The Anathema (49 page)

“Gaul?”

“It’s about time. Pull yourself together. There are things that must be done, and you, Chief Auditor, are the one who needs to do them.”

Today, Alice thought, is going to be a big day for the old diary.

* * *

There was something wrong with these Weir. They were… twisted, somehow. Malformed. Hideous and rank, their skin crawling with tumors and sores, their features obscured and deformed. Alex couldn’t help but wonder if they were somehow already dead.

Katya ducked underneath the outstretched arms of one of them, and one of three needles she clutched in her left hand disappeared. The Weir’s howl was muffled, as she had impaled it with a needle through the jaw and into the skull. She opened her hand and the other two needles disappeared, and the Weir behind it fell as well. Then it was his turn, stepping up behind her. He had practiced it dozens of times, but he had never felt more nervous than with a Weir lunging at him and nothing else at all to rely on. He reached out his hand, using his arm as a rough visual guide. Wait until the Weir was twice as far… Katya had taught him to aim, and he did, for the point right between the beast’s eyes…

The Black Door skidded open a crack. Alex let a little bit of the cold in through an opening the size of a pinhole. The blood in the Weir’s brain froze, along with some of its head and most of its eyes. The creature made a ghastly sound, and then fell to the ground and twitched as its nervous system died in shock.

“You only need to freeze like five centimeters, max,” Katya scolded. “You’re still overdoing it.”

She walked over to the Weir he had killed, and kicked its head experimentally.

“It’s like someone poured a slushy inside a pumpkin,” Katya observed dryly, then paused, and looked away. “But you did pretty good, all in all. You’re still slow, but I don’t feel quite as bad about you watching my back.”

“I’m going to accept that as a compliment,” Alex said happily, “because I know it’s as close as I’m going to get. Look, we do this, and I’m gone, okay? We get Rebecca back on her feet, and then I’m going back down to Central.”

“Through the woods,” Katya said coolly, tapping her foot impatiently.

“Yeah.”

“Which are filled with…? I don’t know. Anathema, I suppose. Lots of them.”

“Well, yeah. I mean, I have to, right?”

“I suppose,” Katya mused. “The only other girl in the world who was willing to sleep with you decided that she preferred death, so your options for the future are limited.”

“Hey,” Alex said, genuinely hurt and not fully able to disguise it. “That’s really harsh, even for you.”

“Sorry. You’re just going to have to deal with it.”

“Well, whatever. I have to go for Eerie. I said some things that I wish I hadn’t… and now that I think about it,” Alex said, wondering why he was confessing this to Katya, of all people, “there are some things that I want to say that I should have said. Right now, I’m trying not to compound my mistakes. So, while I appreciate your help, I’d appreciate it even more if you would lay the fuck off. Please.”

Katya regarded him narrowly. It could have gone either way. He wasn’t sure how many of the needles she had left woven into the lining of her jacket, and he found himself watching her hands intently. Then she shrugged and walked off, toward the gate, stepping neatly over the corpse of the Weir, head steaming from internal temperature deferential.

They made it halfway to the gate, which seemed good, given how crowded the woods seemed to be tonight. At least, for variety’s sake, they managed to stumble over the next group of Anathema, rather than vice versa. Both Weir looked very surprised. The human – well, no, Alex reminded himself; the Anathema with them looked even more so.

Katya threw one of her needles at him, overhand, and he ducked to avoid it, reaching for his gun. It flickered out of sight in mid-air, holding onto the momentum when it reappeared somewhere inside of him, emerging, point first, from the right side of his chest, poking out from between his ribs. He dropped the gun he’d been holding and stared at it in horror. Alex held out his hand, measuring from there, and waited for the Weir to move. He didn’t have to wait very long.

They were faster than he anticipated, and he almost didn’t get the first one, on the way in, which would have been a problem, because Katya was still digging through her pockets. He had to try twice, in rapid succession, unpleasantly aware that every pinhole meant a few more hours of his life lost to dreamless, hollow sleep. His first attempt grazed the back of the Weir’s skull. The second one hit the mark, and the thing fell down in the same horrible convulsions. Alex spun to face the final Weir, knowing the he would be too late to stop it, wondering if Katya had worked anything out.

The Weir dropped to its knees in coughing, choking spasms, close enough that Alex could smell its foul breath. He turned and looked at Katya gratefully as the thing died.

“Fuck, man, I thought you were out of needles or something,” Alex gasped, his hands on his knees. “I would’ve been dead.”

“Actually,” Katya said modestly. “I did kind of run out of… accessible needles. I actually killed that one with a handful of dirt. Whatever works, right?”

“Accessible?”

Katya blushed.

“Yeah, can we not talk about that?”

“Right,” Alex said, turning back toward the gate. “You’re right. How do you think we should do this? Do we walk right in, or what?”

As they walked along, he could hear clothing rustle and shift behind him. He risked one quick look back, and caught her fussing with her skirt lining, and got a good idea about where the “inaccessible” needles were stored. Then Katya caught him looking and glared, and he sort of wished he hadn’t.

As much as Alex tried to keep his mind on other things, it returned again and again to Emily. He recalled the strange things she’d said, the water bleeding out of her skin, watching her disintegrate in his arms; it was like a sore in his mind, constantly threatening to occupy his attention. When he actually gave in and tried to think the whole scene through, though, Alex drew a complete blank. His mind fixated and recoiled over the sheer horror and impossibility of the situation. Alex remembered what she looked like in her white dress on a sunny afternoon not so long ago, on the other side of the Gate he and Katya were cautiously approaching now, and it caused pain that ran right through him, nestling in his chest as if it planned to stay. However, if he had been asked to explain, there would have been nothing he could articulate.

It got quieter as they approached the gate, and there were more bodies scattered around the trees and the road, some of them probably people he’d seen around, some of them maybe even people he liked. He tried very hard not to look at them.

The road broadened into a plaza, a roundabout with a stone pavilion in the center, directly in front of the Gate. There had been a bus stop and a rain shelter in its shadow, but now there were only fragments of torn metal bolted to the stone that reminded him of the way Emily laughed on a certain afternoon. Katya motioned for him to be quiet as they approached, and something about the gesture recalled the way it had looked - Emily’s lovely, well-proportioned head marred and violated by a thin, rounded piece of metal - and for a moment, he thought he that couldn’t go on any further. Then he saw them, standing near the Gate and talking in low voices. Anathema, dressed for battle, in face paint that he couldn’t identify but he knew indicated their cartel membership. He didn’t need to be able to read it to recognize them. He’d seen the same paint a half-dozen times tonight, and the people wearing it had always been trying to kill him. There were five of them, and all of them had guns.

Alex crouched in the brush, not far from the edge of the woods, where the road begin. Katya bent down beside him. The heavy skirt and jacket combo she’d worn had seemed unreasonably warm on the island. Now he envied her the heavier clothes.

“What do we do now?”

Katya opened her mouth to answer, and then she closed it again, and shrugged.

“I have three needles left,” she offered. “Can you take some of them from here? I’m going to have to get closer…”

As it turned out, she didn’t have to, after all.

Normally, an apport was delivered as close as possible to ground level. When Svetlana performed an apport, Alex noticed that he often had the sensation of falling slightly, on arrival, probably due to inexperience. But whoever put Grigori twenty feet above the huddled group outside the Gate did it on purpose. Apparently, the electric blue crackling aura that surrounded him was enough to be absorb the impact.

The two men who were caught below him, not so much. Alex sincerely hoped they were dead. They sure looked dead; with a whole lot of what was supposed to be on the inside suddenly squeezed out by Grigori’s telekinetic dive-bomb. A shallow crater contained the carnage that Grigori was still in the process of extracting himself from.

The first one of the survivors to react was a guy wearing one of those ski-mask things that people use to rob gas stations. He must have been a pyrokine, and he clearly wasn’t stupid. Apparently, he didn’t need to use his hands to operate his protocol, because the air around Grigori ignited while the man leveled his squat British bull pup SMG, flicked off the safety, and started pumping rounds into Grigori, who had gone up like a Christmas tree in February. Alex moved to help him automatically, before he even thought about what he was going to do, but Katya pulled him down by his arm, hissing her disapproval. She indicated with curt, angry gestures that he was to follow her. She crouched and then lead him off to the side, flanking the remaining men near one side of the Gate. Ten steps later, Alex realized why.

Grigori was invisible inside the Roman candle he had become. But he wasn’t flailing or falling down. He was moving toward the men, slowly but surely, and beneath the layer of livid orange flame, Alex could see brilliant blue undertones.

He had seen Grigori use his protocol before, once or twice, when he visited sessions of the Program, but he didn’t really understand it that well. Grigori was some kind of wideband telekinetic, as Alex understood it, powerful but with an extremely limited range and a blunt, dramatic dispersal. He couldn’t project or strike at a distance like Michael. Instead, he used his protocol almost entirely in contact with his own body.

Grigori crossed about half the distance between him and the remaining Operators before they had the good sense to kill the fire. Underneath, Grigori was sheathed in a shimmering blue field that ebbed and waxed around him, tidal fluctuations in high speed. He looked a bit cooked and unhappy, but otherwise unhurt. Two of the men had the good sense to start using their rifles, banana-clipped AK-47s. The last one had the even better sense to go for his radio. Alex could only assume that meant that the squad telepath had been one of the two unfortunates that Grigori had landed on.

Grigori got his hands on the closest one, the pyrokine. The air in front of his fist radiated a livid blue as he concentrated his telekinetic abilities down into a single point. Alex had seen him do this before, once, but it had been as part of a demonstration, on a block of concrete. The effect on the pyrokine’s abdomen was similar, but much uglier.  

One of the other ones must have been a telekinetic. Alex didn’t actually see it that well, but whatever happened, it knocked Grigori over and sent him skidding across the pavilion, the shifting energetic field that surrounded him tearing a furrow in the old stone of the road, raising sparks and making an awful squealing sound. He hit the wall next to the gate hard, sending chips of stone and dust flying. Fortunately, for Katya and Alex, all of this made so much noise that the Anathema didn’t notice them circling around until they were close enough to do something about it.

Katya was supposed to go first, and he was supposed to hang in reserve, since she could strike multiple times rapidly, and he had only managed to figure out how to do it once, with a long windup. But something about the remains of the post in the ground where the bus stop had been, where Alex had stood with Emily, brought back memories; the sly way she smiled when she was enjoying a private joke, the way she would nestle, comfortably, underneath his arm, the way she looked in a dress that she liked. Now all of these memories were poisoned.