No TV monitors. Albert had been expecting monitors, some kind of surveillance system. Not seeing one bothered him. He glanced back at the doors they’d come through. Both had four deadbolts, keyed this side, one at top and bottom and two on the latch side. Three heavy hinges, pins welded in place so you’d need a torch to remove them. They’d designed this place so you couldn’t just wander around, that was certain.
He looked back at the sole guard and saw his hand creeping down his side toward a . . .
“GUN!”
Again she blurred and he heard a muffled crunching snap and the guard’s head ended up leaning to one side at an angle, her hands on chin and back of skull. Somehow, she still had the pistol in her right hand, she’d done that with the heel of her palm. The guard jerked a couple of times and settled lower in the chair. His pistol clattered to the floor.
Dead. Just like that. And he was a fellow cop, uniform, badge, patches, clean-cut cropped-blond-hair look. She let go, stepped back, and surveyed the room. She gestured Albert toward the side doors. Still silent.
He drew her pistol and this time she didn’t shake her head. First door—a storage room, animal feed and bedding, his nose told him that before his eyes confirmed it. Also held steel shovels and rakes and a bin of what looked like coarse bone dust. Recycling. He bet they made the prisoners clean that out, sort of like digging their own graves. Second room—toilet, just flush and sink and mirror.
Third room—small office, unoccupied, metal desk and filing cabinets and a couple of the hard, uncomfortable chairs you give subordinates when you want to . . . discuss . . . their job performance.
A nameplate sat on the desk, lettered in lines and ovals and squiggles in no language he’d ever seen before. He walked back to the guard’s desk and studied the magazine. More lines and ovals and squiggles. He could read the pictures. Porn. Bondage and torture porn, and it didn’t look consensual . . . he glanced a question at her.
She nodded. “I can understand six or ten languages. Recognize about a dozen others. That isn’t any of them.”
Writing is an arbitrary thing. Those squiggles could still represent English or Arabic or Russian. A small battery radio sat silent on one corner of the desk. He turned it on. The knob turned counter-clockwise rather than clockwise. Knobs also represent arbitrary conventions.
“Gahn ab yhgen, rehnf ab yesten.” Sounded like the tail end of a poem or chant. Then music with voices. He looked at her. She shook her head. He turned it off. Not English or Arabic or Russian or Finnish. Languages evolve and diverge on their own pace.
He caught himself staring at the corpse-guard’s badge and patches, then compared them with hers. Lettering he couldn’t read, but shapes the same. Colors the same. He looked up at her.
“Don’t expect me to mourn. You saw what kind of place this is. He wasn’t a cop, he was a death-camp guard. Some people are just too stupid to live. Going for a gun like that, he asked to die. Not even worth a cartridge.”
Albert checked the room again, still looking for surveillance cameras. He couldn’t believe they’d lock this place up as tight as they had, without monitoring it. They had radio—they had transistor technology by the size of that radio—they had fluorescent lights. One man on guard, alone, the scene made him twitchy.
“Can we get moving?”
“First things first. I’ve got an experiment to run and a body to ditch. Good thing they go together. Grab an arm.”
She stowed the man’s pistol back in his holster and grabbed the corpse under one armpit. Albert grabbed the other. He already knew she wasn’t big on explanations. They hauled the dead guard through the cellblock, back into the tunnel. He weighed a lot, deadweight, floppy. Albert had moved bodies before. They always weighed more dead than alive. Always seemed to catch on the floor or doorsill or ground or whatever, as if they fought you.
Then she hauled him upright and pushed his feet against the barrier, the cushion that stopped fireflies but let persistent humans or gods shove through. You had to keep pushing, a certain amount of continuous force . . .
“Any idea what this is?”
She shook her head. “Magic. Or maybe a quantum entanglement field. In other words, damn if I know. It works.”
The corpse set its feet into the bone-heap and then fell through, face first, boots and calves at the edge of the cushion but knees and everything above flopping across the bone-chip pile that the fireflies could reach. And they did. They swarmed. They coated the body. Flesh and hair melted away. More fireflies appeared, streaming down the tunnel, he didn’t have a clue where they came from. The first ones crawled away, sated, too heavy to fly and their orange glow muted. They all settled. The air cleared. No new ones came.
“Thought so. Give them a big feed, you can walk right past them. That’s why the goats. Don’t have anybody you want dead, you can still use the gate.”
So the people who ran this place, Them, kept their options open. At a price.
“Any idea how Mother got through?”
Mel cocked her head to one side and studied him. “Way I see it, any number of possibilities. At least two of them you won’t like. First, Bilqis is Big Boss of the crew running this. Their goddess. She calls ahead and they make smooth her path. Second, she didn’t come this way at all, just set up things so you’d hear and follow the Seal through that door. Brought it to this end of the tunnel and then hid it elsewhere, maybe. Anyway, a deliberate trap. She isn’t a very nice woman, you know.”
Albert felt gut-punched. Mel was right. He didn’t like either suggestion. Problem was, either one fit the Mother he knew. Nobody else mattered quite as much as she did . . .
Or at all.
Humans called that a psychopath. Or sociopath, he guessed they had renamed the trait. The description fit a lot of gods. Part of the definition of god-ness, even.
I am God. Do what I say, or suffer. And even if you do obey, you’ll still suffer. Because you don’t count. Humans are less than dust to Me.
I don’t like gods.
“Can we get out of here, now? I keep expecting the whole place to blow up on us, or the army to break through that front door with machine guns.”
“Patience please, the night is long. You’ll have noticed the front door is also locked on the other side. Our late host was locked in here alone to deal with anything that could get through the tunnel. Not even a coffee pot. Punishment detail. He didn’t hit his alarm button. I got to him first.”
Albert hadn’t seen any alarm button, but she’d been on the other side of that desk. “These shall be rewarded with high places because they were patient, and shall be met therein with greetings and salutations.”
“Surah 25, verse 75. Which talks about rewards after death and judgment day. Go back to Shakespeare. Or Tennyson, if you have to.” She paused and stared him in the eye. “Seriously. Stop quoting the Holy Qur’an at me. Given what you know of me and my background, it comes across as mocking.” Pause. “Little man, that’s mocking me, not Muhammad or Allah.”
“Yeah, and mocking the Goddess gets your city melted into radioactive glass. You’re a lot like Mother, that way.”
Her palm exploded over his ear, he hadn’t seen her move, and he fell into stars and darkness but managed to sweep her legs from under her as he fell and rolled to pin her gun hand, her right hand, and smacked her left wrist when that hand came up with the other gun, and he twisted and reached and had his knife at her throat. They froze, him half on top of her and feeling hard lumps poking him from inside her coveralls and also soft lumps and the hard curves of hipbones, she was a woman.
Not that it mattered.
He could push the knife down on her carotid. An eighth of an inch, more or less, and they’d both find out if gods could really die. The knives he made, a good slash and he’d cut her head right off. The knife didn’t move. It had a will of its own, and he didn’t force it.
She took a shallow breath, her chest moving under him. A deeper one. Her stare left his hand�
�what she could see of it—and the hilt of his knife and met his eyes.
“I guess Legion didn’t follow us here. Either that, or that damned demon is afraid to get between us now.”
Then she grunted and moved her left hand slowly, slowly, making sure he saw everything she did, and pushed his hand and the knife away from her throat. “Three times now, you’d think I’d learn. You don’t look fast, you don’t look dangerous . . . ”
Then another pause, “I may not have a conscience or what humans use for one. No sense of right or wrong. I just am. I do have a code of honor, of what I want to be, things I don’t want to have to remember, and I try to stick to it. It feeds my own ego. Part of it is, I don’t burn cities. I could, I allow myself to think about it, but I don’t. I only kill people who need killing. Because of what they have done, to other people.”
“Three times?”
She squirmed a little under him, probably some of her hardware caught between soft feminine bits, difficult as he found it to think of anything about her as soft, and the concrete floor, pinching. “The synagogue, that can of cherries in your apartment, here. Three times you’ve got past my guard and hurt me. And every one of them my own damned fault.” She squirmed again. “Now, if you aren’t actually going to kill me, would you let me up? I’ve got the grip of a twelve-gauge pump shotgun trying to drill into my right kidney.”
Trust. It all comes down to trust. She hasn’t had much practice at it. I’m not too big on that, myself.
He rolled off her and sat up, still trying to shake the daze out of his head. His left ear hurt, and he wouldn’t hear too good out that side for a while. Other bits ached and throbbed and burned, suggesting he’d be carrying bruises in the morning. Yeah, he’d proven yet again that concrete was hard.
Another slow learner.
If she wanted to kill him, now would be a good time. She had both guns out and handy.
She didn’t do it.
They both staggered to their feet and shrugged kinks out of backs and shoulders and shook some kind of linear thought back into heads. They each checked and stowed weapons. Truce.
He didn’t want to talk about what just happened. Apparently she didn’t either.
He glanced at the outer door, still locked. “Now can we get out of here?”
“We still getting closer to that Seal?”
He checked with the ache between his ears, the one that had nothing to do with her right palm, and then consulted the buzzing whine that set his teeth on edge. “Closer, yes. But I don’t like the feel of it. I think that crack has gotten longer.”
She massaged her left wrist and bent that hand back and forth a few times. Wrinkled her nose.
“Did I break it again?”
“No. Just bruised, this time. It’ll do.”
They walked back through the cellblock and the outer office, leaving those doors open and to hell with the fireflies. She laid her palm on the outer door and listened. Shook her head. She unslung her shotgun and checked it yet again.
“Something out there, something my winds don’t know. Also a couple of guards. You might want that Smith.”
He drew the pistol and checked it, round in the chamber and safety off. She waved him to one side of the door, up against the concrete wall: looked to be a foot thick at least, would stand up to light artillery. Then she moved to the other side, tucked herself up against that wall with the shotgun in her right hand and braced against one hip, and reached around to do her wind-magic on the locks.
He heard the locks click. He saw her shove on the door, hard, heard it swing open and bang against a doorstop. Another click.
Black smoke and orange flame blasted through the doorway, an explosion that knocked him flat. A second followed, felt rather than heard, his ears had quit and gone on holiday, and then a third.
Black.
XV
Bitter reek of explosives, dust, burning, tortured metal—Albert’s nose sorted through the smoke. If I can smell things, that means that I’m probably still alive. Against the odds.
He opened his eyes. That didn’t help. Except . . . a faint light defined the billowing black, low against the floor, white rather than orange. Not fire. If he wanted to stay alive . . .
He tried breathing, nose scraping the floor. Oxygen content low, dust content high. He coughed and scuttled toward the light on hands and knees. The air got better.
He broke into light and cut left, on the general principle that he didn’t want to stay in the doorway. That doorway wasn’t a healthy place to be. Now he could see green. Trees, grass, shrubs. A green metal post with three scorched green metal plates welded to it, angled low-middle-high, he guessed they had held booby-trap mines triggered by the door. Unfriendly greeting.
A man in blue uniform stood beside a tripod-mounted green tube. The tube belched and farted orange fire, soundless, a stream of fire that disappeared through the hole that had been a door. White light burst back out of the smoke, trailing white smoke. Albert centered the sights of the automatic on the man and fired twice. Fired without sound, even though the gun jerked in his hand. The man clutched at his belly and fell writhing to the grass. Bad shooting, Albert had been aiming at the chest.
No bang. Okay, I’m deaf. We’ll see whether that’s permanent. Just keep moving. If you’re moving, you’re still alive.
He had the gun, damned if he knew how. Convulsive grip, probably. For that matter, he still had the cane in his other hand and Mel’s pack on his back screwing up his balance. Her pack. Where the fuck was she?
Did she get out of that hell? She’d been shielded by the concrete, like him . . .
Two uniforms struggled, off on the other side of the belching smoke of the door. Fifteen, twenty yards, maybe. Damn near same uniforms, blue coveralls with patches, and no snowball’s chance he could read patches at this distance. One had black hair, one didn’t. One had a shotgun, one didn’t. He aimed, but didn’t dare fire.
One of the uniforms staggered and fell. The dirty one, the ragged one, the black-haired one. You couldn’t have been inside that shit-storm and come out clean. He fired twice at the standing clean uniform, saw it twist away and fall. Then he ran, weaving, ducking. She’d only waved two fingers at him before the blast but he expected more damn soon. She’d rolled to her hands and knees by the time he got to her. He pulled her up by the collar of her coverall. Blood and soot and tattered cloth. She started to yell at him, he could see her lips moving, her throat moving. He pointed at his ear.
She grabbed the shotgun from the ground, spun around for a quick check, and staggered off toward the nearest clump of trees. As good a guess as any. He glanced back at the door, the belch of thick black smoke climbing into a cloudless sky. They’d come out of a concrete bunker on a hillside that led up to a wild mountain, looked volcanic and tall, with trees halfway up and then gray jumbled stone above tree-line. The door hung askew on one hinge. Side window slits also smoking. That rocket must have blown them out. Or the first series of blasts.
Shit-storm. He was repeating himself.
People could see that smoke for miles. Time to leave, but not up the hill. That had “trap” written all over it.
She had headed downslope. He wondered if she could still talk to her winds, hear her winds. Her ears must be just as shot as his. His just gave him a dull ringing.
Should be a perimeter fence, to keep people out as well as in. So far, everything seems focused on stopping anyone or anything coming through that tunnel without an engraved invitation. The Big Men here know where it goes, what it hides. Don’t want any strangers coming out.
Anyone going in, is their own problem.
Wetness trickled warm down his nose. He swiped at it with the back of his fist, found blood. His right knee hurt. Other parts didn’t report at all—no feeling in his left arm, but it still seemed to work. Still gripped the cane, anyway.
She’d reached the first trees, leaning against one with both hands, panting. He caught up with her. She looked a
s bad as he felt. Uniform torn and black with soot, other spots red with blood, blood on her forehead and trickling from her nose, left eye swelling shut underneath a raw red scrape. At least that wasn’t her shooting eye, judging by the way he’d seen her handling guns.
She was talking again, he could see her lips move. He held his fist and the pistol up by his ear and shook his head. She nodded. Cocked her head to one side, wincing. Swiped one finger through the blood running from her nose, drew a pair of triangles interlocked on the back of her other hand. Star of David. Solomon’s Seal. Looked a question at him: Which way to the Seal?
He shrugged. Shook his head again. He couldn’t feel that bit of annoyance through the rest of the noise. Maybe later. He needed sign language.
She seemed to get the meaning, anyway. Waved downhill again, toward thicker forest. Pushed herself off the tree, swayed, and started off at a ragged trot. They needed distance.
Albert glanced back at the wrecked bunker, the sooty smoke still rising. Still no signs of other troops. Still no sign of an outside fence or wall. Maybe the Big Men—maybe Mother, he had to admit—didn’t care about people on this side. But best guess was, he wouldn’t be able to use this gate to get back home again.
If he could count his apartment as home. But his forge sat there, too . . .
He glanced around at the trees, trying to get some sense of place. They looked like maples and beeches and scattered hemlocks—northern hardwood forest and well grown, not cut in at least a generation. Season looked like late spring or early summer, fresh leaves but not just budding out. Downhill would be water, would probably be people. People they didn’t want to meet, wouldn’t be able to talk to if they did meet.
The bridge, by whatever metaphor, burning happily behind them.
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