He poked him again.
“Now, you want to start thinking I’m with them? Really? Me? Holy fuck, Prospero, you want to go and do that to me?”
There were tears in King’s eyes.
“You’re my brother,” he said, almost snarling the words. “You’re the only one who ever gave a shit about me and you’re the only one I ever or will ever give a shit about. We live out in the storm lands, man. Don’t cut me loose now. Don’t let me drown. Fuck… I’d die for you.” He caved forward and pressed his forehead against Prospero’s. “I’d fucking die for you.”
It took a lot for Prospero to move, or to want to move, but he did. He lifted his aching arms and wrapped them around the weeping boy’s shoulders. He held him.
And it occurred to him that he had never held anyone like this before. Not even his mother.
King kept repeating what he’d said.
“I’d die for you.”
After a long, long time, Prospero whispered something to him. A statement and a question. A counter to King’s promise.
“I don’t want you to die for me,” he said. “But would you kill for me?”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The following morning Sam told me that Rudy was stable and resting. Church had arranged for the top orthopedic surgeon in California to fly in and do the repair work, but the prognosis was that Rudy would likely need more work later. Sam said that he heard them talking about a total knee replacement. That was the leg Rudy had smashed in a helicopter crash a couple of years ago. A replacement was inevitable, so they’d schedule it as soon as his other injuries were healed.
The neck sprain was bad because neck sprains are always bad, and they were keeping him heavily sedated while they assessed it. His nose was a mess and he’d probably need to get some work done on that, too. I felt absolutely horrible. Rudy was my best friend. He was a gentle person and a far better man than I’ll ever be. No one had a clue as to why he’d gone crazy. Sam said that the blood tests they’d taken all came out negative. We were waiting on results of a CT scan and other tests.
Except for Sam, I was not allowed to have any other visitors. The DMS lawyers had to earn their retainers by keeping me from being arrested. You know the expression “cluster-fuck”? Yeah, well this is pretty much going to be the gold standard example of that henceforth.
I tried to pump Sam for news about Gateway, but he parried my questions by claiming ignorance — which was probably bullshit — and by saying that Mr. Church planned to debrief me personally. That meant that he was probably told to play dumb, and you can’t trick information out of Sam Imura.
The only good news was that they decided to let me go home. Or, maybe it was that they were happy to get rid of me. I’m a terrible patient. Lots of bitching, yelling, threats, escape attempts. I don’t make life easy for anyone and the staff seemed happy as hell to wheel me down to the front door. Pretty sure the orderly thought long and hard about shoving my wheelchair into traffic.
Junie was there, waiting for me at the curb. She came running to grab me, hold me, damn near squeeze the life out of me, showering my face with dozens of small kisses, tears in her eyes. Ghost was with her and he barked very loudly and bounded around like a puppy until I gave him a big hug and a kiss on his furry head. From the haunted look in Junie’s eyes I could tell that she knew some of what had happened. Maybe not the Gateway stuff, but about the flu and about Rudy. I heard her whisper to Sam and heard him tell her that Rudy was stable.
“Stable” is a nice word but it’s often used as a lie, a comfort pill.
Sam drove me home, with Junie holding me in the back of a DMS SUV and Ghost staring at me from the front shotgun seat. At home, I had to lean on Junie and Sam to make it from car to elevator and elevator to bed. After Sam left I used a cane left over from a previous injury to thump my way onto the balcony. The Pacific was a gorgeous blue and there were spouts from whales migrating north. Seagulls and pelicans floated on the breeze. Junie made coffee and kept feeding me high-protein foods. I’d lost weight and energy and she was doing her level best to fatten me up and bring me back to life.
It was working, too. I felt better as the day went on and by the following day the cane went back into the closet. Let me clarify that… I felt physically better but my head and my heart still hurt.
Rudy. Damn it.
The tough part was trying to fill in the blanks of everything that had happened while I was out. And a lot had happened. I got some of it from Junie, and Sam had doled out a few thin slices of news, and some of it came from my secretary, Lydia-Rose, who kept calling every five minutes to make sure I hadn’t wasted away and died.
Top and Bunny were okay. Both of them had come out of it sooner than me. Bunny was back in the gym as soon as he could walk, and when the physical therapists asked him to do ten reps he did twenty. He’d already put back a lot of the weight he lost. Lydia was taking very good care of him. Bunny and Lydia had maintained a relationship for years that was technically against DMS protocols. But since I’m his boss and I broke that same fraternization rule within two weeks of signing on I was not about to throw stones. Top and I gave him a big-brother chat once, and he told us to go fuck ourselves, so there was that. Since moving to San Diego he and Lydia had bought a cottage on the beach in Encinitas. Cute little place. Never would have figured Bunny for having a green thumb, but he does the gardening. He taught Lydia how to surf and she taught him how to dance. Love, baby. It keeps the old world spinning.
Top was another matter. He’s not as young as Bunny. He was almost ten years older than me and I was eight years older than Bunny. None of those had been easy years for Top. He’d been marked by our war. Marked by bullet and blade, fang and claw. And now by disease. He was back to work at the Pier, but on light duty.
I kept trying to get Church on the line but he was always busy. Lydia-Rose and Sam had both been evasive about why. Something was going on and they had clearly been instructed not to tell me. Maybe it was because Church didn’t want to overload me before I was well enough. Or maybe not. I learned that he was at the Pier, and so I informed Junie that I was going into work the next day.
We had a big fight about that. Shouting, throwing of things. Some tears. Some very careful make-up sex.
In the morning she gave me the car keys she’d hidden. Along with a paper sack filled with protein bars, vitamins, and lots of other healthy crap. She made me swear, hand to God, that I wouldn’t toss it in the Dumpster in the parking garage.
That night, while we were lying there, naked and sweaty and entwined, I found out that Junie was dealing with problems other than her drowsy and frequently irritable boyfriend. Someone had broken into FreeTech, the company she runs. Church set the company up and hired her to run it, and mostly she takes some of the less lethal technologies the DMS confiscates from the bad guys and mad scientists we fight and then repurposes them for humanitarian aid around the world. Funny how there are useful side effects even from evil science. Crazy old world. In any case, when Church sent me to San Diego to open the Pier, he moved the headquarters of that company out here, as well. Junie now has seven hundred employees in forty-six countries, but only a handful of them know the source of these radical technologies.
Junie told me that two nights ago — the night I woke up — two of her most trusted employees, a scientist and a lieutenant who was second in command of FreeTech security, brought big canvas laundry carts up from the basement, loaded them up with computers and reams of technical papers, and rolled them out of the building at around three in the morning. The two thieves had since vanished.