The shimmer was green, and as I watched, it became a deeper and more vibrant green. Luminescent, as if there was a powerful light beyond it and someone was turning a rheostat to make it brighter. Understand me, there was no light hanging on that wall, and I don’t think this was light shining through it from another room. The hue was exactly like that of the broken gun and the guard’s ring. It was exactly like the spikes in the tentacle — or whatever it was — in the lab. The same. An alien hue, like a shade of green that doesn’t really fit into this world.
My bruised head could not make sense of it, failing even to select the right adjectives to describe it internally. My heart began racing and I sat there, so startled that I did not even think of getting away. Ghost got to his feet and stood trembling, but then he began barking furiously at the green glow as he backed nervously away.
Then there was a shadow within the shimmer. It was a figure and it seemed to be moving inside the distortion, and in my semi-delirium I wondered if maybe whatever was happening had indeed punched a hole into the next room and this was one of the Russians trying to get out.
That, you see, would make some sense.
Panic flared and I thought for a twisted moment that it was the rest of whatever that tentacle had belonged to.
It wasn’t either of those things.
The moment, you see, was heading in a completely different direction, because the figure that stepped through the crack in the wall was not a Russian soldier, or one of the guys in dark suits, or a lab technician, or even a security guard. Nor was he one of Echo Team come looking for me. Not a tentacular sea beast, either.
The figure that stepped through the wall was tall. Very tall. At least seven feet. It was dressed in some kind of strange and weirdly stylized body armor. It was as green as the shimmering light but painted to look like scales. Darker green on its massive shoulders, arms, and legs; paler with yellowish horizontal plates across its chest and abdomen. The figure wore bizarre boots and gloves that were scaly and oversized, and each toe and finger ended in a thick, dark nail. Or, maybe… claw?
The intruder stopped and looked down at me. It wore a mask and helmet that, like the rest of its armor, was designed to look like the horned, knobbed, ridged face and skull of some kind of unnatural reptile. Instead of eyes there were large goggles with lenses painted to resemble a lizard’s slit-pupiled eyes. The mask had two slits for nostrils and a lipless slash of a mouth. It had on what looked like an old Apache breechclout made from tooled leather and covered with symbols I could not identify. Belts crisscrossed its hips and there were objects in holsters whose nature and purpose were beyond my failing mind.
Lying there, dazed and concussed while the building shook itself to pieces around me, I stared up at the intruder and tried to understand what I was seeing. Clearly this was someone in a costume, in exotic body armor. I mean… really, what else could it be?
Ghost kept barking and backing away, his tail tucked under its hip, and eyes wild. The tension in his taut muscles told me that he wanted to run, to flee, but his need to protect his pack leader kept him there. He was losing it, though, and any second he was going to cross the line of pack mentality into pure survival mode. He’d flee, and I would be left staring at the man — if it was a man — who towered over me.
I fumbled for my sidearm, but my holster was empty, the gun lost when Ghost attacked to keep me from blowing my own brains out.
The big stranger looked down at the pieces of crystal on the floor. The tremor had scattered them around. If someone wearing a Halloween mask could frown, then that’s what it looked like he did. He took a device from his belt and squatted down. I heard a whir of a small motor and stared in frank astonishment as he vacuumed the green crystals up. He nodded to himself, stood, hung the vacuum on his belt, and drew an object from a holster and pointed it at me. It was unlike any gun I’d ever seen, if gun it was; it looked more like a flashlight with a pistol grip. The whole thing, body, handle, and bulb, was not made of metal or glass but instead seemed to be made of some kind of that same green quartz. However, his device did not glow like the pistol had. Did that mean it was of a slightly different material, or was it not, as Junie put it, activated? I had no way to know, no way to even properly theorize.
The intruder thumbed a lever and the gun suddenly glowed with a yellow-green light so intense that I winced and half turned away. Again, the light was not the same hue as before. He did not fire at me, but instead raised his weapon and aimed at the far wall. For one terrible moment I thought he was going to shoot Ghost, and that snapped me halfway out of my daze. I snatched my Wilson rapid-release folding knife from its pocket, snapped the blade into place, and lunged at him. The blade flicked across his calf as he dodged away, but only the tip made contact, drawing a thin cut through his armor.
He hissed like an iguana and I froze, gaping at his leg.
The body armor was bleeding.
Green liquid, thick as blood, beaded up and ran in lines down his leg. That slammed me into absolute stillness. It was the same color as the green substance I’d seen on the injured Closer in Maryland.
Not paint.
Blood.
The intruder rattled off something in a language I’d never heard before, wheeled, pointed his gun at the far wall, and pulled the trigger. There was another massive rumble and once more the building seemed to shudder as if struck by some titanic fist. Overhead lights snapped loose and crashed to the floor, showering me with fragments of glass from the fluorescent tubes. I didn’t care. I couldn’t care, because all my attention was fixed on the opposite wall. A new crack appeared and it shimmered like the other one had, and once more the wall seemed to open and part like curtains on a stage. The intruder kept his gun pointed at it, the trigger pulled back until the crack widened enough for him to step through.
I watched him go.
I could see that the wavering crack was not really in the physical structure of the wall, but rather imposed upon it. Don’t ask me how, because I was way beyond the capacity for rational thought.
As the intruder vanished inside I caught a glimpse — just the merest glimpse — of a different place. Not another room, not even the darkened parking lot outside. This was a rocky slope painted by bright sunlight that was the wrong color. More of a sickly sea green than yellow. Plants and flowers bloomed between the rocks and I did not recognize a single one of them. They were towering ferns with leaves as long and sharp as swords; and something like a three-headed rose, its petals the color of fresh blood. Weeds lined with seedpods swayed in a wind that I did not feel. At the top of the slope was a building, a tower made from what looked like carnelian and red jasper, that rose into the sky. And the sky. Dear God, that sky. There were two large moons and a dozen smaller ones partly obscured by wisps of clouds, and beyond all of them was the monstrous curve of a gas giant that swirled with storms, like Jupiter, only more violent.
Something flashed — a burst of green light that snapped like lightning from that alien sky and struck my chest with such force that I was picked up and smashed once more against the far wall. I managed to duck my head this time, but it didn’t matter. The world went black then green then red. I dropped to my knees and felt like my head was cracking into a hundred tiny pieces. Little bursts of color, like crimson poppies, blossomed in the air in front of my eyes. And when I looked down at my hands I could see tendrils of electricity writhing and twisting on my gloves and up my arms.