“You are no longer needed, Agent Hakala. I’ve drained your magic and almost all the magic from your pet Magician. There is no more need to feed off your deaths and pain because I have sufficient energy now.”
Rat’s subvocal voice came through the ear patch. “If it needs magic to survive, then killin’ the first team woulda given it a boatload, boss, and I’m guessin’ that Buffalo’s death provided plenty as well. If what it’s sayin’ is true, that it doesn’t need more from us, then it’s even more dangerous than it was before. It must be ready to leave the buildin’, and that means it’s about strong enough to withstand anythin’ the Bureau can throw at it.”
Ng’s drug-dilated eyes opened wide and Dove looked ready to vomit. I thought fast. “How are you going to let us go, then?” I asked, praying that the angel couldn’t hear our subvocal conversation.
“I merely let the barrier that coats this building down and you walk out. It’s that simple.”
R-i-i-ght. “Just that simple, eh?”
“Quite.”
My mind raced as I considered the implications. The Angel of Mass Murder seemed to be handing us a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card. Ng needed medical attention, Rat looked like ten miles of road kill, and all the piss and vinegar seemed to have bled out of Dove’s veins. Not to mention my new hairdo (or hair-don’t) and various contusions and abrasions. My chest hurt something fierce from where the succubus tried punch my heart out through my spine and I was craving a serious slug of vodka.
Too good to be true—had to be. The proof was in the pudding and I wasn’t about to trust the Supernatural as far as I could shot put the Chrysler Building.
“Okay,” I said slowly, “how about lowering your force field now?” To Ghost, “Get ready, old Spook.”
“On it, Kal,” he replied.
Gone was the sense of amusement as the voice replied, “How do I know you won’t order an airstrike on this location, Agent Hakala? Make of yourself and your team martyrs for the cause?”
“Same way I trust you to let us go without any monkey business. Call it a sign of good faith.”
“I will have to decline, I am afraid.”
Thought so, you sneaky bastard. “Well then, the only thing left to say is [CENSORED] you, asshole,” I yelled in my best Schwarzenegger.
No more Mr. Nice Guy, the voice cut out abruptly and the screaming started—that horrible, high-pitched wail that hit my eardrums like spikes, digging into the soft tissues of my inner ear. From the corner of my eye, I saw Dove swoon and Rat grow even whiter, folding at the knees, while Wesley Ng began vomiting into his lap. From around the bend of the outer wall came the gray/red sphere, roughly the size of a beach ball and sizzling with malice, shooting our way and trailing its ugly, dirty mist behind it.
“Damn you!” I screamed futilely at the orb, slapping my palms over my ears. It would be here any second now and I we would be done like dinner.
From four pairs of DRAFTlite came a familiar voice, now taut with some unnamable emotion. “Not this time!”
Four DRAFTlite speakers began to emit a low thrum, a bone-deep vibration that I seemed to feel more than hear. It enveloped my skull in cottony noise that cut through the high-pitched screeching of the orb, a low counterpoint that buoyed me up, lifting me from pain, soothing my raw nerves. The bass hum became my world—annoying, but safe—and I found myself once again able to think.
“Awesome,” I growled. Or I think I did. The only thing I could hear was the Ghost hum, but that was peachy with me.
The orb slid to a halt some twenty feet away, hovering over the carpeting and vibrating in place. It looked … confused.
Whether it was annoyed or dismayed by Ghost’s counter-noise, I didn’t care. All I wanted was something to kill, and standing still, it made an excellent target. The Lahti spat its last few rounds and I saw puffs of ugly mist or steam erupt from its center.
The orb began to retreat and I drew my punch knives, the blades sticking straight out from between my fingers. I ran toward the orb, but it retreated too quickly, still bleeding vapor from where I’d shot it. Ghost’s noise faded and I began to be able to hear again.
“It took a while for me to find the correct frequency that would not cause you permanent hearing loss,” commented Ghost when the orb was gone. “I think that worked quite well.”
“Goddamn it!” I swore and headed back to the team. My ears were ringing, but at least it was the honest noise of tinnitus. “Mount up. We are out of here.”
Ghost cut in on our preparations. “Kal, it is sure now that the Angel of Mass Murder knows about the elevator. He will no doubt use the folding space trick to keep us from descending.”
“The elevator is shielded, Ghost. With silver, with gold or platinum, it’s shielded from magic. You said so.”
“I surmised it was, Kal. It is not certain.”
“Good enough for me, old spook.” I chewed on the cigar, puffing away. It had tasted kind of nasty at first, but now I was getting used to it. “Besides, I have me a cunning idea.”
The team gave out a collective groan. No faith in their fearless leader. It would’ve hurt if I gave a damn right then. I chomped down on the stub of my cigar. “Everyone, give me your belts.”
“This? This is your cunnin’ idea?” Rat sounded less than impressed with my tactics. Sweat streamed down his face as he descended the ladder.
I sent up a noxious cloud of cigar smoke. Only a couple inches left on my stogie, but I had the rhythm of the smoke, and I knew I could milk it down to the one-inch mark. “Deal with it, Agent,” I grumbled, keeping my eyes on Ng above me. His face was paper-white and he was sweating more than Rat. With every rung down the ladder, he hooked his injured arm around the horizontal bar while navigating with his remaining hand. Each step made him wince, despite the Oxy coursing through his system. I was point man on our descent because it was my boneheaded idea and we needed someone strong to catch Ng should he take a tumble.
Ghost sent the elevator on down ahead of us, but kept the door open so we could descend the service ladder. The shaft looked clean, free of grime and grease. I examined the cement walls and wondered if Quint had used silver or gold mesh to turn the shaft into a Faraday cage.
Units of magic are measured (creatively enough) in ‘merlins.’ A single merlin could light a cigar. A hundred merlins could fry a nervous system. Precious metals absorbed merlins—that is, until they absorbed so much they began to bleed excess magical energy in the form of heat. The amount of precious metals used to coat the inside of a thirty-story elevator shaft had the absorptive potential to negate ten terramerlins of raw magical energy. That’s enough magic to short circuit the brainstems of a million people.
My guess was that our little pal, the Angel of Mass Murder, couldn’t penetrate the elevator shaft with magic, so he had to use other avenues to foil our attempt to stop him. Thing was, I had no clue as to what he planned to do.
But I found out right quick.
At floor twenty, the faux maintenance door burst in with a bang, ripping off steel hinges to slam into the opposite wall. The elevator continued its descent and had just passed eighteen when something the size of an upright Ford Gran Torino burst through the opening, sending pieces of door frame flying, and leapt into the shaft, one giant hand grasping the thick elevator cables. The cables groaned alarmingly as the weight of the creature threatened to tear them like tissue, and it clung to them for a brief moment before falling to land upon the car below.
Metal buckled under a thousand pounds of raw-muscled, slab-sided humanoid that began to tear at the roof of the car with fingers as long as road flares tipped with bear-like claws. Steel shrieked in agony as those enormous talons tore and shredded.
“Of course,” Dove said tiredly over the din. “It had to be an ogre.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Kal
It’s the End of the World as We Know It ….
If the Incredible Hulk had a bastard love child with a cement mix
er, an ogre would be most likely be the result. Up to twelve feet tall, built like a Chevy with legs, covered in hide thicker than a rhino’s, and with a face not even a nearsighted mother could love, ogres have only one redeeming quality: they hate everyone equally.
“Be vewy, vewy quiet,” I subvocaled. “It’s hunting BSI Agents.” I did my best to add a little machine gun burst of laugher. “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.”
Soft groans ghosted through the bone-induction patch behind my ear. As they faded away, Wesley Ng’s voice came through. “Hope this is over soon, boss, because I can’t hang here forever.”
I looked up in time to catch a drop of his sweat right in the eye. It stung like a bitch, but what can you do? It’s not like he was aiming for my baby blues. “Hold on, Ng, the elevator has to descend a couple dozen more feet. Last thing we need is for a pressure wave to kill us now.” I patted my waist where the Bat Belt used to be.
My clever idea, the one that had my team more scared than a mouse at a cat convention, was to use the explosives that comprised our belts.
You see, about three years ago, Special Branch came up with a clever invention, an explosive with the look, feel, and tensile strength of leather. Incredibly stable, the explosive, dubbed ‘boom leather,’ only reacted to a magically (but was not magic in and of itself) created acid called … well, the technogeeknerds gave it a long, twenty-seven syllable name that even I, with a master’s in chemical engineering, can’t pronounce or understand. I call it ‘boom juice.’ Safe to say it takes a Magician the better part of a day to produce a gram of the stuff so it’s not like there are gallons of the liquid lying about waiting to react with boom leather.
I’d used four belts, a little over one pound of boom leather with an expansion rate of 25,800 feet per second upon detonation. The belts were tied in a Gordian knot and placed on the floor of the car, a gram of boom juice (formerly hidden in the heel of my boot) and radio detonator in the center of the bundle.
“Now Kal!” urged Dove.
“Wait for it.”
The ogre lifted a fist the size of a four-cylinder engine and hammered it completely through the top of the elevator, a stomach-wrenching deep roar of victory blasting through its mouth.
“Boss!”
“Now kids, let Daddy work.” Some people have no patience, a hindrance to careful planning and homicidal precision.
Metal tore and ripped and the ogre dropped from sight into the car. I tapped a virtual icon on the DRAFTlite. The glasses sent out a weak radio signal to the detonator far below.
Twenty-five thousand feet per second sounds like a lot, when in fact it’s a little less than the expansion rate of C4. However, when you’re right next to a pound of boom leather, a little less than C4 doesn’t count for beans.
The elevator disappeared in a bright flash of energy and a clap of thunder as the boom leather cooked off. The minimum kill radius on that much explosive is about ten feet, but when the pressure wave is stuffed into a ten-by-ten elevator shaft, it has only two places to go, up or down.
Hot wind scorched my face as the pressure wave hit us, fortunately dissipated by distance, though the blast was strong enough to rattle my teeth. The cables, not more than three feet away, swayed heavily as the weight of the car suddenly disappeared. From below, carried with the wind, a spherical object flew up, up, and up until it flew past, but not before I caught of glimpse of torn and burnt leathery skin and empty, blasted eye sockets beneath a thick shelf of bone.
“That’s one big-ass head,” commented Rat.
I grinned. “Big as a basketball.” We watched as it sailed back down and fell out of sight, down the shaft toward the wreckage of the car. The echoes of its crashing still bounced along the cement walls.
“Okay,” I said aloud, feeling pretty chipper. It’s not every day you kill an ogre, especially with such flair. Showmanship matters. “Let’s go.”
Ng hesitated. “How far?”
“We’re on the twenty-fifth floor, so let’s see what the twentieth looks like. Nice round number, that.”
They groaned and grumbled, but in the end where else were they going to go?
In short order, we made it to the twentieth and pried the door open while trying not to fall head over heels into the shaft.
Another hallway greeted us, curving to the left along the outside wall. It was the mirror image of the area we’d left above, except no dead Agents and no ugly orbs to shriek in our ears. Thanks to Ghost, it looked like the shrieking no longer posed a problem.
Ng leaned against the wall and slowly collapsed until his cheeks hit the carpet. “What’s down here?” He didn’t bother with subvocaling.
I knelt at his side. “Answers, Wesley.” My mouth felt dry as toast, but I kept speaking, trying to keep him focused on the here and now. “The Angel didn’t want anyone down below the twenty-eighth, so maybe, just maybe, the way to beat him is here.”
“Gimme a second, I need to catch my breath.”
He needed a vascular surgeon and four straight days of sleep, but I merely held out a hand to Rat and he set two off-white tablets on my palms. “You mean to continue, Wes?” I asked.
That earned me a weak nod.
I held out the tablets. “Take.”
“Oxy?”
“Yeah.”
He dry-swallowed the pair.
“Need some rest?”
Ng considered that for a moment. “Nah, the Oxy will kick in soon.”
Onward then. We headed along the outside wall, guns and knives at the ready. The only person still in possession of bullets was Rat, and he had pistol in hand. Considering that we were after a Supernatural with the ability to shapeshift into a screaming beach ball along with other unknown magical and physical abilities, our weapons seemed kind of pathetic. We were bringing knives to a magic fight, but what else could we do? Where could we go? The op needed to get done and sometimes all you can do when the odds are piled high against you is grin at the devil and spit in his eye.
We passed several branches leading toward the guts of the building, but it wasn’t until we’d traveled a good hundred or so yards that we took one. It made sense that whatever the Angel didn’t want us to see lay deeper in. Slowly, carefully, we made our way into the belly of the beast, tensions running high. Several times I blinked sweat out of my eyes, and I could see that my team members’ nerves were strung tighter than piano wire. It’s hard to maintain that level of alertness. The human body and mind can only function like that for a short while before becoming distracted by other needs or events. Still, all of us had practice dealing with stress, so we managed to stay bright-eyed and bushy-tailed despite all that had occurred. Except for Ng, who, judging by the glassy look in his eyes, was starting to feel the Oxy.
We arrived shortly at a wooden office door with the words BARTON AVIONICS stenciled in black, smack dead center. Why would an avionics … never mind. I shook my head and opened the door wide.
And here I’d thought things were weird before.
Imagine a rope made of translucent bluish flesh a foot thick and a couple hundred yards long. Now take that rope and tie the ends together seamlessly. Got it? Well then, you’re better at this than I am because my mind still wobbles. Take that rope and cover it with a jillion tiny mouths with perfect ruby lips—lips that should be on the face of a beautiful Hollywood starlet, glistening and beckoning. Now have those lips move in strange sinuous ways that no human lips could imitate and have them cover teeth like a lamprey’s, all bone-white needles around the edges of the mouths leading down into the depths of the flesh cable.
Still with me? Good, now have that ring of blue flesh hang in midair, a circular horror that spins and rotates while it spins, a hula hoop from your worst nightmare. Now add another, smaller circle of flesh inside that one, also rotating on its axis while spinning. Then add a third, smaller ring about twenty yards in diameter in the center, spinning and rotating. In the center of this ring, where there should be nice, clear, sane air, add a shimmering n
othingness that eats light and spits out a grayish aura I could only describe as not-light. Not blackness, not darkness, more like a negation of vision, as if the blind spot in your eye were to expand to hover in the middle of that center ring.
You expect something of that size, all spinny and such, to be noisy, to cleave the air with a great whoosh, but the flesh rings were eerily silent and that in itself added to their horror.
It was pretty trippy.
There we stood, staring at the rings as they hung in the chilly air, barely realizing that the entire center of the Quint Building had disappeared, had been hollowed out like a pumpkin for Halloween from floors five to twenty-seven. The internal structure had all been sheared away neatly as if by a giant laser scalpel, leaving pristine, antiseptic terminations to the interior structure. As to where the rest had gone—all that material such as wood and concrete—I didn’t know. There was no rubble, no dust. Nothing. Despite the fact that several thousand tons of debris should have been lying on the floor of the chasm … nothing.
“Boss,” said Rat, “I sure am hatin’ what I’m seein.’ ”
“For once I agree with the little skink,” Dove added.
Ng shook his head. “Please tell me this is a drug-induced hallucination.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I quipped, “please put your tables and seatbacks in their upright and stored position.”
Moving carefully to where the floor ended and a whole big span of nothing began, I peered out over the drop. Whoa! Way farther down than I really wanted to consider. My stomach crawled up to my throat as I estimated the interior of this hollow to be at least twenty stories tall and far enough across that it was hard to see the other side.
It was then, as I stared out into the hollow of the building, that I heard the voices. Whispery things that slid through my ears, a soft babble that at first didn’t make any sense. The more I listened, the more I felt the need to move closer to the spinning flesh ropes, to touch them, to caress those twisting lips. Something deep inside me, the primitive limbic animal, began to squeal in dismay. I took a step closer to the edge, to where the carpeting had been sliced clean. Just a few feet away, a glistening ribbon of blue flesh spun, spouting those whispery, almost intelligible words that caressed, urged, drew me closer.
The Spirit in St. Louis Page 24