I’m taking the stairs two at a time. Is he still breathing? I can’t feel his heart over mine, which is wildly beating. They have the corner room at the far end from the office. A pudgy young teenager is holding open the door. I recognize him from the photo Ray displayed. I rush into the room. It’s dingy, the spreads are threadbare, but it’s meticulously clean.
She’s waiting. The photo from BICC doesn’t capture her. In the photo she’s ugly. In person, her life and soul are in her gray-green eyes. She spares me not a glance. She gathers Baxter into her arms, and settles onto the end of one bed holding him in her lap. It’s hard for her to arrange the fat, bristly tail, but I scarcely notice that. It’s a pietà.
“It’s okay, kiddo. Momma’s here.” She has a warm, low voice with a husky little catch in it, and that overlay of East Coast money. The little ace reaches up and tangles his hand in the chocolate-colored hair that falls over her shoulder. “Drake,” Niobe says. “Would you go get me a Coke? I think there’s still a few cans in that machine.”
The nuclear ace goes.
“Is that wise?” I ask.
She shrugs. “You either brought people or you didn’t. And I don’t want him to see this. He knows too much about death.” She leans forward and gently kisses Baxter on the forehead. The small chest is barely rising and falling.
She’s softly humming. I don’t recognize the tune. I stand there feeling gauche and decidedly de trop, but I can neither move nor look away. So, this is death when you care.
I try to remember all the deaths I’ve dealt. I can’t.
I try to remember if I cared. I didn’t.
I try to picture holding Dad when he passes. I can’t.
I’m afraid.
The death is so subtle that I miss it. Only Niobe’s soft sobs tell me it’s happened. She closes Baxter’s eyes, quickly kisses each cheek, and hurriedly lays him down on the bed. The small body melts, leaving only a smear on the worn bedspread. She looks up at me. Her eyes are filled with tears, but she seems at peace.
“Thank you.”
I squat down in front of her. “How do you bear it? I don’t think I can.”
She pushes her hair behind her ears. She is frowning, thoughtful. “You’ll do it for him. Because you love him, and he wouldn’t leave you alone if you were dying.”
And that says it all. We sit together in silence. Then she asks, “Who are you?”
“I’m Noel Matthews. I can get you out of here. They’re going to kill him.” I jerk my thumb toward the absent Drake. “And if you try to stop them they’re going to kill you, too. There’s nothing you can do.”
“I can not leave him. That’s what I can do.”
“He’s a living bomb. They’re right, he’s too dangerous to be allowed to live.” I can feel my frustration rising.
“A lot of people are dangerous, and when they kill they mean to. Drake is a little boy. He doesn’t . . . didn’t want to hurt anybody. We have to give him that chance.”
“Why do you care so much?” I ask.
The sensitive, overly soft mouth tightens with determination. “Because this is one death I can stop.”
The door opens. “I had to get an orange pop. There wasn’t any more Coke,” Drake announces. His eyes slide across the stained bedspread and slide away. He goes to Niobe and gives her a rough and awkward hug. “I’m sorry,” he says gruffly. She hugs him tight.
I can’t believe I’m hearing myself saying, “All right, I’ll take you both, but I’ve got to make a little change first. . . .”
Won’t Get Fooled Again
Victor Milán
A FIGURE APPEARED IN midair beside the open-topped Land Rover Wolf. It floated eight feet off the crappy road and easily paced the vehicle’s twenty-two miles an hour. Which was fast enough on this surface to make John Fortune’s brain feel Shake ’n Baked. “Jesus!” Simone Duplaix yelped. Their Croat peacekeeper escorts jumped and pointed and yelled. The car swerved.
“Tell them to take it easy,” John said over his shoulder to Zvetovar, the shave-headed corporal with ears that stuck out like hairy amphora handles beneath his blue UN beret. “It’s just the Lama.”
“It creeps me out when you do that,” Snowblind said from the backseat beside the corporal. She wore a black T-shirt with the words BITCH GODDESS written on it in gold glitter. John wondered if that was really appropriate for an official UN fact-finding mission.
“I merely manifest myself in astral form,” the Lama said. He smiled in a way he probably thought was benign. John thought of it as a shit-eating grin.
Oh, great idea, John thought back. How?
The Lama was a devout coward. Right now his physical form squatted in a tent miles away from potential trouble in the middle of an armored column from the Simba Brigades, the PPA’s regular army, guarded by Brazilian peacekeepers.
“I have discerned a Nigerian roadblock awaiting you around this curve in the road,” the floating figure said.
“Good job,” John said grudgingly. “Thanks.”
“Let us see that asshole Llama do that,” the Lama said. “He lacks the Buddha nature.”
Snowblind said, “You’re a monk. You can’t be supposed to talk like that.”
“You are not the boss of me.”
She flipped him off. He gave her a sardonic namaste and vanished.
How the hell did I ever let DB talk me into changing teams? John Fortune wondered. I should be in Arabia, with Kate. “Tell your guys to look sharp,” he told Zvetovar. “We got Nigerians up ahead past these palm trees.”
Zvetovar grinned and bobbed his head. To say he understood English might be stretching things. More accurately, he occasionally responded to what John said, and even more occasionally said something John could make out. He did pass something along to his men. Probably orders.
“I don’t like this,” Simone said, shaking her head. The streaks were magenta today. The stud in her left nostril looked like a gold Egyptian scarab. It made John Fortune’s own nose twitch to look at.
The day was hot and bright. They always were, here in the Oil Rivers region of the Nigerian coast. Unless they were hot and rainy. “We’re the UN,” John said. “The Committee. We’re legit. What could go wrong?”
“Everything,” she said. “There’s war. I wish the Radical had not been killed. We could use his backup.”
“Yeah,” John said. “Well.” They could have used some of the Committee’s heavy hitters, too. Lohengrin, Earth Witch, Bubbles. Not that any of them could have matched Tom Weathers for sheer power.
He hadn’t much cared for the guy. But getting backshot into a trench full of piss was a hell of a way to go. And Simone was right. It would be comforting to know the world’s most powerful ace had their backs. Instead of what John did have: a redneck who turned into a big toad. A flying Apache with an attitude. An even surlier astral dude. A French-Canadian princess who could make people temporarily blind.
Don’t start, he thought back. “Nothing’s going to happen,” he said aloud. He drummed his fingers on the outside of the door, ignoring the way it scorched the tips. We are not here to fight, he reminded himself. This is just a fact-finding mission.
The Wolf rolled around the bend. A Fox armored recon car blocked the road. It’s menagerie-of-war day in the Oil Delta, Fortune thought. The armored car was narrow and precariously tall, like a normal sedan with big tires and a turret stacked on top. Its long-barreled cannon pointed straight at John’s nose. It was only 30mm but looked as if they could drive right up it.
A pair of utility trucks angled into the ditch to either side. Troopers in Nigerian battle dress slouched around. They didn’t point their long FN-FAL rifles at the newcomers. Maybe they thought the autocannon was enough.
A tall man in a mar
oon beret held up his hand. “Halt,” he commanded. That was one good thing about the Nigerians: English was their official language. Their accents got a bit dense sometimes, but John could talk to them.
Snowblind had to translate with their PPA allies. She could be a bit of a diva, but wasn’t a bad type. And her ace might actually come in handy if things got crosswise.
“What is your business?” the Nigerian demanded.
Isra had a point. UN PEACEKEEPERS was painted on both sides of their car in four-inch white letters. “We’re the United Nations fact-finding commission,” John said. He kept his voice level despite Sekhmet’s influence stirring in his blood like angry bees. “We’re legally entitled to go wherever we need to.”
The officer looked doubtful. He wore no rank badges: like most modern armies the Nigerians had figured out that officers’ insignia served as wizard sniper aim-points in the field. The Browning Hi-Power in a holster on his web gear in lieu of a broomstick-long assault rifle marked him as head guy even to John Fortune, who wasn’t exactly Gary Brecher the War Nerd. It struck him as kind of a wash.
The officer turned to shout in some tribal dialect to the guy in the helmet and goggles peering at them from the Fox’s cupola. John wasn’t sure that was a good sign. Nigeria usually mashed up its innumerable ethnic groups among its military units, he knew from the briefing dossiers Jayewardene had loaded onto them. Tribal strife had wracked the country since in de pen dence.
The Nigerians fought hard and mean to suppress Oil Delta ethnic groups, primarily Ijaw and Ogoni. The UN recognized their right to do so. The issue that had John Fortune and his fellow Committee members driving around through the swamps enjoying bugs and heat and having guns pointed at them was whether the horrorfest the Chinese had shot—currently the world’s hottest viral video, even though YouTube yanked uploads as quickly as they could for graphic violence—was aberration or policy.
The guy in the space helmet spoke into a chin mike. “What’re they doing?” Simone asked.
“Probably bumping us upstairs,” John said. “Must have a radio in the armored car.”
Simone sighed. She flipped open her phone and began texting somebody.
To either side of the road rose dunes of white sand, overgrown with brush and tall grass, all wispy and pale green. It didn’t look healthy. Maybe petroleum seeping from the ubiquitous oil pipelines poisoned it.
John was just feeling grateful they weren’t near a bayou right now, so that the meanest bugs had farther to fly and consequently had less energy to torment them, when a plump figure pushed through the grass on the hillock to his left.
Butcher Dagon grinned at them and gave them the reverse V-sign that was the Brit equivalent of the bird.
Fear blasted through John’s veins. His grip, always tenuous, snapped. He just kept presence of mind to yank open the door and spill himself onto the broken-shell road. Then the beast broke free. Sekhmet seized the ascendant.
The Nigerians opened panic fire at the sight of a giant golden lioness appearing in the road. Sekhmet the Destroyer saw the Croatian corporal stare at her in gap-mouthed shock before a bullet pierced his head and he slumped. The copper-haired girl yelped and dropped from sight.
The Fox’s turret gun erupted in thunder and fire. Like the troopers on the road the gunner fired high. The muzzle blast still blew the Wolf’s windscreen in. The safety glass obediently sugared. The force of the blast shotgunned the particles into the face of the driver, who hadn’t been quick enough to hit the floorboards.
The Destroyer’s ears rang from the horrific noise. It stoked her primal fury.
A flash. Sekhmet’s head swam. Her vision turned all formless white, as if she drowned in a Nile of milk. She understood: the strange-looking girl had used her power, blinding all in the vicinity. Even a Living God was not proof against that, it seemed.
But Sekhmet did not need to see. She had the senses of a beast, as well as the brain of a man.
And the wrath of a god.
Though her sensitive ears rang from the unnatural loudness of guns she smelled the soldiers’ sweat, laced with adrenaline bright as silver. Smelled the hot metal of the great iron beast, the petroleum farts of its diesel exhaust, the strange chemical reeks emitted by its weapon.
She breathed flame. The horrific shrieking that answered it was sweet as the music of ugab flute and lyre, accompanied by the crackle of fire and the smells of burning cloth and hair and man-flesh.
She bunched muscles, leapt. Her mind and body knew where her target lay. She struck the squat metal monster’s turret and clung like a locust. Her claws dug deep into metal that the men inside thought armor to protect them. She roared in amusement as much as triumph.
She heard screaming, smelled man-breath that carried traces of tobacco and a breakfast of gruel, bread, and pulses. She lashed out with a forepaw. The strike of a mortal lioness could break the neck of a wildebeest. Sekhmet the Destroyer was much stronger than that.
She felt the impact of the plastic helmet on her pads. Felt more than heard the skin and tendons and tissue and bone give way as her fury tore the gunner’s head from his neck and spun it toward the ditch.
Hot blood sprayed her face and shoulders. She yanked the headless corpse from the hatch and flung it aside. Then she drew a deep breath, thrust her muzzle into the opening that reeked of sweat and metal and chemicals, and filled the car with fire.
The screams of those trapped within exalted her.
With a bound she reached the crest of the dune from which the foe had shown her—her, Sekhmet!—disrespect. She roared again in triumph and challenge.
But the blindness still fogged her eyes like cataracts. The stinks of burning and the knife-edged clamor of ammunition bursting in the burning vehicle blanketed nose and ears. Yet she knew.
Her enemy had escaped.
She raised her head and roared. In nature lionesses did not roar. But she was Sekhmet the Destroyer. She roared.
We shall meet again, dog-spawn, her roaring said. And when we do, I shall taste your blood.
“Hei-lian!”
Walking through a well-lit corridor on the palace’s ground floor, Sun Hei-lian stopped and turned. Sprout broke from her female handlers and ran to her. She wore shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Her blond hair streamed behind her. Hei-lian had a moment to wonder why she was being taken for her usual exercise in the garden. With her father’s fall, why would the Nshombos indulge this unnatural creature?
The creature hit her in a hug so desperate it was almost a tackle. It took all Hei-lian’s taijiquan-honed balance to keep from being bowled over.
Sprout clung to her like a handful of flung muck and wept, drenching Hei-lian’s blouse. “My daddy! They killed my daddy!”
For a moment Hei-lian stood rigid. Her stomach heaved with revulsion at the contact, at the disgraceful display she’d been made a part of. Many times her life depended on fast thinking followed by faster action. Now she had no idea what to do.
I should push her away and go about my business, she thought.
Instead her arms went around the young woman and tentatively returned the hug.
Vision blurred. She felt wet heat on her cheeks. I’m crying!
Holding awkwardly on to Sprout, Hei-lian shook her head. It’s pent-up emotion—fear of what loss of Weathers might do to our hard-won position in the PPA. That’s all.
“Oh, Hei-lian,” Sprout moaned.
He means nothing to me, Hei-lian thought.
Mechanically she stroked the long golden hair. It struck her that for all the many things she knew how to do, she had no idea how to comfort someone. “There,” she said. “There, there.”
Nothing.
Even in the glaring morning sun the tracers from the BO-105 attack helicopter’s strap-on mini-gun made red streaks in the sky. Brave Haw
k wove deftly between them, great falcon’s wings spread wide.
“He can’t keep that up long,” Simone said. She had gotten minor scorches and punctures from the autocannon blast and flying glass. Our Lady of Pain had healed her without putting herself out of action for more than an hour. How she did that still made John cringe, and left Simone inclined to guilt up over it.
“Isn’t there something you can do?” he asked. “Blind the chopper dudes?”
“Not without a chance of blinding Tom. So close to the ground he might crash.”
Sitting in a fresh Land Rover, with fresh Croat escorts, John Fortune felt frustration crawl like ants throughout his body—felt the scarab stir beneath the skin of his forehead. Since Butcher Dagon turned a routine highway stop to carnage, the UN mission had been functionally at war, fighting alongside the Simba Brigades.
John couldn’t say that bothered him. The Nigerians and their Brit pals were playing the monster here. The kind of things they were doing were the things the Committee had been formed to stop. But with the Mideast occupation unraveling in sabotage and suicide bombings, he was seriously worried if the Committee would be enough.
There’s nothing we can do, he thought. Kate could have brought the chopper down with one well-thrown stone. Michelle could have taken it out with a bubble. But Kate was in Arabia, and Bubbles in New Orleans. This was just supposed to be a fact-finding mission, damn it. He squeezed his eyes shut so hard brief tears came.
Two attack choppers had jumped the small convoy out of a clear blue sky. The flat coastal swampland of green canals and white sand offered nowhere to hide. Diedrich sprang fearlessly into the air. He’d actually managed to wrench a landing skid off one gunship and whack it a few times, causing black smoke to pour from its engine housing and the bird to turn north and run for home.
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