Dragon Over Washington (The Third War Of The Bir Nibaru Gods) (42 page)

Thorpe sighed, closed his smartphone and put it in his pocket. He sipped his drink and looked around him. The pub didn’t have too many clients this evening. A couple sat by the corner, holding hands. A few tourists sat around a table. Thorpe glanced outside through the pub’s large glass doors. People passed by, most holding slim briefcases, hurrying on their way to wherever they were going. The trees lining the street swayed gently.

“Let’s see what’s new in the real world out there.” Thorpe pulled out his smartphone again, went online and started checking emails. There was a new message from his gaming guild. Thorpe was suspended for missing too many gaming sessions in the last two weeks. He was instructed to contact his guild master. Thorpe sighed.

Thorpe then logged on as Tanya, but there wasn’t any message from Roger.

“Bummer, even that hunch led to a dead end,” Thorpe murmured, sipping his drink. He was about to close his smartphone’s browser, but then decided to search for Roger’s personal page.

“Maybe he posted something interesting in his own page -” Thorpe’s face drained of color.

Roger had posted three recent status updates on his personal page, the last one from last night: “In Al Jaghbub. No people visible. Internet service, phones, electricity and water supply go down at night. Deserted cars and trash everywhere. We’ll get our batteries and then, bye bye, Al Jaghbub!”

Thorpe hurriedly scrolled down to see Roger’s second posting.

“Heard something on the roof tonight. Maybe a big vulture. Not even Eric had courage to go up. Look what we saw this morning.”

Thorpe clicked the video link and watched it, the smartphone’s screen crystal clear in the semi-dark pub.

“A steady hand, finally,” Thorpe murmured. In the video he saw a cabin’s roof. It was weird, almost alien, the wooden planks seemed to have melted and flowed, growing into strange shapes with eyes, sharp beaks and talons.

“You smell this?” someone in the video asked.

A rusted rail, torn and bent into a serpent’s form swung idly. The cabin’s small metal chimney now resembled a toothed maw.

“Look at this, man,” a small voice on the video said. The camera zoomed in on the rail. The rusted metal pipe still moved. An eye suddenly opened on the rail’s end, dark yellow and angry, looking straight at the camera.

“It’s alive!”

The camera’s last shot was of three imprints on the roof: talons, more than a foot across.

“Look at the sky, man.”

“What?”

“The sky!”

The cameraman lifted his camera up. Thorpe blinked. The sky over Al Jaghbub was streaked with yellow swathes, as if dark yellow, venomous clouds enveloped the town and then were cut into ribbons, only above the town. It was as if the sky was cracking open.

“We’re gone, man. Let’s go!”

The video ended. Thorpe scrolled down to the message.

“Tried getting out, but roads blocked. More giant vultures heard. Saw people lying down on the streets, eyes totally black, like zombies. Phones are dead. Barricading in hotel. We’ll try to escape tonight.”

It ended there. Thorpe reread all Roger’s postings, ignoring the comments posted by his worried friends.

“The people with the black eyes. Ellis’s attack. The altered car. And now they have taken over the town. I was right. There was something going on in Al Jaghbub.” Thorpe’s grin was weak. He picked up his glass, but put it down without taking a sip.

“So what. The suits don’t care, why should I?” Thorpe murmured savagely. A moment later he sighed. “I should have seen it coming, though.” He browsed through the blackboard images again. “But the things happening made me look elsewhere. We attacked the cult and the creatures in Colorado. I had no time for Al Jaghbub.” Thorpe got out of his seat and started walking around in the pub, ignoring the stares he got. “But we attacked them because Ellis was attacked and Mathew’s patrol car vanished. But whoever or whatever attacked them was similar.” Thorpe froze in mid-stride. “Whatever attacked Ellis and the patrol car is similar to the things in Al Jaghbub, but because of these attacks we retaliated, hence I didn’t look into Al Jaghbub hard enough. What was the purpose of these attacks? To draw my attention away from Al Jaghbub?”

Thorpe resumed walking to and fro in the pub. “The attacks in Africa occurred only after I started investigating Al Jaghbub. If the attacks on Ellis and the patrol car were supposed to make me overlook Al Jaghbub, were the attacks in Africa the same?” Thorpe paced faster. “Whatever we discovered in Russia, we discovered in Africa the next day. People disappearing, buildings destroyed, no visible enemy, damage caused by unknown means. There’s something fighting the Russian army, but in Africa there’s nothing.”

Thorpe sat back down on his chair, drumming his fingers on the counter. “And the professor? Why was she attacked? To prevent her from translating the message from the NY apartment, the message warning us against the things in Al Jaghbub. All they wanted was to hide whatever happens in Al Jaghbub from us. But now we know.” Thorpe raised his glass, but he put it down yet again without drinking. “Wait, wait, wait. I was the one heading the investigation. All the attacks on Ellis and the professor and the attacks in Africa were meant to confuse me. They wanted to hide Al Jaghbub from me. Me!” Thorpe sat on his chair, saying nothing for some time. Then he pulled out his smartphone and went through the blackboard images, reviewing the stages of the investigation again.

“How did they know? How did they know how to divert my attention? How did they know to direct me away from Al Jaghbub?”

Something he couldn’t identify, a feeling on the back of his neck as if someone was looking at him, made Thorpe look outside the pub. Agent Winder was walking on the other side of the street. Thorpe watched, his eyes wide, as Agent Winder stopped, bent down, brought his nose to the pavement, got up and looked straight at Thorpe. Winder stepped down off the pavement and started to cross the street towards Thorpe’s pub.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Thorpe mumbled, his glass trembling in his unfeeling hands, eyes on the man heading towards him, mind racing.

“The professor and the patrol car attackers led perfectly normal lives till they visited Wicomico. Somebody paid them? Brainwashed them? Blackmail? Winder was in contact with his team in Africa. Winder could see everything on my blackboard. He saw there that the professor was deciphering a message. He saw what I knew about Russia. He was in a perfect position to divert the investigation. Divert me. And his team hid the occurrences in Al Jaghbub because they also went rogue.”

Thorpe started panting. “And now, since I understand what’s really going on, what’s next?” Winder was a few feet away from the pub’s large, glass door, reaching for the doorknob.

Thorpe felt a cold shudder passing through him. “Better totally paranoid than totally dead.”

Winder started opening the pub’s door.

“Stop blabbering, man!” Thorpe got up and ran to the back of the pub, reaching a long corridor with doors to the toilets and the kitchen. He stood there, his head moving from side to side. A waitress carrying a tray passed near him and Thorpe whirled around and grabbed her by the arm, making her yell and drop her tray. Thorpe winced at the noise.

“Where’s the back door to his place?” Thorpe demanded. “The back door!”

She looked at him, taken aback by something in his eyes.

“There’s no back door. Only the front door,” she said and bent down to clean the mess on the floor. Thorpe stood above her, panting. She looked up at him.

“There’s a fire escape over there.”

Thorpe whirled around again. He had somehow missed the large metal fire escape door. Thorpe ran to it and tried to open it. It wouldn’t budge. Thorpe, panting, put his shoulder to it and it finally moved slowly, its rusted hinges screeching. Thorpe stumbled out of the pub and fell onto trash bags littering the back alley behind the pub. He flailed his arms in panic, pushing himself up and dirtying his clothes. For him it seemed like an eternity, but he finally got to his feet and ran along the alley till he reached New Jersey Avenue.

The lighted road, the cars and the multitude of people passing nearby made him slow down. Thorpe turned around and leaned on a wall at the end of the alley, his eyes on the pub’s fire-escape door. Thorpe tried to catch his breath, bending down, his arms around him. His eyes never left the fire escape. He slowly straightened up. Nothing came out of that door. Maybe he was just paranoid. He felt the blood rushing in his ears. He had never thought that staying in shape was important.

Suddenly, the fire escape door exploded out, bouncing between the alley’s walls, raising an incredible metallic racket. Winder stepped out the doorway, looking at Thorpe, his expression unreadable. Winder blinked and his eyes became totally black. He blinked again and his eyes returned to normal.

Thorpe turned and ran.

Thorpe wove between people, breathing hard, passing a tight group of men in matching black suits carrying heavy brown suitcases. He looked back, the many street lamps and stores on the avenue shedding bright light all around. He couldn’t see Winder. Thorpe ran on, nearly colliding with a woman pushing an orange baby carriage. “Sorry,” Thorpe mumbled. He ran on, glancing back again, trying to spot Winder. He could hear his new shoes on the pavement, the cars and the busses passing by, the tourists and the many people on the street talking and laughing.

Thorpe came to a pedestrian crossing and stopped there, panting, bending down and holding on to his knees. He felt a small throng of people gathering around him, waiting for the green light. All of a sudden, Thorpe shuddered, imagining Winder’s hands reaching for him. He straightened up, looking around. There were people everywhere near him, surrounding him, suffocating him.

Thorpe broke out and ran into the crossing, heedless of a car that stopped with a squeal just before hitting him, honking loudly. Thorpe reached the other side of the road, turned back and waited, looking at the solid wall of people he had just left. Winder was nowhere to be seen, but Thorpe’s eyes flew to a tall man standing at the back of the throng of people waiting to cross. The man held his hand to his mouth and started coughing. Another man started coughing and then a woman joined them, choking and retching. In a short while, the throng opened and Winder passed through, the yellowish aura around him making the pavement melt and bubble. People fled from him. A bespectacled Japanese tourist started to yell as his overcoat fall apart in smoking tatters. The Japanese tourist froze, looking at his hand, as his nails started turning black, growing, and lengthening into claws.

Winder reached the end of the pavement and the traffic light above him started to malfunction, a cascade of sparks raining down. Winder stepped onto the street towards Thorpe. Winder’s eyes were entirely black again, but this time tiny points of yellow light swam inside them. Winder shrieked, a terrible high-pitched screech that couldn’t have come out of anything human.

Thorpe turned and ran.

“This isn’t happening to me. This isn’t happening to me. This can’t happen to me!” Thorpe ran on, banging into people, stumbling onwards. His lungs hurt and his muscles felt like pure agony. Thorpe’s breath rattled in his throat. Whenever he looked back, he saw Winder striding towards him, getting closer all the time. Thorpe tried running faster, but felt his legs weakening, slowing down. He felt that he was being dragged down. He was sure he could start feeling Winder’s corrosive effect touching the back of his neck. He could hear the sounds of the tall street lamps on the street malfunctioning, the lights blinking and dying, their poles weakening and falling down with a metallic crash, one after the other.

And then Thorpe almost sobbed with relief. A hundred yards away, blinking softly with its blue and red lights, a police car was parked on the sidewalk. Thorpe put everything he had into a last sprint. He glanced one last time behind him and then crashed on the white police car’s hood, panting, holding his sides, gulping air.

“Hey, Mister!” It was woman’s voice, the police officer who left the car and approached him.

Thorpe tried calming down. He pushed himself off the car and moved towards the officer. “Look - I’m - chasing me - call help!” Thorpe panted. He saw the officer looking at him skeptically.

“I’m an NSA agent -“ Thorpe put his hand in his pocked and froze when he saw the police officer put her hand on her revolver. “It’s just my ID card!” Thorpe breathed hard and put his hand on the car to try catching his breath. “It’s -” Thorpe whirled around. Winder was moving towards them, his features normal again.

“Conley, check this out,” the officer said. A second officer moved towards Winder, walking purposely.

“Good evening,” the officer said to Winder. “May I see some ID?” Winder raised his arm and the officer flew sideways, crumpling against a lighted storefront and laying there unmoving.

“Conley!” The officer near Thorpe drew her gun and ran towards Winder. “Officer down, New Jersey Avenue and Morgan Street, request assistance!” She said into her radio. “Freeze!” She yelled at Winder.

Thorpe watched Winder’s eyes become large and as round as small saucers. They focused like a raptor’s on the police officer. An instant later Winder leaped towards her, lifting her up in his hands, knocking her gun knocked. Winder’s face festered, his mouth growing, turning into an elongated beak getting larger and larger and gaping open. Yellow misty power poured out of his eyes. The officer struggled, her arms flailing, but Winder held her up effortlessly, screeching in her face as if screaming with centuries-old hunger. Then the officer screamed. Winder’s inhuman maw approached her, a black, long, three-tipped tongue coming out towards her, flicking across her face as if sniffing her out. The officer screamed again as a ball of light lit up inside her belly and traveled up, shining through her body. The light exited through her mouth and Thorpe could see the ball had the officer’s face, features twisted by horror. Winder swallowed the ball of light and threw the officer aside. She lay limp on the sidewalk, head turned towards Thorpe, eyes opened, black as night, unseeing.