I turned off the radio. He said, “What did you say my name was?”
“I didn’t because I don’t know. Your code name was ‘Operative Nine.’ ”
“Why did I have a code name?”
“Because you’re a Superseding Protocol Agent.”
“And what is that?”
“It basically means the rule book’s out the window.”
“What rule book?”
“Every rule book.” It felt strange to me, being the one in the know. “You work for a super-secret agency called OIPEP. Right now we’re hunting down a rogue agent named Mike Arnold. Mike stole the Seals of Solomon from the OIPEP vaults or whatever you call them, and then he tried to kill me, I guess because he knew my blood was the only thing that could do some damage to the demons. But he lost the ring—I mean, I lost it—to King Paimon, and now Paimon wants the Vessel basically to avoid ever being shut up in it again. So you and me went to Chicago to hunt Mike down and to get the Seal from him—the Lesser Seal, not the Great Seal—only the demons got there before we did and they were waiting for us in Mike’s house. You left me in the car and went in alone and I guess Abalam got hold of you and made you look into its eyes.”
“I should not have done that?”
“Oh, you most definitely shouldn’t have done that.”
“I remember a whirlpool of fire and, in the center, utter darkness.” He shook his head. “But that is all I remember.”
I pulled off at the next exit for gas and to pee. There were three stations at this exit, but only one was open, manned by a very nervous clerk who kept playing with the metal stud in his bottom lip. He told me he was shutting down the station as soon as his girlfriend got there with the car and he didn’t care if they fired him. Then he asked what happened to my face. I paid for the gas and some munchies with the company credit card and dropped Op Nine’s snack into his lap.
“What is this?” he asked.
“A corn dog.”
“Why a corn dog?”
“It’s for luck.”
He peeled off the yellow wrapping paper and took a bite, chewing it very slowly.
“Corn dogs are lucky? Is this something else I’ve forgotten?” “I had one the last time I saved the world. Or actually, come to think of it, I had two.”
He glanced at me. “You are an agent for this OIPEP?”
“No, I’m just an oversized kid whose hobby happens to be riding to the world’s rescue.”
“You are being facetious.”
“I’m working on laughing in the face of despair.”
I jumped back on the interstate and we drove in silence for a few minutes. The speedometer went up to 250, and the needle hovered just above the number. My driver’s ed teacher had talked about “acceleration desensitization,” the phenomenon where you get used to the speed you’re going and are lulled into a false sense of security. But I didn’t think there was any danger of my developing a false sense of security in this situation.
“So we still pursue this Mike Arnold?” he asked.
“You bet.”
“To gain the—what did you call it?—Holy Vessel.”
“Right.”
“That we may do what with it?”
“Well, I’ve got about thirty hours left to rendezvous with Abalam and his boys at the devil’s door.”
“Devil’s door?”
“Wherever that is.”
“And there we will imprison them in the Vessel?”
“We can’t. Nobody can without the Great Seal, and they have that.”
“Then why do we bring them the Vessel?”
“So they won’t consume the world.”
“What is to stop them once they have it?”
“Nothing, I guess.”
He was silent for a couple miles.
“This mission does not make sense to me,” he said.
“Well, I’m doing the best I can. I don’t have a choice now but to get the Vessel. If I don’t get it, we don’t have a prayer.”
“We seem not to have one either way.”
“We’re smack dab in the middle of it,” I admitted.
“The middle of what?”
“The place between desperation and despair. That’s where my father told me Fortune often smiles.”
I saw it then, a gray wall of smoke or fog looming up ahead. I eased up on the gas, but still we plunged into the fog at over two hundred miles per hour. Suddenly I couldn’t see two feet in front of the headlights.
“This is quite dangerous,” Op Nine said.
I ground my teeth and didn’t say anything, gripping the wheel hard with both hands.
“Alfred,” he said. “We must slow down.”
“I’m not slowing down,” I hissed between my grinding teeth.
With no points of reference, we hardly seemed to be moving at all. Of course, Op Nine was right. If I hit something going two hundred miles per hour, we’d be vaporized, but what choice did I have?
Mixed now with my fear was an expanding pocket of rage. What did they hope to accomplish with this? Did they want me to get the Vessel or not? My jaw was aching by this point and my fingers cramping from gripping the steering wheel so hard.
“Alfred, I really must insist—”
I lost it. “Look, buddy, you’re not in the position to insist on anything. I’ve been literally put through hell because of you people and I think I’m doing pretty well considering I’m completely cut off from any help whatsoever, plus the fact that I’m slowly being driven mad with cracks in my brain and weeping pustules and the knowledge that when it really comes down to brass tacks, there is no hope. That’s how they get you in the end, with hope, don’t you understand? They dangle it in front of you and yank it away again—until you can’t take it anymore.”
He stared at me for a second. “In the medieval renderings of hell, the souls of the damned writhe in eternal agony as demons prod them with flaming brands.”
“That’s right! You got it!” I was sweating by this point, and the salt in my sweat burned in the open sores covering my body. I wanted to leap out of my own skin. “Flaming freakin’ brands of fire!”
“Or the Greek story of Tantalus,” he went on, “who in Hades suffered of starvation while a bunch of grapes dangled just beyond his reach.”
“Damn straight!” I shouted. “Flaming brands up your ass, the itch you can’t scratch, the grapes you can’t reach!”
“Perhaps they torment you because it is already too late, Alfred. The day is lost and it delights them to torture you with hope.”
“I’m not dead yet,” I breathed. Then I shouted it at the top of my lungs. “I’M NOT DEAD YET, YOU HEAR ME? YOU GOT THAT? SO BRING IT ON! BRING! IT! ON!”
I shouldn’t have said that.
45
I looked at my hands gripping the wheel and noticed the sores there had crusted over and were pulsing to the rhythm of my heart. A huge one on my knuckle itched horribly, and I started to scratch it, out of defiance, I guess (I’ll show them I can scratch the itch!). My nail barely nicked the surface and the scab tore off. Clear liquid seeped from the wound and my heart quickened, not from the sight of the pus, but from the squirming gray-bodied, black-headed creature that rose from the little pool, twisting this way and that in the air, as if shaken from a sound sleep. I watched it in horror for a second, then took my hand off the wheel and held it under Op Nine’s nose.
“What is that?” I asked.
“A maggot, I believe.”
I could taste the corn dog on my tongue as I yanked the rearview mirror toward my face. Fighting the nearly overwhelming urge to throw up, I gently ran my fingertips over my cheek.
The scabs burst open and a stench crowded my nostrils, that same smell I had noticed in the hotel room, the smell of decay—I was rotting from the inside out.
I screamed and Op Nine shouted, “Alfred!” as I slammed on the brakes, sending the car into a spin, until our rear wheels hit the grass on the edge of the road, w
hich slowed us down enough to keep the car from flipping.
As soon as the car stopped, I hit the button to raise the door. I fell out onto the moist grass, on my hands and knees, retching. The fog wrapped itself around me and the car looked ghostlike in the shroud of mist.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, pulling me back.
I leaned against Op Nine’s chest, crying and cursing. My hands flailed at my face until he grabbed my wrists and forced my arms down.
“Alfred,” he said into my ear. “Alfred, tell me what to do. Just tell me what to do.”
They will consume us, Op Nine had said in the briefing. They will consume us.
I looked into his face, the kindest, ugliest face I think I’ve ever seen. “Home,” I croaked. “Get me home.”
46
He helped me back to the car, but it was hard going because he was weak, I was big, and neither of us looked forward to hitting the road again. I sank into the passenger seat and he took the wheel, while I sat on my hands to keep myself from tearing open any more boils.
I glanced at the speedometer: forty-five mph.
“Faster,” I murmured. The rank smell rising from my pores was making me dizzy and it took every bit of willpower I had to keep from giving in again to the nausea.
I watched the needle creep up to sixty.
“Faster,” I said.
“Alfred, in these conditions . . .”
“We’re running out of time!” I shouted. “And time’s the only condition that matters now!” Then I shut up because the screaming hurt my throat. The needle hit eighty-five and kept inching higher. He squinted through the windshield, as if his squinting would somehow penetrate the white cloak around us.
My right arm twitched as I fought the urge to reach into my pocket, pull out the semiautomatic, and blow his hound-dog head off. It was like the feeling I had in the Taurus that night outside Mike’s house, but ten times stronger and I fought it in silence for a few miles.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” I said finally. “Something you should know.”
He nodded.
“I’ve been getting these urges to, um, hurt you. Kill you.
It’s almost more than I can stand.”
He glanced at me.
“It’s not me,” I went on. “At least, I’m pretty sure it’s not me. I didn’t have homicidal urges before they got into me—at least, not like these. I guess it crosses everybody’s mind and that doesn’t make it right, just normal.”
He nodded. “I have had similar thoughts.”
“About me?”
He nodded again. “Since I woke in the hotel room. I came close to leaving you back there by the roadside. The urge was almost overwhelming.”
“I can still tell which ones are their thoughts and which ones are mine. But the line is getting thinner between them. I’m scared that I’ll reach the point when I can’t tell the difference.”
I pulled the gun from my pocket. He looked at it, and then looked quickly away.
“It would be useless against our enemies, would it not?” he asked.
I nodded. It comforted me in a strange way, holding it. My head hurt and my vision began to cloud. Kill him. He betrayed thee and lied to thee. Kill him!
I rolled down the window and wind whipped into the confines of the little cockpit. He wasn’t looking at me. His whole body tensed, waiting.
I threw the gun out the open window.
For the rest of the drive, I spoke only to tell him to go faster, because without realizing it, I think, he would slowly back off the gas, and I would say, “Faster, faster.”
There was fire in Louisville and Frankfort; we could see the fuzzy orange glow of it burning through the fog. I had lost all sense of time. When we were about a hundred miles north of Knoxville, I dialed Needlemier’s number on Op Nine’s cell phone.
“Hello, Alfred.” The line was staticky, but I could hear the tremble in his voice behind the pop and crackle. “Everything’s been arranged.”
“About an hour,” I said. “Meet us at the airport.”
On impulse, I hit the speed dial for headquarters. I didn’t get a recording. I didn’t get anything. The line just went dead without ringing.
The fog was so thick on Alcoa Highway that Op Nine missed the airport entrance, and we had to pull a U-ie to get back. A silver Lexus was the only car in the parking lot. I wondered what Mr. Needlemier thought when he saw us stumbling toward him, two broken-down, slumping shapes, leaning on each other as they emerged from the fog.
“Alfred . . .” He took a step forward. “Dear Lord, what has happened?”
“Practically everything,” I said. “Mr. Needlemier, this is—”
And Op Nine said, “Samuel.” He looked as startled as I must have looked. “Yes, I remember! My name is Samuel.”
“Great,” I said. “Now you’ll have to kill me.”
“The first order of business is getting the two of you to a doctor,” Mr. Needlemier said.
“No,” I said. “There’s no time.”
He opened the door to the backseat and we slid inside.
“There’s a duffel bag in the CCR,” I told him. He left to fetch it.
“How much farther?” Op Nine asked. His face had gone the milky white color of the fog.
“He’s in the mountains south of here,” I said. “About a thirty-minute drive.”
“You are certain of this?”
“I’m not certain of anything anymore.”
Mr. Needlemier dropped the duffel into the trunk. He came to my side carrying a long thin box.
“You got it,” I said.
“I got it. But faced many uncomfortable questions while getting it. Horace Tuttle is not a trusting fellow.”
“Horace Tuttle is a jerk,” I said.
“What is it?” Op Nine asked.
I opened the box and drew it out. “The blade of the Last Knight of the Order of the Sacred Sword of Kings.”
47
Of course, we had to rely upon my memory to reach Mike’s hideout, and my memory wasn’t great, plus the fog had thickened and Mr. Needlemier crawled along, even when I yelled at him to speed up.
“Where is Hell’s Gate?” I asked him.
“Ah, I’ve done some research on that,” he answered, and passed a folder back to me. Inside were several pages printed from the Internet.
“The first Hell’s Gate we found is in Kenya,” Mr. Needlemier said. “There is another Hell’s Gate located in British Columbia and a third in New York City. However, the only mention we could find of a ‘hell’s gate’ that is also called ‘devil’s door’ is in Florida.”
“Florida?” I asked. I turned to the last page in the file.
“Called ‘Devil’s Millhopper,’ ” Mr. Needlemier continued.
“What’s a millhopper?”
“A place where corn is held before it is ground into meal.”
“A grinder?” I studied the picture. Shot from the top of a winding wooden stair leading to the rim, the picture showed a black hole about five hundred feet across, rimmed by tangled undergrowth and the tops of trees growing in the bottom of the pit. “You grind things up in it?”
“Yes. The oldest legend surrounding the millhopper concerns an Indian princess who was sucked into the hole by the devil. It is well known in the literature for, and I quote, ‘devouring sinners.’ Of course, geologists believe it is actually a sinkhole.”
“That’s it,” I said, slapping the file closed. “That’s the one they mean.”
“How can you be sure?” Op Nine asked.
“It’s the only one that goes by both names. Plus the grinder reference. It’s their style.”
“Whose style?” Mr. Needlemier asked.
“The demons,” Op Nine answered.
“The demons! Alfred, what have you gotten yourself into?”
“Well,” I said. “At least it’s not something really bad, like drugs or alcohol.”
A sign materialized in the swi
rling mist. It was the sign for the park entrance.
“There!” I said. “Right before the sign, that gravel road.”
“That road?” Mr. Needlemier asked. “Alfred, that road appears to go straight up.”
But he turned onto the road, and the gravel crunched beneath the tires of the Lexus. I sat holding the sword between my legs and it comforted me somehow. We crawled up the side of the mountain, the needle on the speedometer barely registering. I could see sweat shining on the back of Mr. Needlemier’s bald head.
“What is our plan?” Op Nine asked.
“I don’t have one,” I said.
“Perhaps this is the time to develop one.”
“It was hard for me to plan even when I wasn’t slowly going mad.”
Mr. Needlemier looked at me in the rearview mirror.
“Is this Mike person armed?” Op Nine asked.
“Oh, you can bet on it.”
“But we are not.”
“Just the demon blasters. They’d blow a hole in him the size of Nebraska.”
“Do we wish to do that, though? Blow a hole in him the size of Nebraska?” Op Nine asked.
“Timing’s everything,” I said. “First we get the Vessel; then we blow a hole in him the size of Nebraska.”
“To what purpose, if we have the Vessel?”
“He’s the cause of it all,” I said, my face growing hot.
“He’s responsible.”
“I still do not understand. Why do you need to kill him, Alfred?”
“One word,” I said. “Maggots.”
We reached the final crest before the road leveled off at the top of the mountain. I ordered Mr. Needlemier to stop the car. We got out. It was very cold. The fog of our breath mixed with the fog that had wrapped itself around the world.
We gathered around the open trunk. I loaded fresh clips into the 3XDs and handed one to Op Nine. I stuck the sword into my belt and said to Needlemier, “Stay here with the car.”
He nodded rapidly, looking relieved. Op Nine was staring at the 3XD.
“What is this?” he asked.
“Your life’s work.”
“I made this?” He slowly shook his head. “A weapon! Seems a waste of a life.”