Prophet, p.42
Prophet, page 42
“Shit,” Rao exclaims.
“What?”
“I could have . . . before, you know? Done this before.”
Adam looks at him. “Let’s take five, Rao.”
They sit for a while, backs against the wall like the corpses a few feet to their right. Rao doesn’t look at them. Stares instead at the staples and spent casings littering the floor, the trail of smeared blood with Adam’s boot prints tracked through it. And he wonders why in hell he feels fine.
“I should be more freaked out,” he says suddenly. “But watching that, it was like . . .”
“Watching a movie.”
“Yeah. Exactly. The Thing, to be specific. I saw that when I was thirteen and didn’t sleep for a fortnight. The head on the table, the spider with the legs.”
Adam smiles. “It was like that, yeah.”
“But a teacher.”
“Substitute teacher.”
Rao snorts. “Fucking hell, love. Are you always this funny when staring death in the face?”
A sidelong look, amused. Then the faintest narrowing of eyes. “How are you feeling, Rao?”
“Less frightened than I have any right to be. Is this adrenaline? Is this why you always look so resigned? You feel like this all the time?”
“How are you feeling, Rao?”
“Why are you asking?”
“Your pupils are blown.”
“It’s dark in here.”
“No, it isn’t. But . . . you look steady. You solid?”
“Yeah, I’m good. Where’s Rhodes?”
“No idea.”
“We should look for her.”
“No, we shouldn’t.”
“Leave no man behind?”
“She’s not my concern.”
“Adam—”
“Rhodes can look out for herself.”
“So what now?”
“We find De Witte.”
CHAPTER 72
Deeper in, the corridors are grim. The light feels singed, flutters arrhythmically. For a while the walls and ceilings are brown velvet, the floor beneath their feet buttoned like leather upholstery. For twenty feet, the stench of roses is so overpowering that Rao is forced to hold his breath; even Adam gags. A small plush purple platypus dragging itself towards them on yellow felt flippers gets pinned to the ground by one of Adam’s knives and is left there, squeaking in protest.
Then follows a stretch of wood panelling punctuated with the silver of malformed sporting trophies, which turns, a few yards farther on, into a mess of beige computer casings bled into brickwork, scraps of glossy black screens winking with green DOS prompts.
The first door they try opens into a spacious storage area. Bare walls, a stack of containers and shelves. In the middle of the vinyl floor a heap of brightly coloured Tamagotchis squirm against their own chains. The noise inside the room is atrocious, an ear-splitting mess of voices, advertising jingles, laughter, snatches of Sugar, Sugar, the NASA Quindar tone, screams from fairground rides. It cuts out as soon as the door is closed.
The next door is faced with a sheet of polished copper.
“RadSafe counting room,” Rao announces.
“Yeah. The engineer.”
She’s lying in the middle of the floor, a small, broken corpse in a white coat, a hazmat mask next to her, her phone still gripped tightly in one hand. Around her, equidistantly spaced, a grid, a perfect array of green plush worms with nightcaps and glowing plastic faces.
“Night-lights,” Rao says. “I had one of these. Fuck. Fuck,” he adds. There are lights beneath the engineer’s skin. Inside her arms, her torso, inside her face. The grid of glowworms manifested itself right through her. He stares, swallows back something like an apology. This death is worse, somehow, than Monty’s. Worse than any dealt by the horrors back there. It’s so quiet. She looks so terribly alone.
The following room is dark and dense with fog. Dripping water. Smells like fall. Banks of flat-screens flicker with static CRT snow. Adam switches on his flashlight. The beam picks out a column of bark half buried in the far wall, and above and around it a tangle of branches with serrated grey leaves and shining fruit.
Rao speaks through the hiss of white noise that sounds like heavy rain.
“Fuck, it’s De Witte.”
He’s on his knees beneath one of the branches, head bowed, hair dishevelled and damp. Both hands are high above his head, clutching an apple he’d reached for, the branch bowed with his weight. His fingers are golden, fused with the apple, spotted with pores and pits, the backs of his hands bulging horribly. Adam crouches, lifts two fingers to De Witte’s throat. Rao thinks of Ed dying in the mud. Thinks of the men in cells in Kabul they kept like this, for longer than this.
“Lucky he didn’t get full-body contact,” Adam’s saying. “His hands are gone but his pulse is strong. I’ll get out of the way so you can—”
“Adam.”
Adam raises his eyes.
“This isn’t why I came.”
“You don’t want to cure him?”
“Nah. Never wanted to in the first place. Man’s a cunt. War criminal. Wants to take over the world. But that’s not what I mean. Helping him isn’t why I’m here.” Adam opens his mouth to speak, and Rao raises a hand to hush him. “Don’t hold up your fingers and ask me to count them, love. It’s the twenty-seventh of November, 2010, and I know who you are, and I know who the president is, and I continue to know what’s true and what isn’t. With the usual exception. It’s just,” he points at De Witte, “he is not why I’m here.”
“Ok,” Adam says, rising to his feet. “What’s your personal objective?”
Rao reaches for an answer. He can’t find one. He’s pinging between the meanings of the terms “immanent” and “imminent” in his head, and he can’t get past them to where the knowledge is. “There aren’t words for it,” he says shortly. “I know how that sounds but trust me. All I know is it was out there. I mean, it’s out there.” He gestures behind him. “Also, if I fix De Witte now, he’s just going to be another thing for you to worry about, because from what I’ve heard he’s a super-high-maintenance asshole, and that’s before spending three days hanging from a tree.”
Adam’s lips twitch. “Ok. We’ll come back for him when you’ve completed your objective. Please inform me when you know what that objective is.”
“Don’t nag, love. I’ll let you know.”
Adam smiles at that, glances up at the tree. Frowns. Looks more closely. “Huh,” he says. “These apples aren’t apples.”
“No shit.”
“They’re gold. I think they’re gold.”
“Yeah,” Rao says. “Hesperides. Doesn’t surprise me in the least. You’re not thinking of pocketing a few?”
Adam snorts. “Fuck off.”
“Yes, let’s.” Rao loves it when Adam swears like that. “Things to do, places to be.”
“Right. You just don’t know what they are.”
“You’re nagging.”
“No, just stating the facts, Rao.” They’re both grinning. The disaster this mission’s become, their walking away from De Witte, shock, adrenaline, Prophet in the air: this sudden surge of elation could come from any of those things and all of them. Rao feels peculiarly porous, permeable. Wonders if Adam’s caught this mood from him. The elation is a full-on champagne-bubbles birthday morning coming-up high, and it’s making whatever Rao needs to do so exquisitely alluring it’s hard not to bolt from the room and run to find it.
But he feels it before he hears it.
Feels it in his head, like in the diner.
Ed’s gone. Ed’s gone, and that stings inside him, and Nancy’s gone, and Roberts is gone, and the others, too, and Polheath is done. Though somewhere, he knows, Polheath is still happening.
But it’s not Sinatra he’s hearing now.
Adam’s already looking at the source of the music. His gun is drawn but pointed down. It’s a song. A simple song, sung by someone who’s not good at singing. At the end of the corridor is an archway deep enough to be a tunnel and emerging from it is a man in his midforties with greying hair. He looks untouched by any telltales. At first, Rao thinks this man walking towards them, smiling and singing, shrugging off his jacket, must be immune.
But that’s not true. He knows that isn’t true.
And the words of the song he’s hearing are—
Rao shakes his head. He understands the words perfectly, knows what the man is singing, but the words he’s using aren’t English.
No, they are. They’re definitely English but they’re also every language he’s ever spoken, ever heard, ever heard of, all at once. Each word resonates like . . . Rao thinks of how texts have described the inhuman voices of angels as the man walks easily towards him. He’s singing to Rao. He’s singing for Rao. Singing about how the weather in the neighbourhood is perfect. Asking if Rao would be his . . . if Rao could be his. The words sound like a seduction, but not the usual kind. Rao’s being sung to like he’s a child.
The man tilts his head. He shrugs off his jacket, lets it fall to the ground. Rao watches it drop and crumple onto the concrete, and when he looks back up, the singing man is holding a cardigan so red it hurts Rao’s eyes. Technicolor.
Rao glances at Adam. He’s frozen in horror. Which is impossible. Adam doesn’t get horrified. Bare minutes ago, they watched a man get eaten by a training bike. That was horrifying. Adam’s mouth is moving, silently mouthing the words to the song like he knows it by heart.
“Adam,” Rao says.
Adam lowers his weapon as the singing man approaches. Silvered hair, brushed to one side. Salt and pepper eyebrows. He’s the most charming person Rao has ever seen. But it isn’t charm. Rao isn’t charmed. The man’s smile is warm in a way that speaks of absolute safety. Seeing it, Rao can relax. Like he’s just walked through the door after a cold day, like his mum is in the kitchen cooking dinner and his dad is watching the telly too loudly. Safe, familiar, welcome. Warm. All in a smile.
The man is still singing. He sings of the day, how beautiful it is, how it belongs to them, how it’s theirs to make the most of. He zips up his cardigan gleefully. When Adam shakes out a breath, it takes everything Rao has to look away from this serenade to check on him. Now the horror is gone from Adam’s face. He looks—
Adam looks—
He looks like he does when he’s sleeping. He looks like he does moments after he laughs. Glimpses of what happiness might look like on Adam’s face.
The song continues. The man is still asking Rao to be his, now they are together again.
Adam’s expression shifts. Rao feels it too. A pull to this man. A desperate longing for the welcoming safety his presence offers. Prophet, Rao thinks. Knows. No threat but Prophet.
Now the man halts. He’s standing in front of Rao, eyes twinkling. That red cardigan is grafted to his skin at his neck. He’s not human. But he’s not a telltale. This man is different. And he’s not perfect. Stupidly, wildly, Rao knows he could have done a better job. He could have made this man perfectly.
The smile on the man’s face is softer now, as he croons another plea for Rao to be his neighbour. He offers his hand. Adam inhales sharply. All the air is gone from Rao’s lungs.
The man speaks, then. A normal voice. Friendly. American. Warm, welcome, familiar. Safe.
He’s glad, he tells Rao, they’re together again.
Rao takes his hand.
There’s Prophet in this man, and it is drawn into Rao. Bigger and badder this time. Silver behind his vision for a breath, forever, for a second. He stands, dizzy and solid, hears a soft thud.
It takes too long, this time, to blink himself back into the room.
Mercury, he reminds himself.
Adam, he remembers.
Adam’s kneeling by the body of the man Prophet made. “Rao,” he’s saying, far away. Distant. Muffled like tinnitus. Underwater. In the past. Far in the future. Right now, he reminds himself. They’re both right here, and it’s now. “Did you just kill Mister Rogers?”
“Did you know him, love?”
Adam looks up at him, mouth open.
“Adam. He came from there. It’s in there. He was welcoming me.”
The door’s green paint has curled back in hexagonal patterns to reveal the steel beneath. Very cautiously, Adam walks up, brushes its surface with the back of one hand.
“It’s here,” Rao says.
“This is what you want?”
“Yeah. It’s where I need to be.”
Adam’s face contorts briefly. He lifts a hand to the side of his face, heel to ear. The tips of his fingers pale with pressure as he pushes them hard against his helmet. “I’m going in,” he says. “Stay here.” Sliding the door open, he slips through. But Rao can’t wait. The draw of the room beyond is inexorable, and it’s agony that Adam’s out of his sight. He steps over the threshold into the hot bay.
CHAPTER 73
It’s cavernous. Vast. An aircraft hangar. It tastes sacred. A temple. A cathedral. It’s crushingly silent but singing with noise too deep to hear, a cacophony so appallingly loud Rao’s chest hurts with it. Adam’s a silhouette in winter light. His jaw has dropped. His eyes are wide. He’s holstered his pistol. Knows there’s nothing a firearm could do against this. He doesn’t move, doesn’t budge an inch even when Rao stands against him, shoulder to shoulder.
“Is all this—” Adam’s voice is muffled like he’s speaking into falling snow.
“Yes, love.”
Every inch of the hall is covered with Prophet. It resembles metallic rime ice, flocked lace. Veins. Branches. The threading map of a ravenous fungus. For a moment, Rao’s back in Ranthambore, walking in the groves of the banyan tree through slanting sun. His eyes slip across the buried shapes of Lunastus’s storage system along the nearside wall. Prophet’s slumped over them in drifts, over the far doors, obscuring the inspection windows, furring the pipework, the mezzanine, blanketing the numerous corpses spread across the floor. Rao blinks back what feels like blindness, hears Adam’s voice.
“What did you say?” he asks.
“What’s the plan,” Adam repeats.
“The plan.”
“Yes. Is there a plan?”
That’s funny. It’s genuinely funny, and Rao can’t hold back the laugh it provokes. It feels like the struggle for breath after a storm of tears.
“I think there is a plan, love,” he says. “But it isn’t mine.”
“Rao, we should go.”
Rao looks at him, laughter gone.
“I can’t.”
“You can. Come on.”
He’s standing oddly, one foot pointed slightly inwards, hands crooked and shaking by his sides.
“I can’t,” he says again.
It’s that point inside him. The tiny point buried deep inside. The cold. It’s opened its arms and is beckoning everything in. He feels a desperate flash of refusal that’s summarily dismissed, and he breathes in once and breathes out once, and knows exactly what he is. What he’s for. Funny, he thinks. I always knew. An absurd memory of the moustached face of his career counsellor at school, the one who told him that his questionnaire showed he wanted to help people, and maybe he should consider medical school or joining the police, fast track. And Rao had shaken his head then, amused as all hell, and he’s shaking his head now, but there’s no amusement. He’s recoiling from what’s happening to him, but he can’t stop it. The cold has opened its arms and it is beckoning everything in.
*
Adam has to blink. He blinks, and then he can’t open his eyes. But he sees it all anyway. Like the afterimage of staring at the sun, the sight burns bright and close and terrible against his lids. All the Prophet in the hot bay changes state at once. It slips liquid as running glass, soft as frost on a frozen vodka bottle. Runs along the floor, slides from the ceiling, pours down the walls, flows toward Rao like it’s being pulled by gravity.
It’s falling into him. Adam’s eyes jerk open and he can’t shut them. He wants to. Both Rao’s hands are held out from his sides. Sinuous ropes of Prophet are streaming up to them from the floor. His head is thrown back, mouth wide, and there’s no sound but still Adam can hear him scream, and when Prophet reaches his chest and throat, it pours into his mouth and with a sickening curl like a silvered fishtail slipping underwater the last of it disappears inside.
It’s all in him.
He’s still standing. His head is bowed like he’s at prayer, his chest is heaving, and there’s no Prophet anywhere. The room is empty, and Rao is—
How can it all be in him? How?
Rao raises his head and looks toward Adam. Not at him. His eyes are far away. There’s blood around his mouth. It’s terrible to see Rao’s face so still, so devoid of expression.
“Rao—” Adam begins.
“Everything’s going to be fine. Wait there.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Rao shuts his eyes. His face is animated again. “I can’t know, can I?” The laugh is low, delighted, conspiratorial, the laugh in the motel with the lizard. But there’s something in it screwed right to the limit. “So that’s why,” he says. “Fuck.”
A pause. “Fuck,” he says again. Low, astounded. He’s not talking to Adam.
“Rao?”
Rao raises a hand. “Hang on, love, just wait. Be with you in a second.” His voice is precise, teetering on the edge of laughter. His punch-drunk voice. He grins. It’s a brilliant smile. But his open eyes are dully shining metal, and the tears falling from them are beads of mercury, disappearing into his skin as they track down his cheeks.
Is he blind now? He’s working through how this will impact his exfil in the rapidly narrowing window in which both of them survive when he sees Rao’s eyes clear. They’re dark now, and steady, and they’re looking right at him, but the sight is almost worse. Adam thinks of the time in basic when an idiot kid jokingly put an unloaded M9 to his own head, everyone laughing. Everyone laughing but Adam because he’d seen something far too true in the kid’s eyes.
