8:01
When a mark hides behind a face in a crowd, you have to be careful.
They can jump you out of nowhere.
They can put up smokescreens and fuck you up real bad.
And if they go too deep inside a host, they’re like hell to pull.
If you’ve been hunting marks for thirty years, you figure out how most of them think—but these are different. Insane and powerful, reduced to essence. Hard to see and tough as nails. And I’ve already got one bouncing inside me, hanging on way down in my dark places, cutting me up bad.
But I can use that.
As I walk through the crowded room, I slip on a pair of my shades from the satchel. I palm a razorblade, too—put it in one hand so its hidden, ready to bite me hard when I need the jolt. I do it casually. The shades aren’t as good as my goggles, but they blend right into a party. Nobody sees me at all.
Good.
I slowly begin to release the power of the mark, carefully at first…then a little more…until…my vision begins to polarize…and the room goes neon dark…
Now, the Blacklight.
I see the people in here split into X-ray shapes, the form of their own emotions and obsessions and addictions playing in the air above them like crawling sea creatures that hover and skitter and wriggle. The world moves fast, vibrations shaking me bad as the train accelerates my senses. I slow myself down, trying to ride the storm…but it’s terrifying, even as I focus on the members of the party:
Jerry Donaldson, still shooting craps, drunk as hell now.
Francis Crowe, chatting him up, talking about a movie deal.
Senator Maxton, surrounded by ladies half his age, who fawn over him like he’s Frank Sinatra back in the day.
Carolyn Lewis, conspiring with her cameraman, plotting her next ambush.
Agents Dryden and Jacques hovering near Maximum Bob, looking serious, passing the odd remark.
The bartender, serving a drink to Junk-E, who quaffs it fast and shouts for another, his eyes scanning the room.
His eyes…
I put out a line to him and search for his thoughts. No freestyling now, no business numbers or thoughts of civil rights speeches. Nothing at all.
And he’s a big guy, too.
Big and powerful.
I move toward him, and there’s something…
Yes, something.
I lose it in the wild accelerated slithers of phantom darkness, layers on layers of memories, projections—bits of old lives flashing past me, shaking me hard. Just standing in a room is bad enough when you’re on solid ground. This is a million times worse, entire worlds built and destroyed in split instants as I walk forward through it. My body begins to flicker in and out. I clench my fist and the razorblade cuts into my hand. The pain hits me sharp. Blood drizzles along my closed palm. I pull back…
And the world moves slower now.
I refocus on Junk-E, moving toward the bar, still a little dizzy.
Have to move fast.
He sees me and does something that looks like a weird smile, one gold tooth peeking out the corner of his mouth. “What’s up, man?”
“Just a fan,” I tell him. “Thought I’d say hello.”
“Who you be with?”
“Hired help.”
“Hired by who?”
“Doesn’t matter. I just like your music.”
He looks at me funny.
Nothing.
I feel nothing coming from him at all, not now. Solid steel wall up, on all sides of him. It could be my own mind playing tricks. Never been in a room like this. A room that moves this fast and this hard. Have to stay focused. Gotta try something bold.
“So tell me something,” I say slowly. “How do you like being black?”
“What the fuck did you just say to me?”
“Think you heard me just fine.”
He jabs a finger in my face and I sense something move inside him. “You get the fuck outta here before I snap you in half, punk!”
I reach up and grab his hand.
His little finger breaks easy.
He spits out a howl, but nothing comes loose. His eyes fill with water. He grits his teeth hard, takes a swing at me, snarling, and I feel his mind flare white-hot with rage. I sidestep him and grab his right arm, sending him into the bar, where shot glasses shatter.
I was wrong—it’s not in Junk-E.
It might not even be in this room now.
Maybe saw me coming and hauled ass.
And meanwhile, I have a very pissed off black man coming back at me, blind with pain and rage and a broken finger. The room freaks out a little. One of the girls screams, then laughs. Carolyn Lewis nudges her cameraman, who starts filming the whole scene. Jacques and Dryden don’t unholster their weapons, but they start to come near us, looking like this is all they need right now. But the room is packed, and the fight is on. Some people even start cheering. The two agents are almost swallowed up in it.
I aim my fingers for the nerve center in Junk-E’s right shoulder, hoping to end this fast, but something punches me in the gut before my blow connects—something already inside me. The mark. I go down on the floor, doubled over, and the big rapper is on top of me fast, his whole weight pouring in like deadly lava, his hands around my throat.
While I’m down there, something comes straight out of Junk-E’s eyes.
Like crawling red fingers—laughing, pulling his strings.
Played me like an amateur, dammit.
It was in his body, but deep down—took longer for the nerve spike to reach it. I curse myself as it spews over me, the mucky red ooze homing toward the Pull. But the son of a bitch is scrappy, just like the other one.
I get it all the way out, but it clobbers me hard.
Junk-E screams as the mark leaves him, blasting backward and into the bar, his head smashing against the polished wood, knocking himself cold. I dance to my feet, wrestling with the skittering mist. It claws at my face like a crazy dog, screaming wordless curses. I bear down hard, getting a good grip on the goddamn thing, the Pull coming down mercilessly…
The mark shatters against my skin and goes deep.
The desperate animal cries oozing directly into me.
It joins the other one, overloading my senses, scorching my lungs and my heart and my stomach and pulsing along my bones, swirling in the center of my body, in the roaring black hole of the Pull, which expands like a negative fist clenching my heart. My mind registers it as a complete fucking overload, all my bells and whistles lighting up in the red. I sense the same trace memories from before, smothered in sticky unformed animal mulch…and for one long second-and-a-half that crunches in my skull like dirty electric blowback, I hover there in slow motion, allowing myself to feel the primal truth of it—these spirits who’ve gone beyond rage, beyond revenge, beyond humanity. They are the worst parts of everyone. They are the worst parts of me. The screams and the blood and the eating of flesh…and…and…
Another one hits me from behind.
Right out of nowhere.
Its invisible attack lands like a bomb in the whirlpool center of the Pull, almost breaking my hold over the marks.
They don’t come loose from my body, but they start pounding me hard.
Start grabbing for control.
Their combined assault smothers me in long terrible bulletflashes of absolute hopelessness, hitting me in all the worst places.
Places of the mind.
Places of the soul.
It’s been years since I was ratpacked like this.
I reel in the undertow, pulled almost under as the gored remains of writhing animals twist my mind to hell and back. My world spins out and almost crackles away, and I expect the hot blast of the Blacklight to hit me in the face but it never comes. The magnetic force of the train speeds in on my senses, combined with the sneak attack of the mystery mark, plunging straight down on me, my mind exploding with fragged images, shuffled and blown apart and seared back together in tracerfire sequence, like some video-stitched montage, overdriven and loud…
Razorblades covered in blood.
The smiles of blinded men and women, possessed by marks.
The gun, exploding in my face…
A face like an angel, hair blowing in the white hot breeze.
The face of my mother.
my mother…
The shock blasts my heart as I come back from it, but I have no time to ponder.
The two marks inside me have the upper hand—and it’s merciless.
People scream.
The world shifts and boils like smothering ooze.
I am dazed on my feet.
I hear the kid scream Francis Crowe’s name in my earbud just before the guy sits up from his chair near the craps table, and something like a ten ton kinetic deadweight smashes into me. His hands never touch my body, but the air turns into a battering ram and does me hard. The floor under my feet vanishes and I fly back, clearing ten feet, slamming against the slot machine on the opposite wall. My ribs start screaming at me and I slump over, dazed.
Crowe.
The mystery mark is in Crowe.
And it wants in the game.
Wants the marks inside me.
The images from the desert pound at my mind one more time:
The gun.
The razorblades.
A face that could be…could be my…
Agent Dryden shouts my name and aims his gun at me. It’s a monster, that thing—a Ruger P345 Centerfire pistol with a laser sight. Major stopping power, high velocity. This guy doesn’t fuck around.
Tom appears at the far end of the room, his gun up. What the hell is he doing here? He was supposed to be…
I throw out my hand. “Get back, all of you!”
Tom freezes, his hands shaking on the gun. “What is it?”
“It’s Hollywood,” Crowe hisses with a wicked grin.
The mark inside him takes another swing with his invisible fist, and the world fritzes out again as the pain rips into me…
Blacklight.
The room swims in neon shadows.
The rush is pure now—overwhelming.
None of the people in this place can see what I see hovering over the little guy now. Another one of the Nine, swarming its essence just inches above his flesh, making his eyes dark, manipulating his body like a herky-jerky meat puppet. He steps forward now with staccato grace.
I pull myself back, the Blacklight ripping away painfully…the two marks colliding inside me, hitting hard…and…
Crowe attacks again.
He narrows his eyes at me. The invisible force slams into my stomach, and this time I manage to summon the Pull, which deflects some of it, spinning the shockwave across the room to knock down Dryden. He crashes into Jacques and his Ruger goes spinning across the floor like a toy. Dryden recovers fast and looks up, his eyes wild, as the panic in the room escalates into a full-scale terror scene.
The marks bounce back inside the walls of my soul—and it’s complete fucking torture. Like rows of scalpels and ripping claws peeling back the skin of my youth, robbing me of everything. I barely manage to stand on two feet. I concentrate on grounding myself. Summoning the Pull. Trying to rip them out of my biorhythms and digest them. But they still hold out against me.
Crowe attacks again.
His hands never touch my body.
The invisible fist punches a double whammy, folds me in half, pinning me to the deck, and I crumple there, my soul buckling under the strain. I lose control…
And the Blacklight shatters the room again.
No coming out of it now.
I’m in for the long haul.
The air swims in surreal shadows, moving faster than the speed of sound, the screaming and crying people letting loose with terrible formless essence that swirls and crackles and blows like multicolored bombs. It’s crazy. Total insanity. Crowe pushes past two of Bethany Sin’s crew and lunges forward, focusing his attack again. This time I see what the fist looks like—a malformed shape like a steel battering ram with bad memories and movie scenes and spatters like blood and piss and semen flowing just under its liquid metal surface—and it forms into a knife and scrapes into me, tearing a deep gash in the worst spot—deep down, where the real Bethany was when she tried to seduce me. The private place where you give up everything. The marks inside me are street fighting now, kicking me while I’m down and pissing right in my face. I clench my teeth and take it on the chin. A vein pops somewhere in my head and a teardrop of blood streaks down from my right eye. I actually feel my hair go white in this moment, damn-near paralyzed.
I have to get up.
Have to get what’s in Crowe.
My legs won’t work.
Tom sees it hit me again, the steelbar force keeping me down. I smell his adrenaline blow bad in his heart, mixed up in the ripe blowback of several dozen panicking men and women. He runs forward, re-aiming his gun at Crowe, who is rapidly turning black, his eyes glowing with strange neon. The monster winks at Tom and licks his bottom lip, the mark crackling over his body like a storm of dead things that only I can see, a voice full of playful malice that everyone can hear:
“Let’s wrap this one out, shall we?”
The force hits Tom and he stumbles back, the cloud over Crowe amping up, and it starts really screaming now, infusing him with twisting veins and blotches like living bruises, crawling all over every inch of his skin. Tom’s eyes go white and wide like a shocked china doll, his whole body quaking and rumbling, terror striking through him like a sledgehammer.
Hell of a time to go crazy on me, Tom.
Dryden crawls along the floor, to where Senator Maxton is crouched in a corner, yelling at him to stay down, retrieving his gun. I see his panic materialize in the space above him like glowing blood diamonds, and his eyes are full and nuts—he’s about to blow, too.
Crazy people everywhere.
Sheer Section Eight on both sides of me.
The thing-in-Crowe comes at me and I roll out of the way. It smashes against the bar and snarls there, hunched over like some bizarre nightmare about flesh and blood made dark and wrong. Crowe stands in the center of the hissing cloud of smoke and tendrils, enveloped in black stinking anti-flesh. He channels it with charcoal eyes, the will of the mark somewhere in there, pulling his strings. His movements are fast, the hatred under his skin commanding muscles at superhuman speed, coming right at us again.
Tom raises the gun and almost fires, his panic-on-overdrive killing all common sense in his strained mind…but I grab his hand.
“You’ll kill him! Don’t!”
The thing-in-Crowe pauses—snarling, laughing.
All the muscles in his body snap and pop, like the pistons of a machine.
His charcoal pupils dilate and recede into black infinity.
A billion thoughts crash through my mind in this moment, and not all of them belong to me. I focus up, bringing the Pull to the surface of my fingers again, aiming myself at him. I can’t lose this battle. I can’t let Crowe die. The marks inside me scream and tear at me, slowing me down.
The Pull comes painfully to the surface, knocking them back.
Calling for the thing inside Crowe’s body.
It snarls and spits at me, digging in deeper to the little guy.
Telling me to come and get him.
Calling me a fucking asshole.
Agent Jacques closes from the other side, puts his sights right between Crowe’s eyes, telling him to drop to his knees with his hands over his head, his voice calm and professional, like he’s the only sane man in the room who has a gun. There’s a bad joke for you. The black cloud is invisible to him—all the cop sees is a pissed-off movie producer with baby blues gone black.
Crowe snarls and screams at him to go fuck himself.
“Mr. Crowe, I need you to calm down,” Jacques says, slow and easy, taking three slow steps toward him, riding the trigger heavy with each breath he takes.
The thing-in-Crowe turns and jumps at Jacques, its hand scraping across his face—an inhuman blur of stylish silver fingernails and thick spritzing blood. The cop staggers back like a drunk puppet and I leap up to take the thing while he’s distracted.
And in that moment, time seems to slow in the Blacklight.
And I see a shape moving toward me in the corner of my eye.
Tom.
His gun raised.
His finger squeezing the trigger.
His panic blowing all the way now.
Right in time with the flashbomb of the high-caliber discharge.
It resounds like a god exploding in the casino and the bullet zangs just over my shoulder, going right into Crowe’s forehead.
The back of the little guy’s skull opens and the shot evacuates his brain in a chunky-pink goosh, like a scoop of mulched Silly Putty scattering in the air.
Hollow-point round.
Nasty.
The sound is still keening sharply in my head as the next shot comes, drilling out his heart and blowing apart one of the slot machines. A flower of blood detonates through his spine and the mark tears free, coming right at me, homing on the Pull. It looks like a blurred thrash of chitinous arms and legs, almost insect-like and changing shape from millisecond to millisecond, full of bad memories and animal instinct, a raging, roaring missile of pure supercolliding hatred…
The force of the blow knocks me off my feet.
I hear another shot as I go down.
Dryden’s gun.
It hits Tom in the shoulder, scraping blood into the air and dropping him to one knee, his pistol falling from his hand. Jacques is still on the floor with blood in his eye as his boss pins Tom with his little red dot and tells him to get on the floor, right the fuck now. His voice is crazy, out of tune and warbling, like a heat-scorched record album.
Tom, you crazy fucked-up son of bitch…
The thought goes through my mind in bullet-time, before I realize there’s still a mark on top of me, screaming, clawing at my face. But it’s weak from throwing so much into the fight—weaker than the others. The Pull takes it into me, but it comes through my skin hard, crashing into the other two in my guts like merciless surf. I spiral faster on the dark downward as I feel the force of the train slushing and pounding and pulsing like wet electricity, just outside of sight. And I can feel the marks dive-bombing, writhing on multiple trajectories, the force of the train accelerating them into some weird black overdrive. Their screams buzz the magnetic field, pulling me under with phantom talons, kissing me with smells of dark oozing liquid, like oily lifeblood swirling and boiling and screaming, taking me back…making me see…
…and here come the memory flashes again, stronger now, like they’re all of the same mind. Shattered glimpses, vague whispers, slashing across my mind like projected bits of an old life blown to hell and arranged in the wrong order…
The face of a madman smiles and makes promises.
Jack’s face.
Blackjack Williams.
He opens his fist and the razors glare in the sun.
Someone tells me everything will be okay.
Someone tells me I will be safe.
The gun roars…
I can’t stay in this maelstrom. It’s burning me too bad and there’s a war on. I have to break away. Break away NOW. I grit my teeth and find my center. I concentrate on nothing but grounding myself in my own humanity. I am not the marks—the marks are mine. I am not the memories—the memories are long gone.
The power of control slides in.
I grit my teeth and bear down.
The marks hurl slashing curses at me as I bring them under my leash. Bits of screams. Fragments of faces. All splattering against the chambers of my soul…but not digesting. Instead, something else happens. I feel them combine into a deep black burst of superheated energy—something that seems to feed directly from the Blacklight, focusing into power…and the power runs through my nerves, scores my brain and bounces back, making my body hum and rattle and speed faster than light, in synch with the massive drug-rush of the train beneath my feet…
And it’s good.
Power.
Glowing, churning…coalescing.
Inside me.
Like nothing I’ve ever felt.
It pins me where I stand like jagged bolts of energy whipping through a lightning rod. My eyes glow with it. My lips are red from it. Tears streak down my face, dark with blood and strange humors, smoldering like the souls circling inside me. It’s my birthright. It’s where I belong.
Here in the Blacklight.
Yes.
YES…
Something hits me in the face as I begin my ascent to godhood—something hard and cruel, yanking me back to earth. A sharp pain opens a gash along my right cheek, and I see Dryden as he pistol-whips me again, and I go down on the floor like heap of dirty laundry. My shades fall off my face, and the Blacklight cuts across my eyes like a laser beam. The lenses hold, but the pain blasts through everything…
…brings me back…
And it’s a total clusterfuck.
The room full of chaos.
One VIP dead, another out like a light.
Tom on the floor with Jacques digging a knee in his back, telling him not to move one fucking muscle.
And Dryden standing over me, his gun aimed right in my face.
8:05
There’s a lot of screaming.
That’s the first thing you usually notice in these situations.
The marks do another crash-and-burn in my mind, then I fight them back, as the unbound napalm blows fireworks again and again, just under my skin. They still won’t go down. How much longer can I hold them? I struggle up on my elbows, but Dryden keeps the gun in my face and I don’t get very far with that idea. He spits rage, but his voice is like a whoosh of angry air that makes no sense under the punishment tearing me from the inside. I try to keep focus on the room, which swims with sharp panic and frenzied voices—all kinds of voices. The kind you can hear out loud and the kind people come up with inside themselves when they’re afraid to die.
The only one controlling himself is the senator, who stands near the center of the room like a Roman statue—he looks damn confused and even a little grossed-out, but he ain’t showing a trace of fear. Jerry Donaldson is a different story: he’s a racetrack full of drunken frenzy and shock, screaming his dead partner’s name over and over while his arm candy clings to him in desperation, crying. Carolyn Lewis chokes back tears, the cold fingers of some inevitable bottomless despair clutching her heart. Bethany’s posse all huddle together in a corner, hysterically shrieking, abandoned by Maxton—and not one of them wonders where their magical diva wandered off to. And Tom…
I feel him bottoming out again and again, consumed by his own panic and desperation, kept on the floor by Jacques, smothered in his own sweat. It mixes with the insanity rumbling in the room and pours in like a punishing wave, the speed of the train accelerating another notch on program, the world screaming by at hundreds of miles an hour now…
It’s too much, but I steel myself against it.
Finally…somehow…the world starts to ooze back into some coherence, and Dryden is wild-eyed as he yells in my face again:
“I said what the fuck just happened in here, Carlsbad? I wants some answers out of you now!”
I fight the marks and try to make a normal voice happen:
“The train…we’re under attack…”
“You’d better start making some sense, buddy—I’m not kidding! ”
Agents Ben and Jerry come into the room from the forward observation deck, pulling Lauren Chance between them.
Agent Kendall brings up the rear, hefting his thick revolver.
Dryden sees them and hisses his next words in quick bursts, like machinegun fire. “Get that bitch over here! On your knees now! Hands on your head!”
They shove her next to me and we both put our hands on our heads.
“Cover the senator,” he barks to Ben and Jerry. “I want all these people and the staff members rounded up now. Everyone is on lockdown until we get to Vegas. I’m getting to the bottom of this one way or another.” He turns to me and spits in my face again, his gun held tightly. “You hear me talking, Buck? You and your pals have officially fucked yourselves.”
Tom doesn’t say a word, his mind slushed, Jacques still holding him down with his knee, gun aimed right in the back of his head—looks like he’d really relish an excuse to do some wasting right about now.
Ben and Jerry cover the senator.
Agent Kendall just looks confused.
“You can’t put all these people in lockdown,” I tell Dryden, starting to get a grip above the pounding in my head and guts. “There’s something loose on the train. If you put them all in one place, they’ll be sitting ducks.”
“Shut the fuck up,” he yells. “You are a terrorist, Carlsbad.”
“I was hired to protect these people!”
“And you did a bang-up job, buddy—be sure to tell that to the judge.”
“Didn’t you see what just happened, man? That guy on the floor turned black and tried to kill me!”
“What I saw was you picking a fight, buddy-boy—and your friend here blew his goddamn head off! Is that the way you deal with ghosts down in Texas?”
“You have to listen to me…”
“Just shut up, boy—shut the fuck UP! ”
The force of the train comes in harder when he screams at me.
The marks scramble to get a grip on me.
It’s so hard, keeping them down…
Carolyn Lewis and her cameraman keep their heads, but just barely, on the floor with Senator Maxton. Derek Pappas is shouting that he wants to know what’s going on, and the blue-blood from the Mideast looks real nervous. Donaldson and his arm candy are shaking in each other’s arms—their crying boiling into a mumble paralysis, unable to speak. Bethany’s posse hold on to each other for dear life.
The senator doesn’t say a word. Kind of scowls in my direction.
Cool as ice under fire.
I sit there on my knees, feeling the burn inside, the speed of the train rushing toward hyperspace on all sides of me, blurring my senses.
Tom shivers and quakes under Jacques’s knee, wounded and sideways.
Roosevelt, stuttering in my ear: “Buck…holy shit, man…”
Dryden hears his voice and snaps to Agent Kendall: “I want that kid with the cameras brought in here with the rest of these terrorists—all of them are under arrest.”
Kendall does a quick yessir and bolts from the room.
“You hear that, kid?” I say into my earbud. “Looks like the big show’s been cancelled.”
His voice comes back: “Fuck me.”
One of the girls gets hysterical, the one with purple hair. She’s pretty far gone, her two friends crying at her to calm down.
I check for shadows, listen for voices.
Nothing else in the room, just panic.
Tom grunts as Jacques hauls him up on his knees, slapping iron around his wrists. I look Tom in the eye and he shivers, like he has no idea what to do. He’s delirious now, in shock. Just doesn’t make any sense. I’d think he was possessed, if I didn’t already know better. I hear Roosevelt being arrested over my earbud—and then the signal shuts down, terminated at the source. There goes our eye in the sky.
Dryden fires his next words in a half-stutter, struggling to keep himself in charge of everything, his adrenaline pumping double-time: “Mr. Carlsbad, I’m supposed to inform you of your rights—but you don’t have any rights as a terrorist. I’ll give you one chance to confess.”
“Confess what?”
His mind does a terrible snap, and I feel it like a bone breaking:
“Who are you working for? Who paid you to assassinate the senator?”
Lauren spits at him: “Have you lost your mind? ”
He aims his gun right in her face.
“No, Miss Chance. Have you?”
The room freezes.
Agent Jerry gets wide-eyed. “What the hell are you doing, Richard?”
Dryden grinds his teeth hard. “Everyone just needs to relax…the situation is under control.”
He doesn’t sound convinced.
At all.
I struggle to keep it together, squinting at his gun.
“You can’t do this,” Lauren says, very calmly.
“I can do anything I want. This is an emergency situation.”
She almost laughs. “I’m a employee of Jaeger Industries—a goddamn security guard. I didn’t have anything to do with this.”
“You were all hired by Sidney Jaeger, which makes you all terrorists as far as the law is concerned, and terrorists are guilty until proven innocent—or don’t you watch the news? How about it, Buck?”
He thumbs back the hammer, re-aiming at me, his eyes glimmering with something that looks like madness shot through with macho.
“You gonna shoot me right in front of all these people? I thought you spook-types were sneakier than that.”
“I’ll blow you away and they’ll pin a medal on my chest for it.”
“Just like your dad, huh?”
“Fuck you, terrorist.”
He explodes inside himself, his mind doing backflips, his finger on the trigger.
Sheer Section Eight.
“One last chance, Buck. Who are you working for?”
Carolyn Lewis nods to her boy, who still has his camera rolling, getting everything on video. The senator finally notices that and takes a cautious step toward Dryden, his bodyguards moving with him, his voice strong and measured. “Richard, you need to lower your weapon. I am ordering you to lower your weapon.”
“Sir, please remain calm,” Dryden says, his voice still mad-on-macho. Terrifying. “The situation is under control…we need to have everyone move quietly to the rear of the train…need to ask each of you a few questions…”
The senator doesn’t back down.
“Richard, I’m going to tell you one more time and I want you to listen carefully. Lower your weapon. Arrest these people by the letter of the law and the courts will decide if they are guilty. You and I both serve the public trust and this will not stand.”
He’s playing for the camera now.
Turning a bad situation into a chance to be a media hero.
I want to tell him to back off—that this guy is a hair-trigger lunatic with a death wish, but he keeps coming forward, even when Agent Ben slaps a hand on his shoulder and tries to pull him back.
Dryden’s finger almost curls on the trigger.
“Senator…the situation is under control.”
Maxton, cool as ice: “You’re right. It is. Now lower your weapon.”
I feel Dryden’s mind make a crazy dive for a black zone I can’t read, and the marks twist and burn inside me, screaming for him, sensing fresh blood in the water. Everyone in the room holds on the next three seconds, as they stretch to the end of time, Maxton reaching out to Dryden, his hand unwavering.
“Richard, give me the gun.”
Dryden blinks twice and says:
“No.”
Then…
He lowers the gun. Slowly. Turns to Maxton with a stone expression, everyone in the room breathing again.
“Get these people to the rear of the train,” he says to Ben and Jerry. “We’ll hold them in the movie theater and sort this out when we get to Vegas.”
“Thank you, Richard,” Maxton says, and follows after Rashid Hopi, along with the others. They move toward the door, led by Agents Ben and Jerry.
Dryden looks back at me with disgust.
His eyes, stone cold and desperate at the same time.
He wants to shoot me so much it’s like a bad taste in his mouth.
I stay focused on his madness, the Blacklight hissing just out of sight, the marks clamoring for my surrender. I begin to concentrate on their wordless voices, bringing the power forward just a bit…so that I can see…but I decide that’s a bad idea and force it back down. I size him up on instinct.
Nothing in Dryden.
Nothing I can see.
He would have killed me, like the others tried to.
Jacques drags Tom over and tosses him alongside us. He’s half conscious now, blood trickling down the scrape on his arm, his shirt sleeve dark with blood. Agent Kendall brings Roosevelt into the room, his hands locked behind his back in cuffs. Dryden orders the kid to his knees, and we’re all in a row now—all us nasty terrorists.
“So where’s the booze?” Roosevelt says.
Dryden turns on him, the gun still at his side, gripped in a nervous fist. “Shut your mouth.” He redirects his eyes to Agent Kendall. “We’ll hold these suspects in the forward passenger compartment. I want them cuffed and interrogated.”
“Thought we were saving the party for Vegas,” I tell him.
“Mr. Carlsbad, if I were you I’d get smart and crack a tab on a nice frosty can of shut the fuck up.”
When he says that, something shifts in the room.
Something like the shockwave I felt before.
Something moving toward us.
I concentrate on it, focusing all my energy…
And the Blacklight spirals into view, washing the room in dark heatwaves, splitting apart everyone and showing me the shape of their fear. Dryden is a mess of writhing blue panic, but there’s nothing riding inside him—he’s just a crazy man. The agents are all clean, too. But I can hear the screaming now, like the sounds inside me, and it’s terrible and piercing, feeding back in my head, filling my senses.
Crawling along the ceiling are two marks.
Their madness rolls the air into boiling red muck and the sound of their tantrums solidifies, blasting in circle after circle.
It’s a thing of intense, terrifying beauty.
No one can see it but me.
I get a dirty lungful of what they are, reaching out to touch the smell…which burns like flesh set on fire, blood and sweat dripping from an open wound. I see smiles set into malformed faces, like cancers giggling, boiling skin and viperous plasmic substance doing whirlpools, upside down and right side up—the bitter shape and stench of unfocused insanity—coiling through the air like slime slithering through a drain…slithering down from the ceiling to strike home.
Right in Carolyn Lewis and Rashid Hopi.
No.
Goddammit, no.
I feel the wave hit me, as the marks inside my body shift again, kicking up a lot of shit as they see the touchdown. Lewis takes it with a rough jolt. Hopi has no idea it even happens. Nobody would know if they didn’t see like I’m seeing now. And what I see is terrible, like a couple of spiders spinning up flies in a million tiny membranes that go deep into every pore, every orifice, then burst with a sick red glow, as the marks slide home, riding along the nerve impulses, dragracing through their bloodstream, hissing and laughing all the way. Carolyn Lewis really feels it now, and she goes down on one knee, as Rashid Hopi begins to convulse, still holding it together.
“It’s in her! Carolyn Lewis! Don’t let her go with the others!”
Dryden is shocked by my voice, then he hears someone scream and spins to see Lewis on the floor.
I scream again: “Get her away from the others!”
He hisses at me: “Shut your mouth, terrorist.”
“I’m telling you—they’re gonna lose it, just like Crowe did!”
The kid pipes up: “Listen to him, man. The shit’s going down now.”
Dryden punches him in the face and he shuts up.
The marks are going deep now inside Lewis and Hopi.
Taking control of them.
I have to do something.
Dryden takes three steps away from me, sizing up the situation, with Agent Kendall right behind him. Carolyn Lewis is on the floor now, moaning. Rashid Hopi shaking it off, feeling the burn, but he still has no idea what’s happening to him.
In ten minutes, he will know.
They’ll both be at the mercy of those sons of bitches.
And I’ll be cuffed on the other side of the train…
I reach up and jam my finger along the wound Dryden cut into my face when he hit me with the gun, and the pain shocks me…
I bring myself back and focus up, the Blacklight spiraling away.
Have to make my move now.
I hear someone scream my name—I think it’s the kid—as I jump up to my feet, coming right at Dryden and Kendall from behind, landing between them like a bomb. My left foot wheelkicks around and sweeps Kendall’s leg at the back of his knees, putting him on his back. Dryden curses and tries to aim his weapon at me—but I intercept his move at the wrist, slicing two fingers along the nerves that govern his fingers and he drops the iron in a big hurry. My elbow comes into his face and he sees stars explode from the crack of his jaw, joining his buddy on the floor. I kick away Kendall’s thick revolver and jump across the room in three fast pounces. Seconds later, I clear the space between the fallen agents and Carolyn Lewis and she’s still shaking, the mark sliding along her bones now, having hell with taking control of her. Hopi is my first target.
But I never get to him…
Someone slams into me from behind in a full-body tackle.
The world tilts and then goes upside-down.
I look up to see Agents Ben and Jerry holding me on the floor.
Agent Dryden comes into my line of sight, rubbing his wrist, blazing down on me like a playground bully finally getting his way. Agent Jacques hovers there, too, pulling his revolver off his shoulder.
“That was real smart,” Dryden says. “You just made my whole day, Buck.”
He nods to Agent Jacques and says:
“Book him.”
Smith and Wesson slams down into my face and all the lights go out.