Walker

by Michael Langlois

Clothes close to the skin were spared, but anything more than a hairsbreadth away was razored open in fine lines. The Arc-protected gun barrels and stocks weathered the assault, but their unprotected magazines and the rounds inside tumbled to the floor in finely sliced disks and rectangles of brass and steel.

  The massive granite barrier cracked with an earsplitting detonation as long slivers of stone vanished all down its length, only to come back slightly out of position, exploding out of the solid stone when they reappeared.

  Daniel collected impressions in fragments as the room erupted into motion. The Protectors along the walls realized that they still had one round left in the chamber of their weapons. Iyah grasped this at the same time, and swept Daniel and Saul to the floor in a dive. The first gunshots cracked out.

  Sika threw himself across the floor to land at the edge of the center aisle where the rows of desks began. He reached out on his stomach and grabbed a chair leg, then whipped the chair towards the Protectors on the left wall. It hit the center man, punching him back into the stone wall and smashing his hastily raised rifle. The chair shattered into wooden shrapnel, killing him and wounding those nearby.

  Daniel and Saul were on the floor under the desks where Iyah had thrown them, but Iyah herself had already surged to her feet and ripped one of the desks out of the floor where it had been bolted into the stone. Daniel didn’t think she noticed. She threw it at the Protectors on the right and charged towards them as it exploded against the wall, drawing her knife as she ran.

  Daniel saw that Sika was also charging his group in the momentary confusion, his knife held low and away in his right hand. The council had expected them to be unarmed, being in Gray’s custody. It was an unpleasant revelation for the Guards. Some of them were trying to swing their long weapons around to take a shot at the figures blurring towards them, but the smarter ones just dropped the guns and snatched out their own blades.

  The men who stuck to their rifles didn’t last long. Two died as Sika’s blade passed through barrels and skulls in one wide sweeping arc, and the only one to choose the gun on Iyah’s side followed as she straight armed the weapon into the unfortunate man’s chest.

  Iyah and Sika were then surrounded by slowly circling knifemen. Leland had dropped his rifle and drawn his blade, but was still against the wall, not having joined in the counterattack.

  At the head of the room, the lesser council members and Waldgrove were gone, leaving only Keldon and Vincent. Keldon was watching the fight with one hand outspread on Vincent’s chest to restrain him, who was standing with one foot already up on the long granite desk.

  Daniel and Saul stood up. Only a few seconds had passed since Daniel’s initial attack. Saul had his pistol out and was discovering that it had been unloaded in storage and was useless. Daniel watched Sika block an upswept knife attack with one forearm and spin out of reach of a straight thrust at the same time. He flicked his gaze to the other side of the room to see Iyah confronting her final attacker over the bodies of the other two. Daniel couldn’t tell if the man looked more terrified or amazed as her blade bit through his wrist and her fist shattered the bones and cartilage in his neck.

  Three down in as many seconds. Sika still had two opponents and was backing towards the center of the room as they pushed hard against his defenses. That was the difference between being highly skilled, and being Iyah.

  Daniel picked up a chair and threw it at the far wall directly over Sika’s head. Sika couldn’t see it coming from behind him, but the guards he was fighting could. Their gazes went upwards for a split second as they registered the movement. They died. Sika rejoined Daniel and Saul in the middle of the room with a nod of thanks.

  Iyah snapped the blood off her blade with practiced flick of her wrist and turned her back on Leland to join the others.

  Keldon gave Leland a significant look and then said to Daniel, “Last chance. No irreparable harm done yet.”

  Daniel shook his head. Keldon dropped his arm with a sigh and Vincent stepped down onto the floor. A fear that hadn’t been there when ringed by rifles surged up from Daniel’s belly and parched his mouth. Vincent didn’t look angry or excited, he just looked like a man about to do a necessary chore.

  Iyah ran forward to meet him halfway. There was a sound like a whip cracking and she came hurtling backwards toward them, her broken arm smashed against her chest where she had tried to block the blow that Daniel had never seen. She slammed into Daniel and knocked him flat on his back hard enough that he tasted blood.

  Daniel knew he couldn’t Walk them away, he wasn’t skilled enough to do it in time. But he knew who was.

  “Saul!” he shouted. Needing no further prompting, Saul threw himself to the floor across the two of them and reached across to grab Sika’s foot. Feeling like he was struggling through molasses as adrenaline dilated his sense of time, Daniel reached across his body with his left hand and pulled his backpack off of his right shoulder.

  He tossed it into Vincent’s face and yelled, “NOW!” As he felt the Veil slam into him through Saul, he flicked one last slender tendril of Veil current outwards.

  Right through the airborne bag and its payload of C4-enhanced restraint collars.

  The world went white.

  35

  Daniel didn’t want to get up off the floor, but it was on fire. Wiping his palm across his face to get some of the blood out of his eyes, he noticed with relief that only patches of the carpet were burning. There were other small fires sprinkling the smashed furniture that was crushed against or embedded in the walls of what probably used to be a pretty swanky living room.

  He rolled Iyah off of him as gently as he could, trying not panic at the sight of the blood running out of her hair, and stepped over Saul’s unconscious body. Sika was a few feet away, groaning weakly. Daniel let out a bark of surprise to see Leland lying next to him, his arms still wrapped around one of Sika’s legs.

  That hurt his ribs, and wobbling to the kitchen made his right knee throb, but he was still grateful to be alive, much less conscious after being mostly shielded from the explosion by Iyah’s body. He flung open doors and cabinets until he found a fire extinguisher on one wall of the pantry and managed to put out the flames spreading through the living room and stay upright at the same time.

  Smoke and white extinguisher powder made the air hazy. Then he went back and grabbed all the kitchen towels that he could find and hobbled back into the living room.

  A quick check revealed that everyone was alive. He pressed a handful of the towels against the glistening black wound on Iyah’s scalp and waited for the others to wake up.

  They did so within a few minutes of each other, moaning and coughing.

  Saul tried to say something, but it took a long time for the ringing in their ears to die down enough for him to be heard. In the meantime there was a lot of gentle poking at wounds and wincing.

  Iyah opened her eyes, their icy clarity vivid against her sooty, blood smeared face. She put her hand on top of Daniel’s to hold the towels against her scalp. A vise he hadn’t realized was there unclenched in his chest, and he took a breath.

  “I said, why does my living room look like Frosty the Snowman exploded in it?” Saul yelled.

  “Fire extinguisher,” said Daniel.

  Saul pointed across the room. “That was a twenty-thousand dollar handmade Italian leather sofa!”

  “It was on fire.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it, Saul,” said Sika, struggling to his feet. “I doubt you could have gotten it out of the wall anyway.”

  “Shut up about the bloody couch! You fuckers tried to kill me!” Leland appeared to be upset.

  “You pointed a rifle at me,” retorted Daniel.

  “I had to, I was under orders!”

  “If you’re taking orders from the council, why’d you hitch a ride with the enemy?”

  “Well, you were going to blow me up, weren’t you?” Leland staggered a bit as the shouting was making him light heade
d.

  “Bull. You had no idea what was in that bag when I tossed it, you just knew we were about to leave you behind. Now sit down before you fall on me.”

  Leland sat down. “I wasn’t going to shoot you, now was I? I was only there as a hostage. I’m not stupid.”

  “Yeah. Glad you made it across the room in time.”

  “Thanks.”

  Everyone just sat, drained and stunned.

  “You think Vincent and Keldon are dead?” Daniel asked after an indeterminate amount of time spent wondering what the coffee table had looked like before it took up life as modern wall art.

  Iyah looked up at him. “Who knows,” she said. “We’re alive, and they’re far harder to damage than we are.”

  “Yeah, but we only caught a tiny fraction of the blast, they caught the whole thing in the face, shrapnel and all.”

  She shrugged, then sucked air between her teeth as the movement jostled her broken arm.

  That sent Saul to his bedroom to fetch some first aid supplies, which turned out to be a huge orange trauma kit the size of a suitcase ordered from a paramedic supply company. He splinted Iyah’s arm and looked at her head, which by then had stopped bleeding. Daniel got some butterfly closures across a gash right over his ear where a piece of restraint or maybe a buckle off the backpack had narrowly missed perforating his skull for him. Leland had two broken fingers. Sika got off with only a strained shoulder and a nice collection of bruises.

  They had been extremely lucky and they knew it.

  After he had finished patching everyone up, Saul closed the trauma kit. “Well, Dan, looks like you’re in pretty good shape, why don’t you come help me round up the rest of my stuff.” Daniel nodded and followed him to the back bedroom.

  “So,” said Saul, throwing clothes out of the walk-in closet onto the floor, “think we can trust him? Seems kind of suspicious that he would switch sides like that all of a sudden.”

  “Who, Leland?” Daniel shrugged. “I know that he was feeling pretty conflicted before we left, maybe he had a change of heart. Or maybe he figured out that Keldon wasn’t going to let any of my pals live after we escaped. Either way, I say we let him come with us, but keep an eye on him. He’s a good guy, I promise.”

  Having emptied the closet, Saul grabbed the clothes hanging rod and pulled hard. The rod and back wall swung down, revealing a hidden shelf about six feet deep and three feet tall. On the shelf sat three duffel bags.

  “Up to you, he’s your friend.” Saul handed two of the bags to Daniel, and grabbed the last one himself. Rejoining the others in the living room, they set the duffle bags down next to the trauma kit. Two of them were stuffed with banded stacks of hundred dollar bills, and the third one was filled with clothes, guns, and assorted gear.

  From this bag Saul drew a cell phone and made arrangements with someone on the other end. The conversation was very brief, both men obviously having already agreed on the details previously. Then he made one more call and left a message that said simply, “Everything is ready, see you soon.”

  He tossed the phone to Iyah. She caught it one-handed and crushed it to fragments, letting the bits fall to the carpet.

  Everyone took turns cleaning off the worst of the blood and grime in the bathroom, and Saul passed out some spare clothes. His and Iyah’s were obviously purchased with them in mind, everyone else had to make due with baggy shirts and drawstring sweatpants.

  They left the apartment and caught a cab to the 79th Street boat basin, which wasn’t too far from Saul’s Manhattan apartment. Daniel watched the bustling nightlife slide past and felt a tingling excitement in the pit of his stomach. He smiled in the darkness of the cab’s cramped backseat.

  They wound up walking down a well-lit pier to a numbered slip containing a huge, beautiful catamaran named Swift Crossing. The brisk night air, the smell of the water, and the hollow thumping noises of people moving around on the dock reminded Daniel of the feeling he used to get going on trips with his mom years ago. It was a bittersweet memory, but quietly joyous all the same.

  Saul sailed them down the Hudson River and past Staten Island, continuing on into the Atlantic. Nobody spoke until the city was little more than a collection of twinkling jewels on the horizon.

  “I assume this boat isn’t registered to you,” said Sika.

  Saul shook his head. “I paid a guy a fortune to leave it in his name. It’ll never be reported stolen, and there’s no record of me ever owning a boat.”

  “Slick,” said Daniel. “So where are we going?”

  “The Caribbean. Palm Island in the Grenadines. Bruce should be checking that voice mail drop every day, so when he gets the message, he’ll make his way there as well.”

  “Sounds like you’ve been planning this for a long time,” said Leland, leaning out over the water, his gaze on the dark sea.

  Saul shrugged and sat down, dangling his legs off the side and looping his arms through the railing. “When you spend your life catching runners, you can’t help but wonder how you could get away yourself, if you had to. I’ve kept things ready for the last couple of years. I had hoped to convince Iyah to use it if things got bad enough. I never thought I’d be going with her.”

  “Glad you did,” said Sika, clapping Saul on the back, his smile brilliant in the darkness.

  Daniel leaned against the cabin bulkhead with one foot braced on a rail post. He could feel the insistent thrum of the engine against his back and smell the sea that swelled and undulated under the Swift Crossing’s twin hulls. He felt good, peaceful.

  "Daniel?" Iyah’s voice came from a few feet away on his left.

  "Yeah?"

  "Back in the Council chambers. Keldon offered you a chance to rule with them. If it weren't for us, if he would have really let us go, would you have taken his offer?" She was sitting cross-legged with her elbows on her knees, head resting on her hands looking out over the water. Everyone but her turned to look at him.

  Daniel answered slowly, the deep thrumming of the engine in his bones making him sleepy. "How long has the Council been in charge on Earth?"

  Leland answered. "I dunno. A hundred, hundred and fifty years?"

  "Any wars start in that time? A couple of really big ones that I can think of off the top of my head, and more smaller ones than I can count. I bet it’s the same thing on all the worlds. A steady boil. Never so much that things break down completely, but never so little that people can get a handle on things."

  Daniel closed his eyes and listened to the sizzle of the leaping bow spray falling back into the ocean. "Keldon admitted that it’s easier to maintain control if you give people an enemy to fight, and that the constant chaos keeps them one step ahead of everyone else. Can you imagine? All that misery, just so a handful of people can stay on top. All my life I’ve taken it for granted that this mess is just how the world is. Now I find out that it’s on purpose, and some guy wants me to help them keep it going? Not gonna happen."

  Leland shook his head. "So you turned down the chance to rule the world? Hell, worlds."

  "Yep. But the truth is that they were so desperate to get their hands on Autumn that they would have said anything. There’s no chance that they would have given me any real power. More likely they would have just used me to set up some beacons and then fed me to a new Illahi patch. Still, it wasn’t a total loss. I learned two things in the last couple of days that nobody else knows. That there’s way more suffering in the world than there should be, and where the guilty party lives."

  Iyah, having known all along where her question would lead, said, "And what are you going to with those two pieces of information?"

  "Not me, we. What are we going to do with those two pieces of information? Easy. We’re going to save the worlds. All of them."

  "How are we going to manage that? The only reason they didn’t squash us earlier is because we ran," said Leland.

  Daniel yawned and said, "Beats the shit out of me."

  Iyah leaned against his sho
ulder and slipped her hand into his.

  Tomorrow would sort itself out. They were together, and they were free. And that’s all that really mattered.

  Acknowledgments

  I want to thank award-winning artist Vincent Chong for another amazing cover. I don’t know how you do it, Vinny, but each one is better than the last.

  See more of Vincent’s work at http://vincentchong-art.co.uk.

  Thanks also to Diana Cox for correcting my many, many mistakes and making me look presentable. Much appreciated, Diana.

  Also by Michael Langlois:

  Sixty years ago Abe Griffin saved the world and gained eternal youth.

  Or so he thought.

  Now, a man that Abe believed to be long dead is killing the surviving members of Abe’s old squad in order to reclaim the relics that they have kept hidden for decades.

  The relics form an ancient beacon that must never be used, in a ritual that must never be completed. But the end of the world requires more than just activating the beacon.

  It requires Abe.

  With help from the granddaughter of his oldest friend, Abe must learn the truth about his immortal body, while at the same time trying to stop a horrifying series of supernatural opponents from sweeping away everything that he cares about.

  Buy it now on Amazon:

  http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Radio-Emergent-Earth-ebook/dp/B005IHANGG

  About the Author

  Michael Langlois lives in Texas with his family, two dogs, a cat, and BB, The Most Confident Rabbit in the World. When he’s not playing tabletop board games, video games, or waxing nostalgic about zombies on his blog, he will occasionally stop procrastinating and write something.

  You can follow his antics at http://michael-langlois.net.

  Copyright 2011 Michael Langlois