WLA out of the parking lot of the motel and onto MLK Jr. Drive, headed east. Heck was the first out the shattered door of the late Mark Stolar's hotel room. He pushed past the crowd, jumped most of the first flight of steps, then flipped over the wrought-iron rail and landed, running, on the lot's asphalt. He had his helmet on by the time Jimmie, Lovina, and Max were crossing the lot to their vehicles.

“He's headed east on MLK!” Heck shouted as he slid the steel demon face over his own and kicked the T5 Blackie in the guts, bringing it to snarling life. He tore out of the lot after the Master of the Hunt.

“Ears on!” Jimmie shouted out to the biker as they reached his rig and Lovina's Charger. “Channel 23!” Sirens were filling the air. “You're with me, Doc,” Jimmie said. “I need a consult.” Max nodded and struggled into the passenger seat of the 18-wheeler as Jimmie climbed into the truck's cab. “You got that handset radio I gave you?” Jimmie asked Lovina as she slid behind the wheel of the Charger.

“Got it,” she said. Jimmie gave her a thumbs-up and started up the truck.

Heck swung the turn out of the motel lot hard and fast. He heard horns bleat at him, blurs of motion at the edges of his periphery; he swerved to avoid a Volvo. There was a wall of flashing blue lights barreling down on the motel parking lot, westbound on MLK Jr. Drive.

“Shit!” he said, clicking on the radio on his belt. “Cops,” he said into the mike. “All up your asses. I got 'em.”

Heck swerved to a full stop on the street and sprayed the patrol cars with machine-gun fire, shooting out the light bars on the roofs of the cars. Squad cars swerved, braked, and crashed everywhere.

“What the hell are you doing?” Jimmie's voice boomed in Heck's ear.

“Being a good fucking team player!” Heck growled. He let the MP9 drop back to his side and flipped off the assembled horde of police cars. He spun out the back tire of the Blackie, streaming foul-smelling rubber smoke, and shot off the wrong way down his side of the street, headed west now. The police units that could still move chased after him, ignoring the 18-wheeler and the muscle car speeding in pursuit of the Master of the Hunt in the other direction.

Max clutched at her seat belt as Jimmie slid the lumbering rig through the jumble of late-morning rush-hour traffic, squeezing through gaps she didn't believe it was physically possible for Paladin's truck to move through.

“He's turning right onto Joe Lowery Boulevard,” Jimmie said into his headset. “I think he's headed for the interstate.” Jimmie keyed his mike to Channel 23 again. “Break 2-3, break 2-3, looking for any brothers out there, anyone. This is Paladin, and we sure could use some help right about now, c'mon?” There was no answer, only silence. “Damn it,” Jimmie muttered, and swung the wheel to avoid a car and to slip through another impossible gap.

“I thought you Brethren were everywhere,” Max said through gritted teeth.

“We are,” Jimmie said. “Just not all at the same time.” He glanced for an instant at Max, then back at the road. “What you said back there, in the hotel, about the universe being in trouble, what did you mean?”

“It's kind of complicated,” Max said. “And—oh God, watch out!—shouldn't you focus on driving right now?”

“The Three Who Are One?” Jimmie said, ignoring her as he slid the rig between a minivan and a PT Cruiser. The Cruiser honked at him and the driver flipped him off. “That's a Wiccan reference, isn't it? I've dealt with enough good and bad witches over the years to know that much, at least. He said something about the three being dead—”

“Not dead,” Max corrected, “diminished. I don't think they can actually die. If they did, that would be the end of everything.”

“Okay, explain that,” Jimmie said, stuffing some snuff into his cheek. The Master's bike was a dark shape about half a mile ahead. Jimmie downshifted to allow the moving puzzle pieces of the other cars on the road to drift into a new pattern that, hopefully, would provide an opening.

“The three are the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone,” Max said. “Anthropomorphized representations of cosmic forces. It was a way for early man to grasp cosmology. Many cite the Triple Goddess as the creation of Robert Graves in the early to mid twentieth century. However, as early as the first century BCE—”

“Max!” Jimmie interrupted. “Not teaching a class here, chasing bad guys. What forces does the Triple Goddess represent?”

“Right, right, sorry,” Max said. “The Maiden is the generative principles—new life, creation, renewal of a cycle, birth. The Mother is the balancing principle—stability, maturity, order, progress.”

Jimmie swerved and the whole cab rocked. Max grabbed her seat belt again and gave a frightened little squeak. The truck broke free of the bottleneck in time to see the Pagan's bike ascending the 55A ramp. “He's on I-20 west,” Jimmie said into his mike. “He's hauling ass.”

“Jimmie!” Max shouted, her arms and feet locking in terror. Jimmie instantly realized that the truck in front of him had jammed on the brakes. He did the same, jerking the shotgun gearshift down. It was pure instinct; there wasn't time for anything else. The rig groaned and shrieked to a stop, with less than an inch between its grille and the rear bumper of the truck. Past the truck, Jimmie could see a line of traffic, all stopped.

“Damn it!” Jimmie said, slapping the wheel. “We're tied up. He's out of sight on I-20, copy?”

Lovina's Charger snarled past, gliding up the on-ramp's shoulder after the Master of the Hunt at eighty miles per hour. “I'm on him,” she said over the radio.

Jimmie sighed and waited for the jam to clear. “What about the Crone?” he asked.

Max exhaled and rubbed her face. “Entropy,” she said. “The end of the cycle—closure, death. The three represent the feminine aspects of creation—in eternal opposition, and complement, to the masculine aspects, represented by Cernunnos, one of the names of the Horned God. Jimmie, if what the Pagan said is true, then the universe, at its most fundamental levels, is out of whack and is falling apart. We have to do something before it's too late.”

“Right,” Jimmie said. “Save the universe. Got it, but first we have to merge into the damned right lane.”

Traffic on I-20 was light compared with the street, and Lovina's Dodge slid through it like a snake gliding on water. The hum of the engine was like being in love. She was going over a hundred now, and she saw the Pagan and his motorcycle ahead in the left lane, accelerating. She did the same.

When Lovina was in Afghanistan, she met a guy everyone called Benno—she honestly couldn't remember what his real name was. The reason Benno stuck in her head was that it was because of him that she loved so much weird-ass music. He'd play mix CDs all the damn time—back at base camp, on patrols whenever he could, and even a few times in the middle of a hot LZ, when he shouldn't. Benno's musical tastes were almost as wonky as the man himself, but some of them had rubbed off on Lovina, even back in the world. So now, far away from home, chasing a man she had just seen shrug off small-arms fire as if it were shower water, she had the Charger's speakers throbbing to a mix Benno had made for her when they were both headed home. Shriekback's “Running on the Rocks” flowed, morphed, into Billy Idol's “Rebel Yell,” and it made Lovina will the muscle car faster, faster, closer to the Master of the Hunt.

The Pagan glanced back, and Lovina sensed his eyes on her, like a cancer creeping into her cells. He moved toward a cluster of traffic, sliding in and out between the cars, ignoring lanes and angry car horns. Lovina took to the shoulder of the highway again; the Charger shuddered and shimmied as she edged around the cluster of traffic. Gravel sprayed everywhere, and the motorists honked and flipped her off as she fishtailed the Dodge back onto the highway and around the island of cars and trucks. The Pagan did it again, threading between another mass of vehicles, ignoring the lanes and the inches that separated him from the other vehicles. The gap widened, and Lovina wished she had roller lights and a siren to get these people the hell out of her way. The Charger was a beast on the open road, and she knew she could run him to ground, but he was putting too many cars and trucks between them. She wrestled the Charger onto the edge of the road again, one of her tires almost dropping into a two-foot drainage ditch, but she jerked the wheel and managed to keep from wiping out. She was back on the road, but even more distance separated them now.

“I'm at Exit 53,” she said. “He's about a mile ahead of me, and accelerating. He's going to be out of sight in a second.”

“Stick with him, Lovina,” Jimmie said over the CB. “We're on the interstate, and we're coming up fast.”

“I'm trying to get up to him, but he's lane-splitting,” she said. “He's driving like a maniac—no fear of crashing, none. Damn it! He just put another half mile and another group of cars between us. Hang on a second!”

Lovina began to try the shoulder trick again, feeling her tires scrambling for traction on the greasy loose gravel that littered the edge of the road. She whipped hard right to avoid an abandoned muffler on the shoulder and then turned hard to slip back onto the road. She succeeded, but fishtailed again and had to swerve and brake to avoid being T-boned by a silver Toyota.

“Lovina? What's happening?” Jimmie asked over the CB.

The Master of the Hunt was again in the middle of a group of cars, sliding between them. He edged closer to a compact smart car on his right, and Lovina saw him draw his nasty-looking hunting knife, its blade a glint in the late-morning sun. He brought his bike within inches of the driver's open window; his knife arm flashed inside the car for an instant, then withdrew, and the Pagan's motorcycle accelerated quickly away.

“Oh God, no!” Lovina shouted, downshifting and turning hard to avoid what she knew was coming. “Jimmie, he just killed someone!”

The compact veered over into the left lane. Lovina saw the driver slump like a rag doll, thrown by the inertia. The out-of-control car slid in front of a work truck. The two vehicles struck each other, the sound of metal screaming. Lovina saw the whole dance, of velocity and control, begin to fail as brake lights glared, and wheels were hastily jerked, all too late. She buried the gas pedal under her foot and weaved between the elements of the six-car pileup on instinct, slipping between the folding cages of shredding metal and the constellations of exploding glass. For an instant, the numbers on the various license plates of the crashing cars seemed hyperreal and in perfect, almost exaggerated focus. The numbers moved in front of her eyes and in her mind, unbidden, like a compulsion that could not be ignored. Her universe was the road in front of her, the Charger was her body, and she was nothing but engine and will. Then she was clear and she had no idea how she could possibly have done that. She was sweating and every muscle was tensed. She felt as if she had overslept and suddenly awakened.

The Master of the Hunt was almost out of sight, gliding through another set of cars and trucks, and then clear and open highway. He accelerated to, easily, a hundred and fifty miles an hour. Almost gone.

“I'm losing him, Jimmie!” she said. “I'm losing the son of a bitch.”

There was a flash of black-and-silver on Lovina's right, something hurtling past at dizzying speed.

“I got him,” a voice crackled over the CB. It was Heck. “Sorry I'm late.”

Heck came up on the Pagan's right, slipping between the cars and trucks, using them as cover, drifting less than inches from paint and steel moving at a hundred and seventy-five miles an hour. The Master of the Hunt spotted him just as they both cleared the traffic. Heck veered hard left and was beside the Master of the Hunt, separated by a few feet. They were on open road now, passing Exit 52, headed toward I-285.