by Brian Fuller
“How hard do you think it will be to find them?”
“Hard,” she answered, “but the AAO thinks they are making some headway. There’s evidence the Dreads’ new weapons are still moving around, and that means someone is in charge. We’ll be briefed when we arrive at Zion Alpha.”
Helo couldn’t wait to hear what they knew. He needed a direction to run and hoped the Michaels weren’t as good at hurry up and wait as the military had been. “Sounds good. Thanks for your help.”
She smiled, almond eyes soft. “It is my pleasure, Helo. This trip was an excellent opportunity to skip the graduation ceremony. They are tedious affairs.”
“I didn’t get one either, technically.”
“So I heard. Your Ash Angel father, Lear, told me all about it. An interesting fellow, Lear. I quite enjoyed speaking with him.”
Helo grinned. “Did he sing?”
“Of course. A few lines from The Man of La Mancha, I believe.”
“That’s him. Nothing inspires him to sing more than a beautiful woman.”
While Aclima’s conscientious driving style ensured the miles passed at an even pace, her stories gave time fast wings. The woman had seen everything. Helo figured he could ask her questions for the rest of his afterlife and never come to an end of her knowledge and experience. Egypt at the time of the pharaohs. Alexander the Great. The Incas. Vikings. The French Revolution. Aclima had crisscrossed the world and back and was a veritable encyclopedia. It made Helo feel like a kindergartner.
What she wasn’t, however, was forthcoming about what kind of life she had lived. Helo respected her silence. If his past mistakes and pain were hard to face, what would the past feel like to a converted Dread who had lived thousands of years glowing red? She had done murder at Cain’s behest. That he knew. But staring at her across the car as the long desert miles slipped by, he was convinced something within her had turned away from the path of evil long before he had stood up for her in the Hammer Bar and Grill. More than her looks were angelic, and her transformation to an Ash Angel was more than the work of one night’s act of sacrifice.
“Your stories are crazy,” Helo said as the first hints of Zion Alpha’s large buildings humped up on the horizon, distorted by the late afternoon heat. “I wish I could give back.”
“Give back?” she asked.
“Well, yeah,” he said. “I’m racking my brain here. I think the best story I’ve got left was when my brother and I used to pee down the heating vents. Took a week for my Dad to figure out why the house smelled so bad.” What his dad had done to them afterward hadn’t been so funny.
“Helo,” she said, throwing him a teasing look. “If enthralling stories were money, I would be the richest of women. But let me assure you, there are other areas in which I am quite poor, and you, I believe, hold all the currency. When you are ready to end my poverty in those things, you will find someone more than ready to be enriched.”
Helo turned the words over in his head for a moment. “Did you come up with that, or are you borrowing from some author guy you met five hundred years ago?”
“That one’s mine,” she said proudly. “Freshly squeezed.”
“You’re good.”
“Yes, I am. Now you know the standard you should aim for when you’re ready to woo some lovely Ash Angel who catches your eye.”
Helo shook his head. “If that’s what it takes to charm the ladies, I give up. I’ve got better things to do right now anyway.”
“More necessary things, perhaps, but not better,” she said.
Aclima’s phone rang, and she pulled it from the console. She answered and listened for a few moments before putting it away. “They’re tracking us and know we’re coming. Archus Mars is so anxious to see you he’s going to meet us at the gate. Fancy that.”
Chapter 4
Zion Alpha
After Aclima parked the Civic near the gate, Helo opened his door and stepped out into the desert heat. Aclima got out but stopped to text someone. A silver SUV purred nearby, Archus Mars standing by the driver-side door. The SUV waited by a fortified gate blocking a long straight road leading off to several white buildings in the distance, their shapes warped by the heat.
The Archus stowed his phone in a pants pocket as they approached. The leader of the fighting order of the Ash Angels was a solid hunk of Latino beef—squat, muscled, and square-headed. Every time Helo had seen him, Archus Mars had used the same morph, his dark hair cropped into a flattop and his body aged into his thirties. He wore a khaki T-shirt with desert camo pants and looked like the kind of guy who could take an artillery shell to the gut and laugh it off.
“Afternoon, sir,” Helo said.
Archus Mars extended a meaty hand, and Helo shook it. “Good to see you, Helo. My condolences for your folks. I guess we should have figured Cain would pull something like this. How you holding up, son?”
“I’m good,” Helo said. “Ready to gear up and get downrange.”
The leader of the Michaels division had always supported him, and if anyone had the grit to take it to Cain and his lackeys, Mars did. The man had no mercy for Dreads and was a guns-first, questions-later kind of soldier. And that’s what Helo liked.
Aclima crossed over to stand by Helo, and Archus Mars’s eyes slid over her appreciatively. “Good to see you, Aclima. You taking care of my boy here?”
“Helo is very capable of caring for himself,” Aclima answered. “He just needed a ride.”
Mars smiled and nodded. “Let’s get you two on base. We’ll send someone out for the car later. Hop in.”
Helo opened the door for Aclima, who beamed at him as she got in. Helo shut the door, finding Mars looking at him with a boyish expression.
“That is a damn fine woman,” Mars commented in low tones.
“Yes, sir,” Helo agreed. “Glad she’s on our side now.”
“She on your side yet?” Mars asked with a dash of innuendo.
“Just getting to know her.”
Mars chuckled. “She’s six thousand years old. You will never know her. Get to work, soldier, or I will.”
Everyone needed to lay off. It had taken months to get over Terissa’s betrayal. Dolorem used the old cliché that love was a horse and that every brave man should get back on the horse that had bucked him off. What no one seemed to get was that the love horse hadn’t just bucked him off. It had bucked him off, bit him, kicked him in the face, and trampled him before it ran off. He didn’t want to find that horse again.
Helo jumped in the rear seat with Aclima, who smiled at him and rubbed his arm.
“Thank you for getting the door for me,” she said.
“Sure thing,” Helo said.
Maybe the stupid love horse was going to find him whether he wanted it to or not. She seemed so soft and inviting. The woman beside him and the one who had smashed him in the Redemption Motorcycle Club hardly seemed like the same person. As for that, she really wasn’t.
Archus Mars’s amused eyes reflected in the rearview mirror for a moment, and then the SUV lurched forward, gathering speed down the deserted road. As they neared the complex, the heat’s distortion faded, buildings and vehicles coming into sharper focus against an empty blue sky. Zion Alpha was a mishmash of different structures. The white buildings visible from a distance were half cylinders, flat sides down, like airplane hangars. Other buildings of sandy colored stone dotted the area, most no bigger than a two-story office building you might find on a street in a small town.
Mars slowed as they closed on the complex. “As you would expect, the Ash Angel parts of the base are underground, though a couple of the hangars do have some of our toys inside. The Michaels have all the fun stuff.”
They crossed through a sliding gate and onto the compound proper, Archus Mars driving toward the southern-most hangar structure across a wide stretch of asphalt lined with Trevex-branded semitrailers and delivery trucks. Plainly dressed soldiers from the Michaels division watched them drive by, and after m
onths of being with Dolorem, Helo found seeing so many Ash Angels with glowing auras a little surreal. He was a Blank, and the residents of Zion Alpha reminded him he and Aclima were a minority.
Ahead of them, an Ash Angel dressed like a low-rent bodyguard punched a button on a concrete pillar, and the doors to the hangar cracked open enough for Mars to nose the SUV inside. A Learjet sat in the middle of the hangar, a handful of Ash Angels gathered around a ladder by the rear engine, eyes on the newcomers. Behind them, the hangar door boomed shut, and Mars pulled the SUV to a stop in front of the jet, tires squeaking on the polished concrete of the hangar floor.
“Where are we going?” Aclima asked as Mars killed the engine.
“The jet’s not for you,” he said, opening the door and hopping out. “Follow me.”
Helo slid out, Aclima following. Mars led them toward a small office built into the side of the hangar, opening the door to a little anteroom with a couple of well-worn fabric chairs and potted plants, leaves frayed with brown around the edges. An office with a computer waited beyond, but Archus Mars stopped dead center in the anteroom and reached up to press a button barely within reach on a hanging light fixture.
A vibration rose through Helo’s feet as machinery whirred to life beneath them, and then the floor jerked and fell six inches—jarring his spine and nearly toppling him and Aclima—before beginning a smooth descent.
“Nice,” Aclima said, eyebrows raised.
Archus Mars chuckled. “Sorry. Should have warned you. Getting that fixed is way down on somebody’s to-do list. Helo, I’ve got the team you’ll be with assembled below. It’s a unique group. I think you’ll like it.” He turned to Aclima. “Have you decided where you want to serve? Just about every division wants you in a bad way.”
“I’ll serve in the Michaels as long as I am on the same team as Helo,” she said.
The Archus’s eyes lit up. “Done. Must be my lucky day.”
Helo sized her up. What was she doing? The woman was way too valuable to be slugging it out with the Dreads on the front lines. “You sure about this, Aclima? With the amount of intel you have on the Dreads, you’d probably fit best in the Medius, helping coordinate operations.”
Aclima opened her mouth, but Archus Mars cut her off. “She’s made her choice, Helo. She can’t back out now.”
Helo remembered how desperately Archus Mars had wanted Blanks assigned to the Michaels, and now he had two. Even better, Aclima could probably outdo anybody in everything, except Bestowals. When she would get her first was anybody’s guess. Blanks usually had to wait a year.
With a spine-crushing slam, the elevator came to a halt worthy of being thrown off a roof, sending him and Aclima backward into the side wall.
“Should have warned you about that, too,” Archus Mars said with a grin as he pulled apart a vertical mesh grate. “Follow me.”
Unlike the refined interior of Deep 7, the hidden base beneath Zion Alpha was little more than a concrete cave interrupted at regular intervals by riveted metal ribbing. The hallway stretched almost interminably before them. Black cables the thickness of garden hose had been tacked up along the right wall just below the ceiling, dipping and rising like a wave. From the boot-scuffed floor to the heavy-gauge metallic doors to the protected light enclosures along the wall, Zion Alpha looked sturdy and ready to take a beating.
As they approached an intersecting hallway, Archus Mars stopped. “All you really have to do to navigate this place is remember that this hallway stretches from the hangar we just left to another on the other side of the compound. Four other hallways intersect with this one. Each intersection has signs to point you to where you need to go. Before you meet the team, get outfitted by Marley at the equipment depo at the end of the first hall to your left. You’ve both got Ash Angel IDs now, correct?”
“Yes, sir,” Helo answered.
“Good. Once you have your equipment, Marley will assign you a room to put it in. No fancy accommodations here, just a place with a desk, computer, and a trunk. You won’t spend a lot of time there, especially not now.”
“Something going on?” Helo asked. He hoped they had more information about his parents’ deaths. Both Dolorem and Aclima thought Cain had sent a Sheid to do his vengeful dirty work, and if the Ash Angels could track it, they had a chance of finding it and its master.
“Looks like it,” Mars said. “The Medius let me know they have some actionable intelligence and are finalizing the details. They want to have a team, maybe as early as tonight. I want you two on it. Now, get your gear, get changed, and head to the last hall on the far end. Look for Mission Briefing Room 3. Got it?”
Helo didn’t know protocol. Was he supposed to salute? He settled for another “Yes, sir,” which seemed to suffice.
“You ready for this, Helo?” Aclima asked as they parted ways with Mars. “I was serious about what I said. You go after Cain and neither one of us might come back.”
He was sure. Stepping onto the base had felt familiar, right, even, and his hands itched to hold a weapon again so he could put evil in its sights. He might suck at sermons, but he could pull a trigger with the best of them.
“I’m ready,” he said. “You really should work with the Medius, though. You don’t need to babysit me.”
“I’m not babysitting anyone,” she said, eyes drilling into his. “The only way you get to put a bullet into Cain is if you can beat me to it. Don’t forget I’ve hated him and been hurt by him since before the flood. Yeah, that flood. Besides—and no offense to Dolorem—your sword skills are, shall we say, uninspiring? I think I’m best qualified to help.”
She wasn’t going to let that go, was she? Just because she’d beat him once with the help of Dread Bestowals didn’t mean anything. But if Aclima wanted to teach him the blade, he’d let her do it.
“I’ve been practicing. Besides, you used Speed on me,” he said. “I didn’t even get a swing in. Then you torched me. Hardly a fair test.”
“You should have lunged,” she said. “Instead, you pulled the sword back like a baseball bat. If you would have lunged forward, I would have run headlong into your blade.”
That was true, though the torch would have done him in anyway. “I’ll do better now that you’re a little more tame.”
She grinned and said “Mm-hmm” in a you’ll-get-what’s-coming-to-you sort of way.
As they traversed the hall, the steady, rapid-fire beat of screamo metal grew louder, issuing from an empty doorway at the end.
Aclima’s face screwed up in a frown. “There was this Dread at the Hammer Bar and Grill who used to crank this stuff up after hours all the time. I just about burned him with gasoline for it. Cain was using his music to cover up the sounds of his Ash Angel interrogations. I can’t believe an Ash Angel would listen to this stuff.”
Helo nodded. He liked a loud, chunky guitar and a solid beat, but the screaming was like rubbing your nerves with sandpaper. When they went through the doorway, they found a chunky Ash Angel in a black jumpsuit behind a counter thrashing his head around in circles like he was trying to clean a toilet with it. He took no notice of them.
“Ahem,” Aclima said. No response.
“Marley!” Helo yelled a moment later.
“MARLEY!” he bellowed a few moments after that.
Finally, the rocking Michael looked up, held up a finger, and ducked behind the counter. The music stopped, and Marley popped back up like a gopher. He was morphed as a young man with a shaved head. He looked like a bull made human. Marley didn’t bother to fake breathe or to blink, things Helo now did without thinking. Marley’s eyes seemed open permanently wide, as if he’d just been surprised by a camera flash or hit in the face with a hammer.
“Noobs?” he said, eyes fixed on Aclima.
“Yep,” Helo replied.
“‘’Kay,” he said. There was a vacancy to his stare that indicated he wasn’t the sharpest sword in the Michael’s armory—though he did look like he could choke an ox to death
with his bare hands.
It was clear he did know his job, however. After a brief foray into a storage room behind a mesh metal wall, he returned with two BBGs, two boxes of bullets for each one, and two laptops.
Marley fixed his empty gaze on them. “What’s your IDs? Gotta match ’em to the equipment and stuff.” They only had to repeat their IDs three times before he got them straight in the computer. “Now, come around to the back. Gotta get you some clothes. Get clothes the size of your battle morph. Gotta be able to zip up your pants when you go to war, know what I mean?”
“Yep,” Helo said. Zipped pants were a must for every mission.
Marley turned his gaze to Aclima. “What size are you, lady?”
Aclima’s face pinched. “I thought we got to pick the clothes.”
“Well, yeah,” Marley said, scratching the back of his neck. “But you’re like that lady who is Eve’s daughter, right? So if I knew, like, what size you were, I could know what size pants Eve wore, and like nobody knows Eve’s pants size. Was Eve, like, a total smoke show like you?”
Helo chuckled, but Aclima regarded Marley for a moment as if trying to determine whether he was being serious or just stupid. “Show me the clothes,” she finally said. Helo couldn’t tell if he was serious, either, but clearly Marley had more thoughts running around in his head than just screamo.
Black camo cargo pants with plenty of pockets, black T-shirts, and black boots and socks. It only took a few minutes and they were done. After telling them they were assigned to room 34, Marley waved goodbye with a meaty hand. They hadn’t gone five steps out of the door when the music assaulted them again.
“So, lady, what size pants did Eve wear?” Helo joked.
Aclima shook her head. “I’d love to know that man’s story. As an Ash Angel, he’s at the top of his mental game, and if what we saw a was the top of his mental game, he must have been a brick in his mortal life.”
Helo nodded. “He might have split wood with his head for a living, but he died to save someone, so there’s a good heart in there somewhere.”