Lyons turns the TV off. “The United States government currently has more tangible threats to manage. Civil unrest. External threats. Global strife. We’re at the tipping point of World War Three.” I open my mouth to speak, but he holds up his hand. “And the powers that be can’t be fully trusted to act accordingly. They, like the rest of the world, have already been affected and influenced by the Dread’s prodding fear, directing humanity towards a precipice like a herd of panicked cattle. Further exposing men like the president to the Dread could spiral things out of control even faster. Ultimately, involving outside government agencies is Winters’s call, but I have made my case to her as well, and she agrees. Neuro was tasked with handling what we call the mirror world and its residents and that’s what we’re going to do. We’re the front line in this war, and you will either be part of finding a solution or wait the crisis out from the confines of your apartment upstairs. Or SafeHaven if you’d prefer. But I can’t have you punching any more holes in my building. You could undo everything.”
“That possibility exists whether you answer my questions or I start looking for them,” I say. “I can see them now.”
“And they you from what I’ve heard.”
I nod.
“You won’t last long on your own,” he says.
“Can we please stop with the bravado?” Allenby asks. “I expect it from him, but not from you.”
With my back to Allenby, I’m not sure who “him” and “you” are, though I suspect I am the “him” in question.
Lyons takes a laborious breath. “I will answer your questions. All of them. But first, a request.”
“What?” I say.
“Clean up your mess.”
“My mess?”
“Security was compromised because of your paranoia-fueled egress yesterday.” He motions around the room with both hands. “This building’s natural defenses—”
“The tinted windows.” I guess. It’s the same odd tint I noticed in the ice creambulance.
He nods. “The glass is laced with oscillium particles. Not impenetrable, but solid in either world. Several of them were shattered and have yet to be replaced. The Dread typically try not to be noticed. They prefer subtlety. They won’t force their way through the windows, but the breaks already made in floors not protected by the shielding you saw on the ground level must have been too tempting. And we didn’t anticipate a situation where a window higher than the second floor could be shattered.”
“Cracks or no cracks,” Katzman says, “it was brazen for the Dread. We’re running out of—”
Lyons holds up a hand, silencing the Dread Squad leader. “I want you, Crazy”—he has to force himself to use the nickname—“to track down the injured bull and kill it before it can relate what it found to the colony.”
“On his own?” Katzman looks equal parts surprised and offended.
Lyons swivels around toward Katzman and, with something close to a growl, says, “You have other matters to focus on.”
Katzman just purses his lips and nods.
Lyons’s chair squeals as he swivels back toward me. “The bull has a fifteen-minute head start, but I’m told you wounded it. The nearest colony is an hour south, on foot. If it’s moving slowly, you’ll be able to catch it in time.”
“And if I don’t?”
Lyons’s face grows dark. “You have cost this organization a great deal. Never mind the dead men lying in the stairwell. You’ve exposed us to the enemy. Provided a chink in our armor. Even worse, you have given our enemy advance warning.”
“Of what?”
He raises a single eyebrow and points a finger at me. “Of you. Imagine if Japan had advance knowledge of the atom bomb. Do you think the B-29 bomber would have reached Hiroshima unscathed?”
“You’re … comparing me to an atom bomb?” I’m seriously starting to wonder what kind of a man I was before losing my memory.
He shrugs. “Perhaps closer to the Enola Gay, the B-29 that carried the bomb. Either way, the choices you make will have an impact on a war that most people aren’t aware of but are feeling all around them. There is no insulation from what’s coming. We will prevail and live or lose and die. That is the nature of war, and your actions will have very real and long-reaching consequences. I need you—we all need you—to take this seriously.”
I look to Allenby, knowing she’ll give it to me straight. “Is he serious?”
She looks from me to Lyons and then back to me. “There is no doubt that the Dread are attacking the human race. What I would like to know is why. I would prefer a peaceful resolution, but that doesn’t seem likely, and if they continue on track, with no resistance from us, it’s going to be an easy victory.”
“That’s enough for now. Time is short.” Lyons says. “If you want answers, they will be given when the bull is dead, and only if you decide to grace us with your presence.”
“And if I decide to leave?”
“You can watch the world burn on your own.”
I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean, but if these Dread are behind the turmoil around the world, they need to be stopped. Though I don’t fear them myself, I’ve seen the effect they have on people. If they can turn three trained soldiers against each other, they can turn a crowd into a mob or a protest into a riot. Maybe even a misunderstanding into a war.
I stand from the chair. “I’ll kill it.”
“You’ll try,” Lyons says.
“And when I do,” I say. “No more secrets?”
Arms open wide, he says, “I will be an open book.” He turns to Katzman. “See about the windows. I want every crack, ding, and scratch repaired within the hour. We cannot afford another incursion.” Then to Allenby, “Get your nephew whatever he wants. I expect him out of our doors in five minutes.”
“He’s sustained some injuries,” Allenby says.
Before I can wave off her concern, Lyons says, “Pain focuses the mind. He can heal if he comes back.”
“When,” I say. “Not if.” But as I turn to leave, a strange sensation washes over me. It’s not fear. It’s a lack of confidence. For the first time in my short memory, I’ve just talked straight out of my ass, and everyone in the room knows it.
23.
Four minutes later, after a stop at a first-floor armory, I’m fitted with black body armor; have a new, sound-suppressed P229 handgun holstered on my hip—for all the good the last one did; and what I’ve begun to think of as my machete over my back. The new addition to my jet-black arsenal is a compound bow and twelve arrows with wide hunting tips. A bullet will punch a hole in a target, but these arrows will carve two one-inch-long slices deeper into the target’s flesh than a bullet can puncture. Unlike a bullet, which fragments on impact, the arrow will slide straight through. And it will barely make a sound. Even without a kill shot, a target will quickly bleed out. Last is the up-close and personal weapon of last resort, or perhaps first resort. Nothing kills as efficiently or quietly as a garrote wire. The thin oscillium cable has a handle at each end and, once wrapped around a target’s neck, can kill quickly and quietly. No one has ever tried using the device on a Dread, but it’s an assassin’s best friend when subtlety is called for. Or, at least, I think it is. I have no memory of ever using one, only that I know how. I loop the wire around my hand and pocket the weapon.
The bow and arrow clip onto the back of my ride, a jet-black ATV, the perfect vehicle for navigating the woods of New Hampshire.
“I’d offer you the helmet,” Allenby says, holding a matching black helmet in her hands. “But we both know you won’t take it.”
When my hand grips the key already in the ignition, Allenby puts her hand on my arm.
“Last advice from my aunt?” I ask.
A glimmer of sadness makes a brief appearance but is chased away by hardened eyes. “From your doctor. The … changes your body is undergoing. It will let you do more than see them. Much more. If that happens, the pain you felt before, when you were just
seeing them—”
“Got it,” I say. “It’s going to hurt like a bitch.”
She smiles. “Like the mother of all bitches.”
“It’s rewriting my DNA or something like that, right?”
“Something like that, yeah, targeting your senses.”
I nod slowly. “I’ve heard them.”
“Good,” she says. “Just remember that you’re in control. You can turn it on. You can turn it off. Just like they can.”
There’s a hint at something in what she’s told me. Something I don’t like. But I can’t figure it out, don’t really have time, and there is a more pressing question on my mind. “You said the Dread world was like another frequency. Separate from ours.”
She nods.
“So how was that creature, that bull, able to be intangible to me yet in contact with the stairs and walls?”
“There is a third frequency that is neither A nor B, but also both, where parts of each physical reality overlap. Inanimate, nonliving matter vibrates at a slightly different frequency than actively animate, living, moving matter. This zone of overlapping frequencies includes some natural elements such as older trees and man-made elements like roads and structures, with the older, sturdier variety being more common. In contrast, a human body, even when standing still, is always in motion. Muscles, lungs, heart. We are in perpetual motion. Our frequency, like those of most living things, remains rooted fully in A with no overlap. This allows the Dread to interact with the inanimate, physical elements of A—like the staircase—while avoiding contact with the animate life that resides here—such as you. It’s a physical place with elements of both notes, but lacking the distinct life of each.”
“B-flat,” I offer.
“Exactly. What we do know is that to make real physical contact, you and the Dread have to be in the same frequency. You might be able to see and hear between A and B, but to interact physically, you can’t just be sensing other frequencies, you need to move fully between the frequencies.”
“Out of A and into B. And maybe B flat.”
“In theory. Good enough?”
“For now,” I say, “And Allenby … If I don’t make it back, I’m glad we’re family.”
Her smile is the most genuine I can remember seeing. “Arsehole,” she says, wiping tears from her eyes. She shoos me with her hands. “Go.”
I start the ATV, give Allenby a last, quick nod, and tear off across the nearly empty parking lot toward the woods where I last saw the bull. Upon reaching the grass, I slow to a stop. The green lawn is neatly trimmed and greener than any grass has a right to be. But there is no sign of the bull, either in the grass or the dark woods beyond.
See what’s not there, I think to myself, willing my vision to shift.
And it does. Painfully. I grind my teeth as an imaginary Jack the Ripper stabs my eyeballs.
My vision flickers between worlds: one bright and colorful, the other shades of black striped in green and cloaked by a purple sky. It’s like night vision, I think, still recognizable as the world but in strange shades of color. Is this the Dread’s B world? Or is it B flat?
Muscles behind my eyes twitch, each snap sending a fresh pulse of pain into my nervous system. But I can see both worlds now—the tree line has changed, a mix of recognizable trees, now leafless and large; sagging black trunks, held back by a fence; and the paved, inanimate parking lot—and the trail of glowing green blood left by the wounded bull. The bright plasma against the bleak background shines like reflective road markers, spaced every five feet, when the bull put weight on the wounded limb.
I’m about to gun the engine when a sound like whispering rises up around me. It’s from nowhere, and everywhere, ambient like the wind. As I try to ignore the rising din, a smell tickles my nose.
It stings like ammonia and is foul like death, but is new. And heinous. I breathe through my mouth but can taste it, too. Fresh agony swills through my core as my other senses are … What? Changed? Expanded? Twisted? Whatever is happening, Allenby was right. It hurts like the mother of all bitches.
Despite the foulness of the scent and the pain of detecting it, I know it’s not harmful. It’s always been there, in the air, in my lungs. I just couldn’t detect it before. This whole new world was just beyond reach. And if Allenby is to be believed, I came to understand that on my own once, without Lyons’s help. These things are real and apparently observable to those not afraid to look. The problem is, that’s pretty much just me.
I glance back at the building. Allenby is there. The staggered pyramid behind her is like an obsidian megalith, a sheet of impenetrable black, except for two squares of light marking my escape route and the failed attempt to stop me. There are men inside, trying to position new squares of tinted glass.
Attuned to the world just beyond our own but still physically present in the real world, I gun the throttle and follow the long drive out to the security gate, past the fence. The guards must be expecting me, because they just wave me past the newly repaired gate. Beyond the fence, I speed into the woods. Happily, the scent of crisp pine needles, which carpet the forest floor, still exists and helps drown out the foul tang. The pain eases, too, diminishing to a dull headache. It’s the shifting of senses that hurts. Maintaining the shift is easier.
The forest, cast in shades of gray shadow and purple light, is strangely beautiful. There are pine trees, but they’re intermingled with other, strange black trunks rising up to empty branches. Some of the trees occupy the same space, twisting in and out of each other. Some stand solitary. Green veins, like those on the Dread bull’s hide, but not nearly as bright, cover the ground, connecting everything. Am I just seeing both frequencies at once, or is this a separate place? I can’t tell, but I’m pretty sure I’m still physically located squarely in my home frequency, not in Lyons’s mirror world.
I follow the trail of blood for twenty minutes, crushing a path through dense forest. While the many streams, saplings, and fields of ferns don’t stand a chance against the ATV, I have to navigate around fallen trees, two ravines, random granite boulders, and a hundred-foot cliff, which, if the blood trail can be believed, the bull scaled.
The beast fled in a straight line, due south. According to Lyons, it was headed toward a colony. While he didn’t explain what that is, I get the implication. If I don’t catch the bull before it reaches the colony, I’m going to be facing more than just one of these things.
But what can they do?
Their weapon of choice seems to be fear, to which I am immune. It appeared to be capable of significant physical harm, but what good is all that nasty potential if it can’t touch me? Maybe it’s not a matter of can’t, but won’t. If that’s the case, the oscillium weapons provided by Neuro give me an advantage, provided the bull doesn’t come across some hunters and frighten them into shooting me.
Or a mob, I think, remembering the people in Manchester. Could all of that fear, and the resulting anger, really have been fueled by these things?
My rumination is cut short by a cloak of black rising into my field of view.
The bull! It swipes out with one of its thick arms.
I swerve left, but the shape moves with me, blocking my view.
Then it leaps aside, revealing a thick pine tree, five feet ahead. I hit the brakes, but I’m moving at forty miles per hour. There’s no avoiding the impact. The front of the ATV slams into the pine’s armorlike bark. For a fleeting moment, I think that I should have worn the helmet, but then I’m lifted up and propelled forward, straight into the tree.
24.
There shouldn’t have been time to think about the pain I would feel upon kissing the tree, but I do. It’s not long, just a second, but when the words, this is going to hurt, flit through my thoughts, I realize I’ve somehow passed the point of impact unscathed.
And then the pain comes late. My body arches, going rigid as though in the grip of fifty thousand volts. The pain is so overwhelming that I think I should be dead, or at
least unconscious, but there is no escaping it. So I do my best to reach beyond it.
I’m airborne, spinning like a flung action figure.
I feel the subtle pull of gravity, identify which direction is down, and reach out. The simple movement comes with a wicked sting, like my muscles have atrophied in the past second, never used and withering. My hand grazes the forest floor, which feels wrong. The rest of my body responds, muscle memory acting despite the severe discomfort, turning me over. The fall becomes a roll. It’s not something you’d see in a movie. I don’t spring back to my feet. But after three bouncing somersaults, I’m not dead, though I seem to be experiencing the torment of the damned. The bodywide ache makes self-diagnosis difficult. While it’s possible I could have survived an impact with the tree, I would have most certainly broken bones and been on the receiving end of a concussion. The pain is equally distributed throughout my body, but I’m mobile. This isn’t broken bones; this is something else. The headache of shifting vision has enveloped my entire body. But why?
My tumble ends as I slide to a stop in what feels like cold mud. The goo hugs me in place. When I try to stand, the gunk—and the muscle-numbing pain—holds me down. I strain to move, lifting an arm. It spasms from the effort, drawing an angry shout from between my clenched teeth. When the arm comes free, I fight through the pain, knowing that my body isn’t broken. Snapped bones would undo me, but I can fight past pain. With a growl, I pull free, climb to my feet, and draw my handgun. A quick spin reveals nothing.
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