by James Axler
The container in his hand hissed, sputtered, then ran out of propellant.
One of the intruders stepped from between the others. Across its arms, it carried a smaller individual who was dressed in the same style.
Nudelman backpedaled from this advancing apparition until his spine hit the edge of the marble countertop. In the U-shaped kitchen there was nowhere to run. The intruder held the small person cradled not three feet away. The face was mostly hidden by the hood’s overhang and the intense backlight of the ceiling spots. He stared dumbfounded at the bare foot that dangled before him.
The pale toes, arch and instep were flesh and blood and distinctly human, but the rest of the appendage was steel. A set of overlapping plates appeared to supply articulation at the ankle joint, with some kind of connected, through-and-through axle. Everywhere it abutted metal, the flesh looked angry and inflamed, and there was green pus.
In short, it was a prosthesis from hell.
“Dr. Nudelman,” a rasping voice said, “gather up whatever material you will need to continue your work. You are coming with me now.”
How many times in the dead of night had he replayed a variation on this dark fantasy? That the Chinese or Russians would break in and steal him and his discovery, that he’d be locked away in a concrete prison of a top-secret research center and never seen or heard from again. But they didn’t look Chinese or Russian. Nor a goon squad hired by one of the big oil and power octopi. Their strange, dark and bumpy skin, the cruel amber talons on their thumbs, the width of their bodies and the blocky shape of their heads—they all looked alike, and they didn’t look human.
The pack of huge bodies shifted slightly, and he saw they had already taken a human captive—a slender man dressed in a black limo-driver’s uniform, complete with shiny cap. One of the creatures at the rear had him by the back of neck and lifted up on tiptoe.
“Who are you?” Nudelman asked, trying desperately to stall for enough time to think through his options.
“I am your master,” the little person told him, “from now until you draw your last breath.” Then it reached up with a steel claw and tossed back the purple hood.
As Nudelman recoiled, he felt his bladder sphincter release, but there was no flood of hot wetness down the front of his pants.
The littlest monster had scared him pissless.
Chapter Ten
Mildred glanced up at the big analog clock on the wall of Vee’s office and couldn’t help but do the math, adding the hours left in this day to the countdown to noon of the next. In the hellscape, time wasn’t measured in seconds, minutes and hours. Few people had a watch that worked. No one asked what time it was. The sun rose and fell. Night, with its attendant terrors, dragged on and on until dawn. In Deathlands the experience of time passing was unique to each individual, norm or mutie, not some kind of by-mutual-agreement shared reality.
In this remote past that she so well remembered, seconds were seen as hard currency. Spectator sports counted down to zero before they were won and lost. Fortunes made or disappeared to the ticking of global clocks. Lives lived, ordered by an artificial heartbeat, a punctuation mark that divided present from past. What was unreal in the Deathlands was real here, as real as the constantly moving second hand.
Time was slipping away, and the punctuation mark to end all—the ungodly fires of hell—loomed certain.
“There’s only one Magus as far as we know,” Mildred told the editor.
“Why aren’t the police saying what was taken in these attacks?” Krysty asked.
“Actually they are saying,” Vee said. “And it isn’t ‘what,’ it’s ‘who.’ Police radio code for a kidnapping is 207. That code has been repeated over and over from different locations. It means there have been multiple, almost simultaneous kidnappings at various Manhattan hospitals.”
“What’s 187?” Jak asked.
“Homicide,” Vee said.
The albino gave her a pained look.
“Chilling,” Mildred translated for him. Scattered among the 207s there had been a lot of 187s. The enforcers were doing plenty of what they did best.
“Although the police aren’t saying who was kidnapped,” Vee went on. “From what you’ve told me about this cyborg creature, I think we can assume the targets are medical specialists who can help repair its physical and mechanical systems.”
“I think you’re right,” Mildred said. “Hospital departments and staffing in major cities are pretty much the same across the board, from institution to institution. If just any neurosurgeon, ortho doc or transplant doc were needed, it would be one-stop shopping. Magus must be kidnapping particular specialists, otherwise there’d be no reason to strike so many locations.”
“Do you think the repairs will be made here, in this time?” Vee asked.
“Not with Armageddon less than a day away,” Ryan said. “Magus has to be taking them back through the time hole to Deathlands.”
“Are there medical facilities there?” Vee asked.
“Only the crudest imaginable,” Mildred said. “Think of the Wild West in the 1880s. But Magus has made many trips here for looting. The hellscape is vast. Who knows what’s been hidden away. And where.” She was thinking of the vast redoubt system.
“My dear Vee,” Doc said, “the only thing certain is that Magus is a tactician of the first order. He always seems to be a few steps ahead of pursuit and always has an escape route or two. The ultimate purpose of unfolding events remains a mystery to everyone but our steel-eyed foe.”
“Even if, as you say, there’s only one Magus,” Vee said, “there has to be a lot of those enforcers here. So far there have been more than a dozen attacks by eight or ten of them.”
“Maybe they’re already here,” Ricky suggested.
“Entirely possible,” Ryan said. “We don’t know how many enforcers went through the time hole ahead of Magus, or when. They could have already been stationed close to their targets, waiting for the signal to attack.”
“This is all very interesting,” J.B. said with a frown, “but how are we going to find the bucket of bolts?”
“There’s only one way out of here that we know of,” Ryan said. “And right now it’s surrounded and blocked off by armed sec men. Magus has to be stashing his victims someplace fairly close to the time hole, waiting for a chance to jump back to Deathlands.”
“The victims could be stashed, but maybe the looting campaign isn’t over,” Mildred stated. “Magus has more than a day before the hellstorm to collect whatever else is on the to-steal list.”
“Every bad guy leaves a trail of bread crumbs,” Vee assured them.
“Speaking of which, we need more food,” Krysty said. “And we need it now.”
“We might not have the chance to eat again soon,” Ryan agreed.
“I can phone in a to-go order and have it delivered to the security desk downstairs,” Vee said. “What would you like?”
“I don’t care, as long as it’s not that plastic-wrapped shit,” Krysty said.
Vee seemed at a loss. “Pizza? Burgers? Thai? Mexican? Sushi?”
“Just get whatever will be delivered the quickest,” Mildred said.
Vee got up from her chair and left the room.
When the editor returned she said, “The food will be here in ten minutes. I need someone to go down to the ground floor with me and help carry it back.”
Doc and Ricky rose from their chairs at the same instant.
“I’ll go,” Ricky said, beaming.
“Perhaps the lovely lady should do the choosing,” Doc countered.
Glaring at each other across the table, they looked as if they wanted to start throwing punches. Mildred realized at once what was going on, and it was hard to keep from laughing. The world was about to end, and the geezer and the kid were squabbling over a woman neither of them had a chance in hell with.
Vee had it figured out, too. Smiling sweetly she said, “Mildred can help me with the food. She knows how
to fit in here if we get questioned. And her appearance will draw less attention from security. If they ask, I can always say she’s one of our writers.”
Mildred wasn’t sure that was a compliment.
“The conference room will be a more comfortable place to eat,” Vee said. “We need to keep monitoring the police calls. And keep a record of any new attack locations as they come up. Write down the time, as well, so we can figure out a direction of travel.” She shut off and unplugged the scanner, and she carried it with her as they headed back to the long table.
After the unit was back online and crackling with frantic chatter, Vee unstrapped her Desert Eagle and set it down beside the scanner and a legal pad and pen she had picked up along the way. “If we take firearms into the lobby, Mildred, it will bring a visit from the police,” she said.
Though it made her uneasy, Mildred left her Czech-made ZKR .38 revolver and holster on the conference table.
On their way down the hall, Vee stopped at the vending machines. She picked up the fire ax and gave both machines several whacks, breaking loose their pot-metal cash boxes.
“Just like an ATM,” she said as she gathered up handfuls of one-dollar bills and stacked them into two fat bundles.
After the elevator doors closed and the car began to descend, Vee looked at her and said, “Do you have living relatives in this time?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Do you want to contact them? You can use the office phone when we get back.”
“You mean, do I want to say goodbye?”
“Well, yes...”
“They think I’m frozen in a tank in some cryrofacility, Vee,” Mildred said. “They said goodbye a long time ago.
“If I can’t protect the people I love from what’s coming tomorrow, scaring them in their final hours seems just pointless and cruel.”
When they reached the ground floor, the delivery man was waiting at the security desk, which was manned by a pair of seated, uniformed guards. Six big white paper bags sat on the counter in front of them.
“I don’t know those security men,” Vee said softly. “Let me do the talking.”
As they neared the counter, the aroma of hamburger and fries made Mildred’s mouth water. How long had it been? A hundred years? It seemed longer.
Vee counted out sufficient singles to cover the cost of the food, then handed the rest to the delivery man.
His eyes widened as he accepted the wad of cash. “Ma’am,” he said, “there must be fifty bucks here.”
“Do me one favor,” she said.
“Sure, what?”
“Spend it all tonight.”
“Deal!” he said, turning quickly for the exit.
As they gathered up the six bags, Mildred noticed that both guards were armed with 9 mm Glocks and wore body armor under their uniform shirts. That stuck in her mind because she didn’t remember building security ever carrying guns or wearing armor, except in banks or big city hospitals of course.
One of the guards said, “Whoa, that’s a lot of food, ladies. Got a party going up there on twenty-two?”
“No, we’re stocking up for an all-nighter,” Vee said. “Final tweaking of a book. Got to get it ready for the printer.”
“Good luck with that.”
Mildred smiled and nodded and followed Vee back to the elevator.
When the car doors closed behind them, the aroma of charcoal-cooked meat and deep-fried potatoes became overwhelming. Her stomach began to growl ominously as she held the hot bags to her chest.
“Do you miss the food?” Vee asked as the elevator climbed.
“Not until now. I’d forgotten.”
“What do you eat in the future?”
“Trust me, you don’t want to know. It will put you off eating for a week.”
They trooped into the conference room, set the bags on the table and started passing out paper-wrapped, double bacon cheeseburgers and grease-stained bags of French fries.
Mildred watched Jak sniff carefully at the sandwich he held in both hands. Then he took a huge bite of what had to be his first bacon cheeseburger. He groaned as he chewed, then gulped it down.
“Don’t eat the paper,” Vee told him as his mouth gaped to take bite number two.
“Or your fingers,” Mildred added.
The others were already hard at it, cheeks stuffed like chipmunks, jaws grinding away vigorously.
As Mildred raised her own sandwich to wet lips and parted teeth, then crunched through the toasted, seeded bun, the copious mayo, ketchup, lettuce, pickle, red onion, sliced tomato, crisp bacon, melted cheddar and two juicy, charbroiled meat patties, she saw a pair of tiny red dots, like dancing insects, on the other side of the plate-glass window.
They weren’t insects.
And they weren’t dancing.
She spewed her mouthful of burger across the table and into the lap of an astonished J.B.
Chapter Eleven
Lieutenant Nathaniel watched from the shadows at the mouth of the alley across the street from the target building. There was a damp chill to the winter night but no precipitation, air temp just above freezing. He wore body armor and a black knit hat. The right side of his black nylon NYPD windbreaker was pulled up and tucked behind the holster of his Glock 19, clearing the path for a quick draw. Like a string of paper cut-out silhouettes, men in black combat fatigues and balaclavas, full-body armor, carrying bulletproof riot shields and M-16s ran soundlessly, in formation, down the other side of the street, toward the building’s front entrance.
Nathaniel keyed his secure, tactical com link and spoke into the headset microphone. “Team Bravo, this is Operational Command. Request an update. Over.”
After a brief pause, the bud in his ear crackled, and the gruff voice of the Emergency Services Unit leader replied, “Ten-four, Command. All rear exits secured and sealed off. Team Alpha is in position on roof opposite. Team Bravo entering front of target site now. Suspect contact is in estimated less than ten, repeat contact in less than ten.”
After looking at the building’s location, which was surrounded by other high-rise structures, they had decided not to helo drop a fourth team onto the roof in advance of the main assault. They didn’t want to risk alerting the suspects with rotor noise and echoes off the other buildings. The plan was to disable all but one of the lobby’s elevators, then ascend to the twenty-second floor, using that car and the two emergency staircases. Once the suspects were engaged by the three-pronged assault force, the helicopter would land and the fourth team would close the trap from above. With all escape routes blocked, the suspects had nowhere to go.
It was surrender or die.
“Confirm when you are in position to engage,” Nathaniel said. “Acknowledge.”
“Ten-four that. Out.”
Not often, but sometimes, things just fell into place.
The positive identification of one of the suspects in the metro attack had led Nathaniel in short order to the company that employed her, which had led in even shorter order to its location. A quick phone call to night security at the building revealed that eight individuals had been caught on video at about 5:30 p.m. entering the premises through the parking lot. Security had recognized one of them as Veronica Currant, and she had input the necessary entry key codes. The suspects had taken the elevator directly to the twenty-second floor and had not left the building.
Nathaniel immediately ordered a full-force response—mobilization and deployment of the precinct’s police, tactical and EMT units. Without lights or sirens, and out of sight of the target floor, squad cars had sealed off the connecting streets, blocking access to the building. Minutes later he and the ESU vans had arrived on scene. A pair of armed ESU personnel had borrowed the uniforms of the private security guards and then taken their places at the front desk. They had orders not to fire unless directly threatened; their primary function was to observe activity on the video monitors and report suspect movement inside the building.
Kidn
apping seemed to be the major part of the gang’s MO. In all but one incident, a citizen had been taken away. Even though video showed the suspects hadn’t brought hostages in with them, that didn’t mean they hadn’t taken prisoners after entering, from the floor they were on or others above or below. If the perps were in fact holding anyone captive, the element of surprise combined with overwhelming force could save innocent lives.
Tactical units had still been assembling outside when Currant had informed the security desk she had phoned out for food to be delivered. Nathaniel had been tempted to take out whoever came down to pick it up and thereby reduce the odds, but the assault teams had been nowhere ready to close the net. He’d reasoned if the gofers didn’t return promptly with dinner, the other suspects would know something had gone wrong and would have the chance to prepare for attack. Nathaniel had told the disguised officers to sit tight, let the suspects collect their food and go back up.
When the time came, ESU would be going in first. Given the situation and attendant department protocol, it was the only option. There would be casualties, he had no doubt, but with any luck they would be one-sided—the other side. The sniper teams on the roof directly above him had a clear line of sight into the twenty-second floor offices. From initial reports, they had all eight suspects in view. All were in the same room. No hostages in sight, just viable targets.
The shooters were waiting for the green light, which was ultimately his call. He had no qualms about giving the command, but he had made it clear to the ESU leader how important it was to keep some of the perps alive if possible—they could provide valuable intel on the locations of the other suspects, the ones in purple. He was confident that ESU personnel would show more restraint under the circumstances than his precinct’s beat cops or even his detectives. They were better trained. Better armed. Better shots. And because they worked as a cohesive unit, they were less likely to go rogue and take individual revenge for the killings of their fellow NYPD officers.
The identified suspect, Veronica Currant, turned out to be a Canadian citizen living in the U.S. on a work visa. Age twenty-six. Single. No roommate. Educated at the University of Toronto’s Massey College. When contacted by Canadian authorities, her family had had little information to offer. They didn’t know the last names of her friends at work or the names of anyone she was dating.
