“Baxman, I don’t…”
“We got nowhere else to go. I need the door clear. Go.”
Wilson jumps, makes a cushioned landing on his magic boots, dropping to a squat. He comes up, rifle ready, reading for life signs. “Still clear,” he says to Baxter.
“Stay there!” Baxter continues urging the rest of the patrol to hurry and then he goes, “Aw, shit!” and screams at them. Wilson hears bursts of small arms fire and the concussion of grenades. He checks his screen. Wolves, he thinks when he sees the figures that are closing in on the pearl. But they’re not true wolves, they’ve got human feet and hands… except the fingers have talons. They’re knuckle-draggers, their arms incredibly long, covered in reddish brown hair, the same color as the mountain. They’re long-jawed, too. Red-eyed. Their limbs are spindly and strings of drool sway from their chins as they move through the flowers, harrowing the much smaller figures who’re racing toward the pearl. Even hunched over, their heads scrape the ceiling, so they must be forty, fifty feet tall… if he’s to believe his instruments. But how can he believe, how can he accept these digital monstrosities as truth? He calls out to Baxter, asks what he’s seeing, but Baxter’s too busy shouting orders to respond. Wilson focuses on the helmet screen. Watches as the shambling gait of one werewolf carries it close to a running soldier. Janet Perdue. It snatches her up in a taloned hand and bites her in half like she was a candy bar with wriggling legs. Blood splatters as in Japanese anime. Shocked, incapable of belief, Wilson hits replay and watches it happen again.
A soldier appears framed in the doorway above and jumps down beside him. Gay Roban, looking terrified behind her faceplate. She unlatches her helmet and removes it, rips off the skullcap that’s covered her close-cropped blond hair. She stares with dazed fixity at Wilson, then casts her eyes over the disarray of the room.
“Is it wolves up there, GRob?” Wilson asks, catching her arm. “Like werewolves?”
She pushes him away and says dully, “Fucking monsters.”
Baxter jumps down, closing the door behind him as he drops, and GRob screeches at him. “Chickenshit asshole! You can’t just leave ’em!”
“Check your screen,” he says, and when she won’t calm down, he shouts, “They’re gone, goddamn it! Check it out!”
Acting stunned, GRob puts her helmet back on. Wilson goes wide-angle on his screen. Werewolves prowling about, bending to sniff at the flowers, then hurrying with a gimpy, hunchbacked gait to another spot and sniffing again. No soldiers are visible, but the fact that the werewolves are hunting for survivors causes Wilson to think some may be alive, their suits shut down, maybe burrowed under the dirt. Three patrol groups. Seventy-two soldiers. They can’t be the only ones who made it. It was all so fast.
GRob lifts off her helmet. “Jesus!”
“Wrong fuckin’ prophet,” Baxter says flatly.
“Could be still some of our people out there,” Wilson says. “They could be shut down, they…”
“Could be?” Baxter spits out a laugh. “We ain’t goin’ back out there for ‘could be.’ Put that from your mind.”
“We can’t stay here.” GRob slaps at the wall. “Something picked this goddamn thing up and threw it. You seen the track it left. Like, y’know? They fucking threw it! You wanna be here when the son of a bitch comes back?”
“We’re not stickin’ around,” says Baxter.
“We’re not going outside, we’re not sticking around…” GRob gets in his face. “You gonna make us disappear, Baxman? You got that much mojo?”
Baxter steps away from confrontation and aims a forefinger at her. “You best slow it down, woman!”
Her cheeks flushed, GRob drills him with a furious stare, and even in the midst of fear and freakery, Wilson feels the pull of an old attraction, this long-standing thing he’s had for her. He wonders how he can think of sex, even fleetingly, even with GRob, who’s muscled up but looks like a woman, not a steroid queen like Perdue. Escape, he imagines. His hormones offering him an out. He still can’t accept that Perdue is dead. She was a mad fucking soldier.
“Punch yourself some downs,” Baxter says to GRob. “Light level.”
GRob doesn’t move to obey.
“That’s an order!” He looks to Wilson. “You, too.”
“That’s not cool, man! We can’t be doing downs, we’re in the shit!”
“Hear what I said? That’s an order!”
“I already did up. When the wolves showed,” Wilson says, not wanting to dull his edge. “I went way light, but I did up.”
Baxter eyes him with suspicion, then says wearily, “They’re shaitans, not wolves. I told you about ’em in the carrier.”
“I wasn’t all the time listening.”
“Muslim hell got some devils resemble wolves. That’s what we saw.”
“I thought this was supposed to be Paradise,” Wilson says, and Baxter says, “Who the fuck knows? Maybe the ragheads back in the village weren’t tellin’ it straight. Maybe they’re chumpin’ our ass. Wouldn’t be the first time.”
GRob, keying up a drug mix, makes a disparaging noise. “We just gonna sit around and get high until the shit comes down? That the plan?”
Baxter checks the mix on her computer, tells her to do up, and then says to Wilson, “Read the pearl for her.”
The interior of the pearl consists of chamber after chamber, what seems an infinite progression of rooms of varying proportions. Wilson reports this and Baxter says, “You got that, GRob? Infinite. There’s this room, then another and another and another… Get the picture?”
GRob’s leisurely tone reflects her new chemical constituency. “Naw, man. I don’t got it. How’s that possible?”
“Right! I’m goin’ explain this whole thing.”
She doesn’t seem to notice the sarcasm in Baxter’s voice and waits for him to deliver an explanation. Finally it appears to sink in. Her head droops to the side as if with the weight of acceptance that no explanation will be forthcoming. A smile touches the corners of her lips, the strain empties from her face. She might be seventeen, a sleepy girl waking after being with her lover, remembering the night they had. “This is probably the way to go,” she says.
It’s a vague statement, but Wilson, recognizing the hopelessness of their situation, trapped inside a giant pearl that has no end, devils like werewolves roaming everywhere, without the guidance of command, and maybe sixty-nine dead, death by cartoon, understands precisely what she means.
1200 hours
They pass through room after room, more than a hundred by Wilson’s count, all essentially the same. Luxuriously appointed and in disarray, the only sign of previous habitation being the smears of blood on the door through which they entered the pearl. Shortly before noon they open a door and find that it leads out of the pearl, which is lying not in a field of flowers, but in the midst of a brass forest. Perhaps the same forest DeNovo mistook for gold, though Wilson’s not clear on how the pearl ended up in the middle of it. Stunted-looking trees and undergrowth, every vein of leaf and fork of stem and twist of root wrought in cunning detail, rising to the roof of the cave. The temperature of the forest is near scalding. Steam rises from the brass foliage. The vegetation is too dense and interwoven to afford an easy passage. Baxter orders them back into the pearl and calls for a break. Says he’s shutting down for an hour. He tells Wilson to close the door leading to the forest and to stand watch while they sleep. Wilson doesn’t believe this is a good time to rest, but he’s tired and raises no objection. At the center of the room is a fountain, its basin covered in a mosaic of white and turquoise tiles. Liking the trickling sound of the water, Wilson sits on the lip, his rifle across his knees. GRob removes her helmet and lies down among some pillows. Baxter sits against the opposite wall, his legs stretched out.