by Thomas Locke
“The monsters,” Lena confirmed. She settled down on the pallet and offered Brett as potent a smile as the people and place allowed.
Robin said, “Nobody else has seen them. Your monsters, I mean.”
“Just the same,” Lena said. “They’re coming.”
“I believe you.” Robin watched Lena settle onto the pallet. “In case I get too busy later, I just want to say, you know, thanks.”
“De nada.”
Bishop added, “That goes double for me, young lady.”
Lena opened her eyes. Bernard stood between the monitor station and Brett. He was a stubby man in need of a shave and a week’s rest. His beard grew in unattractive patches. His shirt was wrinkled and there was a hole in his left sock. But his eyes burned with the fire of bygone days, intelligent and ambitious and something more. His gaze carried a new focus. His features were carved with a future he thought had been ripped away. “It’s really good to have you all here.”
Robin said, “I’m starting the count now.”
The ascent started and Lena entered a white room. Even before Robin said, “Go and check for any incoming threat and remain safe,” Lena knew she wasn’t going anywhere at all.
The room was boundless, yet tightly confined at the same time. Lena touched the wall and felt an unwelcome friction, like she had been repelled at the very core of her being. She backed away. And stood in the center of white nothingness. Everywhere she looked, she saw the same smooth curvature. Not exactly an oval or a globe. The only way to describe the setting was, Lena rested in the middle of a white womb.
Her ascents had all felt smooth. This one was the same, only now it carried a special intensity. Not bad, not good. Just . . . Lena used her white cage as an opportunity to study what before had been too overwhelming. She realized that the event now carried a naturalness. Ascending was now part of her world. She had moved beyond the initial shock. The question was, once this threat was behind them, where would she go next?
A voice said, “That is an excellent question.”
Lena stared at a version of herself. Only this woman was so alien it would have been easier to face a stranger. The woman who confronted her was utterly content, an emotion so foreign to Lena’s existence that it took her a moment to even shape the word. She was also in love.
And she was pregnant.
The stranger wearing Lena’s face cradled her distended belly and said, “This is our second. We are naming him Brett. And that’s all the time we can spare for us.”
But Lena had to ask, “Am I with him?”
“There are restrictions to what we can discuss, you and I. Many, in fact. But you need to remember, the promise you see in me is intended to help you get through what comes next.”
A terror flooded her, so potent it almost wrenched Lena out of the ascent. She wanted to depart and find Brett and shield him from whatever might take him from her. And yet Lena was trapped by her need to hear what this woman had to say.
“We meet because the purpose justifies the deed,” the woman said.
“I don’t understand,” Lena replied.
“You will,” the woman assured her. “Now pay attention.”
There were two flashes, similar to the events Lena had experienced with her temporal self, but far more intense. One lightning bolt of warning, another of response.
Clearly the woman knew Lena wanted to depart. But she held her in the white room long enough to say, “Here is the key to us having any future at all. When the monsters enter your lair, you strike. Do not think, do not hesitate. It all comes down to this.”
And it was over.
Lena bounced up to a seated position, halting Robin in the middle of counting her back. She ripped off the neural net and felt her heart squeeze at the empty space by the doorway. “Where’s Brett?”
“He went to help Charlie.”
Lena staggered to her feet, her limbs caught in the quicksand of returning from another ascent. She reached out, and Bishop offered her a strong right hand. She gasped, “Outside. Hurry!”
“What’s the matter?” Robin cried.
Lena hated how she could not support her own weight. Hated how she had to slow down even more to reply, “They’re here.”
59
Reese waited until she had fit the neural net into place, then told Carl and Ridley and their backups, “We’re going after something entirely different from what we discussed.”
Ridley asked, “Why are we only hearing about this now?”
“Just in case,” Reese said. “They might be listening.”
Carl nodded slowly. “You mean, the crew in Havana could be monitoring us.”
“I had to plan for that. But my guess is they’re too busy right now.”
“Which gives us a window,” Carl said. “Smart.”
“I think they’re planning to finish this business in New York, then come for us.” Reese fingered the mike. “Kevin, you getting this?”
“Roger that. And I agree.”
“Our task is to build us a window we can all climb through.”
Ridley asked, “So what are we going to do?”
Reese told Kevin to break the seal and read the handwritten instructions out loud. When Kevin finished, Ridley said softly, “Oh man.”
Carl shrugged his massive shoulders. “Works for me.”
Ridley studied her partner. “What if, you know, they eat us?”
“You heard what the lady said,” Carl replied, watching Reese. “You’ll protect us, right?”
“With my dying breath,” Reese said.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come down to that,” Ridley said. “For all our sakes.”
“Roger that,” Kevin said. “I’m starting the count now.”
Identify the enemy’s core element, their primary purpose, the real reason why they are on the field at all. Shift it slightly, and everything changes. Those were the words written across the top of the whiteboard in Reese Clawson’s first class on tradecraft.
Reese had been approached late in her junior year at university. She was sulking in a Starbucks after another oh-so-boring job fair in the rec center. Just one of six hundred juniors desperate for an internship, a summer paycheck, a chance to carve a chink from the mountain of student debt.
Reese had said yes before the guy finished his windup. When he had asked what fueled her eagerness, she replied, “I’ve wanted this my whole life.” Even then, Reese Clawson could lie with utmost sincerity.
What she had thought was, the man and his pitch both smelled of danger. And she wanted in. Desperately.
Tradecraft had been taught by a grandmotherly woman who had peppered her lectures on stealth and tracking and eliminating opposition with real-world tales from the field. The instructor had been a black-ops agent for twenty-one years, a specialist at blending into the scenery and attacking with a smile. She had a musical lilt to her voice and gave most of the class nightmares. Reese had gone up after the first class and said, “I want to be you.”
Throughout that first summer of training, Reese had often thought of that first class and the words written on the whiteboard. The instructor had called it “stressing the situation.” The aim was to keep the opposition off balance by never doing the expected. Finding their core assumptions and breaking them in subtle and unseen ways. During the final assessments, the woman had described Reese as a natural, perhaps the best she had ever taught at stressing.
As Reese listened to Kevin count them down, she had the sensation that the instructor was there in the departures lounge with them. Watching and smiling in approval. She whispered the words, “Here we go.”
60
Brett stepped through the doorway and entered the empty street. Dawn was less than fifteen minutes away, according to Charlie’s timing. Which meant the apparitions that only Lena had seen were on the move. In Brett’s own ascent, he had witnessed an assault by two Russians and four Cubans, all heavily armed. Each of his ascents ended the same way, with
gunfire and police sirens.
As he started forward, Brett felt a single gnawing ache that he and Lena had never kissed.
Charlie moved like liquid through the floating mist. He told Brett, “Go back inside.”
“Save your breath.” Brett turned and faced the direction from which the enemy would arrive. And waited.
The fog seemed unsettled by the pre-dawn light. There was no wind. The air was utterly still. Even so, tendrils of vapor writhed and weaved, like an underground cauldron was being kept one degree off full boil.
Charlie’s voice took on a military edge. “This is a direct order, mister.”
Brett did not turn around. “You’re not sacrificing yourself. I’m not letting you.”
Charlie’s only response was to grip Brett’s arm and start pulling him toward the entrance.
“Go ahead, take me inside. I won’t stay.” Brett felt Charlie’s pace falter. “If anyone takes a hit for the team today—”
“No.”
“It will be me,” Brett persisted.
“Not happening.”
Brett lifted the phone in his hand, placed it directly before Charlie’s eyes. “How about we call Gabriella, let her decide?”
Charlie froze.
“That’s what I thought.” Brett shook his arm free. “So you’ve got about three minutes to figure out a different way to save us both.”
Whatever Charlie’s response might have been, Brett never had a chance to hear it. Because that was when the attack began. Not with the bang he had always heard during his ascents. Rather, with a scrape of leather and one small, metallic laugh.
61
At first Brett thought the two couples walked hand in hand. Then he realized it wasn’t like that at all.
They drifted into sight through the shifting fog. The light was vague enough to leave him feeling as though great fists unfurled, releasing the four.
One of the ladies had blonde hair that gleamed in the dim light like a brass helmet. She called down the half block that separated them, “Well, well. What do we have here?”
The other woman did not actually laugh. The sound she made was like a bird’s call, high-pitched, staccato.
Charlie tried to step in front of him, but Brett moved forward, keeping himself between Charlie and the enemy. Because this was who they faced. Of that Brett had no question. The motions caused the woman to emit another of those sounds, ack-ack-ack-ack, up and down an inhuman scale.
Charlie said, “Tell my team to come out.”
“You go ahead,” Brett said. “I’m good right here.”
The four held empty hands out from their sides. Which was why Brett had thought they were holding on to each other. They were less than forty paces away now, and Brett could see how unsteadily they moved. Part shuffle, part stagger. They bounced off one another every now and then. Their heads shifted up, down, side to side. Brett had seen the motions before but could not place where.
Charlie said, “I need to clear the range of fire.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” Brett said. “Go inside.”
The four were within thirty paces now, moving so slowly they could not logically represent any threat. And yet the sight of them made Brett’s skin crawl. Around them the fog boiled like a live thing. Figures seemed to appear in the mist, four nightmarish beasts that staggered and stretched and moved forward. The images mocked the dawn light, keeping ragged cadence with the approaching figures.
The warehouse door slammed against the concrete siding with a crack so loud one of the guys backed up and tripped over his own feet and almost went down. Lena rushed out, followed by Bishop and the Latino security guy. Bishop had one arm outstretched, like he was concerned Lena might fall without his support, which was not altogether a bad thing, because Lena staggered as she shrieked, “Get inside!”
Brett turned from the four and saw how Charlie scouted the surrounding rooftops. He was about to say something about snipers when Lena slammed into them both, a football tackle that caught them so completely off guard they fell in a heap on the pavement.
Two things happened instantaneously. The approaching woman gave off another of those impossible cackles, and the pavement beside Brett’s head was scored by something, a dark gouge that gleamed in the growing light.
Charlie plucked them up, one fist gripping Lena’s arm and the other holding Brett’s collar. From prone to racing in half a second. “Ten o’clock and two, rooftops!”
Hector did not bother aiming. Raising his rifle to his shoulder would have cost precious moments. He lay down a covering fire, racing through a clip in three seconds and flaying the buildings across from them.
Brett tried to protest, tell Charlie he was not going anywhere, but the soldier’s grip on his collar cut off his air. As they passed the doctor at a full-bore sprint, Bishop spun like a convulsive top and fell.
“Bernard!” Lena did not quite manage to break free of Charlie’s hold.
Charlie responded by lifting her off her feet and flinging her through the warehouse door. “Gun! Gun!”
Brett knew Charlie was heading out, the officer who only knew one way to lead his troops, and that was from the front. Taking the worst of whatever was incoming. Brett gripped the doorjamb, refusing to allow Charlie to push him into safety. He blocked the door with his body.
The hit, when it came, was astonishing on many levels. He did not feel a bullet. Instead, it seemed as though an invisible flame shot through his side. The pain was so intense he could not even breathe.
“No!”
Brett slipped to the earth because he no longer had legs to support him. The sounds were a furious barrage now, gunfire and Lena screaming and the woman outside still giving off that strange reptilian cackle. Then he stopped hearing anything at all.
62
Lena gripped Brett’s arm and struggled to shift his inert form out of the entryway. Charlie and his two remaining team members were firing and shouting for Hector to “Move, man, move!” Bullets whacked chips from the door frame and the cement wall, showering Lena with debris. She wanted to shriek for somebody to help her, but the dust and the cordite choked her. Then Robin shoved in beside her and grabbed Brett’s other arm.
Brett’s left foot snagged the Anglo security agent, spoiling his aim. He snarled something that Lena did not bother hearing. As she and Robin pulled Brett away from the gunfire and the danger, they left behind a trail that glistened blackish-red in the smoke. Lena forced down the gorge that rose in the back of her throat. She did not have time for nausea.
As she knelt beside Brett, Hector appeared in the doorway. He hauled Bishop with him. The doctor’s head lolled at a sloppy angle. Both men were stained black with blood. Hector grimaced and gasped as the Anglo dropped his rifle and shouldered Bishop. Together they dragged the doctor back and settled him beside Brett. Hector waved away whatever his mate said and started toward the doorway. Charlie shouted and pointed back behind them. The rear access portals were locked down, but Charlie wanted them covered. The Anglo helped support Hector as they hurried back.
Lena laid her head on Brett’s chest. The wet stain was warm as a departing life. “I can’t hear anything!”
Robin’s response was lost to a rain of bullets that hammered the metal shutter over the front window. She pointed at Brett and crawled toward the pile of gear that Charlie’s crew had brought with them. Then Lena felt Brett’s chest moving beneath her stained hands. A fractional gasp, up and down. He was breathing.
Robin dropped back down beside her, holding a black nylon kit the size of a large briefcase. A red cross was stitched into every side. She used a sudden gap in the noise to say, “Guys like this always come prepared.”
Lena watched as Robin unzipped the case and started sorting through the contents. Lena stroked Brett’s forehead and left a red streak from the blood staining her hands. She had no idea what to do except yell, “Please wake up!”
Charlie dropped down beside her. He dug two fingers into Brett�
��s neck, then used the scissors Robin handed him to cut away the sodden shirt. He inspected the wound to Brett’s lower left side, then pointed to the wound and said something lost to the shooting. But Lena found a hint of reassurance in the way he swiveled away and started working on Bishop.
A sudden silence filtered through Lena’s frantic helplessness. Charlie shouted, “Cease-fire!”
The quiet was deafening. Charlie asked the man by the front door, “See anything?”
“The shooters have vanished.” He risked another peek. “Looks like the four civvies are coming our way.”
“They armed?”
From his prone position on the floor, he shot a glance around the door frame. “Their hands are empty and over their heads.”
Charlie shouted, “Hector, you okay?”
“Just a scratch, jefe. Everything’s cool back here.”
The guy by the front door asked, “Do I let them in?”
“Tell them to wait.” As the guy shouted orders, Charlie ripped open a pack and sprinkled a yellowish grit all over Brett’s wound. Then he set a bulky bandage in place and said to Robin, “Apply steady pressure.”
“Got it.”
The guy by the front door called, “Charlie!”
“Hold them where they are.” Charlie inspected Brett’s wound, then said, “No bubbles.”
Lena was almost afraid to let in hope. “W-what?”
“If the lung was punctured, the wound would bubble. It’s not, see?”
“There’s so much blood.”
“Probably nicked an artery.” He tore open another packet, motioned Robin to peel off the gauze, and sprinkled more granules liberally over the wound. “Okay, apply the pressure again. Good. Lena, help me roll him over. Gentle, now.”
The guy by the front door flicked his head in and out of low-level view, then called, “Charlie, they’re still coming.”
“Watch their hands and don’t let them enter. They show a weapon, take them out.” Together they turned Brett far enough to inspect his back. “Okay. Clean exit. Same thing, no bubbles. Just below the lung is my guess. Maybe nicked a rib.”