Quicksilver(89)

From beyond the milling Specials, Bridget saw me holding Keiko. Although neither of us was gifted with telepathy, her shocked and compassionate expression told me that she knew the general shape of the extraordinary and dreadful discovery that had just been thrust on me and Keiko.

Emmerich’s death didn’t mean that our escape was a less urgent matter than if the creep had been alive. At any moment, the soul children would rise. Addicted to pleasure by habit and most likely also by drugs that Emmerich included in their diet, they would be greedy for all the sensation that they had to wait for nightfall to experience. Shattered by the discovery that their guru and sole means of support was dead, a lot of them—if not all—would seek the one pleasure still offered: vengeance.

Sparky, Panthea, and Winston led the freed prisoners out of that deepest level of the Oasis. They climbed the stairs toward the communal floor that included the orgy chambers and the private rooms in which residents of the hive even now prepared to swarm. Bridget and I followed.

In the gold-and-crystal vestibule, over the shuffling of feet, I heard a wretched sobbing issuing from the open door to Emmerich’s apartment. Having found his master lying lifeless in red silk, Tim staggered forth. His brow and one cheek glistened with blood from the scalp wound that I had inflicted. His face, which he’d thought handsome, was wrenched now into an ugly expression that might have been part grief but that largely conveyed the shock and fear of catastrophic change. The billions of dollars that had been used to instill and feed Timothy’s addiction and his years of idleness would now go to estate taxes and otherwise be locked away in trusts for the delectation of attorneys and to pay off the lawsuits that would make it into court in a decade or so. Convicted of whatever crimes he might have committed against the Specials, if in fact he ever participated in their abuse, he would find the accommodations of prison far less comfortable than those of the Oasis.

When Soul Timothy saw me, his face contracted with bitterness. His brow seemed to thicken as if he were undergoing a metamorphosis, and his eyes shrank in their sockets. The changes weren’t physical, but the alchemy of fierce emotion. He bared his teeth and reached toward me as he approached.

Bridget leaned past me, her gun in a two-handed grip, and squeezed off two shots before I could bring my Glock to bear. She was Sparky Rainking’s granddaughter in more than name. Timothy’s shriek quieted when most of his throat dissolved. The sound of his body meeting the floor was as final as the thud of a coffin lid.

“You’re something,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I still owe you one for taking out the two thugs at the Sweetwater Flying F Ranch.”

All of us hurried through the communal chambers, past entrances to the five hallways where the cultists had yet to fling open the doors to their rooms. Momentarily they would burst out, attired for easy disrobing, ready to feast and drink and have their rec drugs in a macabre celebration of their vacuity. This was Prince Prospero’s castellated abbey in “The Masque of the Red Death,” although the doomed partiers here were hiding out not from a plague but from the truth of themselves.

Quick then, up the Deco stairs to the first subterranean level that housed, among other things, the kitchen and the Egyptian-themed theater and the room where we left twelve Asian slaves in a drugged slumber.

Still no Nihilim. But for the sounds we made, quiet prevailed.

We brought our charges to the elevators we’d been reluctant to use earlier. The first cab connected this level to lower realms; the second went only up to the garage.

Sparky, Panthea, and Winston urged the nine Specials to join them in the second elevator cab, which was a squeeze. Bridget and I decided to resort to the spiral stairs in the blue-neon-lined shaft while the others ascended to the garage and boarded two Mercedes Sprinter Cruisers in the fleet of four, where the keys were waiting in the cup holders.

The getaway had gotten underway with admirable alacrity, and nothing could go wrong now except what always did in such a scene. Just when there seemed that nothing remained to this adventure other than roaring engines and spinning tires casting up clouds of dust and escapees cheering and the heroic rescuers being feted at some future function, just then would come the barrage of bullets or the ghost drone armed with Hellfire missiles, or an attack by denizens of the first universe with tentacles for fingers and talons that could gut a rock.

According to my watch, twilight was sifting down on the world above. If we were left with any grace at all, it would be a minute or two in duration.

As the lift doors slid shut, the door across the hall from the theater opened. A man stepped out of the room where the workers had earlier begun to wake from sedation. Bridget slipped her right hand—and gun—into her purse, and I held my Glock down and at my side, shielded from the stranger by my body.

Tall, slab shouldered, hawk faced, with a trimmed but dense black beard, this guy would have looked like serious trouble if he’d been wearing anything other than pale-green hospital scrubs with a stethoscope dangling around his neck. As a physician to Dionysius the Elder, medico at the Bacchanalia, dispenser of ecstasy in pill form, bone setter and abrasion patcher to the Special Selections, pulling down a million a year in addition to whatever orgy action appealed to him, he might have needed the man-of-medicine costume to maintain the authority of his position. Or maybe he was so seduced by what the Oasis had to offer that he required the scrubs and the stethoscope to remind himself who and what he was.