Red Equinox (21 page)

Blind to what he would find around the corner, Brooks drew his gun and sidestepped with his back to the church. He could hear the chanting now. He crouched low, weapon aimed at the ground, and stalked around the corner, but before he cleared the building and reached the grass, he saw them: a group of robed figures marching across St. James Ave. toward the Hancock Tower. They moved in synchrony, like dancers, their hands tracing gestures in the air as they went, some holding glimmering blades, the leader carrying a black box by the handle.

Brooks thought of the device on the train and almost fired at the figure with the box, but the hoods made it impossible to see their faces. It might be Darius Marlowe, but what if it was Agent Fanan? He raised his pistol, hesitated, and then they were across the street and passing between the small oak trees rising from the concrete islands that sheltered the skyscraper from car bombs. He sprinted across the street and into the shadow of the tower. Looking back he saw an armored car trolling up Clarendon alongside the small lawn between church and chapel.

Brooks was aware of vast shadows shifting in the glass beside him, and when he looked into the mirrors, the brain-shattering sight of a forest again nauseated him. The mirage lacked the stark clarity he’d glimpsed at a distance, and it crossed his mind that maybe it was akin to a projection on a movie screen. Up close the boles of the great black oaks resembled pillars of greasy smoke rising in such slow motion that the vapor took on a bark-like texture. The ground on the other side of the glass was littered with a bed of what at first appeared to be fallen leaves but upon closer inspection turned out to be pieces of ash the size of human hands.

He gazed up the vertiginous plane of the tower at the pale sky high above and saw the same oily black cord they’d flown under on landing, connecting the tower to the black orb. He was reminded of an umbilical cord. His stomach churned, and he wanted more than anything for the building to just be a building and for the sky to cradle a solitary yellow sun without that malignant black twin.

But if none of these things were what they should be, were the cloaked figures really men and women? Would they bleed and buckle over if shot, and if they pulled their hoods back, would he see human faces, or something…else?

He passed between the planter islands and onto the triangle of concrete that skirted the main entrance, the bank of doors now coming into view. No security guards emerged to confront the cloaked cultists, and Brooks was stone cold certain for a moment that none of the tenants of the Hancock Tower were in this world any longer, despite the fact that the building stood perfectly intact. Were they lost in some parallel dimension? Roaming a forest of black-smoke trees and obsidian columns where rivers of blood wove between ruined temples and stepped pyramids erected in alignment to stars unmapped by man? He swallowed, and his throat reopened with the slow stickiness that came with lack of saliva. All of the moisture in his body seemed to be flooding to his armpits and the slick palms on the grip of his gun.

The cultists came to a halt in a triangular formation, mimicking the shape of the concrete slab on which they stood, their heads and hands upturned toward the mirrored monolith. The chanting reached a crescendo, a discordant human drone iced with electronic harmonics, swelling and cresting, and crashing against the glass in a wave that caused the building to
waver
as if the walls were made of water or dense vapor.

Something was gathering in the surface, something was coming through, and now Brooks realized that the creature stalking the impossible forest beyond the glass had a name, and was being called forth by that name from one world to another.

IÄ! SHUB NIGGURATH! IÄ! SHUB NIGGURATH! IÄ! SHUB NIGGURATH!

Lightning flickered in the glass, delineating a jagged horizon of shale crags and conifer spires. A shockwave rolled over the shadow forest and stirred the heavy wool of the black robes, flooding Brooks’ sinuses with musk so rich with piss and peat and the sexual secretions of that lumbering beast that he retched and felt his knees buckle.

He turned away, drew a breath, and held it for as long as he could, then moved in, searching the ground for the boom box.

A giant cloud of oily black smoke floated out of the glass trailing myriad cycling limbs with tufts of coarse fur…
or were they wisps of curling vapor?
There was a clattering of hooves on the concrete, and the cloud revolved to reveal its massive head, black and goatish, with a snout the size of a car and horns like curved swords forged of serrated bone. But the worst of it was the eyes, rows of eyes the color of congealed milk lining the snout and brow of the thing, rolling along divergent paths, scrolling black hourglass pupils.

The boom box was nestled in one of the concrete planters, aimed at the glass. The cultists were in front of it, now approaching the creature—some eagerly, others with tentative steps. Brooks had caught sight of the copper disks dangling from their necks, each engraved with a different letter of some arcane alphabet, encircled by asymmetrical symbols. Did they aid in the summoning, or were they protective devices that marked the cultists as forbidden meat? And if they
were
wards of defense, would the one Samira was wearing be enough to protect her? If the disc provided her with a kind of immunity, then maybe she had a better chance of surviving the encounter than he did with his gun.

The reeking black mass was moving into the center of the concrete triangle now, wisps of it breaking away through a perverse process of mammalian fission, the hooved tendrils forming pseudopods and then detaching into blind offspring: tumorous bubbles bucking and braying around the central cloud.

Brooks heard boots and checked the street again. The first unit was crossing St. James Ave., but the lead man had stopped running and stood wide-eyed in the street, making the sign of the cross as his comrades bumped his shoulders and flooded around him. He’d heard the chant, could see the beast, and was raising his assault rifle.

Brooks looked back at the tower and saw a man and a woman in business dress exiting one of the main doors. They saw the black-robed figures and stopped dead in their tracks. Brooks didn’t know if they could see the monsters, but having spotted the flashing knives and the approaching tactical team, the man pulled the woman back into the lobby.

One of the cultists tugged her hood back, spilling long black hair, and turned to look over her shoulder: Fanan. A shot crackled past Brooks and two of the blue windowpanes shattered. A shriek cut the air from the now-exposed lobby. Gunmen were kneeling around the planters, aiming their rifles at the cultists, but the lead man, the one who’d heard the chant and seen the goat creature, had fired into the black cloud and taken out the glass. One of the shooter’s team members was now pushing the muzzle of his gun down toward the pavement and trying to usher him to the side of the road. Brooks turned back to the tower as two of the cultists drew handguns and fired. Bullets sparked off the concrete planters but the police didn’t return fire impulsively, now acutely aware of the glass building.

One of the gun-wielding cultists took a headshot from a rooftop sniper and crumpled under a mist of blood.

Fanan drew her own gun from her cloak and dropped another cultist. Brooks sprinted toward the planters where the riflemen were taking cover, seized the boom box, dashed it to the street, and fired a slug into it. The air seemed to lose an electrical charge when the chant cut out, but the wrecked device had already served its purpose. Spinning around he came face to face with Samira Fanan, the roiling black mass charging her from behind. Her eyes bulged as a ridged horn tore through her robe, impaling her.

Brooks cried,
“NO!”

With no chant to fill the air, he could hear a thin whistle emanating from her throat, laced with a crackling gurgle. The beast jerked its head back, and Fanan’s body was swept away with it. Before Brooks could recover from the sight, Darius Marlowe, mounted on one of the mammoth goat’s offspring, charged into the space where Fanan had been, leading a procession of six riders. God only knew what the riflemen saw coming at them. Most wore helmets that covered their ears. Were they now watching cloaked figures on invisible steeds running them down and jumping the barriers? A couple of them fired shots in panic. Another window shattered, this one on the third floor.

The great beast passed into the street, its many hooves cycling, but not touching the ground, and even if the Special Forces guys couldn’t
see
the monster, it seemed they could smell the fetid wave of poison fumes that wafted from its black fur and gaping maw. One vomited, others clamped their gloved hands over their mouths and noses. Brooks squinted against the acrid musk, eyes burning.

The riders’ cloaks blended with the black fumes rising from their shaggy mounts, and soon they too appeared to be made of greasy smoke. Brooks recovered as the procession passed, and looked up at the rooftops bordering the square. He could make out the silhouettes of snipers training their rifles on the street and the church grounds. Their infrared goggles flashed in the sunlight as they pivoted, but no shots were fired. The cultists and their steeds were too close to the glass, too much a chaos of rolling smoke.

Tactical vehicles screeched around the square behind him. He could hear and feel the pounding of boots on the pavement, could sense the crosshairs of the riflescopes passing him over from the rooftops. And then, just as the great black goat had emerged from the mirrored plane of the tower, so did it pass back out of range into that malignant mirage beyond the silver panes, leading the black-robed riders on its spawn.

Watching the front door of her warehouse apartment, Becca thought there was no way of getting in without goons jumping her and throwing her into a van with blacked-out windows. She didn’t see such a van on the street—not even one of those fake delivery vans with a bogus company logo on the side that agencies like SPECTRA used, if TV was to be trusted—but she knew it would appear, jumping the curb, side door sliding open, and men in Kevlar giving her the cable-tie-and-bag-over-the-head express service to Government Center for the second time in two days if she were to walk up the steps and fish her keys out of her pocket. She could feel it.

Maybe she was paranoid, but she thought Maurice would approve.

The cabbie, a balding white guy with an ample beer gut and bushy sideburns, was getting antsy. “Time to shit or get off the pot, sweetheart” he said.

Becca sighed. If she told him to go around the block one more time, that alone would be enough to draw attention to the cab. She rolled her window down and listened to the air outside. The neighborhood was quieter than usual at nightfall; most people were indoors, heeding the Governor’s advice.

A plane droned overhead, and gazing up she saw a contrail but no helicopter blades on the rooftop. She couldn’t hear Django barking, either, and that was what she was listening for. Would Rafael have checked in when he couldn’t reach her by phone? Would he have used his spare key to tend to the dog? With an apocalypse in its opening overture, she felt that having robbed the dog of his freedom to run from it, she was at least responsible for not consigning him to starvation. Maybe that was a little out of balance with so many human lives at stake, but for her it was a simple emotional imperative. There might not be much she could do for the city, but she could at least rescue the dog again.

And yet, another voice was vying for space in her head beneath the platinum wig she’d picked up along with a clean pair of jeans walking through Copley Place Mall before hailing the cab:
Bullshit, there’s nothing you can do for the city. You may be the
only
one who can do something, if you don’t get caught here. Is that what you’re doing? Trying to get caught so you don’t have to shoulder the burden and deal with the pressure?

“Fuck it, why save myself if I can’t even save a dog?”

“You talking to me?” the cabbie said, swinging an arm over the seatback.

“No.” She handed him a crumpled twenty. “Give me a five-minute head start and then drive up to the courtyard and I’ll hop back in, okay?”

“Why don’t I just drop you
there
and wait for you?”

“Just do it like I said.” Then she was out of the car, forcing herself to walk, not run. They had to be inside the building if they were here. Most of them, anyway. Whoever was watching the street would probably radio the ones inside to announce her arrival.

She approached the door, keeping pace with a silver SUV, hoping it wasn’t the vehicle of the recon guy, and then using it as cover to duck into the weedy courtyard. She’d left her army bag in the cab—it was too much of a giveaway—and now she reached into her jacket pocket and found what she needed, the one tool she’d transferred.

It was fast work, and no doubt sloppy, but she was coming back out of the courtyard right in time for the cab; and before anyone knew where the blonde had gone, or that her cab wasn’t just leaving but picking her up again, she was in the backseat, lying low, and telling the old man to get her out of there, not too fast.

Her fingers trembled with adrenaline as she dialed the prepaid cell phone. She could so easily imagine Rafael looking at the unfamiliar number and deciding to blow it off. Just when she thought he would, he answered, his voice uncertain.

“It’s me,” she said. “Just listen, I’m okay. I need you to take care of the dog for me. His leash is hanging on a hook in the kitchen. Take him to do his business in the courtyard. Use my headlamp; it’s on the same hook as the leash. Walk him before you put him in your car. I don’t know how long he’s been crated. Then take him to your place and feed him. The bag of food is in the cabinet by the fridge. Can you do that for me, Raf?

“Becca, where are you? Are you in trouble? Some spooks took me in for questioning about you and I was freaking out, but I told them you would never hurt anyone. They weren’t even cops, they were like…I don’t know. What’s goin’ on, Becca? What kinda mess are you in?”