Part Twelve
"Baby girl, stand up and fight
This is not some paradise
Oh, it's just where we live."
Our Lady Peace, "Story About a Girl"
Lloyd, as it turned out, was not a conversationist. He answered all of Cordelia's rapid-fire questions with grunts, his hands clenched tightly enough on the steering wheel to turn his knuckles into pearls. 'I am ditz, hear me roar,' Cordelia thought, watching a muscle in Lloyd's cheek jump. She only wished that the panic were more feigned on her part.
"So, evil," Cordelia said, injecting a special viciousness into her tone. "That seems to be working well for you guys."
Lloyd took his eyes off of the road long enough to flick a glance over her. Rather than being smug, his expression was tense and even a little pitying. "Lady," he said, "if I were you I'd shut up and save my voice. You're going to be talking your ass off soon enough."
Cordelia slid her hand, hidden from Lloyd's sight by the rest of her body, into the pocket of Lindsey's jacket. The tips of her fingers brushed against cool, slightly oily metal. 'Probably not even loaded,' Cordelia thought, her mouth twisting for a moment before she regained control of herself. It counted for something that Lindsey had given it to her, but after landing her in a mess of life-threatening proportions Cordelia wasn't sure what. Possibly a high-heeled kick to the kneecaps instead of the head.
If Flagg had the ability to sense lies, then Cordelia found that she still had it within her to hope that he killed Lindsey quickly.
She had been silent for too long. Lloyd's guard was going to be going back up. Cordelia cleared her throat, turning in her seat so that she could face Lloyd more fully. Her fingers parted from the gun with great reluctance. "Why are you here?" Cordelia asked, wishing that it was someone else she was asking. "The big evil? Typically not known for being the most stable taskmasters on the planet."
She didn't get a glance this time, but an outright stare that lasted until Lloyd was in danger of driving off the road. He swore and corrected himself. "You gotta be kidding me."
'That hit a nerve. What do you know, he has some.' "Nope, not so much." Cordelia lifted an eyebrow and gave Lloyd a critical once-over. "If the best you can get for your soul out of this guy is a car and a half-way decent suit, then I'd be petitioning for a refund."
A lazy smirk slid across Lloyd's face. He was too young for it. "Flagg's been saying you were part of some kind of truth, justice, and the American way army back in Los Angeles. Is that true?"
'Hardly an army,' Cordelia thought, but nodded anyway. "Yes."
The smirk was chased away, so that Lloyd could replace it with an outright smile. It was like watching a snake twist across his face. "And how's that army doing now?" He didn't wait for an answer before he pushed on. "See, the thing about you white hats is that you get up in your little towers, making self-righteous plans, and forget about everyone who exists in the margins entirely. Now the margins are fighting back."
'You poor homely idiot.' If Cordelia felt any pity for him, then it was swallowed up by anger too quickly to matter. "Great. Your entire defense boils down to 'I'm doing it because the popular kids were mean to me.' Do you have any idea how pathetic that is?"
Lloyd laughed. "And yet, I'm the one driving the car and wearing the half-way decent suit. You really think that old broad in Nebraska is going to be able to take down Flagg?"
"I think that you flinch every time you talk about her, and for now that's good enough for me." Cordelia's hand slid back into the jacket, feeling the gun's weight against her palm. She was soothed by it as much as she was repelled. Cordelia flicked the safety off and coiled her finger around the trigger. "We popular kids might just be in the mood to come down from our tower and start rat hunting." Her voice sounded predatory and cruel to her own ears.
Lloyd appeared more annoyed than threatened. "It'll be quite a show either way, won't it?" He braked the car and cut the engine.
Cordelia, startled out of her thoughts and feeling her skin crawl with just how close she had come to actually shooting, looked out her window. Her lips parted. "Someone has a high opinion of themselves."
"The rent's cheaper than you would think." Lloyd exited the driver's side door, coming around to Cordelia's side and placing his hand beneath her arm to help her emerge. The stone he wore around his neck swung on its silver chain, nearly striking Cordelia in the cheek. It twisted, the flaw beginning to look more like an eye than a key. Something in Cordelia's mind snapped and she wrenched her arm out of Lloyd's grasp, never mind that she had to lose her grip on the weapon in order to do so. More of Flagg's followers were coming out of the building's entrance, watching her curiously. She wondered if Flagg had been making common knowledge of her, if she was quite the Cassandra that they had been expecting.
Lloyd straightened, arching his eyebrows at her, and just for a moment Cordelia glimpsed the man that Flagg saw. The baby-face veneer was already being worn away by hard use, like the gold plating on cheap jewelry.
Cordelia exited the car under her own power, barely deigning to look at Lloyd as he took her arm again. She wondered in Lloyd had a gun. She wondered if she should draw her own, and to hell with the crowd. Of all the things that Cordelia wondered, whether or not she would be able to pull the trigger no longer numbered among them.
Cordelia held her head high as she stepped into the lobby of the MGM Grand, now lowered into serving as headquarters for a creature that couldn't call himself human on a good day. Cool air chased the heat from her skin and Cordelia gasped, swiveling her head up to look at the bright, beautiful, and above all fully functioning fluorescent lights. "Electricity?" she gasped, forgetting for the moment that she was supposed to be doing stony and heroic.
Lloyd made a faint sound of amusement. Cordelia decided that it wasn't worth her energy to twist around and glare. "Generators," he said. "What, Mother Abigail hasn't thought of it?"
There was a fine line between bravery and stupidity, and she was walking tightly enough on it already. "Probably not," Cordelia looked over and at Lloyd and, self-admonishments or not, couldn't resist widening her eyes a bit. "Gosh, do you think if I sell my over my soul like you guys I can get a hot tub?"
"If I were you, I'd be more worried about what I was going to say than what I was going to get." Lloyd directed her to the elevators and Cordelia discovered that Flagg even had the tinny muzak up and running again. A truer evil never walked the earth. The gooseflesh on her arms lessened, just for a moment.
"Here," Lloyd said as the elevator came to a smooth halt at the top floor. Of course.
"Only the best," Cordelia murmured.
"Just tell Mr. Flagg what he wants to know," Lloyd told her before he allowed her to exit. "It'll be easier for you."
Cordelia, her mind already fixated on the world that awaited her ahead, had no time for eloquence. "Bite me." From the corner of her eye she saw an ugly, hungry look cross Lloyd's face. A vampire look. In all of his shades of rage and nastiness, she had never seen that look on Lindsey himself.
Not important now.
Cordelia strode past a lovely secretary's desk with a lovely print of 'Around the Fish' hanging above it. She was sure that the secretary herself was making a lovely corpse wherever her body had been dumped. Cordelia put her hand upon the door to the office beyond, twisted the knob, and came face to face to Randall Flagg himself.
'How the hell did he get up here so quickly?' Cordelia thought, as her eyes widened and her entire body felt as if it had been dipped in dry ice.
Flagg noted the reaction and smiled, his eyes taking on the light of a small child's when they had a big secret that they couldn't wait to tell. "Thank you, Lloyd," he called over Cordelia's shoulder as he took her hand lightly, possessively in his own. Any human with a body temperature that high would have had their brains cooked inside their skulls days before.
Lloyd nodded, his face wiped as clear as a dry erase board of emotion, and disappeared back into the elevator. Cordelia felt more alone with him gone, soulless rat bastard that he was. He, at least, had been definitively of this world.
Flagg was grinning at her when Cordelia turned back to him. She was suddenly sure, by that terrible look alone, that there were maggots squirming and pulsing beneath the surface of his skin. As soon as she thought it she could Ifeel/I it, and with a squeak of distress Cordelia wrenched her hand away, so fast that she nearly left skin behind. Bile surged hot and sour into her throat.
Flagg made a soft clucking sound from the back of his throat. "Now, now, none of that," he chided. "The time has come for you and I to talk of many things, and it's best if we start out as friends, don't you think?" He moved aside so that Cordelia could step into his office. "Come into my parlor."
"Said the spider to the fly," Cordelia supplied under her breath, loud enough to ensure that they both heard.
She was expecting an office full of decadent, light blocking brocades, deep cherries and mahoganies, furniture designed to impart a sense of awe and power. A lair, in other words. In its stead gleaming metal, crisp blacks and whites, and a breathtaking view of the city beyond greeted her. Shelves of jade figurines lined one wall; Cordelia saw several wolves scattered throughout the menagerie and an entire flock of crows. There was a desk with chair in the room, but it had been shoved back against the wall and, save for a heavy marble paperweight in the shape of a softball, was entirely bare. The whole package seemed strangely refined for a man who wore a denim jacket and dusty cowboy boots.
"Love your interior decorator," Cordelia said as Flagg stepped up beside her.
"It has a certain flair," Flagg said and, seeing the way that Cordelia's eye was being pulled towards the window, asked, "It's lovely, isn't it? And to think, all we had to do to cope with that nasty little pollution problem was shuck off the race that created it."
Spell broken. Cordelia stepped away from him, curling her lip. "Small price, huh?"
"A joke, my dear." Flagg inclined his head. "Perhaps done in poor taste, but well-meaning all the same."
Cordelia turned her eyes back towards the window. They was a sky was a crushing, merciless blue without a single cloud to break it apart. "What do you want from me?"
Flagg bobbed his head, looking pleased. "And now we get into the heart of it." He moved out of Cordelia's line of sight. She could still hear the muted clump of boot heels as he passed behind her, but she refused to turn her head. Flagg's fingers wound their way through her ponytail, across the nape of her neck. They fluttered to a rest at her temples. "You've been talking to that witch and her god," Flagg murmured, his voice barely audible over the air-conditioning's discreet hum. "And what did you talk about, I wonder? What did she tell you?" The butterfly pressure turned cruel, denting the skin downwards. Cordelia cried out and felt tears of pain spring into her eyes. "How long will it take her to pay you another visit?" He worked his fingers even deeper into the delicate hollows above Cordelia's temples.
The pain was blinding, scorching, and Cordelia heard an incredulous shriek of laughter roll out of her lungs, anyway. Cleansing her. The weight in her head ceased as abruptly as it had begun, halted by Flagg's releasing her and stepping away. Cordelia's brain cooed. Her knees sagged and she grabbed at the desk chair, barely saving herself from a fall as it tried to roll away from her.
"What's so funny?" Flagg snarled at her. The mask of geniality had been banished far, far away. Naked in his fury, Flagg was fearsome, yes, but he was also ridiculous, an angry tinpot dictator throwing a fit because no one would play his games any longer. 'That's all he is,' Cordelia thought. 'All this time, and I've been afraid of a wannabe.'
'Still got teeth, girl,' she could imagine Mother Abigail saying. 'You remember that. Just when you think they're down for the count, they always got teeth.'
Cordelia felt the peals of laughter continue to ring out of her, anyway, watching as the stuff of nightmares turned a rather interesting shade of purple. "Answer me, you stupid bitch!" Flagg roared, lunging forward and grabbing Cordelia's ponytail. He twisted her head up with it, and squeaking pain drew Cordelia's jaws together with a clack so hard that she nearly took the tip off of her own tongue. "What's so fucking funny?"
"Oh," Cordelia gasped, giggles still escaping in spite of the tears that ran freely down her face. "Oh, Iyou/I." Flagg released her hair and Cordelia slumped to the floor. Laughter continued to bubble out of her in dangerous little spurts. "Do you actually think my visions work like that? That I have a nice little chat with the Powers whenever I feel like it? God is one of us?" Cordelia doubled over, braying, and it was several seconds before she could continue. Flagg's rage filled the room like fever.
"You idiot," Cordelia wheezed. She regained control enough to look up into Flagg's face. "I don't control when I receive my visions. I don't have control over what's Iin/I my visions. They come whenever the Powers That Be want me to have them, and show me whatever the Powers want me to see." A fresh fit threatened to overcome her. Cordelia pushed it back, but she could not stop her smile. "And I haven't had a single one since the plague started. The Powers The Be don't even care enough about you to put a blip on my radar screen."
"Lying Icow/I!" Flagg roared, striking her across the face with what felt like all his strength. If he had more in store somewhere, then Cordelia did not want to know about it. Her head snapped back until her head squealed at the point of breaking, the rest of her body following in an ungainly arc that deposited her several feet away. The air wheezed out of Cordelia's lungs on impact, leaving her feeling as if a full-grown man had sat down on her chest. She was too stunned to draw more.
Flagg's boot heels as they stalked towards her made the loudest sound in the room.
'And, oh, the light, too bright, searing her eyeballs away. Cordelia gasped, turned her head, made a futile attempt to protect herself. The light retreated from retina-dissolving brilliance slowly, resolving itself into the silhouette instantly recognizable to anyone born into the twentieth century: the mushroom cloud. Cordelia's awareness whooshed down into the base of the cloud, forcing her back a few seconds in time. Her ears throbbed with the roar of explosion even as she could still hear Flagg's fury from outside of her head. The Flagg within the vision howled with pain and fury as his attempt at immortality was burned away-not dead, never dead, but he got his ass kicked good this time around-and the Las Vegas skyline dissolved. Cordelia was drawn further in, barreling past disintegrating buildings and melting flesh. To her horror, she could still make out the faces as they screamed and writhed in the split-second before oblivion, caught in an eternal freeze-frame so that she could watch them again and again and again.
The face that she sought more than any other was not there.'
Cordelia was thrown out of the vision only to feel a pair of hands grabbing her about the shoulders and shaking her without care for comfort or injury. The back of her skull rebounded off the floor with every jounce. More head traumas on a noggin that had already taken its fair share, not really helping her to get her equilibrium back. Cordelia groaned and rolled over until Flagg released her. Her eyes rolled towards the ceiling. "Your timing sucks," Cordelia croaked.
"What did you see?" Flagg had reverted back to his sociopathic toddler with ADD stage. "Tell me what you saw!" He grabbed Cordelia's shoulder to roll her back over. Cordelia dove her hand into the pocket of her jacket, found the gun.
'The corn made a sound like bolts of silk rubbing against one another as Cordelia and Mother Abigail walked through it-even this place was not impervious to violation-but Cordelia heard every word.
"It won't be more than a small window," Mother Abigail said, "but, God willing, it will be enough."
"How will I know?" Cordelia asked.
Mother Abigail shook her head. "I'll be pushing as far as I can go to give you this much. You'll just have to know."
Cordelia exhaled her breath in a huff. "I think you have the wrong girl here," she said. "I'm not the hero. I'm the Gal Friday with occasional seizures to the hero."
Mother Abigail gave her a smile that both the saddest and the kindest that Cordelia had ever seen and took Cordelia's hand in her own. "Child," she said, "there ain't a one of us left who's not in the middle of becoming something that we never thought we could be." She released Cordelia's hand and rubbed at her head a if it pained her. "So little time," she muttered, her eyes growing distant.
"Mother Abigail?" Cordelia ventured.
Mother Abigail startled as if she was surprised to find that Cordelia was still there. "You goan now," she said, "You give the devil his due, and then you come find me in the new place. We'll make our stand together."'
"Guess you're not a dead battery, after all," Flagg said, his face lit up into a devil's rictus. "You're going to tell me, oh, you're going to tell me every little thing that you saw."
Cordelia had never fired a gun before. She thought she should be alarmed by how easy it was.
At that close a range it was impossible to miss. The report echoed through the room and Flagg staggered back, staring at the bloodied hole left in the flannel shirt that he wore. Not nearly enough blood as there should have been. He began to grin. "You stupid cow," Flagg said, "haven't you figured out by now-"
"Shut up," Cordelia said, and fired again.
The second shot staggered Flagg back further, and the third threw him off his feet entirely. Flagg fell backwards into the shelves of jade figurines, collapsing them. The statuettes shot off the shelves like animals escaping from a zoo as an unseen wind blew through the room, rocking the remains of the case back and forth. It teetered, seemed to debate with itself for a long moment, and then fell forward onto Flagg's body. Shards of jade flew like knives.
Cordelia flinched backwards both to protect her face and to put herself further away from the source of the dangerous anger that was filling up the room like a burgeoning storm. 'I'm not supposed to be able to hurt him like that,' Cordelia thought. Satisfaction rolled into her fingers and urged her to pull the trigger again. 'I'll bet he didn't even know it was possible.' As far as miracles went, Mother Abigail didn't do half bad.
Cordelia tucked the gun, warm enough to be mistaken for a live thing, back into the pocket of Lindsey's jacket. She had no illusions that she had killed Flagg, not with her head throbbing like a sore tooth and the vision echoing in glorious Technicolor through her brain. She had bought herself a few minutes of time; that would be good enough. Someday soon, someone was going to take Flagg and his whole rotting city back down into the mud they had come from. Cordelia wanted to have something to look forward to.
Cordelia didn't bother with stealth as she blew out of Flagg's office and into the elevator, breaking into a run and not caring who saw her. The angry, wounded god that she had left behind wasn't going to be in the mood to be gentle when Mother Abigail's mojo wore off. Cordelia was grateful enough for one miracle; she didn't expect a second.
A man that Cordelia didn't recognize made to step into the elevator just as she was stepping off. He had the look of security, though, and his hand was diving towards his gun even as the look of startlement was still working across his face. By virtue of an adrenaline rush that was making the entire world seem acidic and fast, Cordelia beat him in the race. The shot echoed and reechoed as the mystery man did a slow slump onto the floor. The hole that Cordelia had opened up in his chest smoked for a second before blood extinguished it.
"Oh, God," Cordelia moaned, nearly dropping the gun. Her conscience gave a short, strangled squawk before it decided that the entire situation was far too much to cope with at once and retreated into a shocked silence to think things over.
He would have died in the nuclear explosion, anyway. Right. That made it so much better.
Cordelia cringed and forced herself to reach beneath the man's jacket to retrieve the weapon that he had been planning to use on her. Lindsey's revolver had only two shots left. If Cordelia had had the luxury of introspection, she would have been appalled by how quickly she was adopting the cold, efficient mechanics of survival. As it was, she was only glad that her heart was still beating.
Cordelia tucked both guns out of sight and slid along the wall until she could blend into the crowd being drawn towards the sound. The first waves of panic carried her out the door.