Chapter 27
WICKMAN DROVE ALONG THE rutted path at fifty miles an hour, the vehicle jouncing and rocking violently, the brush that pushed in on both sides whipping against its flanks.
He forced himself to slow down—he’d kept the road, if you could call it a road, intentionally overgrown and crude, more a trail than anything else.
It wouldn’t do to break an axle or lose a tire. Not now, of all times.
He pounded the steering wheel again and again, cursing.
It wasn’t fair. After so many years, so much planning—risking danger or even capture dozens of times, only to find the resource he’d just taken wasn’t suitable and it had been for naught…
now, he’d finally been able to relax, certain he’d succeeded.
This last resource had been perfect in every way.
Except he’d been more clever than even Wickman, comfortable by now with expecting the unexpected, had imagined.
Even though ultimately Wickman had seen through his sham unconsciousness, who could have ever anticipated the man would then—before succumbing to the gas—do what he’d done?
I’m slicing up your meal myself. What the hell did that even mean?
He couldn’t stop to think about that now.
He’d put off Dr. Telligren and the operation once already—doing so a second time would make things much more difficult.
And with the evil stirring ever more aggressively in that limb, he couldn’t wait any longer.
It had remained in his arm, almost dormant, longer than he could have hoped—he knew that any day now it would begin to spread like an infection… at which point, he’d be done for.
No. Telligren and his assistant were arriving that evening, and Wickman hadn’t called to postpone. That meant he had only a few hours to find a new, perfect resource.
He was approaching the camouflaged barrier, close to where the old dirt track met the highway.
He eased to a stop, got out of the van, and approached the steel cattle gate—on the far side of which he’d attached the base of a fallen tree trunk, blending it carefully with the other roadside vegetation.
This was a stretch of Chef Menteur Highway, like so many surrounding areas, where not only was the road terrible, but the primary landscape was swamp; as a result, the drivers who infrequently sped down this straight stretch of blacktop were intent on getting somewhere rather than gazing out at the endless creepy foliage.
Assuring himself the coast was clear, Wickman swung the gate inward, careful not to disrupt the camouflage wired to its outer side.
Then he got back into the van and crept the last hundred feet out onto the highway.
As he did so, a lash of rain sprayed over his windshield.
He craned forward and glanced up at the dark, bruise-colored sky.
His route from the manse to this road had been so densely covered by a canopy of trees and sagging bamboo that he hadn’t even realized it was drizzling.
The road was still empty. He paused one last moment, checking the rearview mirror, ensuring the gate of his fallen-tree contrivance had swung closed behind the van. Then he turned the vehicle to the left and pressed hard on the accelerator.
He wondered why he’d instinctively turned westward.
Normally he would have gone east; most recently, his hunting ground had been a carefully mapped scattering of towns fifty or more miles into Mississippi.
But then he smiled to himself. Of course.
In his dismay and sudden trauma, he’d almost forgotten how—lolling around his manse first with Drakos, and later the security guard or whoever he was, safely locked in the basement—he’d whiled away part of the waiting period by considering quicker and safer ways to obtain a resource.
He’d never need to act on them, of course—after nabbing the security guard, he thought that part of his life was done—but with his years of practice, and his own “radar” mature, it seemed almost second nature to keep dreaming up new and better scenarios to collect resources.
Now he would put one of those scenarios—the one that seemed quickest and most certain—to the test.
Less than half an hour later, he was cruising down the boulevards of Slidell, Louisiana. Not only did Slidell have advantages of proximity and demographics, but the manner in which its sprawl had overtaken the neighboring towns meant game would be more plentiful.
He continued until he reached the fringes of town, where a no-man’s-land of sorts—part commercial, part residential—overlapped. More slowly, he passed a lonely landscape of gas stations, bars, Blockbuster Video outlets, and gyms, for the most part all scattered widely apart.
He pulled over across from one gym and stared at it with a critical eye.
He’d used the place himself once, years ago, when he was first preparing.
He had disliked the atmosphere—the flexing; the masculine preening and primping; the furtive looks, checking out how much weight the guy on the next bench was lifting—and so he instead had assembled a gym of his own in the basement of his grandmother’s old mansion.
The gym was well separated from other buildings, and the rain was now pouring harder, with occasional tongues of lightning licking through the clouds.
This spot was not ideal for his scenario—and besides, the gym wasn’t the kind he was looking for.
It was old-fashioned, without a lot of the newer machines that added aerobics to the mix.
Younger men would be turned off. Putting the van into drive, he pulled back onto the road and continued.
Half a mile farther on, he saw what looked like an ideal spot: Diamond Gym.
The signage was new, and through the gaudy neon-adorned front window he could see it was enjoying heavy use.
He glanced at his watch: quarter past one.
Guys using their lunch hours to pump iron.
Like Tantalus, they’d keep struggling at it but—he thought with disdain—never be satisfied.
Next to the gym was a tavern, with an alleyway between that was empty except for trash cans.
As he watched, two men in their late twenties walked out of the gym and headed into the tavern.
It was Friday, after all: why not follow a workout with a burger and a beer—or maybe five—and get the weekend off to an early start?
Twisting the wheel hard, he turned the van around and parked in front of the gym, just back from the large front window.
It was raining cats and dogs, but so much the better: the rain had washed all the mud from the wheel wells of his van; the downpour kept traffic to a minimum; and any passersby would be intent on getting from point A to point B without looking around at the scenery.
In his scenario, he hadn’t accounted for rain—but he realized it only made the odds of success more favorable.
He took a quick look around the interior, making sure he hadn’t forgotten anything and that all was prepped.
He scowled as he did so. After ditching the white van in a swamp and buying this gray utility van from a retired Alabama electrician for cash, he figured that—once he’d taken the security guard—he wouldn’t need a vehicle for any further harvesting.
As it was, in his haste he’d almost driven off without some critical elements of his tool kit.
The scowl faded as he saw all was in readiness.
Then he hopped lightly down from the driver’s seat, closed and locked the door, and jogged toward the tavern, keeping as much as possible out of the rain.
Stepping in, he glanced around. It was just as he’d hoped: most of the patrons were exercise freaks in various sizes.
A few heads swiveled toward him at the noise of the opening door, but they all looked away again disinterestedly: he was wearing a technician’s short-sleeved blue polo shirt, the name of a fake machine parts store stitched on it, and his chest and arm muscles stretched the fabric admirably.
Just another well-ripped blue-collar worker bee with close-cropped blond hair.
He quickly sized up the scattering of tables, and particularly the long bar that took up the entire rear wall of the place.
A lot of the patrons seemed to prefer sitting on its stools and having their lunches there.
He walked along the nearest wall, and then—when he got to the bar—he turned and strolled along it at a leisurely pace, as if deciding which stool was most suitable.
In truth, he was using the inner power he’d been given—refined and developed, now, to the point where it was instinctual, not to be doubted—to discern if any of the patrons seated at the bar would make a good resource.
Wickman’s radar—as he’d come to call it—suddenly went off, and he glanced over at the seated man he was passing.
Well built, under forty, check, check, check…
but then Wickman noted the ugly tattoo on the man’s right arm.
Shit. He continued almost to the end of the bar, then took a stool and ordered what everyone else seemed to be having: Bud Light.
He sat there, nursing the beer and doing his best to be patient.
Glancing around stealthily, he reassured himself he fit in well and was, essentially, unnoticed.
The place was full of fit young men, drinking and laughing.
His scenario was proving to be as perfect as he’d imagined, save for one thing: not just any one of these fine specimens would work.
To fit his needs—to put a stop to the crawling evil that even now threatened to spread to the rest of his body—the resource had to be ideal.
He’d learned how to channel his inner power to check for that; he’d perfected various ways to procure a target…
the one thing he could not control was when an acceptable resource would appear.