Gabriel’s Watch - Book One: The Scrapman Trilogy (28 page)

“You don’t want him?” he asked dryly.

Alice shook her head.

“Gabriel thought you would be pleased.”

“I guess he doesn’t know me all that well then.”

There was a long pause between the two of them as they studied each other.

“Very well,” Mohammad said, shaking his head. “You know, over the years I’ve noticed that you enjoy Greek mythology, Alice. Would you say that’s true?”

My mind leapt to Dinah, curled up and sleeping next to Alice every night since we rescued her from the trap. She was a spy, a breach of our privacy. Mohammad had proved that the best infiltrators are those who remain blissfully unaware of their true purpose. That cat had allowed Mohammad to know Alice to a point that made me want to rip his throat out.

Alice nodded. “So?”

“So it’s time for me to remind you of the legend of Prometheus,” he said, reaching into his satchel. “We believe that your ... fascination with these myths is rather intuitive on your part—not merely a coincidence.”

His hand rummaged for just a moment longer before extracting something and setting it on the display cove. “You are a clever one,” Mohammad smiled. “Your ancestors told some amazing stories, but in those stories you will find certain truths, and in those truths you will discover even more.”

Mohammad then melted through the wall, motioning for Zeke to follow; but before he left, he whispered one last thing:

“Gyges.”

Neither Alice nor I had the slightest idea of its meaning.

The robot, left momentarily with us, was indeed a different psychological machine than before; its edge was gone, carved from its circuits like a digital lobotomy. Zeke nodded to us, its head tilting with the sadness it portrayed, before it passed through the wall on Mohammad’s heels.

“Prometheus? Gyges? Finally, someone who speaks in riddles like you do.” I scrunched my face as we approached the object Mohammad had left behind. “Now you know what a pain in the ass they are.”

“They are not a pain in the ass,” she insisted.

“Okay, so what did he mean by all that?”

“Gyges sounds a little familiar, but I know Prometheus was a Titan who was punished for giving our ancestors the gift of fire—punished for breaking protocol.” She bent over to examine the thing. “This must be Mohammad’s way of telling us that Gabriel would be punished for giving us this.”

“And what
is
that?” I asked as Alice picked up the item.

The thing had five rings attached to it, each bound by thin and flexible strips of metal, leading to some kind of sleek operating device at its base.

Alice studied it momentarily, then began to slip her fingers through each of the rings until she donned it like a glove. It looked somewhat like a skeletal hand, placed neatly atop hers, as it articulated along with her movements. I then noticed a vile protruding from its back, by her wrist, a vile containing a silverish liquid that looked a bit like mercury, only less dense.

The glove, I’d seen it before. Similar to the one Mohammad had, it matched those worn by certain Travelers ten years prior—that thing I suspected of being some kind of weapon.

Unsure of what to do with her hand, Alice held it away from her, spreading her fingers apart, and activated the device by pressing an illuminated switch. The liquid was gone in that instant, released into the device, which dispersed it out onto Alice’s skin. It then began to crawl across her fingertips and along her arm.

Alice looked to me, unsure of how she should be reacting to this shiny, explorative substance.

“What does it feel like?” I tried to ease her with further conversation.

“Warm,” she answered as it crossed her shoulder, engulfing her entire left arm, continuing its travel until her entire body was covered. Even her head had been wrapped in a sheet of liquid silver, a sheet that never hindered her achievement of breath and sight.

Within thirty seconds of the glove’s engagement, Alice was the living, breathing statue of a goddess.

“You look amazing,” I told her.

Alice’s lips parted in a smile as she blinked up at me, but the substance covered her down to the centimeter, thickening her appearance by perhaps only a couple thousandths of an inch. I reached out and touched her, feeling the smooth texture of that liquid, just before she and the substance vanished from sight.

“You’re invisible,” I told her.

“I’m invisible?”

“Yeah, I can’t see you.”

“Gyges!” she exclaimed.

“What?”

“I’m such an idiot! The ring of Gyges! It renders its user invisible!”

Then, like a kid in a candy store, Alice began to press more buttons, eager to unlock the secrets of its design, and marveling in its doomsday potential.

Mohammad returned shortly after, minus the robot, ready to give Alice the lesson she was drooling for. And once she’d learned the ins and outs of the device, she was ready to launch herself into something dangerous, which was exactly what Mohammad had in mind.

He triggered his wrist device, a unit slightly bulkier than Alice’s, as it cast an emerald hologram into the cavern. It was the picture of an attractive young woman.

“This is the woman,” he said, “and without our help, her baby won’t make it past utero. We will go, obtain the woman, and bring her back to the Vahana. There, Gabriel can take care of her and make sure the child is born healthy.”

I looked at the floating hologram, squinting my eyes. “God, she’s so young.”

“Her youth is what makes her strong,” Mohammad said. “It’s what gives us a fighting chance.”

She looked so familiar. I knew I’d seen her before. I would have believed she was my own daughter, had my daughter been alive that day. And that was when it struck me.

“It’s Saint John’s kid,” I said. “Jesus Christ, she’s pregnant.”

“She’s still alive?” Alice approached the hologram.

Mohammad nodded, “But you don’t want to know the things she’s been through.”

“I can’t imagine.” I actually could, but really didn’t want to.

Mohammad turned to us. “I observed your previous mission; and as impressive as it was, when you work with me you must be more organized.” He pointed to Alice. “No crop-circle graffiti or blowing up cars.”

“That was strategy,” she insisted.

“Indeed it was, however we want to keep from turning heads this time. In fact, we don’t even want them to realize she’s gone till tomorrow.”

“Stealth is our specialty,” I said, which earned me a sideways glance from Mohammad. “Well, stealth-
ish
,” I corrected.

“Let’s discuss strategy then, shall we?” Mohammad enlarged a hologram of the infamous strip mall; it filled the entire cavern as the three of us stood at its center. The Fijian walked us through the complex, leading us to where he believed the woman to be.

“What’s her name?” I interrupted. “Do you know?”

“I didn’t before, until you informed me that she’s Saint John’s daughter.” He looked at me. “Her name is Hazel.”

I whispered that name to myself, letting it blend with the image I had of her in my mind. My fatherly instincts began to awaken.

“We’ll be entering here.” Mohammad brought us to a wall just beyond the front of the complex. “It’s as close to the Land of the Damned as I’ve gotten.”

“You can’t get us any closer?” I asked.

“Any carpenter would say you have to construct a door before you can walk through it. It’s not
Star Trek,
Miles. I can’t just beam us anywhere I want.”

“You have to build a door?”

“Yes, I’ll go over that with you later; but you have to get acquainted with the cloaking device first.”

I was then given a Gyges glove and instructed on its many uses. After the warm, liquid metal coated my body, I discovered what it was like on the inside. I could see Alice and Mohammad, although all three of us were invisible to the naked eye, the liquid allowed us to see one another; and through it the world also appeared to be bright, even in utter blackness.

I triggered the shield, which would apparently protect me from anything short of a nuclear bomb, but was instructed to leave it down unless completely necessary. This was due to the flashes of purple it gave off when disturbed— they would give us away in a heartbeat.

There was also a plasma weapon, the same Mohammad used to take down Zeke. The Fijian had disengaged it earlier, but now that we were having a more formal lesson, he’d engaged it again. Once triggered, I found I could release a brilliant burst of blue energy when shaping my hand in a specific way.

“Are you comfortable with the equipment?” Mohammad asked.

“I think I’m getting the hang of it, yeah.”

“Good,” he said. “Now, are you ready to save the world?”

As melodramatic as it sounded, I still managed to nod.

A minute later we were aboard the Vahana, standing before that liquid portal once again. Mohammad punched in another code on the protruding device and the rim of the colossal door illuminated with his touch. The three of us stepped through, and immediately found ourselves on the opposite side of town—miles and miles away from the safety of our cavern—at a place that was crawling with agents.

Suddenly this all seemed like a very bad idea; one that Alice and I had surely been seduced into executing. Alice, by the very device attached to her wrist; and me, by the notion of saving my daughter. Hazel was not my daughter, but she might as well have been. I felt instantly foolish, a victim of my own need to protect.

But Alice hadn’t missed a beat; her mind never appeared to second-guess itself as she kept close to Mohammad. The two of them headed for the street, weaving between vacant and abandoned vehicles, before coming to rest at the bed of a Toyota pickup.

“There’s the entrance,” Mohammad pointed as we came to the gaping partition between the buildings. A sign arched along the top of that entrance, one that read: “Cherrybrook.” But someone had taken it upon themselves to rename the strip; and in a flat, black spray-paint had christened it: “The Rapture.”

I guess the Land of the Damned was what the outsiders had come to call it. Surely the government wouldn’t think of it in such a way. To them it was a place of divine beauty, the pinnacle of what their world had come to.

It made me sick.

There were women in there; women who’s heroes were ripped away by either the war or by those who currently held them captive; women without a shred of hope left in the world, just waiting for the final kindness that life eventually grants all its creatures.

Little did they know that hope had finally arrived.

W
hen through the grand Cherrybrook opening, dodging the various agents that gathered there in conversing groups. Their voices offered enough cover that the sound of our footsteps could hardly be heard. Perhaps this would be easier than I thought.

It was more of a challenge to watch, without comment, as Alice slipped just inches past agents, and they were none the wiser. To me Alice was clear as day, as was Mohammad, but the three of us, beneath our cloaking devices, moved as sleekly as specters through a graveyard.

A few would turn upon feeling a slight gust of someone’s passing, but then, discovering no one, would return to their previous focus.

It was initially an exhilarating experience, but the deeper we got into the Cherrybrook Rapture, the more I felt the agents thickening around us. The sensation of being untouchable soon faded, along with the novelty of being invisible. The danger grew very real around us; and there, at the heart of each and every moment, lay the constricting potential of being discovered. It wrapped itself like a tourniquet around my lungs. There was no escaping it, looming there like a dense and dreadful fog.

Mohammad took a sharp turn and we followed him into one of the many remaining stores. It was impossible to tell exactly what its previous owner had sold years ago, but I doubt it had given off the same disturbing impression. The place was in a state of lasting disarray, and I gathered it had been like that for quite some time.

Perhaps it was the way the shelves had collapsed onto one another, or the weathering paint beneath them, but the walls hinted that no one ever ventured beyond the clear and clutter-free path running neatly along the room’s center. The people who walked this path must have come for whatever could be found at the back of the store, neglecting the area on either side as one might learn to overlook a disordered garage. It probably went unnoticed, closed off from their minds, reserving their attention for whatever lay ahead.

Something illuminated that faraway space as I saw the dancing of shadows in the distance. Mohammad entered first, pausing briefly in the opening—Alice followed close behind. There were voices nearby and I could sense the shifting and shuffling of movement beyond the arch of a corridor. They were the voices of men—several men—within.

Mohammad stopped to turn to us, but spoke mostly to Alice. “Remember why we are here,” he said. “We get Hazel and get out.”

We both nodded.

I could tell by Mohammad’s expression that he was not quite convinced.

“I’m sorry for what you are about to see,” he finished, then entered the room.

We passed the threshold as a cold and heartless reality slipped its frigid fingers around our throats, for this was indeed a terrible place.

Here a man could shed himself the burdens of decency, strip down to his hideous core, and parade it for all to see. There were about eight of them, looking like devil-operated, sex-driven, marionettes. Who needed demons when there were men like this? They were the monsters of a seemingly ancient society. By watching them, one might think they were the spawn of some chaotic and lawless era. Many men had undoubtedly lost their souls to this place, seduced by the power it possessed.

Then, to my growing revulsion, we came upon the women, those who had been forced to partake in the atrocities we were witnessing. Their faces vacant of any emotion, they stared blankly ahead, apparently able to gloss over the horror that was taking place. They tucked their minds someplace safe, someplace their bodies could not follow; so they were left behind—a nonconsensual offering on which the demons were greedily feasting. I felt like Dante, traversing through one of the nine horrid circles of the inferno.