Pistol raised, Sela Sinclair stepped out onto the porch, its wooden boards groaning in complaint at her weight. She turned to Farrell and gave him a silent look of warning, indicating the creaking boards beneath them. Farrell nodded.
Outside, three house lengths away, the two hooded figures moved through the undergrowth. They were not being especially stealthy from what Farrell could tell, but just hacked their way through it, two Stanleys searching for their Livingston.
Sinclair edged forward, hunkering into herself as she stepped off the porch and out onto the overgrown front lawn. She was wearing dark clothes, a sleeveless vest-top in a black that had washed out to a green-gray, combat pants and sturdy boots. Farrell wore his Cerberus operational uniform, a white one-piece jumpsuit, but he had augmented this with a dark green windbreaker that blended—passably if not well—with the junglelike flora all around. He followed the sec woman as she made her way to the property boundary, passing a rusted pipe that had once formed the exhaust of an automobile, using the plants for cover, her eyes never leaving the hooded figures that approached.
Sinclair stopped behind a clutch of sprouting reeds that had reached over seven feet in height, nosing at them with the muzzle of her gun to see the street. Farrell joined her a moment later, feeling his heart pounding in his chest, pulsing in his ears. The robed figures were moving efficiently along the street, checking left and right without slowing. Their clothes were just like the jailers who had held them captive in Life Camp Zero; there was no question in Farrell’s mind that they worked for the enemy.
“Dammit, Sela,” he whispered, “they’re Ullikummis’s people. We need to get out of here right now.”
A thin smile touched Sinclair’s lips. “We’ll be safe,” she assured Farrell, her voice low.
Farrell watched the street from over Sinclair’s shoulder, glanced at the gun in her hand, back up the street. What the hell was she thinking? That she could shoot them both right here and now? What if she missed? The two recruits for Ullikummis continued making their way along the street toward them, as if sensing their presence. A shaft of sunlight cut through the plants and, just for a moment, Farrell saw the face of the woman of the group. She looked young and pretty, but her blue eyes seemed vacant, as if she was in a trance. He had overheard the Cerberus field personnel who had come into contact with Ullikummis’s troops describe them as “firewalkers,” as if their minds were locked in a hypnotic state, their actions not entirely under their own control. The way these two moved without discussion made him think there was something in that, like watching two puppets being moved across some grand stage, their strings hidden from his sight.
Sinclair narrowed her eyes as she watched them, the Colt pistol held steadily out in front of her in a one-handed grip. Farrell watched as her other hand came up to add support to the grip, planting it firmly beneath the ball of her hand. Wait a minute, he thought. Is she nuts?
“What are you doing?” Farrell whispered. “You can’t shoot them.”
But Sela Sinclair wasn’t listening to Farrell. She was listening to the drumbeats as they pounded louder and louder, like a thunderstorm raging in her skull.
The robed figures were just a house away now, standing there and looking it up and down like a parody of a newlywed couple choosing their first home.
“They’re getting close. We should get out of here,” Farrell insisted, nudging Sinclair gently but urgently on the arm.
Sinclair turned, a sudden movement like a lightning strike, and Farrell found himself falling even before he could acknowledge that she had tripped him.
She jabbed the pistol at his face as he landed.
“He’s here,” Sinclair said, enunciating the words clearly so that they reverberated down the overgrown street. “The nonbeliever.”
Chapter 4
It was like a child’s toy, Mahmett thought, this city so empty and so devoid of life. Squawking birds circled overhead and occasionally the bark of a wandering pye-dog or the meow of a cat might be heard. But the animals kept their distance, avoiding the place the way they might avoid fire, some instinct they chose not to challenge.
Mahmett was here for two reasons: a city that was empty inevitably contained untold riches. Even more inevitably, he wanted to impress a woman. But now, walking through the echoing streets with his brother Yasseft and his cousin Panenk at his side, Mahmett wondered just how far he would need to go to find one and hence achieve the indulgence of the other.
“People have died poking around there. There are easier ways to get a woman to notice you,” Panenk had berated before they had set off for the strange city.
“But this will prove to her that I am brave,” Mahmett insisted.
“And if you die, then what will you have proved?” Panenk asked. “Better just to buy a trinket in the market and then tell Jasmine that you went to the city and got it there.”
“But I will know,” Mahmett had argued with all the naivety and conviction of youth.
“And so will I, and so will Yasseft,” Panenk had said, “but at least we’ll be alive.”
But Mahmett wouldn’t hear of it. So now all three of them wandered through the eerily silent streets that shone a creamy white in the sunlight, feeling cold despite the warmth of the afternoon. The city itself had not been here six months ago. It had appeared, like the ruins of some ancient civilization washed up on the shores of a dream. Mahmett had recalled the stories he had heard of America, where a terrible cataclysm had befallen a great society leaving only the Deathlands, where scattered monuments waited for brave explorers to make their fortunes. That had been more than a century ago, but the myth prevailed, the same myth of lost treasure that had been told over and over since the dawn of language.
The city itself was empty. Everything was made of the same substance, a chalky stonelike stuff that slowly crumbled to dust beneath the sun, the streets and buildings and channeled drains all molded from the same. Bisected by the Euphrates, a confusion of spires and domes climbing toward the sky, interior courtyards and ugly, misshapen towers lunging forth as if vying for space among the narrow, alleylike streets. Those claustrophobic streets wound on themselves like string, doubling back as often as not; narrowing and bloating like a series of valves and pipes. Here and there clear water swished along the sides of the streets in drainage channels, reflecting the sun in bright flashes like lightning under glass.
People had gone missing here, traders and settlers, young and old. No one had explored the place and come back to tell of their findings. Mahmett half expected to find the place full of bones, the remnants of the dead, lost perhaps in the labyrinthine streets and alleyways of the dream. And yet there was nothing, no sign of people, no litter or damage. No footprints or scrapings. No trail of string.
If this was the labyrinth, then no monster came to greet them even as they neared the center; instead it remained obstinately silent, just the cawing of the birds and the raindrop pitter-patter of beating insect wings as they navigated by the sun. The insects didn’t stop—why would they? Nothing lived here, nothing rotted or discarded, so nothing remained to make them stay.
The three young men had trekked for hours, and Yasseft regaled them with stories of his own womanizing. Yasseft was older than Mahmett and Panenk, and his exploits seemed a thing of wonder to the younger men. They egged him on, assuring each other of what they would have done in the same situation, of how they would satisfy flocks of maidens. It was nonsense, of course, but it was only natural that the young men would choose to dream when walking within a place that seemed plucked from one.
They turned a corner, and up ahead they saw a great saurian head looming over them like some dinosaur from another era, its reptilian smile indulgently benign. The thing had narrow eyes that shone with a faint trace of fire red in the blazing afternoon sun as it glared at them from its high arching neck. For a moment all three men took it to be alive, and they reared back in fear, as if the thing might snap down on that thick neck, the flat arrowlike head reaching toward them down the length of bone-white street. But it did not. It merely waited there, serene in its majesty, a lizard sovereign waiting for who knew what.
“Is it a statue?” Mahmett asked, not daring to look away.
Yasseft studied the head where it loomed high above them like a cloud, blotting the sun where it waited. He estimated that the head was at least as large as a toolshed; perhaps even larger, like the house of newlyweds.
“I don’t like it,” Panenk finally said, breaking the silence that Mahmett’s brother had left.
“Who made it?” Yasseft said aloud, knowing neither of his companions could supply the answer.
“Six months ago, this whole region was empty,” Panenk reminded them. “This place came to life…” He stopped, embarrassed and scared by his unfortunate choice of words.
“There’s no life here,” Yasseft stated firmly, as if to reassure himself. “Nothing. Not even death. It’s empty.”
“But people have searched,” Panenk said. “People have looked and they have never come back. There are things, man-made things…”
Yasseft fixed him with his stare. “What things?”
“My grandfather spoke of his time with the army,” Panenk said. “He saw things that had been made. Not just to hurt people, but to change landscapes. Perhaps this is one of those things.”
He turned to Mahmett, asking the lad’s opinion but the boy didn’t answer.
Though silent, Mahmett had doubled over, his arms wrapped around his stomach.
“Hey, Mahmett,” Panenk urged. “Hey, what’s up with you?”
Mahmett looked up when he heard his name, and Panenk saw the way he ground his teeth, the fearful look in his wide eyes. If he had tried to speak, no words had come out.
“Yasseft,” Panenk hissed. “Your brother…”
Hearing the edge to Panenk’s tone, Yasseft turned his attention reluctantly from the dragon’s head at the end of the street and checked on his younger sibling. Mahmett clutched at his stomach as if trying to hold his intestines in place, and sweat beaded on his forehead like cooking oil. “What is it? Something you ate before?” Yasseft asked.
Mahmett shook his head, the movements jagged and abrupt as if he couldn’t stand to do so for long. “S-something inside…me!”
As he spoke this last, his mouth opened and a torrent of water rushed up his throat and past his teeth, splashing on the ground in a rapidly forming puddle.
Yasseft grabbed him by the elbow, pulling him close and looking at his brother as the younger man remained doubled over. “Look at me, let me see,” Yasseft urged.
Mahmett looked up, his dark brows arching in whatever pain it was that was driving itself through his body like a knife. Yasseft had been there when his brother had been born fifteen years ago, and he saw something in his brother’s eyes that he had not seen for a long time. He saw tears, the type that stream like pouring water with no effort from the one who cries. Water streamed from Mahmett’s tear ducts, thick lines running down the dusky skin of his face almost as if they were placed there by a paintbrush.
“What is it?” Mahmett mumbled, seeing the fear in his brother’s eyes.
“You’re crying,” was all Yasseft could think to say.
From deep inside, Mahmett felt the swirl of liquid charging through his guts, racing and churning with the power of nearby thunder, rocking his frame and shaking his very bones. “I f-f-feel…” he began, but a stream of saliva threatened to choke him, blurting from his mouth in a wave.
Yasseft’s grip slipped but slightly, and Mahmett tumbled to the chalky cobbles of the street. He hit hard but made no cry of pain. It was almost as if he was anesthetized, or more likely that whatever pain was driving through him required more attention than a simple blow to the knees.
Mahmett lay shuddering on the ground, his mouth widening, tears streaming down his cheeks.
“What is it?” Panenk asked frantically. “What is with him?”
“I don’t know,” Yasseft admitted. “It’s like a fever.”
They stood there, aware of how helpless they must appear in the face of this. They were the eldest of their little group, they had played together almost since birth and they had had it drummed into them that they were to keep little Mahmett safe. Suddenly a hundred near-misses were remembered: climbing by the power lines, when Mahmett had fallen from an olive tree, and when they had climbed over the neighbor’s wall for a ball, only to come face-to-face with his mean-tempered mastiff. And now Mahmett was collapsed on the ground in a strange city with not a soul in sight.
“Shit.” Yasseft spit. “We need to get him back. I don’t know what’s got into him but we can’t stay here.”
“I didn’t even want to come here in the first place,” Panenk reminded him, looking at the younger lad with worry. He wanted someone to blame now, and it wasn’t going to be him.
Yasseft crouched and placed his hands beneath Mahmett’s shoulders. The glistening, sunlit water at the side of the street sparked and shone like a polished mirror at the edges of Yasseft’s vision. “Just grab him,” he ordered. “Help me. We’ll carry him.”
Though dissatisfied with the arrangement, Panenk at least had the good grace to raise his complaints while lifting his cousin’s ankles. “It took three hours to get here,” he said. “It’ll take twice that to get back if we have to carry him, and it’ll be nightfall long before that.”
Yasseft didn’t answer. He stood there, his hands clenched beneath his brother’s armpits, wincing as a tremble ran through his own body.
“You okay?” Panenk asked.
Yasseft shook his head wearily. “Just…” He stopped. “Feel like I’m going to…”
He dropped Mahmett, the younger man’s arms slipping from his grip as he staggered backward. Yasseft’s hands reached for his guts. It felt as if he urgently needed the toilet, as if he had diarrhea. He stumbled for a moment, bashing against a wall in the shadow of the looming saurian head and neck.
“What is it?” Panenk asked again.
“Going to…” Yasseft began and then he belched, a watery spume blasting from his mouth.
Panenk let Mahmett’s legs drop to the ground, apologizing automatically as he rushed over to Yasseft’s side. “My grandfather told me about this,” he said fearfully. “Airborne weapons that get inside you, eat you up from within.”
Yasseft was not listening. He stood propped against the bone-white wall of a single-story building, vomiting an odorless mix of saliva and water.
Panenk looked around him, searching for some clue as to where this attack had started. “We’ll leave,” he shouted to the empty buildings. “We’ll go. Just leave us alone, please.”
His voice echoed back to him, its fear magnified.
In the road at his feet, Mahmett shuddered where he lay in a puddle of water he himself had created with tears and vomit, and Panenk watched incredulously as the lad vibrated faster and faster before finally shimmying out of existence.
“Please,” Panenk cried, stumbling away from the pool of water his cousin had been. There was no sign of Mahmett; he had simply ceased to be.
Behind him, Yasseft was clawing at his clothes, pulling his shirt away from his belt as his guts threatened to burst loose. Panenk looked at him, the fear making him shake like a leaf in the wind. As he watched, the older teen began shuddering in place, water streaming from his eyes, his mouth, his nostrils and ears. Water gushed from his hands, spurting from beneath his fingernails and darkening the white walls of the opposite building.
Panenk walked backward, his eyes fixed on what was happening to Yasseft. Yasseft seemed about to scream, but it came out more like a belch, a hacking blurt of noise as if a wind instrument played through water. Then, incredibly, Yasseft seemed to sink to his knees, but his legs had not bent. Instead, he dropped into the ground, his body sinking into the pool of water that had formed around him, sucking him down like quicksand. If he screamed, the scream was lost in the sound of rushing water that washed over his disappearing form. And then, just like Mahmett, Yasseft was gone, and all that was left was a puddle of cool water reflecting the overhead sun.
“Leave us alone,” Panenk cried as he backed away. His voice echoed through the empty white streets. Even as he backed away, he felt the first thrum of water in his stomach like a single drumbeat, and he saw the silvery figures approach.