Nightworld (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack) (42 page)

And then they backed off, all but the ones pinning him there in the water. The drain grew quiet. The sloshing and splashing, the scraping of the myriad feet died away until the only noise in the pipe was the sound of his own ragged breathing.

What did they want? What were they—?

Then came another sound, a heavy, chitinous slithering from the impenetrable darkness beyond his feet. As it grew louder, Hank began to whimper in fear. He thrashed in the water, struggling desperately to pull free, but the pincers in his arms and legs tightened their grip, digging deeper into his already bleeding flesh.

And then in the growing shaft of light from the rising moon he saw it. A millipede like all the rest, but so much larger. Its head was the size of Hank’s torso, its body a good two feet across, half filling the drainpipe.

Hank screamed as understanding exploded within him. These other, smaller horrors were workers or drones of some sort; they’d captured him and were holding him here for their queen! He renewed his struggles, ignoring the tearing pain in his limbs. He had to get free!

But he couldn’t. Sliding over the bodies of her obedient subjects the queen crawled between Hank’s squirming legs until she held her head poised over his chest, staring at him with her huge, black, multifaceted eyes. As Hank watched in mute horror, a drill-like proboscis extruded from between her huge mandibles. Slowly, she raised her head and angled it down over Hank’s abdomen. Hank found his voice and screamed again as she plunged the proboscis deep into his belly.

Liquid fire exploded at his center and spread into his chest, ran down his legs and his arms, draining the strength from them.

Poison!
He opened his mouth to scream again but the neurotoxin reached his throat first and allowed him to voice little more than a breathy exhalation. His hands were the last things to go dead, and then he was floating. He still lay in the water but could not feel its wetness. The last thing he saw before tumbling into a void of blessed darkness was the queen horror with her snout still buried in his flesh.

WNYW-TV

News from NASA: We have lost contact with most of our higher orbiting satellites. The communication satellites are still operational—otherwise you would not be watching this broadcast—but the rest are simply … gone.

Over the Pacific

They got in and out of Bakersfield in record time. Or so Frank said. Jack would have to take his word about the record part, but it sure as hell had been fast. The main reason was that Frank’s plane was one of only a half dozen scheduled there today.

It hadn’t been Bakersfield, actually, but a small airstrip just outside it. Frank seemed to know everybody in sight; not very many of those, but they all seemed impressed that he was still on the job. Especially impressed that he was making arrangements to get refueled here on his return flight.

“Yer gonna be flyin’ inna dark comin’ back, y’know,” the old guy who ran the place had said as the wing tanks were filling.

Wrinkled and grizzled and looking old enough to have been Eddie Rickenbacker’s wingman in the Lafayette Escadrille, he was the one who’d pocketed a stack of Glaeken’s gold coins for the fuel.

“I know,” Frank said from the pilot seat. He had his iPod earphones slung around his neck and was playing with one of the drooping ends of his mustache.

Jack sat beside him in the pilot’s cabin—he’d called it the “cockpit” earlier and had been corrected—while Ba sat in the passenger compartment, adding more teeth to his billy clubs.

“Lotsa planes disappearin’ inna dark these days, Frankie. Go up, neva come down.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Some are even disappearin’ inna day. Inna
day
! So nobody’s flyin’—nobody with any sense, that is. Scared to get off the ground. ’Fraid they won’t come back. Don’t want you t’be one a thems that don’t come back, Frankie.”

“Thanks, Pops. Neither do I.”

“Where’s Joe?”

“On his way to Bucharest.”

“Hungary?”

“No. Romania.”

“Same difference. Shit! What’s the matter with you two? You need the money that bad? Hell, I can lend you—”

“Hey, Pops,” Frank said. “It ain’t the bread. I’m a pilot, man. I fly folks places. That’s what I do. I ain’t changin’ that, okay? Not for anybody or any bugs. Besides, we once like promised this here dude that any time he really needed to get somewhere, we’d take him. You can dig that, can’t you?”

“No, I can’t dig nothin’ of the sort. Where y’goin’?”

“He says he’s got to get to Maui and back real bad.”

Pops stared past Frank at Jack like he was looking at a lunatic. Jack smiled and gave him an Oliver Hardy wave.

“Got to see my girl. It’s her birthday.”

Pops rolled his eyes and started to turn away.

“Real weird kind of weather you got around here,” Frank said, glancing up at the lid of gray overhead.

“All that shit from Hawaii.” Pops wiped his finger along the fuselage and held it up to demonstrate the coating of gray ash. “Just like your last name, Frankie. And you’re headed straight into it. Tops off at twenny thou, though. Watch yer intakes.”

“Will do.”

Pops went back to check on the refueling. A few minutes later they were airborne. Jack sniffed the air that leaked into the cabin at the lower altitude.

“Smells burnt.”

“That it is,” Frank said. “It’s
vog
—a mixture of like water vapor, smoke, and fine, fine, super-fine volcanic ash. Under normal conditions it would give us awesome sunsets all over the world. But now? We don’t seem to get real sunsets anymore.”

Jack felt closed in, trapped by the formless grayness pressing against the windows. Wasn’t even sure if they were headed up. He’d have to trust Frank on that.

Which was probably one of the reasons he didn’t like to fly. He liked to be in control of a situation. Up here he was at Frank’s mercy. He didn’t know which way they were headed, and if something should happen to Frank, Jack didn’t have the faintest idea of how to get them down safely. Scared the hell out of him when Frank had put the controls on autopilot over Denver and made a trip to the head. He’d returned soon, but nowhere near soon enough for Jack.

Suddenly the grayness darkened as if a curtain had been drawn, and the jet wobbled.

“What’s up?” Jack said as calmly as he could.

“Don’t rightly know.”

“Those are three little words I do not want to hear from my pilot.”

Jack held on to his seat’s armrests and knew if he looked down at his hands he’d see two sets of white knuckles.

“We’ll be okay.”

“Good. I like those three words much better.”

“Be cool, Jack. Gotta expect some weird voggish updrafts and down.”

The grayness lightened as abruptly as it had darkened. Jack began to breathe easier. He was leaning against his window, staring out into the unrelieved grayness, when the plane passed through a brief break in the vog. His throat closed and his hands renewed their chokehold on his armrests. Directly below the wings he saw a broad flat surface, smooth and black as new asphalt, spanning off in all directions until it disappeared into the gray. He was about to shout to Frank that they were going to crash when he saw the eye: Far off to his right, perhaps a quarter-mile away, cathedral-sized, huge and yellow with a slit pupil, it sat embedded in the black surface, staring back at him like a lab tech eyeing a microbe.

Jack slammed back in his seat.

“My God, Frank!” he said, his voice a croak. “What
is
that?”

Frank glanced past him. “What’s what?”

Jack took another look. The vog had closed in again. Nothing there now but gray.

“Never mind.”

Jack remembered Glaeken mentioning winged leviathans big as towns cruising the skies, but he’d said they’d keep to the nightside. Looked like he was wrong. At least one of them had made itself at home in the dense vog. Maybe more than one.

His mouth felt dry. “How long till we get above this junk?”

“Any minute now.”

Sure enough, two minutes later they broke into clear air. But no sign of the sun. The whole sky was now some sort of tinted filter, a ground-glass lens that wouldn’t allow direct sunlight through. Right now, Jack didn’t care. They were out of the vog, out of reach of that thing in the clouds.

He looked down. As far as he could see, nothing but a smooth dome of gray. Plenty of room for a gaggle of leviathans down there. Frank said they were over the Pacific; for all Jack knew they could be headed back toward New York.

The pilot’s cabin suddenly seemed too small. Jack decided to head back and see what Ba was up to. He slapped Frank on the shoulder.

“Get you anything?”

“A hefty J would be super right about now. I’ve got a lid of bodacious—”

“Frank, don’t even kid about that.”

“Who’s kidding, man? It’s the only way to fly. Hell, I recall the time I jumped the Himalayas and coasted into Katmandu totally wrecked. It was—”

“Please, Frank. Not on this trip.”

Six miles above the Central Pacific with a blitzed pilot. Not the kind of Friendly Skies Jack wanted.

Frank grinned. “Okay, man. Another coffee’d be good.”

“Not getting sleepy, are you?”

“Not yet. I’ll let you know when. Then you can take over the controls.”

“
Two
coffees coming right up! An
urn
!”

Abe’s Place

“What’s wrong with the sky, Mom?”

Gia looked up for maybe the hundredth time. Nothing special about the few puffy clouds, but no blue behind them. Just a wan, diffuse yellow light that threw strange shadows across the verdant hills rolling away in all directions.

“I don’t know, honey, but at least we’re up here in the fresh air.”

One night in that concrete coffin and she was already itching to flee back to the city. She’d pushed two of the folding beds together for Vicky and her. Vicky had slept straight through. Gia hadn’t been so lucky. Between Abe’s thunderous snoring on the other side of the curtain and worrying about Jack, sleep had proven hard to find.

Abe had snagged some eggs from the chickens in the barn and they’d had breakfast in the farmhouse. The property sat atop one of the taller hills in the area and offered peaceful, wide-angle views of the countryside. The leaning, peeling barn was showing its age, but the house was in pretty decent shape. Gia had cast longing glances at the airy bedrooms.

“Look!” Vicky said. “There’s the cat again!”

She started after the barn cat. As in all their previous encounters, the cat took one look at Vicky and headed in the other direction.

“Be careful.”

“She’ll be all right,” Abe said, waddling up behind her. “Nothing sharp or dangerous left in the barn. And no sign of Parabellum.”

Gia figured here was a chance to float an idea that had been perking since breakfast.

“What do you think about sleeping in the house tonight?”

Abe shook his head. “Too risky. And besides, everything is below.”

“We could bring up what we need. There don’t seem to be any bugs in the area.”