Kirev's Door

by JC Andrijeski

  “We have narrowed down possibilities,” Wreg said, frowning over his shoulder at her.

  “Is it what the Father said?” she pressed, rearranging her grip on the gun as she took a step closer to them. “Is it really from seer bodies they are doing this?”

  Kirev tensed, looking to Wreg to hear his answer.

  Wreg didn’t answer her, though.

  Kirev went back to watching Ute’s face, still half-lying on the carpet. For the first time, he saw the anxiety in her light, just as he’d heard it in her voice. Whatever this thing was, or whatever she thought it was, it bothered her. It bothered her a lot.

  Kirev was tempted to ask again, but remained silent when he felt the harder, warning pulse on Wreg’s light.

  Turning back towards Ute, he held out a hand, motioning a question in seer sign language. He repeated the request aloud when she didn’t look over.

  “Sister, could you help me up?” he said politely.

  She looked at him that time, the frown still etched in her face.

  Then, seeming to see something in his light or perhaps his expression, she exhaled, walking up to him. Grabbing the hand he’d extended to her, she yanked him unceremoniously to his feet, ignoring his groan when it jarred his injured arm. Her light remained focused on what Wreg and the others were doing when he looked at her next.

  He could feel her frustration as she stared at Wreg’s broad back.

  More than that, though, he could feel her fear.

  The two of them only stood there though, not speaking again as they watched the other three work.

  THEY LEFT THE building altogether approximately thirty minutes later.

  It was dark downstairs as they left…ominously so.

  Kirev felt nerves shooting through him as his mind fought with implications.

  When he reached the bottom of that staircase leading into the main room overlooking the ocean and the dimming lights of the Cliff House and the darker structure of the Sutro Baths, Kirev saw that most of the guests he remembered were asleep on the floor by the balcony. The only person standing there now was the female seer in the revealing dress with that strangely colored, dark red hair.

  She smiled at him when she saw him.

  Then she frowned when she saw the blood staining his jacket where he held his arm. By then it had seeped through the brown material enough that she could likely smell it, too.

  “Brother,” she said, walking towards them. “What happened, little brother?”

  The warmth in her voice and light caused a slight ripple to go through Kirev’s own aleimi. He fought to suppress that reaction, even as one of the male seers behind him chuckled.

  “Be nice to him, Venai,” the seer said in a friendly voice. “I think he’s crushing on you…although brother Wreg will be annoyed if you encourage him, I suppose.”

  Kirev gave the male an annoyed look, but when he looked back at the red-haired seer, she only smiled.

  “Brother,” she said to Kirev, taking his good arm. “We will patch you up in the car.”

  Kirev saw Wreg motion to the other two male seers to go ahead, probably to get the car so they wouldn’t be waiting visibly outside. Kirev watched them jog towards the front door, even as he fought not to remember what he’d seen upstairs.

  Both of the female seers from upstairs were with them, too, the one who had been Bilford’s prisoner now wearing the robe her human owner had been wearing. Wreg had left the host’s body on the heart next to Dan’s, only with a hole blown in the middle of his forehead, something he hadn’t done to Dan himself. Wreg had offered to activate Dan’s key explosive while they were there…or even to shoot him…or let Kirev shoot him himself…but Kirev’s lust for the human’s blood had waned by then.

  He’d only shaken his head, telling him he didn’t need to see it.

  He knew his refusal would not save Dan’s life, of course.

  He understood the reasons for that, but still, he did not wish to see it.

  “You’ve got the charges set?” Wreg asked the female, Venai, his voice low.

  She gave him a seer’s nod, affirming it also with a slash of her hand. “It is done. The place will be wiped clean, brother. Food for the gods…” she ended in quote.

  “Did you get all of them?”

  She frowned, clicking softly as she folded her arms. “No. That davos ridvak Marcous got away…he had his own security here, as you suspected. I could not stop them. I thought they would stay to fight, but instead they only left the other worms to die and escaped out the balcony…” She motioned towards the darkness of the forest with one pale hand, clicking under her breath. “I should have expected that, I suppose. No loyalty even to his own.”

  Wreg followed her gaze, frowning briefly. Then he shrugged, seer-fashion.

  “It does not matter,” he said, gruff.

  She gave him a disbelieving look. “Easy for you to say, brother.”

  “It does not matter,” he repeated. “We will find him.”

  She snorted, folding her arms tighter. “I will find him, you mean,” she grumbled. “But by all means, brother…you can pretend you will do this thing with me, if it flatters you.”

  Wreg smiled, his teeth showing in the dark.

  Then he startled Kirev, wrapping an arm around the red-haired seer and pulling her roughly against him. She unfolded her arms, but didn’t push him away, softening her body against his when he kissed her passionately on the mouth.

  Kirev tensed a little, then flushed, stepping away from the two of them and fighting discomfort when they didn’t stop right away. When Wreg finally raised his head, ending the kiss, a coil of separation pain left his light.

  “I will help you, sister,” he assured her, releasing her from his arms. “I vow it.” He glanced at Kirev then, grinning as he sent him a dense pulse of warmth. “Just don’t go flirting with this youngster and making me jealous, sister…and I will follow you to the ends of the earth.”

  She rolled her eyes, clicking at him as she shoved at his large chest with her hands.

  “You are a liar, brother Wreg,” she grumbled at him, smiling. “And I’ll flirt with whoever I want, for your information. Moreover, I will stitch up our young recruit for you…since you’ve done such a poor job at keeping him in once piece.”

  Wreg rubbed Kirev’s shoulder affectionately, still smiling at Venai.

  “He did well,” Wreg said. “Barely even whimpered. And he managed to move fast enough to save his own life…even being fired upon from point-blank range.” Pride touched Wreg’s voice, even as he squeezed Kirev’s shoulder in a muscular hand.

  “Although he cursed up a blue streak,” he joked. “You should have heard him, ilya…it might have made even you blush.”

  “Your empathy is overwhelming him I’m sure, brother,” she said, clicking at him. “But why don’t we get out of here before Marcous and his traitor lap-dogs decide to call the authorities and set us on fire for their amusement?”

  “I will protect you from the authorities, my queen…”

  She snorted again. “Right. Sure you will. Just like you protected our young brother here.”

  Even in the sharpness of their rapid back and forth, Kirev could not miss the affection he heard and felt sliding between the two of them. Despite the slight pang of jealousy he felt, a smile touched his lips, just from standing so close to so much warmth.

  Wreg chuckled, then motioned them all towards the door with his head.

  “We’re out of here,” he said, winking at Kirev. “The queen has spoken.”

  Releasing the red-haired female entirely, he glanced at Ute next. His voice turned gruff, sounding full military again.

  “Go tell Rigor and Tan to bring in the gasoline,” he said. “The three of you handle clean up while we patch up the pup here and contact the secondary team…then meet us at the outer gates.” His words grew more warning. “Don’t screw around, sister. Venai’s right…we have to assume SCARB is on their way. I’ll have engines
running. Work fast.”

  “Of course, boss,” Ute said, giving him a respectful salute.

  Kirev watched her jog towards the front door, her light sharp, purposeful.

  He found himself struggling with a sudden burst of emotion-laden pride.

  He was a part of something in this.

  He was truly a part of something.

  6

  BLOOD AND BONES

  KIREV COULD SEE the flames from where the delivery-style truck stood on the edge of the long driveway, even before the seer tasked with starting the blaze had returned to the vehicle.

  He stared up at the top-story windows as several burst out at once, belching smoke into the night sky before lighting up the darkness with higher tongues of flame.

  Dan would be gone by now.

  Hopefully he had died before the blaze reached his skin. Kirev had heard a few gunshots and saw flashes by upper story windows before the fire began. Knowing Wreg, he would have ordered the seers to shoot any of those still breathing before they started, as a precaution if nothing else. Kirev imagined one of them handling that end of things while the other two poured gasoline all over the carpets, floors and furniture, spraying it out of the blood-red metal cans.

  Kirev had watched them pull nine of those cans from the back of the truck before they disappeared inside.

  It turned out, they didn’t need the explosive on the key, after all.

  Even as Kirev thought it, a hollow concussion sound came from the top story of the mansion-like house overlooking the ocean.

  He heard Wreg and the female Venai muttering under their breaths.

  It took a few seconds before he realized they were saying death prayers for the beings they had just sent to their Ancestors. Not just the seers…the humans, too.

  Flushing a little when he realized the thought hadn’t even occurred to him, even knowing seer lives had been lost up there too, Kirev tried to remember if he’d ever learned the proper words to say, at least in their entirety. He struggled with disjointed pieces of memory from his early childhood, trying to pull them apart, when Venai patted his leg with her hand.

  “Do not worry, brother,” she said, smiling at him. “We will say them for you this time…and I will teach them to you when we return to camp, if you like.”

  Kirev smiled at her. “I would like that,” he confessed. “Thank you, sister.”

  She had already stitched up his arm.

  She’d started work on him right away, as soon they first climbed into the back of the truck, where someone had already pulled a first aid kit from one of the canvas bags. She’d worked quickly, and more or less in the dark, but with obviously practiced hands and eyes.

  Since then, Kirev had put his dress shirt and jacket back on, bloody and torn though they were. He’d done it mostly because he was cold. The salt-laced air bit through the thin material even now, tunneling through the open back door of the truck.

  He was watching the flames climb higher, realizing there must be people from the Cliff House watching that fire now, given the height of the flames as they broke through part of the roof on the north side of the house. He was still watching sparks rise up into the night sky in fascination when three shadowy forms appeared on the snaking driveway, sprinting up the gravel track between the overhanging trees. They no longer carried the gasoline cans with them, Kirev noticed, although Ute still carried a gun in one hand.

  The two males climbed into the back of the truck without preamble while Ute sprinted for the front of the vehicle, opening the passenger door next to Wreg. Without waiting, Tan smacked his hand against the dividing wall between the cab and the trailer to signal Wreg to leave, while Rigor reached for the back doors to close them. He swung them shut right as another explosion rocked the lower floors of the turreted house.

  Wreg revved the motor, putting the truck into gear as they began to bounce down the last segment of driveway for the paved road below.

  Looking back at the flaming windows of the five story house, Kirev felt a faint whisper of regret as he remembered the beauty of those long windows out to the sea.

  “Don’t cry over those fuckers,” Tan retorted, glancing over his shoulder at Kirev as Rigor flipped the inside lock to the back doors. “Don’t you dare cry over them, little brother. Fucking slavers, every last one of them. This place is built on blood and bones, little brother…blood and bones. It’s only a good to make it burn…”

  “Do you have to be so morbid?” Venai muttered, squeezing Kirev’s thigh.

  “He needs to learn,” Tan said, unapologetic as he glared at her. “Harboring romantic fantasies about humans and their pretty castles is a delusion our people cannot afford, sister. The sooner he learns that, the better…”

  “Oh, leave him alone,” Venai scolded, inserting her body between Kirev’s and Tan’s and squeezing his thigh protectively again. “He’s young, brother. Barely above a child. You cannot badger him all the time with your dogma and expect him to understand…or sympathize for very long if everything is always in blacks and whites. You’ll only alienate him in the end…and other young seers like him. At best, you’ll convince them we are nothing but bitter, vengeful murderers, too twisted with hate to see clearly.”

  “He needs to understand the point of this exercise,” Tan began, angry.

  “The point is to save more of our people,” she cut in, her voice openly warning. “Vengeance on its own is never noble, brothers. Never. If that is the only thing that drives you, then you are no better than a worm yourself…”

  The other two seers fell silent at her words.

  Kirev saw Tan glanced towards Wreg who sat in the front cab, driving the truck next to Ute in the passenger seat. The window was open between the cargo area and that driver’s bench, but the older seer had no comment to what his girlfriend had said. He didn’t even look over his shoulder, but continued to drive, staring straight ahead.

  As for Kirev himself, he only nodded, not speaking either.

  He knew Tan was right.

  Yet, it was strange that a part of him still hated to see such beauty destroyed.

  7

  ORGANIC

  KIREV WALKED DOWN the cement-block walled corridor, in the midst of eight other seers, including the five he’d already been with at the Sutro Heights mansion. Two other seers had been left at the front of the building, to guard the entrance, and communicate with them on walkie-talkies in the event anyone approached the building.

  The building itself had been nondescript from the outside.

  Not even bunker nondescript…more like a run-down schoolhouse in the middle of nowhere nondescript, with a few high windows but otherwise featureless and in need of a few coats of paint. A few hours east of anywhere in the Bay Area that had a real population, the complex might have been unfindable if it hadn’t been for the twenty-foot-high electric fence that surrounded its perimeter, topped with razor wire, and the smaller cement bloc wall that surrounded the main buildings.

  Most of the structures Kirev had seen in the last few miles before they arrived had been barns, along with a few single-story ranch houses, hardware stores and gas stations. Even the road that split off from the main highway had been dirt more often than it had been paved, and Kirev had glimpsed cows through the back windows of the truck as they drove by in the moonlight.

  Venai and the others told him that a small airport lived out here too, used almost exclusively by cowboy crop dusters, fair balloons and the occasional recreational flyer. The labs utilized the airport too, but generally they trucked in what they needed from the highway itself and other back roads.

  Getting inside hadn’t been difficult really, not compared to what Kirev expected.

  There had been security guards, of course. Locks. Guns.

  Most of it was useless against seers. They’d used pushes and the stolen badges to get past security at the main gates; using more of a middle way kind of approach, as Wreg put it, to avoid raising any immediate alarm. They knew if the com
plex was unreachable for long, given what they’d left behind at Sutro Heights, there was a good chance the military would be sent out here, since it was a government-funded research facility.

  The seers at the front desk would cover any communications between the lab building itself and those front gates.

  Wreg led them from there into a series of shafts where they rappelled down the walls with hooks and cables versus using the elevator, which utilized a key that none of them had been able to get. That part, while new to Kirev himself, went smoothly enough, too…so much so that he wondered why they had bothered to go after the humans at that cocktail party at all.

  Now that they were in the real downstairs, however, several floors below the main labs, which were primarily housed in the cement basement of the aboveground structure, Kirev began to understand the need for the preliminary infiltration. He especially understood why they’d risked so much for the blueprints they’d pulled off of old man Bilford.

  How they would have ever found this place without them, he had no idea.

  Wooden doors with white-painted windows lined the cement corridor every ten or so paces on either side of the white, cement corridor. Kirev saw numbers etched on most of those, and each of them appeared to be locked when he scanned them with his eyes.

  Wreg didn’t pause at any of them, however. He walked through the long passageway with barely a glance to either side, other than to occasionally send thoughts to one of the others who had been with him to read Bilford.

  Kirev might not have known about that much if they didn’t occasionally verbalize their responses to one another, if with maddeningly cryptic brevity.

  “Yes…then right,” Tan said, affirming something Wreg sent to him.

  “I don’t think so…” Wreg began. “Ah. Yes. Right. I see what you mean.”

  “Another one?” Rigor muttered. “What if we can’t?”

  “I can feel it now,” Wreg said reassuringly. “It won’t be a problem, brother. Trust me.”