2012 (33 page)

It was them. THEM!

It had been some kind of an enemy unit, he could see that, but even they had taken a hell of a beating from these people. The mother cut up some of their exotic weaponry with a damned axe, and the little girl-what, seven, eight-stood there watching and laughing. “Mommy’s killin’ a big spider.” Tough sonembitches.

That was an outrider and outriders belong to the enemy, soldier, and you are working for them, and you need to FACE THIS!

The trapdoor was opened again. Light swamped his eye for a moment. Then he saw a silhouette.

“This man isn’t dead! This man is breathing!”

Another head appeared, disappeared. “Fuckaroo, he’s right.”

The woman’s voice: “Kill him!”

“You can’t do that, Brooke! I gotta call EMS, I gotta try to save his life. And-Kee-rist, you got a man all shot to hell in your crawl space, so nobody leaves. Got that? Nobody leaves!”

“It was self-defense, he attacked us.”

“I know that, but I got procedures, buddy. This is serious.”

“He’s from our universe,” another voice said.

General North listened to them up there, murmuring together. Those bastards had figured out how to get through a gateway, and they were gonna mess this whole operation up.

You’re not sad about that! You’re glad! It’s good, it’s a triumph, for God’s sakes, listen to your soul!

His mind cast about, trying to find a way to carry out his orders. There had to be one, there always was.

There were guns upstairs, plenty of them. But down here there was nothing, only dirt. His own gun was long gone. So, did he have anything else that might cause damage? Belt-sure, but he wasn’t going to be able to garrote anybody. Pins on his medals, big deal. Teeth. He could bite, maybe damn hard. So there was that. He could bite through one of their cheeks. And clutch with his left hand. He tested it. Yes.

So he needed them to pull him out. He’d take it from there.

He waited. Nothing. No more voices that he could hear. Stomping that faded, then faint shouts. They were looking at whatever the intelligence unit had done.

So they’d called EMS and now that was done, they were showing the cop the rest of the damage around the house. Not good. He needed them to pull him up before some EMS bunch showed up to spirit him away.

He took a breath, deep as he could, and let his pain possess him. He knew how to manage pain, and he’d been doing that, but now it was time to change his approach. As he let out the breath, he made himself scream.

It worked amazingly well. Damned well. He took another breath, did it again. The sound was odd, a lost, bansheelike howl, and it caused the river of pain to start flowing again.

It also caused the trap door to open. “EMS’ll be along directly,” the new voice said.

Then that other voice again, somehow gentler, thinner, “He’s from our world and he’s evil, you have to let us-“

“I don’t have to let you do one damn thing, Doctor Winters! This man is shot, he is here, and what you have to do is let me do my job.”

“He’s a criminal in our world. Wearing a military uniform but working for the enemy. He belongs to us.”

“Don’t you push me,” Matt said.

“Hey, guys, knock it off,” Wylie responded. “Martin, you’ve got gumption, after all.”

“We need to take that man back with us,” Martin insisted.

“Sounds like you need to take the whole damn Marine Corps.”

“We had a Marine Corps, too, did you know that? And they are gone. Gone! The military was done in the first wave. Worldwide. Done. So unless we can stop the seraph, they are coming here tout de suite.”

“Matt-“

“Fellas, I’m gonna show my piece here in a second, and I do hate to do that.”

“Did you know that you have an equivalent in our universe? Who is also a lifelong friend of mine, just like you are of Wylie’s? His name is Bobby. He’s disappeared and we think he’s wandering-alive but without a soul.”

“And you will be, too,” Trevor added, “if they come here. Wandering with your soul locked up just like Wylie has seen-or worse, you’ll be like that man down there, so twisted and turned around that he works for the enemy and thinks he’s working for his own kind. You’ll be just like that, and possibly within days.”

“Look, this shooting is the most serious thing to happen in this town in my entire career.”

“You should see the one my mommy shot. It looked like a big spider and when she blasted it, it sent out hot stuff that smelled like when you burn bacon.”

Listen to them! They’re your friends.

He sucked another breath, howled another howl.

“Let us take him back,” Trevor pleaded. “Let us find out what we need to know.”

“You can question him in the hospital,” Matt offered.

Wylie laughed scornfully. “Oh, for shit’s sake, Matthew, this cat needs to be waterboarded at the very least. He needs a live rat stuffed in that eye socket. At the very fricking least. Hospital. Do you put a goddamn cobra in a hospital?”

“If you’re me, you sure as hell do. In an animal hospital. Departmental requirement, all injured animals are provided treatment.”

“That is not what I meant.”

The ambulance was coming soon, so Al had to make a maximum effort here, a supereffort, or this was not going to come out right. He had more than one job to do, he knew that now, because he had to kill every one of these damn people, especially the ones from the his own universe.

How had things gone so wrong? He had to kill them and get back and warn General Samson that things were out of control, they were way out of control.

Then the cop came down into the crawl space. Just like that, he was standing over him. This was his chance, his only chance.

As the fool bent down, he reached up and pushed the pistol out of the holster with the heel of his hand.

It hit his thigh with a thud that shook him but which he didn’t feel.

“Excuse me,” the cop said, reaching down.

Al was faster. Al got the butt of the weapon between thumb and fore-finger. He felt along the side of it, and got his finger around the trigger.

He raised the weapon.

“Shit, he’s got my gun! He’s got my fucking-“

He shot upward wildly, through the floor. There were cries from above. He had no way to know if he’d hit anybody, so he shot again and again, until there was only one bullet left.

By now, the cop had skittered back up there, too, and they were all yelling.

He knew what he had to do because he knew the stakes. They needed information that he did indeed possess and it sounded as if they were going to drag it out of him with pliers. They would succeed, too. Our expertise at torture was child’s play compared to what these bastards sounded capable of.

Give it to them! Tell them everything!

There was one gateway they knew nothing about. But he knew about it, because he’d been taken through it, and they were not going to find that out.

They couldn’t destroy the seraph, not even close, but they might slow things down, and that was the issue, wasn’t it, because every day after the twenty-first, things were going to get harder, and around the twenty fifth, the gateways would once again close, and Abaddon would be denied all but minor access for another thirteen thousand years. They’d have to go back to sending through agents provocateurs to derange human civilization, cause wars, spread starvation and greed and confusion, and keep the bastards weak.

Keep YOUR people weak, you mean. Listen to yourself, General, you’re thinking with the enemy.

He got the barrel of the gun nestled under his chin, prayed to the good lord above that he had killed the man he’d been sent to kill, and pulled the trigger.

Then he climbed up out of the crawl space and into the kitchen. Wylie, whom Al had been sent to kill, was unhurt. They were all unhurt.

And Al was elated.

The next second, he understood that the person still lying down there in that crawl space with a splayed head was him. And, all at once, he realized what he had done. “Uh, hey! Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry. Sorry!”

He remembered the Mountain, going down into the rock with that woman, Captain Mazle. He realized that she had been seraph. Samson was one of them, too. They were heavily disguised and they used drugs to enable them to live in our air, and they had stolen his will.

Needles, sharp scissors, clipped flesh wobbling in silver trays-brain being removed, brain being installed.

They had stolen his memory. They had subverted his honor.

This soldier owes his duty to his country, NOT TO THEM!

He’d been working for the enemy.

As he watched, EMS technicians came running in. He watched them jump down into the crawl space.

“I can tell you what you need to know,” he said.

The cop hurried out behind the EMS doctors. Wylie and his family came together, holding each other. Martin and Trevor left, and began to move off down the hill.

Al ran outside. “Wait! Listen to me! I made a mistake, but I can help you!” He went up to them. He shouted into Martin’s face, “Listen to me! I can help you!”

Nothing. He grabbed Martin-and his hands went through him. Martin shuddered and said, “I feel like a goose just walked over my grave.”

“Dad, we have a problem here, because when we go back, we’re gonna hit really fast water. Remember, in our world, the Saunders is in flood.”

Al could hear every word. “Can you hear me?” he bellowed.

“Yeah, that’s right, we can’t cross, not with the flooding on the other side.”

“What about the Hummer?”

“Yeah!”

No! NO! You fools, it’ll float right down the river!

They started back up the hill. “It’s full of dead seraph.”

“Take ‘em with us, save Wylie and Matt a lotta trouble.”

“Plus, the back’s caked with venom. They must’ve brought that busted up outrider with them in it.”

Al had followed them. He was right with them, just inches away.

LISTEN TO ME! LISTEN NOW!

They set about pushing reptile bodies into the back of the Humvee.

Al inventoried his situation. You still exist, you can think, you can see and hear, you can move effortlessly wherever you want to go. But how in hell do you communicate? A quick review of his knowledge of ghosts and such, and the answer was immediately clear: you don’t.

He was a damn ghost, was what he was.

But no, this ghost was no cute little Casper and-he hoped-no raging banshee. He had a much larger vision of his life than before. His conscience was very, very powerful now. He saw deep into the arrogance that had made him who he was, the entire falsity of it, and how profound feelings of worthlessness were the foundation of the ego that had led him across all his life, all the way to this final predicament.

He knew now who he was, he knew the mistakes he had made, and he knew just exactly how to help the people of his world turn everything around. They could completely defeat Abaddon-these people, this man and this boy, if only they knew what he did. He had to tell them-but he couldn’t make them hear him or see him.

Martin and Trevor opened the doors of the Hummer and shoved two gray, lifeless seraph bodies into the back, then, as an afterthought, Trevor pocketed one of their hand weapons. Al knew those weapons, electrical-centrifugal handguns that could propel thousands of light-weight plastic rounds at five thousand clicks an hour. The only sound they made was the crackle of the rounds breaking the sound barrier, but they could slice a man in half a mile away. Or a dozen men…or a thousand.

“How do these work?” Martin asked.

“Let’s test ‘em.”

Holy shit, be careful!

“It doesn’t look very lethal,” Trevor commented.

Martin held one of the black disks away from his body, pointing its three short barrels in the direction of some trees. He pressed the two triggers, top and bottom. There was a brief snarl, and three of the trees literally flew apart, a foot-wide chunk of their trunks turned instantly to sawdust.

“What is this thing?”

The U.S. military has the same thing. Bigger, vehicle mounted.

“It’s a seraph weapon,” Trevor said, producing a dark blue box with seraph hieroglyphics on it. “Here’s some ammo.”

“Wylie and Nick would love this.”

“You like them. Their macho and their guns and all.”

“They’re winners, Dad. This whole universe-it works better than ours, it’s more dynamic.”

“It’s been at war with itself for a hundred years.”

“And we live in a world of kingdoms and empires where nobody’s really free.”

“We’re free.”

“We are and the French are and the English are, at least at home. But look at the rest of it, Dad, it’s a vast system of slavery-orderly, easy to live in, but-“

The Hummer roared to life. Al watched, no longer trying to stop them. He knew that he couldn’t. The dead did not communicate with the living. Just didn’t.

So when you finally understand and you can tell them everything they need to know, this happens.

They closed the doors and drove the Hummer down toward the bank of the Saunders-here, flowing gently. There were places where you could jump across it, even, but certainly not into another universe.

They needed to know about the seraph headquarters, deep underground and just a few miles from here, had to be told what he had remembered about being in there.

If they could enter it, they could free millions of trapped souls, they could wreck the power systems, maybe even stop the lenses from functioning. They could cause core damage to Abaddon’s plans, maybe kill Mazle and Samson, even.

He raced down to the Hummer, shot into it right through one of the windows. “Hear me! HEAR ME!”

“There’s the gateway,” Martin told Trevor.

“Is it big enough for this thing?”

“They got it through.”

Maybe this was good, maybe the gateway was too small, maybe the Hummer wouldn’t fit and they wouldn’t kill themselves, the damn fools.

“Do we just aim at it or what? I’m not sure I know how to go about this.”

“I’m not sure, either, Dad.”

Don’t try, please.

“We have to try.”

Please.

As Martin backed the Hummer up, Al did everything he could think of, attempting to project his thoughts into Martin’s mind, actually going inside his body where his organs were sloshing and his blood was surging. He went directly into the brain, but even that didn’t help. He could perceive the gray matter like a pulsating, sparking fog all around him, but he couldn’t do anything to affect thought from in here, either.