Merciless

by Robin Parrish

  The garbage truck edged closer, growling and snarling. Daniel watched, his heart racing fast enough to explode at any moment as the two large metal arms used to pick up dumpsters were deployed from their vertical positions at the vehicle's sides. The arms faced forward, low to the ground, like forked teeth ready to bite.

  The old man made a daring wide turn to the right, trying to shake the truck, but Alex floored the gas just as they took the turn. The truck slammed into the right side of the car, and the entire Camaro rose up off the ground as the metal arms retracted.

  The truck carried them sideways fast enough to take on a freight train.

  Lisa screamed. Daniel turned to see a high bridge about half a mile ahead, and now they were angling to ram straight into one of the massive cement beams that held the bridge in place.

  "Daniel ... !" Lisa cried, squeezing his hand so hard he couldn't feel it anymore.

  "Get out! Jump!" Daniel shouted.

  "I'm not leaving you!" Lisa refused.

  "GO!!"

  "Forget it!"

  Daniel looked up; the enormous bulkhead support holding up the freeway overpass was closing in ...

  He was aware of many things at once. The growing heat and darkness ... The strong sulfuric odor permeating the air ... The scattered wildfires that even now were springing up out of absolutely nothing ... Fleeting thoughts flashed through his mind-of his mother, his career, his feelings for Lisa ...

  The old man turned in his seat and grabbed Daniel's face with his one hand and shook him back to reality. When Daniel snapped to, the old man pointed at Daniel's gun, still on the floorboard where he'd dropped it while facing off with Payton.

  The roar of the truck's engine was overpowering as it rolled on, only two feet or so from where Daniel was trapped. He strained in his squeezed position between the compressed front and back seats to reach the weapon. He didn't dare look up, afraid that their proximity to the freeway support pillar might make him give up the struggle.

  His fingers grazed the handle of the weapon, and straining for an extra inch or two, he finally got it between forefinger and thumb and tugged it free. Daniel was about to take aim at the truck when the old man hollered again. Daniel turned; the old man's hand was right beside him, open and waiting. Daniel placed the gun into his hand.

  The cement pillar loomed ahead and they were closing fast.

  The old man motioned for Lisa to hold the steering wheel steady, and then with surprising agility he opened the door, swung his head and shoulders up and over the roof of the car, and brought the gun up to bear on the truck's cabin.

  Daniel turned back to face Alex, afraid the crazy old coot would shoot her dead. Instead, when the gun was fired, there was a horrendous lurch, and Daniel saw that the top of the truck's gigantic gearshift, which was visible thanks to a big black ball at its tip, was gone.

  Gears somewhere inside the truck screeched and grinded powerfully against one another. The sound was so awful, Daniel had to cover his ears. The old man was already back in his seat putting his seat belt on as there was another strong lurch, and the Camaro fell free from the truck's grasp. The man floored the gas and they shot out of the truck's path with inches to spare.

  Daniel looked back and saw the truck had suddenly roared into reverse and was stirring up tremendous amounts of the black soot-like ground into an angry maelstrom of dark dust as it struggled to end its forward momentum and move backward instead.

  Lisa's eyes were ready to pop out of her head. "Did he just shoot their gearshift? Into reverse?" she shouted.

  The old man thumbed on the gun's safety and then tossed it back into Daniel's hands, his eyes glued on the road ahead and nothing else.

  "He saved our lives," Daniel replied, placing a hand on the old man's shoulder. "Thank you."

  Lisa was too stunned to conjure any gratitude. She was still trying to catch her breath, and was looking from Daniel to the stalled truck in the distance behind them, to the old man and back again. "But ... the gearshift ..." she stammered.

  The gearshift stick had been shot clean off the truck's dash. They wouldn't be able to get it back into Drive again, and would have to stop. By which time the three of them would be very far from here, with any luck. Daniel was astonished at the simplicity of it and how easily the old man had pulled it off.

  Lisa, meanwhile, had stopped looking between Daniel and the old man and was now focused only on the gentleman beside her in the driver's seat. Her mouth still hung open wide, and she was breathing faster than ever.

  "Who are you?" she shouted, her tone somewhere between astonishment and outrage.

  The man never acknowledged the question or even looked in Lisa's direction. He merely drove, grinding the car into the eternal twilight.

  "How long do you suppose we have?" Lisa asked.

  "No idea," Daniel replied, glancing at his watch for the hundredth time, only to be reminded that time was not in motion. "They'll catch up sooner or later, and we'd better have some kind of a plan by the time they do."

  They had stopped at a large gas station in the middle of Santa Monica. It was as far as the car would take them without needing more gas. Like downtown L.A., the hip oceanside suburb was almost completely abandoned. Fortunately, even though the power was out and no one was working there, the old man seemed to know how to get the gas pumps flowing again. While he busied himself fueling the car and prying apart the backseat enough for Daniel to sit there without hurting himself, Daniel and Lisa sat cross-legged on the ground just beside the car. This ground had once been oil-streaked pavement, but just like everything else, it had been transformed into black rock and dirt.

  The skies above raged and churned, casting the gray of dusk and oncoming night onto the world below. Daniel and Lisa used the car's interior illumination for light but didn't dare anything brighter. Their tracks would do a good enough job of leading Alex and Payton straight to them as it was.

  The one advantage this place offered was a clear view of the main road for a mile or more in both directions. Normally this would have been unheard of in Santa Monica, but they were close to the beach. Or at least what used to be the beach. Now the ocean was eroding, boiling to intense temperatures until it evaporated. The warm mist being generated by all this evaporation blew in across the coastline and made them moist and clammy.

  Daniel poured the fragments of the Dominion Stone from his backpack out onto the ground, and the two of them set to work assembling them like a jigsaw puzzle. Ten minutes passed and they'd put together what they had, which Daniel estimated was ninety percent of the whole. The old man had done a remarkable job uncovering it.

  "Okay, so we know that the Secretum is afraid of this thing," Lisa began, to refresh both of their memories, "which can only mean good things for us."

  Daniel nodded in agreement.

  "The question is," she summed up, "what exactly are we supposed to do with it that could hurt them?"

  "These symbols here"-Daniel said, pointing and studying the Stone intently-"I'm pretty sure they're the ones for `Dominion Stone.' But this symbol next to it ... I don't know that one. The next one I'm sure I've seen before. And look, there it is again. Echh, this would be so much easier if Morgan were here ..."

  Lisa wrapped an arm around his. She was feeling Morgan's loss too.

  "Do we still have her cipher notes?" Lisa asked.

  "Think they're somewhere in my bag," he said absently.

  She yanked open the bag. Setting a few things aside, she dug deep within to find the thin spiral-bound notebook upon which Morgan had once scrawled out her notes about the symbols on the Stone. Morgan had done more than anyone outside the Secretum of Six to translate the Stone's markings and uncover its secrets, spending more than a decade of her life attempting to decipher it. They were very lucky to still have her notes on the Stone's symbols and language.

  Lisa was putting the displaced items back into the backpack when something fell out of her grasp and rolled across the ground. It was
a CD.

  "What's that?" Daniel asked, noting the CD even though he was still concentrating on the Stone fragment before him.

  "I don't know," she replied. She stood and followed it until it came to a stop against a gas pump and toppled flat onto the ground. "Oh!" she gasped.

  "Huh?" said Daniel.

  Lisa stuck her finger into the hole in the middle of the disc and brought it back to show him. "This is Morgan's handwriting. Look."

  She handed him the disc. It read, In Case of Emergency. He brought it closer to his eyes and looked at it intently through his glasses.

  "You're sure it's Morgan's writing?" he asked.

  "Positive."

  "I don't think this is an audio disc," he said. "Where was it?"

  Lisa sat again, combing through the stacked notebooks and other items inside Daniel's bag. "Here, it fell out of this, I think," she said, picking up a book. It was a novel: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. She turned to the back flap, where she found a square envelope just big enough to hold a CD disc. It had been taped to the back cover, beneath the dust jacket. "I saw Morgan give this book to Julie to read. It was the first day of the riots in L.A. The two of them had gotten into the habit of trading books . . ." Her voice trailed off.

  Daniel's thoughts of Morgan now included Julie as well. They were dead, the both of them. It was a hard thing to digest since he hadn't witnessed either. In his mind, they were as alive as he was.

  He looked again at the disc in his hand. "'In case of emergency,' " he read aloud, thoughts drifting to a time and place far away from here. Morgan had been doing a great deal of research about the Secretum of Six around the same time as the L.A. riots.

  And didn't she tell us she'd figured out what it all meanteverything from the Secretum to the Bringer?

  He looked around. It was unlikely this gas station had any technical equipment that would be useful in this situation ... "We've got to find something to play this on. A DVD player or a computer maybe."

  Daniel placed the disc carefully back into its paper sleeve taped to the novel and returned his attention to the Stone spread out on the ground. He thumbed open Morgan's notebook and began looking for the third symbol-the one he recognized. The pages were already becoming spongy in the heat and moisture.

  He scratched the itch on the back of his right hand, which had grown into a red, angry bump.

  "Here it is," he said, and Lisa drew up just beside him and rested her head on his shoulder as he read from the book. " ` ... difficult translation ... unable to determine if noun or verb ... Seems to indicate some sort of uncontrollable movement, like an aimless wandering. Also used to describe something that was strictly confined but is set free to move without a prescribed course.' "

  "Hmm," he said. "I wonder if she has anything on the other ..."

  His voice trailed off at the sound of a powerful, wordless yell that fluctuated in its inflections. The old man was screaming. They looked up and saw a silver Mustang tearing down what used to be a road, racing in their direction, less than a mile out.

  "They found us," Lisa whispered.

  Daniel and Lisa snatched up everything that was on the ground and tossed it onto the backseat of the car as fast as they could. Pieces of the Dominion Stone fumbled out of Daniel's grasp, flying into the front seat as well. They jumped in the car, which the old man already had started and was waiting to gun.

  With them safely in, he took off before Daniel had even closed his side door.

  Crouched down low, Daniel chanced a glance up over the back of his seat and caught a glimpse of the silver sports car approaching them from behind at blistering speeds. It was like being chased by a sleek, muscular shark in wide open waters. There was nowhere to go now, no place they could take the Camaro that the smaller Mustang couldn't follow.

  It began to rain as they sped along the open road, but it wasn't water that was washing over the car. It was blood.

  They'd lost the front windshield in their last encounter, so the man at the wheel and Lisa were both soon wet with the hot, sticky blood.

  The Camaro may have been older than the other car, but it could certainly accelerate with the best of them, Daniel thought. In no time at all, they had matched paces with their pursuers and were doing their best to put any distance at all between them, despite the suddenly wet weather.

  The old man veered to the right, slinging Daniel and Lisa around in the car like rag dolls and skidding across the bloodwet ground. Daniel looked up to see that an entrance to the 10 freeway was about one mile straight ahead, and they were making a run for it.

  Even if they reached it, they were far from safe, so Daniel grabbed Morgan's notebook off the rear floorboard and began skimming through it quickly for the mysterious symbol that he didn't recognize.

  "Look out!" Lisa screamed, and their vehicle was violently smashed into from behind.

  Daniel had been hurtled onto the floorboard, then wrenched himself back up on the seat. But he stayed low, continuing to thumb madly through Morgan's pages.

  Come on, come on, where is it? Is it in here ... ?

  They hit the on-ramp and Daniel looked up as they approached the top. The westbound lane had plenty of cars in it all right, but they were abandoned, just like the cars in town had been.

  How strange, the thought occurred to him. During the riots, everyone was consumed with escaping from town, but now it's like everyone has gone home and holed themselves up in basements or whatever. Guess they know there's really nowhere to run. Nowhere to go that the raining blood won't soak you ...

  There was a tap from behind, but this time they managed to avoid a major collision, even though Payton and Alex never slowed down. They were darting in and around the stationary cars, barely missing most of them.

  Payton was behind the wheel this time, a vicious, predatory expression painting his features.

  So this is what it feels like to be hunted by the Thresher ... Daniel mused and felt a momentary pride that they weren't dead yet. Few made it this long.

  He snapped back to the moment. Focus, Daniel! Focus!

  The notebook fell out of his hands and onto the floorboard again, but this time Daniel froze before picking it up. The page it had fallen open to bore the symbol he was looking for.

  "I got it!"

  "What's it say?" Lisa shouted without raising her head over the top of her seat.

  " ` ... body, breath, or life,"' he replied. "So ... we have `unconfined movement'.. . and now `life."'

  He saw Lisa peek over her seat at him, her dark hair now soaked with blood and matted down to her scalp, her eyes big and unable to look away from the car right behind them. "What do you think it means?" she asked urgently.

  "Not sure," he replied in the voice she often referred to as maddeningly detached when he was going into scientist mode. "What's another word for `unconfined movement'?"

  "Freedom, maybe?" she offered.

  "No, I think in this context maybe it's more like leaking, or spilling. . ." he replied, feeling another jolt from behind as the old man tossed them back and forth. He surmised that they had to be doing speeds well above a hundred miles an hour. "What happens when something gets spilled or leaks out?"

  Lisa nervously pulled at her wet, stringy hair, still watching the Mustang. "I don't know, it runs over?"

  Daniel stopped in mid-thought. "It flows," he said. His thoughts turned back to the passage on the Stone and the order the symbols were in. "Dominion Stone ... life ... flow ..." He looked outside, at the otherworldly storm that was making visibility on the freeway increasingly hard ...

  And he had it.

  Knowing exactly what to do, he peeked over the top of the seat at the passengers in the Mustang. It wasn't easy to make them out through the gushing drops of red falling from the sky, but he was pretty sure that neither of them were wearing seat belts.

  He ducked back down and whispered silently so that only he could hear, "If either of you survive this ... please forgive me."
<
br />   Daniel reached through the gap between the two seats up front and grabbed the old man by the arm. "Slam on the brakes! Now!" he shouted, squeezing the man's arm firmly.

  "What? Are you crazy?" Lisa replied.

  The old man grunted a similar-sounding question.

  "I know what I'm doing!" Daniel snapped back. "Just DO IT! Do it NOW!!"

  The old man frowned but jammed his foot down on the brake pedal as Lisa and Daniel both braced themselves.

  It worked. Almost too well. Payton obviously hadn't been prepared for it, and the Mustang slammed even harder into the Camaro, with Daniel getting wedged once again in his seat. This time he was so far down he couldn't get out.

  But soon the car came to a screeching, grinding halt, and he opened the side door and squeezed out into the pouring red rain.

  Please, God, let them be alive ...

  Alex was on the ground some thirty feet in front of the Camaro. Payton seemed to have used his unique agility to gain some kind of foothold and jump onto the roof of the Camaro, but then fallen onto his back. Neither of them were moving.

  Daniel reached inside the car and grabbed a fragment of the Dominion Stone from the floorboard and then ran toward Alex.

  Whether it was her blood on the paved freeway or the kind falling from the fiery clouds above, he couldn't tell, but she was most definitely unconscious. Yet when he was ten paces out, she stumbled to her feet, her eyes were still blissfully shut. Daniel stopped in his tracks, unnerved by the sight of her moving like a marionette, and knowing that Oblivion was holding her strings. Her right arm came up slowly, grasping for him, but Daniel was moving too fast.

  He ducked under her arm and slammed the Dominion Stone fragment into the black crusty scars covering her abdomen. He scrubbed at the scabs until a spot of raw, pinkish flesh appeared, along with a fresh oozing of blood, and he thrust the Stone fragment into it fully.

  The Ring on Alex's right middle finger glowed, casting a diffuse white glow in a four-foot circle around where she stood. The rain stained it red.