Artifact

Artifact Page 44

When the white light faded and she began to recover her senses, Peta thought for a moment that the world had been turned on end. But the problem wasn't the world. She was the one who was upside down, lying on the floor of Ray's penthouse lab, staring up at the underside of the main table and the solid gray line of the ceiling beyond it.

Reoriented, she jumped to her feet. Her body responded at once, but she felt weightless, as if she had floated to a standing position in a flying dream.

On the table, the artifact had returned to a state she could only think of as dormant. It looked like nothing more than a chunk of rutilated quartz from somewhere in Arizona, or a pretty colored rock that some collector had picked up on Montserrat to remind himself that a sleeping volcano could look like any other mountain until it erupted.

"What the fuck?"

Frikkie's left hand appeared on the far side of the table as he pulled himself up off the floor. Staring at it, Peta flashed on what it had looked like minutes ago as he'd reached for the artifact: severely scarred from the fire that had killed Paul Trujold. Now, it wasn't scarred at all. The skin looked smooth and healthy.

No amount of plastic surgery or expert grafting could have achieved that result in so short a time, she thought, as Frik's head came into view.

Immediately, she noticed that the scarring on his face was gone too, as was the damage to his eyelid, which had given him the permanent sleepy-eyed look of a myasthenic in the throes of crisis.

That was when it occurred to her that she was standing with her full weight on her twisted ankle, but there was no pain. Her side and back, which should have been covered with cuts, bruises, and abrasions from her ride on the runner of the helicopter, felt fine. If anything, she felt as if she had just come from an hour with a masseur. She reminded herself that she was a physician, a scientist. Perfect cures didn't happen this way, in a split second. Miracles, as they said, took a little longer.

Reluctantly, she acknowledged the certainty that had been taking shape in her mind. It had to be the artifact. There simply was no other answer. They had both touched it; they were both made whole.

She shook her head at herself and her ridiculous willingness to believe in magic. Fact: Antibiotics and aspirin were miracles. Fact: People couldn't walk on water without webbed feet.

Fact: That thing over there was not God any more than Frik was the devil.

In the throes of intellectualizing, Peta almost missed seeing Frik reach out to grab the device. Using a reserve of strength she didn't know she had, she shoved him away from it. Taken by surprise, he staggered backward. His carotid pumped.

"Out of my way, bitch!"

Frik's rage at Peta's continued attempts to thwart him was palpable. She braced herself for his assault.

"I suggest you move away from the artifact, Frikkie." Arthur stood framed in the doorway into the lab.

Frik stopped in his tracks. Very slowly, like someone in an Abbott and Costello movie, he swiveled around. It occurred to Peta that the Afrikaner had been so busy grabbing for the piece of the artifact she had dropped that he hadn't taken the time to notice who was piloting the helicopter.

"I wish everyone would stop looking at me as if I were a ghost." Arthur stepped into the lab. "If you want to find out how alive I am, why don't you try to touch that device."

"Why don't you try to stop me."

Frik took a step toward the table. Arthur moved to intercept him. The Afrikaner spun on his heel and charged at his old friend.

Caught off-guard by Frik's change in direction, Arthur didn't have time to brace himself. The two men tumbled, ass over elbows, through the door and back into the great room.

Recovering his feet, Frik grabbed Arthur by the jacket and lifted him into the air. As he rose, Arthur thrust out his leg, catching Frik in the groin just as Ray and McKendry and Keene charged in from the helipad.

Arthur bounced lightly to his feet. "Stay out of this. He's mine."

"Don't be so sure," Frikkie said in a stage whisper.

It had become obvious to Peta that an all-out physical battle between Arthur and Frik was inevitable. Arthur was taller, Frik broader. They weighed about the same, and since the miraculous actions of the artifact, both were fit and hugely strong. Without intervention, it would be anybody's victory.

As if to prove her right, Frik rushed toward Arthur, who prepared to block the Afrikaner's charge. Too late, Peta noticed that Frik had grabbed a vase filled with roses and baby's breath and flung it ahead of himself. Arthur's blocking punch shattered the crystal, sending water and flowers and splinters of glass flying everywhere. And blood. Arthur's blood. Spurting from his knuckles.

That was enough for Peta. She wasn't about to let Arthur be annihilated. The others could stand by out of respect for his wish to deal with Frik on his own terms; she couldn't. There was no way that she could endure it - or live with herself - if he died again. This time for real. She dashed forward, ready to attack Frik.

And stopped.

The hairs on the back of her neck rose. She felt as if something had hit her at the base of her neck and a jolting shiver ran down her spine and up again.

Disoriented, she turned around.

The lab was bathed in an eerie glow, the way light looks from twenty feet underwater. She tried to call out to the men. No sound emerged. She faced them and tried again. This time her voice rang out loud and clear, but the fight claimed their full attention.

Pressing his advantage, Frik grabbed Arthur by the shoulders and spun, hurling his former friend over a plush leather chair and into an antique coffee table. He threw the chair out of the way and dove. Arthur was ready. Catching Frik with his feet, he propelled him through the air, to land with a thud by the sliding glass doors to the helipad.

With a handspring, Arthur was back on his feet, running toward his opponent. As Frik struggled to stand, Arthur kicked him in the chest, sending him crashing through the closed half of the glass door.

"That one's for Simon," Arthur yelled.

Cheering, Keene and Ray and McKendry moved toward the helipad. Spurred on by their support, Arthur started forward. Through the commotion and the shattered glass, Peta could see Frikkie roll to his knees and come up throwing something. The Grenadian shielded himself from a shower of pebble- sized chunks of glass.

Frik, backing up onto the wide roof, motioned for Arthur to come and get him.

Hoping that the other three men would have the sense to make sure the right man won, Peta started after them. Their attention was focused on Arthur and Frikkie, rolling near the low parapet at the edge of the roof, first one on top, then the other.

She looked back into the lab.

The artifact had transformed into a single brilliant, shapeless white mass. She saw what might be the outline of a face in the glow as the object left the table and began to float, infinitely slowly, toward the tall ceiling. The image of the strange mural in the undersea cave rose in her mind. Was this what the painter had been drawing?

Midway between the table and the ceiling, the device ceased its motion and hovered.

The lights in the suite flickered and went out, leaving only the green glow of emergency fluorescents. In the moment before their screens popped like balloons pricked by a dozen pins, she saw on the security monitors that downstairs in the casino, machines were wildly spewing out money.

Glancing to the side through Ray's wall of glass, Peta watched the city lights of Las Vegas blink out. A wave of black washed over the neon city, leaving Las Vegas Boulevard in darkness. An instant later, almost as if it had been timed, fountains of sparkling red and orange and yellow shot from the roofs of the other casinos, starting from the southern end of the strip at Mandalay Bay, rushing toward the Daredevil Casino and beyond.

In homage to the midnight hour and the start of 2001 - the true millennium - the nine minutes of planned fireworks crackled and flashed and boomed from the Strip's megahotels.

Firework mines thundered in quick white bursts that deafened her and drowned out the sound of her shouts. Rockets rose into the sky, bursting into sparkling blue and red and gold and white star-flowers.

She looked up at the artifact.

As if it had waited for her attention, the glowing orb started to move again, this time toward her. Like a living thing, it floated inches from her face and, impossibly, passed right through the vast wall of windows. She turned to follow its progress and spotted it, one small, unblinking light against the backdrop of flaming, sparkling fireworks that showered Las Vegas. Traveling southeast, slowly at first but gaining speed, it left a trail like a miniature comet drifting through the desert sky.

Peta stood transfixed until she could no longer differentiate between the orb and the stars. When it was out of sight, she turned toward the door that led to the helipad. The Daredevils, their battle abandoned, stood in awed contemplation of what they had witnessed.

Characteristically, Keene was the first to break the silence. "I wish Selene could have seen that."

And Simon, Peta thought.

"Maybe she did see it, Josh," McKendry said. "Anybody want to take a guess at what it was?"

"It was mine, that's what it was," Frik said.

"By all means go and get it." Arthur's voice held no antagonism. His body language indicated that his desire to fight had left with the vanishing object.

"Do you think, maybe, this proves we aren't alone in the universe?" Ray asked, a surprising note of longing in his voice.

We had it in our hands - the cure for the ills of the world - and we let go of it, Peta thought as the lights came back on in the suite. She knew without looking that the monitors were back in operation, and that downstairs in the casino and out on the Strip, it was business as usual. "And so the world goes on," she said.

"Time for our meeting?" Frik was apparently trying to resume command of the situation.

"We'll meet, all right, but without you." Arthur took a step toward him. "You're out of here."

The others chorused their agreement.

Frik didn't move. Almost in pantomime, Ray walked over to Arthur's side. Frik backed up to the exit. "You'll be sorry, you bastards."

"Oh, I don't think so," Arthur said. "What do you think, guys?" His glance included Peta.

Reserving judgment on the issue of whether or not she wanted to be one of the boys, she joined the Daredevils as they walked Frikkie out of the penthouse.

Epilogue

GULF OFPARIA, JANUARY1, 2001

At the base of the abandoned oil rig in the Dragon's Mouth, off the coast of Trinidad, Manny Sheppard cut his engine. In the absolute quiet of the Caribbean night, he watched a strange glow hovering over the water.

Beneath it, a rippling began, like waves from a dropped stone. Once, twice, and again, as if in a three- gun salute to Obeah, and to the dead and finally buried, the glow faded and returned. Then it began a slow ascent into the heavens.