by S. M. Reine
Its legs were long, but the feet were too awkward for moving on the ground—he managed to reach the houses first, and jumped behind a parked truck.
He fired over the hood of the truck. The hybrid took flight with a powerful sweep of its wings, and Anthony’s shot zoomed harmlessly underneath it.
It soared over him, disappearing behind the roof of the house.
Anthony swore under his breath and gave chase.
He found the hybrid standing in Alsu’s back yard. It had picked up the severed head of its brother, holding it between both hands and staring into its dead gaze. Maybe it was Anthony’s imagination, but the hybrid almost looked sad.
Anthony raised the shotgun again.
Something thudded on the roof of the house behind him.
He spun to see that a second hybrid had landed. It was even uglier than the first. It had cloven hooves instead of talons, massive horns hanging over its shoulders, and no nose—almost like its face had been ripped off to bare the skull underneath.
While he was distracted, the first hybrid attacked. Claws raked down Anthony’s back, leaving fire in their wake.
Anthony’s shoulder slammed into the ground. The birdlike hybrid was on top of him in an instant. Its foot grew in his vision, huge enough to blot out the sun, and he kicked with both feet to knock it away.
More gunfire exploded through the air—not Anthony’s this time.
The hybrid whirled into the air.
Malcolm and Alsu stood on the edge of the yard, shooting simultaneously. At another time, it might have been funny to see an old woman with a headscarf plugging away at a half-demon, half-angel monster, but now, Anthony was just relieved.
Lucas stepped around the side of the house, firing both of his handguns at the one on the roof. Three humans against two hybrids—not great odds.
But it was enough of a distraction to allow Anthony to get to his feet. His back was as cold and numb as if he had jumped into ice water. His arms were stiff when he lifted them. That was a bad sign. The damage must have been deep. But he’d have to worry about bleeding to death later.
“Is it just the two of them?” Lucas asked, helping him stand.
Anthony scoffed. “Just two?”
“I thought I saw a third,” Malcolm said helpfully.
Another thud—the hoofed hybrid had landed again. It was shorter than the first one, but still towered over them.
Its hooves ripped into the grass as it charged.
Lucas dragged Anthony to the ground just in time.
Muffled gunshots rang out from the neighboring house. One of the families had lined up by the fence to shoot. Two men, a woman, and a child—all with shotguns.
Alsu shouted first in Russian, then repeated herself in heavily accented English: “Aim for the wings!”
Bullets ripped into the back of the hybrid. Its roar made Anthony’s eardrums feel like they might explode.
The wings ripped into tatters in seconds. The feathers were pulverized. It took eight people to shoot off the wings, and blood gushed over its back as if fire hoses had been opened.
Anthony kept firing at the stumps until he was out of bullets.
“Behind you!” Lucas said.
He spun. Two more hybrids were approaching.
The family on the other side of the fence jumped into the house, and Anthony couldn’t blame them. One hybrid had been more than enough. They couldn’t handle two—not without more backup.
Alsu pointed like a general leading her army. “To the street!”
They ran around the narrow yard on the side of the house and emerged onto a dirt road.
Anthony skidded to a stop.
A third hybrid waited for them, blocking their approach. It was the biggest of them all—like the hoofed one on steroids. The other two stepped up behind the group, blocking their retreat. There was nowhere to run.
Alsu pumped her shotgun. “The wings,” she said again, her eyes glimmering.
She fired.
A massive concussion split the air.
The biggest of the hybrids exploded in a red mist. Anthony didn’t jump back quickly enough—blood sprayed over him, coating his legs from the knees down.
That hadn’t been Alsu’s gun.
“Oh, fuck me,” Malcolm said with gusto.
A black tank was rolling up the street followed by blocky assault vehicles, which Anthony recognized as BearCats. Bold white letters were stamped on the sides of the tank: UKA.
The Union had arrived.
The remaining hybrids fled, and Anthony shook his fist at the air. “Yeah, you run!” he shouted. It wasn’t much of a victory, but it was a victory—he would take it.
Anthony changed his mind about the victory about half an hour after hybrids took flight. The Union had quickly seized the village, and now armed guards were sorting the survivors into lines. Anthony and Lucas had been put into their own tiny group, since the two Americans apparently stuck out.
“Where did Malcolm go?” he asked. There was no sign of the third kopis.
Lucas jerked his chin toward the trees. “Long gone.”
“What an asshole.”
“I would have done the same if I’d been thinking fast enough,” Lucas said with a sheepish grin.
Anthony watched with some amusement as a group of Union kopides attempted to push Alsu into a line with the other women of Oymyakon. She was shouting at them, waving her hands, red-faced with anger. Apparently, she wasn’t happy at being ousted.
Along with the tanks and BearCats, they Union also brought a fleet of SUVs, a few RVs, and a couple of semi trucks in their convoy. All of them were painted black. Subtlety didn’t seem to be in the vocabulary of this branch of the Union.
Now they were flooding the village like rats, establishing a perimeter and erecting tents on the streets. As soon as the bodies had been cleared, the Union started loading the women and children into a black bus. They even managed to get Alsu onto a bus, although it required two burly men.
One Union member broke away from the others. When she got close enough, Anthony could see that she had close-cropped blond hair, hard brown eyes, and a scar splitting her bottom lip.
She spoke to them in Russian.
“Sorry,” Lucas said. “We’re Americans. I have no idea what you’re saying.”
She waved over another soldier, whose features were indistinguishable under the helmet. He had a deep voice and a Southern accent when he spoke. “My name’s Roger,” he said. “I’ll be translating for Commander Haldis.”
“What the hell is going on?” Anthony asked. “What are you doing with the people who live here?”
Roger ignored the quest. “What are you doing here? This isn’t exactly a tourist destination.”
Anthony opened his mouth to tell them the truth—that they had come to save the world—but Lucas spoke first. “We’re taking a motorcycle trip across Russia, but our bikes broke down while we were passing through.”
When Roger translated what Lucas said, she looked annoyed. “Give me your passports,” Roger said.
“I lost mine,” Anthony said. In truth, he had left his passport at Alsu’s house with his backpack, but he didn’t see how complying with the Union’s requests would turn out well.
Roger quickly frisked Anthony and Lucas, whose passport was in his back pocket. “Lucas McIntyre,” Haldis read aloud. She tossed the passport to another guard and spoke. He saluted, taking the passport away.
“We’ll check your identities,” Roger said. “If you don’t raise any flags, we’ll send you to Yakutsk with everyone else. This is a secure area now.”
“Yeah, fine,” Anthony said, although it probably wasn’t fine. Considering that the Union’s only record of Lucas McIntyre was likely to be in relation to a murder case, they would be lucky if Roger didn’t try to shoot them both where they stood.
The line of male survivors was loaded onto a second bus. Anthony watched, torn between growing anger and the desire to go with them—
far, far away from the hybrids.
“You were armed when we arrived. Where did the guns come from?” Roger asked.
Lucas was red-faced, obviously growing angry, but he said, “The locals loaned them to us.”
Haldis touched her earpiece, turning away as she spoke into it, and Anthony’s stomach dropped. Whatever she was hearing on the other end wasn’t going to be good—he could already tell by her posture.
He sighed when Haldis nodded, and one of the guards grabbed Anthony roughly.
“You’re under arrest,” Roger said.
“Of course we are,” Anthony muttered.
Malcolm watched the Union deploy their makeshift city from a nearby hill. They operated quickly. According to his watch, it took exactly fifty-eight minutes to get a complete fence around Oymyakon; by the time another half an hour passed, they had set up guard stations and inspection points. It was a fully functioning—albeit temporary—base of operations in less than two hours.
The European arm of the Union was a lot more efficient than the American one, he had to give them that. He would have killed for units that operated so smoothly when he had been commander.
But now he was more likely the one to get killed, if the Union realized he was nearby. It wouldn’t be hard to connect Gregory’s sighting of him with the death of the unit out on the highway. There was no chance they’d incarcerate him now. They would plant a bullet in his brain and leave him in the forest to rot.
“Elise will be fine without me,” he said aloud. “She could eat the Union and hybrids for breakfast.”
Right. Yes. He definitely wasn’t needed there.
Malcolm studied the highway. He’d have to wait until dark—brief as that period would be—and walk to the nearest village before picking up a vehicle. He wouldn’t be able to steal one from the Union. It was too easily tracked. But even in a four-hour night he could cover a lot of distance. Hopefully, they would be too distracted by hybrids to keep an eye out for people wandering along the road.
As he headed farther away from Oymyakon, deeper into the fields, he contemplated where he would go next. The South Asian countries didn’t have much of a Union presence yet. Malcolm hadn’t been to Sri Lanka in a long time.
The thumping of a generator kicking to life drew his attention back to Oymyakon.
Some soldiers had set up equipment outside the perimeter. His stomach dropped when he saw the lights that they set out in a ring, surrounded by electrified wires. That wasn’t a typical part of a Union temporary base.
It was a cage. A very specialized cage, intended to contain demons that could turn incorporeal.
They knew that Elise was coming, and they were ready to capture her.
He really should have read those damn prophecies.
“She’ll be fine,” he said again, trying to convince himself.
It wasn’t helping.
Malcolm found himself walking around the other side of Oymyakon, hanging back on the edge of the trees to watch the soldiers work. The evacuees were gone, leaving only an army of men in black uniform—and two people wearing nothing at all.
He almost laughed when he realized that the Union was strip-searching Lucas McIntyre and Anthony Morales in the middle of the street. They were down to their boxers while people wearing blue latex gloves probed their naked bodies.
“Better them than me,” Malcolm said. But it was with even less conviction than before.
Another bus departed. He watched it go with longing.
In the distance, over the mountain ridge, a dark shape spiraled—a hybrid waiting to attack again. That irritating, heroic kopis feeling returned. A fire grew in his belly, tuning out his much more rational urges of self-preservation.
“Fuck me,” he said. “I am a suicidal moron.”
Malcolm found a shadowed place between trees and sat down to wait for nightfall.
After the earlier attack from the hybrids, the silence that fell over Oymyakon that night was almost eerie. Anthony knew that those creatures were still out there, ready to attack, and that there were enough of them to pose a threat to any number of Union tanks—he could feel them humming at the back of his mind with distant power.
But they didn’t attack again. As daylight faded into a long twilight, the temporary Union outpost quietly bustled with activity, preparing for an apocalyptic event. Anthony watched through a gap in the boards blocking the window of their trailer. From what he could see, the Union was occupying all of the houses on the block, and they were emptying food and toiletries from the homes for their use. Fucking vultures.
He and Lucas had been stripped to their boxers, given cavity searches, and detained without further questioning. Their only visit had been from a doctor, who had stitched up Anthony’s back and given him a handful of Percocet before vanishing again.
It wasn’t the first time that Anthony had been subjected to the Union’s tender mercies. It was less frightening the second time, and a hell of a lot more irritating.
At least it distracted him from the sheer terror of whatever was possibly going to kill him the next night.
“I almost wish they would just kill us,” Anthony muttered. “The anticipation is worse.”
Lucas was sitting in the corner picking at the dirt under his fingernails with his teeth. “I never should have come here,” he said, spitting some debris onto the floor.
Anthony hadn’t even thought about how Leticia and the kids would react to Lucas’s extended absence. He grimaced. “Sorry, man.”
Lucas shrugged. “That’s life.”
Anthony paced back and forth across the trailer for a few hours, keeping his muscles warmed. He toyed with the idea of attacking the first person to walk through the door, but the logistics of getting out of the compound after that were somewhat hazy.
The evening wore on long. Nights were short in the late spring, so the sun didn’t set until what had to be eleven at night, although Anthony had no way of telling time.
Lucas stopped picking at his fingernails around the time that the sun dropped to the horizon. His head slumped against his shoulder. He snored deeply.
Anthony kept pacing. He kept worrying. And he kept his ears perked for any signs of attack. That would be his best chance to escape, he decided—if he waited for hybrids to tear through the Union outpost, everyone would be too busy running for their lives to care about a couple of escaped prisoners.
Complete darkness fell. Through the gap, he saw stars emerge.
Then the doorknob jiggled.
Anthony moved to wake Lucas, but his eyes were already open. He was instantly wide awake and alert, faint light reflecting off of the whites of his eyes. Lucas crouched behind the door. Anthony took the wall on the opposite side.
“Get ready,” Lucas whispered.
The door swung open.
Anthony grabbed the man who stepped in by the shirt and body-slammed him to the floor.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” the man protested.
Anthony pulled back his fist without punching, and realized that he had just pinned Malcolm. The scars and missing eye were harder to see when it was so dark.
“Did you come to save us?” Lucas asked. “You?”
“Save the incredulity for later.” Malcolm dusted himself off. “Nice boxers, by the way,” he added, winking at Anthony. At least, Anthony thought it was supposed to be a wink.
Lucas peered through the door at the street beyond. “How did you get in?”
“Shift change,” Malcolm said. “And there might be at least one dead guard involved. Don’t worry your pretty heads about it. Let’s get out of here.”
Anthony could almost see what Elise must have seen in him once.
Almost.
The men scaled the fence without being seen. It was easy with a former Union commander guiding them. Malcolm knew all of the patterns that the guards walked around the perimeter, so they just had to sneak between them when their backs were turned.
“And now we run,” Malcolm sai
d as soon as they reached the other side of the fence.
Anthony felt stupid sprinting through the fields wearing his boxers. Stupid, but grateful.
They didn’t stop until they reached the edge of the forest and the lights of the Union outpost were reduced to pinpoints. Even then, they only paused long enough to catch their breaths.
The outpost stirred. Shouts drifted through the night.
Their absence had been noticed.
“Let’s keep going,” Lucas urged, so they did.
They sheltered in the foothills until dawn hit, and then kept climbing. It was a warm spring day; by the time they climbed to a vantage point that allowed them to look down on Oymyakon, Anthony was soaked with sweat and breathing hard.
“The Union’s preparing to grab Elise,” Malcolm said when they finally stopped climbing. He stretched out on the ground with his arms behind his head. “I saw the cage in the village. Thought you blokes might find that interesting, in the terrifying kind of way.”
“It doesn’t really matter, does it? They can’t contain her,” Anthony said.
“Actually, they can. All it takes is some electricity and a lot of light. Run a few volts through a demon, and it’s like dropping them in acid.” He plucked a long piece of grass free and picked his teeth with it. “Then you take away her shadows so she can’t go all incorporeal-like…”
Lucas grimaced. “If they’re prepared to contain her, we have to expect that they’re prepared to capture her, too.”
“They’ll have to surprise her,” Malcolm said. “They’ll snag her the instant she’s back in the dimension, throw her in the middle of some lights, and haul her back to HQ for God knows whatever they have planned.”
Anthony nodded. “Which means we have to get to her first so she can’t be surprised. How the hell are we going to do that?”
The other men didn’t answer.
Anthony squinted, watching a glimmering line of vehicles drive out of Oymyakon toward the forest where Malcolm had said that the meadow was located. Whatever they had planned, they were already preparing for it. “When’s this thing going to happen?” he asked.
Malcolm shrugged. “Dunno. You’re the one getting phone calls from a prophet.”
