by Chris Vola
He nodded and caught a glimpse of the soldiers in the rearview. Their faces were similarly lockjawed, emotionless masks gazing nowhere, exuding the calm of seasoned veterans. Karl was staring back at him from the driver’s seat, his brow furrowed in contemplation, probably analyzing the chances of Ryan fucking things up for his beloved Vanessa.
Don’t worry about them, Ryan said to himself. Don’t worry about any of it. This will be over soon.
He slid open the van’s door and stepped onto the pavement. He crossed the parking lot, careful not to walk briskly enough to attract attention or to cause his shirt to fly up and expose his holstered pistol. To the handful of people he passed that were lingering at the bus stop or in front of the museum’s entrance, whether they might be tourists or members of Xansati’s entourage, he was nothing, or at the worst, another crazy (and sickly) aficionado of thirteenth-century tapestries hoping to snag a replica of one at the gift shop before it closed.
As he pushed through the doors, he found himself in an unoccupied, dimly lit stone alcove that had been constructed to resemble the bowels of a European monastery. He reached for the pistol and clicked the safety off, leaving it in the holster. To his left was a wide, upward-sloping passage. Opposite that was the closed-off entrance of a passageway that looked like it led to a subterranean section of the museum. Ryan visualized the blueprints of the building that Vanessa had shown him and took the stairs. Before he’d gone ten steps, he saw the sallow, balding head of a man above him illuminated in the glow of a computer screen, sitting behind a desk on a wide landing. To the man’s right, the stairs curved, narrowed, and continued ascending to a large entrance hall containing the information and ticket desk, Ryan’s ultimate destination.
As Ryan climbed, he noticed that the man was wearing a navy-blue sports jacket with a security company’s insignia. Paunchy, sixtyish, much closer to dead than warrior. Ryan stepped onto the landing and was reaching for his pistol when the man looked up from his screen.
“Sorry, buddy,” the man said, scrunching his nose a little, “we closed half an hour ago. You’re going to have to come back tomorrow.”
“I know,” Ryan said, his fingers curling around the pistol’s grip. “I was hoping that it wasn’t too late to check the lost-and-found. I was here earlier and I think I might have left my backpack in one of the exhibits. It’s got some stuff in it that I really need for work tomorrow. Look, I’ve got a picture of it on my phone.”
Ryan lifted the pistol and fired in one quick motion. The dart lodged between the security guard’s second and third chins, with seemingly no effect. He let out a confused grunt, plucked out the dart, and stared at it. Ryan was about to fire another round when the man let out a barely audible croak, began to convulse, and then shook so fast that it was almost seemed like he was vibrating.
His eyes widened, then rolled back, then turned a weird shade of neon pink. Then they melted into a thick sludge that oozed onto his face. A few more strands of the same substance escaped the corners of the man’s mouth before he began deflating like a flesh balloon. Within ten seconds, there was nothing left of him but a chunky, leaking pile of skin and clothing where he’d been sitting. The chemical reaction hadn’t necessarily been explosive; the security guard had simply been liquefied from the inside out. Meaning he was probably Ànkëlëk-ila, the first of his former species that Ryan had killed.
Before he could attempt to comprehend what had just happened, Ryan heard the sound of a conversation above him, echoing from the stairwell to his right. He jogged up the short flight of stairs and found himself in a cathedral-like, high-ceilinged atrium with three ornately carved archways—two large ones that led to exhibit halls and a smaller one that served as the entrance to the museum’s gift shop, where soft flute music was wafting from unseen speakers.
The long, semicircular information-desk-slash-ticket booth was to Ryan’s immediate left, manned by a pair of twentysomething girls wearing white collared shirts and sorting piles of earbuds used for audio tours. Before they looked up at him, Ryan fired two rounds in quick succession, hitting one of the girls in the side of the neck, the other in the shoulder. Instead of melting, they spontaneously disintegrated into puddles of sludge, coating the chairs they had been sitting in, the desk, and the wall behind them in splatter marks. It was an accelerated version of what had happened to Derrick Rhodes. The puddles had been human.
Ryan lifted the smartwatch he was wearing and swiped until he found the number he had been told to call. He found it and pressed the send button almost unconsciously; he was transfixed by the slime and the household-cleaner aroma it had begun to emit.
He heard a noise behind him, swiveled around, and saw a pale, middle-aged woman dressed in khakis and a navy-blue vest with a name tag. She was standing in the center of the gift shop, her mouth gaping in bewilderment. Ryan fired at her and she dove out of sight behind a stack of replica tapestries, lightning-quick, her reflexes much too fast for a mortal.
Before he could pursue her, he heard a voice echoing in the distance, getting closer. Three security guards were jogging toward him from the far end of the exhibit hall he was now facing, guns drawn, one of them barking into a phone. In the corner of his eye, Ryan noticed more movement, turned, and saw two figures, both dressed in black tracksuits, charging at him from the other exhibit hall to his left.
So much for the element of surprise.
One of the security guards got a shot off before Ryan had time to move. The sound was deafening in the hall’s cavernous expanse. The bullet barely grazed the armor plate covering Ryan’s shoulder, but the impact was strong enough to knock him back a few feet, into the side of the desk.
Ryan barrel-rolled across the desk counter and crouched behind it. The soles of his shoes struck the pink gunk on the floor, causing it to splash onto his pants and burn several small holes in the fabric. He fumbled around with his utility belt and found the compartment that contained the shard bomb Rodney had given him. As he gripped the smooth metallic sphere, the footsteps and voices got louder, closer, seemed to multiply and surround him. He pulled out the bomb and found the indentations that would activate it. Just as he was about to press them and toss the sphere, he heard two or three gunshots, then a series of muffled hissing noises followed by several thuds and the scattering of hard plastic on stone.
Then total silence, except for the gift shop music that had changed to a somber Gregorian chant.
“Whatever you’re thinking about doing behind there,” Vanessa said, “stop it.”
Ryan put the bomb back in its compartment and stood up slowly, suddenly overcome with intense dizziness. He gripped the desk and tried not to cough, but it was impossible. Vanessa and Troy were standing near the stairwell, rifles lowered. Five steaming piles of mangled skin—in addition to random pieces of hair, clothing, and firearms—were scattered across the floor of the atrium. Rodney and Ramon were already moving silently and cautiously through the exhibit hall to the left, their rifles slung across their backs and their pistols raised, weaving around Virgin Mary statues and crucifixes in glass cases until they disappeared through a pair of open wooden doors.
Troy was grimacing, rubbing the edge of a hole in his cheek where a bullet had torn through the skin and exited the other side, healing much slower than it should have. “Fucking honey-dipped shells,” he said to Vanessa, spitting blood. “Remember those?”
“You’ll live,” she replied, unsympathetically.
“I’m assuming the honey is DXT,” Ryan said, hopping over the desk when he’d stopped coughing.
“Yup,” Troy said. “Nowhere near as potent as what we’re packing, and our armor will stop them, but it still stings like a bitch.”
“It’ll do more than sting you,” Vanessa said to Ryan. “You performed better than I thought you would, got us in the door without any problems, did what we needed you to do. Go back to the van and wait.”
“No,” Ryan said. He opened his pistol’s magazine to refill the chambe
r. “I’m going with you. I read the mission briefing. I studied the blueprints. And I’m pretty sure I know how the statues work, if I make it that far. I can hold them without injuring myself.”
Vanessa shook her head. “Out of the question. And when have you ever been close enough to a statue to know how your body would react to them? Unless you weren’t telling me everything that—”
Ryan fired a shot over her shoulder. There was a high-pitched shriek that ended as abruptly as it started.
“What the fuck was that?” Vanessa stammered, physically shaken for the first time that Ryan could remember.
Troy jogged over to a jewelry display case near the entrance to the gift shop, reached behind it, and lifted a gelatinous corpse by the collar of its vest. The dart Ryan had fired was still lodged in its forehead. It was the shop’s employee, or what was left of her.
“I’m surprised you didn’t smell her,” Ryan said to Vanessa. “Is that because of the, uh … job?” He lifted his fingers to his nose and made a pinching motion.
Troy’s eyes widened as he walked back toward them. “Dude,” he exclaimed, trying not to smile, looking at Vanessa as if he expected her to strangle Ryan. “I can’t believe you just went there. Based on the size of those balls alone, Vanessa, we should let him stay with us. He’s not a bad shot either.”
“Fine,” Vanessa muttered, her lips contorted into a fierce scowl. “We don’t have time to argue about this anymore. But I’m not responsible for what might happen, what’s going to happen. I’m done caring about you.”
Though it wouldn’t have helped to tell her at that moment, Ryan appreciated her concern for him more than she would ever know. She had given him a chance to die with the gratification of having avenged Jennifer, or at least knowing he had tried.
Vanessa’s smartwatch flickered, flashing a message. “The other team is in the tunnels,” she said. “Meaning they’ll be losing service soon. Let’s move.”
The main level of the museum was modeled after a medieval abbey. It comprised eleven distinct chambers featuring Western European medieval artifacts that formed a rectangle around the museum’s centerpiece, the Cuxa Cloister, an open-air courtyard and garden ringed by a series of arches that had once stood in a twelfth-century French abbey. The team’s job, as Ryan understood it, was to split up and sweep the chambers, to clear it of any hostile elements, then converge and head belowground to the vault, eliminate Xansati, and secure the statutes, if the other team hadn’t already completed their end of the mission or failed to do so.
To Ryan, it didn’t matter who pulled the trigger, as long as he could see a body.
Rodney and Ramon had already headed south into the Late Gothic Hall, meaning the rest of the team would be going west, then south, eventually rejoining them and taking a descending flight of stairs adjacent to the Gothic Chapel. Vanessa lifted her rifle to her shoulder, turned on the sight, and stepped over the security guards’ bodies and into the Romanesque Hall, trailed by Ryan, then Troy.
The room was largely barren and a good deal bigger than the atrium, its walls lined with giant, brightly colored frescoes and stone carvings of dragons, griffins, lions, eagles, and camels. The air was still, settled after the recent altercation, and almost totally silent, save for the echoing thuds of Ryan’s feet against the stone floor that caused Vanessa to flinch a tiny bit every time he took a step. He’d forgotten how impossibly soundless dead warriors could be.
For a moment, he became self-conscious and a shred of doubt crept into Ryan’s mind. He briefly considered whether he should continue, whether he was putting Vanessa and the team at risk. But he shook off the thoughts as she stepped cautiously through an archway bounded by the carvings of two sword-wielding kings and into a smaller room with an altar and a wooden and gold crucifix at its rear. She raised her hand and extended her thumb for the all-clear signal, or at least Ryan hoped that was what it was.
He followed her into a gallery illuminated by narrow stained-glass windows that shot kaleidoscopes of color onto carved statues of human heads, peering out from the walls that were composed of limestone blocks from a French church. Chairs had been set up in two parallel sections in front of an altar and were separated by an aisle-sized space. It was a beautiful—and at any other time, calming—scene. Not just this room, but the entire museum. If the situation had been different, if he hadn’t had to worry about getting shot by chemically enhanced projectiles, Ryan would have enjoyed wandering the corridors, imagining himself lost in another place and era.
A hail of gunfire rang out nearby, shattering the chapel’s contemplative aura.
“Let’s go!” Vanessa grunted as she darted through a small doorway to left of the altar.
Troy and Ryan rushed in the same direction, weaving around the pillared boundary of a thirteenth-century monks’ enclosure. When they caught up to her, Vanessa was situated in a large, naturally lit hallway facing the Cuxa Cloister, squinting into her rifle’s scope, scanning the sundrenched, grass-and-plant-filled courtyard that featured two perpendicular walking paths and an ornately carved stone fountain at its center.
Directly across from where they were standing, on the other side of one of the gardens, Ramon was slumped in a sitting position at the base of one of the pillared archways that formed the cloister’s border. His pistol was lying in the grass a few inches from where his left arm was extended as if reaching for the weapon. But he would never reach for anything again. Nearly a quarter of his head, mostly above the right temple, had been shot clean off, causing the skin around it to splay and peel back like a partially removed rubber mask. Still-steaming bits of skull and brain matter mingled with already-congealed fluids on his shirt and the pillar that was supporting him.
“Fuck,” Troy muttered. “They had to have gotten right on top of him. How is that possible?”
“I don’t know,” Vanessa said. She lowered the rifle and nodded at an open doorway made of oak and iron, about ten yards past Ramon’s corpse. “When I got here, I saw Rodney sprinting after someone into the tapestry rooms. He’s sticking to the plan. We need to do the same.”
“No updates from the other team?” Troy asked.
She looked at her smartwatch. “No.”
They walked south for several yards along the edge of the courtyard, then took a right into a room whose floor space was dotted with sculpted bishops and gold-embossed angelic figures on cordoned-off pedestals, and whose walls were covered with paintings of saints in supplicating poses. There was no sign of movement. The room’s southern boundary featured a nearly life-size statue of a pope or a cardinal, a three-foot-high stone barricade that separated the main level of the museum from the lower exhibits, a stone ledge overlooking those exhibits, and a narrow set of stairs that cut between the two.
Vanessa’s watch lit up. “It’s Rodney,” she said. “He’s at the Treasury entrance, about to rig the door. It’s a straight shot for us through the crypts and the Glass Gallery, maybe sixty yards.”
Troy slung his rifle over his shoulder, pulled his pistol out of its holder, and checked the magazine while Vanessa did the same. “These’ll have to do from here on out,” he said.
“So you’re saying I’m ahead of the curve?” Ryan asked, checking the compartment on his belt that held the extra ammunition cartridges.
He got the slightest courtesy chuckle out of Troy, while Vanessa ignored him and headed quickly for the stairs. Her head disappeared behind the stone barricade. Troy nodded at Ryan to follow.
He’d gone down four or five steps when he felt the barrel of Troy’s pistol pressing sharply into the center of his back. He stopped walking. “Easy, man,” he said softly. “What’s going on?”
There was no response. Troy pressed harder.
Ryan swung around and Troy’s body tumbled past him down the stairs, collapsing in a disjointed heap near the stone tomb of a fourteenth-century Spanish nobleman. He convulsed in electric bursts, then began to shrink. An emptied dart was sticking out of the back of
his deflated head.
A second dart zipped by, inches from Ryan’s eye socket, and shattered against the ledge, burning an acid-rimmed cavity into the stone and releasing an overwhelming, sickly sweet hospital aroma.
Ryan didn’t waste time trying to pinpoint the source of the shot. Instead, he sprinted down the remaining stairs and leapt over Troy’s corpse, finding himself in the Gothic Chapel, a semicircular, vestibule-like room with brightly colored stained-glass windows and lined with the burial caskets of several important Catalan counts. Vanessa was frozen with her back to him, pointing her pistol at a mousy, gray-haired woman with a confused expression and a small metallic object in one of her hands. The two were standing four feet apart, separated by the eight-foot-long and three-foot-high tomb effigy of a famous crusader that was resting on the floor in the exact center of the room.
“Troy’s gone,” Ryan stammered, nearly out of breath as he pulled up even with her. “And they have darts. They have our darts. I thought they weren’t supposed to have access to them.”
“That’s not all they have,” Vanessa said softly, not breaking her gaze from the woman, who was shivering and mumbling to herself. She was clutching a shard bomb in her gnarled, arthritic fist, her unsteady fingers pressing the indentations that activated the detonator. If she let go, they’d have five seconds before the blast.
“He told me,” the woman was muttering, “he told me to come here, said I could be one of them, that I would be, that I would, that I would be more than meat, that I would become one of them, that the pain would end, that the pain…”
She lifted the bomb as if she were preparing to throw it across the room. Vanessa put a dart in her chest and lunged at Ryan, pulling them both down to the ground, where they braced themselves against the side of the tomb. Ryan heard the clang of the bomb against the floor, then a soft popping noise. A burning hot mist settled on the back of his neck but before he could wipe at it, the bomb went off.
