The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(23)

“I get it,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I did. “You’re a psychic. A mind reader.”

Buddy slapped the plastic cover over his improvised still, frowning as he waved a fluttery hand.

“I hear the machinery of the universe,” he said. “So many thoughts, so many voices, crowding everything out of my head. They tried to put me on pills once. Just made it worse. Nothing stops the transmission. I’m Radio Free Buddy.”

Poor guy. I’d seen the unlucky ones like him before. Natural talents who never got the training they needed. It was easy to dig too deep, push the senses too hard, and end up a burnout or a head case. There but for the grace of Bentley and Corman go I, I thought, thinking back to my own misspent youth.

Still, he could come in handy. It’d be easier to clear up the mystery of Hive B and get back in good graces with Winslow and his gang if Buddy had any talent for remote viewing.

“I don’t have a phone,” Buddy said, “but I have a connection. My sister, she’s singing out across the lines. You need to hear her. Drink.”

I eyed the pink glop. I’d swallowed some pretty dubious concoctions in my day, either for occult purposes or just in the pursuit of a good time, but this was a little extreme even for me.

“Hey,” I said, reaching to hand the cup back to him, “look, not that I don’t appreciate the offer, but I’m going to take a pass—”

“Lauren Carmichael,” he said.

That froze me.

“My sister,” he said, squinting as if listening to a voice I couldn’t hear, “says you think it’s over. But you don’t understand. Everything Lauren Carmichael did and all that she became, everything you think you stopped…it was nothing but a side effect.”

I should have been able to put it all behind me. Lauren Carmichael was dead. I should know—I’d helped kill her. I’d put her, her followers, and her whole rotten legacy to the torch. I should have been able to sleep easy after that.

Sometimes, though.

Sometimes, if I heard her name, or if I was lying awake in the still hours of the night, I was suddenly right back there again—back in that place I never wanted to go.

Flat on my back on a blood-soaked carpet, paralyzed, my aura shredded, her hands on my body. Forcing her toxic energy inside me, one quivering inch at a time. Hearing her gasp of pleasure as she finished her work and let go.

I should have been strong enough to fight her off. I should have been strong enough, after it was all over, to shrug off the memory and let it go. And I hated that I couldn’t. I hated that it was so easy to slip back to that place in my mind, feeling filthy and worthless all over again like it just happened yesterday.

I’d killed Lauren Carmichael, but I couldn’t kill her ghost.

Maybe this would bring me one step closer.

“Buddy,” I said, lifting the cup to my lips and trying to ignore the stench.

He looked at me, a question in his eyes.

“If this is a trick,” I told him, “I will kill you. Understand that.”

“No tricks.” He nodded, his shock of hair bobbing. “No treats either, sorry. Only truth.”

I held my nose and drank it down.

The slime tasted like a rotten animal carcass smells. It coated my tongue and got stuck in the back of my mouth, my gag reflex fighting me as I forced myself to swallow. Blood roared in my ears as the drink hit my stomach, the cell beginning to spin, the ground falling away from my feet and chunks of concrete raining down as the ceiling wrenched itself open to let in a stream of molten light.

Then I was gone.

*

Home again.

I stood in the middle of South Las Vegas Boulevard under a burning midday sun. Raw desert heat washed over me, stealing my breath, turning distant parked cars into mirages.

Not parked. Abandoned. Crashed. One of the busiest streets in the world was a graveyard of broken-down, rusted, and burned-out shells. Dead taxis and capsized rental cars. I stood alone in the wreckage.

The last living man in Las Vegas.

The Karnak, once a pyramid of glass thirty stories tall, was nothing but a shattered, twisted skeleton of steel girders burned black. Its closest neighbor, a resort built to look like a fantasy castle, had been through a siege: what walls remained were charred and half-battered to rubble. In the other direction, the Taipei Tower—Caitlin’s home—stood skewed on blasted foundations and poised to fall.

A page from the Las Vegas Sun blew past my feet, carried on a stray gust of hot wind. I snatched at it, too slow, and only saw the single-word headline before the breeze carried it under the smoldering husk of a taxicab.

GOODBYE.

Rattling, squeaking wheels turned my head. A stoop-shouldered woman puttered up the sidewalk, her tangled hair poking out from under a dirty lace shawl, pushing a shopping cart piled high with empty cans and clutter. She stopped. As she raised her head, I realized she could pass for Buddy’s twin.

“You aren’t the Thief,” she croaked.

“So I’ve been told.”

“Then who are you?”

I took a step closer, showing her my open hands, trying to be reassuring. She didn’t seem to be afraid of me, though.

“I’m Daniel Faust.”

“I didn’t ask your name,” she said. “I asked who are you? Not the same question at all. A reasonably bright dog can learn his own name. Do you even know who you are?”