Fifty-one
He had been shot once in the back. There wasn’t much blood because the round had gone through his heart, stopping it in an instant. He hadn’t drawn his weapon. Taylor Pipes had been smart and quick, not a guy who allowed himself to be shot from behind.
The room in which he’d met his end measured perhaps ten feet from the door by which I’d entered to the front wall of the fun house, maybe twenty-five feet from side to side. I was behind the head of the ogre, looking at a reverse mold of the beastly face. From the midway, you couldn’t discern that it had been cast in two pieces, but from this perspective, the joining bolts and the center seam were evident. The backs of the eyeballs, which rolled ominously when the face came to life, were maybe six feet above me, and the mouth just above floor level.
In addition to the door beyond which lay the ladder to the high gray corridor, four other doors offered choices, a pair that flanked the first, and one at each end of the space. Between the doors were trick mirrors. In this one, I swelled fat. In the next, I shrank thin as a pencil. Here, I stood with a huge head and diminutive body. There, I had an immense body and a head no bigger than a baseball. In another, my body and head were sinuous, twisting, as if I were a vaporous genie writhing out of a well-rubbed lamp. In every mirror, I bled from my left hand, and in every mirror, I held the Glock in my right.
I assumed the four doors through which I had not entered all led to different sections of the maze and that patrons returned more than once to this space behind the ogre’s head as they tried to find their way out. The cultist who had taken Taylor by surprise might have left the fun house for some reason or he might still be lurking elsewhere within it. In either case, there were five doors by which he could return at any moment.
Turning from the last mirror, I saw what had been so important to me in the dream of the amaranth: what I had thought of as the urn, a stainless-steel cylinder about half again as tall and half again as wide as a carton of milk.
The object stood beside a heavy-duty electric air compressor and associated equipment that, even to a mechanical ignoramus like me, couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than the source of the ogre’s blasts of breath that accompanied his roars of rage. A four-inch-diameter tube led from the compressor to the monster’s mouth.
The urn could be nothing else than a container of the weaponized rabies virus suspended in some medium that would efficiently convey it into the ogre’s exhalations, whereupon it would be spewed with force across the crowded concourse, through the happy bustling crowd, toward the many rides and the other attractions in the center of the midway. The medium would be odorless and tasteless but might appear as a faint mist.
Because Ozzie Boone had written a novel about a killer virus and because he was incapable of withholding from his friends the numerous fascinating details of the research he did for a novel, I knew a few things about viruses, just as I knew more than I ever wanted to know about bats, liver flukes, the incidence of psychopathic tendencies in clowns, and the capacity of hogs to be trained to kill.
Bacteria were exceedingly small creatures, but viruses were smaller still. Big viruses were one-fifth the size of the average bacterium, but the vast majority of them were orders of magnitude smaller. The flu virus measured eighty thousandths of a millionth of a meter in diameter. Viruses were so tiny, they couldn’t be seen with ordinary microscopes. Their structure wasn’t known until the invention of the electron microscope in 1933. Billions of viruses could fit into one drop of water.
Viruses have none of our five senses. But they have one sense, the only one they need: an unexplained ability to detect the chemical composition of the cell surface of whichever species make the best hosts for them. Detecting it, they are drawn to it. You might say that viruses have one sense, and that it is pretty much the same one that I call psychic magnetism.
For those who don’t believe the world is a mysterious and deeply layered place, brood on that awhile.
The urn could hold megatrillions of the weaponized rabies virus, enough perhaps to infect the entire population of the planet. Pico Mundo might be the locus from which a plague spread across several counties in California and Nevada before being contained, or across the nation, or across the world.
From the top of that shiny cylinder of death sprouted a nozzle encircled by what appeared to be a rotating petcock currently in the closed position. A rubber tube connected the nozzle to a hole that had been drilled in the four-inch-diameter out-feed pipe through which the compressor released jets of the ogre’s breath into the world beyond.
I knelt beside the cylinder and was about to pluck that tube from the nozzle when the door at the west end of the room flew open and a little man appeared there. Lou Donatella wasn’t dressed as a bear cub this time, but pretty much like me, except that he had the good taste not to wear a powder-blue sport coat. Holding the pistol in a two-hand grip, he squeezed off three shots, killing the man behind me, who I had not heard come out of one of the other doors.
More often than I could count in my eventful life, I had been taken by surprise, but never more so than by Lou’s in-the-nick-of-time arrival. After our brief encounter in the carnie campground, he had decided to ally himself with me.
Our eyes met in shared amazement and astonishment, which were not the same thing, which I knew to be true because Ozzie Boone had explained the difference to me.
When he spoke, Lou revealed that he possessed psychic abilities, as I had thought that he might: “I foresaw this much, but not what comes next.”
I tore the rubber tube from the urn just as one of the mirrors, which proved to be a hidden door, flew open like the lid of a jack-in-the-box, and a cultist shot me. Lou shot the cultist, and in turn the cultist shot Lou dead. Although I’d taken a bullet in the right side of my chest and could not get my breath, I had the strength and balance to shoot the cultist, finishing the job that my short comrade had started.
Aside from dying, there was nothing left for me to do but take the stainless-steel cylinder, the urn in the amaranth dream, where the cultists couldn’t get their murderous hands on it, to Chief Wyatt Porter, who would know what to do, who always knew what to do, who was one of the two surrogate fathers who had always been there for me when my real father could not be bothered.