The Paladin Prophecy (10 page)

Lying in a deflated pile, crumpled on the floor, were the woman’s purple warm-ups. Fluids leaked from the arms, legs, and neck. The right arm of the suit extended into the toilet. A loud sucking sound filled the room from the bottom of the bowl, stuck open in the flushing position. That same nauseating smell he’d noticed before hung in the air.

He saw motion inside the suit. A shape the size of a football slithered from the torso, down the arm, and out the open commode. The purple suit collapsed and lay flat. Then, in a single move, something yanked the suit down into the hole and out of sight. Something fleshy and loose slithered with it; it looked like the discarded skin of an enormous snake, studded with tangled hanks of hair.

The disk in the toilet snapped shut. The sucking sound cut off. A flight attendant appeared behind Will, pulling the door from his hands.

“Sir, you need to go back to your seat,” she said.

“I saw water coming out under the door,” he said.

The attendant glanced at the wet carpet underfoot. The plane jolted. “We’ll take care of it,” she said. “Please go back to your seat. Right
now
.”

Will saw no point in arguing. Using seat backs to steady himself, he worked his way down the aisle as the plane bucked and swayed.

“I might need to throw up now,” he mumbled.

Will glanced back and saw the attendant shut the door and head toward her station. He passed the fat woman’s row and saw her floral carry-on under the seat. He grabbed the handle and brought it with him to his own row as the plane dipped into a hard pocket of air. The cheap bag felt weightless. A price tag hung on the flimsy handle. He zipped the bag open. Empty. The roll-on was a prop. Had that pathetic creature even been a
person?

“What did you see?” asked Dave.

The man was suddenly standing beside him. Will described what he’d seen.

“A Carrier,” said Dave. “Bugger’s luck, they snuck a Carrier on board.”

Another flash of lightning—closer, brighter—drew Will’s attention to the window. Sparks spit out from the rear of the engine below the right wing. He turned back to Dave, but he was gone. Will reached for the glasses in his pocket, put them on, and turned to the window.

After his shock wore off, he counted six of them. They looked like crazed animated sacks of cement or stunted life-forms dredged from the depths of the sea.

A Carrier: And
these
are what she was carrying?

Squat, repulsive, rubbery plugs of flesh. Bushel-basket mouths tangled with razor-sharp fangs. A sturdy curved horn shot from the center of each pale forehead between wide, pebbled white eyes. Four stout limbs sprouted from the ribbed, sectioned torsos, equipped with curved talons. Nightmarish creatures designed—or customized—for the purpose of wreaking mindless destruction.

Exactly what they were trying to do right now to the plane’s right engine.

Will lifted his glasses. He saw nothing but the sparking engine and empty wing. Dropping the glasses back over his eyes, Will saw the awful writhing swarm again. He took off the glasses and turned them over in his hands.

Got to be some sort of projection system inside the frame that throws a moving image onto the lenses
, Will thought.
I can’t be seeing this. It’s a trick, a special effect
.

But the frames looked solid and seamless, incapable of hiding technology sophisticated enough to manufacture what he was seeing. He was considering taking them apart with his Swiss Army knife when he heard an alarming, sputtering choke outside. A burst of sparks spewed from the engine, then a stream of dark smoke.

He fumbled the glasses back on. In a flash of lightning, he saw all six creatures attacking the engine housing in a frenzy, hammering away at it with tooth, horn, and claw. The plane dropped into another pocket of turbulence that lifted Will out of his seat. He refastened and tightened his seat belt. The creatures remained glued to the engine through every buck and tilt. Will realized their hideous torsos were studded with suction cups that clamped to the metal.

They were moments away from tearing the engine to pieces.

Will pushed the glasses up on his head, struggling to make sense out of madness. Somehow, somewhere, he found a string of logic:

They’re related to the things that chased me in the hills. Monsters somehow set loose from the same twisted nightmare realm—what did Dave call it? The Never-Was
.

Then Will remembered where he’d seen creatures like these. Devilish monsters attacking airplanes in flight. It didn’t make any more sense than the rest of it but there it was, from an old cartoon set in World War II:

Gremlins
.

Will turned to the window and saw his reflection in the glass. And something else.
Someone
else—
inside
his reflection—staring back at him.

A girl. Somehow she was out there; he
felt
her presence. Trying to
say
something to him.

The plane jolted, and the dark glasses dropped down over Will’s eyes again.

A gremlin was pressed against the other side of the glass, staring at him with its blank white eyes. It pointed a talon at him, opened its mouth in an evil grin, and drew a finger along its throat. Then the thing gripped either side of the window and reared back, ready to thrust its horn straight through the glass. Will recoiled.

Something grabbed the loathsome beast from behind before it could strike. A hand closed around the creature’s horn and yanked it away from the window. Dave was outside, standing on the wing. As the creature bucked furiously, Dave flung the thing out into space and out of sight, its limbs flailing.

Dave tossed a salute at Will, then drew a long-barreled sidearm from a holster under his jacket, some kind of hybrid handgun/rifle. He walked farther out on the wing, working to keep his balance but eerily unaffected by altitude, temperature, air speed, and every other principle of physical science that should destroy anyone in these circumstances.

Anyone human
.

Dave stopped halfway to the engine, raised the gun, and opened fire on the hideous swarm. Bursts of light shot out the barrel, ripping holes clean through the creatures. One after another, they fell away into darkness.

Will watched through the window, his jaw hanging open.

The last two gremlins whipped around and launched themselves at Dave like missiles. He fanned the hammer, blasting one in midair, and it tumbled into the void. The survivor landed on Dave’s right shoulder. Pincers snapping, it scrabbled around to the back of Dave’s neck. He twisted after it but couldn’t grab hold as it worked itself into position to stab its horn into the base of Dave’s skull.

Dave holstered his weapon. He staggered to the front edge of the wing, dropped to his knees, and lay flat. Grabbing the wing, with one powerful thrust he drew up his knees and planted his boots on the wing’s tapered rim. Struggling against ferocious g-forces, Dave slowly straightened his legs until he stood pointed straight ahead, parallel to the wing, leaning into the wind like a ski jumper. The creature on Dave’s neck hung on desperately, unable to strike, pinned by the crushing wind.

Finding his balance, Dave turned 180 degrees until he faced skyward. The gremlin clung to him, fighting the pull from the engine’s intake draft directly below. Then with a silent scream the gremlin was sucked down into the whirling grill of the jet’s turbine. The engine stuttered and the whole wing flapped like a startled bird.

Will’s stomach flipped over. He ripped the glasses off and held his head in his heads, gripped by feverish vertigo.

This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening!

He wiped sickly sweat off his forehead and forced himself to look outside. Dave was standing on the wing. He walked over to Will’s window. Will watched through spread fingers, unwilling to let go of his head, afraid it might splinter into pieces.

Dave peered in at Will. He looked tired and annoyed. He held up two fingers in front of the glass and said something Will couldn’t hear. He didn’t have to: “That’s
two
.”

Dave shook his head, and then shot straight up into the clouds, out of sight, like he’d been launched from a cannon. Will yanked the shade down over the window, closed his eyes, and tried to imagine he was someone else, somewhere else.

Anyone, anywhere.

He’d had a good look at the round patch on the back of Dave’s jacket and tried to settle his mind by thinking about that. Three things inside it: The outline of that animal he’d seen was a red kangaroo. Beside it was a drawing of the helmeted head of a knight. The third was a silhouette of a helicopter. Printed above it was the word
ANZAC
.

And although he couldn’t see her, that girl was still looking at him. From
inside
his mind. Her haunting eyes asking him a silent question:

Are you Awake?

DAN MCBRIDE

They landed in Denver forty minutes later without further incident. No one said a word as they shuffled off, grateful to be back on earth. Will’s next flight was delayed an hour by the storm. That gave him time to cover his tracks.

He found another airline with a nearly empty midnight flight to Phoenix. He handed the tired ticket agent his boarding pass to Chicago and pushed a mind picture at her—of a pass for the Phoenix flight. Then another of his name on her computer’s passenger list. She checked him in. He wandered away.

He did the same thing in reverse before boarding his flight to Chicago: the agent
voided
his name from the manifest. “Pushing pictures” was getting easier; this time he felt tired, but not drained. Once in his seat, Will put on the dark glasses and scanned the plane. All clear. With any luck, whoever was tracking him would think he’d taken the flight to Phoenix.

Within minutes, beyond exhausted, Will surrendered to a thick, dreamless sleep. He didn’t stir for hours, until he felt the landing gear drop as they descended into Chicago.

Central standard time: 5:45 a.m. Will entered an empty O’Hare terminal. At baggage claim, an older white-haired man held up a message board: MR. WEST spelled in moveable type. He spotted Will, gave a wave, and started forward.

“Is that you, Will?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Dan McBride, from the Center. I’m a colleague of Dr. Robbins. A genuine pleasure to meet you.”

McBride locked eyes in a friendly, benevolent way. He stood six feet tall, upright and spry. His ruddy face looked as weathered and lined as that of a man in his seventies, but he moved with the energy of someone half that age. His handshake crushed Will’s hand; he squeezed back defensively to avoid wincing.

“May I take your bag? And are you expecting any others?”

“No, sir, that’s it,” said Will, handing over his bag.

“We can move right along, then. The car’s just outside.”

McBride gestured to the doors and took the lead. He walked with a noticeable limp—a knee or hip problem—but powered through it as if he considered physical pain a minor inconvenience. Will heard the tart, astringent flavors of New England in his clipped and proper phrasing.

“How are you feeling?” asked McBride, as if he really wanted to know. “Rough night?”

“Does it show?”

“I’ll wager most of your fellow passengers were business travelers, rushing to another meeting. At the risk of sounding like an academic fuddy-duddy, Will, the red-eye has always symbolized for me how worship of money makes us behave with utter contempt for our own humanity.”

Will stared at him.

“That may have sounded a bit obtuse after a sleepless night on a plane.”

“I understood you,” said Will. “I just don’t hear people talk like that much.”

“Now, Will, plenty of folks on the West Coast speak perfectly good English.”

“Yeah, but it’d be more like, ‘The red-eye, dude—that blows chunks.’ ”

McBride laughed agreeably. It was still dark outside as they exited. A wall of cold walloped Will, bypassing his thin cotton sweats as if they weren’t there. He inhaled sharply and his nostrils froze.

“We’re in the grip of an early cold snap,” said McBride. “You’re not used to this sort of thing in California either.”

“Is it always like this?”

“No, no, no. For the next five months it’s usually much worse.”

“What’s the temperature?”

“As we drove in this morning, a balmy twelve degrees.”

Will couldn’t believe it:
“Twelve?”

“Walk quickly; it’ll get the blood flowing.”

Will felt paralyzed. He’d never been in temperatures below thirty-six degrees before. He had trouble making his lips move. “I’m sorry, people actually
live
in weather like this?”

“I will now be the first, and far from the last, to recite one of my favorite canards about midwestern winters: They build character. Fiddlesticks. But, adaptable creatures that we are, you’ll acclimate with a speed that will amaze you.”

A blue Ford Flex stood at the curb, the Center’s coat of arms on its side. An immense man in a fur coat and matching hat popped open the rear gate and came toward them like a building on wheels. He wore a big, irresistible smile. His wide, flat nose seemed to cover half his face. He took Will’s bag and swung it into the back.

“Say hello to Eloni, Will,” said McBride.

“Nice to meet you,” said Will.

Eloni smiled broadly and cradled Will’s hand in both of his, which felt like the world’s largest catcher’s mitt. Thankfully, he didn’t squeeze. Will’s bones would have been crushed to pulp.

“Brother, your hand’s an ice cube. I got the heater running. Get in before you freeze. Never been in cold like this, huh?”

“Not even close.”

Eloni chuckled, a rumble deep in his chest. Moving nimbly for such a huge man, he opened the rear door and gestured Will inside. “I know how you feel, Mr. West,” said Eloni.

“Eloni is from American Samoa,” said McBride.

“Closest to snow I’d ever seen was a snow
cone
,” said Eloni.