ALLIE, PLEASE! WHERE ARE YOU?
He reaches the door that leads inside the House on the Hill.
Instead of the fifteen-foot, burnished copper and iron panels he remembers, covered in the pantheon of seer gods and ancestors––now, only one door remains, and it is broken. Hanging crookedly on bent hinges, it drags the ground, blackened by fire. It looks less like a door than a piece of melted scrap metal, half-blocking the entrance to the high-ceilinged hall.
Jon steps gingerly over glass shards in his bare, Barrier-made feet, holding one arm out for balance, covering his nose and mouth with his other hand.
He takes his hand away only to call her name.
ALLIE! ANSWER ME, PLEASE!
He looks up, taking in the stone banister and the marble stairs that once led to a higher floor. He sees the staircase broken down the middle, cutting him off from the upper levels of the house. Curtains hang in tatters from the one intact window.
The raised platform under the stained glass window to his left, with its altar and statues of seer gods and tapestries, now stands empty, the tapestries ripped from the walls, the statues smashed. The altar itself is burned black with smoke, and dead birds are littered around it, along with what looks like blood and broken glass. The gold that once covered the wall behind the altar is gone, torn out by greedy fingers.
All that remains of the stained glass are bent pieces of iron that once formed an image of the blue and gold sword and sun.
Jon chokes as another wave of that foul-smelling smoke assails his nostrils.
He forces himself to walk deeper into the temple, to stare up at the skylight which appears to have burst in the same fire. Curtains flap in tattered rags in a breeze that smells worse with each breath. Jon feels glass slice open the bottoms of his feet, but forces himself to keep walking, to approach the blackened altar.
He nearly reaches it, when he sees her.
She lays on top of the stone, sprawled there obscenely.
At once, Jon feels resistance.
Voices buzz and clang inside his head. Dark, winged creatures dive at him from above.
He puts out a hand and falls, slicing open his knee on a glass shard. He lets out another cry, staring down at the blood. The pain is numbing, overwhelming, more than he can handle. Even so, something in his mind screams louder.
When he focuses next, he is kneeling at the base of the altar.
It isn’t real it isn’t real it isn’t real it isn’t real…
The screaming in his head doesn’t abate, but it dims somehow.
He wants this now, wants it so badly it forces him past the horrors around him. He screams back, fighting to hear his mind over the voices that talk over it. He blinks, trying to see through the sickening dip and jerk of his light. He beats his way through ghosts, dead birds, shadows, apparitions.
The closer he gets, the worse it is. When he reaches her, he is sick to the point where he is bent over, gripping the stone where she lays. His cut and broken feet fall on the maggot-filled bodies of the corpses that ring the raised platform.
He reaches for her. Reaches for her…
He grabs her, as hard as he can, with both of his hands.
She wears a filmy, filthy dress, covered in oil and blood, exposing her bare legs.
When he grips her shoulders, the dress exudes a puff of smoke and dust, from all the time she’s lain there. For an instant he thinks she’s dead, that he’s killed her again. He grips her harder, putting his face into hers. He ignores the bruises covering her pale skin, the emaciated figure, the cuts, the gaunt cheekbones, the insects crawling on her, in her hair. He feels no flesh on her at all, only bone and teeth pushing out from under stretched skin.
He holds onto her as if his life depends on it, knowing, somehow, that it does, that all of their lives do.
ALLIE! he screams into her face. ALLIE WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP!
He stares down at her, still screaming as he looks at her pale face, her high cheekbones under those slanted, closed eyes.
He screams at her, shakes her.
For a long time, there is nothing. Nothing at all.
He throws all of himself into her, into the screams, into her body and light.
He does it over and over again, until he is exhausted, until there is nothing of him left.
Then, there is something. He cannot say what.
He sees the tear first.
He sees it run down from under her lids, her long eyelashes black against her white skin. It moves slowly, even as he screams at her.
ALLIE! ALLIE!
Then, as his mind finally breaks apart, ungluing under the assault of the smoke-like shadows…
Her eyes snap open.
Brilliant green. Luminous.
They stare up at him, glowing pools of light in all that smoke and death, and Jon is half out of his mind with joy, afraid he is imagining it, that he’s not really seeing it––
––WHEN SOMEONE PUNCHED him in the face.
Jon’s head snapped to the side.
His eyes jerked open in shock.
He stared up, panting, nausea still clinging to his head, stomach, throat, chest. It choked him, clutched at his lungs, making his head throb with the worst migraine he’d ever had in his life. It hurt so much he could barely see. Tears streamed down his face from the pain.
Gods, he felt sick. So fucking sick.
And now, on top of that debilitating sickness, his jaw hurt too, or maybe his cheek. He couldn’t make sense of where he was––but he recognized the light of the being who’d just hit him. Jon closed his eyes, groaning from the pain that exploded in his face, but more so from the sickening throb of his head.
He was going to throw up.
He was definitely going to throw up––
Revik hit him again, harder, snapping Jon’s head and neck in the other direction.
Jon held up a hand, a feeble attempt at defense, even as it sank in that this was real, that this was really happening. He was lying on the floor in a candle-lit room, his back pressed to white, shag carpet, and a tall, black-haired seer was sitting on his chest, his arm cocked to hit him a third time. Jon stared up at Revik’s angular face.
“I’ll kill you!” Revik hissed, tears in his eyes. “I’ll fucking kill you!”
Jon gasped, fighting for air. He couldn’t get any.
“What are you doing here?” Revik said. “Why won’t you leave her alone?”
The seer gripped Jon tighter, his fingers wrapped around his throat. Revik’s hands raised Jon up enough to thunk his head against the floor, forcing a moan from Jon’s lips.
“Are you still working for him?” Revik growled. “Are you still their fucking lap dog, Jon?”
He smacked his head against the floor again––harder.
“Answer me!” he snarled.
He shook him again, slanting out Jon’s vision when his head hit the floor a third time. Jon gasped, fighting to reach his hands towards his pounding skull.
“Answer me, goddamn it! Are you trying to kill her, Jon? Or is it just me you want dead? Is that what that fucker wants? To kill me off for good?”
Jon could only lay there, his head exploding in throbs of pain, unable to come up with words, to think of anything.
He still lay there, paralyzed, when the person on the bed above them began to cough.
Revik froze.
He hung there, panting, his whole body taut.
He stared down at Jon, his clear eyes so wide, so filled with grief and disbelief and hope, warring with fear and uncertainty and doubt…
Then she coughed again, louder that time, choking.
Revik left Jon’s body so quickly, Jon could only groan.
He gasped, fighting to breathe, to turn his body, groaning again as soon as it reached his mind that the other’s weight had lifted off his. He reached for his throat, his chest, paralyzed by the rush of air that filled his lungs once the pressure of the seer’s weight vanished. Jon hadn’t even
realized he couldn’t breathe until then.
For a long moment, silence.
Then Jon heard Revik yell, calling to someone outside the room.
Jon couldn’t make sense of what he said.
He didn’t even know what language it was.
He heard Revik speak again, lower that time, too low for Jon to make out words, a rolling murmur that began weaving a light-filled cocoon over the form on the bed. Jon felt sparks off that web of light, feelings too dense for words––
He couldn’t understand any of it.
He couldn’t move, not even to lift his head. He couldn’t look at the bed. He couldn’t look at Revik––much less at her.
He could only lay there, sick with that black smoke and the throbbing swaying visions that wanted to eat away his mind in slow, ripping tears.
He is still there, some part of him.
He is still in that horrible room at the base of the Himalayas.
He is still burning on that altar, blackened and alone.
11
BREACH
DANIELLA “DANTE” VASQUEZ coughed, fighting to clear her throat.
Shivering, she tugged her hooded sweatshirt closer around her body, rubbing her face and eyes with a numb hand before she leaned back down to squint at the monitor.
Like everyone else in the damned hotel, she was fighting the edges of what they’d come to call “the crud,” an amorphous multitude of sinus and lung problems from the few thousand miles of backed-up sewers seeping up through the basement, along with all the mold that continued to creep inexorably up over every viable surface of the hotel in the aftermath of the tsunami.
It didn’t help that the damned hotel was cold most of the time––paradoxically, in a way, since it had been unseasonably hot and humid outside.
Somehow that humidity turned into cold air inside the glass and organics-sealed walls of the hotel, especially now that they had to conserve every possible spark of power, and most of the windows didn’t allow in sunlight, due to the organic shields.
The cold and damp seeped into Dante’s very bones, making it hard to think straight, so she had a tendency to move around a lot, to stay on her feet while she worked via the headset across their cobbled-together network of still-functioning machines.
They had icers and worms scrubbing the mold off, pretty much every day, and pumping the sewage out of the basement whenever the fields crashed––which they did at every power surge, every dip in the current, major fluctuation, or full-blown brown-out, all of which happened all the time now. The head honcho icers in charge, including the big boss Sword from his bunker in San Francisco, gave everyone jobs.
Everyone worked now, from the lowliest sad-sack refugee and bottom feeder “Lister” to the highest ranked of their hack-heads and sniffer dogs.
Really, Dante counted herself lucky to have a useful skill, one that got her off the hook from most of that drudge work in the basement and lower floors. She took a turn at the lower-rung stuff, too, but nowhere near as often.
Regardless, there were only so many pairs of free hands and only so many hours in the day, so neither problem seemed to get much better.
If this damned rain would ever stop, Dante’s mind grumbled bitterly.
But that wasn’t going to change anytime soon, either.
There was talk of evacuation to higher, drier ground, but that was a risky proposition still, with the disease ravaging the human population outside those quarantine walls.
Here they had some protection from that mess, at least.
Clearing her throat, she aimed her eyes at the flickering monitor, scanning the data dump with rapid shifts of her eyes. They had an “all hands” thing going with the comps these days, especially when any real intel came in.
They had to work fast, too––and not only because they needed to glean as much as they could before they got hit with another brown out, or someone sniffed their cut.
They’d lost over half their solar cells in the last big storm, and while the Vik-Man and Holo had teams up on the roof and upper floors, working to maintain and repair the cells that remained, the fact was, they’d lost actual storage capacity, mostly in damaged fields. Over half of them leaked now or lost their loads at every brown out.
Until they managed to stabilize the current on a more permanent basis, the problem would remain; right now, they just didn’t have the hardware. Holo, Declan and Anale joked that the current config was starting to look like one of the jerry-rigged setups they used in refugee camps in Asia “back in the day,” which they described as masking tape, bubble gum and a prayer.
According to her, those also got knocked out every time a strong wind blew.
A few of the whiz-kids at Arc suggested working some kind of turbine thing, fueled by modified water scrubbers or something, but it would be another few weeks before they got that cranking out real power, assuming they could make it work at all. It still wouldn’t do much to store the charge, but, given the non-stop rains and flooding, it would probably provide them with nearly steady power, if they set it up right.
Sighing, Dante glanced at the three other humans in the room, giving a tight smile to the cute one, a tall, black-haired guy with striking blue eyes that the seers still had a tendency to whisper about, at least in their more bored, gossipy moments.
The rumor was, Cutie Blue Eyes used to do the pipe thrust tango with Allie Taylor, The Bridge.
Clearly, that must have been before Allie married the Sword. Otherwise, Dante had a very strong suspicion Sword-boy would have kicked baby-blue’s cute, jean-clad ass all the way up into his teeth.
Next to her, Vikram chuckled.
“You are not wrong,” he said, quirking an eyebrow. “I hear he still would like to.”
She quirked an eyebrow back. “You guys are such old women.”
“Yes, because teenaged humans are well known for their discretion, good taste and kind appraisals of others,” he smiled.
Dante grinned wider before she turned back to the cluster of humans on the other side of the partition. She aimed her grin at blue-eyes, too, not wanting to make him paranoid. Truthfully, she mostly felt sorry for him and the others.
Maybe because Dante got here earlier, or maybe because she was used to living a high-wire act even before the shit with C2-77, she seemed to be doing better than the majority of humans here. The others she’d met so far seemed to struggle with just about everything––the no power, the crazy outside the city, the crazy inside the city, being surrounded by icers, the lack of down time, the manual labor, the lack of good food.
Really, with everything. They’d been struggling with everything.
Well, more than Dante, anyway.
Right now, blue eyes looked too tired to even acknowledge her smile, although he tried. Nodding to her, his lips twitched in a friendly way before he glanced back at the monitor in front of him. Dante’s smile earned her a scowl from blondie big-boobs, though––what Dante dubbed blue-eyes’ skanky, always-pissed-off girlfriend.
Their real names were Jaden and Tina.
She knew that––it was just more fun to call them the other things, and anyway, they weren’t seers, so for once, Dante could think whatever she wanted. She only had to worry about eavesdropping seers cracking up if they happened to hear her.
Even as she thought it, Mika grinned at her, rolling her eyes.
“Give it up,” she mouthed at Dante, motioning with her head towards Jaden.
“You can do better,” Anale agreed drily via her headset, without looking up from her own monitor.
“MUCH better,” Mika emphasized, using the same channel.
Dante made an elaborate face, making it clear to both female seers that she had no intention of touching baby blue eyes. Anyway, the guy probably had serious diseases, considering where he’d been putting his dick for the past few years.
Anale choked on a laugh, covering her mouth with one tattooed hand as she looked up from the screen for the first time
all morning. Vikram chuckled, too, along with Raddi, who sat at the terminal on Anale’s other side, and of course Mika, who laughed aloud.
Dante glanced again at Tina and Jaden, both of whom looked warier now.
Sheesh, Dante thought in general at the seers. Obvious much?
Vikram grinned, clicking at her.
Dante gave up, grinning back.
Shit, what else were they going to do in this submerged steel and glass ark but gossip? That and dick around with machines, try to salvage food from the flooded basement, fight information out of broken security systems, and figure out ways to keep the water out. She knew others had their own lists, but those five things seemed to be all she ever did anymore.
Those five things seemed to be all anyone in the hack-head group did.
Well, some of the seers were having sex, she was pretty sure.
Some of the seers were having a lot of sex, from what she’d heard, maybe just to keep their minds off of everything else.
She’d tried teasing out info on the Vik-man’s sex life during one of the longer blackout days, and he’d turned scarlet, so she knew he probably wasn’t getting any. He’d also informed her in no uncertain terms that he didn’t sleep with “children,” and that she would do better to find a human partner of “appropriate age.”
He’d said it kindly, but the sheer embarrassment on the seer’s face made her grin.
Just how much of a snowflake did he think she was?
If she hadn’t liked him so much, she might have taken it as a challenge.
As it was, she assured him she would attempt to control herself, which made all of them bust up laughing––not just the Vik-man himself, but Declan, who happened to be eavesdropping but pretending he wasn’t, and Anale and Mika, who’d been eavesdropping openly.
The very next night, while they’d been passing around a bottle on the upper floors, Declan offered her some, joking he’d only give her a drink if she would promise to “control herself” around Vikram.
That was another thing Dante learned––seers loved giving one another shit, even in the middle of an apocalypse.
They all seemed to have taken to her, too, treating her more like one of them than they did most of the other humans, presumably because she spoke comp-nerd better than the rest.
Bridge Page 11