Squatting, I lay my Sword across my legs and pulled with both hands, pooling the glowing cord in the palm of my left hand. As quick as I could pull it, the portal disappeared and when the last strands fell into my hand, I covered it with the other palm and squeezed. The pressure in the room changed with a pop that I felt most in between my hands and when I pulled them apart, the cord was gone. Then I smelled potato salad. Awasos had pulled open another fridge door. I hurried over before he could scarf it all, popping the Sword back to its alternative dimension as I went.
“There are people outside,” Arkady announced from his position by the door. “Soldiers with guns.”
“Where are we exactly?” Tanya asked.
“The Pentagon Courtyard Café,” Stacia said, holding up a laminated menu with the title on the top. She was naked again.
“For the love of God, can’t you keep clothes on?” Lydia asked.
“Arkady…” Tanya growled as she walked to the window to peek out. The giant vampire grinned as he took off his shirt and threw it to the naked blonde who shrugged into it.
“Hello inside the café,” a familiar voice yelled, amplified by a loudspeaker.
“Hello yourself, Nathan,” Tanya yelled back.
“What is your condition, Ms. Demidova, and who is with you?” Nathan Stewart yelled back. The others moved to windows and the doorway to look out. I stayed with the tub of potato salad but ‘Sos hooked it out of my hand with a claw like a fisherman’s gaff. I would have struggled for it but I spotted coleslaw in another tub.
“That’s a whole lot of guns out there,” Lydia noted. “Is that a rocket launcher?”
“M136 AT-4,” Arkady said, nodding and pointing over her shoulder. “At least two of those and two M2 heavy machine guns and that over there is mini-gun. 7.62mm.”
“We’re all here, Nathan, and we’re good—no unwanted passengers, if that’s your meaning,” Tanya yelled back.
Nika nodded at her. “He’s still not certain because a demon inside one of us would lie about it.”
“Our instrumentation shows a gate closing. Is that correct?” Director Stewart asked, tinny-sounding voice booming.
“Christian closed it. How can we prove we’re safe without you doing something regrettable? Or is that what you’ve been ordered to do?” Tanya asked.
“We have a device. You’ll have to come out, one at a time and be tested. If anyone so much as twitches, it will be as you say, regrettable,” he answered.
“Okay, that’ll work,” Tanya yelled back, preparing to step out.
“Nope, me first. In case it goes tits up,” Lydia said, slipping out the door before anyone could stop her.
Now I was interested enough to move to the window, the coleslaw exchanged for a more portable metal dish of egg salad.
Harsh lights lit the exterior to full daytime brightness, making it impossible to see the soldiers with normal vision. Thermal vision showed dozens of heavily armed soldiers manning enough barely portable heavy weapons to decimate a full unit of main battle tanks.
Stewart made Lydia walk, hands up, halfway to his position, kneel on the ground, and submit to some kind of scanning by his assistant, Adine, with a tablet-shaped device.
“She’s clear,” was the pronouncement.
Stacia went next, hands held to shoulder level. The massive shirt came to barely mid-thigh and I think if she raised her hands any higher, her modesty would have been compromised.
She, too, was pronounced clear.
Next went Nika, then Arkady. Tanya told Awasos to change to wolf before sending him out. Finally, it was just her and I.
“You go next,” she said.
“Nope, you. They’re gonna be all keyed up when I go. I don’t want you caught in the kill zone if they get itchy,” I said, wiping my hands on about a dozen napkins. My savage food frenzy had left them a mess.
We went together, holding hands. Everyone tensed up when they saw us, with much yelling and screaming for us drop to our knees almost as soon as we stepped outside the door of the café. Then the stupid scanner thingy went off when Adine waved it over me. It beeped once and Adine jumped back.
“Wait!” Tanya yelled before things could go all pear shaped. “It’s probably his blood. He was exposed to demon blood several years ago.”
Adine was ten feet to our side and now she studied her readout. “It’s a very low reading, Nathan, barely registering.”
“Check him again,” he said, his eyes hard and his mustache twitching. Beside him, I saw the teen girl, Ariel, watching with eyes wide open. She clutched something in one hand. Despite everything around me, it caught my attention.
Adine came up and scanned us again, two soldiers coming out from behind us to help.
“Yeah, it’s a super low-level reading,” she reported.
Nathan grimaced, coming to a decision. “Chris, we’re gonna cuff you just to be safe.”
The soldiers behind me clicked heavy cuffs around my wrists, moving my hands from the back of my neck to the small of my back. Then something clicked around my neck and both ankles.
Tanya glanced my way and started to frown. “Hey, what the…” was as far as she got before Adine snapped silver cuffs on
her
wrists. Tanya started to stand up but Adine wrapped her legs around her from behind and took her to the ground, stabbing her in the neck with a syringe.
Grim thrust forward, twisting my body to stand, but two sharp bites, one on my neck, the other in my ass, burned through me, my muscles locking up and starting to jerk involuntarily.
I fell forward, my eyes on Nathan’s. His looked sad, even as his mouth formed a straight line of determination. Beside him, Ariel looked scared and upset, but still holding that black object by her leg, pointing whatever it was straight at me.
Then I locked up even more, going rigid. I hit the ground and bounced, my vision now locked on Tanya as the light around us dimmed. Her blue, blue eyes were all I saw before the lights went out.
Chapter 33
They never fully went out—the lights, that is. There were jumbled sounds and sensations of moving, blurs of light and periods of dark, and the whole time, I was frozen solid—muscles locked and rigid.
There followed a whole lot of shouting and commands, boots pounding, gear rattling, along with the electric whine of a motor. The bouncing of being carried smoothed into the glide and sway of a vehicle ride. We went down what felt like a sharp incline, and light penetrated my eyelids in a steady progression, like white lines down the middle of a road or… overhead lights flashing past.
We came to a stop and there was more yelling and bouncing, then the sounds of two electric vehicles moving away.
“Hurry, this stuff won’t last long,” one voice huffed.
“Come on, Sarge, those hypos were like bananas. There must be enough of that stuff in this guy to kill a rhino,” another said.
“Shut the fuck up, Morgan, and keep hauling. This ain’t no rhino we’re hauling,” the sarge voice said.
“Yeah, he’s the motherfucking God Hammer, that’s all,” a new voice added from somewhere in the vicinity of my feet. “He weighs a freaking ton.”
“You just shut it too, Corporal,” Sarge said. “Let’s get him in here and chained before the motherfucker wakes up. You want to be here then?”
A breathless chorus of
no
’s sounded. “Alright, Morgan, you lock his legs to that chain there and corporal numbnuts here can lock up his arms.”
Feeling was coming back to my limbs and my eyelids started to twitch as I was dumped on the floor.
“Hurry, you assholes, he’s coming to,” the sarge said as the ratchet sound of locks snapping and chains rattling filled my ears.
Footsteps pounded away and then a whoosh sound accompanied a metal-on-metal clunk and click as if something heavy and metal had just closed. Whirring noises like motor servos sounded by the upper corners of the room.
I opened my eyes. And closed them against the harsh bright light. Opening them again found more of the eye-searing light, but I manned up and kept them open, ignoring the tears that formed. After a few good blinks, I got my vision back and looked around my new surroundings.
I was in a large square glass room, which seemed to be inside another, much larger space. Huge high-powered lights shone down through the thick glass ceiling, making the vast space overhead murky and dark. The outside floor seemed to be made of an acre or so of concrete. The whirring in the upper corners was coming from automated mini-guns mounted in each corner of my glass box, all four pointed straight at me.
The floor underneath me was rubber coated, but based on the draining feeling I was getting from it, it was probably depleted uranium. Outside my box, Nathan Stewart was looking at me, a distinctly unhappy expression on his face. Beside him stood General Creek, who looked unhappy as well, but his was more of an I-hate-the-asshole-in-the-box type look, mixed with I-wish-I-could-just-shoot-him.
Four lines of six soldiers each stood around the four sides of my crystal square. Movement in the upper darkness caught my eye and I switched to infrared vision, the thermal outlines of two snipers lying prone on steel catwalks, heavy rifles pointed at me.
I checked my link. It was still there, feeding me a steady hum of silent rage from my vampire. She was also in a box, but I think she could see the others. Then I felt something else, another connection, this one more feelings than anything else. Stacia was mad too and I could sense her frustration. Wherever they were, they seemed to be together. It might have been a different part of this space but I couldn’t hear, see, or smell them. Just feel the links, humming with frustration.
“I’m sorry, Chris. I had my orders and much as I protested them, I still had to follow them,” Nathan said as he noticed me awake. His voice came from the corner of the ceiling and the wall on my right, where compact speakers were installed.
“Yeah, Gordon, imagine that… someone who follows orders. Strange concept, huh?” General Creek said.
I sat up, not speaking but just studying my situation. The cuffs on my legs and arms were now locked to heavy chains sunk deep into massive bolts in the floor. My legs were stretched out in front of me and my hands were still behind my back, leaving me just enough room to sit on my ass, but none to move around and get any kind of leverage.
“The cuffs are DU, as is the floor and the collar around your neck. So are the bullets in the mini-guns. Your collar also contains a radio-controlled explosive that’s strong enough to actually break the armored Lexan that surrounds you, which itself is almost a foot thick. Oh, and your collar is linked to matching collars on all your little gang of freaks, each coated in DU to keep you from messing up the mixture. So if you so much as twitch, there’ll be seven matching explosions. It’d be a hell of bloody mess,” Creek said, voice even and deep. “Also, there are sensors that look for particle emissions—try any of your tricks and the collars go off.”
I turned it all over in my head. Nathan’s precognitive, Ariel, figured out where we would emerge, right smack in the middle of the most heavily guarded building on earth, the Pentagon. The government saw the opportunity and took it. Now we were chained and booby-trapped, locked down in the bowls of the Pentagon.
“No comments, smartass?” Creek asked.
I didn’t answer, locked deep in a wrestling match with Grim. He wanted to go for it. Pull the Sword from its pocket in space and time, cut my bonds and collar and take them all on. He had it all figured, the exact angle to pull the Sword with my back-bound hands so that the lump of explosive I could feel at the back of my head would be cut as the Sword manifested. If I had been by myself, I might have let him.
But even if his speed was great enough and the Sword sharp enough to cut the explosive collar and my chains, it wouldn’t save the others. And I was terrified to lose any of them. Not to mention that if they all died, I wouldn’t be able to stop my dark side from wreaking vengeance. Cataclysmic, apocalyptic vengeance. The sky’s falling kind of vengeance.
“Why not just kill me, Nathan? Why take any risk at all?” I asked, finally breaking my silence.
His face twisted for a moment, his twitching mustache and goatee almost comical. Almost.
“Because those were not
my
orders,” a new voice said as a flood of footsteps announced a small army of new arrivals. Black suits filled my vision before spreading out enough for me to see the gray-suited speaker in the midst of a sea of Secret Service agents. The woman by his side was familiar… too familiar.
But
his
face was immediately recognizable; it even predated my memory loss, having seen it enough times on TV and in the papers. President Hogan Garth looked more impressive in person, more than his admittedly impactful media images.
He was a big man, maybe six-two or six-three, and built like an athlete, albeit an older one. His salt-and-pepper hair was more salt than pepper, maybe an effect of two years in office.
Alexis Bishop stood at his elbow, face expressionless, studying me. Her boss looked self-satisfied, almost smug.
“No Mr. Gordon, simply killing you doesn’t suffice. Right, Alexis?” President Garth asked.