The Ninth Dominion (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) (22 page)

He sank slowly to the bottom, and she bounded out from the pool. Around her the chaos was everywhere. She rushed for the parking lot in the hope she would be able to join it.

“You!” a scream ran out behind her. “
Stop!
”

She had been seen, then, identified as one of the parties in the battle that had raged up on the mountain. Before her in the parking lot cars continued to scramble away. Perhaps she could reach one just as its owner was inserting his key, or yank a driver from behind the wheel.

She was charging forward with that intention, when a trio of police cars blared into the parking lot and headed straight for her. She spun around to flee in the opposite direction and saw an old sedan hurtling toward her. Hedda lunged out of its way, and it screeched to a halt beside her. She caught a glimpse of the driver and couldn’t believe her eyes.

“Get in!” Chalmers ordered.

Chapter 22

FOR A LONG MOMENT,
she couldn’t move.

This was Librarian, her control! He had set her up in Lebanon, deceived and then tried to kill—

“I said … get in!” the speaker wedged against his windshield blared.

Bullets slammed into the ground around her, and Hedda jumped into the backseat.

Librarian jammed the big sedan into reverse and floored the accelerator before she had gotten the door all the way closed. Just as it caught, the sedan’s rear end slammed into a pair of police cars speeding for it. Librarian spun the wheel and floored the gas pedal in a desperate move to escape. Bystanders dove from its path as the car tore forward, jumping the curb and clanging hard to the pavement. Its back window exploded and showered Hedda with glass. She could hear Librarian’s labored breathing, coming from his speaker, she thought, and not his mouth.

The slight head start Librarian had gained over his pursuers wouldn’t last long. In hopes of foiling the pursuit, he spun the big sedan onto an unmarked, unpaved road a mile down the main drag before the police drew back in sight.

“Listen to me,” he rasped, turning around to look at her.

“The road!” she screamed, as the car left the road and headed for the trees.

Chalmers looked back too late. He managed to swing the wheel to avoid a head-on collision, but impact was nonetheless jarring. Hedda kicked her door open and moved around to his. The radiator was hissing from the white steam that was rising from beneath the crumpled hood.

“Come on!” she screamed at him, finding her feet. “Hurry!”

Chalmers mouthed, “Can’t.”

Hedda stooped and grasped a rock. “Look away,” she warned, and then smashed what remained of the driver’s side window. Still not understanding why Librarian had chosen to rescue her, Hedda eyed him warily, then reached inside to grab him. His leg was pinned between the crushed door and the seat. Hedda pried it free and hoisted him out.

She gazed back up toward the road, over two hundred yards away. “I don’t hear them yet, but they’ll be coming. We’ve got to move.”

From the ground, Librarian mouthed, “My speaker.”

Still eyeing him with caution, Hedda reached inside the car and found it lying on the passenger seat. Then she hoisted him to his feet and began to drag him away. When it was obvious he couldn’t walk well enough to cover any ground, Hedda effortlessly placed him over her shoulders. None of her own wounds were serious, but there wasn’t a part of her that didn’t ache beneath her slowly drying clothes.

She brought Librarian as far into the woods as she thought necessary to avoid pursuit from whoever found the car. For some reason, he had helped her escape, even though the Gunmen back at the slide might as well have been the same ones from the Litani River Bridge. She set him down and gave him his speaker.

“Time to talk, Librarian,” she ordered.

“Chalmers,” he mouthed.

“What?”

“My name is … Chalmers,” he mouthed again, reaching for his speaker.

“You saved my life back there.”

A nod.

“Why? You tried to kill me first, and then you save me. Why?”

He fumbled the speaker as he drew it upward. Stretching the cord out, he found the pronged end and raised it obscenely for his throat. Three holes peeked out from the discolored patch, looking like bites from a vampire. Chalmers felt his way and jammed the prongs into the proper slots.

Instantly a wheezing sound emanated from the speaker, a wet gurgle like that of a man bleeding to death inside.

“No,” emerged through the wetness.

“Bullshit!”

“I let you … escape in … Lebanon.”

“Your men shot at me! They hit that boy!”

“But you lived … You got away … like I knew … you would.”

“What are you saying?”

“They wanted you … dead. I couldn’t… do it. Not … after Deerslayer.”

“No! You had him killed!”

Chalmers’s expression looked pained. “Like killing … a piece of … myself.” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t … do it again… . Not to you … not to the … others.”

“The Caretakers?”

Chalmers nodded. “They were mine … You were mine… . I couldn’t hand … you over to … him.”

Hedda felt chilled. “To who?”

“Not yet,” Chalmers said, shaking his head.

Hedda grabbed him at the shoulders. “Now!”

“You’re not … ready yet… . Trust me.”

“Why should I?”

“Because I … saved your life … twice now.”

“But you lied to me. You lied to Deerslayer. About the boy. All of it, lies! His father wasn’t Aramco, he was an organic chemist.” Hedda stopped. “Wait. If you arranged the boy’s kidnapping, why’d you need me to get him back?”

“Screens … fronts … everywhere … the Arabs held … the boy for us… . But then they … wouldn’t give him … back. We tracked … them down and … sent you.”

“So you could kill him?”

“No. Just you.”

Hedda slid backward, suddenly wanting to put distance between herself and Chalmers.

“I would have … returned the boy … to his father.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“I expected … you to do … what you did… . I knew you … would save the boy… . I let it … all happen … because it was … the only way I … could keep you … alive.”

“Why bother?”

“Because you … are the best… . That’s why I … need you now.”

“Need
me
?”

“It may be too … late to stop him.”

“Stop
who
?”

Chalmers seemed to be catching his breath. Hedda spoke again before he had a chance to reply.

“Lyle Hanley’s son was kidnapped to force him to create a poison deadly to the touch. My God, that’s what this is about. Whoever it is you suddenly want to stop has the poison! That’s it, Librarian, isn’t it?”

Chalmers nodded slowly.

“What else?”

“I don’t … know.”

“I do. The way the poison is going to be delivered is somehow connected to a plastics company that burned to the ground yesterday. I think the poison was placed in plastic strips and then shipped to a trio of paper mills as part of some secret government contract. But what is it that’s coming out of those mills?”

Chalmers’s face twisted in puzzlement. “I don’t know… . I never did.”

“But you do know millions of people are going to die, don’t you? You know that’s what The Caretakers were involved in the whole time. I’ve seen Pomeroy, Librarian. I know
what
I am, what all of us were. But I still don’t know
who
I am, Chalmers. Who am I?”

“You don’t want … to know.”

“I
have
to know. You said you need me, but I’m not going to help you until you tell me
who I am
!”

Chalmers regarded her thoughtfully. She didn’t realize he was speaking again until she heard the speaker’s rasp coming from next to his lap.

“Only name that … matters,” he started with strange evenness, “is the one … you were … wanted under.”

“Wanted?” Hedda waited with breath held and stilled heartbeat as Chalmers’s next words emerged.

“For murder. They … called you … Lucretia McEvil.”

The memories came flooding back as pieces of her story emerged through the speaker in rasps and gurgles. Hedda didn’t need to hear it all; enough was returning on its own, triggered by the name.

Lucretia McEvil …

The name for her the press had used a dozen years ago. It was all coming back to her, and she realized with terrifying starkness that August Pomeroy had been right: she indeed
did not
want it to. The easiest memories to suppress are those the conscious mind would prefer to smother. Pomeroy had said that was what made her a willing subject. So much she wanted to suppress. Becoming a different person was infinitely preferable to staying the one she had been.

Fragments of a fractured life came back to her in large chunks, fitting themselves together as Chalmers continued to speak. Her eyes left him and focused on the speaker in his lap, but soon they saw nothing other than what her mind had denied her for years.

Chalmers’s words concerned the events of 1979, but the fragments of her life before that time were returning as well. There were five of them in all, friends from the sixties who missed the fire of those times and decided to bring it all back. The raw, untempered violence that had been expected for a time, even condoned. Where had it gone? Vietnam was finished, along with the cause and the rationale it brought. But who needed a rationale when you came right down to it? Revolution was revolution. You didn’t need a cause; you needed a desire.

Hedda and the others called themselves the Storm Riders, after the song “Riders on the Storm” by the Doors. They planned to ride herd on the storm, sweep the nation away in its vortex and show it that God might be dead, but His wrath sure the fuck wasn’t. Their group was spawned from the remnant waste of the Weathermen and SDS, fringe dwellers who had almost remade society and got buried for it in the end.

They took their names from famous songs from the times that had spawned them. Hedda was Lucretia McEvil from Blood, Sweat and Tears. Bob Calhoun was the Reaper from me Blue Oyster Cult tune. Frank Webb was Major Tom courtesy of David Bowie. Ian Swenson was the Sandman from the song of that name by America. And Paula Rebb became Eleanor Rigby, who was buried along with her name.

The Storm Riders took themselves seriously. Maybe it had started as a game, but it hadn’t ended up that way. They’d robbed banks, depositories, even a casino once. Their specialty, though, was kidnapping. At first they chose their victims politically. Before long politics changed to economics. Only the facade of activism remained.

The boy had been thirteen years old, Hedda remembered now. His name was Ricky Baylor. They’d grabbed him after school while he was waiting for the bus. Son of a rich Washington lawyer who had actually defended a number of fringe dwellers back when revolution was more fashionable. Hedda had just walked right up and snatched him, shot up the bus a little to discourage anyone from playing hero.

Though a woman, she was actually the tallest of the Storm Riders and equally as strong as the men. Naturally attractive she deliberately worked against her good looks, for the Storm Riders didn’t care about how they looked. That was buying into the system. Thinking products from Revlon or Max Factor could change your life was bullshit. You wanted change, you went out and did it, went out and
made
it.

The Storm Riders weren’t really changing much, except maybe themselves. If Calhoun and Webb couldn’t transport themselves back to the sixties, maybe good old LSD could. They started eating the stuff and seeing zoo animals everywhere. Paula went sex crazy, fucking everything in sight, including, perhaps especially, her .44 magnum. She chambered a single bullet once and played her own version of Russian roulette. Spun the cylinder and stuck the gun up into herself, pulled the hammer back and fired.

Click.

Said it was the best come she ever had. Ian and Hedda stayed clear of the drugs and the weird stuff, and through it all, somehow, they fell in love. They would lie in bed hugging while in the next room Bob would be freaking out over some inside-out acid dream where the world changed color and only he could see it. And next door down Paula was screaming in ecstasy with God knew what jammed inside herself.

It was all coming apart, but none of them could see it. They made up their own rules, and if the rules changed that was okay, too. The Baylor kid would make everything all right for a while. They needed to disappear, burrow underground to recharge the fringe batteries that had drained dry on excessiveness. Make themselves a cool mill on this one and ride into the sunset on a horse with no name.

But Bob the Reaper fucked up. Got himself IDed buying groceries; never even saw the FBI man who was one of five hundred showing pictures around the Washington area where their van had been found. Goddamn Frank was supposed to torch it, but he forgot the detonators and just drove it into a ditch instead.

“
This is the FBI. Come out with your hands in the air. We know you’re in there. The house is surrounded
.”

Hedda was the only one who heard this first challenge over the bullhorn. Ian was asleep, Bob and Frank were tripping, and Paula was painting the inside of her vagina with cocaine. Hedda reached the window just as the spotlights came on, the house hit by a sudden patch as bright as day. They were everywhere, more guns than people, barrels attached to figures lost to the night.

“What the fuck?” Bob wondered, as he stumbled down the stairs with a pair of pistols in hand.

“Wow,” Paula said, emerging from painting class in the kitchen.

“We’re fucked,” Hedda heard Ian say.

“
I repeat. We have the house surrounded. Come out with your hands up, surrender the boy and—
”

“Ah, fuck you!”

Frank’s booming voice shattered the night, rising even over the bullhorn. Automatic fire from one of the upstairs windows followed, and one of the cops’ windshields exploded. Instantly the fire was returned, peppering the house and chewing it apart.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

Hedda was conscious of her own screaming, and for a brief time nothing else. But then something happened. The Storm Riders got their collective sense back. The five terrorists who at that time occupied five slots on the FBI’s most wanted list coalesced once more into a fighting group. Bob took charge.