Limbus, Inc. Book II Read online

  Limbus, Inc.

  Book II

  A Shared World Experience

  Harry Shannon

  Gary A. Braunbeck

  Joe R. Lansdale

  Jonathan Maberry

  Joe McKinney

  Edited by Brett J. Talley

  JournalStone

  San Francisco

  Copyright © 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously.

  JournalStone books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

  JournalStone

  www.journalstone.com

  The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  ISBN: 978-1-940161-33-4 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-940161-34-1 (e-book)

  ISBN: 978-1-940161-35-8 (hc)

  ISBN: 978-1-940161-36-5 (hc—limited edition—Fine binding)

  JournalStone rev. date: October 24, 2014

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover Design: Rob Grom

  Cover Photograph © Shutterstock.com

  Edited by: Brett J. Talley

  This book is dedicated to Anne C. Petty, a woman whose kindness and generosity were matched only by her talent and wicked sense of humor. That talent gave Limbus to the world, and it will continue on even though Anne has left us. She is dearly and truly missed.

  What is Limbus?

  Limbus is Latin for “edge” or “boundary,”

  but that’s not the whole story.

  Welcome to the world of Limbus, Inc., a shadow organization at the edge of reality whose recruitment methods are low-rent, sketchy, even haphazard to the ordinary eye: a tattered flyer taped to a bus-stop shed or tacked to the bulletin board of a neighborhood Laundromat, a dropped business card, a popup ad on the Internet. Limbus’s employees are as suspicious and ephemeral as the company, if indeed it could be called a company in the normal sense of the word.

  Recruiters offer contracts for employment tailored exactly to the job seeker in question. But a word to the wise… it’s always a good idea to read the fine print.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue – Český Krumlov

  Zero at the Bone – Harry Shannon

  First Interlude: Whispers in Shadow

  Fishing for Dinosaurs – Joe R. Lansdale

  Second Interlude: No Good Deed

  Lost and Found – Joe McKinney

  Third Interlude: Beyond the Veil

  The Transmigration of Librarian Blaine Evans – Gary A. Braunbeck

  Fourth Interlude: A Pawn in their Game

  Three Guys Walk into a Bark - Jonathan Maberry

  Epilogue

  About the Authors

  Limbus, Inc.

  Book II

  A Shared World Experience

  Prologue: Český Krumlov

  The tourists had not come to Český Krumlov that winter, for the heavy snows had dissuaded even the most adventurous travelers. That made it perfect for Conrad. He had needed somewhere to disappear after Prague had become too hot, even if no one yet knew his face or his name. After the Silk Road fell, anything was possible. Every day he expected Interpol to show up at his door, even in this sleepy and forgotten town, nestled deep within the Czech Alps.

  But they had not come, not yet, and he hoped no one had or would connect Conrad McKay with the hacker known as Jack Rabbit, the same Jack Rabbit who had sold his skills on the dark net, sometimes to the highest bidder, sometimes to the one with the most interesting offer of employment. The same Jack Rabbit who had hacked the NASDAQ and the NSA. The first for fortune, the second for glory.

  In Český Krumlov, he was only a college kid taking a year off from school to travel Europe, even if he never left the ancient city center of the medieval town. The locals didn’t ask questions. The tourists had not come. It was cold and the snow piled high and they needed the cash.

  He lived in a boarding house that doubled as a hotel and tripled as the home of the family who owned it. He spent his days and his nights and his koruna in the corner of a cellar bar called Van Gogh’s that was not nearly as chintzy as the name suggested. He played chess with the bartender until the early watches of the morning. Then he spent hours reading message boards and TORchan, following the demise of the Silk Road and trying his best to ferret out any rumors of the infamous Jack Rabbit’s hiding spot. They knew he was in Europe. That was it. But even that was too close.

  Otherwise, he stayed off the net. He resisted the urge to play. To break through walls, just to see whether he could. They were watching. He had to lay low. And it was driving him insane.

  There were worse ways to live. Conrad ate steak every meal in nearly empty restaurants and pubs, and every meal he washed it down with Budweiser—the original kind. And all for the price of a burger back home. Not that he worried about the money. The Bitcoins he still held were worth a fortune, and he could live for a month or more converting a single one to koruna. Not a bad life at all, and he guessed he should be happy here, a place lost to time where he could live like one of the city’s ancient rulers. But the mountains and the medieval citadel ramparts built to hold back the Turks centuries before felt like prison walls. And as the snow piled higher and higher and the temperature plunged further and further, even his thoughts seemed to freeze.

  He needed a release. One night, he found it.

  It began in the midst of a particularly strong snowstorm when the heavy fall of powder-white flakes had dissuaded Conrad from venturing out into the darkened streets. He sat at a wooden table, rough-hewn and no doubt carved by hand some decades before. A fire roared in the hearth, and the barmaid—the youngest daughter of the owners of the place—dropped a flagon of beer and a large stein in front of him. He thanked her and smiled sheepishly. She stared back with lust in her eyes as she had since the first day he had arrived. Conrad wasn’t much to look at, but he was new and different and exotic, and she wanted him. If he stuck around much longer, he might just let her have him.

  Conrad opened his computer and signed on to Iram, a message board he had often visited when the Silk Road still ran strong and true. Iram of the Pillars they had called it. A pun, for Iram was a lost city of the net, buried beneath the surface of the web in a place to those who knew it existed called the deep net.

  Or, as Conrad preferred, the dark net.

  There was freedom here. Or there had been before the FBI and ICE and NSA had found it. Now, he wasn’t so sure, and in truth, it was foolish for him even to come, even to dip his toe into the black waters. Dangerous and deadly if they were watching. But it was exciting, too. To be back in the deep.

  Most people don’t know it, but the Internet is like an iceberg. The vast majority of people only ever see what is above the surface. But what lies beneath is so much bigger, and so much wilder. There is no law on the dark net. No rules. No limitations. Just vast possibility.

  On that day, Conrad found one of those possibilities.

  Among threads about 9/11 conspiracies, hacking conquests, and questionable porn, there was one that caught his eye. The title read simply,

  “How Lucky Do You Feel?”

  Conrad was intrigued. He felt quite lucky to be free at a
ll. And it wasn’t just that fact that piqued his interest. The thread had no responses logged. In fact, it had no views. Unusual in a world where most threads were posted, buried in crass profanity, and relegated to the trash heap, all in mere minutes. And yet this one remained pristine, as pure as the snow that still fell outside. Conrad couldn’t help himself. He clicked the link. The thread opened, and a single sentence appeared on the screen.

  Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.

  Conrad grinned. A riddle. A diversion. He opened his bag and removed a notebook, plopping it down on the table next to his laptop. He poured beer from the flagon into his stein and took a long draw. He knew the sentence. He had taken Latin before coding had become his second tongue, and it had been the first thing they translated in Mr. Wheelock’s class.

  “All Gaul is divided into three parts,” the first line of one of Julius Caesar’s most famous works. It was the only clue he needed.

  Conrad wrote out the sentence carefully in his book, sure to leave enough space between each letter. The thread was a test, he figured. And thus this sentence was most likely a code. A Caesar cypher, to be exact. A simple puzzle, certainly, but a little bit of fun, nonetheless.

  A Caesar cypher was easy enough to crack if you knew what you were looking for. Just move up or down the alphabet a set number of spaces for each letter and, voila, secret message uncovered. Caesar himself had used a down shift of three spaces, so that’s what Conrad tried, too. He counted in his head, even though he knew there were programs that could do this for him in an instant. But that would be cheating and he wanted to work through this riddle himself.

  He leaned back in his chair and looked down at what he had produced.

  Doo Jdxo lv glylghg lqwr wkuhh sduwv.

  It looked like gibberish, and it was. Normally, you started with the gibberish and went the other way. But Conrad had a feeling that this particular code wasn’t for reading.

  He typed the letters carefully into his browser—one specially designed for navigating the dark net—and hit enter. The machine worked for a moment. And then … nothing. Just an error message. Conrad frowned, drumming his fingers on the table. That should have worked, he thought. Perhaps it was alpha-numeric. He ran the phrase through a program that assigned a value, 1-26, to each letter. Not cheating, he thought. Just a shortcut.

  He frowned again. It was a lot of digits.

  4-15-15 10-4-24-15 12-22 7-12-25-12-7-8-7 12-17-23-18 23-11-21-8-8 19-4-21-23-22

  He doubted anything this long would represent a web address. Still, he dutifully typed it in anyway and hit enter. But his fears were confirmed. They came to nothing. He rubbed his chin and stared at the screen. Maybe he had made a mistake, gone wrong from the beginning. Maybe he shouldn’t have translated the phrase to begin with. He looked at the numbers again. Studied them. And then he noticed something he had not seen before; several of them were primes.

  7,7,7,17,23,23,11,19,23

  Somehow, he knew he had found it. He typed the numbers into his browser. The screen went black and he grinned. Words began to appear, one letter at a time, as if they were being seared into the screen while he was reading them.

  Well done, but a child could have solved that riddle. The test is not of your mind, but of your soul. Not of your intellect, but of your spirit. Will you be the master of your fate? The truth is far down the rabbit hole. How deep are you willing to go?

  Conrad shuddered. It was a common enough phrase, he told himself. Surely it had nothing to do with his past, with the name that had made him famous, even if anonymously so. And yet, as the cursor blinked at him, something told him it was no coincidence. That somehow, whoever this was, they knew. It wasn’t the FBI, though. Somehow he knew that too. It was something much more interesting … and dangerous.

  He typed the only thing that came to mind in response to the questions.

  Down, down, down.

  The screen flashed white and then back to black. A cascade of numbers, letters, and arcane symbols poured from the top of the screen, filling it quickly before rolling down in waves. For several minutes they continued to appear, the scroll bar on the side shrinking with startling speed. By the time they had finished, Conrad guessed the code that now seemed to go on forever numbered in the millions of characters. It was utterly unintelligible, except for a message written at the top of the screen.

  There is music in the noise, beauty in the chaos, truth in the lies, light in the void. He who has eyes, let him see.

  The curser flashed beneath. Conrad understood. Hidden in this mass of text, of gibberish, was a message. But he needed the right key to find it.

  Conrad considered closing out and going to bed, maybe seeing if the cute barmaid was still up, leaving this behind before he did go too far down whatever rabbit hole he had stumbled upon. Considered it so strongly that he actually grasped the top of his laptop screen and began to pull it shut. But in the end, he couldn’t. The need to know had always been what had driven him, both to great heights of ability and infinite depths of obsession.

  And if he stopped, where would that leave him? Waiting here until someone found him? Until the authorities tracked him down? Who would be the master of his fate then? The captain of his soul?

  A light clicked on in Conrad’s brain. Without thinking, his hands went to the keyboard and he typed,

  Invictus.

  The data on the screen began to reform. Blocks of text moved around, swirling, reordering, recombining. Then it settled on an image—three women. Then, it reformed again, changing into line after line of text. But not random letters. Words. Sentences. Conrad started at the screen for a full five minutes before he realized it was a story. There was only one thing he could think to do.

  He began to read.

  Zero at the Bone

  By

  Harry Shannon

  A NARROW FELLOW IN THE GRASS

  A narrow Fellow in the Grass

  Occasionally rides—

  You may have met Him—

  did you not

  His notice sudden is—

  The Grass divides as with a Comb—

  A spotted shaft is seen—

  And then it closes at your feet

  And opens further on—

  He likes a Boggy Acre

  A Floor too cool for Corn—

  Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot—

  I more than once at Noon

  Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash

  Unbraiding in the Sun

  When stooping to secure it

  It wrinkled, and was gone—

  Several of Nature’s People

  I know, and they know me—

  I feel for them a transport

  Of cordiality—

  But never met this Fellow

  Attended, or alone

  Without a tighter breathing

  And Zero at the Bone—

  -Emily Dickinson

  *

  “My name is Mike and I’m an addict and an alcoholic.”

  The group of men said, “Hi, Mike.”

  “I want to forget.” Dolan looked down. His burn-scarred hands lay still on the cheaply laminated brown podium. He felt calm. Not long ago he would have been shaking like a teenaged boy opening his first blouse. He closed his eyes for a long moment then opened them again. The small room was crowded and smelled like unwashed males who’d been chain smoking. It was raining outside and the heater was on. Someone flushed the toilet at the back of the room and pipes rattled behind the peeling brown wallpaper.

  Dolan said, “I want to forget but I can’t.”

  A man whispered, “Amen.”

  “I started going to meetings in rehab,” Dolan continued. “I hated them at first. Hey, who’d want to hang out with a bunch of assholes like you?”

  The men chuckled politely. A white-haired old guy in overalls came out of the bathroom, zipping his fly. His name was Adam Gordon and he was a retired electrician with seventeen years of sobriety. He scurried acros
s the back row and parked himself in an empty chair.

  “I was in a bad place for a long time,” Dolan said. “They gave me some pretty intense therapy in rehab, along with some medications I didn’t like at all. I guess I was pretty messed up. I got better after that. Even though I’d still rather forget, I’ve been putting my mind back together bit by bit for nearly a year now.”

  Someone in the second row cracked his knuckles. A skinny teen speed freak responded to the abrupt noise by twitching. His metal folding chair squeaked like a mouse caught in a trap. Someone else whispered for everyone to be quiet.

  “I’m supposed to tell you what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now,” Dolan said. “So I guess that’s what I should do.”

  The men waited patiently.

  “Here’s what it was like before.” Dolan cleared his throat. “My dad was in the navy. He drank himself to sleep every night but never told us why. A lot of you guys know the story. He also beat us pretty bad sometimes. My mother left finally, just when I started high school, and then it was just the two of us fighting, the old bull and the young bull. Except this time, the young bull was the more ruthless one. One Saturday night, he got me really good, blacked up my right eye and made me reset a broken nose. I waited until he was passed out and just flat kicked the shit out of him. He could hardly move when he woke up. I told him I’d do it again every time he went to sleep unless he left me alone. He stayed off my case after that. It focused his mind pretty good. He happily signed for me when I went into the navy at seventeen. I never spoke to him again. He shot himself a few years back and nobody buried him because nobody gave a shit. I didn’t cry. I haven’t cried since I was little kid.”

  Dolan cleared his throat. The men listened intently.

  “Okay. Here is what happened. I became a drunk too. I went for Special Ops early on. I made it, so there’s a bunch of shit I can’t talk to any of you men about. I’m not trying to hide anything, but I ended up in a branch of the service where most of the stuff we did was off the record. A lot of people died and sometimes it was the wrong people, not that a government ever wants to admit that. That shit really changed me. I’m not the first swinging dick who ever felt that way, and I won’t be the last. I know that. I heard lots of stories like mine at the VA and again in rehab.”