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Authors: Jon Land

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BOOK: Kingdom of the Seven
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“Judgment Day, Blainey.”
“Not if we can help it.”
 
Earvin Early sat huddled against the building, knees tucked against his chest. The name of the building, he did not know. The name of the city did not matter. They were all the same; interchangeable pieces in a puzzle he cared nothing about.
Early shifted his great bulk, twirled his canvas coat tighter against him to provide further obscurity. Not that he needed to.
He could, after all, make himself invisible. He could do lots of things if he really put his mind to it. Could go places just by closing his eyes, anywhere he wanted. Do anything he wanted when he got there.
Earvin Early lived in his mind. The body was nothing to
him; a ragged shell the only purpose of which was to shroud the vast temple of his being. For this reason a bath for Early consisted of being caught in a downpour. He liked the stink that rose from his soiled clothes and frame because it kept him in touch with his physical self. So did the pain rising off the boils and open festering sores that dotted his face, neck, and shoulders. The pain kept him from slipping away permanently into one of the worlds his mind created.
Early suddenly saw rats rushing down the sidewalk, clustering around him, rising on their hind legs and sniffing at him. Early reached out to pet a few and they nuzzled against his fingers, purring. Early blinked his eyes.
The rats were gone.
He saw lots of things that didn’t last very long. Long ago he had stopped trying to figure which was real-world real and which was the product of his mind that could do anything. Instead he just assumed everything was real-world real; a kind of compromise.
Early’s revulsion for his consciousness was what caused him to become a vagrant. But the role evolved into the ultimate disguise. Wherever he went, wherever they brought him, he fit in. He could disappear without really disappearing at all, and that was good because becoming invisible took a great deal of energy, energy better saved for his Freeings.
That’s what Early called what he did best. He used to know it was killing, but if all he was ridding his victims of were the consciousnesses that chained them to mediocrity, then he was actually doing them a favor.
Freeing them.
Early had Freed a man earlier that day. He had made himself not there when he did it so no one would see him.
But someone did. Early saw the man and recognized him in the flash of sight he allowed himself before he made himself gone.
The Indian
…
The Indian was one of the last memories he carried before
they gave him the power and the real world grew all fuzzy and misted over. When he had survived the fall off the ravine with two arrows stuck in him, he knew he had passed into a higher plane of existence. Great powers had saved him, great powers that were certain to expand beyond his wildest dreams inside him. A world was born only he was fit to inhabit. He let himself grow dirty on the outside while the rest of humanity grew soiled on the in, prisoners of their own consciousness and bodies.
No matter. Given time, Early would be more than happy to free them all.
He knew his great powers would serve a purpose, and waited for that purpose to be revealed to him. When the Others found him, he knew right away it would come from them.
He did not work for them in the traditional sense of the word. He only performed an occasional Freeing when the need arose and then he disappeared once more. The fact that they always knew how to find him proved they could direct themselves anywhere, just as he could. The missions they selected for him, the subjects they selected for Freeing, were part of a much larger program he knew little, and cared nothing, about. He kept his special gifts secret even from them. No one who lived in real-world time could know about those, no one!
But the Indian had known; the Indian had seen him, recognized him, looked at him, and known everything.
Earvin Early sat crouched against the building, rocking himself now as he tried to send his mind to find the Indian. The Indian, though, must have known enough to put his psychic shields up, and the efforts of Early’s mind went for naught.
Of course, Early hadn’t told the others about the Indian; he wouldn’t have even if he still spoke in the words of the many prisoners who needed Freeing. He spoke only in lines of poetry learned in the days before his wondrous changing. In doing so he never let
his
words give away his true self; the words he spoke were all other people’s.
But the absence of words did not change things so far as the Indian was concerned. He relied on them no more than Early did, and Early was glad the afternoon had ended without their inevitable confrontation. Early knew fear only for those who saw him as he was.
Earvin Early would wait for another time, another place. Twice their paths had crossed. They were certain to cross again.
“What fates impose, that men must needs abide. It boots not to resist both wind and tide.”
Early quoted Shakespeare out loud to the night and then returned to the inner reaches of his mind, where it was even darker.
“You understand why I have summoned you,” the man in formal priest’s robes said to the figures kneeling on either side of him, slightly offset so a slight twist of his gaze could capture both of them.
The figures nodded, in unison.
Unlike the priest, they were cloaked in the garb of a novice or a monk: brown robes stitched of scratchy burlap held at the waist by a rope belted as a sash. Their hoods threw dark shadows over the tops of their faces, leaving only their mouths partially visible in the dim light.
The church around them was huge and dark, unseen recessed lights casting their meager glow from the ceiling far above. The wood of each pew was hand-carved, smoothed and darkened from years of experience and wear. The altar before them stood as it had for over two hundred years. The stained-glass windows, scratched and battered and left to the elements, kept the light out and secrets within. In the background a youthful choir could be heard chanting softly in traditional Latin.
“Ratansky was killed,” the priest continued. His exposed face was long and drawn, worn by fatigue and strain. The deep blue of his eyes had faded. His graying hair hung limply to frame a right ear that angled into a sharp tip and left ear that angled into no tip at all.
The lobe on that side was missing.
“We have lost contact with all those forming the chain set up to aid him.” The priest rotated his eyes from one of the figures before him to the other. “The network has been compromised, rendered useless to us.”
“Are we safe
here?
” The voice from the figure on the left was young, masculine; fearful and excited at the same time.
The priest nodded. “I have kept this place a secret even from our most trusted contacts. Now, beyond these walls, trust no longer exists.” He looked at them both. “Remove your hoods.”
The robed figures did so in perfect simultaneity, revealing soft faces pale with strain and worry. Each had long, sandy brown hair; the boy’s shoulder length and the girl’s a half foot longer. Their eyes were an identical shade of piercing crystal blue, perhaps too large for the rest of their elegantly chiseled, statuelike faces. Their noses were long and slender, narrow chins centered between angular dimples grooved into both lower cheeks. Too perfect and unmarked, too beautiful to be real, and yet so perfectly matched that anyone seeing them would know instantly they were twins.
“It is only us,” the priest continued.
“Then we have lost,” said the boy.
“No, Jacob!” his twin sister insisted, her voice slightly smoky while Jacob’s rose a bit too high for a male’s. “There are still the three of us!”
“Yes,” the priest acknowledged, and they both turned his way. “But Ratansky had what we so desperately sought.”
“Then we must retrieve it,” Rachel said staunchly. “Whatever that takes.”
The priest shrugged. “That may be the only way to stop them. They have the means; we’ve feared that all along. But I never believed they would be in position so soon to bring it off … .”
“As I said,” Rachel picked up, “whatever it takes.”
“But,” the priest started, and stopped just as fast, “I
can’t
! …
I can’t!”
The words stretched a grimace across his tortured features.
The twins looked at each other.
“We will do it,” said Rachel, her twin, Jacob, nodding his agreement.
“If there was any other way,” the priest followed, his voice dry and pained.
“There isn’t,” Jacob told him. “And there is no place to run to. At least there won’t be. Not in this world.”
The priest’s face bent in sadness. The haunting melodic chants of the young choir echoed in the background and turned the sadness to grief.
“Children,” he said softly, “all that remains are children … .”
“
We
are not children,” Rachel insisted.
The priest looked at them. “You have not yet seen your eighteenth birthdays.”
“But we have lived this war with you for half of them,” Jacob remained. “And for the last four years we have trained with the other soldiers, who have now abandoned us. Taken the courses over and over again,
mastering
the skill sets—you said so yourself. And now you know there is no choice, for any of us.”
“If we are as good as you always said,” put forth Rachel.
“You are better.”
“Then we will go to New York. Ratansky must surely have left
something
.”
“The challenge lies in finding it,” added her twin. “Perhaps picking up where he left off.”
“The risks,” from the priest forlornly. “Lord in heaven, the risks …”
“Whether we go or not, they remain,” said Jacob.
“Only different,” added Rachel. “This is our last chance, the
world’s
last chance.”
The priest nodded slowly, reluctantly. He rose from his crouch, knees and back creaking, and waited for the twins to join him. When they did, facing him with bowed heads, he performed a brief blessing that ended with the sign of the cross drawn in the air before their foreheads.
“May God be with you,” he said finally. “May God be with us all.”
 
Captain Ted Wilkerson of the Arizona Highway Patrol strode down the corridor of Tucson General Hospital quickly, causing Dr. Lopez to break into a trot to keep up.
“We got him here as fast as we could, Captain,” Lopez explained, trying to plead his case.
They had come to the elevator. Wilkerson pressed the up arrow.
“Just give it to me again, Doc, and make it quick.”
“Your man Denbo—”
“He’s not just
my
man. He’s a man with a family who are gonna want to know what happened to him.”
“Well, as you know, he was found by one of your patrols four hours ago halfway between Tombstone and Mexico. He had driven a good ways across the desert, by all indications, and was suffering from severe heat prostration and dangerous dehydration. I think we got him here in time, but the next twenty-four hours will be the key.”
The elevator doors opened and Captain Wilkerson stepped in without waiting for those inside the compartment to step out. Dr. Lopez squeezed through the crowd to join him.
“I want to prepare you for what you’re going to see,” Lopez continued as the elevator hummed toward the third floor.
“I seen lots of men been in the desert longer than Wayne Denbo, Doc.”
“It’s not the desert that accounts for what I’m talking
about, Captain. It’s whatever happened to him before he drove himself out into it. Shock’s not unusual in these cases, but Officer Denbo is totally unresponsive and incoherent. He hasn’t said a word since we brought him in here, and we’re not sure he can hear what we say.”
On the third floor Lopez lunged out of the compartment ahead of Wilkerson and led him toward Wayne Denbo’s room: a corner private with a view of the night-lights burning in the hospital’s parking lot. When they got to the door, Lopez felt his progress stopped by a beefy hand in his chest.
“I’ll take it from here, Doc.”
“But—”
“Call ya if I need you.”
Wilkerson closed the door in Lopez’s face and turned to find Sergeant Bart Harkness standing vigil over Denbo’s bed.
“Jesus,” muttered Wilkerson.
Denbo lay there spread-eagle on the bed with his unblinking eyes staring at nothing. The heat blisters that had pocked his face had all been swabbed and bandaged, giving him the look of a man who had gone crazy during his morning shave. The flesh Wilkerson could see was sunburned red.
“Anything?” the captain raised.
“Not a word,” said Harkness.
Wilkerson reached Denbo’s bedside and looked back at the sergeant. “What the Christ happened?”
Harkness let his eyes fall on the still form lost in the air-conditioned cool of the room. “He makes a crazy distress call to dispatch, but before he can say where he is, the message just cuts off.”
“Like that? Nothing else?”
“When we found the car, what was left of the mike was on the passenger seat. Looks like he crushed it apart. Tore up his hand in the process,” Harkness explained, gesturing toward the bandage covering Denbo’s right palm. “Anyway, he left wherever he was in a hurry and drove straight
into the desert. Didn’t seem to matter where he went, ’long as he got away. Chopper found him just before dark. He was sitting by the front fender, the car out of gas, looking just about like he does now. We airlifted him here.”
“What about his partner? What about Langhorn?”
“Not a trace. We figure maybe Denbo left him off somewhere between where he ended up and where he started.”
“Any idea yet where on their patrol that was?”
“We’re sweeping a widening perimeter around Joe and Wayne’s last known position. Lots of square miles, though. Size of Rhode Island, maybe.”
Captain Wilkerson took a long look at Wayne Denbo’s blank face before continuing. “What was it you couldn’t tell me over the radio, Bart?”
“Wayne and Joe had someone in their backseat. We found hair that don’t match neither of theirs and fresh blood.”
“Blood …”
“Not much. Enough to tell us it wasn’t Wayne or Joe’s, though.”
“Where’s Langhorn?” Wilkerson asked out of frustration. “What the Christ happened to him?”
The question drew a shrug from Harkness. “Wish I knew, Cap.”
“Then try answering me this, son: What is it can make a man drive himself into the desert and leave him like … that?”
The two men looked down at Denbo’s still form and then at each other.
“What the fuck did he see, Bart?” asked Wilkerson. “What the fuck did he see?”
BOOK: Kingdom of the Seven
3.69Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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