"Nothing much, still," Sike reported. I had to trust him on the readings, unable to make much sense of the complicated graphs flitting across the screen.
We forged deeper into the building. I came across turned-over trashcans, looking like sad artifacts of a fallen office, scattered with smashed glass and destroyed staplers. It looked as if a massive wind had come through this hallway. Everything was strewn about, and it was hard to say what the office had originally looked like.
An unsettling sensation from the thick air made me stop. I looked down another wing of the building, but it was partially gone. When the meld happened, it had cut the flimsy wooden structures easily, like a hot knife through butter. On the other side, I saw the vines and overgrown plants thriving in the faint sunlight coming through the treetops. It was strange to see the mortal sun on immortal trees. It highlighted their eerie beauty, but dread clawed at my insides. Had everyone truly vanished?
Whether or not that was the case, at least the vampire technology appeared to be working... when it wanted to. Sike held up a different scanner now, puzzling over it.
"What's that one for?" I asked him. They all looked the same to me, although the scanners came in a few different colors of black, gray, and khaki. He held a khaki one at the moment.
"It's measuring the strength of the barrier. It says there might be a gate nearby, but, just like the others, the range of the scanner is limited." He tapped his chin. "I can basically sense the same thing with my own abilities, but this scanner actually maps things out for us mathematically. It'll give us a good picture of where we need to go if we ever got separated since only Dorian and I can sense the actual gates. Plus, I can send the map between all our scanners."
A map of the barrier sounded good. I liked data and tangible things that I could work with.
I glanced up at a partially destroyed roof. A nearby tree grew aggressively into the building, littering the ground with leaves and bits of vine. I stepped over them, ignoring the sensation of my hairs lifting up. It was hard to ignore the constant soft movement of the vines. I was just glad they didn't whisper, like some of the immortal vegetation we’d encountered on my first trip to the Immortal Plane.
A rodent squeak made me turn in time to see something shadowy and blue darting past. I raised an eyebrow as it disappeared into a pile of rubble in the corner. My parents used to work in this place. Worse creatures than this could have found them. I frowned at the unpleasant thought.
A dank, sweet scent of decay in the humid air of the next room made me gag. A pipe had burst and soaked the entire area. Wild mushrooms in bright eggplant hues grew in clusters around us. Some stagnant puddles remained behind, our footsteps splashing through them.
When I returned to the main hall to continue the search, I spotted another granola bar wrapper by a crumbling wall. Coincidence? After finding one opened by human hands? Dorian watched me stoop over to pick it up. As I did, a blue shape came bounding out of the nearby underbrush. There was a hiss and a flash of tiny fangs snapping—one of the spiky, ratlike creatures came at my boot. I kicked it away and it spun, then landed on its feet. It fled, but the surprise made me grimace. I hadn't noticed or heard the creature until it attacked. The pests were obviously getting used to our presence.
Dorian swept the next room. "There are no bodies, yet," he said gently. I nodded. That could be a good sign, or it could mean that the bodies had been dragged away by predators. The granola bar wrapper was still in my hand. I held it up to him as we moved along.
"Doesn't seem torn by small teeth, does it?"
"Not at all," Dorian replied. "You think someone is leaving a trail?"
I shrugged. It was unlikely, but the presence of human trash gave me hope that people had still been here, even after the meld.
We moved on to the barracks. Most of this part of the base had been destroyed by the meld. The barracks building seemed to have been sliced down the middle: on one side of a long corridor, the rooms were mostly intact, while on the other, sunlight spilled through missing walls and saplings had taken over the floor. In one of them, scattered photos splayed across the ground. Moisture ravaged many of them, but I crouched to look. What if someone had left them behind for a reason? With their disarray, however, I strongly suspected they’d just landed this way after being blown off someone's shelf.
I looked down at the first one and made a strangled sound of surprise. A familiar pair of brown eyes stared up at me. Zach. My brother, who had fallen in the battle to destroy the Immortal Council, shot down by our own uncle. I felt my heart squeezing into the familiar numbness of loss.
In the image, still visible behind moisture damage, Zach hugged me wildly while my parents beamed beside us, one either side, all of us in our Bureau dress fatigues. It was the day of my graduation from Bureau training.
My heartbeat sped up when I saw my mother's faint cursive handwriting on the other side, but it was merely a notation to mark the event and the day, and the hope faded, while the anxious heartrate remained. I pocketed the photo as Cam came up behind me, not wanting to get emotional in front of him. I didn’t want him to think of me as the kind of leader who teared up during a mission.
“Find anything good?” Bryce asked on the comm. “Front area is good.”
“Personal effects,” I replied. “We’ll keep looking.”
Cam surveyed the rest of the area with me. There was nothing but a few more photos, some from my family and a few that must've come from other Bureau officials. Maybe they’d had a bulletin board in this room to share. I tucked that sad thought away and pushed on.
"Lyra, you're going to want to see this," Dorian called. I joined him and Sike at the doorway of the next barracks room, Cam following behind.
Instead of a doorway, a barricade faced us. It was definitely human-made, a pile of objects stacked on top of one another, with old desks and a heavy bar resting on top to act as a weight.
Dorian eyed me, a look passing between us, and I nodded, telling the other two to stand back with weapons at the ready. Dorian and I worked together in silence, carefully sliding objects from the doorway. Once again, I was grateful for his vampire strength. No sound came from inside. After we’d cleared the way, I peeked in, hand on the gun at my hip.
Through the door, I spotted… a bed. My eyebrows shot up with interest. Dorian behind me, I stepped inside and my excitement soared.
This was a room largely untouched by the savagery of the plants. The walls still stood and the window had been boarded up; the small bed had been used recently, judging from the lack of dust on the sheets. I scouted the nearby effects, where someone had piled a few crates to serve as a shelving unit and a bedside table. On the table was a Bureau-issue laptop with an official-looking label. My heart soared as I spotted a nearby battery pack. Another barricade had been set up on the other side, allowing for a narrow exit from the building.
I spotted a pile of more granola bar wrappers and some old MREs, the kind of military meals given to soldiers to eat out in the field. An unlit lamp that had recently been burnt, judging from the wick, sat on a weathered desk. On the back of a rickety chair, a shirt faded by the light and time was freshly wrung and drying. I seized the laptop and the power cord. Jackpot. If only the internet had managed to stay online in this area, so the survivor could’ve shot us an e-mail.
Someone had been here recently, and they were from the Bureau from the looks of it.
"Come look at this," Cam’s voice shouted in the distance. Hadn’t he just been standing behind me and Dorian? I whipped around, towards the destroyed portion of the barracks on the other side of the hall, but I could no longer see him. A chorus of incensed squeaking rose louder and louder from the same direction. Dorian and I looked at each other, then headed for the sound.
Bryce will kill me if I’ve lost his nephew already.
Chapter 2
Roxy
I was losing brain cells by the second.
Brushing my red hair out of my face, I c
oncentrated on the sight below me. It was Valentine’s Day, and I was busy stalking a statuesque brunette. This ridge I hid behind was a perfect hideout with the tame brush providing camouflage. I hadn't been to Salt Lake City much, but it was nice enough despite the proximity of the nearby Leftovers. Nice enough, if I ignore this idiot.
How had it come to this? My scanner and my binoculars were trained on Jessica, an amateur vlogger. We’d seized on the opportunity to use Jessica and her dutiful boyfriend, Dan, as pawns for this game. If they wanted to sneak into restricted zones, they were going to do some of our dirty work. We didn’t plan to let any harm come to them, but maybe it would teach them some respect for military no trespassing signs.
"It is so dry out here," Jessica fretted as she patted her face with a tissue. It would only dry her out more, but who was I to offer beauty advice? I was a soldier who slept in the dirt half the time. "Danny, can you get my cream?" It had been easy enough to bug their equipment. We could hear everything.
Dan, the camera man in a faded V-neck shirt and scarf, happily fetched Jessica's hand cream. It took every fiber of my willpower not to gag profusely over the comm system. This was the first mission where I was truly in charge, and I didn’t want to look that unprofessional.
“Your hair is fine," Dan insisted after Jessica paused to adjust it again. Their matching nose rings glinted all the way from here. "It's more than fine. It's beautiful."
She smiled at him. "Thank you. Let's do this." She sucked in a deep breath and steeled herself for Dan's countdown. The red light on their camera went on. Behind her, the immortal plane trees made a gorgeous and frightening backdrop on the screen.
"Welcome, everyone, to The Truth with Jessica. This season, I take you to the heart of the weird, the conspiracies, and the downright unexplainable. I’m attacking the subject of the Leftovers in today’s video. The truth is out there if you look for it." She delivered a mega-watt smile to the camera, to which Dan gave a thumbs up.
As much as I disapproved, I had to hand it to this flimsy-looking chick for doing a show in one of the most dangerous parts of the US. Colin had said that, according to her easily stalkable online profile, she was twenty years old. Apparently, she was shunning college to break into restricted government areas and film her stupid show. Of course, this footage wouldn’t matter if she got herself and Dan eaten before we could step in, and we were absolutely going to confiscate it afterwards, but still, she had guts. Too many of them.
Jessica pushed on. "I'm standing on the outskirts of the area known as the Leftovers near Salt Lake City. I've been granted exclusive access by an unnamed government agency." I fought a roll of my eyes. She hadn't been granted anything by anybody—besides an unwitting status as bait.
I had wanted to yank the two of them out immediately when the Bureau’s scanners caught them sneaking into the restricted areas for a second time, but Hindley, my lion of a direct supervisor, had seen it as an opportunity. She’d suggested we use them as bait—after all, bait made monsters easier to hunt. And once they had a good scare, we wouldn’t have to waste resources fishing them out of trouble once a week.
I hadn’t even been that amused. Amazing how leadership positions had pushed me into a newer, more mature place. I used to rag on Lyra all the time over being so serious, but now, I had a better idea of why; I didn’t want to watch these idiot kids get torn apart by monsters. I glanced briefly at my team. We had five members, including my former teammate and rebel, Colin. Judging from his occasional sigh at Jessica's monologue, I could tell that I wasn't the only one suffering.
Dan trotted after Jessica as she made a few dramatic steps back. For one moment, she twitched and stiffened. I searched for a sign of what had spooked her, but then her face relaxed into an easy smile. Probably just acting for her show.
I’d rejoined the Bureau after Fenton personally issued me an apology on their behalf and offered a promotion that came with a hefty paycheck. Before taking the job, I’d consulted Lyra about it. She and Bryce were starting their own company, and she’d invited me to join… but the thought left me restless. I wanted to find my own way, not tread in her footsteps forever. The subordinate role was starting to chafe, and Lyra said I could always try the job and leave if I hated it… but after so long without a paycheck, the Bureau job and the relative stability it promised was attractive.
The Hellraisers, the newly founded department that I’d joined within the Bureau, weren’t here to be babysitters. We’d earned the nickname because we were all itching for the hunt. We were here for the monsters that hadn’t stopped arriving in the Mortal Plane since the meld. I needed to keep my eyes on the prize.
I settled back down behind the ridge. Neither of the duo had spotted us. So much for finding for the truth, Jessica. You can’t even spot the five well-trained professionals around you. On my orders, Colin had his sniper rifle trained on the tree line. If a monster darted out to grab Jessica, we would get it. I’d arranged each of my team members several yards away from each other, perfectly spaced to head down at a moment’s notice to extract these two morons.
"It's a true mystery that occurred during what many called the end of the world," Jessica narrated, looking more casual than ever as her thin mauve cardigan flapped gently in the breeze. It was chilly, but maybe she was tougher than she looked. "I was in my apartment in Sugarhouse when it happened. I nearly drowned when my own living room sank into a lake. Officially, the government says it’s over, and my apartment went back to normal, but we know there’s more to the story. What about Ogden? Whole neighborhoods there have lost contact with the outside world.
“And what are we to make of these strange sections of land known as the Leftovers? The term sounds as innocent as packing yesterday's casserole for lunch, but that's just because the government is trying to downplay how frightening these places are when they’re so close to our homes and schools. Monsters of all kinds have been reported near these areas, some of them venturing further into the suburbs. They’ve tried to cover it up, but last week, a child was lost to the very trees behind me. His friends valiantly tried to rescue him, but the monster was too quick, too ferocious. There’s supposed to be some investigation, but believe me, they’ll never find that boy.”
I inwardly corrected her facts out of sheer boredom. First, the government hadn't even named these places the Leftovers. Officially they were meld sites, but a couple of journalists had floated “Leftovers” in the first twenty-four hours and the term had stuck. Second, that ‘innocent child’ had been a teenaged boy had been shooting fireworks into the trees. Third, his friends hadn't tried to rescue him; according to an eyewitness who’d been working down the road on a nearby downed power line, they’d run like hell. Fourth, there had been no investigation because the body had quickly been found and retrieved, and nobody’s accounts of the incident had differed.
Of course I was sad for the boy and his family, and I was determined not to let anything happen to these idiots, but... I’d raised my siblings to be smarter than that. Wild like me, maybe—it's in our blood—but never stupid.
"Got anything, Holt?" I commed to a man several yards away with a bulky black scanner in his hand. I could make out his shaved head from here as he bent to focus on fine-tuning the controls of his scanner. Holt had spent years in supernatural work, although he’d largely dealt with smuggling. Apparently, black-market sellers loved supernatural stuff. Holt’s previous job had involved snatching up illegal movers of redbill talons and beaks. Guess there's a buyer for everything. I’d spent so much time fighting redbills, before I made friends with them, that I never considered someone actually wanting a piece of them as some sick trophy.
At fifty, he was the oldest of our group and had the most military experience. I’d been instantly impressed with his resume when Hindley forked it over onto my desk, along with the rest of my team assignments. He’d far outranked me in the Bureau, but everyone who’d joined the Hellraisers had to basically start over. Each of my team members h
ad done supernatural work with the Bureau, but no one besides Colin and me had experience in the Immortal Plane. I hoped this first experience would be enough to show Holt and the others what it was like to fight an Immortal monster.
"I've got a big one," Holt muttered. "It's darting through the woods parallel to Miss Vlogger, keeping low to the ground." He paused. "It seems to be following her, at least. Maybe it can smell her perfume. I know I can."
"Got it," I said with a chuckle. "You hear that, Colin?"
"Yes, the perfume is overdone and entirely too floral," Colin replied. "I've got eyes on something moving in the underbrush."
Jessica tossed her head as she went in for a dramatic take. "It's incredible, the feeling that this place has. You can feel how disturbed it is, like the land is telling you that it shouldn't even exist. Fans of my blog will be familiar with the interview I did with Father Jacobs, a prominent spiritualist, who believes that these supernatural creatures are humanity's darker energies emerging from the shadows due to society's moral deterioration. Spooky, huh?" She paused to wrap her cardigan around her, as if the thought of being in this area was truly bone-chilling. "We're out here doing the real work, while the government hopes that you continue eating lies."
This was it, the big dramatic take. Dan walked forward for the close-up as she did her best serious face for the camera. "My name is Jessica Laurence, and we're here to find out what's really happening in the Leftovers."
The leaves rustled for a moment. Dan tilted the camera so Jessica could get a gander at her performance on his camera. They reviewed the footage, unaware of the danger.
Darklight 7: Darkfall Page 42