Level 26

by Anthony E. Zuiker

  Newark International Airport

  Saturday / 8 A.M.

  Dark sat in his window seat, trying desperately to control his breathing. He had caught the first available flight back to L.A., which was at 8:20 A.M., and the logical part of his mind was trying to talk sense.

  Sqweegel was shot just a few short hours ago. You saw the bullet strike his body. He’s not stepping onto a commercial aircraft—no matter who he is under that mask—with a gunshot wound. You’ll make it back to Sibby long before he’s even touching down in L.A.

  So why was Dark having such a hard time breathing? Why was his heart smacking the inside of his rib cage?

  Because the logical part of his mind was full of shit. It hadn’t helped find Sqweegel then, and it wasn’t going to help now. Because the monster inside his head kept taunting him:

  How is she? How’s my little baby?

  The flight crew made their sweep of the cabin; the plane was about to take off. Dark looked down at his cell; he had just texted Riggins for an update and was waiting for him to reply.

  Don’t worry. She’s safe. Riggins has it under control. You used to trust Riggins with your life; why not trust him now? Why this cold ice ball in your guts? Why this urge to take over the controls of the plane yourself and fly faster, fuck flight patterns, faster, faster, goddammit, all the way to the West Coast…?

  A text message arrived, just as a flight attendant who looked too tall for the aircraft walked by.

  “I’m sorry, sir, I’m going to have to ask you to turn off your phone in preparation for takeoff.”

  Dark looked at the screen. The message wasn’t from Riggins. It was from an unknown caller. He thumbed the OK button.

  “Sir?”

  The image was hard to understand at first. There was blood and stitching…on a human shoulder. But where? The top of the building behind the shoulder looked familiar. The white letters ENCY ran along a patio.

  Emergency.

  Socha Medical Hospital.

  Oh, fuck.

  “Sir, did you hear me?”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  Dark speed-dialed Riggins, got his voice mail, and began to talk fast.

  Socha Medical Hospital

  Thirty Minutes Later

  Riggins walked behind the plainclothes team. He spoke into a palm mike.

  “Subject on the move. Back of house elevator. Stand by.”

  Then, inexplicably, the lights flickered out.

  “We’ve lost light,” Riggins snapped. “All of E-Wing. What’s going on?”

  There was a click, then a mechanical hum. The backup generators had kicked back on; the yellow lights returned.

  “Proceed. Let’s get her out of here.”

  Riggins had no idea if that was just a fluke, or friggin’ California blackouts, or something worse. But he wasn’t going to waste any time standing here trying to figure it out. He needed Sibby safe, and for Dark to know she was safe.

  What gave him hope was that Sqweegel seemed to be human after all. Dark had winged the creepy little fucker in Manhattan. And now, for the first time, they had a tiny sample of his blood, now on its way to the satellite Special Circs War Room here in L.A. Probably it would reveal little…but it was something. It proved the thing was mortal, not some supernatural entity set on pissing in their Cheerios the rest of their days. That alone gave Riggins something he hadn’t felt in a while.

  Hope.

  Especially now that Sibby was under the watchful eye of three plainclothes officers—handpicked by Riggins. They would escort her to another private residence—again, one hand-selected by Riggins, and known to Riggins alone—where she would be guarded until this was over.

  For the first time, Riggins believed it could be over. He even told Wycoff as much, and the man sounded relieved, then effusive, promising Riggins whatever New York support he needed. Riggins told him he’d let him know.

  Now he watched his men lift Sibby into the ambulance. Two climbed in after her; a third slammed the double doors shut and made his way around to the driver’s seat.

  The plan was simple: Riggins would lead them up the 405, then out the 118 all the way to a town house out in Simi Valley. The place he’d chosen had no obvious connection to Riggins, let alone Dark or anyone he knew. Sibby’s guards had no idea, either. Which was why Riggins would lead them.

  And then Dark would return, and they’d finish this fucker off for good.

  We have some of your blood, you little prick, Riggins wanted to tell him.

  Your dead body soon to follow.

  The patient opened her eyes and recoiled from the red flashing lights of the ambulance.

  “Hey, you’re okay, Ms. Dark,” the EMT told her. “We’re taking you someplace safe and your husband’s going to meet us there.”

  She nodded and seemed to drift off again.

  He busied himself in the stainless-steel supply cabinet near the floor of the ambulance, shifting clean bandages into the staging area in case the worn suspension on this old crate opened any of her sutures. This was some strange shift. The EMT prided himself on never leaving Los Angeles County, and now here he was on his way to Simi Valley of all places, a couple of creepy Feds riding behind the patient, conferring in low voices and ignoring him altogether. At least he was getting double-time for his trouble. A couple of hours of L.A. traffic and the nurses at the new location could take over; maybe the EMT could even get home in time to catch the Dodgers game.

  He checked again on his patient and then bent back down to the low cabinet. That was odd; the white bandages were stacked differently than he’d left them.

  And then they started to move.

  He figured he was imagining things; there was no reason the pile of white bandages should have two soulless black eyes. Wait, no; that was just a reflection in the door from the stainless-steel cabinet behind him….

  The EMT thought he heard a faint click and a rush of fluid just after two pale arms grasped the sides of his head and twisted, and as the light faded his last thought was that he’d just heard the sound of his snapping spinal column.

  Sibby nodded awake as the ambulance hit some kind of pothole—at least she assumed that’s what had happened, since something heavy seemed to have hit the floor behind her. Sibby felt the reassuring hum of the tires on asphalt beneath the gurney. Riggins had explained quickly what was happening, but it was all so dreamlike and fuzzy. What mattered most to her was that Steve was on his way; he had gone somewhere, it had been very important, but now he was on his way back.

  There was the clack of metal beneath her gurney, but Sibby assumed that was normal, too.

  Until a hand reached up and placed a mask over her nose and mouth.

  And two straps tightened, and the mask cut into her face.

  Sibby reached up with her fingers, feeling the butterfly IV needle pull from the back of her left hand. She scratched at the plastic mask, but her fingers felt fat and formless, partially numb. Why was this so difficult? Goddammit, it was happening again, and here she was unable to do something as simple as pull this fucking thing away from her own fac—

  chapter 76

  Socha Medical Hospital

  Sqweegel had needed only three seconds of darkness to slip into the tiny space beneath the hospital gurney.

  He’d flittered across the linoleum floor like a spider and fitted himself in place before the light returned.

  They hadn’t suspected a thing.

  Arranging those brief moments of darkness had been easy, too. Simply a matter of placing an inexpensive remote fuse-blow in one of the many circuit boxes on the bottom level of the hospital.

  It was even easier to slip into the hospital unnoticed. All you needed was patience and a map.

  Traveling west across the country hadn’t been easy or cheap. But Sqweegel had realized the importance of ultrafast travel decades before. Under multiple aliases, he had set up accounts with half a dozen private carriers, and $20,000 bought him speedy passage from
JFK to Burbank in a little less than four hours. He used the time to stabilize his shoulder and practice a few new techniques. The flight crew let him be. Wear the right fabric over your skin and present the correct series of numbers on a piece of plastic, and the world can be yours.

  All of which put him into position to take the woman and the precious cargo she carried inside.

  The rest was just executing a ballet that he’d practiced in his mind a hundred times.

  A second after pushing the mask down on her face, he threw the first flash grenade. The concussive blast knocked her two guards to their knees, moaning, hands over their ears. The ambulance rocked on its tires as they hit the floor.

  Then the choking gas had them gasping for air and reaching for their guns at the same time. That would keep them busy for a few seconds.

  Sqweegel used the opportunity to slide out of his hiding space and remove his own gun. He wore a mask, too—and earplugs.

  The ambulance driver, by this time, knew something was horribly wrong. The blast produced by the flash-bang would have roared like a cannon. Sqweegel felt him steer the ambulance to the side of the 405.

  Just as Sqweegel had expected.

  By the time the ambulance had ground to a screeching stop, Sqweegel had already placed a bullet in the back of both guards’ heads, pop-pop, nothing fancy. A low-caliber bullet meant the slug would stay within the cavity of the skull and scramble their brains.

  This left enough time, too, to place a third bullet into the back of the driver’s head. The small caliber was especially important here, as blood spray on the windshield would only attract attention. The bullet did what it was supposed to: shatter skull on the way in and spend the rest of its short life span cutting through gray pulp and veins.

  These steps completed, he walked back over to the woman and ripped away her mask. She began to choke.

  “Relax,” Sqweegel purred from behind the mask. “Sleep. We’ve got quite a drive ahead of us.”

  …quite a drive ahead of us.

  She was not going to fall asleep.

  She was not going to fall asleep.

  She was not going to fall asleep.

  Sibby dug her nails into her palms until her skin burned and she could feel blood dripping from the cuts.

  She was going to pay attention and look for landmarks. Signs. She knew the highways of Southern California better than anybody else. She was not going to be a frightened little girl, helpless in the back of a goddamned ambulance driven by a monster in a white suit.

  She couldn’t afford the luxury of being the frightened little girl, because she was about to become a mother—the person who was supposed to chase the monsters away.

  She pressed her nails deeper into her palms until she thought she’d ripped all the way down to her bones.

  She was not going to fall asleep.

  Riggins had slammed on the brakes, skidded to the breakdown lane, pulled his gun, and found himself running up the 405…but he was still too late.

  The ambulance rocketed forward, blasting by him in a flash of spinning reds and gray exhaust.

  He cracked off three shots at the vehicle, but his aim was off—mostly out of fear that a bullet would pierce the metal body of the vehicle and find its way into Sibby.

  Oh, Christ, Sibby.

  What had he missed? If Dark had wounded Sqweegel in New York City, how had he made it back to L.A. in a matter of hours? Riggins wondered whether Sqweegel wasn’t a supernatural creature after all. Able to resist gunshot wounds. Endowed with the capability to spout thick, leathery wings and flap his way across the continent.

  Even as he ran back to his car, Riggins knew it would be too late. Sqweegel had her. And they were long gone.

  Thirty-five thousand feet above Pennsylvania, Dark squeezed his armrest until he felt the plastic shatter beneath his grasp. It would be three hours or more until he’d get cell reception again. Something had gone wrong; he felt it.

  And there was nothing he could do about it.

  chapter 77

  Somewhere in Southern California

  Several Hours Later

  All she saw, at first, was a small red light in the corner of the room.

  She felt something touching her right foot.

  Sibby jumped but realized she couldn’t move. There were restraints on her wrists and ankles. If she squinted, she could make out her binds, bathed in red light. Thick cuffs made of leather and metal, keeping her arms pinned to the sides of the gurney and her knees bent and spread to an unsettling degree.

  “Who’s there?”

  She heard a tittering sound, then cold plastic fingers gently touching her left ankle. Was she still in the hospital? Sibby looked down over her pregnant belly and saw a ghostly thin form. She must be hallucinating from the painkillers, she thought. None of this made sense.

  The thin little ghost began to undo the restraint around her right foot.

  And then it all came back to her. The texts. The almond smell. The soreness. Her cut and bleeding palms. The landmarks. The ambulance.

  The monster behind the wheel.

  So this was him—the creep who’d been tormenting them.

  The ghost-thin man froze midactivity, as if someone had pressed PAUSE on his central nervous system. Not a single part of him moved. He seemed to stop breathing. Even his skintight bodysuit betrayed no movement—no moving bulges or wrinkles.

  Then he slowly craned his head to face Sibby. Those horrible dead black eyes peered at her through the holes in the mask. Sibby tried hard not to react to it, but there’s something fundamentally terrifying about a face that chooses to hide itself.

  “Stay away from me,” she said.

  “Oh, but it’s so much fun when we’re together, Sibby.” He reached out and placed his gloved hand on her belly, and she tried hard not to flinch. “Can’t you feel the connection between us?”

  “Don’t you dare touch me!”

  “I’m not doing anything I haven’t done before,” Sqweegel said.

  “We have much to discuss, so much to catch up on…”

  HE HAS SIBBY

  Dark felt his heart race uncontrollably as he ran through LAX. The words of Riggins’s last text message were still imprinted in his mind.

  That hadn’t been the only message. Riggins had sent him a bunch, rapid-fire, that arrived in his in-box during the descent beginning the moment his cell phone had started getting reception again. Each had been like a metal spike jabbed straight into his heart, scraping rib along the way.

  The first had been a warning:

  DA ON YOU

  In other words: Dark Arts was onto him. All the while, Riggins had been keeping tabs on the fake identity Dark had been using. All had been fine on the trip out to NYC, but halfway through his flight back, the name—“Gregg Ridley”—had been flagged on a Homeland Security watch list. This could mean only one thing: Wycoff had found out about the fake identity and made that phone call to Dark Arts.

  Dark knew the fake identity wouldn’t last long. The incident under the Brooklyn Bridge had probably tipped Wycoff’s goons off. It was only a game of elimination to come up with a list of who’d flown to NYC then back again during that time frame—and then poke holes in each until the flimsy identity was revealed.

  The second was brief but chilling:

  SQ STOPPED AMBULANCE ON 405

  And then:

  3 DEAD

  And finally:

  HE HAS SIBBY

  So what line in the murder poem would this be? Sqweegel had taken the two most important people in Dark’s life. Would they cry? Would one of them die?

  Dark felt like he’d heard this poem all of his life—background noise he’d managed to ignore until it was too late. Now it was impossible to unhear it, to pry it out of his mind long enough to think clearly. It was just a fucking childhood taunt. A silly rhyme from a sick creep who wanted to pretend his words had some kind of totemic power over the world. They were nothing. He was nothing. And whe
n he was dead, the words would fade away.

  Yet he still heard the voice of his enemy whispering his poem in the middle of his brain…

  One a day will die.

  Two a day will cry.

  Soon the black bondage tape was cut from her wrists and ankles, and her tormentor was yanking her by the arm, forcing her onto her swollen feet. She desperately hoped the pins keeping her left femur and her right fibula together would hold.

  Sibby hadn’t moved since the accident, and she felt an uncomfortable, dizzying head rush as she went vertical. Her insides were beyond sore. Her entire torso felt like it was throbbing.

  Resisting would do no good. She could tumble to the ground and hurt the baby.

  “Walk,” the freak in the mask said, draping her arm around his hard, wiry neck. She was repulsed to touch him, even through the latex, or whatever the hell he was wearing.

  “Walk,” he commanded again, a bit more angrily now.

  No, she couldn’t walk. She could hardly move. She was only a few days removed from major surgery; she hadn’t walked on her own in days. The exhaustion was like four heavy slabs of concrete affixed to each of her limbs.

  But one nudge of his foot to her left leg forced it to take a step. It held her weight while he nudged the other leg.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Walking has been shown to induce labor,” he said.

  “No. I am not having my baby down here in this dirty base—”

  “Walk,” he bellowed, then nudged her left foot. Then her right. Sibby wished she could smash one of the concrete slabs attached to her forearms right into this freak’s face. But it was all she could do to avoid falling over.

  “That’s it,” he said.

  The left foot. The right.

  “Just focus on walking,” Sqweegel replied. “It’s going to be a long night for all of us. Oh, but what a night.”