She blinked, taking things in swiftly. A white room, small and clinical, which meant-
"We're in the bunker," she croaked. "How long has it been?"
"She needs to rest," Lucas said to Peters, plainly continuing an argument. "They won't do anything now, Inchcombe promised." He turned to her. "You almost burned your heart out, Anna, you have to-"
She kicked her legs out of the sheets.
"What's happening?"
"Movements outside," said Peters. "The bunker is changing hands, I think."
"I really think-" Lucas said, but then Anna was standing. Some things couldn't wait. She looked down at Jake, into his rimless and veiny eyes, taking in his pain and marking it as another factor in this long and brutal war, and nodded once. It was good he was alive, and there would be time for reunions later, but now she had business to do.
She strode to the door, holding Peters' arm. "Take me to her."
"You can barely walk," Lucas protested. "Stay and rest, help me with-"
She reached the door and swung it open.
Outside a young man was jogging with a rifle held at his side, in a plain white corridor with over half the ceiling lights dark. The air was humid and there was no hum of air conditioners.
He stopped when Anna opened the door, looking surprised to see her. He didn't know what to do. He took a step back and said, "I'm supposed to-" then Peters darted over and hit him. One punch to his nose, one into his solar plexus, and he went down.
"Get the gun," Anna said, already stumbling away down the corridor. "Seal that door, Lucas. He was looking for us."
Each step she tottered forward, she felt more of the flows of bodies ahead. There was coordinated movement, Peters was right. Something was happening.
The door slammed in back, then Peters was there at her side, taking some of her weight and propelling them on together.
"Inchcombe," Peters said as they hobbled forward. "She didn't lie, but she is losing control. I feel it."
"Tell me," said Anna, so he did.
A day and night had passed, and it had been touch and go with Anna for a time. Inchcombe had rallied, and the world above ground had continued with its mission of helping their own people injured in Amo's assault. Hundreds were dead, hundreds injured, hundreds more gone mad from whatever Amo did to them on the line, and there was no shortage of work required.
"Inchcombe moved us here in secret, in the night," Peters said. "For safety."
Anna gritted her teeth. "Was that her man in the corridor?"
"I think not."
They turned a corner and made for the bunker stairs. The layout was similar to Maine. At the stairwell they passed a blank-eyed man, still smeared with soot in a slash across his face, staring at a featureless point of a wall. As they went past Anna heard him muttering nonsense syllables underneath his breath.
"Many are like this," Peters said darkly.
Others were moving up and down the stairs, people from the bunker walking with supplies, walking with injured people. Many of them stopped to stare at Anna.
Of course they knew her. For months she'd held the threat of death over their heads, forcing passage of her treaty. Now there was this uneasy truce, but something was breaking. These people didn't know it, but they felt it too. A shifting mood that let them stare at her unafraid. Perhaps to them she looked like a devil. To Anna these were more casualties waiting to happen.
They climbed the stairs, Peters helping a lot. Sweat beaded on her brow and her body trembled. He spoke in a low voice as they climbed, explaining what had happened to Lucas, to Jake, how some of the others had been left in a ward above ground as a decoy, about the general recovery of order and Inchcombe's fading grasp on control.
"I saw them," Peters said softly, reaching floor minus 1. "Recruiting. I heard one of them talk about what you did. Anna, that is a power they fear. Every day more die, more in comas, more sick, and they blame you."
Anna hissed as her left leg seized in pain. Peters dragged her forward and she used the railing to stay upright. "What about Inchcombe?"
"She will not see me. She advises to stay here, below, through intermediaries. She is washing her hands of us, I feel."
Anna looked at his face. His skin was pale and worn too. "What have you been doing?"
"Working with Jake. Lucas tries to do his science, but he cries. He is guilty. Jake is angry. Then Jake is guilty, and Lucas is angry. I go between."
"And the others? Sulman, Macy?"
"Sick, broken. The people in that hangar, it was awful, Anna. They were too angry. At Amo. At you."
They reached the top of the flight of stairs. Here there were more people, gathering in a crowd that pushed steadily in the direction of the elevator. The air hummed with rising panic. Anna glimpsed a pair of soldiers with rifles, watching the crowd from the wall, and ducked her head down against Peters' chest, steering him deeper into the crowd.
People here were afraid and they didn't know why. They were being herded.
"Get us through," Anna whispered, and pulled her shirt up high at the back to cover her distinctive, frizzy black hair. Peters' grip was like iron around her shoulders, holding her firmly as he pushed into the crowd like the prow of a ship, splitting people smoothly to either side.
Anna heard whispers and felt signals shifting around her as she was seen, like the sun steadily sinking behind the horizon. The moment was coming, there would be no stopping it.
"Hey!" called a sharp male voice.
"Keep going," Anna whispered.
"He sees me," Peters said. "He knows me. I recognize him."
"Stop there! You, stop him, he's one of them."
The crowd around them, previously shuffling and sad and consumed with their own miseries, abruptly opened wide. Faces showed shock and scrabbled further away.
"Run," hissed Peters, and gave Anna a shove into the gap, then whirled and raised his rifle.
RATATATATAT
The sound of bullets filled the air with a cacophony, echoed by screams. Anna staggered forward and nearly fell. Her legs were too weak.
RATATATATAT rang out again, and people nearby dropped, and all hell broke loose as everyone tried to flee at once, forgetting that she was the enemy and just trying to get away from the gunfire.
Anna tumbled on the flow of bodies like a child in the arms of the Ocean; too weak to control her direction. Together they flowed like a wave down the corridor and burst into a large yellow hall, which Anna recognized by degrees, as she struggled to keep her feet beneath her; the video screens on the walls, the scent of flowers on the air. It was a double of the entrance hall of the Maine bunker, and took her back to years ago, listening in the front row while Amo was on trial and Witzgenstein declaimed against him. Now it was filled with terrified faces, clamoring to get away. On a swell in their movements Anna saw the elevator at the end, with two more soldiers guarding it, their rifles up.
She closed her eyes and reached down into the loam of the line, trying to remember what she'd done before in the mad night run, after seeing Jake screaming in the dark. It felt like plumbing a deep dark well, reaching through herself and twisting something inside out, even as heavy bodies collided with hers and the undertow dragged her down.
She fell and feet trampled over her, and she focused on channeling that well, in twisting the line, in sucking up the fuel and pouring it into her legs. A woman fell over her and landed on her back, driving the wind out of her lungs, but that didn't matter any more.
She didn't need air. She poured anger into her arms and shoved upwards, tossing the woman off and getting her feet under her. It took a second only to reorient herself, not in the pell-mell chaos of stampeding people, but in the flash and spray of signals. The ones with the guns were different, resolving like hot blemishes on her skin.
She charged.
Bodies peeled away before her, split by the arrowhead of will she poured three feet ahead, letting her stamp into the gap.
"Halt right there!" o
ne of the soldiers shouted, seeing her coming through the mulch of bodies, and leveled his weapon at her. Not for the first time she stared down the whorled barrel at a bullet.
And stopped it.
Now the well was pumping smoothly into her, filling her with strength, and it wasn't hard to mold that force into something familiar. With the right kind of control and a simple twist she turned the shape of her rage into an icy, stifling wall, just like she'd felt the very first time she saw a demon in the depths of Mongolia, and flung it at the soldiers ahead.
They froze. Their eyes showed fear but they didn't move. Their trigger fingers strained but didn't pull.
Anna sped up. Shouts and gunfire rang from behind, but there was no stopping now. She pumped the cold out like a shield, even as she cleared the last few feet and pushed past the two frozen soldiers, into the elevator.
Wild excitement flooded her. This was real and she was doing it now. She hit the call button and the doors chimed closed. Every eye in the frozen hall stared back at her, every eye terrified.
As they should be.
The doors closed and the carriage rose.
In the pocket vestibule, hung halfway between the Habitat below and the real world above, she poured more anger into her weary limbs and took to the ladder. Last night this had burnt her out, and it would so again, but she could tell she was getting better at it; sucking the anger out of others and using it as fuel as she passed.
With every rung up she felt the sense of what was coming from above more clearly, and drained it faster.
Then she was there, and there were two more soldiers at the top, skulking in the hot, stinking hangar, but the drain had already left them vacant, watching her with their weapons hanging slack.
Anna ran on.
Bodies still lay in the hangar's shadowy, wet heat, nestled in with little mounds of trash; plastic bottles, meal trays, rumpled towels and bedding. The smell of old sweat and urine filled the air, mixing with the stench of putrefying death.
She strode through the ranks of the sick, scanning the shadows and the opening beyond for more soldiers, but there weren't any yet.
"Anna," came a call from behind, and she saw Peters loping after her, limping but otherwise unharmed. "Where are we going to?"
"Montcliffe," she answered, and emerged from beneath the hood of the hangar, out onto the melting airport blacktop. The sun was high in a cloudless cobalt sky, beating heat down. Bodies still lay scattered on the runway; the dead in clusters as if gathering for warmth. Clouds of flies roamed and buzzed. Off to the right, past the curve of the terminal building, lay a large harvested heap.
Anna ran on and listened to the nearby signals, while Peters struggled to catch up. There were people in one of the nearby hangars equipping themselves with weaponry. There were people slowly dying in the makeshift above ground hospitals, suffering the failure of the line. There were others standing around a table, studying a map. The level of detail she was getting now was more than ever before, as if in its absence the hydrogen line had somehow opened up to her.
She looked for Inchcombe and found her in a baking cell; one of the prison huts they'd used for Lucas and the others, resurrected in the sun. She'd been beaten. Anna tasted blood in her mouth, and wondered that she was lucky not to already have been over-ridden. Montcliffe must be exercising an abundance of caution, with the earlier soldiers sent just to scout out where she was hiding.
"Anna?" said Peters. "Where?"
They were drawing stares again. Two men and one woman were standing guard by the entrance to the weaponry hangar, and they leveled their rifles toward her. Yes, there. She sent a probe ahead and felt Montcliffe in the thick of them. Angry. Working hurriedly. This was it.
It added up.
"We're in the middle of a coup," Anna said. "Montcliffe's coming for us now."
"How did you-"
Anna honed in before the first of the soldiers could fire, twisting off a chunk of ice and shaping it into a bullet, that flew out and dropped him where he stood.
The two remaining guards watched him go down with a second's disbelief, then tried to fire as well, but Anna dropped them with two more shots, pop pop, to the floor. The power was really humming in her now. She wasn't even thinking, just doing, surfing the surge intuitively just as she'd learned to race catamaran on the ocean. There were tides and flows and she rode them better than anyone.
"How did you do that?" Peters called out.
Anna shifted her flows and began to sprint.
There were seventeen signals in the dark of the hangar ahead. She ran under the lip of the wide entrance and circled round a stack of large crates, to emerge into the midst of them as they prepared for combat; putting on black tactical gear similar to the uniforms worn by the ones in Istanbul city center. A range of strange helmets sat on a table beside them, some matte black and others like ancient diving bells similar to what Salle Coram had worn.
Montcliffe stood in the middle, a powerful man dictating his most trusted troops, amongst whom were the five who'd pulled the skin off Jake; she recognized them not by their faces but by the stink of their signals in the absence of the line. In their hands were rifles, grenades in long rolls, even a flamethrower, ready to come kill her and her people.
They saw Anna and their faces paled. Their weapons spun around like a circular firing squad.
Anna waved a hand and cold shot out of her like a bomb, freezing them in place. Only Montcliffe went untouched, his jaw dropping as the strings of all his people were cut. There wasn't anything any of them could do. They hadn't grown up in the arms of the Ocean, faced off with demons as a teen, lived through the explosion of a leper that broke the line. They just weren't prepared.
"You can't do that," he said, as Anna stepped up to him, the slightest note of a whine entering his voice, as if he'd just caught her cheating at Monopoly. "How can you-"
"It's done," Anna said, passing by the table of helmets. "Get used to it. Put your gun down."
He looked down at the gun in his hand. He'd forgotten it was there. His face flicked from shock to an ugly snarl, and he raised the gun smoothly as he spoke.
"I should have killed you the moment we had you."
Anna froze his hand with a thought.
"Yes," she said, "you should have," then covered the last few yards and knocked him out with a solid punch in the real world, a right cross across his jaw. He dropped.
For a moment Anna stood at the head of his frozen people, looking out at their wild, terrified eyes. Yes, it wasn't fair. Yes this wasn't what they expected, but she was going to show them a hell of a lot more mercy than they ever would have shown her.
"Stop fighting me," she said. "I'm not fighting you. Open your eyes."
At that moment Peters came running in, panting round the boxes. He stopped at the edge of the ring, like the final statue in the full-size diorama, and stared with disbelief at them, at Anna, at Montcliffe on the floor.
"Anna, how did you-"
"Can you please tie these people up?" Anna said, not willing to waste another moment.
"But how did you… I've never…"
"Please, Peters," Anna said, already starting back through the hangar toward him. "I can't hold them like this forever. I'll explain everything soon. But please, do this for me now."
He looked at her, into her eyes and past the new demon-like aura she exuded, and she tried to show him the real Anna inside, who she'd always been, just altered, and he nodded.
"Good. Yes. Of course."
"Thank you," she said, rested a hand on his shoulder as she passed by, then continued swiftly out.
The air was dead silent outside. Anyone watching had tucked themselves away. Good. It was time to sort this place out.
She ran toward one of the hospital tents. The signal was clear and bright there, shining in the absence of the line like a lighthouse.
It was stuffy and smelled of gangrene inside the tent. Doctors and nurses called to each other in quiet, h
arried tones, their white aprons marred with blood and soot still. How long had they been working like this, saving lives? In the corner a man worked at a sputtering air conditioning unit. People on beds watched her dimly pass by. Blood streaked the canvas ceiling.
Anna advanced through their ranks, drawing no attention, toward a doctor in the middle who was intent upon an incision in a patient's abdomen, extracting a fragment of what looked like rubber. It was a young woman. Across her chest Anna picked out the unmistakable marks of tire treads.
Amo.
She waited while the operation continued. The doctor was skillful, precise, though she had to be exhausted. Her concentration did not break until the last shreds of rubber were extracted, the wound cleaned and sealed.
Then she turned to Anna, as if she'd known she'd been there all along, waiting.
"You," she said.
"Me," Anna answered.
It was the woman who'd saved Anna and her people the night before. She was young, perhaps twenty-four, with the same pale skin as the rest of the bunker people, bloodshot eyes, but a gritty resolve in the set of her mouth.
A moment passed.
"I heard something about a coup," the woman said. "Was that you?"
Anna smiled. "It is now, I suppose. Montcliffe was coming for me, trying to undo your work, and I couldn't have that."
The woman frowned. She was not impressed, nor afraid. Anna liked that.
"Dead? Injured?"
"Just unconscious."
The woman grunted. "It's not my business." Then she started to turn, but Anna caught her arm.
"It is your business. I need you."
The woman looked at the hand and frowned. "I have work here. Too much work."
Anna shook her head. "You're not helping anyone like this, in a tent in the baking sun without air conditioning, understaffed, under-resourced, getting by on probably no hours of sleep. That's bullshit and you know it. Inchcombe's out of her depth and your people won't listen to me, not after what I've done. They need someone strong and fair, and as far as I can see that's you."
The Lies (Zombie Ocean Book 8) Page 18
