Project Antichrist

by Pavel Kravchenko

  “Luke, you’re hurt.”

  I chuckled against despite the pain, but my grin disappeared quickly.

  “Iris, where’s Doc?” I scanned the room. There must have been a hidden passage somewhere, a cell, a cage, something.

  “They kept us in a cell downstairs before bringing me here,” she said.

  “No, no, no,” I was saying. “He led me here. His… chanting led me here. I heard it all the way, then it stopped as soon as we entered this room. He must be here somewhere…”

  I turned to the toothless guy.

  “Where’s Dr. Young?”

  “I don’t know!” he groaned. I started walking towards him. “Please! Last time I checked he was down in the dormitory. They might have moved him if he isn’t there.”

  Suddenly, it dawned on me. “No. He is there. Damn it, Doc.”

  We couldn’t go back for him. I knew it, and Dr. Young had known the same thing when he had begun his weird telepathic chant. The crazy doctor-priest I barely knew had led me straight to her, and with her freedom I’d accumulated a debt I couldn’t repay. We had to leave. Now.

  “Luke!” Paul shouted. More shots were coming from the other side of the locked door.

  Taking Iris’s hand in mine I hurried back into the TV room. Paul was pushing the armchair across the floor. He wedged it under the locked door, which was now under heavy fire. It gave in just as the elevator closed. More thuds.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  “Brome, what are you doing?” It was Brighton, on the chopper’s radio. Four minutes had passed since takeoff. He needed nine more to get there. He ignored his partner, but did not turn the radio off.

  “Brome, I know you’re there. The cameras picked you up. We’re tracking you heading north. Listen, whatever it is, you’re not thinking straight. Land the chopper and surrender. I talked to some people here. They know about the pills. They’re willing to give you a long medical leave with full pay. I’m talking three, maybe four months paid vacation. Just don’t do anything stupid.”

  The radio stayed silent for two minutes. When Brome showed no sign of following the instructions, Brighton returned.

  “Listen to me. You should know how edgy everyone is today. First the Pope, then we get word Whales drove a car-bomb into some lab…” A pause. “Now you’re stealing a chopper and flying it in the same direction. Not too hard to make a connection. They think you might be headed to finish the job. That you and Whales are friends now. Of course, I know better than that, but…” Here Brighton lowered his voice. “They want to blast you out of the sky. The only reason you’re still airborne is because I keep telling them you’re not the sort to blow up a building. That you’re not crazy. Help me out here, partner. Land somewhere we can talk.”

  Down below him the Chicagoland sprawled like an old bed sheet. He had complete feel for the machine now; the inevitable rust was off. Also, now that he was in the air, Brome had complete control of himself.

  Brighton was bluffing. He knew as well as Brome that FBI choppers did not carry any missiles. Twin eighteen-millimeter machine guns were the extent of their armament. A chopper like that would do well against infantry, but there wasn’t enough firepower to damage a building much, let alone blow one up. Same went for blasting him out of the sky. Even a civilian would not immediately catch an anti-air rocket less than thirty miles from O’Hare. For an FBI agent there would be calls made, then there would be an escort. A couple of fighter planes to make sure he didn’t reach anything important. It would be at least fifteen minutes between the first call and the escort reaching him from Chanute Air Force Base. All Brome needed was five more.

  “Oliver,” Brighton’s voice said. “Grace and Annie are here at the office. They’re worried sick. We all are. Do them a favor. Land the chopper before it’s too late. Come on, partner. Don’t throw it all away.”

  Brome shook his head. Another bluff. Had his family really been there, they would be on the radio right now. He knew Brighton well enough to expect that.

  Just then, a dying cloud of smoke and the distinct black rectangle of the facility appeared on the northern horizon.

  “Brighton,” Brome said into the microphone. “Stall them. I’m not going to blow anything up. This is a rescue mission, not an assault. I’ll bring the chopper back to the HQ in twenty minutes.”

  Switching the radio off, he began to descend.

  Chapter Forty

  The song of helicopter blades that greeted us when the elevator doors opened could have easily topped every chart in the world. Top it off with the brightest sunshine I had ever squinted against and the touch of frigid November wind on my wet hair, and even thoughts of Dr. Young’s sacrifice loosened their hold on my conscience. The pain in my shoulder I had forgotten completely.

  Still holding on to Iris, who must have been freezing in her attire, I stepped out on the roof’s black surface. The sound of the helicopter was coming from the north, from behind the gray squat box of the elevator chamber. Turning, I saw its whirring blades over the top.

  “Good old Brome,” I said and started skipping towards it, when Paul’s hand grabbed my maimed shoulder and pulled me back behind the cover of the wall. I howled in pain, but before I could punch him in the face, a volley of automatic gunfire erupted from the chopper’s direction. Iris and I dropped to the floor and crawled back to the elevator.

  Bullets whizzed, ricocheted with sickening, resounding CHOWs off the walls and tore the black vinyl of the roof’s surface to shreds all around us. Throwing my hand forward, I prevented the elevator from closing.

  Paul returned fire, sticking the gun out around the corner.

  “Four!” he shouted through the cacophony. “Coming around the right side.”

  Taking a quick peek, I saw four surprisingly black shapes circling in from the left, behind the cover of vents, satellite dishes and stairway exits that concentrated mostly in the rear half of the roof. The damned elevator chamber we’d come out of grew like a boil in the dead middle, twenty or so feet from the roof’s façade edge. Not a single piece of jutting terrain for miles around it.

  “There’re four on the left, too!”

  Pushing Iris back into the elevator, I readied the gun. No longer chaotic, the bullets continued to rain around us, as the two squads advanced methodically. One bullet took a chunk out of the corner, showering my face with concrete dust. Paul and I were both shooting back now, hitting nothing at all.

  “Shit!” Paul’s shout came behind my back.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “This doesn’t look good at all.”

  Something hit the back of my knee. It was Paul’s head. He was on his back, face a grimace of pain, blood on my jeans, a black hole in his white shoulder.

  “Paul!”

  “Hurts like a motherfucker,” he growled through clenched teeth. “My bulletproof vest is defective. I wanna talk to a supervisor.” I pushed him into the elevator as gently as I could in my hurry and picked up the gun he’d dropped. It became quickly apparent that the extra gun would not do me any good even if I had two operational arms. Both squads were at the last point of cover. They were ready to advance into the final stretch of open space. Heavy suppressing fire chewed up corners, preventing me from further assessing the situation. I assessed it well enough in my brain, though. In about thirty five seconds it would all be over.

  Slinking inside the elevator I looked down at Paul and Iris, who knelt beside him, trying to do something she didn’t quite know what about the wound. I placed my pistol by Iris’s bare knee. Paul caught my gaze and held it. I shook my head.

  “We have to go back down.”

  “We can’t.”

  “We’ll take our chances with the guards downstairs. At least they don’t have armor-piercing rounds in their guns.”

  “All right, man,” Paul said, but even as he did he was shaking his head. And I knew he was right. There was no point. I stuck my head out of the doorway. The eastern crew was advancing across the open. I took a shot a
nd missed, but for a moment they went flat, returning fire. I didn’t bother checking the other side, assuming the picture was the same there. The masterpiece of the famous French painter Fuckuover De Lastmoment, called, “Au revoir, le suckers.”

  “We surrender!” I shouted. The shooting stopped. “We surrender. Don’t shoot.”

  There was a long silence, disturbed only by whirring helicopter blades, the sound of which I no longer found appealing. Silence long enough for the squad leaders to confer with their superiors. Silence so long that it spoke volumes.

  “Come out with your hands up,” a voice replied finally. “You will not be harmed.” Even as I heard it, I knew he was lying. Take no prisoners had been the answer. Reconfirmed. They meant to kill us. All of us.

  I took another peek eastwards. Four dark-clad soldiers were kneeling some fifty-feet away, guns breathing suddenly hot air. Guns that would kill me as soon as I stepped out into the open.

  Resigned, I almost did. But at that point I realized that the sound of the helicopter was getting stronger. And then I saw it, rising above the line of naked trees behind the kneeling soldiers to the east. They turned their heads towards it, then their bodies, then their guns. They began shooting, but it was no use. I saw the helicopter’s sides light up, and bullets began to rain on the black roof once again. The soldiers shook and lurched, as pieces of their flesh flew in all directions. One tried to run back to cover, but a bullet took him in the back of his helmet, separating the top of his head from the rest of the body. He ran several more steps before collapsing with arms outstretched.

  I turned away, which afforded me a view of the western squad. They had scrambled back and were now firing on the chopper from behind cover. Ignoring them, the pilot spun the chopper and unloaded on their transport, which was trying to take off from the pad. There was a pop and a crash. The other helicopter landed again. Brome (I figured it could only be our very Special Agent) brought the machine towards us, landing it so the elevator chamber was between him and the second squad.

  I saw Brome’s grim face through the side window, as bullets hit and bounced off the glass. Unbuckling his seat belt, he rushed to the back and slid the door open.

  “It’s Brome,” I said hollowly, still not quite believing his timing. Seemed Paul believed it well enough, though.

  “Brome!” he shouted. “A bottle of the best vodka in the world is on me! If the rich boy pitches in, that is.”

  “Come on,” Brome urged from the chopper. He was still dressed in his civvies-civvies, but there was a big rifle in his hands. He lifted it and popped off a few rounds in the direction of the black-clad gunmen.

  Iris went first, ducking inside head forward. She must have bumped her knee; I saw her wince and rub it as she turned. Next Paul, with Brome’s help climbed into the cabin. I was about to follow, to leave, to complete the half-successful rescue, when it dawned on me that the gunfire had stopped. Brome, who had stretched his hand out to me, froze, staring over my head. His face lost color.

  Now what? I thought, turning around reluctantly. Immediately, I wish I could undo the move, but unlike the previous encounter, this time I couldn’t even avert my eyes.

  About fifty feet away, in the open area between me and where the second squad had found cover, so black that the roof suddenly seemed gray, its tentacles stretching outwards like spikes, stood the seven-foot-tall nightmare I’d seen once before at the house of the man whom I’d just failed to rescue. “Dog,” Dr. Young and Lloyd Freud had called the creature. Now one was dead and the other as good as dead. And the dog found the last hidden bone.

  Chapter Forty-One

  The human inside the crude flying machine began to fire his weapon. He felt the stings, some quite painful, but this time he would not be distracted. All he saw was his target. Every white strand, which blind humans could not see. Every feeble limb, which he intended to pull slowly out of the still alive body.

  The bullet that hit him in the head was the cue. His fury, kept in check for so long, was set free.

  He launched forward and in one easy leap was on top of his prey. A piercing cry, one that had frozen so many in place, arose and fell. Fear, thick and juicy, flared up and quivered before him, emanating from those inside the helicopter. He stared into the human’s eyes as his tentacles wrapped around the body and squeezed, pushing air out of the puny lungs.

  The human gasped, trying to draw the air back in, and he squeezed harder, but not too hard. He wanted him to be alive. To feel what was happening to him. Sure, this was the end, but just this once a Seeker’s quarry would not die quickly. As he continued to squeeze, the human’s eyelids began to flitter and close. Yet even as the consciousness was leaving him, as his lungs were prevented from refueling his life force, the human continued to resist. His muscles, feeble as they were, remained tense. His veins bulged. There was no hope, but still the human fought.

  The Seeker squeezed too hard. The body in his embrace suddenly went limp. The fight was over. Over too fast. The human’s head, lifeless, fell forward. In a second, the white strands would disperse like fog. Stunned, he relaxed his grasp momentarily.

  Then something else happened. Something that was impossible. The head moved. The eyes of the human snapped open and a steady, determined gaze confronted him. Furious, automatically resolving the problem as misinterpretation of symptoms on his part and discarding the solution immediately, before he remembered that Seekers didn’t make mistakes, he squeezed again, discovering that this time the flesh would not give. In fact, he suddenly realized, he was no longer touching the flesh at all.

  He saw the white strands, those that no human could see, wrapped around each of his tentacles, holding them at bay as easily as though he was a human. It could not be! Another cry echoed across the fields. Fear rose again: three threads inside the helicopter, twenty-seven from humans down below, who could not see him, but none of it came from the target who was no longer in his grasp. Engulfed in fury and simply unable to comprehend something that was impossible, the Seeker squeezed with all his power, snapping at the human’s head at the same time with his maw. It did nothing. His maw, open and wide enough to swallow the entire skull, froze inches from the target’s face, as those eyes continued to watch him calmly.

  After a pause, the white strands that held him started pushing him away. He struggled and tossed, managing only to leave two of his tentacles in the white clutches, spraying steaming bodily fluids on the roof. Ignoring the lost limbs he continued to try to free himself, until a loud and clear voice spoke in his head in his own language.

  “You cannot defeat me, Seeker of Sobak. Go and tell them what you saw here.”

  The human’s eyes closed, and the Seeker was thrown backwards. He slammed through the top of the squat concrete box directly behind him, causing pieces of stone to burst in all directions. The impact interrupted his momentum, but only that. His flight continued until, at last, the fiery remains of the other helicopter stopped it.

  In an instant he was up again, prepared to resume the battle he could not understand to be already over. The human was inside the flying machine, which was rising up, beyond his reach. He rushed ahead anyway, but was stopped dead in his tracks by a sudden command.

  “Do not reveal yourself to humans on the ground, Seeker.”

  The Guard. Four of them rose and landed on top of the black roof. Not five. Their target had somehow evaded them, too. As he, they returned empty-handed. The helicopter was receding in the distance. His target was inside, but the seeker would not follow. Because a Seeker obeyed. For now.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  I was flying. That was the only thing I knew for a long time. Years, maybe. I suspected I was dead, and it occurred to me that it wasn’t so bad after all. Unless what I had taken for flying was really falling.

  As I pondered that possibility, another truth was revealed to me. My head was pounding. As though it was bulletproof and someone had shot it from a submachine gun, I thought. Then it all came back
to me in a single large wave, and I opened my eyes and ran. Tried to run, really. I was flat on my back, so my heels kicked at the floor. Hands grabbed at my shoulders and I screamed.

  “Luke! Luke!” a familiar voice was calling. “Calm down, man. It’s over. It’s over.”

  It’s over. That short sentence popped the stopper and I slumped to the floor like a deflating air-mattress. It was over. We were in the helicopter. The blades were rotating. We were in the air. We made it. But why does my head?

  “You tanked and conked the back of your head on the edge here,” Paul said. I must have asked it aloud. He was seated above me, pale and jacketless, shoulder tightly bandaged. He pointed where I had conked my head. I examined the spot and found nothing particularly enlightening.

  Propping myself up on the elbows, I looked around. Iris was behind me by the window, a black cashmere jacket over her shoulders. “You okay?” I asked. She nodded and smiled.

  I sat up. From my vantage point I could only see the uninterrupted blue of the sky outside. It felt like we hovered in place.

  “How long was out?” I asked Paul. “Wait, don’t tell me. Three seconds?”

  “Almost ten minutes,” Iris answered for him. Paul attempted to grin, but it came out one-sided and distorted his face. Giving him a glance, I crawled into an empty seat.

  “Did I miss anything?” even as I asked it, I felt how still the air was inside the cabin.

  Iris smiled again, but didn’t answer. Instead, she sort of half-shrugged and looked out of the window. I followed her gaze and there was the lake, brilliant in the sun. To the right, downtown rose to meet us like a huge castle built by a race of pacifistic artisans, all towers and no walls. Agent Brome guided the helicopter up, over the first buildings.