Broken Hero (23 page)

The plane brings us down in a broad flat bowl of land. The city of Kathmandu spreads around us. For a moment, standing in the plane’s doorway, the peaks surrounding it don’t look that large. Then my sense of scale adjusts. I gawp.

Hannah pushes past me and I remember I am a hardened government agent. I shut my mouth.

“OK,” I say as my feet meet solid ground once more. “Due to the whole lying in a bloody heap thing the other night, I am a little behind on our next steps.”

Tabitha grunts as if the typical-ness of this has just aged her an extra five years. “Car rental. Drive two days. Catch a bus. Drive a day. Get off the bus. Hike two days. Arrive. Get papers. Do it all backwards.”

“Five days?” I ask. “We can’t get a helicopter or something just to whisk us up and dump us there?”

Hannah reaches over and pats my stomach in a way that might possibly be OK if we were in any way friends. “Too much time behind a desk?” she asks.

“Too much time elapsing while Friedrich and his bunch of screw-loose nut-jobs work on creating the bomb that is going to kill me,” I snap at her. Again, diplomacy seems like a waste of time given my agenda. Hell, if everything goes as the future has apparently dictated, there won’t be an MI37 for Hannah to end. I can say to her exactly what comes into my mind.

Hermann and Volk are clanking down the Hercules’ back ramp. “For once he speaks something resembling the truth,” Hermann barks.

Felicity, standing behind me, puts a hand on my arm. “It takes the time it takes. We can’t commandeer the military here. It’s Nepal. But it’s OK. We’ll sort everything out.” There’s a sort of Zen calm to her as she says it. As if this place is already rubbing off on her. Or as if she’s in some sort of mental shock and not dealing with reality at all. I might be more worried about resolving these sort of long-term issues if I had any faith in there being any sort of long term to worry about.

As it is, I suppose I get to spend five days with my girlfriend traveling through beautiful countryside in a foreign land, to a place in the Himalayas seen by only a handful of other people. There are worse ways to spend your final days, I suppose.

We round a bend in the trail and suddenly a valley is exposed to us—lush untouched vegetation filling it, a warm green blanket dotted through with spikes of vibrant color. Epic mountains rise, thrusting majestically up into the sky. The serrated teeth of the world. Clouds skid and collide with sheer rock, roiling up in thick rolling banks of white. It is an epic view.

It can also kiss my arse.

“We have to be nearly there,” Felicity pants, leaning heavily on a makeshift walking stick which has already given her three splinters and me five.

“There is no end,” I tell her, desperately trying to stop the backpack from digging any deeper into my flesh. “This is karma. We must have done something awful. Some decision we made in the past is responsible for the drowning of a million kittens.”

“Green fucking hell,” Tabitha mutters.

“Well, it is quite a beautiful view,” Clyde hazards.

“I will slap you,” Hannah says. It is one of our rare moments of agreement, but considering our decreasing ability to talk to each other without using curse words, I don’t tell her so.

Volk offers no comment. Hermann manages a sneering chuckle. I would offer to slap him as well, but ever since I discovered that my early demise could cause the destruction of all reality, I’ve found myself becoming less antagonistic with people who could potentially backhand me into oblivion.

The first day in the car was mostly OK. Even if the air conditioning was broken. And the radio. And the suspension. Looking back on it, even that was OK. There was a sort of camaraderie in hating that car. And Volk and Hermann were towed in a trailer behind us so I didn’t have to put up with the latter’s snark.

The second day was not so good. If we had been able to sleep better perhaps. In a hotel that had mattresses for example. And fewer lice. But the camaraderie became rather bitter that day. Clyde kept saying nice things to Tabitha of course, but considering their mutual grunting had been audible through our hotel’s paper-thin walls, it didn’t hold much charm.

The bus was a definite step down. The suspension may have actually worked until Volk and Hermann clambered on board. But it was the chickens, I think, that were my breaking point. Not only was the noise deafening, but Hannah was allergic to them. She spent the entire fifteen hour ride either telling us about the fact or producing a volume of snot which seemed untenable given her size.

And now the hiking. We started almost with a sense of excitement. We were finally leaving mechanized hell behind us. Apart from it turned out that slowly broiling to death in our own sweat in a chicken-filled, allergen-contaminated hell-bus was infinitely preferable to slowly broiling to death in our own sweat in a forest filled with insects the size of our thumbs. All of us bleed openly from the bites. And on top of that, someone appears to have jammed a small semi-detached bungalow into my backpack.

How Clyde and Tabitha were up to having noisy sex in their tent last night, I have no idea. If I didn’t have to listen to it, I would almost admire their stamina. As it is, I would gladly spay them both.

And to top it all off, Volk and Hermann are immune to both the insects and the exhaustion. They just keep grinding on.

Volk at least offered to help carry some of our equipment, but Hermann just watches and sneers. I keep expecting him to call us “weak fleshy things” or something like that.

As we contemplate the view and the shittiness of the hiking, Kayla comes jogging back. Her unique physiology puts her in a class closer to the Uhrwerkmänner when it comes to weathering the journey, but she is somehow less smug about it. Possibly because Hannah seems to be suffering as much as any of us.

“About another hour, then you’ll be right on top of the feckin’ thing.” She’s been scouting ahead. On her own she probably could have been at the lab in two days or less. Why Lang chose to put himself through this every time he wanted to get some research done, I have no idea.

“Oh thank God.” Hannah collapses onto her knees. “Tea break. I demand a tea break.”

“Come on,” Kayla chides. “Another hour and you can rest all you feckin’ want.”

Hannah clutches her hands together. “Mercy,” she mock begs.

I look at Felicity. She shrugs. “Just another hour,” she says.

I groan but she’s right. Resting will just make starting up harder. I want this done with. “Come on,” I say. “Just a little bit more.”

This is not a popular suggestion, but we push on.

Kayla falls into step with us. “Bit of a militaristic-looking sort of place for a feckin’ research lab,” she says casually. It doesn’t sound like casual fact.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“You know,” she says, “sort of imagined something quite feckin’ dull. Square and shite. Maybe a little sort of European mountain home or some Heidi bollocks. But it’s like a fort carved out of the stone. Very feckin’ impressive.”

“He was a Nazi,” Hannah points out.

“Yeah, but his feckin’ mountain castle wasn’t,” Kayla objects.

“Tainted,” Hannah says with a shake of her head.

“Can we go back to the part where his lab is actually a fortress,” I say. “Does that not strike anyone else as odd?”

Felicity looks over to Clyde and Tabitha. “Did the notes say anything about the lab itself?”

“No.” Tabitha doesn’t even look up from her plodding feet.

“Just mentioned the place by name. The
Ort wo gute Dinge sterben
,” Clyde elaborates. “Bit of a mouthful. Though I do have to say that his prose style really does obfuscate a lot of his meaning. Not one to use three words if fifteen and a complex metaphor involving pineapples will do the job.”

“He likes to rhyme,” Tabitha comments, as if this is possibly his greatest crime against humanity.

“Could be a reclaimed space,” Hannah suggests, moving back to the more relevant matter of the fort itself. “Old space, moves in, takes it for himself.”

Kayla nods, but I’m less sure.

“That seems remarkably free of paranoia for you,” I comment. Felicity flashes me a look, but I am tired, aching, and need to let off steam. Sniping at Hannah seems like a viable option.

“Oh,” Hannah says blithely, “I’m all for nerve gassing the place before we step inside.”

“Oh good.” I nod. “Because two crimes against humanity make a right.”

“Anyway,” Felicity cuts in, attempting to stamp out the argument before it can really catch fire. “Let’s just all be on the lookout for trouble, shall we?”

We spot the trouble less than two hundred yards from our goal. This particular iteration is female, about five foot two tall, stands in the middle of the trail, and wears nothing more than a small skirt.

“Tour guide?” I hazard.

Felicity grunts, staggers to a stop, and drops her backpack on the ground. “I am too tired for this shit,” she says.

The woman before us is wiry, and muscled in the same way as Kayla. Her nut-brown skin has a healthy, ruddy glow to it. Dense black tattoos twist over her arms, across the top of her chest, down between her breasts, and then spread over her stomach. Something between script and tentacles.

Her face has been painted, a stylized pattern. Black is smeared around her mouth and nose. As if she has been feasting on coal dust. The rest is white except for black dots that make exaggerated eyebrows. White dots drip down from her chin. Her eyes float, cataract-white in the white make-up.

“OK,” I say. “Not to go all judgmental about a book based on its cover, but she doesn’t look totally friendly.”

“Couple of beers in you, you’d feckin’ love her,” Kayla suggests.

Despite her exhaustion Tabitha still has her laptop out and open in under three seconds. Her fingers fly across the keyboard. “Shitty face painting database,” she mutters. “Take much longer?”

The woman reaches behind her back and from somewhere or other produces a singularly prodigious sword. It makes Kayla’s look substantially more toothpick-like than usual.

“Stupid weapon,” Kayla comments. “Too feckin’ slow.”

“Not to be contrary,” Clyde says, “but doesn’t that rather depend on the wielder?”

Kayla shrugs. “I’ll feckin’ gut her, no worries.”

“Couldn’t I just shoot her instead?” asks Hannah, which is hardly the attitude I’m trying to foster.

“Sure,” Kayla says, stepping aside.

“No!” I say as Hannah pulls her gun. “Nobody is shooting anybody until—”

“Wait,” Tabitha says. “Hit. Seventy-four percent likelihood. Ashmortok sisterhood. Limited to the Himalayan region. Associated with the Book discovered here in the thirties. One that led to the founding of MI37 and all that. Seemed to be dying out in the forties. Reinvigorated in the early fifties. Primarily European immigrants. Co-opted a lot of the National Socialism precepts from the disbanded German party. Sort of fit with their whole death cult thing.”

The woman licks the blade of her sword. Black blood wells from her tongue. She spits it at us. It starts to boil on the ground.

“You know what?” I say to Hannah. “Just go right ahead and shoot her.”

At almost exactly that moment, a lot of bad things all happen at once.

Four figures leap from the trees that tower over either side of our trail. Men and women alike, wearing facepaint and little else. They are silent, the only sound the rustle of foliage behind them.

The blood the woman spat on the ground before us boils up, a great black cloud steaming off it. Thin gelatinous tentacles rise up from its surface. Eight-foot-long strands whip back and forth, block the path ahead.

The spitter herself charges toward us, through the cloud of thrashing blood.

Hannah shoots her.

The shot snaps through the whipping blood severing strands, and slams into the woman’s neck. Flesh rips and blood explodes out of the wound. She drops, gurgling and thrashing. That’s actually rather reassuring.

Then the four jumpers land, and are upon us.

Felicity leaps back. A blade falls close enough to slice a button from her shirt. She tries to get her pistol up but her assailant—a wiry little man with curiously long nipples that are possibly the most horrifying thing I’ve seen since I joined MI37—slams an elbow into her wrist and the weapon goes flying.

I get my own gun up and blow a fist-size portion of his brain into the forest beyond the path. That’s quite enough of him, his violence, and his creepy nipples.

Of course, defending Felicity has left me open to death by hideous gutting. I drop and roll as a blade slices the air above me.

Despite the size of their blades, which are broad enough to resemble absurd anime props, our attackers move with terrifying swiftness. I on the other hand move with agonized lethargy.

I had intended to come out of my roll in a cat-like crouch. Instead, I come out flat on my back, panting.

The blade reappears in my field of vision, starts to fill it.

I roll sideways. The blade hammers into the ground next to my head, slices down into it several inches.

That buys me time. My attacker heaves on her blade trying to free it. I heave to try and get my body into a kneeling position. We both get there at about the same time. She raises her blade. I raise my pistol. My bullet beats her downward strike. She topples over backwards, carried by the weight of her weapon.

I struggle to my feet, survey the scene. There are more of the bastards now. Hermann and Volk are almost covered in them. Three are clambering up Hermann’s back. He throws himself backwards, lands on his spine. Blood and bone go crunch.

Volk for all his humble nodding and placating smiles seems to have no problem burying his fist six inches deep in a man’s chest cavity.

But swords bite at them. Volk’s chest plate is notched and pitted. He leaks oil from a gash in his thigh. Sparks are spitting from Hermann’s shoulder.