F Wilson - Fatal Error

Weezy said, "I think the last q'qr died in 1983."

Veilleur gave her a strange look.

"One used to live on your property in the Pines, Mister Foster. Jack and I ran into it-the last one I'm sure-when we were teens. We're pretty sure it drowned."

He frowned. "You're quite sure?"

"Quite."

"How odd. But not impossible. A q'qr can be killed, but if left alone, it lives on and on."

"Immortal?" Weezy said.

"In a sense, yes."

Jack didn't care much about that q'qr. Dawn's was the one that mattered.

"Can we get back on topic? Why do the One and the Order want this quasi-q'qr baby?"

"Again, I can't even hazard a guess. Though I doubt the One is personally changing diapers, he does seem to have taken the child under his wing."

"Or the Order has. Dawn mentioned that her OB man had the Order's sigil on his watch."

Weezy frowned. "You don't think they're going to worship him or anything like that, do you?"

Veilleur barked a laugh. "Oh, I doubt that very much. The Septimus Order has its roots in the First Age. Its leaders took orders from the Seven and marshaled the q'qr armies. They had nothing but contempt for their filthy, ignorant, brutal charges. In fact, when the Order executed one of its own for treachery or a high crime, they q'qred them."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning they would cut off his forearms at the elbows and shove them into his armpits as a show of contempt."

Jack stiffened and glanced at Weezy, only to find her staring at him.

"Mister Boruff!" she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

"Who?" Veilleur said.

Jack turned back to him. "A corpse we stumbled on in the Pine Barrens when we were kids-on your property, in fact-turned out to be a member of the Order, and he'd been killed that way."

"To mimic the form of a q'qr," Weezy added. "We never dreamed… no one had ever seen the Kicker Man back then."

"Speaking of which," Jack said, "if the q'qrs were fashioned by the seven-crazy Otherness, why do they have only six limbs instead of seven?"

Instead of answering, Veilleur turned to Weezy and pointed to the Compendium. "Do you think you could find the Order's sigil in there and trace it for me?"

"I'll try." She opened the book and began flipping through it. "With the way the pages shift around, finding anything in here is a real challenge." But only a few seconds later she stopped. "Well, I'll be. Got one."

She grabbed a pen and began tracing, then handed the sheet to him. Veilleur held it up for Jack to see.

"Now," Veilleur said to Weezy, "may I have one of your markers?"

Weezy handed him one of her ever-present Sharpies and he went to work on the tracing.

"It's true that q'qrs do not have seven limbs, but their symbol, the one they left behind wherever they pillaged and slaughtered, the one Hank Thompson has misinterpreted as the Kicker Man, has seven points."

He held up his handiwork.

"And so, the rule of seven holds."

Jack shook his head in wonder. "It fits right into the sigil. I never saw it, never guessed."

"Everything is connected," Veilleur said. "Everything."

"But we still don't know why the One is protecting this baby instead of disposing of it. Because if he wanted it gone, he wouldn't have waited for its birth; he'd have killed Dawn last year and been done with it. Someone's got plans for that baby."

"Then those plans must include me," Weezy said. "Else why would he install the baby's mother across the hall?"

Jack had been thinking along those same lines.

Veilleur said, "What puzzles me more is the obviousness of the move. The One is devious. He's practiced at the art of misdirection. A blind man could see through this."

"Maybe that's the point," Weezy said. "Maybe we're supposed to see through it. Maybe its real purpose is to cause us to spin our wheels in confusion while the plan to bring down the Internet"-she glanced at the Lady-"and you, goes forward."

Jack shook his head. "Well, he's confusing me. Does he want us looking for Dawn's baby or not?"

"Maybe he doesn't care," Weezy said. "Maybe he's so confident the Internet will fall that he feels we're irrelevant now, and he's just playing with our heads."

Veilleur pushed himself up from the chair. "Weezy is right. If the assault on the Internet succeeds, these questions will be irrelevant. We must find a way to save the Internet."

If I'd been allowed to find and take out Rasalom, Jack thought, this conversation would never have happened, because it would be irrelevant.

"Yes, please," the Lady said. "I like it here. I don't want to leave you. I don't want you to suffer what will befall you if I am taken away."

Veilleur stared at her a moment, seemingly appraising her, then turned to Jack.

"May I ask you a couple of favors, Jack?"

"Sure."

"Would you drive me out to Queens tonight?"

"Sure. When?"

"Around midnight or so?"

Jack frowned. "Where do you want to go at midnight?"

"A graveyard. Would you be so kind as to bring along a two-gallon container of gasoline?"

"Um… okay. Can I ask what you need it for?"

"I'm going to help someone start a fire."

"Well, as I always say, set a fire for a man and he's warm for a day; set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life."

Weezy punched his arm. "Jack!"

But Veilleur's expression was stricken. "How did you know?"

"Bayside?" Jack said as he headed for the Queensboro Bridge. "What's over there?"

He'd pulled up in front of Veilleur's building in his big black Crown Vic at about 12:10 and found him waiting at the curb. The old guy had given him the destination as he'd settled into the roomy front seat.

"A cemetery."

Jack felt his gut clench. "That wouldn't be Saint Ann's, would it?"

"Yes. How did you know?"

"I'm familiar with it. My… daughter is buried there."

"Oh, yes. You mentioned her. Emma, correct?"

Jack nodded, his throat thick. She'd never been born, never officially lived, but she was far enough along in gestation and might have survived if not for the trauma Gia had suffered.

"I'm sorry," Veilleur said. "Had I known, I would have asked someone else."

He found his voice. "No, it's fine. Gia and I go out there every so often and visit her grave."

Veilleur shook his head. "Terrible thing to have to bury a child."

"Have you-? Never mind. Of course you have."

Over the span of the millennia he'd lived, Veilleur must have buried many children. Then Jack realized with a start that he'd lived long enough to bury all his children.

"Too many times. It wasn't so hard with the old ones-the sons and daughters who had lived a full life and eventually became sickly and decrepit with age. But the children who die as little ones… no matter how often you go through it, that ordeal does not get a bit easier."

They drove in silence for a while, with Jack wondering how many children Veilleur had sired through the ages.

"Do you remember them? All of them?"

A sigh. "All of them. They ran the gamut from the saintly to the downright evil."

"Evil? You had an evil child?"

He nodded. "A number of them. Some people are simply born bad. They grow up bad. There's no accounting for it. A couple of them, well, I had to end their lives myself."

Jack swallowed. "Kill your own child?"

"Twice, yes. They weren't children, they were grown men, and they were killers. This was in times without much in the way of civilization, no 'authorities' who could arrest them, no medications to treat them, no jails to lock them up. But they had to be stopped. They couldn't be allowed to go on raping and killing whenever they felt an urge in their loins or became angry. So it fell to their father to stop them."