“Dad’s got this really fucked-up guy from your universe trapped in our crawl space. He’s human, so we have this cop we know, he’s on his way to take a look.”
“It’s Al North, isn’t it? General North?”
“He’s in rather iffy shape,” Wylie said. “But I’m not gonna go killin’ people without the cops say it’s okay. If you get my drift.”
“Could we question him?” Trevor asked.
“Sure, waterboard the fucker, for all I care.” He sucked on the cigar, pulled it out of his mouth. “Use this on his eyes. Make ’im chatty as hell, be my guest.”
Trevor took the thing from him, held it. “How would we?”
Nick laughed.
Wylie said, “Waterboarding is a form of torture, makes the chappie you’re curious about think he’s drowning. And as far as that cigar you’re holding is concerned, boy, you stick the business end of that thing in the sore eyesocket General Al is nursing, my guess is he’ll tell you more than his address.”
Trevor thrust the thing away from himself.
Wylie caught it before it could touch the floor. “Cuban, remember?” He sucked it, made a great cloud of smoke. “A thing of beauty.” He got up and strode across the room and into the kitchen.
Martin reflected that he might be a writer by trade, but he had the speed and power of a soldier about him. The boy did, too, and with her hard-set lips, the woman looked as if she could kill a man as soon as look at him. Only the little girl seemed vulnerable, or perhaps that was just because her cuddle toy was also called Bearish, and Winnie had been such a gentle child.
Wylie opened a trapdoor. “Howya doin’ down there, General? We’re gonna torture you in a min’, just wanted to let you know.” He closed the trap. “It’s called softening ’em up.”
“He’s not playing with a full deck, Dad,” Nick said.
“Always remember this son, if they’re just playing with a half a deck it don’t matter as long as it’s your half, or even one card, if it’s the card you need.”
“We have no idea how to deal with Al North,” Nick said. “And neither do they.”
Silence followed. It was true enough.
Wylie opened his cell phone, dialed. “Where in fuck’s name are you, Matthew? I just finished your last Partagas, incidentally.” He listened. “Well, I’m telling you, the weirdness index up here has just shot through the roof. You need to put the fricking donut back in the fricking box and get your ass moving.” He hung up. “You know, I’m not saying a whole lot on the phone, so he thinks I’m bullshitting him some way, but I gotta tell you—” He stopped. Suddenly the bravado blew away like so much sea foam. He closed his eyes. Shook his head. “I saved my family,” he said softly, “me and my boy did.” Then he sat down. He took a long drag on the cigar.
A truck came bounding up to the house, its gears grinding as it negotiated the steep driveway. It came to a stop. “Ah, wait until the gentleman of the law does his body count.”
A tall man in a police uniform opened the front door and came in, using the same striding, aggressive walk that, it seemed to Martin, characterized them all.
“What in hell kind of a Hummer is that,” he said as he entered. Then he sniffed the air. He looked toward Brooke. “He dope you up or something?”
“He’s getting a reward for saving our lives.”
“From what? Some drug dealer’s fancy Hummer? Man, that’s a U.S. Army vehicle, full scale. You don’t see many of those puppies around. And in limo paint, no less.” He looked at Wylie. “Don’t tell me you purchased that thing? Buddy, that is gonna piss me off.”
“Matt, I want you to turn around and look at that man standing in front of the fireplace trying not to wet his pants. I want you to look into his eyes and tell me what you see there.”
The lean, narrow-faced man turned, and as he did, Martin saw that he did not carry a small firearm like Bobby, but a gun almost as big as the family’s hand cannon. Martin looked to the pistol and the great ham of a hand dangling beside it, then, reluctantly, up to the face. He let Matt look into his eyes.
“What happened to you?”
“I—it’s—”
“It’s a rapid evolutionary change induced by extreme species stress,” Wylie said. “That would be correct, wouldn’t it, Martin?”
“I would say so.”
“But, uh, excuse me, I don’t think we’ve been introduced.” He thrust out his hand. “I’m Matt. Uh, hi.”
“Hi.”
“You—” He motioned with his chin, an expressive gesture.
“That’s right, we’re from over there. This is my son, Trevor.”
“So you’re the one lost Lindy and Winnie. Oh, Jesus, you poor guy.”
“Matt, I would recommend a very stiff scotch, but we don’t have time. What we do have is one of his compadres tied up in our crawl space. A very weird, very altered piece of work that used to be a general over there in their version of the U.S. Air Force, but is now a sort of monster designed to be able to function freely in both universes, apparently by being made into a cut-up mess. You wouldn’t believe it. I mean—you remember the guy downstate with the mutilated face?”
“Nunnally. Sure do.”
“The missing pieces have been sewn onto this man.”
“What?”
“Sewn onto him to provide a physical connection with our universe. Give him greater freedom of action. The theory. In fact, bullshit. It’s the seraph who have trouble moving around in our universe, not people. And he’s people. Was.”
“Okay, I’m getting an occasional word. There is a man in your crawl space that has—Nunnally—Nunnally’s body parts—”
“In a misbegotten attempt to enable him to function more freely in our universe.”
“And this is Martin and his kid.”
“Yessir.”
Matt looked at them again. He held out his hand. Martin shook it. “Wow,” Matt said. “You sure this is for real, Wylie?”
“Oh, yes, and what we need is for Frankenstein down in the cellar to tell these people something—what, Martin? What might he know that would help you?”
“If we could stop the seraph coming through, that would help us. If we could understand how to close their gateways, that would help us. Anything at all.”
“You’ve read the part about Samson’s journey to Abaddon?” Wylie asked. “Do you see a vulnerability there anywhere?”
“They’re in a hurry. So we need to slow them down,” Martin replied.
“Thing is, I also keep seeing an ending to my book, and in it I see these filthy huge cities full of starving seraph, and they are in your world. I do not see New York and Washington and London. Sorry, fellas, but I just don’t. What I see there is open ocean. Right now, looks like you lose.”
“Can this man extract information? Does he know these techniques?” Martin asked.
“He knows ’em, Martin,” Wylie said. “He’s served in the Mideast in his time.”
“So you’ll torture General North for us?” Martin asked.
“I can’t do that!” Matt burst out.
“You gotta, buddy,” Wylie said. “Because once the seraph finish with these guys, we’re next.”
“We’ll cut their hearts out,” Matt muttered.
“What we’ve been through here, believe me, it will be mutual. No, we don’t wanna have them show up here, believe me. And this North cat is the key. So you are gonna help us. You are gonna devote five minutes to this effort.”
“It’s totally illegal!”
“He doesn’t exist in this universe, therefore has no legal standing. Therefore, Nick, go get your skateboard. I think we can do this with a skateboard and a towel.”
“I am not going to waterboard a goddamn general in any goddamn air force!”
“Yeah, you are.” Wylie pulled the trapdoor open. A stench of urine and blood rose from the crawl space. He looked inside. “Good morning, again, General. Visitors!”
General North’s eyes stared. His chest di
d not move. Wylie knew it at once: Al North was dead.
TWENTY
DECEMBER 20 THE GOOD SOLDIER
GENERAL AL NORTH HAD NEVER experienced pain like this. Although he had seen torture in Lebanon—men getting phosphorus splinters jammed under their fingernails and lit—he did not think for a moment that their pain, as awful as it was, approached this.
He was screaming, he knew that objectively, as if from a distance, but he also knew that no sound was coming out. He’d come into this strange place—a parallel universe, he had come eventually to realize—faithful to his orders, to carry out an assassination. He’d never expected to be asked to do such a thing, but this was war and we were desperate and the military and intelligence communities were in chaos, so, yes, he got why he had been called upon, and he resolved to do his duty.
Something is wrong!
He lay listening to the voices overhead. The man he had been sent to kill had proved to be a tiger, and his son was just as ferocious. Very frankly, they had overpowered Al, who was not a small man, and had excellent personal combat skills. He had not expected an adversary ready, willing, and able to gouge out eyes with his bare hands, or a child who would pick up a damn handgun the size of an anvil and just literally blow a grown man’s guts out. A child!
They’re not the enemy!
What was that? It was like part of his mind was yelling at him from behind a closed door. He had to get the hell up and get back out there, because those folks needed killing and they were still walking around. He was going to do them all. Massacre them, the women, too. Kill them all.
Don’t!
Yeah, that’s great, disobey a lawful order transmitted to you in person by your commanding officer, who also happened to be the acting commander in chief. He did not like Tom Samson, never had. The president had made a grave mistake giving him his appointment. But this was wartime and they’d just about had it, and under such circumstances you have no choice but to trust your superior officer.
You trust your own soul!
That voice—it was saying something. “Soldier,” perhaps. “Soldier, you’re dying,” that’s what it was saying.
He had not completed his mission and he had to get out of this hole and do the damn deed!
He fought to rise, could not. He closed his working eye, took a breath, then pressed downward with both hands. Rivers of agony swept up and down his arms and through his bubbling chest. His head went light. He fell back. His heart was thundering. Below the waist, no sensation at all.
He’d seen others in the house, he’d seen a Hummer come up.
It was them. THEM!
It had been some kind of an enemy unit, he could see that, but even they had taken a hell of a beating from these people. The mother cut up some of their exotic weaponry with a damned axe, and the little girl—what, seven, eight—stood there watching and laughing. “Mommy’s killin’ a big spider.” Tough sonembitches.
That was an outrider and outriders belong to the enemy, soldier, and you are working for them, and you need to FACE THIS!
The trapdoor was opened again. Light swamped his eye for a moment. Then he saw a silhouette.
“This man isn’t dead! This man is breathing!”
Another head appeared, disappeared. “Fuckaroo, he’s right.”
The woman’s voice: “Kill him!”
“You can’t do that, Brooke! I gotta call EMS, I gotta try to save his life. And—Kee-rist, you got a man all shot to hell in your crawl space, so nobody leaves. Got that? Nobody leaves!”
“It was self-defense, he attacked us.”
“I know that, but I got procedures, buddy. This is serious.”
“He’s from our universe,” another voice said.
General North listened to them up there, murmuring together. Those bastards had figured out how to get through a gateway, and they were gonna mess this whole operation up.
You’re not sad about that! You’re glad! It’s good, it’s a triumph, for God’s sakes, listen to your soul!
His mind cast about, trying to find a way to carry out his orders. There had to be one, there always was.
There were guns upstairs, plenty of them. But down here there was nothing, only dirt. His own gun was long gone. So, did he have anything else that might cause damage? Belt—sure, but he wasn’t going to be able to garrote anybody. Pins on his medals, big deal. Teeth. He could bite, maybe damn hard. So there was that. He could bite through one of their cheeks. And clutch with his left hand. He tested it. Yes.
So he needed them to pull him out. He’d take it from there.
He waited. Nothing. No more voices that he could hear. Stomping that faded, then faint shouts. They were looking at whatever the intelligence unit had done.
So they’d called EMS and now that was done, they were showing the cop the rest of the damage around the house. Not good. He needed them to pull him up before some EMS bunch showed up to spirit him away.
He took a breath, deep as he could, and let his pain possess him. He knew how to manage pain, and he’d been doing that, but now it was time to change his approach. As he let out the breath, he made himself scream.
It worked amazingly well. Damned well. He took another breath, did it again. The sound was odd, a lost, bansheelike howl, and it caused the river of pain to start flowing again.
It also caused the trap door to open. “EMS’ll be along directly,” the new voice said.
Then that other voice again, somehow gentler, thinner, “He’s from our world and he’s evil, you have to let us—”
“I don’t have to let you do one damn thing, Doctor Winters! This man is shot, he is here, and what you have to do is let me do my job.”
“He’s a criminal in our world. Wearing a military uniform but working for the enemy. He belongs to us.”
“Don’t you push me,” Matt said.
“Hey, guys, knock it off,” Wylie responded. “Martin, you’ve got gumption, after all.”
“We need to take that man back with us,” Martin insisted.
“Sounds like you need to take the whole damn Marine Corps.”
“We had a Marine Corps, too, did you know that? And they are gone. Gone! The military was done in the first wave. Worldwide. Done. So unless we can stop the seraph, they are coming here tout de suite.”
“Matt—”
“Fellas, I’m gonna show my piece here in a second, and I do hate to do that.”
“Did you know that you have an equivalent in our universe? Who is also a lifelong friend of mine, just like you are of Wylie’s? His name is Bobby. He’s disappeared and we think he’s wandering—alive but without a soul.”
“And you will be, too,” Trevor added, “if they come here. Wandering with your soul locked up just like Wylie has seen—or worse, you’ll be like that man down there, so twisted and turned around that he works for the enemy and thinks he’s working for his own kind. You’ll be just like that, and possibly within days.”
“Look, this shooting is the most serious thing to happen in this town in my entire career.”
“You should see the one my mommy shot. It looked like a big spider and when she blasted it, it sent out hot stuff that smelled like when you burn bacon.”
Listen to them! They’re your friends.
He sucked another breath, howled another howl.
“Let us take him back,” Trevor pleaded. “Let us find out what we need to know.”
“You can question him in the hospital,” Matt offered.
Wylie laughed scornfully. “Oh, for shit’s sake, Matthew, this cat needs to be waterboarded at the very least. He needs a live rat stuffed in that eye socket. At the very fricking least. Hospital. Do you put a goddamn cobra in a hospital?”
“If you’re me, you sure as hell do. In an animal hospital. Departmental requirement, all injured animals are provided treatment.”
“That is not what I meant.”
The ambulance was coming soon, so Al had to make a maximum effort here, a supereff
ort, or this was not going to come out right. He had more than one job to do, he knew that now, because he had to kill every one of these damn people, especially the ones from the his own universe.
How had things gone so wrong? He had to kill them and get back and warn General Samson that things were out of control, they were way out of control.
Then the cop came down into the crawl space. Just like that, he was standing over him. This was his chance, his only chance.
As the fool bent down, he reached up and pushed the pistol out of the holster with the heel of his hand.
It hit his thigh with a thud that shook him but which he didn’t feel.
“Excuse me,” the cop said, reaching down.
Al was faster. Al got the butt of the weapon between thumb and fore-finger. He felt along the side of it, and got his finger around the trigger.
He raised the weapon.
“Shit, he’s got my gun! He’s got my fucking—”
He shot upward wildly, through the floor. There were cries from above. He had no way to know if he’d hit anybody, so he shot again and again, until there was only one bullet left.
By now, the cop had skittered back up there, too, and they were all yelling.
He knew what he had to do because he knew the stakes. They needed information that he did indeed possess and it sounded as if they were going to drag it out of him with pliers. They would succeed, too. Our expertise at torture was child’s play compared to what these bastards sounded capable of.
Give it to them! Tell them everything!
There was one gateway they knew nothing about. But he knew about it, because he’d been taken through it, and they were not going to find that out.
They couldn’t destroy the seraph, not even close, but they might slow things down, and that was the issue, wasn’t it, because every day after the twenty-first, things were going to get harder, and around the twenty fifth, the gateways would once again close, and Abaddon would be denied all but minor access for another thirteen thousand years. They’d have to go back to sending through agents provocateurs to derange human civilization, cause wars, spread starvation and greed and confusion, and keep the bastards weak.