Absynthe, page 9
“Don’t know.” Her mouth worked as if she were teasing a canker. “They said to take utmost care with you, though. Why, boyo? What is it they think you can do?”
“It’s got to be the Devil’s Henchmen. The abilities we had.” Liam recalled the explosion in front of Club Artemis, the lightning strike on the tree when the hopper was chasing him and Morgan. “The military did something to us.”
“We need more than that, Liam. I feel them closing in. You do too. And they’ve got well more’n we do.”
Liam thought back. “Something was done to us. To all the Devil’s Henchmen. But I don’t remember what.”
“Maybe not, but Grace knows something. She did the same thing you were able to do. She’ll have answers.”
Liam nodded. “You’re right. I’ll keep looking for her, but Morgan’s in trouble. Dr. Ramachandra’s our next move.”
Nana considered this, her face pinched so badly she looked like she was sucking on a lime. “Didn’t Morgan say Ramachandra was a surgeon in the Army?”
“Yes. So?”
“So, the coppers who chased after you came on awfully quick after you left his office. And an Army-issue hopper was sent as reinforcement.”
Liam thought it over. “You think Dr. Ramachandra called someone?”
Nana laughed. “You think he didn’t?”
“He might’ve,” Liam admitted, “but I still need to go.”
“Fine”—Nana’s stare turned hard as nails—“but you can’t go light.”
Liam twisted his glass on the stained wooden tabletop. “No, I suppose I can’t.”
“Here’s what we’ll do.” She laid out precisely how she wanted things to go, finishing the jar of gin as they worked through the details Liam hadn’t thought of yet. When they were done, Nana stood and shuffled away, but paused at the hallway that led to the door. “And Liam?”
“Yes?”
“I know you’ll want to, but you’ll not be holding back. Hear me, boyo? Whoever’s after you is the enemy, as much as the goliaths were, as much as those bastards in the trenches.”
“You’re right,” he said. “I won’t hold back.”
She nodded, her face as pinched and angry as he’d ever seen it. “Good.” And then she was gone.
Ten
It was still dark when Liam reached the sidewalk opposite Dr. Ramachandra’s office in Wicker Park. The air was chill and oppressively humid. Rainclouds hung over the city, threatening another day of rain.
Through the low-hanging branches of an elm tree, Liam peered through Dr. Ramachandra’s windows, watching for movement. He felt grim, ready for anything. Then suddenly the tops of the facing brownstones were lit golden. In the east, the clouds were drawing back like a defeated host, breaking to reveal the sun, stunningly bright after the accumulated days in darkness.
The street, the parked cars, the lamp posts, and the benches were still wet from the morning rain. As they glistened, dew-like beneath the bright morning sun, Liam took a deep, cleansing breath.
Dr. Ramachandra, as Morgan had said was his habit, came to the front door early and unlocked it so that his assistant, Nurse Harris, could let herself in. After taking one last look along the street, Liam pulled his tweed cap low over his face, like a gangster, and headed for the doctor’s front door.
As he climbed the steps, he unbuttoned his double-breasted Ulster, allowing it to fall open. Inside the flaps, two sawed-offs hung from belt clips. A pair of Colt .45s rested heavy in their shoulder holsters. Heavier still was the single-shot hip cannon hanging from the back of his belt. It was a thing he’d kept squirreled away for years, a highly illegal bit of surplus he’d procured after the war in a fit of paranoia. After the hopper incident the other night, Liam thought it more than worth its cumbersome weight.
He opened the door without knocking. A small bell rang as he stepped into the foyer. After closing the door quickly behind him, he locked it.
“You’re early!” called Dr. Ramachandra from the back room. Then a pause. “Nurse Harris?”
Liam strode into the waiting room, then through an archway to the small kitchen, where Dr. Ramachandra brewed tea for his patients. He wore a coal-gray suit with a bright red dastar. At Liam’s entry, he turned from the breadboard, where he’d been buttering some soda bread, then started, staring wide-eyed at the .45 pointed at his chest.
“Remain calm, Dr. Ramachandra. No shouting. No sudden movements.”
The doctor swallowed hard. His frosty beard waggled as he motioned to Liam’s gun. “What makes you think you need that?”
“Today, I’ll be the one asking questions. Are we clear?”
Dr. Ramachandra nodded. The look on his long face might not have been calm, but it wasn’t hysterical, either—the instincts of a war surgeon kicking in.
“You’re aware of the attack after Morgan and I left your office?”
“Yes. I spoke to Morgan’s father the morning after. He told me about it.”
“Did you call the authorities after we left?”
Dr. Ramachandra shook his head. “No, why would I have?”
“We were stopped by two police officers shortly after leaving your office. Alastair was deactivated by some strange device. Morgan and I were nearly killed. So I’ll ask you again. Did you call the authorities?”
“I did not.”
Liam searched his face carefully for a lie, but found none. “Has anyone else contacted you about Morgan?”
“No one I haven’t contacted first.”
“Who were they?”
“The lab downtown for the results of Morgan’s blood test. Also two doctors whom I trust, to consult about his condition.”
“And what did they tell you?”
At this, Dr. Ramachandra’s look turned grave. It was the sort of mask doctors tended to put on when delivering dire news. “The blood tests came back with high levels of C-reactive protein, an indicator of a possible bacterial infection. Morgan’s symptoms are similar to a number of the other cases reported in New York, Philadelphia, and Novo Solis. They match the profile of a biological agent Germany and the SLP have been spreading.”
Liam felt his heart pounding. “The protein. What does it mean?”
“We need to run more tests to determine if it’s the same strain or not, but if it is, I’m afraid Morgan’s prognosis is not good. Those who’ve contracted it have thus far succumbed within a week. They present chills, stomach aches. They begin to have piercing headaches.”
Morgan had complained of that very thing that morning.
“Have any survived?” Liam asked.
“I don’t know. The patients were all taken by the Bureau of Health for further study.”
“So all of them may have died?”
“It’s possible. I couldn’t say.” He paused, swallowing hard with a glance toward Liam’s pistol. “Morgan should be taken to them. He should go to the Bureau of Health today. There’s an office here in Chicago.”
In the pause that followed, a rhythmic booming filtered in from somewhere outside. The medicines in the nearby cabinets rattled, nearly in sync with them but ever-so-slightly delayed.
The hair along Liam’s arms rose. It felt as if the ground were opening up beneath him, and that once he started falling, he would fall forever. All of the strange events from the past few weeks began to meld in his mind: a vision of nurses injecting his arm over and over again; the Devil’s Henchmen screaming as they bounded over a battlefield; Clay dressed as a porter, escaping the flashtrain station with a case of blue serum under one arm; the strange voice in his head that ordered a hopper to help the two cops capture him and Morgan. He didn’t understand everything that was going on, but he knew enough to distrust everything and everyone until he had more answers.
Liam focused on Dr. Ramachandra as the booming grew louder. “Quickly now, Doctor. The people you spoke to, were they from the bureau?”
Dr. Ramachandra seemed surprised by the question. “Well, yes.”
“When? When did you speak to them?”
He glanced at the rattling cabinets with a flustered look, his battlefield nerves giving way to befuddlement and distress. “Only last night.”
“Did you tell them anything beyond Morgan’s symptoms?”
“I may have mentioned the state he was in when the two of you arrived. I told them I’d likely be seeing him in the next few days.”
In the waiting room, visible through the archway Liam had taken to reach the kitchen, a curtain rod above one of the windows fell and clattered to the floor. Revealed was the small park across the street, the buildings beyond. The booming sounds were growing rapidly, not only in intensity but in their ability to instill fear. Oddly, a woman wearing posh clothes walked calmly along the sidewalk across the street. She seemed oblivious to the noise. An automated baby buggy propelled ahead of her. Her small black Pomeranian, leashed to the buggy, was yipping madly as it wove around her ankles.
“What in the name of God?” Dr. Ramachandra said.
Liam pulled the other revolver from its holster beneath his right arm. “Doctor, get back!”
The words had hardly left his lips when a massive form darkened the leftmost window. With a thunderous crash and an earth-rattling boom, glass shattered inward. The entire wall crumbled over the waiting room chairs, sending plaster, wood, and bits of brick flying toward Liam and Dr. Ramachandra. Liam crossed his arms over his face and twisted away as it sprayed him. Something heavy and hard struck him along the side of his head. He stumbled against the butcher block, sending the soda bread, butter cellar, and still-buttered knife clattering to the floor.
As a keen ringing sound filled his ears, Liam turned to find a vaguely humanoid shape filling the massive hole in the front wall of the doctor’s home. It was easily nine feet tall, with mechanikal limbs. Through the semi-transparent visor in the helmet, Liam could see a woman working the controls of the armored suit, a wallbuster.
As Dr. Ramachandra fled through the door at the back of the kitchen, Liam emptied his revolvers directly into the mechanika’s visor. The shots hammered his hands as he alternated squeezes of the triggers. The bullets ricocheted off the surface with attenuated tings. When his guns had both been emptied, the only evidence that he had just fired twelve high-powered rounds were the small divots in the dusty surface of the reinforced glass.
—The scourge. Find the scourge.
The voice again. And this time Liam felt it even more strongly than with the two policemen who had stopped them on the night they drank absynthe.
The wallbuster ducked low, gears whining, and reached an arm in with a speed that belied its bulk. Using pincers affixed to the end of its arm, it snatched Liam’s Ulster and yanked him forward. Had the buttons not been undone, Liam would have been caught and trapped in his own coat. As it was, he was able to spin and slip free, but not before being drawn halfway across the waiting room.
The buster’s opposite arm drove in like a piston and caught the cuff of Liam’s trousers. He had dropped the Colts and reached for the shotguns. He decided against the hip cannon—he was too close, and the explosion would kill him too. One shotgun slipped from his grasp as he was thrown to the dusty floor, the pincer pulling him toward the gaping hole. He scrabbled, trying to escape, but couldn’t. He was caught.
The soldier eased the wallbuster away from Dr. Ramachandra’s home and onto the sidewalk. The morning sun shone brightly. The buster’s arm whined upward, lifting Liam upside down until he was eye-to-eye with the woman inside the armor. By then Liam had managed to grab the other shotgun. He unloaded both barrels, point blank, into the visor.
Bits of glass flew. Cracks webbed outward from the point of impact. Liam felt sharp pain along his left ear from the blowback. But the visor held. The pilot inside smiled as her voice rang harshly from the two speakers set into the hulk’s shoulders. “Where are you hiding your friend, Mr. Mulcahey?”
Liam managed to unhook the hip cannon clumsily. By the time he swung it around, the pilot had noticed. The buster’s other arm came across him hard, bashing his right arm and knocking the cannon from his grip. It skittered over the sidewalk and onto the grass, well out of reach.
“I’ll ask you one last time, Mr. Mulcahey. Where is Morgan Aysana?”
“Right here.”
The hulk lumbered itself into a turn. Liam’s trousers ripped and he fell to the ground. Ten paces away, Morgan stood in the middle of the street. He’d come out of the rumble seat of the Model A he’d been hiding in since early that morning, well before first light. He looked terrible. Shaky. White. Barely able to hold his ground. But hold it he did, with Liam’s second and only other hip cannon braced properly against his hip.
People were exiting their homes, staring in shock at the wild scene before them.
The wallbuster took one lumbering step forward, crushing the hood of Packard Twin 6 to reach the street for an unobstructed path to Morgan. It had just taken a second step toward Morgan when he pulled the safety pin and squeezed the launch mechanism. From out of the snub-nosed cannon, a shell streaked toward the wallbuster’s chest. Liam ducked behind the Twin 6 as it crashed dead on, the munition exploding in a cloud of smoke and screaming metal.
Eleven
The hulking suit of armor reeled from the explosion. It stumbled, arms flailing, for all the world a giant’s toddler trying to regain its balance. It crashed onto the pavement with a boom Liam could feel through the sidewalk. Farther down the street, the woman with the baby buggy was just turning the corner away from them. The baby had begun crying loudly, and her Pomeranian was tugging maniacally at its collar, teeth bared, biting at the leash, yet the woman herself walked blithely on as if the morning were like any other. The people who’d rushed to the street from their homes were acting similarly. Shocked at first, they were heading calmly back into their homes.
Nearby, Morgan dropped the spent hip cannon onto the ground and strode toward Liam.
“Stay back, Morgan,” Liam said, worrying the wallbuster still had power to its limbs.
For once, Morgan didn’t argue. He remained where he was, standing in the middle of the street, his eyes both wary and angry as he studied the now-open pilot’s compartment. Inside it, shattered glass framed the pilot’s head, which was sheathed in a black, skintight hood. Blood dripped in rivulets from a dozen wounds, especially her right eye, which was coated in red.
“Who sent you?” Liam knelt on the armored chest and gripped her head, willing her to give him the answers he wanted. “Why are you after Morgan?” His fear and frustration boiling over, he shook her violently. “What’s a bloody scourge?”
Morgan was a few yards away, holding Liam’s snub-nosed revolver and staring down the street. “Liam?”
“Who speaks to you?” Liam shouted at the woman, desperate for answers. “Whose voice is feeding you your orders?”
She smiled, blood coating her teeth. “It wouldn’t matter if I told you.” Her voice was strangely soft after the distorted megaphone of the wallbuster’s speakers. “Soon you’ll both be ours.”
“Why?”
She paused, then seemed to come to a decision. “Because the end is near, and your friend will deliver us there.”
“Liam, someone’s coming!”
The fear in Morgan’s voice made Liam lift his head and stare down the street where, fifty paces distant, a man approached. It was Max Kohler, wearing chalk-striped pants, a matching vest, and a crisp white shirt. The red lens over his right eye shone brilliantly in the morning’s light. His blue eye stared intently.
Liam moved to Morgan’s side and took the gun from him. “Run, Morgan.” Liam shoved him into motion. “To the attic!”
Morgan staggered but kept moving, thank God, and Liam turned to face Kohler.
“That’s not going to help, Mulcahey,” Kohler called, his voice muffled by the mask.
Liam stood his ground, aimed the snub-nose with both hands. “I remember you now. We served in the Devil’s Henchmen. You were my CO.”
Through the slits in Kohler’s mask, the hint of a smile could be seen. “You’re acting like you’re only just piecing it together.”
“That’s because I am.”
“Oh?” Kohler, twenty paces away, stopped and tilted his head, the sort of gesture that made it clear how preposterous he considered Liam’s answer to be. “Then explain to me why you were at the very same flashtrain station where an Uprising attack occurred. You were there to help them, Mulcahey. You’re one of them.”
“No, I’m not!”
“Then you won’t mind answering a few questions. Why does our President want to speak to you so badly?”
Liam stood there for a moment, stunned. The President wanted to speak to him? “I have no earthly idea.”
“None?” Kohler used one knuckle to rap on his mask, where it covered his forehead. “You don’t recall what Colette hid inside that noggin of yours?”
“Who’s Colette?”
Kohler’s head tilted to one side. “Come on, Mulcahey. You’re going to have to do better than that.”
“I mean it. I have no idea who you’re talking about.”
“That’s the story you want to tell?”
“It’s the only one I have.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see about that,” he said, and began stalking toward Liam once more.
Liam, a surge of fear running through him, aimed the revolver high and pulled the trigger, a warning shot. When Kohler’s pace didn’t slow, Liam aimed for his leg and fired again. In that same moment, Kohler swayed his arms to his left, and the street bent. The asphalt curved to meet him. As did the row of cars. As did the sidewalks and the buildings beyond. When he completed the movement, the world snapped back into normal position, but Kohler was no longer where he’d been. He was three yards to the left and five yards closer to Liam.
