Chapter 36
44.
 Lee Collwood reloaded his Glock as he drove the long miles toward the Salton Sea. At one point he had a scare, because he encountered a State roadblock. Agricultural agents in dark green uniforms were looking for illegal shipments of fruits possibly containing some insect that was ruining crops in both Arizona and California. Seeing his destination—in the desert not far from Brawley—they didn't bother checking his trunk.
He also encountered a similar stop by the Migra, or Border Patrol. They, however, were checking cars coming north from Mexico, and he was heading southeast. He could well imagine the looks on their faces if they did open his trunk. Then again, the first tell tale sign that a man had illegals in the car was the extent to which the car rode low on the road. Five or ten people could lower the chassis—a sign the Feds would spot.
He sailed through this roadblock and prayed to make it okay to his plant. At six p.m., the desert was still hot while shadows grew long, and the light frying the walls of buildings turned from incandescent down to an increasingly honeyed, soft glow. It was almost sad and poetic in a way. Melancholy, if you swung that way. But Lee Collwood was all action, lights, music, no time for sentimentality. He had no time for fear or self-doubt.
Long ago, when his mother lived, she had taken him to see a bearded doctor with a Vienna accent and African statues on his bookcase. This doctor had diagnosed the pubescent Lee as having touches of sociopathy and megalomania, embedded in a mild bipolar condition that made him at times hyper, at other times lethargic. Another doctor some years later—after he had pushed a girl from a horse at a riding stable during classes, and the parents sued because she had become paraplegic—had said Lee was narcissistic. It meant he loved only himself, if one could call that love, and he didn't care whom he hurt. He had no feelings for other people. He didn't know where he ended and other people began. His mother had cried for weeks, and regarded him with large, tragic eyes while holding a hand up to stifle sobs. He kept getting thrown out of schools, usually for doing things to other boys that went beyond the normal pranks and black eyes. Lee mellowed with time, converting his brute physical energy and raging carelessness into more subtle maneuverings—manipulation, lying, cheating. While he was physically violent earlier, he'd always been outmaneuvered by those who resorted to cleverness rather than physical cruelty. When Lee learned that it was more effective to be psychologically cruel, and easier to cover one's tracks—especially coming from a billionaire family that could always clean up the mess, fix the problem, buy the next pony, pretend Lee was getting better—then Lee switched gears from brute to just plain creep. Of course, that wasn't how he saw himself. That was from the lengthy, hateful depositions made in divorce court by his three ex-wives. He saw himself as being a victim of the 'lonely at the top' syndrome of those who are better than their peers. His burden in life was to inherit a billion dollar fortune that others had let slide to the brink of ruination. It was his duty, a patriotic duty to his country as well as to his family, to restore Anaconda Chemicals to its former glory. That end justified any means. And since he paid generous amounts of child support and alimony, always on time, he figured he was a far better fellow than these awful women made him out to be. After all, he'd never struck any of them, or their children. One could easily tally up the plusses and minuses, the debits and credits, as Lee tended to do, and come up with a wholly different accounting.
Lee Collwood drove up to his personal entrance at the south end of the plant. At a press of a button in the car, the three-wide steel garage door rolled up for him as he drove into the cool gloom. Sensors noted the entrance of his car and closed the door behind him. He pulled to a stop in the 18 car garage and motor pool that contained his prized Lamborghini and classic Porsche, among other treasures.
First, there was the matter of the bodies. He opened the trunk and stood back, gasping. Even for his strong stomach, the sight he saw was revolting. The entire trunk was gauzed over with a light mesh of very fine threads. Through the threads, Collwood saw that the headless torso of the mushroom man had managed to wrap its arms and legs around Morton, apparently killing him. The mix of human decay and mushroom bloom was overpowering. Morton must have been rotting for at least three hours in the hot trunk going through the desert. Strangest of all, the head had somehow gotten out of the bag and loosely reattached itself, by just those glossy black eel-belly tubes. The head was now also firmly attached to Morton's neck by such a tube coming out of the head's mouth and entering Morton's left jugular artery. Morton's eyes were slightly open with an odd sheen, and his mouth was open in what looked like a deflated, final scream. Collwood was tired and disgusted. He yelled out an obscenity and slammed the trunk lid shut.
He climbed into a golf cart and drove across the garage, up the ramp, and back into sunlight. He entered the inner courtyard of his personal estate, which contained a large swimming pool, jacuzzi seating up to 18 people, and amenities to throw a rolling party for hundreds who had arrived by jet at his private runway on the desert floor outside. In recent years, the celebrities who used to come to his grandfather's and father's parties didn't come anymore. Lee didn't make friends very easily. He managed to attract women who liked his money, were okay with his reasonably good athletic looks, and tolerated his roller-coaster personality and personal disconnection.
At the moment, he lived alone in the sprawling estate. Locals from the entire county still showed up for work at the adjoining plant. Parts of the plant had shut down over the years, and entire buildings stood empty like a ghost town. Anaconda Chemicals today employed more workers at its San Diego facility (5,000) than at the home plant near Brawley. Since his last wife had moved out a year ago, taking their last child with her, he'd been alone here with his guns, his cars, his planes, and his dreams. He had plenty of time to fly in experts in various fields to deliver one and two day briefings on mycology, lichenology, and other tributaries of the great river of biology, the study of life.
When old Robertson had brought him the translated journals and notes of Major Tomio Karasawa, Lee Collwood had quickly grasped the implications. Karasawa had been on the headquarters staff of the Imperial Japanese Army's infamous Unit 731 stationed in China. Lt. General Ishii Shiro, a microbiologist and commander of that unit, had performed horrific human experiments on hundreds of thousands of Chinese men, women, and children, in addition to thousands of Allied prisoners of war. The unit's very existence had been covered up by MacArthur's Japanese occupation government after the war, for various political reasons. In a manner reminiscent of the treatment of certain Nazi war criminals—who were valuable assets for the ensuing Cold War with the Soviets in Europe—the U.S. and her allies seized the information about Unit 731 and buried it in deeply secret classifications to avoid having it fall into Soviet or Red Chinese hands. Robertson had been a minor U.S. official involved with Chiang Kai Shek's Nationalist government before Mao Tse Tung's Communists drove the Nationalists from the mainland to form the Republic of China (Taiwan). Robertson later, by his own account, received the Karasawa documents from an alcoholic and debt-ridden U.S. officer in San Diego. Robertson, who understood both Japanese and Chinese, translated the documents and planned to release them to the press after his death by means of his will. His wife's illness, and his own illness, and his looming bankruptcy as a result, forced him to seek a buyer. Because of the nature of its business and proximity to San Diego, Anaconda Chemicals had been first on his list of candidate buyers, and he'd hit the bull's eye on his first shot. He had been cagey in his discussions with Lee Collwood, but Collwood was desperate and Robertson didn't need much at all by Collwood's standards—half a million dollars.
Collwood mixed himself a drink and walked out to the pool. The evening was cool, and the interior of the pool twinkled slowly as waves on the surface mixed light sources in and above the water in hypnotic dancing patterns. Collwood dropped his clothes on a deck chair, pulled a swim suit out of a metal dresser full of them, and dove into the pool. He swam several laps, letting the cool water flow over his body and wash away the dirt of the outside world. Purified, he wrapped himself in a large towel, turned on a gas heater, and lay on the deck chair. He was a bit hungry, and resolved to make himself a sandwich later. He had no staff anymore, having let them all go for lack of cash.
He was awaiting a phone call, and it came shortly. His phone warbled and he popped open the clam shell. "Yes?"
"This is Thomas Blake. Who am I speaking with?"
"Lee Collwood. Where are you?"
"Driving to your place with six of my associates."
"Great. Call me when you're outside and I'll open the gate."
It took several hours for the van full of men to arrive from Phoenix, where they had been especially recruited by some of Syd Appelbaum's friends in L.A. Meanwhile, Collwood dozed off. The warbling of his cell phone awakened him from a deep, tired sleep. Blake and his men were outside. "I'll let you in. Give me 15 minutes, okay?" He dove into the pool to wake up. He clambered out, dried off, popped several uppers to get himself going, and drove his golf cart out to the garage. He raised the steel door remotely, and a dark green van glided quietly into the garage even as the door unrolled itself back to the shut position.
The passenger door opened, and a strapping man of 30 got out. He was blond, with a sort of page boy hairdo that turned frizzy at the ears and ended at the collar. He had a strong jaw, small broken nose, and features Collwood had seen on body builders and extreme martial arts guys. He wasn't bulked up, but had solid muscle in a lean frame. "Nice to meet you."
"Same here," Collwood said. "I have a severe problem, and I need you guys to fix it for me."
Blake grinned, showing small white teeth. "That's what we're here for." He sounded vaguely Commonwealth, now that Collwood began to notice, and he recalled that Blake was South African. Syd's people had recommended this guy as tops in the field. He'd been a mercenary in several wars, including those fought by the U.S. in the Middle East. The guy was said to be intel material—trustworthy, dedicated, tied by an umbilical to his employer's wallet and therefore loyal to a fault.
"Let's meet your men."
Blake bellowed over his shoulder: "Okay, gents, show the man your face. Don't scare him to death."
Six men climbed out—two white, two Asian, two black. "That's the whole six pack," Blake joked. "These boys will cut their finger off for you, honest."
"I believe it. Do they scare easily?"
Blake guffawed, and the others followed suit. They were all cut from the same jib—youngish, hard, lean, ready to scrap. At the look on Collwood's face, their laughs lost some of their heartiness. Collwood gave them a brief rundown, warning of the blowing of dark air full of spores, and of the ruthless inhumanity of their opponent. He assured them a total license to kill them.
"Let me give you an example of their kind," Collwood said. He had them gather around the trunk of his car and unlocked it. As the trunk groaned open on its spring-loaded hinges, Collwood gasped more than the others.
The bodies in the trunk were gone—head and all. The gauzy mess had been torn so that only a few shreds remained to blow in the wind. Against the far wall of the trunk stretched a dull brown mass—a bracket fungus. Henry Morton's shoes and clothing lay wadded in a corner, covered with slime. The being who had been Tidjeman had apparently chewed or cut his way—oh yes, the ceramic knife!—through the firewall behind the back seat. It would have been easy to reach up and pull the lever that made the back seat fold forward.
Collwood whirled to confront several snickering faces. "You think I'm nuts, eh?" He reached into the trunk and pulled Morton's clothing out. He shook the klutzy brown shoes. "You see these? The thing's a mimic. Your first assignment is to get out there right now and hunt down this killer, this mimic, this fungal freak. Here is your challenge. You think it's a joke, you get careless, and this thing spots you before you see it—you get a blast of black air in the face, and you're done for."
Blake betrayed one instant's uncertainty. "Mr. Collwood, you're quite sure now—?"
Collwood got in his face. "I'm paying you guys top dollar per diem and you do what I pay you for. Hunt this thing down and get the practice you'll need when you go hunting in the city!"
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Copyright © 2014 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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