THE RED WAKE

Chapters-15-16-17 (pt)

CHAPTER 15

       “I say we continue. Business as usual.” 

     Harry Bendix thumped the desktop, making the phone and fax machine jump. Bendix was furious. He’d been planning the exenteration of the New Caananites for weeks, and the President’s announcement had sent him into a rage. He fumed and paced the length of their two bedroom suite while Scott Lang sat in a chair near the window, looking out over  Lake Michigan. 

     Lang and Bendix were staying in the empty downtown Hilton, awaiting orders from their touchstone. They hadn’t heard from Jacobs in the three days since arriving in Chicago, so, intead, they’d haunted their rooms on the twenty-third floor and watched the city plunge  into madness. 

       I’m so bored, Lang realized. 

       “Screw this,” Bendix said. 

     He stormed out of the living room and slammed the door behind him.

     Relieved, Lang  went to the window and looked out over Chicago.

     The Windy City was full of light tonight. The Willis Tower, Aeon and Trump Towers were fully involved in major fires. Smoke from dozens of fires blackened the skies over Chicago, and some of the world's tallest buildings had become burning death traps

  Chicago had also been in the grip of a particularly vicious Red Wake following the Object’s appearance. The South and West Sides had been devastated by gang warfare and looting. Several housing projects  had become embroiled in a “Murder War,” revenge- driven violence that swept the length of the tenements, transforming each of them into war zones. The suburbs to the north were being devastated by the violence as well. The Governor, preceding the President’s national declaration by two days, had declared a statewide emergency and imposed curfews  across  the Land of Lincoln. 

     Then the obsidian spheres fell on Chicago.   

     Scott Lang felt a powerful desire to go out into the chaos, an almost sexual excitement at the sheer weirdness of it all.  He'd heard things, nervous whispers between cleaning ladies, stories of monsters and murder, but he was excited by the havoc he sensed unfolding all around them. But Bendix and their absent contact were becoming a major pain in the ass.  

     Lang reached into his suitcase and produced a small, stoppered, glass vial. Lifting the stopper, he unfolded a dollar bill out of the pocket of his denim shirt and the small hand mirror he kept with him. He checked his hair, then poured a line of powdered crystal methamphetamine  onto the mirror and used the rolled up dollar to snort it. A second later, he leaped up and clapped his hands, dancing around the room as the buzz hit his nervous system like a freight train. 

       "Oh you...motherfucker!" 

      It was then that he decided he would definitely have to see about squaring away a certain uppity colleague named Harry "Asshole" Bendix. 

     He’d have to see about squaring him away real soon.

 *****

CHAPTER 16

      Gloria Dawn and Billy Wilcox burned together in the fires of a passion not wholly their own. As they lay joined on the floor of cell number 3, even the sounds of destruction from outside couldn’t shatter their unearthly concentration, or ease their grim purpose.  They danced like marionettes for the entertainment of the third presence in the cell. It hovered above them, invisibly exhorting them onwards in their exertions. The presence, all cold intelligence and need, toyed with their bodies through the exertion of its will, smashing Billy into Gloria Dawn with a force that normal human muscles would have been unable to match. Blood seeped from between her battered thighs as he rode her. Her skin bruised in the places where Billy gripped at her, leaving burning fingerprints in her flesh.