Three dead natives lay in the clearing. One, spread eagle near a tree, had a near perfect hole through his face, like an apple which had been cored. A second lay on his back peacefully, one arm lazily draped across his chest, a chest which was no longer heaving, thanks to the neat hole punched through it. The third native was a mess; his face and chest had been seared by some sort of flame, and his black skin had been charred to a barbecue-like crustiness. His lower jaw was gone, removed violently in what looked like a shrapnel wound.
In the fight, Rai could recall the third native retreating back a dozen or more steps from Arnold, lifting a silver cylinder from the floor of the jungle and turning to face him, his face lit by the sickly green glow of the strange lamp. Then, nothing.
“Where is the lamp now?” Rai mumbled to himself, surprised at the weakness in his own voice.
Lieutenant Arnold was not in the clearing and neither was the odd, glowing box the natives had placed on his chest. As the light of the morning became more pronounced, Rai could spy footprints from the center of the clearing, heading off in the muddy earth to the northeast. Bootprints.
Arnold was gone.
Rai lifted his right hand slowly, already half-knowing what he would see there. He did not scream when the ruined hand came into view. All but two fingers had been blown from it, and the skin, once a clear brown, had been burned to a deep black, split in places to reveal a meaty, sickly red. He knew without looking that the other hand was in a similar state.
The native had...shot him with the silver cylinder somehow. It was some sort of electrical device. Rai recalled the gunpowder in the unused rounds in his pistols igniting as the electricity flowed through him. Now, suddenly, Rai could recall the entire incident as if he had observed it from outside himself.
He had charged the third man, bringing his guns to bear on him, and the native had scuttled away from the center of the clearing, fumbling for a long, thin, silver tube which the native brought forward in a sloppy hold beneath his arm like a folded umbrella. Rai raised both pistols to fire and the flash happened. His Webley was the first to explode, ripping his right hand to shreds and leaping from his grip like something alive. Fragments of the barrel shot forward into the neck of the native, cleaving through it. Rai’s fingers were thrown into the air by the force of the blast like party favors. The pain shot through him, head to toe, and began to throb into his mind, erasing all thought within it.
Then the .45 went, a terrible explosion, tearing into his arm and hand suddenly, just as the pain of the first wound was fading beneath shock. The explosion, which sounded like a harsh, short cough, sent a lick of belching flame forward to the native’s head as he goggled at the blood pouring from his neck in a fatal spray. The fire licked the native’s face and eyes and he collapsed backwards, writhing on the ground. The blast had shot forward, and not back—otherwise Rai would be dead as well.
Rai fell too, but could not recall his body finding the ground. He had lain unconscious for minutes or hours. There was no way to be sure, but the light had come and he had survived the night. He could see what he had accomplished.
Directly in front of his eyes, the bootmarks led off to the northeast, towards the city.
The natives all were barefooted.
Arnold had made it!
Rai felt an ebb of energy enter him. The feeling of completing some great task filled him. The feeling of returning from a nearly endless journey. This warm glow surrounded his body and permeated him, until the pain in his hands was nothing more than a numbness—at least for a moment. His need to right the situation had proven more fruitful than he could have imagined. Despite his wounds, Rai could not stop smiling.
An hour passed with him lying still, propped up on a tangle of roots, ruined hands resting on his blood-soaked lap, a smile lighting his round face.
Finally, with a grunt and slight shift, Rai pulled one leg beneath himself and slowly, with great effort, stood. The world rocked and swayed in front of him, but he somehow, through some amazing force of will, maintained his balance.
First some morphine from the medical kit, he thought, then back to the Lomela River for whatever equipment he could carry in his state, then on to Itoko and what passed for civilization in the Congo.
His wounds could not stop him now; he had things to do. If he didn’t make it back, who would tell the Americans their man was on his way to somehow complete his mission?
He could not stop smiling.
“I have learned much, grandfather, so much...“ the little Gurkha mumbled, and plodded off into the jungle to the southwest in a morphine haze.
INTERLUDE 7:
A song for the last act
March 14, 1943: Somewhere near Itoko, Belgian Congo
John Smith crouched over the sigil it had spent the last five hours drafting in chalk. Intricate curves, parallels, squares, ellipses and circles contained within a single enormous oval, rendered with exacting care in the exact center of the grey city. The alien science it represented was eons beyond modern man, and yet had been perfected millions of years before man’s rise to prominence. The lines seemed to float above the dark, grey stone and push out at its borders, shrinking and growing depending on which direction they were observed from.
Smith squatted in front of it like a toad, considering the interrelationships of the thousands of intersections of lines. The proportional relationship of the circles to the squares. The way the looping ellipse of the edge made the stone it was drawn upon seem almost warped. With nothing but chalk lines on rock Smith had changed space itself—a simple enough task for a creature native to the dimension of time. Time was the element here, and it could be shifted by changing space, for the two were interwoven. Here below the city, time was so warped that it looped back upon itself. Beneath the great ward, which is what the grey city truly was, time did not proceed and the Great Enemy was entombed forever in the bowels of the Earth.
John Smith knew how to restore time here to its natural rhythm. It had spent years in this wild era perfecting the complicated art. It had suffered through countless discomforts, misunderstandings and, above all, immense loneliness for its own kind. The human “civilization,” which did not even begin to touch upon the perfection of Pnakotus, was traumatic to experience even in limited doses. It was nothing more than a million mistaken biological paths leading only to chaos, despite all its attempts to organize itself into patterns resembling the orders of the past. The human feeling of “morality,” the endless struggle for some perfection which the humans knew could never come—this order was embedded in the very fabric of creation. Humans cities imitated Pnakotus, imitated its art and science and morality, but this was nothing more than genetic memory, protein recollections of a time when man was a more base and wild creature ruled by beings native to time. Ruled by the Great Race. The dim stirrings of gods, magic, and morality all came from this place in the Congo, from the city, from the white apes which would lead to mankind.
Still, the nature of perfection is, by necessity, stagnant. And anything was better than a frozen, never-ending order. Even chaos, in its own way, was beautiful.
It stood and the noise of its shuffling feet reflected back at Smith off the endless stone faces, drawing its attention up from the sigil. When the noise died, behind those fading echoes, another sound was dancing down those same corridors of stone. More distant, but more distinct.
At first it thought perhaps the phantom noise was a trick of acoustics, but then Smith clearly heard the voice.
“Doctor!” The voice echoed down the stone streets, playing off a million different surfaces, reflecting back, growing and diminishing in power. It was the voice of the human, Thomas Arnold. Smith considered its options. Soon enough it would have to begin the noisy ritual, which would certainly draw the human to the location of the sigil. There was no way to complete the necessary ritual without attracting attention, and then... Physically, the shell Smith inhabited was no match for Arnold, and Smith had shed all advanced t
echnology some time before in order to elude its pursuers, so it was also no match for Arnold’s primitive weaponry.
But why would the human search for Smith in such a manner? Why not stalk the streets silently until it came upon the alien? Because, most likely, Arnold had no idea that Smith was an alien. Arnold was at a supreme disadvantage.
Smith decided it could conceal its intentions by going to Arnold and dispatching him after had it gained his trust.
Smith followed the voice up the vast, canyon-like streets of the ancient necropolis. He came upon Arnold standing in an intersection of streets, next to a small series of ascending pillars. Arnold’s back was to a pyramid which dwarfed all human attempts to imitate it. It was obvious Arnold was injured, but Smith knew little of human anatomy. Blood had been drawn and had dried on Arnold’s shoulder, staining his ripped khaki shirt a deep crusty purple, but what did this mean? Smith had never been injured in human form before. Would Arnold perish on his own, without assistance? Or was the dried blood a sign that his body would heal from its injury?
Smith did not know.
What it did know was that it had no chance in a direct confrontation with such a creature as Arnold, a human trained extensively to kill other humans. It would have to rely on subterfuge.
Arnold held nothing except the same chemical emulsion camera he had carried on the flight across the ocean. Smith was quite familiar with these devices. In Darwin, Smith had used them to document many of the books from the library of Pnakotus, rather than taking the books with him, since that would have allowed the assassins to track its progress.
Smith could see no weapons on Arnold, just a small hip pouch which was too restrictive to carry anything offensive. Then, as Arnold turned, still searching for Smith, preparing to shout again, Smith saw the knife on the human’s belt.
“Doctor!?” The voice echoed down the abandoned streets.
A knife was a simple cutting implement with which Smith was familiar in the most basic sense. Humans were vulnerable to such instruments. Poor evolution had lead to an upright, bipedal stature, exposing organs to assault. Such an instrument could prove useful in close quarters.
A plan began to form in Smith’s mind.
“I am here, Lieutenant Arnold,” Smith shouted back, watching Arnold spin around suddenly to locate its voice.
Arnold’s face held little emotion. “Doctor. I was concerned. We were separated during the... assault.” The human held his hands out in an odd gesture. It was the most Arnold had ever said to Smith.
Smith flexed his mouth muscles, imitating the human custom of smiling, and showed his empty hands. Arnold trotted over to Smith and stopped, considering it from top to bottom. What a foolish custom, smiling, baring one’s teeth to show good nature. Idiocy. Random genetic lunacy.
“You are uninjured?” Arnold asked quietly, glancing over Smith’s shoulder.
“Yes.” Smith replied smugly.
The distant sounds of the jungle played in the empty streets.
“Lieutenant Arnold, perhaps we can use you chemical emulsion camera to record this moment in time.”
Some unrecognizable emotion played across Arnold’s face for a brief second. Smith could not even be sure it had even seen the slight change in Arnold’s countenance. Then Arnold fiddled with the camera for a moment, and smiled blandly at Smith.
“No one else from the...group survived, then?” Arnold asked, his voice empty of emotion.
“No. I am the last. The explosives are lost as well.”
“Let’s take the photograph,” Arnold muttered, placing the camera on a stump-like stone pillar which rose to his chest in height. As Arnold turned his back to adjust the camera, Smith’s eyes played greedily across the hilt of his knife.
Arnold returned to pose next to Smith. The two men stood with their backs against the wall of an immense stone pyramid which rose hundreds of feet into the air. A clicking sound, like a timer, could be heard chattering away from the camera box.
Smith’s right hand slowly began to shift towards Arnold’s belt.
The alien saw too late the oddity in the camera, something it never had the chance to look at closely before. The lens of the device was a strange, luminescent green. Smith’s hand froze inches from the hilt of the knife.
Like a snake striking, Arnold’s hands clamped down with frightening strength on Smith’s right wrist, then his left. The smaller, older Smith struggled vainly in Arnold’s grip, but the two men shifted slightly in front of the camera as it continued to click away seconds.
“It is not a real camera device! It is a trap!” Smith shrieked. Inside its mind a million ideas meshed into one overriding fear. It would be gone. Its mind would be gone from all time, and its mission would be left uncompleted.
“I know,” the thing in Arnold’s body replied evenly. “I constructed it.” Smith locked eyes with the assassin, seeing through the human shell for the first time. Although the alien did not know it, its human face contorted into a mask of rage.
“You,” Smith breathed.
“Yes. We have finally returned for you.”
A bright, white flash flared for the briefest moment.
Nothing remained of the two men after the flash, nothing but the tiny, camera-like device. It let out a small click, a hum, and then was silent, perched on the pillar like an artifact left on display in some bizarre outdoor museum.
As on a billion other days in the city where man was born, silence filled the avenues, and the animals which had learned to shun its streets continued their vigil in the jungles that crouched around the stones like a dense, green fog.
CHAPTER 28:
So even Hell has laws?
March 13, 1943: Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
As his vision and mind cleared, what Arnold first took for a ruined and cracked sky—some vast and crumbling firmament of heaven—turned out to be a fractured and fissured plaster ceiling, its white paint fading to sickly yellow with age and cigarette smoke. As his mind cleared enough to focus, something about the scale seemed wrong. The ceiling hung above him unnaturally, like an omen.
The ceiling was immense. It went on and on. Portions of it, water-soaked and crumbling, had sagged, revealing between the fissures the rib-work of the floor above.
Something very bad had occurred. An explosion—he recalled that much. A jungle. Natives hunting him in the jungle.
The ceiling looked down on him with indifference. He could smell the acrid aroma of burning cardboard and the thin, clear stench of heated plastic in the freezing air. They were not the smells he expected. He expected either the hospital or the jungle; ammonia and sulfur or plants and dung, not burning plastic and cardboard and a giant’s room.
Thomas Arnold sat up. He found himself in a tremendous bed which shrieked as he moved, the springs inside the thin padding crying out like an insane chorus of birds. His legs were shrouded beneath a ragged and stained sheet, which may have once been white but had seen so much use that it was covered in various organic blotches which almost looked deliberate. He felt very strange, almost uncomfortable. But even that was not the right word. He had no pain, no apparent wounds he could feel.
Still, something was wrong.
The ceiling hung at least twelve feet above the floor of what appeared to be a bedroom in some type of tenement building. A door, normal in all aspects except its massive size, stood opposite him. The door, at least nine feet tall, was open a sliver, revealing a rich, yellow light from the room beyond. The bed, the door, the ceiling, even the windows which hung behind his head were terribly out of scale. Everything was built for a giant.
Footsteps interrupted his reverie.
A gigantic, swarthy-skinned man, nothing more than a backlit shadow broken by glinty eyes and a ring-filled hand, stood at the crack of the door, which to the giant seemed to be normally proportioned. The stranger’s eyes shifted over Arnold momentarily and then he was gone, transformed to rapidly diminishing footsteps on old wood floors. A distant door sl
ammed; a galloping sound of feet taking a series of steps two at a time from some far-removed stairwell.
Another distant door, somewhere below in Arnold’s nightmare, slammed shut.
He could feel the emptiness of the apartment. His breath flowed out in white plumes. Something about the prickling of his skin, the way his hair stood on end, the perfect and creamy white complexion of his arms resounded in his mind like a warning.
Something was wrong.
He wore no rings. His class rings were gone. His fingers looked plump, short, and held no deep creases, as if he had been in bed a long time and they had softened by the long convalescence—but his mind whispered to him that this was not the case. A coma, then? Something else about his hands were very wrong. Best not to think about it.
Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy Page 28
