The Apocalypse Ocean (5 page)

So here he was, back in one of these wagons.

The last time he’d been packed in with bleeding, bruised, exhausted rioters, hardly able to breathe. He’d been terrified, but sure someone would understand there’d been a mistake.

He knew better now.

At least, he thought, it had stopped raining. The sirens had gone quiet and he’d gotten into the wagon without protection.

The wagon jerked forward with a belch of compressed air from the drivetrain underneath. Tiago looked around at the grimy, and of course, rain-scarred, faces.

For a moment he panicked when he didn’t see any clean, carefully tailored figures. He was going to have to go all the way to Dekkan. Then he looked a bit closer at the youngest face. Dirty, disheveled, but not rain-scarred. And the matted hair could be, if cleaned and brushed once more, well cut.

Tiago shuffled around on the benches, kneeing a few others to get them to move.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey you.”

The boy had been shrinking into the back corner of the wagon as best he could. Trying to be invisible. He pretended to ignore Tiago.

“I’m talking to you,” Tiago snapped, trying to break the little shell of silence the boy had up for whatever protection he could muster. “What’s your name?”

Tiago saw suspicion and fear flicker in his eyes as he finally looked at Tiago.

“They already stole my clothes. I do not have anything else for you to take,” the boy said miserably.

Tiago was cheered. Oh, this was looking more and more likely.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” Tiago asked, a little bit more gently. “It’s okay; I don’t need your clothes. I just want to know your name.”

The wagon clattered along the road, hitting potholes hard enough to jolt Tiago’s spine.

Finally, he heard what he’d been hoping for. “My name is Juneas. My friends just call me June.”

Tiago smiled, and palmed the small sliver of a tracking device. He pressed it until it glowed, and then turned to June. “Good to meet you, June,” Tiago said. He grabbed June’s hand firmly, and sunk the tracker into the palm of June’s hand.

“Hey … ow! What the …”

Tiago shoved June back against the wall and put a hand over his mouth. “You listen to me,” he hissed into his ear. “We are getting you out of here. So keep calm. Do not freak out. Stay right next to me and you’ll be okay. Make a sound, freak out, and I’ll crack your head open. Get it?”

June nodded, and Tiago took his hand off his mouth. The boy looked terrified.

Tiago felt guilty, for a moment. But the truth was, he was really, really relieved they weren’t going to Dekkan.

“Don’t pull it out,” he told June. The boy was looking at the palm of his hand. “I know it hurts. But just leave it alone.”

How long before something would happen? Tiago was wound up and ready to explode here.

The wagon finally slowed, brakes squealing. Tiago heard the driver swearing. “They’ve got spikes on the road!”

And then the wheels exploded. The whole wagon shook and rattled on bare rims and slid to the side. It tilted and slumped into one of the gutters. Bodies shoved hard up against Tiago, he grunted and shoved back.

He couldn’t see ahead, but the bars let him see the building they’d smashed into on one side and the open street on the other. Behind them three Runners loped up the street. With their grotesquely long, muscular legs and thin frames they could run faster than the wagon.

They pulled out pistols and walked up to the front of the wagon. “Stay inside,” they ordered. “We’re not after you.”

A shadow dropped down from the top of one of the nearby buildings and struck the sidewalk with a crunch. Pulverized cobblestone leapt into the air, and Nashara stood up from a crouch and walked across the street to the wagon.

“Holy fuck,” said a grizzled old man staggering drunkenly down the street his eyes wide.

Nashara ripped the back door of the wagon off, shattering the lock.

“Tiago, June, come on.”

Tiago shoved June in front of him. “Follow her, and shut up,” he said.

June looked around the wagon, hesitated, then thought better of it and awkwardly clambered his way out of the tilted wagon.

Tiago jumped to the ground behind him. Yeah, it had only been a few minutes … but it was nice to be free again.

Five Ox-men swept in from the front of the wagon. They’d laid the spikes and disabled it. Now they surrounded Tiago, Nashara, and June.

A flare shot up into the air. It had been fired just a few blocks away, Tiago realized as he followed Nashara back up along the street. “So you’ve got June,” he said. “Is that it?”

“Well, back at the …”

Nashara spun around.

Tiago glanced back where she looked off into the dark. The Ox-men around him were looking in the direction of the flare, down an alley. Into the same darkness.

Something moved.

“Fire!” Came a yell.

Up on the roof a shoulder-launched missile streaked downwards, over Tiago’s head, and into the alley.

It exploded. The fireball roiled and blinded Tiago, and the heat rushed toward them.

As his vision recovered and the crackle and pop of rifle fire from snipers on the roof opened up he saw what they’d seen.

The Doaq.

The seven-foot-tall, hooded figure moved with unnatural quickness. Tiago caught a glimpse, in the flicker of a gas lamp, of two large, catlike eyes under the cowl and a slit-like nose.

But it was the mouth that he noticed most. It yawned, the jaw dislocating and stretching like a snake’s: a two-foot gaping chasm of darkness.

The Doaq whipped across the street, slamming into a nearby Ox-man. The jaw dropped even lower and the Doaq rose taller, somehow, and then the gaping maw descended on the Ox-man who was firing rounds and rounds of bullets from a large machine gun at it.

Hundreds of pounds of rippling, Nesaru-engineered brute strength disappeared and the Doaq turned to face Tiago again.

“That looks like a damn wormhole in its mouth,” Nashara said, awe in her voice. Then she grabbed her side and stumbled. “And it’s generating an EMP field … powerful enough it’s messing with me.”

Tiago was looking everywhere for somewhere to run. But there were Ox-men everywhere. And everything was happening so damn quickly.

Did he grab June?

Or stay close to Nashara for protection?

But she was looking surprised, which meant she wasn’t as powerful as the Doaq. 

The Doaq flowed forward, the robe rippling in the slight wind. The massive jaw gaped wider and wider as it got closer. It seemed all maw to Tiago, mesmerized by the black nothingness opening up, propelled by the creature’s feet.

“Tiago! Run!” Nashara pulled out a large shotgun, and the deafening discharge filled the tiny stone canyon of street and houses. The Doaq twitched to face the incoming shot and swallowed it all without any change in its approach.

“Take June,” Nashara said, and leapt forward. “Meet me back at the
Streuner
. If you can.” The Doaq ducked and grabbed her, redirecting the energy of the jump to throw her into the side of a house.

Nashara staggered back to her feet in the middle of a mess of rubble sliding down around her shoulders.

“
Run Tiago
!”

He grabbed June’s collar; the boy was as frozen as he had been, and yanked him into a run up the street as the battle intensified behind them.

Tiago didn’t get very far up the street before one of the nearest doors opened. The whip-lean shape of a Runner beckoned at him to get inside.

He needed no encouraging. He ran for the door.

Three explosions shook the street, and Tiago saw with a glance back that Nashara had flicked grenades at the Doaq. It swallowed several, but couldn’t be in more than one place at the same time. One of the grenades exploded to its side, and the Doaq faltered. It looked dizzied.

The Doaq could be harmed, Tiago thought, dazed. It
could
be harmed. He paused at the doorway. Maybe Nashara could face it down. Now that would be something to see.

And then it seemed like the Doaq paused, turned away from Nashara, and looked at Tiago.

That made no sense. Why would the Doaq care about him?

It slid up the street, completely ignoring Nashara, headed Tiago’s way.

“Oh shit.”

An Ox-man yanked Tiago into the house and barred the door shut. “This way,” the Ox-man grumbled, and shoved the two boys forward through the house.

A trapdoor underneath a table led them under the house into a hidden basement lit by a single bulb.

“Through here,” said another Runner, appearing out of the dark. The shadows made his ribs, visible under a thin shirt, look even more pronounced than normal. 

There was a heavy, thick steel door a pair of Ox-men had opened. As they passed through that, they groaned as they labored to push it shut. Then they hit a switch, and large bars dropped into place with loud clangs. The smell of rank sewage took the breath away from Tiago, and he switched to breathing only out of his mouth.

In the distance an explosion of brick and screaming startled Tiago. The Doaq must have gotten into the house. With Nashara in pursuit.

They stood inside a tunnel, lit glancingly by the Runner’s flashlight. The center of the tunnel had a wide trench in it, currently dry.

The flickering light revealed Kay, waiting with a pair of Ox-men armed with more RPGs. They aimed the weapons at the thick door behind Tiago.

“So this is our quarry,” Kay said, turning on a small, expensive shielded penlight to check the boy. “Your name is June, right?”

The shell-shocked and very bewildered June nodded.

“Can you speak, June?”

“Yes.” It was no more than a faint whisper.

“Well June, this is Tiago, and we have to move quickly before the Doaq comes after us. Do you know about the Doaq?”

June’s eyes were bug-wide. He nodded.

“Well, it’s taken an interest in you. Probably since that man ran through your home while fighting it back on Palentar. But we will have time to talk about that later. Come on.”

“What about Nashara?” Tiago asked, looking back at the door.

“She’s a big girl,” Kay said, “she can take care of herself. Now, we have to move.”

Kay led them down the gentle slope of the tunnel at a brisk pace to a junction, where the sound of running water filled the air and the stench of sewage increased.

Five Ox-men stood in a trench full of dirty water holding onto a small metal boat with an old, dirty combustion engine on the back.

It sputtered to life with a pull of a handle.

An explosion from further up the tunnel echoed through the sewer tunnels as they clambered in.

Kay smiled. “That should slow the Doaq down.” She waved her hand at the Ox-men and they let go. She gunned the engine up to a brisk whine as the boat shot clear, bouncing off the sides of the trench.

Tiago looked around. “All this. You knew the Doaq was coming for June? How?”

“It was a guess,” Kay said. “I’ve been studying it a bit. It’s hard. I can’t even get a good picture of it because cameras fail around it. But like any other thinking creature it has habits. It has motivations. And with enough time, it betrays some of them.”

Tiago stared at her. Most people hid at night. Stayed low. That was when the Doaq prowled and did its unearthly business. When people disappeared, you didn’t dwell on it. You knocked on wood that you would never be the one to turn a corner and see the Doaq standing there.

But Kay. “You hunt the Doaq?” Tiago asked.

She heard the stunned disbelief in his voice and turned to him. “It’s an alien. It’s not some supernatural creature, Tiago. It’s like the Nesaru, just more powerful. We don’t know where it comes from, but just like the other aliens, it plays on human land as if it owns it. It thinks it rules us, but it does
not
!”

There was a hatred in Kay’s face. Open for the two of them to see. And she didn’t seem to care. She’d let her control slip. “I will destroy it. And then I will take the island. And after that, I will make the Nesaru leave, and the Gahe, and all the other stinking aliens that once kept us under their thumb before independence. They are not welcome here. Pepper may have failed to kill the Doaq for me. Nashara may fail yet. But I won’t.”

She turned down another tunnel as Tiago hugged himself. This was insane. Kay was starting an all-out war with the Doaq?

Tiago was a part of that war.

He wasn’t going to survive that.

He was dead. Still up and walking. But dead, at some point in the near future.

“You did good, Tiago,” Kay said, now calm again. “You’ve gained Nashara’s trust, I think. That is not an easy thing. If she didn’t have a connection with you, she probably would just have grabbed June and made a run for her ship and left you for dead. Instead she’s battling the Doaq in place, which is fantastic. You have a place among my lieutenants and a place on this island, Tiago. You did very well.”

Tiago swallowed and said nothing.

That thing back there, it would keep tracking, and coming.

There was no stopping that.

And it didn’t matter if he were a lieutenant or just Tiago the pickpocket, none of that shit mattered if the Doaq swallowed him alive.