Disciple: DreamWalkers, Book 2 (32 page)

“Shit.” Zeke darted toward the dinosaur, wondering if he could shove his sword far enough down its throat to saw its head off. He might lose an arm, but he’d rather lose that than his and Maggie’s lives.

He just hoped she could tie a tight tourniquet.

The dinosaur twisted and clawed at the opening, which wasn’t big enough for the remainder of its body. Yet. Its upper arms scrabbled at the concrete in a blur of wrath. Small chips of mortar flew in all directions, but the hole didn’t expand.

Dinos, anacondas, spiders and other monsters manifested by alucinators weren’t accurate representations of their real-world counterparts. Based on fossil records, T-Rexes had had smaller heads, much larger bodies, and longer forearms than the ones created by alucinators. Pop culture influenced wraith physique in the terra firma, and for that Zeke had to be thankful.

The T-Rex, which didn’t need to be the same as its prehistoric ancestors to kill people, roared out its deafening frustration as it realized its body couldn’t wriggle through the hole. Zeke was close enough that the sound sliced through his eardrums like a sonic boom.

“Blind it while it’s stuck!” Maggie yelled at his side. He realized that wasn’t the first time she’d yelled it. She was right—the T-Rex was too damn loud.

He approached it cautiously. The big head snapped at him, but right now the bark was deadlier than the bite. He lunged forward and carved out the critter’s eyeball.

The T-Rex screeched, wraithlike instead of dino-like, and yanked back through the hole. Exposed rebar bent. Concrete rattled. If it continued to batter the weakened wall, it would soon create a large enough crack for its body.

And Zeke and Maggie were still trapped. The T-Rex peered through the rubble at them with its remaining eye. Its teeth somehow managed to gleam in the dim emergency lighting.

It disappeared for a moment. Its monster’s tail lashed through the dust right before the wall received a thunderous jolt.

The T-Rex was going to break into the armory. It was only a matter of time. There was nobody they could call for help. Zeke didn’t even have a radio.

“I used all my bullets, but what about a grenade?” Maggie offered him the one he now recalled stashing in her vest earlier in the day.

“You could have pulled that out sooner.” He worked his paralyzed arm furiously. T-Rex or no T-Rex, this one-armed shit was going to get them killed.

Maggie traded him the grenade for his sword, which she trapped under her injured arm. Her face scrunched with discomfort as she adjusted her sprained wrist. “I’m stressed. I only just remembered I had it.”

“It might destabilize the ceiling.” Would it blow the fucker’s head off? “Or it could spit the grenade at us and blow us up instead.”

She stared at the prowling beast with big, fearful eyes. “Not if you lob it down his throat. Hey, it works in movies.”

“Worth a try.” Zeke’s heart raced. Maggie’s calmness impressed him. She had to appreciate how much danger they were in, and she was terrified but not defeated.

The dinosaur buffeted the wall again, enlarging the hole. Slowly, menacingly, it shoved its head through the new, improved opening. When it reached its shoulders, Zeke held his breath—and the grenade.

The T-Rex continued to slip forward. Inch by inch. It met resistance, wriggled, and its arms slipped through.

He had one grenade. One shot.

It roared at them. Lunged forward one, final, violent time…

And stuck midway through the hole.

Thank God its hindquarters were bigger than its head.

Their brief respite wouldn’t last. With most of it in the armory, it wouldn’t be long before the rest followed. It had more leverage now, and its nostrils flared as it scented them.

Half its face oozed blood where Zeke had stabbed it. Its single eye promised death.

It started to withdraw before Zeke could arm the grenade.

“Hurry,” Maggie encouraged.

How could he keep it stationary long enough for the grenade to work? He shoved the munition into his pocket, whipped out his sword and drove it as far into side of the dino’s neck as he could. The blade and hilt stuck out about two feet.

The monster screeched. It tried to spring at him, jaws chewing. The remaining wall stopped it. Zeke danced out of the way. More concrete surrendered as the powerful beast struggled to bite him in two.

“Other side!” Maggie yelled, holding up a second blade.

He sprinted around the thrashing, furious beast and snatched the weapon from her. After a running start, he struck the other side of its neck point first. The blade sank deep.

Maggie had another sword ready for him as soon as he jumped out of the creature’s range. Chain saws weren’t a standard part of Somnium weaponry, but right now he wished he had one. Working as fast as they could, he and Maggie drove several swords and one axe into the creature’s neck. They had little hope of cutting off the head without extensive sawing, which Zeke somehow doubted the creature would allow, but he did have a plan.

On his final retreat, he was too slow. The T-Rex’s huge head buffeted him. The power of the blow knocked him off his feet. He tucked and rolled, avoiding the teeth. The pain that lanced through his poisoned arm gave him hope it would soon be restored to working order, provided it hadn’t broken.

Maggie, a thin gleam of sweat on her flushed face, helped him up. “You okay?”

He hopped, shaking out his limbs. “Peachy. Let’s kill ourselves a dinosaur.”

The dino’s head and arms thrashed madly, as if suffering convulsions. But it wasn’t. It was just pissed. Saliva spattered them. It pushed a few more feet into the room as its muscular hindquarters strained. Its front claws etched the painted concrete floor.

Unless Zeke was mistaken, the low, dangerous groan that accompanied the dino’s latest lunge was the sound of a collapsing ceiling.

“There are cracks forming along the wall.” Maggie hugged her wounded wrist to her side and gripped a sword in her other hand. “When it goes, will it bring down the roof?”

“Doubt it. These places are made to last.” Actually it might, but why give her something else to worry about? There was a T-Rex fifteen feet from them and it was very, very angry.

Snarling and growling, and with thin, watery blood seeping down its neck and face, the dino struggled to get at them. The concrete and rebar barely held it, and the steel door canted to the side. Zeke edged closer to the beast with a final sword, intending to take out its other eye.

It saw him coming and withdrew—or it tried to.

The weapons bristling out of its neck like acupuncture clacked against the wall, preventing its escape. Temporarily. If it could bend rebar, it could bend swords.

The dino roared its pain and frustration. Zeke whipped out the grenade, yanked the pin and pegged it into the T-Rex’s gaping red maw.

“Fire in the hole!” He tackled Maggie behind an overturned gun assembly table.

The explosion rocked the whole room. Plaster crumbled around them. Small pieces struck his back and bounced off his vest.

Maggie wriggled beneath him. “Get up, get up. Cracks above us.”

They lurched to their feet. The emergency lighting burned through the room, now a smoky red hell instead of an armory. Zeke peered through the clouds and saw a great deal of wraith dust dispersed on the floor, darker than the powder and chips of concrete.

A T-Rex amount of wraith dust.

“It’s dead.” He grabbed her arm, not taking any time to rejoice, and ran.

Falling ceiling pelted them. They clambered through the ruined wall. Uneven footing on the piles of rubble tested Maggie, who had shorter legs. Zeke half-dragged her. He didn’t care what was going on above ground—they had a better chance up there, with wraiths, than down here, with a building collapsing on their heads.

They reached the door to the common room. Zeke slid to a stop, and they peered inside.

At first, he saw no one. Then scarlet glimmers caught his attention. He started to drag Maggie away from whatever was going to burst out of the conduit—probably another fucking T-Rex—when he realized it wasn’t a conduit.

Red emergency lights twinkled on the curator’s metal walker. The old man hobbled through the dusty, murky room toward the door.

His clothing was still neat as a pin. He hadn’t donned the protective vest. But he was alive.

“My stars,” he said when he saw them. “I wondered what exploded. I was coming to find out.”

Maggie trotted to the curator’s side. She tugged his arm. “We have to hurry, sir. The building may be unstable. There was a T-Rex. It got really mad.”

“I’m going as fast as I can, child.” The curator shuffled. The tennis balls on his walker left trails in the dust.

The structure rumbled under their feet. Maggie braced the curator.

The roar of a cave-in down the hallway near the armory heralded billows of dust. Zeke considered the ramifications of tossing one of the seven most powerful individuals in the Somnium over his back in a fireman’s carry. The arm poisoned by the Cthulhu had regained most of its strength, so he should be able to manage it.

“Where’s your guards?” he asked the curator.

Maggie and the curator reached the door. “The soldiers went to find Adishakti and Lillian. The last I heard, Adishakti had managed to vigil-block the correct area.”

“So there shouldn’t be any more manifestations?” Maggie asked. “Then we can end this.”

“We have to plow through the wraiths Karen already manifested,” Zeke pointed out, wondering how long the vigil-block would last—and how much it had exhausted Adi to place it. “What have you heard about the rest of the troops?”

“Unfortunately, I gather several more soldiers have lost their lives.” The curator shook his head sadly. “We are going to be in dire need of reinforcements soon.”

Maggie shared an anxious glance with Zeke and sheathed her sword, which was too long for her height and nearly dragged on the ground. “We’re already in dire need of reinforcements.”

“I mean after this incident. We’ve lost too many L5s. Alucinators with that sort of strength are hard to come by.”

“We can’t worry about that. We need to get you somewhere safe.” Zeke couldn’t imagine where that would be, but it wasn’t stuck underground in a structurally unsound facility.

He jogged ahead, checking the first stairwell for intruders. A soldier lay near the top, unmoving. Taking two steps at a time, he reached the soldier and checked the man’s pulse.

Dead. Zeke recognized him as one of the men who’d been guarding the curator. Had he been returning to assist the curator, or had he never made it to the surface?

No way to tell from his current position. Zeke unclipped the walkie from the soldier’s belt and flicked it on. “Zeke Garrett. I have Maggie and the curator on the first floor. Can I get an above ground status update? Over.”

The only response from the walkie was static. Dammit. Either everyone was too busy fighting to respond or everyone was dead.

He’d been in this situation before. In Harrisburg. Separated from his team, beleaguered on all sides. But this was worse. If he failed, he’d lose his life and his team’s life as well as the life of the woman he loved. Not to mention a curator. He’d go down in Somnium history as the number one cautionary tale of incompetence and stupidity, if he wasn’t already there.

“Hold my shoulder,” Maggie encouraged the old man. The curator began to negotiate the stairs, his walker at the bottom. He braced himself between Maggie and the railing. Zeke dragged the soldier’s body out of the way.

Once she had the curator at the top, Maggie jogged down the stairs for the walker. Zeke again considered hoisting the old man over his shoulder. The curator was scrawny, stooped and probably not very heavy.

“I use one of those runabout chairs at home,” the curator explained when he noticed Zeke eyeballing the walker. “I decided not to bring it on the plane. Too much baggage.”

“At your level, sir, you should have an assistant to handle your baggage,” Maggie chided. Not that the curator’s wheelchair would have been an improvement in a facility with stairs.

“Oh, I like to be independent. It gives the other curators such fits. I’m the oldest, you know.” The curator chuckled. The slide-clack of his walker was too sluggish for Zeke’s liking.

Impatient, Zeke strode ahead, checking each room for lurkers. He closed every door that still latched, which would prevent some types of wraith from escaping should they be hiding within.

“This way.” Zeke led Maggie and the curator toward the front door. The one emergency exit led out the back of the building, on the other side of the rubble. Even if it were accessible, it involved a long, hard climb up a ladder in a narrow tube. He doubted the old man could navigate that.

Though Zeke was impatient and edgy, perhaps the curator’s turtle-like speed wasn’t a bad thing. If there were no wraiths here, should they remain underground? The curator claimed Karen had been vigil-blocked, and the long, straight hallway seemed stable, unlike the bottom floor. Nothing sounded from either direction in the corridor except the creaks and moans of the protesting structure. No T-Rexes roared; no werewolves howled.

But Zeke wanted—no, needed—to see what was going on at the surface. He needed to know why nobody was answering the walkie. He needed to hear Karen had been located outside the sphere and stopped.

He needed to hear she was dead.

They passed two more bodies. One was the doctor who’d been sent to help the wounded aboveground.

So they didn’t have a physician on the premises anymore. Great.

The curator paused over the woman’s bleeding body. Zeke couldn’t tell what kind of wraith had taken her out, but it wasn’t the T-Rex. Her limbs were intact. He removed the walkie from her belt and handed it to Maggie.

“Such a shame.” The curator shook his head. “She wasn’t even an alucinator. Margaret, be a dear and close her eyes. I should say a few words. She was quite concerned for me. It’s ironic that she’s dead and I feel fine not an hour after I gave her such a scare.”

“We don’t have time for this.” With a frown at the old man, Zeke hoisted Maggie to her feet after she’d obeyed the curator’s request.