Bunny and Top shot looks at me, saw the bag and the dangling rope. They understood. They began sliding along the wall, firing with renewed frenzy. Top’s MP7 was slung, probably empty and he was using the grenade launcher. There were dead bodies everywhere. Dozens of them. It was a slaughterhouse. It was what we call a target-rich environment, except that usually doesn’t mean that the shooters were likely to lose.
But now we had a chance. I laid down covering fire with my MP7 and lobbed a few grenades as party favors. They ran. We all reloaded and stuffed the magazines into our pouches.
The priests and the spiders kept coming.
There were still so many of them.
I picked up the empty bag and pointed to Mercer. “We need to secure the book and send it up on the rope. All other considerations secondary, hooah?”
“Hooah,” they said.
“Grenades,” I said. “Blow these fuckers up. Buy me time.”
Bunny and Top stood their ground and as Top fired, Bunny hurled one fragmentation grenade after the other. They set a pattern, tossing the grenades just over the front rank so that the priests and spiders in front shielded them from the shrapnel. It was a rinse and repeat method, but we knew it couldn’t last. It just had to last long enough.
I threw a pair of grenades underhand at the killers and monsters between me and Mercer, making sure not to over-throw. Lizzie didn’t say that I could kill Mercer. Which sucked, because I really, really wanted to.
The pit was filled with lightning and thunder as the grenades detonated. Cracks appeared in the walls. Even worse, the cleft was widening — either from the concussions, or the spell, or the diligence of the spiders in this world and the aliens in the next. It was madness down there. Total madness.
I don’t know how long it took me to kill my way to where Mercer knelt. Ten seconds? Ten years?
Time was meaningless. Hope was a nail hammered into the center of my chest. Hate filled my head with thorns. I was deafened and screaming at the top of my lungs.
As the spiders and priests died, I saw Mercer again. With all of the violence and madness around him, he had not moved. Never even looked up, as if he existed in a space apart from this hell hole.
I switched from grenades to knife, not wanting to risk accidentally shooting the prick. There were four priests between me and Mercer, and they tried to form a protective wall.
They tried.
They had big weapons. My knife is a Wilson Rapid Response folding knife with a three and a half inch blade. They should have won, at least in the way they would have calculated the odds. But the math works best for who wants it more. They were fanatics, but I’m actually crazy.
Batshit, monster-in-the-dark crazy.
They tried to keep me from saving my world. They tried hard.
I cut them to pieces.
As the last one fell away, his hands clamped to what was left of his throat, I stepped up to Mercer. He knelt there, his skin steaming with heat like a roasting pig. His dick was still fully erect as if in the throes of the most intense and existential of sexual encounters. I was very tempted to use my knife on him, because this son of a bitch deserved it. But not yet.
Instead, I put my knife in my belt pouch and reached for the book.
Yes. I thought it would be that easy.
Fuck.
15
TOUCHING THE BOOK was like touching a live electrical power cord. Not a little one, but a big one. The shock was so intense that my hands clamped onto the covers and I suddenly felt as if I was on fire. My body went totally rigid except for my hair, which stood straight as needles from arms and scalp. The pain was off the scale. There’s pain, and then there’s agony, and then there’s a level that is so big, so comprehensive that you can almost stand back from it and watch. Like seeing your house burn down and take everything you own with it. You’re aware of the pain, but it seems somehow unreal.
That kind of pain.
I don’t think I screamed. Pretty sure I couldn’t at that point. Nor could I move. All that was left for me was to experience it. And to feel myself die.
They say your life flashes before your eyes. That’s not true. I’ve been out on the very edge too many times, so I know.
What happened — at least to me — was that I saw the things I haven’t done, the life I had yet to live and would not get to live. I saw my lover, Junie Flynn, running through a dying world as monstrous fighting machines burned the city around her with heat weapons. I saw my brother, Sean, and his family, tangled in the big baskets on the back of one of those tripods, caught like trout and devalued to nothing more than food. I saw my friends and allies, and my fellow soldiers, fighting a losing war against an unbeatable army. Wave after wave of jets and helicopters going after the legions of fighting machines, and then falling like spent fireworks from the sky. I saw the green earth become choked by red weeds, in which the last free people suffered and starved and died.
I saw that.
It was all going to come to pass because of me. Because I’d failed in this task. To take a book away from a man who was not even able to resist.
Because I was not strong enough to do even that.
I wanted to scream. To beg for mercy from everyone who I’d failed. To cry out to Junie and my brother, and all of them.
The heat burned me, and I knew I was dying.
Except…
Maybe it was the Dragon suit that saved me.
Maybe it was that I saw a smile form on Mercer’s face, blossoming like a flower of hate in a blighted field. Maybe it was that. A last insult. The sting of mockery, the gloat of triumph.
I don’t know what it was. I’ll probably never know.
But my hands became mine again. Mine to use, mine to choose. Mine to move.
My thumbs lifted first. And then each finger in a slow — bitterly slow — choreography of obedience.
And then I was falling. Free of the book. Not free of the pain, though. That came with me as I collapsed. I dropped to my knees. The world was full of thunder and I could feel something warm leaking from my nose and ears. Blood, probably. I coughed and could taste it in my mouth as well.
Mercer turned his head slowly, focusing his blind eyes on me. “Your world will fall.”
“F — fuck you,” I gasped. I coughed again and spat more of blood into the hood of the Dragon suit. It painted the visor with viscous red, partly obscuring him. All I could see was that smile.
“Joe?”
The voice was in my ear and for a moment I could not tell if it was Junie or my dead mother or…
“Lizzie?” I whispered.
“Joe,” she said, “listen to me.”
“I—” But really, that was all I could manage.
“Joe,” said Lizzie as if from a million miles away, “all we need is the book. Do you understand?”
I mumbled something. Not even sure if they were actual words.
“We just need the book, Joe. Can you hear me?”
“B-b-book—” My vision was dimming. The world was turning red as the edges of the cleft began to crumble. Mercer’s smile became a laugh.
“Joe,” yelled Lizzie, “we don’t need Mercer.”
She shouted those words. Over and over again. Trying to reach me. Forcing me to understand.
I spat again. The visor was totally blocked now.
My hands, swollen and burned and nearly useless, rose as if from their own accord. Finding my hood. Finding the seals. Fumbling their way through. Tearing the hood off.
The air was so hot. Like an oven. Like hell.
But I could see.
And I could see James Mercer’s fucking smile. That smug, superior, malicious, evil goddamn smile. I wanted to wipe it off his face.
One hand dropped to my lap.