Phyllis interrupted the Baron’s story at this point to add her own interpretation. “The Apostate thinks Jakob dodged, died in his sanctuary, and was buried in an unmarked grave.”
“So was he really this Böhme guy?” Marco asked.
The Baron answered promptly: “Indeed. He’d been extending his life, completing tasks on borrowed time, then extending his life again. He had access to oceans of prestige, and at the time, wishes for truth were common. The gods told him that I was the preeminent man of reason, the first to complete a materialist metaphysics. If I could be convinced of the occult, then nobody was beyond the system of prestige. Everyone could be convinced.”
“Except you couldn’t be?” Marco asked.
“That’s right. Their evidence isn’t enough. It never will be.”
“It was a disaster,” Phyllis noted.
“What happened?” Marco asked the Baron.
d’Holbach took a deep breath, brushing aside any lurking stress or memories of that long dead conflict. “They called it the Fall of Trust. One day, the gods decided that I would never believe in them, and the condition on my head would last forever. I’d stolen immortality out of Böhme’s well-meant wish, and the cults of Europe tried to kill me for it.”
“Can they kill you?” Marco asked.
“I can die,” the Baron said. “I’ll recover from most injuries, but I’m only a man.”
“Did Böhme know what was going to happen to you?”
“No. Diviners don’t know the future. They’re listening closely to the gods, and the gods are always watching the world, so the theory goes that a Diviner is vaguely aware of what the gods are watching. In a sense, they know the present better than anyone else, but not the future.”
“So he made you live forever by accident?”
“He thought agelessness would be proof enough to convince me. Even the gods must’ve thought I’d change my mind, or they wouldn’t have agreed to the wish.”
“You live because you’re an atheist then.”
“Because they aren’t gods. They’re powerful, unknown beings, but they aren’t divine.”
Marco paused mid-step. “Does anyone else live the way you do?”
The Baron stopped and faced him. “Are you asking if anyone has the same kind of immortality?”
“Yes, sir.”
“No. I’m unique, the first and last of my kind. The gods are fallible and people find holes in the system, but if the exploit is severe enough, the gods change the rules to close up the loophole.” The Baron patted Marco on the shoulder to get him moving again. “Take my example. I proved that conditional wishes could accidentally lead to immortality, so you can no longer make wishes of that kind. That’s the Fall of Trust.”
“It’s a fall from grace,” Phyllis clarified. “It’s like the Fall of Man in the Bible. The Baron sinned against the system by exploiting its gracious implementation.”
“It was an accident,” the Baron insisted.
“You were accidentally stubborn enough to throw away letters from hundreds of Oracles across Europe?” the Zombie asked. “Accidentally thick-headed, maybe.”
The Baron grinned. “Böhme’s accident, my friend. Not mine.”
Phyllis continued talking to Marco. “Before the Fall of Trust, you could wish that if something happened, then your wish came true. After the Fall, conditional wishes were banned. We couldn’t trust that someone would fulfill every condition. Old wishes were grandfathered in however, so as long as the Baron keeps his own philosophy, he’ll remain young. Tough.”
“I have no reason to lose my way,” the Baron added.
Phyllis smiled. “For what it’s worth, Marco, the Apostate wrote that the Baron was a friendly zealot. A sane man would’ve believed by now.”
“I’m attached to skepticism!” the Baron declared.
“You’ve told me what you believe,” the Zombie said. “You’re attached to science-fiction.”
“Ha! Not as much as you.”
“I still believe they’re gods.”
“But you hope they aren’t!”
“Hope? Don’t you mean pray?” the Zombie joked. “They’re gods after all.”
The Baron and Phyllis laughed, while Marco gave them both a confused stare. “There’s really nobody else like you on Earth?” he asked.
“Nobody,” the Baron answered. “I’m not just any baron. In the system of prestige, I’m the Baron.”
“And I’m the Zombie,” the Zombie said.
“I’m just Phyllis,” the Artemisian added wryly.
That last joke was lame enough to make Marco crack a smile.
They crossed over the peak of the hill and hit an intersection crossing a one-way road, with all four lanes of traffic heading south. This place formed both a main artery of the neighborhood and a natural commercial district. An afternoon shopping crowd was streaming along the sidewalks, visibly doubled by the vertical ponds of the storefront windows. The colors of cars and passersby reflected in them fluidly, streaming along like oil on water.
Maybe a century ago, this wide road must’ve been a dirt track following the shallow spine of a ridge. It stretched from the nearby lowlands up a shallow slope to the broad summit, where old admin buildings stood only a little higher than the surrounding landscape.
Down the hill, about a mile from the summit, taxis clustered around an underground train station. Like an ant trail, people were following implicit and signalled directions, carrying packages in and out of the hole in the Earth.
The Baron halted at the intersection. “I need everyone to be on the lookout for suspicious behavior. This is one of the stations close to the apartments, and if Malik is half as good as I think he is, he’ll have placed people to pick up our trail around here.”
“Why?” Phyllis asked. “We could’ve taken a car for all he knew.”
“Don’t underestimate the level of surveillance he could muster. The Soviets are well-organized and state-funded—Stalin is both Soviet Premier and Chairman of the Soviet Cult. If he’s putting resources behind their Bolshevik agents, then we’re talking prop planes with spies in them, long-distance observation—whatever it takes.”
“Spy planes?” Phyllis reflected on that. “Ok, for the Cat o’ Nine Lives, yes.”
“Exactly. Denisov thought they’d have no manpower on the ground, but look at what happened—Malik called up a fifth column of sleeper agents, apparently cultists to the man. I wouldn’t be surprised if the CPUSA members we saw were all New York vassals. I doubt it’d cost them much to put a man or two on every station to watch for us.”
“So what’s the call?” Phyllis asked.
“Avoid them if we can.”
She hummed thoughtfully, glowering. “If they’re well-prepared, wouldn’t they just inform the next tail somewhere down the line? If we see anyone, I think we should take them out, then backtrack, and find a different route.”
The Zombie was delighted. “Take them out?”
“No killing,” Phyllis and the Baron said at the same time.
“There are many ways to stop a man without murdering him,” the Zombie said with an air of condescension. “Some of them are even fun.”
“I’d just like to get this thing out of me and go home,” Marco said. “Mom needs to know what happened, and pop needs a burial. Who do you even call to make that happen?”
“We’ll worry about arrangements for your father,” the Baron said, “but first I need to make sure you get out alive before CPUSA manages to kill you.”
“Wait, what?” Marco asked. “They don’t know that I have it, do they?”
“No, but killing everyone around us is the easiest way to test for the Cat,” the Zombie said.
“Oh…” That revelation visibly weighed on Marco.
They started downhill on the left side of the road, moving against uptown foot traffic. They weren’t causing a disturbance—many people were pushing against the flow—but the natural snaking of movement around angry pedestrians, the pauses and meaningless apologies and excuses all added up to slower progress.
Even so, the Baron didn’t want to cross the main street and give anyone in a vehicle an excuse to try running them down. By forcing the crowd to thicken up around them, they were making it harder for possible CPUSA members to hit and run.
“We look paranoid,” Phyllis whispered.
“Thats because we are,” the Baron said, “and justifiably so.”
“Spread out a little, look casual.”
They all took one step apart, spacing to let people slip between them. The crowd was thickening with every step towards the subway station. Its presence would give CPUSA a lot of camouflage, but it’d force them to act discreetly. In a short range struggle, the Zombie was an absolutely superior force. Phyllis would also add a bit of uncertainty to the affair. Malik’s decision makers wouldn’t be able to cleanly pick out the “innocent” to test.
“If someone comes for you, step towards the Zombie,” the Baron muttered to Marco.
“What’re you expecting?” the Zombie asked conversationally. “Knife?”
“Talk quietly,” Phyllis ordered softly.
The Baron answered the Zombie’s question, talking at a level just barely audible above traffic and footfalls. “Watch for a close range stabbing. They won’t shy away from murder. Remember, they don’t want witnesses, but desperation is the father of necessity.”
“Don’t you mean ‘mother of invention?’” Phyllis asked.
“Sure, but I don’t think they’ll be inventing anything. Odds are good the attack will be as cliche as it gets.”
They were about halfway down the block now. Beat cops were idly watching the road and chatting with white shoppers. The sparse immigrants and blacks averted their eyes, a behavior beaten into them by a lifetime of betrayed trust, by the blind eyes of authority overlooking them whenever they were victims of organized crime.
The Baron met the policemen’s bored expressions with a gentlemanly smile, though the rest of his companions looked away. Marco was Italian. The Zombie was busy looking for things to fight. Phyllis was clearly on guard.
Down at the end of the block, a man in a captain’s uniform was idly chatting with the drivers of an emergency ambulance, a white-and-red box coach. There wasn’t anyone hurt in the area. They were simply idling by the curb, discussing something from earlier in the day.
The captain looked up the street twice, directly at the Baron. They didn’t make eye contact, and it was more than a hundred feet away, but the Baron could sense the recognition. There was something unusual about the man’s gait. He paused his conversation with the ambulance drivers and lifted up a radio to exchange a few quiet words.
“That man,” the Baron said, “police captain. He sighted us for someone.”
“You sure?” Phyllis asked.
“I’m sure. He’s the only one looking for someone.”
“Okay,” she muttered. “Do we want to cross the street?”
“That’d just confirm who is with us.” The Baron felt a chill sweep across his scalp. He held out a hand to stop Marco. “Do you feel that? It wasn’t just my imagination?”
A passing lady with exposed calves asked aloud: “A cold front?”
“Feels like it,” Marco answered, mostly speaking to himself.
The temperature continued to drop. The Baron could feel the moist air of spring disappearing into the sharp bite of winter. He touched his bare head. Chilled water was beading on his skin. On windows up and down the street, a thin film of frost spontaneously sublimated.
“You can’t make that much air cold,” Phyllis said quietly.
“Zombie?” the Baron asked.
The invincible man grunted. “Never seen anything like it.”
“That’s so much prestige.” The Baron’s last word was muffled, as if all sound were being dampened by a pillow. The whole street was quiet, heard from across some gulf of open, silent air. They might as well be on the far side of a canyon from the world, but it wasn’t true silence either. The atmosphere was positively frigid for an instant, cold like a still winter morning, dead of life and activity. The Baron had never felt anything exactly like it.
There was a sound like the gentle crack of a gas bottle being opened. Again, and again, three times total. Marco’s back splashed like flesh was made of jelly. Three tidy spurts of tissue, not red but pink, disintegrating muscle. His shirt fluttered neatly. They weren’t grand hits. There wasn’t much noise. If the Baron hadn’t been watching, he wouldn’t have seen anything.
Marco croaked, the air knocked out of him.
Phyllis hadn’t even noticed yet. Her eyes were on the sky.
One second passed. Two seconds. The Baron was shoving Marco to the ground too late. The spring warmth suddenly blustered into being, the static grip on the atmosphere was finally relieved. Water ran in tiny droplets down glass and dried away.
“Get down!” the Baron roared.
The thundercrack of three shots, fired almost five seconds ago, finally reached them. The pedestrians around them shouted and screamed, scattering, an uproar that hurt the ears.
“Up the hill!” the Zombie shouted over the din.
The Baron swept about. Over a mile away—tiny at this distance—a rifleman was standing at the peak of the hill in the middle of an expanding shockwave of panicked civilians. They’d been running for some seconds already, having seen the man uncover, aim, and fire a rifle three times. This sniper threw down his weapon and jumped into an idling vehicle. Beat cops were running for their squad cars.
Bullets, likely .30-06 rounds, were hypersonic. They easily outraced the sounds of gunfire over such tremendous distances. The Baron would think of all this later, processing the moment over and over, but at that instant, he recognized only one thing. The air had chilled because the sniper had wished for perfectly still conditions. No crossbreeze had disturbed those shots. The sheer scale of it all, and in public! Years of prestige had been spent to kill a boy.
Marco gurgled wetly, face down against the walk, and all other concerns fled the Baron. He squatted over the fallen teen, grabbed one of the holes in the back of his shirt, and tore the cloth wide open. The edges of his entry wounds were pulled in like puckered lips. Red rings of hemorrhaging skin were swelling visibly. Blood didn’t gush or run from the wounds. There was a slow, gentle upwell of fluid, filling a cavity beneath Marco’s shoulderblade. The dearth of blood wasn’t a good sign. The teenager was bleeding into a chest full of ruined organs.
“He’s shot?” Phyllis yelled to the Baron. She huddled down around the wounded teenager across from d’Holbach. “How bad?”
“At least one death!” The Baron leaned closer to Marco’s ear. “Start breathing, or it’ll count as two lives!”
Marco made a noise like someone squeezing air through an old bellows, then shuddered violently, forcing a dark gush of blood out of the clustered entry wounds.
“Is that near his heart?” Phyllis asked him.
“Above it. Major arteries.”
“Didn’t he swallow the Cat?”
“He’ll be on his feet in a second.” He slapped Marco on the good side of his back. “Breathe! Don’t asphyxiate!”
Marco tried again, and there was a sound like air being forced into a football bladder, a long wet, sour whine making its way through flapping bits of rubbery flesh.
A sudden sonorous noise interrupted them like the long howl of a steel wolf.
The Zombie was close behind the Baron. “Police captain, on the move!” he called. “Ambulance pulling around!”
“After the sniper?” the Baron asked, hoping that there wasn’t a secular problem running uphill to meet them. He pressed his hand on Marco’s flank, feeling the next wet pull of air. Breathing was already easier. They only needed a few seconds.
“You know they’re coming here,” the Zombie declared gravely.
The Baron glanced down the hill. The new threat was about thirty feet out—the captain that had noticed them just before the shooting started. He was wearing the colors of authority and secular state violence—a five-point peaked cap with a gold crest, a white shirt, a black jacket, and a black tie. For all they knew, he was also a spotter for the occult.
Dread drenched d’Holbach like a soak in the North Atlantic; if he was arrested, the Zombie might harm a lot of people before the New York Cult could arrange for his release. They needed to run. Marco needed to be on his feet seconds ago.
“Is this man shot?” the captain yelled, trotting to a halt just a few yards away.
The Baron didn’t answer him, concentrating on the boy. “Fight the pain, Marco! You’re alive! Will it, and move! Like the ancient warriors, move!”
The boy tried to speak and choked on every broken thing inside his body. No words followed, only a violent, hacking cough. Vibrant, living crimson spattered across the concrete.
The captain approached slowly, chest out, holding out a gloved palm at all of them. “Sir, ma’am, I’m going to need you to step back.” He had a holstered revolver on one side of his belt and a bulky field radio on the other.
“We know him!” Phyllis shouted at the captain.
The Zombie stepped past the Baron, providing a physical barrier to the officer’s approach. The captain stopped moving. The Zombie’s tattered clothes were more intimidating than words. Maybe the captain knew who the Zombie was.
“Marco,” the Baron pleaded with the downed teenager, “you’re not dying. Get up!”
The captain took two steps left, circling around the Zombie. “Sir, I’m with the New York Police Department. Step back!”
The terrible machine howl of the ambulance filled their world. The bulky coach pulled up against the curb beside them, its thunderous tone shifting low and deep. Time was up. The crisis had arrived. If anyone took Marco, there was no saving the boy from the Soviets. Their spies would find him in a hospital, murder him, and harvest the Cat.
So the Baron stood up and bellowed at the captain: “Stay away, officer!”
The Zombie stepped forward, backing up those words with every foot of his towering visage. The captain instantly took a step back.
The siren shut off, and two fit young men hopped out of the cab with white coats and white caps, donning pairs of blue latex gloves powdered in corn starch. They looked like off-service firefighters, just the kind of men who’d be on standby for medical services. One was large; the other, small, carrying a doctor’s bag in one hand.
“Recognize the Zombie?” the Baron shouted at the captain.
The police officer flinched, shrinking away from those words. It seemed increasingly certain that the man was at least trained in occult lore.
“Out of the way!” yelled the large medic. He deliberately barged into Phyllis, who was still kneeling, and shoved her off balance with his leg. “Move!”
“Fuck you!” Phyllis caught herself with one hand, barely keeping her balance.
The large medic planted his boot against her chestbone, and shoved again before she could stand. She half-stumbled, controlling her collapse until she landed on her bottom.
The Baron turned on the large medic. “You too! Step back, or else!” he threatened.
“Don’t you dare!” Phyllis roared, looking past the Baron.
d’Holbach turned around. The smaller medic jabbed the needle of a full syringe into the nape of Marco’s neck. Into the spine.
“Zombie!” the Baron roared, a rough, desperate cry that demanded violence.
Before anyone else could fully react, the smaller medic slammed the plunger, injecting the syringe’s contents with force. Then he jumped to his feet and sprinted exactly like a man should when the Zombie was already charging after him. An instant later, they were both running past the ambulance and into the road.
“What was that injection?” Phyllis shouted.
Marco clenched up violently, going into some kind of sudden spasm on the concrete. He smashed his nose against the walk, smearing another line of blood where his face dragged. What little air he’d brought into his lungs escaped with a single wet hack; then he seized up entirely, eyes opening wide in deathly panic.
“Poison!” the Baron shouted.
The captain swept in quickly and drew his revolver with his right hand, pointing the weapon at the Baron’s head. The Zombie was away; for an instant, such threats mattered.
“The Pact!” the Baron shouted.
“I told you to get back!” the police captain roared. “That’s an order!”
Marco began to relax, unfolding face first against the ground. The large medic kneeled over Marco and started to lift him under the shoulders, prepping him for a proper fireman’s carry—ill-named, since it was more often practiced as a soldier’s technique.
“Zombie!” the Baron cried, a completely different tone that begged for help.
“Last chance!” the police officer yelled. “Move!”
The Baron stepped back slowly, buying time. One step. Two. Three.
The smaller medic sprinted into view a few yards downhill, finishing a full arc around the ambulance before returning to the sidewalk. Already flagging, he tried to stop, lifting his hands and turning to “surrender,” but the Zombie caught up and playfully crossbarred him, flinging the man off his feet and onto his back. A meaty thud, a wheeze.
Laughing, the Zombie swiveled to help the Baron—and spotted the revolver. All smiles died, leaving behind a polar calm. “You’ll put that away,” the Zombie called. “Or else.”
“Everyone, stay where you are!” the captain shouted.
Around them, civilians were beginning to collect at ten paces, watching from the sidelines. They couldn’t know what was happening, but they could sense a conflict unfolding. Their glares could be felt on the Baron’s back. A policeman was their champion. A captain’s enemy was the people’s enemy. The growing crowd was catcalling.
“Get him out of here!”
“Help the boy!”
“Watch the coolie!”
“This’ll be peaceful!” the captain roared at the Baron, implicitly demanding a secular resolution that didn’t involve any further violence.
The large medic finished shifting Marco’s dead weight up over his shoulders. After a fatal poisoning, it might take the teen a minute or two to learn to move again. Enough time to lose him forever.
“They aren’t medics!” Phyllis yelled at the crowd, “He’s not a cop!”
The Baron couldn’t wait any longer. He took one step back towards the captain, gambling on aggression. “You can’t shoot me,” he declared.
The captain lifted his revolver, glancing at the Zombie.
The Baron pressed on. “If I die, you’ll die, everyone you know will die—”
“Shut up!” the captain bellowed at the top of his lungs.
“Everyone they know will die. The city will burn—”
The captain aimed the revolver again. “I said shut up!”
“I’m begging you to consider what’s at stake.”
The Baron’s attention was split, even as he pleaded for sanity. While arguing with the officer, the smaller medic had risen to his feet, dazed. Then he’d jogged well around the conflict and arrived at the ambulance in time to pull the stretcher out for the large medic.
In seconds, they’d lay Marco down, buckle him up, and shove him into the back for transport. This was the worst case, but the Zombie wouldn’t move to stop them, not so long as there was a gun trained on his vulnerable friend.
“We can’t let you take him,” the Baron said.
“You don’t have a choice!” the captain snapped back.
“I could keep coming. You can’t stop me.”
The captain was sweating. “If I have to shoot you, it’ll be on your head! All those lives on your head, Baron!” So there it was—the masquerade was dropped because Marco was laid down on the stretcher. “We’re taking him. We have the authority here.”
The Baron waited. Phyllis was yelling at the crowd, telling them that the medics were kidnappers. The story was too fantastic to believe, but they couldn’t ignore her either. The Zombie was frozen in place. The Baron suspected he’d have to make the opening move. Once events were in motion, the Zombie would do the rest.
“Zombie, if anything happens, you have my permission to go wild,” the Baron said.
“Nothing will happen,” the captain insisted.
On cue, new sirens began to scream.
“Others on the way!” Phyllis shouted.
Some of the other cops uphill had noticed the confrontation and were making their way down, squad cars droning like air raid sirens.
The Baron had reached the limits of peaceful confrontation. If he attacked, he was gambling with his life and thus the lives of everyone around him, but he couldn’t wait. There wasn’t any more time. Tied to a stretcher, Marco’s limp body was shoved into the ambulance.
The Baron had to make a move. If his intent was clear and the wish was obvious to all, then his words could be brief. The secrecy of the public would hold. Anticipation was key.
The back door slammed shut. The captain glanced at the vehicle.
The Baron charged, bellowing his wish at the revolver, “Misfire!”
Author’s Note:
Death is defied, but it hurts. Oh, how the body screams!
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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