After the Dark

by Max Allan Collins

  Ignoring White, Bostock turned toward the tall, silver-haired monklike figure. “Matthias! You know I would do anything to further the goals of the Conclave—anything! And White, here . . . he's failed so many times. Open your eyes, Matthias! Look who I have delivered unto you! How many times has White failed, and who is it that brings her to you—the One!”

  Disturbingly, White was smiling, his arms folded, the gun casual in his grasp. The robed figure—Matthias—listened to Bostock's pleas impassively, his expression blankly unreadable.

  Bostock was saying, “And when she's gone, there will be nothing that can stop the Conclave's directives from being carried out. I brought her to you—on this, the night of nights!”

  Bostock's voice echoed across the grounds.

  “The Coming,” he was saying, “is but minutes away—we are close to final victory, total victory . . . because of me. I brought her to you! Not White. Not this . . . spawn of Sandeman, the father of all of our problems.”

  Still, Matthias said nothing—his eyes bright, as he stared at Bostock. A hint of approval . . . ? Max wondered.

  Finally, the secretary said, “Yes, I had Ray White killed, another weak spawn of Sandeman—but it was part of my design, the plan to bring her to you . . . and here she stands. She is here. She is ours—yours. Kill her now, and the future is ours.”

  White glanced, almost casually, at the silver-haired man. Their eyes met for a brief instant, and Matthias—almost imperceptibly—nodded.

  White raised his pistol and shot Bostock in the head.

  Bostock went straight back, flopping onto the snowy ground, sending up puffs of white; the black hole in his forehead was ringed with red, and he lay looking at the sky with wide, empty eyes, as if even in death he was anticipating the arrival of the comet.

  White brought his pistol to bear on Max. “The fool was right about one thing, 452—you do need to die.”

  “The comet!” someone in the crowd shouted, and others blurted the same. They milled, wide eyes raised, arms and hands upraised, a sea of faces salted with the ritual markings, some paint, some inked flesh.

  White's eyes went to the sky, too, where a stream of sparks flew across, exploding in a shower of color.

  The rocket provided the diversion Max needed—she would kiss that spudhead Dix the next time she saw him—and, as White realized the ruse of the fireworks and swung the gun back around, firing it at her, the shot sailed wide, Max diving toward the two Familiars holding Logan's arms. She flung one off, kicked the other in the head, and held her hand out to Logan.

  He took it.

  More rockets streaked across the sky, and not all of the Familiars were wise yet, though several had taken time out from the display to attack Joshua, Alec, and Mole in a flurry of martial-arts moves, bizarrely awkward coming from the robed warriors, yet formidable. The snow-dusted grounds glowed yellow and orange under the momentary daylight.

  “It's fireworks, you fools!” White yelled.

  And then all of the Familiars were on them.

  The quartet of transgenics fought hard, but it was clear that the Familiars' numbers were just too great. The only plus—other than White—was that the cultists did not seem to be armed; they had gathered at Big Sky to party, not fight.

  Logan was slugging it out, too, but he was weak and no match for Familiars.

  Then, echoing up through the woods, came battle cries.

  Dix had brought more than just fireworks from home.

  A hundred transgenics stormed out of the forest and joined in the fray—Dix and Luke and so many strange, familiar faces. A few brandished weapons, but mostly it was just a wave of sheer mutant force, sweeping onto the wintry landscape.

  She stepped in and helped Logan, who was battling the two Familiars who'd held him captive before, and her kicks to the throat and groin and every other dirty tactic that could actually get through to a Familiar were enough to put the two down, at least long enough for her to grab Logan by the hand again and look him in the eyes and say, “Run—Logan, go to the woods and wait!”

  He shook his head and went for another of the Familiars. She loved him for wanting to stay and stand to fight at her side, but it was a decision as stupid as it was brave. Within seconds he was on his back on the ground, the Familiar looming over him, choking the life out of him.

  She head-butted a tattooed face in front of her, the man's nose exploding in a scarlet shower; he wobbled but did not fall, and it took an elbow in the throat to convince him to do so. She got behind the one strangling Logan, grabbed his head and gave it a good hard twist, snapping his neck. Before the dead weight could fall on him, Logan rolled out from under.

  She knelt next to Logan, who was groggy, face red, from the near strangulation; a gunshot cracked the night and something hot erupted through her shoulder, knocking her back. She lay there, looking up at an enormous sky, seemingly filled with stars, but it was just Dix's fireworks display continuing to go off. Turning her head to the right, she saw Logan reaching out to her—he was dazed, his eyes wide in horror—and their hands touched and she felt peaceful, happy, a quiet settling over, banishing the battlefield . . .

  . . . but the sensation lasted only a moment, as White jumped on top of her, straddling her, pulling her up to him by her vest. In a way, he did her a favor, snapping her back to full consciousness and a world much bigger than just her and Logan; again she was cognizant of the sounds of fighting around her, the explosions in the sky . . . and Ames White's tortured, demonic face inches from her own.

  “Bostock may have killed Ray, 452,” he said, and he was smiling though there was pain in it—Familiar or not, he was a father who'd suffered the greatest loss—“but you caused it, didn't you? Like every misfortune that's been rained down on me in the last year and a half—you.”

  He raised the barrel of his pistol toward her face to deliver the kill shot.

  Lips peeled back over that terrible smile, he said, “My son won't live to rule . . . but I will. Your death at my hands assures me of that immortality.”

  She watched in seeming slow motion as his finger squeezed down on the trigger. She could almost see the bullet ready to ride the black tunnel from firing pin to her skull. In that instant a thousand thoughts coursed through her mind, all at once and yet each one clear, concise, easy to see.

  The people who were important to her, the things that made her happy, what she would do with her life, her life with Logan Cale, if just somehow in the next second this bullet failed to blow her brains out . . .

  Above the cacophony of the battle, she heard something primal and horrifying, and then a beast loomed above and behind Ames White . . .

  Joshua.

  The gun fell with a thunk next to her, and she heard the cry from White . . . Was it pain? He couldn't feel physical pain . . . could he? Was it rage, or sorrow, or just some gargling horrible sound that a man might make, should a beast grab him by the skull . . .

  . . . and yank.

  She did know that White's head disappeared from her view, and the weight of him lifted off her.

  She was on her elbow, propping herself up, when she saw White—or anyway, White's body—on the ground next to her, red pumping out of the pipelike opening of his neck, a wide geysering spigot where his head had been.

  And when Max sat up, she saw where that head was now—six and a half feet above her, where Joshua held the detached cranium, by the hair, at eye level, staring into White's lifeless face.

  “You shouldn't have done it,” Joshua said, and his voice was strangely gentle, scolding the blood-dripping head, as if warning a child. “You shouldn't have killed Annie.”

  Annie . . . the ordinary Joshua had loved, and who loved him, a gentle blind girl who White had slain out of sheer meanness.

  Joshua was staring at White's head, as if waiting for an apology.

  Then, when no apology came, a cry of anguish rose from deep within the leonine figure, and he swung his arm, like an airplane propeller, and cast t
he head into the dark night, where it landed with a distant plop.

  Suddenly Joshua was leaning down over her, saying, “Sorry, Little Fella. Kinda lost my head.”

  She just looked at him, wondering if he knew what he'd said. Then Joshua was pulling her up to her feet, and she inspected her wound—the shoulder was stiff, but the bullet seemed to have gone on through, and her transgenic body was already working at repairing itself. Rolling the shoulder a little, she said, “Gonna be all right.”

  Joshua helped up Logan, too.

  She quickly surveyed the battle—transgenics outnumbered Familiars now—looking for that silver-haired ghost, Matthias.

  She spotted him, on the run, the long robe flowing behind him, the tippet flapping, as he headed up the stairs and back inside the asylum.

  “Stay out here,” she told Logan and Joshua, “till the building's secure . . . Alec! Mole! Follow me!”

  Chapter Eleven

  * * *

  THE END

  THE CONCLAVE STRONGHOLD

  DECEMBER 25, 2021

  Max waded into the sea of robed Familiars. Behind her, in an impressive display of martial-arts prowess, Alec was handily dealing with a pair of the cultists. Mole was off to the one side, taking care of another of the armed three-man TAC patrols, blasting away at them mercilessly, and they fell like camouflaged bowling pins.

  But soon the two warriors—in answer to her call—were at her back, as she plowed her way toward the steps to the front entry of the hospital.

  The tide of the fight had turned decisively toward the transgenics. Those Familiars who weren't already lying in broken heaps on the ground were taking flight, a few literally heading for the hills, others around the building, presumably for another way inside or perhaps to make it to the parking lot—and, in either case, the ragtag transgenics gave chase.

  Once they were up the short flight of steps, Max, Mole, and Alec went inside unimpeded. For all the frenetic and violent activity outside, the asylum itself seemed deserted. Initially, they found themselves in what had once been a reception/waiting room area, with a double-door elevator, but no chairs lined the walls, and the nurse/receptionist window was vacant; otherwise, it was just a big empty slab room, cut through the middle by a long hallway.

  Though voices could be heard, the cries of prisoners, these did not emanate from this floor—in fact, they sounded more like they were coming from the walls. The effect was ghostly, troubling, but this floor was clearly administrative, small tidy offices with computers and desks and chairs and files, as you might find in any institution of this type. The thought of the inhabitants of these neat offices being cultists with pagan facial markings, parading in flowing hooded robes, chanting ritual gibberish, seemed utterly absurd . . . or would have, if they hadn't just pushed their way through a throng of them out on the battlefield that the asylum grounds had turned into.

  The building was old and badly in need of renovation, yet the place was neat, floors dust-free, no cobwebs, the walls and ceilings clean, the entire facility smelling of pine cleaner and disinfectant.

  Moving cautiously, Max signaled for them to split up, Alec and Mole each taking one of the side halls while Max went down the middle.

  Max found fire stairs at the end and started up.

  The second floor was cells—cries for help, shouts for attention, echoed down the hallways. No guards were around, no robed Familiars—no one home but the inmates. She had a good idea who they were: prisoners of the Conclave, perhaps ordinaries who'd tipped to the evil practices and intentions of the Familiars, or betrayers among their own ranks, possibly even transgenics—mixed with the real mental patients who'd provided the cover.

  On the third floor landing she found another small reception area, this one not so spare—nicely paneled, with comfortable chairs and magazines on end tables, another window (empty, of course) where a nurse and or receptionist could sit.

  She pushed through double doors down a short corridor of examination rooms and more small tidy offices. The medicinal scent was strong, making her nose twitch, but that was well in keeping with what seemed a clinic of some kind. This section of the building seemed to her a facade designed to fool state inspectors and those families who really were committing their loved ones (unwittingly) to snake-cult care.

  At the end of the short hall was a windowless metal door, with no knob—just a slot for an ID card. In bold red letters on the gray door it said:

  NO ADMITTANCE

  Well, surely somebody could go in there, she thought. What was the point of a place that no one could be admitted to?

  So she kicked the door down. It was solid and took two tries, but on the second it went flying and clattered to an obsidian floor.

  She got a quick look at the room—a large rounded chamber, with a planetarium-type dome, a vast curved viewing window that made the starry sky, in effect, the room's ceiling. The circular room, dimly lighted by recessed fixtures, was wall-to-wall stacked monitors; a dozen seats—empty at the moment—faced these monitors, with computer stations at each post. About a third of the monitors were security cams—showing inmates in their cells, views of the grounds and hallways and stairs and the downstairs reception area, and the area she'd just come through, for that matter.

  The rest of the monitors were satellite images from all around the world, each boldly labeled with a red-letter readout that identified the city shown, as well as the local time—she glimpsed Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Seattle, Toronto, Moscow, London, Lisbon, Sydney, and on and on. On the screens were live pictures of the cities, in populous areas—Chicago's cam was on Michigan Avenue, near the Water Tower, and New York was, of course, Times Square, where Christmas Eve had turned into something approaching New Year's Eve, people with little glowing candles in hand, watching the sky, waiting for the comet to come.

  And in the center of the room, raised up on a five-foot platform, was a molded black chair, strangely like a human hand rising to caress the person perched there, with controls built into the wide flat armrests—Captain Kirk's chair, revised by Salvadore Dali. In this chair, this throne, his hood back, sat silver-haired Matthias.

  All of this she took in, in a moment, which was all she had before a figure flew at her, snarling, a priestess with a ceremonial dagger in one hand and long clawed nails ready with the other. Rather lost in her robe, the priestess was slender and lovely, or would have been if her face had not been covered in ritual tattoos, and she took Max down in a diving roll, one powerful arm and hand slipping around Max as the knife rose.

  But before the blade fell, Max grasped the arm hugging her and snapped it like a twig, then flung the woman off—the priestess, Familiar or not, was feather light.

  One arm dangling, useless, the priestess hissed and came at Max low, charging, knife again raised; and Max sidestepped her, latching onto the flowing robes and running her headlong into one of the monitors, crashing the woman's head through the screen in a shower of glass and an eruption of smoke and flame.

  “So much for monitoring London,” Max said to Matthias as the priestess shuddered and shivered, literally jolted as electrocution won out over centuries of selective breeding.

  Matthias swiveled toward Max. He seemed not at all concerned, certainly not a whit distraught over the loss of the priestess.

  “In the pre-Pulse world,” Matthias said to her, his voice rich, strangely soothing, with a faint Teutonic lilt, “such demonstrations of your mutant powers might impress. Now . . . as we await the momentary arrival of the Coming, seeing such a childish display on your part, 452 . . . seems almost nostalgic.”

  She kept her distance from him, for the moment; his hands were on controls on those armrests, and she had no idea what he could do from his perch.

  She heard something behind her, whirled, and it was Alec, with Mole bringing up the rear.

  “Whoa,” Alec said. “Dude's got some home entertainment center . . .” He nodded toward the slumped, smoking priestes
s hanging out of the London monitor. “But y'know, it's dangerous, if you sit too close to the screen.”

  Mole, glancing around, said, “So who's this character? Blofeld? . . . Building's clear of snake suckers, except for this guy. Lots of inmates, though, on the second floor.”

  Matthias seemed bored with them. But he granted them this observation: “The Coming is inevitable. Your efforts . . . They are small, pitiful attempts, small boats hoping to ride out a typhoon.”

  Hardly listening, Alec was staring at the ceiling. “Now, that's a skylight . . .”

  Matthias gestured toward a bank of monitors—in the hooded, loose robe, it was like the specter of death, pointing.

  “We flee into the night, and you cannot stop us,” he said.

  Among the monitors were views of the parking lot, where robed Familiars were frantically getting into their cars and booking.

  “Where do you keep your car keys in those cloak things?” Alec asked.

  Max shot him a look.

  “Just wondering,” Alec said.

  “Some of our brothers have fallen tonight,” Matthias said. “But these others will go out into the world and spread the word . . . and our seed . . . even as the ordinaries wither like unpicked fruit on the vine.”

  Alec, still chatty, asked, “So in a few minutes, when this biotoxin hits . . . How long's it take to kick in?”

  “Many will die in moments,” the silver-haired Familiar said. “Others, the strongest of a weak species, will cling to life.”

  “And Max here,” Alec said, “can give 'em a clean bill of health, once we get the vaccine goin' . . . Mole, you're a businessman. How much do you think we can get, for a shot of Maxine?”

  Max arched an eyebrow. “Maxine?”

  “Vaccine . . . Max . . . get it? We'll have to trademark it.”

  Mole was not amused. “Let me ice this sucker, and let's be home for Christmas.”

  Matthias stood, looming over them. “Kon'ta ress! Ken'dra hiff!” He was staring at the sky—the stars—and, seemingly, speaking to them. His arms outstretched. He continued the ancient incantation: “Adara mos rekali . . . konoss rehu jek!”