Red Equinox

by Douglas Wynne

  A smell of maggots flooded Becca’s sinuses, and she felt her bile rising as her tongue tried to crawl back into her throat, retreat from the taste of death on the air. Her eyes watered, and she held down the shutter button on the camera, taking a rapid flurry of shots and hoping she was aiming near enough at the creature to get most of it in the frame. She tried to gulp a breath of cleaner air from the interior of the helicopter, and held it when she turned to look back at the plaza. The monster had seized a man from the scattering crowd in one of its foreclaws, and the nest of tentacles had parted to reveal a puckered maw with a chattering beak at the center.

  Becca couldn’t watch. She tossed the camera into the bay of the helicopter and scuttled in after it. Tom was pressed against his seat as if he hoped to merge with it. He wore the wide-eyed look of an animal locked in the slaughter chute at the instant it comprehends the reek of blood and shit.

  Brooks climbed in behind Becca and edged into his seat beside the pilot, pointing at Mass. Ave. The pilot nodded and steered away from the pool. Becca tumbled in the open compartment, crawled on hands and knees to her seat, and was almost strapped in when a pair of tentacles slammed the front window, throwing the helicopter sideways. She saw the tips of the tentacles chopped off by the rotor blades before the cathedral came into view at a wrong-looking angle. In a panic, she fumbled with the buckle until by sheer, clumsy luck it latched. Her muscles tensed for a crash, but the pilot had regained control and the bird gained altitude, the buildings dropping away in a grid of gray squares…giant fans, AC units, and rooftop gardens where the reflecting pool had been seconds ago.

  Brooks had his headset on and was directing the pilot. Becca clawed at her seat, her heart pounding as they circled over Symphony Hall and touched down on the vacant top level of a parking garage on Westland Ave.

  The landing shook the cabin, and Brooks was out and walking before the blades stopped spinning. Becca and Tom sat paralyzed, still gripping their seats and catching their breath.

  “You stay here. Both of you,” Brooks said, jabbing his finger and walking backwards down the car ramp. Tom seemed relieved at the order, and Becca was willing to bet that if Brooks had wanted Tom to follow him to street level, he would have had to march him there at gunpoint. Tom’s jaw trembled on the verge of speech, but none was forthcoming, just a thin whine. His gaze kept drifting back to the slime smeared across the windshield.

  Becca couldn’t read the pilot’s face under his helmet, shades, and beard, but she had an idea and wanted to test it. Leaning forward, she pointed at the glass and asked, “How did you see through that shit to land this thing?”

  “What shit?”

  At her question, Tom sank deeper into his seat.

  Becca unbuckled and climbed out of the helicopter, camera in hand. Brooks gestured for her to stop. “I can’t lose you in the city. Don’t make me cuff you to the helo.”

  In reply, she merely held up her camera.

  He shook his head and continued walking down the ramp. They were almost in the shelter of the garage, and she hurried to catch up with him. “I have a job to do, right?”

  He stopped, turned, and sized her up, obviously restless about the time she was forcing him to waste in dealing with her. “Whatever you got from the air is good enough. Go back. If I have to track you down again for the pictures—”

  “I’m not gonna run.”

  He scoffed, but before he could argue further, screams and car horns cut the air and the concrete garage shuddered beneath their feet. Brooks ran to the edge and peered out at the street below. When Becca came up beside him, she was already looking through the viewfinder.

  The creature was crawling down the center of Westland Ave., postulant slime oozing from the tentacles severed by the chopper blades, claws sending shockwaves into the pavement with each step. The street was far from crowded, but people were emerging from the doors of apartments and shops to see if there’d been an accident. Two cars and a delivery truck were mashed together on the sidewalk, and a few people were running frantically, some trying doors to see if they were locked, others pushing past the residents in the doorways, knocking them down to reach cover. It dawned on Becca that those who hadn’t been at the reflecting pool, who hadn’t heard the chanting, would be looking through the creature at their equally confused neighbors across the street, utterly blind to the abomination among them.

  The sight of the creature galvanized Brooks. He either no longer cared about losing Becca or had decided that the cost in time and effort wasn’t worth it. Without sparing her another glance, he sprinted down the spiraling ramp, his weapon drawn in spite of its likely impotence. Becca took a few more pictures, then hurried after him.

  On the street she found a mixture of the terrified and the befuddled. She made her way among them, scanning the crowd for Brooks, and saw that he’d made it almost to the intersection of Hemenway on the trail of the thing, which had to be moving at least thirty miles an hour. Already its bulk was disappearing as it crossed the street, and she felt an unfamiliar nausea as she watched a stream of cars passing through the titanic claws and the base of the mottled trunk without crashing, as if they were passing through a projection. Looking back at the crashed delivery truck on the side of Westland, she wondered again at the difference between those whose senses had been opened like her own, and those who remained untouched. Had the drivers swerved to avoid the monster or had they only been reacting to the panicked people in the street who had seen it and were running pell-mell away from it?

  Deciding she didn’t want to be there when Brooks gave up the chase and returned, she cut through a passage in the apartment tower across the street from the Christian Science Complex. Horns bleated at her as she ran across Mass Ave., but she ignored the cars, scanning the crowd for a man in a black overcoat, a man with tentacles writhing from his shoulders. She didn’t see him, but now, surveying the sky from the ground, she did see a black orb floating behind the skyscrapers. It dripped ribbons of darkness onto the city, one of which extended down Westland in the wake of the creature. The fens lay in that direction, and she wondered if the thing was headed for the boggy creek that ran through there, looking to burrow in the tall reeds until night fell.

  She knew she should get out of the Back Bay by whatever convoluted path might make her most invisible to the authorities. She was now only one of an ever-growing number of civilians on the street with what she was thinking of as the sight, but she was probably the only one with photographic documentation of what lurked beyond the visible spectrum. She needed time to think and examine the photos before committing to a course of action.

  She needed to get away, but her boots were carrying her back to the reflecting pool. They seemed to have an agenda of their own, and, as she neared the scene of the killing, where the only evidence of the creature was a cloud of blood spreading in the water, she realized that she needed to see the place where the thing had emerged, needed to look into the pool and see either a portal or the flat bed of impenetrable stone that had always been there.

  Crossing the open ground she felt horribly exposed, but chaos hung in the air like a poison gas and no one paid her any attention.

  Someone was in the pool—a man, lumbering under the weight of water-soaked clothing, struggling to rise from his knees to his feet. He wasn’t wearing a cardboard crown, but she recognized him.

  Becca set her camera bag in one of the concrete planters and climbed over the rounded marble edge of the pool. The cold water sluiced around the tongues of her boots and soaked through her pants. Maurice was close to the middle of the pool, where the vortex had been, but she saw no sign of it now. The water was settling into stillness, and she could see the bottom. Even with her new perception she spotted no fissures in the stone, no hole to account for the whirlpool or the emergence of the monster. At the north end of the pool, the blood cloud now floated in tatters.

  Maurice trudged through the knee-high water, dragging his wet trench coat behind him. He seemed
even more dazed than when she’d last seen him, searching the sky with faraway eyes.

  “Moe?” She had to repeat the name louder to get his attention, but when his eyes slid sideways and fixed on her, they kindled with recognition, even while the lower half of his face maintained a grimace of pain.

  “Hey, shorty. Thought I might see you again.”

  “I thought you were dead,” she said, and wished she hadn’t.

  “Not yet, sugar. Soon, though…soon.”

  “You passed through a wall at the mill and came out here with that thing.” It wasn’t a question, and he nodded in reply. And then she saw that his hand was in his coat like Napoleon’s, and it was dripping blood into the water, little hemoglobin roses blooming between them.

  “Oh God, we have to get you help.”

  “No help for me now.”

  “Don’t say that. There’s a helicopter less than a block away. I’ll get them to take you to a hospital. You just…just hold onto me.” She wedged her shoulder into his armpit, smelling the dirt and sweat and death of him, and trying to take his weight, getting his blood on her khaki pants where she could see the stains, and on her black shirt where she couldn’t, and as she walked him forward the scarab amulet swung on the chain around her neck and caught the fire of the sun, sending reflections darting like minnows through the dark water around them.

  “I’m done. Been through the veil and seen the cogs. I told you we was at the…hub,” he said, the last word delayed when he swept his gaze up her body to look into her eyes and caught sight of the scarab dangling just inches from his nose, flashing like Morse code on his ashen cheeks.

  “Praise Kephra,” he whispered.

  Having led him to the edge, Becca looked for someone with enough muscle and wit to help get him over the rounded marble border where water rolled into a grate, but before she could hail anyone his legs gave out and he slid off of her. She grasped at the trench coat and managed to ease him down so that he landed with his rear end on the marble, his feet still in the pool. She knelt beside him and steadied him. Someone was going to have to keep him from falling over while she went to get Brooks or the pilot. She wasn’t going to let him drown in two feet of water. Scanning the shell-shocked witnesses, fear climbing her chest with icy fingers, she realized that there actually were cold fingers touching her, the delicate probing digits of Moe Ramirez touching the beetle and lifting it for a closer look.

  His face was a mask of awe—eyes blazing, nostrils flaring with the stilted rhythm of broken lungs, death indistinguishable from ecstasy.

  “You have it,” he said, “The Fire of Cairo.”

  She touched the beetle, her fingers folded around his, and she drew his hand away from the pendant, squeezed it gently in an effort to get his eyes to focus on hers. He was delirious, but she needed to reach him if she was going to keep him in this world. Keep him in this world. The words echoed in her mind as soon as she’d formed the thought. He claimed to have been out of this world mere minutes ago, in some parallel dimension. And somehow she didn’t doubt it.

  “It’s true,” he said, his face contorting with anguish, “The gem is gone, the flame is lost.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Moe, but you need help.”

  Now he met her eyes. “No, you need help.” His eyes welled up with tears. “And I won’t be here to give it to you.”

  She shook her head and squeezed his hand harder.

  He steeled himself, winced, then straightened his shoulders, locking his eyes on hers with new intensity. “You hear me now, girl. You’re gonna hafta cover your ass carrying a totem like that. You hide it, now. And keep it hidden.”

  Becca tucked the beetle back under the wide neck of her shirt. When it was out of sight, he breathed a ragged sigh.

  “I can pass easier now I’ve seen it. But we shoulda had more time.” He coughed, a violent wracking spasm that sprayed specks of blood over his coat. “I’m sorry…so much you need to know and I can’t help you now….” He blinked, heaved, and his eyes lit again like a dying flashlight given a smack. “There’s a book…Mortiferum Indicium. You find that…might have a chance.”

  He slumped. She slid aside and let his head rest on her thighs, stroking his coarse hair with her fingertips and thinking that this was what it was like to comfort a sick child or a dog on the euthanasia table. She felt a strong urge to argue with his resignation, to get help and lift him over the side, to run for the airlift, but the feeling was diminishing with every labored breath he drew. She couldn’t see his face, but could feel the flutter of his blinking eyes transmitted across his scalp each time she touched his temple and dragged her fingertips to his hairline. One of these blinks would be the last, a shut with no open.

  A sudden thickness formed in her throat. She barely knew the man, but she felt for him. He was a misfit like her, and before today her affection for him had been inspired by the fact that he seemed crazier than her. But no, her breed of crazy was an inability to reconcile her internal chemistry with the facts of the cosmos, the cycles of Earth and Sun. His, on the other hand, was a kind of stark-raving sanity, an acute awareness of deeper, more profound cosmic truths that few could bear to even consider. He’d made the bold pursuit and confrontation of them his life’s quest. But the quest had cost him his life, and there was no time now to ask him what he’d hoped to achieve, or what he’d learned.

  “I’m glad I get to die under this sky instead of the other one,” he said.

  Becca watched a tear fall from her face and land in his dusty hair, a drop of water in which the salt of her body now mingled with the pollen of some unfathomable hell.

  A sound from above—the cries of geese—drew her eyes skyward, and she watched a flock rising from the fens and winging over the city in a strange formation. They were heading south, following the Earth’s magnetic field to warmer climes…in the shape of a five-stemmed branch.

  Chapter 14

  Jason Brooks was back on top of the parking garage surveying Westland Ave. through a pair of high-powered binoculars. For a moment he trained them on a flock of migrating geese that resembled a symbol he’d seen in the graffiti Becca Philips had shot and the hair on his forearms rose. But the passing form was a minor oddity in light of all that had just occurred, and the flight soon resolved into a more traditional V. He refocused on the street below.

  The bedlam there was settling a bit as panic-stricken seers—those who had seen the monstrosity—were absorbed into the consensus reality of the majority who hadn’t been at the reflecting pool. Neighbors, relatives, and coworkers had at least figured out there wasn’t another bomb exploding or somebody with a gun popping people in the street, and were now leading their gibbering fellows indoors or into cars bound for hospitals, or simply wrapping arms and blankets around them while asking questions.

  It would take time for the general population to process the commonalities of this “mass hallucination,” but within a few hours, with the help of the media, the city at large would begin to see the pattern. It wasn’t like the subway tunnel. It couldn’t be contained. Already the crowd was a mixture of seers and their first listeners and no team could round them all up or quarantine the entire neighborhood. That made Rebecca Philips just one of many…almost. She alone had willingly infected herself with the sight, and for what? To get a better photo?

  Sweeping the pavement and the building entrances with his binoculars, Brooks felt an increasingly heavy weight, knowing that despite her sworn promise, she had no plans to let SPECTRA benefit from her sacrifice.

  He could hear the Director’s baritone already: One of many, Brooks? How about the only one who captured it on fucking film?

  He wound up—knee and elbow raised—and dashed the binoculars onto the concrete at his feet.

  The damned things didn’t even give him the satisfaction of breaking. He wiped his cupped hand over his chin and mouth, felt his stubble prickling in his palm. What were the odds of spotting her from the air if she d
idn’t want to be found?

  Pretty shitty without those binocs.

  He plodded toward the helo, then turned and went back for them, scooping them up by the strap and feeling like a jackass. Flyboy and Shellshock were silent as he strapped in.

  “Take us up and circle the area,” he said, examining the lenses. Damned things weren’t even scratched.

  * * *

  Samira Fanan was half a block away from the Starry Wisdom Church on Beacon Street when she saw the black armored vehicles. Her hand went to the pocket of her long wool coat, and someone bumped her from behind as she clicked her phone on. Murmured curses reached her ears as those she had blocked by stopping short flowed around her. She turned her face away from the church and shuffled sideways into the shadow of a shop awning. Reaching for the phone had been an instinct, but now, hearing the drone of a helicopter, she folded it into the palm of her hand and let her arm drop to her side. She scanned the street. Anyone could be moving among the pedestrians, watching her, scrutinizing her reactions to the raid in progress. She steadied her breath and tucked the phone back into her pocket. She’d known this was coming, just hadn’t known when.

  No familiar faces on the street.

  She took her bearings and remembered a gap between the apartment buildings that led to one of the public alleys. Would the alley be swarming with agents and police? Maybe not this far out. She didn’t have time to deliberate. She shoved her hands into her pockets, tucked her head down, and slipped through the gap, the rough red brick scraping against the shoulder of her coat.

  Stepping into the broader alley behind the building, her head cocked toward the church, she didn’t see the figure emerging from the shadows to her right until a leather gloved hand wrapped around her mouth, pulling her backward down a concrete stairwell.