“Look sharp, some of them made it to the door,” Howe comments over the open channel. A couple of bodies still clutch bulky assault shotguns with drum magazines: one, wearing a distinctly more professional camouflage rig than the rest, is holding a Russian AKS-74 rifle. None of them, however, are moving. The feeders have eaten their fill and moved on.
“Trapdoor over here, sir!” One of the troops waves, pointing at a raised door.
“Secure it,” says Howe. “Tidily, our boy might still be down there.” He doesn’t say what everyone fears: the next living soul they find in this city of the dead will be the first.
As the soldiers move in, something runs at them, out of the tunnel, frighteningly fast. There’s a burst of automatic fire. “Hold that!” yells Howe, as the revenant comes apart in a tumbling rain of dust and bones. “Batons!” A pair of troops step forward, holding heavily customized cattle prods before them-electrical shock-rods, customized with signal generators to loosen the grip of extradimensional horrors on their walking hosts. There’s a snap and crackle of sparks as they test their tools.
“You think he’s down there,” Mo says quietly.
Major Barnes nods. “Cultists. They go to ground for their rituals.”
Up ahead, Scary triggers his shock-stick, sparking the terminals: he grins at Howe. “I love the smell of-”
“Don’t say it, son, unless you want a week on toilet duty.”
“Aw, Sarge.” He steps forward, bending to follow the lead team into the cellar. “That’s harsh.”
There are no living bodies in the tunnel. Some of the possessed are still stirring feebly, their luminous eyes guttering in the darkness, but the flying wedge of soldiers with shock-sticks shut them down in short order: it’s easier than clubbing baby seals.
At the end of the tunnel they come to an open door. Now there’s noise, and the troops take up position to either side of the entrance, ready for a forced entry. But while they’re waiting, Dr. O’Brien and Major Barnes arrive. Mo holds her violin, ready for a killing chord. Barnes glances at her, then waves Howe back from the right-hand side of the door. “What do you think?” he asks quietly.
“It stinks, sir. You saw the sov kit back there?”
“I did. I reckon we’ve got company. More to the point, we haven’t found our boy yet. Could be a hostage situation.”
“Shit. I’ll tell Moran to bring up the snoop kit-”
Mo’s eyes are hollow shadows in the darkness. “Major?”
“What is it?”
She points at the entrance with a hand half-folded around something. “He’s definitely in there.” She unfolds her hand, palm upwards to reveal the cracked and battered screen of Bob’s iPhone, icons glowing balefully in the darkness. “Got a soul tracker on this thing. He’s alive, and he’s not alone-”
Which is when the screaming starts.
ALEXEI IS BECOMING ANNOYED.
He’s been down in the crypt for half an hour, moving with painstaking care. The place is literally crawling with the risen dead, feeding on the dwindling survivors of the Black God Slave Cult-some of whom have barricaded themselves into the ossuary, with predictable consequences-and only sheer luck and the revenants’ lack of situational awareness has saved him. They don’t communicate with each other, don’t raise the alarm when he lands among them and lashes out with a sharp-edged entrenching tool or shoots their neighbors with a silenced pistol firing banishment rounds. It would be good news under other circumstances, but Alexei is acutely aware that he has a serious lack of backup and a mission that under other circumstances would be hopelessly compromised.
The sounds of gunfire from up above had nearly died out ten minutes ago. Now they’re getting louder and more frequent. And there’s something different about them: different weapons, much tighter fire discipline. The new shooters are professionals, but they’re not his squad-they’re firing NATO spec ammunition.
As it is, it looks like the only way out is in; if he can find somewhere to hole up until morning, he stands a chance of exfiltrating on foot, and if he can meet the mission’s core objective, retrieve the missing document, so much the better-
And everything looks like it’s coming down to this corridor here, and the open doorway gaping blackly at the end of it.
Alexei glides towards the entrance, then pauses briefly on the threshold. It’s a cul-de-sac, and every instinct warns him not to go in-at least, not without a couple of fragmentation grenades to clear the way. But there’s a quiet sobbing sound coming from inside, a woman’s lamentation. (And if the mission target is present, it wouldn’t do to cut up hard.) He adjusts his goggles, then flashes his infrared torch briefly at the ceiling.
A confused jumble of impressions: bodies. Mattresses arranged in concentric rings around a pit, leading down to an altar. There’s a four-poster bed behind the altar. The sobbing comes from a figure on the bed. Sacrificial victim, thinks Alexei. There are bodies, some new and some old: this is not a novelty. The idea of rescuing a victim from the cultists, however, holds some appeal-especially as she might know where they will have taken the mission target. Alexei is Spetsnaz through-and-through: the product of an incredibly harsh training system, ruthlessly self-disciplined, and trained as a soulless killing machine. But he’s also intelligent, a misfit who was a round peg in the square hole of the regular army, and possessed of the romantic streak that leads some men into professional soldiering. Given an opportunity to rescue a damsel in distress and expedite his mission goals at the same time, Alexei will go for the gratitude shag. And who can blame him? It’s been a hard night’s work.
And so he dances down the aisle, leans over the lady tied to the bed, and-holding a knife to the neck of the man lying next to her-who just happens to be me, myself: Bob Howard-asks: “Woman, you tell, where is Fuller Memorandum? Speak now, or will cut throat of All-Highest.”
I LIE IN THE GRIP OF A GREAT LASSITUDE. I’VE BEEN LYING here for what seems like decades, staring with unblinking eyes at the star-pricked canopy of black silk above the Skull Cultists’ altar. I know, distantly, that I am in extreme danger; I’m in the middle of a monstrous summoning, and lying like a drunkard next to a bound but still deadly Iris while her minions panic and try to fight off the eaters outside the chapel is not a life-expectancy-enhancing situation. But I can’t move. I don’t even feel tired; I feel dead. Some kinds of summoning cause serious physical fatigue, possibly via a mechanism not unlike a mild form of K syndrome, and this would appear to be one of them.
The black sky above me, pierced by the flickering light of unfamiliar constellations, blows like a chill wind through my awareness. I’ve seen this sky before, I realize; where? Oh. Yes, the canopy of the altar-bed of the Black Skull mirrors the chill starlight that sluices across the desiccated plain surrounded by the fence of impaled corpses that I dreamed about, the fence that locks the Sleeper in the Pyramid in somnolent darkness. I’m not the only one to see that skyscape when I close my eyes, I think.
I can feel Iris nearby, her mind slowed and frustrated, defocused by the bindings woven into the ropes that trim the altar of the sex-magic cultists that used this chapel before her own people moved in. She’s angry, terrified, embittered; I could almost feel sympathy for her if my right arm didn’t remind me constantly of what she stands for, who she is. There are the eaters, torpid and in some cases well-fed, resting in their bony chrysalids in the porous earth beyond; and there are other human lives upstairs, some of them familiar. They’re coming this way. One of them, not so familiar, is almost here already-
Something touches my neck, as a voice speaks, in a thick eastern European accent: “Woman, you tell, where is Fuller Memorandum? Speak now, or will cut throat of All-Highest.”
Bastard. I’m lying here helpless and I can’t even tell Laughing Boy that I’m not the All-Highest! That, and the Fuller Memorandum happens to be snugly jacketed in the folder I’m clutching to my bosom with arms like lead weights: this is not looking good. Close to panic, I try to twitch a finger or blink an eyelid-anything to reassert control over my own treacherous body.