Pattern Black, page 11
“Tell me if I’m losing it,” Mason pled.
“Bitch, you ain’t even here.”
Preacher’s foot on his head was like the dropping of a shroud.
Black replaced white.
Then Mason was—
FIFTEEN
The Vacant Abyss
Mason. How many fingers?
He rose to the surface, unable to breathe, consciousness spreading like pooled water. Something deep in his gut told him he’d rather not rush to face whatever was waiting out there.
There’d been something a moment ago. A rotten memory he’d already forgotten, lingering behind him like a spook in the shadows. He shouldn’t take his mind off it lest it attack him.
Bitch, you ain’t even here.
But … the new memory. Which was to say, the old one.
Come on, Mason. Just one more time.
None. No fingers. You’re trying to fool me.
An elbow jabbed him in the ribs. His eyes jolted open, then the rest of his senses assaulted Mason at once. He heard an engine’s muted rumble, the thumping of tires on uneven road, the sway of something inside. Cold, hard metal beneath him — the edge of a bench biting his fingers as he reached down to grip it. The space smelled like sweat and anger, fateful decisions gone awry.
“Shaw. You paying attention?”
Mason looked at the speaker. Cruz, snapping his fingers.
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
He was supposed to respond. Instead, his eyes went to the lightbulb.
Hello lightness, my old friend.
Inside were a handful of filaments, their centers submerged in yellow wax. The glass was foggy and burnished. Beaten to hell by a lifetime of being screwed and unscrewed.
“Yes, I’m goddamn sure.”
“You look like shit.”
“I’m getting a little tired of everyone telling me that.”
Cruz looked at the others. “What?”
“I look like shit. Can we move on?”
Mason heard a voice in the back of his head, one he could no longer place. You walk the line. More command than observation.
“He’s hungover,” Watt laughed.
“Shut the fuck up, Frank.”
“What’s your problem?” Watt demanded.
They came for him, you know. Jus’ like they gonna come for you.
“My problem is I’m going to rob a fucking bank. How about you?”
“Easy, Shaw,” said Cruz.
“I have a headache. And I’m getting a little tired of …”
Of what?
“You just need to breathe,” said the tattoo-riddled woman, sitting right-side to the rear door.
“Leigh, right?”
“You okay?” she asked.
“Leigh D’Abo,” Mason said it like an item on a fancy French menu. “Is that your name? Or are you going to say, ‘I ain’t’?”
“What’s wrong with him?” asked Buster, by the cab.
Life was a double-exposed photo, and he could see both versions at once.
“Nothing’s wrong with me.” Mason busied himself with an untied shoelace.
“Maybe you should stay here,” Cruz suggested.
“What fun is that?”
The van rolled on. They hit a curb, then the occupants slid sideways on their seats.
As they composed themselves, Cruz glanced around and continued with seeming reluctance. “Once we’re inside, watch the corners. Buster, you go left. Shaw―”
“Mason,” Mason said. “My name is Mason.”
Cruz stopped, wondered, then looked at Buster, Leigh, Watt. Eventually, he went on. “Shaw, you go to the—”
“Just don’t shoot first.” Mason shook his head and muttered, “Fucking Buster.”
“Do you have a problem with me?” she asked.
If he focused hard, Mason could almost recall why he did, but his head wasn’t into thinking right now.
Cruz rattled, went on. “Shaw, you handle the guards to the right. By―”
“The poster.”
“That’s … Yeah.” He shot Mason a troubled glance then turned to Sasha. “You handle the manager. Thin woman, by the fat man. Until the jammer is set, she can still trigger the hard-wired alarm.”
“Do we even have a jammer?” Mason asked.
“What? Yeah. Sasha has it.”
“Can I see it?”
All eyes went to Sasha. She didn’t have a bag. Mason figured a jammer had to be at least big enough to require a backpack or a bulge, and Sasha had neither.
“D’Abo, you watch the doors,” Cruz continued.
Everyone braced, but the van didn’t hit anything. That part was over. But they all looked at one another anyway, the way people do when geese waddle across a row of graves.
“Watt. You handle the old lady.” Now Cruz sounded tentative. He paused for an interruption, but none came.
So, Mason decided to add, “Sasha. Manager. Shoot her in the face and take the key.”
“Now wait just a second … ”
There was a sound like jet engines roaring. Mason had time to realize, This is new. Then something struck the van hard enough to spin it in a circle and crumple the front end.
The driver’s arm squirted from the beer-can wreckage, no longer attached to his body.
The van jolted to a stop, the reek of burned rubber rising to the level of suffocation.
Mason looked at Buster, who was staring at the severed arm, but then she exploded as if her insides no longer wanted to stay inside. A hundred tiny round holes appeared in the wall behind her. A second later, Leigh and Sasha were slamming shoulders to the door in a rush to escape.
Mason followed. He piled into the daylight ― too bright and not hot enough, ski mask still tucked into his waistband. He gasped, unable to keep his feet moving. He’d seen what’d struck the van ― what’d turned its front end into an unsolvable Rubik’s. A massive speedboat. But that wasn’t even the odd part. A minigun was mounted to the vessel’s top — an M134 if Mason had to guess. Faster than an uzi.
A thin blonde in goggles behind the gun turned it on Watt.
He shouted something, then the gunner turned him into pulled pork.
“Go! Goooo!”
Cruz, panicked, waved the others toward the bank. Mason, watching with the eyes of a cop, found their decision idiotic. There was an alley right there. The gun was in a boat, for fuck’s sake. They weren’t going to give chase, but the hail of bullets could easily reach the lobby from where it was. Firing that fast and that often, the gunner would turn them to sushi in seconds.
Bullets chipped brick behind Mason. He ducked into the alley, pressed his back to the wall, then patted himself to see if he’d been hit. He was whole … fine …
Inside the bank’s lobby, strewn with customers and employees ducking for cover.
At first, Mason had no idea what to do. He’d gone to an alley, and now he was in the place he had so carefully avoided? Too much input, not enough time. Should he duck? Or stand and die?
“Mason!”
Leigh’s body, tattered seemingly of its own accord, glass raining behind her as the minigun coughed lead.
Then Cruz shouted, “MASON! COVER THE OLD LADY!”
Fuck the old lady.
He put his head down and bolted for the offices at the bank’s rear, for the door with the bright red handle.
Mason was through a second later, out the fire exit into the alley beyond.
He ran down the street, leaping felled trash cans, looking for a car. Any car.
Traffic ahead. At its front was a man in a suit behind the wheel of a Saab.
He remembered his weapon, trained it on the man after wrenching open the door. Reached for his badge, but of course, he wouldn’t carry it here. Still, as the man stumbled then fell to the pavement, Mason shouted, “Police business! I need your car!”
Then he dove through the door, planning to land on upholstery and hit the gas.
Instead, he struck the tile floor of the bank again, with that giant, Preacher, standing above. Had he seen him recently? It felt like they had unfinished business, but Mason couldn’t remember what or where, or when. Or who, come to think of it, “Preacher” even was.
Mason looked now, aware of the poisonous seconds. The giant’s clothes were too tight because they belonged to Cruz. He’d ripped through arms and legs like the Hulk, almost as if he’d come to life inside them rather than needing to don them.
Preacher reached down for Mason and picked him up by the collar. “You forget what I said already, bitch? Fuck. I ain’t even supposed to be here.”
Things were happening too fast. Mason could make no more sense of Preacher’s words than the world itself.
They came for him, you know.
Something exploded by the door. A metal frame flew past Mason, then collided with a desk. Glass filled the air in a rain of razors and shards. Blood tickled his skin.
Jus’ like they gonna come for you.
An enormous man appeared at the bank’s front holding the now-unmounted minigun, the ammo chain wrapped from waist to wrist.
He fired. Mason flinched, but the bullets only hit Preacher. On the ground, he looked Hispanic and was down to Cruz’s former weight.
Mason waited to die, but a second person walked past the gunman. The woman he’d seen firing the thing earlier. She passed him with the unmistakable aura of authority, surveying while her assassin awaited instructions. She was waif-thin ― diminutive next to the gunner — with hard cheekbones, alabaster skin, albino blonde hair — short and spiked. Sunglasses hid her eyes.
She took a step, reached into her pocket, then stopped, frozen like a statue, looking past Mason to something beyond.
A large arm wrapped around his throat from behind. Who was left? Sasha? Yes, she’d been wearing the little flashlight on her belt that Mason now saw in the corner of his eye.
Except Sasha was small and didn’t have such a deep voice. “Get me, and you get him. Eighty-nine, twenty, three. ‘I will crush his foes before him and strike down his adversaries.’”
The big man with the minigun moved its muzzle, looking for a shot. “It’s the outlier.”
“Shoot him,” said the woman. “He’s out of bodies.”
Preacher held him tighter, his breath hot in Mason’s ear as he repeated himself. “Get me, and you get him.” He laughed, then went on in a tone that was decidedly taunting and knowing. “You don’t know who you dealing with, and you ain’t even know who you got.”
The man with the gun looked at the woman. They both seemed to consider Preacher’s words. Then a light crossed the woman’s expression, her eyebrows drawing tight. She squinted at Mason. “Is that …?”
In Mason’s ear, Preacher whispered, “Thatta girl. You seein’ it now.”
Mason tried to turn, but Preacher held him bone-tight.
The woman kept staring. “That’s not Shaw.”
“Of course, it’s Shaw,” said the man with the gun.
“It’s not him, Ike.”
“Of course, it’s Shaw.” The same set of words said in exactly the same way. He sounded like a recording, as if someone had hit rewind.
“I’m not going to sit here and argue with myself, Ike.”
The gunner twitched. “It’s not Shaw.”
Preacher didn’t flinch, nor did he move. Everyone waited.
“Shoot him, anyway,” the woman ordered.
Mason clenched. But then someone shouted ― an insectile man with big round glasses, as covered in debris and dust as the rest of them, holding a tablet and rushing to be seen.
“Calliope! Wait!”
He showed his tablet to the woman. She raised a hand for the gunner. “Shit.”
Preacher grabbed the back of Mason’s skull, fingers like vises.
Mason saw stars. Then a white room filled with black circles, like a plague of locusts.
“I go,” Preacher said, “you go, too.”
“Sasha, huh?” Mason said.
“What?”
“Sasha was carrying a sidearm.”
But not just any sidearm. Sasha had been carrying a Glock, and it didn’t have a safety. Mason reached back, torquing his shoulder, and managed to grip the stock while it was still in the holster at Preacher’s side. He tilted it inward then pulled the trigger.
The round punched through Preacher’s leg, then he hopped away.
Mason boosted his momentum by kicking him in the side.
The gunner pricked the trigger. A metallic rattle filled the bank, and after the machine fell silent, Preacher — or perhaps Sasha — was no more.
Mason ran, waiting for a hail of bullets. None came, but he heard a metallic thud behind him as the massive man dropped his minigun to the floor.
He dodged fallen bodies as he headed for the employee lounge. Once inside, he realized he had nowhere else to go. No exits. Not even a closet.
The door banged open and the gunner, absent his weapon, entered with the blonde and four-eyes behind him.
“Take it easy,” the woman said.
Mason wished he’d been able to pinch the Glock from Sasha’s holster or that he’d survived that little mashup with his own gun in tow. As it was, he could only pace with them in circles, looking for a weapon his next best chance.
But this was already wrong, already off-script — Mason had never been here, despite being sure he had been.
“What’s your name?”
“Fuck you.”
“Are you Mason Shaw?”
“The fuck’s it matter to you?”
The big man flinched toward him, but Mason dodged behind a desk and grabbed a paperweight that felt like marble.
The woman raised a hand, its back toward the ex-gunner. “Do you know who I am?”
“How the hell should I know who you are?” But behind the mania inside his head, something had already struck him as wrong. Something one of them had said in the lobby. Something about the exact thing the woman just asked.
“I’m Calliope. Do you know that name?”
Someone had told him about a person named Calliope. Recently. But that was the mixing of worlds, and whatever knowledge Mason had uncovered elsewhere felt irrelevant here.
“I was your father’s contact,” the woman said.
Mason shook his head.
“Think, Mr. Shaw. Think back to what Carter may have said before he went away. It won’t come easy in here but try. We have …” She looked at a beat-up watch on her wrist, then said what struck him as a lie. “We have time.”
It took seconds, but an anemic memory found him.
“The hacker,” Mason said, still holding his paperweight. He had a line on the big guy, who so far felt like the only genuine threat. He could beat him if he had to. “You really exist?”
“That’s right. Your father was supposed to bring me something.”
“Good for him. He’s not fucking home right now.”
Calliope looked back to the man with the glasses. He glanced down at his tablet and said, “It’s definitely here.”
“Listen to me, Mason,” said the woman, her hand out, trying to pacify. “I don’t have time to explain, but your father had something we need. I think” — she glanced at her fellows — “I think you might be able to help us find him.”
“He’s dead.”
The woman turned again. They conversed in whispers. The only thing Mason clearly heard was the man with the glasses saying, “Thirty seconds.”
“I need you to lie down.”
Mason laughed. Feinted to one side, then surged to the other. Finding split-second aim, he flung the paperweight hard at the big man who’d been holding the minigun. It connected with a sick, wet crack, making his target stagger and shout.
Taking his chance, Mason tried to rush past. The man in glasses moved to block, but he had less confidence than your average napkin. Mason hit him in the throat.
He hurdled a set of plush chairs, but the woman blocked the doorway. Mason could easily take her, but as he lowered his shoulder, the gunner came up again with his nose raining gore then closed the distance.
Mason rushed anyway — no other options. He managed to knock one aside and another to the floor, then was halfway down the corridor when Four Eyes tackled him.
He hit the ground hard.
They turned him over.
The woman produced something that looked like a miniature scroll. She unrolled the thing and held it by a dowel at each end. Rather than parchment, Mason saw a plasticized material that shone like foil. Thin, light, and rolling through a rainbow of refracted colors.
She knelt. Moved the thing toward Mason’s face, still holding it by both ends as if planning to strangle him with a too-wide garrote.
He squirmed. Thrashed. She put her attention on him, making him still.
“What’s the first thing you remember?” she asked.
“Fucking your mother.”
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Fucking your mother!”
The blonde turned her head and spoke to the man with glasses. “Hold him still.”
With the big man pinning Mason to the floor, Four Eyes gripped him by the chin and the top of his head. A thumb got too close. He tried to bite it.
“Mason,” said the blonde. “It’s you who must decide.”
He shot a knee into the gunner’s crotch. The man gasped, and his eyes hardened, but he managed to flatten the offending leg again and hold on.
“You can come with us,” said the woman, unfazed. “Or you can stay with them.”
Shouting came from the front room, followed by a tremendous sound of detonating metal and glass. Was that SWAT arriving? Blowing in the windows? Cruz and the others had better watch out.
“You gonna kill me? Just get it over with.”
The gunner-man, still wincing, reached to the small of his back. He removed a handgun and shoved it against Mason’s forehead. But maybe it wasn’t a pistol. The thing looked fashioned from fence wire and chicken bones, with plated metal only for show.
“Put that away,” said the woman.
“He made his choice.”
“He doesn’t know what he’s choosing. Not like that. Not after the outlier.”
