Deep Silence

by Jonathan Maberry

  And then I heard Ghost bark. Once. Twice. Not at another threat heading our way. He was barking at me. Sharp, angry, frightened barks.

  I flinched away from those barks and toppled back against the wall, gasping as if I’d run up a flight of stairs.

  That fast, it was all over. I was back in complete control and there was no inner argument. It was so sudden and so total that I had a very hard time accepting that I’d heard the Modern Man say those things. Looking inward, even he seemed surprised.

  Ghost barked once more. Low and mean and urgent.

  “I’m okay,” I said, gasping it out. “I’m good.”

  The wolf eyed me without tolerance or mercy. I straightened and I could feel the Killer looking out through my eyes. In the presence of his true pack leader, Ghost sat down and even wagged his bushy tail.

  My life is a freak show. Ask anyone.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOURTEEN

  PUSHKIN DYNAMICS

  VOSTOCHNY DISTRICT

  RUSSIA

  “Area,” I said to Ghost. It was the command to use his canine ears and nose to assess the stairwell the two soldiers had come out of. He whuffed quietly. All clear. We went down fast. I cleared each corner and made sure, though, because even a dog as well trained and experienced as Ghost can be wrong.

  We went down three flights, and with each step the sounds of battle grew louder. We moved out into an empty hall. As we ran along it, I tapped my earbud to the team channel and left the signal open.

  “Sergeant Rock,” I said quietly, “sit-rep.”

  I wasn’t sure if he’d be able to answer, but his gruff voice was in my ear, breathless and tense.

  “Got some weird shit coming down, Cowboy,” he said. “The new hostiles are soldiers, no doubt about. No rank or insignia, but they move like SpecOps. But the security guards are queering the math. Those assholes have suddenly gone totally ape shit. They’re shooting up the place. Not really aiming, but throwing a lot of ordnance downrange, aiming at anything that moves, including the soldiers. Don’t make sense to me, but that’s the situation.”

  “Sergeant Rock,” I said, “confirm that the Pushkin guards are shooting at everyone?”

  “Confirmed, Cowboy, it’s like they’re drunk or something. But there’s a shit-ton more of them than we thought. Not just more guards, but a bunch of guys dressed like factory workers, too. At least thirty. Some guys in white lab coats, too. Coming out of everywhere.”

  Bunny came onto the call. “Got that here, too. Couple of doors opened to a lab or something. These assholes are streaming out. Most do not have firearms. Repeat, most civilians are not carrying guns. They’re coming at us with broom handles and fire extinguishers. They’re not even organized.”

  “Green Giant, have you engaged the soldiers yet?”

  “Negative. Coffey and I are moving through a suite of offices. Only encountering some guards and civilian staff.”

  Smith chimed in, “You’re about to have a lot of company, Green Giant. Count ten hostiles. Possibly more.”

  “Three more SUVs just pulled in on the far side of the lot,” called Duffy.

  Well, I thought, isn’t that just peachy?

  “Keep them entertained, Spartan,” I ordered, and he actually chuckled. Fruitcake. “Green Giant and Coffey, open the Toybox.”

  “Hooah,” said an enthusiastic Tate. The Toybox was a satchel of really nasty booby traps and urban-warfare limited-area mines developed by Doc Holliday. Tate, who was the techiest of us, loved all that shit. While Top and Cole had been investigating the loading bay and I’d been visiting the damn Twilight Zone, Bunny and Tate spent their time preparing for a worst-case scenario with Doc’s gruesome gizmos.

  “Everybody turn your Tinglers on,” said Bunny. We all did. Tinglers are a real-time warning system hardwired into our suits that let us know where the booby traps were, what they were, and which routes were safe for us to use.

  “Sergeant Rock,” I called, “what’s your twenty?”

  “We’re still in the loading bay, rear exit,” said Top. “But we’re boxed. I have shooters between me and the exit and behind us firing from cover, and a lot of those crazy-ass guards and lab techs running everywhere. We’re going to have to start dropping civilians if we’re going to get clear of this.”

  “Coming to you,” I said.

  Duffy chimed in. “Echo Team, be advised you kids better haul ass or hide, ’cause there’s a shit-ton of them about to storm the castle. We’re not getting out of this without a gunfight.”

  Top said, “This is going south on us, Cowboy.”

  And Bunny was back, yelling in near panic. “Fuck, I just had two lab guys try to bite me.”

  “Confirm … bite?” I demanded. A chill raced through me nonetheless. We’d encountered biters before. The living dead infected from Seif al Din, the genetically enhanced Berserkers, and the bloodthirsty Red Knights. I could feel terror boiling in my gut.

  “Roger that,” Bunny said, sounding out of breath. “It’s cool, it’s cool. I don’t think we’re dealing with Seif al Din. These guys had heartbeats. When they couldn’t bite me, they began punching each other. I banged their heads together and they went out for a nap. But there’s more chasing us. We’re heading to the lobby. No other route possible, but there’s a shitload of these assholes on our six. Coffey’s leaving some parting gifts on our back-trail.”

  “Green Giant, are you able to confirm if the hostiles are wearing heavy rings? White metal.”

  There was a rustling sound and then he said, “Yeah. Both of them. And … oh shit. The rings have a little cap on them and they’re open. I can see some of that green crystal stuff.”

  “Get away from them,” I roared. “Do it right now.”

  “Okay,” whispered Bunny, “we’ve moved to an alcove. We’re good.”

  “Echo Team, listen to me,” I said tersely, “all of the hostiles are wearing rings with green quartz chips. The rings are activated by an electronic signal, and it’s somehow been sent. Assume that everyone else in this building is under the influence of crystal energy.”

  It sounded stupid to say that, but no one laughed. We’d gone past that point.

  “We need to just end this,” I said. “Eat your gun. Whatever. End it.”

  And then I froze as the echo of my own words came back to me. I tried to fix it, take it back, change it. I yelled at them to disregard, but the wrong words came out of my mouth.

  “It’s too damn quiet in here,” I heard myself say. “I can’t hear my own damn thoughts. I can’t take it.”

  There was a weird sensation in my arm and I looked down to see my hand raising the pistol toward my own face.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIFTEEN

  PUSHKIN DYNAMICS

  VOSTOCHNY DISTRICT

  RUSSIA

  Ghost attacked me.

  He launched himself into the air and slammed into me with both front paws, knocking me back, ramming me against the wall. I hit my head and the point of one elbow, and my trigger finger jerked and the blast blinded and deafened me. Fresh pain flared through the bruised muscles of my shoulders and lower back. I slid down and Ghost came at me again, standing on my chest and snarling, his gleaming teeth inches from my face. Beyond those teeth, though, I did not see anger. I saw total, mad panic.

  I shook my head, trying to make sense of my own thoughts. The gun. Jesus Christ. The gun. My cheek stung from powder burns and there was a terrible ringing in both ears.

  Ghost barked at me, but I couldn’t hear him.

  Somehow that scared me more than anything so far. It was like watching a movie with the sound turned all the way down. The only noise was the ringing in my ears and … something else. It was like wind, but distant, faint. Like the breeze you can hear in parts of the Grand Canyon. Far away and ghostly.

  There was darkness at the edge of my vision.

  Let me fall, I said.

  Or thought I said.

  Ghost kept barking in total silence. The fe
ar in his eyes was like a fist that punched me in the face. It was one of the worst things I’d ever seen in my life.

  I pushed him back with palsied hands. And then I slapped my own face. Hard. Really fucking hard. Again. And again.

  Ghost barked again and this time I heard it. Faint. But there. And in my mind I ran toward that sound. Fleeing from those distant, empty winds, running from my own thoughts. He kept barking. Drawing me out of the deep and silent darkness, and he was the light. That bright white fur. Those desperate eyes.

  Then I heard voices. I turned, fumbling for my gun, but immediately realized the voices were in my head. In my ear.

  My team.

  They were yelling. There were other sounds. Snarls and screams and gunfire. But my mind fought me, trying to wash the sounds away again. So I belted myself across the face again and again. I punched myself in the stomach, and then pounded a fist against my bruised hip.

  It helped. The pain was specific, it was tangible, and it helped.

  Top was yelling for me, but I had no voice and did not trust what I would say. So, he took command of the situation. “Okay, Echo Team,” he roared, “we ain’t playing no more. Let’s light these motherfuckers up.”

  I fell over and it took forever for me to get to my hands and knees. The torn Faraday bag was there, with the spilled pieces of broken green crystal. I wanted to pick them up, take them. Eat them. Push them into my skin. Put them into my eyes.

  Ghost shifted to stand over them. Growling again. I heard it now, and when I looked at him I knew that he would tear me apart to keep me from those stones. I hated him. I wanted to kill the damn mutt. I wanted to stab him to death and wear his skin and …

  I screamed.

  It bubbled up from deep inside of me and I screamed so loud that I could feel my throat ripping raw. And I flung myself away, falling, crawling like a baby, scrabbling, kicking my way along the floor, away from that green glow. Ghost stood his ground and watched me, his sides heaving, drool dripping from his lips.

  Suddenly an explosion rocked the whole building.

  It wasn’t the soft whump of earlier, but something much bigger, much worse. And it seemed to come from everywhere, rippling out in waves of destructive force that made the floor under our feet writhe as if we were on the back of some living thing. The poured linoleum cracked underfoot. I tried to stand but fell at once. Ghost went skittering and sliding away from me. As I reached for the wall to steady myself, jagged cracks whipsawed from ceiling to floor, snorting out plumes of brick dust. Framed art fell from its anchors and crashed to the floor and I could hear pipes inside the walls groaning as they were twisted out of shape.

  I gasped, “What the—?”

  And then there was a second massive crunch as if a towering giant had swung a pile-driver punch into the very heart of the building. The shock wave plucked me off the ground like I was nothing and slammed me into the wall. I tucked my chin to save my neck and skull, but the impact drove the air from my lungs and stabbed me with daggers of pain. I heard Ghost utter a sharp cry as he crashed into the opposite wall. We both fell hard onto the juddering floor. He scrambled to his feet but stood quivering, his hair standing on end, eyes wild with terror.

  I lay there, dazed, my eyes filled with bright and painful lights. I spat brick dust, coughed too hard, and felt something burning in my chest. My ribs and shoulders were mashed and each square inch felt like a separate volcano spewing red-hot lava. When I tried to get up, the next aftershock punched me into the wall so hard that my head chunked against the cracked plaster. All the lights winked out for a moment and I fought my way back to consciousness, blinking a paste of dust and tears from my eyes. There was a high-pitched ringing in my ears. I lifted the ten thousand pounds of cracked block that was my head.

  And that’s when the whole fucking day went sideways.

  The wall ten feet in front of me seemed to shimmer and lose solidity and for a moment I thought I was seeing the structural integrity disintegrate as vibrations turned brick and plaster to powder.

  That would have been bad enough.

  Yeah. That would have been bad.

  What I saw was worse.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SIXTEEN

  PUSHKIN DYNAMICS

  VOSTOCHNY DISTRICT

  RUSSIA

  The shimmer seemed to be shaped like an irregular crack, but it was clearly not part of the wall.

  Actually, that’s wrong—I could see the regular wall pushed back like a curtain. It was as if the wall was nothing more than an image painted on cloth and something was parting it. The cracks that had been there before were still visible, but rippled and pushed aside. And, yes, I know how that sounds. I know how crazy it sounds.

  The shimmer was green, and as I watched, it became a deeper and more vibrant green. Luminescent, as if there was a powerful light beyond it and someone was turning a rheostat to make it brighter. Understand me, there was no light hanging on that wall, and I don’t think this was light shining through it from another room. The hue was exactly like that of the broken gun and the guard’s ring. It was exactly like the spikes in the tentacle—or whatever it was—in the lab. The same. An alien hue, like a shade of green that doesn’t really fit into this world.

  My bruised head could not make sense of it, failing even to select the right adjectives to describe it internally. My heart began racing and I sat there, so startled that I did not even think of getting away. Ghost got to his feet and stood trembling, but then he began barking furiously at the green glow as he backed nervously away.

  Then there was a shadow within the shimmer. It was a figure and it seemed to be moving inside the distortion, and in my semi-delirium I wondered if maybe whatever was happening had indeed punched a hole into the next room and this was one of the Russians trying to get out.

  That, you see, would make some sense.

  Panic flared and I thought for a twisted moment that it was the rest of whatever that tentacle had belonged to.

  It wasn’t either of those things.

  The moment, you see, was heading in a completely different direction, because the figure that stepped through the crack in the wall was not a Russian soldier, or one of the guys in dark suits, or a lab technician, or even a security guard. Nor was he one of Echo Team come looking for me. Not a tentacular sea beast, either.

  The figure that stepped through the wall was tall. Very tall. At least seven feet. It was dressed in some kind of strange and weirdly stylized body armor. It was as green as the shimmering light but painted to look like scales. Darker green on its massive shoulders, arms, and legs; paler with yellowish horizontal plates across its chest and abdomen. The figure wore bizarre boots and gloves that were scaly and oversized, and each toe and finger ended in a thick, dark nail. Or, maybe … claw?

  The intruder stopped and looked down at me. It wore a mask and helmet that, like the rest of its armor, was designed to look like the horned, knobbed, ridged face and skull of some kind of unnatural reptile. Instead of eyes there were large goggles with lenses painted to resemble a lizard’s slit-pupiled eyes. The mask had two slits for nostrils and a lipless slash of a mouth. It had on what looked like an old Apache breechclout made from tooled leather and covered with symbols I could not identify. Belts crisscrossed its hips and there were objects in holsters whose nature and purpose were beyond my failing mind.

  Lying there, dazed and concussed while the building shook itself to pieces around me, I stared up at the intruder and tried to understand what I was seeing. Clearly this was someone in a costume, in exotic body armor. I mean … really, what else could it be?

  Ghost kept barking and backing away, his tail tucked under its hip, and eyes wild. The tension in his taut muscles told me that he wanted to run, to flee, but his need to protect his pack leader kept him there. He was losing it, though, and any second he was going to cross the line of pack mentality into pure survival mode. He’d flee, and I would be left staring at the man—if it was a man—who towered over me.r />
  I fumbled for my sidearm, but my holster was empty, the gun lost when Ghost attacked to keep me from blowing my own brains out.

  The big stranger looked down at the pieces of crystal on the floor. The tremor had scattered them around. If someone wearing a Halloween mask could frown, then that’s what it looked like he did. He took a device from his belt and squatted down. I heard a whir of a small motor and stared in frank astonishment as he vacuumed the green crystals up. He nodded to himself, stood, hung the vacuum on his belt, and drew an object from a holster and pointed it at me. It was unlike any gun I’d ever seen, if gun it was; it looked more like a flashlight with a pistol grip. The whole thing, body, handle, and bulb, was not made of metal or glass but instead seemed to be made of some kind of that same green quartz. However, his device did not glow like the pistol had. Did that mean it was of a slightly different material, or was it not, as Junie put it, activated? I had no way to know, no way to even properly theorize.

  The intruder thumbed a lever and the gun suddenly glowed with a yellow-green light so intense that I winced and half turned away. Again, the light was not the same hue as before. He did not fire at me, but instead raised his weapon and aimed at the far wall. For one terrible moment I thought he was going to shoot Ghost, and that snapped me halfway out of my daze. I snatched my Wilson rapid-release folding knife from its pocket, snapped the blade into place, and lunged at him. The blade flicked across his calf as he dodged away, but only the tip made contact, drawing a thin cut through his armor.

  He hissed like an iguana and I froze, gaping at his leg.

  The body armor was bleeding.

  Green liquid, thick as blood, beaded up and ran in lines down his leg. That slammed me into absolute stillness. It was the same color as the green substance I’d seen on the injured Closer in Maryland.

  Not paint.

  Blood.

  The intruder rattled off something in a language I’d never heard before, wheeled, pointed his gun at the far wall, and pulled the trigger. There was another massive rumble and once more the building seemed to shudder as if struck by some titanic fist. Overhead lights snapped loose and crashed to the floor, showering me with fragments of glass from the fluorescent tubes. I didn’t care. I couldn’t care, because all my attention was fixed on the opposite wall. A new crack appeared and it shimmered like the other one had, and once more the wall seemed to open and part like curtains on a stage. The intruder kept his gun pointed at it, the trigger pulled back until the crack widened enough for him to step through.