They reminded him of the child at the hotel room.
Arnold and Rai charged towards the firefight. The tribesmen had already disappeared over the crest of the slope and were out of sight by the time Arnold and Rai had rushed up the hill, less than a minute behind them. Arnold quickly removed a grenade from his pack and hooked it through the spoon onto his shoulder harness. Rai cocked his Sten. As they ran both men looked at each other, and Arnold could see through Rai’s illusion of invulnerability, but only for a moment. The little Nepalese man’s eyes flinched each time a submachine gun blared from the far side of the hill, an unconscious reflex. Rai was ready, though, and Arnold had no doubt the man would follow him into the jaws of hell itself without hesitation.
Strange sounds answered the bursts of submachine gun fire from over the hill. Ear-splitting cracks like the snaps of a giant bullwhip. In time with these cracks, the darkness of the canopy was illuminated suddenly by stark bursts of white light which left harsh afterimages on Arnold’s eyes. In those bursts of light each tiny aspect of the dark canopy above was illuminated in perfectly. As they reached the top of the rise that stood between them and the fire-fight Rai started forward, but Arnold jerked the little man back by the strap of his backpack. Something, some warning, danced across Arnold’s mind. The sound—the light—lightning? Electricity?
For a split second they stood, heads just barely over the crest of the hill, listening to the sounds of the ambush. Then Arnold’s mind finished the equation: Electricity + Composition B = ... With all his strength, Arnold slung the Gurhka back down the slope by his equipment harness.
“What—” Rai began to say, and then the world was lost in conflagration.
The buffeting, torturous wind ripped by Arnold’s head like a train, missing him by inches, followed by the sharp burning needles of a million tiny splinters hitting his skin. Flight, just the feeling of being in the air, of being upside down. The terrible feeling of falling upside down towards an unknown point of impact, afterimages of the flash obscuring his vision as he hit. Leaves first, then a small tree which split and cracked under his weight, and finally a breath-stealing, muddy deadfall. The sounds of a thousand creatures the size of elephants crashing through the woods, the domino-like crashing fall of a hundred trees. A rasping overpowering wind, a pounding like a hammer on his skull—his breath, his heartbeat. Then a rain of tiny flaming pieces of wood, dropping from the sky as if by magic.
Something dug uncomfortably into his shoulder as he lay in the smoldering underbrush, and Arnold sat up, dazed, pulling an inch of pulverized blackened tree out of his arm in the process. The portion of wood fell to the ground but made no sound. The entire world was silent except for his pulse in his ears.
Blood began to cascade out of the gaping, black wound in his arm, but he felt nothing. Arnold put his hands to his legs and found them both intact. He clutched his face and found nothing amiss, though his sight was shot through with blotches of white and red and his face felt heavy. His submachine gun was beneath him, he was sitting on it, and the strap had broken. His grenade had rolled away somewhere into the jungle. He would have to fix that strap, he thought numbly, and began to slowly gather up the remnants of his gear with his good arm.
Rai was over him then, saying something, looking as fit as always, somehow miraculously untouched by the apocalyptic event. The little Nepalese man grabbed Arnold’s arm and looked at it. Pulling a case from his improbably large pack, which he settled on the ground like it was weightless, he tore a length of bandage out and began to wrap Arnold’s arm, but Arnold shook him off and stood up shakily. The world rose and fell around him, like he himself was not even moving but the world was moving for him. Like a drunk he stumbled up the rise that he had been thrown down, and crumpled to his hands and knees on the crest in the middle of a gap in the underbrush. Rai ran up next to him. Arnold stood again with the man’s help, but the world kept careening from side to side crazily, like he was watching it from the deck of a ship in rough water.
Where Haulewell and Jackson and Kitely had been at the bottom of the hill, where the natives had rushed, where the jungle had once grown, was now simply a wasteland. A huge, circular ditch of deep black more than fifty feet across cut into the earth like a giant pockmark, and the trees surrounding it had been knocked flat in concentric circles, some still on fire, others uprooted and flung about like matchsticks. The canopy itself had been violated, and the sun now shone down so brightly that Arnold, looking up into it, flinched away and found his eyes drawn again to the scene of devastation. Nothing lived within the circle.
A hundred yards of jungle had been incinerated by the explosion, the underbrush aflame or just gone, the ground rent into blast zones of black, grey and brown. Nothing of the team remained. Nothing of the natives remained. Nothing remained at all. Arnold felt his legs give way, finally, like a rusty hinge forced to open. His body was suddenly liquid and loose. The shock of his head hitting the ground felt like falling onto a pillow of feathers. He stared up at the sky past the burned remnants of trees to the unearthly glow of the sun. Beyond the haze, into the glow there was more. Past this world, was there respite? Was there some place where he might find peace? Rai was yelling at him from far away.
Was he staring at the same sky that left a smile on Karl Bruning’s ruined, dead, face? Was it so wrong to want it all to be over? Didn’t he deserve that peace, too? Hadn’t he done his part? Something seeped into his mind like shame, spilling over his thoughts and tainting any dream he might have had of escape with the blackness of guilt.
No. He was the last vestige of hope in this abused world. He was all that was left, and Smith was loose and alive in the jungle. Arnold still had his part to do. A shiver ran through his body and shook it like a rag-doll. Rai was screaming at him now, but there was no sound. Arnold tried to focus on something, some little thing to bring him back, to bring him up out of the tunnel which had surrounded his vision. A green plant hung over his head, over Rai’s head. Like Rai it was miraculously untouched by the explosion.
On it a small, luminous silver bug crawled over the huge expanse of the leaf, oblivious to the carnage around it. Everywhere else, everything past the leaf was gone, was void, but the bug crawled forward unmindful of larger events. The bug was alive, surrounded by nothing but disintegrated forest and an endless field of blast-ravaged dirt. Yet it continued forward. Arnold’s hands limply tracked across his chest, a shaft of pure pain rippling up his body as he shifted his blood-covered shoulder. His hands searched on their own for something which was gone, something which was important, something so vital that his hands, independent of thought, knew to search for it.
The sky began to flicker before his vision, shuttering in and out like a film sputtering to a stop on a screen. Black, then the sky, black and the sky. Arnold tried to pull his eyes wide, but realized too late that his vision was not obscured by his eyelids but something inside his body was wrong. Arnold’s last thought before unconsciousness clutched his struggling mind was:
The box.
And then the rushing darkness.
CHAPTER 22:
A dance so complex even the dancer forgets the steps
March 1, 1943: Kilmaur Manor, Scotland
“Sit down, Alan,” Major Cornwall said in a subdued voice, distractedly considering a conglomeration of photographs on his huge desk. Weak, yellow sunlight spilled in the vaulted window, leaving everything facing Alan Barnsby in shadow. Barnsby walked swiftly into the room and stood at the front of the desk, as stiff as the suits of armor which flanked Cornwall. Barnsby’s thin, gaunt face was set in sharp angles. The tiny zig-zag, white scar traced its way across his brow, rippling with the tension in his frame. His anger was a vibrant thing, alive in the room like the hum of a tuning fork. The major looked up slowly, his face fixed in a frown which brought the edges of his waxed mustaches up at a strange angle.
“Alan?”
“Major. I wish to know your plans regarding the information I uncovered i
n America... sir.” Barnsby’s voice was high-pitched and unsure, like that of a boy confronting his father for the first time, and his eyes darted uncomfortably around the room.
Major Cornwall settled into his seat deliberately, letting out a small grunt. He glanced up at Barnsby and then down again at the photographs on his desk. In the grainy black and white photos huge stone blocks stood in limitless desert, looking as old and timeless as the sand itself. Aborigines and white men posed around the stones, looking windblown and lost, as small as ants in front of the huge masonry.
“Lieutenant, you are the last person I— “ Cornwall began, his voice filled with quiet, angery disbelief.
“Stop, please, sir.”
Cornwall glanced up and something shifted behind his blue-grey eyes. He let loose a long, drawn sigh and pointed at the chair implacably with a single taut finger. Barnsby sat suddenly as if commanded by God himself.
“It really doesn’t do any good posturing with a ‘talent,’ does it, Alan?” Cornwall stood and stiffly straightened his starched uniform. He looked away from Barnsby and something like emotion bled through his voice as the sentence died on his lips. He cleared his throat and stared out the window onto the moors.
“What have you heard, Alan?”
“About the disappearances in Australia, sir. The American agents,” Barnsby sputtered.
“Who told you this?” Cornwall turned his head, looked Barnsby over once and then, realizing the frail man did not mean to answer, turned back to consider the window.
“What are you doing with my information, sir?”
“I am doing my best for England, Barnsby.” Cornwall’s voice was muffled and he drew a deep breath in, straightening his shoulders squarely, like he was at attention. A cloud passed over the muted sun.
“What are you doing with my information, sir?”
Cornwall turned suddenly.
“Your information simply pointed us in the direction of something we were searching for since 1940.”
Barnsby’s confusion let silence fill the room. The ticking of the huge clock rang against the dusty bookshelves and empty fireplace.
“What do you mean?”
Cornwall gave Alan Barnsby a small, deprecating smile.
“In 1940, I was still rebuilding my stable of talents from the disaster...but then you wouldn’t know about it. It was before your time, even before PISCES itself was formed—but the outlines of the division had already been established, and things were going well, until the disaster of 1925.” With a sweeping gesture Cornwall flattened his thin, blond, oil-slicked hair. Sweat stood on his brow in tiny beads.
“Disaster, sir?” Something dark moved in Barnsby’s gut, like the shadow of a memory.
“Let me ask you, Alan. In the spring of 1925, when you were fourteen years of age, do you recall any odd occurrences in your life?” Cornwall gathered the photographs on his table together, pushing them roughly into a accordion folder.
“It’s in my file, sir. You know all about the nightmares...” Even fifteen years later they leapt back without hesitation. The black dreams which had swept over his life. Like a tidal wave of sewage they had spilled into his adolescent nights, corroding and rotting everything good in his mind. During those dark days young Barnsby had stumbled about his life, drawn and ill, while at night a voice so deep and resonant Barnsby could feel it in his bones called to him from a place so terrible its burial at the bottom of an ocean was not enough to stop its power. A dead city in the absolute black of the sea, the shuffling of drowned monstrous forms stirring from the miles of filth on the bottom. Creatures, heralds of the end of man, swimming up towards the sun, and what was worse—in the dreams he was there too, straining for the upper air, lungs bursting with effort. Barnsby had kept what he could to himself in those days, his sanity draining away as the voice grew more insistent and the city crept closer in his mind. Finally he had gone into fits on the last night of the dreams and was taken to a doctor. He drifted in and out of consciousness for eight hours. When he woke, the veil which had fallen over his life was gone. It was that plain. An invisible but very real weight was lifted from his mind.
Beyond that night the dreams had never recurred.
“Barnsby?” Major Cornwall was saying.
“Yes. Sorry.”
“I see you remember the dreams. Those same dreams struck my pool of talents in 1925. Two died. Five went irretrievably mad, eleven others left the service for good. You suffered the same dreams as a young man. It is now how we test for the ‘real McCoy,’ as the Americans might put it. Nightmares in the spring of 1925 equals psychic talent. The dreams seem to be indicative of genuine psychic ability.”
“But what did the dreams mean, sir?”
“I don’t believe that is germane at the moment. In any case, I’m not sure you will want to know. I was speaking of our search for talents in the 1940s...”
“Well...I’m...go on, sir, I’m sorry.” Barnsby’s anger had somehow drifted away. He was now held rapt by the narrative. He leaned forward.
“Where was I? Yes. The recovery of our resources in the 1930s. We searched the globe for ‘talents’ to replace those we had lost in the debacle of 1925. In the crown colonies and abroad. One of particular interest was discovered in Darwin, Australia, in 1940. Lawrence Hutchins was his name. He made a living by predicting world events for second-rate spiritualist magazines, and he was strikingly accurate, at least for a time. We became interested in Hutchins—”
“So he was a precognitive, like Mr. Briggs or Miss Chalmers?”
“No.” Cornwall leaned down and removed a file from his front desk drawer. It was sitting at the front of the drawer as if Cornwall had perused it recently, or perhaps he knew this confrontation with Barnsby was coming. Barnsby did not need to use his talent to guess which circumstance it was. Cornwall was one of the brightest men he had ever known. Next to the workings of Cornwall’s mind, Barnsby felt like a child playing chess with a master.
“I don’t think I understand, sir.”
“Hutchins, it was discovered, had somehow come upon a cache of...books. Odd books. Old...books.” Cornwall removed an aged, coffee-stained photograph from the file and placed it on the table in front of Barnsby.
Barnbsy’s memories of the library at the dawn of time rose unchecked in his mind, a flood of images linked to the one Cornwall had placed on the table. The photo showed a hinged grey box, with a looping hieroglyphic-like scrawl in an unknown language embedded in its silver-grey metallic cover. But Barnsby knew what it meant. He knew the alien sigil represented humankind. Barnsby could still recall opening such a box in the vast silences of the library at Pnakotus to read the handwritten text within, one hundred and fifty million years before. He stood suddenly and stepped back from the table and the photograph, as if something had just startled him. His thin, glove-covered hand trembled in the air. As he noticed the tremor, Barnsby ran his hand up his face and through his hair, as if to calm his trembling fingers. He stared with wide-eyed amazement at the photo, as if it would disappear if he blinked, like he was looking at something unreal which had somehow materialized simply because of him.
“Now you see why I did not wish to involve you?”
“It’s all real, isn’t it?” Barnsby breathed, but Cornwall continued, unmindful of the interruption.
“Our investigation, it was...convoluted, but needless to say, our tests revealed Hutchins as a fake. He was involved in some type of cult and when we searched his home we discovered his—” Cornwall cleared his throat “—library.” Another photo fell to the table: a cluttered, filthy apartment strewn with dirty cups and beer bottles, stacks of cheap magazines and stained clothing. In one corner, carefully set apart from the mundanites, a three-tiered stack of the alien volumes shoved against a peeling plaster wall. Barnsby’s initial thought chilled him to the bone: They are supposed to be stacked side by side. He shook it off, silencing the voice of the dead Professor Peaslee in his mind.
“What—um
. Sir. What did you find?” Barnsby felt his voice tremble as he spoke.
“In Hutchins’ collection of books? Books exactly like the alien books you described in your brief? Nothing of direct use, really. Most were written in human languages using oversized characters. Some in languages we could not identify. Others were empty.” Cornwall lit a cigarette and flipped through the file on the table.
“What...was in them, sir?” Barnsby sputtered, as the broken filaments of a dead man’s memories played across his mind. 1945, atomic weapons, the final war. The whispers faded into the darkness of his mind as he clutched at them, leaving him with only a dim feeling of predestination, a feeling of huge creatures shaping his destiny with alien, antiseptic thoughts that he could never understand, only blindly serve.
Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy Page 24
