“Wait here for a second,” I said. “I’ll check down this corridor.”
“That goes back to the garages, back to where we came in.”
“Probably, but I’m going to check. If there’s no better target, we’ll blow up this system. Even if it’s full of sewage.”
“Hurry,” he said.
I ran down the corridor and found a T intersection. A ramp led upward to my right. I had expected stairs or an elevator, but apparently stairs weren’t in style for Gray Men. They connected levels with ramps.
That moment of staring and thinking almost cost me my life. A jolt of freezing plasma flashed down from the ramp. I think I survived only because they’d tried for a head shot. Fortunately, they missed. My hair was frosted white, however, and a searing pain lanced the back of my skull. I lurched forward past the intersection with the ramp. Without looking, I pointed my gun up the ramp toward them. Only my gun and my hand were exposed. I fired again and again, blindly. My first empty magazine clattered on the ramp at my feet. I reloaded the gun with a fresh magazine.
Two more beams lanced down at me. They iced over a spot on the floor. The metal crackled and smoked. I fired three return shots, still without looking. I realized there was no way I was going to win this fight. There were several of them, and they were probably already moving to flank me.
I heard more sounds then. Distant booms. I had no idea what they might mean. Almost immediately after these sounds, the lighting shifted again from blue to a subtle lavender. Another, deeper level of alert? What were those booms? The urge to run became overwhelming. This mission was over.
Behind me was the corridor leading to the garages. Ahead, across a deadly kill zone, was the path that led back to where I’d left McKesson. I couldn’t see him now. I realized my best move would be to run to the vortex we’d used to come here and step out. I could go home to my own peaceful desert in less than one minute.
But I hesitated. Another snap and boom sounded. More bolts of cold came down the ramp. They weren’t advancing, I could tell. They were pinning me down here and probably sending more troops around to get me from behind. Once they had me in a crossfire, I had no hope of survival. But I didn’t want to run and leave McKesson behind.
Cursing the day I’d met the man, I fired a last spray of bullets around the corner and up the ramp to make them duck, then I jumped across the open passage. I barely made it. The sole of my right shoe was frozen into a lumpy, misshapen mass. I was never sure afterward if I’d stepped in one of those cold spots or if one of the bolts had clipped my foot. In any case, I was running slightly off balance as I reached end of the corridor.
When I got there, I stared in disbelief. I instantly understood what I had been hearing. McKesson had fired his weapon and run. Hot, goopy fluid like oily blood gushed over the floor. McKesson himself was nowhere to be seen. His RPG, minus the charges, lay on the floor. Immediately next to that was a rip in space.
The rip was a small one, and it was guttering already. It would soon go out and vanish.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the object McKesson had so thoughtfully wrapped in aluminum foil. I ripped off the foil. If I’d ever needed some firepower, this was the moment.
The object was…an alarm clock. It was small and old-fashioned. Painted a bright yellow, it had two bells on top for ears and a smiling face with closed eyes on the dial. I squinted at the antique child’s clock. What was I supposed to do with this? I tried twisting the knobs in back, and the hands spun and the bells on top dinged once. I winced, but there was no reverberating boom. Did one simply set it down and let it go off like a bomb? I wasn’t sure. I felt a tickle of sweat.
Rostok had set me up, I thought. He’d given me something that would kill me and the Gray Men together, planning to take great pleasure in the reports afterward. Maybe McKesson was in on it, and that was why he’d fled. Together, the two of them would sip fine booze in the dark tonight, having a laugh at my expense. Perhaps I’d warrant a toast for a job well done.
Running feet. I heard no shouting, but the Gray Men never shouted. They were charging down the corridors after me. In moments, they would come into the area where I was standing and freeze me into a block of ice. When I hit the floor, I would shatter into a dozen shards of icy meat. I could see Old Red’s split-open body in my mind.
I almost put the clock down and left, but I couldn’t quite do it. The thought that gave me courage was the knowledge that Rostok didn’t like losing objects. No one did. That lowered the odds he’d sent me here on a suicide mission.
I decided to give the clock one more try the moment the Gray Men arrived. Maybe it needed a specific target to operate. I didn’t have to wait long. Gray Men came jogging into sight.
I held the clock out in front of me and willed it to operate, to fire, to destroy. For a fraction of a second, nothing happened. Then the twin, yellow-painted bells on the top of the clock began to rattle. The rattle quickly turned into a high-pitched, irritating ring.
The Gray Men spotted me and raised their weapons. But they didn’t fire immediately. Perhaps they were too shocked by the monstrous blob of rock that swelled up between us as fast as a wave crests and breaks. Something huge bubbled up out of the floor in front of the clock. It ballooned higher until it was the size of a car, then grew bigger still, becoming the size of a small bus. The growth slowed at that point, but it seemed to me it was still puffing up and up.
I saw the Gray Men for only a moment. They were on the far side of this massive, rocklike lump. When I saw them, I noted shock in their faces. I heard their guns unleashing frozen beams. The monster I’d created grated with a voice that shook the metal beneath me. It extended two eyes on stone stalks and I knew then what I was seeing. It was a lava creature, one as big as a school bus now. It turned and lurched toward the things that had hurt it with rays of splashing frost. Cold…the sensation it hated above all else.
If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s knowing when to run. I turned around and bolted for the small rip McKesson had left behind and dove into it. Behind me the monster’s back rippled against the roof, shaking the cubes that could no longer contain it.
I was inside the circle of the rip now, and all sensation of the Gray Men and the monster I’d unleashed upon them ceased as if it had never been. I could no longer hear, see, or smell their world. It was relief, but it was short-lived.
I’d never experienced a passage like this one. I think it was different because the rip was so close to vanishing. The edges weren’t stable anymore. They had turned into knives with perfect edges.
I was reminded of a time I’d once picked up a length of sheet metal, freshly cut and curled on the floor. I’d been building something—I couldn’t recall what it was. But the memory was a true one from my past, that much I was sure of. I had cut my palms back then, so perfectly I didn’t feel it at first. I had taken my hand away, dropping the sheet metal, but my hands had looked fine. A second later, the blood had begun to flow. The illusion of wholeness had vanished. I had sliced both my hands open in long lines.
Stepping through the rip was like that. Its edges cut my legs and shoulders. My head was down; otherwise, I might have cut it cleanly off my neck. As it was, my shirt was slashed open on my back. My left shin got the worst of it. A long gash ran around my bone and a half inch deep into the meat of my calf.
I tumbled and rolled, knowing I was hurt. The ground was hot under me, and rougher than the desert should have been. The feeling of heat became increasingly intense as the rip faded, and I was left lying on a slanted region of smoking black ash.
I recognized the sulfurous smell of the place. Brimstone and fantastic heat. I had to be in the world of the lava slugs. I opened my eyes, gritting my teeth against the pain. I looked around and saw a figure retreating in the distance. He was walking away from me, upslope.
“McKesson!” I roared after him.
The figure paused, then slowly turned around. In front of him, a new rip glimmered. He had been ab
out to step through to some other, better place. He stood there, gazing back at me. I couldn’t get up. My leg was too badly cut. My clothes were burning away too. I could feel blood running down my neck and back from a number of serious injuries. I struggled up onto one elbow.
“McKesson, dammit! You said you owed me!”
He walked back slowly. “Oh yeah, I owe you all right. You shot me back home in my car, Draith. You remember that?”
“I shot an object,” I said. “You just happened to be on the other side of it.”
“I still have a bruise, you know.”
“You ditched me. You fired the RPG and took off. I could have run for the other rip, but instead I came back down the ramp to find you.”
McKesson sighed and crouched next to me. “Can you get up?” he asked.
I shook my head. It was humiliating and painful. “Rostok gave you Robert’s object, didn’t he?” I asked.
“Robert didn’t need it anymore,” McKesson said, smiling tightly. He showed me his wrist, but not the one with the watch strapped to it. A dirty white sleeve hung there, clipped by a gold cufflink. I noticed there wasn’t another cufflink on the other side. I figured the cufflink must be Robert’s object.
“Both his objects were jewelry?” I asked.
“No, the cufflink isn’t the object. I just lost the other one.”
I looked at his hand again. He had something in his palm. Staring at his hand, I realized he was holding something. A coin. It looked like an ordinary quarter.
“This is it,” McKesson said, hefting the quarter. “It’s one of the old ones from the nineteen fifties. All silver.”
“That’s wonderful. Now, get me out of here. I think my pants are burning off.”
“First, let me give you a pointer,” he said, sounding like a veteran talking to a rookie.
I stared at him, wondering why he wasn’t hauling me to my feet. Vaguely, I wondered who in this day and age still wore cufflinks on a regular basis. Maybe that was another of his objects. I didn’t know. McKesson was so full of crap, even if he told me everything, I could never be sure what parts he had invented.
“See this ash?” he asked me. “This shit is valuable—sometimes. Dig in it like this.”
He demonstrated by kicking at a large hump of ash. “You want to find a good hard spot down in one of the craters. It has to be close to the lava, see? But not too close. Sometimes a big nodule of ash really delivers.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but I watched because I had no choice. McKesson kicked at a blackened lump five or six times until it split open. A mass of crystalline chips sprayed out.
“Now usually, you get crap. Quartz, ebony, glass. But sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes, you get emeralds, peridots, diamonds. Really, it’s hard to tell until you take a mess of these to a jeweler.”
“Man,” I said, teeth clenched in pain. “I really appreciate this, but I’d appreciate a trip home even more.”
McKesson chuckled. “Yeah. You wouldn’t want to get trapped here. See that slug out there in the pool? He’s out in the lava now, but you can tell he’s coming. He’s smelled you, or something. They sense flesh and blood. They are quicker in the lava, aren’t they? Not like on land. Heat makes them move faster.”
I craned my neck and stared out into the crater. I couldn’t help it.
McKesson squatted nearby. He put out his hand.
“What now?”
“Give me the clock.”
I looked at him, hating him. I put the clock in his hand. I found that, just as Rostok had said, I didn’t want to keep the thing. How often did I need to destroy a town?
McKesson palmed the alarm clock and pointed at the monster in the lava. “See him?” he asked, his voice husky and urgent. “Right there, about a dozen yards out. That hump isn’t a normal bubble. Normal bubbles don’t swim in one direction like a cockroach under a napkin.”
Did McKesson want to make me rich, save me, torment me, or was he just having fun? I couldn’t tell. But I did see the hump in the lava, and it was definitely swimming my way. I wished I wasn’t out of ammo—I would have drawn my gun on the detective and ordered him to drag me out of here.
But when I looked back toward McKesson, he was gone. A rip stood in his place. I dragged myself uphill by my elbows, sending up plumes of hot ash. I cursed the day McKesson had been whelped by an inhuman mother. I understood now that he’d wanted me to experience a little pain and fear, because I’d once done the same to him. But he’d made me rich as well. As I passed the broken nodule of black ash on my way to the rip, I scooped up the gemstones that had spilled out. I shoved them in my pockets, where they burned against my thighs and stomach. After all, who knew how long it would be before I returned here? I wasn’t the kind of man who passed up easy money.
It was nearly two months later when we officially closed the case of the Gray Men. Their murderous rampage had ended—for now. Most parties speculated that the structure of oily pipes we’d blown up had been some kind of a power source. Maybe the monster I’d released in the midst of the building had done the trick. In any case, the machine that allowed them to open rips into our world seemed to have been rendered inoperable.
In truth, we really weren’t sure why the raids ended. Maybe it was the shock of being counterattacked successfully. Maybe the Gray Men had their own regiment of government accountants and budget jockeys running their daily lives, just as we did. When the costs grew too high, the risks too great, perhaps someone on their side pulled the plug on the project. Whatever the reason, they had stopped coming, and I received the majority of the credit for stopping them.
Jenna drove out to see me soon after I picked up the keys to my new home. She was impressed, as she’d never seen the mini-mansion before. Standing in the golden afternoon light on the north terrace, the view was breathtaking. We looked down together over a yard full of freshly planted palm trees. Downtown Las Vegas sprawled in the distance, filling the flatlands encircled by stark moonscape mountains.
“Isn’t it a little creepy out here—at night, I mean?” Jenna asked me.
I smiled, refilling her glass with fresh chardonnay. “The cultists don’t hold their little meetings here anymore,” I said.
“But people have died here.”
“A few,” I admitted. “But I haven’t seen their ghosts yet.”
“Well, you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, you’re wondering how I can sleep in a place that attracted the Gray Men more than most. They liked coming here. They did it multiple times.”
Jenna and I were friends again. She’d taken the news of Robert’s death hard, despite the fact he’d run out on her. I’d learned their whirlwind romance had been a brief, intense thing. Just the sort of relationship that Las Vegas weddings were famous for consummating. But in some ways, I think the brevity of her love affair with Robert helped her get over him faster. She’d been with him a few months, married, and then had it officially annulled on the basis of his disappearance. It was nothing to be proud of, but they were scars that would heal in time.
We sipped from our glasses and gazed down on the metropolis together. From this vantage point, I better understood why rich people liked to build houses on hillsides. It felt as if you owned the world.
“Did Rostok buy the house for you?” she asked me.
I shook my head. “No, I did that on my own.”
“You could afford this?”
“I had a bit of money, but not enough for this place. One thing that helped—it was a foreclosure and I got it at auction.”
“What else helped?” she pressed.
“Well, Rostok’s bank held the paper on the mortgage.”
“Rostok sold the place to you?” she asked, laughing. “I get it. He wants you to stay here and play watchdog. In case they come back.”
I grimaced slightly. I had come to a similar conclusion, but didn’t want to think about it in those terms. I preferred to call the house a trophy, a prize in
return for a job well done—and also as payment for the house Robert had destroyed with his lava slugs. I shrugged, not wanting to dwell on my status with the Community and Rostok in particular. They saw me as both useful and annoying. An irritant that would be tolerated only as long as was necessary. I sensed they wouldn’t move against me for now, but I knew Meng still smoldered.
A few other things lingered in my mind. I could not stop thinking about Holly and all the others who had suffered. The Community wanted to blame the Gray Men—but many of the recent deaths could not be attributed to them. Tony, for instance, had died with his innards full of sand. As far as I knew, a weapon that could perform such an odd trick wasn’t in the Gray Man arsenal.
I didn’t know much about myself either. My prior life was still a hole in my mind, but I’d decided to forge new memories and get along with what I had. Something must have showed on my face, because Jenna stopped talking and eyed me curiously. I smiled and hoped she hadn’t just asked me anything important. She smiled back, and I knew I’d lucked out.
There were still mysteries unsolved. I still had work to do, but I didn’t want to spoil this moment with Jenna. I turned the conversation to Jenna herself and her plans for the future.
“Are you going home?” I asked her quietly. She’d come fully packed. Her rental car was bursting with suitcases. She’d been on many shopping sprees with the money she’d won from the casinos.
“I have to leave soon. But I could be convinced to stay a few days longer.”
I smiled slowly. I reached out and touched her elbow. She didn’t pull away, so I touched her shoulder lightly. She still hadn’t met my gaze, so I lifted her chin and kissed her.
Soon, I was doing my best to convince her. I had fresh hopes for the rest of the evening.
End of Technomancer
Photograph © Alma Larson, 2011
B. V. Larson is the bestselling author of over twenty novels, spanning genres from military science fiction to epic fantasy to paranormal romance. He lives with his wife and children in the western United States, where he also teaches college.
Technomancer (Unspeakable Things: Book One) Page 30
