“I did, until the Truth killed him. I’m not sure why or how Dr. Ram was lying. Maybe he was faking his data.” She shrugged. “We’ll find out sooner or later, I imagine.” She put out the stub of her cigarette, reached for her pack. “Now. Tell me again how your family drove the Hellion away. They strapped you down and read you books?”
“Lew read me comics. My mom read me Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. I loved it.”
“What do you mean, you loved it?” Before I could answer she stood up, frowning. She leaned into the little window that overlooked the lake and cupped her hand to the glass.
I heard it then, over the pattering rain. The chop of helicopter blades. The sound grew louder, until it was directly overhead: a deep, thumping drone. The helicopter was either very close, or very, very big. It passed on, but we could still hear it.
“Search and rescue?” I asked.
“I don’t think so.”
The sound grew loud again as the helicopter circled back. I went to the door and opened it. Fifty yards away, over the motel parking lot, a circle of lights descended through the dark and rain like a UFO, settling behind the silhouettes of trees. The helicopter filled almost the entire parking lot, the blades of its twin rotors nearly brushing the tree limbs. It looked like a Huey, one of those huge transports the army used, but it was newer and sleeker than that. A Huey redesigned by Audi.
Lew came up behind me. We were ten feet from the edge of the parking lot, back in the trees. “What the fuck is going on?” he said.
“What’s she doing here?” Meaning O’Connell. The priest had pulled on her silver jacket and was jogging for the porch of the main house, where Louise stood with a long coat pulled around her. The old woman looked pissed.
The only marking visible on the helicopter was a logo painted onto the side door and the nose: a gold H in a gold circle.
“We’re being invaded by Hilton?” Lew said.
“Maybe they’re buying out the motel.”
The rotors gradually slowed. Louise stepped down from the porch and stalked toward the helicopter, past the plywood cutout of the Shug. O’Connell called to her and then reluctantly followed. The side hatch slid open and five bulky, helmeted men jumped to the ground and fanned out. Lew and I instinctively crouched. The men wore some kind of blue-black camouflage, and they were heavily encumbered with packs, belts, and bandoliers. Jutting from the back of each helmet was a thick black cable that ran down the man’s back to connect to the pack at his waist, giving the men the appearance of ponytailed warriors from a Chinese martial arts flick. In their hands they carried bulbous things that looked like Star Trek phasers. None of them seemed to have seen me or Lew, but they were scanning the trees.
Lew grabbed my shoulder. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he said into my ear.
“No, wait,” I said.
Two more men appeared in the open hatch of the helicopter. The first man was square-shaped, waist as wide as his broad shoulders, belt cinched tight under his gut, making his legs look skinny. He was completely bald. He wore a silky flight jacket over the same camo gear as the other men, but he was helmetless. There was something on his face, though—a kind of metal mesh, as if he’d made a form-fitting mask of chicken wire.
The man next to him was much shorter. He was dressed in street clothes—dark chinos and a gray, fuzzy sweater—but his head was covered by the same black helmet as the camo goons. His face was scrunched in concern, and he kept glancing up at the bigger man.
“The H doesn’t stand for Hilton,” I said under my breath. Louise shouted something, and several of the men shouted back—
commando shit like “Get down! Freeze!”—aiming their little science fiction weapons at her and O’Connell.
I stood up and Lew grabbed my arm. “What the fuck are you doing?” he said.
“They’re here for me!” I said.
I stepped forward, and some of the men swiveled to face me, barking orders to halt. I lifted my hands in the air and stepped onto the gravel of the parking lot. The foot soldiers surrounded me. I resisted the urge to glance backward at Lew, hoping they wouldn’t notice him, but no—they yelled for him to come out with me. From the helicopter doorway the smaller man waved excitedly. I waggled a hand, but only slightly—I didn’t want to give these guys an excuse to shoot.
The man with the chicken-wire face hopped down and strode toward me with an assured smile, like a pastor welcoming a sinner back to church. He was fifty, maybe sixty years old, the stubble on his scalp gray. A few feet from him I realized that the metal on his face was no mask; copper wire was stitched into his skin, threaded over and under. The skin was raw and peeling.
He held out a hand, and the skin there was embroidered too—a mesh glove.
“Delacorte Pierce,” he said in a booming, theatrical voice. “I am Commander Stoltz of the Human League.”
He stood there, hand out and smile steady, waiting for me to shake. The goons—I could only think of them as goons—seemed to aim their phasers a little more forcefully, if that was possible. They were all white men, faces wide and puffy beneath their black helmets. Some of the bulk that I’d attributed to body armor turned out to be beer gut and man boobs: most of these guys were seriously overweight. I gripped Commander Stoltz’s hand. The commander didn’t wince, exactly, but his smile faltered for a moment. The ridged skin of his palms felt like scar tissue, and was alarmingly hot, like a waffle iron warming up.
The short man in the sweater looked up at me, beaming. “Hi, Del!”
I sighed. “Let me guess: Caller ID.”
He shook his head, smiling. “You called collect. But the calling number shows up on my bill. I got it on the web.”
I’m an idiot. I never should have called from a landline. “I thought we had an agreement, Bertram.”
“You’re going to thank me later,” he said.
I didn’t think so. I nodded toward the goon to my right, at the thing in his hand that looked like a plastic bar of soap. “What are those supposed to be?”
“Show him,” Commander Stoltz said.
No boom or pop: just a delicate zip! and my vision went white. I hit the gravel on my side, my limbs useless. The pain, when it caught up to me a second later, was mathematically pure. And it didn’t stop. A thin wire connected my chest to the mouth of the goon’s gun, and the pain flowed for an absurdly long time.
The goon must have released the trigger at some point, but it was several seconds before thoughts could tumble into the void where the pain had been. My body felt like a pile of cooked, boneless meat. One of the camouflaged men did complicated things to my wrists, and commented on all the bandages on my hands. The other man fastened one of those helmets onto my head. I couldn’t marshal the neuromuscular resources for even a feeble thrash. Bertram leaned down into my line of sight. “I’m really sorry about this, Del. I really am.”
Fuck you! I shouted. You just fucking Tasered me! Converted through my nonworking vocal cords, this came out; “Faaagaaah!”
Somewhere above me in the unseen land of the vertical, much shouting. Lew, O’Connell, the goons, even Louise—all of them yelling. God, they wouldn’t Taser an old woman, would they? The shock would kill her.
“Take these people inside,” the commander ordered.
“You’re making a terrible mistake,” O’Connell said. Those hard Irish r’s.
“There’s no mistake,” Stoltz said. “You have no idea how dangerous this man is. But don’t worry, we have no
