The men mounted the waiting HWMMVs, weapons at the ready, and Mason gave the order to move out. One by one, the armored vehicles turned and headed in the direction of the gates.
But it was not to be.
As Mason’s men drew close to the entrance of the base, the strange storm that they had been watching for hours moved to intercept them. Mason had not other words for it; it was as if the storm had a living presence of its own, that it moved with intelligent forethought and intention. The black funnel cloud roared down the main thoroughfare toward them, kicking up waves of dust and dirt that mimicked the powerful sandstorms of the Arabian desert. In seconds, visibility was reduced to a few feet and then down to nothing. Radio communication between the vehicles died and each unit found itself on its own, unable to see and as a result, unable to move forward at any decent rate of speed without endangering those in the vehicle before them.
Mason ordered his driver to leave the road and try to go around the storm, but the howling wind and blowing sand made that next to impossible. While the HWMMVs were designed for strenuous off-road travel, the land around them was crisscrossed with steep ravines and treacherous sinkholes. If they couldn’t see, they couldn’t maneuver around them and driving blindly into such an obstacle would ruin their day for certain.
In the end, Mason had no choice but to give the order for his driver to turn around and do his best to get the back to base, hoping that the drivers of the other vehicles would have the initiative to d the same. They had no defense against the power of the storm and pushing forward would just result in the useless deaths of more of his men. He would regroup at the command center and wait for the storm to die down again before making another attempt.
If they were still alive, Echo was on their own.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Not wanting to remain in the same place directly after the attack, Cade ordered the team to make for the stairwell at the other end of the corridor, intending to take them up another level and away from the scene. Unfortunately, as the old saying went, even the best laid plans can come undone.
When they arrived at the end of the hall, they discovered that the target stairwell was completely blocked by a convoluted pile of discarded furniture. Everything from desks to bookcases to box springs seemed to have been tossed down the stairwell from above until they filled not just the first staircase and its landing but also at least the one above that as well. None of the jumbled mass was balanced very well and Cade had visions of it tumbling down on them the minute they tried to work their way over it or through it. He had no desire to see any more of his men injured in such a useless manner and he quickly made the decision to take an alternate route.
He didn’t want to chance going through the exercise complex again, so he turned his attention to the elevator shaft beside the stairwell.
Prying back the doors revealed the fact that the car itself was somewhere below and that was all Cade needed to know.
They would go up the shaft.
Ropes were quickly rigged and minutes later Chen and Davis were hauling themselves hand over hand up the elevator cables to the floor above. Finding the doors on that level open and the corridor beyond clear, the former stood guard while the latter secured himself to the ledge to serve as a belayer and then sent a rope down for the next man.
Ten minutes later all seven of them were standing on the third level of the complex, the elevator door behind them now closed in an effort to give them some warning should anything attempt to follow them up the same route.
Continuing their investigation, they found that the corridor in front of them extended only a few feet before taking a sharp turn. Around the bend they discovered a massive vault door prevented them from progressing any further down the hall.
With the way ahead sealed off and the path behind under tight guard, it was as good a place as any to take that much needed, and previously interrupted, rest. Cade ordered the group to do just that.
The men knew the routine, knew the watch schedule and who was in charge of preparing meals for the others, so Cade settled down against one wall of the corridor, leaning his head back and closing his eyes as he mentally worked through what they’d encountered so far.
His thoughts were quickly interrupted however, as Riley settled down next to him with a look of concern on his face.
“How are the men?” Cade asked.
“They’re doing okay. This place has them on edge, but I’m okay with that. It’ll keep them ready for whatever it throws at us next.”
Cade nodded, agreeing with the sentiment. “Something else on your mind then?”
“I don’t want to make the other men nervous, but back in the locker room, before the reapers attacked, I saw something.”
Cade waited for him to continue.
Riley shook his head, as if trying to knock loose an unwelcome memory. “As weird as it sounds, I saw you.”
“Me?”
“Not you personally. Or rather, I know it wasn’t really you. But whatever it was, it certainly looked like you.”
Riley went on to explain how the creature had questioned him about Vargas and how it had turned violent, summoning the reapers, when he had refused to answer it.
Cade gave it some thought and then ordered Riley to keep the information to himself. The idea that their enemy could mimic them at will was not a comfortable one. If it got out, every single one of them would be wondering about the guy next to them and that would be disastrous for team morale.
Riley agreed and got up to supervise the meal preparation. As he turned to go, Cade called out to him once more.
“How’d you know?”
Riley looked puzzled. “Know what?”
“That it wasn’t me?”
The master sergeant grinned and pointed to his face. “The scars. They were on the wrong side.”
Cade nodded and, in a sense, felt some relief.
At least their enemy wasn’t infallible.
And with that he leaned his head back once more and was soon fast asleep.
*** ***
A short time later Chen shook Cade awake. “You need to see this, Commander.”
He led him around the corner to where they’d found the vault door, except now the thick steel barrier was wide open, revealing another short corridor that ended in another door similar to the first. This, too, now stood open.
“How’d you do that?” Cade asked.
Chen grinned. “You’ll have to ask the Master Sergeant about that, sir. Claims it came to him in a dream.”
Considering what they’d been through so far, Cade was almost ready to believe it.
Almost.
He moved through the corridor and through the second vault door to find himself in an enormous room the size of a large warehouse. It was a good three stories high, with a complex arrangement of steel catwalks extending throughout. In the center of the catwalks, suspended equidistant from the floor and ceiling, was another, smaller room. This one was fashioned of what appeared to be high density Plexiglas and its walls, ceiling, and floor were all opaque. The room itself was held in position by thick metal columns at each corner that stretched down to the floor below.
From where he stood in the doorway, Cade could see Riley and Duncan standing on the catwalk across from the glass enclosure. He radioed that he was coming up. Chen led him to a staircase he hadn’t seen in the corner of the room and then up through the maze of catwalks. As he got closer to where the men were standing, he could see his two sergeants carefully examining a set of controls built into a small pedestal at the edge of the catwalk.
“Okay, Houdini, how’d you do it?” Cade asked, as he stepped up to meet them.
Riley grinned. “Had a hunch. The combination was 7:2:8, the same as the verse on the door leading into this place.”
Genesis 2:8, with G being the seventh letter of the alphabet.
Cade had to hand it to him; he wouldn’t have thought of that. “So what’s this?” he asked, indicat
ing the control box the other two were studying.
Riley straightened up. “Best as I can figure, it’s an extendable drawbridge. Seems to provide access to the holding cell over there,” he said, jerking his thumb toward the smaller room across the open space behind him.
This close Cade could see that access to the “cell” as Riley called it, was provided through a door set in the middle of the wall directly across from where they stood. Like the walls themselves, the door was made of the same, see-through material, though the steel locking mechanism set within it was plainly visible even from this distance. So, too, were the furnishings distributed throughout the chamber; a table and four chairs, a couch, even a king-size bed, all of which were made from the same strange material. Cade now understood why Riley had called it a holding cell. Its see-through exterior would allow its occupant to be monitored twenty-four hours a day and not even the furnishings would block the view of the prisoner. He glanced up at the ceiling high above. It took him a few minutes to find them but eventually he could make out the shapes of several close-circuit cameras hung amidst the tangle of pipes and cooling ducts.
“Must have been one heck of a prisoner to require a set up like this,” Chen said.
“Let’s get a closer look,” Cade said, his curiosity raised.
“I thought you’d never ask,” Duncan replied. He flipped a switch on the console and the ground beneath their feet shook slightly as the drawbridge began to extend itself out from under the catwalk and across the open space before them. A few minutes later it settled into place on the far side with a loud clang.
Duncan swept his arm out with a flourish. “Ask and you shall receive.”
Cade stepped out onto the walkway, testing it. Satisfied, he headed across with Riley and Duncan close on his heels. Chen remained behind to guard the approach and to man the drawbridge controls in case of an emergency.
The three men quickly crossed the extended platform and stood on the small landing before the door. Expecting the door to be both locked and heavy, Cade was surprised when it swung open silently at the light touch of his hand.
Despite the fact that they could see the room was empty, they entered cautiously, weapons at the ready. Duncan and Riley fanned out on either side of Cade as soon as they were through the doorway, each of them alert for the unexpected and wary of a trap. After several moments, when it was clear that they were alone and unlikely to be molested, they relaxed and set about examining the strange tableau laid out around them.
To Cade, the interior of the room resembled a sparsely furnished apartment, if you ignored the fact that everything was constructed of reinforced Plexiglas. One corner had clearly been set up as an eating area, with a kitchen table and chairs, but there was no sign of any kind of appliance for preparing meals. No stove, no microwave, not even a small table-top refrigerator. The same held true in the bedroom area. There was a nightstand and what appeared to be a king-size bed, but no sheets, no pillows, and no bedside lamp. Standing next to the bed, Cade realized that the room was also missing any kind of washroom facility. No shower, no sink, and perhaps most telling, no toilet. Even the most rudimentary prison cell has a bucket to piss in, Cade thought. Just who the heck were they keeping inside this place?
His line of thought was interrupted when Duncan called out, “Over here!”
They found Duncan standing next to the far wall of the enclosure, in front of a hole that had been melted through the glass. The hole was large enough for a man to step through without bending over and from its appearance it seemed that the glass had been heated into an almost liquid state that flowed down the exterior wall before re-hardening into a jumbled mass that hung off the far side of the enclosure like an icicle.
Lost in his examination of the object before him, Cade didn’t hear what Riley said next and asked him to repeat himself.
The Master Sergeant waved at the home in front of them. “It got loose. Whatever it was,” Riley said. There was an ominous tone in his voice and his choice of wording only served to emphasize it.
“What do you mean, ’it’?” Cade asked.
“Look around this place, boss. See-through walls. A floating room. Cameras all over the ceiling. Do you think they went through all this trouble for some ordinary Joe? Seems damned unlikely to me. They were holding something, not someone, captive.”
“Okay, fine,” said Duncan, “but where on earth did it go? In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s no causeway on the other side of this wall and it’s at least a three-story drop straight down.”
“Maybe it jumped,” said Riley.
“Jumped? Down three stories? Are you out of…”
Cade turned away from the other two men, tuning them out. He knew his exec was right; this was no ordinary holding cell and its occupant hadn’t been any ordinary prisoner. He had a sudden vision of the shadow creature that had wreaked havoc with the first squad who dared enter the facility. Could this place have been used to hold such a thing?
He considered the layout. A room inaccessible except for a single entry point. What he assumed was round-the-clock surveillance. Walkways that could double as patrol routes for guards. While this might be sufficient to constrain an ordinary criminal, it would do very little to hold a creature of supernatural ability. He’d seen it go through a squad of heavily armed recon troops. The glass walls of this enclosure wouldn’t last ten minutes.
Unless, that is, there was something unusual about the glass.
Removing the patch from in front of his right eye, Cade triggered his Sight.
Light blazed out at him from multiple directions, light so bright that he was forced to hold his hand up in front of his eye to protect it from the glare. Mystical words, glyphs, and sigils were written on the face of the glass in every direction, covering almost its entire available surface, each and every one of them ablaze with the light of their inherent power. While Cade recognized many of them from his years of research involving the Adversary, others were entirely unfamiliar. Yet their purpose was clear.
The entire room had been warded.
Designed to guard a specific location or object, wards were one of the mainstays of modern magick. They came in two types; minor and major. Minor wards were just what the name inferred; minor magicks that could be used to protect a small object such as a book or a small storage chest. These could be performed by a single individual with limited preparation, often on the fly. Major wards were another story entirely, requiring several days of preparation and a sorcerer or mystic of no little skill with several acolytes to assist him or her. They were not undertaken lightly and the slightest mistake could have disastrous consequences. Major wards that failed outright often ended in the deaths of all involved in the casting.
Not only could wards be used to keep people away from a particular location, they could also be used to keep someone or something confined. Common folklore held that a demon summoned inside a pentagram could not cross its lines and the summoner was therefore safe to request the demon perform a certain act in exchange for releasing it. This was, in part, based on the fact that the pentagram, when inscribed in the proper sequence and with the proper materials, was actually a very ancient form of a major warding. But what had been fashioned here made a pentagram look like child’s play.
Yet it still hadn’t been enough.
A chill ran up Cade’s spine and he turned back to face the damaged wall. Just as he’d expected, its surface was dark; the glyphs and sigils inscribed there were drained of their power, allowing whatever it was that had been imprisoned in the room to escape.
Not even major wards had been able to contain it.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Lord of Eden moved through the tunnels at a brisk pace, his thoughts on the newcomers. He’d been observing them for the last several hours and it was clear by their actions and lack of familiarity with the complex that they were newcomers. Which meant that some other outside group had taken an interest in the activity here. That, in itself
, was interesting. Outsiders wouldn’t understand what his captors had tried to do, wouldn’t know why the various wards and barriers had been erected. Without that knowledge, he reasoned, they would be more likely to help him escape the confines of the complex, might even unintentionally break the bonds that held him without knowing what they were doing.
That would be fortunate indeed.
But if he was not so lucky, there were other ways to persuade them to help. For all he knew, they might even listen to reason.
And if they chose to oppose him, he would deal with them in an appropriate manner just as he had with the others before them. He had been locked in the darkness for too long to allow anything, least of all a group of weakling humans, to prevent him from regaining his rightful heritage.
He would do what needed to be done, just as he always had.
And the Creator be damned if he didn’t like it.
An odd sensation washed over him like a sudden dousing of ice-cold water, the walls around him wavering like a mirage on the hot desert plains that he had haunted so long ago, and the feeling was so unexpected that it stopped him in mid-stride.
He was intimately familiar with the sensation; it wasn’t its unusual nature that brought him to sudden halt but the simple fact that someone other than he was capable of producing that particular effect.
It shouldn’t have been possible.
But there was no mistaking it.
Elsewhere in the complex, someone had just opened a window into the Beyond.
The face of the battle-scarred leader he’d observed in the tram tunnel came instantly to mind and the Lord of Eden intuitively knew that he was the one. Somehow he had penetrated the Veil, had tunneled through the barriers between worlds and had peered into the other realm. What he was looking for the Lord of Eden did not know, but he instantly recognized that having that particular human at his side would be an advantage in his fight to escape this place.
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