Marked

by S. Andrew Swann

  “This is a mess,” I whispered.

  “My Lady—”

  “Quiet!” I snapped at him, holding up my hand. I still had an untapped reservoir of anger, and I didn’t want his voice stoking it while I had other issues to deal with. I tried Jacob’s cell again, but it still dropped into voice mail.

  I put the phone away and looked at Ivan. “You stay here. I don’t want to have to explain your cuffs or your pirate clothing.”

  Before Ivan could respond, I had gotten out of the car. It was the last thing I wanted, leaving him unsupervised in my car. I would have felt better giving him free rein in my townhouse, where there wasn’t anything I really cared about.

  But I had no choice. Couldn’t drag him into a firefight and couldn’t leave him to be food for some wandering Shadow back home.

  I ran up and flashed my badge at the nearest uniform and asked him what the situation was. He confirmed my worst fears. There were an unidentified number of terrorists in the building, everyone not involved in evacuating people was sitting tight waiting for SWAT and the hostage negotiation team, and Jacob was in there along with Ms. Whedon from the Justice Department.

  There were fifty yards of no-man’s-land between the police line and the building, so I couldn’t just walk up to the building.

  At least not across this parking lot.

  Once I stopped talking to the cop, everyone stopped paying attention to me. A van was on the curb behind the line of police. I walked away from everyone, hanging my badge around my neck, and stepped behind the van and let the Mark push me once I was out of view.

  I stepped out from the other side, and all the police were gone.

  I ran across the parking lot, startling people on their lunch break who had no idea that there was a hostage crisis in this same building one universe over. I reached the entrance where, in another world, cops in riot gear were evacuating panicked civilians. I pushed through the doors and ran into a reception area, and two security guards started converging on me.

  I stepped forward with a nudge from my Mark and slid back into my own world like slipping into a well-used chair. I had stepped away from the doorways because I didn’t want to get tangled up with the escaping civilians, and—badge or no badge—I didn’t want to step out into SWAT view drawing a gun.

  However, in the time I’d been elsewhere, the evacuation out of this lobby had been completed. I saw the shadow of police flanking the entryway, waiting for orders to converge.

  I realized that I was seriously off-script here, jumping into the middle of this.

  But I knew it wasn’t a normal hostage situation. I had started feeling it as I crossed the parking lot, but I felt it now full force—dead hands groping me. I shuddered at the cold touch, it was as if a corpse—multiple corpses—were trying to rape me and couldn’t manage the coordination to actually consummate the act. I tried to imagine the touch was something else, just a breeze, but my brain wouldn’t cooperate with the interpretation.

  I stepped into an empty corridor and, back to a wall, I lowered my gun and took out my cell phone. I called Jacob again. It rang, but Jacob didn’t answer.

  Deeper in the building, I thought I heard something.

  When Jacob’s voice mail finally answered, I hung up. I dialed him again, lowering the phone from my ear. Somewhere deeper in the building I heard the strains of Ted Nugent’s Dog Eat Dog start up again, ending when I hung up again. I kept dialing his number, stalking down the corridors toward his ringtone.

  I had the uncomfortable sensation of approaching something evil in the empty building. What my Mark felt was vile, and I wished for Ivan’s inability to sense these Shadows.

  As I closed on the source of the ringtone, I started passing signs of the Shadows’ arrival, or the occupants’ retreat: an overturned water cooler, a microwave hanging open, a busted window on an office door. I reached an intersection in the corridor. On one wall was a bloody handprint, and in the area where the three corridors met, a copy machine made unpleasant mechanical noises, a bullet hole marring its side.

  Oh, hell, Jacob.

  I ducked around the corner. The corridor facing the copy machine was empty. It was short, the only exit a large pair of swinging doors marked “Authorized Personnel Only” and “Caution, Automatic Door.” The white walls were marred by a few streaks of blood, and another gunshot had darkened one of the fluorescent fixtures, dusting the linoleum with glass and broken plastic.

  In the middle of the floor, in front of the doors, lay Jacob’s cell phone wailing about overturned cop cars in Ted Nugent’s voice.

  I hung up.

  A big button was on the wall about three feet away from the doors. I braced my gun at the doorway and hit the button with my hip. The doors swung inward, revealing a continuing corridor toward the morgue proper. They stopped moving when they hit a body.

  I gasped a moment, thinking it was Jacob, but as the doors closed again, I could see the security guard’s uniform. Blood smeared on the linoleum as the door swung itself shut.

  I hit the button again and moved forward as the doors opened, slipping past the dead guard as I covered the hallway and swung around to make sure no one was concealed behind the half-opened doors.

  The hall was empty, but the floor was covered with bloody footprints from a half dozen people, some with bare feet. A few sets seemed to appear and disappear at random as the owner moved forward.

  I followed the footprints, hugging the wall and holding my Beretta ready. I passed two more bullet holes in the wall before I reached the doors to the room where the footprints led.

  The footprints led right to the door and through. The surface of the door was smeared with bloody handprints, and I could hear muffled wet noises beyond them.

  I pushed on the door, and it didn’t want to budge.

  Locked?

  The Shadow I had seen seemed too narrowly focused to lock doors behind himself. That was just one guy, though; others might be less monster-of-the-week.

  Or Jacob could have tried to barricade himself inside.

  I pushed my Mark and stepped forward to face another door. I expected it to be free of bloody handprints, but it was as smeared as the one I had left. Behind me, I heard someone say, “What the hell?”

  I glanced behind me and saw the twin of the dead security guard. He was bent over a pair of lab techs who were sitting on the floor, one holding a compress to his head. The guard looked at me with wide eyes, and I could tell he had just seen me appear out of nowhere.

  At my feet were more bloody footprints.

  The Shadows had been here for the same reason I’d come, to get around the blocked door.

  As the guard reached for a sidearm, I pushed my way inside, shoving the Mark as I went, feeling invisible corpse hands pulling and tugging as if they were trying to flay the Mark from my skin. I stumbled inside the room, feeling violated.

  I brought the gun up to cover the room, and it took me a moment before my brain had fully processed the image in front of me. John Doe’s body sprawled half on and half off a stainless steel table. A bright overhead light carved everything into visceral clarity. The corpse had been rolled facedown so the upper torso hung over the edge of the table. I could see into the shadowed cavern opened by the massive Y-incision of an unfinished autopsy.

  Nothing was left of the Mark on his back, nothing of the skin bearing the Mark. Under the harsh fluorescent light glistened raw muscle and the exposed nubs of his spine.

  My gorge rose, half from the sight of the mutilated corpse, and half from the sensation I felt from being so close to six Shadows. The three nearest me, at the head of the autopsy table, responded to my presence by turning toward me.

  I started firing.

  My first shot got one who was still bent over John Doe’s corpse; the 9mm slug slammed into the side of his skull, and he slumped across his unfinished m
eal, sliding to the ground. That was the last of my luck. The first gunshot alerted even the most oblivious of them, and the four following shots passed through their shifting bodies as if they were ghosts.

  “Dana!” I heard Jacob’s voice from deeper in the room, where he had braced himself behind a cart carrying surgical tools and tissue samples. Ms. Whedon was trying to fade into a corner behind him, apparently unhurt.

  The Shadows converged on me as I backed up. No time to coordinate anything. I yelled, “I’m going to lead them away—”

  I wanted to shift back with my Mark, but I couldn’t do it scrambling backward, and I couldn’t turn my back on these things. The bastards were too damn quick. I barely got the sentence out when the first leaped on top of me, grabbing at my gun hand. I got one shot off, grazing the guy’s hip, but it didn’t faze him.

  Like the last one to attack me, this one was cadaverously thin, but way stronger than he appeared. He wore a shirt, but it was ragged and unwashed and splattered with fresh blood, as was his face.

  He slammed me against the wall as the other four crowded around, looking for an opening. I tried to scream something at Jacob about going for the door while these things were distracted, but I was choked off by a hand clutching my throat and my field of view was filled by a crazed woman’s face, all anorexic lines centered on a pair of eyes that were as completely black as the Mark on my skin. Her breath smelled of carrion, her teeth were rotting, and there were shreds of something unmentionable caught between them. I swear her jaw dislocated as she opened it, bending her face toward my shoulder.

  I struggled against the hands holding me down, tensing for the feel of her teeth in my flesh. A red flash came out of nowhere, and a metal cylinder slammed into the side of her head. She stumbled away from me, the side of her face leaking a mixture of blood and black fluid, revealing Jacob raising a fire extinguisher up to bring it down on the arm holding my gun hand.

  I didn’t spare any thought for where his gun had gone as I heard bone crunch under his improvised bludgeon. I just wrenched my gun hand free and leveled it at the face of another one who was holding me down. My finger tightened, but the Shadow vanished before I fired. They understood how vulnerable they were while they were in the process of grappling with their victim.

  I was suddenly free as the Shadows dissolved around me.

  Jacob spun around in a circle, brandishing the fire extinguisher, “Fuck!” he yelled. “What are those things? Where did they go?”

  “Ivan called them Shadows,” I gasped, staring at the half-skinned corpse. I still felt dead hands perversely stroking my Mark. “They haven’t gone far.”

  “They’re part of—” Jacob was interrupted by Whedon, who had spent the time pulling away the barricade in front of the doors.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here!”

  SEVENTEEN

  I TOOK UP the rear as we ran through the building, feeling the touch of the Shadows reaching for me all the time. I asked Jacob where his gun was as we ran.

  “One of those things appeared behind me and grabbed it out of my hand.”

  I didn’t want to hear about ambushes. It was bad enough to feel them around me without seeing them, I didn’t want to add onto that the idea that they might be engaging in some sort of strategy.

  We turned the corner, and I saw the light from the parking lot though the doorway up ahead. Just then, the feeling from my Mark became nearly intolerable. The sense of the Shadows around me intensified to the point where I probably couldn’t tell if they flayed my back right then like they had John Doe.

  “Run!” I called out.

  Something appeared and grabbed for me, and I spun around, firing a shot into a gaping, blood-smeared face. I didn’t wait to see the effect on my attacker. I pushed my Mark going forward, away from the Shadows, taking three steps through a hallway filled with startled people innocent of the cat-and-mouse game I played with the Shadows. When I reached the wall of the corridor, I turned around and took a step back.

  I’d never used the Mark like this before, but the tactic was effective. I had stepped through a line of eight or nine converging Shadows. I was behind them now. Jacob and Whedon were running for the doors pursued by a trio of the Shadows, and one of them was just about to grab Whedon. I raised my gun, braced it two-handed, and took the extra seconds to aim because I knew I was only getting one shot.

  It touched Whedon, and I fired, striking the Shadow dead center between the shoulder blades. It crumpled as it was hit, just like anyone else would have.

  He . . .

  It . . .

  The remaining Shadows converged on me, and I pushed with the Mark and stepped toward them. The Shadows disappeared, and I ran toward the door past confused civilians who were still trying to make sense of the woman who had suddenly appeared in their midst. Halfway to the exit, I discovered the flaw in my tactic.

  The Shadows were better at it.

  I ran, and directly in front of me the remaining two Shadows who had been pursuing Jacob and Whedon suddenly blurred into existence. Someone here screamed as I plowed into the suddenly corporeal Shadows. The collision was too quick for me to use my Mark to slip by them. I felt a hand take an iron grip on my arm, twist, and I was slamming into the floor. I tried to turn, but I only managed to get on my side, my gun arm pinned under me as one Shadow fell to its knees, straddling my torso as the other yanked my Beretta out of my hand.

  I’d been thinking of them as impersonal monsters so much that I think that I was surprised when the Shadow with my gun pointed it at an approaching security guard.

  “No!” I screamed, but it fired, striking the guard in the chest.

  I struggled under the weight of the one on top of me. But it—she—had me pinned to the ground under her thighs, and I couldn’t get the leverage to dislodge her.

  This Shadow still looked human. She looked about nineteen, and her gauntness wasn’t nearly as severe, and her hair wasn’t as matted. She wore a black concert T-shirt for a band I’d never heard of, and mostly intact blue jeans. The only signs she was abnormal were the solid black of her eyes and the edges of unhealed wounds pulsing black revealed when her T-shirt rode up.

  I struggled, and she grabbed the lower half of my face in a viselike grip. She said nothing, just shaking her head as, out of my view, I heard more screams and gunshots. She brushed the hair from my face with a free hand, licked her lips with a black tongue, and smiled.

  The hunger I saw in her face made me shudder.

  I could feel the other Shadows drawing closer even if I couldn’t see them.

  At least Jacob and Whedon had got away. . . .

  Then, as the teenage Shadow on top of me bent down, a pair of arms dropped over her head. I saw a flash of chrome, her head pulled back, and her weight was suddenly off me.

  I pushed myself upright and saw Ivan.

  He had the chain of his handcuffs around the Shadow’s throat, and as she struggled, he spun around with her to face the Shadow with the gun. The last two shots slammed into the Shadow Ivan was holding up. The Shadow with my gun threw it aside once it was empty, and Ivan dropped his shield. He turned toward me, and his eyes widened as he yelled something imperative in Russian.

  I didn’t need a translator. We both ran out the door with something more than ten Shadows following us.

  “Shit!” I cried out as we ran into the parking lot. Even with the gunshots, things had happened too quickly for the parking lot to empty of people. At the far end ahead of us were half a dozen people exiting cars, returning from their lunch hour, and just now realizing that something bad was happening.

  I didn’t want to lead the Shadows into another mass of civilians. They might be coming after us, but they had shown no reluctance to kill anyone who came between them and their target.

  I grabbed Ivan’s arm and pushed with my Mark as we ran. Around us
the light and most of the cars dissolved as overcast day became a rain-swept night. I risked a glance behind me as we ran across the rain-slick asphalt. I saw the Shadows appear behind us, flashing into existence one at a time.

  I led Ivan out of the parking lot, the Shadows less than a hundred feet away. On the night-empty street, I pushed forward with my Mark again as I ran. This time I could feel Ivan pushing as well, a strong comforting hand that brushed aside the corpselike fingers grasping for me.

  The world around us became an indistinct blur, the sky melting into a blue-gray that pulsed in time with my heart. The traffic on the road became shimmering walls flanking the double yellow line, walls made of fluid metal and glass. Even the buildings around us became less substantial, as if they verged on the edge of unreality.

  I pushed myself harder with the Mark than I had ever tried before. Ivan’s phantom hand on my back urged me forward, past the point where I would have normally fallen back. My breath burned in my throat, but even though I ran full out, my body had begun to acclimate itself. My muscles were used to this; it was the Mark that ached with new use—and as I forced the Mark through the wall, I felt a burst of endorphins that gave me a runner’s high like I had never felt before. I wasn’t running anymore, I felt as if I was flying, dragging Ivan behind me.

  My body throbbed with the new contact, the fear pushed aside, feeding into the new sensations, sharpening it in a way I’d never done on my own. Ivan’s presence, the danger, it all fed into a throbbing rush with every running step, every ragged breath, every step through the surreal landscape around us.

  Around us, the world itself began to lose its physical character, as if a fog began to warp everything in a featureless white mist until even the asphalt I ran on became indistinct under my feet. If anything, the dissolving of the world around me enhanced the feeling that I flew through the barriers between worlds. My legs felt very far away, and Ivan became a negligible weight on my arm. My Mark throbbed with a new sense of power; the touch I felt was now completely my own. Its own. The touch I felt now overwhelmed my entire body, no longer only hands. I felt as if I was in contact with something so much larger than myself that with the touch of one phantom finger it could lift me into the sky.