Coven

5) Wade didn’t know where the bomb was.

6) Jervis wasn’t going to tell him.

Beautiful, Wade thought.

Next he assessed the obvious yet elusive elements of evil involved. (1) The labyrinth was a spaceship/genetic engineering factory that would someday return to earth and repopulate it with mindless integrated slaves optimally hybridized from various life forms. (2) The Supremate ran the show. (3) The Supremate enlisted certain natives—i.e., Tom, Jervis, Winnie, Besser—to assist in specimen procurements. (4) The Supremate was evil.

But evil was relative, wasn’t it? Certain people gave their allegiance to evil for certain reasons. Some of these reasons were voluntary. Besser and Winnifred, for instance, had sided with evil through their own greed. But Tom and Jervis had gone over involuntarily, which meant that their loyalties must be maintained by control.

Evil, Wade thought. Control.

He glanced at Jervis. “You’re not evil. Neither was Tom.”

“There’s no such thing as evil,” replied the head affixed to Jervis’ limbless torso. “There’s only idealism and reality. What joins the two together isn’t evil, Wade. It’s perfection.”

Hadn’t countless presidential candidates made the same assertion, as well as countless monarchs?

“All I know,” Wade speculated, “is that a couple of days ago, you were a good person. Now you’re evil. I want to know why.”

Jervis gushed laughter. It had—yes—an evil ring to it.

Wade hopped off the table. “It’s that thing, isn’t it? That thing they put in your head.”

Jervis stopped laughing.

“What would happen,” Wade wondered, “if I pulled it out?”

“Get away from me!” Jervis shouted. His torso was suddenly shrugging, rocking, inching back. “Stay the fuck away!”

“That’s it, right? If I take it out, you won’t be evil anymore.”

“I’ll die!”

“You know what I think, Jerv? I think you want to tell me where the bomb is. You want to tell me how to defuse it. Except that thing in your head won’t let you.”

“Don’t, Wade! Please don’t!” the torso yelled.

Wade grabbed the small black knob in Jervis’s head. It was about the size of a marble, and it was warm.

As he pulled, Jervis screamed.

The torso went stiff. The head arched back, mouth locked open in an unbroken howl of pain. The transceptionrod didn’t come easy; it creaked out a little at a time, like twisting a nail out of old wood. Two inches, then three, four, five. Finally, at the sixth inch, the rod came out.

Jervis’ head and torso fell still.

Wade threw the wet transceptionrod into the hall.

The reaper worked quick, giving Jervis an instantaneous refund on the time he’d borrowed from death. The torso and face began to rot in short order, going from gray to brown to…mush.

“Damn it,” Wade muttered. It had been worth a try, at least. But instead of removing Jervis’ evil, he’d only succeeded in removing life. In seconds, it seemed, the torso began to bloat.

Then the sagging brown face said, “Time.”

“Jerv! You’re still with me!”

The order of nature reduced Jervis’ voice to a sluggish, phlegmy rattle. “How much…time?”

Wade glanced at the clock. “It’s twenty till midnight.”

Jervis made a facial gesture of approval. Putrefactive slime oozed from his stumps, his shit dark face melting. He spoke in a liquid wisp. “The bomb is in my car, right outside.”

“Great! Tell me how to disarm it! How do I turn it off?”

“Can’t,” Jervis bubbled. “Preprogrammed. Can’t disarm it.”

Wade was outraged. “What do I do with it, then? It’s got a ten mile kill zone! I can’t just throw it into the woods and stick my fingers in my fucking ears! Tell me what to do!”

Jervis smiled, if in fact his percolating lips were still capable of it. “Put it…” he wheezed, hacking up slop. “Put it in the labyrinth.”

“If I go back in the labyrinth, the Supremate will know. He’ll send the sisters to tear me up.”

“Supremate won’t know.” A sputter. Jervis was going fast. “How do you think you got out so easy earlier? This close to recharge…no power. Sensorposts are dead. Supremate has no way of knowing you’re there.”

Wade stared down. Jervis was losing his race against autolysis. His lips split. His eyes had liquefied and pooled in their sockets. “Use my key. Pointaccess to first subinlet. Look for sign…”

“What sign?”

“Guidance…tracking…pah pah point.”

“Okay, what then?”

“Put bomb there and…get…out.

Wade touched the corpse. It was hot with rot.

Yet Jervis’ mush face still smiled in final freedom. The gas fat torso began to smoke. “Stick it up the Supremate’s ass.” A titter, like a giggle. Then: “I—I…”

“Aw, no, Jerv!”

“I’m gone.”

And he was.

««—»»

The bomb was black, a six inch cube, but it seemed like magic to shift minutely in size. It felt warm as a hearth brick.

He’d found it on the front floor of Jerv’s Dodge Colt, which had been turned, over the last day or so, into a hatchback gorewagon. The Supremate had transformed his friend into a murderer. It was time for payback.

Better get a move on, Wade thought. He jogged back into the building, back to the lab. What remained of Jervis was just a clothed rib cage around which had settled a large puddle of dark slime. The only remnant of the real Jervis Phillips was a pack of Carlton 100s stuck in the shirt pocket.

Wade snapped the extromission key off the corpse’s neck, then ran up to Besser’s office.

The extromitter dot stared like a glazed eye. Wade’s watch read 11:42—eighteen minutes would be plenty of time to get in and out. He felt surprisingly fearless as he inserted the key and began to extromit. What did he have to worry about? Even if there were any sisters left, the Supremate wouldn’t be aware of his entrance. There would be no way that the Supremate could alert them. These were comforting thoughts.

They were also stupid ones.

—

CHAPTER 42

Lydia slammed the brakes and skidded. In front of the sciences center, she saw Wade’s Corvette and another car behind it. Lydia backed up and wheeled in.

The other car was a gold Dodge Colt, Jervis’ car.

The spotter and Tom’s key remained where she’d left them in the Vette. Lydia grabbed them and rushed into the building.

It wasn’t hard to find where the confrontation had taken place, nor was it hard to discern the victor. Somehow, Wade had done the job on Jervis—the dismembered, smoking carnage was proof. But the cadaver’s neck lacked the extromission key.