Epitaphs (Echoes Book 2)

by Knite, Therin

  Out of nowhere, the man slams his fist on the enter key, and a third window pops up on the wall screen, a highlighted segment of his cipher translation:

  MEETING SCHEDULED FOR 11/24 2300 AT APT 215 CORNER BUCHANEN AND HEARST ON SOMNX REPORT AND REL INFO.

  DO NOT BE LATE.

  -FINN

  A meeting. Between Lang, Anderson, Castile, and Finn. A meeting scheduled for tonight. That Anderson and Lang, who are likely still hiding somewhere in the city (else the highway or public transit cams would have caught them, too), might still attend in a last-ditch attempt to get Finn to help them out of this mess.

  At the terminal, Jin Connors whips his chair around and beams a grin at the entire crowd. He juts a thumb over his shoulder, toward the big wall screen, and says, “Told you I knew this.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  There is a blank space between the ask and the answer.

  Between the part of the story where I ask Briggs what his game plan is for scouting the foreclosed apartment building on the corner of Buchanan and Hearst and the part where I wake up in an overturned vehicle with a sandstorm raging all around me. By the laws of logic, I know that the blank space is filled with the sounds of shattering glass, crunching plastic, metal screeching as the wrecked SUV skids along a segment of the Capital Beltway five miles south of the crossover between Route 17 and Interstate 95, the place where Castile lost her life.

  I know the front windshield implodes from the force of a fist like a battering ram, attached to a misshapen monster thought up by a girl with a nasty mind. I know Jin, beside me, screams, that Briggs yells for Weiss and Weiss shouts for Briggs, as the auto-drive AI tries to compensate for the vicious blow. Tries and fails. Barely manages to slow the SUV enough to prevent instant death for all passengers.

  I know my seatbelt tightens around me to hold my body in place while the SUV flips and spins and bounces off the asphalt, jerking my newly healed back in a dozen awkward ways. I know airbags deploy to cushion my whiplashed head before it smacks the vehicle’s reinforced metal frame, skull shattering on impact, brain bursting out in a slushy, foamy mix of blood and dreams. I know an arm and a leg slam into hard objects that might be the arm and the leg of someone else in the car.

  I know, as the vehicle slides to a stop, as the first grains of sand find their way through the broken, gaping, frame-bent windows, that somewhere, beyond the Beltway, from a vantage point far enough away that we will never catch up to her in time—Chelsea Lang laughs. At the sight of the field of debris raining down on the road. At the sight of the first real traffic jam in forty-seven years clogging up the Beltway behind us. At the sight of the crumpled remains of the caravan of IBI SUVs, torn apart like old tin cans, exposing the raw and bloody meat inside them.

  I know all these events and more occur in the space between the ask and the answer. But all I perceive is a dozen words leaving the tip of my tongue before a blackness more absolute than the empty echoverse swallows me whole for a minute and a half. And when my mind fades into the world again, the answer is ringing loud and clear in my ears, stinging my eyes with sharp, orange grains of sand, and thump, thumping toward me, a grotesque beast on the prowl to finish the job it failed to the last time around.

  But before the ask and the answer, the story goes like this:

  Since they learned how Lang operates from the disastrous museum raid, Briggs and Dynara decide to part ways for the next leg of the case. The latter, my new boss, remains at EDPA with Chai, Murrough, Lance, Donovan, and three full Day teams on standby, prepped and ready to attack through the Nexus the moment the sandstorm dream roars into existence again. The former, my old boss, organizes a scouting party to watch the mysterious meeting place on the corner of Buchanan and Hearst for any signs of Anderson or Lang.

  Through some cruel machination between my new boss and my old one, I get saddled with the IBI team instead of EDPA. Banned by Cyril from echo field for the rest of the week, due to my weakened back, and banned from Dynara’s presence because, at this point in the game, I’m of little use if I can’t use my special echo powers when they’re needed. We know the majority of the murder details—there’s nothing left for me to read or reconstruct.

  So I end up in an IBI SUV, on its way toward Washington’s southern outskirts, with Briggs and Weiss. And Jin, who’s been tight lipped since he solved the one-time pad cipher with suspiciously little effort. Five minutes of confusion and stunned silence gave way to a mountain slide of unwanted, incessant interest. Everyone in the foxhole jumped on his ass, asking a hundred questions per minute, badgering him for his “secrets,” until he clamped up and ran away. Literally. He barricaded himself in a supply closet in a random EDPA hallway until I coaxed him out half an hour later.

  Now, he sits slumped in his car seat, cheek pressed against the tinted window, discomfort stuck to his face in a dozen unnatural wrinkles. He’s hunched in on himself, like he expects an attack from someone in the car. And oddly enough, it’s me he’s leaning away from.

  Briggs and Weiss, facing us, the two front seats turned one-eighty in “conference mode,” are holding a rich but near-silent conversation on the upcoming scouting operation. But every few minutes, Briggs throws a glance Jin’s way, a stern frown mixed with understanding eyes, as if there’s something my old boss knows about Jin that I do not. Something related to this case. To his knowledge of the OTP cipher key. Finn’s cipher key.

  I remember Jin’s strange, chilling comment in the hall. Why not just have some fun?

  And I wonder, not for the first time, what sort of man Jin Connors was in the time before I met him at Jericho.

  A year ago last week. Our “friendship” anniversary. We went out and had a special dinner at a restaurant we could only afford because my new EDPA salary is three times my old, mediocre IBI payout. (Dynara claims it’s a “risk premium.” I believe her.)

  And never once did I think to question him then, in the most fitting moment for it—the one hour in a year where the masks were peeled away, and we talked, frank and open, about ourselves and one another—never once did I ask what sort of man he was before the Jericho Bombing ripped away half his personality and replaced it with alcoholism.

  I got a glimpse, two days’ worth, of the well-balanced goofball he used to be, on the surface, the one he still pretends to be at times. But I never pried far enough into him in those peaceful forty-eight hours pre-Bombing to learn the truth. To meet the true Jin Connors.

  Sometimes, I think I don’t deserve to know. The old Jin. The real Jin. The Jin before.

  Not after what I did to him at Jericho.

  But today, in an IBI SUV zipping along the crowded pre-holiday streets, a winter sky bright and clear above me for the first time in a string of gloomy days, I think:

  What could Jin, of all people, know about Finn? And how could he know it?

  Unfortunately, this is neither the time nor the place to pick my best friend’s brain.

  Instead, I clear my throat and say to Briggs, “What’s your formation plan for staking out the apartment building?”

  Briggs breaks off his coded conversation with Weiss mid-word and rubs his chin with the back of his hand. “Three defense circles of three vehicles each, spaced two blocks apart, fanning out three-sixty from the apartment. SWAT in the middle ring. Reserve in the last. First assault in the front ring with full army gear.”

  “Sounds like overkill for a college student and an aging dean.”

  Briggs shrugs in the most formal manner possible. “After the museum disaster, I’m not taking chances, Adamend. If Anderson or Lang do anything but surrender, whether it’s an echo attack or a VERA grenade strike or a blind shootout with a handgun, they’re taking the bullet, and that’s that. I will not allow them to risk any more of my agents, and I will especially not allow them to risk innocent civilians like Castile did on that goddamn interstate. One misstep back there, and she could have killed dozens. No more. I’m done with that risk level. Our next encounter, they su
rrender or they die.”

  My teeth scrape the skin off the edge of my tongue, and I swallow down words of protest. If we kill Anderson and Lang, we’ll lose Finn for sure. Even with the cipher broken, we know little about his operations. Most of his coded messages to Castile were requests for updates about the effects of the Somnexolene on the killer trio, and her responses to him were terse, on-the-point summaries:

  Lang, being the youngest recipient, showed the most profound echo power development, while Castile clocked in at a Class Two and Anderson got bupkis. Which explains why the dean never popped up in the dream anywhere. He and Castile weren’t nearly as responsive to the drug as Brennian. Poor luck on their part. Good luck on ours.

  But I digress. The only chance we have to track Finn down is to wring some shred of intelligence out of our surviving murderers, to hope and pray they heard his voice or saw his face at some point in the last few weeks. If they die…

  Briggs coughs. “I can see what you’re thinking, Adamend. The distaste is written all over your face. But in this situation, we have to consider the immediate consequences over the long term. When lives are at stake in the here and now, we can’t ruminate on the What Ifs? that won’t be relevant for months and years. You know that as well as I do; in fact, I’m pretty sure you’ve said something similar to me before. Which makes me wonder why you’d backtrack on your own philosophy.”

  I rap my knuckle against the window, peer out at the windy day, snow drifting on the wide highway shoulder. Bright morning sunlight glitters off the icy banks, and if it weren’t for the gray-shaded glass, my eyes would burn. “I have a hunch, sir.”

  Weiss, who was busy drawing random shapes on his pant legs with his fingers—a tic to keep his hands occupied in times where they hold no gun—responds to my words by nudging Briggs with a pointy elbow. The Commander turns his attention to his right hand, and another silent message passes between them in blinks and twitches and nods.

  To be honest, I’ve only heard Ric Weiss speak three times. He has a perfectly normal voice (though it’s a bit soft from disuse), but there’s something, some unknown factor, that keeps him silent more often than not. Yet another Briggs-Weiss story I’d be enthralled to hear but likely never will, since the two men hold their secrets tighter than Dynara holds her iron fist.

  But whatever Weiss says sets off a chain reaction in his boss, and Briggs’ entire body goes rigid. “When you say hunch, Adamend, do you mean the sort of hunch where—?”

  “He doesn’t mean a hunch at all,” Jin cuts in. It’s the first time he’s spoken since he sat down in the car. “He knows for a fact that Finn is a danger like nothing we’ve ever seen before, but instead of telling you outright, he’s beating around the bush because he’s worried about how little factual information he can produce on the topic. He’s worried that most of his specifics will be wrong, even if his severities are correct, and he thinks that means he shouldn’t specify at all until he knows more.” Jin shifts even farther toward the window. “It’s a weakness of his, sir. Get used to it.”

  Heat creeps up my neck, and I wonder what the hell I did to set off Jin in such a way, or if his words are just the result of his overall poor mood. “Ah, well…yes. Jin’s right. But even so, I agree with you that focusing on Finn at this exact time might not be the smartest move. We do need to find Anderson and Lang first. I only meant to suggest that we should do our best to bring them in alive, in case they can provide any relevant information about Finn that might help us in the long run. Because, as Jin so helpfully pointed out, I think the long run might hold risk on a scale we’re unfamiliar with.” I swallow the sticky saliva in my throat. “Anyway, I asked you about the formation because I think—”

  There is the blank space.

  And after the blank space, I wrench my heavy eyelids open to find myself hanging upside-down in the remains of the SUV. Across from me, Briggs and Weiss, both bruised and banged up, are a tangled heap of limbs and clothing, trying to free themselves from their seatbelts. To my right, the window, once a bulletproof sheet, is an empty, warped hole with jagged edges, and the glass that used to fill that hole is now in a million shards, a dozen of which have pierced the sensitive skin of my face. Blood drips from the top of my head down onto the floor—once the roof—of the vehicle. I blink the stinging red from my watering eyes, vision blurred at the edges, and turn my aching neck to the left.

  The left-hand passenger door is gone.

  So is Jin.

  But his body isn’t sprawled anywhere on the pavement nearby, broken beyond repair. Because this case could never have a devastating twist so simple and mundane. Oh, no.

  Through the gaping hole in the side of the car where the door used to be, in the worsening sandstorm building around the crash site, I catch a glimpse of Pat Anderson. He runs across the highway and jumps the low cement border that skirts the edge of a flat grassy field that surrounds the city’s central hub for floodwater management. Where all the wide, easily accessible underground floodways converge into a central point. A prime escape route.

  Slung over Pat Anderson’s shoulder, bloody, unconscious, swinging to and fro as the dean rushes away, is Jin.

  The meeting message was a trap.

  Meant to warn Finn and company if the cipher was broken.

  And Jin was the cipher breaker—somehow, they know it—so Jin is being kidnapped.

  And Adam Adamend, his so-called best friend, the smartest guy around, is strung up in a busted car, unable to do anything but watch.

  * * *

  The cavalry arrives ten minutes into the slaughter of the century.

  Briggs and Weiss manage to right themselves before I do. They cut themselves free of their tangled seatbelts with a knife Weiss had in his boot. Then they unlatch my own belt and lower me onto my feet, and I have to brace myself against the bent doorframe as a wave of dizziness washes through me. My vision blurs white, and I taste metal, but I clench my eyes shut and breathe, slow and deep, until my head clears enough for me to move without toppling over. I shuffle to the side to let Briggs and Weiss crouch next to me, all three of us peering into the orange haze beyond.

  Screams permeate the roaring wind, and nearby, the telltale pounding of the monsters’ steps vibrates through the asphalt. They’re attacking another disabled car in the convoy, killing crash survivors without discretion, ripping heads from shoulders, dashing already injured bodies against the ground to crush skulls and scramble brains. At least one is heading toward our overturned SUV, the outline of its bulk visible through the sandy shroud. It’ll be on us in under a minute, and if it catches hold of an arm or a leg or a neck, we’re done for.

  And Jin…

  I can’t see him anymore. The sandstorm is too thick, and Anderson has vanished past its outskirts. Judging from the distance between the road and the floodway center, coupled with the speed Anderson was moving last I saw him, it’ll still be five to seven minutes more before the man reaches an accessible floodway. If I catch him before he disappears into the maze of shadowy tunnels beneath Washington, I can recover Jin. If not—

  No. I will get Jin back. I have to save him.

  Because the alternative is likely torture or death at Lang’s hands or at Finn’s.

  I should have known. I should have figured out the message was a trick. I should have realized that Finn would put a safeguard in his communications to tip him off if his cipher was broken.

  I should have known this. I should have known that. I should have known everything.

  Because I can, goddammit. I have the brain for it. And when I don’t—people die.

  Jin will not be one of them.

  The dream monster stalks closer to the SUV, its form emerging from the orange haze as a wriggling, deformed mass. It’s the same monster that bested me last time, that mangled my spine, and its wormy skin seems to slither and writhe as trillions of sand grains ripple over its body. Its mouth, cockeyed and filled with rotten, razor-sharp teeth, tears a hole in its face th
at a demented man would call a smile when the beast finds its targets crouched in the doorway of the overturned vehicle. Its hands, bloody, sand stuck to fingers, mock us with grabbing motions.

  Somewhere, Lang is watching this nightmare unfold through her monsters’ eyes, much the same way Brennian peered through the eyes of his dragon. She’s pulling her puppets’ strings to and fro, imagining the vicious murders and then making them so. That night at the warehouse, her boyfriend’s death, DuPont’s betrayal, her future as a rich woman snatched out from underneath her, ambition burned—it must have cracked something in her mind. There is no way on Earth she’s been this crazy all her life.

  A rounded piece of metal brushes against my arm, and I jerk my head to the left to find Weiss holding a fully assembled sniper rifle he apparently pulled out of his ass. The array of medals and trophies and military pins on the shelves of the Lieutenant’s IBI office come to mind, most of them for marksmanship. He was an army sniper for twelve years before he joined the IBI, and despite the fact that eighty percent of his old military missions are the sort of classified that no one even speaks of, the man is universally praised (and feared) for his skills with a gun. I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing him in action before.

  That all changes in seventeen seconds.

  Despite the raging winds around us, Weiss rolls out of the overturned SUV, raises the rifle, points in a direction that looks completely wrong (but isn’t), and fires. The bullet, buffeted by the powerful winds, shifts its trajectory by several degrees and curves around through the air at the exact angle required for it to bury itself in the side of the monster’s face. Metal eats through bone, and the massive beast stumbles, gunky, purple blood and gray brains oozing from the wound.

  But it doesn’t fall. It’s not a monster of the Earth. It’s a monster in a dream. And Lang’s dream creations don’t follow the laws of reality, like we do.