He’d seen ghosts, and they were random and unstoppable and unfathomable. They belonged fully to the Other Side, and they only pushed through with great effort. He could outlast ghosts.
These two, however, didn’t appear to be slowing down.
But nothing human could survive on the Other Side. The things over there were starved for life. Anything real, anything alive—even as little as a drop of blood—was like a light, drawing a billion buzzing insects. They would swarm for even a small taste of the living. And they would take any chance they could to breach the vital world again.
They must be protected somehow, Cade realized. As invisible over there as they were over here.
The strain must have been enormous. The Other Side didn’t let go of live meat that easily.
He could use that.
For that moment when they stepped into reality, they were vulnerable. The question was, how would he know when they were about to step through?
They count on being untouchable, Cade thought. Let’s test that theory.
Cade quit moving. Stood at the center of the dark space in the room, perfectly still, guarding Zach. He waited.
He didn’t see the Shadowmen emerge from the dark behind him. He seemed like a perfect target.
Cade felt it. Somewhere, in the quiet place where his soul used to be, he felt the first step of darkness entering this world. Like a silk nightdress hitting the floor. The Other Side opened behind him, and the Shadowmen coalesced and stepped through.
They were still human, and humans were predictable. Give them a defenseless target and they can’t help themselves.
They came at him from both sides, so there would be no escape.
They thought they had him. They stepped in for the kill, wanting to make it intimate, wanting to see it up close—
And Cade lashed out, plunging his hands into their shadows, and grabbed. He grabbed hard.
He connected with something warm amid all the dark and cold. Bodies, struggling under his hands. In his right, he had a man by the neck. In his left, he had the other man by the arm. Warm and unmistakably human.
They immediately retreated back into the shadows, but Cade would not let go. He felt true cold, for the first time since he had changed. The blackness bubbled around his hands, colder than liquid nitrogen, slicker than oil, but he managed to keep his grip.
He got them just as they were about to emerge into the real world, trapped between this reality and the Other Side.
They were stuck.
Cade stood between the two Shadowmen as they struggled, one man in his right hand, the other in his left.
They tried to get back into the dark, where they would be safe. But Cade had managed to get hold of their core—the part that was still human. That was still fragile. They squirmed and panicked. Cade smirked and tightened his grasp. He felt the bones snap under his left hand. First the radius, then the ulna.
The cold soaked him to the bone, but he didn’t let go.
The men thrashed and pulled. On his right hand, Cade’s fingers kept slipping—he didn’t have as good a hold. He felt skin shredding. At the same time, his left hand began to slide off the arm of the other one. The bones were being crushed to powder; it was like trying to hold a greasy sock.
The Other Side had let him in, he figured, because he already belonged to it. His vampire side was connected with the darkness there. It was almost like coming home.
Getting out again was another matter altogether.
The cold crept up his arm, into his shoulder, his chest. Stealing whatever heat was left from the blood he still had inside.
The Shadowmen kept pulling.
Cade pulled with everything he had, dragging them almost back into the real world.
He could see them, panic in their faces, behind the thinnest veil of darkness.
He almost had them out. But it wasn’t enough. He was about to lose his grip.
So he let them go.
But not before scratching them both with his thumbnails, deep enough to open skin and capillaries. Deep enough to spill blood.
Instinctively, both of the Shadowmen retreated, back to the Other Side.
Mistake.
Fresh blood. Like ringing a dinner bell on the Other Side.
Screaming began from the darkness.
Both of them tried to escape. Their outlines reappeared, but it was as if they were drowning in quicksand.
The Shadowmen began to condense, to sputter out, like a bad TV picture.
The first one almost made it back. The shadow opened once more, and a man’s face appeared, his eyes wide with terror. He seemed to be up to his ears in a pool of ink. He was still screaming, but no sound escaped his lips.
The darkness reached up and covered over him, almost gently. Then it dribbled away, running off into itself, as if a plug had been pulled. Cade could have sworn he heard a burp as it vanished completely.
The other Shadowman made it all the way.
The darkness spat, and a man hit the floor. The shadows behind him closed up and whispered away.
He could have been a thousand years old. Skin like parchment. Bones jutting from strings of dried-out muscle. The dark stuck to him, here and there. Filled his mouth, clung to his teeth.
He looked at Cade once. Cade saw nothing in his eyes. The man’s mind was broken. The trip back had been too much.
He coughed, giggled once, then curled into a fetal position and quietly died.
Cade picked up Zach. His pulse was stronger already. Whatever nightmares were tormenting him, they died with the Shadowmen.
FORTY-TWO
That’s probably the other, more important reason for Cade’s unusual strength and endurance. Since the vampiric transformation is accomplished by lateral genetic transmission (through retroviral bodies in the saliva or other fluids), it’s probable that the traits of the carrier can be transmitted to the infected, as well. In other words, Cade most likely inherited a set of vampire genes from a much purer, much stronger source than most of his kind. Honed by centuries of constant struggle, these genes turned Cade into as close a copy of that King Vampire as they could manage.
—Dr. William Kavanaugh, Sanction V research group
Z
ach was unconscious, exhaustion and his head wound combining to put him down. Cade looked him over, opened his eyes to examine his pupils. He was concussed. Cade had to get him awake.
He sat Zach against the wall.
“Zach,” he said. “Zach, wake up.”
His breathing was steady, but he didn’t open his eyes. Cade slapped him lightly on the face.
“Zach. You have to wake up.”
Nothing. Cade smacked him again.
“
Zach
,” he bellowed, as loud as he could. Zach’s hair actually ruffled.
Zach opened one eye. It glared at Cade.
“If you woke me just to say I told you so, I’m gonna be seriously pissed,” he said.
Cade’s lip curled. “I need you on your feet. I can’t carry you and fight at the same time.”
Zach struggled up against the wall. Cade didn’t help him. He knew he had to get him to medical help, and soon. But he also knew Zach had to walk, and the sooner he found out if that was possible, the better.
Zach wobbled, but stayed upright.
“Let me tell you something,” he said. “Any girl who works for the Shadow Company offers to show you a good time, you tell her—”
He vomited.
Cade noticed Zach was shuddering all over. He wondered what he’d seen in that room. He stank of fear and regret in a way Cade had never sensed before.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Super,” Zach said, lifting his shoulders as if pulled by a crane. “Don’t suppose you have any gum?”
Cade started walking for the access shaft.
Zach followed. “No? That’s fine. Touched by your concern, though.”
LEVEL TWO
On the other side of the Site, Marsh stood in a long line of Snakeheads, filing toward the surface. Their twisting path had taken them all the way up to Level Two.
Marsh was far at the back of the line. He wanted to follow the trail of scent to whatever was waiting at the end. Even though the blood of his first victims was still wet on his snout, he was hungry. He hoped there would be something left when he got there.
The line came to a complete stop. The Snakeheads jostled and crowded one another, but none of them moved. Marsh knew what that meant: there was something in the way.
Marsh was curious. He moved forward. He seemed to have retained more of his own mind than the others. Maybe they recognized this, because they made room for him, let him pass ahead.
The stairwell above them was blocked. The other Snakeheads scratched furiously at a steel plate that covered the opening to the landing. Marsh began pushing, and the rest of them followed his lead.
Strong as they were, it was no use. The plate didn’t budge.
They had no way of knowing the plate was a steel shutter from the fail-safe system. Or that an Archer/Andrews Armored Personnel Carrier, along with desks, office equipment and the wall—much of it broken slabs of concrete now—lay on top of it, sealing the passage shut.
Cade had seen no reason to leave the stairs open. After finishing with the strike team, he’d used the freight elevator to bring the APC down. Then he put one of the merc’s tactical batons against the gas pedal. It tore through the interior of the Site, finally ramming into a steel shutter and knocking it loose from its housing before crashing into the stairwell.
The APC alone weighed 12.3 tons. It would take hours and heavy equipment to open this pathway again. That was time Cade had already ensured the Snakeheads wouldn’t get.
Their frustration became a yowling, thrashing rage as they hurled their bodies against the metal over and over.
Marsh felt like he’d let them down somehow.
Then he heard something. Like the other Snakeheads, he’d lost his ability to speak English, but these words resonated with him. They seemed to drill right into his brain.
A figure appeared below them at the door.
“You want out. You want food,” he said. “I can show you the way.”
He turned, and they followed without hesitation. Marsh and the others knew, on some basic level, there was no questioning this. It was simply the natural order of things.
FORTY-THREE
THE BLOOP is a cute and harmless name for what might be the largest sea creature on the planet. In 1997, an ultra-low-frequency and extremely powerful underwater sound was detected by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The sound was
several hundred times louder
than the call of a blue whale, the largest known creature in existence, and human sources—such as underwater detonations or submarine propulsion—were ruled out. Some have suggested that the location of the sound—50° S 100° W, off the Pacific coast of South America—is near the fabled underwater city of R’lyeh, the home of the massive underwater creature Cthulu in the stories of H. P. Lovecraft. Of course, Cthulu and R’lyeh are completely fictional. The true source of the sound remains unknown.
—Cole Daniels,
Monsterpaedia
B
ell and Tania waited at the top of the access shaft. Tania eyed Bell as if she contemplated snapping her head back like a Pez dispenser and sucking her dry.
“What is this?” Tania asked.
“Emergency escape route. Graves had it made, off the blueprints. I oversaw construction.”
“You are just full of surprises.” She gave Bell a completely neutral look. Somehow that was worse than Cade’s active hate. Bell mattered less than zero to Tania, except as food, and, currently, as a key.
She checked a watch. Bell noticed it was Hermès.
“How long are we supposed to wait?” Bell asked.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I plan on giving myself plenty of time to get out.”
“Before what?” Bell couldn’t help asking.
“Before this entire place goes up in flames,” Tania said. She seemed almost eager to tell Bell what she’d done. Unlike Cade, Tania was chatty.
When a fire broke out, the Site’s fire-suppression system sprayed inert gases through ceiling-mounted nozzles, smothering the flames by removing oxygen.
Tania had rerouted the Site’s natural gas line into the system. Now when a fire broke out, the nozzles would spray pure methane into the air all over the Site.