The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(88)
The elevator hummed as it slowly carried us to the top of the tower. Point of no return.
“You ready for this?” Jennifer asked me.
“Nope. You?”
“Nope. Figured we’d wing it.”
“Yeah.” I stretched my arms behind my back and cracked my knuckles. “Just another day at the office.”
The penthouse floor was a box of glass on three sides. No rooms, no doors, just support pillars set into a white marble floor. Mystic patterns chiseled into the marble glowed faintly in my second sight, like the wiring on a circuit board. Walls of glass looked out onto the world below, the flashing lights of the Vegas Strip on one side and the black desert night on the other.
In between, taking up one entire wall, were the plants.
Thick ropy vines choked the far end of the penthouse, pushing through floors and ceilings, winding through Amazonian bushes and big, leafy fronds. The foliage burst with color, sprouting blossoms in vivid purples and pinks. A lush aroma filled the air, the earthy scent of a greenhouse under hot lights.
What I didn’t see was any water or soil. The plants didn’t need any. The whole scene felt skewed, wrong, like finding a teapot on Mars.
We strode out of the elevator and onto the chiseled marble. It thrummed against the soles of my feet. Off to the left, a bank of security monitors showed the views from cameras all over the tower in grainy black and white. I saw a couple of Xerxes guards walking up and down between prison cells stuffed full of drugged hostages.
Nedry didn’t notice us at first. He stood behind a bank of computer terminals in the corner of the penthouse off to our right, next to the fire-exit door. Cables ran to a polished chrome vat about eight feet high, and transparent hoses snaked across the penthouse floor, disappearing into the greenery. Viscous, faintly glowing fluid, like radioactive lime juice, trickled through the hoses.
“Tolerances are fine. Variances are all holding in the expected range,” he said, talking to Clark on his monitor. A webcam clipped to the edge of the screen kept watch.
“Hey, buddy?” Clark said. His voice crackled out over a cheap pair of speakers. “Don’t mean to interrupt—”
“We’re ready for final integration,” Nedry said. “How are things looking down there?”
“Uhh, buddy?” Clark said. On the screen, he twirled his finger in a look-behind-you gesture.
Nedry turned around. His bushy eyebrows shot up behind his mirrored glasses. “Oh. Shit.”
“Those are some terrible last words.” Jennifer pulled her gun. “You wanna try again? I’ll give ya a do-over.”
“Lauren,” I said flatly. “Where is she? Cooperate and you might, emphasis on might, walk out of here alive.”
Nedry shook his head wildly. “You can’t interrupt her now! She’s so close. You’ll ruin everything!”
“That’s the general idea,” I said.
Then we heard Lauren’s voice. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. A whisper carried on a plague wind.
“It’s all right, Doctor. I will deal with this personally.”
The vines twitched and began to unspool, taking on animated life. Bushes parted, brambles and fronds peeling back. In the midst of the wild growth, seated on a throne of stainless steel, sat the thing that used to be Lauren Carmichael.
She was the green. Roots burrowed into the necrotic flesh of her bare feet and withered hands, and brambles wrapped around her brow in a crown of thorns. Her flowing hair was a cascade of tangled grass, and flowers and thorns sprouted from her naked body. One of her eyes was inhumanly bright and blue. The other was gone, and a crimson rose bloomed inside the empty socket.
“No,” I whispered, shaking my head. “What did you do, Lauren? What did you do?”
The abundant growth that choked one entire wall of the penthouse quivered, expanding then contracting, as if taking a deep breath. It was all Lauren, all connected to her, growing from the soil of her body and blood. She slowly pulled away from her throne and stood. Behind her, hypodermic needles tipped in droplets of green fluid protruded from the back and seat of the chair. My eye followed the tubes on the floor. Nedry had been pumping Viridithol-2 straight into her body from the vat in the corner of the room.
Vines constricted, lifting up her arms in triumph, hoisting her into the air. She dangled there, looking down upon us.
“You want me to start shootin’?” Jennifer breathed.
“Not yet.”
“No,” the transformed woman said to us. She slowly shook her head. “I am not Lauren. Not anymore. That name is not grand enough to contain what I have become. It is time for something more fitting.”
The vines gently set her down. She walked toward us. Where her feet touched the floor, the marble buckled and broke open. Wildflowers in a riot of colors sprung up in her wake, sprouting from the stone and filling her footprints with spontaneous life.
She stopped halfway across the room, standing in the center of the penthouse floor.
“Lauren Carmichael is gone,” she said with a faint smile. “Call me…Eve.”
Forty-Three
“It’s over,” I said. “Eve, Lauren, whatever the hell you want to call yourself. It’s over. All of this.”
Lauren stared into my eyes as she lolled her head to one side, too far for a human neck to bend without breaking.