"Maybe you're in the last place you'll ever be, Toys," she said.
Toys.
There it was. She knew who he was, and suddenly the fragile construction of their chance meeting cracked and fell to the ground, leaving behind a lot of possibilities. All of them were ugly.
He straightened and reappraised her, and as he did so, the chair to which he was bound creaked. The tape held him fast to it, with his hands behind the back slat and his ankles tight to the front legs.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"Who do you think I am?"
"A wicked bitch who needs her throat cut. But that's just my wishful thinking."
She got up and walked over to him, smiled, and then slapped him across the face. She did it forehand and backhand. Hard blows that tore his lips and rattled his head. She knew how to hit and how to hurt.
Then, still smiling, she went back to her seat. "Try again."
He spat blood onto the floor between them. "Is Aayun even your real name?"
Her dark eyes glittered with strange light. "Yes. Does it ring any bells? It should."
Toys thought about it. Over the years he'd met a lot of people, and a fair number were from the Middle East. Sebastian Gault and Hugo Vox both had extensive dealings throughout that part of the world. How many women named Aayun had he known? One? But she was an old woman and probably dead. How many had he known of? That took more thought, and he could come up with only two. One was the young wife of an antiquities broker in Cairo. He'd seen her only briefly once, and this woman was the wrong physical type. Who was the other? He had to fish for it. A niece of someone? No . . . a younger sister. Seen only once in a family photo but spoken of often. The sister of . . .
He froze and felt the blood drain from his face. Aayun was watching him, and she nodded when she saw that he remembered.
"You're her sister?" he said.
"Yes," she said.
And then all of the memories that had tugged at him whenever he'd looked at Aayun clicked into place. If he had seen her somewhere other than a Catholic church, if they'd met under any circumstance that might have tied her more firmly to her family, then he might have understood sooner. Now he felt like a fool, and very possibly a suicidally stupid one.
"You're Amirah's sister," he breathed.
"Yes," she said again.
"Dear God . . ."
"I've looked for you for such a long time, Toys," she said. "First I chased rumors, and twice I thought you were dead. People have been saying that you went soft. That you found God. That you lost your nerve."
"Is that what people say?"
"They do. People have been looking closely at you. You used to be a careful person, but now you've become predictable, even clumsy. You live at that resort, you eat in the same diner every day. You go for long walks on the beach. You go to church nearly every day. You make no ripples. So . . . yes, the people who file reports on you say that you've lost your nerve, that you've become weak. That you're no one."
She paused, but Toys said nothing.
"So I had to come and see for myself. I had to know for sure."
"Know what?" asked Toys.
Aayun smiled. "I had to see for myself if you were broken."
"Oh?"
"I had to see if you've really become some kind of altar boy. And if so, why?"
His heart was pounding now. "What have you learned, Aayun?"
Aayun said, "I don't really know, and that's my dilemma. You could be broken, but you could also be licking your wounds and lying low until you figure out your next move. After all, you've had bad luck in picking patrons. Gault failed you. Twice, by my count. And Hugo Vox outlived his relevance."
"Doesn't say much for my effing judgment, though, does it?" muttered Toys.
"Oh, if we're to talk about judgment, let's start with why you killed my sister."
He spat more blood. "Your sister was insane."
"She was brilliant."
"She was a classic example of the mad scientist, sweetie, let's face it. She created an actual doomsday weapon."
"It was because she believed in--"
"Stop," he said. "Just stop. You can effing kill me if you like, but please don't subject me to a lecture on the virtues of Dr. Amirah Malaki. She and Sebastian made quite the pair. He was a self-absorbed narcissist with delusions of economic grandeur, and she was a brilliant back-stabbing soulless witch. And let's add El Mujahid to that mix. He let his wife whore herself to Sebastian in order to fool him into thinking they were a team."
"Sex is a very useful weapon," Aayun said flatly. "It makes men unbelievably stupid."
"Okay, touche, love, but it doesn't whitewash anyone involved. We're all whores of one kind or another. Amirah fucked Sebastian stupid, and he believed that she was his ally. The Seif al Din pathogen was only ever supposed to be used as a scare tactic, as part of the biggest extortion gambit the world has ever seen. But your sister and her husband actually tried to release it and start a global pandemic. They would have killed everyone. You do grasp that, don't you? Seif al Din could not be stopped once it was out. And don't give me that claptrap about them wanting to use it to preserve their twisted version of Islam. They would have killed billions of Muslims with it."
"They wanted to save the faithful and--"
"Bullshit. They turned themselves into fucking zombies! Sure, they were smarter and could speak, unlike the rest of the infected, but they were still effing zombies. Think about that, Aayun. They perverted their own bodies and were willing to destroy the whole world. Do you think Allah would have approved? 'Cause I bloody well don't."
Aayun shook her head. "I don't care about that. I'm not a Muslim. Not anymore. I don't believe in that any more than I believe in your idiot who got nailed to a tree with a promise of salvation on his lips, which, I should point out, was a failed promise. Has anyone ever been saved by Christianity? Or Islam? Or anything? No."
"So this is what? Revenge?"
The smile on Aayun's face changed. Twisted. Became darker and stranger.
"Of a sort," she said softly.
Aayun got up and walked a few yards away, stopping in front of a packing case that was about the size and shape of an old-fashioned phone booth. A crowbar stood against it and she picked it up, weighed it thoughtfully in her hands, and then fitted the crow's foot into the gap between the front of the box and the closest side.
"What are you doing?" Toys asked quickly.
"Oh, you'll see," she said between grunts of effort. The green wood squealed as she pried the box open.
"Aayun," he called, and he hated the sound of fear in his own voice. "Aayun, whatever you're doing . . . don't. Come back. Let's talk this through."
She paused in her work and looked at him over her shoulder. Her face was flushed with effort. "You are a murderer, Toys. My sister killed a lot of people, but you're right . . . she was actually insane. She was always insane. I think God drove her mad, or at least the twisted vision of God that she always clung to. Her and El Mujahid. That was no loving God. They worshipped a monster. They believed in fatwa and jihad and all of that bullshit. They thought they were still fighting the Crusaders to protect the Holy Land. No matter what any of us tried to tell her, she would never listen. It was 'Allah wills this' and 'Allah wills that.' And I've seen people like her all over the world. I've traveled, Toys. I didn't lie about that. I actually went looking for God, for hope, for something to believe in, but no matter where I looked all I found was lies, propaganda, false hopes, and more insanity."
She gave another pull, and the wood cracked a little but didn't give way. She repositioned her crowbar.
"Maybe you weren't looking in the right places," said Toys. His heart was still hammering, but it hurt. Not physically, but for her.
Aayun shook her head. "Oh, please. Spare me the proselytizing. I was never the audience for that kind of thing. Not even at home. Not even when I pretended to be a good and dutiful little Muslim and went to the mosque and pretended to
pray. I wanted to be, but God kept disappointing me. I was hoping that you were haunting the church as some kind of dodge, some kind of protective coloration, but you're not. You actually believe. You actually think you're going to be saved."
"No," he said. "I don't think that at all."
"What . . . you don't believe in God?"
"No, darling, I don't believe I'll be saved. If you know so much about me, then you know that I'm beyond redemption."
"I thought Jesus was all about cleansing sins."
"Surely there's a limit, and I can say without fear of contradiction that I'm well over the mark."
She studied him, and he saw something flicker in her eyes. It looked like sadness, like the kind of raw emotion he'd seen in her before. But it was there and gone.
"Do you know what I've been doing all this time?" she asked.
"Other than following me? No."
"Oh, I mean what I've been doing my whole life. Since before you even met my sister."
"What . . . ah . . . field of study?"
The sadness in her face shifted, darkened. "I followed in my sister's footsteps."
"Oh, God . . ."
"There's no real name for the field. Amirah was pioneering new ground. She called it 'transformative biology,' but that was for lack of something else to call it." Aayun paused and shrugged. "As good a name as any, I suppose."
She gave the crowbar another fierce pull, and the front of the packing case leaned outward, seemed to pause for a moment, and then fell with a crash.
The case was filled with madness.
7.
Toys had to fight back the scream that rose to his mouth.
Inside the crate was a cylinder of heavy reinforced glass seated in a metal base upon which was a computer control pad. Wires and thick cables snaked up to the lid, and hoses dangled down inside. The lights on the control panel glowed in vibrant shades of red and green. A monitor beeped softly.
The cylinder was filled with liquid, and inside the liquid, standing like a golem from some mad story, was a naked figure. A man.
A man Toys recognized.
His name was--or had been--Abdul Fazir. Like Amirah, he was a scientist, and a good one, specializing in virology and infectious diseases. He had helped Amirah modify Seif al Din to bring its level of communicability to near 100 percent. The last time Toys had seen Fazir was the day he and Sebastian had sabotaged the geothermal vents in Amirah's lab beneath the sands in Iraq. Fazir had already been infected with the latest generation of the pathogen. Not the version that created the mindless and murderous living dead, but the strain that let the victims retain their personalities, even at the cost of their sanity and humanity. It was the strain that Amirah had used on herself and that had given El Mujahid the power to nearly kill Joe Ledger.
And now here Fazir was. Suspended in liquid, but awake. Dead, but not dead. Living dead. Staring with milky eyes through the curved wall of glass at Toys.
"What have you done . . . ?" he whispered.
Aayun bent and rested her forehead against the glass. Fazir's hand moved and touched the inside of the cylinder. His fingers twitched as if caressing her hair. She spoke without looking at Toys. "He's the last of my family," she murmured. "Uncle Abdul . . ."
There must have been some kind of speaker attached to the tube, because when she mentioned his name, the dead man smiled. His teeth were rotted to jagged green stumps, and there was a look of dreadful, bottomless hunger in his eyes. His bloodless lips formed a single word.
Aayun.
He said it to her, but he was looking at Toys. Then his eyes shifted away, and Toys turned to follow his gaze. At least half of the crates were of the same size and shape as the box in which Fazir's cylinder stood. Toys's mouth went dry. There were at least forty of them. Maybe more.
"No . . . ," he breathed.
When he looked back at Fazir, the dead man was grinning at him. A tongue the color of an old mushroom lolled out from between those jagged teeth and licked the rubbery lips with great, slow relish.
"Aayun!" cried Toys. "Aayun, what is all this? Why did you bring them here? Why did you bring me here?"
She pushed off from the cylinder, walked back to him, and stood so close that he could smell dried sweat and sex on her from last night. Aayun caressed his cheek with the backs of her fingers.
"I'm dying," she said.
He gaped at her. "What . . . ?"
"Yes. Cancer. I've had it for years. My hair just grew back from the last round of chemo and radiation. They thought they'd gotten it all, but it's back. I can feel it growing inside me. Imagine what that feels like, Toys, to have something consuming you from the inside out. My uterus, my breasts. The doctors said that they could try radical surgeries, but what's the point? It'll come back. They said that I have a twenty percent chance of remission this time. Twenty."
Despite everything, he felt tears burn in the corners of his eyes. She saw them, too, and shook her head.
"Amirah wanted to transform the world, Toys," said Aayun, leaning into the words, using the urgent tension in her body for emphasis. "She wanted to create a new kind of life using Generation Twelve of the Seif al Din pathogen. Transformation into a new state of existence. Not alive, not dead, but rather living death. A kind of immortality. Alive forever, but different, changed. Think about it, Toys. To never grow old, to never get sick again. To never die. It's a wonderful thought."
Toys shook his head. "You have it wrong. Amirah turned herself into a monster. She was going to kill most of the world and turn the survivors into monsters like her. Like Fazir. That was the price of immortality."
"Yes," agreed Aayun. "And if you're alive, like you are, and healthy, like you are, with a future, like you have, it's too high a price to pay. But think about it from where I stand. I'm dying. If I allow them to cut me open and scrape out my uterus and cut off my breasts, I'll buy myself maybe another year. Maybe. Which means that in eighteen months I'll be dead anyway. Dead forever. Dead and forgotten."
"Oh, please . . ."
Aayun spread her arms wide. "If I embrace the transformation, I'll live forever."
"As a monster!" he cried.
"So what?" she snapped. "You're a monster. You're a soulless monster, Toys, and you know it. You're no better than Amirah. You enabled what she did. You share in every one of her crimes, and you own so many more of your own. You're a far greater monster than she ever was."
"She wanted to kill the world."
"She wanted to remake it."
"No."
"Yes!" said Aayun, pounding her thigh with a tight fist. "Not into the kind of world where someone like you would want to live. No. There wouldn't be a place for monsters like you. For the damned."
Toys closed his eyes.
"But it would be a world that would survive," said Aayun softly, almost gently. "And that's what I'm going to do. To finish her work, to ensure that her dream becomes the only enduring reality. I will build my lab right here. My uncle and the others I've already infected with his blood will provide me with all of the biological materials I need to perfect the pathogen, to bring it to Generation Thirteen, or higher. To remove some of the cognitive side effects, to create something that will help me bring about a wonderful new world. I mean . . . if God can't or won't save the world, if Jesus and Mohammad and all of those frauds can't do it, then I will. Science is, after all, the only god whose existence can be proved."
Toys shook his head. "Aayun, please, you can't do this."
"I've already started, Toys. It's taken me years, but everything I need is in these boxes. I'll have the lab set up in a month and I'll have a working Generation Thirteen within weeks. Amirah's lab was destroyed, but all of her research was backed up in the cloud. I have everything I need, and I have just enough time to do it before I'm too sick to work. And then . . . then I won't be sick ever again. No one will. All disease will end for those who survive the Seif al Din release. No birth defects, no cancer, no Alzheimer's, no anything. The
world will be purified of all of that."
He struggled against the duct tape, drawing shrieks of protest from the wooden chair. "Why tell me this, goddamn you? Why bring me here? Why not just cut my throat in bed? You could have, Aayun."
She looked surprised. "What? No . . . you don't understand, Toys. I don't want you dead."
"Then what, for fuck's sake? Are you looking for a confessor? Sorry, sweetheart, but I'm no priest."
"Not that, either."
"Well, I'm running out of ideas. If you wanted to gloat or if you want a cheerleader, sorry, I'm the wrong choice for those, too."
Aayun took his face in both hands. "No, you idiot," she said fiercely. "I want you to join me."
"What?"
"I want you to be one with me. To become immortal. Let's leave everything behind. God, sin, damnation, redemption. You can't go to hell if you never ever die. I brought you here this way because I didn't think you'd listen unless I made you. I wanted you to know that I was serious, that this is real, that I know what I'm doing. You're like me, Toys--you're damaged goods. You used up whatever this version of the world had to offer, so I'm offering something else. A new chance. A clean slate in a new world."
He stared at her, his mouth wide. There was such earnestness in her face, such deep pleading in her eyes, such total need, that it froze the world for a long, long moment.
Toys leaned toward her as far as the tape would allow.
"God . . . ," he whispered, "yes."
It came out so fierce, so hot.
"Yes . . . ?" she asked, her voice small, tremulous. Uncertain and afraid. There was hope, too, but it was tiny, fragile.
"Yes, yes, yes," he said. "Please, yes. I . . . need this. More than anything else in the world, I need this. To step back from the edge of the Pit. I . . . I . . . oh, please . . . yes."
Tears sprang into her eyes and rolled down her thin cheeks, and a strange, twisted, delighted laugh bubbled out of her. She showered his face with a hundred small kisses.
And then she was tearing at the duct tape, ripping it, sometimes bending to bite it. When he was free she pulled him to her with surprising strength, kissing him, touching him. Her need burned furnace hot, and Toys felt himself getting hard despite the eyes of the monster in the tube.