Devil's Pocket

by John Dixon

  Somewhere, recycled fighters in red togas were seeing this footage, sounding alarms . . .

  Across the lake, the elevator dinged.

  Carl turned to the box. No time for memory clips or caution or anything but action.

  People spilled from the elevator, shouting. They were all the way around the lake, but escape was impossible. It was too late to save himself. All he could do now was jam his thumbs into the eyes of the Few’s grand plan.

  He grabbed the wires and yanked, but they wouldn’t come free.

  “There he is!” an all-too-familiar voice—deep, not quite English, not quite African—hollered.

  Carl pulled frantically at the stubborn wires, but they wouldn’t come loose. He needed to sever them—all of them, regardless of the dangers, real or imagined—but he had no cutters, no knife.

  As the shouters raced around the shore, coming for him, Carl searched for something sharp. He picked up a stone, tossed it away, and saw the bird, lying twisted at the base of the boulder, its wings fanned out at strange angles, its feet flexed, clawing even in death.

  That was it!

  He swept the shattered thing from the rocks, gripped a talon between his thumb and forefinger, slashed the bundled wires . . . and the Cauldron erupted.

  FORTY

  LOUD EXPLOSIONS shook the volcano. Alarms shrieked overhead, where Carl heard shouting and gunfire. Debris hurtled down, splashing into the lake and pitching geysers of black water.

  What had he triggered?

  He tossed the severed wires out into the water, then dodged a chunk of falling stone that cracked loudly off the rocks where he’d been standing.

  Across the lake, the red togas, having evidently abandoned him for whatever was happening upstairs, raced back into the elevator.

  Hope the thing falls in on you, Carl thought, watching the doors slide shut.

  Overhead, smoke clouded the air, but he could see the empty opera box, people fleeing the bleachers, and three figures—

  Z-Force—standing on the black bridge, looking up . . . where dozens of soldiers in black uniforms and gas masks were rappelling down out of the smoky upper reaches, firing machine guns as they descended. Someone in a red toga came hurtling down, splashed into the center of the lake, and did not rise.

  Red togas fired machine guns from the bleachers.

  Carl saw one rappelling soldier twitch, spin, and go limp, like an abandoned puppet, but the others—so many of them!—blasted away, some mowing down red togas, others firing at targets unseen, and still others contending with a far stranger threat.

  Dark shapes cut the smoky air, dive-bombing the dangling soldiers. The Krebs hawks had joined the fight. They tore into the men, pecking and slashing and flapping their muscular wings. Muzzles flashed flame, and mechanical birds folded and spun, raining from the above like a bad omen.

  A sequence of rapid pops patter-rattled somewhere up there, and mist joined the smoke.

  Tear gas, he thought, and then another large explosion rocked the mountain, and someone fell, screaming, from the bridge.

  Carl watched in slow motion as the Z-Force lightweight plummeted not into the water but onto the shore of black sand, where he lay in a motionless heap.

  Above, Baca dangled from the bridge, having been knocked from his feet by the explosion. A soldier rappelled onto the bridge, seemed to hesitate, then offered his hand to Baca, who swung up to safety. A second later, Decker felled the soldier with a vicious blow to the back of the neck. Baca scooped up the soldier’s machine gun and went to work, firing in short bursts as he retreated across the bridge, followed by Decker. Then Baca jerked and fell out of view. Decker grabbed Baca in one hand, snatched up the machine gun in the other, and swung the weapon one-handed, blasting away. Then the hulking boy-thing jerked once, twice, three times, and Carl saw wounds open in the overmuscled legs and shoulder.

  Still holding Baca, Decker jumped from the bridge. This was no hop-and-drop. His tremendous leg muscles crouched and sprung, launching him out and away from the bridge, with Baca fluttering behind him like a flapping cape. Thanks to Decker’s mighty leap, they arched out over the sand and splashed into the lake.

  Carl smelled a sharp and unmistakable chemical smell misting down from above. At the same second, his eyes began to sting, and he felt the muscles of his face beginning to twitch and spasm. Tear gas raining down . . .

  He winced, ready to dive into the lake, and then saw the elevator doors open. Red togas emerged first, waving machine guns.

  Carl crouched in the shadows.

  The Few hurried from the elevator—or rather, four of them did, followed by the masked children Carl had seen in the upper levels—with the bearded man leading the way. He shouted at the red togas, who nodded and took up defensive positions, covering the retreat of the Few, who sped across the black shore to the far end. They had just reached the boat ramp when Decker rose from the water, Baca draped over one shoulder. The bearded man raised an arm, obviously ready to fire the curious cloud weapon with which he had incapacitated Carl, then hesitated, seeming to think, and beckoned to Decker, who followed the Few as they disappeared up the ramp and into the huge room filled with the remaining funeral boats.

  Across the lake, the red togas opened up on soldiers firing down from the bridge.

  All at once, Carl understood. He hadn’t caused the explosions. Those had come either from the defenders or the soldiers . . . who he now realized were agents of SI3. Somehow, Octavia—brave, amazing Octavia—had managed to signal them, and they were assaulting the Cauldron full force, fighting and dying to stop the Few from escaping.

  At the other end of the lake, something groaned loudly, as if the Cauldron itself were voicing its pain.

  Determined to help SI3, Carl pointed himself in the direction of the groaning and hauled his damaged body along the darkened shore opposite the firefight, lurching and hitching toward the boat room. He couldn’t stop the Few, but it was in his nature to join the fight, and since, as Stark often pointed out, information wins wars, he chased after his enemies in hopes of seeing something—anything—that he could later share with the soldiers.

  He had expected a telltale blood trail, a secret door slamming shut, or perhaps funeral boats rocking as the Few settled into hiding spots, but nothing could have prepared him for what he saw when he topped the ramp.

  The floor of the boat room was gone, having spread apart to reveal a vast pool of water, at the edges of which, tilted like broken toys, bobbed the last of the funeral boats. At the center of the pool floated a dark blue submarine perhaps fifty feet in length.

  Overhead, more explosions shook the Cauldron, raining down debris, but the gunfire slowed, coming now only intermittently, in short, controlled bursts.

  The CS mist drifted past, and Carl watched with stinging eyes as the sub sunk, disappearing into the pool, and the boat room floor groaned, rumbling slowly shut again.

  FORTY-ONE

  CARL CREPT FROM THE BOAT ROOM to see the red togas retreating across the sand, backpedaling in his direction, firing at the soldiers rappelling onto the opposite end of the lake. In the same instant, the Agbeko-Kruger-thing turned in slow motion, saw Carl, and fired.

  Carl dropped.

  The bullet snapped overhead, so close he could feel its slipstream on his scalp. He scrambled back into the room and hunched, awaiting the next volley . . . which never came.

  All at once, the shooting stopped. Then came a rapid string of splashes on the lake and a muffled pattering on the sand, what sounded like a final round of debris raining down.

  After several seconds of silence, Carl risked a glimpse. Krebs hawks, dead or deactivated, littered the beach and lake. Near the elevator, several soldiers gathered around the red togas, who lay motionless on the beach. Shot them all, he thought, and felt a pang of sorrow. That hadn’t been Agbeko firing at him, but it had been Agbeko’s body. . . .

  Carl rose and limped from the shadows.

  Soldiers raised their we
apons and shouted, “On the ground! On the ground!”

  Carl flattened out, a smile coming onto his face. A curious moment—feeling happy to have guns pointed at him. The good guys were finally here.

  All gunfire had stopped. Not just down here. Everywhere.

  Five SI3 shooters approached in a fan—maintaining good form, Carl noted—two weapons trained on him, the others covering a full 360. In their black jumpsuits, gas masks, and body armor, they looked like they had rappelled straight out of some black-ops shooter game.

  Two flanked him. The others raced into the boat room.

  Carl tried to tell them that the Few had left, but no one would listen until the forward team returned from the boathouse. Then it was hurry-up-and-go. This place was going to explode any minute now.

  “No,” Carl told them, “it’s not.” And he explained what he’d done around the shore.

  Things relaxed slightly once they verified his story. Surprise rippled through the men when he reported his name.

  “Sigma,” someone said.

  “Lock it up,” the leader, a burly guy with a superficial bullet wound to his shoulder, said. Turning to Carl, he peeled off his gas mask, revealing a square jaw and piercing eyes. “Sergeant Cutter, SI3,” he said, and looked Carl up and down. “We’re happy to see you, kid. You did one heck of a job, deactivating those munitions, and you also happen to be one of the things we came here to find. Maybe this mission isn’t completely hosed after all. Put those cuffs away, Slade. Kid’s got a broken arm.”

  After all Carl had been through, even this small kindness felt like the warmest of welcomes. But he couldn’t relax until he knew the truth, no matter how much it frightened him. “Where’s Oc—Margarita?”

  Cutter frowned. “Advance chopper did an emergency evac.” He shook his head. “That girl saved this mission. How she did it, I’ll never know. Running all those miles over mountain trails in the snow and dark, only wearing sandals and a toga. Time we reached her, she was hypothermic, but she wouldn’t let herself pass out until she’d told us what we needed to know.”

  Carl swallowed with difficulty. Emergency evac, hypothermic. “Is she . . . all right?”

  “She will be,” Cutter said. “She’s with the medics now.”

  “And Davis?”

  “Don’t know who that is,” Cutter said. “Let’s head upstairs and sort all this out.”

  As they led him across the sand, Carl told them about the sub and the moving floor, about Decker and Baca, and how he’d only seen four of the Few, one of the women missing, the blonde, he thought.

  Cutter nodded. “She’s . . . upstairs,” he said, and Carl understood by the man’s tone that she, too, was dead.

  Agbeko lay beside the other togas. Carl looked at him and then looked away, feeling sick and sad and angry. Agbeko’s eyes were open yet empty, their whites as red as his toga. Blood pooled at the corners. Red tracks ran down his face into the black sand. The others’ eyes were the same.

  “They all dropped at once,” Cutter said, and snapped his fingers. “Like somebody flicked a switch.”

  Looking at the tears of blood, Carl figured he knew exactly what had happened. The bearded man had indeed flicked a switch—or maybe pressed a button. The red togas, just like the Cauldron, had been wired to explode. It didn’t take C4 to ruin a brain. All it took was a tiny explosive wired into a neural chip . . . and a remote detonator. A similar arrangement would explain the rain of ruined birds.

  Despite his grief over Agbeko, Carl’s brain rushed forward. He needed to get upstairs, needed to know what had become of Davis.

  They ascended to the main floor, where lingering CS gas stung his eyes and tickled his nose. At least his facial muscles had stopped doing the two-step. The fighting had ended, but the devastation was incredible. Carl scanned the scene, looking for his friend.

  Smoke poured from the upper levels and huffed out the volcano’s chimney. The track and bridge were covered in thousands of brass casings, broken glass from the shattered television screen, and the dark corpses of countless birds, one of which sparked at the feet of a fascinated soldier. The trooper watched for a second, then stomped the sparking mess with his combat boot.

  Bodies littered the track and bleachers. Most of the dead wore red togas, but Carl was sad to see dead tournament fighters and SI3 troopers, too. He said a silent prayer that Davis wouldn’t be among their number.

  “Watch it,” a soldier said, guiding him around a random puddle of blood. A drip splashed at its middle, and Carl looked up. A soldier hung twenty feet overhead, obviously killed by gunfire, spinning slowly back and forth from his rappelling line, looking like a half-finished meal a spider had left for later.

  SI3 had taken heavy casualties.

  Then Carl’s heart surged. “Davis!”

  His friend didn’t hear him. He was busy helping a fallen trooper. Davis’s hands were bloody, but he moved with confidence, tightening a tourniquet around the man’s injured leg, then called across the floor to a medic. The medic handed something to a soldier, who ran it to Davis. In that instant, Davis looked up, saw Carl, and beamed—then went back to work saving a life.

  Carl swelled with pride, seeing his friend in action. It occurred to him then that Davis might go on to become the first doctor in history with tattooed tears—only to spend the rest of his life trying to erase them.

  He started to step around the corpse of another red toga and lurched to a stop. Alexi lay at his feet, staring up lifelessly, the tracks of crimson tears now pink against his pale flesh.

  “Someone you knew?” Cutter asked.

  “Sort of,” Carl said, and discovered that he didn’t know exactly how to feel about this. No, he hadn’t ended Alexi’s life—not in the fight, and certainly not by flipping some remote kill switch—but he had crushed him in the ring, and based on this, the Few had recycled the Zurkistani. Now Alexi would join the ranks of Ross and Drill Sergeant Parker, neither of whom Carl had killed but who had both died because of him.

  Not far away, the beautiful blond woman sprawled indignantly on the arena floor directly beneath the opera box from which she had undoubtedly fallen. Her look of shock suggested disbelief that Death would dare come calling someone of her status.

  “She’s one of them,” Carl said, “one of the Few.”

  Cutter crouched and retrieved the golden mask from the ground beside her. “Not anymore,” he said. He radioed forensics and told them to send a team immediately. Then, to Carl, he said, “If we can ID her, it might help us identify the ones who got away.” He glanced up to where smoke billowed from a hallway high above. “I wish we’d been able to rescue Margarita’s sketches.” He shook his head. “But they’re long gone.”

  Carl offered a weary smile. “No, they aren’t.”

  FORTY-TWO

  “THAT’S IT,” Carl told the sketch artist. He shifted on the hospital bed, checking the drawing from different angles, then nodded. “It’s perfect.”

  “Amazing,” Crossman said. The SI3 director stood, hands on hips, just inside the door.

  It had taken several hours, given Carl’s endless refinements, but the artist had finished the fourth and final sketch. Carl had simply rewound his memory of Octavia’s maps and directed the artist’s efforts until the new sketches were mirror images of the original drawings.

  The artist, a willowy middle-aged woman with long, slender fingers, smiled wearily. She looked both happy and exhausted. “You did great,” she told Carl, patting his shoulder. Then Crossman dismissed her, and she left the two of them alone.

  It was still difficult, even after a day of being back in America, tucked away in the SI3 Bunker, for Carl to believe that he, Octavia, and Davis really were safe at last. Octavia would need time to heal—as would he—but doctors expected both of them to recover fully. Davis was ecstatic. He’d received a hero’s welcome at the Bunker for having saved soldiers’ lives, and the medical staff had already offered him a full-time apprenticeship. Julio had made
it out, too, though the Few had beaten him severely in their attempt to extract information.

  Search-and-recovery teams had never found Tex, so his death couldn’t be verified. By choice, Carl imagined the traitor frozen in a kind of Judecca at the bottom of some icy gully, abandoned for eternity.

  “We can’t thank you enough,” Crossman said. “You’ve saved the mission.”

  Carl shrugged. “I couldn’t have done it without Margarita”

  “I’m certain this news will be great medicine for her. These are the best leads we have.”

  “What about the blond-haired woman?”

  The SI3 director shook his head.

  “You couldn’t ID her?” Carl asked.

  “Oh, we ID’d her, all right,” Crossman said. “It’s just that we can’t make any sense of her identity. We’d been expecting someone rich and powerful—a young CEO or heiress or duchess . . . something like that—but we were way wrong. Her name was Ada Boros, and she was a poor farm girl from rural Hungary.”

  “A farm girl? You’re positive?”

  “One hundred percent. She disappeared from the fields six months ago. Authorities listed her as abducted but had no real leads.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense,” Carl said, yet even as the phrase left his mouth, he understood. “She was a vessel.”

  “What?”

  “A vessel,” he said. “The Few used her body. They’re riding in other people.”

  Carl had expected shock, confusion, or doubt, but the SI3 director merely leaned forward, staring at Carl with those intense blue eyes.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Take your time. I want to hear everything.”

  The next day, Crossman visited again, this time with Dr. Bleaker in tow. By this time, they had more to share.

  When SI3 had run the faces against an international database of suspects, they had come up empty. Then, based on Carl’s vessel theory, Crossman had changed his investigative approach, and SI3 soon matched the sketches to missing persons, one from Greece, one from Singapore, and one from Bulgaria. Like Ada Boros, these three were simply regular people who’d gone missing.