Thirst No. 2: Phantom, Evil Thirst, and Creatures of Forever

“Hatram, you are a wonder.”

  “But tell me, what will you do for me in return?”

  “What do you wish?”

  “Umara’s head.”

  “I’ll give you her heart. After all, it was her heart that betrayed you.”

  “Well said. When do you wish to appear?”

  “Now.”

  Moments later, I sit at the head of Haru’s table in the stone chair he reserves for his most powerful Familiar. Because their eyes are closed, the group isn’t aware I’m in the room until I speak.

  “Hello, people,” I say cheerfully.

  Their eyes snap open. Including Haru, there are four men and four women present. Most are dressed in casual attire but Haru has on the same black suit and a red shirt as before. He’s squat and strong. He has a long torso that reminds me of a gargoyle. His beady eyes belong to a demon. For a guy who has ruled the world for ages, he’s one ugly bastard.

  “How did you get in here?” he demands.

  “Does it matter? I’m here and I’m not leaving until I get what I want.”

  “What do you want?” a beautiful woman on Haru’s left asks. She is pure Egyptian. Her black hair is thick and shiny, her copper skin is without blemish. I realize I’m looking at Haru’s wife.

  “Revenge,” I say.

  “Isn’t such an emotion beneath you?” Haru asks, and I can see he is scared. They all are. The last thing they expected has occurred. Despite all their planning, all their layers of physical and psychic shields, their great enemy has suddenly materialized before their eyes.

  My voice hardens. “The last time we met, Haru, you tortured me so viciously that I passed out from the pain.”

  Haru shrugs but his fear remains. “You refused to talk.”

  A part of me pities him. With Hatram’s protection out of the way, I can feel the power of the Cradle’s focus on this chamber. It reminds me again how dangerous these kids can be. They wait with bated breath to torture the Telar. Like Hatram, they crave the pain, it feeds them.

  “It’s over,” I say. “Your thousands of years of subjugation. Look at the way you sit here, so smug and confident in your hidden temple. Did you meet here when you decided to create a virus that would wipe out the bulk of humanity?”

  “We haven’t released the virus,” Haru’s wife says. “Not so far. But if you force our hand, we can’t be responsible for what happens.”

  “How quickly you resort to childish threats. You’re not going to be giving any more orders. In fact, none of you are going to leave this room alive.”

  Haru struggles to keep his composure. “Surely we can reach an agreement. The virus is like the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals during the Cold War. They were never meant to be used. They only existed as instruments of deterrence.”

  “Then why did you lecture me endlessly about how overpopulation was destroying the earth? Let’s be honest. You created the virus to kill billions. Not for a moment did you stop to consider how much suffering you would cause. For that reason you deserve no more sympathy than the Nazis who ran the death camps. Of course, Haru, you’ll recall that you boasted to me that you and your group were behind the Nazis.”

  The others glare at Haru, including his wife.

  “We apologize for how Haru treated you,” a kindly-looking woman on my right says. “Most of us were opposed to the Arosa operation. We saw no point in taking you captive. Certainly, we were appalled at your torture.”

  “Are you saying it was all Haru’s fault?” I ask.

  “That would not be far from the truth,” a man says from across the table. He’s the only other one who wears a suit. He looks like a banker.

  “Then why didn’t one of you try to rescue me?” I ask. “Or better yet, warn me before I was taken captive.”

  Haru’s wife speaks. “We discussed the issue at length but Haru insisted that you were dangerous and needed to be broken. We weren’t allowed to vote on the matter.”

  I nod to Haru. “It looks like your people are hanging you out to dry.”

  “Umara put you up to this, didn’t she?” he snaps.

  “No.”

  “Now you lie, Sita. You recall how sensitive I am.”

  “I recall how arrogant you are! You know nothing about Umara. You never will.” I stand and stroll around the table. “As of this instant, you will discover that the Familiars that were protecting you have turned against you. The IIC is ready to psychically attack with their Array. Indeed, that’s why you’ll notice that your bodies are paralyzed from the waist down.”

  As a group, they struggle to stand. They fail.

  “Please, show mercy,” Haru’s wife begs.

  I respond angrily. “I begged for mercy from Haru and all he did was keep turning up the dial on the Pulse. Maybe the rest of you wouldn’t have been so cruel, I don’t know. But I do know you represent the cream of the Telar and yet none of you has a conscience. Just now, not one of you has even tried to take responsibility for your crimes. You just keep trying to pass the blame to Haru.”

  Several of them try to speak at once but I silence them.

  “There’s no point to this discussion. I’m not sure why I bother to speak to you. Already I have given Kram the order to fire a barrage of cruise missiles at this temple. The weapons are in the air, they will be here in ten minutes. And if you think I’m no better than Haru, then try to imagine what the IIC could do to you now that they have shattered your Link. Honestly, you should thank me for my mercy.”

  “Are the missiles loaded with nuclear warheads?” Haru’s wife asks.

  I shake my head. “I saw no reason to contaminate this area with radiation.”

  Haru summons his most persuasive tone. “Then there’s still time. If you release us now, we can take shelter deep beneath this temple.”

  “I’m not going to release you.”

  “Think, Sita. We can help each other,” Haru pleads. “I’d be willing to work with you to remake this world into a paradise. The last time we spoke, you had some wonderful ideas. They’ve stayed with me, I swear it.”

  “Petty revenge is unworthy of you,” his wife says.

  “You’re probably right,” I say. “But, you know, after all I’ve been through, it feels pretty good.”

  I stay long enough to see the missiles arrive.

  The temple is engulfed in flames.

  Again, I pity them, even Haru, but not for the fire that kills them in this world. No one knows better than I how small a matter that is compared to the suffering that awaits them in the next world.

  TWENTY-SIX

  When I return to the room in Malibu, I find the majority of the kids still deep in a trance, although a few are starting to scratch. I can only assume the Cradle is psychically attacking the Telar who were protecting Haru and his inner circle, or at least the men and women who were related by blood to them. From working with the kids, I know they have a deep distrust of any Telar and would just as soon kill them all.

  Leaving Umara’s body beside Lark’s, I flee the room and hurry upstairs. I want to get out of the main building before the children start dying. I don’t want to see them suffer. But I run into Matt, who is armed to the teeth, and he tells me that Seymour’s looking for me.

  “He discovered you switched the vaccine for the virus,” Matt says.

  “I stained the virus blue so it looked the same as the vaccine. How did he find out?”

  “Remember, this vaccine works as an antidote, too. You get a shot, you should begin to feel better right away. Seymour believed he was giving out the permanent cure. He’d give the kids a shot and a few minutes later he’d ask how they were feeling. The kids kept saying they felt the same. That made him suspicious, but he wasn’t given a chance to drill them. You swept in and gathered the kids together for your last session. So Seymour went looking for Charlie. He found him in the bottom basement and showed Charlie a sample of what he’d been injecting the kids with. You know Charlie, he invented this stuff. He just had to sme
ll it to know you had tricked Seymour into shooting the kids up with a pure strain of the virus. Seymour freaked out, he tried to burst in on your session. If I hadn’t stopped him, he would have disrupted your attack on the Source.”

  “Did you see everything that happened in the room?”

  “Not in your room. I was too busy keeping order. I had Seymour and Charlie screaming at me, along with Cynthia and Thomas Brutran. I was lucky to keep them at bay without hurting them.”

  “Thanks for backing me up,” I say.

  Matt shakes his head. “I can’t say I agree with how you handled the situation. Why use Seymour? He has a soft heart. I would have hated it but you should have had me give the kids the shots.”

  “The kids in the Cradle are sensitive. The ones in the Lens can almost read minds. I know you can block your thoughts, but there was a chance they would have picked up that you were hiding something. To be safe, I chose Seymour. He loves kids. I’m sure he felt good about giving them the shots, protecting them from the virus. I wanted the kids to sense his goodwill and nothing else.”

  Matt nods his approval. “Clever. But now you’ve got a problem. Seymour’s demanding that you immediately give the kids the vaccine.”

  “Does Charlie support him?”

  “Sort of. He wants to talk to you first.”

  “Then we’ve got to get them both out of here, and fast.”

  Matt is torn. “Isn’t it enough to leave the kids in the Lens infected? According to what Freddy told us, the Cradle needs them to focus its power. Otherwise, the Cradle should be harmless.”

  “The psychic gap between the most powerful kids in the Cradle and those in the Lens is not as great as you think. Even if we kill all the kids in the Lens, there’s no guarantee that Brutran or the remaining children won’t create another Lens in a few months. We can’t take that risk. We have to follow Hercules’ example and destroy all the heads of the monster.”

  “But even he ran into a head he couldn’t destroy.”

  “I can’t worry about that part of the story right now.”

  Matt is a mass of emotion. Like Seymour, I know he’s always had a soft spot for kids. “Has Charlie told you how they’re going to die?”

  “I know it ain’t going to be pretty.”

  “It’s going to be bloody awful. It might be more merciful if I stayed behind and took care of them.”

  “No. Some of these kids are related to adults who work in this building. They are ‘planned children.’ The IIC paid the parents extra to have the kids on special days and in special places. It goes back to what Freddy told us. But their parents love them just the same and they’re not going to stand by and let you put a bullet in their little darlings.”

  “But they’ll convulse and hemorrhage. They’ll die in agony.”

  “More the reason we get out of here now.”

  “Wait. You want us all to leave?”

  “Except for the infected kids, I want the building evacuated.”

  Matt finally gets it. “Are you saying the war’s over? That the Source has been destroyed?”

  “They’re all dead and buried under a mass of sand.”

  Matt smiles. “My mother will be pleased. She’s been fighting those bastards for thousands of years.”

  I put a hand on his shoulder. A Telar grenade hangs loose from a clip and bumps against my hand. “Matt. I don’t know how to tell you this.”

  He lowers his head. “No,” he says.

  “She told me she talked to you about it on the ride down.”

  He turns away and my hand falls uselessly at my side. He pounds the wall. “This can’t be happening! Not again!”

  I stand there feeling utterly useless, extremely vulnerable, and totally damned. “She died to disrupt the Telar Link. She sacrificed herself so they could be killed.”

  “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “I’m not sure I understand it myself. It seems that long ago the Telar developed a remarkable Link and tapped into a spiritual realm of light and joy. And they were able to channel that light into the lives of their people. It was only later they discovered that they were immortal.”

  “My mother told me this story last night.”

  “Did she tell you that she was the last member of that original Link? The reason the Telar were immortal was not because they possessed some secret knowledge. It was because they were blessed from this high realm. To this day, it’s like your mother functioned as a vehicle for this blessing.”

  “Are you saying that she protected them?”

  “Yes. Just by being alive, she made them virtually impossible to kill. That’s why she had to give up her life to stop them.”

  His pain turns ugly. “How?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “How did she die?”

  “She asked me . . . I killed her. I broke her neck.”

  The look of horror on his face takes me to the time outside the cave. When I told him I was trying to transform Teri into a vampire to save her. He killed me then and it looks like he could kill me again. He is so strong. Yet he gestures helplessly.

  “You couldn’t have done that, Sita. Not you, not again.”

  “I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I know apologies are useless. All I can say is that I did what I had to do.”

  “Did you leave her down there? With the sick kids?”

  “Yes. But as far as I know, most of the kids are still in a trance.”

  Matt reaches out a trembling hand and touches my neck. I can’t bear to see the pain in his eyes and so I close my own. I feel his fingers touch my skin. It’s possible I have a second left to live, and afterward an eternity of fiery damnation to look forward to. Yet, whatever he does to me, I feel I will deserve it.

  His touch turns to a gentle caress. “I’m proud of you,” he says.

  I open my eyes. “Matt?”

  “Everything you’ve done so far . . . I would never have had the courage. That includes what you did to my mother.”

  I swallow. “If there had been any other way.”

  “There wasn’t.” He takes back his hand and stands at attention. “Tell me what you want me to do.”

  “Have all the adults been inoculated?”

  “Charlie says we have a hundred percent containment of the virus when it comes to the adults.”

  “We have to isolate the kids in the bottom level of the basement.”

  “Those in the Lens or all of them?”

  The question and answer to that will haunt the rest of my life.

  “All of them,” I say. “First isolate the kids and then enlist the help of IIC security and start moving the adults out fast. Lie if you have to. Say the vaccine isn’t working the way we expected on the children and we have to quarantine them more carefully.”

  “Keeping IIC security in line will be difficult.”

  “It’s why you’re here. It’s a job only you can do. I’ll get Seymour and Charlie and we’ll meet outside. Oh, where’s Shanti?”

  “I assume she’s where you left her.”

  “I put her in an empty room above the Cradle. She’s probably still there. I’ll get her.”

  “What about Cynthia Brutran and her husband?”

  “Order them out of the building.”

  “Their daughter is one of those who’s going to get sick. I don’t care how evil Cindy is, she’s not going to leave Jolie. Not without a fight.”

  “I’ll take care of Brutran. The key is to move fast.”

  Matt fiddles with the Telar grenade pinned to his chest. “I understand what has to be done.” He leans over and gives me a quick kiss on the lips. “You didn’t have a choice.”

  “How can you be so understanding?”

  “I don’t have a choice.”

  Matt tells me about a van he’s placed outside the main entrance and gives me several sets of keys. He explains about the vehicle’s cell phones and hidden weapons. But I know he has something up his sleeve he’s not telling m
e about.

  I run toward the isolated room where I left Shanti but bump into her in the elevator. She was on her way to see me. Her eyes are big and red and I can see she’s been crying. She hugs me when we meet.

  “Did it work?” she asks.

  “It worked.”

  “Is Umara okay?”

  “She didn’t make it.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t have time to explain. I need you to get to a black van that’s parked out front.” I hand her a set of keys. “Wait there until I arrive. I won’t be long.” I turn to leave.

  “Wait! Sita, there’s something wrong with the vaccine. The kids are coming out of the session. I saw their hands and legs. They’ve got worse blisters than Seymour and I had. They’re real sick.”

  “Trust me, I’ll handle it. Right now I need you to get to the van.”

  “Is Seymour coming?”

  “I’ll get him. Now go!”

  Unfortunately, it’s the Brutrans I run into next, not Seymour and Charlie. We meet in a stairway between the basement floors. Tom and Cindy are both armed and have half a dozen guards with them. They plant themselves firmly in my way. But they’re below me, I have the high ground, and that makes a bigger difference than they realize.

  Cindy and Tom have semiautomatic handguns. They don’t point them at me but they don’t exactly avoid me either. They look tired and desperate.

  “Where are you going?” Cindy demands.

  “To the basement to get Charlie and Seymour.”

  “They’re there but I’ve placed them under guard.”

  “Why?”

  “This is still our building,” Cindy says. “I’ve been monitoring you the last ten minutes. You’re gathering your friends and preparing to leave. In all this time, you haven’t stopped to call me. I haven’t been debriefed.”

  “You want a debriefing, I’ll give you one. The Source has been wiped out. Our business is finished. My people and I are getting out of here. Do you have a problem with that?”

  “You’re damn right we do,” Tom says. “You’re leaving behind hundreds of sick kids, and as far as we can tell, no cure. One of those kids is our daughter.”

  I pause. “Has Jolie begun to show symptoms?”