“I love you,” she says.
He doesn’t answer. She reaches up, touches him. It’s like touching ice.
He’s dead. Charles is dead.
Then his jaw falls open.
“You’re ugly, Alex,” Charles says. “Scarred and ugly.”
It’s isn’t his voice. It’s Jack’s.
Charles becomes Jack, his features cracking and twisting, and then she’s standing over Alex with angry black eyes, pointing down at her like a vengeful god.
Alex reaches up, feels her own face, feels the scars.
And she’s afraid.
The pleasant field smell sours, becoming the acrid odor of sweat and fear. The gentle breeze goes rotten. The sun shines black.
Alex runs. Into the corn.
The corn grabs at her, tries to stop her. But Alex has a knife, and she cuts and slashes, and the corn cries out and bleeds, bright red arterial jets that sting like acid. Stalks morph into severed arms and legs, and Alex climbs up the bodies of the slaughtered, climbs up an ever-growing pile of people she has killed.
At the top of the mound is a face. Her face. Unscarred. It beckons her on.
Behind her, Jack grows to monstrous proportions, reaching out an enormous hand to pluck Alex away from her goal. Alex dodges, stabs at Jack’s huge thumb, then launches herself upward, hands outstretched and yearning.
Alex’s face is atop a pedestal, and she snatches it up and presses the perfect mask of flesh against her scars. It glows warm, then burning hot, shooting out rays that blind the Jack creature and cause her to tumble down the mountain.
And Alex smiles. Not a half smile. A full smile, all the muscles working, lips doing what they are supposed to, wide and bright and beautiful.
Then Alex begins to grow. Bigger than Jack. Bigger and stronger and almighty. She crushes the squealing lieutenant underfoot, her rib cage cracking like a bird’s nest.
For miles around Alex, the corn trembles and begs for mercy.
Alex’s blade stretches and curves, becoming a scythe.
As the world screams, Alex reaps.
CHAPTER 27
“I GOT NOTHING, SIS.”
I rubbed my eyes, which felt like I had sand under the lids. We were parked in an all-night diner lot, which was half-full even at five in the morning. I’d gone in earlier, not to eat but to borrow a phone book. Now I wished I’d eaten. The salsa-less tortilla chips and five sticks of jerky hadn’t done much to satisfy my hunger.
“Try searching for motel plus Zd plus Wisconsin,” I told Harry.
“I tried that. I’ve tried every possible Boolean search combination, and I don’t even know what Boolean means. Plus I’m exhausted. The only thing keeping me awake is this case of SuperMax Energy Drink I got at the discount store. What the hell is taurine anyway?”
“We’re all tired, McGlade. Try pinching yourself.”
“Does that work?”
“No. But it will amuse me.”
“Funny, Jackie. We’ve got half an hour left. Maybe the Milwaukee PD has found him already.”
“Milwaukee cops find him?” I asked Phin.
Phin shook his head. Naturally, Phin owned a police scanner. He was using an earpiece to listen in so the radio chatter didn’t interfere with my phone call. I was using Alex’s cell, because it was pretty much trace-proof. No doubt the Feebies were tracking my personal cell.
I yawned. “Did you try another search engine?”
“I’m using an aggregator that searches all the top search engines, including foreign ones. I’ve found some pretty horrible things, Jackie. Do you know what a brass clown is?”
“No. And have no desire to find out.”
“It’s this sex thing. But it isn’t really sexual, unless you’re some sort of sicko nutjob. You take a cup. Guess what you do with the cup?”
“I don’t want to know what you do with the cup, and if you try to tell me I’ll hang up on you.”
“I wish I could do a system restore on my brain and go back to a time before I saw it. There are certain foods I can no longer eat.”
For the fiftieth time I fought the temptation to drive to the nearest motel and start randomly searching rooms. With several hundred hotels within ten square miles, the odds weren’t with us. Much better to stay centrally located and be ready to move when we got some information.
The problem was, we had no information. And I held out little hope that Alex would call back with a last-minute hint. The next time she called, it would be to send pictures of David Strang with his head blown off.
“Think Alex fucked him?” Harry asked.
“Not sure if it matters, McGlade.”
“Maybe it does. What if there was some sixty-nine action going on?”
“What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“A lot. If she was on top, she could have written the letters upside-down.”
I accessed the picture on the cell phone, then rotated it one hundred and eighty degrees.
How about that?
“I bow to your deviant mind, Harry. Try all the searches again using PZ.”
“Way ahead of you, Jackie. Got twenty-seven million hits. Some scientist named PZ. A punjabi site. An ID3 tag editor.”
“What’s that?”
“It helps you catalog your music collection if you appropriate MP3 files on the Internet.”
“Appropriate? You mean stealing.”
“File sharing isn’t stealing. If I stole your bike, you lost property. That’s theft. But if I copied your bike, you still have the bike.”
“Then I’ve lost my right to sell the bike. How can I sell the bike if everyone is copying it?”
I bet myself twenty bucks McGlade was rolling his eyes.
“What if I already have the music on vinyl? Can’t I download an MP3 of a song I already own?”
“Downloading music for free is illegal, Harry.”
“No it isn’t. Ask Phin.”
“I’m not asking Phin.”
“Ask Phin what?” Phin asked.
I sighed. “This really isn’t something we need to discuss right now. Or ever.”
I hit the button for speaker phone anyway and repeated Harry’s question.
“It’s illegal,” Phin said. “You’re taking money away from the artist. That’s what intellectual property laws are for.”
“So downloading an out-of-print album is bad, but it’s okay to rob a bank?”
“That’s illegal too,” Phin said.
“We need to stick to finding Lance,” I said.
“Phin, you ever see that brass clown video?”
“Yeah. It was horrible.”
“Lance,” I said, holding up the picture. “He’s going to die soon. Remember him?”
“Remember that cup scene?” Harry said.
“Yeah.”
“I can’t eat corn anymore because of that.”
“I had to give up Greek food for a while.”
“Why Greek? Oh…oh yeah. You know, the last Greek I ate was a sorority girl.”
I was going to tell them, more forcibly this time, to stay on task, but the word Greek stuck in my head and bounced around like a pinball. I looked at the PZ again.
“Harry, do a search for Greek alphabet.”
“She was a physical therapy major, Phin. Had an incredibly strong grip. I used to fake injuries.”
“Harry! The search!”
“Okay! Sure! Greek alphabet! Done! You happy?”
“What do P and Z stand for?”
“P is rho. Z is zeta. Rho zeta?”
“Row zayta. Row zeta. Rosetta?”
I flipped the Yellow Pages open to Motels and searched the Rs. No Rosetta Motel, or anything even close.
Harry chuckled softly. “Damn, Alex is smart.”
“You got something?”
“I did a search for Rosetta plus Milwaukee plus lodging. First hit is for the Rosetta Stone-that old rock with all the languages on it. But farther down the page is the Old Stone Inn. If PZ is Greek for Rosetta, the Rosetta Stone was certainly an old stone. And the Old Stone Inn is near the Milwaukee airport.”