“What is a God Machine, Prospero?”
The boy walked slowly across the room, still clutching the sketchbook to his chest. He stopped by the window and raised his face to the warm sunlight.
“It’s how I’m going to go home,” he said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I heard Bunny’s sharp intake of breath.
I heard Top softly murmur, “God in heaven.”
Then something moved in the darkness. We crouched, weapons ready, barrels following line of sight, fingers lying nervously along the curves of our trigger guards.
Inside the chamber, a dozen yards away, we could hear something. It wasn’t footsteps. Not exactly. This was a soft, almost furtive sound. A shift and scrape as if whatever moved in there did not move well. Or was unable to move well.
“NV,” I said very quietly and we all flipped down the night-vision devices on our helmets. The world of snow white and midnight black instantly transformed to an infinitely stranger world of greens and grays.
The thing in the darkness was at the very outside range of total clarity. It moved and swayed with a broken rhythm, obscured by rows of stacked supplies.
“What the fuck…?” breathed Bunny.
The thing moved toward us, a huge, weird shape that was in no way human. Pale and strange, it shuffled steadily toward the open door, but we only caught glimpses of it as it passed behind one stack of crates and then another. The abattoir stink of the place was awful and it seemed to intensify as this creature advanced on us.
“Got to be a polar bear,” whispered Bunny.
“Wrong continent,” said Top.
Their voices were hushed. They were talking because they were scared, and that was weird. These guys were pros, recruited to the DMS from the top SpecOps teams in the country. They don’t run off at the mouth to relieve stress. Not them.
Except they were.
“Cut the chatter,” I snapped, and from the way they stiffened I knew that it wasn’t my rebuke that hit them — but the realization that they were breaking their own training. Each of them would have fried a junior team member for making that kind of error. So… why had they?
The thing in the darkness was behind the closest set of crates now. In a few seconds it would shuffle into view. I could feel fear dumping about a pint of adrenaline into my bloodstream.
And then the creature moved into our line of sight.
In the glow of the night vision it was green and unnatural, though I knew that it was really white. Not the vital white of an Alaskan polar bear, or the pure white of a gull’s breast. No, this was a sickly hue and I knew that even with the NV goggles. This was a pallor that had never been touched by sunlight, even the cold light here at the frozen bottom of the world. This was a mushroom white, a sickly and abandoned paleness that could only have acquired that shade in a place of total darkness. It provoked in me an antagonism born of repugnance and I nearly shot it right there and then.
The creature was as tall as Bunny — six and a half feet or more — with a grotesquely fat body and eyes that were nothing more than useless slits in its hideous face.
I heard a sound. A short, humorless laugh of surprise and disgust. Could have been Top, or Bunny. Or me.
“It’s a goddamn penguin…” said Bunny, his voice filled with surprise and wonder.
A penguin?
Sure it was.
In a way.
The problem is that it was too big. Way too goddamn big. Massive. Twice the size of the Emperor penguins and bigger than the prehistoric penguins I saw in a diorama at the Smithsonian. The wings were stubby and useless as if it no longer flew even through the water. The beak was pale and translucent; the body was blubbery and awkward. It waddled toward us and we gave ground, though we kept our guns on the thing. Crazy as it sounds, I was scared of it. The sight of it was triggering reactions that were way down in my lizard brain — miles from where rational thought could laugh off instinctive reactions.
The penguin shambled past us through the airlock but then it suddenly stopped at the exterior door. The sunlight was almost gone but what little there was touched its face. The creature turned toward the warmth for a single moment, and then it reeled backward from the light and uttered a terrible sound. It was the kind of strangled shriek of terror you hear only from animals whose throats are not constructed for sound — like rabbits and deer. A scream that is torn from the chest and dragged through the vocal cords in a way so violent and wet that you know it has damaged everything it touched. The penguin careened into the wall as it fled backward from the touch of the dying sunlight. Its screams were terrible.
Even after the blind animal crashed backward into the airlock it continued to scream and scream. I could see black beads of moisture flying from its beak and with sick dread I knew that they were drops of bloody spit from its ruined throat.
“Boss…,” said Bunny, his voice urgent with concern and horror.
“Push it back inside,” yelled Top.
Bunny let his rifle hang from its strap and with a wince of distaste he placed his hands on the animal’s back and gave it a short, sharp push toward the airlock, away from the sunlight. The penguin paused, though, at the mouth of the airlock, and immediately began fighting its way backward, screaming into the darkness it had come out of. Bunny shoved again, throwing his massive upper-body strength against the creature’s resistance. It lurched forward, but then it turned and stabbed at Bunny with its pale beak. Bunny howled in pain as the razor-sharp beak tore through the knitted wool of his balaclava. Black blood erupted in a line from the corner of Bunny’s mouth to his ear.
“Shoot the fucking thing!” bellowed Bunny as he backpedaled, shielding his eyes from another peck.
Top shoved him out of the way and raised his Glock. There was a single, sharp crack! A black hole appeared between the slitted, useless eyes of the penguin and the entire back of its head exploded outward to spray the line of stacked crates. The sheer bulk of the thing kept it upright for a moment, giving the weird impression that the bullet hadn’t killed it. Then it leaned slowly sideways and collapsed.
We stood there in a loose circle staring at it.
Bunny said, “What…?”
Just the one word and he let it trail off because clearly we had no more answers than he did.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Sixteen cars roared around the track.
In the stands tens of thousands of fans leapt to their feet in groups as the cars swept around. The race was five minutes old. Every car was still in the game; all of the drama and potential was still ahead. Anything could still happen. And this was the start of the NASCAR Spring Cup series. With each race more of the drivers would be eliminated until that last grueling challenge between the top four. All of that was to come.
This was the first race.
Everyone was wired. The announcer and color commentator were already yelling, calling the moves, talking about the drivers and their cars, their histories, their crashes, their lucky escapes, their courage. Pit crews were in position, each of them ready, and even the most jaded among them filled with nervous energy as they watched the cars accelerate to breakneck speeds.