The Blood Guard (The Blood Guard series)

by Carter Roy

  “It appears Ogabe got the cover off the manhole,” Dawkins said, swinging his legs into the mouth. “Will be a bit of a drop, but I’ll be there to catch you two.” He let go and plunged out of sight.

  “You next,” I said to Greta.

  She grabbed the giant’s nose for balance, and slid her sneakers into its mouth. “This is…kind of creepy,” she said, scooting backward. “Though plenty of stuff in the past day has been loads creepier.” When just her hands and head were visible around the curve of the giant’s tongue, she said, “Thanks, Ronan.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. For everything? For helping me look for my dad. For putting up with me when I’m less than awesome. For being, whatever—a friend.”

  And then she let go, slipping away before I could reply. I wanted to tell her that she was the one who deserved thanks, not me, that I wasn’t like her. Whenever I did something good, it was by accident, or because someone had told me what to do. But Greta tried to do the right thing just because it was the right thing.

  I took one last look around at the empty park, then climbed into the giant’s mouth. The wide metal tongue was cold against my belly, and it stank like stale, grimy water. I turned and let my feet dangle.

  “We’re not getting any younger,” Dawkins called from below.

  I let go and fell about ten feet—right into Dawkins’ arms.

  “Ogabe and Greta have already gone down,” he said, setting me on my feet. We were in a tiny concrete chamber barely large enough for the two of us. At our feet was a round concrete shaft, metal rungs like enormous staples leading down into the gloom. “Greta shouldn’t be here at all, but there was no way to stop her from looking for her father. So I’m relying on you to stay back and protect her.”

  “You can count on me,” I told him.

  “I know that,” Dawkins said, placing his feet on the rungs. “I just wanted to make sure that you know it, too.”

  We went down.

  Greta and Ogabe were waiting at the foot of the ladder, their flashlights on. We were in an enormous concrete tube, maybe twelve feet high: The storm drain.

  “Which way?” Greta asked.

  I cast my light over the map Ogabe had us print out. “Looks like we hike north,” I said. The two storm drains and the substation weren’t connected on the map, but Ogabe assured us there was a link between them.

  Dawkins led. Twelve feet of rope connected him and Ogabe. Behind them was Greta, and I brought up the rear.

  Eventually the tunnel ended at a metal grill. It stretched from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, like the bars of a jail cell. Stringy bits of moss drooped from the crossbars. “This is what Ogabe told us about,” Dawkins said. “We should now be level with the top story of the substation.”

  Ogabe stood in front of the grill as though he were looking it over—though of course, he couldn’t see a thing without his head. He reached up and pulled at the bars, but they didn’t budge.

  Dawkins played his light across it. “Typically there’s a gate somewhere—there!” Along the right-hand wall, his beam caught a rusty padlock.

  Greta examined it. “I can’t pick something this old without the right equipment.”

  Dawkins smiled and produced a leather pouch. “Miss Sustermann,” he said, “may I present to you your father’s lock-pick set.”

  Greta’s smile in return was huge, and her voice wavered as she said, “I’ve missed these!” She ran her thumbs over the worn leather of the pouch, then untied the laces and unrolled it. Inside were four pockets filled with hooked metal blades. “These are as good as a set of keys.”

  She got to work. At first I’d found it strange that she and her dad shared this hobby, but now I couldn’t help feeling a little jealous. My dad and I never did anything together these days. At least Greta and her dad bonded over lock picking.

  With a click, the padlock fell open.

  “I’m sure Gaspar would be proud,” Dawkins said, smiling. “All right, we are now entering the substation. The plan: I park you two somewhere—anywhere safe—while I go in search of Ogabe’s head. I reattach it, and then he and I find your dad, Greta, and the three of us destroy this Eye of the Needle thing.”

  “No,” Greta said. “You need help—that’s what Ogabe said. So we’re going to help.”

  “I’ve let you come this far,” Dawkins said, “because it was too dangerous to leave you at your dad’s house, or up in that empty stolen car. But I will not have you in harm’s way.”

  “Fine, we’ll stay out of harm’s way, but we’re still coming with you,” Greta said. “Right, Ronan?”

  I thought about how she’d thanked me earlier, and then about how our parents were probably somewhere up ahead. “Greta’s right. You need all the help you can get,” I said. “We can come with you and still be safe. I promise.”

  Dawkins threw up his hands. “I don’t know why I waste my breath with you two.” He swung open the gate, and we all passed through.

  We turned down one tunnel after another until we heard a deep thrumming up ahead. Dawkins shut off his flashlight and we followed suit.

  “What is that?” Greta asked.

  “Generators,” Dawkins whispered.

  The tunnel ended in the corner of a large, warehouse-like room. The floor was a checkerboard of clear-glass brick squares and steel planking. And filling the room were eight enormous devices, each about as big as a garbage truck. They were the source of the humming.

  “Turbines,” Dawkins whispered, pointing. “River water gets pushed up those massive fat tubes there”—giant pipes rose from the floor and curved around the central engine housing for each of the turbines—“and the water pressure turns the blades in those generators, creating electricity. It’s supposed to be decommissioned, but as you can see, the Bend Sinister has it up and running again.”

  Control panels the size of refrigerators were set in a row down a central aisle, one at the foot of each turbine. Strung from the high ceiling were banks of floodlights, but they weren’t turned on. What light there was in the room rose up from below, through the squares of glass.

  “The Bend Sinister must need a lot of power for…”

  “The Eye of the Needle?” I asked, but Dawkins didn’t answer.

  We moved single file out of the tunnel—Dawkins, Ogabe, Greta, and then me—and crouched down between the humming turbines. Along the way, Dawkins paused to peek down through some of the glass brick squares in the floor. “It appears that operations are visible through the floor of this room,” he said. They were like skylights into the rooms below. The first bunch we looked through revealed an empty room packed with plastic-shrouded desks and dark computers. On the far wall was a pair of white doors, the only way in or out other than the tunnel we came through.

  “Clearly, we can get downstairs through those,” Dawkins said, pointing. “But before we do, let’s make a systematic search for our friends via these glass brick windows—taking pains not to be visible to anyone who might be below. Greta, you take the right side of the room; Ronan, the left; we’ll park Ogabe beside the exit; and I’ll check out the middle.”

  I had checked only ten glass squares—some empty rooms, another four that seemed to follow a hallway—when I looked down and saw something round lying on a cot: a dark-skinned head. It looked at me and blinked, then broke into a huge smile.

  “Hey!” I whispered. “I see Ogabe!”

  “Never mind that,” Greta hissed. “Something very weird is going on over here!” She was on her knees against the right wall, just out of reach of the light from the room below.

  Dawkins and I crouched down next to her and looked down upon a strange scene.

  The chamber below was a bizarre cross between an operating room and a computer lab. There were banks of monitors and keyboards along one wall, and, in the center, five people gathered around a stainless-steel operating table. One of them was speaking, a gray-haired man in a lab coat and surgical mask. He
was waving one hand in the air as, with the other, he guided a big metal ring to the head of the table. It was attached to a pivoting metal arm like a dentist’s X-ray machine and was about the size of a hula hoop, made out of segmented chrome parts and bristling with wires and cables.

  Whatever they were going to do, I didn’t like the looks of it. “We should get back,” I said. “Before someone sees us.”

  “Shh,” Dawkins said, quieting us. We could hear the faintest of murmurs, like people talking in a distant room. “Sounds like there may be a way to hear what they’re saying.”

  Dawkins withdrew a screwdriver from his pocket. Then he went to a row of ventilation grills along the base of the wall and removed one. Immediately the murmur became slightly clearer. “Right,” he said, wiggling into the shaft behind the grill. A few minutes later, he backed out, gray with dust, holding a pair of filters. “Had to remove a few obstructions,” he said.

  “Shh! They can hear you,” Greta whispered.

  Everyone in the room had stopped what they were doing. They were gazing up toward the glass brick panels.

  We scooted back until we were out of sight, fully hidden from below by darkness. But we could still see them, frozen and staring upward.

  At last, from the vent, we heard the faint echo of a man’s voice. “It’s nothing. This old substation makes all sorts of noises—it’s like a house settling on its foundations.”

  Another voice, a woman’s, said, “It sounded like people talking.”

  “You worry too much,” said the man in the surgical mask. “As I was saying, the Eye of the Needle is nearly ready. Please throw the switch, Donald.” The lights in the room below dimmed for a moment, and the metal hoop filled with a net of brilliant red light.

  The crisscrossed grid of beams was so bright that it took our eyes a moment to adjust. “It’s beautiful,” one man exclaimed, and everyone in the group seemed to agree.

  We edged closer again as the man in the surgical mask positioned the hoop. “As you can see, the table is on rails, allowing us to easily pass our subjects through the Needle’s Eye. The soul is combed out and trapped here, in the Conceptacle.” He tapped his finger against a silvered glass bottle and screwed it into place on the side of the hoop. “This is a double-walled silvered flask, which has undergone a complicated enchantment that effectively traps the soul for as long as we wish to keep it.”

  “And what happens to the…subject?” the woman asked.

  The man in the mask paused and thought for a moment. “I suppose the subject could be kept alive in a vegetative state, hooked up to breathing machines and the like, though I can’t imagine why anyone would bother.” And then he laughed like he’d said something funny.

  I was so tense with anger that I felt like I could throw up. After the past eighteen hours, I’d gotten used to the fear. But anger? That fed something new: a determination to stop these people. I’d felt the first inklings of it on the side of the highway while looking at Ms. Hand; but now it was overwhelming. Somebody had to stop the Bend Sinister, and wasn’t that what my mom had secretly raised me to do?

  Greta’s breathing quickened. “He said subject,” she whispered. “Ogabe said something about that. Are they going to use my dad as a test subject?”

  “Before we comb the soul from our first Pure,” the man continued, “we have to make a few test runs—to calibrate the Eye, so we can be sure the Conceptacle is properly hosting the subject’s essence.” The man gestured and the net of light in the hoop disappeared. “Donald?” he said. “Bring out the boy.”

  A moment later, a familiar voice said, “Dr. Warner—I mean, Dad? What’s going on?” And then a frizzy head of dark hair entered the room, escorted by a brawny guy in a suit. “Am I forgiven?”

  “Absolutely, Samuel,” Dr. Warner said. “We know you were an innocent pawn in the hands of those people.”

  Even from up above, through the glass bricks of the floor, I could see Sammy’s shoulders relax. “That’s what I told everyone, but no one listened.”

  “It’s okay, son,” Dr. Warner said. “We brought you here to ask for your help. We’re testing a new scanner and need someone to examine.”

  “A scanner,” Sammy said, and I could see him tense up as he looked around. Then he nodded. “Sure. Okay. What do you need me to do?”

  “Just lie down on this gurney. We’ll guide it through this metal hoop here. You might feel a slight pull, a tugging inside you. But ignore it. It won’t last long.”

  “Do as your father tells you,” said a petite lady with short blonde hair who was wearing a lab coat.

  “Okay, Mom.” Sammy climbed up onto the gurney. “No problem.”

  I pressed my hands to the glass, wanting to shout to Sammy, to warn him, but I couldn’t seem to draw a breath or get a word out. They can’t do this. But it was too late: Sammy was already on the table, the straps looped around his wrists, chest, and ankles.

  Greta opened and closed her mouth, unable to say anything, and turned to Dawkins, but he was already up and running, the screwdriver clenched in his fist.

  CHAPTER 25:

  MAN ON FIRE

  “Make noise!” Dawkins yelled. “Get their attention! Slow them down!”

  Greta pounded her fists on the glass so that everyone looked up. “Sammy!” she cried. “Get out of there!”

  “Greta?” Sammy said, smiling and squinting past the lights. “What are you doing up there?”

  “Donald,” Dr. Warner said calmly, “send someone to take care of this disturbance.” He gently pressed Sammy back against the gurney. “Never mind them, son.”

  “Don’t trust him!” I yelled. “He’s lying to you!”

  “Ronan!” Dawkins shouted, “I need your assistance.”

  He fell to his knees beside one of the enormous generators and wedged the blade of the screwdriver under the steel planking on the floor. Beneath the steel was a channel filled by a fat braided cable covered in black plastic.

  “What’s that?” I said as I reached him.

  “Conduit,” he said breathlessly. “All the power from those generators there goes through these cables here to the station below us.”

  “They’re going to kill you, Sammy!” Greta shouted, banging on the glass.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen,” Dawkins told me. “I am going to stab this screwdriver into that cable. That will create a short in the system and cause all the power to shut down.”

  “But you’ll…get electrocuted,” I said. “You’ll die.”

  “That’s usually what electrocuted means, yes,” he said. “But die? Me? Never!” He slipped out of his leather jacket. “Nonetheless, once the power is off, I am going to need you to pound on my chest with your fist to bring me back.”

  “Pound your chest, got it.”

  “You will have to hit me very hard. You’re basically kick-starting my heart. Otherwise, it will just take its sweet time, the lazy thing, and I need to be up faster than that.”

  Greta shouted, “Sammy’s got one of his arms free!”

  “Good to hear,” Dawkins called. “Greta, go join Ogabe by the door.”

  He whispered a few words, and the blade of the screwdriver grew incandescent. “Remember: Don’t touch me until the power has cut off. If you touch me before then, I may still be conducting electricity.” Dawkins said. “Oh, and I almost forgot: please put me out if I catch fire.” He handed his leather jacket to me. “Use this to beat out the flames.”

  Then he clutched the screwdriver with both hands, raised it over his head, and slammed it into the cable.

  There was a blinding burst of dazzling light, followed by a sudden silence as everything shut down. The room went completely dark. After a moment, I saw something in front of me flickering orange.

  I blinked and turned on my flashlight.

  The flicker was Dawkins. The electrical short had blasted him backward, away from the cable. In the flashlight’s beam, I could see tendrils of smoke rising gently from h
is body. His jaw was slack, his eyes open and empty.

  And his T-shirt was on fire.

  I froze for a second, thrown back to that nightmare moment in Brooklyn when I’d woken up to flames crackling around the edges of my bedroom door.

  And then I snapped out of it. This was my friend on fire—a friend who was depending on me to save him for a change.

  I smacked his leather jacket on him, using it to douse the flames.

  And then I did as I’d been told: I pounded my fist against his sternum. Once, twice, three times.

  Nothing happened.

  “Come on,” I grunted. I sat astride him on the floor, clasped my fists together, and brought them down as hard as I could.

  He inhaled loudly, then coughed, arching his back.

  I couldn’t help myself: I laughed. He was alive! He couldn’t be killed, but still I’d worried—that I’d let him down, that I’d let him die.

  He said something unintelligible, flexed his fingers and hands, then said, “Why…are you…sitting…on me?”

  Laughing again, I pulled him up, threw his arm over my shoulder, and half dragged him to where Greta and Ogabe stood beside the doors, their backs against the wall, holding hands. There was the sound of a chain rattling from the other side of the doors.

  “I think someone’s coming,” Greta said.

  “The door will hide us,” Dawkins whispered, “but we will have to move quietly.”

  Across the room, I saw the flashlight I’d forgotten on the floor. I started for it, but Dawkins held me back. “It will lead them that way.”

  Greta let go of Ogabe’s hand and hugged Dawkins. “You saved Sammy!”

  “Yes, yes,” Dawkins whispered. “Now shut up.”

  The doors were pushed open, and four men wielding powerful flashlights ran into the room. Each was perfectly groomed and dressed in the dark business suits that seemed to be the Bend Sinister uniform. In the light of their flashlight beams I could see that three of them held swords, while the fourth carried a Tesla rifle. Without speaking, they went straight toward the beam from my flashlight.

  Dawkins caught the edge of the door before it closed, and the four of us quietly slipped through, Greta leading Ogabe by the hand. On the floor in front of the door was an open padlock and chain that Dawkins ran through the door handles. He snapped the lock shut. “That might hold them for a few minutes.”