“What?” Finn began.
“I’ve got to go.”
Marcus paced out his agitation. He carved a long, sinuous oval on the dusty road. “We have to go,” he whispered through gritted teeth. “Come on. Let’s just go.” He wasn’t speaking to anybody but himself, and it wasn’t the first time he’d said it. Now that Olena was safe, the only thing that mattered was getting out of here. Each passing minute of inactivity was torture, but time kept dragging on. Most of the villagers still talked among themselves in small groups. They cast uneasy glances at him, ones he couldn’t read. A few had returned to homes, or gone off to do other things. Marcus wasn’t sure he’d convinced anyone—even Olena—how much danger they were in.
A truck’s engine rumbled to life. Timur, and the group of men he’d organized, climbed into the vehicle.
“Shit,” Marcus said. He squirmed toward them. Palms held up, he cast his tail across the road, blocking it. “Don’t go! You don’t know what you’re heading in to.”
At first the men couldn’t understand him. Both sides shouted at each other with increasing anger. Olena arrived and did her best to translate. Marcus said, “Tell them that when they get near the contagion the truck’s engine will fail. It’ll just die, and when it does it’ll be too late for them to escape on foot.” Olena spoke for him, but in answer Timur revved the truck’s engine. He jolted forward a few feet, rocking it. Clearly, he had more faith in his engine than in Marcus’s claims.
“You have to let them pass,” Olena finally said.
“No.”
“Yes, Marcus! They’re free men and this is their village. They have the right to—”
She cut her words when a shout reached them. One of the village boys was hobbling up the main street, hard work with his deformed left leg. He shouted something over and over again.
“What’s he saying?” Marcus asked.
Olena listened for longer than Marcus could stand, and then said, quietly, “Something is coming up the road.”
Marcus caught the specificity of her wording. Something. Not someone. He said, “Tell Timur to wait a minute. Let’s first see what this is. Tell him.”
She did, and instead of driving away, the men climbed out of the vehicle and gathered at the edge of the village, looking down valley. It wasn’t long before they saw it. A shape, pitch-black, appeared from around a turning in the dusty road, perhaps a hundred yards away. It was too wide and hunched to be human. Furred, bushy-looking. Whatever it was, it faced away from them, showing only its back, coming closer with a weaving diagonal gate. Marcus felt the familiar dread of the miasma drench him again. Just seeing this thing brought it back. It was talking. It was barely audible at first, a low whisper that, as soon as he heard it, Marcus wanted to listen to. Needed to listen to, the unintelligible sounds suddenly very important that he hear.
“What is it?” Olena asked.
“We should run.” Marcus said it, and knew it to be true, but he didn’t move. He couldn’t help but stare at the approaching thing, listening to it. He wanted to grab Olena and slither away. He knew he should stir everyone into motion. In his mind he saw himself do that, felt himself forming the words and turning and yet … he stood stock-still, unable to move, waiting, and yet hating that he was waiting.
“Run,” Olena said. “Yes, we should.” But she didn’t move either.
None of them did.
The thing kept backing toward them, moving in a crab-like sideways shuffle, first to one side, then cutting back the other way, getting closer all the time. In all the furred blackness of it, the thing that stood out were its eyes. Each time it angled toward them, one eye watched them. The left. Then right. Then the other again. Marcus could see the bulbous whites of them, and the tiny black dots at their center. They jerked and twitched, as feverish-looking as the thing’s string of unintelligible whispers.
Then Marcus began to understand the whispers. He heard them in his own head. The language wasn’t English, but he knew what the creature was saying. It was asking if he wanted to see its face. Over and over. Asking. Promising. Coming closer. “Do you want to see? Do you? Do you? Do you want to see my face? I’ll show you. I’ll show you now. Here I’ll show you now.”
It turned. And the face it showed them was monstrous. It was all face, his entire body a concave plate displaying a rabid, shifting, jiggling horror. The eyes danced with glee from behind a long snout that levered open. Inside, an endless abyss lined with row upon row of curving, fetid yellow teeth. Somehow, the thing still talked, even though his mouth gaped open, tongueless.
“I’m showing you. I’m showing. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me. Watch eat you now. Watch me—” The barrage of words stopped suddenly. The monster’s eyes ceased their twitching. Instead they grew larger, making his pupils into pinholes on large white balls. The glee fell from it, replaced by terror. And then it dropped. All of it. The monster fell apart before their eyes, liquified. It splashed to the ground, a sack of organs and flesh and hair. And two eyes that slowly dissolved, terror in them until the last.
Behind the corpse, a man strode up the road toward them. Strong strides. Shoes that clipped against the road. Expensive, though tattered, suit. A cold face that Marcus knew. Vasel. His hand snapped out one side, and a shimmering coin flew from the monster’s remains and slapped against the man’s palm. He strode up to the steaming heap and jumped on it. He leapt and leapt, slamming his hard heels down on anything with form enough for him to squash, which wasn’t much. He let out a string of what could only be Ukrainian curses. He was at it for some time, slipping occasionally, so furious in his work that the villagers had to jump back to keep from being splattered.
When there was nothing left worth stomping, the gangster looked up. Wild-eyed. Murderous, as if he was inviting any of the villagers to be next to feel his wrath. Nobody moved except for Vasel, the coin twirling from knuckle to knuckle, flashing.
“Papa?” Olena said, her voice small as a child’s.
Vasel looked at her, noticing her for the first time. He stared, his eyes hard at first, but changing as recognition came slowly into them. He glanced at Marcus. Chin raised, he made a noise in his throat, as if to say it was all coming back to him. To Olena, he said, “Beloved Daughter.” The words should have been pretty, but they weren’t. “You left me to die. You left me to the mouth that lights up before it bites down. And the reaper. And eaters. And the things you can’t see but can hear. So like you, daughter, to choose him over me. Always that way with you. Your mother over your father. Ukraine over Russia. A towel-head over me. This mamba over me. Listen; you even want his language more than your own.”
“Papa,” Olena began, but faltered.
“You should’ve waited for me! Who could protect you better than I?”
“I got her back here, didn’t I?” Marcus said.
“I … I didn’t choose anything. I was unconscious. I don’t remember anything after the helicopter flight. Where are the others? The pilots and your—”
Vasel silenced her by grinning, a malicious, uneven smile devoid of anything like humor. “You don’t remember? Lucky you. Better that way. Don’t remember, and don’t ask about the others. Pray that they are dead, all of them.” He strode down the village street, first to an old car, then past it to a flatbed truck, calling out something in Russian.
Olena following him, with Marcus slithering just behind her. She peppered her father with more questions, switching into Ukrainian when he wouldn’t answer. When Marcus asked what he was shouting, Olena said, “He wants the keys to a car. A truck. Anything.”
“Where’s he want to go?”
She asked him. First in Ukrainian. And then—when he looked at her—she repeated it in English.
Vasel pointed back toward the smeared remains of the creature he’d stomped to pulp. “Things worse than that are coming for us. The gates of hell have opened. I must close them. So I go to Baikonur.” His eyes moved away from her and settled on the men standing near Ti
mur’s truck. He started toward the truck. “There I can end this. I’ll send them back to hell, all of them.”
“What’s Baikonur?” Marcus asked once Vasel had engaged with the men by the truck.
“Soviet military facility.”
“What’s there?”
“Soldiers. Planes. Rockets. Missiles. Everything.”
Marcus liked the sound of that. So long as they weren’t directing all that weaponry at them, it might be the safest option they had. “Is it far?”
Wincing, Olena touched her fingers to her temples. “I don’t know, Marcus. Yes. It’s far.”
“Far away from Talas…” Marcus chewed that over, latched on to it. “Olena, tell your father we’ll get him to Baikonur. And then tell everyone else. We’re all going.”
“Let them go, Ana,” Michelle said. “We need them now that the soldiers are all dead.”
Recycler was still trying to climb out of his pit. And Aero, still trapped up to his neck in a muddy tube, looked at Ana—and Michelle knew he was thinking of exploding her lungs. It was what Michelle would have done in his position.
Ana glared at Michelle, but did as she asked. Aero’s mud encasement dropped away. He was filthy up to his neck. Michelle saw him reaching into his pocket, and she sent a soft bubble that knocked him off balance.
“No blowing up Ana,” Michelle said coldly. “We haven’t finished the missions yet. You can kill her later.”
“You bitch!” A wave of earth surged up and swatted Michelle across the street into the wall of a café. It left a Michelle-sized hole in the wall. She had plumped up, but the pain from the blow had almost knocked her out.
This is wrong, she thought angrily. I don’t hurt. I never hurt. But she was scared, too. She didn’t like what was happening. Not at all. I don’t like pain. No one likes it. Something tickled the back of her mind. Something she had forgotten. But it slipped away. Then she felt a rage building in her. And it needed to go somewhere.
Another wave of dirt rose up, and Michelle blasted it with several bubbles. It exploded, spraying dirt that rained down on them all.
“He can kill me later? What all the fucks, Michelle,” Ana said angrily.
The cold-hard indifference slipped from Michelle, and for a moment, her rage slid away as well. “I don’t know why I said that,” she muttered, holding her suddenly pounding head. The buzzing and pounding made her want to vomit. The combination was worse than any migraine. A migraine would have been a relief.
“I’m sorry, Ana,” she said, then immediately regretted it. Why the fuck should she apologize to Ana? It was getting difficult to concentrate on anything other than her rage and the splitting headache. How the fuck was she supposed to find Bugsy with people this useless? Ana, Recycler, and Aero were getting in her way. She needed to get the mission done so she could save Adesina. Even if Adesina is a freak of nature, hissed something nasty in her mind.
She made her way out of the rubble of the store. As she did, she realized her hazmat mask had come off. She didn’t retrieve it. Whatever it might have been protecting her from, it was too late to protect her now.
The mist had become thick and oily, and things were moving in it. Things she only occasionally caught out of the corner of her eye. They slid and dragged themselves through the destroyed streets with a wet slithering sound.
And now there were things whispering to her, too. She couldn’t understand what they was saying, but they filled her with dread. She shook her head, but the voices persisted. Her head was going to explode if the pounding, the buzzing, and the whispering didn’t stop.
“We need to go,” she said thickly. “Leave the soldiers where they are.”
“Jesus,” Ana said. “What the hell is wrong with you?” The earth around her was rippling. “We can’t just leave them. What’ll Klaus say? It’s a mess and he really doesn’t like messes.”
“I could clean it up,” Recycler said with a laugh. “But I’d just as soon let those pouco cadelas rot in the street. People died and were left rotting all the time in Rio, so why should I care about them?”
Michelle blinked. Recycler didn’t look like himself. He looked like Wally. If Wally had had something terrible happen to him. His skin was rusted through, and the muscles underneath looked like red raw ropes. He smiled, and Michelle shrank away from the madness there. She turned, and Ana wasn’t Ana anymore either. A vile, pulsating cocoon lay on the ground covered in foul-smelling goo.
Adesina, Michelle thought. Why are you here?
Something grabbed her wrist. She looked down and saw Mummy’s desiccated hand. It spun her around, and now she was looking into Mummy’s inhuman eyes. The creature was saying something, but Michelle couldn’t hear it. Her mouth went dry as Mummy’s power began leeching the water from her body.
And then rage filled her. “I killed you once, you little bitch,” Michelle snarled. “I’ll kill you again if you don’t let go.”
Mummy released her hand, but Michelle suddenly didn’t care. She grabbed Mummy’s head with both hands. With a glorious release, she let two massive bubbles explode. Mummy’s head collapsed into a spray of blood, pulverized bone, and grey matter. Michelle laughed as Mummy’s body slid down to the ground. Then she peppered the body with marble-sized bubbles until it was nothing but a smear on the ground.
“Holy fuck,” she heard Adesina say. “What have you done to Aero?”
It wasn’t difficult to find the black spot. The Angel saw it from a mile away, darker than its surroundings, as if it was absorbing even the feeble starlight that illuminated the night and silent as the mouth of hell. She felt more and more fatigued as she approached it, not only physically, but mentally as well. Was all this effort even worth it? she wondered. Why am I even here? She was tired and desperately in need of rest and she missed Billy badly.
She hovered over the dome that had embraced a large, modern-looking four-story building, realizing that Satan was whispering in her ear, telling her that she should give up and forgo her duty. She should turn her head and fly away when all around her she could see destruction that had brought misery to thousands.
Destruction all around her … except for this one building.
It looked intact, at least outwardly, though the other structures around it had been hit particularly hard and mostly reduced to rubble. Across the street from the building covered by the darkness was a parking lot. There was some rubble within it, a few abandoned cars, and what looked like broken bodies strewn about like abandoned dolls. The darkness that enshrouded the building had also covered perhaps a third of the lot. It wasn’t impenetrable—she could see into it—but it did obscure her vision, as if it were a ray of darkness instead of light darker than the night.
She hovered over the scene for perhaps two minutes. Nothing moved within her range of sight. Nothing made a sound. She realized that she’d have to get closer, to land and make a thorough inspection if she had the hope of discovering anything useful. Besides, she had been in the air for quite a while. Perhaps that was what was making her feel so weary. It would be good to feel her feet firmly planted on the ground again. She’d check things out, and then report back to Lohengrin. It was a plan. Maybe not a good one, but the only one she could come up with. She paused for a moment to check her cell phone again, but it was no good. If anything, the static and whiny electronic sounds were louder and more annoying. She put the phone away and descended, cautiously, glancing about carefully as she drifted earthward.
Her sense of unease increased as she dropped lower. By the time her feet touched the asphalted parking lot and her wings vanished to wherever it was that they went when she didn’t need them anymore, her unease was almost palpable, but she could see no reason for it. Yes, of course the scenery was distressing and she’d just been through an uncomfortable experience—to understate it—but there was something wrong here, very wrong, if she could only figure out what it was.
There were, she realized, voices speaking in her head, but she couldn’t
understand what they were saying. She wasn’t even sure if they were speaking words. Maybe they were talking in a language she’d never even heard, let alone could understand. She shook her head, but they were still there, vaguely at the limits of her consciousness, buzzing, chittering, laughing, screaming.
She crossed the parking lot slowly and cautiously, passing abandoned cars that looked perfectly fine, mostly, and a few that had run into each other or were oddly crumpled, as if something large had stepped on them or thrown them so that they’d rolled over and over again. She was a dozen feet in before she passed the first body. She’d smelled it first. It had obviously been there awhile. It was a woman in what looked like a white nurse’s uniform, although it was stained with brownish splotches of what was blood, probably hers. A look of horror was still stamped in her swollen and darkened features and it looked as if something large had taken a bite out of her neck where it curved into her shoulder. The Angel said a quiet prayer for the repose of her soul as she passed her by.
She went by more wrecked cars, some rubble from adjacent buildings, more dead bodies. None had died peacefully, none were whole. Some were dressed like normal people in suits and coats, some more casually. Others were in uniforms, either holding weapons or with weapons lying nearby. Soldiers or paramilitary troops of some kind, obviously. One, in a white uniform with a name badge, had been strangled with a stethoscope. Doctors? Nurses? She looked at the shadowy lines of the building before her. Could be a hospital.
All the corpses had one thing in common, all the ones who still had discernible features, anyway. Their faces were all stamped by the mark of madness. They were all twisted into a rictus of crazed insanity. The Angel’s flesh crawled as she realized that. What could cause such a thing? she wondered. Mind-destroying fear? Some kind of psychoactive gas? She sniffed deeply and instantly regretted it as her stomach clenched and she gagged. If someone had released some kind of poisonous gas in or over the hospital, any lingering trace of it had been covered by the fetid scent of rotted flesh.