“We’re back,” said Ren superfluously.
“So I fucking see.” Ward seemed to notice Scott for the first time. “You, get down to the sub dock and take a look at the air scrubbers on Lastman. Felt like I was breathing farts and fumes the last hour back, I nearly fucking had to surface it got so bad.”
For about half a second, before he spotted the idiocy of it, Scott thought about refusing to leave Ren until Ward had calmed down. He swallowed instead, said: “Might be a compatibility problem, all that software we took out of, uh, Fell 8 was—”
Ward pinned him with a glare. “And can you fix that for me if it is?”
“Well, no, but—”
“No, that’s right. Because I didn’t fucking hire you as a software specialist. So why don’t you get the fuck down there like I asked you to and take a fucking look at what you can fucking fix for me. All right? Simple enough for you?”
Scott looked at him, knowing he was flushing. Breathed in hard, nodded on clenched teeth and lips pulled tight.
“Good, then why are you still standing here?”
Scott wheeled about and plunged back into the corridor, fury rising through him like heat. One more month, he promised himself silently. One more fucking month, and out. Before today, he’d thought Ward was okay, he’d thought the man was an American. Guy lost his temper now and then, but what real man didn’t. Point was, he knew where the lines were. But now, talking that way, treating Scott like he was some just-over-the-fence liability who’d fucked up when all the time it was Scott had been warning Ward that if you were going to cannibalize plug-ins from one sub to another, you couldn’t just expect that the systems would fall in love with each other without you ran a whole slew of up-to-date compatibility patches.
He was on the stairs down to the dock when he became aware that something had changed fractionally in the light in the corridor behind him.
He stopped on the first step, looked back.
Saw a tall figure advancing down the passageway from the other end, darkening the view along the narrow perspectives as it passed under each overhead bulb and got between Scott and the light source. This guy really was tall, and big with it, and advancing with inexorable calm. Someone not used to being stopped, someone who must not have liked the signs all over the topside offices that asked you to buzz and take a seat while you waited, one of our staff will be with you shortly, must instead have decided to just come down anyway and find whatever he was looking for.
Scott lifted an arm and waved.
“Uh, hey,” he called.
The figure gave no indication that it had seen or heard him. It moved steadily along the corridor toward the con room door, seemed to be wearing a long coat and had one hand held stiffly down inside the folds of the garment—
And suddenly, out of nowhere, a lever tipped over in Scott’s guts. Something was wrong. This was trouble.
He hopped off the step and jogged back up the corridor, toward the newcomer. He didn’t call out again; there was no point. He knew from experience how voices boomed and echoed in the metal confines of the corridor—this guy had heard him well enough. And yes, there was definitely something in that coat-shrouded hand, he saw the way the material wrapped stiffly around it. He dropped the jog, kicked into a sprint.
They met at the door. Scott’s sprint died, puddled right out of him. What he had to say dried up in his mouth. He gaped.
It was the face. His mind seemed to gibber it. It was the face, the face.
Right out of the End Times comics they gave out every fourth Sunday in church, the ones the little kids got nightmares over and the older kids had to earn with red ticks in Pastor William’s Book of Deeds. It was the same hollow-cheeked privation and clamped mouth, the long, untidy hair hanging past the hard-angled bones of cheeks and jaw, the same burning eyes—
The Gaze of Judgment. Right out of Volume II Issue 63.
His knees trembled. His mouth worked. He couldn’t—
The door hummed—he’d never noticed the noise before now—and slid back. Voices within, still angry.
The coat swirled, the stranger’s right arm came free, came up swinging. Something hit Scott in the side of the head and he stumbled, went down in an awkward, twisted-limb sprawl. Lightning switched through his head, left sparks and a wow-and-flutter effect in his ears. The Gaze lit on him briefly, then swung away again, left and into the opened con room. The stranger stepped through.
Yells erupted. Nocera and Ward, almost in unison. “This is private fucking property, asshole, what do you—”
A sudden silence that sang above the numbness in his head where he’d been hit. Then Ward again, raw disbelief.
“You? What the fuck are you doing in here? What—”
Deep, soft cough—a sound he knew from somewhere.
And the screaming started.
Scott felt the sound wring sweat from his pores, turn his skin shivery-ticklish with horror. Like the time Aaron got his arm trapped in the teeth of Dougie Straker’s rock breaker, exactly the same feeling—the sound of agony, of damage so massive it ripped register and recognition out of the voice that made it, left only a flayed shriek of denial that could have belonged to anyone and almost anything.
Carmen!
Scott flailed about. Panic for her got him to his knees, got him to his feet. He felt blood trickling in his hair. He stumbled and almost fell, braced himself on the edge of the door just as it started to slide closed again. The mechanism trembled against his grip a moment, then gave and sank back to full open. Scott shoved himself upright and staggered through.
He had time for one flash-burned glimpse.
Blood, everywhere, the siren color of it shocked onto the consoles and wall, what looked like a couple of fistfuls of offal from the discount end of a butcher’s counter drip-sliding down the screens. Nocera was down, face turned awkwardly sideways, eyes open, cheek pressed hard to the ill-swept, dusty floor as if he were listening for rats in the understructure. More blood, a broad, wine-dark puddle of it leaking out around his midriff, tongues of the stuff twisting out through the scattered dust. Over his body, Ren and the stranger wrestled for a squat-barreled weapon—Scott made the match with the soft impact he’d heard, one of the Cressi sharkpunch guns from the cabinet upstairs. Supposed to be locked, he was always telling Ward that, but—
Ward lay on his back beyond.
More blood again, the big man thrashing and slithering in it, clutching, Scott saw with numb horror, at a raw red hole where his belly had been. Shredded tissue hung in ropes out of him, was clotted on the floor and smeared on his fingers like some red-stained cake mix he’d stuck his hands into. Ward’s mouth was a gaping pink tunnel—you could see right down to the molars and a trembling whitish yellow tongue—and the screams came up out of it in sickening waves. His eyes clawed onto Scott as he stood in the doorway, nailed him there. Wide and pleading, crazy with pain, Scott couldn’t know whether his boss knew him or not. He made to throw himself forward into the fray, threw up instead, with punishing, gut-wrenching force. Vomit splattered in Nocera’s pooling blood.
Carmen yelled, desperate.
Cough of the sharkpunch.
Another impact, this time in his neck below the ear. He grabbed for something, anything. The floor came up. Blood and vomit, warm and wet in his face as he hit. He tried to get his mouth closed or twisted clear, failed in the attempt. The hot acid stink and taste—his stomach flipped again, weakly. His legs flexed like a crippled insect’s. Vision dimming out on a pool of red and flecks of yellow-white. He groped after a prayer, fumbled it, couldn’t get his mouth to work, made a handful of scrabbling words in his head—
Our Father…deliver me not…