by null
The detective felt no shame in retreating. His main concern was to be able to move Bridget to his car, to give her his keys along with a chance to escape to safety. After that he could turn back to see if there was anything he could do.
Whatever goddamned little that might be.
The thought chilled LaRaja. What, he wondered, what could he actually do? And about what? What exactly was going to happen next? What could happen? For all intents and purposes, the scene from which he was retreating was just two men standing on a lawn. What in the name of God, the surface levels of his mind screamed at him, was he so worried about?
But that was the rational part of his brain, the cop, the everyday fellow who still liked John Wayne movies, the tea drinker, the piece of him that still believed a two and another two could be reasonably assembled into a four no matter what. The part of him that was almost always in control, that had steered the ship of his actions nearly every second of his life.
What had him so worried, he knew, was that there were more voices within his head than that one guiding force. And after what he had seen that evening, those other voices were stirring, flooding his mind with dread warnings and whispered possibilities, most of them beyond his immediate comprehension. Normally he could dismiss such thoughts easily, locking them back in their cells where they belonged.
That night, however, his nerves screamed at him to listen to them. His entire body seemed to be teaming up with that part of his brain. Although he was striving to remain in control, sweat was beading on his brow, running down his spine, gathering in his armpits, behind his elbows and knees, around his ankles. His back was chilled, his neck tightening. His breathing was coming faster; his eyes had stopped blinking.
“There are ghosts in the world, Denny,” the new voice whispered. “You know it’s true now. And, just as surely as you know that, you know there is something completely, terribly wrong with this whole scene.”
LaRaja, his shoulders beginning to shake, the muscles in his knees trembling, signaling their desire to collapse, to throw him to the ground, caught hold of himself with a violent, internal scream. Still moving toward his car, his hand still clutching Bridget’s arm, he hurried forward, ignoring all the sounds within his mind. He would reach his car, give it to the girl, send her on her way.
Then, he told himself, then he would figure out what he was going to do next.
AT THE SAME TIME AS THE DETECTIVE’S RETREAT, KNIGHT AND HIS adversary had begun to move slowly, eyes locked, circling one another. Their movements were not threatening; they were not crouching, ready to pounce at the first sign of weakness. It was more a need to move, to stay in motion, to simply not remain stationary.
“You surprised my people at the museum,” Bakur said, his tone thick and dark. “They were not expecting interference. Especially not anything so effective.”
“We do what we can,” answered Knight. “So it was you that sent the thieves. Makes sense. But tell me, if you would, why? The museum would certainly have granted full access to the Dream Stone to Ungari. Why steal it?”
“Access.” Bakur laughed at the word, the noise of him a snarling bark. “And what good would that be to one such as I? Oh, may we touch your stolen rock? Might we breathe the air surrounding it? Your generosity is boundless, Piers Knight.”
“I’m certain you could have taken the piece back to Syria in time. The museum has worked with many governments to—”
“I am no government, you fool!”
The professor stumbled slightly in reaction to Bakur’s sudden outburst. The man screamed his words, spittle flying from his lips, the bizarre light in his eyes intensifying. As Knight continued to stare, the terrorist bent his neck at an odd angle, tilting his head until his eyes were practically perpendicular. Opening his mouth wide, two lines of drool sliding down over his cheek, he allowed another dark sound to rumble upward from within, then bellowed;
“I am not interested in the workings of your world. I have no concern for babbling rules, idiot regulations. I am come to take all that I desire—and the first thing I want, the event I cherish at this moment, Piers Knight, is your death!”
And with those words, Bakur snapped his head in the opposite direction. Standing suddenly straight, he threw his arms directly out before him and sent a dazzling blast of flaming, searing power in an unavoidably straight line at the professor.
CHAPTER FORTY
“Keep firing! For Christ’s sake, pour it on!”
The captain’s orders did not go unheeded, but the following of them accomplished little. First Post Able was about to be overrun and there was absolutely nothing that could be done about it.
“What the hell is that thing, Captain?”
“You tell me, soldier, and we’ll both know.”
That the fifty men assigned to defend Post Able could react at all in the face of the thing approaching them was a testament to their training and their commander. Large it was, gigantic, but formless for the most part as well. The tanks that had been sent out to meet it had pumped shell after shell into it with no effect. The rounds had passed through the shape, exploding against whatever they finally struck that stopped their progress.
The gunners had known their missiles were on-target. Their line-of-sight weapons utilized heat-seeking technology, which made it impossible to miss their target, for the thing at which they hurled their shells was completely made of fire. It was akin to the horror sent into the precinct house basement with which Jimmy Dollins had done battle, but a thousand times larger.
“What’s happening there, Captain?” Major General Harris’ voice boomed through the officer’s earpiece.
“Aren’t you receiving our video feed, sir?”
“Negative. We’re getting something, but there must be some sort of interference. The images we’re receiving are too unclear for us to make anything out. Repeat, what’s happening there? What are you up against?”
“I, I don’t know, sir,” answered the captain. “It’s gigantic, twenty, thirty stories. I don’t know exactly; it keeps changing size.”
“Changing size?”
“Yes, sir.” The captain closed his eyes, straining to keep the terror he was feeling out of his voice. The man was a well-trained soldier. He had no overwhelming fear of dying. That was his duty and he was ready to give his all. “I don’t think it’s actually alive, sir. I don’t know how else to say this, sir, but this … thing, it’s like it’s made of fire.”
But this was different. This enemy was not here to capture territory, to seize plunder or make some sort of political statement. The captain knew—could feel it in his bones—this thing had come to suck away souls, and nowhere in his indoctrination did anyone mention the possibility of that.
“Fire?”
“Yes, sir—fire. It’s walking flames. Sometimes you can make out a kind of body, but it, it shifts, sir. It just … changes. Our shells either pass right through it or they explode from the heat. When they do explode, they kind of spread the fire around, but they can’t put it out. Nothing can put it out. It just … keeps coming. It just … keeps coming!”
“Get that damn hunk of rock out of there, Captain. Move it to Post Baker, now!”
“Already done, sir. We …”
And then, the captain’s voice faded from Harris’ receiver. Try as he might, the officer could not speak. His mind had become riveted, focused entirely on the sight spread out before him. The thing seemed to have become enraged—the officer could think of no other word—at the attacking tanks. So far its speed had appeared ponderous, clumsy. But now, suddenly the walking fire simply threw itself at one of the Abrams, enveloping it in flame. Screams filled the air as the men inside the tank were roasted, their uniforms burned from their bodies, their flesh melted to their seats. Then, the molten force swirling within the war wagon finally reached a sufficient temperature to ignite its ammunition. The tank disintegrated from the force of the explosion.
“Oh God, oh my—”
&n
bsp; Before the captain could complete his prayer, the shambling horror turned its attention to more of the tanks. Having found a way to rid itself of the petty annoyances, it hurled itself from one to another. Traveling at practically the speed of light, it burned its way into each of them, incinerating their crews, then either causing them to explode or melting them into slag. After watching some twenty such attacks, the captain finally managed to shout into his microphone;
“Sir, don’t send out any more Abrams. It, it’s destroying them all—one by one. It can’t be stopped, sir.”
“Captain, listen to me—can you hear me, soldier?”
“Oh dear God, it can’t be stopped. It can’t be stopped!”
“Captain …”
Harris tried to halt his officer’s apparent mental breakdown, worked at focusing the captain’s attention on performing his duty, but it was too late. The man was no longer capable of responding to orders. His men, those he had not sent to remove the Dream Stone to the next post in the chain of command, were running across the fields, screaming in terror. They were not in retreat, nor were they deserting their duty station. Either would have taken the ability to make rational decisions, and none of them was capable of such at the moment.
“Captain …”
None of them could explain what they were witnessing. They had been told they might be facing some manner of new offensive technology, but this their minds knew was no man-made weapon. This thing coming toward them was some terrible, malevolent evil thrust forth from one ancient hell or another to lay waste to everything in its path.
“Goddamn it, Captain … come in … answer me, soldier.”
As the officer stood transfixed in his command bunker, he watched as one after another of his men were barbecued, the flaming monstrosity launching small napalm blasts at the running figures as if spitting at mice. Several score spots of the countryside were now ablaze, each of them with a flaming war machine or fallen soldier burning in its center.
“Captain,” Harris growled, his voice terse but still crackling with authority. Refusing to give up, he snapped, “Pull yourself together. Get yourself out of there. Do you hear me, soldier?”
“Too late,” came the captain’s feeble whisper after a moment. His voice low and frightened, reduced to that of a man stripped of any sense that the future still lay before him, he whimpered, “Too late … sir.”
The captain’s voice broke into a momentary sob, after which came a terrible rumbling. Before any could question the sound, tremors rattled the room—walls cracked; light fixtures fell. Then, as the room flooded with darkness, Major General Harris’ earpiece was filled with the sound of rushing flames, a terrible scream, and then a cold and horrible silence.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
“You are, I must admit, a very resilient human being, Piers Knight.”
The words flowing from Bakur were not an understatement. The scorching power he had released from his body had been more than enough to overturn an eighteen-wheel truck, to send it rolling end over end. Yet the professor had only been forced back several feet, and then it had been but the force sliding his hard-soled shoes across the close-cropped cemetery lawn. Knight had, of course, utilized his white-oak rune to divert the energy blast. The defense had taken every bit of his concentration, and the effort had left him quite drained. But the effort had also left him alive and unscathed, and his opponent a trifle confused.
“Well, you know,” the professor answered, breathing heavily, desperately stalling for time, “in my profession you have to be somewhat hearty. All that sorting through files, flipping page after page, and … oh my goodness, the card catalogs—don’t get me started—”
When Knight had scattered Bakur’s life force, he had also managed to study it. As the power passed over his protective shield, he allowed the barest contact between it and his own aura so he might identify his enemy’s energy source. What the professor had felt startled him greatly. So greatly, in fact, he began to scrutinize the terrorist more closely, trying to determine exactly what had happened to the man.
“Are you babbling out of fear, Piers Knight, or are you attempting to waste my time?”
Watching Bakur closely, the professor realized the words he was hearing were not being spoken, were not emanating from the terrorist’s larynx, were not being formed by his tongue and teeth. Nor, Knight finally concluded, was he hearing them within his ears as he would other sounds. What he was hearing was being created within his brain, a fact that terrified the academic deeply. Summoning what little courage he could find left within him, Knight answered;
“Well, since you’re not laughing, I suppose I was wasting your time, after all. But all right, if it’s going to be nothing but work, work, work with you, perhaps we should get down to business. So, here’s a question… . I’m not actually conversing with Hamid Bakur, am I?”
“Of course not, Piers Knight. That creature gave itself over to me long ago. At first I could only make suggestions to it, guide it, and then only where our mutual interests crossed. But it did not take long before this shell you see was merely my puppet, an extension of my will in your dimension.”
The professor clamped down upon his nerves as harshly as he could, desperate to not show what he was feeling. His system screamed in rebellion, desperate to shake, to thrash. His knees flared with pain, hoping to force him to the ground. Every part of him that was human, the primal mammalian instincts of him, were all rolling one over the other within his mind in unimaginable terror, overloading his neural pathways with commands to run, to crawl, to beg—to faint.
“Well, it’s not actually my dimension, you know.”
The part of Knight that was more than animal rallied around his ability to still toss off a joke. Minuscule and unfunny as it might have been, it was still a sign of defiance, one thrown at both his foe as well as at those parts of his mind bellowing for him to surrender. More frightened at his own human weakness than at whatever had sunk its ethereal claws into Bakur, the professor followed up his answer with a question;
“Look, let’s make this easy on ourselves. You want something. I’m insignificant. You have power; all humans want power. Surely there must be some basis for mutual cooperation where we can work something out here.”
The body of Hamid Bakur continued to stand in the same robotic pose it had taken when first it had begun to converse with Knight. Nothing about its stance changed—its mouth did not twitch, eyes did not move. And yet, despite any of the normal clues one might look for to determine what was happening within the mind of another, the professor knew he was being studied, that his words were being considered.
Perhaps it’s the fact we’re in mental communication, he thought. It must not be able to read my mind. If it could, if nothing else, it would have known about the white oak, would have made some different attack. Or would have kept attacking.
Knight gave off watching the unmoving figure. Searching for human cues was useless, for Bakur was no longer human. He had been taken over, possessed—but by what?
Come on, curator, the professor snarled at himself within his mind. Think. You’re so damn proud of this brain of yours—use it, goddamn it! What is this thing? Where does it come from? What does it want?
Deciding the entity within Bakur was not going to speak again without further prompting, Knight decided on the direct approach. Summoning all of his diminished courage into one lump, he squeezed it as tightly as he could, praying his voice would not crack as he asked;
“So, this dimension of yours, where is it exactly? Why have you come here? What is it you want?”
“You question me?”
Knight froze slightly. For the first time, the Bakur thing managed to throw tone into its communication. Darker, angry, the words crackled with warning within the professor’s mind. Straining to remain jovial, the curator answered;
“Again, my fine new friend, I can’t help you if I don’t know where you’re from, or what you want. I mean, are you something
that’s come this way before? What we might think of as, oh, I don’t know … the Christian Devil? An Iblis, Ahriman, or Shaitan from the Middle East? Maybe the Teutonic Nixie, the Huldrefolk of Norway, Australia’s Bunyip … we’ve had so many extradimensional visitors here. If you would just—”
Silence!
The single word rang within Knight’s mind, shattering his concentration, forcing his mounting fear once more to the surface. His nerve endings tingling, teeth close to chattering, the professor searched desperately for a next move when suddenly the Bakur thing obliged him by revealing all he had wanted to know.
“I am none of the petty mites your tiny monkey brain can comprehend. But do not know fear, Piers Knight. I will reveal to you all you wish to know, and then you will do all that I command!”
The professor heard the horror’s words in his mind, and for a moment his soul sparked with hope. Once he understood, once he had a handle on what was happening, he prayed, then he might plan a strategy; then he might be able to cobble together some kind of defense. For one brief split second, optimism flooded the curator’s brain with assurance.
Then, the Bakur thing seared his mind with all the information he desired, and Piers Knight responded by falling to his knees and screaming into the night.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
“Get those men out of there,” shouted Harris. Waving his arms at his subordinates in the command center, he told them, “Do it. Get everyone out of the field. Pull them back—now, goddamn it!”
The major general did not fault those around him for being stunned—for momentarily freezing in helpless silence. The fantastic horrors they all had witnessed, the screaming terror they had heard, it had shocked him into immobility for a moment as well. Scores of his men dead, hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment destroyed, in only a matter of minutes. He had never before experienced such losses, never had a command so utterly routed—so completely destroyed. Worse than all that had happened so far, however, was the fact that none of them still had even the slightest idea what they were up against.
