“Where are they?”
Mikhail called out to Don Tran, his tracker and remote viewer. He looked up from the corpse in front of him and pointed, toward a distant hill crowned with trees, where Mikhail thought that he could see movement.
Leaves broke and crackled beneath his boots. He moved fast now that he had the trace, the thread of fright and desperation that marked the trail of those that had fled before his team. It wound through the brush and the undergrowth, over the ridge and partway down the valley. They were still bridging a narrow stream when he finally caught up to them. He steadied himself on the uneven surface of the rocky slope, aiming the. 40 pistol he had clutched in both hands. A woman, the one trailing behind, cried out and fell, and then was swallowed up by the swollen water as her companions plunged onward, Mikhail pursuing. The creek slowed him down a little. He caught the man near the top of the next ridge, the hatchet burying itself right in the center of his back. The man fell, cursing him, and for a brief moment, their eyes met.
And then he said the word, and Mikhail’s brain, reacting in primeval horror, relayed it to every neighboring mind before tearing itself apart in revulsion.
The meeting stretched on, through the afternoon, much too long for North’s taste. It was George Muir from the Raleigh Cartel, again, as usual, protesting his family’s shrinking interest in the covert Iranian opium trade that had been their traditional area of expertise. He had already wrung whatever consolations he was going to receive from the Hegemony for this perceived breach of territory, and he knew it, but he was offended and frightened by his family’s failing fortunes. He expressed this by making long, aggrieved speeches at the meetings they were still obligated to invite him to.
North had heard it all before, so he had tuned out shortly after the blowhard had begun talking, his eyes drifting out to the window to the blue sky and the rolling hills outside of Dublin, where they were doing this quarter’s financials. That put him in the position to see it first.
“Something is wrong,” he said firmly, cutting off Muir in midsentence, while the whole room turning to face him.
“What do you mean?” Tuttle asked suspiciously, squinting at him through the rolls of fat that surrounded his eyes. “You do not have the floor at the moment, Lord North.”
“You fools,” North sneered, gesturing at the window while he walked purposefully for the exit. “See for yourselves.”
At first it was only one person, a man, running along the road that connected the retreat buildings to the main security gate. He wasn’t wearing the normal uniform of the security forces, but the snipers stationed on the roof took care of him, so that didn’t seem too ominous. The men in the room, largely older, largely fat, had already begun to nudge each other and exchange whispered speculation on whether the younger North had finally lost it, the same way the elder had done so many years before, when another man came around the same curve, running as if his life depended on it. Followed by another. Then several more. The snipers felled the first few, but soon there was a whole crowd, a small army of strange people rushing the building, heedless of who the security staff shot.
And when they one of them got close enough, they said the word.
Eerie hesitated at the entrance to the old Physical Education building, currently unoccupied and slated for revamping next year.
“Alex?”
She said his name softly, probably too softly for anyone inside the ragged old building to hear her.
She debated a moment longer, then ducked underneath the caution tape and opened the front door, which had been left unlocked and partially ajar. Eerie stepped into the half-lit room, one side flooded with yellow light from the streetlight outside, the other shrouded in the shadows of the interior of the building. The whole place smelled powerfully of dust and mildew.
“Alex?” Eerie asked again, hopefully.
“Not exactly,” Steve admitted, stepping in the front door behind her and shoving her unceremoniously aside, while Charles closed the door firmly behind them. “I guess you’ll have to make do with us.”
Eerie caught herself on the arm of a chair covered by a paint-smeared drop cloth in time to avoid hitting the stripped wooden flooring. Her knitting basket went clattering to the floor and overturned, spilling yarn and darning needles.
“What?” Eerie looked from one sweating, leering boy’s face to the other. “But, the email said…”
“I know,” Steve said, moving forward, reaching for her with one massive hand, while Eerie shrank away. “What can I say? I am as surprised as you are. I always figured Emily for too good to talk to the likes of me, but I guess we both misjudged her, right? Anyway, I’ve wanted to settle things with your piece-of-shit boyfriend for a long time now, for my teeth. He ain’t here, so I guess that makes you the next best thing, right?”
“Maybe better…” Charles suggested evilly, his face flushed and ugly as he advanced on her.
Eerie backed up until she bumped up against one of the walls, sending a cloud of dust puffing up around her, like a halo in the late afternoon sun.
“What do you mean?” Eerie asked quietly, her fingers knotting in the fabric of her oversized sweatshirt.
Charles laughed his nasty little laugh, and Steve ambled forward, with a smug, self-satisfied grin on his face as he reached out again through the dust and the strange golden motes that filled the air, his hand clenched tight around her arm.
“Oh, you don’t get it?” Steve asked, his voice rich with mock sympathy, his face red and swollen. “I got the strangest email this morning. It turns out that Emily wants you gone in the worst way, and she’s willing to give us all sort of things, including a free ride into the Hegemony, if we take care of it for her. We were sent here to make you disappear, retard. And no one will care if we take our time about it.”
“Alistair?” Vladimir said, clearly stunned. “Why are you here?”
The old man’s laboratory was a mess as always. The two long tables were both covered with components and machinery, pipes and coils of wire, the remnants and wreckage of a dozen experiments, failed, functioning, and ongoing. Alistair picked up a length of steel pipe that looked about right on his way over, still a little groggy from the apport in.
“The boss sent me,” Alistair said jovially. “There was something I had to take care of here.”
Alistair looked up at the cells that hung across the second level. The traumatized witch that Alice had brought home was the only current occupant. Alistair winked at her, her eyes widened in terror, and she shrank back into the corner, as far away as her cell would allow.
“That’s odd,” Vladimir said, frowning. “I was sure Gaul told me that he had sent you out on assignment a few days ago.”
“Oh, now I understand the confusion. You see,” Alistair confessed, rolling the pipe around the palm of his hand, “I don’t work for him anymore.”
Vladimir spun to face him as he advanced, gripping the table top next to him for support, water leaking out of the corners of his wrinkled, weepy eyes. Around him, a circle flickered to life, a frenetic ring of unintelligible words burning faint orange.
“Alistair, you can’t be serious.”
“I can,” Alistair said, swinging the pipe at the his wrinkled head and connecting with the side of the skull. Vladimir toppled without making a sound, the orange ring around him disappearing as he hit the floor. “You never gave me enough credit, Vlad. None of you did. For such ambitious men, you could be very short-sided when it came to your proteges.”
Alistair’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he strained with the effort of wide-spectrum broadcast telepathy.
“Come on,” he said, to whoever was listening. “The door’s wide open.”
Across Central, apports were completed and gateways opened. Central had scarcely sunk into darkness when they begun to kill.