The Terminals

by Michael F Stewart

  It was a pale, bone-colored sea. And it was a sea. So that even stopping, the hooks never ceased catching on him. He knew that to drown in a sea of hooks was never to resurface. The hooks grated as they rubbed, bone upon bone. Bone from all of those who had gone before. Resentful, eager, hungry, aware bone. Voiceless bone which could never be free of the deep. Their rubbing spoke to him, a lulling rhythmic grating that coaxed him downward despite what his disintegration would mean.

  His robe shredded and was gone. The pain favored quick jerky movements. Each inch he howled. Tears dripped from his eyes. Blood ran into the gnashing waters. He had no choice but to continue, or to fail.

  The hooks gathered his meat into tents before pulling it away in chunks. He dug his hands in again. Baiting the hooks with his flesh and then hauled. The points ripped at his chest and stomach, thighs, and groin. Soon all the skin was stripped, and blood lubricated the hooks, making for quicker passage.

  His voice was lost and his heart pounded in his ears. Charlie never grew accustomed to it; the human ability to conquer even the worst torture through loss of consciousness was gone. He was maddeningly, inhumanly aware. His only hope was that the next hell would be better, that it couldn’t possibly be worse. And that the creature in the distance roaring in pain was Hillar the Killer.

  Sinew tore. Muscles corroded. Hooks caught on bone. No longer could Charlie lift his head to keep it from the tines. The hooks flayed his throat, his chin, and then face. The dust of their rubbing clogged his nose holes and lodged in his eyes. When the loss of muscle threatened his ability to swim, he flipped on to his back. New pain. New flesh to score, but he could go forward. Above him, the sky roiled with black and blacker clouds. It was unforgiving, and cold, and mechanical, but it was a heaven to the sea of pain.

  “Help me!” he croaked to it, his jaw in agony. Throat gurgling. He stopped for a moment, to let the torment of tearing flesh dissipate, to leave only the cold burn of poison and crushing terror to consume him. Bone rasped. Waves of hooks crested and ripped, crested, and ripped. They lapped away his ears and hollowed his cheeks. The cold press closed about his eyes as he sank.

  “Help yourself,” he whispered in reply. He took an agonizing backstroke. Then another. When he craned his neck, he saw shore. Hooks crashed against it.

  Charlie bore down and swam closer until his skull pressed against something firmer than the hook sea. He pulled himself on to the beach, its barbs jabbing into him like caltrops. The bases of his feet were one of the few areas not entirely stripped. He stumbled on them and let the bony spurs of the beach chew his soles. Flesh sloughed from his shoulders as he shambled to the crest of a dune and looked on.

  He dropped to his knees.

  In the nimbus of light, a golden-robed woman led Hillar forward. Beyond the last scattering of bone hooks and bone sand, the beach disappeared, replaced by a white nothingness except for the woman who seemed unconcerned with the gnawed fingers she held. Charlie laughed—a choking sound he barely heard. Never had he known the absence of pain to be such rapture. Never had he been so needful of a reward.

  The leg beneath Hillar’s right knee was missing and so he hobbled. The light cast sheen over his shiny red bare muscles and tendons. The tattoos lifted in scraggly remnants, and Charlie could only hope that at least they might now be free. He noted the crystal dancing at Hillar’s neck and urged himself to action.

  Charlie drew himself to his feet, the pain greater for all its freshness. Darkness closed its curtains about him, and he fought for consciousness, slipping to the ground. Hillar turned, eyeless and earless, but seeing, and he grinned with his bare jaw and nose-less face. He clutched the thin waist of the woman. She hugged him closer, pressing her breast against his stomach and supporting him so that he could hop the remaining distance into the promise of light.

  And as darkness fell, Charlie remembered the crystal, the mission. He remembered the name.

  IAO. But he had no throat, or voice, and his chest glistened white with bony ribs. His fingers traced the letters in the sands.

  It was enough. A woman came and held Charlie, and he felt the press of her breast against his bare bone, he heard the dulcet voice, and he ignored that the woman’s skin was closely scaled, and that her eyes were the dull matte black of a shark. Together they reached the light, and Charlie was glad because nothing could be worse than the sea of hooks. Nothing.

  Tears of gratitude sprang to his eyes, blurring his vision in the glare. He eased back onto a plush divan. Fingers ran over Charlie’s thighs; they slipped through the crack of his buttocks; they traced up his back and circled the nape of his neck. The light was so bright to be blinding, and he captured only flashes of shadow. He sucked honey from a slender digit and then two. Mouths sucked at him and his pleasure redoubled. As with the pain in the sea—barely a memory—there was no soreness, no lapse in his ability for coitus. No ceiling to pleasure. His vows forgotten. His hands moved seemingly of their own accord, tracing to her shoulders, to the soft spot where neck met collarbone.

  A tongue traced up his spine. Only a steadily growing hunger marred Charlie’s ecstasy. A hunger briefly sated in the throes of orgasm. His thumbs pressed and fingers tightened, closing on one another. As the woman screamed, he quaked as he came. Quaked with the tension in his muscles, which he released in a sudden roar of power, throwing the body to the altar and grasping for the next.

  Charlie shut his eyes against the pain of the now too-bright light, and shut his ears against the pain of the remembered scream. Light shone red beneath his closed lids. As the light swelled, so too did his need. When a shadow passed before the glare, he grasped for it, catching the dark shoulders of the form and jamming himself into it until the hunger was gone. His partner cooed and moaned encouragement. But in a moment, the hunger multiplied.

  Fingers found his member, and he tossed his head back as his body shuddered. But the hunger returned, one, two. Quicker. Hunger and guilt and now disgust. The need was too strong. He grabbed the figure’s hair and twisted the shadow into him. Not enough. Again his fingers found her nape and squeezed. Screaming, and for a brief moment he was free and could think—then passion surged. And he sought out the shadow, its honeyed fingers. Charlie lunged and missed, only clutching the emptiness of his stomach.

  The shadow teased. Charlie caught something, a wrist perhaps, and pulled it to him, and he groped for a hole, and finding nothing, he tore one and drove himself there, hooking fingers into ribs, until he was done.

  One second. Not even. The briefest release, but sublime. Hollowed out, he needed more.

  But the cooing and easy tones of his lover had turned to taunts. The honey was gone, replaced by dry flesh, but Charlie was hungry. He found a spot between two bones lubricated with his diminishing spittle and, fingers clutched around the spinal column, for an instant, was nourished as it splintered. And with the snap came the scream a final time and he knew it. He’d heard it once before, loud despite the distance as he sprinted from Jo, as Jo had died in the park, alone and calling.

  Something mumbled in the din of Charlie’s need. It prodded him. It shook him to awareness.

  The pleasure was suddenly ripped away. And he was left empty. No more shadows. No more light. Only hunger, guilt, and his need. He humped at stone and the bones of souls trapped here long ago.

  “There’s an abandoned grain elevator off the rails near the town of Gramsbeak.”

  Release, and for that fraction of time Charlie could think again. Hillar spoke. “You’ll find the kids there.”

  “Thank you, Charlie.” The disembodied voice was Attila’s, but Charlie knew they didn’t address him.

  Melodic voices decayed into fury. Their spell cracked by the words through the crystal.

  “Attila.” Charlie gasped and fell from his bed, landing hard. He clawed at his eyes to peel away what glued them.

  “Good luck,” Hillar’s voice rasp
ed.

  Charlie screamed. Finally the mesh of his lashes broke, and he could see.

  Stone altars, tipped at each corner with a spout for drainage, stretched eternally. Each one was a duplicate of the one buried in his ancestral memory, the one pictured before the cowl-framed monk and his human sacrifice. The one upon which Seth had discovered gnosis while killing his fellow Borborite, Theudas. But Charlie knew no gnosis, despite the ache of his hands, despite the sacrifice of Jo. Experience was the way of the Borborite.

  Charlie leaned against his altar, skeletal and wasted. Through gaps in his chest wall, his spark flashed feebly. On other altars lay bones. On some, sickening forms mounted bone or mashed themselves into rock, before slumping to rub again. But on another stood Hillar.

  “ASTAPHANOS,” the killer cried and darkness oozed down from above like an insect’s proboscis. It curled about his waist and lifted him.

  Charlie shambled from one altar to the next, his bones clattering with each impact. Hillar laughed, whole again. Climbing to the top of an altar, Charlie took a final leap upward and jumped higher than he thought possible, his bony fingers brushing Hillar’s heel, but he was too late. He fell, writhing through the air, back to the ground.

  “ASTAPHANOS!” He longed for the Archon’s darkest grip.

  Chapter 21

  “Can we trust it?” I asked, sitting beside Attila on Morph’s cot.

  On the bed where she lay, Morph was making annoyed grunts at us. Deeth administered her lie detector test. I didn’t want to act on Charlie’s most recent declaration. I didn’t want to leave Morph. If I was honest with myself, I’d have said that I sought comfort from her. Why does a message from a dying person hold more weight? Why is it that looming death strips the banality from words, to make us listen? Is it only that the dying have so few words left?

  “Excuse me, but would you get the fuck off my bed?” Morph waggled her fingers. “I’m trying to die here, and where I come from that’s an important life event.”

  The general snickered from the doorway, hovering like biding Thanatos. I knew he’d duck behind the mirror before the injection, however; he was a voyeur, not a participant.

  “Sorry, Morph,” I mumbled, but didn’t move nor take my eyes from Attila, who continued to stare into his crystal. “So?”

  “What choice do we have?” he asked. “We’ve made contact again. That’s good. Charlie’s there—we know that.”

  I wanted to believe. “So we don’t need another Euth.”

  “And what are the five pillars of Sunni faith?” Deeth’s baritone rumbled about the room.

  Charlie was still here, too, in front of us, gray and collapsing. It had pissed Morph off, but Attila was insisting Charlie remain because the connection was so fragile, or so he explained.

  Despite her annoyance and the straps around her chest and arm, Morph looked at peace. Everything but her face was covered in white silk, so that her expression floated over the bed like an exotic moon. Her black eyes sparkled and she drew shallow breaths. I had seen her do this between shots of morphine and suspected she avoided the press of her diaphragm against her liver. She was no longer on any drugs.

  “Shahada, Salah, Zakah, Saum, and Hajj.” The words were like a melody, and she spoke them with a reverence I’d never held for anything except my father—a father I hadn’t known.

  “Blah, blah, blah … stop wasting time,” the general snapped.

  Deeth swiveled on his seat, eyes swinging to aim at the general. I couldn’t see the look on Deeth’s face, but the general blanched, stuck his mighty chin into his neck, and held up a hand.

  “I meant Christine.” His hand fluttered with impatience, and I saw his fear of the doctor in the motion. What did Deeth hold over the general? Up until then, I’d thought Deeth was an order taker, but there was more here. I couldn’t help but smile. “Colonel, get on the horn to Volt.”

  I looked to Attila. “Anything more from Charlie?”

  “Sorry, Chris.”

  Fingers found my hand, and I looked over at Attila before I realized that Morph had taken it. I leaned in so that her lips were an inch from my ear. “Go get the kids,” she whispered. “Then escape this hellhole.”

  I jerked back, and she was smiling, answering another of Deeth’s questions that I had somehow missed.

  Although Attila looked like he wanted to know what she had said, he remained quiet.

  I bent and kissed Morph’s forehead, trying to think of something witty to say. I couldn’t come up with anything. “It was nice to have met you, Morph.”

  “Kade,” she said. “My name’s Kade.”

  “It was a pleasure to call you friend, Kade.” I nodded and headed for the door, accelerating to brush past the general before the tightness in my chest could reach my eyes.

  It was dark on the helipad, but Pat was near the door, smoking a cigarette. “Can’t say I like the night shift,” he said. “Too busy lately.” It was three A.M.

  I dialed Volt, and he answered on the fourth ring, “Better be good.”

  “Agent Volt? Christine Kurzow.”

  “Go ahead, Colonel.”

  “We have another location.”

  He was silent, and I looked at the phone to check the connection.

  “You know. No one can figure out how you came up with the last one. We puzzled it out, and we’re pretty good at that sort of thing, but no theory holds water. And now you’re back with another.”

  Pat saluted me and climbed the three steps to the elevated pad.

  “Yes, Agent, I have another.”

  “And your intel? What’s the intel leading to this belief?”

  “We believe the intel to be accurate.”

  “Like last time, because last time—”

  “I know what happened … Tell the media the truth, that the intel is coming from the Army and to bash it if they want. We’ll send them a memo so redacted they won’t know the year it was written.”

  “This isn’t about who will shoulder the blame,” he retorted. “It’s about men and women. Dead ones.”

  “And children. Dying children, Agent. If you haven’t forgotten,” I said, and then because Morph was dying and I think I needed to rationalize what I did, I added: “We weren’t drafted. We joined our units on a voluntary basis, knowing the risks. But those kids, they were on a field trip.”

  “Goddammit.” And his voice grew distant as he spoke to someone I imagined to be his wife. He came back: “Give it to me.”

  “Grain elevator, Gramsbeak.”

  “What’s your ETA?”

  “Three hours.”

  The helicopter whined, and the rotors began to slowly rotate.

  “That’ll make it fifty-two hours for those children, Colonel,” the agent said before hanging up. “I haven’t forgotten.”

  “Said to wait, saidtowait, saidtowait,” she half-sang, half-chanted. In the bell of their prison, the words echoed, tinny and sharp. At Ming’s side, Cordell’s breathing had grown ragged.

  If Ming could have, she would have placed her palms over her ears. One of the other kids had begun to jerk and spasm. Ming wondered at the medic-alert bracelet she’d seen on Anya. Anya was Scandinavian or something, definitely had Viking in her blood, tallest in the class and not in a willowy way, stronger than Ming could ever hope to be—like one of the Hawkeye line backers—but she’d had a stainless-steel pendant with a red snake wrapped around a red staff. Ming suspected Anya was having a seizure. She rapped her head against the ladder cage.

  “Saidtowaitsaidtowait—wait!” The woman screeched angrily and gripped someone and shook them while she screamed. “Not you, not you.”

  Not Alistair, not Alistair, Ming thought. Take me, take me.

  But when hands, bony and strong clutched her shoulders, she cried out and didn’t want to die. Where was her dad? Her mom? Why
hadn’t they come for her?

  Everyone was screaming and moaning and weeping, and Ming swallowed her fright. The hands left her, and after a few minutes, the crying settled. No one had the energy to cry long. And Anya, or whoever, had stopped jerking against the ladder.

  Ming’s arms were asleep due to holding them above her head, and her wrists bled where they chafed against the metal. She pulled at the handcuffs, and either due to the fasting or the length of time her arms had been held up, they slipped right up to the base of her knuckles. The darkness hid her surprise.

  “I dun wanna die.” Luke’s lament broke the quiet, running from a whine to full scream.

  With one hand nearly free, Ming’s resolve returned.

  “Luke,” Ming croaked. “Stop it.”

  And he did.

  “You’re not going to die, Luke,” Ming said. “No one …” She bit her lip, glad for darkness. “No one is going to die.” Her voice held steady with the hope inspired by the loose handcuffs.

  Quick steps rang out, ending abruptly. Close. Ming sniffed the woman’s perfume, lilac now laced with coppery blood. She could feel her captor’s breath on her arms, smelling the chocolate and caramel from the energy bars the woman ate, and something else, like spoiled meat.

  A flashlight blinked on, not a foot from Ming’s nose. She couldn’t see past its glare and was unable to shut her eyes to it.

  She turned her head away, and next to her, Jake hung limp. When Ming kicked his shins, he barely moved. People were going to die. Ming had to do something.

  “Mommy! Moooommmmy!” Luke began again.

  Ming sensed that if everyone were quiet, they all would stay quiet; they could be brave together. But silence was a thin veneer.

  “Ommigod, ommigod, ommigod,” someone suddenly chanted. “She’s been eating Jackie … eating Jackie.”