Allie's War Season Three (189 page)

Allie’s face flashed in front of his eyes again, even as he let out a low groan.

“Ideas?” he gasped, not slowing his pace as he slogged through the deepening mud and silt. “We’re running out of time...”

Silence from the other two, when Maygar’s voice suddenly burst out from behind him.

“There!” he said. “Another pipe...looks like it’s going up!”

Revik stared at it, but only for an instant.

Cursing the collar, he fought to decide, then abruptly changed course when they reached the Y-junction, running up the slightly larger tributary. Jon and Maygar splashed behind him. He heard a grunt as one of them fell then struggled back to their feet, but Revik didn’t slow, and within a few more minutes, he could hear both of them splashing not far behind him in the tunnel again.

The sound of rushing water was getting louder.

“Fuck,” Jon muttered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck...”

Revik saw it then, and let out a cry.

He would have pointed if he’d had use of his arms, but as it was, he only ran towards it. He didn’t really think about the logistical issues until he was standing right in front of the damned thing, and then he could only gasp, giving the other two a kind of helpless look.

It was a ladder, but they didn’t have use of their arms.

Hearing the water rushing louder behind them, Revik turned around, grasping hold of one rung with his bound hands. Leaning as much of his weight back as he could, to keep from toppling over, he stabbed his foot onto the lowest rung, and fought to pull himself up. Quickly, he realized it was futile. His hands were bound too closely together, and every time he let go of a rung, he would fall, face-forward, into the bottom of the pipe.

“What the fuck do we do?” Jon shouted, now to be heard over the rushing of the water filling the pipes below. “There’s not going to be
any
way out...not without a ladder!”

Revik looked between their two faces, feeling his chest go numb.

They could let the water bring them to the surface...in theory...but the reality was, it wouldn’t. The flood of water would knock them over, instead...send them spend them spinning down the pipe, slamming into the walls and ceiling until they got knocked out or drowned...assuming they weren’t stabbed or beheaded by shrapnel, first.

Revik fought to think, to breathe through his panic to come up with something, anything.

If there was some way to get the chains off even one of them, but there was no time for that, either. There was no time for any of the dozen of so solutions that flickered through his mind. He fought to think past the obvious barriers to something he hadn’t tried before. Maybe he could risk blacking out, try to get a signal to Wreg and the others through the collar.

He could ask Maygar to try, too. Maybe between them...

“Well, hello down there!”

The voice jerked all three sets of their eyes up.

Revik stared up at the faces peering down at them, feeling a kind of disbelief as he saw a few of them smiling, their eyes taking in the three of them with the torch clutched behind Maygar’s back, their faces dirty and Revik’s swollen and darkening from Ditrini’s fists.

None of the three of them had heard the manhole cover being rolled away, with the sound of the water coming at them.

Immediately, looking up at them, though, Revik knew they weren’t friends.

On the other hand, he wasn’t all that sure how many friends he had left.

“Need some help?” the man in the NYPD uniform asked, grinning at Revik above a dark rain slicker with florescent bands across the front. “Or were you planning on learning to surf in the next five minutes, iceblood?”

Looking up at them, Revik didn’t need his sight to know they wouldn’t help him get to Allie. But right now, that couldn’t be the priority, either.

“Help!” Revik said, staring up at them. “Help us!”

“Now why would we want to do that, iceblood?”

“I’m him!” Revik said at once. “The Sword...Syrimne. I can take you to her! I can give you what you want...” Panting, he felt his heart jackknife in his chest as he added, “...It’s her you want, right? That’s why you’re here? For her? My wife?”

The man grinned at him again. Then, glancing to his side, he motioned someone next to him to bring something over.

Turned out, it was a crane.

20

DARKNESS

REVIK WOULD HAVE held up his hands, probably, under normal circumstances.

Surrounded by automatic rifles held by some very pissed-off looking humans, it would have seemed the logical thing to do.

As he couldn’t hold up his hands because of his bound arms, Revik just stood there instead, balancing most of his weight on the leg Ditrini hadn’t hit with the coiled chain right in the muscle of his thigh. He knew how the three of them must look, him in particular, given the blood running down his face, one eye swollen most of the way shut, and not so much as an armored vest since he’d gone down to interrogate Maygar in his street clothes. The white shirt he’d worn was now stuck to his wet skin, spotted with blood where his injuries marked it as he ran, along with mud and cement dust and whatever else.

Revik coughed, hopping a little on his good foot, before he glanced at Maygar and Jon, who huddled not far from where he stood, dressed about as appropriately as he was.

Needless to say, they hadn’t taken off the collars.

Revik found himself loaded roughly into the back of a military grade helicopter, dark black with dead metal, so likely SCARB or one of the several other federal or international branches that operated with high-paid seer infiltrators acting as advisors. Sikorsky X4, so one of the high speed varieties, and able to do quick extractions even under conditions such as this.

Jon and Maygar were loaded into the same vehicle next to him, and all three of them were locked to the jump seats, including the collars themselves, forcing them to sit upright and not really turn their heads.

Revik watched as the first human he’d spoken to, the one who’d crouched in that circle of light from the open manhole cover, sat down across from him. The human smiled at him, but it wasn’t a friendly smile. He arranged his muscled weight in a seat while his eyes took in Revik alone, measuring him without apology.

“The mighty Syrimne,” he said, grinning a little. “Who would have known you would turn out to be such a bad swimmer?”

Revik didn’t answer him.

Instead he swallowed, shifting his eyes to look out the window at the driving rain, and the wind buffeting the side of the helicopter even where it sat parked in the middle of the Avenue of the Americas.

“Don’t worry,” the man said, pulling the fingers of the gloves off his hand one by one, right before he banged on the glass separating them from the cockpit with his bare knuckles. “We’re leaving, your royal ice-bloodedness. As much as some of my people would love to leave you here to test that swimming ability of yours, I’m afraid your presence is wanted elsewhere.”

Smirking a little, the man leaned deeper into his seat, propping an ankle on his own knee.

“It didn’t take long for you to throw your wife to the dogs either, did it?”

Revik didn’t look away from the window.

Sighing audibly, the man leaned deeper in the seat across from him.

“We’re going to take you somewhere else before we ask you a few questions, Mr. Syrimne,” he said with mock politeness. “...If it’s all the same to you. Since you seemed to be so amenable to our ‘help’ just now, I’m going to assume you’re willing to return the favor...”

Smiling a little wider, almost as if he couldn’t help himself, the human motioned at Revik’s face. “...Although it looks like someone who likes you even less than we do already paid you a visit. I guess karma is a real bitch, isn’t it, iceblood?”

Revik didn’t answer that, either.

Feeling a pit trying to burrow back into his stomach as he thought about Allie, he tried to reassure himself that at least he was alive.

At least he wouldn’t kill her that way.

And being alive, he could find her.

Even though the man was human, he chuckled, looking at Revik’s face, almost as if he’d guessed his thoughts.

“I wouldn’t count on any grand rescues, either, O Mighty Syrimne,” the human said, smiling. “We’re going to have to travel a spell, I’m afraid...and there aren’t a lot of windows where you and your friends are going...”

The man motioned towards the open doorway again, even as the Sikorsky lifted agilely off the ground, creating a dip in Revik’s stomach when it caught him off guard.

The bird continued to rise smoothly between the buildings, compensating for the wind as it slid up and sideways before clearing enough ground to begin moving forward as well, in a line heading due south.

Revik couldn’t stop himself from following the motion of the man’s fingers with his eyes, seeing the scattering of other helicopters rising with the US Army logo stamped on the side of their dead metal walls. Revik’s eyes flickered lower then, sensing the change on some level, even as water began flowing out of the manhole covers from the sewer pipes underground.

Swallowing as he thought of where he, Jon and Maygar had just been, as well as the probable locations of Balidor and Wreg, Revik found he couldn’t look away as the water flow increased, until the manhole covers disappeared under the onslaught.

“Ah, but that’s only the beginning, Mr. Syrimne,” the human smirked, folding his arms across his chest before he motioned towards the horizon. “There’s a lot more to come, believe me. All of your friends will get a chance to test their swimming skills pretty soon...”

As the helicopter lifted higher, Revik saw what the human meant.

A literal wall of water was approaching the city.

Revik had read about tsunamis before. He’d even seen images on the feeds once or twice, as well as in VR simulations during disaster training. He’d never actually seen one before, though, not with his own eyes.

The sheer magnitude of the wave brought a base, almost animal terror to his body, shaking his limbs as he stared at it. He could see the rising swell approaching faster and faster once the Sikorsky rose above the main skyline and began accelerating in the direction of the wave itself. Seeing the height of it, even before it had crashed into the first buildings facing the ocean beyond Staten Island, Revik felt his throat go completely dry.

That sick feeling in his stomach worsened.

He fought to push it out of his light, to dim it before he panicked for real and ignited the collar, but all he managed was to keep it from getting much worse. When he looked at the man next, the human was still smirking.

“There are humans down there, too,” Revik said. “A lot of them...”

The man shrugged, his eyes cold.

Not Ditrini cold, but cold enough to piss Revik off.

“I guess you don’t have family in town,” Revik added, his tone biting.

“It’s tough all over right now, iceblood,” the man said, his eyes turning colder as they held Revik’s without flinching. “Maybe you hadn’t heard? That little disease you and your whore decided to dump in the water supply of half the civilized world has kind of made this a zero-sum game for the rest of us. No time to cry over the rich assholes of New York, sorry.”

Revik didn’t answer that.

Instead, he let his eyes return to the window.