by Jody Wallace
This time the curator answered. “Sadly, no. Nor private jets. Despite the fact we have some very talented accountants and investors on staff, the fundi simply can’t support such extravagant purchases.”
Right now, a few tanks didn’t feel extravagant. The tension in the air was thick enough to punch, like the dreamsphere when the wraiths swirled around her. Maggie took a moment to breathe slowly in and out to calm her racing heart. “In Harrisburg, Karen’s wraiths didn’t attack her, correct?”
Adi nodded. “Mystifying but true.”
“The wraiths aren’t going to converge on her as they would a normal alucinator.” Maggie swallowed. Throughout history, wraiths had focused on killing the alucinator who’d manifested them, with bystanders a delicious side dish. But since the Harrisburg incident—and since Maggie’s awakening—some of the norms had shifted.
At least for Karen and Maggie.
“You seem convinced the young lady controls the wraiths.” The curator’s eyebrows rose. “That would imply one can communicate with them, yet they haven’t that type of intelligence.”
“This isn’t new information, sir,” Adi told him levelly. “The atypical behavior of the Harrisburg swarm has been known for a year.”
“Hm,” the curator mused. “Was other atypical behavior noted in Ms. Kingsbury before Harrisburg? She can confound, which wasn’t known until recently, and I find that curious. I realize she shares a tangible with her young man, but that shouldn’t have—”
“Her mentor,” Maggie said. “Zeke’s her mentor, not her young man.”
“The skill of confounding shouldn’t have been overlooked by any mentor,” the curator stated. “Unless, of course, she was confounding the knowledge out of him. Then there’s her vigil-trapping and your pesky conviction she’s mastered the curatorial camouflage. I do love a puzzle. We need to check the medical records from that time for evidence of—”
“Sir,” Maggie interrupted, “we’ll have time for the fine points later. We have to find Karen. It’s the only way to stop this.” Otherwise the wraiths would keep coming until they were all dead.
Definitely not the good kind of exciting.
What did Karen hope to achieve? Zeke was in her manifestation zone—did she want him dead too?
“She’s not in the bunker,” Adi said. “We even checked the ventilation system. She’s outside.”
Outside, where she’d probably witnessed Maggie and Zeke’s lovemaking. While Maggie didn’t regret being with Zeke and telling him she loved him, it was troubling that this code one was partly due to their lack of discretion.
Then again, Karen had been a ticking time bomb from the moment she’d awoken. Or before. Who knew what could have set her off if Maggie and Zeke hadn’t?
Adi set her daggers on a piece of furniture and deftly rolled her braid into a knot, which she secured with a rubber band. At Maggie’s questioning gaze, she said, “Harder to grab.”
“Outside is a big area.” In fact, that was why the coma station had been built here—it was remote, desolate and uninteresting, even to outdoorsy types, which Maggie wasn’t.
“Ms. Kingsbury was in a coma for a year,” the doctor said. “She can’t have walked far.”
“I don’t think Karen’s as much of an invalid as she’s been pretending to be,” Maggie said. If Adi’s beliefs about healing were true, Karen could energize herself. Maggie remembered Karen’s pink cheeks and lustrous hair. Dreamspace healing would explain her miraculous return to health after a year in a coma, not to mention the injuries that had first made Adi suspicious.
Should they ask the curator about healing? He was watching them avidly, as if they were a play enacted for his entertainment.
“Doesn’t matter where she is. My teams will locate her.” Adi glanced at her phone, frowning. She hasn’t been using the phone to communicate with the soldiers outside, since the walkies’ signals were more dependable during a manifestation.
“You know the wraiths will come after me, right?” Maggie asked. There was no reason not to blurt it out. It was true. “It’s been that way since I became an alucinator.”
“You know, I’m beginning to agree your condition isn’t caused by simple conduit blindness.” The curator shuffled toward Maggie, all vestiges of his ire at Adi gone. He smiled at Maggie as if he’d been given a gift. “My girl, you are a treasure.”
“That’s not how it feels from my perspective.” Maggie rubbed her sweaty palms against her pants again, transferring the gun from hand to hand. If she didn’t have conduit blindness, she’d still have to relocate to the Orbis because she was a bellatorix. But this was the internet age. She and Zeke could remain in touch, and hopefully, one day, be assigned to the same area. Or at least the same continent.
Not that alucinators got much vacation time. Maggie sighed. Then she noticed the ruckus in the corridor had faded.
The door swung open. Lill and Zeke, dusty but unscathed, appeared.
The curator raised a hand. “Ah. Our conquering heroes have returned.”
“Older and wiser.” Lill smacked wraith dust off her clothes.
“Now that the wraiths have been handled, it might behoove Margaret and myself to vacate the premises.” The curator hobbled toward the door, toward Zeke, whose glower could have bored through solid steel. It didn’t affect the old man at all. “We should leave the fighting to those of you who are able-bodied and obey my physician’s orders to avoid stress.”
“You’re not going anywhere until we control the situation, sir.” Adi didn’t appear to be taking her dismissal from employment to heart. She’d lost none of her poise and air of command. “What exactly do you think is happening outside the bunker? A couple zombies shambling around? Look.”
Adi thrust her phone toward them. Some enterprising employee had snapped a digital image of the chaos outside.
The curator wasn’t the only one to whistle at the photo. If it had been blurry and grainy, it would have been easier to ignore, but it wasn’t.
At least sixty wraiths surrounded the vehicles in the parking lot, facing the bunker. The clarity of the photo allowed Maggie to see the types. Dinos. Medusa things. Whedons. Sasquatches. Jasons. Spiders. God, she hated spiders. And—Maggie squinted—more in the distance. Masses of something, dark along the horizon.
Wraiths? Sagebrush? Reinforcements?
Soldiers in the photo fought back to back, blades extended, but there weren’t enough to deal with a horde like that for long. Did the coma station have this much to plow through and more? It was the easiest thing to explain why the reinforcements hadn’t arrived.
“How can there be so many manifestations from the conduits of a single alucinator?” Maggie asked. It was almost as if Karen had been amassing them in the sphere, biding her time, preparing.
“She’s done this before,” Lill said. “Practice makes perfect.”
Would this be the time Karen succeeded in whatever goal she might have?
“I’m gonna need a sword.” Zeke raked a hand through his hair, scattering dust. “And a missile launcher. Let’s hit the armory.”
“I don’t see how the soldiers are going to locate Karen in all that,” Maggie said dubiously.
“Two teams got past the main horde,” Adi said. “The rest are guarding the bunker.”
“They don’t know where to look.” Zeke paced into the hallway and back again. “The bitch could be any direction. Anywhere. Hell, she could be hiding in one of the fucking SUVs and we wouldn’t know.”
“Since she’s actively manifesting,” Maggie said, “can we enter dreamspace as a team and geolocate her signature? Anyone creating conduits has got to be leaving tracks in the sphere.” Geolocation was something Maggie could do—something she understood.
“That didn’t work in Harrisburg.” Zeke paced by the door, every inch of him alert. “Now we know why. The damn cu
rator camouflage. We only caught her in Harrisburg because we stumbled across the house she’d holed up in.”
The curator eased himself onto a couch and sighed, rubbing his left arm. “An unsanctioned alucinator with the camouflage. I never thought I’d see the day.”
“What can you tell us about it?” Maggie asked.
“I suppose this counts as a crisis. It’s against all the rules, but I could teach you a trick, as far as that’s concerned. On one condition.” He held up a finger. Maggie couldn’t help but notice it seemed shaky. “You must give me permission to confound the trick from your memories after it serves its purpose. I could get in a lot of trouble for sharing this.”
Everyone shifted uneasily at the thought of the curator erasing knowledge from their brains. Adi lowered her chin and tightened her lips in evident displeasure. “I will happily take a team to vigil-block Karen once you geolocate her, but I would prefer my memories remain intact.”
Or what was left of them after being around Karen for three days. Maggie didn’t think she herself had been affected, but the rest had.
The curator nodded. “Networking is the key with a renegade who can vigil-trap.”
“It sounds like you’ve dealt with renegades before,” Maggie said. That was not something she’d learned in class—the Harrisburg situation was considered the worst outbreak in modern times.
“Here and there.” The curator waved a hand. “We curators have our ways of handling it.”
“Do the curators handle many situations the rest of the Somnium isn’t told about?” she asked, carefully not glancing at Adi again. And did the curators, say, need to heal themselves from those situations?
The old man winked at her. “Maybe you’ll find out some day. I’m told I’m close to retirement age, but personally I feel fit as a fiddle.” He chuckled, but he didn’t look as well as he had earlier. Was the stress taking its toll on him? “The other curators are worry warts.”
Maggie exchanged a glance with the doctor, who seemed to have noticed the curator’s pallor and palsy as well.
“I’ll just check your pulse,” the doctor said gently, holding out a hand for his wrist. The curator pulled a face but complied.
“Perhaps,” Adi suggested, “rather than take such drastic measures, you could simply handle Karen’s camouflage and geolocate her yourself? I assume you have methods to avoid being vigil-trapped. Once you find her, I can do the rest. Then there would be no need to for you to expose classified information.” Since Karen had proven she could pop in and out of the trance sphere as quickly as a confounder, a vigil-block was one of the few things that could stop her from creating more monsters.
Or an ECT. Or a lobotomy. Or death.
“I can’t imagine Karen wouldn’t have considered the possibility of a vigil-block, if she’s the mastermind you all fear she is.” The curator peered at them around the doctor, who was glancing between her watch and the old man with a concerned expression.
“She might be assuming we can’t geolocate her with her camouflage.” Was it Maggie’s imagination, or was the curator sweating? “She wouldn’t have to worry about being vigil-blocked as long as she’s physically far enough away.”
“That reduces our search area,” Adi mused. “If she fears scattershot vigil-blocks, she won’t be near the outbunker.”
“What the hell does she want, anyway?” Zeke said, frustrated. “To kill people? There’s not that many here, and we know how to fight. If mass murder was all she wanted, she’d have waited until she was in a populated area.”
“It’s me,” Maggie said. “I suspect she wants to kill me.”
Shame flashed across Zeke’s features, quickly hidden by a grimace. “So much for her dread of going back into the dreamsphere and getting possessed by the Master.”
“Her evil, split personality twin, you mean,” Lill said. “Like that one needs an evil twin.”
Adi’s walkie crackled, and she stepped away from the group to speak into it. “Sharma. Yes, the curator is safe and the outbunker is secure. For now. We need those reinforcements, Blake. Any signs of them?”
Fighting and gunfire echoed through the walkie when Adi’s second in command replied. “The main body of the horde appears to be concentrated between the coma station and here. The manifestations continue. Small ones. Three or four at a time. It’s almost concentric, converging on the outbunker. We’re killing some, but they keep coming. There’s also an airborne creature. Pterodactyl, maybe.”
Flying wraiths were few and far between. Could it be that Karen not only commanded the wraiths, but what would manifest?
“She’s got to be controlling them,” Maggie said. “She’s keeping our reinforcements from getting through on purpose.”
Zeke held up a hand, his head cocked and his eyes narrow. “Hold that thought. I think I smell—shit.”
Red sparks popped in the hallway. Six wraiths coalesced like a Star Trek transporter beam.
“Blake, we have a second internal.” Adi drew her blades and positioned herself in front of the curator while Zeke and Lill sprang into action. The door slammed behind them before any wraiths could shamble into the common room. If Karen could target her wraiths inside the bunker, Maggie didn’t know where would be secure anymore.
“Move the furniture there and there. No, sir, you stay seated,” Adi said. As the muffled sounds of combat issued from outside, Adi directed Maggie and the doctor to rearrange the utilitarian furniture into a sort of blockade. Her walkie crackled with intermittent static and updates from Blake—which grew less and less frequent.
Maggie tried to remain alert for manifestation sparks inside the room. Some of the furniture was heavier than expected, requiring her complete focus. She was shoving a heavy chair on top of a couch that protected the curator when the doctor shouted a warning.
“Look out!”
Maggie ducked. The chair, imbalanced, toppled toward her. She protected her head with her arms and flipped it behind her as it struck.
Pain walloped her left forearm. A human-shaped, smelly body thumped to the ground beside her, the chair tangled in its legs. It glared at her and hissed.
Dammit. A Whedon, not a zombie.
And she only had a gun.
Maggie drew quickly and shot it in the head. Gray goo splattered in a spray of ick, but it wasn’t dead by any means. It struggled with the chair, struggled to get to her.
She shot it again. Right between the eyes. The crack of the gun hurt her eardrums.
“Neck shots,” Adi called. “Three, horizontally.”
Maggie risked a glance at the vigil, who was crouched on the supply counter with her blades held before her like a ninja. Dust clouded the air around her. Two vampires menaced her. How many had Adi taken out?
The chair on Maggie’s attacker crashed to the side and broke. The vampire groped blindly for her, since the second gunshot had taken out most of its face.
Oh, God. Chips of bone, gobbets of flesh and an eyeball. Clawed hands grasped her foot. Maggie, arms trembling, aimed at the monster’s neck and fired three times in quick succession.
Too close to miss. The monster’s head canted to the side, nearly severed. Swallowing bile, Maggie kicked at the skull, hard. She danced to avoid the arms scrabbling for her. When a solid blow detached the head like a soccer ball, monster and head alike faded to dust.
Maggie immediately ran to help the doctor. She brandished Maggie’s knife in front of the curator, fending off a…what the hell was that? Some kind of white, tendril-haired humanoid in a lab coat. It looked like a Nosferatu crossed with a Medusa, and it dribbled dark blood from a gash on its hand.
Maggie didn’t want to risk shooting the doctor or curator by accident. She grabbed a chair leg and advanced on the wraith. Favoring her right arm, because the left hurt like a bitch, she walloped whatever it was in the back of the head.
The skull crunched like thin ice. Bone shards glanced off Maggie’s cheek, stuck in her hair. It whirled and attacked her. She stumbled back, shocked by the wraith’s extremely human face.
It was one thing to chop zombies and slime monsters into bits and another when the creature looked like a regular person.
A person with a caved in skull, scalpels for fingers, and snakes for hair. Was this Karen’s nightmare? Well, Karen’s nightmare had just coated Maggie in a rain of putrid flesh. Maggie felt a retch coming on.
Retching mid-combat? Really? This was getting old.
The doctor, less squeamish, tackled the monster from behind. It fell forward, barely missing Maggie. Together, Maggie and the doctor managed to brute force the dagger through the monster’s neck.
All the bits and pieces of wraith on the women puffed into dust. The smell remained. Adi dispatched her monsters, and Maggie swore the vigil looked more composed than she’d been before the code one. Perhaps she’d needed to work some frustration and anger out of her system after being fired by the curator and fooled by Karen.
“Is the curator secure?” She might have been sacked by the man, but Adi would perform her duty.
He hobbled out from behind the stack of furniture. Not a speck of wraith dust marred his spiffy guayabera shirt and pressed khaki trousers, but his skin had a grayish cast. The doctor took his arm and helped him back to the sofa.
“That was unexpected.” He didn’t say exciting. The way he looked right now, excitement would give him that heart attack he’d kidded about.
Zeke and Lill returned to the room, brushing themselves off. Zeke frowned when he saw them. “I told you to fetch me if there was a manifestation.”
“We handled it.” Maggie debated having the doctor check her left wrist, the one walloped by the falling chair. The throb said nasty bruise, but her hand had gone numb. Whatever was going on with the curator was more important than a bruise. “I got one and a half.”
“The ladies were quite efficient.” The curator’s voice cracked, and he coughed. “However, I’m not happy with how well Ms. Kingsbury is pinpointing her manifestations. I’m going to have to insist we geolocate her immediately and put a stop to this nonsense.”
