Fever House (Fever House, #1)

by Keith Rosson

my fucking guest,” Wesley says. Tim stands in front of him, delighted. He grins over at Hutch. “This guy’s alright,” he says, and then he bends down and breaks Wesley’s nose with the butt of the .38.

He turns to the two of them and says, “So what’s the complication?” and Wesley springs up, almost preternaturally fast.

It’s a thing where you get dressed and your whole life sits with you while you do it. Your past, your future. How every decision you ever made brought you there, next to a dead man, in coveralls and gloves.

Unhappily, Hutch says, “Well, there’s the hand.”

“We got to get the fuck out of here,” Hutch says in a ragged whisper.

bag with its treasure—hand, money, gun—clutched in one bloody fist, the night relentlessly unspooling before him, Hutch staggers on.

“Okay,” she says. Theirs is no longer a relationship where she can demand things from him. It hasn’t been that way for years. And that fact alone makes him feel a little guilty. The wretched land mines of love, when your parents begin to need you. And she does, she needs him more than most parents need their children, and he knows that she feels terrible it’s that way. Katherine Moriarty has, in the years since her husband’s death, stretched her arms around the width of these rooms and held on tight. This apartment is her life and her son is her lifeline and they both know it.

Like a goodbye kiss, the hand whispers that he should consider ripping his own tongue out, plucking his eyes from his head.

He is unable—or unwilling—to understand time, and cannot read a clock.

Becoming afraid of leaving your house is not a thing you ever plan on. It’s something that happens to you. Has happened to her.

And that’s when the man turns to Belle and takes his pistol out, shows it to her. Belle backs up to the edge of the bar so smoothly that the ice in her drink makes no noise at all. It’s only then that Katherine realizes the music has stopped.

He became accustomed to the cadence of touring at a young age, the strange rhythm of it, the repetition—the promoter with the plugs in his ears and the tattooed face that they saw every time they played Lexington, Kentucky, how he would say What’s up, my champion? to Nick in the same funny voice, always pulling a ten-dollar bill from behind Nick’s ear, folded in the shape of a diamond, which he would then press into Nick’s palm. The same skylines of the same cities as they drove down the same highways. The skeins of sunlight rippling through tattered clouds, or a sky grown slate-gray and threatening snow. The quality of light depending on the time of year, the way it fell on his legs in the van. How he could tell what time of day it was by the sunbeams sliding slowly across the Econoline’s floor. How you could read the grownups’ moods by how they sat in their seats, their posture, how they talked to each other. How Doogy would play drums on the steering wheel for a hundred miles, for forever, until someone, usually his dad, yelled at him to stop. Arthur always with a book in his hand, talking up that evening’s hosts and trading the book he’d just finished for another from that person’s collection. Nick graduating from an air mattress to a folding cot as he got older, falling asleep in some back room while the grownups bullshitted quietly, the clink of glasses. The occasional groans and burst of giggles when someone dropped something. The pungent smell of joints drifting be...

Bonner curses, threads the sedan to the curb.

This, at last, garners the slightest nod of approval from Weils. She

Michael could say all this, but he only says two words. Two words. He is eager to be done here. Let me walk the dark hall, he thinks. “Start talking,” David Lundy says, “or I’ll saw your fucking head off myself.” The remnants, the remnants, the hand, the voice, the eye. Use them all at once and here comes the seepage, the devil stepping forth, the grand and yawing darkness. It has been Michael’s purpose to witness this. To see. He says two words only. Saint Michael smiles with blood on his teeth. He says, “It’s begun.”

“One of the weapons being developed by the agency is buried within a song called ‘I Won’t Forget It,’ by a band called the Blank Letters.” Rachmann waits pointedly. “I’m assuming you’ve heard of them.”

tell you to sever the head of your neighbor, yes, to dine in the bowl of their skull, you do it, and we might call that fealty. If I tell you to make me a necklace from the heads of your children, to make me a red veil from their latticed veins that I might lay on my brow, you’ll curtsy on bloody knees and crow, ‘Yes, Father!’ and you’ll ready the knife. And we might call that fealty as well. I say cut out your eye, you slice away. Take your hand off at the wrist, you whet the blade and get to work. That too is fealty. You understand? Yes? Make me a king’s house from this whole place. How I use your voice now, how I speak through you, the sorrowful jaw working just so. How you might remake the world for me. A king’s house among all the leaning world. You shall make me a house of fever and wounds. A house of beetle and crow. A house of worms. A house of hounds that savage forever at the belly of love and take root there, devouring.

don’t know what you did that was good enough, or bad enough, to get you transferred into my show, but I think—and I’m not dumb enough to ask you to tip your hand here, John—I think I’m going to watch you real close. You know what I’m saying? The fact that Terradyne’s got their hands in just about every marginally developed country’s weapons market is not lost on me.” He’d taken on the cadence of a man explaining something to a child now. “So I’m telling you, John, that this is a compartmentalized, top secret op we’re running, and I find it concerning that I get saddled with you, just as I hit these other snags, like losing one of my remnants. I am alarmed by that, and I hope you’re not running any of this highly classified information through any pipelines to, say, a third-party defense firm that’s run by one of your relatives.” He splayed his hands out and offered Bonner an eat-shit smile. “Might you understand me now?” The thing was, he did. He didn’t want to understand, but he did.

I’ve got a hand that turns people into fucking zombies when they die near it, and I’ve got my little recording, and I’ve got you. My life’s work. My trifecta of bullshit.”

“Goddamnit,” David Lundy hisses, and leans forward, leans his great pale head over Michael’s. And the straps lashing Michael to the gurney give way with a sound like someone slapping a wall, and Michael, flesh now bubbling in great red welts, his face a painted rictus of black oil, wraps his hands around the globe of David Lundy’s skull. “You and I have incurred a great debt,” Michael gasps, and the bones of David Lundy’s head crack like a breaking dish beneath his hands, and he squeezes still, squeezes until all the man’s dark and clotted life spills out onto Michael’s upturned face and David Lundy issues a last gurgling scream thirty thousand feet in the air.

“There’s rumors that other agencies want to just greenlight a saturation campaign. Tap into global satellites. Play it on every phone on the globe simultaneously. Protect enough of the command structure and then watch the world burn.”

The sense of abandonment about the place is so strong it might as well have a taste.

“First one I was in school,” he said, “second one I was in prison,” and Katherine, to Nick’s surprise, laughed out loud.

using solely your mind.” “And this is a real thing?” Beverly tilts her head. “Well, that’s rude.”

A guy named David Lundy was the one running that program. Just a monumental prick.

“Okay. Ever hear of someone called Saint Michael?” Beverly pauses. “I mean, yeah,” she says quietly. “Heard of him for sure.”

“I know what you’re asking me. It was way after my time.” Rachmann nods slowly, smiling. “What am I asking you?” “You’re asking about the hand, and the recording they found. The remnants, they call them.” Nick swallows, his throat clicking.

“Well, what I heard is, for one, they got a recording of the devil.”

sick

Weils grins, surprised and pleased. “Which one?” “Arnsdorf.” Her grin widens. “Professor Arnsdorf gave you the name of the bar I work at?”

“What’s going on,” she asks. “You’ve got a meeting.” “Look, I know I fucked up, Diane.” A tight smile. “Oh, that’s true.”

“Did you know, Samantha, that you failed your psych evaluation as it pertains to the National Security Adjudicative Guidelines? Like, hardcore fucking failed it, man. You flop-sweated through your poly, your written tests look like a series of cry-for-help Rorschachs, and if this was still the 1980s and we were doing MMPIs for our baseline psych evals, I’d be having Diane here put in

“The fuck do you want,” Weils finally says through gritted teeth.

Michael is the ladder that Lundy has used to crest the tide of the world. His

is Lundy’s gun. She is his bullet. In her ear, his joy impossible to miss, Lundy says, “You saved me.”

lucky rabbit’s foot that occasionally offers visions that are wildly, incredibly accurate—people, places, events that will, if acted upon in a certain manner, truly change the world in this way or that.

“Sometimes, David Lundy, things are true whether you believe in them or not.”

months peeling away, a year, another year.

Bonner, she hates straightaway.

nothing, arrogance shot through every word when he does deign to speak. When they’re out in the field he asks her endless questions, the answers either obvious or unknowable.

Then Seaver loses track of the hand, falls sway to it, takes it out of Camelot and leaves it on a toilet in a dive bar, and then everything—every last thing—falls apart.

“Nick, they’re blackmailing me.” “What?” “They say they’ve got evidence that we’re terrorists, that they’re going to charge us—” Monahan comes back on the line. “As you can see, all’s well.”

You’ve just been handed a life raft. Go into dark ops and disappear quietly, gratefully, keeping your head down in the land of no paper trails. Or jump dick-first into the whirling blades of public accountability. Killing a guy at a racial justice protest? Accidentally or otherwise? You fucking kidding?

“Upon return to my home here in the States—Los Angeles became my home years ago—I felt that with possession of the eye, finally, I could resolve to destroy the devil’s hand. As if owning one might cancel out the other’s pull, its glamour. I was weak, you see, still resolutely a fool. I flew back to Montana, to the family estate, with the eye in my possession. The homestead was as I’d left it—abandoned and cold. I hadn’t been back in years. I was an old man now. The caretaker I kept on salary—one in a long number of them—had done fine work with the property. I thanked him and sent him away. I hired a team of a dozen men and they ravaged the place, digging and destroying, looking for the hand my assistant had buried all those years ago. For six months I dismantled that place and never found it. The grounds, the house itself. Screw by screw, panel by panel. Every pile of dirt sifted through. My original assistant, the one who had dispatched Patricia, was long dead by then, my secret buried with him. I never found the hand.

Goud smiles and taps a bent finger to his temple again, where the hair is thin and white. “Why, it tells you the manner of your death.” He points that finger at Nick. “And do you know what I saw, boys? When I used it?”

looked in the eye and saw,” he says, “the world’s end. Streets overrun with the dead. Great buildings falling. Saw my own terrible complicity in it.” He leans forward then, with some effort, and with trembling hands, holds out the box. He is grinning terribly, full of a dark mirth. “And I saw you two, my little harbingers of the world’s end, waiting for me.”

sick

Sustained perhaps for years. Goud glances at him and Rachmann for a moment, and then the old man drives the blade into his own throat, left to right, giving a savage twist at the end.

He reaches toward the old man, and this time Gunter doesn’t stop him. But Goud is already gone.

of her dismal past trailing and rattling along behind her.

When the remnants are used together, a lesser devil is brought forth. He makes a promise, and becomes deathless. He walks again.

Jesus Christ. Who does he promise, Michael? A: … Q: Michael, who does he promise?