“Supergeek, actually, and proud of it,” he corrected, and tapped his watch. “Jackson…”
No more putting it off. Taking a deep breath, I transferred the keys to my other hand, stripped off the right glove, and then cradled the hunk of metal again, this time against bare skin. The mill was already verified; now it was time to read Charlie. There were the usual bits and pieces of him floating about in the keys. Driving for groceries. Taking Meleah’s puppies to the vet for shots. Cruising in the rain with Elvis wailing about wild horses and hound dogs. The flotsam and jetsam of daily life. The normal results of a reading. Unconsciously, I relaxed and enjoyed the warm weight of a puppy in my lap and the sounds of the King shaking the speakers.
Then it started.
At first, it was almost indistinguishable from the backdrop of the memories. It was just another emotion. Lost. I’m lost. It was so faint and muted that I expected to see Charlie pull a map from the glove compartment. Just a mild annoyance. Maybe he’d stop at a gas station and ask for directions.
It was because I forgot. For a moment, I forgot what had happened the day before at the caverns. The talent was banged up a bit thanks to reliving Charlie’s death, bent but not broken. Emotions were hazy TV viewing instead of living 3-D, and Charlie wasn’t feeling the kind of lost that a map could do a damn thing about.
Trees. Water.
How do I get in?
Where’s the door?
Where’s the door?
Where is me?
Where, where, where, where, where, where…
“Shit,” I muttered, shoving the keys into my pocket and looking around wildly. As if I’d be able to see anything.
“What?” Hector demanded.
“He’s here,” I said instantly. “He’s looking for a way in. He’s lost. He’s looking for a way home. He’s looking here.”
Hector was on his cell phone immediately, but the caverns were easily an hour away. They’d never get there in time. I started toward the mill at a run to warn the others. We had a team of six: Hector, me, and four others. And one of us was about to get real ornery real quick.
The mill didn’t have the history Carlson Caverns did, but it wasn’t all kittens and frigging rainbows, either. Hundreds of years before the phrase “going postal” was around, there’d been a similar one in these parts: “gristed.” Or, to be more precise, “done got himself gristed.” This one hadn’t been a legend needing my confirmation. This had been in the papers of the day. One of the mill workers, I had no idea what his name had been, had flat lost his mind, tossed his coworkers off the roof, then chopped up their bodies with an axe and fed the pieces down the hopper to be milled, a.k.a. gristed. By the time someone found out what had happened, whatshisname-really, what the hell was his name? — was chopping off pieces of himself to feed to the hungry mill.
There were no axes here, though. That was a good thing. It’s hard to chop up people without the proper tools, any homicidal maniac could tell you that. Reasonable, logical, but it didn’t stop the screaming from starting.
I hesitated for a split second, then ran on. How bad could it be? Three of them were scientists loaded down with their geeky equipment. The remaining guy was a soldier, but he was unarmed as a safety measure. Everyone was. Not even a penknife among us.
And yet the screaming went on.
As I continued toward the mill, I could hear the grass-muffled pounding of Allgood’s feet behind me. He pulled even with me as the first person was thrown off the roof. I skidded to a stop and could feel my jaw slacken as the man tumbled through the air, white-coated arms windmilling and mouth stretched wide in a scream. He hit the ground with a highly unpleasant thump and a bounce. He was still twitching, though, when he came to rest; the fall was only a little more than two stories. I liked to think that was an excuse for what I said next, but it probably wasn’t.
“Geeks falling out of the sky. If that’s not a sign of the Apocalypse, I don’t know what is,” I said, awed.
Hector swore and ran into the mill. I didn’t follow, not yet. Instead, I shaded my eyes and peered at the roof, because a little information goes a long way toward not having to realize firsthand that you can’t fly. I didn’t know for sure who was up there-I tended to label the scientists as geeks one, two, and three and the soldier as goon one. Geeks and goons didn’t need names-or so I’d thought. This was geek number two on the roof and unfortunate geek number three on the ground. The guy on the roof doing the tossing, his name was… Damn. His name was… Bob, I pried out of my brain, triumphant.
“Uh, hey, Bob,” I called up. “Can you just, I don’t know, not throw anyone else off the roof for a minute and listen up?”
A cloud crossed the sun, blocking the glare, and I could suddenly see him perfectly. Raging eyes, saliva cascading over his chin, and his mouth twisted in a hoarse scream. Because he was the one screaming. Without a second’s pause, it went on and on and on. It was the kind that rips throats to bloody shreds and minds to the very same. The worst part was that I didn’t know if it came from Bob himself or the recording playing in him. It reminded me of an old commercial: Is it live or is it Memorex?
But he didn’t stop or listen. He bent and dragged another form into sight. The goon. I could see blood in the blond hair. Bob hadn’t been able to find an axe, but he’d found something to use to whack his coworkers over the head. A length of wood, maybe. It seemed that when the recording loop within him couldn’t reenact the event exactly, it stuck with the spirit of it: death. Lots and lots of death.
Bob grunted as he moved the soldier over the peak of the roof. Grunted, screamed, grunted, screamed some more. Insanity incarnate. I’d only seen one thing in my life more disturbing than this.
A well and a drowned little girl.
Tasting bile, I tried to hold on to the casual tone. “Bob…” No. That wasn’t who he was now. Jim, Joshua… what the fuck had been that guy’s name in the file I’d skimmed?
“Jacob!” I said triumphantly. “Jacob, I know you can hear me. I need you to listen to me, okay?”
Jacob Messersmith was long dead and had nothing to do with this current mess, but a certain pattern etched into the fabric of reality didn’t know that. The energy, alien and trespassing, flowed along that pattern like water filling an empty riverbed-it brought to the pattern a very limited facsimile of life. An imitation of it. But imitations don’t always know that about themselves. Computer programs are a good example. Jacob didn’t know that he didn’t exist, and Jacob recognized his name.
The screaming stopped. He stared at me, his hands tangled in the dark green T-shirt of the soldier, one heave away from moving forward with his task. “Jacob.” He said it in a voice thick and gravelly. It sounded as if his throat was choked with stones and blood, and it was as far from human as you could get. “Ja-cob.”
But that made sense, because he wasn’t human, was he? He wasn’t even a he. It was nothing… nothing that thought it was something.
“Jacob, you look like you’re having a bad day. Want to talk about it?” That was me, a shrink to a paranormal rerun. It didn’t get much more screwed up than that. I wasn’t even sure I could talk to a pattern. Did it have enough information imprinted in those violent moments to be able to respond beyond killing? Was there an imprint of Jacob’s mind-set, his emotions and thoughts? Or only his actions?
“Jacob,” I repeated when the doughy face stared down at me blankly. “What’s going on? What’d these guys do to piss you off?”
“Jacob.” There was blood on his lips-from the screaming, I thought. “Jacob.” The limp form of the soldier bobbled in his grip. “ Gott. Gott tells Jacob. Gott erklarte mir. God tells me. They are against me. They plot. They would murder. They are demons. God tells Jacob to be his right hand. To smite the fallen ones.”
Great-not just an animate pattern but an animate, schizophrenic pattern. I had no hopes of reasoning with him. How do you reason with a DVR player? I could only hope to distract him, to make the disk skip, so to speak, to give Hector-
And there he was. On the roof behind Jacob-Bob. He’d left the scientist part behind, and now he was all soldier, loose and tense all in one.
“Jacob,” I called again hurriedly. “Demons. Tell me about the demons.”
“The fallen ones. Gott says smite the fallen ones,” he mumbled, the blood streaking his chin as he hefted the unconscious soldier. “ Gott took their demon wings. They can no longer fly. They can only fall.” And with a horrible
