by Myke Cole
But he was competing with an engine climbing at over two thousand feet per minute. He watched the helo skid receding in his vision, the ground rising hungrily beneath him. He waggled his fingertips, straining his shoulder, trying to eke out the last inch of his grip. He felt his fingers brush metal. And snag. His knuckles stretched, the joints separating. A human’s hand would have lost its grip, the ligaments separating, the tension overwhelming the bone to rip it into fragments. Schweitzer felt his fingers hook, bite, and hold. He held on as the helo roared out through the open bay and into the sky.
Schweitzer spared a look down at the small building, growing smaller by the moment, and the parking lot outside. Three vans were parked there, surrounded by SAD operators in their tactical gear. No effort was being made at concealment now. They were quickly prepping to extract whatever was left of the team. Farther out, a team in orange hazmat suits were standing up barricades beside military Humvees.
“Jesus,” Schweitzer said into the commlink. “You could have fucking warned me. You nearly ground me up just as fine as the bad guys.”
“I told you to get on the bird,” Sharon replied. “I’m not in the habit of repeating myself.”
And then she was toggling the radio channel, getting comms with Ghaznavi’s control helo, waving off the extraction. What was left of the team was out, and Schweitzer looked down on the silent building concealing the warren of tunnels that made up the Gemini Cell facility beneath. They wouldn’t be going in blind again. They would cordon it off, spin their story to the press, and try to figure out what to do next.
Reeves read his mind. “Now what?”
“Now,” Schweitzer said, “we rope it off and come up with a plan.”
“What plan?” Cort asked. “There’s just one of you and dozens of those other things.”
Schweitzer didn’t answer. The helo shot out over the blackness of the woods behind the building, making slow, lazy loops, gun trained on the building, until SAD controllers on the ground guided it home.
CHAPTER VII
SENSE OF URGENCY
The Director stood in the open helo bay. He hadn’t ordered the overhead bay doors closed and saw no reason to bother. The horses were out of the barn already.
The SAD team had stolen his standby helicopter and used its GAU-19 to shred the access corridor. Huge furrows were dug in the walls and floor, the ceiling blackened from the ricochets skidding off the surface, heating the paint until it bubbled. The remains of three of his Gold Operators were spattered through the wreckage, so finely minced that it was difficult to tell the flesh from the rubble.
Still, they’d managed to kill five of the SAD operators. That was something. The Director had ordered the four corpses that could be recovered put in the cold storage and prepped for Summoning. Magical Operators used the capabilities of the body they inhabited had in life, which was why they were built almost exclusively from the corpses of special operations personnel. The SAD troopers had done a lot of damage; the least they could do now was be of some use. Of course, he would need to recruit a new Summoner first, but now that the facility was locked down, he could turn his attention to finding one.
The Director looked up at the lightening sky, listened to thrumming motors outside. They were assembling quite an army out there. He could pick out the baritone grumble of vans and sedans, the deeper coughing of heavier vehicles. Strykers, certainly, and something on treads but lighter than a tank. He could hear the thudding of boots and the crackle of radio static. There were a lot of them, in a tight cordon that reached all the way around the facility. He dialed his magically augmented hearing farther out, could detect only a single helo, probably a Black Hawk, making a slow rotation of the building’s perimeter. They didn’t have the airspace closed yet, not securely.
The Director didn’t fault himself for inadvertently providing the SAD team with their means of escape. It was his backup helo, and one should always have an emergency escape vehicle. His real mistake had been overconfidence. He was so certain that with the advantage of surprise and with so many Golds fighting on their home turf, even the mighty James Schweitzer couldn’t have turned the tide. And Schweitzer hadn’t, in the end. That had been the work of the AH-6’s GAU-19 and the fatal funnel it made of the hangar access corridor.
But the airspace was clear enough for now. He could get out if he moved quickly, but it wouldn’t take Jala Ghaznavi long to muster whatever resources she’d need to make the skies a lot more hostile. Once he was bottled up here, all chance at reaching the Summoner in the Northwest Territory would be lost. He’d taken his shot, done what damage he could.
Time to go.
The Director walked to the wall and punched a five-digit code into the keypad, then turned and waited as the hangar floor slid silently open, yawning wide to reveal an elevator pad large enough to carry three helicopters side by side. The Director stepped onto it, clasped his hands behind him, and waited as the elevator made its slow, quiet descent into the dark.
When it finally settled to a stop, the Director stepped off into a second hangar, a maintenance bay lined with repair equipment, bullets, hydraulic fluid, tools, and paint. The cabinets seemed to go on forever. The Director’s “away” helo stood beneath another set of bay doors, these covered by a layer of dirt and grass and opening out of the hillside behind the building. The helo was enormous, nearly twice the size of the dual-rotor Chinooks that the Director had flown in when he’d been alive. It was patterned off an old Soviet helicopter, the Mi-26. He’d seen it when the Army had leased one to haul stranded tanks off an Afghan mountainside.
The Cell’s engineers had made some modifications. Rotor and engine muffling, radar dampening. It had been painted to camouflage it against the sky. Much of the airframe had been replaced with composite materials to cut down on the radar cross section. All joints were baffled, the engines silenced to the fullest extent possible. You could never make a machine so large and loud invisible, but the Director had come as close as he possibly could.
The rest of the modifications were for cargo. An enormous metal cage dominated most of the lower deck, leaving just enough room for a single man to walk outside it while staying out of reach of the wide, reinforced metal bars. A massive winch was installed in the bay’s top, the thick metal cable anchoring to the thicker metal cage. Chains hung into the cage’s interior, each ending in a hook. Each hook was slathered with still-steaming blood dripping from hunks of fresh meat speared through the barbed tips.
“Incentivize the cargo bay,” the Director said into his commlink. “Spin up and let’s roll out immediately.”
“Aye, sir,” came his crew chief’s response. The air intakes whined and the rotors slowly began to churn. With a groan, the bay doors began to slide open, dirt and grass showering the deck as the pale dawn light flooded in. A man jogged to the helo from a corner of the room, leading another man in cuffs. An attempted rape, the Director had been told, and the prisoner had chosen to “participate” in the program rather than face court-martial. The Director made sure that all of his employees understood that there was no leaving the Gemini Cell, even to go to prison. He couldn’t risk idiots running their mouths on the outside.
The prisoner went cooperatively enough until he saw the cage, the meat, and the hooks, then began to scream and pull. His escort had a good hold of him, but their progress toward the helo slowed, and the Director knew that every second counted now. He wasn’t going to risk giving Ghaznavi the time she needed to close the airspace.
In an instant, the Director had reached the prisoner, seizing his elbow. His grip tightened and the Director felt the bones beneath the soft skin crunch. Amazing, how delicate the living were! He could hardly believe he had ever been like this. The prisoner screamed louder but stopped pulling. The escort released him and fell back, hands coming up in wordless plea.
“Allow me,” the Director said, and whisked the prisoner up the ra
mp. The man struggled again, heedless of the pain from his broken elbow, but it was the fluttering of a butterfly in a steel vise. There was absolutely no danger of his breaking free. The Director lifted him by his cuffs and slung him over a hook in a single motion, as effortlessly as hanging up an empty plastic bag. The man’s toes dangled off the bay floor. “Come on!” he shouted at the Director’s back as he went back down the ramp again. “Jesus Christ, this wasn’t what I . . .”
The Director ignored him, stepping away from the ramp and readying himself. The rotors chopping the air over his head stirred the lapels of his threadbare black jacket. He regretted the need to use incentives, but it couldn’t be helped. If he was going to get the Golds into that cage, he had to give them a reason. The smell of fresh blood and the heat of the warm meat would help, but nothing could top a beating heart for getting a Gold to do what you wanted. “Load up,” he said into the commlink.
There was a loud hiss of air and a reinforced door in the hangar wall slid open. The Director could hear the clanging of other doors opening in the corridor beyond. There was a moment of silence broken only by the whipping of the rotors and the screams of the prisoner inside the cage, drowned out to the living but certainly audible to him.
Then the scrabbling of claws, the slapping of bare feet on concrete.
The first of the Golds to burst into the hangar was what the Director affectionately called “salvage.” It was cobbled together from the dismembered parts of its body, an unfinished attempt to cut it to pieces to the point where the corpse could no longer hold the soul bound inside. The severed arms, legs, and head were attached by a series of metal cables ranging in thickness from fishing line to sturdy rope. It wasn’t a natural join, and the thing’s head lolled slightly as it bounded toward the helo and the heartbeats inside.
The Golds were little more than wild dogs, and like wild dogs, they hardly ever did what you wanted. The salvaged Gold made for the helo cockpit instead of the ramp leading up to the cage, no doubt lured by the greater number of heartbeats inside. The stream of Golds coming behind it followed suit. They exhibited limited pack behavior, but only insofar as it led them to what they thought was greater slaughter.
The Director leapt to intercept the Gold, backhanding it across the face so hard that he worried he’d overstress the cables and decapitate it. The thing’s head stayed on and it took the path of least resistance, bounding up the ramp toward the shrieking prisoner. A single heartbeat readily available was better than a hard fight.
And it would be a hard fight, the Director knew. He was faster than the fastest of them, stronger than the strongest of them. Time and time again, he had repeated this process, corralling the Golds, extending his will over them by sheer force. None had ever so much as challenged him. He was confident that he could defeat any of the monsters, any three undead things, maybe even any five at once.
Save one. The only one he hadn’t faced. Schweitzer.
But that day was coming; he knew it.
He nodded in satisfaction as the rest of the Golds bounded up the ramp and the prisoner’s screams abruptly ceased. Behind the stream of Golds came Xolotl and Quetzalcoatl, walking as calmly as if they were out for a Sunday stroll. Their gold crowns and pectorals flashed as they stopped, waiting for the Director. The gold and jewels were stupid gewgaws, vestiges of the vanity of the living. Had Xolotl and Quetzalcoatl been Silver, like him, they would no doubt realize that.
But they were, no matter how relatively intelligent, still Golds. He gestured to the cage.
Quetzalcoatl shook its head, pumped air through its desiccated throat. No. With you.
He sympathized. He wouldn’t want to be shut up in a cage with the rest of the Golds either, but the fact remained that while his living crew had all seen Golds before, they hadn’t seen these particular ones, not with their command over their appetites and their beaten gold and their jewels. It would be . . . unsettling.
He tried to find a way to explain it to them, but his limited grasp of the language wouldn’t allow it. At last, he settled on saying, They living, and miming a man trembling in fear.
Xolotl shrugged. You king.
Yes, he supposed he was. The crew wouldn’t ask questions if he made it clear that questions were frowned upon. He briefly considered pressing the issue, then decided there was little to be gained from it. His living servants would be more understanding than his dead ones.
The pair followed him as he jogged his way to the cockpit, hauling himself in.
The helo was big enough for the pilots to be seated on a separate deck above him. The cramped space below was his mobile office. Of course, the Director didn’t need any of the trappings of an office, but he did need to make certain concessions to his human staff if he wanted them to be cooperative. He didn’t refrigerate the helo interior, but neither did he heat it, and his people were bundled into thick winter clothing around the battered folding table. For now, they were sweating, but they knew how cold it would get once they were airborne. The airframe shook as the living crew secured the cage door, took up their positions, raised the ramp.
Mark was seated at the head, her eyes as adoring as ever. “This is unexpected, sir.”
“I do try to keep people on their toes,” the Director said as Xolotl and Quetzalcoatl climbed aboard behind him.
He stopped the collective intake of breath with a gesture. “These are my bodyguards. You may refer to them as X and Q. They will be with me on this trip, and they are to be treated as if they are invisible. I hope I make myself clear.”
“Crystal, sir,” Mark stuttered. He wondered how she would feel to know she had been in a room with them at least half a dozen times, her weak human eyes unable to penetrate the darkness the few feet to where they stood. No one else said a word, their accelerated heartbeats the only evidence of their shock. That would do, he supposed.
“So,” he said, “you were saying this was unexpected. What precisely was it that you did not expect?”
“Well, it’s just that we repulsed the SAD team,” Mark said.
“We did, and that is why I feel comfortable resuming pursuit of our original objective.”
“Sir, you can’t honestly think that SAD will stand down. They’ll just pour more peo—”
“I am perfectly aware of what SAD will do,” the Director cut her off. “That is why our original objective has taken on renewed importance.”
“Sir?”
“We are, to put it mildly, found out,” the Director said. “I have complete faith in our facility’s ability to hold out against even the might of SAD for a time, but not forever. Sooner or later, we are through here. We need a new Summoner, and the only one I know of is in the Northwest Territory. In defeating their team, we have bought ourselves some time. In fact, having them busy with our presence here might even ensure they never pursue us at all.”
“Sir, I know you have confidence in the leads, but they’re still just folktales,” she said. “Staking everything on that is . . . risky.”
The Director put his fists on the table, leaned over them. The people around the table drew back, all save Mark, who leaned even closer, as if mere proximity could bring her the gift of death and reanimation she so desperately sought. “Do you think that I would be willing to take such a risk if I wasn’t acting on some more-specific intelligence that maybe you are not privy to?”
She looked down. “No, sir.”
He leaned closer, until the fabric of his hood nearly brushed her ear. “If you’re so uncomfortable, perhaps you have a better idea? A plan that doesn’t involve holing up here until the full might of the United States government is brought to bear on our position?”
Mark bit her lip. “No, sir.”
“I thought so; let’s make the best of it, shall we?” the Director asked. He opened the laptop on the table and began tapping out a general order to all personnel inside the facil
ity. Help was on the way, he wrote. Until then, they were to hold their ground to the last round and the last breath.
The airframe shook as the helo lifted off, rising up through the bay doors and out into the gold-orange streaks of the dawn sky.
CHAPTER VIII
TO THE NORTH
By the time they checked out of the medical tent and reported to Ghaznavi, the facility was already surrounded. The SAD operators gave no sign they even noticed, but Schweitzer was astounded by the scope and completeness of the combat cordon.
And that’s what it was, a combat cordon, but a combat cordon expertly designed to look like a medical quarantine zone. Sawhorses and plastic pylons marched off in orderly rows, long loops of fluorescent yellow tape reading CDC: QUARANTINE—DO NOT CROSS strung between them. People in hazmat suits patrolled the edges. Schweitzer could smell the propellant through the fabric, knew that the suits concealed submachine guns and pistols, the seals loose enough to permit quick access. In the distance, he could make out a second blinking line of pylons and more fluorescent tape. This was only one line of many.
They’d covered Schweitzer with a fire blanket and a roll of camouflage netting they’d found stowed in the back of the helo. It looked ridiculous, but it was enough to keep the people manning the perimeter from seeing what Schweitzer really was. They stared at the strange figure hulking alongside Reeves, but they were SAD, used to not asking questions.
“Impressive,” Schweitzer said to Reeves. “When you button a place down, you really . . .”
One look at Reeves’ face and the words died in Schweitzer’s mouth. The operator’s mouth was set, his shoulders tight. Schweitzer could see the barely contained grief and shock, the superhuman effort it took to maintain his composure. They lost brothers and sisters in there, Schweitzer thought, and you want to crack jokes about the perimeter. The thought was followed by another, that he had been dead so long that dying was losing its gravity. Another thread of his humanity slowly fraying. No. You are still James Schweitzer. You will never let that go.
