Double Dose, page 16
“Right. And then we have to deal with that.”
(“We’ll deal. The fact is, this plague needs to be stopped, and we’re the only ones we know of who can do it. So let’s do it.”)
“But coffee first.”
(“Absolutely.”)
Rather than walk all the way around the side, she cut through the store, back door to front, and stepped out onto the boards that passed for a sidewalk. A few doors up from her, Jason Tadhak came out of his office and waved as he strolled to his car and opened the trunk.
(“For a man who’s supposedly rich, he doesn’t seem to mind working on a Sunday.”)
How do you think rich people get rich? Not from taking a lot of days off.
(“I wish you could ask him about that surreal storage area at the windfarm, but we weren’t supposed to be there.”)
As Daley stepped out into the street to cross to Arturo’s café, she noticed a big SUV speeding downhill from the spa. The silhouette of the driver seemed to have his or her head down and the car was drifting to its right…toward where Jason was leaning into his trunk. She kept thinking the driver would look up but now the car was aimed directly at him.
“Jason!”
He looked up just as the SUV plowed into him, catching the rear of his car and sending him flying. He landed hard a good ten feet from the impact and Daley was rushing toward him before he stopped tumbling.
“Oh, God, Jason!”
A girl who couldn’t have reached twenty yet jumped out of the SUV screaming “Omigod!” over and over. The phone in her hand explained why her head had been down.
Jason wasn’t moving. Daley dropped to her knees beside him, calling his name. He was breathing but didn’t respond.
(“Make contact,”) Pard said. (“I’ll see if I can find what’s wrong.”)
Daley grabbed his wrist—his skin was cold—and hung on, still saying his name while the girl kept up her “Omigod!” mantra in the background.
Pard said, (“Okay, going in. I’ll let you know when—”)
His voice cut off abruptly which was unusual. Not alarming, just different.
Pard?
He didn’t reply. Probably just busy. Daley gave Jason a quick visual check: He wasn’t twisted into some crazy, unnatural posture; no blood, no obviously broken bones
The girl finally got a bit of a grip and said, “Who can I call? Who can I call?”
Daley thought about that. On a Sunday morning, Doc Llewelyn was very likely at home instead of in his office. The unconscious Jason was going to need an ambulance for sure, but that could take a long time to run from Brawley or El Centro.
Behind the girl she spotted the white Tadhak bus turn onto the street and roll their way.
“I think help is here now,” she told the girl.
Perfect timing. They could take Jason straight to a hospital without waiting for an ambulance to drive all the way out here. She waved her free hand to flag them down but they kept on coming with no sign of slowing. She thought of stepping in front of the bus to make it stop but that would mean breaking contact with Jason, which would interrupt whatever Pard was doing inside.
The bus pulled past her, then made a three-point turn and came to a stop beside Jason. The side doors folded back and two men in gray coveralls, both with Jason’s blocky build, stepped out and marched toward him.
“You’re pointed the wrong way,” Daley told them as they approached. “He needs to go to a hospital.”
They didn’t answer her—didn’t acknowledge her presence let alone that she’d spoken to them. Without a word, one grabbed Jason under the arms, the other grabbed his ankles, and they lifted him.
“Hey, wait!” she cried, still clutching his wrist. “Be careful with him!”
She couldn’t tell them that she was helping a separate consciousness explore Jason’s insides and try to help him.
They ignored her and finally she had to let go.
Sorry, Pard.
She watched them carry Jason through the doors and lay him on the floor of the bus.
Pard?
No answer.
The side doors closed and the bus roared back upslope toward the Tadhak compound instead of down toward the towns and the hospitals. Did they have their own doctor up there? Some kind of infirmary?
Hey, Pard…
Still no answer. Where was he? Had something happened to him?
PARD!
42
Tom got a text from Lucy:
Got through the Clan history!
They’re planning the end of the world!
Lucy liked exclamation points. Another recurrent annoyance.
He found her dressed in another of her kimonos and lying on the floor of her room, staring at her tab4let. The tablet was bedizened with sticky notes containing her latest lists.
“What’s this about the end of the world?”
She didn’t look up. “Okay. So I decrypted the history of the Pendry Clan document, and dug into it, and am I glad I did. These folks have definite plans to bring on the end of the world—or at least the world as we know it.”
Tom stared at her, looking for some sign she was kidding. But besides being literal and brutally honest, Lucy’s totally flat affect didn’t allow for humor. As in zero laughs. Because humor was an emotion, after all. Well, sort of.
“You’ve got to explain that.”
She rose from the floor in a surprisingly fluid motion for one of her bulk and tossed the tablet onto the easy chair. “After we eat. I’m hungry.”
“Hey, you’re talking about the end of the world.”
“Yeah, but that’s not maybe gonna happen until long after lunch, and I’m hungry now.”
He sighed. “What do you want to eat?”
“I’ll make a list.”
He had to wait for Grubhub to deliver from one of Pasadena’s three KFCs before she’d talk. When it finally arrived, she dove into the Colonel’s extra crispy—chewing with her mouth open, of course, another of her endearing habits. Eventually, after demolishing a leg and a thigh, Lucy got gabby.
“It all goes back to the British protectorate in Egypt,” she said, swaying back and forth as she started on a breast. She often swayed when she sat.
“Protectorate? You’ve lost me.”
“The Brits occupied Egypt after the Anglo-Egyptian War. From 1882 to 1956. Everybody knows that.”
“Oh, right-right. Of course.”
Tom hadn’t the faintest what she was talking about. Lucy possessed a phenomenal memory crammed with all sorts of useless info. Probably from making all those lists. Tom figured he saved brain space by being choosy about what got filed away.
“So, anyway, lots of the upper-class types liked to vacation there—you know, see the Sphynx and the pyramids, ride camels through Giza, see all the old shit. The clan lived in Wales then, and one of the patriarchs went on one of those sojourns to Cairo in 1888 and was browsing a back-alley souq when—”
“Whoa. A back-alley what?”
“A souq. A bazaar. A marketplace.”
“Then why not just say that instead of using a weird foreign word?”
She stopped in mid-chew to stare at him over the breast. “Everyone knows what a souq is.”
He waved it off. “Go on.”
“Okay, so this patriarch is browsing this mar-ket-place”—she said it slowly and carefully—”and comes across these battered old scrolls. On impulse he buys them and doesn’t realize until he’s back in Wales that he’s got something special. The tip-off is a crudely accurate map of the world in the third scroll. He figures this is evidence that either the scrolls are fakes or its author had been granted knowledge unique among his contemporaries.”
Tom said, “I don’t get it.”
Another withering look. “A map of the world, Tommy—the whole world. If the scrolls are as ancient as they’re supposed to be, nobody was doing maps of the Americas and the Pacific Ocean back then, at least not until the sixteenth century.”
“Oh.”
“Alwyn eventually discovers that he owns the only existing copy of Teachings from the Empty Places—AKA The Void Scrolls.”
That put Tom on instant alert. Void was a magic word for Lucy.
“So?”
“So I looked them up and there’s not much info on them. No one knows where or when they originated. Legend has it the original set of scrolls had been written in Sanskrit but that those were a translation from an earlier, even more ancient language. From Sanskrit they were translated into Arabic, then Greek. In 48 BC the last set was presumed lost when Caesar burned forty thousand scrolls stored in a warehouse at the Library of Alexandria.”
Really? Tom thought. How did one know how many scrolls were stored in an Alexandria warehouse in 48 BC? How? Whatever.
He said, “I’m gathering this set survived.”
“You gather rightly. Apparently one of Titus Livius’s flunkies had stolen a copy of the Greek translation before the fire. It got handed around down through the centuries with no one aware of what it was and wound up in this souq. The Pendry patriarch has it translated into English and what he reads changes his life.”
Titus Livius…scrolls…Tom’s eyes were glazing over. Lucy was unusually loquacious today. She could go for days with no more than monosyllabic responses or without speaking at all. Something had sparked her. But this was typical when she started talking on something she was into: on and on in stultifying detail. He didn’t need all this background.
“What about the end of the world? Can we get to that part?”
“Relax. It’s coming, it’s coming. The scrolls tell of a time, four or five million years ago, when a race of alien beings occupied areas of the Earth. The Rymwyr—who called themselves ‘the Lords of Creation’ but are mostly referred to as ‘the Visitors’—dwelled here during Earth’s warmer days when ice caps were minimal and the oceans were higher.”
This had an all-too-familiar ring to it.
“Let me tell you now, Lucy: The Scrolls are fakes. Someone’s been reading too much of that Cthulhu Mythos shit.”
She blinked. “You know Lovecraft?”
“Who doesn’t these days? I’ve heard it all before and so have you. The maps and the whole tone of this scenario reek of a scam.”
“Maybe we’ve heard it all before because people read these ages ago and remembered. And as far as a scam goes, according to the notes, the Scrolls were carbon dated back to BCE.”
Tom shrugged. “I can go out and buy ancient blank papyrus and write whatever I want on it.”
Her eyes lit with fury—there was that anger. “I know that, Tommy. Everybody knows that, which is why they had the ink dated and it’s also BCE.” She flashed a so-there! expression and went on. “The scrolls were written by an ancient group that worshipped the Rymwyr. Where the Rymwyr originated—another star, another galaxy, another dimension—no one can say, but one of their fave spots was an inland sea that ran from Palm Springs into the Gulf of California. When that dried up they decided to go elsewhere. Their return, if they come back at all, has to coincide with specific astronomical alignments.”
“Let me guess,” he said, urging her toward the point of all this. “Those alignments have occurred.”
She held up a hand. “Don’t rush me.”
Damn.
Finishing the breast, she said, “The patriarch shared all this with his relatives and they started a cult that worshipped the Rymwyr. His son inherited leadership. For some reason—and I haven’t ferreted this out yet—the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, combined with the flooding that created the Salton Sea in 1907, and then the two Imperial Valley earthquakes in 1915, persuaded the whole clan to move from Abereiddy, Wales, to the Salton Trough just a year later. They settled in a place called Nespodee Springs.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Nobody has. It’s in a remote corner of the Sonoran Desert in Imperial County.”
“A string of earthquakes attracted them? That would convince me to go just the opposite direction.”
“I know, right? I get the impression the clan took the earthquakes and floods as a sign that the Visitors were coming back, but they haven’t yet.”
“Obviously. Well, this is all just riveting, Lucy, but once again I ask: What’s any of it got to do with the end of the world as we know it?”
She’d grabbed a KFC biscuit and was slathering it with butter.
“Oh, that.”
“Yeah, that.”
“Well, the current leader of the clan keeps a digital diary of his progress toward bringing the Visitors back.”
“And these Visitors are going to end the world as we know it?”
“If they’re real.” She jammed half the biscuit into her mouth and spoke around it. “Which seems highly unlikely.”
Tom had to agree. Except…
In the past few weeks they’d experienced two quakes, a 3.6 and a 5.5, both originating in the Imperial Valley.
“You mentioned earthquakes attracted the original clan members back in the last century. And now we’ve got a couple of new ones. Connection?”
“I’ve been wondering the same thing. Most likely just coincidence, but I’ve got a lot yet to read. The clan scanned all their ancestors’ papers into the server, and they were a verbose bunch.”
Takes one to know one, Tom thought, but kept it to himself.
“Does this digital diary offer any clue as to how they plan to bring these Visitors back?”
She brushed off her hands as she rose from the seat. “It’s currently on my reading list. I downloaded it to my tablet and was reading it when you stopped by. I’ll let you know if I find something to worry about.”
Lucy walked away, leaving him with the leftovers to clean up. Another hateful habit.
43
You must protect her…You must become her guardian…
His aunt’s words had haunted Jeffrey all night as he lay in his truck wrapped in Jimmy’s blanket. Why should a goddess—one who could rise from the dead—need a puny human like him as her protector?
But Aunt Juana knew things most people did not. She said she knew a lot about Elis Pendry. Maybe he and his clan could find a way to kill the goddess so she’d stay dead. Maybe it was his job to get between them and the goddess. Maybe that was why she’d sent him that picture in the newspaper.
Putting it all together, he’d wound up back here in Nespodee Springs, parked downslope from her shop and apartment. He’d angled his pickup so he could keep watch on her place through his rearview and side mirrors.
He’d watched her come out the backdoor of her shop, go up the steps to her apartment, stay there for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, then come back down to the shop for about the same amount of time, then go upstairs again.
What the fuck was she up to?
44
Daley had spent most of the morning and into the early afternoon wandering through the aisles of her closed shop, then up to her apartment where she wandered from room to room, and then back down to the shop. All the while calling to Pard—usually in her head, but sometimes out loud.
Pard, where are you?
What could have happened to him? It had to have something to do with Jason Tadhak. Had he found Jason’s nervous system more comfortable? A better fit? More welcoming?
Pard’s voice had cut off in midsentence. Was that when he’d deserted her? If he’d left her…if he’d made the leap then, he wouldn’t have been able to tell her because he would have been out of her system and into Jason’s.
If he’d left her…
Would he do that?
He could be so annoying at times—no, make that often. More often than not. And he was always around. Always. She confessed that got on her nerves. How could it not? Did he sense that? She certainly hadn’t made him feel welcome at first. And why would she? He wasn’t welcome. Really, who’d welcome a second mind to their body? The whole situation was intrusive, invasive, bizarre.
And his obsessive-compulsive nature. She couldn’t let herself get started on that. Like having Felix Unger or Sheldon Cooper living in her head—and constantly rearranging the furniture up there.
And yet…
And yet, against all odds she’d grown accustomed to his presence. She never thought she’d miss his annoying quips and constant corrections. No, wait. She didn’t miss them. She’d just gotten used to them, like people living near train tracks got so used to the recurrent rattle that it stopped bothering them after a while. That was what he’d been: a noisy train rattling through her brain. And now that train had stopped running.
Not a bad thing…not a bad thing at all.
Three…no, three and a half weeks with Pard in her head, in her life. Not all of them bad, but maybe that was enough time together. He’d learned about humanity through her, and in return she’d learned a few things about herself. She might even be a better person now because of him.
Pard wanted to help humanity—well, at least those humans struck down by the horrors. Today was the day they’d planned to return to the medical center and see if they could do something meaningful about it, something beyond curing random cases.
So much for that plan. Up in smoke. Without Pard, she was helpless. No, make that useless. He was the essential ingredient; she was simply the transportation, the conveyance. If he preferred Jason, well, Jason could grab a victim’s wrist just as well as she could, allowing Pard to go in and do his business. She was fine with that. Totally fine.
And yet…
And yet right now she knew she’d take a lot of comfort in the sight of Pard perched on his spot over there in the shop’s front window.
“Goddamn it, Pard!”
A knock on the glass of the shop’s front door interrupted her. She stepped to where she could peek at who was there and saw Rhys. He waved to her. She wasn’t in the mood for company but she couldn’t very well turn him away now that he’d seen her.
She unlocked the door and pulled it open.
“Is everything okay?” he said with a concerned look.
“Yeah, why?”
“I thought I heard you shouting at someone just now.”
