Waiting for Mister Cool Read online

  Though the surrounding countryside had seemed deserted on the ride into the valley, there had to be people living close enough to have heard the explosions. Of course, the booms might have been dismissed as thunder. Or the locals had been paid to ignore anything unusual, by either side.

  Max shook his head. Someone still may have called the state police. And the men, dead and dying, had to have connections in the area, like the motel, or bars and restaurants they frequented, certainly lovers. Locals were sure to know something was going on in the local ghost town. Come breakfast time, people would be missed. Questions asked. Someone would come around. And though Morris’s men, and even the opposition, had apparently known enough about the old, secret facilities not to set off possible alarms connected to distant monitoring stations during their underground activities, the firefight had to have set off devices everyone had simply avoided, missed, or not gotten to, yet.

  Life was complicated enough. Max’s instincts told him it was time to move on.

  But he hesitated. More than concern for the twins held his instincts in check.

  He’d stumbled across something new in the world, a different kind of hunting ground that at first glance seemed perfectly suited for him, but which he was beginning to believe held a kind of power the Beast, perhaps even the twins, could not overcome. What was going on didn’t feel connected to the usual web of subterfuge spun by governments, corporations, and all the other gangs, criminal and legal, who hired him.

  The idea of a new and different power rising in a world filled with rivals accustomed to fighting each other by the same old rules filled Max with dread. Because whatever power capable of generating hallucinations and hysteria on the scale Max had observed and experienced, bio-engineering a new species of plant, concocting the underground pool’s mind-cleansing potion, and producing the bizarre effect he’d witnessed in the cottage with Santos, might not need someone with Max’s talents.

  With so much power, death on the scale of the small and the personal could become irrelevant. Even the threat wars and nuclear or biochemical annihilation might be defused, if minds could be twisted by illusions, and familiar hungers channeled to a new purpose, or eliminated altogether. If all men like Morris came to believe in, and had the capability of tapping into, a higher power hiding behind false gods, then what would happen to Max, to the Beast, the twins? What place would non-believers have in a world controlled by men who could forge a hallucinogenic unity in the minds of people who should be busy trying to kill each other?

  Fragments of an insane puzzle fell together for an instant, but Max couldn’t hold on to the picture that refused to make sense.

  Max took a deep breath, checked his pulse. The Beast circled impatiently around his thoughts, but gave no warning of poisons or chemicals inducing paranoia. Max calmed the Beast, and himself, and waited, promising he’d do what had to be done soon. Very soon.

  There was no sign of Cal, and the silence between Morris and Max wore on. Max didn’t push. But he did place a hand on Morris’s shoulder, feeling the man quaking, and after a minute he asked, “Are you all right?”

  “No one understands,” Morris said, too fast, as if Max had pulled a dam’s release. “I’m an agent of change. I bring hope. I’m here to set these folks free.”

  “They’re free,” Max said. “Most of them are dead, actually. Or will be.”

  Morris waved Max’s words away. “I’m a revolutionary. I stand against fundamentalist, reactionary forces. I’m bringing the truth. I’ve seen the light. I’ve heard the Word. I have a mission, and nothing human gave it to me. You see, I know what’s been going on here. Been keeping my eye on this place for years. My father did, too, and my grandfather. Some say great granddad help build the original cottages. All that bullshit I told you about learning about this place through service, it was a fucking lie.”

  Morris laughed, too loud, and before Max could say anything he rushed into the silence between them. “Got to keep hiding in the smoke. Can’t be too careful. Maybe what I’m telling you now is a lie, too? What a joke. But I’m telling the truth. I enlisted to get to the inside track of what went on here. I knew what profile to give them. How to get close to the records, the people still interested but biding their time. I was taught. There’s a clan of us, families of people who were here, and survivors, who’ve been watching the place switch hands. We watched pipe dreamers run it down into the ground, freaks try to ignore the reality of the place, and people who thought they knew enough of the truth to try to harness it. But you see how far they all got. A hole in the ground, a secret pool. You haven’t even seen the mirror, yet. Or the gallery. The guy in the sky is just the tip of the iceberg, Max. Big things are coming. Big things.”

  Max didn’t want any more information. No more fragments of the puzzle. Kueur and Alioune would be enough.

  “Maybe we should move up a little –” Max began. There was no trace of Cal, and he didn’t want to hear any more of Morris’s torrent of words.

  “What’s needed in this here place is as simple as a golden arch. That would really help bring the new order in. That’s all people have been trying to do, with their resorts and carnivals and bases. But me, I’m thinking of putting together a little downtown strip with a franchise coffee shop and a couple of antique stores. Bam, we got ourselves civilization. Hell, a donut store would get us grounded. Next step, get a nice little congregation going. Build a beautiful temple. Lots of glass. Nice acoustics. Get great music, a radio show, then some television time. In a snap, people see how we’re just part of the bigger picture, not a bunch of marginal nut jobs. Then go back and open the resort like it was supposed to be, or expand to a cathedral, or hell, why not both, and pretty soon we’ll have people coming out of here full of the good word, knowing what’s really going on, spreading the truth.”

  Max imagined seeds being sprinkled across suburban lawns by the handful, and massive coils of flesh streaming through storm clouds.

  “You said this stuff was passed down to you?” Max asked. “Does your little tribe have a chief? A shaman?” Morris’s rambling brought him back to his younger days, and work he’d done after his discharge to feed his taste for blood. Certain military contracts had involved recruiting and motivating insurgent forces with a mix of drugs, spirituality, and modern arms. He’d just followed the scripts given to him, without much enthusiasm, but his more gifted associates had recast themselves as holy men, sweeping up half-starving farmers and herders into armies devoted to sacred war. Intoxicated by the adulation, some of those men had forgotten who they were working for. Max never had. And when the assignment came to eliminate them, he’d found holy men bled and screamed just as easily as anyone else.

  “Ah. You mean our spiritual leader?”

  “Santos, right?” Maybe he’d been wrong, and the strange, sick man in the cottage was connected to a larger scheme, guiding a bunch of incompetent misfits on a path too dangerous for more valuable assets. Or perhaps he was a rogue agent, continuing an aborted mission. Someone on an enemies list. Either way, there were angles to play, if he really was involved in a larger game.

  Morris turned to Max, ignoring the half-lit, shadow-veiled terrain around them. “He’s more of an angel. A representative of heaven, sent to us as a guide on the path.” Morris grabbed Max by the shirt cloth, pulled him closer. “Look, Max, you’ve been touched by the higher spiritual force. It came down and smacked you in the gut. You felt it in the thorns. Smell it in the air. You know our higher power actually does exist. I’m just a fighting bishop leading a holy host on a crusade. There’s a few others like me out there. I’ve got a half-brother, in fact, who’s running for . . . but you’re looking for our pope, right? The keeper of the flame? Yeah, yeah, you’re ready. We need you. Your kids and friend can come over, too, if you find them. Everybody’s welcome. As long as they believe. Here, let me bring you all the way in.”

  Morris took out a satellite phone from underneath his vest. Max started to ask why he hadn’
t used it before now to call for more backup. The Beast threw itself against his words, wanting to move, to finish the wounded, finish the killing.

  Then the phone was in his hand, against his ear, and Morris was saying, “Just listen, just listen.”

  And the truth was clear. Max’s gun hand moved toward Morris, brushing aside conjectures as wild as his hallucinations. Reality was simple. First impressions correct. There wasn’t going to be anybody on the line. No vast conspiracy, or rogue operation. Morris and his men were just a handful of vets who’d worked on a secret project long ago, along with friends and relatives, and a few odd characters picked up along the way, all looking to cash in on a psuedo-religious real estate deal involving an undoubtedly toxic ex-military site.

  Max was ready to end the charade, to kill Morris, when the ringing in the earpiece stopped, then the line connected and someone began talking and Max forgot where he was.

  Picking up the conversation in mid-stream, Max thought the phone had misconnected with an interfering signal. But the voice rolled on, and Max realized there was only one voice on the line, a single, constant stream of talk, and like water it flowed cool and steady from a higher source, a frozen distant place, and the voice ran through him with a rush of words that wore down bumps and edges, carried off spilled blood and semen, soothed him with the music of its passage through the world, cleansing, healing, relaxing, teaching him how the world worked as it moved through him, nudging the foundations of the reality he understood like pebbles along a stream bed, and the voice that was water changed boundaries along its edge with sudden surges, drowning the terrible roar of the thing inside him that wanted to kill, that wanted the voice to stop before it, too, was carried off, and suddenly Max slipped, like Cal had earlier in the mud, and he was down someplace looking up at the world and the view was different, he could see everything clearly, he could see because he was at the center, and the world, the universe revolved around him, and so much mattered, everything mattered, because everything belonged to him and he belonged to all that was, and it all meant something he couldn’t put into words but what he felt in his heart and gut was vast and filled the empty places he’d carried with him all his life to overflowing, and for the first time since he was a child he wanted to cry, but he couldn’t, he didn’t, he shouted, but the stream of words wouldn’t stop, it rode over the sound of his voice, and the Beast roared like a river falling over a cliff and carried Max with it for an instant, enough to change the course of the voice for an instant and shift reality sideways again –

  – and this time he was looking up from the pit a madman’s world, or a world which had driven a man mad, and he couldn’t decide which was right, and the stream of a voice flooded him with its words, telling him it didn’t matter, there were bigger truths, and the Beast argued back, taking control of Max’s hand and smashing the phone into his own nose, and Max was knocked back into the night and the rubble and the silence except for the words coming out of the receiver and the Beast howling for honest blood –

  Morris took the phone back, listened, smiled and nodded his head, mumbled an echo of what Max had heard, then turned off the receiver.

  “I know you won’t believe it, but he’s a homeless guy in Toronto,” Morris said. “A cousin, actually. Fucking genius. Carrying the family tradition. Closest thing to our great granddad our older clan members ever saw. Showed me things when I was up there. He’s a vet, still listed as M.I.A. in Cambodia. Some guys get hooked on him like he’s crack. Happy to just sit at his feet and listen. Got to watch that.” He gently touched Max’s nose with the tip of his finger. “Got to do what you’ve got to do to keep the faith going. Can’t just sit back and wait for deliverance.”

  Cal appeared, so suddenly both Morris and Max had their weapons on him before he’d said a word.

  “Got half a dozen guys staged by the other generator,” Cal reported, earnest and bright-eyed, brimming with the importance of his work. He’d settled down his last appearance, and the Beast was jealous of what he might have done to calm down. “It’s still working. None of the underground facilities took any hits. We can leave a couple of guys behind to gather the wounded, set up triage, call in our own medical team. The rest can handle themselves, help us mop up –”

  Max’s shot caught Cal in the forehead and knocked his head back. He was dead instantly, but Max kept firing while he snatched Cal’s M16 out of his useless hands, pumping his entire clip into the man’s skull until the bone had cracked open and his face was smashed and his brains had spilled out.

  And he was already firing the M16 when Morris was bringing up his weapon, mouth open and stuffed with questions he couldn’t spit out fast enough. Morris never pulled the trigger because he was already falling, taking the first bullet in the hip, and then two more in the shoulders, placed to shatter bone but avoid the major arteries, so all he could do was lay in shock and pain, safe behind his vest and the wall of his faith, while Max looked him over.

  The Beast wanted him, but Max offered it Cal instead.

  They ripped Cal apart using Morris as a table, until both Max and Morris were covered in blood and gore, and anyone who might have come across them would have thought they’d both committed atrocities before attacking each other.

  Morris never screamed. Through the sound of teeth tearing and gnawing, the greedy gulps, the gush of blood as Cal’s body was drained dry, the wrenching of joints and tearing of muscles, the suffocating weight of a body, or one of its parts, over his face, Morris never spoke a word.

  But there was pain and fear in his eyes, twisting his face and mouth, devouring the insanity in the words that died stillborn on his lips, and Max took pride in imposing his own reality on Morris, and exorcizing, if only for the duration of his feasting, the faith that had carried the man he’d just betrayed so far through life to the final gateway of his death.

  The Beast, driven to a hysteria, wanted Morris, his men, and any survivors on the carnival field of battle. But Max worked hard at controlling his demon, raising the necessity of finding the twins to the leading banner of his action, until the Beast, with its sorrowful keening, was forced to mourn the lost opportunity of feasting on Cal’s half-dozen men who would have tried to save Morris, had he only called for help.

  They watched Morris die, choking on the truth he no longer had the senses to encompass.

  Max assuaged the Beast’s pitiable grief by feeding it all the nonsensical pieces of the puzzle he’d been trying to put together, promising more tangible fare to come.

  Chapter 6

  Max changed his mind about carrying weapons, choosing efficient killing over the pleasurable kind. He dropped the .45 and picked out a more modern 9mm, a shotgun and full Uzi for close quarters, and an M16, as well as two bags of clips, Morris’s armored vest and flashlight from the surrounding litter of supplies. He kept the knife he’d carried, in case he needed to kill quietly. Making sure the three grenades were clipped safely to a belt he’d strapped on, he started off in the direction of the enemy camp, feeling as if he’d fallen off an action movie screen.

  The awkward weight and balance of shifting cargo, accompanied by the clatter of stocks and barrels, made him feel clumsy, unnatural. Like a target. And again, a clown. The Beast begged for him to strip down, to move fast and hunt quietly, to terrify victims with his sudden, terrible attack, and kill slowly, inflicting fearful anguish. But the twins needed him. He had a duty to his pack. He might need the weaponry.

  He steered away from the remaining lamp lights and kept off the paths, creeping instead between sheds and shacks, keeping himself in the night. He did his best to move silently. Despite its disappointment over his priorities, blood from the men he’d murdered kept the Beast aroused, and its strength flowed easily into Max.

  He paused by a pair of shot-up bodies – older men, with neatly styled dark hair and crisp outfitter’s camouflage fatigues that made them stand out from Morris’s group. Clean, surgically tucked skin and manicures marked their privile
ged status. Like Morris’s men, neither of them were wearing armor or helmets. Like Morris’s men, they looked unprepared for the kind of close-quarter combat that had erupted on Max’s arrival. Armed with shotguns, they still had one of his grenades between them. Max checked them for a trace of the twins’ scent, and when he didn’t find any, he put away the knife he’d been ready to use on their dead bodies, took the grenade and kept going.

  His hunter’s mind turned to the prey he was stalking, searching for an advantage over their number, and a way to track down their nest. He tried linking mad, half-naked teenage boys with the mix of men he’d seen from the other side. But as with Morris’s followers, who lacked their leader’s missionary zeal and hadn’t seemed hardened enough to sacrifice children for whatever vision possessed them, Max detected fundamental gaps in the nature of his latest targets.

  That they were all child molesters of one type or another, he didn’t doubt. But he couldn’t conceive men from such different backgrounds, some with much to lose, and with only one thing common to all, capable of establishing an elaborate and risky bargain with the locals, exploiting the underground military base on their own, or setting up ambushes and explosive charges. Even the surrounding county populace, as sparse as it was, should not have embraced either group so easily. Conspiracies, in his experience, usually collapsed under the weight of the ever-growing number of participants.

  In this case, everyone connected with whatever was going on at the carnival grounds was behaving perfectly according to a larger plan. This was unnatural. Unpredictable. Dangerous. In some way Max couldn’t pin down, all the people around him were ill.

  It was as if something had infected their petty appetites and worked itself into their minds, transforming personalities, and instilling the will and intelligence to fulfill hungers that only mimicked their own, hungers that ached to satisfy something else’s demands. In the course of his work, Max had seen men broken and re-shaped, programmed to accept behaviors they’d always had the potential to engage in, but never the need or desire. The human brain was only so much dying flesh, and it could be filled with almost anything to sustain the illusion of a meaning to its own brief existence.