2012 (24 page)

Had to be true. He’d seen a weir cat himself, and not far from here, when he was a kid. Damn big, damn black, and damn scary. Then gone-poof-right before his eyes.

The slashing sound grew louder. Came toward him.

Brooke stopped singing. Her voice floated across the night. “Wylie?”

Jesus, he needed to get back to the house, he needed to get his hands on a gun. Nick had been right to get them ready. That was a smart kid there. He had foresight.

The slashing was now right in front of him-but he couldn’t see it. It was loud, it was deafening-and then he could feel tickling, then pricking against his face, his neck. Crying out, he lurched back.

He fell against what felt like iron bars. Where he touched them, they became visible, and he saw that they were not bars, but the legs of what the kids called an outrider. And now the slashing sound was overhead. He was under the damn thing!

He rolled. The slashing came down toward him. He lashed out at it, kicking furiously toward the sound. Where his foot struck, he saw a section of the creature-a gleaming abdomen striped yellow, then a complicated eye, then a hooked claw on the joint of a leg.

Screaming now, he rolled.

There was a pneumatic, liquid hissing and boiling yellow sludge sprayed the ground around him. A stinger the size of his arm slashed his jacket and was gone.

But it was coming back, he could hear the mechanical slashing of the jaws, but more he could feel the thing probing with its legs, and he knew that the next time it attacked, that stinger would impale him.

A roar, huge, echoing off into the woods.

Silence.

Nothing there. Nothing at all.

“Dad?”

“Nick!”

His son scrambled down the hill that dropped to the riverbank. He carried his 10-gauge. He wore pajama bottoms and one house shoe. Behind him came Brooke. “Wylie! Nick! What’s happening?”

The moon sailed in splendor, the night birds called, the sacred peace of the Kansas night enclosed them, and the sweet little river rolled on.

Nick threw his arms around his father as Brooke came running up, seeking with her hands, almost hitting him, enraged with fear, then choking back sobs, then holding both of her men.

“An outrider,” Nick said. “I heard it and I saw it attacking Dad. Sort of.”

Brooke nodded.

“Martin’s in trouble,” Wylie said.

“We know,” Brooke responded.

“We just read it, Dad.”

“I was trying to get to him. To cross over.”

Faintly, from the house, they all heard Kelsey’s voice call out, “Is anybody home?”

“We’re coming, Baby,” Wylie called, and they all trooped back to the house, where she waited at the kitchen door, her hands on her hips.

She hugged her brother. “Thank you for saving our daddy.” Then she went into her mother’s arms.

Wylie was not too surprised at what his family knew. Kelsey was eight and an excellent reader. She was probably reading the book in everybody else’s downtime.

Brooke put on water for coffee. “I think we need to tell Matt,” she said. “We need some support out here.”

“Fighting them is acknowledging them. Believing in them. And the more we do that, the stronger the link to their reality becomes. So getting a posse out here might not be such a good idea.”

Brooke poured water into the coffee maker. “Then we need to not try to use that gateway at all.”

“She’s right, Dad,” Nick said.

“But Martin-he’s dying out there. Right now.”

Nick gave him a long, searching look.

“What?”

“Dad, just let it happen. You’re fighting and we can’t fight. We have to just write and hope they find it, and hope that it helps them. If one of us takes so much as a single step into that world-“

Kelsey’s eyes were wide, and Nick dropped it.

Brooke poured three mugs of coffee and sat down. Kelsey came into her lap.

“Nick, should you-this late?”

Nick gave him another of those searching looks. “You don’t remember?”

“He doesn’t,” Kelsey said. “He can’t.”

“Remember what? What am I missing?”

So softly that it was almost inaudible, Nick said, “I’m the guardian, Mom is the facilitator, you’re the scribe.” He glanced toward Kelsey, whose eyes were heavy. “She’s the sentinel.” He raised his eyebrows. “Remember?”

It didn’t make a bit of sense, any of it.

Nick stared into his coffee. “Our sentinel woke me up when she heard the outrider. If she hadn’t, you’d be dead now.”

He owed them his life. The bond that he felt with his family at this moment was the strongest thing he had ever known, the biggest emotion he had ever had. “Thank you,” he said.

Then he heard from upstairs, low voices.

Kelsey had closed her eyes now, and Brooke began singing “Dereen Day” again, her own voice as soft as a breeze, too soft to drown out the conversation Wylie was hearing.

He looked toward the dark stairs, then toward Nick-who jumped up and ran upstairs.

“Nick!” Wylie followed. Brooke only glanced at them, then continued singing.

Nick stood in front of Wylie’s office, his shotgun ported in his arms.

Wylie had known that there wouldn’t be anybody there. He went into the office. The voices were louder here, more distinct.

But nothing was breaking through, not here, not this far from a gateway.

“It’s my story,” he said to Nick. “My story’s calling me.”

FOURTEEN

DECEMBER 18, 

LATE THE MONSTER

WYLIE SAW REPTILIANS, GORGEOUS LIKE snakes are gorgeous, their scales shimmering in a bright room with white tile walls, fluorescent tubes lining the ceiling, a metal autopsy table.

Where was it?

Then he knew, and he wrote: The entrance to their lair is in Cheyenne Mountain, but the place itself is right here, right beneath us. It has to do with the mass of the planet and the power coursing through its veins, which are the ley lines, and the great confluence of lines in this place.

Twelve miles from this house lay the geographical center of the continental United States. In the other human world, their base was beneath it. And in this world, if there was anywhere that they could break through, it would be in this area, where the veil between universes was thinnest.

Wylie’s hands flew. He hardly noticed that Nick and Brooke stood behind him, with Kelsey asleep in her mother’s arms.

The little team rode thus deep into the night, on the tide of Wylie’s words.

He watched his own hands, then watched the screen as the words appeared:

General Samson injected himself, sucked air through his teeth as the familiar agony spread up his arm, then burned through his chest, then invaded his face and head, his whole body. It was a hateful, miserable thing to have to do every day.

Today, he did not expect to expose himself to the human earth’s atmosphere, but he was doing it under an order that he could quote precisely: “You will maintain a physical state that allows you free movement in existing planetary conditions at all times.” There was nothing about not being prepared for a day because he didn’t expect to be in their raw damn air.

“Time?” he barked as he entered the abattoir. His feet squished in blood. The place stank of raw human meat.

“01044,” Captain Mazle replied.

Lying before them on a steel table was a body. Samson looked down at it dispassionately. General Al North, big deal. He’d despised the eager creature with its idealism and its pathetically uninformed mind.

He looked at the mouth, noted the drying along the raw line where the lips had been removed and the clotted blood in both eye sockets.

“Mazle!”

“Yessir!”

He gestured. “If you fail-“

“We won’t fail.”

“It’s you, Captain. You. You will fail or you won’t.”

“Don’t threaten me, General.”

She came from a powerful family. He didn’t like it, but he must not forget it. “I’m doing nothing of the kind.”

“You’d like to, though. Anyway, I’ve already told my father what a complete piece of shit you are.”

He tried not to take her threat to heart. Her father could order death to a man in Samson’s position. “Captain, I’m sorry if you don’t like my style.”

“Your style? You have all the charm of a skerix, and you smell a lot worse.”

“It’s the anitallergens, as I’m sure you are aware. Please be reminded that my responsibilities leave me no choice.” He gestured toward General North’s ravaged body. “If we’re going to get this thing through that gateway, we have no time, so let’s get started, Captain, if you don’t mind.”

“You’d be delighted if I failed, General, of course. But I’m not going to fail.”

“This whole operation is in danger of failing, and if it does, not even your father will be able to save you. We still don’t have enough slaves and we can’t get the personnel in to control the ones we do have because the lenses are old and barely functional. We’re losing 20,000 humans a minute and we need another billion in four days.”

“Well, that’s not my issue, General. My issue is this little writer sitting in the other human earth-you know, the one you people haven’t been able to enter usefully for the past fifty goddamn years!” She strode over and slapped the chest of the inert human. “If we don’t succeed in this, we will both stand before Echidna herself. You and me, General Samson, and not all the power of Abaddon will save us.”

She crossed the room, moving toward a male who stood in silence, waiting. “Doctor,” she said to him, “it’s time for you to do your duty. Assuming that you can.”

The doctor gleamed in the light, his scales tiny and creamy. She didn’t know his name, but his appearance confirmed his class. She would be polite to him. He’d no doubt paid a lot for this job, in hope of sharing in the spoils of earth.

However, the doctor didn’t do anything.

“Let’s get moving, okay?”

Samson chuckled. “The loyal retainer. Your personnel are as promising as your plans.”

“I need more power,” the doctor said. “Forty thousand volts at least.”

“Do it with twenty.”

“Captain-“

“You do it, all you have to do is use care instead of brute force to cover your incompetence. So do it with twenty or you’re going on punishment report. I’m sick of your excuses.”

“Captain, for this to last-“

“We don’t need it to last, we need it to work for a few hours.”

The doctor threw a look of desperation toward General Samson, who did not react.

“Okay,” Captain Mazle said into her phone, “how much can you give him?” She looked at the doctor. “Compromise: you can get your forty, but only for one minute.”

“I applied for two, Captain.”

“Do it! Now!”

The doctor drew a narrow silver case from his pocket, opened it, and took out an instrument with a black, tapering handle and a long blade so thin that it was no more than a shimmer in the air. “This specimen has mild arterial damage from cholesterol,” he said, “typically associated with advance of age in this species. Do we want to invest-“

“This species,” Jennifer snarled. “Where do you get off? It’s the only other intelligent species we’ve found across a billion parallel universes and throughout our own.” She gestured toward the remains of Al North. “This creature, if it can successfully do what it’s being designed to do, could save us all.”

“I hardly think-“

“Because, Doctor, have you heard the news from home? Have you heard what’s happening there?”

“It’s an aged specimen.”

Samson broke in. “I don’t want you two sniping at each other, not when we’re working against time and there’s so much at stake. We are behind schedule so MOVE.”

“I won’t be responsible if I’m rushed!”

“Doctor, I’ll hand you over to the soultechs.”

The doctor’s scales shuddered and flushed yellow. Everybody feared the soultechs and their skills to capture the soul and to destroy the soul.

“Under what regulation? You have no right.”

“Maybe and maybe not, but I will do it, of that you can be sure.”

“You ought to do it anyway,” Mazle added.

“Shut up, bitch,” Samson said, his voice deceptively mild.

“How dare you!”

“Gonna tell on me again? Daddy’s getting old. Daddy’s not who he used to be. So maybe Daddy loses his power soon, and I get to kill your fucking little prune of a soul.”

“Talk about a hollow threat.”

“Are you willing to take the risk?”

“All you do is talk, but the clock doesn’t stop, does it, General? You’re easily distracted. You’re failure prone. Daddy says.” She curtsied.

“This thing of yours probably won’t even work.”

“A mix of biological material from both earths. It’s bound to.”

“Well, great, because if it doesn’t we can all kiss our asses good-bye. We fail here and we die here-in this facility, fifteen hundred cubits beneath gorgeous Kansas.”

The doctor began to set out his instruments. “Get support services in here,” he said, “if you want this done.”

“I’ll be your support services. This is extremely classified.”

“Nothing like a military idiot for a nurse-assistant,” the doctor muttered.

“Maybe I’m better than you think. Maybe I’ve even been trained.”

“I bought my job and your Daddy sure as hell bought yours. If I’m lucky, I might be able to flush a child’s craw. Very lucky.”

Jennifer opened the small box she had brought in with her, in which there was red liquid. “Look at it, Doctor. This is living material from the one-moon earth.”

“You’re kidding.”

“There are humans crossing between the two worlds,” Samson said miserably.

“That’s ridiculous,” the doctor replied.

“We believe it was a lucky accident. But that might not be the case. The union’s hand might be in the matter somewhere.”

Mazle, suddenly interested, strode up to him. “You didn’t tell me this.”

“You didn’t need to know,” he replied.

“This casts everything in a very different light.”

“In what sense?” the doctor asked. He had a stake in the matter, too. They all did.

“If we’re defeated by enemy action, Echidna might not be so-well, so hard.”

“Harder, never doubt it,” Samson said. “I’ve had experience in the palace.”