The sea and the salt spray offered no answers.
I floated and tried to coax the Cop forward to analyze the details, to make sense of it the way he always makes sense of things.
I wished Top and Bunny would find me. Or me them. Where were they now? Had Top and Bunny paid for their actions by going down, down, down into the watery deep? If so, despite what had just happened, this world had lost two of its heroes. Actual heroes. The best of the best. Which means that Santoro had done what no one else had managed to do. Not walkers or berserkers, not mad scientists or ancient cults, not hired killers or soldiers of foreign flags. That rat bastard had killed Top Sims and Bunny.
I did not want to weep; I couldn’t spare the moisture. But the tears came anyway. Anger followed soon, though, and its heat burned those tears to dry salt on my face.
Questions, questions everywhere and not an answer to be had.
Above me the sun fell in slow defeat over the walls of the world, dragging behind it a beggar’s cloak of shameful darkness.
CHAPTER NINETY
PACIFIC OCEAN
SOMEWHERE WEST OF SAN NICOLAS ISLAND
TIME UNKNOWN
Night.
Black and wet and cold.
The sky above me was ablaze with more stars than I could ever remember seeing. I could see the soft, pale sweep of the Milky Way. There were constellations I knew and others that in my semidelirium I believed had been created just for me. To mark the event of my death.
How’s that for an ego trip?
I blame it on the beating Santoro gave me. My head felt like it cracked open and fiddler crabs had taken up residence. Not sure how many hours I was out there with only a burned seat cushion and my own questionable thoughts for company. My imagination conjured an endless string of worst-case scenarios for what Santoro was going to do with all the technology he stole. He could start a war. Or wars. He could unleash plagues. He could disrupt the power grids. He could open the door to terrorist attacks that would make what Mother Night and the Seven Kings did pale in comparison.
I could have stopped him. I should have been able to. It played out wrong. Why?
Consciousness came and went, and each time I went out of my head I went all the way out. Back into the kind of dreams I’d had after being exposed to the God Machine. The kind of dreams I had when I was in my coma.
So strange, and yet so goddamn real.
In one dream …
I was back on the dock, but instead of fighting Esteban Santoro I was duking it out with a man I’m sure was a complete stranger to me. I’d seen him before. He was taller and more heavily built than Santoro, but with a face that was totally obscured as if covered with smoke. He fought with superb skill, top of the line, with blood on his hands and black ice in his soul.
“You’re a joke, Ledger,” he told me as he smashed down my guard and pummeled my face. “Maybe you were good once upon a time, but now you’re only a worthless thug.”
That dream ended when he grabbed my hair and chin and snapped my neck. I heard it break and felt myself die.…
I woke from that to find myself in the water again.
But the water was suddenly ice cold. No, it was worse than that. The water was absolutely freezing. Insanely cold, and it stabbed into me like knives. I cried out in fear and pain, thrashing to get away from where I was, impossible as that sounds. The light had changed, too, and off in the distance I saw huge mountains rising above me. Not the green and brown coastal mountains of Southern California. Somehow, impossibly, this was a massive mountain range of solid ice.
Incredibly high, blue-white in the pale sun of some nameless day. And deep inside the ice, revealed only by some trick of the light, was a wall. Or walls. Towers, too, but in strange shapes. Gigantic cones and cubes the size of cathedrals. Towering stairs too vast and grand to have been constructed for humans to climb. And even though this was buried behind walls of ice, I could see figures move.
Shapes.
Things.
And wafting toward me over the freezing waves was a plaintive call from some animal I could not name. It cried nonsense words.
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
Over and over and over and …
Something dark and mottled rose suddenly out of the water. Not a whale this time. No, this was more like a tentacle, but one that was too big to comprehend. It rose and rose, taller than a building, taller than a mountain, tearing upward through water and sky until it blotted out the sun. Ice water sluiced down its length, raining killing sleet over me.
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” came the call. Not from it, but because of it. Maybe calling to it. Begging it for something I could not, and never would, understand.
Then the tentacle fell.
Toward me.
Over me.
Smashing me down once more into the icy waters.…
A dream.
Only a dream. I floated now in waters that, while cold, were not the lethal waters of the arctic or Antarctic. It was dark again. The stars above me were the ones I expected to see. Needed to see. I listened for that plaintive voice and heard only the faintest of echoes.
“Tekeli-li … Tekeli-li…”
My wakefulness, though, was no more securely anchored to those waters and those stars than was my sanity. Blackness wanted me so badly, and it claimed me over and over again. There were other dreams. All strange, all violent. I wanted to dream about Junie, about being in her arms, about holding her warm body to mine, about clinging to her. But she could not find me in those dreams. Only pain and horror and strangeness knew where I was.
So I drifted and dreamed, dreamed and drifted.
A few times I heard that same strange voice again—more animal than human—crying out in an unknown language. It kept repeating Tekeli-li. And in one deep, deep dream I crawled out of the water onto a coastline that was muddy and choked with slimy weeds. The message of that voice persisted and I yelled at it to shut up, but the words that came from my own mouth were equally strange.
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
And then a thousand voices rose up out of the darkness to echo those words. “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
Beneath me, the very mud on which I knelt began to shift as if it was the skin of something vast that had been called to wakefulness by the content of that chant. That … prayer.
I screamed myself out of that dream.
And then I stood in a corridor in a subbasement. Not sure how I knew that, but there was no doubt. A subbasement built years ago.
I walked along the basement, beneath rows of fluorescent lights. There were doors on both sides of the corridor, and I stopped and looked into each one.
I found laboratories with equipment I didn’t understand.
I found one room filled with TV monitors and advanced computer equipment. There was a security guard sitting on a folding chair, his chin on his chest, eyes closed as he slept. He wore a comical peaked hat made from shiny aluminum foil. On a table beside him were dozens of similar hats. All made from aluminum foil. Above the table was a printed placard that read:
Playroom Security Notice
All Employees Must Wear Protective Skullcaps
During Dreamwalking Exercises.
This Means You!
I looked around. It was a room—a big room—which was lined with rows of coffins. Only they weren’t really coffins. Funny things to have in a place called the Playroom. They were capsules of some kind. On a small metal stand beside each one was a miniature version of the God Machine, exact in every detail except that it was no bigger than a camp stove. The machines hummed quietly and on their faces a row of tiny gemstone chips flashed on and off in a random sequence. First the diamond, then two flashes of the ruby, then the topaz, the diamond again, the emerald. Over and over, and I stood watching, transfixed, almost hypnotized, lulled to the edge of sleep. In my mind, though, a voice that was not my own whispered, ?
??The pattern is wrong. The more they dream this way, the greater the neurological damage. We’ve lost so many dreamers already.”
It was the voice of Dr. Erskine. When I turned to look, though, he was not there.
Another voice spoke. One I almost recognized, but it was strangely distorted, almost mumbled. “You can’t expect to look at the face of God and not go crazy. It stands to reason.”
There was no one there.
But I was wrong. When I went over to one of the capsules I could see that there was a person inside. He wore pajamas. How strange was that?
I realized that he wasn’t dead. The man was sleeping. He wore a metal cap with all sorts of wires attached to it, and he was sleeping an electric sleep. His face twitched and his mouth moved as if he was speaking, but there was no sound. There was another person sleeping in the next capsule, and the next. More than twenty people. All of them sleeping. And when I got to the last one I saw that the person asleep in the tube …
… was me.
Frightened, I ran from the room.
Across the hall there was another door and I ran through it.
I stopped because I smelled something bad. Like burned meat. I was in another laboratory, but this was much bigger. And stranger. There, in the gloom at the far end of the laboratory, I saw it. A God Machine. Huge, gleaming. Bigger than the one I’d seen down at Gateway. It hummed and pulsed with power.
Standing before it was a twisted shape that almost—but not quite—looked human. He wore white pajamas that were smeared with food and snot and piss and blood. His skin was wrinkled and puckered and blistered. He heard me and turned to look at me with emerald green eyes.
“You’re not wearing your hat,” said the man.
When he smiled his teeth were white in his burned red face.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“They killed me,” he said, “but I didn’t die. Now I’m going home.”
And then something came whipping out of the mouth of the God Machine. Huge, twisting things with suckers and claws and spikes and …
… and …
I woke in the cold water.
Alone and dying. Lost and forgotten.
Terrified beyond belief.
And … angry.
I was so goddamn angry.
Because I knew.
Son of a bitch.
I knew.
It’s a bitch when clarity comes so sharply but so late. In dreams we are so receptive to the truth, even when it comes to us wearing a disguise.
I knew who we were fighting.
I knew.
ISIL, Santoro, the Closers … they were like arms, like tentacles attached to the same monster. As I drifted out there I thought I knew the name of the monster. And I was going to die out here and never be able to tell anyone. I was going to float into oblivion, a useless piece of flotsam drifting out on the tide. And because I was too slow to understand, everyone I loved and everything I cared about was going to die when darkness fell. All of those children would scream in the darkness and I wouldn’t be able to do a thing to save them.
CHAPTER NINETY-ONE
PACIFIC OCEAN
SOMEWHERE WEST OF SAN NICOLAS ISLAND
TIME UNKNOWN
There was a sound in the darkness.
Not a weird cry or my own voice talking nonsense words. This was different. A mechanical sound. Or was that my mind breaking further open? When you first hear something like that it’s so easy to doubt your senses, to believe that it’s a fiction created by desperation, wishful thinking, and a failing psyche.
It was faint and far away, both muffled and distorted by the sound of the ocean. I made myself go still in order to hear it, to try and determine where it was. Not east, I thought. Probably not a Coast Guard rescue craft unless they’d gone out looking and were on the way back to the barn after giving me up as shark food. Wasn’t west of me, either. I found Venus and used that to orient myself. The motor sound was off to the south. How far off, though?
In this gloom there was no way in hell anyone could see me. Could they hear me? The engine, though a ways off, had a throaty rumble. Something powerful but small. A boat engine, not a ship engine.
Going slow.
Slow.
In these waters at this time of night a slow engine could be a night fisherman out for yellowtail or bluefin tuna. Or maybe there were squidders. I rode a couple of swells upward and looked in that direction.
There.
A light.
Two lights. A bow light and the harsh white glow of a searchlight.
Someone was out looking for us. Had they found Top and Bunny? Please, please, let that be the case. Those men had followed me through hell and today they’d followed me into an ambush. If there was blame, then it was totally on me. They deserved better.
The boat was a couple of hundred yards off and it might as well have been on the far side of the moon. To them I’d be a dark dot on a dark ocean.
On the next swell I yelled as loud as I could.
“Ahoy the boat!”
Did it again on the next, and the next.
Kept doing it until my voice was sandpapered away.
Kept at it, though. Kept yelling. Hailing them. Begging for help.
When the engine noise changed from a rumble to a roar, I had that terrible feeling all survivors get when they see rescue within reach and then it begins to pass them by. I screamed and waved my arms, and the motion pushed me right down into the drink where I took a mouthful of water.
Then light filled the world. Bright as the sun, pure and perfect. And a voice bellowed louder than the motor.
“There!”
And another voice roared back, “Goddamn it, I can see him, Farm Boy. Why don’t you drive the boat like you ain’t drunk?”
I knew those voices.
Impossibly, I knew them.
When they got closer I knew the boat, too.
It was an XSR military interceptor. The boat Church had lent me, which had been stolen out from under me by Esteban Santoro. As the engine slowed to a muffled idle and the boat swung sideways toward me, I saw the faces of Top Sims and Bunny. Battered, worried, panicked, and relieved. I saw hands reaching toward me.
And they were real. No illusion, no wishful thinking. They were actually here. Somehow, impossibly, after all these hours and in all of this darkness, they’d found me.
I wanted to scream out their names.
A sudden swell picked me up and flung me toward Top and Bunny.
CHAPTER NINETY-TWO
PACIFIC HOLIDAY MARINA AND YACHT CLUB
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
SEPTEMBER 10, 2:13 A.M.
Top and Bunny told me the story of how they found the XSR drifting in the water, the key still in it. They called in for help and there were at least a dozen other boats out looking for me. How the hell I managed to drift right through them is a logistical puzzle none of us will ever figure out. Top used the radio to call Church. He told him everything. And during that call he learned about what had happened to our air support.
Church directed them to a private marina in San Diego owned by one of his friends. DMS support team members helped us ashore and took each of us into a different cabana, where medical teams treated our wounds but asked no questions other than what they needed to know. My soaked and salt-caked clothes went into a trash can and an EMT brought me a Walmart bag with fresh clothes. New stuff with the tags still on them. Socks and shoes, too. I just finished dressing when there was a light tap on the door and Mr. Church came in. It was a small room with a shower stall, a dressing table, and two chairs.
He came and stood in front of me, studying my face, looking deeply into my eyes. I knew what he was doing.
“I’m me,” I said.
Church made a small noncommittal sound and sat down on one of the chairs, waving me to the other.
“Tell me,” he said.
“We don’t have time.”
“Brick is on his way here wit
h a tactical support vehicle. Until he gets here we cannot and should not act. And I need to know what happened yesterday. Tell me what happened, and I do mean everything, Captain Ledger.”
So I told him. Every single detail of what happened on the gas dock and on the salt. He listened without comment. When I was done he studied me for a long, uncomfortable time. Seconds cracked off and fell around us and the cabana was dead silent.
“And it is your assertion,” Church said at last, “that you were not in full control of your actions?”
I shook my head very slowly and decisively. “I’ve been in enough fights to know the difference between losing my shit in the heat of the moment and not being in my own right mind. I know what happened.”
Church nodded. “And what should we infer from that?”
“I had a lot of time to think out there,” I told him. “There are a lot of pieces to this, so that so far it’s felt like we were cruising the edges of things. Like we were catching glimpses of several different cases. ISIL and the Kill Switch. Gateway and all that interdimensional shit. The breakdown of the American intelligence community. The theft of SX-56. The Mullah of the Black Tent. The Unlearnable Truths. The Closers. The plague of … whatever you call it. Insanity, treason … the DMS falling apart.”
“Yes,” he said slowly.
“It’s not a dozen cases,” I said.
“No,” he agreed.
“This is all the same goddamn thing.”
“Yes.”
“And I’m pretty sure I know who’s behind it. I maybe even know why. It’s just that it’s crazy … and … I’m not sure I can trust my own judgment on this.”
“Even after all of that time floating and thinking?”
“Don’t joke,” I said.
“Believe me, Captain, I am not joking. There are eleven dead in Oceanside, and another sixteen injured. Three of the injured are critical, including a six-year-old boy.”
I closed my eyes because that hurt worse than any punch, knife cut, or bullet wound I’ve ever had. Much worse. I wanted to turn away from him, from those numbers, from the horror. But no matter where you turn, the truth is going to be right there in clear line of sight.