by Peter Clines
His mind raced through possible scenarios and solutions. The ants listed obstacles and assets. Four bugmen left in the room, thought Mike, and the tall thing. Against him, Jamie, and Sasha. Plus a pile of Marine equipment they didn’t know how to use.
He came up with three options. He didn’t have the resources for any of them.
Sasha shuffled over to join them. One of the bugmen had circled around to flank her. It was bleeding from its high shoulder. It took another step toward them, reached out, and wrenched the spear out of Olaf’s shoulder. The body tipped and thudded to the floor. His eyes were half open.
The tall monster looked down at them and blinked its one human eye. It walked around them. It moved like an octopus, each limb curling up and then stretching back down.
Mike turned to watch it. So did Jamie and Sasha. They shuffled to keep their distance from the stitched-together thing, and something bumped Mike’s heel. They’d backed up to Black’s body.
Less than ten feet from the remote.
“So fortunate,” the patchwork man lisped through his shredded lips. “First to feed our Great Lord.” It moved to the ramp. They slid away again, backing toward the tanks. It let them move away. Its mouth pulled into a tight grimace. The remote slipped away in Mike’s peripheral vision.
Then he blinked, and when he opened his eyes things were different.
Pattern recognition kicked in. As a child, he’d always been good at the game where there were two similar pictures with a collection of differences. He’d always been able to solve them in seconds, faster than he could write down the answers or say them aloud.
It took him four seconds to spot all the differences on the main floor. At the workstation, the cushions on one of the chairs had changed from dark green to dark blue. In his peripheral vision, there were now three black tool chests. On the far side of the room, a second warning light had appeared on the wall. And…
He counted off more seconds. One by one, the others noticed the changes. The patchwork man stared behind them. Mike glanced over his shoulder to see one of the bugmen studying a fourth nitrogen tank that had appeared. Sasha looked at the chairs. The bugman that had corralled her twisted its head to the tank to see what had caught her eye.
Jamie looked at the light, and then her eyes slid over to—
“Look at me,” whispered Mike.
She turned and stared at his cheek, then at his left eye. She took three deep breaths through her nose and let them whistle out as she tried to get control.
“Look at the tool chests. How many are there?”
“Did you see the—”
“Don’t. How many tool chests?”
Jamie swallowed. “Four. Three black ones and the silver one.” She blinked. “No, wait. It’s gold now. Gold with black trim, I think.”
“Good. Don’t look at it. Try to tell Sasha. She can’t look at it.”
She nodded and shifted her feet. Her hips swiveled and carried her over toward Sasha.
He made a point of staring up at the patchwork man. It noticed him after a moment and stared back. The two small eyes were just black dots, but the human eye looked down at him. Its lid blinked in a slow, deliberate manner.
In his peripheral vision he could see the rings. Not quite in the corner of his eye, but close to the ten o’clock position. The monsters hadn’t been looking at the rings when the change happened. They still weren’t looking. In their minds, the ring was the one place trouble couldn’t come from.
Up at position fourteen, a loop of duct tape had reappeared. It was a three-inch strip of silver against the off-white of the plastic housings. Easy to overlook among all the supports and hoses and cables.
He could just see the C4 charge poking out between the two rings.
FIFTY-TWO
Mike summoned the ants. For his whole life he’d kept them locked away, letting them out in streams and clusters. He needed all of them now.
He needed to stop being Mycroft and become Sherlock.
The ants carried out swarms of images and sounds and raw facts for him. The scale model of the main floor grew, spun, zoomed in again and again to show him different details.
Other ants carried out the U.S. Marshals scene again, even though it wasn’t entirely relevant. He looked at similar moments and images from movies and real life. He was pretty sure he had what he needed.
“Same plan as before,” he whispered to Jamie.
“What?”
“You’re not an alpha predator,” Mike said to the patchwork man.
The tall creature turned from the Albuquerque Door and blinked twice. “I’m sorry,” it said. Again, Mike was struck by the prissy aspect of the expression. Whoever the patchwork man had been before, he’d probably been very high maintenance. “Pardon me?”
Mike tried to stretch himself a little taller. He gestured at the bugman over by the workstation. “You’re not an alpha predator like them,” he repeated. “So what are you?”
The patchwork man’s human eye shifted. The hairless brow furrowed. The shredded lips moved, forming silent, unreadable words. It made Mike think of a fish.
And then the creature let out a few wet sounds. For a moment he thought it was choking. He saw the same hope in Jamie’s eyes.
Then its chuckle became a full laugh.
“The seraphs are not alpha predators,” it lisped. Its stitched-together chest puffed out. “They are the jackals waiting the return of the lion. The dust before the endless sandstorm. They are the tide going out before the wave comes in.”
It recited the words with halts and accents. High maintenance and more than a bit smug, Mike thought. The cadence reminded him of overzealous people reading from the Bible, even though he didn’t recognize any of the passages.
“So what’s that make you?”
The slender creature uncoiled a long finger and touched the tip to its shredded lips. “I was a man,” it said after a moment. “A family man who thought he understood the lessons of his congregation. Now I am like Enoch, ascended to become the voice of my Lord, and remade in the divine image with the flesh of Charles and Lucas and Howard and Timothy.” The finger moved down the opposite arm, touching each section between the stitches.
The ants searched for a reference to the names, listed them in different orders, and found nothing. Mike nodded and counted to six. He didn’t break eye contact with the creature. “One more question.”
“Of course,” said the creature. “Please make the most of your time as my Lord draws near.”
He stared at its human eye. “Do you know what proprioception is?”
The patchwork man blinked at him. So did Jamie and Sasha.
“It’s one of the few neurological terms I know,” Mike admitted after a moment. “One of those extra senses you don’t hear about often. It’s how you know where your body parts are even when you can’t see them. Like how you can reach into your back pocket without looking.”
The creature loomed over him, and he retreated from it with a trio of nervous steps. But he didn’t break eye contact. He could see Jamie tensing in the corner of his vision.
“In my case,” he continued, still staring at the creature’s eyes, “it’s useful because I can remember where everything else is, too. So I can leave the lights off a lot of the time. I don’t need to look at things around me to pick them up. And I can aim that way, too.”
He reached back without looking, grabbed Black’s pistol off the workstation, and fired at the target behind him.
Things slowed down as Mike took in every detail he could.
The recoil wrenched his wrist around, but the ants showed him diagrams and angles and he aimed again.
The patchwork man broke the stare after the first shot. It roared. Spittle rained on Mike’s face as he fired a second shot. He heard one of the bugmen—the seraphs—hiss behind him.
The one by the nitrogen tanks.
Jamie flinched away from the gunshots and lunged forward. Sasha was a few steps behind
her.
The tall creature shoved Mike aside on his third shot. It loped past him.
The lone bugman on the pathway had one of its arms up. The arm with the spear. It was already pulled back. Its eyes went between Mike and Jamie, picking a target. Mike heard a louder hiss behind him. A cold breeze hit his back. He braced himself and took a step away from the tanks. He swung the pistol around to aim at the seraph on the pathway.
The other seraph by the far workstation, the one with the wounded arm, growled at him. It reached for the spear that had impaled Sann, but its movements were slow.
Jamie’s foot hit the ramp.
Mike took another step and squeezed the trigger two more times. His first shot punched through the cloak to hit the seraph in the thigh. The second round went straight through the rough leather and vanished through the rings as the seraph hurled its spear.
The nitrogen tanks exploded.
There was no heat, just a blast of freezing air. It slammed him into the far workstation and saved his life. The spear that was aimed at his chest wobbled and caught him in the side under his arm. The force and speed of the glancing blow shattered bone. His ribs blazed with heat and pain. The shaft sliced through cloth, flesh, and muscle.
A chunk of metal hit him hard in the back, and a second one slashed his calf.
Another second passed. His ribs felt like broken glass grinding under his skin. He could picture needles of bone breaking off as they rubbed against each other. He was wet with blood. The arm holding the pistol shook. He had no idea how he’d managed to hold on to the gun.
A chill ran through his body, like stepping into a cold pool. It could’ve been the cold air or blood loss. He wasn’t sure which.
Jamie was sprawled on the ramp. Mike couldn’t see any blood. He counted off another second and saw her take a breath. He didn’t see Sasha anywhere and figured she’d been knocked down on the other side of the ramp.
The seraph on the pathway pushed itself up onto all fours. A gash in its side leaked dark blood onto the pathway. Its large eye was a wet socket. The two small ones glared at him, then down at Jamie. Its mouth opened to display the forest of narrow fangs.
His arm came up with the pistol and fired twice. The explosion still rang in his ears so the gunshots were muffled and flat. They both hit it in the torso, but nowhere near center. The creature let out another clicking growl and crouched lower. It reminded him of a dog getting ready to charge.
Then one of its arms collapsed under it and it slumped on the pathway. The cloak settled around it and grew still.
At least two seraphs dead. Maybe three.
Mike shifted his weight against the workstation and tried to balance. His knees were loose. It was as if they’d become ball and socket joints, and his body still needed time to figure out how they worked. His hips felt loose, too. His side was very wet, although it didn’t hurt quite as much, and he was pretty sure he was going into shock.
His vision dimmed. The thought flitted through his mind that he was losing consciousness. Then he realized it was a shadow.
The patchwork man loomed over him and snarled something. Mike couldn’t hear what, and it was impossible to read the shredded lips. The curved, Kindle-sized chunk of metal stuck in its shoulder had part of a green warning label on it. Six of the stitches along the shoulder were broken. Three fingers had vanished from its extra hand, and the whole limb sparkled with frost.
It reached out and grabbed his arm. The long fingers wrapped around his bicep twice. He could feel the knots on the stitches through his sleeve. The patchwork man yanked up, and the fire in Mike’s side exploded. Shards of pain tumbled through his body. His fingers spasmed. The pistol dropped to the floor.
In the corner of his eye, Jamie lunged over the dead seraph on the pathway and grabbed the timer. She fiddled with the controls for a moment and squeezed it again and again. Mike’s stomach twisted. She squeezed the remote again, and something clicked. A light on the half-hidden charge flashed on.
The patchwork man snarled again and let Mike drop. His side exploded with pain. The cut on his leg flared. The bandages on his wounded stomach felt hot and wet. He slumped against the workstation but forced himself to stay on his feet.
The tall creature stalked away, toward the rings.
One of the surviving seraphs crawled into view on the other side of the workstation. The hood of its cloak was shredded, and a piece of metal stuck out from the side of its skull. Dark blood ran across its face. The patchwork man growled and clicked at it, and it moved to follow him.
Jamie saw them coming. She tucked the remote under her arm and scooped up Dylan’s rifle. She struggled with it for a moment.
The seraph raised its claws and snarled. Its feet clanged on the ramp. The patchwork man took another stride toward her.
Jamie looked at them, then at Mike.
Then she turned and ran through the Door.
FIFTY-THREE
Jamie’s feet landed on gritty sand and stumbled. She’d gone through the Door almost forty times, but it had always been the same experience—stepping from one room to another along the steel pathway. With no other reference points, it almost felt natural.
Now she was outside.
She was outside in what was left of Site B.
She ran for another minute. Her adrenaline was pumping. She didn’t know if the stitched-together thing was coming after her. She just slogged across the sand until her heart rate slowed.
The wasteland stretched out before her, endless sand as far as she could see, spotted by a few rocks and withered patches of grass. A few feet away was some kind of bush that looked like it might’ve seen water a decade or so back.
Above her, the sun hung in the sky like an old ember. She knew hung was the right word. This sun was tired, almost exhausted, bled of all its strength and power. It was red and dull, not the harsh yellow she was used to.
She looked behind her and saw the fold, a hole in the air that blurred at the edges.
Just beyond the fold she could see the outline of a set of rings resting on the sand and concrete gravel. Jamie realized the pathway might still be there, too, a foot or two down under the strange desert.
She spent a moment trying to focus on the edge of the rift, unbound by the rings, but her eyes kept slipping. It was like trying to focus on part of an optical illusion. The part she was looking at would stabilize, but everything around it would blur and spin faster.
On the other side of the fold she could still see a wide swath of the main floor. The dead bugman lay sprawled on the pathway. Past it were the workstations and concrete floor and dead Marines and Olaf’s skewered body and a collection of tool chests.
And the seraph crawling up the ramp.
And the patchwork man glaring at her.
Jamie took a few more steps away from the hole. The sand crunched under her feet. It didn’t feel right. It was too coarse and too gray.
She turned and ran a few more yards.
In the distance, maybe two miles away, she could see the canyon. The canyon that was out behind Site B. She and Bob had hiked out there once to look down at the various office parks and storage units and one building Bob insisted belonged to some unnamed government group that was monitoring them.
There were four specks near the canyon. The bugmen with the C4 charges. It was hard to be sure at this distance, but she thought they were all facing the other way.
The air brushed against her face and hands. It struck her that it had been still until that moment, just as lifeless as the desert itself. No wind, no breezes, not even a slight difference in temperature.
She heard a grunt behind her and turned.
Sasha pushed herself up off the sand and scrambled away from the fold on all fours. She spat out a mouthful of grit, climbed to her feet, and took a few more unsteady steps across the desert. A Marine’s rifle was clutched in her hands.
Then she looked up and stared at Jamie. “Oh, thank God,” she said. She stumbled across
the wasteland. They fell into each other’s arms for a moment.
Then Jamie pushed her back to arm’s length to look at her. “Are you okay?”
Sasha nodded and rubbed her jaw. “Didn’t know he was going to blow up the tanks.”
“Neither did I.”
“I got hit by a nozzle. Lucky it didn’t break my jaw.”
“Why did you follow me?”
She glanced back over her shoulder at the fold. “There weren’t many options. When you went away, the big skinny guy went after me.” She glanced around at the barren wasteland. “Fuck me.”
“Not now,” said Jamie.
“Not here,” Sasha agreed. She looked up at the dim sun. “Last days of Krypton. Where the fuck are we?”
Jamie looked around again. It was arid nothingness as far as she could see. There were hills and mountains near the horizon, but even they looked barren and lifeless. The only vibrant colors were the fold in space and Sasha’s WALKING RED T-shirt.
“I think…” said Jamie, “I think this is the world without us.”
“The world after people?”
“The world after everything. I think Mike was right. It’s all been eaten.” She pointed up at the sun. “Everything.”
Sasha shook her head. “Did you get the charge set?”
“Yeah, I think so. We can’t stay here. We don’t have much time.”
“Yeah, but what do we…crap.” She looked past Jamie, toward the canyon. “Is that the bug people?”
“I think so.”
“We need to get out of here before they—”
The air rippled again. They both turned.
The wounded bugman crawled toward them on all fours. It paused and took a deep breath. Then it pushed itself up onto two legs. Its head tilted back and forth, and they felt its focus shift between them.
It growled and bared its forest of fangs at them.
Jamie stumbled back, her feet dragging in the sand. Then she noticed the weight in her hand and glanced down. She still held the rifle.
She brought it up again. She wasn’t sure why it hadn’t fired before and wondered if it was out of bullets. Or maybe there was a safety switch. Did rifles have safeties?