Suddenly Theia and her coterie of terrified wives appeared out of the lower corridor and hurried toward them. “Oh, Husband,” Theia cried. “Here we are, ready for you to take us to safety!”
If Swain knew Theia was addressing him, he gave no indication, angling past her toward the Sanctuary ramp. “Keep them all away from me,” he commanded his Enforcers. They immediately formed a line between him and the others as he and the Institute security guards stalked up the ramp. Halfway up he turned, lifted the assault rifle Lacey had not noticed he’ d been carrying, and opened fire, shooting first into the backs of his Enforcers, then raking bullets across the crowd at large.
Hardly believing her eyes, Lacey saw Theia and all her girls flung backward as the bullets tore into them. People started to run or dive for the floor, Lacey one of them. The moment she hit the ground, someone fell half upon her, and then someone else.
Her ears buffeted by the thunderous reports, she clenched her eyes shut and prayed. The weapon seemed to fire forever, but finally its hideous blasts devolved into a series of clicks as Swain kept the trigger down, though the gun’s magazine was empty. Then those, too, stopped, leaving only the cries and moans of the wounded.
Terrified he would reload and start again, Lacey lay where she was, trying to breathe in slow, shallow breaths, feigning death. A sharp pain pierced her right hip, and a warm sticky wetness ran down the side of her face. The body upon her was crushing to the point it stimulated waves of claustrophobic panic. Please, God, let him leave now!
Instead, Swain and his guards started shooting the wounded. The moans soon turning to pleas for mercy and screams of terror cut off by short bursts of gunfire. She was shaking uncontrollably now, biting her lip to keep back the sobs of terror that wracked her.
Finally Swain cut it off. “That’s good enough,” he told his men. “If we don’t go now, we won’t get out at all.” Multiple pairs of boots gritted on glass and rock as the men congregated by the ramp, then moved up into the Sanctuary and faded away. She heard the faint, distant sound of a door opening and closing, then nothing except a soft, rattling moan not far from her. It carried on for a few breaths, then silenced, and she lay there, her ears ringing, afraid of moving, though the body atop her seemed as if it was slowly crushing her.
It was many long, tortuous moments before she dared lift her head. The smell of burned flesh and blood and the sulfur of gunpowder flooded her nose and mouth, and she coughed. That provoked the person lying on top of her to move, and she soon saw that it was Terra, who had been sandwiched between Lacey and Zowan. As Lacey pushed herself to her knees, a middle-aged woman stirred not far ahead of her, wriggling out from under a dead man in a field of bodies drenched in blood and broken glass, dust still swirling gently through shafts of light from the sky holes.
Every Enforcer lay dead, sprawled in the ring they had formed to protect their “Father.” Theia and her girls also lay where they had fallen. Poor Andrea Stopping had been shot dead where she’d stood just behind Lacey, perhaps by the same bullet that had skipped along Lacey’s ribs. That and the glass cut on her hip from when she’ d fallen were her only injuries. The blood on her face was Zowan’s, who had a bloody bullet track along his temple and a big chunk of flesh blown out of his upper arm. Terra had come through with no more than a few cuts and bruises.
Parthos had not been so lucky. His body lay almost immediately in front of them, and seeing how badly he’ d been shot up, Lacey thought he might well have been the salvation of the rest of them. Finding him, his two friends stood over his body and stared down at it dumbly, as if they couldn’t believe what they saw. Terra was first to break, sagging to her knees beside the corpse with a moaned, “Oh, Parthos . . . ” Moments later, Zowan fell beside her, wrapping his good arm around her as she wept while tear tracks glistened down his cheeks.
From over by the upper corridor, the middle-aged woman began to wail, drawing Lacey’s eyes. She, too, knelt beside the corpse of a loved one, clutching the man as she screamed out her misery. A little ways behind her a young man covered in someone else’s blood stood surveying the carnage, dazed and wide-eyed. The fifth survivor of the massacre, and evidently the last.
Seeing the more than thirty bodies sprawled about them, Lacey felt a chill of wonder, astonished and humbled to be alive. Her whiny words to Cam from a couple nights ago ran through her mind. “God’s done so very little for me over the years.”
She could never say that again. . . .
It was Zowan who pulled himself together first, standing and drawing Terra after him. “We can’t stay here,” he said. “You must have heard Father say we don’t have much time to get out.”
To which the bereaved woman wailed, “No! I’m not leaving! I’m not leaving.”
“If you don’t, you’ll die.”
Ignoring Zowan, she turned to the young man. “Go up to the clinic and get some help for us,” she commanded him. He went without comment. She turned a glare on Zowan. “I’m not leaving him. And you can’t make me!”
Shrugging, Zowan didn’t even try. Instead he turned and picked his way through the corpses toward the Sanctuary’s ramp, Terra and Lacey on his heels. But just as they stepped onto its smooth surface, the Sanctuary erupted in a geyser of flame and rock and deafening sound. A hard rolling wall of air knocked them all backward. Lacey fell half on her side and rolled over, covering her head as rock, glass, and who knew what rained upon her. Then the floor trembled beneath her, and though she heard nothing, a thick, choking cloud of dust enfolded her from behind.
She lay in blessed silence for a while, feeling breathless and dizzy. When things had settled a bit, she sat up and looked around. Some of the mall remained intact, but the back part of it was choked with rubble. Palm trees listed off the island and water ran out into the walkway. The sky holes still shone down upon them, though.
It was only as she watched the others stir around her that she realized she couldn’t hear anything. After a moment of panic, she realized it was probably only temporary. Indeed, soon after, her ears began to ring and some of her hearing returned. Supplementing the conversation with sign language and pantomime, she discovered all of them had suffered some degree of hearing loss—though that was the least of their problems. Not only was the Sanctuary now a wall of rock and earth, so were the upper and lower corridors.
They stood, staring dumbly around, all escape cut off.
Surely God wouldn’t have gotten us through all He’s gotten us through just to end it here, Lacey thought.
It was Terra who voiced the doubt: “So, after all that, we’re to be buried alive?”
“Maybe not,” said Zowan. “If it’s still standing, there might be a way through the Star Garden.”
Chapter Fifty
New Eden
As the trickle of streaming dirt and falling rocks died away into silence, Cam heard the hum of a motor starting up somewhere, perhaps an auxiliary generator. If so, it didn’t appear to service the lights. Or perhaps the lights were all too damaged to work whether they had power or not.
“There’s an extra head lamp in the duffle,” Rudy said, his voice dry and rough.
“Where’s the duffle?”
“Somewhere off to my left, I think.”
Cam groped around for it, then donned the head lamp and pressed the switch.
He turned toward the prep room first, and confirmed that it was completely filled with rock and rubble. There was no way they’d be getting out that way. And with Rudy injured, no point even considering the tunnel that Swain had taken. Especially since Cam was sure that one had been blown as well, Swain’s final, but unmentioned, backup provision for keeping the Nephilim contained. Or maybe that was too charitable, considering how quickly he’ d fled when things began to go south. Maybe he was simply trying to cover his tracks.
Cam turned to Rudy, the beam of his head lamp illuminating his friend’s bloody chest in blue-white light. His swarthy face was gray, cheeks sunken. He didn’t look good.<
br />
“What happened?” Cam asked, squatting beside him as he pulled Rudy’s water bottle from his belt.
“A couple of Swain’s security guys were hiding out here when we arrived,” Rudy said. “Took us by surprise. We were pretty distracted by the racket coming out of the lab up there.”
Cam helped him sip from the bottle, then pulled aside the bloodied shirt to look at the wound. Rudy swatted his hand away. “It’s nothing.”
“It doesn’t look like nothing.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m not going anywhere.”
Cam frowned at him. “Did you have a medic on your team?”
“Yeah. I think he stayed in the booth, but there’s no need . . .”
Cam was already up and striding away. But the three men who’d been manning the booth just moments ago were nowhere to be found. Whether they’d been blown out by the blast wave, pulled out by the Nephilim, or had left on their own, he didn’t know. In any case he found no medical supplies, and he could hear the Nephilim eating outside the shattered windows, wet smacks and crunchings intermingled with growls and snorts, all of it far too close for comfort.
He hurried back to Rudy, who looked noticeably weaker even after so short a time.
“Why weren’t you wearing a vest?” Cam asked.
Rudy grimaced. “I wasn’t part of the assault team, just the eyes and ears, so they didn’t figure I needed one. Or so they said.”
“So they said? What? You think they set you up to take a round?”Things are unraveling, Rudy’s note had said. Trust no one but God.
“I don’t think they knew those security guys were there, but . . .”
Rudy sighed. “Yeah, it probably wasn’t an accident I was the one without the vest, and also in the lead.” He fell silent for a moment, then went on. “When we started this operation, it was about finding the sarcs and destroying them. The big brass deemed them too dangerous to open, and we sure didn’t want Swain to have them, given all the routes he could take genetically should he get one out—not to mention the potential of him selling one to the highest bidder. The last thing we wanted was for our enemies to have them. . . . The Saudis at the party last night? That couldn’t have been good. . . . And I have no idea who Lader’s working for, but that was a surprise, too, seeing him there.”
“He was here today, too. In uniform.”
Rudy grunted, then sipped some more water from the canteen Cam held to his lips. “I think we might be running two simultaneous operations. Or one big one, from which I’ve largely been excluded. The original plan was that once you’d located the sarcs, we’d send in the team to destroy them. But the group I’d assembled was suddenly called away to a new assignment last week, and when I insisted we had to go in now, they sent me a new team. And new orders—someone up the chain decided we were to secure and recover them after all, rather than destroy them.”
He looked up at Cam, pain wrinkling his face. “That’s why I was so desperate to get you in last night. I wanted you here with a bit of time to work before they arrived. I figured . . . you’d go ahead with the original plan.”
“And that’s why you put all that C-4 in the duffle bag.”
Rudy nodded, dropping his head back against the wall as he closed his eyes. “I didn’t think you’d let Swain open them, though.”
“Actually . . . I opened them.”
Rudy didn’t move, didn’t open his eyes. He sat there for a long time. “Well, I’m sure you had a good reason.”
“I did it because God told me to,” Cam said simply, realizing as he did that it might not have been as insane as it sounded.
Another long silence ensued, at the end of which Rudy said, “So you’re on speaking terms with Him again, are you?”
“I have been for quite a while.”
His old friend and mentor smiled, still with his eyes closed. “Well, that is a wonderful thing to know.”
They spoke then of old times, of mutual friends, of events in their lives over the eleven years they’d been estranged, the things God had taught them. And through it Rudy grew weaker and weaker.
Periodically fights broke out among the Nephilim and they trumpeted like elephants, the sound ricocheting off the cement walls, deafening, terrifying, disheartening. . . . Then they’d go back to eating again. Cam occasionally considered going to the window to check their status but never did, not only because of the risk, but because he refused to leave his old friend to die alone.
He thought he understood God’s plan now. Released here, there was no way the Nephilim could have penetrated the small corridors of the Enclave, even before they’d been collapsed. Yes, the techs and security men had perished, along with Rudy’s recovery team, but all of them had known the risks. Considering all the safeguards Swain had arranged, and how deftly each had been circumvented to result in the present situation, he had to think even that was the hand of God. Now the beasts would eat each other until only one remained . . . and then Cam would take it out.
He remembered exactly how to do that, too. . . .
He didn’t hear Rudy’s quiet breathing stop, only realized after the fact that it had. He surprised himself when the tears came, for he and Rudy had been so long apart, and he’ d carried such bitterness for the man over the years. Unjustly, it seemed . . .
Some time later a sound he could not identify roused him from a semi-doze. Slowly it dawned on him that he could no longer hear the Nephilim. Having turned off his head lamp to save the battery, he kept it so and felt his way into the observation booth and over to one of the blasted-out windows. Were the giants skulking below, waiting for him to emerge so they could seize him? He listened with every fiber of his being but heard nothing. Could they really have fought to the end this quickly? Finally, frustrated, he switched on the lamp and swept the room with its beam.
The lab stood still and silent, spattered with blood and chunks of flesh, the chain tracks pulled half out of the ceiling, steel tables and drums overturned, pods crushed and scattered about. The carnage was such it made him glad he could see only a small bit of it at once. His beam played over two dismembered Nephilim heads, skulls bashed in, brains eaten. But only two. No sign of the other three.
He moved the beam on around the big chamber and stopped, stunned to find that the huge metal panel in the wall to the left had been breached. Cut as with a welding tool, the two edges had been folded back to reveal a room beyond. The squeals of bending metal must have been what had awakened him.
Hurrying down for a closer look, Cam was horrified to discover it wasn’t a room, but a massive freight elevator, likely the one that had brought the pods down in the first place. The giants had torn through the car’s roof, again bending back the metal to make a hole big enough to squeeze through.
Cam stepped into the ruined car, dread gathering in the pit of his stomach. Cool air washed down from above, but the big shaft was pitch-black and extended farther up than the beam of his light reached. He had no idea how far the climb was, but looking up the shaft, discouragement flooded him. The Nephilim had probably climbed it in moments, whereas it would take him all day, and all the while they’d be ravaging the countryside.
An eerie squealing sounded far above, followed by a gonging sound, a grinding groan, and then a louder squeal, like metal scraping against metal. The sudden sense of something coming at him made him back out of the elevator just as a sky-blue van crashed nose first through the roof, spraying him with shattered windshield glass. He stared at the golden ziggurat on the van’s side door, noting at once that there were no people inside it. Moments later a second van fell sideways onto the first and he jumped back. It, too, carried the zig logo, and no passengers. Nor was there any sign anyone had been ripped out of the vehicles.
Did the shaft perhaps terminate above in a garage? Surely Swain would have disguised it, and company vehicles parked on a covering plate would do the trick. The Nephilim’s penetration of that cover would explain the falling vans. All of which could mean this la
b lay directly beneath the campus, possibly even the zig itself. . . .
The dread in his belly became a sick fear as he stood looking up. It was his fault those monsters were on the loose at all, let alone in a place where there’d be food aplenty. Worse, they wouldn’t just kill to eat. He’ d sensed the deep and furious hatred they had for his kind. He’ d sensed it back in Tirich Pazu, sensed it even more strongly here.
You knew about all this, Lord, didn’t you? And still you let me do it. Why?
He got no answer to that question, just the sense he needed to hurry—though he had no idea how he’ d do anything useful with that endless shaft to climb first.
Suddenly it occurred to him that this was Swain’s private and most secret lab. Given the length of that shaft and the size of this car, it wouldn’t make sense for Swain to have used it to ride up and down. Was there a smaller express elevator somewhere nearby?
He did a fast sweep of the floor, looking for sign of such an elevator and picking up whatever salvageable bits of the soldiers’ gear he could find—mostly weapons and ammunition, including a sniper rifle and a handgun, but also a bullet-proof vest and helmet. He considered breaking the ax out of its glass case by the fire extinguisher but decided it would weigh him down too much. He should be able to find one nearer his point of need.
Hurrying back to the observation booth, he found another door on the far side and used one of the lock blowers in the duffle to get it open. Sure enough, the corridor beyond led to a small private elevator. The only external control was a single keyhole in a panel beside it, so he pulled out his fat black ballpoint pen, pressed a small button on its side with a fingernail, and the end extended. This he inserted into the hole. After a few seconds the latches clacked and the door opened.
The car bore him swiftly upward, and in minutes he stepped out into another corridor, well lit, vinyl-floored, walls finished with painted drywall and topped with acoustic ceiling tiles. It could be any corridor in the zig. He followed it to a narrow stairway, passed through a couple of doors, and walked into the elevator lobby just off the Madrona Lounge.
The Enclave Page 50