“I have,” she said. “You’re going to introduce me to them. I’ll be your date at dinner. You’re not spending one second alone with those people.”
“My date?”
“That’s right. And if they try anything, I’ll scream. Unless you’d rather blow them off and go bowling.” She smiled, and Will’s heart skipped a beat.
“Fake date or real date?” he asked.
“As real as US Steel.”
“Milk shake and a movie after?” asked Will.
“Not unless we can sit in the back row and make out.” They stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked at each other. Brooke stood on tiptoe and kissed him. “Moving too fast for you?”
“You’ve never seen me run,” he said.
“Run, Will, run.”
Brooke opened the door and they walked out into a world of white. Over a foot of snow had fallen, and it continued to tumble down in a howling wind, blowing and swirling into massive drifts around the buildings.
So this is what snow looks like.
Brooke waved down a Bobcat with a snowplow attachment and spoke to the driver, who threw back the hood of his parka. It was Eloni, the head of security.
“Eloni will drive you over,” said Brooke. “Page me when you’re done. I’ll be digging for deep background on the Knights and the Crag. That’s spy lingo, by the way. I met mucho CIA types when Dad was posted overseas.” She punched him on the shoulder. “Later, West.”
Will climbed into the Bobcat beside Eloni. He couldn’t stop grinning, which made the big Samoan laugh.
“Medical center?” Eloni asked.
Will nodded and they plowed forward, the blade cutting through drifts like the prow of a ship.
Kujawa was waiting for Will when he stepped off the elevator on the medical center’s third floor. He walked Will into a medical suite with a small locker room and asked him to change into running gear. Dr. Robbins knocked and came in as he was finishing up.
“You look tired,” she said.
“I’m okay,” said Will.
“I heard your parents are flying in today,” she said.
“So did I,” said Will.
“I was told they’re coming in by private plane,” said Robbins, watching him closely. “Could they afford something like that, Will?”
Will shook his head, trying to keep his anxiety hidden.
“Will, I’ve been thinking about how you could have scored so high on that test when you weren’t trying to,” she said, moving closer to him. “I think that maybe, unconsciously, you were trying very hard indeed. Because you knew something was wrong in your life and that you needed someone, anyone, to notice you.”
Hearing her say it, Will had to admit to himself that might be true, which made him feel a whole lot worse.
Robbins lowered her voice. “I can act as your advocate here, if you need me to, but to do that I need you to level with me.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Has something gone wrong between you and your parents?”
Will chose his words carefully. “You could say that.”
She took a step closer. “Do you think there’s any possibility that they’re coming here to remove you from school?”
Will looked into her eyes, wanting to believe she could help but afraid to say too much. “Yes. I think that’s possible.”
“If that turns out to be the case … do you want to leave with them?”
“No. I want to stay.”
She studied him. “Then I want you to know that I’ll do whatever I can,” she said.
Dr. Kujawa stuck his head in. “We’re ready for you, Will.”
Will and Robbins followed him into a lab filled with exercise machines and an array of large and complicated medical devices. At the far end of the room, a panoramic picture window looked out over the snowy campus. Will sat on a bench and stared at the wintry landscape as Kujawa attached dozens of self-adhesive electrodes and polymer dots to points on his torso, neck, and forehead.
“These are wireless sensors that transmit data to computers on the other side of that window,” said Kujawa, pointing to a small interior window. “We’ll observe you from the control booth and go over the results with you afterward.”
Kujawa led Will to a high-tech treadmill and fitted him with a blue plastic mouthpiece that looked like a horizontal snorkel, connected by a long tube to a nearby computer deck.
“Wear this for me while you run,” said Kujawa. “We’re going to measure a couple of functions, like the efficiency of your oxygen consumption. The mouthpiece lets you breathe normally. You won’t even know it’s there.”
“Sounds easy enough,” said Will.
Kujawa clipped a pulse monitor to the tip of Will’s right index finger and put a blood pressure cuff on his arm. He swabbed the back of Will’s right hand and painlessly inserted a small catheter, which he fastened down with tape.
“We’ll also take a few blood samples to grab real-time oxygen uptake.” He connected the catheter to another long tube, which split to a couple of different machines. Will saw a small stream of red run from his hand down into the tube.
Kujawa set some controls on the treadmill. “Hop on. The belt will adjust to your pace so don’t hold back.”
Kujawa and Robbins retired to the control room and through the window signaled him to begin. Will started walking and the treadmill belt rolled with him. He quickly advanced to a trot and then a steady run. In spite of the mouthpiece and electrodes, he found his rhythm, breathing easily. He let go of his worries and, as Kujawa had requested, held nothing back. The belt underfoot whined as he increased his pace, his legs pistoning faster and faster. Will felt eerily weightless, nothing but green lights ahead of him.
Will glanced into the control room and saw that his friendly genetics teacher, Dr. Rulan Geist, had joined Kujawa and Robbins. Kujawa was showing him a readout.
Good. Maybe he can give me some answers. Let’s show him maximum speed.
Will pressed a button that tilted the nose of the treadmill bed upward until he was running on a six-degree incline. He pushed faster and faster, until the treadmill’s gears and motors groaned in protest. When he saw sparks rising from the belt and smelled burning rubber, Will slammed a red emergency stop button on the arm. The belt screeched to a halt, and before he could tell his legs to stop, Will sprinted into midair off the raised front end. He landed on his feet, turned, and saw flames spreading from under the elevated bed.
Kujawa rushed into the room, grabbed a fire extinguisher, and doused the fire. Will saw Robbins staring at him from the doorway, curiosity mixed with serious worry. Dr. Geist was still in the observation room, looking dumbfounded as he stared at the monitors.
Will took out the mouthpiece as Kujawa gently removed the catheter from his hand. “Uh … sorry about that, Doc.”
“No, it’s all right,” said Kujawa, making an effort to stay calm. “You did what I asked you to. Let’s move over here.”
Kujawa led Will to a large white machine, an open cylinder of molded plastic set on its side. Kujawa operated a control panel, and a flat waist-high platform slid out of the cylinder.
“Lie down here, Will, faceup and your head toward the machine.”
“What’s this?”
“It’s an MRI machine,” said Kujawa. “We’re going to take some pictures of your brain. This time you don’t have to move. In fact, it won’t work if you do.”
“Good. I don’t want to break this one, too.”
“Please don’t. It’s a lot more expensive.”
As Will lay down, Dr. Geist rushed in holding a Center tablet, with Robbins trailing behind him. He showed Kujawa and Robbins results from the treadmill test, gushing with excitement.
“This VO-two rate is astonishing,” said Geist. “Higher by three basis points than any I’ve ever seen—hello, Will, forgive me, but this is incredibly impressive. Hematocrit level is low triple figures; that’s unprecedented. Watts expended steady at over si
x hundred but pulse never got above one-fifty—are your leg muscles sore?”
“No, sir.”
“I’d venture to say he’s not even producing lactic acid,” said Geist to Kujawa. “His cellular rate of exchange is a kind of self-cleaning engine.”
“Any evidence of PEDs?” asked Robbins.
“No, his blood’s pristine,” said Geist. “Glucose levels are steady without spikes. He’s generating EPO in response to stress in an extraordinarily efficient homeostatic loop.” Geist again remembered Will was lying there. “I’m sorry, Will, this must all sound like gobbledygook to you.”
“What does it mean?” asked Will.
“It means you have remarkable aerobic and metabolic capabilities,” said Kujawa.
“To say the least,” said Geist, shaking his head at the numbers. “This is marvelous. Absolutely marvelous.”
“Do we have a plausible explanation?” asked Robbins, concerned.
“It’s awfully early to speculate,” said Geist, deferring to Kujawa.
“Maybe the MRI can shed light on that,” said Kujawa. “Let’s take a look.”
Geist smiled, patted Will’s shoulder, and walked back to the observation room. Feeling even more unsettled, Will tilted his head back and looked warily into the dark center of the machine as Kujawa entered commands in the control panel.
“How does this work?” asked Will.
“An MRI machine immerses you in a harmless magnetic field, which we flood with radio waves pitched at different frequencies. They’re loud, by necessity, so wear these.” Kujawa handed Will heavily padded headphones, equipped with an adjustable bayonet mic. “Close your eyes, lie completely still for ten minutes, and we’ll have a picture of your entire nervous system.”
Kujawa headed for the observation room. Dr. Robbins stepped forward and took Will’s hand; her palm felt smooth, cool, and reassuring.
“Have you ever been in one of these before?” she asked.
Will shook his head.
“Just breathe and relax,” she said. “That mic is voice activated. If it feels like too much, let me know and I’ll pull the plug.”
“Let’s get it over with,” said Will.
Dr. Robbins squeezed his hand and moved away. Will put on the headphones and settled back. A moment later, the platform slid slowly into the narrow aperture. The headphones muted the motorized whirr. Will kept his eyes closed and tried to stay calm by focusing on his breathing. He felt another jolt when the sled came to a halt, leaving him in muffled silence inside the machine, encased down to his knees in what felt like a plastic coffin.
Kujawa came on the headphones. “Are you all right, Will?”
“I’m okay,” he said.
“I’m going to start the sequence,” said Kujawa. “Lie as still as you can.”
After a short silence, a rhythmic, insistent electronic bass note pounded through the chamber around him, sound waves clanging through Will’s skull. While the bursts continued, another sound blended in, a familiar voice hitchhiking inside the gravelly frequency. Then it emerged—clear as sunlight—deep in his brain.
“ ‘Stay calm. Breathe deeply,’ ” the voice said. “What a load of hog slop. Easy for them to say. They’re not the ones packed in there like bloody sardines in a ten-cent tin.”
Dave.
TESTED
“Are you’re actually here?” asked Will. “Or am I talking to an ‘astral projection’?”
“What was that, Will?” asked Dr. Kujawa in his headphones.
“Nothing,” said Will in the mic, and then whispered, “What do you want?”
“I left you with a snoot full to cogitate last time,” said Dave. “Now that you’ve had a chance to cleanse the mental palate, you’re ready for the rest of it.”
Back in the control room, Kujawa, Geist, and Robbins were watching images of Will’s brain on a monitor. Dr. Geist pointed to multiple flares of orange and bright red. “He’s neurally hyperactive all through the frontal lobe … and here in the corpus callosum, both sides are firing in unison. The hemispheres are almost in perfect sync.”
“And look at this,” said Kujawa, tapping the screen. “His posterior hippocampus is enlarged to nearly twice normal size, and not at the expense of the anterior.”
“What would that mean?” asked Robbins.
“His spatial comprehension must be almost beyond belief,” said Geist.
Lillian Robbins cocked an ear to the speakers and listened. “Is he talking?”
“When we’re finished here,” said Geist, “I need to run a full genetic profile.”
The MRI machine switched to the next frequency burst, this one long and high-pitched. Will tried to keep his voice as low as possible.
“Go on,” said Will.
“Our executive council’s been called into emergency session,” said Dave. “All hands on deck, round-the-clock discussions—”
“I’m tired of hearing about this, okay?” Will hissed. “Those thugs set some kind of freaky roach motel that burned down my house and tried to kill my friend. My parents, or what’s left of them, are on their way here right now, in a stolen jet with the feds on their tail. The Black Caps are hooked in with a secret society at the school that’s bringing creatures over from the Never-Was, and they killed or kidnapped the kid who was living in my room—”
“Wow,” said Dave. “You have been busy.”
The frequency changed again, clobbering the chamber with sound. With his eyes closed, Will realized he could now see Dave walking around the MRI machine. He even noticed writing in the helicopter patch on the back of his jacket: ATD39Z.
Am I seeing him right through this machine?
But when Will opened his eyes, the only thing in front of him was the white plastic ceiling an inch from his face. Will’s heart hammered. He closed his eyes again and tried to ride it out. Dave moved into sight, leaning on the MRI machine.
“That’s it, mate, keep breathing,” said Dave. “Here’s the word: You’ve been given our highest security clearance, Level Twelve. Cards on the table. You need to know the background on the Other Team.”
Will struggled to stay focused. “Okay.”
“The Other Team is what we refer to as the Older Root Race,” said Dave. “Have a squiz at this.”
Dave walked through the MRI machine until he was standing right in front of Will. He took out the glass cube with the floating dice. The dice slowed to a halt. A beam of light shot from the die on the left and refracted through the other like a prism. The split beams shot directly into Will’s eyes. His mind filled with tumbled, disturbing flashes of the narrative Dave proceeded to tell him.
“They were here eons before humans,” said Dave. “They’re our distant predecessors. Not ancestors. Ancestor implies lineage. They’re not human, but a different breed altogether. Hence predecessors. As in, prior inhabitants of Earth.”
An older race. Someone else told me something like this recently. Coach Jericho.
“Back in their day,” said Dave, “these Old Ones made a thorough bollocks of the premises and ran afoul of the Hierarchy.”
“How?”
“They were smart. Wicked smart. They built empires and wonders that make humans’ great achievements look like squiggles in a sandbox. And the bigger they dreamed, the further they sailed off course. They lost their moral compass a million miles at sea, which led them into wrong thinking and the development of what we call aphotic technology.”
“What’s aphotic mean?”
“Without light,” said Dave.
In the flickering light of the dice, Will saw strobing images of vast laboratories filled with towering slabs of unfathomable machinery, manned by huge, shadowy inhuman figures.
“That’s when they stuck their skizzers in where they shouldn’t have mucked about. With their infernal tinkering, they abused the primal tool kit and brought all manner of unnatural creatures into this world that were never meant to be.”
Will saw row after row of
transparent canisters filled with rank, roiling substances. Suspended in them grew shockingly deformed creatures of all shapes, species, and sizes.
“They twisted the earth’s flora and fauna into a catalogue of nightmares: bugs, beasts, bacteria, whatever they could lay their hands on. They tainted codes, perverted blueprints, and made the world a butcher’s picnic beyond the end of madness. Unable to stand idly by any longer, and in spite of our eternal hands-off policy to let locals sort things out for themselves, the Hierarchy intervened.”
“What happened?” whispered Will
“Suffice it to say, these bad boys did not go quietly.”
The visions bombarding Will shifted. Now he looked down on a grim, befouled earth where explosions erupted from a surface rent by titanic storms, earthquakes, and massive tidal waves. A global cataclysm.
“After a period of time referred to as the Great Unpleasantness, we banished the whole rotten horde of them to the confines of an interdimensional holding area. Or, if you will, a prison.”
Above a barren arctic landscape, a gigantic shimmering scythe slashed open a hole in the sky, revealing the hellish wasteland Will had glimpsed once before.
“Otherwise known as the Never-Was,” said Will.
“Yes,” said Dave.
Dark demonic legions driven by a gleaming host of warriors passed through the glowing, fiery portal. When the last of their shadowy masses had gone through, the portal slammed shut and vanished with a finality that made Will’s blood run cold.
The Gates of Hell.
“So this lot isn’t from a different dimension; they’re from here. They’re now in a different dimension, very much against their will. Most of their misbegotten handiwork went with them, but we missed a few lurking in dark corners. When a new apex species emerged from the primordial kettle, the human race, those last, fugitive remnants became the monsters of all our early myths and legends.”
More images appeared, mythical creatures of land, sea, and air terrorizing primitive man: flying serpents, werewolves, deepwater leviathans, a complete zoology of horror.
“Over the last millennium,” said Dave, “the Old Ones have been trying to restake their claim on the planet. And they’ve recruited some of our own—human collaborators—to help them.”