The Way of Sorrows

by Jon Steele

  “Can you tell me what it means? Is it a password?” she asked him.

  The man stayed dead.

  “Guess not.”

  She stood up, looked back through the tunnel, then ahead. So far there’d been four bodies; four bodies from her side from the look of it. And though there were clear signs that dozens of attackers took head shots at point-blank range, not one of their bodies was anywhere to be found. Perhaps all of the attackers were gone. She turned to the open steel door leading outside.

  “Only one way to find out.”

  She took a slow breath, raised the Glock, stepped ahead. Halfway across the control room she smelled fire smoke, and the fumes grew heavier with each step. She stopped short of the exit, saw a screened porch beyond the steel door. The screen door was swinging slightly in waves of heat. Beyond the porch was a long yard; at the end of the yard a two-story house was in flames.

  “Keep moving, it’s only a dream.”

  Stepping through the doorway and onto the porch, the burning house was revealed in wide shot. Its roof had collapsed, and broken pipes spewed water over blackened timbers and licks of flame. All the windows had burst, and she saw the fire inside the house. Her eyes were transfixed, as if gazing into a churning furnace of white-hot flame. If anyone was in there, they were dead. Next to the house was a driveway where two vehicles had caught fire in the radiating heat. Burning tires cast off oily smoke that blocked any hint of safe passage; not that there was anywhere to go. As best she could see, wherever this place was, it was surrounded by a forest of tall evergreen trees. Nearby branches were singed by hungry flames, but the trees did not catch fire. She watched the smoke. It rose in a black spiral and formed a mushroom cloud above the forest, but the cloud did not drift away. And like the fire in the house, the cloud seemed to churn. No, it wasn’t churning; it was pulsing, as if breathing. She looked at the swinging screen door.

  “Jesus, this is . . .”

  Something caught her eye. On the underside of the mushroom cloud hovering above the trees. Shreds of black mist broke away from the cloud and sank into the forest.

  “. . . so fucked-up.”

  She eased through the screen door, keeping her Glock ahead of her. She stopped at the top of the porch steps, saw slaughtered bodies scattered over a smoke-filled yard. She counted twenty-six all wearing the same strange camouflage as the men outside the bunker. Some of them had Brügger & Thomet machine guns slung over their shoulders or Glocks in their hands; others lay empty-handed next to discarded weapons. She stepped down into the yard. Her eyes locked on the tree line, watching for anyone watching her. She could see only a few feet into the forest, where the trees and underbrush became a darkening web.

  The smoke was thick and she coughed and covered her face with the collar of her cloak. She counted ten steps to the first body. It lay on its back, and she eased it over with her foot. She didn’t know him. She tucked her Glock into her belt, dropped to one knee, touched the man’s forehead. Same as the man in the control room—not warm, not cold. She didn’t bother searching his pockets or checking his cell phone, but she went through his ammo magazine pouches looking for bullets. Not one bullet left. She zigzagged her way up the long yard, stopping at each of the bodies to conduct the same examination. In the center of the yard, three men were squeezed together back-to-back as if they had been surrounded, firing outward till they ran out of ammo, then they were sliced to death.

  “Who did this to you?”

  She reached fourteen bodies near the tree line and peered into the forest as far as she could see, but there were no more bodies. She looked back at the burning house, then to the building from where she’d come into the yard. Wood planks had been ripped from the exterior to expose concrete walls underneath. The few planks still attached to the building bore slashes and gouges from ground level to the roof. She imagined a swarm of hungry beasts clawing their way into the building. First through the wood planks, then solid concrete.

  “And why not? No weirder than anything else in this place.”

  She lowered her gaze to the bodies on the ground. Some of their faces were identifiable, most were disfigured. She sensed the men were European, then wondered why she did. She remembered reading and understanding French in the child’s book she’d found in the concrete room, and the three broken clocks in the control room marking three different time zones. The one on the right marked CET. Perhaps I’m in Europe; perhaps this is France. She did a slow three-sixty of the scene. Wherever the dream was taking her, it was leading her through a wasteland. Confusing, she thought, adding that it might help if she could remember who she was besides some subconscious representation of herself wandering an imaginary wasteland without a trace of fear. And she remembered the woman in the mirror down in the concrete room; the bitch with no soul who wouldn’t offer a clue as to where this place was or what had happened.

  “So it goes.”

  She remembered the cell phone she’d collected back outside the vault.

  “Or not.”

  She found it in her cloak, touched the control button. It lit up, asking for the nine-digit code; plenty of battery, no signal still. She held it up, turned in a circle. Not a blip for a signal. She returned the phone to her cloak.

  “Just have to figure it out yourself, whoever the fuck you are.”

  She retraced her zigzag steps, looking at the way the fourteen men had fallen near the tree line.

  “Huh.”

  The bodies were evenly spaced in two close-set lines, like the point of an arrow. There was a trail of dark blood coming from the forest, cutting through the men. The trail led to two more men, then six in a row, then the three in the middle of the yard with their backs to one another. Then, finally, to the man who lay a few steps from the porch.

  She turned back to the men at the point closest to the tree line. Her imagination kicked in again. They were first to take on the swarm as it charged from the forest. They were overrun and the swarm rushed ahead, killing every defender in its path. The swarm clawed at the outbuilding until it broke in. They killed the man in the control room who died typing a sequence of letters, numbers, and symbols. The swarm then rushed into the tunnels, where two men and one woman in civilian clothes made a last stand at the stairwell outside the concrete room where she was alone with one bullet in a gun. Down to me?

  No, she remembered the signs of a little boy in the room; a little boy who was missing. She looked at the dead scattered through the smoke-filled yard. Why would there be all these dead and not the little boy? She looked at the burning house, wondered if maybe he’d been trapped inside. Or perhaps he never was, she thought. Perhaps he was missing from the scene because he was a dream within a dream, guiding her through the wasteland of wherever the hell she was.

  “So where are you guiding me now, little boy?” she mumbled.

  Her eyes searched the forest.

  “Are you out there, or are you only in my head?”

  There was a growl behind her, and she turned quickly around as a stairwell within the house collapsed into the flames. Heat rushed through the yard and washed over her.

  “Shit.”

  She backed up into the trees, crouched down, and covered her face with her cloak. She waited for the heat to pass. She stood and looked around the forest. There really was no way out of here, not that she could see. She turned back and walked toward the yard. Her boots caught a fallen branch—crack.

  A cry sounded from the forest. She looked back.

  “Is somebody there?”

  She stepped forward, pushing low-hanging branches from her face. The cry came from the left now, then from the right.

  “Is it you, little boy? Where are you?”

  She followed it deeper into the wood.

  “Come on, help me out here. I’m doing the best I can. Where are you hiding?”

  She saw shreds of black mist slither over the ground as if leaking from the underbrush. She retreated a few steps, then turned and hurried into
the middle of the yard. She stopped, looked back. The mist emerged from the tree line and spread over the yard. Over the scattered bodies, over her boots. It rose to midcalf before stopping. She moved one foot, then the other; the mist rippled.

  “Fuck me.”

  She began to walk slowly, like moving through a shallow pool of dark, thickening goo. She stepped up to the porch and the goo dripped from her shoes. She turned, faced the yard. Pulsing smoke, churning fire, a pool of whatever the fuck it was.

  “No little boy out there, that’s for damn sure.”

  A radiating pulse of heat circled the yard and whipped up the smoke and soot. She gagged, backed into the control room, choked and coughed. She wiped her mouth and nose on the back of her hands. She looked at them, saw streaks of mucus on the skin. She wanted to vomit.

  “Dream or no dream, I need to wash this shit off, right now.”

  She headed to the stairwell and back to the concrete room. The one working monitor on the wall flickered and sparked with the same data as before.

  1 @ 3 U c G n

  Seven characters typed by a dying man as life drained from his body. The last deliberate act of his life. Perhaps it wasn’t a password; perhaps it was a message, she thought. A warning that they were being overrun and needed help . . . But nobody came.

  She wiped her hands on her cloak, walked to the desk, and stared at the keyboard. Seven character keys plus the shift key were bloodied; the rest of the keys were clean, including the return key. She looked at the dead man on the floor.

  “You didn’t live long enough to press the return key to send the message, did you?”

  She looked outside, saw the shreds of black mist over the dead. Then came the oddest sensation so far in the dream. Whoever you are, girl, you have so seen this shit before. She looked at the dead man again.

  “This is what I’m supposed to do, isn’t it? This is how I get out of the dream, isn’t it? I press the key, then I wake up in a bed with fluffy pillows, isn’t it?”

  She turned back and leaned over the keyboard.

  “Here goes nothing.”

  She pressed the return key and a high-pitched tone screamed through the control room.

  “Shit!”

  She tumbled back, tripped over the dead man, fell into the wall and down to the floor. The tone rose in pitch and sliced through the room. She locked her eyes on the broken clocks, trying to steady herself. Just then, the clocks advanced by one minute, and the second hands of all three clocks moved ahead in perfect marching order. The screaming tone climbed higher. She covered her ears with her hands.

  “God, it hurts!”

  The data on the screen began to shift left to right, right to left, the characters passing through one another and rearranging itself, holding a moment as if searching for meaning and shifting again till it locked in place.

  @ n G 3 1 U c

  One by one the characters flipped into uppercase letters: @ to A, n to N, and as each letter appeared, the screaming tone rose another painful pitch until it pierced her hands and ears and seeped into her brain.

  “Fuck!”

  The last character flipped from c to S, and a word flashed in her eyes.

  A N G E L U S

  A N G E L U S

  A N G E L U S

  “For fuck sake, make it stop!”

  FOUR

  i

  The north transept doors flew open and real time rushed in. Silhouettes lingered against the fading evening light, unable to enter the cathedral till time equalized throughout the cathedral. Harper checked his watch, figuring the volume of the nave meant equalization would take ninety seconds. But nine ticks later the silhouettes crossed the threshold, and touching the stone floor of Lausanne Cathedral, they took human form.

  Krinkle glanced at Harper. “Some entrance,” the roadie said.

  More like an apparition, Harper thought.

  “It is at that,” he said.

  On point were five men in black leather and boots. They wore comms headsets and night vision gear. They carried a mix of machine pistols and submachine guns, and Gurkha knives were sheathed at their belts. Two of them held positions just inside the doors as the others marched ahead. Harper made them for Krinkle’s post-rockers on the Older Than Dreams Tour, having traded their Stratocasters for kill kits. Then came a young woman with her blond hair half covered by the hood of her sheepskin jacket. A set of japa mala beads dangled from her right hand, and she swung them like some sacred censor. Harper tagged that one as Karoliina, the crew’s guitar tech and muse. The two rockers at the door fell in step behind her. On the magic bus from Toulouse, Krinkle let slip that Karoliina was a dream catcher. First one in three hundred years, the roadie told him. Seeing her surrounded by her own rock-and-roll army suggested it was true. Krinkle called to her.

  “How on earth did you do that, sister?”

  “Wasn’t me. It was the cop.”

  “What cop?”

  Karoliina kicked back her head—Behind me—to where two huge lugs in ill-fitting suits walked on either side of a well-tailored gent in a cashmere coat. Krinkle looked at Harper.

  “Someone you know?”

  Harper nodded.

  “Management. Inspector Jacques Gobet of the Swiss Federal Police. Runs the Special Unit Task Force out of Bern. That’s his cover, at any rate. The other two are his muscle, Mutt and Jeff.”

  “Mutt and Jeff?”

  “Rhyming slang for death.”

  Krinkle eyed Gobet. “Trippy.”

  The north doors slammed closed, and a rollicking boom echoed through the nave. Harper looked down at the girl next to him. The noise had not disturbed her, and she continued to lean against his chest, fast asleep.

  “Ahem.”

  Inspector Gobet was standing at the foot of the crossing square now, considering the scene before him. Krinkle in denim overalls, slumped on the wooden bench to the left, puffing on a gold-filtered cigarette. On the bench to the right was Harper with one arm around le guet; both his hands were wrapped in blood-stained bandages, and the girl’s hands clutched Harper’s mackintosh. In the middle of the crossing square lay one Christophe Astruc, OP, renegade priest, father of a half-breed son. Near him was le guet’s lantern, the first fire of creation waxing and waning on the tip of a dripping candle. For a moment it seemed the inspector did not know where to begin. He settled on Krinkle.

  “The laws of Switzerland forbid smoking within public spaces—that would include gothic cathedrals.”

  Krinkle searched the cop’s eyes for recognition. Maybe he wasn’t convinced Gobet was the real deal; or maybe the cut of the cop’s clothes irritated the rock-and-roll remnants of Krinkle’s 1960s-edition form. The roadie pulled another hit of radiance.

  “Says who?”

  Mutt and Jeff made a move to explain who with their fists. The inspector beat them to the punch by raising the palm of his right hand into the roadie’s eyeline.

  “Omnia mutantur nos, et mutamur illis.”

  Krinkle froze, and Gobet held him a long moment before releasing him. The roadie pulled his cigarette case from his overalls and ground out his smoke on the lid. He dropped the roach in the front pouch of his overalls.

  “Just checking it’s really you in that form, Boz. You have to admit, it’s so not you.”

  “You will address me as ‘Inspector.’ And as far as the form before you, get used to it.”

  “Because?”

  “As I have explained to your crew, after a rather unpleasant standoff at gunpoint with a company of Swiss Guard tacticals, all of you are to be placed under my command effective immediately.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Security around the cathedral until we reestablish the protected zone over the old city, for starters. From then on, whatever I tell you to do.”

  “But we’re in the middle of a world tour. We’ve got confirmed dates in Tallinn next week.”

  “Canceled in lieu of an extended run at a small club around the corner from
the cathedral. It will serve as your base of operations until further notice. Your associates will have a place to perform and you will have secluded parking at the back of the club where you will continue your radio broadcasts.”

  Krinkle looked at his band.

  “I don’t have a choice about this, but you guys do.”

  Karoliina pulled the hood of her coat from her head.

  “We’ve made our choice, Krinkle. We’re staying in Lausanne. We’re needed.”

  Krinkle listened to the sound of her voice. She was telling the truth; her free will was intact. And knowing her, she was speaking for the rest of the band.

  “Cool. How many of his Swiss guns did you hold off?”

  “Lost count at fifty. Luckily, the cop showed up with his two pals before someone pulled a trigger.”

  Krinkle smiled. “Even more cool.”

  Harper watched the roadie and the dream catcher stare at each other. He read unspoken words passing between them. He checked Inspector Gobet to see if he’d picked up the vibe on his copper radar. No was the answer. The inspector was looking at Astruc. Harper read solemnity, as if the cop recognized a battle buddy from long ago, once strong and righteous, now fallen low because he could not bear the weight of his sins.

  “Joy be the consequence,” the inspector said quietly to himself.

  The words popped hot in Harper’s brain. Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice: act three, scene two. A line about the folly of choices costing a pound of flesh further down the road. The inspector recovered, signaled his muscle to take Astruc.

  “Tell the medics I want him conscious and ready for interrogation by tomorrow morning. Tell them I don’t care how they do it.”

  Mutt and Jeff moved quickly onto the square and looped their elbows under Astruc’s shoulders. They peeled the priest off the floor and dragged him down the center aisle. The heavy curtains at the narthex billowed as two of the inspector’s tacticals pushed open the great west doors. There was an ambulance pulling up onto the esplanade; its spinning blue lights splashed against the doors and highlighted the hole where the iron latch used to be, the hole Harper had drilled with his SIG to break into the place. The ambulance backed up to the main doors, and its rear hatch opened to receive Astruc. Inside, two white-smocked medics were standing by in a mobile operating theater. Mutt and Jeff lifted the priest, tossed him on the gurney, and jumped in behind him. The hatch slammed shut, the ambulance sped off, and the tacticals pulled closed the doors—boom. Harper looked at Gobet.