Powers (19 page)

They didn’t seem to have gotten to his carotid.

When he ran the battle through his memory, they’d been concentrating there. They knew where humans and gods were weakest. He’d been guarding his neck and eyes and throat by instinct. To hell with low attacks, those wouldn’t kill him as fast.

He looked over at her. Blood on her forehead and cheek, her throat, but it wasn’t flowing. She was panting, shaking her head, staring back the way they’d come at the milling swarm of thwarted fireflies. She leaned against a door set in the center of the tunnel, steel in a steel wall.

The fireflies didn’t like steel.

He looked back the way they’d come, at the cloud of frustrated fireflies pushing at . . . whatever held them away from their next meal. The hand still lay there on his side of the barrier, what was
left
of the hand, bones held together by sinew and dried flesh, on the edge of the pile of bones and bone dust. He stared at it. That person had been alive in there, fighting, screaming, bleeding, dying, grabbing the only weapon he could find. A leg bone from a previous victim. He gagged at the visions.

He poked it with the tip of his steel cane, back through the barrier, back into range of the fireflies. They swarmed, covering it, glowing brighter as they fed, chewing it into fragments of bone as he watched.

He didn’t bother with the skulls—the human skull still with a hank of dark hair and dried flesh in the rictus grin of death, the goat skull with one horn gnawed down to the bony roots and the other still curling. Again, lines defining where the fireflies could reach.

He could smell animal,
goat,
in the air now, faint, not fresh, and a trace of dirt and rain and growing things—outside air.
I hope that calms her claustrophobia a bit. Either that, or she included horse-tranquilizers and a dart gun in her emergency kit. I’m not much good for dealing with heavily-armed psychos.

She’d been hanging on the edge back there, he’d felt it. He glanced over, about to ask what her winds told her
now,
and she hushed him with a palm. She cocked her head to the door, listening. The
blank
door, no hardware on this side, just a slab of gray steel with a few streaks and patches of rust—he
hoped
it was rust—and a couple of suspicious scratches at one jamb where he’d expect to find a latch on a normal door. He glanced around. No light, except for their flashlights. No doorbell, no security peephole, no mailbox. They, whoever
they
were, didn’t expect the neighbors to come calling.

Looks like the fireflies are their guard dogs. Which have to be fed now and then, to keep them in fighting trim. That explained the goats. Not fed
enough,
though, have to keep the dogs hungry.

She nodded to herself, laid her flashlight on the stone, stood, and waved him to his feet and over to the right of the door. Taking command, officer and squad, which he preferred to her either freezing up or going all bear-shirt and chomping on the edge of her shield.

Then, just like at her apartment, she laid the palm of her left hand on the door. He heard clicks and clanks beyond the steel, and the door shifted a fraction of an inch, swinging away from them. She pushed, slow, gentle, eyeing the edge, knife at the ready. Light oozed through the widening crack. No alarms, no screams of rage or terror. She pushed the door further, flooding light into the tunnel. Still no reaction from the other side.

She nodded again, picked up the flashlight, turned it off, and stowed it somewhere inside her coveralls. Produced his sheath from the same place, sheathed the knife, and handed it to him. Reached back for her shotgun, shook her head, and pulled out her .45 automatic. Eased the door wide enough for her body, and slipped through.

He tucked his knife back into his jacket—it felt more comfortable there than in her hand. Wondered whether he should switch the cane for her police pistol, wondered whether he should stow his flashlight back in the pack, ran out of hands. Just kept on with cane and flashlight. Nobody was shooting yet, and he could drop either, damned fast.

Then he followed her through the door. Bright, after the tunnel, but not eye-squinty dazzling. They’d entered a hallway, what looked like poured concrete walls and ceiling, rough and unpainted. Doors marched down one side, tan-painted steel, with small barred grills and what looked like prison hardware on the corridor side. He’d seen the inside of jails now and then.

The other side of the hallway looked more like a couple of barn stalls with plain latches on grilled doors rather than locks. That’s where the smell of goat came from. His nose sorted out aromatic hay and feed and clean straw bedding, as well, and fresh water, and outside air from screened vents. Steel screens, in case the fireflies got loose. The jail-cell side didn’t give any good smells, hole-in-the-floor toilets and unwashed human bodies, days or weeks old, nobody in there now.

I’ve never met
them
and already I don’t think I want to. I can understand not wanting random strangers wandering in from another world, but it sure as hell looks like they
trained
the fireflies to attack humans. Using live bait.

He revised his opinion of the people who ran this place. Downward. His nose said the cells didn’t have windows or running water or any food. Whoever ended up there—political prisoners, heretics, torture-murderers, rapists—got treated worse than sacrificial goats.

She had moved, faster than he had gotten through the door, about twenty feet down the hall, and stood like a statue next to another door, listening. Twenty feet. Two ten-foot stalls for the goats, four five-foot cells for the humans, barely enough room for cell doors. Ugly.

She waved him forward, still with a hushing finger in front of her lips. He stopped and dropped the pack with as little noise as possible and stowed the flashlight. She nodded. Pack on his back again, waist belt unbuckled in case he needed to dump it in a hurry.

He shifted the cane to his left hand and drew her pistol. She held up one finger, not her middle one so it wasn’t social commentary, hooked a thumb past the next door, and shook her head. He holstered the pistol again. Apparently her winds only found one heartbeat on the other side of the door, and she didn’t want any chance of him touching off a round through clumsy fumbling. Still not a lot of trust there.

We probably ought to work on signals, if we’re gonna spend much time hunting as a team.

She pointed to the wall beside her, then gestured that he should go to the right immediately when she opened the door. And, left hand on the door . . .

The locks clicked and she banged the door open, no stealth this time, through the door and he followed. She had moved
fast,
fast as the wind.

A little stupid there, not adding two and two and ending up with four.
Wind
goddess, moves
fast . . .

A shocked guard with a bleary wide-eyed stare sat behind a scratched metal desk, leaning back in his steel swivel chair because the muzzle of her pistol pressed into his forehead. Albert had time to take in the scene. Plain painted concrete walls with high barred windows, steel screens again, and file cabinets and a couple-three blank doors to one side and one out the front, all steel, couple of chairs, a coat rack. Magazine lying open on the desk, not dropped or flung, only visible thing inside the room beside him that might serve as food for the fireflies, looked like maybe he’d been sleeping on the job.

No TV monitors. Albert had been expecting monitors, some kind of surveillance system. Not seeing one bothered him. He glanced back at the doors they’d come through. Both had four deadbolts, keyed this side, one at top and bottom and two on the latch side. Three heavy hinges, pins welded in place so you’d need a torch to remove them. They’d designed this place so you couldn’t just wander around, that was certain.

He looked back at the sole guard and saw his hand creeping down his side toward a . . .

“GUN!”

Again she blurred and he heard a muffled crunching snap and the guard’s head ended up leaning to one side at an angle, her hands on chin and back of skull. Somehow, she still had the pistol in her right hand, she’d done that with the heel of her palm. The guard jerked a couple of times and settled lower in the chair. His pistol clattered to the floor.

Dead. Just like that. And he was a fellow cop, uniform, badge, patches, clean-cut cropped-blond-hair look. She let go, stepped back, and surveyed the room. She gestured Albert toward the side doors. Still silent.

He drew her pistol and this time she didn’t shake her head. First door—a storage room, animal feed and bedding, his nose told him that before his eyes confirmed it. Also held steel shovels and rakes and a bin of what looked like coarse bone dust. Recycling. He bet
they
made the prisoners clean that out, sort of like digging their own graves. Second room—toilet, just flush and sink and mirror.

Third room—small office, unoccupied, metal desk and filing cabinets and a couple of the hard, uncomfortable chairs you give subordinates when you want to . . . discuss . . . their job performance.

A nameplate sat on the desk, lettered in lines and ovals and squiggles in no language he’d ever seen before. He walked back to the guard’s desk and studied the magazine. More lines and ovals and squiggles. He
could
read the pictures. Porn. Bondage and torture porn, and it didn’t look consensual . . . he glanced a question at her.

She nodded. “I can understand six or ten languages. Recognize about a dozen others. That isn’t any of them.”

Writing is an arbitrary thing. Those squiggles could still represent English or Arabic or Russian. A small battery radio sat silent on one corner of the desk. He turned it on. The knob turned counter-clockwise rather than clockwise. Knobs also represent arbitrary conventions.

“Gahn ab yhgen, rehnf ab yesten.”
Sounded like the tail end of a poem or chant. Then music with voices. He looked at her. She shook her head. He turned it off. Not English or Arabic or Russian or Finnish. Languages evolve and diverge on their own pace.

He caught himself staring at the corpse-guard’s badge and patches, then compared them with hers. Lettering he couldn’t read, but shapes the same. Colors the same. He looked up at her.

“Don’t expect me to mourn. You saw what kind of place this is. He wasn’t a cop, he was a death-camp guard. Some people are just too stupid to live. Going for a gun like that, he
asked
to die. Not even worth a cartridge.”

Albert checked the room again, still looking for surveillance cameras. He couldn’t believe they’d lock this place up as tight as they had, without monitoring it. They had radio—they had transistor technology by the size of
that
radio—they had fluorescent lights. One man on guard, alone, the scene made him twitchy.

“Can we get moving?”

“First things first. I’ve got an experiment to run and a body to ditch. Good thing they go together. Grab an arm.”

She stowed the man’s pistol back in his holster and grabbed the corpse under one armpit. Albert grabbed the other. He already knew she wasn’t big on explanations. They hauled the dead guard through the cellblock, back into the tunnel. He weighed a lot, deadweight, floppy. Albert had moved bodies before. They
always
weighed more dead than alive. Always seemed to catch on the floor or doorsill or ground or whatever, as if they fought you.

Then she hauled him upright and pushed his feet against the barrier, the cushion that stopped fireflies but let persistent humans or gods shove through. You had to keep pushing, a certain amount of continuous force . . .

“Any idea what this is?”

She shook her head. “Magic. Or maybe a quantum entanglement field. In other words, damn if I know. It works.”

The corpse set its feet into the bone-heap and then fell through, face first, boots and calves at the edge of the cushion but knees and everything above flopping across the bone-chip pile that the fireflies
could
reach. And they did. They swarmed. They coated the body. Flesh and hair melted away. More fireflies appeared, streaming down the tunnel, he didn’t have a
clue
where they came from. The first ones crawled away, sated, too heavy to fly and their orange glow muted. They all settled. The air cleared. No new ones came.

“Thought so. Give them a big feed, you can walk right past them. That’s why the goats. Don’t have anybody you want dead, you can still use the gate.”

So the people who ran this place,
Them,
kept their options open. At a price.

“Any idea how Mother got through?”

Mel cocked her head to one side and studied him. “Way I see it, any number of possibilities. At least two of them you won’t like. First, Bilqis is Big Boss of the crew running this. Their goddess. She calls ahead and they make smooth her path. Second, she didn’t come this way at all, just set up things so you’d hear and follow the Seal through that door. Brought it to this end of the tunnel and then hid it elsewhere, maybe. Anyway, a deliberate trap. She isn’t a very nice woman, you know.”

Albert felt gut-punched. Mel was right. He didn’t like either suggestion. Problem was, either one fit the Mother he knew. Nobody else mattered quite as much as she did . . .

Or at all.

Humans called that a psychopath. Or sociopath, he guessed they had renamed the trait. The description fit a lot of gods. Part of the definition of god-ness, even.

I am God. Do what I say, or suffer. And even if you
do
obey, you’ll still suffer. Because you don’t count. Humans are less than dust to Me.

I don’t like gods.

“Can we get out of here, now? I keep expecting the whole place to blow up on us, or the army to break through that front door with machine guns.”

“Patience please, the night is long. You’ll have noticed the front door is also locked on the other side. Our late host was locked in here alone to deal with anything that could get through the tunnel. Not even a coffee pot. Punishment detail. He didn’t hit his alarm button. I got to him first.”