BANG-BANG-BANG.
Three shots escaped her gun in rapid-fire. One found its target and the soldier fell, crashing in a contorted ‘S’ by his former comrade. Lexi stood to head back to the freight elevator but as she did this an explosion up ahead knocked her back.
Pain ripped into her shoulder. She slumped, nearly dropping the rifle onto the SEMTEX.
The whoosh-whoosh of adrenaline boosted her reflexes; she caught the rifle in time to prevent her own explosive demise. Her recovery produced just enough time to finger the wound in her shoulder. It was only a graze. Lexi flipped the little switch on the side of the rifle to the “20” position for automatic firing. Pulled the trigger.
The power in her hands was almost as shocking as the lightning effect it had on the enclosed space. This sudden light allowed her to decipher a figure on the other side of the room. This trilby-topped vision returned her volley but Lexi’s rapid-firing overwhelmed him and within seconds he fell. All was silent now save for the uninterrupted humming of the Device.
She grabbed the SEMTEX. Using the strap over her shoulder to take the weight of the rifle, she aimed and walked through the darkness, her memory her only guide. Tedious steps, toes to locate the bodies, sense of echolocation to save herself from slamming into walls.
What are you going to do as punishment for this?
The buzz of gathering electricity filled the hall as she moved for the elevator. Like a world coming to life. Or dying.
As eyes adjusted to the abrupt shift from absolute darkness to direct sunlight brilliance, the report of a gun sounded close by.
Lexi was off running even before looking for the shooter, distancing herself from the elevator as the oversized doors yawned open. Another shot pinged off the wall inches from her face. She turned the corner and dropped the flashlight. With the bomb in the right and the rifle swung back in her left hand she ran, firing backwards. A slug bore a hole through the floor to her right but still she ran, fleeing as though she had been running her entire life, as though this was the sum of her life.
A jubilant breath as her next shot ignited screams behind her. She gave a quick glance to be sure there was only one shooter. Satisfied, she walked over to it.
In the light glinting off the soldiers’ goggles, Lexi caught her reflection, and froze. A smile had been creasing her face. She hadn’t even realized she was smiling. A hard and loud slap eradicated the repugnant smirk.
What have you become?
With SG 550 poised eye level Lexi slowly made her way back to the freight elevator, eyes dancing in concentric motion as she waited for the car to return and open. At last it did and she entered, the car swallowing her as she stared at the bodies lying in the armory. “No,” she argued with the accusatory air. “Dorl took their lives. Not me.” There was a kind of sad desperation in the voice which spoke these words. It was a voice she no longer recognized.
Lexi shivered.
The red button marked “SB” subbasement, depressed with little effort for so great a moment. Quiet breaths filled the brass trimmed car as it descended. Lexi recited the words of Lewis, recalling with peculiar recollection the manner of setting the bomb and where to place it. As she did, she wondered how she would ever return to a normal life, when she was becoming a murderer.
When the doors cranked open a gale of sound attacked her, the force of it bringing her to her knees, hands over ears, pain striking deep, long secret places of her mind. The air shivered as bursts of amethyst light shot out above the chamber filled with towering machines.
She stood and trembled and stepped into this terror.
With ears nearly destroyed by the cacophony, and while blinking against the light-show, Lexi made her way through the subbasement. For the complexity of every machine here, it seemed that any one might be what she sought, but at last, when half way through the labyrinth of terminals and power boxes and transformers she looked up and saw the Device.
At first it appeared to be a telescope, long and thick and pointed at the heavens. But the silver and copper tentacles circling the shaft, and the large automated gears below bespoke of something far more complex, and when a stream of light escaped the Device, there was no longer any doubt.
“It will be about fifty feet away from the Device itself,” she repeated Lewis’ words. “Fifty feet away and . . . damn!” Her memory, the home of so much knowledge had become a world of sorrow and loss, a garbage heap of recollections.
With the roar of the Device in her ears, reverberatingin her chest, Lexi struggled to latch onto the memory. “It will have a screen lit up with star charts and lines of latitude and longitude. Set the bomb there.” A weak smile creased her features as eyes swept the floor for just such a screen. She found it flanked by columns of shielded transformers. Leaning on her flanks with the rifle lying beside, Lexi placed the bomb on the floor under the machine with the screen.
After opening the access panel to expose the machines power grid, she took the wires with the small alligator clips connected to the SEMTEX and attached them to the one-inch thick gray insulated power cords of the machine. Tedious movements to combat the tremors.
Then, cutting away the plastic housing of a ground wire, she attached the trip wire from the bomb and set the SEMTEX timer to three minutes. Countdown began instantly.
Lexi stood up at the sound of racing footsteps. She turned and saw what could only be Dorl himself, bearing down on her from the elevator. It was a vision straight out of a Lovecraftian nightmare, the man dancing on the edges of sanity, blurred to impossible lines.
How could such a being be real?
Reaching her swiftly, Dorl looked down at the bomb. “What have you done?” the clear, sharp voice rang out. “You’ve killed them all!”
Chapter 42
Moments later another plume of particle-accelerated light shivered through the air where Cotes’ head had been. He raised his stolen Teleforce weapon and aimed. Nothing happened.
“Son of a bitch,” he eased back on a slide mechanism with steady hands, heard a faint click followed by the whir of gathering power. He kicked off for the other side of the hall as another beam struck it, a hairs breadth from decapitating him.
He eased back on the trigger. It may have depressed with stunning ease, but the weapon kicked with the force of a Nitro Express. The beam appeared almost yellow as it streamed out of the barrel. His arms vibrated and swayed under the onslaught. Its brilliance illuminated his opponent even as it eliminated him, slicing the man in irregular halves. Cotes reset the weapon and ran forward, deftly avoiding entrails and human sludge.
Soldiers continued to scream in his earpiece, their cries punctuated by the crackle of particle beams. Years of service and training aided in his breathing as Cotes flew through one empty hall after another, weapon at the ready. As death moans died off to the sway of spent energy in his ears, Cotes came to a stop. He listened and tapped the earpiece.
“Jeffries? Ackles? Jackson?”
No one responded.
Then, sounding as if from another plane, a voice tinged with a mysterious accent, spoke through his ear bud: “Hello Agent Cotes.”
“Dorl?” For the first time in a quarter century, Cotes felt his heart skip.
“You should have stayed in the Pentagon. Now leave.”
Cotes ripped the piece from his ear and threw it to the ground. The lights switched on like an instant sunrise, glorious and illuminating. He ran for the nearest stairwell, raced down, skipping two steps with every footfall. At the midway landing he froze as a shadow was thrown against the wall.
He waited, listening for the sound of footsteps. Removed the Glock. Quickly calculating by the direction and length of the shadow, Cotes judged the distance of his enemy, reached around the corner, and fired.
He was up at the distinct thud of a body dropping and, rounding the corner on the landing, put two ‘Screw You’ shots in the man’s chest. Particle stream light boiled the air around him, making even the phosphorescent overhead l
ights appear gloomy by comparison. Cotes whipped around and fired without looking, listening as another body fell to the cold concrete below. Trilbies lay motionless beside their masters.
Cotes tore down the stairs, sinking a kill shot into a man’s forehead as he ran, sending a holey trilby on a short flight.
The Glock swept the air, confident, lethal. Confident he had a second to switch weapons; Cotes holstered it and swung the Teleforce around while crossing the floor of the basement at a trot. Gun-metal-gray tables lined the floor, food still steaming in plates. A kitchen was searched, revealing only a cook cowering in the corner under some soiled towels.
“How do I get to the subbasement?”
Cotes could see that Mr. Chef was too petrified to respond. He continued on.
Next to be searched was the dorms. Empty. Cotes squinted in the look of a man who understands what empty dorms in a hardened facility means. One door after another busted open as he searched for the subbasement stairs.
At the opposite end came a storeroom with a map of the facility. Practiced eyes perused its linear mysteries.
Armed now with directions, Cotes to collect himself. He then resumed his search with a smile deformed by his scar. Turning east out of the dorms, he found the room he had been looking for; a small office lined with bookcases and a sheaf of coffee-stained papers mucking up a glossy tiger maple desk. Head darted around like a robin for the trap door. Cotes tore books from shelves until finally stumbling on the faux pile, which promptly fell.
The fake collected works of Charles Dickens.
Behind it was a large flat button. He pressed it, releasing an electronic lock. A two-foot diameter section of floor flipped open on mechanized hinges in the center of the small office, revealing a screaming underworld. Better this path than taking the elevator; Dorl knew he was in the facility and Cotes was certain Dorl would lock down the elevator if he took it.
The Device gathered power with the liquid sound of a nuclear plant juicing up. The moment of release was a soul shattering explosion, hammer-falls driving spikes through his skull. Cotes scanned the office, found a box of earplugs in the desk drawer and jammed a pair in his ears. He descended the spiral staircase as his body shook with the celestial power on display here. It seemed the kind of place where God formed his lightning.
He (Cotes, not God) hopped down the final steps. The roar of a furnace room assaulted his ears in spite of the plugs. Threads of light were darting everywhere, even beyond the wire mesh nets apparently set up to collect excess energy. Electrical and sundry other mechanical apparatus lined every wall, filling what space there was in the midst of the manmade cave save for a three foot concrete path weaving among the mammoth machines.
Three Tesla coils, each about ten feet in diameter, stood like a trinity of guardians outside the furnace room. Cotes trailed the wall to escape their humming power, but an unbearable pressure brought him to his knees when he tried to pass between them. The Teleforce in his hands shook and glowed. As it transformed between the coils Cotes screamed and released it, ran around the screeching towers, falling on his face ten feet away.
The strident cries of a human voice pricked his ears. Cotes stood to attend to it. Old instinct activated, Cotes found the Glock in his hand, but after looking around, he reconsidered, holstered it. In its place he withdrew a four-inch Balisong. He hated to use it, hated all knives and sharp objects.
Especially potato peelers.
But with the coils and God knew what else, any gun he held down here might explode.
The coils dulled by decibels as he walked away along the yellow-striped path. Black polymer columns lined the way with every other one stretching to the ceiling, sheathed in what he identified as bullet proof glass. Bolts of ionized light darted around inside the columns. Stray bolts pierced the shell in needle-thin fingers.
“Dorl!” Cotes picked up the pace, slamming into a steel-sleeved concrete support beam. “We’ll let you live. Hell, they’ll probably even give you your own wing at the Pentagon. Just give yourself up and let us take control of the Device!” His voice, stretched thin by fatigue, didn’t go far.
A few yards later, in the center of the room, he looked up and saw the Device.
It not only extended up to the ceiling, but also protruded through a wide shaft that apparently led up through the roof four floors overhead. Giant steel gears circled the massive mounts. The center of it shimmered ocean-blue, a giant wire-rimmed tube appearing at first to be a telescope. As Cotes tried to climb up to the seat mounting the side of the Device, a screen below beeped.
“Targeting system,” he said with reverential awe.
A human shrieked somewhere below.
The Device, automated, ground a few gears, repositioning itself, and fired through the great circular chimney running to the roof. Cotes watched in wonder. The shriek resumed.
Scanning the floor, Cotes caught sight of a long train of raven hair streaming across the embankment of machines. He leapt down and ran after it as another scream pierced the air. This one came from the right of the fleeing woman. He flew to the source.
Turned the corner of a stainless steel device cluttered with lean-faced levers and dozens of buttons topped with gauges; stopped as he saw the man known as the Tower bending over something black and red. “Dorl?”
“She’s killed you,” the sharp accented voice declared with tones of unspeakable finality.
Cotes stepped forward, leaned over a shoulder that seemed to vibrate. At the sight of the SEMTEX, he inhaled. Dorl meanwhile scrambled to diffuse it. Suddenly Dorl stood erect—and screamed.
Following the Towers’ penetrating gaze, Cotes spotted a mane of long black hair twenty feet away. The Glock came out of hibernation, aimed at the shoulder, fired.
In that same instant the bomb exploded. The rush of fire thrust Cotes against a support column even while he thought to fire again.
Through waves of pain he watched (he was all but deaf now): columns crunched and crashed, and the flotsam of machinery flew everywhere. The bursting facility shook loose the Device from its foundations, bringing it to its knees without stopping its eruptions. Cotes’ second shot, fired almost whimsically, struck one of the giant Tesla coils a few feet in front of Lexi. Under a rainbow of electricity the coil shuttered and exploded.
There was no clunky metallic debris associated with it, but as the coil unraveled, the immense power within lured the amethyst beam erupting from the crumpling Device. The beam sluiced across the room in a pyrotechnic display of electromagnetism.
As it struck the spectrum from the exploding coil, all shadows evaporated. Light filled the world, emerging from the marriage of the ruptured Tesla coil and the dying Device. Like an acre-sized sheet of pure luminescence it reached out and enveloped Lexi.
She stood in its midst for a single, defining moment, becoming light itself, before flickering and dematerializing altogether.
Cotes observed this in a split second so brief it could hardly be said to have happened—and then he was eviscerated and the facility imploded.
Chapter 43
It struck first her mind, in that distant intangible region just beyond the realm of reason and understanding. She knew in that instant that one form of life was over and that what lay beyond was infinitely More.
Sound came second, the explosion from the gun, the whizzing of the bullet cleaving the air, leaving the spent remains of oxygen in its wake, followed closely by its penetration of the coil.
Metal gave way like paper to the force of the projectile and the coil stopped for a single fragmented moment. Then it exploded. Tendrils of light leaked out of the coil and poured over her. She felt them as they dug beneath her flesh and burrowed deep, beyond her physical self, down into her soul. The potential energy of her body mounted a revolution, the two powers of consciousness and unlimited energy twining to become one cohesive dynamo.
But even as she felt and heard and knew all of this, Lexi Montaigne was coming undone.
&n
bsp; The SEMTEX explosion had initiated a fission reaction that was occurring simultaneously with the destructive Tesla Coil chain fusion reaction. Waves of kinetic energy burst out in every direction, throwing Cotes to the ground, where he lay for a tick, watching her.
She knew this though she did not see this. Transformers burst asunder, their cumulative energies erupting and cascading in a spectrum.
This effulgence rolled over each column, ever growing and ascending as it approached the Device at the other end of the subbasement. The coil poured forth the entirety of its power, driving it into Lexi, transforming her into electrolysis. As she stood there under the might of the world, knowing and thinking and feeling, the aggregate energy of the unleashed transformers pierced the hull of the Device just as it was emitting its latest stream of charged particles. The united voltage overwhelmed it and a new type of energy escaped the housing.
Because electricity attracts energy, this escaped stream merged with the convulsing energies just as Lexi was about to disintegrate. The amethyst beam fell—its machine controls destroyed—unleashing an endless ripple of energy directly into Lexi.
She lit up in a towering inferno that vaporized the building until all that was left was the black hole of former existence. A memory of life.
It didn’t stop there, though the Device too had been vaporized. As amethyst and emerald rays exploded before her eyes and azure and crimson beams scored the fading edges of reality, Lexi Montaigne stretched to the heavens. Hands morphed into streaks of lightning, fingers moving as shoots of their mother beam. Her feet descended into the molten catacombs of the earth, her heart beating the pulse of all life.
As the physical woman ceased to be, an entity of pure energy and knowledge replaced her.
With eyes of crystalline brilliance she looks out beyond the pleated curtain of life to behold what lies in the absence of both light and darkness.
The Fifth Descent of Lexi Montaigne Page 25
