by Tad Williams
Oddly, for once Jeremiah was sympathetic. Turning the V-tank into what it so strongiy resembled, a coffin, could not help but remind Joseph of his daughter Renie lying nearby in another almost identical casket. She and her Bushman friend might still be alive, but at this point the difference between them and the dead mercenary seemed largely academic.
And then there's the three of us, Jeremiah thought glumly. What's the difference between us and Joseph's daughter, except that it's a bigger coffin?
The thought abruptly popped like a soap bubble and disappeared as Jeremiah stared at the monitor. "Joseph, what the hell is this? You're supposed to be watching here, aren't you?"
Long Joseph looked at him, scowled, and turned back to his contemplation of the laboratory floor and the silent pods.
"Del Ray!" Jeremiah shouted. "Come here! Quickly!"
The younger man, who had been scavenging some breakfast from among the supplies—Jeremiah had been too tired and depressed to cook even one of the rudimentary meals he had been making—hurried up from the floor below.
"What is it?"
"Look!" Jeremiah pointed to the monitor that showed the feed from the front door camera. "The truck—it's gone!" He turned to Joseph. "When did this happen?"
"When did what happen?" Joseph levered himself to his feet and walked over, already defensive. "Why you making such a fuss?"
"Because the damned truck is gone. Gone!" His anger was leavened by an exhilarating, almost dizzying breath of hope. "The mercenaries' truck is gone!"
"But they're not," Del Ray said heavily. "Look." He pointed to another monitor, the one which displayed the area beside the elevator upstairs where the men had been digging. A cluster of sleeping forms lay beside the hole, which was fenced with chairs turned on their sides.
"Then where's the truck?"
"I don't know." Del Ray stared at the screen. "I count three. So one of them took the truck somewhere. Maybe to get supplies."
"Maybe," said Joseph, with a certain gloomy satisfaction, "to get more killers."
"God damn you Joseph Sulaweyo, you just shut up." Jeremiah barely resisted the urge to hit him across the face. What am I turning into? "We should have known this hours ago. He probably took off at night. But you weren't doing your job!"
"What job?" Even Joseph did not seem himself, the opportunity for an argument provoking little interest. "What difference it make? You going to run out and stop him driving away? 'Please, Mr. Killer, don't go get some more men with guns.' So what are you complaining for?"
Jeremiah sat down hard in the chair in front of the monitors. "Just shut up."
"You expect me to stay up all night, looking at some little screens," Joseph suggested, with the reasoned calm of a schizophrenic explaining a worldwide conspiracy, "then you better learn to talk nice with me."
It was late morning when the truck reappeared on the front door monitor. Jeremiah called the others over and they watched with sickened fascination as the mercenary swung himself down from the front seat, adjusted a massive sidearm in his shoulder holster, then went around to the back of the big gray offroad vehicle.
"How many you think?" Despite the hundreds of meters of concrete separating them from the scene, Long Joseph was whispering. Jeremiah didn't bother to say anything—he felt like doing it himself.
"Who knows? You could get a dozen men in there." Del Ray's face was damp with sweat.
The driver swung open the back door and climbed inside, When he had been invisible almost a minute, Joseph said, "What the hell is he doing back there?"
"Briefing them, maybe." Jeremiah felt like he was watching footage of some terrible fatal accident on the net, except this accident was happening to him.
The door swung open again.
"Oh, Jesus Mercy," groaned Long Joseph. "What are those?"
Four of them leaped out in succession, sniffing the ground eagerly. When the driver climbed down they circled him like sharks around a deep-water buoy. Each massive dog had a crest of bristling fur along the top of its spine between the shoulders, adding to the sharkish look.
"Ridgebacks," Del Ray said. "The mutant ones—look at how the foreheads stick out. It's illegal to breed them." He sounded almost offended.
"I don't think that's the kind of thing these men worry about." Jeremiah could not tear his eyes from the screen. Even in the daylight outside the front gate the creatures' eyes were sunken too deeply to be seen beneath the protruding brows, giving their faces a lost, shadowy look. A memory came to him, bleakly terrifying. "Hyena," he said quietly.
"What you talking about?" Long Joseph demanded. "You heard what he say—they are ridgeback dogs."
"I was thinking about the little Bushman's story." The gate was opening. The driver snapped heavy leashes onto the animals' collars and let them draw him through the entrance and into the base. "About the hyena and his daughter." Jeremiah felt sick. "Never mind. Good God, what are we going to do?"
After a moment's heavy silence Del Ray said, "Well, I've got two bullets. If we position ourselves just right, get the dogs to stand properly, I can shoot through one and get the one behind it, too. Two bullets, four dogs."
Long Joseph was scowling fiercely, but his eyes were wide, his voice hoarse. "That is a joke. You are making a joke, right?"
"Of course it's, a goddamned joke, you idiot." Del Ray slumped into the other chair by the console and put his face in his hands. "Those things were used to hunt lions—and that was before anyone really started messing around with their genes. They'll find us even in the dark and then they'll tear us to pieces."
Jeremiah was only half-listening. The dogs and the mercenary were making their way across the garage level of the base, but Jeremiah wasn't paying attention to that either. He was watching a small readout at the bottom of one of the console screens.
"Sellars isn't answering," he said dully. "No message, nothing."
"Just what I thought will happen!" Joseph exploded. "Telling us what to do, telling us, telling us, then when we need him, gone!"
"That smoke idea of his saved our lives," Del Ray said angrily. "They would have been down here days ago."
"Saved us to be eaten by monster dogs!" Joseph declared, but the energy had gone out of him. "Maybe we should build another fire, see how those dogs like smoke." He turned to Jeremiah. "Dogs, they need to breathe too, don't they?"
Jeremiah was watching the monitors. The mercenaries by the elevator had wakened and were huddled with their returned comrade. The dogs were sitting now, a row of muscled, ivory-fanged machines waiting to be turned on and set to work. Jeremiah realized that the mercenaries must have all but finished digging their way through the floor, and planned on using the mutant dogs as insurance against another toxic smoke attack or armed resistance.
If those men only knew, he thought. With what we have, we couldn't drive away a group of determined schoolchildren.
"We can't do that trick again without Sellars," he said aloud. "We don't know how to operate the vents. I don't think we can even access them from down here." He frowned, trying to catch an idea that was already threatening to dissolve back into the fear and disorder of his thoughts. "And we don't have anything left to burn to make that kind of smoke. . . ."
"So we are just going to wait here?" Joseph, too, was staring helplessly at the screen. "Wait for . . . those?"
"No." Jeremiah stood up and started across the lab, heading for the stairs. "At least I'm not going to."
"Where are you going?" shouted Del Ray.
"To find something to make another fire," he called back. "We can't smoke them out, but even a dog the size of a house is afraid of fire."
"But we used everything!"
"No. There is still more paper. There's a cabinet full of it where . . . where the mercenary tried to kill Joseph. And we need to make torches!"
Even as he began to run, he heard Joseph and Del Ray hurrying after him.
For an instant—and mercifully, only an instant—Renie felt herself s
eized again in the implacable grip of the void. There was no restraint this time, only unthinking rage, explosive and all-powerful. Then the pit was around her once more. She was on her hands and knees on the ledge, retching, bringing up nothing but air. The voices of the river were rising, a weeping, begging choir.
"He's coming!" The cry was a childish thing of pure terror that vibrated inside her skull like an alarm bell. A cascade of images battered her, huge shapes, howling dogs, a room full of blood and shrieking white shapes. Pain sizzled through her like electricity. Renie screamed, writhing, adding her own thin shrieks to the weeping children of the river as the voice in her head shrilled again, "He's coming here!"
The pit expanded, deeper, darker, the walls retreating so swiftly they seemed to be collapsing out into empty space. The river and the tiny shape beside it were retreating too, falling away down an endless tunnel, plummeting into a bottomless well.
"Who?" she gasped. "Who's coming?"
Faint, vanishingly faint, the voice in her head was only a whisper now.
"The devil,"
Then the stars fell down from above and Renie was engulfed by the distorted night sky, which seemed to pour over her like an upended ocean. She slipped like a trapped bubble between freezing black nothingness and the white brilliance of the burning stars all around her. She was churned and rolled and crushed by monstrous pressures.
I'm drowning, she thought, a bemused spark of consciousness lost in the silent roaring of the big lights. Drowning in the universe.
CHAPTER 39
Broken Angel
* * *
NETFEED/NEWS: Widow Sues Nanotech Firm Over Honeymoon Holocaust
(visual: Sabine Wendel at husband's funeral)
VO: Capping a tragedy that has already become fodder for comedians all over the world, Sabine Wendel of Bonn, Germany, has filed suit against the distributors of Masterman, a nanotech-based product advertised to cure erectile dysfunction. Although the manufacturers Borchardt-Schliemer insist their product is to be used only under a doctor's care, many distributors sell the product without prescription, and that is apparently how Jorg Wendel purchased the microscopic Masterman trigger-mites that led to the fatal accident dubbed "the Sexplosion" by many tabnets. . . ."
* * *
They stumbled down out of the hills and onto the desolate plain, lightning flickering through the sky behind them as they raced toward what looked like an ocean full of stars. A cluster of strange shapes lined its shores, waiting. Night was falling, the constellations overhead dimmer than those swimming in the pit.
It's like the end of H.G. Wells' Time Machine, Paul thought. The horrible last moments of Earth the time traveler sees—gray skies, gray soil, a dying crab-thing on an empty beach.
Bonita Mae Simpkins tripped and fell heavily, unable to use her crippled hands to stop herself. Paul leaned close to help her up. The roaring of the thing that had followed them from Egypt was muffled now by the intervening hills and the electrical storm still hugged the distant spot where the monstrous form had appeared, but Paul had no doubt that Martine was right—no matter how strenuously the operating system fought back, Dread would be after them soon. He was hunting them.
Mrs. Simpkins was whispering as he dragged her onto her feet. ". . . He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. . . ."
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Paul thought. I will fear no evil. But he did fear—he did. They had been swallowed by a nightmare.
The others were far ahead now, although Nandi Paradivash had stopped to wait. Paul put his arm around Mrs. Simpkins and hurried her forward.
"Thank you," she whispered. "God bless you."
Nandi silently pulled the woman's other arm around his shoulders so he and Paul could keep her upright. The pool of surging, flaring radiance seemed very close now. Some of the throng that surrounded it came swarming toward Martine and the others. For a moment, as his companions disappeared in the tide of bodies, Paul fought panic, then he saw that Martine and Florimel and the rest—that tall one was certainly T4b—were being surrounded but not openly menaced. In fact, the crowd that enveloped them acted more like the beggar children he had seen in Rome and Madrid than like an overt threat.
"Those people are . . . they are. . . ." Nandi was watching, too. "I have no idea what they are!"
Neither did Paul. As they reached the outskirts of the crowd he was astounded by the wild, seemingly pointless diversity of its parts—upright animals and creatures with human faces and the bodies of beasts, as well as others made of things from which no living being could ever be composed. The variety was amazing, but what was most astonishing about them was the apparent whimsy. It was an army of purely make-believe creatures that swarmed out to meet them, a population decanted from children's storybooks.
The nearest, a collection of anthropomorphic bears and goats, fish with legs—even a skinny and fat couple who Paul guessed must be Jack Sprat from the nursery rhyme and his huge wife, but whose silhouettes gave him a moment's nasty turn—now came running toward Paul and his two companions, even the most inhuman faces full of unmistakable fear, the childish voices shrill.
"What is it?" scrawny Jack Sprat cried. "Who are you? Did the One send you?"
"Who took the stars?" shrieked his wobbling spouse. "Have you seen the Lady?"
"Why won't she come to the Well? Why won't she tell us what to do?"
Caught up in the swirl of pleading creatures, Paul was rushed along toward the shore of the pulsing sea like a leaf going over the rapids. "Martine!" he shouted, struggling to hold onto Bonnie Mae and Nandi even as furry fingers and graspingly prehensile wings tugged at him. "Florimel! Where are you?" Someone yanked at Bonnie Mae so hard that Paul, still trying to keep her upright, lost his grip on her and was pulled off his feet. For a moment he was certain he would be trampled to death.
After all this, I'm killed by cartoons, he thought, choking in the dust. There's irony in that, isn't there?
Suddenly people around him began to shout in alarm; the bizarrely diverse collection of legs and feet hemming him in began to back away. Paul struggled to his feet and discovered Nandi and Mrs. Simpkins only a few meters away, staring. He turned to see what they were looking at.
It was not the most unusual sight of the day, but it was still a bit of a surprise.
Rolling toward them through the crowd, moving slowly to give the fairy-tale creatures a chance to get out of his way—but helping them along with occasional light flicks of his riding whip—was Azador, smiling hugely. He was perched on the driver's bench of a fantastically colorful coach pulled by two white horses.
"Ionas, my friend!" he shouted, teeth gleaming beneath the luxuriant mustache. "There you are! Come, you and your other friends—climb up or these idiots will step on your toes."
Paul could not help staring, and not just at the unexpected rescue. In all the time he had traveled with Azador, even in the toils of the Lotos-dream, the man had never seemed a fraction this cheerful. Paul looked up at the sky, which was almost pitch-black now, the stars dwindled to tiny points. How could anyone be in a good mood with this going on? Unless he's daft as a brush.
Still, it was better than being trampled by teddy bears.
Paul clambered onto the side of the wagon and helped Nandi and Mrs. Simpkins up onto the step beside him, then Azador clicked his tongue at the horses, cracked his whip, and turned the carriage back toward the flickering sea.
"There are people waiting to see you, my friend!" Azador cried. "You will be so happy. We will sing and dance and celebrate!"
Not just a little daft, thought Paul as they rolled along beneath the dying sky. Utterly, utterly mad.
Azador's tribe of Gypsies had arranged the dozens of wagons they had retained into a semicircle along the shore of the strange crater, walling themselves off from the rest of the refugees and making a little city with wheels, the lacquered coaches shining both from the light of many campfires an
d the silver-and-blue glimmer of the great pit. Paul was grateful for the respite, however temporary, but he could not help looking back at the hills. Lightning still leaped above the hilltops, swift as swordplay, but the display seemed to have diminished, as if the contest being fought there was coming to an end.
Paul did not feel good about what that ending might be.
He was immediately distracted by people hurrying toward him, calling his name as they forced their way through the crowd of curious Gypsies. If they had not introduced themselves he would never have recognized Sam Fredericks and the Bushman !Xabbu, He might have guessed who the small, almond-eyed man was, given a slightly less confusing situation in which to consider it, but he had all but forgotten Fredericks' confession back in Troy about being a girl.
"It's . . . I'm astonished to see you both," he said. "And delighted." He hesitated. "Where . . . Where is Renie?"
!Xabbu's face fell. He shook his head.
"We don't know," Sam Fredericks explained. "We got separated."
!Xabbu seemed about to say something else, but Martine Desroubins, who it seemed had also survived the attentions of the fairy-tale crowd, was standing beside one of the wagons clapping her hands loudly. "Florimel, Paul, Javier—all of you," she called. "We must talk. Now." Suddenly distracted, she turned slowly toward the spot where Paul stood. Unlike him, she seemed to have no trouble seeing past the unfamiliar faces and forms. "Fredericks . . . !Xabbu?" She climbed down and fought her way through the crowd of refugees until she could put her arms around both of them.
Within moments Florimel had joined the group, laughing, seizing !Xabbu so hard Paul worried she would crack the little man's ribs. The Bushman seemed oddly reserved, but Paul thought it might be his own unfamiliarity with !Xabbu's human face. Even T4b allowed himself to be drawn into reunion embraces and the babble of half-articulated questions and answers.