Absynthe, page 8
The attic had a bed and a couch for sleeping, a bathroom to bathe in. For now, that was plenty. Preferable, even. The garage was owned by a man named Sean. He occasionally supplied parts for the various equipment and mechanika Liam serviced on the Aysana estate. Liam had come to know him well, at least well enough to know he was a man who could be trusted to help a friend in a pinch.
“And why not?” Sean had said in his thick Kerry accent when Liam had asked to use the room. “Anything for a lad from the old country.” Despite the sentiment, he’d given Liam a look, the sort an uncle might give to his mischievous nephew. “Is there anything I should be knowing, Liam?”
“Just a bit of work going on at the flat,” Liam had said. “I haven’t been able to sleep.”
“Your nana’s not bothered by the work?”
“Grandma Ash?” Liam hadn’t had to fake a laugh. “She can sleep through anything. It’s like she’s dead to the world!”
“And what about your friend?”
“A bit of trouble with the missus is all.”
“A bit of trouble with the missus . . .” Sean’s tone made it clear he found Liam’s answers sorely lacking, but he dropped the subject after that.
Liam shook the rain off his coat and hat and hung them on the nearby wall hooks. After locking the door, he headed across the dusty, musty attic. Morgan was lying in a fetal position on the apartment’s small bed, sleeping. Liam went to the table beside the window and dropped his weight into one of the two wooden chairs—a little too freely, as it turned out. His shoulder was still tender from the bullet wound.
As he sucked air against the pain, Morgan opened his eyes. He looked terrible—sallow skin, eyes heavy with dark bags beneath them. “Any luck?”
“No.” Liam had just returned from his bank a few miles away. It had a telephone its clients could use for a fee. “I rang seven hotels. Grace wasn’t registered at any of them.”
Morgan shrugged. “It was worth a try.”
Liam had been kicking himself for not asking Grace how he could contact her, but the moment had been too wild, too chaotic. Now that he’d had time to think, he desperately wanted to know what information she’d planned on sharing with him, and why she seemed to think Morgan was in so much danger.
Outside the garage came the sounds of clopping hooves. Wincing from the burn his fingers had suffered from gripping the soldier’s gun barrel, Liam pulled the window curtains aside. An old mechanikal horse hove into view. A delivery boy with a wide-brimmed hat and an oilskin coat rode on its back. With practiced ease, he pulled up near a stoop across the street, slipped down to the curb, and opened a hinged lid in the horse’s side. Cool steam misted out, consuming the boy’s legs and ratty leather shoes as he took out two quarts of milk in glass bottles. After setting them on the nearby stoop and grabbing the empties, he returned to the horse, stored the bottles, and was up in the saddle in a flash.
“The owner of Club Artemis knows me,” Morgan offered as the horse trotted away. “You want me to reach out to him?”
Liam shook his head. “It’s too dangerous. I don’t want any contact with the club, not until we know more.”
Liam’s gaze slipped to Alastair, who was propped up in a chair in the corner, inert. He’d tried to revive the mechanika several times, but all his attempts had failed. As near as Liam could tell, Alastair wasn’t dead, just deactivated by that strange pulsing light the coppers had used.
If they even were coppers.
Liam wasn’t convinced. Chicago police, even the ones downtown, didn’t have access to hopper exoskeletons like that. And no squad car he’d ever heard of had lamps that could deactivate mechanika. Nor devices that could stun a man like the sergeant’s helmet had done.
Liam hadn’t felt so vulnerable since the war. The attack by the hopper stank of the military’s black-ops labs, the unit that had given birth to all of the Army’s mechanika, though why they might be involved, he couldn’t begin to guess. He only wanted Morgan to get well again and for things to go back to normal.
Morgan, clearly uncomfortable, shifted on the bed, grabbed the large glass of water from the night table, and downed several swallows. “The morphine hardly helps anymore.”
“If Dr. Ramachandra was right about the absynthe being poisoned, it’ll take time to pass through your system.”
As he lay back down, a bit of the old Morgan returned with half a smile. “Well, I wish it would shake a leg already.”
Liam made a miserable go of returning the smile. Morgan looked scared, almost childlike in his fear. The morphine had worked well the first day, but the pain had grown steadily, and Morgan had been taking more to stave it off. The seven-day supply they’d started with was only going to last another day or two, which made it all the more imperative that they speak with Dr. Ramachandra.
“And what if you were right?” Morgan asked. “I mean, you had the absynthe and you’re not sick. What if it was the serum I took at the train station?”
“Dr. Ramachandra will check on that too.”
The attack had happened on a Friday. They’d decided to give Dr. Ramachandra three days—the weekend plus Monday—to learn more. Tomorrow morning, bright and early, Liam would go see him.
Morgan’s gaze went distant. “At the flashtrain ceremony, the porter absconded with that wooden box, the one with the red cross on it. It had to be the serum the nurses were handing out. That seemed to be the only reason they were there, right?”
Liam shrugged. “I suppose so.”
“What I don’t get is why? What’s so important about the serum that the Uprising would go through all that trouble to get some vials of it?”
“There are rumors the Uprising are being sponsored by Germany and the other members of the St. Lawrence Pact,” Liam said. “If what De Pere said is true, that the serum really is an antidote to the poison the SLP have been spreading, maybe they wanted a sample to learn more about it.”
The memory of the porter standing on the platform, firing the tommy gun at the platform’s curving glass roof, was bright in Liam’s mind. The vision was suddenly replaced by another memory of the same man, Clay, but in a different time and place. He wasn’t holding a tommy gun, but a Springfield rifle, and he wasn’t dressed like a train porter, but as a soldier. He was strapped into a hopper exoskeleton. As Liam was. As their entire squad was.
Morgan, sensing Liam’s consternation, propped himself up on one elbow. “What is it?”
But Liam hardly heard the question. His squad, the Devil’s Henchmen, had been patrolling along the edges of Waukesha, a village west of Milwaukee. Though the air was bitterly cold, they’d been out for a good hour and Liam was sweating from it. They crested a low hill and the village itself came into view. Bustling only weeks earlier, it had been abandoned after being bombed by the SLP. It was eerie seeing the gutted, red-brick buildings, the empty streets. The church at the center of it, with half its roof caved in, only intensified the feeling, as if God himself had abandoned the village as well.
“Let’s get a move on!” called Nick Crawford.
Lagging behind the squad was Clay Graves, who alone among them went by his first name. “No one calls me Graves,” he’d told Liam. His last name being what it was, Liam hadn’t had to ask why—soldiers were a famously superstitious lot.
As they headed down the hill toward the nearest of Waukesha’s crater-pocked streets, Liam shivered at the sound of a small explosion. Something whistled past him—a rocket-propelled grenade, Liam realized. It streaked toward the church and crashed through the steeple’s stained glass window, the sound of it reaching them a split-second later.
Everyone turned to look at Clay, who was staggering in his hopper a bit, regaining his balance after what had just happened. He stared at the church, then the squad, then the church again, his eyes wide as a barn owl’s.
Liam felt a bright, burning anger coming from their sergeant, a handsome fellow with bright blue eyes. It felt important that Liam remember more about him, remember his name, at least, but for the life of him, he couldn’t.
“What in the name of fuck just happened?” the sergeant asked as he lumbered toward Clay in his own hopper suit.
Liam felt Clay’s embarrassment flare as he realized the precise degree to which he’d fucked up. “It just went off,” he said.
“It just went off?” echoed the sergeant.
In addition to Liam’s own irritation, he felt exasperation building in the men and women of his squad, as if he were experiencing not just his own emotions, but the entire squad’s. Earlier, Clay had reported one of his practice grenades as having bent fins. The grenades had no explosive warheads, but they did have propellant—in addition to patrolling, they occasionally took time to test the range and accuracy of the weapons.
“So leave it,” Crawford had said.
“Nah,” Clay had said with a broad grin. “I’ll fix it.”
Clay had clearly been trying to do just that, but had accidentally triggered the launch mechanism.
Clay’s gaze alternated between the sergeant and the broken window. “It was an accident,” he said lamely.
“Accidents happen, but they always seem to happen around you, don’t they, Clay?”
“Sometimes.” He stood there in his shame, then jutted his chin toward the church with a lopsided smile. “Pretty good shot, though, wasn’t it? Hit the bulls-eye on my first try.”
“You think that’s funny”—he took one loping stride forward and shoved Clay hard—“desecrating a house of God?”
The fact that Clay recovered from the shove only seemed to incense the sergeant further. Liam felt a bright, burning anger coming from him as he launched his hopper into the air, twisted backward, and kicked. His hopper’s broad feet landed against Clay’s reinforced chest plate.
Clay flew backward. The snow and dirt that had built up along his hopper’s legs arced skyward as he struck the frozen field. Clay lay there a moment, wheezing, his breath coming out in a white fog. Then, using a maneuver they’d drilled endlessly to right themselves, he kicked himself to a stand. “What’d you do that for?”
It was then, as the sergeant was staring knives at Clay, that Liam finally made the connection. The blue in his eyes was an exact match to the lone, visible eye of the President’s aid, Max Kohler.
Kohler had led the Devil’s Henchmen, Liam realized. He’d commanded Liam himself. For how long? And, dear God, what else have I forgotten?
Crawford stepped closer until he, Clay, and the sergeant formed a tight triangle. “Look, it was an accident. And there’s no harm in it. The whole town’s empty.”
Nick Crawford was well known for innocent good looks and a smile that lit up a room, but just then he looked hard, determined, a man ready to defend his comrade. It was only natural. He and Clay had been friends since before the war. Hell, they’d entered the service together, signing up the very same day.
“Did either of you ever stop to think,” Kohler replied, “how much danger stupid shit like that will put us in when the fighting starts?”
Clay backed away, then began lowering his hopper legs so he could reach his rifle, an awkward maneuver at best. “We’re miles from the front.”
A bright flare of emotion rose up from Kohler at Clay’s defiance, at Crawford’s defending him. “Hold it right there, soldier!”
In the moments that followed, the entire squad stood there, stunned. A vision of Kohler’s intent had cascaded through them all. He’d pictured lining Clay and Crawford up against the church wall. He’d pictured lifting his own rifle, sending a bullet through their foreheads. He’d pictured their bodies slumping as blood and brains dripped slowly down the white clapboard siding. The image reverberated through their minds, fading as Kohler’s shock—at realizing everyone had seen it—slowly registered.
Clay, who’d stopped just short of grabbing his rifle, pulled himself upright. He blinked several times, unsure what to say, what to do in a moment like this.
The spell was broken by Reyes, whose attention had been drawn toward the church. “Uh, guys?”
He needn’t have bothered—what he’d seen, they’d all seen.
From the church’s front entrance, several people were exiting. Some stared up at the broken window. Others cast their gaze over the open field, at the Henchmen in their hopper armor.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Kohler said, his emotions obscured, almost muted, now that he wasn’t so lost in the moment. “You and Crawford are going to exit your armor. You’re going to walk to that church and clean up the mess Clay made. Then you’re going to ask how you can help make their lives better. Only when you’ve done that are you going to retrieve your armor and return to base.”
Liam felt Clay’s mind working. A thought came—of defying Kohler’s orders just to spite him, of heading toward the shattered remains of the village and only pretending to comply with Kohler’s order—but he rejected it as soon as it had come. They were mentally linked, and the effect wouldn’t fade for hours. Kohler would see whether Clay and Crawford had complied. They all would.
Clay stood there, a battle of wills playing out, but the outcome was never really in doubt. He folded the legs of his armor, unstrapped himself, and hopped down to the ground. As he retrieved his rifle, Crawford joined him on the snow-covered ground.
“Fall in!” roared Kohler.
As Clay and Crawford jogged toward the church, their footsteps crunching over the snow-covered field, the rest of the squad hopped across the grassy terrain, heading back toward base.
“Liam?”
It was Morgan, in the room over the pneumatics garage. He looked worried.
Liam blinked, shook his head, and slowly the musty dimness of the attic returned.
“A new memory?” Morgan asked.
Liam nodded. He’d told Morgan how, ever since meeting with President De Pere, more of his memories from the war had been returning.
Morgan considered it awhile. “He gave that address when you graduated from boot camp, right? Maybe it’s that, seeing him stirring up all sorts of old memories.”
“Maybe,” Liam replied. “Did I ever mention anything to you during the war about what I did? Or where I was stationed after basic?”
“You sent me a few letters, but they were carefully worded, and sometimes sections were blacked out. I don’t think you ever really tried to tell me, but the Army’s censors made sure no one learned where soldiers were assigned. You know that.”
“What about the Devil’s Henchmen? Did I ever mention them?”
“No, but that was normal, too. We weren’t supposed to talk about where we were assigned, or what our duties were.”
Liam took a deep breath. “I feel like I’m going mad, Morgan.”
“Not mad,” Morgan said evenly. “You took a knock to the head is all.”
“Did I actually, though?”
Morgan’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“That’s just what I was told.” Liam tapped his forehead. “Until a week ago, the last several years of the war had been lost in this fog. All I remembered was basic, a few months learning the ins and outs of being a mechanic, then waking up in my apartment with Nana months after the armistice was signed.”
“You’ve mentioned the goliaths, though.”
“Right, and now more memories are coming back, like ravens spilling from a tree.”
Morgan shrugged. “I wish I had answers, Liam.”
Liam laughed. “Where’s a crystal ball when you need one?”
“I know. All our problems would be solved!” Morgan’s smile was warmer now, but the feeling soured as he cringed and put a hand over his stomach. After several seconds, he leaned forward and grabbed the bottle of morphine off the night table next to the bed.
“Morgan . . .”
“Sorry, Liam,” Morgan said as he twisted the cap off. “I need it.”
Liam was tempted to argue but let it go. He would ask Dr. Ramachandra for more in the morning.
Morgan swallowed another dose, then lay himself down. Soon he’d closed his eyes, his breathing lengthened, and he fell asleep. For a time, Liam stared out the window. He felt exposed as he peered through the narrow gap in the curtains. He expected a hopper to come bounding over the tops of the two-story homes, or a black-and-white to pull up outside in the falling rain. Or maybe it would be a wagon full of gray-suited Uprising men, ready to storm their small room, kill Liam, and take Morgan away.
No sooner had the grim thought come than Liam heard a creaking up the back stairs. The door was locked, yet he heard it groan as it was opened, heard a thud as it closed. He might have been alarmed—part of him thought he should be—but he wasn’t. He suddenly remembered leaving a note for his grandmother two days ago, then hiding a key beneath the mat outside for her to get in.
Feet shuffled along the narrow hallway. Into the dimly lit room came Nana’s crooked, aged form. She wore a patterned dress, white stockings, and her old, worn slippers, the ones she said helped her gout. She clutched a shawl around her shoulders. And she was dry as a bone, not a lick of rain on her.
“Nana,” Liam said.
Nana headed toward the small table, but paused to glare at Alastair’s still form. When she reached the table, she scraped out a chair, sat across from him, and curled her lips into something like a greeting. He could tell she was in a bad mood, but he didn’t mind—she was at her creative best when the wrath was on her.
Nana poured two helpings of bathtub gin from the jar between them, then set one near Liam with a hard clack against the table. She spoke in Irish, her voice rough as a concrete barrier, “ ‘The scourge,’ they said. Said they wanted him unharmed.” She downed her small helping, bared her teeth, then poured another. “Military’s got to be involved somehow.”
Liam took a swig of his harsh gin. “I don’t disagree, but how are they involved? And why?”
