Io is tossed onto the ground at the edge of the pit and lands with a grunt. Meanwhile, Zechariah is lifted and gently set down on the top platform. As the vines retreat — leaving the one that penetrates his temple — a wicked lattice of black needles reaches up through the rusted metal platform and begins to encase his body.
Close the Ways.
In seconds, his left arm is pinned tightly to his side. But with his free hand, Zechariah reaches up and grasps the guardian’s vine where it enters his skull.
You Will Close the Ways!
Fuck you. With a violent yank, he tears the vine out, jagged and dripping red.
The lattice consumes him.
Somewhere in the Ozark hills, in the center of an overgrown meadow, floats a warp in the fabric of space-time. From it have emerged black vines, flattening the carpet of grass and tentatively probing the trees. They have nearly overtaken the deer stand at the edge of the clearing, its old wood obscured with black.
The portal closes.
Having left their essential organs on the other side, the exploratory tendrils quickly suffocate and collapse as harmless black dust.
The University of Gothic physics building was not designed with military occupation in mind, but its new tenants have made the best of things. The above-ground floor is deserted, its empty classrooms locked away. The entrances and campus are guarded by a skeleton crew of soldiers, armed to the teeth and wearing radio headsets in case any should spot incoming hordes of monsters.
In the first basement, near the entrance, a small classroom has been converted to a surveillance and loadout room. One wall is filled with hastily-mounted monitors, all connected to a panel of loudly humming computers.
“I can’t imagine you lack the budget for water-cooling,” Condy complains. He sits near the door, feet propped up on a chair, a netbook in his lap. He’s been given a sheaf of papers to read through, in the hopes that they will occupy him until bedtime. He’s already finished them, and they have not cured his bitchy mood.
The Director rubs his eyes with his good hand — the other arm rests in a sling — and stares balefully up at the uneventful surveillance footage. “Mr. Condy, for the last time: My budget this month has gone to reinforcing the fence and getting almost everyone re-stationed.”
“Yeah, about that. When your goons brought me here on Sunday, you told me there’d be dozens, and I quote, dozens of soldiers between me and the sharps. Then you decide most of them need to be on the fences.”
“I’m less concerned with what may come through the portals, and more with the dangerous assets at large on our side of them.”
The old man makes a skeptical sound and eyes the computers again. “Like they’re crazy enough to come here and listen to this constant noise.”
Drews appears to have his own opinion about constant noise, but keeps it to himself. After a moment of scanning texts on his Army-issue phone, he grunts in surprise. “Portals just closed at Mount Ward. You have anything to do with that?”
“How the hell would I?”
The tall man gives him a tired look. “You’re the one who opened them.”
“And I still understand a hell of a lot less about them than the CDC people you already kicked to the fences.” Condy taps the sheaf of papers sitting next to him on the desk. “They probably open near the laptop because it communicates over w-space, the layer of non-reality between our universe and the other one. So do the needles; it’s what binds them together. And so do those big black sex toys—”
“For the last time, Mr. Condy, they are ‘hammers’.” Drews unconsciously brushes his good hand against the one hanging from his own belt, runs a fingertip over the inscription, ‘#002 KAUMODAKI’.
“When they pulse, they send out a burst of static that temporarily kills all communication in nearby w-space — it’s like a blue EMP.” Now it’s the old man’s turn to rub his eyes. “So whatever opens and closes the portals would be communicating in w-space, too—”
Drews’ radio crackles. “Break-break. Blue, Sierra Two. Come in, Blue, over.”
He plucks the radio off his belt. “Blue. Come in, Sierra Two. Over.”
“Movement on southside. Over.”
“Stand by.” Drews scans the exterior camera feeds. “Cameras are clear. Do you have a visual? Over.”
“Sensors are picking up movement. Hundred pounds. Could be a rhino. Over.”
“Copy, Sierra Two. Continue to monitor. Out.”
Condy has appeared at the soldier’s elbow, squinting at the sensor readouts. As the men watch, the suspicious readings abruptly flatline.
The old man’s eyebrows rise. “Feed is down again?”
Drews presses his lips together. “You said you had fixed that.”
“You said it broke twice before I ever got here. Not my fault your shit is faulty.”
“Our gremlin issues certainly grew worse the moment you arrived.”
The old man holds up his hands innocently. “Do you really think I’d be stupid enough to start interfering with your systems right after getting here? While we’re sitting in the same room?”
Drews sighs, then speaks into his radio. “This is Blue. All external patrol personnel on yellow alert. I have nothing on cameras but am sensor-blind.” He pauses a moment, then adds, “Continue to report, but it’s probably just a sharp. Out.”
The moment he lets go of the ‘TALK’ button, the radio spews static and yelling. The two men jump, and Drews nearly drops the device.
At last, the soldier on the other end remembers Drews. “Sir, it’s our noon-it! She’s inside the city!” Static. “—disappearing—”
“Shoot on sight!” Drews orders. He’s on his feet, eyes roving from screen to screen. “Break-break, this is Blue! All external personnel on red alert! All off-duty personnel, suit up and stand by for orders! The noon-it is shoot-on-sight. You have your training. Do not listen to it, do not reason with it. Over.”
There on the monitor, right before his eyes — a woman-shaped thing flashes across the street and is gone. He needs to raise the fences on the radio and find out how it made it past the—
It’s here to rescue the one in containment! Drews’ eyes fly to the screen that displays the gated stairwell down. He hasn’t even been able to spare a man to watch it. Now the sub-basement yawns open beneath him at the mere thought of the tank beneath his feet being broken open. The result would be unimaginable chaos and destruction.
Condy, meanwhile, watches the external feeds for another glimpse of the figure that so terrifies the soldiers. “The hell is a ‘noon-it’?”
Drews tears his gaze away from the sub-basement feeds and resumes monitoring the situation outside. “You’re not cleared.”
“The hell I’m not, if there’s something about to eat me.” He flaps a hand vaguely over his shoulder. “Besides, it’s probably in the box of papers back in my ‘quarters’.”
The tall man clenches his jaw for a moment, then explains, “Words get garbled in the field. ‘Noon-it’ is just a corruption of a code word, one of the many the previous Director and her pets came up with—”
A figure in the street, there and gone. Condy shoves himself closer to the screen, trying to spot her again. “Io?” he demands, shocked pale. “But you and your gang of baby-killers murdered her!”
“Blue, visual confirmed!” Drews tells his radio. “Shoot on sight! I repeat, shoot on sight!”
Io drops through a portal between two buildings and dashes out across the wide road, deliberately tripping every sensor she once helped plant.
A few buildings away, at an outpost, she hears soldiers shouting, “Noon-it!” Her heart thrills at the garbled code word, horrified and yet proud. She’s finally become what even the first Director predicted.
The world is quickly filling with her like — but not just humans succumbing to the needle virus. She’s seen a laptop defy the laws of reality. She’s inadvertently converted an officer of the law to serve the laws of another dimensio
n. She’s borne witness to a human conquering the source of the portals. And greatest and most terrible of all, there are still so many threats unknown to her, undiscovered.
Each one a dangerous asset operating out of bounds. Each one a New Night.
Io darts back through Earth’s Monday evening and into Fortuna’s early morning. Then it is night again, and she’s headed down the middle of University Avenue. Then she is gone.
Each time she crosses over to Earth, she finds herself a bit closer to the facility. Zechariah is experimenting with the portals, adjusting his aim and understanding. Whenever she returns, she finds him bound head-to-toe in that black lattice, frozen with concentration, sometimes barking with pain. The guardian’s vines claw at him, trying to pull him free.
Night once more, and a smaller street. For a split second, she assumes she is safe and can rest.
BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM
She jerks forward and rolls into an alley, disoriented. Where are the shots coming from? There’s a sharp ping! ping! ping! going off nearby—
Io is halfway down the alley when a soldier strafing past the entrance fires, BAM BAM, two bullets into her back. She jerks and stumbles, recovers, breaks into a run. Her breaths are labored and wet.
Have to find a portal. Have to cross back over.
Have to rescue her.
Io swallows hard. The needles are already closing in over the holes in her back, her lung.
This is nothing.
She presses on.
Lucas walks.
He doesn’t have much else to do, so as he walks, he reflects on how fucking absurd his life has become.
He’s decided that none of this is real. He’s having one of those dying hallucinations people talk about, taking place over the course of minutes but feeling like hours or even days. All of this is just random chemicals being released by his dying brain, and any second, it’s all going to abruptly go dark forever.
At first, he figures he must have died the night before it all started, when he and Zechariah were kicked out of the tavern in Shire. Lucas was drunk. He shouldn’t have tried to drive them back to the site. He shouldn’t have screamed at the poor kid for trying to stop him. And now the two of them are probably crushed against a tree, and this magical fucking adventure has been nothing more than a mist of DMT before obliteration.
Or maybe they survived the drive. There were still the notes he scribbled in that drunken rage, his grand plan to get everyone back into their homes in Gothic. He must have gone through with it — must have invited local media to visit the FEMA site for a little human-interest piece on the sub-human wretches still holding out hope on the outskirts of a quarantined city. They got their interviews with the old, the desperate, and the powerless — and then they turned to FEMA Security Officer Lucas de la Mora for comment.
He remembers being torn between self-immolating, Tibetan-priest-style, or taking his own life with his sidearm. Considering the plot of his death-dream had him shot in the head by a deranged soldier, Lucas guesses he went with the gun. There were cameras rolling, maybe even broadcasting live. The story will have gone national by now. Everyone’s posting on Facebook about it. Congressmen are getting phone calls. Review is being demanded.
Something something something, Gothic will be re-opened. Too bad he’ll never get to see it, because he’s dying of a self-inflicted—
Lucas snorts and rubs his eyes tiredly as he walks.
His training as an officer of the law instructs him to seek the simplest explanation. Since drawn-out intra-mortem imaginary adventures only really happen in movies, he is forced (for now) to take events at face value:
Assuming Drews and his soldiers survived the chaos at the camp, Lucas is now a wanted man back on Earth. He’s almost definitely been fired by FEMA. All his worldly possessions — clothes, guns, a few keepsakes, gi and belt, bank account — are forever lost. If no civilians died in the attack on Mount Ward, it’ll be a miracle, and so he prays for a miracle in order to fight off mounting guilt. He has failed as their guardian, and will never even get a chance to apologize.
His only friends are a serial liar and whatever the hell Zechariah is turning into, but even they would be better company than the dead silence of this alien planet. Lucas is running out of water and won’t survive for long on Io’s snacks—
He almost doesn’t notice the portal until he’s nearly walked into it. He jumps back, eyes crossing as he tries to stare directly into it.
He hasn’t seen a portal since they left the vine forest the previous day. Yet here one is, floating at door-height, as inviting as an elaborate tear in the fabric of space can be. He walks a wide circle around it and finds that it has no front or back. All the same, he suspects that his angle of approach will affect his angle of exit.
He tosses a pebble through. There is no scream of hellfire from the other side. He finds a small stick and pokes it through; the end comes back whole.
He stands chewing his lip, thinking. Most likely, the portal leads back to Arkansas — either some war-torn section of Gothic, or somewhere out in the Ozarks countryside. He can always dash through quickly and check, but the portal might close behind him. Also, he might be stepping directly in front of a sharp, or a soldier.
All along this trek around the southern tip of the wood, he’s found no sign of Zechariah or Io. For all he knows, he’s way off track. They could even be waiting for him back on Earth.
He pokes the stick through again. Delaying the inevitable, he knows. The truth is, he badly needs to see ‘normal’ sky again, even if only for a minute. The previous portal didn’t close upon use, and this one probably won’t either. He’ll step through, take a few deep breaths of familiar air, and then come back.
Lucas tosses aside the stick and closes Mjolnir, holds it ready to open. He squares his shoulders under the backpack’s straps, then steps through.
It’s dark and cold. He’s outdoors, and stars shine above. In the distance, someone shouts.
BLAM BLAM BLAM, gunshots explode very close by. BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM
He hurries forward, trying to find cover, and enters another portal.
Blazing daylight pours down over him, and he finally comes to a stop, shielding his eyes.
Not Earth, he realizes with a shudder in his stomach. His visit to Earth lasted four seconds and was punctuated with gunshots. Now he’s back on Fortuna.
He stands in the bottom of a great crater, its walls curving up into the sky in every direction. Before him is a rusted spire, and at the top—
“Zechariah!” he shouts, stepping closer and squinting up into the morning sunlight. “Are you okay? Where’s—” He stops at the last moment and teeters at the edge of a pit as black as space. “Ghh!” he blurts, and jumps back.
At the top of the spire, which extends up out of the center of the pit, Zechariah stands on a small platform. His body is wrapped in black lattice as shiny as beetle’s wing. His head lolls nerveless on his shoulders, eyes staring into nothing. A black vine digs at his right temple; Lucas’ eyes follow the tendril down the spire, across to the north-eastern edge of the pit. There it joins a huge mass of black tentacles, languid as fallen power lines. This continues up the side of the crater and disappears into the wood.
Io is nowhere in sight. For that matter, the portal behind him has disappeared.
Zechariah grunts — chokes — moves his shoulders slightly. “L-Lucas,” he mumbles.
The man can barely hear him. “You okay? Can you get down?”
His eyes are far-away. His eyes are holes in space. He explores wildly, then barely contains the impulse, then returns his attention to Lucas. Words come slowly to him, and pronouncing them aloud is excruciating.
“I f-found the. W-w-way in.”
“Into what?”
“S-soldiers. Hhh-hallways. G-G-Gothic.” He sucks in as deep a breath as he can; the lattice crushes his body a little tighter. “Help… Io! I’ll h-hold it open as l-long as-zzzz gasp! long
as I gasp—”
A portal appears five feet to Lucas’ left. He hasn’t caught most of Zechariah’s whispers, but he puts two and two together and realizes: Zechariah can control the portals now. He’s opened a door into the Gothic military base. They have already won.
“Hurry!” Zechariah gasps. The black tendril has finally broken the skin at his temple and is badly bloodying the side of his head.
Lucas shrugs out of the backpack, leaves it on the ground at the edge of the pit. Better not to risk Mr. Condy’s laptop falling into Drews’ hands. After a moment’s hesitation, he hides Mjolnir inside the bag, thinking his enemies will not be needles but flesh-and-blood. Besides: Better to travel light. He now carries only Drews’ sidearm.
“I don’t know if you can hear me,” he calls up at the younger man. “I want you to know: You’re a good guy. I’ve always been lucky to have you by my side. And . . . I’m sorry I’ve been weak lately. If we survive this, I’ll do better.”
Zechariah’s head twitches a little, but otherwise there is no response.
Lucas nods to himself, reluctantly turning to face the portal alone. He holds the gun ready, steeling himself for the possibility of soldiers waiting on the other side. Then he steps forward . . .
. . . and is plunged into darkness.
Drews and Condy sit side by side, watching the monitors in silence. The old man is clearly unhappy, and several times he tries and fails to word his complaint. Drews ignores him.
Movement in one of the interior feeds — which is impossible, because he and Mr. Condy are the only humans inside the facility besides the soldiers in the closed barracks. Drews stares at the view of the downstairs corridor, trying to spot the motion again. There — one of the doors pushes open, and a man slips out, a gun in his hands.
Mr. de la Mora.
His blurry form starts down the corridor, which will eventually take him to the tank room.
“No, no, no,” Drews whispers, coming to his feet. His hand goes to his gun, and then to his hammer, and then back to the gun. “No, no, you idiot, no!”
New Night (Gothic Book 2) Page 13