Firewalkers

by Chris Roberson

  The Zotovic thing reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out what Patrick first took to be a ballpoint pen, but then realized was one of the Ink auto-injectors.

  “Now, I’m going to make you the same offer I made to the private investigator last time around, and that I should have made to the professor while I still had the chance. Tell me what you know—willingly—and I’ll bring you onboard as a shareholder, leaving enough of your memories and personality in place that you’ll have some sense of continuity. But if you refuse to cooperate,” he juggled the auto-injector in his hand, “then I’ll have to take what I need from your memories by brute force. Which would not only be more time-consuming and inefficient for me, but would pretty much leave you, well . . .” He gestured at the men on either side of him. “Like these two chatterboxes, basically. A hollowed-out meat puppet good for not much more than manual labor.”

  The Zotovic thing took a step forward, leaning down and putting its face close to Patrick’s. It smiled again, without a trace of humanity or warmth, and Patrick could see something dark swimming behind its eyes. He thought of Pahne’i down beneath the earth, staring down the god of shadows, and knew how he must have felt.

  “Now,” it said, its breath hot on Patrick’s face, “let’s begin, shall we?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The drugs were just starting to kick in as Izzie and Joyce finished marking out a wide ring of salt around Daphne’s car in the parking lot across the street from the Pinnacle Tower. Daphne had finished pulling all of the equipment out of the trunk, and was strapping into a bulletproof vest.

  “You doing okay?” Joyce asked when Izzie stood up suddenly and put her hands out to either side, as if trying to regain her balance.

  It took Izzie a moment before she could answer, blinking rapidly and taking deep, slow breaths. They had taken the ilbal before leaving Patrick’s house a short while before, and the visual distortion she was experiencing now was the first sign of the drug’s effect.

  “Yeah,” Izzie said, nodding slowly. Traceries of light had begun to bloom around the edges of everything in her field of vision, and intensified with each passing moment. “Starting to feel it, is all.”

  “I’m getting it, too,” Daphne said as she zipped a bulky hooded sweatshirt over the bulletproof vest. She picked up the other vest and brought it over to Izzie. “It’s like . . . like everything is catching on fire.”

  As Izzie pulled the vest over her head, Joyce nodded in her direction. “You guys sure that those are going to do you any good?”

  “Against one of the Ridden?” Izzie answered, tightening the straps on either side. “No chance. But if we run up against an armed security guard inside, I’d rather be safe than sorry.”

  Joyce reached into the backseat of the car and pulled out the boombox that they’d taken from Patrick’s living room.

  “I loaded this up with all sorts of noisy jams,” she said, putting it on the roof of the car. They had attached the strap from a messenger bag to the handle, so that one of them could wear it across their back. “If discordant noises distract the Ridden, then hopefully this will give you some kind of edge.”

  Izzie shouldered into a black hoodie, and zipped it up over the vest. It was a snug fit, but could pass for street wear, at least long enough for them to get across the street and into the building.

  “At least we were able to park close by.” Daphne slammed a magazine of shells into one of the tactical shotguns, and strapped another onto its side. Then she slipped it into the duffel, and continued loading the other. “Wouldn’t want to have to explain why we were out walking with all of this hardware in a bag if we ran into any city cops.”

  This part of the Financial District was pretty deserted on a Sunday night, and Daphne’s car was the only one in the pay-by-the-hour lot. Izzie had worried for a moment that there might be an attendant on duty that they would have to contend with, but thankfully there had only been a sign directing patrons to use the pay kiosk in off hours. There was only sparse traffic on the street, with only the occasional city bus or taxi cab driving by. They would have no trouble getting to the entrance of the building. It was what happened next that would be tricky.

  Izzie stood looking up at the towering bulk of the Pinnacle Tower, which seemed to her at the moment to be limned with fire. But she got the inescapable impression of dark shadows squirming inside, like worms wriggling through a corpse.

  “You going to be okay out here on your own?” Daphne asked Joyce as she slung the boombox across her back and hefted the duffle bag.

  “I’ll be more okay waiting out here than I would be going in there with you,” Joyce answered, and gestured with her cane. “I’d just slow you down, and I’m officially the world’s worst shot with a gun. But you let me know when you’re coming back out, and I’ll be ready to play the getaway driver. The salt ring should keep me safe until then.”

  Izzie turned to look in their direction. Both women seemed to be wreathed in flames that burned only brighter as she watched, but there was something more, besides. It was as though Izzie could see how they were feeling, even a sense of what they were thinking. Somehow their emotions and thoughts colored the flames that lit them, Daphne’s anxiety laced with resolve, Joyce’s concern tinged with fear. Was this the kind of second sight that her grandmother had always talked about?

  “Izzie,” Daphne said as she turned to look in her direction, her voice breathless. “You look . . . amazing.”

  Izzie knew that Daphne wasn’t talking about the ill-fitting hoodie and jeans. When she looked closer, she could see into Daphne, as well. Something burned bright inside of her that resonated.

  “Here, I’ve got something for you.” Izzie reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a silver brooch in the shape of a blooming flower that she had taken from one of their makeshift gris-gris bags. She stepped closer, and pinned it to the fabric of Daphne’s hoodie above her heart like a sheriff’s badge. “It’s not a silver face mask, but hopefully it will do some good.”

  Izzie pulled a silver necklace out of her other pocket, and fastened it around her neck.

  “Does this mean we’re going steady?” Daphne said with a smile, and Izzie could see flames of desire wreathing around her head.

  “Let’s get going,” Izzie answered, trying to maintain focus. “Patrick needs us.”

  Izzie took point as they walked through the big glass doors into the lobby of the Pinnacle Tower, the hood of her jacket pulled down low over her face, hands shoved deep into her hoodie’s pockets. Daphne followed close behind, keeping Izzie between herself and the security guard behind the desk.

  “The building is closed to visitors,” the guard said, putting down the magazine that he’d been reading, his tone gruff but unthreatening. “You folks are going to have to leave.”

  Izzie could see the tinges of annoyance and boredom that flared around the man.

  “I just wanted to ask you a question,” Izzie said, keeping her face concealed in the shadows of the hood. She kept walking toward the security desk, her hands in her pockets.

  “No public restrooms.” The flames around the guard flashed with irritation. “And I don’t have any change to spare, either.”

  Beyond the desk stood a bank of elevators, and the art deco bas relief for which the building was famous, and as Izzie approached the desk she could hear the chime of one of the elevator doors opening.

  “We don’t need any of that,” Izzie said, coming within arms’ reach of the security guard.

  A woman dressed in business casual stepped out of the elevator into the lobby, a keycard on a lanyard around her neck.

  “Look,” the guard was saying, standing up from his chair with a weary sigh. “Whatever your problem is, I don’t care, okay?”

  But Izzie wasn’t even listening to him anymore. She was having trouble not gasping in shock when she looked at the woman walking away from the closing elevator doors.

  “Izzie . . .” Daphne
said in a quiet voice behind her, pitched low enough that she was the only one to hear.

  “I see it,” Izzie said without turning around. “I see it.”

  Instead of the flames that she had seen when looking at other people since taking the ilbal, when Izzie looked at the woman walking across the lobby she saw tendrils of shadow that rose from her head and shoulders, that twisted and morphed as she watched, sometimes seeming like tentacles, other times like motes of floating darkness, but always writhing and churning around the woman.

  She was one of the Ridden.

  “Do it,” Izzie shouted.

  From behind Izzie came the sound of thumping bass and grating guitar thundering from the boombox on Daphne’s back.

  “Hey!” the security guard said, turning in her direction. “Turn that—”

  But before he could get another word out, Izzie pulled the Taser out of her jacket pocket and jabbed the sparking end to his neck.

  “Sorry,” Izzie said sincerely as pain tinged the flames that wreathed the guard. “I know you’re probably just doing your job.”

  As the guard convulsed, and then collapsed with a thud to the cold tile floor, Izzie turned her attention back to the Ridden woman.

  The shadows that snaked and danced about her head and shoulders had taken on a spiky quality, throbbing violently, and the woman looked momentarily disoriented and confused. Then the shadows seemed to surge, pulsating larger and then smaller, again and again, and, as Izzie watched she could see pinpricks of inky blackness begin to blossom on the woman’s exposed skin and rapidly begin to swell.

  The woman turned toward Izzie, mouth hanging open as the inky blots flared on her face.

  “Ke-ke-ke-ke.”

  Izzie could almost see the loa forcing more of itself down into the woman’s mind, struggling to maintain control and reorient itself. And as it did, what little remained of the woman’s memories and personality was being consumed in front of Izzie’s eyes. The blots had already spread so much that the woman’s bare skin was almost completely covered.

  “Ke-ke-ke-ke.”

  The Ridden lurched toward Izzie, hands out and grasping. She had been passing close by when the guard had fallen, and was now just a matter of footsteps away. Izzie took a step backwards, and the Ridden came closer still. It might have been disoriented by the discordant music, and unable to perceive exactly where Izzie was standing, but it knew where she was just a moment before, and was clearly heading in her direction. It reached out its hand toward her, and was almost within reach.

  “Ke-ke—”

  A shotgun blast boomed out from behind Izzie on her left, as rock salt and silver shot ripped into the Ridden’s shoulder and arm.

  The woman recoiled in pain, and as the blots on her skin quickly faded Izzie could see the shadows come pouring out of her, like smoke being sucked into a turbine. The shadows shimmered and dissipated into an unseen direction as soon as they disconnected from the woman’s head and shoulders, until a cold blue flame sputtered weakly around her drained body. She collapsed in a heap on the floor like a puppet whose strings had just been cut off.

  Which in a way she was, Izzie realized.

  “You okay?” she heard Daphne say from behind her, shouting to be heard over the music blaring from the boombox.

  Izzie turned, and saw that Daphne still had the stock of the tactical shotgun to her shoulder, one hand on the grip and the other on the fore-end. The duffle bag lay on the floor where Daphne had dropped it only moments before.

  “Yes, I’m fine.” Izzie pocketed the Taser, then knelt down to pull the other shotgun out of the bag. Holding it in one hand, she reached in and with her other hand took the stun baton out of the bag, which she then handed to Daphne. Then she zipped the duffel closed, grabbed its carrying strap, and pulled it over her head, so that when she stood the duffel was slung across her back.

  “That seemed to work.” Daphne walked over and looked down at the body of the woman on the ground. No longer showing any sign of being Ridden, with no shadows around her to be seen, she was still faintly breathing, though the flames which limned her burned only faintly. “Still alive, too.”

  “Well, maybe,” Izzie said as she came to stand beside her. “The loa chewed up a lot of her mind on the way out.”

  “Now what?” Daphne said, looking over in her direction.

  “Grab the security guard’s access card,” Izzie said, nodding in the direction of the unconscious man. While Daphne saw to the security guard, Izzie bent down and pulled the lanyard with the keycard from the woman’s neck, noting that it seemed to have been undamaged by the shotgun blast. Pocketing the keycard as she stood up, she glanced around the lobby. “We have to assume that they already know that we’re here by now. If the minds of the Ridden are linked, then taking this one out likely alerted the rest. But I’m not hearing any alarms, so it’s possible that we’re still under their radar.”

  “So how do we find out where they’re holding Patrick?” Daphne said, slipping the security guard’s access card into the pocket of her hoodie.

  Izzie walked over to the security desk. There was a monitor there which displayed live feeds from different parts of the building, but the coverage seemed limited. All she was seeing was hallways and open-plan cubicle farms as the display cycled through different camera feeds, and aside from a few cleaning staff and a handful of late night workers like the former Ridden laying on the floor beside them, there weren’t many people to be seen.

  “We’ll have to search floor by floor,” Izzie answered, turning back toward Daphne.

  “But if they do know we’re here,” Daphne said, glancing toward the bank of elevators, “then those might not be the best way up.”

  Izzie nodded. “That’s what I was thinking, too. They could trap us between floors just by shutting down the cars from the control room.”

  “I was hoping you’d have some genius reason why the elevators would be better than the stairs,” Daphne said, the flames around her winking a mischievous shade of pink. “But okay. Stairs, it is.”

  Izzie glanced around, until she located the door to the stairway in the far corner.

  “Come on,” she said, hefting the shotgun. “Let’s get climbing.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  As they ascended the stairs to the second floor, Izzie could feel the effects of the ilbal growing stronger. Her thoughts seemed to move in strange orbits, her mind making unexpected connections, everything seeming to take on a newfound significance. Was this what had sent Nicholas Fuller off the rails, spending too much time in this kind of state?

  Glancing back at Daphne a few steps behind, Izzie could see that she was having much the same experience. It took Izzie a moment to realize that she was seeing Daphne have that same experience, interpreting the lights that flared around her.

  “Did you feel nauseated by that Ridden?” Daphne asked, as Izzie approached the door that led to the second floor.

  Izzie shook her head. It hadn’t occurred to her in the heat of the moment, but she hadn’t, at that.

  “Maybe the ilbal is tweaking our perceptions in more ways than one,” Izzie said in a low voice, taking hold of the door handle with her left hand, her right hand tight on the grip of the shotgun. “The weird tastes and smells and the nausea might be our brains trying to process sensory input that is outside our normal range of perception. But with the ilbal, that stuff might be translated into the shadows we’re seeing, instead.”

  “Maybe.” Daphne came to stand beside her, the stock of her shotgun at her shoulder. “But that means we won’t have that as an early warning sign, then.”

  Izzie hadn’t considered that. They could perceive the Ridden, but they wouldn’t know that any were nearby without looking. Which meant that one could be on the other side of the door, but they wouldn’t know until they went through.

  “Ready?” Izzie said, beginning to turn the handle.

  “Go,” Daphne answered.

  Izzie shouldered the
door open as Daphne stepped forward, crouched low and aiming her shotgun through the gap.

  A cleaning lady pushing a garbage can on wheels turned toward the sound of the music blaring from the boombox slung across Daphne’s back, and her eyes widened as she saw the barrel of the shotgun pointed at her. The flames around her spiked with panic and fear, but there were no shadows to be seen.

  Daphne lunged forward and prodded the stun baton into the woman’s stomach, as gently as she could manage. The cleaning lady collapsed to the floor, unconscious.

  “Clear,” Daphne said as Izzie slid past her down the corridor, her own shotgun aimed and ready.

  Izzie could hear the sound of a doorknob rattling, and a door swung open a short distance up the hallway.

  “Who’s playing that music?” An office worker in a Polo shirt and khakis stepped out through the open doorway, tendrils of shadows rising from his shoulders and head. He was looking around, a confused expression on his face. When his gaze turned to Izzie he paused, squinting, as if he was having trouble seeing her. Then the shadows spiked and throbbed as black blots sprouted all over his face and arms, and his mouth opened wide. “Ke-ke-ke-ke!”

  Izzie shot him in the leg with a blast from the shotgun, and the shadows dissipated as the man collapsed onto the floor, eyes rolled up in his head, unconscious but still breathing.

  “Clear,” Izzie said, as Daphne continued past her.

  They continued down the hallway, until it opened onto a large room filled with cubicles made up of shoulder-height dividers. Judging by the computer terminals, banks of phones, and headsets, this was probably some kind of call center during working hours, though it seemed to be deserted at this time of night. The only other rooms that they encountered on the second floor were storage closets, a copy room, and a dimly lit room filled with humming servers. Aside from the cleaning lady and the one Ridden that Izzie had shot, there was no one else to be found. In general, the floor seemed like just the sort of featureless corporate environment that Izzie would expect from a large software company, with nothing to suggest any sinister or otherworldly connections.