by Toby Tate
Gabe finally made up her mind, turned and moved as quickly as she could, the pain shooting up her leg and coursing through her brain with each step.
The twister sounded like a freight train rolling down the tracks, the winds now whirling faster than even the most intense hurricane, throwing trees and rocks through the air, turning them into miniature missiles. Soon, it would pick her up like a rag doll and send her plummeting to her death, hundreds of meters below, if she wasn’t torn apart or impaled on a tree limb first.
Gabe chanced a look behind her as she steadily limped along, and saw that the column had grown immensely. It was now a huge wedge, probably half a kilometer wide, and so close she could feel the suction pulling at her clothes, like the tentacles of a giant octopus ready to drag her in and devour her.
But she couldn’t stop. She had to try. There was more than just her life at stake here.
She put one foot in front of the other, her leg burning with pain and close to giving out on her. Suddenly, her father’s words came to mind, warning her not to go into this alone. If only she would have listened. Now she would likely never see him or her mother again, and they would never know what had happened to their daughter.
I’m sorry, Dad.
The winds howled like a thousand angry wolves, as the suction from the intense vortex stopped her in her tracks and began to drag her backwards across the dirt. She knelt and tried to grab onto something, but there was nothing to grab. She pawed and flailed, dug her fingers into the ground trying to stop her backwards momentum, but to no avail. She continued on her inevitable course into the swirling mass of clouds that were now no more than meters away and saw as she glanced over her shoulder that the wedge was so wide and so close she could no longer see the edges—it was nothing but an enormous black wall, the noise now a deafening roar.
Then, she was airborne, praying that her death would come quickly.
In an instant, she fell to the ground and landed with her face in the dirt. She managed to regain her breath and flipped over in time to see the vortex dissipating into a rope-like column before fading to empty space. The clouds overhead rolled into one another like they were being sucked into a vacuum, and then they, too, disappeared.
As she stared up at the sky, her vision suddenly filled with the sight of Olivia looming over her.
“Looks like you lose, Princess,” she said.
Chapter twenty-three
Gabe knew this was the end, that she had lost. She was tired and weak and completely drained of energy. If only she had a chance to say goodbye to her mother and father. Their faces floated in her mind’s eye, ghostly images of another life. Olivia reached down with one hand and hoisted Gabe up by her throat. Her feet hung six inches off the ground as Olivia’s eyes bore into her, glowing a phosphorous blue like some exotic predatory animal. She reached over with her free hand and pulled the bayonet from Gabe’s ankle sheath and tossed it to the side. Then she pulled the green-handled Ka-Bar from its sheath and held it under Gabe’s chin.
“So, like to play with knives, do you?” she said with a playful tone. “Well, so do I.”
Gabe wasn’t about to give this bitch the satisfaction of groveling. “Just fucking get it over with!” she rasped as her vision began filling with blue spots.
“Oh, I’m afraid it’s not going to be that easy. See, you forfeited your right to die a quick death when you cut off my goddamned hand. Now, I’m going to take my time removing various parts of your anatomy, while enjoying your screams of agony. Now, where shall we begin? Should we begin here? Or here? Or maybe here?” Olivia poked her with the knife as she spoke, first in the nose, then the ear, then just below the eye, where she held the blade in place for several seconds.
Then she grinned and said, “The eyes have it.”
At that moment, there was a loud crack from off to their left, and a pink mist suddenly exploded from the right side of Olivia’s head. A mix of shock and confusion swept her face as she dropped Gabe to the ground, and then crumpled to a heap and lay still.
Gabe had recognized the sound—a high-powered rifle—and glanced over to where the shot had come from. From behind a hill and some rocky outcroppings emerged several dark-skinned men—Australian Aborigines. One of them was carrying a rifle with a scope.
“Are you okay, lady?” one of the men said. She nodded, and then glanced over at her would-be killer. She knew that even though Olivia had been shot in the brain, it didn’t guarantee death. But she knew what would.
She slowly got to her feet, walked over to the woman and pried the knife from her fingers. Then, while the men stood watching with mouths agape, she plunged the ten-inch blade into Olivia’s throat and separated her head from her body.
* * *
Although she wanted to leave Olivia’s corpse in the desert, where the dingoes could get at it, she knew she would have to take it back to Sydney and have it interred until an investigation could be completed. They might even be able to discover from research a few things about her amazing strength and abilities to heal at such an accelerated rate. Why did it always seem like the most gifted were the ones that deserved it least? They stuffed the body into a small outcropping and covered it the best they could with rocks and cut trees. If it was gone when they came for it, oh well—no great loss.
The men had an old truck parked on the other side of the hill, a couple hundred meters away. They carried Gabe there and then drove to a settlement some kilometers south. She ended up in an old ramshackle house owned by one of the men where he and his wife dressed her wounded hand and leg. The man said his name was Ganan, hers was Elanora. The couple was young, with a small girl and another one on the way, by all appearances. Afterwards, they sat in the kitchen as the wife placed a bowl of soup and a glass of water before her. The little girl stood behind a chair, eyes peeking over the top, watching Gabe with intense curiosity as she ate.
Gabe wanted to be polite, but she was ravenous, and slurped the soup like it might be her last meal. She didn’t know what was in it and didn’t care—it was delicious.
“We’ve been watching them for a while, months,” the man said, as he sat across the table from her. “We figured that since they brought you here, you were one of them. When we saw that woman chasin’ you across the bush, we knew you weren’t. Figured we should help you. These are bad people, like mercenaries, and we wanted no part of them. We didn’t want them coming here and hurting our families.”
Gabe put down her soup bowl. “What do you know about them? Do you know what they were doing with me out here?”
Ganan furrowed his brow. “You don’t remember?”
“No. They drugged me,” she lied. “I don’t remember anything since before they brought me here up until a couple of days ago.”
“The shack was built long ago by an old man who wanted to live off the grid. Then he died and no one used it for a long time. A few months ago, all this activity starts happening—fixin’ up the generators and such. Then they show up with you in a black Land Rover. They been going back and forth a couple of times a week ever since, getting supplies and all. Water truck comes out a couple times a month. None of us really paid it no mind, thought maybe it was some kind of secret military op. Then one of the guys sees you hikin’ out across the desert with that woman on your trail.”
Gabe smiled wearily. “If it wasn’t for you, I’d probably be dead. Thank you for that, and for the food and the hospitality. I just need to ask one more favor.”
“Anything we can do.”
“Would you mind taking me to the nearest hospital?”
Chapter twenty-four
Before she left, Gabe spoke to some of the other men about her captors, and found that they knew very little, other than the fact there was something decidedly nefarious going on in the camp. Afterwards, she was taken to the Flinders Medical Centre in Adelaide. The first thing she did was call her parents and tell them she was alive. Her father, who wasn’t given to emotional outbursts, sounded on the
verge of tears. She couldn’t blame him—she knew she would have been a basket case if the roles were reversed.
“I’ll be home soon, Dad. I just have to get treated here at the hospital. I’ll tell you all about it when I see you.”
“I thought we’d lost you.”
“You didn’t lose me. I gave those buggers one hell of a fight, just like my old dad taught me.”
“That’s my girl. I love you, and Mom sends her love.”
“Love you too, Dad.”
The doctors and nurses marveled that she had survived two days of a brutal summer in the outback, and she hadn’t even told them the details of the storm or the fact she had killed a trained commando and captured another. Some of the medical students that populated the hospital gawked at her for a while and tried to pry more details out of her, but she didn’t budge. The doctor stitched the wound on her leg and said that it would probably heal in a few months, but to try not to do any strenuous activity for a while or she could risk more bleeding. The only strenuous activity she planned for the time being was renting a car and driving back to Sydney.
* * *
Gabe figured that after her ordeal she deserved to ride back in style, and rented a Buick LaCrosse with a V6 engine and SiriusXM satellite radio. If the CIA didn’t like it, they could go fuck themselves.
She arrived home late in the evening and her mother and father met her at the door of their house. Gabe suddenly felt five years old again, dropping any pretense of being the battle-hardened soldier as she fell into her father’s arms, tears staining the front of his shirt as her mother stroked her hair.
“I thought I’d never see you again,” she whispered, reaching out to pull her mother close. They stood huddled together on the porch for several minutes, letting the warmth radiate between them. Gabe finally released her grip and stepped back to wipe her eyes.
Her mother glanced at the blood on the leg of her jeans. “Oh, my God. Are you okay?” Gabe followed her gaze.
“Don’t worry about that. It missed the artery, thank God. Right now I just want to eat, drink and rest.”
They went inside and Gabe could feel the tension from the last few days instantly drain out of her. She was home. The smells coming from the kitchen were so powerful to her deprived olfactory senses, she thought she might pass out.
“I already made you some pea and ham soup and baked your favorite—strawberries and cream bread,” her mother announced.
Her father nodded his head toward an open bottle as they sat around the kitchen table. “Thought you might like a nice Tooheys as a welcome home present,” he said.
Gabe smiled and took a swig. “It feels like my birthday around here.”
“You could say that.”
Gabe tried her best not to wolf down her food, feeling like someone who had spent months in a sensory deprivation tank. It seemed that every smell and every taste was amplified ten-fold. She told her parents everything that she remembered from the day she had left until she had been taken to the Aboriginal village.
It was after midnight when she finally climbed the stairs up to her bedroom. She redressed her wounded leg, brushed her teeth and fell into bed, letting the pain from every part of her body evaporate into the night. She was fast asleep in seconds, and dreamed of blue-eyed demons and huge, whirling pillars of black desert dust.
Chapter twenty-five
Although things weren’t exactly going swimmingly between the US and Australia, thanks to revelations about the electronic surveillance program known as PRISM—knowing that your allies were spying on you was not conducive to a trusting relationship—the ASIS and the CIA were at least still on speaking terms. Gabe was thankful for that, because she really wanted to make use of some of their resources—she needed a lot of questions answered. For instance, what the hell had David Jamison, Olivia, and their posse been doing in Australia for the last few months, or years? For that matter, what had she been doing?
Gabe’s father would drive her to the headquarters, and basically put in a good word for her, but it would be up to her to talk them into letting her use their facility. She could plug in the flash drive, which she knew had some files that might be encrypted, and start tracing bank routing numbers to see where they led, and hopefully what the money was being used for. The facility was also the one place with a firewall strong enough to prevent hackers from discovering someone opening the files
She thought about all this as they drove down Federal Highway toward Barton in the Australian Capital Territory. The early morning sun gleamed off the hood of the Land Rover, and it seemed to have a positive effect on her mood, despite what she had been through. Maybe the fact she had made it out alive and was now with her father also had something to do with it. She glanced over at him.
“Thanks for driving me, Dad. I’m glad I didn’t have to do this alone.”
“You’re never alone, Gabe. Just remember that. Even when your mother and I aren’t nearby, we’re always with you.”
That made her smile and tear up at the same time. Her dad could be so corny sometimes, yet she knew what he said was true—when the world was falling apart, her parents had always been there for her. She knew she was fortunate in that respect.
“If you can figure out what you’ve been up to for the last couple of months, you’ll be able to form a plan of action,” he said. “There must be some information on these people—the properties they rented or purchased, money they’ve invested, people they’ve contacted.”
“I think the flash drive is going to prove invaluable. Olivia was ready to kill to get it back. If I can get someone to crack the encrypted files on here, I think it will tell me everything I need to know.”
* * *
The RG Casey Building, which housed the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade as well as the ASIS, was a sprawling modern office complex that reminded Gabe of old-style Elizabethan architecture. With its terracotta tiled pitched roofs and articulated facades, it almost seemed out of place among the other, more mundane structures surrounding it.
The entrance hall of the main building itself was cavernous and somewhat like a gigantic hotel lobby, Gabe noted, with several colorful paintings and hand-woven rugs hanging on its walls. Second-floor walkways fronted with glass railings overlooked the hall, where a semi-circle of floor to ceiling pillars stood like sentinels on watch.
It was certainly more elaborate, and more inviting, than the CIA building in Langley, she thought.
They ended up in another part of the labyrinthine structure, passing several levels of security and ID checks along the way. Just as good as his word, her father managed to get her into the bowels of the ASIS and into the presence of one of their best code-crackers, a specialist by the name of Heinrich Schultz, a tall, lanky man with a bit of a German accent and shocks of white hair on both sides of an otherwise bald head.
“Hmmm,” Heinrich said, turning the flash drive over in his hand as if trying to read it with his fingers. “A Kingston. These are custom-made. Might be hard to crack, but not impossible. They can be remotely identified when accessed, but they won’t be able to trace it through our firewall. Let’s run this off-network and check for viruses, worms, and other nasties. I don’t think it would be a good career move for me to take down the network of the ASIS.” Apparently amused by his own joke, Heinrich barked out a laugh as he rose from his chair and crossed the office to a desk with a single computer laptop. He plugged the flash drive in and they watched the screen as he brought up a virus detection program that Gabe had never seen. Probably some high-powered program Heinrich had written himself, she figured. After a few seconds, he pulled the flash drive.
“Seems to be okay.” He turned and grinned at Gabe and her father. “Now let’s see about cracking that encryption code.”
Chapter twenty-six
David Jamison wasn’t usually given to frustration and anger, but this time it overwhelmed him as he bashed in the door of his Lexus until his knuckles bled. He should never ha
ve listened to Olivia and let her go after Gabrielle Lincoln alone. He had become overconfident, and now he was paying the price. They had already come and taken the body. They would study it, but would probably learn nothing they couldn’t learn from studying Lilith.
As he stood under the desert sun looking into the empty hole where Olivia’s body had been, he told himself that it didn’t really matter that Lincoln had the flash drive. After all, what could she do? She had accomplished what they needed her to do and things were already in motion. This was nothing more than a bump in the road.
He would miss Olivia. He had planned on mating with her—she was quite the handful between the sheets. He supposed that now he would just have to find someone else. But soon, it would be time for the gathering, and they would all be changed as they awaited the final coming of the Outsiders. That would be something, wouldn’t it? The humans were in for one hell of a surprise.
He smiled to himself as he glanced around the arid wasteland they called the outback—nothing but dirt and rocks with a smattering of grass and trees thrown in for good measure. It was no wonder so many people died out here, he thought. It was like another planet. In fact, he thought, it soon would be another planet.
Jamison climbed back into his Land Rover, made a u-turn and headed toward the main road. As he did so, Ganan stepped out from behind a nearby hill and watched Jamison’s dust until it disappeared over the horizon
Good riddance, he thought, and then finally turned and hiked back to his village.