“Tell me about it,” said Marlow.
“I thought you said you weren’t interested,” said Herc. He was stooped over against the van, looking even older than he had when Marlow had first met him. Out here, in the sun, each of his scars seemed to glow. There were so many of them that he looked like he’d been sewn together from scraps of other people’s skin. “In door number one.”
“Please tell me what he’s talking about,” said Charlie.
“Why don’t you?” Marlow asked. “Tell us, I mean. I think we deserve it. Saved your asses back there.”
Herc nodded reluctantly.
“Hey, Pan,” he said. She didn’t reply and he shouted her name again, three times, until she turned and glared at him.
“What?”
“I think we need to talk.”
“Yeah?” Pan said, marching toward them. Her face was so full of rage that Marlow took a subtle step back, shielding himself behind Charlie. “About what? About the fact that he was there? About the fact that he nearly caught us. Jesus Christ, Herc, what the hell was Ostheim thinking? He landed us right in it just so we could use this scrawny asshole as bait, just because there was a small chance we might catch a fish.”
“Wait, what?” said Marlow.
She ignored him, jabbing a finger at Herc. “He had no right to do that. You know what would have happened, another five seconds and we’d be finished. We’d be worse than dead, Herc.”
She wiped her eyes with her hand, tears leaving trails in the dirt on her face.
“Five more seconds. First Forrest, now this. He’s getting dangerous, Herc. Ostheim’s risking everything. He’s going to send us all to hell.”
Herc sighed again, toeing the dirt with his boot.
“Who was he?” Marlow asked. “I mean, what. Or who. I don’t know.”
“Oh,” said Pan, shooting him a look that could have left an exit wound the size of a fist in the back of his skull. “You suddenly decided you want in? Last thing I remember is you clucking out the door like a chicken.”
“Yeah?” Marlow snapped back. “Last thing I remember is using a beat-up crossbow from World of Warcraft to shoot some bug-eyed freak in a big-ass evil bubble cloud.”
They eyeballed each other for a moment, the anger boiling up from Marlow’s gut. His hands hurt and he realized that his fists were balled so tight that his nails were digging into his palms. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to punch the girl or kiss her.
“No you didn’t,” she said. “You were about to shoot yourself in the foot. Lucky I was there.”
Definitely punch her.
“Why do I feel like I’m missing the joke?” said Charlie. “What happened with you guys?”
“No,” Marlow said, waving his hands in the air like a conductor. “Just start from the beginning. Tell me the stuff you forgot to mention the other day. I need to know.”
Herc and Pan shared a look.
“You sure you’re ready?” Herc asked. “You won’t believe it.”
Marlow laughed, but there was no humor there. After what he’d seen in the last forty-eight hours or so it was impossible to know what he believed. Herc took a step back and looked expectantly at Pan. She seemed about to argue, then her shoulders sagged and she stared back out at the horizon. It took her an age to start speaking.
“What would you say if I told you there was a machine that could grant any wish?”
“I’d say wait right there while I call the DEA,” said Charlie. “Because you’re obviously smoking something pretty whack.”
Nobody laughed. Pan didn’t even acknowledge the comment.
“A machine that can do anything,” she went on. “That can make you … superhuman.”
“Come on,” said Charlie. “That’s bullsh—”
“Truck,” Pan yelled across the parking lot. The big guy was leaning against a bulldozer, sipping water from a bottle. “Show them, like they haven’t already seen it.”
Truck swallowed, replaced the cap on the bottle, then grabbed the bulldozer by its caterpillar tracks and lifted. It tilted up at a forty-five degree angle, the frame groaning in outrage. He held it for a few seconds, then let it go. It crashed back down, swaying back and forth like a rocking chair. Truck wasn’t even breaking a sweat, just went back to his drink.
“Got no sense of adventure, that guy,” Pan said. “Same deal every time. Hey, Night,” she called to the girl sitting on the dock. “Got a sec?”
Night nodded, then in a sudden blur of motion she was right next to them. Charlie actually squealed, staggering back in shock. Even though Marlow had witnessed it in the school he had to clamp his mouth shut to stop his jaw landing on his toes. Here, in broad daylight, away from the panic and the violence, it was just insane. What he was seeing was impossible. Nobody could move like that—the sheer force of acceleration would snap your neck like a twig.
“What?” Night said, panting slightly.
“Nothing,” Pan replied. Night frowned, mouthed whatever, then sped back to the riverside, a blur of color that reminded Marlow of a kingfisher he’d seen once on television.
“This can’t be … It can’t be real, Marlow,” said Charlie. He didn’t look shocked anymore, or even surprised. He just looked sad, like somebody who’s discovered the universe has been playing a trick on them.
“It’s real,” said Pan, walking to the van, checking on the girl inside, then pulling a bottle of water from a duffel bag. She chucked it to Marlow and he snatched it out of the air, screwing off the cap and taking a deep pull. Only now did he realize how thirsty he’d been, his mouth like sandpaper, so dry that it crackled as the water filled it. He downed three-quarters of the bottle before remembering Charlie, handing the rest to him. He took it but didn’t drink, just let it hang by his side as Pan rejoined them.
“But how?” Marlow asked, feeling like his batteries had been recharged, the water making everything less fuzzy.
“The truth is, we’re not sure,” Pan said. “All we know is that this machine, the Engine, it’s something older than time, something that … that doesn’t belong in this world. It was discovered during the war, beneath the streets of old Europe. Nobody knows who built it. To be honest, nobody even knows how anyone could build it. So far we’ve counted over eight hundred million moving parts, and there are sections of the machine we’ve not even gotten near yet.”
“A machine?” said Marlow. “I don’t get it.”
“Then maybe let me finish?” Pan said. Marlow held up his hands in surrender.
“The Engine … It’s hard to describe, you need to see it for yourself. There are so many moving parts it’s more like a … like a creature than a machine. It’s almost intelligent.” She shuddered and Marlow could see the goose bumps erupt on her arms. She rubbed them away, still staring into space. “It can give you anything. All you have to do is wish for it. Strength, like Truck, or the ability to run faster than sound, like Nightingale there. I’ve been invisible, I’ve had the ability to read minds, to control them. I’ve been able to fly.” She smiled, obviously remembering something good.
“You’ve come back from the dead,” said Marlow, and her smile vanished like a mouse that’s seen a hawk’s shadow. She glared at him like it was his fault, then nodded.
“Yeah, it can do that too. It can do pretty much anything.”
“But how?” asked Charlie. “How is that possible?”
“Because it’s not something human,” she replied.
“Alien?” Charlie said.
Pan shook her head. “No. Not that we can work out anyway. Not alien.”
“Then what?” said Marlow.
“Something worse,” she said. “You ever heard of Faust?”
The name rang a bell but Marlow couldn’t remember from where.
“Sounds like a player,” said Charlie.
Pan shook her head in disgust.
“It’s a story,” she said. “About a guy who makes a deal with Satan.”
“And wha
t’s that got to do with…” Marlow started, then frowned. It felt like something dark and cold had burst inside his stomach. “Wait, what are you saying?”
Pan kicked the dirt, wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Her eyes caught the sun and there might have been tears there.
“It’s what the Engine does,” she said. “It lets you make a deal with the Devil.”
SHE’S EXPIRING
For a while the only sound was the distant roar of traffic from the expressway and the lazy rush of Fresh Kills River. Then Marlow’s friend, the boy called Charlie, laughed. It was high-pitched and desperate, and there was a hint of lunacy in it. Pan knew the sound, she’d made pretty much the same one when she’d first been told about the Engine. She’d also told Herc to go screw himself and various members of his family, then slapped him across the face for wasting her time. She looked at the old guy and smiled warmly. Seemed like an eternity ago that he’d walked into her cell and told her she had choices.
It wasn’t easy to hear, though, she knew that much. Marlow and Charlie were staring at her with big, vacant expressions. She knew exactly what they were thinking. She would have felt sorry for them if her heart had been whole.
“The Devil?” said Marlow.
“It’s not…” How had Herc explained it to her, all those years ago? “It’s not the Devil, not the way you think. It’s not something you’ll ever find in the Bible. It’s something older than that, something nobody really understands. The Devil’s just a name for it. All we know is that you make a deal with the Engine. You ask it for whatever you want and it grants your wish. But not forever. You get twenty-seven days and change.”
“Twenty-seven days,” said Charlie. “Random.”
“Six hundred and sixty-six hours, to be precise,” she said.
“Then what?” Marlow asked. “You lose your … your powers?”
If only it were that simple.
“No, you don’t lose them, you keep them till the end. Not that they’ll do you much good. No, you make a contract with the machine, a contract signed in blood. You get whatever your heart desires for six hundred and sixty-six hours. Then, when the contract expires, you pay up.”
“Pay up?” Marlow and Charlie asked together.
“With your life,” she said. “And … and something else, too.”
“There’s something worse than losing your life?” snorted Marlow.
“Yeah,” said Pan, turning and looking at the river, at the island beyond. It looked like a paradise now, flowers and trees and switchgrass. But she knew that underneath lay half a century of trash and rubble and ruin. Just like my world, she thought. Everything looks okay, but scratch the surface and there are horrors there, things that you could never have imagined. And once again she thought of Mammon, heaving himself up the road, just too big, too powerful to fit in this universe.
“What’s worse than that?” Charlie asked.
“It takes your soul,” she said eventually, knowing how stupid it sounded even though she’d almost lost hers so many times. Charlie laughed again, and even Marlow was smiling. A solar flare of anger erupted inside her head but she bit down hard. “Why is that so hard to believe? You’ve seen them, the demons. You’ve seen them with your own eyes.”
“The things in the parking lot,” Marlow said, “they were demons?”
“It’s just our word for them,” Pan said. “We don’t know what they are. All we know is that you do not want to let your contract expire, because that’s when they come. They can’t exist in this world, they can only possess things.”
“Like the Exorcist?” Marlow asked.
“Kind of,” she said. “But like the opposite too. They can’t possess anything living. They can’t get inside you or another human or an animal. Not even a plant.”
“Yeah, I remember,” Marlow said. “They were coming out of the walls, out of cars.”
“Not out of them, they were made from them.” Pan closed her eyes and saw them there, clawing their way from the ground, from tables and chairs, from trucks, from anything and everything. “They can only possess inanimate objects, things without a soul. But that’s worse, that’s a whole lot worse, because you cannot hide from them. There is no place on Earth you can be safe.”
“But you can kill them, right?” asked Marlow. “I saw you.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Once your contract is up you’re finished. You still have your powers, right up until you die, so you can fight them off for a while. But only for a while, no power can keep them at bay forever. Shotguns slow them down, but you have to blast the hell out of whatever they’ve possessed—literally blast the hell. It takes a huge amount of energy for them to form in this world, this plane. They’re strong, but only as strong as the material they possess. If you destroy the host, then you destroy the parasite—but only for as long as it takes the demon to build up the energy to cross over again for another possession. You can hold them off for a while, but you’re only delaying the inevitable. If your time is up, they will take you.”
“Take you where?” Marlow asked. Pan shrugged. She’d asked Herc the same question. She’d asked Ostheim too. The truth was that nobody knew, but she had a good enough idea. She’d seen it too many times, the demons dragging you into the molten earth, into the fire. She’d felt it too, the other day when she thought her time had come. A huge, gaping, burning emptiness, the weight of eternity on her shoulders.
“Take you somewhere you really don’t want to be,” she said.
There was a moment of silence, broken only by a meaty fart from Truck’s direction. It didn’t do much to relieve the tension.
“So how come you’re still here?” Marlow asked. “How come the demons didn’t take you the other day? You survived.”
“I survived because my contract was broken,” she said.
“Broken?”
This was always the hardest part to explain. Pan took a deep breath.
“The Engine is a machine. It brokers a contract. Years ago, centuries, when the machine was first built, the contracts were unbreakable. I mean, there are so many moving parts, so many variables, that nobody would have been able to crack the deal. But things have changed. Technology has improved. We’ve cataloged the machine, we’ve made digital maps of every section—well, the sections we use—we have a much greater understanding of how it works and a team of Lawyers who work nonstop to break the contract before it expires.”
“Lawyers?” Charlie asked.
“Anyone else hear an echo out here?” she said. “Yes, Lawyers. But not like ambulance chasers or suits. These are more like … They’re essentially quantum mathematicians. Cleverest guys on the planet, probably. We just call them Lawyers because it annoys the hell out of them.”
“And they, what? Take the Engine to court, get a restraining order?” Marlow said.
He turned away and she locked her reply deep in her throat. Arguing wasn’t going to help anyone right now.
“You’ve seen it,” Pan said. “You want the truth, just think. How else is any of this possible?”
“And what about the thing that chased us up the road?” Marlow asked. “That a demon too?”
Pan sighed. “No, not quite. Mammon is something else entirely, something—”
“Hey!” It was Herc, yelling from the van. He clapped his big hands together. “Enough with the socializing, our guest’s waking up.”
Pan jogged over, peering into the darkness to see that Brianna was starting to stir. Her blond hair was a mess, her clothes filthy and torn. She sat up, blinking away sleep, and Pan saw the moment of blissful unawareness before her memory clunked back into place. She scooted back on her ass, hitting the back of the van. Her brow furrowed and Pan felt a stab of pain in the left-hand side of her brain. Herc must have felt something too because he unholstered his pistol and aimed it at her head.
“Don’t even think about it,” he said, clicking back the hammer. “I feel so much as a probe up there and we’l
l be reading your mind when we wash it off the back of the van, understand?”
The pain in Pan’s head vanished as the girl nodded.
“Brianna,” Pan said. She looked at Pan, a rabbit in the headlights. Truck appeared, blocking out the light. Night was there, too. Pan reached in and grabbed another bottle of water from the duffel bag and offered it to the girl. “Thirsty?” Brianna shook her head like she’d been offered a bottle of poison.
“She’s young,” said Night. “Too young to be fighting for them.”
“I’m seventeen,” the girl replied, showing none of the confidence she’d had back in the school. “Just.”
“Well, happy goddamned birthday,” Herc said. “You must know what’s going to happen now.”
“You’re gonna ask me questions,” she said, some of that bluster returning. “And I’m going to lie.”
“Then we’re gonna stop asking so nicely,” Pan said. “Where is your Engine?”
“You should know,” the girl said. “It’s up your butt.”
“Where is Mammon?”
“Coming for you,” she said, meeting Pan’s eyes, not blinking. “He knows all about you, all of you. He’s going to end you.”
“Yeah?” said Pan. “From what I saw back there he couldn’t even get his fat ass up the street.”
But something in her expression must have given away her fear because Brianna smiled.
“He’ll eat you alive,” she said. “I just wish I could be there to see it.”
“Why won’t you be?” asked Herc. “Got a vacation planned?”
She just shrugged, sadly, and glanced at her watch. It must have been broken, because she rattled it, then looked up and asked, “Anyone got the time?”
“Yeah,” said Herc. “Time you woke up, kiddo. Mammon’s got his agenda but you don’t have to be a part of it. There are other ways of doing things.”
“Like your way?” she said, looking at Herc as if he were a piece of dog crap she was cleaning off her shoe. “I’d rather die.”
“Yeah?” Pan said, resisting the urge to reach for her crossbow and grant the girl’s wish. “You guys make me sick. You’ve got all the power in the world and you live like this, you waste it.”