“I guess we’re lucky they can’t convert you.”
“You certainly are.”
Oliver followed the vampire down a series of corridors. The medical center was largely deserted, which Oliver took as a hopeful sign. He hadn’t been outside the grounds since he’d been brought here, but could only hope the rest of the city would be similarly empty. SCI-3422XB had told him that most of the city’s converted population was involved in the war effort, and that only an occupation force had remained behind. He had no idea how large that force might be, but if they were lucky maybe they could get as far as Filbert Street before anyone noticed them. “How do you plan to get out of here?”
“I thought we’d steal an ambulance,” Maria said. She stopped at a set of double doors. “Through here.”
Oliver wasn’t entirely surprised to find the ambulance bay unoccupied. The cyborgs had no need to guard a fleet of vehicles they had no use for. Maria chose an ambulance near the exit. “Now how do these open?” she asked, examining the closed garage doors.
“Maybe with this,” Oliver pressed a switch next to the orange doors, which began to retract into the ceiling. He only had a brief moment to feel pleased with himself, though, before an alarm began blaring through the building. The carnage Maria had left in her wake hadn’t gone unnoticed.
“Damn it,” the vampire said. “I needed two more minutes. We should probably leave now.”
Oliver wasn’t about to argue. He climbed into the passenger side of the ambulance as Maria took the wheel. “I don’t see the keys,” he noted.
Maria ripped a panel off from under the steering column and began fiddling with the wires there. “You know how to hotwire a car?” Oliver asked.
“I’ve been a vampire for almost two hundred years. I know lots of things,” Maria said. The ambulance’s engine sputtered once and then roared to life. “See?”
“I opened the garage,” Oliver said just a bit defensively.
“I’m so proud of you.” Maria examined the instrument panel. “Half a tank of gas. That’s more than enough.” She put the ambulance into gear and started forward.
Two armed cyborgs appeared at the garage door and raised their weapons. Maria gunned the ambulance and ran them over. Oliver winced at the thudding noises as the bodies passed underneath the vehicle’s tires. “We may be in some trouble,” Maria said. “I didn’t think they’d find us that fast.”
“How much trouble?”
They turned onto Divisadero Street and started north toward Filbert. “About that much,” she said, nodding at something outside the windshield.
Oliver looked. The area they were passing through had been cleared of cars, but he suspected the cyborgs had done that to make it easier for their tanks to pass through the narrow streets. He was fairly certain of this because he saw two of the tanks now, springing into action ahead of them. One of them fired a shell at them but missed, exploding a nearby tree. “How far do we have to go?”
“Too far.” Maria hit the gas pedal and the ambulance’s tires screeched. Several cyborgs appeared behind the tanks, weapons trained on them.
“We’re going through them?”
“Unless you have a better idea?”
The cyborgs opened fire with their energy weapons. One shot hit a front tire and the ambulance lurched to the left. Maria managed to recover and aimed for a spot between the tanks. Unfortunately for the cyborgs, this put them directly in her path. Two of them found themselves run down, while a third was knocked onto their hood as they sped past the tanks. He began crawling toward them, seeming to mean to come through the windshield to get at them. Maria slammed on the brakes and sent the cyborg hurtling forward, rolling down the street like a bowling ball. She hit the gas again but the ambulance was hit by energy weapons fire several more times. Oliver could see electricity arcing all around them and a smell like burning metal began to filter through his nostrils.
Filbert Street was only a few blocks up Divisadero. Maria managed to make the turn at the right intersection, but the ambulance chose that moment to die on them. She tried to restart the vehicle once before giving up. “Out!”
Outside the ambulance, Oliver took a look around. He could hear metal treads grinding on the pavement in the distance; the tanks were coming after them. He was fairly certain he heard a helicopter on its way, as well. “At least we’re on Filbert Street,” he said.
“Filbert is long,” Maria said. “Your friends are monitoring their communications. With any luck they’ll be on their way to pick us up.”
Oliver still didn’t know who his “friends” were supposed to be, but that was about the least pressing thing on his mind at the moment. Now he could hear the march of boots coming in their direction. Cyborgs never ran anywhere. They didn’t need to. Like the zombies on television shows, they somehow seemed to know that their prey couldn’t run away forever.
“Up Filbert,” Maria said. “Let’s move.”
They began running up Filbert Street, Oliver wishing he had something on his feet besides hospital slippers. He was almost grateful they didn’t have to worry about what they’d look like to anyone passing by. Two people who looked like escapees from a mental hospital would draw more than passing attention even on a normal day in San Francisco. But the reality of the situation was worse. The fact that one of them was clearly still human and the other could pass for one if the sun wasn’t burning her to cinders would stand out like a sore thumb to any cyborg that spotted them. “How far are we going?” Oliver panted.
“Russian Hill,” Maria said. Oliver’s heart sank. The Russian Hill neighborhood was on the other side of Van Ness, which itself was at least twelve blocks from their current position.
“We’ll never make it that far.”
“Hopefully we don’t need to.”
A spotlight beamed down on them from overhead. Oliver looked up and saw that the helicopter he’d heard before had found them. A moment later headlights swung around the corner at Baker Street behind them and two black SUVs headed in their direction. The sound of marching boots was louder now, and seemed to be coming from either side.
Maria stopped. “This would be a really good time for your friends to show up,” she noted.
Oliver would have had to agree, even without knowing who those friends were. This would be a good time for anything to happen that didn’t involve being captured or killed. Cyborgs never got angry, so they wouldn’t just execute him out of spite, but they might well calculate he simply wasn’t worth the trouble of keeping alive anymore.
The SUVs stopped a dozen feet away and the cyborgs inside piled out, weapons pointing at Oliver and Maria. “Do not attempt to resist,” one said. “Resistance is…”
“Futile?” Oliver asked.
The cyborg considered that. “I was going to say useless, but you seem to have grasped the general idea.”
“Start running,” Maria said. “I’ll deal with them and catch up with you.”
Oliver looked up Filbert Street. He couldn’t imagine he’d ever make it to Russian Hill before the cyborgs cut him off. But now he saw something coming down Filbert toward them. It was difficult to see at first, but there was definitely…
“What the hell?” Oliver asked.
Maria followed his gaze up the street. “Oh,” she said. “There’s that good timing I was hoping for.”
Oliver was having trouble believing he wasn’t actually having some kind of very strange nightmare. Running directly toward him was what at first glance appeared to be Chewbacca. The creature was tall, covered with brown hair, and roaring at the top of its lungs. But its head wasn’t that of a friendly Wookiee. It appeared to have the head of a fierce-looking wolf.
“That’s it,” Oliver said. “I’m done. I’m just done.”
“What do you mean?” Maria asked.
“That’s the goddamn Wolfman.”
“No,” Maria said. “The Wolfman isn’t real. But it is a werewolf.”
The werewolf roared, givin
g Oliver a chance to take in two rows of razor-sharp teeth. Three cyborgs coming up the street to intercept them opened fire on it, but the werewolf shrugged off the energy bolts, merely howling in pain rather than dropping to the ground in paralyzed agony as Oliver would have done. All of Oliver’s instincts told him to run away as the werewolf ran directly toward him, but his legs stayed firmly rooted in the ground. Was there any chance he was really locked away in an asylum somewhere, and that all of this was a crazy man’s fantasy?
The werewolf reached Oliver and scooped him up in a fireman’s carry. “Hey!” Oliver shouted. He beat at the werewolf’s back with his hands. “Put me down!”
Oliver could see more cyborgs approaching; there had to be twenty or more on foot now and the tanks weren’t far away. “Take him,” he heard Maria say. “I’ll keep them busy for as long as I can.” The werewolf whined at her. “It’s okay,” she said. “Just fix this, Tyler. Save the world.”
The werewolf turned back the way he’d come and began running up Filbert with Oliver over his shoulder, loping his way along with long strides that Oliver could never have matched. The SUVs could have caught them easily enough, but from his position Oliver could see Maria charging them, screaming like a banshee. She went to work on the cyborgs with her hands and was quickly lost in a sea of bodies and flying body parts.
The werewolf kept running. Above them, the helicopter’s searchlight caught them as they crossed Buchanan Street. Oliver would have had to admit the werewolf was making good time to Russian Hill. Had it also run all the way to meet them? It must have. Not getting tired had its advantages.
A cyborg squad attempted to intercept them at Van Ness, but the werewolf used its free arm to bat two of them away. Another managed to catch him square in the chest with an energy bolt and the werewolf roared, staggering for just a moment, then recovered and continued running. Oliver’s body had gone numb from what little of the weapon’s energy he’d been unfortunate enough to absorb in the blast. Things were going to take a bad turn for him once the cyborgs stopped trying to capture them and set their weapons to kill rather than stun.
Filbert Street turned into a long hill after crossing Van Ness. It was far from the steepest incline in the city, but Oliver knew walking the rest of the way to Russian Hill would have worn him out in short order. In his defense he’d have pointed out that he hadn’t had any real exercise in months, ever since the cyborgs had taken him prisoner. In all honesty, though, he’d have had a rough time with it even before that. The werewolf barely seemed to notice the incline, though. It didn’t even appear to be breathing hard as they crossed Larkin Street. It occurred to Oliver that riding by werewolf, as bizarre as it was, was probably still faster than taking a taxi would have been in San Francisco in the days before the cyborgs had come.
A second airborne searchlight joined the first. Oliver doubted it would be long before the cyborgs had them surrounded again, and it was unlikely they’d ask him to surrender before opening fire this time. He was about to tell the werewolf they might try hiding instead of running when it stopped suddenly and stepped into an empty lot. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Oliver wondered why there was an empty lot on Filbert Street. For as long as he’d lived in the city, Oliver couldn’t remember a lot east of Van Ness staying vacant for long. There was simply too little real estate, and this was a prime area. He might have spent more time trying to puzzle that out, but he was keenly aware that the werewolf was no longer running. “Are we giving up?” he asked. He wasn’t sure how he was going to explain this werewolf business to the cyborgs, provided they didn’t just shoot him first.
The werewolf advanced a few steps into the lot, then reached out one paw as if it were opening a door. Oddly enough, Oliver could actually hear a door opening. Then the werewolf stepped forward, and what had been an empty lot shimmered and became the interior of a house. The werewolf turned and shut the door behind them.
Oliver attempted not to collapse in shock as the werewolf put him down. There had been no house on this lot. He’d seen it standing vacant when he’d been outside. But now here he was inside one. It wasn’t a great deal to look at; he was in a sparsely decorated living room. Edwardian chairs sat around a wooden table that had several old-looking books on top of it. A teapot sat on a silver tray nearby, with several delicate cups at the ready. A staircase along one wall led up to another level. As Oliver looked around he didn’t see any family photos or other decorations that made the place look as if somebody lived here. It looked like a model home more than anything else.
“What the hell is this?” Oliver asked.
A blonde girl of about ten years old emerged from the kitchen carrying a muffin on a small square plate. She wore jeans and a t-shirt with a Pokémon character on the front. She looked Oliver up and down, then glanced at the werewolf. “I cannot help but notice that Maria is not with you.”
The werewolf whined and shook its head. Oliver didn’t know how sad a werewolf was capable of looking, but this one certainly seemed unhappy.
The girl sighed. “A pity. We could have used the help. Do not mourn her, Mr. Jacobsen. If we succeed in our mission, she will be restored to life as if this never happened.” She frowned. “Well, not life, precisely. She is a vampire, after all.” The werewolf whined again and looked at the waiting teapot meaningfully. “You will not handle my china until you have resumed your human form,” the girl said.
“Excuse me?” Oliver asked. “What is this? Who are you?”
The little girl nodded at him. “Mr. Jones. It is agreeable to see you again after all this time.”
“All this time?” Oliver took a step forward but his legs suddenly felt weak and he nearly tripped. “We’ve never met,” he said, bracing his hands on his knees for support.
“Of that you are mistaken,” the girl said, “but you are forgiven for being unable to remember. You will probably want to sit down for what is about to happen.” The werewolf took Oliver by the arm and led him to one of the chairs. Oliver sat down hard, his head beginning to spin.
“What’s happening?” Oliver asked. “What did you do?”
“Nothing at all, Mr. Jones,” the girl replied. “It is rather this house that is affecting you. It exists in its own timeline, you see, and is now restoring you to yours. The correct timeline, that is. I fear the process can be somewhat unpleasant, though.”
For a moment Oliver thought he saw the walls of the house starting to melt, and then his vision snapped back into focus. One moment he was sitting in the chair and the next the chair was gone, but he was still sitting as if it hadn’t moved at all. And then the chair was back. For a brief moment he caught sight of another woman, a redhead with a stern expression, who marched down the stairs and then out the front door, slamming it behind her. A moment later he saw another little girl who could have been the first one’s twin, but this one was wearing a Girl Scout uniform, and then she vanished as well.
He heard a rustling and looked at the stairs. A small cat ran down the steps and made a beeline for him, leaping onto his lap and purring with wild enthusiasm. Oliver couldn’t remember anyone ever being so happy to see him before. “Hi there,” he said, scratching the cat behind the ears.
“Hey, boss,” the cat said. “I sure missed you.”
Oliver stared at the cat in disbelief. “Aw, hell,” he said. Werewolves and vampires were hard enough to deal with. A talking cat was where he drew the line.
Then his vision filled with stars. The last thing he remembered before passing out was seeing the werewolf reaching for the teapot, only to have the little girl slap its paw away.
Chapter 14
Oliver had, to the best of his recollection, had only one dream in his life. It had been while he’d been on the run from the Kalatari, when his entire life had been undergoing a radical change. He’d assumed that his brain had needed to dream in order to cope with what was going on back then.
He was aware that people often said that everyone had dreams all the time
and just forgot them, but prior to that one time he didn’t have a single memory of dreaming at any other point in his life. He’d asked a doctor about it once during a routine physical, wondering if maybe something could be wrong with him. His doctor had told him not to worry about it. At the time, Oliver had doubted the doctor actually believed him.
Now he was dreaming again. That much he was certain of. He dreamed that he’d been in his office at the hedge fund six months ago when a man claiming to be an investigator with the SEC had visited, asking to interview him about some government matter. That man had turned out to be an assassin hired by the Kalatari to kill him. His life had been saved by Tyler Jacobsen, who had arrived with only seconds to spare. Tyler was a tall man with a fondness for Hawaiian shirts, who just happened to be a werewolf. He’d met and been punched by Sally Rain, a fiery redhead who was as deadly with her two pistols as anyone Oliver had ever seen. They both worked for Artemis, who physically appeared to be a ten-year-old girl. She’d been wearing a Girl Scout uniform the first time Oliver had met her. Artemis was not ten years old, however. Nobody on the team knew how old she truly was, but Oliver was willing to guess it was somewhere in the thousands of years.
When the episode with the Kalatari was over, Artemis had offered him a job, and he’d taken it. He’d simply seen too many things to go back to his old, boring life. He’d known then that he’d never be the same.
And then there was Jeffrey, his cat. Jeffrey had been a stray that Oliver had taken to feeding. Through means he didn’t understand, Oliver had given him the power to speak. Jeffrey could be a bit of a pain, but Oliver loved him. He wasn’t just a pet anymore; he was a friend.
In his dream his friends had been searching for him, knowing that he was a prisoner of the cyborgs. Artemis had promised to find him, and Artemis was the kind of person who took promises very seriously. She would have given up at nothing to keep her word.
Oliver opened his eyes. He was still in the living room of the house the werewolf had carried him to, but now he recognized his surroundings. This was the house in Russian Hill where time stood still. It couldn’t even be seen from the outside if you didn’t know how to look for it. The only explanation Oliver had been given was that the house existed at a fixed point in time. It would always be here, unchanged, regardless of whatever was happening outside it.
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