by Rob Horner
Little Jack pulled out a few more drawers, stuffing bullets into the pouches at his waist. But he handed over far more than he kept to Ray and Bart and Josh, the guys who would be part of the convoy traveling overland to the mall.
The goal was to try not to hurt any of Fish’s people upstairs. They’d already been through so much. Heck, their whole world was taken over. Ricardo went with us, just in case someone needed healing. Angie was needed with the convoy, to keep an eye open for any Dra’Gal. Tiffany came with Ricardo, because he didn’t normally go out on missions and she wanted to keep an eye on him.
“I can handle myself. You’ll see,” she promised. “I’m almost as good as Ben at making people stick to the floor.”
Her comment caused Danielle to shoot an icy glare her way, before her eyes softened and welled up with tears. She was going with us as well; her auditory abilities would be our best bet to keep fighting to a minimum. Little Jack was our protector and last line of defense.
“I don’t want to shoot any of your people,” he said to Fish. “But if it’s them or us—” He let the comment hang. Fish bowed his head, accepting the logic.
“I’ll be there when they wake up,” he said. “Try to find out how long they’ve been co-opted.”
“Are we sure this will even work?” I asked suddenly. “Will my power work on your people?”
The silence that met this question was deafening. Even the chatter on my Port-Comm, handed out and activated before the others took off in the vans, fell quiet.
Finally, Fish said, “I don’t know. It’s not something we’ve ever encountered, a force strong enough to banish a Dra’Gal presence. All we can do is try.”
That was all we could do. Hope and try.
The kitchen was somewhere between what you’d find in a large house and a small restaurant. Small as in like a Ruby Tuesday, not like a New York hamburger joint. There were three stoves along one wall, three refrigerators and a couple of freezers along another, and every other available space was taken up by shelves of dry ingredients. The food was prepared on large counters in the center of the room, each with its own sink. And of course, there was the requisite dumb waiter in the west wall.
We exited the stairs in plain view of the three soldiers currently on cook duty. Or maybe they were cooks whose secondary job was soldiering.
With Fish and Danielle in the lead, they couldn’t see me at first. Probably a good thing. My notoriety among the Dra’Gal had already earned me an impromptu bath today. These guys had sidearms, though why they should be armed in a kitchen was beyond my ability to explain. Maybe they wanted to make sure the cow was dead before they started grilling steaks.
Little Jack and I came in hot behind Fish and the brunette, and it was clear that having her go first was just as bad as if I was in the front, though it made sense in a hive-mind way. She’d been responsible for holding a hundred of their fellow Dra’Gal trapped in their human bodies, so of course they knew her on sight, maybe better than they knew me. We just hadn’t thought of it.
So here we come, stepping around Fish and Danielle, and the three soldiers are already rushing forward, one reaching for his pistol while the other two just reached, ready to grab or throttle.
Little Jack ignored the rushers, side-stepping neatly to the left and firing one of those Ben-goo-blasts, striking the man who’d held back. The stuff that contained the essence of Ben’s power worked a bit like Danielle’s ability, preventing Manifestation. When Ben was alive, he could generate a field that bound a Dra’Gal’s feet to the ground, preventing movement. The ammunition containing his power worked similarly, but its effect was limited to where the liquid struck.
Thankfully, that included the soldier’s right arm, which froze in the act of drawing his sidearm from its holster.
It didn’t stop him from reflexively squeezing the trigger as his muscles clenched, firing a hollow point 9mm bullet into his own right thigh, which immediately began to squirt blood in an arcing stream.
“Turn it up, Danielle!” Fish said, urgency giving his voice an almost breathless quality. “They’ll have heard the shot.”
My part in this was easy.
As soon as I stepped around Danielle, the leading soldiers stopped their rush. Before they could set their feet and turn around, I was between them, grabbing one by the hand and lightly slapping the other across the face. Light flashed and both collapsed.
Then Ricardo was there, ignoring the blood pooling on the floor, hands out to help the third soldier.
“My power isn’t working!” he shouted.
“It’s because he’s Dra’Gal,” I said, moving up to the soldier’s other side. Despite that its host was in danger of bleeding out from the bullet wound, which must have opened an artery, the soldier tried to shy away from me, uttering wordless growls.
After dispelling his Dra’Gal, I said, “Try now.”
“Okay…it’s working now,” the doctor said with a note of relief. “How did you know why it wasn’t working?”
“Discuss it later,” Fish hissed as four people clad in all-over suits and helmets like his burst into the kitchen. Each one was tall, taller than Brian, like supermodels wearing six-inch heels. As we’d seen on the video screens that morning, each one’s helmet differed from the others in subtle ways that involved coloring and style. The differences spoke to a feminine touch, subtle and distinctive. If you knew just a little about the females underneath the face shields, you’d be able to tell them apart just by the choices in their headgear.
It really wasn’t the time to be admiring their fashion sense.
They came in hot and fast, each one holding a shotgun, and all four were aimed into the room at us.
“Now, Jeff,” Fish said.
Like a firing line in a movie, the four Dra’Gal lifted their weapons.
Chapter 16
Unwelcome similarities
If you think facing Dra’Gal in their Manifested forms is scary, it was nothing compared to seeing the yawning maw of four double-barreled shotguns scanning the room for a target. For someone like me, who had only the most rudimentary understanding of the power of a firearm, and most of that from exaggerated action sequences in movies like Lethal Weapon, Rambo, and Missing in Action, they were far more frightening than even the barrel-over-barrel things the soldiers carried. Minimal understanding or not, it didn’t take a genius to grasp that a shotgun removed the need for experience or expertise. When you can spray a widening fan of deadly pellets instead of a singular bullet, what you lose in stopping power is more than made up for by the lack of a need for accuracy. A blast from one of those things at this range would be enough to take out both Ricardo and me, probably killing the downed cook in the process.
A pop sounded from somewhere behind the Dra’Gal-Quins, a momentary distraction that pulled the attention of two of them. Then came the strange sizzle-zap that marked the firing of one of the top barrels carrying a charge of purple power. It had to be Jeff back there, who’d teleported in right when we needed him.
Even as the Dra’Gal responded to the new threat, something happened to their weapons. It was subtle at first, like a blurring of your vision when you stare at something too long. A change occurred with the barrels of the shotguns.
The bores narrowed, collapsing into the center from the outside, like one of those school videos you see in Health class, how plaque begins to line the inside of the arteries, slowly blocking off blood flow.
Eat your vegetables, kids.
This process wasn’t quite that slow, but it didn’t happen quickly, either. The barrels lost some of their luster, darkening to light gray, as the metal melted into itself.
The Quin on the right, helmet streaked with bright yellow, froze in place. The next one in line, sporting a purple theme on her clothing, began to turn in reaction to the threat behind them. A second sizzle stopped her, frozen in mid-turn.
An image flashed into my head, like my consciousness leaped across the room and entered the
mind of the Quin on the left. I saw Danielle and Fish as if through her eyes, felt the anticipation of their deaths like the salivating desire you get while you’re in line at Burger King. The sizzling fries and grilling meat fills your nostrils and your stomach rumbles in anticipation.
“Get down!” I yelled in their direction. My mind understood what the vision meant on a level below conscious thought. Through my connection to the hive, their intense hatred for the stocky brunette gave a split-second warning before the thing could pull the trigger.
All three dropped to the floor as Jeff fired a third time. Little Jack got his rifle around and fired once. Purple splattered the front of the murderous leftmost Quin as the third staggered sideways into the room, pushed our way by the force of the teleporter’s blast.
The intent to kill was there. The anticipation of doing so was front and center in her mind. Even as Little Jack’s purple slime bullet froze the Quin in place, her finger was able to clench the trigger. An explosion of sound filled the room, encompassing all four Quins as the shotgun blew itself apart, unable to discharge its deadly payload through a barrel that had closed itself off.
Shrapnel blew outward from the weapon, most of it coming back through the stock, which became the weakest point if nothing could exit the barrel. The sharp shards tore into the Quin’s protective suit and shield, eliciting a scream of pain and fear that had nothing to do with the Dra’Gal presence but seemed a resurgence of the Quin personality buried beneath.
“Go,” Jeff hissed urgently, and I went, rushing forward, grabbing at hands and tearing their weapons away. I couldn’t look at the injured Quin, not at first. One glance at the shattered faceplate and torn yellow tissue beneath, coated with an orange liquid like badly mixed Halloween blood, made me swallow hard, stomping on a rising nausea. Instead, I reached for her glove, but it was so torn and ripped that my hand touched cold, yellow flesh instead. Light flashed, and she fell to the floor, her screams silenced.
“Okay, it works,” Fish said, relief evident in his voice.
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. Some of the injured Quins’ blood, it had to be blood, orange and sticky like syrup, had adhered to my hand from our brief contact. I knew it was there but pretended to ignore it.
“Ricardo, get over there, please. Try to help her,” Fish said.
I grabbed a hand from the second Quin and pulled off the glove. Light flashed, and two were down. As Ricardo moved over to begin tending to the one with the blown-up face and torso, I repeated the maneuver on the third and fourth office workers.
Then Fish was beside me, pushing me out of the way, going to one knee beside the female Quin with the turquoise embellishments on her helmet. “We have to find another helmet for her,” he said thickly. “Ricky, can you keep her free from the poison until then?”
“What poison, Fish?” the doctor asked. “I’ve healed the wounds from the explosion. Look. See all the shrapnel that came out of her? There’s nothing wrong with her now other than her body resetting after rejecting the Dra’Gal.”
“No,” the Quin said, shaking his head. “Your atmosphere. It’s fatal to our kind.”
“Maybe so,” Ricardo answered. “But if it is, it’s so slow that a few minutes of exposure aren’t going to hurt her. Honestly, she seems perfectly healthy.” He removed his hands and sank back against the doorframe. “I’ll stay here and keep checking her for some kind of exposure damage while you all go scrounge up a new helmet.”
“What about the others?” Little Jack asked.
“What others?” I asked.
“The off shift,” he said. “It’s not like they have an apartment in the city.”
“They live here?” I asked.
He nodded. “The facility looks like it’s two stories from the outside.”
Fish nodded, rising slowly from the Quin’s side. “They sleep upstairs,” he said.
“Won’t all this noise have woken them up?” Danielle asked.
“Probably,” he answered, “if they were even asleep at all. Our kind needs much less rest than yours.” Turning, he looked at Tiffany. “Don’t be upset about what you did. You saved everyone.”
The petite young woman blushed.
“What did she—” I started to ask, then it hit me. The warping of the shotgun barrels, how the tips melted together. That was her, using her power to warp matter.
“Let’s go find the others,” Little Jack said, coming up beside Fish.
He nodded, leading us out of the kitchen and into the office complex I remembered from my dream.
I looked back at the unconscious Quins, at their exposed pale skin with a yellow tint, so like Fish’s with the extra knuckle and rounded tips.
The Dra’Gal have an extra knuckle too.
There was one more office worker hiding in the lower level, a skinny thing in her full-body suit with lavender flowers crawling up the sleeves. Rather than face us directly, she raced around the aisles, ducking behind partitions and climbing over desks as she fought for a way out of the building. Though it obviously pained him to do it, Jeff finally had to teleport into her path and hit her with a blast of the purple stuff to get her to stop running. She growled as I approached, but the powerful goop prevented her from Manifesting. A twist and pull removed the glove and gave me access to her hand, and a light touch purged the Dra’Gal inside and sent her into unconsciousness.
The day remained bright and clear outside the floor to ceiling windows. There were no vehicles visible in the “visitor” parking lot. A green mound humped up against the sky about a quarter-mile distant.
“We’re near Mount Trashmore?” I asked.
“Yes,” Fish answered. “Closer than we thought we’d be when everything went down. We didn’t know there was a resonator with the carnival at the mall. We can’t detect them until they’re activated, and even then, it’s a pain to track them.”
It made sense. It wasn’t as though the Quins and Iz and all these Chosen could have set up shop here after the lights came down.
“We need to move while we talk,” Little Jack said. “The others are probably waiting at the mall.”
“Not quite, but close,” Ray’s voice responded over the Port-Comm.
“All right, we’re moving,” Fish said, voice tight. Looking back, I can’t help but wonder what was going through his mind just then. Was he already questioning more than the assertion that our atmosphere was poison to them? Had he moved beyond that yet, or was he going through the motions of justification? Maybe there was some anomaly that explained why the Quins believed as they did, or at least explained why the on-the-ground forces had been told to avoid breathing without their helmets.
It was terrifying to me to think they’d been lied to intentionally. I couldn’t begin to imagine what a thought like that might do to Fish. It reminded me of the impossible image Bradley saw, or might have seen.
What if it was real, and Iz didn’t know about it?
Would it be worse if Fish didn’t know either? Or if he did?
Little Jack moved like he’d been given a map of the building and had it memorized—maybe he did, who knows?—guiding us through the warren of cubicles and plasterboard dividers, rifle locked tight to his right shoulder, tracking in line with every twist and turn of his upper body.
Danielle stayed beside us, quiet to my ears, yet undoubtedly putting out that hyper-frequency sound that disrupted the ability for the Dra’Gal to Manifest.
There were more offices along the back wall, a few storage closets and restroom facilities, and one unmarked door. Little Jack tried activating it with his keycard, but nothing happened.
“It has to be a worker in this building,” Fish said. “Or me. My clearance is supposed to work everywhere.”
The tall Quin stepped up to the wall, extending his white card, which had a silver square in the center. The door opened inward, revealing a single flight of stairs with no landings or switchbacks.
Jack went first, with me right behind. Daniel
le brought up the rear.
Opening the door on the second floor, Jack reported, “It’s like a loft. There’s just a hallway with doors in either direction.”
“They’re called relaxation rooms,” Fish said. “The humans have the shorter portion of the hall to the left, two barracks rooms and a washroom. To the right are six safe rooms for us, no windows, doors sealed to prevent atmospheric leakage. We set the interiors to more closely resemble our home world, allowing us to relax outside of our suits. My relaxation chamber is adjacent to the Operations Room.”
“How many?” Jack asked.
“Should be three humans and six Qintana.”
“Stay here,” I told Jack. “Don’t let anyone get by you.”
He nodded, and I moved to the left. It was a narrow hallway with all the doors on the left, which should allow for sizable rooms. The first door had no names or numbers, just a knob, which seemed old-fashioned considering how much technology was evident in every other aspect of the facility.
Of course, the knob wouldn’t turn, and my keycard didn’t have the silver-square magic to make it open.
“Catch,” Fish said softly, and I turned in time to snag his card out of the air, lanyard still attached and trailing like the tail of a kite. This time the lock clicked, and I pushed in the door.
Three beds, full-sized by the look of them and all neatly made, lined the far wall, which was at least twenty feet away. The soldiers each had a chest of drawers and an armoire, and along the near wall was an entertainment center with a television, a VCR, and a Sega Genesis. They had a brown leather couch situated in the center of the floor facing the television, and off to my left, back toward the stairwell, was a foosball table. Otherwise, the room was empty.
Backing out of the room, I proceeded further down the hallway to the second door. Since it was after one barracks room, and there was one more door to come, I anticipated a bathroom/shower room.