Gunshots. Right on the other side, as if someone were pinned down, desperately firing their last shots.
23
The temperature change didn’t register for minutes, but when it did, after Orlando had scrambled through the wreckage, digging frantically under boards and masonry, fearing the worst, the cold hit with a shivering blast of reality. A layer of snow, several inches thick, lay over the valley and carpeted the hills; sunlight dazzled at the icy in the distance and Orlando’s eyes were pierced with hundreds of pins of light.
He blinked and looked down at his feet. All around — wreckage everywhere. No smoke, no scorched earth. It was like some colossus had taken the cabin in its hand and just crushed it with utter disdain.
His hands numb, scratched and bleeding at the fingertips, he took a step back.
This can’t be. I was just here.
The other him. The one with power. He could have stopped this — whatever this was. What happened?
Hundreds of footprints around. Boots by the look of it. But no vehicle treads. The driveway farther back was still unplowed and unblemished.
Then how—?
The wind settled, and a feeling of slight warmth tingled around the base of his neck. He turned up his collar and dropped to one knee before lowering his head. Blew into his hands to warm them, then closed his eyes, still seeing the remnants of the house, the glittering lights off the hills, and the cloudless sky.
He knew what he had to do.
With remnants of after-visions in his mind (the sight of the library-tree, other kaleidoscopic dimensions, and a realm impossibly distant yet within his grasp), he relaxed his mind.
And the visions came.
A figure all in red. A thin but well-built man in a snowsuit of sorts. Maybe an Olympic skier’s outfit, but bright crimson with jagged sporty black lines, lightning-like, across the chest and back. Sleek boots and red gloves. A crossbow on his back, and a quiver of black darts beside it.
He stands before the door to the cabin, in the stillness of twilight. The sun paints slanted shadows to his left, where the dozen or so men in ski masks and white-brown camouflage jackets stand, AK-47s ready. They look tense, scared but alert.
The man in red holds up a fist as he reaches back and readies the crossbow, loading it with two arrows, one in queue.
“Trust nothing,” he instructs them in a low voice. “And don’t be fooled by their appearance. Or anything else that comes our way.”
As if on cue, the wind picks up, gusting from the north, enshrouding the team in a swirling cyclone of ice and blinding particles.
A roar, then: a rending of flesh. Red liquid and something steaming flies through the air. Men scream and there’s a huge dark form rampaging through their midst. More gunshots, and in the obscured cloud of ice, bullets tear into team members even as the great black bear’s claws rend through flesh and bone, and its jaws clamp down on someone’s head…
The crimson man curses, then kicks open the door, ducking inside just as bullets riddle the door frame and shatter the nearest window.
Inside, he raises the crossbow and aims — at the two toddlers sitting innocently by the embers of a dying flame. Their eyes are wide and pupils huge, mouths open, staring at each other, and yet not seeing. The door slams shut, and before the intruder can get off his shot — the roof caves in just above him.
With catlike reflexes, he rolls and ducks to the side, under a sturdy table just in time. The cabin collapses around him, the side windows explode, the walls buckle and the cyclonic wind tears inside.
He can just see the two children between the table legs, wispy hairs on their heads, cute Disney onesies covering their bodies down to the booties, giggling as the ice flakes swirl around them.
More screams and howling from outside. More automatic weapon fire. The bear groans in ferocious anguish. The man struggles against the gale, and the ice blasting against the goggles he’s lowered. He holds the crossbow steady even as more bullets tear inside all around him, just missing.
And he fires.
A small dart, tipped with a tranquilizer point, bites into the first child’s shoulder.
The toddler falls back slowly, eyes widening in confusion and a look of unfair play.
The other reaches for his sister, even as the winds calm by half, and the screams outside fade and the bear slumps in mortal pain.
“Sorry,” says the red-clad attacker as he notches the next dart, lines it up carefully…
The table groans as the rest of the cabin’s infrastructure disintegrates and collapses in on itself. The fire douses itself and the walls turn to dust, but the last dart fires.
And everything else blows away in a final gust of frigid wind and snow.
And the man in red rises slowly, brushing himself off.
He’s alone amidst the dead and dying — and the two sleeping children. His quarry.
Sheathing the crossbow over his back, he advances. Tenderly scoops up each child, holding them both to his chest as he walks into the swirling mist, in the dying light, toward…
Where did they go?
The vision blurs, the darkness threatens to close in.
Not yet! Orlando insisted.
No vehicles, no tracks… Orlando tried desperately to remain in the vision, holding to the trance, the sense of ‘otherness’. The feeling of his body retreated, still kneeling on the cold ground, the warmth fleeing from his legs.
Where…? The vision shifted and—
Helicopters. Black ones, armored and sleek. Men in camo fatigues running, retrieving the fallen, and the twins — set in an encased futuristic-looking basinet of sorts. The man in red surveys the area, narrows his eyes, nearly in the direction of the vision’s point-of-view. He mouths something that looks like: “Don’t follow.”
And then he’s boarding the last chopper, and it rises in a cloud of ice and snow, and—
Orlando rocked back to the present and jumped to his feet in alarm, panicking.
Helicopter engine roaring, the winds blasted ice and snow his way. He could barely see, throwing up his arm over his eyes.
They’ve come back!
Defenseless, he was done for. The twins, the mission, everything gone. He waited for a hail of bullets to shred him to bits, but instead he felt a rush of a body slamming into his.
Thin arms around his neck, a slender but familiar figure pressed against his chest, his arm thrown aside and there were lips meeting his in a powerful kiss.
Phoebe!
He pulled back in surprise, overjoyed but totally disoriented from the vision and the sudden juxtaposition of reality.
“How are you here?”
Phoebe’s wide eyes sought his and were full of wonder. “I took a conventional craft. How the hell are you here? All the way from New York? And where…” She pulled back and looked around in horror. “…are they?”
Orlando took her arm, brought her back to him.
“They’re safe, trust me. But only for the moment.”
She turned up to him. “You saw…”
A nod. “We don’t have much time, but I know where they’re going.”
A look of tempered relief crossed her eyes. “Good. Get in, we’ll chopper to Denali Air Force base. Tell me everything on the flight.”