“What, by drawing a pentagram on the ground and burning candles?” Jean asked.
“I’m just theorizing.” A sudden surge of frustration made me pound both my fists on the tabletop and yell.
Both Jean and Alex jumped. “What?” Jean asked.
“I have no idea what to do here. We’re just spinning our wheels. We can’t recreate Brian’s work, because it’s destroyed. We can’t summon a varcolac, and even if we could, we wouldn’t know how to learn anything from it. We don’t know anything at all.”
“Let me see the Higgs projector,” Jean said.
“What are you going to do?”
She pulled a folded sheet of smartpaper out of her pocket. “I’ve been dabbling with some code,” she said. “Diagnostic only—it might help us understand how Brian used the projector to summon the varcolac and keep it at bay.”
I hesitated. The potential dangers of fooling around with the projector were serious, but it wasn’t reasonable for me to keep it solely to myself. Jean had been a faithful friend through all this, and there was no questioning her quick intelligence. If she thought she knew a way to use it to find out more than we knew now, I trusted her. I handed her the projector.
She synched the data on her smartpaper to the projector, and I could tell by the way her eyes flicked back and forth that she was interacting with it through her lenses. I was amazed that, given the brief look she had gotten at the programming before, she could have remembered enough of the interface to write subroutines of her own.
I felt the now-familiar tugging sensation in my chest, and I knew the projector had been turned on. “What are you doing, Jeannie?” I asked. I hoped she had more of a clue than I did. The device held incredible power, perhaps even the ability to summon and control a varcolac. But what was it doing, right now, to the integrity of my DNA, or my cellular structure, or my identity? To the basic laws of our universe? We just didn’t know.
I got a partial answer pretty quickly when Alex suddenly clutched my arm and gasped. I looked up to see that the room contained, not one, but dozens of varcolacs. Surrounding us.
“Turn it off, Jean,” I said. “Whatever you’re doing, turn it off.”
The varcolacs all had the same not-quite-human look about them, as if taken apart and put together too hastily, but they weren’t all identical. There were male and female faces in the crowd, but they didn’t always correspond to the male and female bodies. There were some different skin colors, but racial characteristics were as mixed up as everything else. Disturbingly, several of the faces bore some resemblance to Elena, Claire, Alex, and Sean. They were preternaturally still.
“What do we do?” Alex whispered, turning her head toward me slightly, but unwilling to take her eyes from the varcolacs. “Tell them we come in peace?”
The creatures glided forward, joints bending awkwardly, giving the impression of a nest of spiders. There was no way around them.
I cast around for some kind of weapon. The iron bar I’d used down here before had made no impression whatsoever, and in my house the man with no eyes had effortlessly snapped a poker in two. Standard weapons weren’t going to accomplish anything.
The varcolacs closed around us. I’d seen what could happen if they got too close, seen them kill Elena and Brian, seen a steel microscope crumpled like paper, seen Marek torn limb from limb. I pushed Alex behind me, shielding her with my body, for all the good that would do. They didn’t speak or make any expression of hostility or hatred. They just kept coming.
Marek wielded his broom like a quarterstaff and stepped forward, cursing loudly in Romanian. He swept the handle in an arc through three varcolac bodies, but they shimmered and diffracted around it just like before. There was no way to touch them.
Jean was hastily doing something with the projector. She stepped forward, holding it out like a charm, and incredibly the varcolacs drew back. The projector seemed to be causing them some kind of pain; when she pointed it in their direction, they shied away, back against the walls, and they shimmered, seeming to become more insubstantial. They had no eyes to track her movements, but their attention was clearly on her and on the projector in her hand.
“How did you do that?” I asked.
It didn’t hold them back for long. As she was pushing them back in one direction, they circled around and approached her from the rear.
“Watch out!” Alex said, and Jean spun in time to push them back the other way.
“I’m going to clear the door,” Jean said. “You won’t have much time.” She held the projector out in front of her and stepped toward the door, clearing an escape path. “Run!”
We all ran, Jean right behind us. Alex headed back toward the stairs, but I knew there was no way we were going to make it back up twenty stories with any speed. Perhaps the varcolacs would find the stairs just as difficult, but I wasn’t counting on it, and once we were stuck in the stairwell with them coming up behind us, there wouldn’t be any other options. We’d be trapped.
“This way,” I said. I ran the other direction, into the accelerator tunnel. I hoped that the golf cart Marek and I had driven might still be there, or else that the police or a maintenance guy had left one behind, but no such luck.
Alex tried to use her phone to call for help, but of course she got no reception. “There are call stations every mile,” I shouted. “If we can make it there, we can ask them to send a vehicle to come and pick us up.”
The varcolacs followed us silently. They ran awkwardly, lurching as they came, but it didn’t seem to slow them down. I thought Alex might be the one to fall behind, but she was fast and ran with a natural stride, and Jean quickly caught up with us. Ultimately it was Marek who started to drop back—as strong as he was, he was heavy, and he didn’t run as much as I did. There was no point in me slowing down to help him. I couldn’t carry him. The best I could do was encourage him to run harder.
“Come on!” I shouted. “It’s all those bacon cheeseburgers! Move!”
He growled at me and put on another burst of speed, nearly catching back up with us, but his breath was coming in big gasps.
“And don’t you get any crazy ideas about stopping to delay the monsters while we escape,” I said between my own panting breaths. “We’re almost there.”
I didn’t actually have any idea how far we were from a call station, nor how quickly they would be able to send someone out to get us. I realized that I had to be far enough ahead, however, that I would have time to make the call before the varcolacs overtook me. I started putting on more speed, trying to widen the distance between me and them. The muscles in my thighs ached, and my side was starting to burn. I generally ran a few miles four or five days a week, but I obviously hadn’t been keeping up with that recently, and it was more of a light jog anyway, not a sprint.
Finally, I saw the call station up ahead against the collider ring walclass="underline" a green-painted booth with a phone inside. Not only that, but someone was already there. It must be a maintenance worker, calling in. Maybe he had heard some part of our confrontation, or had seen some evidence of damage, and was calling in for instructions. He must have a golf cart or other vehicle. I shouted to get his attention.
As I ran closer, however, I could see that he wasn’t on the phone. He was just leaning against the station, arms crossed as if waiting for something. A chill passed through me as I recognized his bearing and the general wrongness of the shape of his body. A few more steps, and I could see his face clearly enough to be certain. It was the man with no eyes, the first varcolac we had seen, the one who had killed Brian and Elena and Claire and Sean.
He stepped out in front of us, legs spread wide. Alex screamed, but I kept running. If we stopped, we had no chance. We had to get past him.