Resistance (Dark Realm Series) (7 page)

"Well," I said before blowing
out the oil-powered flame at the end of my light. "If you plan to examine
any more of his orifices you need to get yourself another assistant."

"No need. I can tell you he's not a
zombie," the medic said.

"I told you that twenty minutes
ago." Marlowe cast a smug smile at me.

The urge to stick my tongue out at him
almost overwhelmed me. Only my soldier's discipline came to my rescue.

"What do you mean he's not a zombie?
Look at him," Riley shouted.

"I am," the medic shouted back.
"If Hoskins was a zombie he'd be eating our brains for breakfast."

"Then what is he? What happened to
him?" Riley asked.

"I don't know," the medic
replied.

We turned to Marlowe in concert.

He shrugged, shaking his head as if to
say, "don't look at me."

"What
do
you know," I demanded of the
medic.

"He's in a catatonic state of
unknown origin," the medic said.

"Brilliant," I groused. "I
knew that without any medical training."

 
Marlowe straightened and pulled a wooden chair from the
corner of the room. "Perhaps if Sergeant Riley would tell us what happened
we could work out the cause of Hoskins' condition." Placing the chair back
down, Marlowe gave the sergeant a slight push and Riley plopped onto the seat.

"I'm not sure." Riley scrubbed
at his face with his hand. "Everything happened so fast."

"Start with your plan," I
suggested.

Riley nodded. "We had intel about
the crown's plan to transport human prisoners to a water-front warehouse in the
Southwark area. We were to set up an intercept point just a kilometer from the
warehouse. We planned to block both sides of a bridge and trap them between
us."

"A sound plan," Marlowe
observed.

"It would have been if they hadn't
been waiting for us," Riley said. "By splitting our ranks into two,
we were overwhelmed easily."

"Once they attacked you, what
happened?" I asked.

Riley shook his head with increasing
agitation. "I don't know. All I remember is the ghouls swarming us."

"Calm down," I put a hand on
Riley's shoulder.

Riley shrugged off my hand, his tone
hysterical. "The ghoul guard didn't behave as they usually do. No one was
biting or tearing our people apart. They just 'took' them."

"How?" Marlowe asked.

"I don't know!" Riley's scream
reverberated against the porcelain tile. "Our people seemed to give up
after one touch."

Riley's babbling was getting us nowhere.
Although I didn't like the idea, I knew what I had to do.

"Were you injured?" As if to
inspect a wound, I touched the sticky splotches on the side of his jacket.

My eyesight faded.

"No. That's Hoskins' blood..."

The vision took hold and Riley's words
faded as if he'd departed on a fast-moving train. Or perhaps I was the one on
the train because all at once my consciousness had left the clinic. I found myself
dropped in the middle of a bridge with a battle waging on either side of me,
surrounded by the sounds of screaming, the motion of running, the smell of
sweat, gunfire and blood. I was wrapped in the memories contained in the blood
that would allow me to relive the time when Hoskins received his injury.

A ghoul stabbed me—the Hoskins
me—in the side and I staggered. The ghoul grinned, showing me his jagged
teeth as he brought up a hand toward my chest. I felt myself as Hoskins, kick
at the ghoul. The blow sent him backwards and into position for a shot at his
head with our gun. One silver bullet struck the ghoul between the eyes and
gooey black ghoul brain matter exploded from his skull as he went down.

Hoskin's satisfaction at the ghoul's
demise was short-lived as he glanced down and I saw the wound in his side. When
he looked up again there were at least ten other ghouls charging toward us. The
fear and panic of my host filled me. Like Riley I wouldn't be able to remember
anything of use about all this if I didn't relax. So, with deliberation, I
forced my emotions to separate from those of the blood. Once I could be an
impartial observer, I began to scan.

A figure at my right shoulder brought my
progress to an immediate halt. Marlowe. But not a Marlowe engaged in the
battle. Instead. it was a Marlowe who, like me, was an observer.

"What are you doing in my
vision?" I asked in confusion.

"You wanted me here," he
answered, giving one of his now familiar smug smiles.

"I did not."

"You need not be ashamed of your
attraction to me," he said.

"My what?" My outrage blinded
me to anything around me. "You are so full of yourself, even when you're
just in my head and not really here."

"Since I am not really here, then I
am not doing this."

Before, I could move, Marlowe grasped me
by the arm, pulled me into an embrace and his mouth covered mine in a kiss. The
movement of his soft lips and his body pressed against mine, and the feel of
his tall, muscular length against my body, sent tingles fizzing through me as
if my blood had turned to seltzer water.

What the Hades? This was not a typical
vision. In fact, I'd never before imagined someone else as a companion. And I'd
certainly never had physical sensations that were mine and not the host. This
kiss was beyond any experience, whether in a vision or in the real world.
Unique and powerful physical sensations radiated from my lips through the rest
of my body. Exciting, but also scary.

Squirming, I pulled away from him. Or he
allowed me to pull away. With defiance I wiped my mouth with the back of my
hand.

"You wanker—"

"Shhh." Marlowe stilled my lips
with the tip of his index finger. "You will miss details of the vision
while you argue with me."

As if he hadn't already wasted crucial
time in the vision.

Around me—or was it
Hoskins—the ghouls were on our people. And just as Riley had reported,
the individual contests were brief. Almost at once our fighters went slack
jawed and glassy-eyed before being led away. I glanced over my shoulder and saw
the charging ghouls closing in and beyond them in the distance was the
warehouse Riley had spoken about.

Inside the warehouse, lightning-like
flashes illuminated its windows intermittently.

"How—" My question was
cut short by the burning in my chest. The pain in my heart —or rather
Hoskins heart —was so intense I wouldn't have been surprised to see its
liquefied remains pouring from my nose. While my attention had been on the
lightning in the warehouse, a ghoul had caught Hoskins and pressed a poker hot
crystal to his chest.

As the ghoul who'd caught Hoskins mumbled
his incantation, I felt my own being, the essence of me—me not just
Hoskins—begin seeping out of my body.

"Amy." Marlowe shook me.
"You must separate from Hoskins."

I heard him, but I couldn't do as he
commanded.

"Now. You must—" Marlowe
slapped me.

The sting of his palm on my cheek brought
me to myself...literally. My essence snapped back.

After a few seconds I was able to speak.
"What was that? What did he do to my chest?"

"I'm not certain...I'd heard of an
experiment but..." Marlowe muttered. "If this is a catcher crystal
then it may make sense."

Not to me, it didn't.

"So you know why there's lightning
inside
that
warehouse?" I asked.

"I may, but we must enter so I can
be more certain."

"Hoskin's blood powered this
vision," I explained. "Since he didn't go into the warehouse, I can't
take us in."

"I can," Marlowe said as he
grasped my hand.

From the instant he touched me it was as
if we flew. More accurately we dematerialized. All the particles within me
scattered before flying through the air like dust wafting on a breeze. The
strange sensation of being separated into millions of little pieces became even
stranger as those particles passed through the microscopic pores and cracks of
the warehouse building. Once inside, my body reconstituted itself to hover like
a hummingbird fairy next to Marlowe, near the ceiling. My fingers were twined
with Marlowe's and I would have pulled away except for fear that without him,
I'd plunge to my death against the floor twenty meters down.

As I took in what was happening beneath
our hovering bodies, I saw workers in blue dungarees bustling about. Directly
under my feet were stacks of grassy turf squares. These stacks took up at least
half of the building's floor space. Was this storage for the prince's
landscapers?

To one side were a number of mammoth
wooden tripod structures. Worker ghouls buzzed around one tripod, which stood
on top of a cart. The workers applied the patches of grass around each of the
three legs before affixing them with mud. From the size of the ladder one
worker used to get to the top, I estimated the tripod must be at least double
the height of an average man. The result was an extremely ugly topiary.

 
Marlowe pointed and my gaze followed his direction to one end
of the building where a ghoul soldier—one of the Prince Leopold's guards
garbed in a proud red coat and all—led a young human male in through a
side entrance. I'm sure I'd met, lived and fought side-by-side with this young man
in our section of the Resistance. He was a private, but I couldn't recall his
name.

More than ever, I was glad I'd adopted a
cold barrier, a shield, between my fellow soldiers and me. Nothing could help
this man who was now in the same catatonic state as Hoskins. Certainly I, in a
non-corporeal state, could do nothing as he was placed in a caged holding area
with what looked like ten more of our people. This was all just a memory of
something that had happened over an hour ago.

Bitter bile filled my throat. I suspected
the young man, along with the other wretched men and women in this holding pen,
would soon be part of Prince Leopold's rumored new feedlot system of food
production. Food production for vampires, that is. But what else was being done
to them?

The ghoul soldier who'd brought in the
Resistance fighter then proceeded up the line to a worker ghoul. The soldier
handed the worker a crystal and he placed it on a tray and covered it with a
cloth. The worker then laid the tray on a table where another worker ghoul sat.
The seated ghoul peered through a jeweler's loupe he wore mounted on a
headband. After a few seconds, he lifted the crystal he'd been tinkering with.
He placed the crystal—which now hung from a chain necklace—in a
box. Before the lid closed, I saw the crystal throbbing with a red blazing
light.

I glanced at Marlowe about to ask him
whether he'd seen the crystal, but my question died at his concentrated stare
in the opposite direction.

"Gethin." He growled the name
of the prince's wizard.

Following Marlowe's hate-filled gaze took
me to a figure. From this distance I couldn't make out the features but I did
see the figure wore a square, red fez hat with a long black tassel sprouting
from its center. The fez was reportedly the wizard's signature look. I'd never
seen the infamous Gethin myself and wondered how it was that Marlowe recognized
him. Perhaps, like me, he was just going by the hat, but I suspected not.

The fez-wearing figure stood in front of
a finished topiary on its cart. Gethin motioned to a worker ghoul. The ghoul
jumped forward and held out a box. Gethin opened it and drew out a crystal. The
red throbbing necklace variety. The wizard nodded as if satisfied and handed it
back. The worker proceeded to climb a ladder where he fastened the necklace
around the topiary, about a head's length from the top. After the worker
climbed down, he removed the ladder and backed away.

Gethin took a step and spread his arms
open wide. "A capite ad calcem."

"From head to heel," Marlowe
muttered in translation.

"Vivat!"

Even I had enough knowledge of Latin to
translate that word as something to do with life.

At Gethin's command, lightning flashed
from the crystal. Involuntarily, I squinted against the blinding effect.
Blinking, I attempted to refocus my eyes. Finally, my vision cleared and I saw
the thing I'd thought of as a topiary caught in a series of convulsions.
Amazement turned to horror as I saw the top of the thing bubble, burble and
undulate to form a head with broad, rough features. The convulsions then spread
to two legs of the tripod, which transformed into low hanging arms with giant
knuckle dragging hands. The convulsions rippled through the remainder of the
thing turning it to torso and leg. Finally, after shudders and pulls, the one
massive leg split into two and the creature lurched ahead. The now animate
thing took one step and then another. The thing continued its unsteady gate so
reminiscent of a baby's first steps.

"What the hell is that?" I
asked, not expecting an answer.