“What about you?”
“Just do it. I’ll think of something.”
Her eyes widened as she realized the sacrifice he was preparing to make, but she complied, squirming into the cramped cupboard. “Good luck,” she whispered as he closed the cabinet doors, sealing her in.
Pierce knew luck was about the only thing that would save him, and the sudden pounding from behind the refrigerator blocking the exit door indicated that his luck had run out.
He scanned the room again, then started opening cupboards and drawers, looking for anything that might be useful in warding off the impending assault. Aside from the tables and chairs, the only things he saw were a small microwave oven, a toaster and a case of bottled water on the counter, along with an honor jar filled with loose change. In one drawer, mixed in with an array of spoons and spatulas, he found a long knife with a serrated edge, but the idea of using it against the monsters seemed laughable.
The refrigerator jumped a few feet away from door, and Pierce instinctively rushed to it, and made a futile effort to brace it with his shoulder. He managed to push it forward a few inches, but then something hit it again from behind, and knocked him back. He fell into one of the tables, banging his hip painfully on one edge, and went sprawling onto the floor.
Wincing from the bruising injury, he rolled over just in time to see one of the hair-cloaked creatures advance into the room. Its red eyes met his gaze, and with a nerve-shattering scream, it started toward him.
36.
King knew that Sokoloff was now the least of his worries.
Copeland had been overly optimistic in his belief that the Army could hold off the assault for eight minutes. According to his still running chronometer, only about six minutes had passed since the activation of the Bluelight device—six minutes in which the creatures had seemingly materialized out of the mist and managed to either find a break in the perimeter or completely overrun the soldiers. And now, the only person who could have stopped it all by shutting down the experiment was dead.
And that wasn’t even the worst of it.
Eight and a half minutes is the upper limit of the green zone, Copeland had said. In his mind’s eye, he saw a temperature gauge with green, yellow and red segments. The imaginary needle was almost out of the green now, advancing relentlessly toward yellow and red. In perhaps in as little as five more minutes, the antimatter explosions in the Earth’s magnetic field would grow hot enough to set the world on fire, and there was no way to shut it off.
But there’s got to be a way to stop it, King thought.
He couldn’t tell if the creatures that now flooded into the control room were actively looking for him or just destroying everything in sight, but either way, he only had a few more seconds before they found him, crouched beneath a flimsy computer desk. King decided not to postpone the inevitable any longer.
He scrambled out of concealment, taking in the room like a game board, with the towering Mogollon Monsters arrayed like enemy pieces, blocking his path to the objective. He didn’t see Sokoloff, and entertained a fleeting hope that the beasts had already taken care of that little problem. Taking a deep breath, he hurled a chair at one of the creatures, hoping to distract it more than anything else, and then launched himself in a low sprint for the exit.
A sweeping arm grazed him, knocking him off course, but he rebounded off the doorframe and scrambled into the darkened foyer. The door to the outside had been completely torn away, and beyond it, the world strobed between night and day as lightning—or rather charged plasma from the atmosphere—flashed like the cameras of a dozen crazed paparazzi on the red carpet. The frequency of the flashes was increasing, with several flashes per second, and the constant roar of thunder resonated through King’s torso like the mother of all woofers.
He burst out into the open, slowing only long enough to take in the carnage. The soldiers hadn’t been completely annihilated, but the few remaining survivors were clustered around a Humvee to his right, fiercely repelling more than a dozen monsters. Their battle was drawing more creatures in like the gravity well of a black hole. The area to his right was eerily deserted, with wrecked and abandoned Humvees jutting up out of the waist high mist. King swerved in that direction and resumed running, staying close to the exterior of the building.
As he rounded the corner, he was exposed to the full fury of the artificial lightning storm.
The air was alive with heat and electricity. He could feel the static crawling on his skin as he raced along the side of the building, toward the precipice overlooking the abandoned pit mine. The mist hid the exact location of the drop, but as he neared the place where the silvery fog seemed to cascade out into nothingness, he cautiously tested the ground before each step, getting as close as he dared.
There, at the edge of the vast manmade crater, he got his first look at the Bluelight device.
The actual structure was unremarkable. It didn’t look much different than an oil rig or an industrial manufacturing facility. At its center, perhaps half a mile away, and several hundred feet below on the floor of the pit, was an upright column, similar to the cooling tower of a nuclear power plant, surrounded by catwalks and miles of wires and tubing. King assumed that the column was heart of Bluelight, the proton gun that was currently firing a steady stream of subatomic particles into the sky, but if the discharge was accompanied by any sort of visible effect, it was impossible to see against the arc-welder bright flashes of lightning. The plasma bursts were being gathered by three metal towers that looked like radio transmitter aerials, each taller than the proton emitter, positioned as points of a triangle around the center.
As he gazed out across the pit, King’s hopes of somehow reaching the Bluelight device and shutting it down manually evaporated. Even if he somehow found a way down to the floor of the mine—a journey that would almost certainly take longer than the few minutes remaining until the world caught fire—the energies being pulled down from the sky would incinerate him long before he reached it. It was all he could do to endure the blisteringly hot fury of the storm here, at the edge of the pit.
But then he glimpsed something that wasn’t quite so far away. Directly below, at the base of the sheer wall, was another familiar looking structure, one that could be found in any American city: an electrical transformer station.
Bluelight pulled massive amounts of raw energy from the sky, but for its own operation, it needed a steady, measured flow of electricity. Copeland and Mayfield had talked about how the device would be used to charge storage batteries; the transformer was a critical step in that process.
Destroy the transformer, and Bluelight goes dark, King thought.
The transformer was almost as unreachable as Bluelight itself, but as he shaded his eyes with one hand, peering down the side of the pit, King saw the solution and felt a fleeting instant of hope.
But as he turned around to carry out his desperate plan, something slammed into the side of his head and sent him sprawling toward the precipice.
37.
Pierce stared up at the beast, searching for some trace of the humanity he had glimpsed during his sojourn into the underworld, but it simply wasn’t there. The creature’s eyes might have been the color of fresh blood, but the real thing was dripping from its bared teeth and oozing from dozens of wounds on its body to splatter onto the floor.
Then he glimpsed something familiar. Dangling from a string around the monster’s neck was a dark, discolored coin with the distinctive likeness of the goddess Athena. The tetradrachm. This was the same creature that had attacked the motorist. The coin it wore as a totem was the very thing that had drawn him into this nightmare.
He wasn’t sure if that met the definition of irony, but the realization was bitter nonetheless.
The thing howled again, spraying Pierce with bloody spittle. Almost overwhelmed by its pungent odor, the archaeologist crab-walked backward, scrambling to put some distance between himself and the creature, desperate to postpone the
inevitable, if only for a few seconds longer. The monster lurched forward, and despite the fact that there was nowhere to go, Pierce turned and ran.
Even though he barely knew her, he had a sudden urge to protect Nina. He angled away from the sink cabinet where she hid and skirted the counter, hoping to draw the creature after him and possibly lure it out of the room. But as he reached the corner, his eyes lit on something, and a light bulb of crazy inspiration flashed on in his head.
As he rounded the corner, still trying to stay ahead of the monster’s extraordinarily long reach, he snatched up the jar from beside the case of bottled water and ripped the lid off. Whispering the quickest prayer he could remember, he thrust his hand in and spun around, holding up the object that he hoped would save him: a United States quarter-dollar coin. He was betting his life against twenty-five cents.
The creature stopped abruptly right in front of him, with both arms spread wide, as if intended to sweep him into a crushing embrace. Pierce kept his hand extended, but closed his eyes in anticipation of the end.
All he could hear was the rasp of the monster’s breathing, and after a few seconds—seconds in which he did not have the life squeezed out of him—he risked a look.
The creature was still there, right in front of him. Its eyes were still blazing with crimson fury. Its teeth were still bared in a grimace of rage. But it hadn’t killed him.
That was a good sign.
The monster slowly lowered its arms, and then reached out to him. Pierce felt its fingers brush his as it plucked the offering from his grasp. The tiny metal disc vanished in its hairy fist, but it drew back its arms with an almost reverent air. With its free hand, the beast plucked the totem string from around its neck and lowered it over Pierce’s head. Then, as if it satisfied with the exchange, it turned and stalked out of the room.
Pierce gasped as he realized he had been holding his breath, and then sagged to his knees. His fingers brushed against the silver obol coin the creature had given him. He’d definitely come out ahead on the trade.
38.
King threw his arms out, scrabbling for something to hang onto even as he felt the ground fall away from under his legs. He’d taken more than his share of shots to the cranium and knew how to deal with the momentary disorientation that followed, but hanging from the edge of a cliff with searing heat and lighting buffeting his back was a lot different than trying to get back up off the mat before the ten-count was finished. One wrong move here, one hand in the wrong place or his weight shifted in the wrong direction, and he’d get a very close, very brief look at the transformer station.
The mist hid everything from him, including the face of his attacker, but he had caught a glimpse in the instant before the attack. Sokoloff. Well, better the Russian hitman than a mob of Mogollon Monsters.
King’s lower torso and legs were hanging out into nothingness, and he felt the hard edge of the pit pressing into his abdomen just below his rib cage. He pressed himself flat against the rough rock and began working his way forward. If he could get just a few more inches of his body back onto solid ground, he’d be home free…relatively speaking. But every inch took a few seconds, and he was all too conscious of the fact that each second he spent trying to pull himself back onto solid ground brought the world that much closer to destruction.
Then Sokoloff did him a favor.
He heard a scratching sound and saw something move in the mist right in front of him, close enough that he could see a military-issue boot probing the ground for solidity.
King grabbed the ankle with both hands and tried to heave himself up and out of the pit. The maneuver was only partly successful. Sokoloff’s weight rested on his back foot and when King pulled, he felt the Russian shift backward in an effort to keep his balance. The attempt failed and Sokoloff’s other foot went out from under him. As King tried to pull himself up, he succeeded only in pulling the Russian closer to the edge, and in the process, he lost what little progress he had made and then some.
Somehow, Sokoloff arrested his slide. King kept his death grip on the hitman’s ankle and hauled in again. A swirling in the mist warned him that something was moving and he lowered his head as Sokoloff’s other boot struck out at him. The heel glanced off the side of his head and hammered into his shoulder. Before the Russian could draw back for another kick, King released one hand and snared the other foot. With a mighty heave, he hauled himself away from the edge and rolled sideways into the embrace of the mist.
“I see now why you’re worth ten million dollars, King.” The Russian’s voice reached out to him, shouting to be audible over the thunder.
“Ten million?” King managed to sound more confident than he felt. His head was throbbing from the blows he’d sustained, and the constant sonic bombardment was like a meat tenderizer working on his muscles. “Is that all Brainstorm thinks I’m worth? No wonder he can only afford cheap-ass punks like you.”
“Ha. What is it you Americans say? ‘Big talk is cheap’? I have killed six hundred and eighty-four men. Five of them, your vaunted airborne infantry, this very night. How many have you killed?”
King cocked his head, trying to pinpoint Sokoloff’s location from his shouted boasts. He got to hands and knees, and then lifted his head up for a quick peek, but the Russian was staying low as well, lurking beneath the mist like a shark in the shallows.
You’re not the only shark in the pool tonight, Ivan.
“Guess I never kept track,” King called out. “But whatever it is, it’s going to be plus one in a few minutes.”
He rolled back toward the cliff, going to what he hoped was the last place the hitman would expect, then low crawled as quietly as possible along the edge…ten meters…twenty. A ripple in the mist cover alerted him to danger and he rolled to the side as the long blade of a combat knife flashed out and stabbed down at him. The tip scored his back, opening a long but superficial gash, before striking the rock where he had been only an instant before.
King reversed and threw himself onto the hand that held the knife, pinning it to the ground, even as he reached out to grapple with its wielder. He was close enough to see his opponent; Sokoloff still wore the uniform and equipment of the soldier whose identity he had assumed, and while the bulky armor was a liability in terms of mobility, it limited King’s ability to find a vulnerable spot to focus his attack. The Russian struggled against him, and King felt the arm that held the knife start to move, warning of another thrust. He threw one arm up to ward off the blow, and then wrapped the other around the hitman’s helmeted head.
Levering his body like an Olympic weightlifter, he wrenched the helmet around, as if trying to twist Sokoloff’s head off his shoulders. He succeeded only in tearing the helmet free, and rolled away with the Kevlar composite shell clutched in his hand.
Sokoloff roared in agony as his neck twisted and the nylon straps ripped away skin, but his rage fueled a swift recovery and he slashed at King with his knife. King parried with the helmet, knocking the knife hand away with a solid blow, and then in the same motion, backhanded Sokoloff’s exposed jaw.
The Russian’s head snapped back as the helmet demolished bone and teeth. He flailed his arms, dazed, but King pressed the attack, slamming the combat helmet into the hitman’s skull. As the dazed man stumbled, King moved in to finish things quick and clean. He caught the man’s head in his hands and with a quick twist, broke the assassin’s neck. The man slumped to the ground at King’s feet.
There was no time to savor the victory however, or even to catch his breath. It had been just over ten minutes since the Bluelight device’s activation. King had no idea how much longer the world had to live, but he was pretty sure the needle was now well into the red.
39.
With the fury of the storm at his back, King ran. He rounded the corner of the building and saw the last remaining soldiers swinging their spent carbines like clubs, trying in vain to beat back the growing mass of attacking Mogollon Monsters. He felt a pang at witne
ssing their plight, but there was only one way to help them, and it didn’t involve joining the fray.
As he ran for the nearest Humvee that was still upright, several of the creatures took note of his presence and started loping toward him. The M1026 had been battered relentlessly. All the doors had been ripped off their hinges and the aluminum shell was crumpled like a discarded beer can, but King leapt into the misshapen cab and started the engine. One of the thick-skinned creatures got a hand on the vehicle as he punched the accelerator, but the spinning tires threw up a spray of gravel that knocked it back.
He steered straight out onto open ground, away from the Bluelight facility and the shifting horde, letting the vehicle build up some momentum. When the speedometer needle registered forty miles per hour, he carved a wide turn and brought the truck around, lining up parallel to the side of the concrete structure and pointing straight into the heart of the electrical storm. His detour out into the desert had put about a quarter of a mile between him and his ultimate destination; the Humvee would close that distance in about twenty seconds.
He reached under the steering wheel and found the hand-throttle control that was intended to be used with the vehicle’s self-recovery winch. Every Humvee with a winch had a manual throttle, as well as a prominently displayed, printed message stating that it was not to be used as a cruise control. The reason was that unlike sophisticated cruise-control systems, the hand-throttle would not switch off when the brakes were applied.
King had no intention of braking.
He pulled the knob completely out, opening the throttle wide, just as the corner of the building flashed by, then immediately launched himself from the speeding vehicle. Much like the Humvee, King was on autopilot. He knew what had to be done, and he didn’t allow himself to think about the consequences. Thinking would lead to hesitation, and if he had hesitated even a moment in making his leap, he probably wouldn’t have made it out in time. He’d jumped out of too many airplanes to count, and between a youth spent riding skateboards and motorcycling in later years, he’d torn himself up on pavement more than a few times. His body knew what to do, and as he pushed away from the truck, he let muscle memory take over.
Callsign: King - Book 2 - Underworld (A Jack Sigler - Chess Team Novella) Page 13
