Babylon Terminal Read online

  Table of Contents

  BABYLON TERMINAL

  Connect With Us

  Other Books by Author

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  PART TWO

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  BABYLON TERMINAL

  Greg F. Gifune

  First Edition

  Babylon Terminal © 2016 by Greg F. Gifune

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

  www.darkfuse.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  OTHER BOOKS BY AUTHOR

  BLOOD IN ELECTRIC BLUE

  CHILDREN OF CHAOS

  DEEP NIGHT

  DEVIL'S BREATH

  DOMINION

  JUDAS GOAT

  LONG AFTER DARK

  MIDNIGHT SOLITAIRE

  ROGUE

  SAYING UNCLE

  THE BLEEDING SEASON

  THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

  Check out the author’s official page at DarkFuse for a complete list:

  http://www.darkfuseshop.com/Greg-F.-Gifune/

  For the great Anna Kavan, imagined and actual.

  PART ONE

  “Woe to the bloody city! It is full of lies and

  robbery; the prey departeth not.”

  —Nahum 3:1

  1

  Wearing only a flimsy nightgown, she sits at a dressing table and looks back over her shoulder at me as the surrounding darkness creeps closer. Everything is blurry and vague, as if seen through a smeared lens. Pain slams my skull, like something trapped and thrashing inside my head is fighting to get out. “Are you all right?”

  The sound of her voice is swallowed by canned laughter coming from a small black-and-white television sitting atop a rickety stand in the corner. Rabbit ear antennas protrude from the top of the television, but the modest screen is fuzzy with wavy lines and crackling snow, the signal so distorted it’s imperceptible. Strangely inexact sounds leak from the television, gibberish that barely sounds human filtered through odd, rumbling, machine-like noises. She turns away, but her eyes find me in the mirror over the dressing table. “Can you hear me?” she asks in a bitter tone.

  Everything begins to bend and move, and the pain grows even worse.

  The world liquefies, and with a thunderous roar, becomes something else.

  “Can you hear me?” she asks, urgently this time. “Can you hear me?”

  * * *

  If you ask me how it all started, I won’t answer. Not because I don’t want to but because I don’t know. Not really. Not totally. It simply was—suddenly—with no indication of where it began or when it might end. All I knew for sure was that Julia had gone missing.

  I hesitated in the cement park and watched the skyscraper before me. The alternate version—the one in daylight—was a busy, vibrant place, or so I imagined. I had no firsthand knowledge of such things, of course, but tried to picture it alive with people, sights, sounds and smells. It was deathly quiet instead, empty and forgotten. Flags flew tattered in the darkness, reminders that this was our reality, my reality.

  It made me think of a dream from long ago. I was lost, only I had left the city and was on a great stretch of sandy earth. Countless people, hidden in the jungle along the far edge of the sand, peered out at me, faces drawn. Lost as well, they stared at me listlessly, as if awaiting some promised salvation. I stood watching them, confused and unsure what to do. I couldn’t see all of them, but knew there were more of them hidden deeper in the jungle. I could smell something my mind told me was an ocean, and heard what I assumed were waves crashing shore, but I’d always been told those things didn’t really exist.

  I’d been searching for Julia then too, but only in my dreams.

  And then there she was, breaking through the edge of the jungle, making her way toward me with a slow and languid gait, her hair dirty and matted and draping her face, beautiful eyes hollow and saddled with black bags. Nearly nude, she smiled at me cautiously, and as I went to her, took her by her delicate shoulders and asked her where we were. She didn’t answer, gazing at me instead as if she’d no idea who I was. I shook her, begged her to come back to me and not leave me alone with these others, these shadows I didn’t know and who didn’t know me. But her dead eyes looked right through me, like I wasn’t there at all, and it was then that I realized I wasn’t dreaming.

  She was.

  I pulled my coat in tight around me, crossed the cement park to the entrance of the building and slipped inside. The empty lobby smelled of a heady cleaner, and the floors still had a mirror-like glow. I moved to the bank of elevators, the revolver heavy in my coat pocket. Before I could push one of the buttons, the elevator closest to me opened. I stepped in, watched the doors slide closed. I made my floor selection.

  The elevator began its ascent.

  I closed my eyes and felt my heart race. In the quiet of the elevator, I felt ashamed. While mine was a necessary and perhaps even ultimately noble undertaking, the shame and fear made me want to run. But despite the rumors and wishful thinking of so many, I wasn’t certain there was anywhere to run to; or that there ever had been.

  The elevator dropped me off on the designated floor. I stepped out into a dimly lit hallway, the red carpeting at my feet like a river of blood coursing through a landmass of offices and cubicles. The area felt, looked and sounded lifeless, as if any trace of the living had been annihilated in the night.

  I moved by a conference room, the long table unoccupied but littered, as was the floor, with papers and office supplies. In the corner a copy machine hummed quietly. I kept on until I’d reached a large glass office at the end of the hall.

  “Deb,” I said softly.

  Slowly, a high-back leather chair behind the desk turned until its occupant was facing me. We were alone here. She, the captain of a ghost ship, manning the helm through a forgotten ocean, and me—just another body bobbing in the water—neither alive nor dead, but teetering at some point between the two.

  “I figured you’d come.”

  I shrugged.

  “What do you want from me?” she asked.

  “Julia’s gone missing.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “I need to know where I can find her.”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t care.”

  I stepped deeper into her office, my hands still in my coat pockets. “Come on, Deb, I need your help. Julia’s gone. I have to find her.”

  Deb raised an eyebrow. “Do you?” She leaned back in her executive chair, feigning indifference. Even now she looked ready to give a presentation, professional chic all the way in her pin-striped skirt-suit, six-inch black
heels; makeup perfect, not an auburn hair out of place. Fifty if she was a day, Deb still had a body and face that turned heads, and she knew it. But none of that mattered. Not really. Deb was a shark in an ocean of fluorescent light, a killer tougher than any of her male counterparts. This was her kingdom, and she had no intention of abandoning it, whether it existed or not.

  “You’ve got to help me,” I said.

  “No, actually, I don’t.”

  “I have to find her, Deb.”

  “Why can’t you just leave it alone?”

  I looked out at the view. The wall behind her was made entirely of glass. Beyond it, a dead city waited in darkness. For what, I had no idea.

  “Something happened,” Deb said rather suddenly. She straightened her already neat desk and tried to busy herself.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  She shrugged, perhaps in surrender. “We all cling to what we need as best we can, don’t you think?”

  “Yes. Now where is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Help me, Deb. Please.”

  She pushed her chair away from her desk enough to cross her legs. “Julia was here a few nights ago,” she admitted, purposely avoiding eye contact as she scratched at her bottom lip with a bright red fingernail. “She came to me and we talked a while.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “She seemed fine,” Deb said, rather than answer the question. “But then she suddenly froze and became strangely silent, as if she had no idea where she was or what was happening. When it looked like she might shatter into a million pieces, she began to laugh. She just kept laughing and laughing. Like a madwoman. I haven’t seen or heard from her since.”

  “Listen to me very carefully,” I told her. “There’s a good chance she’s running, and if so, she’s in a great deal of danger.”

  “Yes, primarily from you.”

  “You have no idea what’s out there, Deb.”

  “Look around you!” She lunged forward in her chair and slammed her palms on the desk with a loud slap. “Do you honestly think I have no idea about these things? Look at me! I’m hanging on by a thread!”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her that thread had broken long ago.

  Deb spun in the chair and rose to her feet. She moved to the wall of glass, her back to me. Fluorescent lights above us buzzed and blinked. They were dying too. “It’s all gone to hell.”

  “It’s never been anything but,” I reminded her.

  “And we’ll never get it back, will we?”

  “We never had it to begin with.”

  “Then what’s the point? Tell me that.”

  I didn’t have an answer for her, and we both knew it.

  After a moment she glanced over her shoulder at me. “I honestly don’t know where she is.”

  I didn’t want to, but I believed her. “Did she say anything?”

  “She kept talking about the beach, and some dream you’d told her about a long time ago, something about people hiding in the jungle.” She turned back to the night, the cityscape beyond the glass. “I think it was Julia’s way of telling me she was leaving the city and planning to run.”

  “Anything else?”

  “You might want to talk to all the usual suspects,” she said through a heavy sigh.

  I planned to do just that.

  “That’s all I know,” she said.

  “All you know or all you can tell me?”

  Deb was quiet a while. “Aren’t we all in the grip of what we can never tell?”

  I understood what she meant but said nothing.

  “In other news fire is hot and chocolate is delicious.”

  There was nothing funny, but I felt myself smile a little anyway. “Is there anything I can do for you?” I asked.

  “You could leave the gun.”

  “What gun?”

  “The one you’ve got in your coat pocket. I need it.”

  “A gun is the last thing you need.”

  “Think I won’t use it?”

  “I think you just might.”

  “Or you could use it for me. Is that too much of me to ask of you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is.”

  “Leave it then. You’ve got others.”

  “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  “No you’re not. But if you really want to make it up to me, you could stay a while.”

  “There’s nothing here, Deb.”

  “I’m here.” When she looked back this time, her eyes were filled with tears.

  “I love Julia,” I told her.

  “So do I, but the Julia we love is gone, lover boy, long gone.”

  “I can’t stay.”

  She wiped her eyes but fresh tears quickly replaced the old. “Was it so bad with me? Was it so horrible and ugly and foul?”

  I did my best to deflect those memories…the look on her face when she came…or the way it felt when I did. But temptation crippled me. It always won, always convinced me to run to it with open arms. “No,” I said, “it just wasn’t real.”

  “It feels like I’m walking barefoot through broken glass, isn’t that real?”

  “We feel like that all the time, you and I.”

  “You think we’d be used to it by now,” she said softly.

  “I don’t ever want to be used to it.”

  “Do you really think you can save her? You can’t even save yourself.”

  She was right, of course, but if I had any chance of finding Julia, truth was the last thing I needed to believe in.

  “You know that,” she added, “all too well.”

  Eventually she softened, as I knew she would.

  “Go to the ocean.” Deb returned to her desk and sank slowly into her chair. “If she makes it that far, it’s probably where you’ll find her.”

  “What if there’s no such thing?”

  “Then you’ve got nothing else to lose.”

  I reached across her desk and gently touched her hand. I wanted to tell her everything would be all right, but we both knew that was bullshit.

  “Don’t,” she sighed, sitting back and taking her hand with her.

  “Love me or hate me, you never could decide.”

  “Neither could you.”

  Fair enough, I thought.

  “I hope you find her,” Deb said, voice shaking. “And I hope you don’t.”

  I knew exactly what she meant.

  2

  All my gods were dead, little more than smashed idols strewn across years blurred by the very sins that had killed them. I was an assassin sent to murder myself, and I’d done my job well. The despair was unavoidable, there was no escaping it. I’d created it in place of my gods, or perhaps because of them. It no longer mattered. Their temples were in ruins and nothing could ever rebuild them. Cradled within the desolation that remained, my life had essentially become a waiting game. Waiting for the next chapter, the next bit of news, the next town, the next person or whatever they might know or choose to tell me. Everything else existed on the periphery, or as bridges between such things, hours spent anticipating the next event. It was all about being there or getting there, and even though it was slowly obliterating me, nothing else mattered. Mine was a gradual apocalypse, a slow burn creeping across a ravaged land, broken as my dreams and diseased as my memories.

  I packed a bag, left my studio apartment and headed out of the city. I didn’t know if I’d ever return, but I wasn’t about to miss that dingy, soulless little room anyway. Nothing good had happened there. Julia and I had lived there for a time, but in a city of darkness, there was no peace in the flames, no salvation in the fire. And even when there was something akin to happiness, it arrived as a lie, a trickster dangling goodies before us only to snatch them away the moment we reached for them. It laughed at us, the night, and we laughed too, because there was nothing else to do. It had us in its clutches. What else was there to do but bleed? Sacrifices to gods long dead, that’s all we were now,
all we’d become.

  She just kept laughing and laughing. Like a madwoman.

  A starless black sky made promises it could never keep, so I ignored it and watched the mostly empty streets and vacant buildings instead. Though my battered car had seen better days, it still ran and could carry me to the deserted highways I hoped might eventually lead to Julia. But before that, I’d cover the city.

  The strip was ablaze with neon lights and blinking signage, the street empty and quiet, which gave the neighborhood an eerie feel. Like a deserted carnival, everything looked open and operational, but there was no one there. Not yet. Trash and debris blew about, bouncing along gutters and across sidewalks as I crossed the street and strolled by an array of porn shops, adult clubs and the like. When I’d reached the address I’d come looking for, I stopped and lit a cigarette. The front of the building was painted to resemble a giant pair of female legs clad in fishnet stockings, spread and welcoming, the door between them a brilliant shade of pink. Above the legs, an arched and lighted sign blinked on and off in timed intervals, bathing the nearby sidewalk in intermittent splashes of neon red that read SIN-DEE’S.

  As I smoked, I kept an eye on the street. Nothing. No one.

  About halfway through my cigarette, I took a final pull, then flicked it away and forced myself through the front door.

  I followed a tunnel-like section of hallway to a set of stairs that led down into the bowels of the building. Everything was black, the floors, the walls, even the ceiling, which left me disoriented and uncertain, but I’d been here before and knew I didn’t have far to go.

  Pushing through a large, heavy set of double doors, I walked into an empty club. The only light came from the backlit bar on the far wall. I negotiated my way through a sea of tables, across a series of cages positioned throughout the room and over to another side door.