“Green Giant, are you able to confirm if the hostiles are wearing heavy rings? White metal.”
There was a rustling sound and then he said, “Yeah. Both of them. And… oh shit. The rings have a little cap on them and they’re open. I can see some of that green crystal stuff.”
“Get away from them,” I roared. “Do it right now.”
“Okay,” whispered Bunny, “we’ve moved to an alcove. We’re good.”
“Echo Team, listen to me,” I said tersely, “all of the hostiles are wearing rings with green quartz chips. The rings are activated by an electronic signal, and it’s somehow been sent. Assume that everyone else in this building is under the influence of crystal energy.”
It sounded stupid to say that, but no one laughed. We’d gone past that point.
“We need to just end this,” I said. “Eat your gun. Whatever. End it.”
And then I froze as the echo of my own words came back to me. I tried to fix it, take it back, change it. I yelled at them to disregard, but the wrong words came out of my mouth.
“It’s too damn quiet in here,” I heard myself say. “I can’t hear my own damn thoughts. I can’t take it.”
There was a weird sensation in my arm and I looked down to see my hand raising the pistol toward my own face.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIFTEEN
Ghost attacked me.
He launched himself into the air and slammed into me with both front paws, knocking me back, ramming me against the wall. I hit my head and the point of one elbow, and my trigger finger jerked and the blast blinded and deafened me. Fresh pain flared through the bruised muscles of my shoulders and lower back. I slid down and Ghost came at me again, standing on my chest and snarling, his gleaming teeth inches from my face. Beyond those teeth, though, I did not see anger. I saw total, mad panic.
I shook my head, trying to make sense of my own thoughts. The gun. Jesus Christ. The gun. My cheek stung from powder burns and there was a terrible ringing in both ears.
Ghost barked at me, but I couldn’t hear him.
Somehow that scared me more than anything so far. It was like watching a movie with the sound turned all the way down. The only noise was the ringing in my ears and… something else. It was like wind, but distant, faint. Like the breeze you can hear in parts of the Grand Canyon. Far away and ghostly.
There was darkness at the edge of my vision.
Let me fall, I said.
Or thought I said.
Ghost kept barking in total silence. The fear in his eyes was like a fist that punched me in the face. It was one of the worst things I’d ever seen in my life.
I pushed him back with palsied hands. And then I slapped my own face. Hard. Really fucking hard. Again. And again.
Ghost barked again and this time I heard it. Faint. But there. And in my mind I ran toward that sound. Fleeing from those distant, empty winds, running from my own thoughts. He kept barking. Drawing me out of the deep and silent darkness, and he was the light. That bright white fur. Those desperate eyes.
Then I heard voices. I turned, fumbling for my gun, but immediately realized the voices were in my head. In my ear.
My team.
They were yelling. There were other sounds. Snarls and screams and gunfire. But my mind fought me, trying to wash the sounds away again. So I belted myself across the face again and again. I punched myself in the stomach, and then pounded a fist against my bruised hip.
It helped. The pain was specific, it was tangible, and it helped.
Top was yelling for me, but I had no voice and did not trust what I would say. So, he took command of the situation. “Okay, Echo Team,” he roared, “we ain’t playing no more. Let’s light these motherfuckers up.”
I fell over and it took forever for me to get to my hands and knees. The torn Faraday bag was there, with the spilled pieces of broken green crystal. I wanted to pick them up, take them. Eat them. Push them into my skin. Put them into my eyes.
Ghost shifted to stand over them. Growling again. I heard it now, and when I looked at him I knew that he would tear me apart to keep me from those stones. I hated him. I wanted to kill the damn mutt. I wanted to stab him to death and wear his skin and…
I screamed.
It bubbled up from deep inside of me and I screamed so loud that I could feel my throat ripping raw. And I flung myself away, falling, crawling like a baby, scrabbling, kicking my way along the floor, away from that green glow. Ghost stood his ground and watched me, his sides heaving, drool dripping from his lips.
Suddenly an explosion rocked the whole building.
It wasn’t the soft whump of earlier, but something much bigger, much worse. And it seemed to come from everywhere, rippling out in waves of destructive force that made the floor under our feet writhe as if we were on the back of some living thing. The poured linoleum cracked underfoot. I tried to stand but fell at once. Ghost went skittering and sliding away from me. As I reached for the wall to steady myself, jagged cracks whipsawed from ceiling to floor, snorting out plumes of brick dust. Framed art fell from its anchors and crashed to the floor and I could hear pipes inside the walls groaning as they were twisted out of shape.
I gasped, “What the—?”
And then there was a second massive crunch as if a towering giant had swung a pile-driver punch into the very heart of the building. The shock wave plucked me off the ground like I was nothing and slammed me into the wall. I tucked my chin to save my neck and skull, but the impact drove the air from my lungs and stabbed me with daggers of pain. I heard Ghost utter a sharp cry as he crashed into the opposite wall. We both fell hard onto the juddering floor. He scrambled to his feet but stood quivering, his hair standing on end, eyes wild with terror.
I lay there, dazed, my eyes filled with bright and painful lights. I spat brick dust, coughed too hard, and felt something burning in my chest. My ribs and shoulders were mashed and each square inch felt like a separate volcano spewing red-hot lava. When I tried to get up, the next aftershock punched me into the wall so hard that my head chunked against the cracked plaster. All the lights winked out for a moment and I fought my way back to consciousness, blinking a paste of dust and tears from my eyes. There was a high-pitched ringing in my ears. I lifted the ten thousand pounds of cracked block that was my head.
And that’s when the whole fucking day went sideways.
The wall ten feet in front of me seemed to shimmer and lose solidity and for a moment I thought I was seeing the structural integrity disintegrate as vibrations turned brick and plaster to powder.
That would have been bad enough.
Yeah. That would have been bad.
What I saw was worse.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SIXTEEN
The shimmer seemed to be shaped like an irregular crack, but it was clearly not part of the wall.
Actually, that’s wrong — I could see the regular wall pushed back like a curtain. It was as if the wall was nothing more than an image painted on cloth and something was parting it. The cracks that had been there before were still visible, but rippled and pushed aside. And, yes, I know how that sounds. I know how crazy it sounds.