“Let me go say hi to the kid,” Shep touched Nina on the shoulder as he made to leave. “Or should I say, your son in law?”
She replied with a half-hearted smirk. The general strolled away and Nina returned to the bar where a goblet of merlot—and that mirror—waited. In the background the DJ made an announcement about some request or another.
Nina eyed herself in the reflecting glass again. The troubles of the future were legion, but her mind kept drifting to a forgotten past.
Snapshots of those missing days came from the videotape and photographs given to her by Ashley. On that video tape she had confessed her love for Trevor, and him for her. So why had they not remained together? Why had he let her go?
One idea haunted her in the middle of the night. Had she betrayed Trevor during that year? She knew she had been under the influence of The Order during that time. She also knew that Trevor had been taken captive by Voggoth’s forces some time that first year.
No matter how hard she gazed at her reflection, Nina could not find the answer.
Crazy, I’m crazy for feeling so lonely. I’m crazy, crazy for feeling so blue…
The song eased tenderly from the DJ’s speakers. And as the melody caressed her ears, something switched on inside the cold warrior’s heart. A feeling of warmth, like a toasty blanket draped over her shoulders on a chilly winter night.
It felt—it felt familiar.
Couples formed on the dance floor and swayed.
“May I have this dance, miss?”
Nina stumbled from the bar stool, chased by a ghost. She did not know if the specter’s voice came from her memories or some residual image imparted to her when the Old Man had built a bridge between her mind and Trevor’s.
She felt her cheeks blush, her body wobble. She found some kind of comfort in Patsy Cline’s crooning voice, but confusion, too.
Tears tried to swell but she held them at bay. Nonetheless, she needed to retreat. For one of the few times in her life Nina Forest ran away, this time for the sanctuary of the ladies’ room at the end of a short corridor adjacent to the dance hall.
She entered the empty, tight confines of the two-stall/two-sink lavatory. Dirty tile lined the floor and the walls wore a grungy white plaster. Volunteers culled from a pool of Denise and Jake’s friends had thoroughly cleaned the reception hall but no amount of elbow grease could completely scrape away a decade of neglect.
She placed her hands on one of the two ancient porcelain sinks and pointed her eyes at the drain; she did not want to see herself in the mirror.
The wooden door swung open and in strode Denise in her bridal gown with that glass of red wine—apparently re-filled—dangling in her hand.
“Heyya, hi-ya, ho-ya, Mom.”
The newlywed did not notice her mother’s state of mind. Instead, the young girl wiggled her way into one of the two vacant stalls and—after struggling to fit her dress in with her one free hand—closed the door behind. Nina heard the sound of undergarments shuffling off.
The interruption served to break Nina’s downward spiral and she dared a look into the mirror. She could still hear the sound of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” but could not be sure if the song played in the dance hall outside or in her memories.
Regardless, that warm feeling faded. Yet another of the little memory land mines laced through her subconscious ever since that entity resembling an old man had built that bridge between her and Trevor, an act of incredible intimacy she had submitted to in order to pull Trevor from a state of mental chaos.
“No,” she mumbled aloud, chastising herself for not being honest.
“Huh? You say somethin’, Mom?”
Nina replied to the closed stall door, “I didn’t say anything.”
The truth, she knew, was that she had agreed to open her heart and mind to Trevor for far more personal reasons. She respected him, true. She would execute whatever order he commanded, also true. Yet, she felt more. Exactly what, she did not know. But something more.
There, in the wilderness, Trevor had needed her. The Order’s machines of torture had destabilized his mind by playing over and over again all his feelings of regret and loss and guilt.
From what Nina had come to understand, Voggoth had delivered to Trevor a life time of torments in a manner of weeks. Time, it seemed, was all in the mind and Voggoth had stretched minutes into days, hours into years.
The door to the ladies’ room opened again. Nina diverted her eyes from the mirror and to the sink as if caught in the act of something embarrassing.
A middle-aged woman strolled in with a big purse slung around her shoulder. Nina caught a glimpse of the woman in the mirror before looking away. Her hair hung in spaghetti strings, her eyes appeared sleepless and red. Nina figured the woman to be intoxicated: she would not be the only one in the reception hall in such condition.
“Oh, hello there,” the woman greeted but stayed a pace behind Nina and pulled a tube of lipstick from her oversized purse while staring at the neighboring mirror.
“Um, hello,” Nina stumbled.
The woman wore a simple dress that appeared two or three sizes too big for her thin frame, as if she had been the victim of sudden weight loss.
“Wonderful party.”
“Yes,” Nina pulled a tissue from a box on the sink top and ran it under a stream of water in an effort to find something for her hands to do. If she stalled long enough, perhaps the new arrival would leave.
“There’s nothing quite like a marriage, isn’t that right?”
“I suppose so,” Nina answered and then admitted, “I never married, myself.”
“That’s too bad, honey,” the woman consoled. “As for myself, well, I married twice. I can tell you that the wedding is a lot better than the marriage,” she added a quick chuckle. Nina hoped Denise—who remained quiet in the stall—had not heard that remark.
Nina stole another glance at the newcomer via the mirror. She did not recognize the woman and did not recall seeing her at the church ceremony. The woman, however, spoke in a tone of familiarity with an occasional nervous chuckle placed between words.
Nina finished soaking the tissue, looked at it, then dabbed at the corner of her eyes where those tears had tried to escape.
The woman shared, “My first husband, he died during the invasion.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be, he was a jerk. My second husband—well, he was murdered last year. Isn’t that something? To survive the whole Armageddon thing only to be murdered by his own kind.”
The woman finished replenishing her lipstick and returned the tube into her purse.
“That’s a shame,” Nina gave the woman another glance in the mirror and saw the stranger’s eyes staring back.
“But of all the people I’ve lost in this whole damned war, it was the death of my father that bothers me the most. I mean, a girl can always find another husband, right?”
“I—I suppose so.”
“My father was a great man. A real, honest-to-God leader. He had it all figured out.”
Nina felt the hair on the back of her neck stand firm. A tingle. A warning.
“But you know what happened to him? He was murdered, too,” the woman spoke faster. Her eyes grew taut. Nina thought she saw a shake in the stranger’s shoulders.
“Maybe you know his name? Maybe you’ve heard of him?” the woman’s voice grew acidic. Her last words came laced in bitterness. “His name was Robert Parsons—of New Winnabow.”
The newcomer’s hand had remained in her purse after replacing the lipstick tube. Now she pulled that hand out again—with a gun.
Nina whirled around as Sharon Parsons leveled a .38 caliber revolver from her purse. Her left hand slammed into Sharon’s right wrist, pushing the gun away as it discharged while Nina’s right hand drove forward in deadly palm-heel strike that impacted with lethal force into the bridge of Sharon’s nose.
The woman who had once been Evan Godfrey’s wife—the woman who
had sworn revenge against whoever had assassinated her father at New Winnabow nearly six years before—fell limp and dead to the grungy tile floor of the dance hall bathroom.
Nina stared at the dead body for a moment with her breath heaving in and out.
Then she noticed a thin stream of red oozing across the tile, coming from beneath the closed stall door; the door with a bullet hole from the errant shot.
Nina’s heart exploded. She ripped open the stall door pulling the rusty lock free of its screws. Denise sat there, on the toilet, with a large red stain across her chest and shock on her face.
She also held in her hand the stem of a glass, all that remained of her red wine. The bullet had missed the girl but hit her beverage, sending the rare vintage splashing across the tile.
Mother and daughter gazed at one another with wide eyes for several long seconds. Behind them the door burst open and Shep—his side arm drawn—led a group to the sound of the gunshot.
Denise began to laugh, and then cry, and then she fell into her mother’s arms.
3. The Horror at Red Rock
Omar Nehru stood at his bedroom window holding a simmering cigarette and watching the first rays of dawn glitter off Harveys Lake. A pair of tree swallows darted out from shore, zigzagged over the lazy water, and returned inland toward the forested slopes surrounding the basin. Omar admired their blue-black coat and wondered what spring game they played.
He watched the day begin from the A-frame home situated a few yards north of the main estate, the place where a small band of survivors had weathered the early storm of the invasion some eleven years before.
Even after the arrival of Stonewall’s brigades and Tom Prescott’s band of roving soldiers the lake kept that isolated feel. Now—so many changes and so many years later—the center of The Empire bustled with activity.
Although Trevor remained far away at the front lines, the estate had regained its mantle as the heart of humanity’s fight for survival. Many of the functions the ill-fated President Evan Godfrey had transferred to Washington DC during his temporary reign returned to the estate. As a result, trucks and cars and helicopters constantly buzzed the area. The two lane perimeter road often grew congested with traffic.
He found it hard to believe so much time had passed; that the fledgling band of survivors had grown into a nation.
From survivors to conquerors. From an extended family to an Empire. Over the course of those years the changes felt gradual, to the point he hardly noticed.
Through it all he maintained a sort of detachment, even when traveling to Atlanta to bring the captured Hivvan matter-makers on line; even when investigating the strange structure in the Ohio countryside that had facilitated Trevor’s disappearance four years ago.
Omar relied on fronts to maintain that detachment, including a finely honed sense of sarcasm and a forced accent to comply with the stereotype of his Indian heritage. Yet those fronts could not help him now. As he watched the birds play and the sun flicker, Omar felt a sense of doom falling like a shroud over everything. It pierced his well-cultivated detachment and brought an ache to his heart.
Omar raised the cigarette to his lips and inhaled a deep drag.
More than a decade ago he came to Trevor’s estate with a six-year-old son, an eleven-year-old daughter, and Anita, his wife.
His boy now worked with a logistics and transportation company supporting garrison units along the northern border. According to last week’s letter, he operated from the ghost city of Toronto. Omar found small comfort in his son serving away from the front lines, but also knew that eventually everyone would face Voggoth’s onslaught.
His daughter worked as a pharmacist/nurse at a hospital outside of Virginia Beach. Last time they had spoken on the phone, his daughter told him that she saw surprisingly few wounded come through her ward. Omar did not tell her that the reason so few wounded reached the rear area was because the troops retreated too fast to save them.
Omar tasted another puff of tobacco to sooth his nerves. Post-Armageddon cigarettes were far cruder than the old world’s, but also more direct in delivering their effects.
My family. What has happened to us?
Of course he had always known that his children would leave home someday. The pain of watching them make off for a new life without you is a hardship for which every parent prepares but it still comes as a bitter pill. But that pain was meant to be shared with the one woman he had ever loved, his beautiful wife, Anita.
He turned his eyes to the King sized bed. The sheets on one-half of that bed were asunder from a night of tossing and turning. On the other side the sheets remained neatly tucked, having been unused for the third night in five.
It seemed to Omar he no longer shared his home with his wife. She had found a new home. Or an obsession. An obsession that threatened to devour not only her time and attention, but her sanity.
For a long time now Anita Nehru no longer lived at the A-frame house along the coast of Harveys Lake. For a long time now Anita Nehru lived in Hell.
Anita Nehru walked in sluggish strides along a catwalk enclosed in heavy glass. A line of containment pens the size of small gymnasiums stretched below, all with transparent ceilings.
One pen held a large predator known as a Shellsquid. A study of the radiation damage done to the creature’s stem cells suggested it came from the same world as the Duass. At the moment the creature rested silently in one corner with its tentacles withdrawn inside what resembled a conical shell.
Anita paused and stared at the predator with a blank gaze. Bags carried under her eyes. The white lab coat she wore smelled from two days’ worth of sweat and wear. Her once-striking long black hair hung in tangled strands.
She moved on—zombie-like—to the next pen. This one presented the biggest puzzle in all of the Red Rock Research Facility. The creature in Large Specimen Containment Area Number Three had been in custody for several years.
Not so long ago, this fifteen-foot tall Stick Ogre resembled a horrific combination of a walking-stick insect and a bald humanoid. Stick Ogres fed primarily on various tree leaves and fruit and their excrement proved not only highly pungent, but highly fertile.
While quite capable of defending their nesting areas—even using small trees as clubs—Stick Ogres usually remained quiet and reclusive.
That had changed in the blink of an eye last year.
The creature in Large Specimen Containment Area Number Three roared and slammed its large body into the walls of its cell, almost continuously. Even the thick safety glass and soundproofing could not muffle its raucous hollers.
It no longer resembled that combination of insect and humanoid. The once slender but tall animal had become wide and lined with blood-red muscles, as if it were a body that had shred its skin. The face had morphed into a devil’s skull complete with a trio of bony horns and eyes seemingly changed from organic to mechanical. Deadly talons sprouted like daggers from paws at the end of its arms and legs. Sharp metal spines—metal!—protruded along its back.
It had not been fed in a long time; the last keeper who tried lost an arm, tranquilizers had no effect, and security refused to enter the cage with anything less than lethal intentions.
As far as she could tell, this metamorphosis occurred instantaneously early last July to all Stick Ogres. In fact, her research teams tracked instant transformations in nearly three dozen different types of invading entities. Some of those had been docile prior, a few predators. All had changed into deadly beasts with a rabid disposition.
Both type A and type B Giant Sloths had morphed into iron-plated beasties capable of spitting fire with a kind of flame thrower protruding from their mouths. Two of those were in containment up on Sub-Level 6.
Reports suggested that a similar fate had befallen all of the alien invaders known as “The Tribe of the Red Hand,” or Feranites, resulting in a new race of robotic soldiers joining Voggoth’s legions.
As in the case of the Stick Ogre, security cam
eras captured the instant evolution of the Sloths on tape. The original animals had grown completely still, then vibrated, and then their new selves grew out of their flesh as if each living cell changed, one by one, into the new entity.
This was no natural evolution like a caterpillar changing into a butterfly, but some kind of biological alchemy. Eyes replaced by artificial lenses, blood, bones, and hair into grease, metal, and wires.
The creature below stopped its rage for a moment; something it rarely did.
Anita leaned against the glass. The surface felt cool. Her sleep-deprived mind worked the pieces of the equation over and over.
According to radiation levels found inside the stem cells of the Stick Ogres and the Sloths, those creatures came to Earth from the same point of origin as the Feranites. But not anymore. They no longer had stem cells. They no longer had any living matter within their frames. Like statues or rock formations, the creatures were made of molecules but not of living tissue. They could be destroyed, but not killed; not exactly.
So how can they thrash about? How can they roar? Why can they walk and attack?
Her thoughts fell away as she realized that the demonic thing in the cell below stared up at her, as if studying her.
She backed away from the glass and stumbled. Her arms and hands fidgeted—as they almost always did anymore—in a sign of nerves.
The creature roared and ran headlong into a wall. She felt the impact as a distant tremor.
Anita closed her eyes tight and let the blackness provide some measure of peace. But it was an illusion. Peace would not come to Anita Nehru; not as long as these mysteries gripped her in obsession. Not as long as she felt an answer lay within her grasp if only she pressed a little harder.
Trevor had assigned her to Red Rock despite her lack of formal scientific training. Her gift did not come from hard core research, but from an ability to take raw data and turn it into usable information. Indeed, her initial contribution to the small band of survivors had been to create sketches of hostiles from fragmented information.
Beyond Armageddon V: Fusion Page 5