End Time (64 page)

That's when the three noticed the Kit-Cat clock behind the counter on the wall. They hadn't noticed at first because it wasn't moving, but the second their eyes lit on it the damn thing began to swing its tail and roll its eyes:
tick-tock-tick-tock.
A gold plaque beneath it proclaimed
PIPER HOLDINGS QUALITY SERVICE AWARD.

The bellhop grinned and wagged his head. “I love that clock.”

It turned out Kit-Cat clocks hung throughout the art deco hotel, in every room, not to mention in every other hotel in the city—as though Mr. P. wanted to keep both eyes on people's comings and goings. Every time the youngsters passed a clock, it clicked to life and went
tick-tock.
Once inside Room 3327, Kid ripped Kit-Cat off the wall and looked about for a window to open, then stopped.

Bhakti Singh had joined them again. Once more, a mantle of light infused the dead scientist, as if more than one entity occupied the same body. And as before the light coagulated, coalesced to the shape of a ball, seeming to hover at his shoulder. The Punjabi scientist stood in one corner of the Tesla Suite, no longer their guide, but a frowning totem of retribution. You could see the storm clouds inside him, a volcano of simmering resolve. He was not through with this world, not yet.

Little Maria glanced at the double apparition. In this special room, the Punjabi scientist and the Light Tesla were living as one; and they wanted to show her something.

“Kid, give me the clock. Give it to me.”

He gaped at her for a second but did not argue. Maria took the clock, holding the plastic thing in her hands like a crystal ball. If the clock let Piper spy on the world, the clock told the little girl much, much more; seeing the machinery of reality, the clockworks of existence going back into time itself. To how it all started. To what was. And how it became … Her eyes fluttered and then rolled up into her head. She whispered softly, “Show me. Tell me.…”

She saw things very clearly now; psychic fingers like a direct wire into the gaunt man's mind, showing her the Pied Piper's galactic history. His story, from the birth of the first perfect thought to the ugliness of the present. Some of it she understood and some of it she didn't, but she let it wash over her, absorbing what she could.

Endless star fields and coils of dazzling gas flowed across the heavens. The Long Souls came out of the vast Magellan cloud, touching the edge of the galaxy, flying on schooners of light like an armada of sparks. Mr. P. was first among equals. The first of the Long Souls to climb the highest heavens; the first to challenge the supremacy of the Great Inspirer, to raise a fist against the Almighty architect of multiple universes and infinite numbers.…

The Long Souls fought the One who set the galaxies to spin—fought and fell, their sparks fleeing across the void. His Resolve chased them across the universe like a cosmic wind, denying them world after world—not the immortal gas giants, not the frozen globes of methane and ammonia, nothing stable, nothing permanent.

Dare you stand against Me?

Then make something of these topsy-turvy blue planets, with oxygen skies, saline swamps, and rivers of lava. Take the most unstable planets to seed, the most volatile spheres, the pretty blue ones.

Try keeping them alive. If you can.

Piper and all his kin were cast into the blue atmospheres, the Long Souls hurtling through formations of clouds like falling stars. As in ancient tales they raised ape to thrall, and thrall to man, creating in His image a pleasing form of graceful life.… They carved mountains with their minds and made metal into floating cities.

But like selfish children the Long Souls turned against each other, burned rocks to glass, battling over who would rule. They fought one last death match over this pretty blue world, this Mother Earth. Then they left only mounds of the dead behind … reverting to simpler forms of life: insects, beasts, the thralls they once enslaved, even mere incandescence. Wandering the face of the Earth for eons, across jungles and deserts, under oceans and over mountains, the gaunt man now scavenged the stone and concrete cities, clawing up from the gutter, the final Piper, the last of his kind to embrace human physicality, the last Long Soul in human skin to reseed the world once more.

As these thoughts and pictures lit up her mind, Maria realized all this past history was coming to a point. This galactic struggle over ancestral life all came down to this day, this moment, this final struggle. The little girl began to speak.

“The Tall Man wants to fly us away to the underground tunnel place. Then down to where the bugs in white coats and their human pie are squared. Where the doctors will use Lila's cells to remake the world and leave her a dried-out skin. They want to put wires in my head and ask me to tell them what happens next. So a special few new-and-improved human beings can see through walls and around corners.”

“What does he want from me?” Kid demanded.

Maria's eyes rolled all the way back; a touch of saliva glistened at the corner of her mouth. “You were Mr. P.'s favorite. He wanted to grow wings on you, make you owner of the world, but now he hates you worst of all, and he's going to butter your buns, cornhole you forever.”

More soft words fell from her drooping mouth.

“The two light friends brought us here because the sparks in the system are still alive in this room; the lightning jumps where they want. Bhakti's ghost and his glow ball, once called Tesla, want you to make a call. They want you to call the Lattimore man in Sioux Falls while there's still a connection, while there's still a chance to stop them. Tell him to try to use electric bots to kill the worms
.
Lock the worms inside and kill them all. Lock them in, and kill them all.”

Kid slapped his laptop open. “You mean a virus? Get the computers at the aerospace company to corrupt that Hillsboro place?” Kid squirmed. Billboard tweaking was not that kind of wizardry. You needed magic codes and infected memory sticks to plug into mainframes. How was he going to explain any of this to the Lattimore guy? How much could the man really know about sending viruses into supersecure research facilities? Convince him to try. The computer-placed call rang through. At the other end, a red-eyed Clem Lattimore accepted the transmission.

Little Maria dropped the Kit-Cat clock to the floor.

Her face frozen in panic.

“Hurry!” she hissed. “Mr. P. has found us. He's downstairs. He's almost here.”

 

36

Numbered Headstones

The magic rabbits that mysteriously thumped dead woodpeckers back to life had vanished into the gorse bushes without a trace. Gray clouds crawled up from the south, that ice storm from the city picking up cold air, turning it into a snow-maker. Beatrice spoke out loud what everyone else was thinking.

“We could do a lot worse than this place. I mean, it is a hospital. Food, medicine, I'll bet the buildings have their own generators someplace.” Sounded reasonable. Wait out the storm. But who knew how long the troubles were going to last? A month? Six months? No, that didn't alter their present situation either. Might as well look for what they needed here and now.

Before they set off on the treasure hunt, Mr. Washington roused himself from the couch on one elbow to warn them, “When the administration closed the max-security building for lack of funds, they spread the hard cases around to different buildings. No telling who's still wandering around. Be careful.”

So they went warily, locked and loaded.

The men walked the length of the cold maintenance garage toward the security office. The place was almost like Home Depot. A half-dozen snowblowers were parked in a row, and even two snowplows—a Kubota front loader, and a red-painted cowcatcher bolted to the front of a 1960s yellow school bus. The only creepy thing about the school bus—the hand and leg restraints and a metal grill door separated the driver from the patients.

Guy looked around the sterile security office. A video-monitor wall showed screens from a hundred or so cameras dotting every corner of the psychiatric hospital. Across the room, scores of labeled metal keys hung in an open metal lockbox. One key was marked
PUMPS
. And below the lockbox a bright red security card sat by a programming terminal—the master pass.

“Wonder if it still works?” Billy took the red key card just in case.

They left by a narrow side door marked
PUMPS.
The key worked; a very good thing.

The red plastic master key card pass also worked every place they tried. As they walked through the empty cafeteria toward the food-service area, Guy became a little reluctant to probe too far, swipe after swipe; like entering a labyrinth, drawing you in—

They stopped cold at the meat locker; the steel door wasn't latched. The two men strained their ears and shared a silent glance. Billy pushed the locker open; they checked the corners, the ceiling. What you would expect; shelves of packed cuts, slabs of hanging meat, just a meat locker. Billy paused, glancing onto a shelf of frozen chickens; an object caught his eye and he picked it up.

“Get a load of this.”

A solid gold wedding band and an engagement ring with a diamond the size of a cherry stone. The rock glittered under the refrigerator lights. Guy was impressed. Lauren's engagement sparkler wasn't half its size, and she wouldn't have parted with it unless they took her finger too. “Ladies don't leave these things around.”

There were scuff marks on the tile floor, the signs of a struggle, as if somebody had been dragged along. Scuff marks. Lost rings. No fingers …

“So where's the hand they belong to?” Billy wondered.

*   *   *

As for the armed and dangerous females, Cheryl and Big Bea were starting to have second thoughts about Connecticut Valley Hospital. A growing sense of dread descended on the women as they tried to locate the psychiatric hospital's up-to-date medical areas. Parts of the place still had that nineteenth-century nuthatch feel.

Neo-Gothic and Victorian brick buildings dotted the campus, many of them in a terrible state of repair, with chipped steps and broken columns. Empty windows stared at the women; rickety iron fire escapes clung to the main structures by threads—nothing you'd want to climb. The silent, empty grounds whispered of peeling paint and abject failure.

Making matters more daunting, the women found themselves traversing an old cemetery once used by the sanitarium. The straight lines of headstones across the grass reminded Cheryl of military graves. But instead of names and dates on the headstones, only numbers appeared. Numbers in granite: 231. Another chiseled gravestone: 202. No name, no date. Endless numbered headstones—the nameless graves of the forgotten insane.

Cheryl saw the mark of doubt in her companion's eyes. “My guess is, the hospital did it out of sympathy, to protect the families from their loved ones.”

“Social stigma.” Beatrice nodded in agreement. “Nothing worse than people thinking you were crazy. Or that you
were related
to someone who was crazy. Nobody wanted their family name on the headstone in the cemetery of a madhouse. Insane blood might run in your veins.”

Cheryl suddenly felt terribly sorry for those buried with nothing to show for their lives but a number on a stone. It didn't sit well with Beatrice either. “Shame can be a powerful restraint. But without it…” Bea paused. “Everybody's crazy.”

The women found the infirmary. Gurneys stood against the walls. The overhead lights were shut off and the reception desk empty. The whole place seemed neat and clean. A sign in the hall pointed to the pharmacy. Beatrice paused at the wide pharmacy counter; drawers ransacked, pills scattered across the floor, the large refrigerator ajar, leaking cold air and colored liquids.

“The staff and patients had a staph infection,” Big Bea remarked. “Not surprising they looted the place. Let's hope they didn't finish off the antibiotics. Might need those.”

“Let's hope,” Cheryl replied, trying not to sound too discouraged.

A subtle noise came down the darkened hall. Big Bea's eyes widened in alarm. “What is it?” she hissed. Quietly, Cheryl unclipped the safety strap on her weapon. Big Bea crept a few paces ahead and unholstered her own gun. She stopped in front of an examination room with a large viewing slit. The sound of faint slurping, lip-smacking, and heavy breathing came through the door. Bea squinted down the viewing slit, but her face betrayed nothing. Gently, she used her cane's rubber tip to open the examination room door. It silently yawned inward. The gun pointed into the room—

Beatrice pulled the trigger.

The gunshot went off like a howitzer in the bare hallway. Bea holstered her weapon and stood back from the open door, leaning heavily on her cane. Cheryl's ears rang. A woman crouched on the floor, shot in the head. The lady was in her mid-fifties: maybe one of the therapists or psychologists—her clothes good enough for that. Reading glasses hung from a bright metal chain around her neck, along with a string of faux pearls; she'd put rouge on her cheeks, wore sensible shoes. The dead woman cradled something in her lap.

A human hand, tapered elegant fingers, pale skin around the ring finger—a young woman's hand. You could see teeth marks. The regimented marks of methodical gnawing. Cheryl stepped back in revulsion.

Big Bea had shot herself a cannibal.

“You can plant that one under a numbered headstone and I won't object,” the lady cop said dryly. A quarter of an hour later, Cheryl and Beatrice returned to the gabled house considerably subdued. What were they going to tell everyone?

Mr. Washington had managed to sit up, a cup of tea nearby. Cheryl brought him some Maalox and various other medicinals she'd found in the pharmacy, so he could finally get rid of that grimy old pink bottle. They'd also found a doctor's bag, which gave Cheryl a chance to use her mandatory ChiPs EMT training. But it had been a long time since she'd wrapped a blood pressure cuff around anybody's arm, and it took two tries to get it right.