Bridge: Bridge & Sword: Apocalypse (Bridge & Sword Series Book 7)

by JC Andrijeski

  He couldn’t feel Tarsi anymore.

  He missed her light, more than he would have ever guessed he could have missed it. Truthfully, the old woman scared him more often than not, and not only because she seemed to see even more of him than Balidor.

  Not only did he miss Tarsi herself, he noticed the absence of other Barrier flavors from his light––flavors Tarsi had apparently taken with her when she left.

  The most significant of these was Vash.

  Jon could no longer feel Vash’s light. Even after his death, Jon continued to feel the old seer; he’d felt traces of Vash’s light even in San Francisco, with Tarsi thousands of miles away.

  Jon never knew Tarsi held that connection for him. Apparently there’d been more tying him to the ex-Adhipan leader than he’d realized.

  Another loud burst of light and sound pulled Jon’s eyes up, just as an even brighter shower of sparks rained down. The sparks snapped and spun in the air, this time brighter across the opening of the tall double doors leading into the Tower.

  After a few more seconds, those died down, too.

  “It’s clear.” The green glow in Revik’s eyes slowly began to fade. He turned towards Gar, holding up a hand for the others to wait.

  “Check it,” he cautioned. “Make sure. They could have a back-up system. Something I can’t see. Menlim used to shield a lot of his physical defenses, too.”

  Wreg nodded in agreement, looking at Garensche. “Do it.”

  Gar saluted them both.

  Turning, he looked around at the nearest stretch of what used to be pristine, upper-echelon city sidewalk. After a few seconds, he walked over to pluck a plastic bottle out of a pile of garbage surrounding an overflowing, freestanding trash bin––a trash bin like every other set at intervals down the block. None of them looked like they’d been emptied in months.

  Human habit was funny, Jon thought.

  He wondered how long people would continue to try and dump their trash there, in the vain hope someone might take it away.

  Garensche approached the double glass doors––cautiously.

  Edging forward on light feet, he stopped a few yards from the opening, a frown hardening his full, scar-crossed lips. His broad forehead wrinkled as he seemed to be scanning the area with his light, and it struck Jon, for the first time in a long while, how handsome Gar would be, if he hadn’t had his face cut cross-wise in that concentration camp during WWII.

  The giant seer threw the empty soda bottle at the space where the OBE field had been.

  That time, it fell straight through.

  Jon winced reflexively at the hollow plunk sound as the bottle bounced off of the organic panel of the left side door.

  The seers all looked at one another.

  Something about the quality of that silence, and the emptiness of the street, with nothing breaking that stillness but the whistling sound of blowing wind, made Jon nervous. He glanced down the sidewalk at the scattered trash piles, blinking into the slanting rain that was coming down harder again. Glancing up at the black sky, he shivered.

  This whole thing: them being here, Revik half out of his head with grief, Tarsi missing, Gar not being able to talk to the organics at this place… it all felt wrong. Even the quality of silence made Jon feel off-balance and weirdly out of joint with time, like they’d already stepped into some kind of alternate dimension.

  He didn’t know if the construct over Manhattan created or only worsened that feeling, but he found himself questioning suddenly, what they were even doing here.

  This didn’t feel like a military operation. It felt like they were about to venture into the lair of a comic book villain––a madman’s funhouse. They were all as lost in denial as Revik, not only about their own chances inside, but believing they had any agency left at all.

  Moreover, something about the group of them standing here, pretending like nothing was wrong, made the whole thing even more surreal.

  Nothing Jon felt about Allie seemed real.

  Some part of him, and not a small part, didn’t even believe she was dead.

  Revik turned his head, giving Jon a sharp look.

  For a second, all trace of confusion left the tall seer’s eyes.

  He stared at Jon like a predator, like a wolf staring at a rival. The look chilled Jon somehow, even as it snapped him back to the present.

  “Don’t,” was all Revik said.

  Jon nodded.

  Swallowing, he looked away, gripping the handle of his main weapon, an organically modified Glock 21. He looked down at it, fingering the molded triggers, including the switch on the outer barrel that gave it fully automatic capability. It looked and felt a lot like the Glock 18 Revik had originally given him, back in London. That had been Jon’s first gun––to fire, much less to own.

  That felt like a million years ago now.

  On this op, Revik advised him against bringing a rifle.

  He’d stated bluntly he wanted Jon to have his hands free. He wanted him more mobile and adaptable than a rifle would easily allow. Others must have gotten the same advice, because Jon noticed only about half of them carried the heavier weapons, and most of those were in Loki’s group, not Revik’s. Revik was rifle-free, too, as was Maygar.

  Wreg carried one, but it was smaller than what Neela and Chinja wore attached to swivel harnesses. He wore it wrapped around his back by the strap, more like a bow or a quiver.

  Loki didn’t carry one of the big guns, either, but he carried a larger weapon than Jon. Jon even recognized it––it was that same, completely custom, short-barreled and weirdly seer-looking rifle Loki strapped to his back whenever he went on military ops.

  Jon knew he was distracting himself, thinking about weapons, but that was okay, too.

  Harboring delusions about Allie, especially where Revik could feel them, would only get them all killed.

  “Fun house, remember?” Jorag muttered, on Jon’s other side.

  Jon looked up, and found the dark-haired seer frowning under his blue eyes.

  “They’ll show us things in here,” Jorag added, softer. “Things none of us want to see. You need to be ready for that, little brother. Boss knows. He’s already expecting it.”

  Swallowing, Jon nodded.

  That pain in his gut worsened as soon as he did.

  When he glanced over at the rest of them, he found Revik’s eyes on his again, now holding a machine-like coldness, stripped of feeling. Jon found the look there even more disconcerting than the anger he’d seen only a few seconds before.

  “Everyone ready?” Revik said, glancing around at all of them.

  The other seers nodded and gestured assents, but Jon knew he couldn’t be the only one to feel their uncertainty. Jon didn’t feel fear on any of them, not exactly. Instead, a low-level tension lived there, vibrating their light, like a live wire against nerve endings.

  Wreg, as per usual, was the one to break that moment.

  The Chinese-looking seer motioned towards Garensche.

  As he did, Wreg stepped deliberately in front of Revik, without being told to do so. The clear message behind it didn’t escape Jon’s notice, or seemingly that of the others, either. That impression grew stronger when Neela stood to Revik’s left across from Jon, who still stood at his right. Maygar remained slightly behind the two of them, with Jorag on Jon’s other side. Jax stepped closer to the front, by Garensche and Chinja.

  Clearly, Wreg saw their job, first and foremost, to keep Revik alive long enough to complete his goal. Loki and Illeg stayed slightly back, but Jon saw their eyes on the surrounding buildings and street, and knew they saw their own job in roughly the same terms.

  For the first time, it really sank in that he and Wreg probably wouldn’t come out of this alive.

  Looking at the muscular, broad-shouldered seer’s back, he could only feel regret.

  Regret that he hadn’t said more to him, even as recently as that night. Regret that he hadn’t been able to pull his shit together in
San Francisco.

  He couldn’t find adequate words for what he wanted to think about him, or say, if he got another chance that night. He knew how unlikely that was, anyway.

  He’d waited too long with Wreg.

  He’d waited too long with Allie, too.

  “After you, my brother,” Wreg said to Garensche, a pale humor in his voice.

  Something about how he said it dispelled the barest layer of that tension coursing through the rest of them. It wasn’t enough to relax the group, but it was enough to bring a few exhales that came closest to laughs.

  Garensche rolled his eyes, clicking at Wreg in mock disapproval.

  He did as Wreg indicated, though, walking forward without hesitation.

  Jon watched Garensche walk towards the glass doors, realizing again just how large the seer was. Garensche always reminded him of a pirate, with his full mouth, shocking hazel eyes, swarthy complexion and barrel-chested body. The diagonal scar he’d gotten in a Nazi work camp only added to the impression, as well as the way he dressed, which had even more of that nomadic, ex-Mongolian flair than how Wreg sometimes dressed.

  Wreg told Jon they all speculated Garensche had more than a little Wvercian blood in him––thus making the giant seer the only known living evidence the two variants of seer could reproduce. The joke made Gar scowl and everyone else in the bar that night laugh.

  Obviously, it was an old joke, since the giant seer threw it right back at him, making some crack about Wreg and his “human names.”

  Part-Wvercian or not, Garensche was tall.

  He was the only seer in the group taller than Revik. Even Jorag was about a half-inch shorter, and Wreg, while being larger than the Elaerian overall, wasn’t as tall as Revik, either. Gar, on the other hand, probably had three inches on him, which put him in the neighborhood of seven feet. As Jon looked up at the other man’s massive shoulders and back, Garensche grabbed the handle of the door with one meaty hand.

  Despite the test with the plastic bottle, Jon saw the relief in the giant’s hazel eyes when he glanced back at the rest of them.

  “Looks okay,” he said, grinning.

  He opened the door.

  A flash of light made Jon cry out.

  He wasn’t the only one.

  He heard Chinja yell out, and Jax. He jumped violently back with the rest of them, nearly tripping on the cement sidewalk, only recovering when Loki grabbed his arm from behind, holding him up and yanking him back.

  A sickening squelch of sound hit Jon’s ears. It sounded like sizzling fat, somewhere between an electric shock and throwing a hunk of raw meat on a grill.

  Bending his knees, Jon dropped to a combat crouch despite Loki’s hand still gripping his arm. He blinked, shocked by the sound, even more than by the sharp dagger of flame that seemed to come out of the door itself––and the accompanying white light.

  By the time he could see again, Jon’s mind had already started putting it together: the sharp light, those horrific sounds, the thick inhales from the seers around him, a hard stab of pain from Wreg. Before he looked, he could smell it.

  Something about the immediacy of that smell hit his mind in a way no visuals or sounds ever could, including the plumes of black smoke that rose in an already-dissipating cloud.

  Then he saw him.

  “Gods,” he heard Jorag gasp next to him.

  The tall seer clung to Jon’s arm on the other side of Loki. Jon barely noticed, even though both grips hurt him now, in some distant corner of his mind.

  He couldn’t look away from Garensche.

  Fragments continued to assemble, turning into a coherent picture, one he didn’t really need detailed. His mind detailed in anyway. A second OBE––it must have ignited when Gar opened the door. It cut the big seer cleanly in half, slicing his head, neck and a good chunk of his chest and upper body off from the rest of him.

  It left the good-natured, affectionate, organics savant and notoriously perverted seer from Mongolia in two, smoking, oddly-bloodless pieces on either side of the sparking and buzzing membrane made by the new OBE.

  Jon could only stare at what remained of the seer.

  He’d known Gar for years, almost as long as he’d known Revik. He stared at that smoking, meat-smelling pile of flesh and bone, paralyzed, unable to make sense of it.

  None of the others moved either.

  Then a curse came from Revik’s lips, in a language Jon had never heard.

  Light came out of him––a hot, furious burst that caused all of them to step back.

  Revik didn’t seem to notice. His rage brightened, turning colder and hotter in different threads through the veins of his aleimi. The combination felt irrational, maybe even unhinged, but Jon couldn’t disagree with any of what he felt.

  The seers around him seemed to mirror those feelings, too.

  Then a flush of hard light left the shield around Revik.

  That time, it was pure fire.

  A scream broke from Revik’s lips as the light left. Not quite a scream––too much anger lived there for it to be a real scream, at least how Jon normally thought of screams.

  Jon felt it like a slam in his chest.

  Not pain, but something in him just… left.

  The drain was so severe his knees buckled, even though the light traveled through him, not from him, or from any of the others. He felt Jorag stagger, even as he gripped Jon’s arm, maybe to keep both of them standing. Wreg let out a snarling yell, and suddenly, Jon felt all of them, furious, but strangely focused.

  He didn’t feel grief, not then.

  It was pure, unbridled fury.

  The gap between Revik’s light leaving him and the outcome must have been short, but it felt long. Silence lived there. Jon could hear only the loud, hollow thuds of his heart, the rush of air as Revik’s light pushed it out of the way, the gasps of their breaths––

  Then the organic wall exploded.

  The panes didn’t crack; they fragmented, turning to powder.

  Somewhere, second and third transformers exploded in a shower of sparks. Dim, in the background, Jon knew he should stand back, that he should get out of the way, or at least shield his face, but he only stood there, staring up at the wall, feeling the construct reel and contort, feeling the flare of presences behind the Barrier as those inside the Tower reacted to the influx of light. For the first time, Jon grew conscious of what must be SCARB agents, NYPD, seers working for FEMA and the other governmental bodies.

  The thought was fleeting, there and gone.

  The organic panes continued to shatter, falling straight down like water. A single sheet fell on the right side, exploding onto the pavement just outside those double doors.

  Jon watched it fall, watched the metal twist and crack in awe.

  A series of sharp blasts of fear rippled the edges of his light. That time, the fear didn’t come from them––it came from the seers inside the Tower.

  Jon couldn’t bring himself to feel vindicated, though, not yet.

  All he felt was the rage in Revik’s light, the focus that grew unnervingly sharp as Garensche’s death grew permanent to all of them. Revik’s rage pounded the light of the seers who stood with him, but it didn’t weaken them; if anything, it woke them up, densifying their own light, sharpening their minds.

  In seconds, the shield around Revik stood diamond hard, impenetrable.

  Without fanfare, the entire building, all seventy-five stories, went dark.

  It took Jon another few seconds to realize Revik had done that, too.

  He’d cut the power.

  Jon felt Jorag’s fingers tighten on his arm, felt wonder from him and the other seers, even as he concentrated on maintaining the shield around Revik. Most of them stepped back from the Elaerian when Jon did, literally and figuratively giving him space to work.

  Revik worked even now, even as the Dreng’s construct stuttered and sparked, trying to recover from whatever he’d already done to it.

  Revik’s mind
didn’t swerve from that unnerving focus; if anything it grew more pronounced as he trained his light on aspects of the building and the surrounding Barrier space Jon himself couldn’t see.

  A bleak attempt at humor managed to insert itself into Jon’s mind.

  Well, that was something.

  They’d managed to wake Revik up.

  40

  NO QUARTER

  JON FOLLOWED REVIK, a gun gripped now in both hands, breathing hard.

  Revik walked straight through the now-shattered wall, entering the lobby of the Tower, his irises the only light Jon could see. The Elaerian barely seemed to notice the rest of them now, unless he needed something.

  Even as he thought it, Jon saw him click his fingers, motioning sharply to get them to step back from a camera embedded in one wall.

  The instant they had, it exploded, showering sparks and a flaring, yellow-white fire. The fire erupted quickly then died down.

  Jon flinched with the others, but didn’t lower his gun. His main focus stayed with the shield, even as he broke into a trot to keep up with Revik.

  Guns went off a few times, mostly from Wreg and Jorag, who’d taken forward positions and picked off the few guards who’d appeared in the lobby near the security station.

  The elevators were all down, of course.

  Jon wondered why Revik bothered with the cameras, with the power out––then figured Revik knew what he was doing as he continued to melt and rip them apart as he passed. Maybe they had a separate power source, something he had to take out one by one.

  Jon heard a series of sub-vocals in his headset, but most of it didn’t pertain to him. Even so, it created a steady background narrative as he followed Revik, telling him what others in the group were doing. He heard about Loki’s group mapping out the left side of the lobby while Wreg and his team took the right.

  In front of him, Jorag dropped a guard who came out of door marked “STAIRS” behind the security station. He used a knife, maybe because he was too pissed off to want to shoot him. Either way, it was over quick, and the tall seer left the body by a desk that stood between two long banks of elevators.