Bleak History (19 page)

“The time has come, Soon Mei,” Helman said. “Send them out to find Harry L. Zelinsky for us. He is in Canada, somewhere in Vancouver, but we don't know exactly where, they keep shifting his safe house.”

Zelinsky!
Loraine thought. The leader of the opposition to President Breslin. Accused of embezzling—probably framed—he'd fled the country a year before to avoid jail. He still spoke to the American public through the Internet, and Canadian media, though the webs of censorship tightened every day.

Directed by Soon Mei, the ghosts fled up the shaft in search of Zelinsky, and a thought came to Loraine seemingly from nowhere.

Where is my duty, really? Am I really serving my country this way?

***

AT ALMOST THAT SAME moment, in New Jersey.

Why did I come?
Bleak wondered. He stood in a small crowd with Oliver and Shoella.

They watched a perspiring man capering on the sidewalk of a business thoroughfare four blocks from Shoella's house, in front of a burning building. The man was shaking his shoulders like a stripper, laughing and crying at once, silhouetted against the burning inferno that had been Sol's Restaurant. He was a long-haired, thirtysome-thing man with chipmunk cheeks and a belly that sagged over his wide leather belt and an old INSANE CLOWN POSSE T-shirt. Cheap single-color tattoos decorated his thick, pale arms. He was shaking his arms as if to get something out of them, doing a dance like a child having a tantrum. Sweat splashed when he whipped his head about, and it pasted his long brown hair to his head and neck.

Bleak knew the restaurant, a popular comfort-food family spot, built in the 1950s, with curving pseudo-space-age lines of red panels and curving chrome, Sputnik-shapes projecting from the SOL'S sign. Now the low, sweeping building roiled and rumbled with smoke-streamed flame. A window burst out, glass tinkled into the parking lot, glinting with firelight. They could feel the heat of the fire sixty feet away.

Yorena sat on the branch of a small elm nearby. Bleak and Shoella and Oliver and Oliver's ferret —its eyes catching the flames—watched as fire trucks roared up and police cars blocked the area off. 13' Cops were putting up street barriers and telling the small, gaping crowd to stay back, nothing to see here.

A middle-aged woman with dyed-blond hair, wearing a Sol's waitress uniform, stood just in front of Bleak, watching the fire, wringing her hands. “We asked him to leave because he was ranting about how he was a great songwriter and no one appreciated it and they stole his ideas, and we said, 'Quiet down, stop yelling,' and he said he didn't have to, and then he said, 'It's happening to me, finally it's happening,' and he started throwing fire-things around.... Oh, Lord, that job was all I had.”

“And I don't see much of anything,” Bleak said, aside to Shoella, keeping his voice low. “I mean —no 'especialities.'“

Two pale uniformed cops, glistening with sweat themselves, were approaching the capering man, one with a Taser, one with a gun drawn.

“How do you think Sol's got on fire in such a short time?” Oliver insisted.

“I don't know—a firebomb maybe.” Bleak was scanning the sky for helicopters or UAV drones. He really shouldn't have come. A man who had, perhaps, helped kidnap his brother had been right there in front of him. And he'd left him unattended somewhere. Who knew what the guy might be doing? Was he contacting CCA—maybe trying to get more money that way?

Oliver shook his head. “I
sawit.
It wasn't a firebomb.”

“I think I'm leaving. We should all go.” Bleak wanted to get back and talk to Coster, pay him if necessary.

“That's what he was doing right before the fire started inside,” the waitress said. “Throwing himself around like that. I got to go home.” But, stricken, she just stood there, staring at the capering man. “How I'm going to pay my...”

“Reach out into the Hidden, here,” Shoella whispered, to Bleak and Oliver, watching the cops approach the capering man. “You can feel it.” She glanced up at Yorena on her perch. “It's something new—he'sjust gotten this—”

The ferret on Oliver's shoulder stood up on its hind legs, making high-pitched
chi-chi-chi
sounds. And Oliver said, “Yeah. Something's building up...about to let go...reaching the flash point.”

Bleak felt it too. He looked into the Hidden and saw the energies boiling around the capering  man...as if the man's contortions were bringing it to a boil.

The cops were shouting—and that's when Bleak saw the fire imps.

The sweaty guy in the INSANE CLOWN POSSE T-shirt suddenly stopped moving, stood there in quivering rigidity with his arms held straight out, palms up—and hunkering in his hands were burning tumor-purple creatures, each about the size of a human heart. Probably most people here couldn't see them, as the ShadowComm did: squat, little, purplish fiery mockeries of humanity.

With his heightened sensitivity, Bleak could see the fire-energy drawn down from above; he could see the atmosphere warping around the man's head as he drew energy and spirit-forms from the Hidden; could see the fire imps themselves coming down from overhead somewhere, in their more ghostly forms: like perverse, transparent cupids, descending this shimmering column, diving into the man, rippling out along his arms, emerging more substantially in his hands, without burning his skin.

Hideous, maliciously grinning, little, purple-black homunculi coated in red fire...dancing in his hands, and on top of his head, as the man had done on the street.

“Put those things down!” the cop with the Taser shouted. To him it would look like fireballs in the man's hands. He'd be thinking it was some kind of bomb. The cop brandished the Taser...

And the long-haired man flung a fire imp like a gas-soaked softball at the cop. The living fireball spun as it hissed through the air, trailing black smoke, to smack into the cop's chest. It
stuck...
then sank
into
him. He opened his mouth to scream—and burst into flames from within, shrieking and running, flailing his arms.

The man who'd thrown the fire imp turned and saw the waitress. She was weeping, backing away. He raised an imp that seemed to widen its grin and laugh happily when it realized it was about to be thrown at someone.

The cop with the gun shouted for people to get out of the line of fire—firemen were trying to put out the flames on the sprawled, burning policeman.

The waitress screamed and ran—scurried randomly toward Shoella.

Bleak pulled Oliver and Shoella out of the path of the waitress as the man with the fire imps flungs his living fireball after her—which missed the waitress, flashed past them, and struck the small tree where Yorena perched, sinking into its trunk...and making the elm explode a split second later, like a grenade of burning splinters. Yorena flapped into the air, to circle overhead screeching angrily. All that remained of the tree was a smoking stump.

If the cops don't do something,
Bleak thought,
I'm going to have to try.
He reached into the Hidden.

But the cop with the pistol fired. Two times, three times, the reports ear-ringingly loud; the bullets cracked into the man's head and into his back...and the man pitched forward onto his face, the back of his head shot away. Quite dead. And the imps sucked away into nothingness.

Bleak stared at the corpse. A fact he had known for a long time: the supernatural wasn't likely to save you from a gunshot in the head.

He had seen too many good men shot dead in Afghanistan to care when a self-indulgent, murderous neurotic was cut down. But as he hustled away with Shoella and Oliver, he thought,
Shoella was right, that guy was new to this. You could feel it. If it came to him as an adult—how many more like him are out there?

***

SHOELLA SAID IT, AS she drove them back to her house. “There's been a change. For a big while, the wall let through just enough for us. Now it's breaking open, opening more, and certain people are being powered up with especialities. From what Yorena and the spirits and Scribbler tell me, it's all bad people. Dangerous people. Crazy, vicious.”

“You got to wonder how that happened,” Oliver said, sitting beside her, the ferret scuttling agitatedly on his shoulders. “Who's directing the new power that way? Toward people with no real sense of...of guidance.”

“Maybe they've got guidance,” Bleak said. “Maybe it's just the wrong one.”

“So,” Oliver said, scratching the ferret under its chin to calm it, “that still suggests that someone's deliberately targeting those kind of people.”

“So who?” Shoella asked.

Maybe,
Bleak thought,
that's something this Coster would know.

But when they got to Shoella's place, Coster was gone. The yard's gate was left open. No trace of Coster remained but an empty rum bottle.

CHAPTER
NINE

Eighteen hours later, in a Humvee—in the Arctic.

“It was under the permafrost,” Dr. Helman said simply. “But the permafrost melted—you know,
global warming.”
He emphasized
global warming
wearily. He was up front, beside the driver. That was Morris, the contract engineer, a round-faced Inuit in brown coveralls, sleeves rolled. Morris had a master's in archaeological engineering from the University of Toronto. It seemed to Loraine, when she watched him driving bumpily along, that the Eskimo engineer was having to work at not laughing at them.

Loraine sat behind Helman next to a young U.S. marine holding a carbine across his lap. The marine's expression, she thought, was a clear question:
What the hell am I doing here?

I don't know much more than he does,
Loraine thought. What was
she
doing here, in the Arctic, almost within spitting distance of the magnetic north pole?

She thought about asking them to open the Humvee's windows—the smell of everyone's insect repellent, deployed against the notorious arctic mosquitoes, was sickeningly strong. Her own repellent itched under the collar of her work shirt and at the cuffs of her heavy general-issue military trousers. The bumpy ride didn't help.

The Humvee bumped and fishtailed over the twisty dirt road, between rolling hills covered with low green and purple scrub. To the northwest, the sea off Ellesmere Island was startlingly blue, the kind of nearly black blueness you got when you dumped india ink in water; ice floes littered the horizon like broken Styrofoam.

She looked south, up the lower slopes of Mount Eugene, multicolored and green with lichen and short grasses; up higher, granite outcroppings glittered with ice. “It's on this mountain somewhere?” she asked.

“The dig site, yes, it is,” Morris said, nodding, though she'd been talking to Dr. Helman. “Yuh, but not far up it; it's just around the curve a dozen klicks, ay? Was under a glacier but she melted away. Biggest mountain on the United States Range, this one, but we won't be going high up. Just above the lake, there. Still in Quttinirpaaq Park.”

“You're keeping the park tourists out, Morris?” Helman asked.

Morris looked surprised. “Tourists? We never had many, almost none now, with the seas rising  up, ay? You people south heat up the world, and...” He shook his head, knowing better than to risk his paycheck grousing over what couldn't be helped now. “Even the Inuit only come here a few times a year. Ritual ground is underwater, we had to make a new holy place on the slopes above!” After a moment, as he jerked the wheel to fishtail around a curve, he remembered to add, “But if we see any tourists, we'll keep them away from the site. With most of the wildlife gone these days, people mostly came to see where Peary had his camp, and that's all underwater now.”

“The whole island will need to be thoroughly secured,” Helman said, looking at Loraine in the rearview mirror.

She nodded, because he seemed to expect some response.

They jounced on again for another two miles, following the beveled outline of the mountain, finally coming out of its shadow into eye-bashing sunlight, some of it reflected brightly off a translucent-blue lake a quarter mile below. The lake looked to Loraine like a piece of smirched glass set into a hollow of the mountain, one end streaked with newly disturbed red and brown clay. The cause of the streaky murk was the dig site above the lake, a compound of concrete bunkers encircled by earthworks and hurricane fences topped by antipersonnel wire that glittered with a just-installed brightness.

The road descended two switchback curves, and a few minutes later they passed through the gate in the fence and pulled up in the graveled area near the bunkers. They climbed gratefully out of the Humvee, blinking in the pale sunlight. Arctic mosquitoes dove at them, some of them looking big as dragonflies.

“You put on the insect repellent, I hope, ay?” Morris said to her. “They'll take a bite out of you, fer sure. I use a seal-fat grease but I didn't bring any for you.”

It was a little too warm, even for summer in the Arctic. Loraine felt sweat break out on her forehead and, at the same moment, became aware of hungry stares from the two young marines who'd let them in the front gate.

How long have those wen been stationed here without a break?
she wondered, walking over to the bank of dirt above the lake. She looked down at the lake about sixty feet below; terns circled over  it, squawking, their bodies perfectly reflected in the glassy water.

“Right this way, Loraine,” said Dr. Helman. “We'll head directly to the dig.” He turned toward the marine who'd accompanied them. “Oh—Corporal? We're inside the compound, all is quite secure.

You can go into the...what do you call the cafeteria here? Get yourself some coffee or...whatever you like.”

The jug-eared marine nodded briskly. Taking a break was something he understood. “Yes, sir.”

When he'd gone, Helman murmured to her, “We'll soon transfer the marines out—we'll have only our own elite black berets here.”

Loraine followed Helman and Morris over to the dig site, a shallow pit between the bunkerlike buildings and the drop-off to the lake. Morris talking proudly about the retaining walls, how the archaeologists asked his advice, couldn't get along without him. Not at all snooty, that Dr. Pierce, but that Dr. Koeffel, now, he was a bit of a...