Immortal (34 page)

“So tell me, Bob,” I say, a bit louder. “Now that you’ve gotten the first phase of this little project out of the way, when do you go to phase two?”

I sincerely hope Iza hears the last part of my sentence and puts it into the proper context. As pixies are not known for being able to follow conversational threads very closely, it’s a good hope.

“Phase one, as you put it, isn’t completed yet,” Bob says. “First I have to eliminate the remaining liabilities.” That means us, presumably. “This technology is very much desired by a number of multinational consortiums. I expect to do rather well for myself.”

“Of course you do,” I say. “And the rest of the world be damned, right?”

I can no longer hear Iza. Either she’s lost interest and is now flying back to Clara, or she caught my request. I would find out fairly soon.

“It’s true that there may be some unexpected political consequences,” Bob agrees. “But that’s inevitable in the face of progress. Might as well do the best I can financially.”

“Sure,” I say. “And when one of your interested parties decides to unleash a biological weapon, you’re going to say what? ‘Oh well’?”

“Yes,” he agrees. “That’s exactly right. Now stop. This is close enough.”

We had walked south, through the unused end of the camp. Human security is supposed to patrol this section, but I haven’t seen anybody, so I’m guessing Grindel told them to stay away for a few hours.

He’d stopped us facing the perimeter fence, just beyond two vacant huts. At the foot of the fence a very deep hole has been dug in the sand, which must have been a challenge to accomplish given the concrete quality of the ground. Probably took Brutus all afternoon.

It’s a new first for me. I’ve never stared into my own grave before.

“You have two minutes, Adam,” Bob says.

“Excuse me?” I ask, turning.

“I’m giving you the face time you’ve been waiting for.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes. Now quit stalling before I change my mind.”

Bob takes two gracious steps backward in the interest of giving us some privacy. I’d have preferred he take forty or fifty steps, but whatever.

I look Eve in the eye, and she looks back. Which is the closest thing to a meaningful conversation we’ve ever had. As always, her expression reveals nothing to me.

“I thought you were dead,” I say to her, after deciding she wasn’t going to be speaking without a prompt.

She smiles. Apparently nobody told her we’re on a clock here.

“Do you have anything to say?” I ask.

She looks quizzically at me, the pale white of her skin contrasting remarkably with her red hair in the half-light.

“Why are you here?” she asks finally. She has a very musical cadence to her speech that would give a linguist fits in trying to place. I recognize it as the rhythm of a language that died before the written word. I just can’t quite figure out which one.

In answering, I could have explained that I’d come to save a woman I thought was in serious danger, but who turned out to have deliberately tricked me into following her—and who might even have tipped off Bob that I was planning on making a break tonight, thus putting the two of us in this position—when I should have followed my instinct and bolted, remembering that I’m
not
the hero, that the hero eventually ends up dead, and the person who put that notion in my head in the first place is the selfsame traitorous woman.

But that would take too long. Instead I say, “I’m here to rescue you.”

“I see,” she says. “How ironic.”

“What do you mean?”

“I knew you would turn up in this place. Even against your own better judgment. It’s why I chose to stay.”

An alarm from the center of the camp startles us both, and more importantly, prevents me from asking her just what in the hell she means. Implicit in being a prisoner is that one doesn’t simply decide to stay. Unless there’s a get-out-of-jail pass nobody told me about.

The alarm catches the attention of both Grindel and his large demon bodyguard. Brutus looks especially tense, which isn’t something you see all that often in his species.

“It’s for the cage,” Brutus says.

“The cage? Who could have opened that?” Grindel asks.

“I did,” I say, even though nobody is talking to me.

“Really? How did you . . . Never mind.” He brings his handgun to bear. “Sorry, Adam. The two of you have run out of time.”

Pointing his gun at my head causes the ground at his feet to erupt. It takes a second to register, but evidently somebody’s shooting at him. He jumps backward, and fortunately, doesn’t pull the trigger himself.

“Let her go!” someone shouts.

Clara?

Bob looks around, trying to pinpoint the source of the voice. It came from the corner window of the hut to Bob’s right, but he can’t seem to figure this out.

“Miss Wassermann,” he shouts, turning in a slow circle, arms raised. It’s an invitation to take another shot. “You shouldn’t involve yourself in something you don’t understand.”

There’s a moment when he leaves himself exposed, but Brutus steps between us before I can do anything, so I just stand still and hope Clara knows what the hell she’s doing. Because when this is over I’m going to have to ask her why she’s more interested in saving Eve than in saving me, and that will be a lot easier if both of us are still alive.

“I understand plenty, Bob,” Clara shouts back. “Now walk away.”

Bob spins around and shoots three times in the direction of the voice. He had been baiting her into talking some more, which should have been obvious.

We’re all treated to a lengthy silence, and for a second I worry he’s gotten lucky.

“Nice try,” Clara says finally. “The fuck, you think I’m stupid?”

“What are you waiting for?” I shout. “Shoot him!”

Bob stares at the side of the building he’s just riddled, then declares, “She can’t. She’s bluffing.”

He points the gun at me again, and now I’m wondering if there’s any place convenient to jump. Just before he fires, say. People in the movies can dodge bullets, so why not me? I don’t get a chance to ascertain the feasibility of this plan, which is good as I really don’t think it’ll work. A shot rings out, but again it isn’t Bob shooting. And this time Clara hasn’t aimed at his feet.

The bullet glances off the side of his shoulder, and the impact causes him to drop the handgun. I dive for it, snatch it up and scramble to my feet, but of the two of us, Brutus is a good deal quicker. He picks up his wounded boss, pulls him into a hug, and starts running back toward the center of the compound. I don’t even get a shot off.

But Clara does. Quite a few shots. Bullets are flying all over the place and at first I’m thinking she’s just shooting indiscriminately, but no. She’s hitting her target. The lead is just bouncing off Brutus’s tough hide.

With friendly fire all around us, I dive at Eve—who hasn’t moved at all during any of this—and carry her into our erstwhile grave until the shooting stops.

Long silence. Except for the siren, which is still wailing away in the distance.

“Are you wounded?” I ask Eve once I’m finally certain Clara’s finished.

“No,” she says, adding, “please get off of me.”

I pull myself out of the hole, then reach down and give her a hand out. She looks a touch perturbed by the whole thing, which just annoys me. I wasn’t coming on to her. I was trying to save her life.

The alarm has been joined by the far-off reports of automatic gunfire and the occasional piercing scream. It’s begun. And I’m about as far away from the lab as I can be while still inside the fence. Not good.

“Okay, what the hell is going on?” Clara asks, lowering herself to the ground from the roof of the hut with what looks to be an M-16 on her back.

“Rampant chaos,” I say. “And if we’re lucky, it’s going to get worse pretty fast. When did you learn how to throw your voice?”

She lands clumsily, then pulls herself to her feet and ambles over. I notice she’s wearing the same kind of uniform the security team wore the last time I saw one of them. Not sure what’s stranger, seeing her in a uniform or seeing her in any clothes at all.

“When did I what?” she asks. “Oh.” She holds up a radio. “I set it to an unused frequency and put another one in the window.”

“Smart girl,” I admit. But Clara isn’t paying attention to me any longer. She’s too busy staring at Eve. “All-mother,” she says reverently.

Tchekhy’s warning about militant feminists springs rather suddenly to mind. That, coupled with the realization that I’d have saved myself a bunch of trouble if I’d asked him to hack into the All-Mother website, is enough to make me nauseous.

“Child,” Eve says. “Tell me you didn’t come all this way . . .”

“Of course. I’m here to save you.”

“Uh, hello?” I interrupt. There would be time for this later. “Ladies, we’re a bit exposed out here.”

Clara, still entirely ignoring me, genuflects at Eve’s feet. What the hell, I ask myself, is going on here?

“Oh, my dear. Get up, please,” Eve says. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. I was never in any real danger.”

We are saved further elaboration on the matter of Eve’s apparent inability to comprehend a life-threatening situation by a scream from the center of camp. A terribly loud, achingly horrible scream that one cannot help but to turn toward. Which I do.

“What was that?” Clara asks quietly, getting to her feet and looking in roughly the same direction. I think she’s finally getting it through her head that we’re in a spot of trouble. Plus, she’s acknowledging my existence again, which is nice.

“Something I haven’t heard in a very long time,” I say, which is true. Not something I’m bound to forget, either. “We have to hurry. Eve, if you . . .” I trail off, as it appears Eve is no longer standing right next to me. And, when one finds out one is talking to an empty space rather than a person, one is disinclined to finish one’s sentence.

“Where’d she go?” Clara asks, turning.

We’re standing in an open area fifty feet from any building and with a clear view of the lit perimeter road a hundred feet in either direction. Straight ahead, the other side of the chain link fence offers a view of the desert that extends nearly that far before fading into darkness. (The fence is entirely too tall to scale anyway, and topped with barbed wire that actively discourages any bold attempts to do so.) Eve is nowhere.

I peek over the edge of the grave, but she’s not in there either. And there’s no way she’s fast enough to have escaped from view in three seconds. Not if, as Viktor reassured me a couple of times, she and I are the same sort of being.

“Where did she go!” Clara shouts, repeating herself.

“She’s just . . . gone,” I say, as nothing more clever is coming to mind. I find myself staring at the ground where she’d been standing a moment earlier. The imprints of her shoes are still there. It’s just that Eve has ceased to occupy them.

“How?” Clara asks. She’s getting a tad hysterical.

“If I knew how she did that, I’d do it myself,” I point out.

“But—.”

A second alarm sounds, up near the front entrance of the camp. This snaps me back into the situation like a slap across the face. There will be time later to ponder the implications of what we had just witnessed, but to get to that point I’m going to have to figure out a way to survive the next few hours.

Clara’s not quite there yet. “It’s impossible!” she insists.

“Oh, absolutely,” I agree. “But we can talk about it later. Like, not when we’re about to get killed. We have to get out of here. Now.”

“She—”

“Clara. Now.”

*
 
*
 
*

Running from building to building, we use the cover each structure provides us as well as we can. And each step that takes us closer to the center, also brings us closer to the sounds of utter mayhem. Alarms are sounding, guns are firing, people are screaming. It seems like it’s happening all around us.

“Are we under attack?” Clara asks as we run.

“You could say that.”

“By what?”

We reach the corner of one of the larger inner buildings. An unused physics lab. I peer around the corner to see if the center compound is occupied. It doesn’t appear to be.

“What made that noise?” Clara continues. “The screaming you said you’d heard before. What was that?”

“That was the sound of a demon being eviscerated.”

“Jesus.”

More gunfire, to our right and pretty close. We hear a man scream before abruptly losing his voice and—based on the somewhat sickening noise that follows—his life. It’s nice to imagine I’m hearing Bob Grindel being killed, but more likely it’s a security team member. They’re probably all over the place by now, as one’s patrol assignment tends to go out the window when one is fleeing for one’s life. It’s another variable to consider.

“It’s eating,” I say, noting the sucking sounds. “Quickly.”

Taking Clara by the hand, I lead us in a sprint over the remaining distance to the center. Clara pulls free and stops when she sees the four huts.

“You had Iza open all the doors,” she notes. “I didn’t know you were going to do that.”

“She didn’t need to tell you,” I say.

“You didn’t trust me?”

“Of course I didn’t. Would you?”

She thinks about it. “Maybe not.”

A noise, that might be described as howling on multiple frequencies, cuts through the air. It’s from behind us, roughly where we heard the death of a man a minute earlier.

“It’s coming,” I say. And the lab’s too far away, assuming the door isn’t unlocked. I push Clara into the nearest doorway—for cell number three—and follow her in, closing the door behind us. And then we hold our breath for a thirty count.

“It’s gone,” Clara whispers.

“Maybe.”

“So what is it?”

“It’s a vampire,” I say. “A very, very hungry vampire. They were keeping it in the second cell.”

“There’s such a thing as vampires?”

“Sure.”

It takes her a couple of seconds to readjust her world view and then, “Why the hell are we headed into the middle of the compound?”

“We can’t climb that fence,” I say. “And even if we tried, is that where you want to be when the vampire comes by? Better to find a place to hide until it’s all over.”