by Kate Danley
Fortunately, help was closer than she thought. Matt and Tanis were already searching the campus for her when they heard the fire alarm. The sound led them to the Earth Sciences building, where they saw smoke pouring from a first-floor window.
As they stepped into the lobby, six students attacked. A heavily muscled guy charged at Tanis with a dagger. His face was as blank as those of the attackers at the lab. She twisted out of the way and used her hammer to knock the knife out of his hand. He turned and punched her.
Pain exploded across the right side of her face as she reeled back. She’d been slapped before, but never punched. It really fucking hurt. Muscles retrieved his dagger and tried to stab her in the throat. She ducked below the strike and slammed the hammer into his knee. He swayed but managed to shift his weight to the other leg. Tanis cracked that kneecap, too. The guy toppled.
Another bolt of pain shot through her injured arm as someone grabbed it and yanked her back. Tanis turned to see a butcher knife coming at her neck. She caught the blade with the claw end of her hammer. The young woman holding the knife was at least six inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than Tanis, with a bad bleach job. She pressed the blade closer as Tanis tried to push it back with her weaker left arm. Her right arm was screaming in the young woman’s steely grip. Blondie leaned in, forcing the knife even closer, the strain barely disturbing her calm expression. The edge of the blade grazed Tanis’ neck. She just wasn’t strong enough to stop it. So she head-butted the girl.
Tanis felt her opponent’s nose break. More importantly, she felt the force on the knife lessen for a moment. She shoved the blade away with all the strength she could summon. At the same time, she hooked her leg around the young woman’s and pulled.
Blondie fell back, digging her nails into Tanis’ punctured arm to keep her balance. They both fell. Tanis slammed her hammer into the handle of the butcher knife, breaking several of the girl’s fingers. She let go of the knife. Tanis tried to grab it, but her useless right hand wouldn’t close. She kicked it away instead. Blondie reached for the weapon, but Tanis took her down with a hammer strike to the temple. She hit the girl one more time to be sure she was out.
The damn fire alarm continued to shriek as she went back to Muscles. He was a determined guy, making futile efforts to stand on two broken knees. When Tanis got within reach, he stabbed at her with the dagger. She moved behind him and hit the back of his head. He fell over but just kept trying to get back up. Two more strikes made him lie still. Tanis knew that Matt would want her to keep going until he was dead. But he was a kid, for Chrissakes, maybe eighteen or nineteen years old. She had neutralized the threat. That would have to be enough.
Tanis realized she had a clear path down the hall, to go find Heather. She turned back to Matt, who was fending off three more students with his ax. He’d already killed one guy, who lay in a rapidly spreading pool of blood with part of his head missing. Matt didn’t need her help. Heather did.
CHAPTER FORTY
It wasn’t hard for Tanis to figure out where Heather had taken refuge. It had to be behind the door with smoke leaking out around the edges and a brainwashed student standing guard. Tanis charged at the young man, who looked thin and not too intimidating until he held up a baseball bat wrapped in rusty barbed wire. He swung it at her in a smooth, well-practiced motion. Tanis ducked and the spiked bat hit the wall beside her, smashing through the drywall.
She backed towards the office door. It was too hot to touch. “Heather! You in there?” she called, then jumped aside as the student took another swing. The force of the blow drove a metal barb into the door, where it got stuck for a moment. Tanis struck him behind the ear. He swayed for a moment, then recovered and yanked the weapon loose.
She barely heard a ragged voice from inside the office. “I’m here!” This was followed by a violent coughing fit. It sounded painful, but at least it meant Heather was alive.
“I’m coming!” shouted Tanis, not at all sure how she was going to do that. Her right eye was rapidly swelling shut. The student was bleeding from the head wound she’d inflicted, but it wasn’t enough. He raised the bat and brought it down towards her skull. She dodged aside. As he bent forward with the momentum of his strike, Tanis leapt onto his back.
She locked her legs around the guy’s waist and hooked her right elbow around his neck. That part of her bad arm still worked, anyway. Her left hand was free to smash the hammer into the top of his head. He slammed her back against the wall. It drove the breath out of her, but she refused to be shaken loose. Tanis hit him again.
The young man swung the bat over his shoulder, landing a blow on Tanis’ back. The barbed wire tore into her skin. She hung on and drove the hammer into his skull even harder. He fell to his knees. She struck him again. And again. Finally, he toppled forward and hit the floor, dropping the spiked bat.
Tanis disentangled herself from the limp body and hurried to the door. “You can come out! It’s okay!”
There was no answer. Tanis covered her hand with the bottom of her T-shirt and grabbed the knob. It turned, but the door opened only a few inches before hitting something solid. “Heather?” she called again.
Heather tried to answer, but the increasingly thick smoke made it almost impossible to breathe. She struggled to drag the desk back. It moved half an inch. Then she had to gasp for air again, only to burst into another fit of coughing.
She heard a solid thud on the door. But it wasn’t the students this time. It was Tanis, swinging the bat as hard as she could with one functional arm. Another blow and the wooden door began to splinter. She kept hitting it, creating a small hole, then a bigger one. Smoke poured out. Tanis inhaled a lungful and started coughing herself, but she didn’t stop battering the door until she heard Heather say, “Wait.”
She held back. The opening didn’t look big enough, but Heather somehow squeezed her head and shoulders through. Tanis grabbed her outstretched arm and pulled. She dropped into the hallway, choking and wheezing.
“Are you all right?” asked Tanis.
Heather nodded, coughed some more, then looked at Tanis’ swollen face and the blood-soaked bandanna on her arm. “Are you?”
Tanis smiled. But they weren’t safe yet. She handed Heather the spiked bat and picked up her hammer. “Come on.”
They headed back to the lobby. Tanis wasn’t surprised to see that Matt had already dispatched two more of the attacking students. Their bodies lay on the floor, blood streaming from gaping ax wounds. One of them was missing both hands.
The last student, a red-haired guy with freckles that made him look all of twelve years old, wasn’t giving up. He moved like a dancer, smoothly avoiding the swipe of the ax blade as he darted in closer to slash at Matt with a pair of garden shears. Matt twisted out of the way, then rammed the base of the ax handle into the younger man’s jaw.
Tanis charged at the student. He flicked a glance at the new threat. Matt took advantage of the distraction to strike. The ax blade bit deeply into the young man’s abdomen. He bent forward but didn’t fall. Matt pulled the ax free. The student straightened and took half a step forward, as if still determined to continue the fight. The wound in his gut gaped open, spilling out a rope of intestine. Tanis fought a strong urge to vomit. Matt didn’t seem bothered at all. His face looked just as blank as the students’, or the attackers’ at the lab. He killed the freckled kid with an efficient chop to the base of the skull.
“We should go,” he told the women.
But as he passed the muscular guy Tanis had knocked out, the kid suddenly sat up and jammed the dagger into Matt’s thigh. Matt fell, landing awkwardly on the marble. The student reached for the ax and actually got hold of the handle for a moment before Matt drove an elbow into his throat. As the kid choked, Matt retrieved his ax and brought it down on his skull.
It happened so fast that Tanis barely had time to start towards them before it was over. Matt pulled the dagger out of his leg with a grimace and turned on Tanis. “You
said you could do this,” he shouted. “You have to put them down so they stay down!”
“They’re not rabid dogs. They’re people,” she countered.
“Not anymore.” He took a few limping steps to the unconscious blond girl and planted the ax between her eyes. The girl’s head split open, spilling out a mass of red jelly that had been her brain. Heather let out a shocked gasp.
Tanis faced Matt. “Is that what you tell yourself? That the people you kill aren’t even people anymore?”
He held her angry stare. “Once evil takes hold of someone, the person inside is dead.”
“And evil is evil, right? Doesn’t matter if the bad guys are walking corpses or brainwashed kids. Doesn’t matter if there might be a way to bring them back. Put an ax through their heads. Matt saves the day.”
“You think I do this for my own ego?” he demanded.
“I think you like being the hero. Even better, the tragic hero. Forced to do things like this.” She waved a hand at the dead girl at his feet. “In a never-ending fight.”
Smoke drifted into the lobby as the fire alarm kept screaming. Matt looked at the room full of corpses and the lake of blood spreading across the marble.
“I do want it to end,” he told her, and set down his ax. “Before I die inside.”
Tanis stared at him, anger giving way to shock. “You want me to…”
“You promised,” Matt said calmly.
She felt the hammer in her hand like a lead weight. It would be no simple task to kill him, she knew. She thought of Jake, and Matt’s seemingly impassive reaction to killing his friend. Had he really lost some essential part of his humanity? And who the hell was she to decide? She’d barely passed Psych 101. Now she was supposed to look into this man’s soul and judge whether or not he deserved to live?
He just stood there, waiting. She had her answer. “If you’re willing to let some girl kill you to stop you from becoming a monster, you’re not there yet.”
She tucked the hammer into the belt loop of her jeans. “Let’s get out of here.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
They went out through a side door as the first fire truck arrived. Tanis saw Matt trying not to limp on his right leg, which was still bleeding heavily. “You should get a bandage on that,” she said. “If you pass out, you’re too damn heavy to carry.”
They went into the next building and found an open classroom. Large white letters on the chalkboard cautioned students, Term paper due Monday. No excuses! The three of them sat by the windows. The expected crowd of spectators was gathering to watch the firefighters tackling the blaze.
Matt unzipped his duffel and pulled out a first aid kit, bandages, and painkillers. Tanis made a mental note to start carrying her own medical supplies. He opened a plastic bottle, took out a few pills, and handed it to Tanis. She poured half a dozen into her hand and swallowed them, wincing at the pain in her swollen, throbbing face.
“Try this.” Matt held out an instant ice pack. Their conversation in the Earth Sciences building, where he’d asked her to kill him and she’d actually considered it, was clearly in the past.
“Thanks.” Tanis took the pack and squished it in her hands to activate it, then gratefully pressed it to her face.
Matt turned to Heather, who was brooding quietly a few seats away. “Are you hurt?”
“No. They hardly touched me. What matters is the ship…The dromon left from Theodosia, officially bound for Byzantium. But the Byzantine lords were paying for the trip, and they told the captain to take them to a small island called Tyrenos. The island was destroyed a few centuries later in an earthquake, but at the time, it held a temple dedicated to a god called Moloch.”
Tanis couldn’t help asking, “Moloch? Like in Mortal Kombat?”
“Yes.” Heather smiled. “But the original Moloch was usually depicted with the head of a bull. He was worshipped by the Canaanites in biblical times. He’s even mentioned in Leviticus. God warns the Israelites not to sacrifice their children to Moloch, as the Canaanites were doing. Moloch demanded sacrifice by fire.” Her smile had disappeared.
Tanis took a moment to process the horror of this. Heather continued, “The lords went to the temple to make a blood pact with Moloch, granting them and their descendants the power to rule all men.”
“That would explain the woman at the lab. She was definitely ‘ruling’ those people,” said Matt. “And she had the same glowing eyes as the lords on the dromon.”
“You saw one of the Descendants.” Heather felt the thrill of discovery, despite the circumstances. “The glowing eyes could mark their bloodlines, the inheritors of power—”
Tanis objected, “But Brett had eyes like that, too. I’m part of the same bloodline he is. And I can’t control shit.”
“You died, remember? That changes all the rules,” said Matt. He had cut open the fabric of his jeans to reveal the stab wound and was taping a wad of gauze over it.
She wasn’t quite convinced. “So why is this power just showing up now?”
“The dromon. This whole nightmare started when we raised the ship.” Heather looked away from them as she spoke. “He warned me, you know? Captain Marco kept telling me that we shouldn’t disturb the wreck, that I didn’t understand what I was dealing with. But I knew better. I was the scientist.”
Tanis recognized the tone of self-reproach. She put a hand on Heather’s arm. “It’s not your fault. There’s no way you could have expected any of this.”
“The university did,” said Matt. “They funded the salvage. They knew what would happen when the dromon docked.”
Tanis remembered Dr. Dorcott telling them they had arrived just in time for the Apocalypse. She had also suggested that she might be a Descendant. Tanis considered that pretty unlikely after what the dead lords had done to her. “They knew about the pact and the power to rule. They’re working with the Descendants,” she realized. “Brainwashing other people to kill their enemies.”
She stopped as she heard something in the hallway. Footsteps. The others heard it, too. Matt moved quietly to the classroom door and stood against the wall beside it, ax at the ready. Tanis and Heather crouched behind the desk at the front of the room. Tanis held her claw hammer and Heather gripped the barbed-wire-wrapped bat.
The door opened and a young woman looked in. She saw the duffel bag and knapsack by the window and went closer to investigate. In one hand, she carried a glass triangle with writing etched on it. Tanis realized it was some kind of award, repurposed as a weapon.
Matt came up behind the woman and swung the ax into her neck. The blade didn’t cut all the way through, but it did sever her spinal cord. She fell.
Now Tanis saw the second student, just outside the door. He opened his mouth and started to call out “Here!”
She threw the hammer at him. It flew end over end and struck the side of his jaw, cutting off his cry. She ran at the guy and tackled his legs, pulling him down. He kept hold of the brick he’d been carrying and tried to hit her with it. But Heather was there, slamming the bat into his head. The student went limp. Tanis quickly retrieved her hammer, ready to hit him again, but he was out.
Heather nodded at the hammer. “Nice shot.”
Tanis smiled. “You, too.”
Matt looked out the window to see whom the kid had been shouting to. The academic quad wasn’t very crowded on a Saturday, so it was easy to spot the search parties. Two young women circled the Arts building, peering in windows and behind trees. Another pair of students searched the parking lot, stooping to check under every car, while a third pair went into the library.
He grabbed their stuff and joined Tanis and Heather. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Bremerton Docks
Ever since the mysterious Byzantine ship had arrived at the Bremerton docks, curious people had been showing up to gawk. But this group was different. There were nine of them, all wearing pajamas and nightgowns, as if they’d evacuated a burning apartme
nt building in the middle of the night. They arrived on foot and walked silently towards the dromon.
Wilson, Carrie, and Lowell had established an observation post on the third-floor patio of a restaurant overlooking the docks. After the ship sent out that brilliant burst of light, they’d been watching it for any more extraordinary activity, but it had been behaving itself. These new arrivals got their attention.
The group reached the dromon and stopped. One of them, a boy of about fourteen, told two of the men, “Get a ladder.”
They promptly obeyed, heading down the dock until they found a boating supply store. It was closed. One of the men tried the door, which was locked. The other man picked up a broken chunk of asphalt and smashed the front window with it. The two of them climbed into the store. In a minute, they opened the door and came out carrying a ladder.
During all of this activity, the men’s expressions remained completely blank. “Looks like they’ve been hypnotized or something,” said Wilson.
“Or something,” Carrie agreed.
As they brought the ladder back to the dromon, a dock security guard ran up to them. “What do you think you’re doing? Stop!”
The boy came forward to intercept the guard. He had to look up at the taller man, and now the freaks could see his eyes. They glowed an eerie yellow, just like the light from the ship.
“I’m not the only one who sees that, right?” asked Carrie.
“No,” Lowell assured her.
The teenager put a friendly hand on the guard’s arm and assured him, “There’s no problem.” The man’s tense posture relaxed and his face went slack. He stayed where he was as the boy joined the two men. Under his direction, they rested one end of the ladder on the dock and leaned the other against the railing of the ship.
The men held the ladder steady as the yellow-eyed boy climbed. He stepped onto the deck of the dromon and turned back to the people waiting below. “All aboard,” he told them, almost cheerfully.
