The sound of gravel crunching under the sole of a shoe came from behind. Alice spun around, and there she was.
Needlemouse.
A woman about Alice’s age, maybe a few years older. She remained in the shadows, her face hidden beneath a black hood.
“You Alice?” she said.
“Needlemouse,” Alice said. It felt a little strange to use her code name when addressing her in person. “Good to finally meet you.”
A slight pause followed. Alice waited for Needlemouse to speak, but she stayed silent.
Her standoffish demeanor left Alice slightly unsettled. But that didn’t bother her quite as much as the fact that Needlemouse was most likely a Xylox addict. The signs were subtle, but it wasn’t hard for Alice to identify one of her own. This immediately gave her cause for concern. Xombies were hardly known for their reliability or trustworthiness.
“You have something for me?” Alice said, once the silence between them had lingered to an uncomfortable degree.
The woman nodded, but remained mute.
She stepped forward and pulled her hood back, and Alice caught a glimpse of her face for the first time.
She was taken aback when she saw how young Needlemouse actually was. She was still a teenager, but her addiction had wreaked havoc on her face. Her eyes were dead and vacant. Her skin was punctured with pockmarked craters. The flesh of her sunken cheeks clung to her skull like a cheap polyester sweater.
Alice tried not to let her revulsion show. She wondered if others had similar reactions when meeting her for the first time.
“You have something for me ... regarding Goliath?” Alice tried.
Needlemouse nodded again, but still didn’t speak. Alice was quickly becoming exasperated by the one-sided nature of the conversation.
“Do you have it with you? Or should we go someplace else?”
“Do I have what with me?” Needlemouse croaked.
Alice battled to keep her cool and not allow her frustration to boil over. This was like trying to communicate with a labrador. “Whatever it is you have for me.”
Needlemouse looked at Alice as if she was making up a new language on the spot. Alice watched her hopes of landing a star-making, career-defining story fade by the second.
“Like a name, or footage, or photographs. Or any other documented evidence.” Alice paused, hoping something would eventually click. “You know, of Goliath.”
“Oh, no,” Needlemouse replied. “I have something much better than that.”
Alice exhaled with relief. Finally, they were getting somewhere.
“And what is that?”
“I have Goliath.”
Alice’s eyebrows knitted slightly. “What do you mean you have Goliath?”
Needlemouse grinned. Her remaining teeth were an identical shade of yellow as her skin.
“He wants to meet you. In person.”
A half-second after this news hit, Alice became aware that she was not alone. She caught a brief glimpse of the two men behind her.
Before she could react, the men had pounced on her and forced her to the ground.
A sack was pulled over her head, and her world plunged into darkness.
Chapter 27
Bourke’s silver Volkswagen was sitting idle by the side of the road when Morgan found it. The headlights were on, and the motor running. The driver’s side door was wide open. But there was no sign of Bourke.
An hour earlier, Morgan’s tracking system alerted him that Bourke was out on the road again. He dropped what he was doing and jumped in his car to follow.
He remained somewhat hopeful as he neared the scene. Maybe this would be the night he would finally catch Bourke in the act.
An early indication that tonight would be different came when he saw that Bourke was not going after Alice, as he had been for the past few weeks. He was heading in the opposite direction – straight for Christopher Gibson’s house.
Bourke appeared to have given up on Alice for the time being and was going after the easier target.
Morgan parked two streets away and traveled the rest of the distance on foot.
He spotted the Volkswagen up ahead. He crept up slowly behind it. He braced himself for any nasty surprises.
He shone his flashlight inside the car. Nothing. It was empty.
He moved around to the driver’s side and poked his head inside. Bourke’s instruments of slaughter were spread throughout the car – a steel crowbar, a coil of nylon rope, a pair of pliers and a gas mask – but no Bourke.
Morgan left the vehicle and made his way over towards Christopher’s place.
The house was a dilapidated dump that looked like a stiff breeze would cause it to collapse in a heap.
He waded through the overgrown weeds to conduct a quick sweep of the property. No one here, either. No one that he could see, anyway.
He peered through the dusty windows. There didn’t appear to be anyone home. No lights, no movement. In fact, there didn’t appear to be anyone living there at all. The house wasn’t just empty – it looked abandoned. The kind of place squatters would have second thoughts about setting foot inside. The lack of wheelchair access also seemed a bit peculiar.
He tried the front and back doors, but both were locked. The windows, too. No sign of a break-in.
Morgan knocked on the door, before realizing how pointless this was. It was obvious no one lived there.
He made his way back out to the street. He stood there for a moment and tried to unravel this riddle in his mind. Whatever was going on here, he was stumped. There was no question that Bourke was somewhere in the area – or at least, he had been very recently – but now he seemed to have vanished into thin air.
A rush of footsteps came at him from behind, a split second before he was tackled and forced to the ground.
Morgan let out an involuntary grunt, as he hit the ground and the wind was knocked out of him.
His initial instinct was that this was Bourke launching a sneak attack. His theory was disproven when he caught wind of his attacker’s putrid stench. It was someone with the body odor of rancid bacon. Most likely a xombie.
Two more miscreants swooped in from out of nowhere. One pinned him down by his shoulders. Another unraveled a length of duct tape.
Morgan thrashed around, face down on the ground, trying unsuccessfully to free himself from their clutches. His feet were forced together and the tape wound around his ankles.
Using every bit of strength he could muster, Morgan stretched his arm around and jammed his flashlight into his attacker’s thigh.
He flicked the switch to taser mode, and fifty thousand volts of electrical current surged through the xombie’s body. The shock propelled him ten feet backwards.
Morgan spun back around and shoved the flashlight-turned-taser into the second xombie’s ribs. The stream of electricity sent him sprawling to the ground in agony.
The third xombie dropped the tape the instant he saw what was happening and escaped in a cloud of dust.
Morgan took a second to catch his breath, then stumbled to his feet. He tore the duct tape from around his ankles and sprinted back to his car as fast as his legs could move.
He dived behind the wheel and floored it.
He cursed his recklessness as he weaved in and out of traffic. Bourke had set a trap for him, and he had wandered straight into it. The whole set-up looked suspicious right from the start, and he still failed to twig.
Bourke must have caught onto the fact that Morgan was following him, and he used this knowledge to his advantage. He was paying xombies to do the actual dirty work, since Bourke didn’t want to get blood on his three thousand dollar suit.
Bourke was onto him. Morgan would have to rethink his whole strategy.
His mind was still working overtime when made it back home and discovered another brown envelope waiting for him.
A feeling of immense dread came over him. Had Bourke got to the others already?
It was w
ith a great deal of trepidation that he retrieved the envelope from the floor. He slowly tore it open and reached inside.
He pulled out two cards, not one.
The first was to announce the elimination of Harrison Ester from the lottery. The second did the same for Melissa Siebel.
Morgan was struck by an gut-churning combination of guilt and relief. He was horrified by the two further deaths, and yet grateful to find that Alice wasn’t among them.
But then it all fell into place, and Bourke’s grand plan came into focus.
Bourke was going after the money now. He’d waited long enough, and he wanted the lottery to end tonight. Morgan had deliberately been led in the wrong direction in an attempt to throw him off the scent. With Morgan preoccupied, Bourke would be allowed to finish his killing without interference.
Bourke had already taken care of Harrison and Melissa today, and Morgan had very nearly become his third victim. Alice and Christopher would be next on his hit list.
Enough was enough, he said to himself. It was time to throw down the gauntlet. Bourke had to be stopped, one way or another. If that meant taking the law into his own hands, so be it.
Morgan returned to his car. He didn’t know how he was going to do it, but he had to find Bourke.
He only hoped that he wasn’t too late.
HARRISON ESTER (2017-2067) Collapsed inside an Aqua Bar outlet on his way to work on 5 October. Paramedics were quick to arrive on the scene, but were unable to revive him. A preliminary investigation found traces of arsenic in his apple and cranberry juice.
MELISSA SIEBEL (2038-2067) Died 5 October when her car veered off the side of the road and crashed head-on into a power pole. The collision occurred at low speed, and it is believed that Ms. Siebel was dead before the point of impact. A preliminary investigation found traces of arsenic in her morning coffee.
The Remaining Contestants
MORGAN COMPSTON (2036-)
CHRISTOPHER GIBSON (2025-)
ALICE KATO (2040-)
BOURKE NATION (2028-)
Chapter 28
The car sped over another pot hole, and Alice’s head collided with the roof of the trunk for what felt like the fifteenth time in ten minutes. She was convinced the driver was doing this deliberately. But given her present situation, there wasn’t a great deal she could do about it. She had a sack tied over her head, her legs and hands were bound with itchy fraying rope, and she was bundled into the trunk of a car with suspension so rickety she could feel every pebble and twig that it passed over.
She was in more pain than she thought any human being could possibly endure. She ached inside and out, like every nerve in her body was coming under attack. She would have traded her eternal soul for a single Xylox pill. The cruelest part of all was the fact that she had three remaining lemon drops hidden in her sock, but no way of reaching them.
Trapped inside the suffocating darkness of the car’s musty trunk, she could do little else but inhale the noxious diesel fumes and curse her own stupidity. How could she have allowed herself to walk into a situation like this? The old Alice would never have done anything so utterly reckless. She was far too smart for that. She took the occasional risk, but they were always calculated risks.
But the old Alice was long gone. The new Alice had killed her, hidden her body, and assumed her identity.
The new Alice made dumb decisions and bad judgment calls. She participated in contests that coaxed ordinary citizens into wiping one another out. She ventured into deserted public housing icebergs to receive volatile information from questionable sources.
And now the new Alice’s carelessness was going to cost the old Alice her life.
She tried not to think about her impending death. But the more she resisted, the more these thoughts kept forcing their way back into the forefront of her mind. She wondered how they would do it. Would it be quick, or would they make her suffer? The latter seemed more probable.
Maybe she would be decapitated, like Ricardo Ferguson had been a few years back. Or hacked to pieces and mailed to The Daily Ink in dozens of separate packages, like Adele Nemshich before him. Either way, it was sure to be as horrific and gruesome as possible. That was Goliath’s modus operandi: kill the victim in such a way that one couldn’t help but imagine what their death must have been like. The actual killing was simply a means to an end. The main purpose was to send a message, and that message was that no one ever got in Goliath’s way.
But the worst part about dying at Goliath’s hand was that Alice would now be remembered as a martyr. She would be lionized as a fearless journalist whose quest for the truth ended in tragedy, and that was the last thing she wanted. Her only dying wish was to be forgotten. Being remembered as a hero was worse than the truth – that she was a greedy addict, killed by her own idiocy.
On the bright side, at least the story of her death would help bump up The Daily Ink’s circulation for the next week or two.
She felt the car slow down, before it finally came to a complete stop. The engine died. The car doors slammed shut, and the trunk flew open.
Two sets of hands grabbed her and pulled her out.
A door opened, and she was escorted inside.
Two goons were manhandling her, one on either side, dragging her along by her arms. Alice tried walking, but both men were so much taller that her legs could only move back and forth in mid-air, her toes barely brushing the surface of the ground.
They hauled Alice through two more doors, then dumped her on the floor.
The smell was the first of her senses to be assaulted. It was a pungent aroma she knew all too well. The stench of xombies, coming at her from every direction.
“Untie her,” she heard a distant voice say.
The rope around her wrists fell away, and her hands were free. Her feet came next. The sack was yanked from her head without warning.
Alice squinted. She shielded her eyes from the bright lights shining directly on her face.
She looked around the room. She didn’t have a clue where she was. It was a large, cavernous building, some sort of converted warehouse, filled with xombies. At least twenty, maybe thirty, lining the walls, staring at her like a zoo exhibit.
“Good evening, Alice,” the voice said. It was a pleasantly nasal voice. One she found somewhat familiar, but couldn’t quite place. Her eyes scoured the room, searching for the voice’s owner.
“I’ve been expecting you,” the voice added.
She spotted him on the opposite side of the room. The city’s most mysterious and notorious figure. He was the psychotic butcher.
He was Goliath.
He sat behind his spacious mahogany desk, reclining in his custom-made padded leather chair that looked more like an emperor’s throne. Piles and piles of cash, hundreds of thousands of dollars, were stacked before him in a Tetris-like formation.
Alice’s mouth fell open. She tried speaking, but the words refused to come.
The room seemed to lurch, like she was a passenger on a ship caught in a raging storm. She worried that she might actually pass out, the way people on sitcoms did to comic effect when confronted with upsetting news.
Until now, Goliath didn’t seem real to her. He was more of an idea, an abstraction. He had become so mythologized that Alice no longer regarded him as an actual person.
But that all changed the moment she saw him with her own eyes.
“I was wondering if we’d ever see each other again,” Goliath said.
He let out a low chuckle. Alice’s stupefied reaction had clearly amused him.
She attempted to make sense of it all. No, she kept saying to herself. No, no, no. This couldn’t be happening. This was impossible.
But deep down, she knew that it also made perfect sense. This had to be him. The most ruthless and violent criminal in living memory. The man more powerful than any politician or corporate trillionaire.
This was Goliath.
Although Alice knew him by another name.
<
br /> His real name was Christopher Gibson.
Chapter 29
It was indisputable that Xylox was a wonder drug. One little pill had the ability to turn chronic insomniacs into sleeping babies. Others went from depressed and suicidal one day, blissful and content the very next.
For Christopher Gibson, Xylox was the catalyst for an even more remarkable transformation. It turned him from an impoverished, overweight invalid into an extraordinarily wealthy, power-hungry megalomaniac.
The first thirty-five years of Christopher Gibson’s life were a desolate haze of humiliation and mockery. He was fat and socially inept. His family drifted in and out of poverty. High school was six years of perpetual hell, and life didn’t become any easier once he graduated. Haunted by chronic depression and crippling insecurity, he shut himself off from the rest of the world and ate his problems away.
His ballooning obesity and rapidly deteriorating health resulted in both his legs being amputated.
Friendless, broke, and confined to a wheelchair for the remainder of his life, he figured this was about as low as a human being could sink. His life couldn’t possibly get any worse from this point on.
Strangely enough, he was right.
His doctor prescribed Xylox to alleviate the pain of his many physical and mental ailments. Christopher did enjoy the effects the pills had on him; that warm, fuzzy bear hug of contentment that temporarily assured him everything was going to be alright.
But the effect they had on other people was even more amazing. Every Xylox patient was only a short stumble away from becoming a Xylox addict, and once someone was hooked there was nothing they wouldn’t do to get their hands on more.
Xylox became the latest lifestyle accessory, a new form of currency, and Christopher intended on taking full advantage of that fact.
Using his initiative and a previously untapped entrepreneurial spirit, he created false identities and doctor-shopped his way to accumulating a massive stash. Thanks to the lucrative kickbacks they received from Elixxia Pharmaceuticals, these quacks were only too happy to write new prescriptions without checking to see if any other doctors had already done so.