Shadow Box, page 14
“Hurry, hurry,” she urged Smarts as they walked toward the sole thoroughfare of the hamlet. “No time to waste.”
Over his shoulder, Smarts glared back at her, his eyebrows knitted in annoyance. “I am wounded, you understand?” he spit.
“Yeah.” Domi smiled. “I shot you good, you fink.”
“Like all Magistrates, you have no honor, señorita,” Smarts snarled at her.
Domi stopped twirling the silver staff and took two steps forward, placing the muzzle of her pistol flush against Smarts’s left cheek. “You bopped me in the back of the head with a case,” she reminded him. “Twice.”
The color drained from Smarts’s face, and his eyes remained on hers as Domi pushed the gun forward. Finally, he staggered back, muttering, “My apologies, señorita.”
“Keep ’em,” she told Smarts as he winced at the pain running through his leg. Domi held the gun on him, her fierce ruby orbs eyeing his body as though deciding where to place a bullet. Finally, she stepped back and pulled the gun away, holding it in a more casual grip but still glaring at the wounded man. “You maybe don’t want to get on my wrong side anymore,” she warned him. “I’m not like Kane and the others. I don’t believe in all that honor shit. You play that card again and I’ll likely put a bullet between your eyes, little man.”
Smarts nodded warily. “I understand,” he acknowledged.
Domi held his gaze a moment longer, until he finally looked away. “When Kane’s done with you, you had better run. Or you had better have a damn good reason for why I don’t carve a strip off you for blindsiding me.”
With that, Domi urged the Mexican toward the buildings. A pair of Incarnates—eagle and jackal masks atop their heads—came over and spoke to Domi. She explained where the other chariot was, and she asked them to guard Smarts very carefully while she gave a full report to Kane.
Domi was directed to one of the shacks, where she found Kane, along with Brigid, Decard, Keb and two more Incarnates standing guard over a third Incarnate who had been strapped to a bed. Domi recognized the tied Incarnate as the one who had been wounded in the skirmish with the black-skinned monster. He lay on the bed, pulling at his bonds and writhing as though with fever, a stream of guttural sounds emerging from deep in his throat.
“What’s been going on?” Domi asked with forced cheeriness.
Decard shot her an angry look but said nothing as Kane stepped forward and guided her through the door and into the next room where they could be alone.
“Just after you left, we made a discovery,” Kane said. “The guardsman who got hit is now a carrier of the same thing that the pregnant girl had.”
Domi swore, her eyes turning back to the bedroom door from which the man’s moans could be heard. “What is it, do you know?”
“Not yet,” Kane acknowledged, “but we’ve got theories.” He told her about how the Incarnate had been the only person touched by the strange creature, the proposition of an Annunaki virus that overwhelms its host. Domi nodded in concerned silence the whole time.
Then Kane pushed the drapes back and looked out the window at the expanse of sand outside. “What about you and Grant?” he asked.
“I got the boy Smarts,” Domi said, gesturing outside with her thumb, “but Grant had to chase Rosalia down. I’ve not heard anything since, but he had Philboyd tagging her the whole way. She won’t get far.”
Kane nodded. Grant could take care of himself, and the man would have been in touch via Commtact if anything were amiss.
GRANT HAD LOWERED himself from the tops of the outcropping and was carefully searching the naturally formed corridor that ran between the two stretches of rocks. When he had passed through here the first time, not ten minutes earlier, the rocks had seemed to soak up the light, casting the whole route into a midnight shadow. Now, confident that Rosalia wasn’t about to leap out at him, he waited with his eyes closed until they had fully adjusted. Then, Sin Eater in hand, he checked every rocky jut and crevice.
He missed it the first time, but on his second sweep through the eighteen-foot-long passageway, left hand running along the lower rock wall, he found what his eyes had failed to see. There was a tunnel, a burrow, like something an animal would use, rising from the ground to the height of Grant’s waist. It was easy to miss; the way that the rocks cascaded within the tunnel made it appear to be almost flat, disguising the tunnel by nothing more than a trick of the shadows.
“Hmm,” Grant breathed. “Hidden in plain sight.”
He knelt, looking into the little tunnel entrance. It hardly looked wide enough to accommodate his wide shoulders, but it would be a cinch for a smaller person—someone of Domi’s stature, say, or the lithe Rosalia with her willowy figure—to slip through it in an instant. For a moment, Grant considered calling Domi in to assist him, eyed the hole again and decided he could make it. It was one woman, no matter how vicious, and he was an ex-Mag. She may have made a chase of it for a while, but she had just run out of track.
Grant ducked, crouch-walking to the tunnel entrance before leaning warily in. Inside, he saw, the tunnel sloped downward at a sharp angle. Getting down that slope would be more like falling than crawling, he decided. Flipping himself around, Grant leaned on his buttocks and let his feet dangle into the hole. Then, gritting his teeth, he pushed off, sliding down the rough surface of the tunnel, using his free hand to slow his descent.
More darkness for a few moments, then Grant’s descent stopped as quickly as it had begun, and his feet slammed into a solid rock floor. Automatically, the ex-Mag bent his knees, absorbing the impact. He calculated that he had fallen no more than twelve feet below the surface.
Crouching instinctively, Grant looked around him. He was on a rocky ledge covered in sand and copper-colored dirt, within a large, underground cavern. The cool air of the cavern hit him with abruptness after the blazing heat of the desert sun on his face, and despite the carefully climate-controlled environment of the shadow suit, he felt a shiver run through his body.
He could hear noise coming from just below him, voices talking. Grant sank to his belly and pulled himself silently to the edge of the rock plinth he had landed on. Stilling his breath, Grant peered over the side of the ledge.
Beneath him he saw a string of lights, just naked bulbs, running around the cavern a few feet below his hiding place. Two men were down there, discussing some woman that they both knew—intimately—and Grant tuned out their sordid conversation as his gaze swept the expanse of cavern.
The underground cave was roughly circular in shape, and it stretched at least fifty feet from the wall where Grant was to its far side. It was hard to judge accurately as the string of lights had been used to illuminate the first two-thirds, but the last part had been left in darkness. Within the lit area, a number of people milled about, and many of them openly bore arms. They were a ragtag group, with no real uniformity to their clothes or weapons, but they were clearly acting together as somebody’s handpicked militia. Grant estimated perhaps twenty-five guards in the cavern, along with a few others who appeared unarmed and busied themselves at errands of one kind or another. One girl in her early teens was pouring piping-hot water into mugs from a kettle over a small gas stove. As Grant watched, a man bearing three days of beard on his chin and a Ruger M-77 rifle across his back stomped over and muttered something to the girl. She physically cowered, handing the man a mug as she bowed her head, but it didn’t help her. The man took the mug, then dealt her a heavy backhanded blow across the face before walking away, back to a game of dice he was playing with several other armed individuals.
Grant’s gaze continued to work around the vast chamber until something significant caught his eye. Off to the far right, a bank of large, upright tubes bubbled with a blue-green liquid. Grant couldn’t tell from here whether the liquid was luminous or if the tubes were illuminated, but it didn’t matter—he knew what he was looking at. It was a laboratory of some sort, doubtless brewing up some new flavor of trouble.
As he watched the whitecoats in the lab work through their experiments, two familiar figures walked into the cordoned-off area of the lab: Rosalia, her silks now wrapped tightly around her and a man’s camo jacket draped over her shoulders, and Tom Carnack, looking none the worse for wear after his ordeal in Hope, and now carrying the metallic case that contained the interphaser.
Carnack called one of the whitecoats aside and rested the carrying case on a worktable before cracking its seals.
Grant shifted his position, wishing he could somehow get closer. An instinct, a sixth sense, suddenly nudged him and he looked around him, certain he was being watched. There was no one there, no one to the sides or behind him. He rolled carefully away from the edge and looked down the sloped side that led down to the cavern floor—no one there, either.
Warily, his senses still on high alert, Grant turned back to the scene in the cavern. If Carnack was here, then that meant that this was his storage depot, or at least one of them. And with the laboratory, Grant deduced, this had to be the place that the brigand leader had alluded to when he had bragged of his experiments with hybrid DNA. As the thought struck him, Grant felt the weight of the Sin Eater pistol in his hand. Where a moment before it had been an irrelevance, no more noticeable than the clothes he wore, suddenly it felt like a coiled snake, waiting to strike. A well-placed shot in this enclosed area and those chemicals would go up in flames, Grant realized. Then it would be all over for Carnack’s new baronies, aborted before they had even been born.
As he stretched the pistol toward the laboratory, sighting down the length of his right arm, a sudden noise caught Grant’s attention from above. He glanced up automatically, and saw the boy, Benqhil, the guide who had taken them to Carnack’s negotiating rooms back in Hope, sitting atop a higher ledge, his feet dangling casually over the side. His lips were drawn back, his teeth clenched, and he let out the strange penetrating sound again—part whistle, part trilling.
The atmosphere in the cavern changed immediately. Suddenly the bandit guards were alert, checking their weapons as they rushed across the cave toward Grant’s hiding place as Benqhil pointed him out. Even as he began to move, Grant saw the first flashes of gunfire from the floor below as guards turned their pistols on him.
Chapter 11
Mariah Falk stared at the impressive view from the San Francisco mountain range as she followed Edwards along the thin trail leading to the summit of Humphreys Peak. It was so strange, she thought, to see how little it had changed since she was last here, more than two hundred years before.
Like a number of the Cerberus personnel, Falk had endured an extended period in cryogenic hibernation while the Russo-American conflict played out, and had missed the terrible years that had followed, when North America had been nothing more than aptly named Deathlands.
When Mariah had shown her findings to Lakesh earlier that day, he had immediately agreed that the triangulated epicenter of the quakes, here in Arizona, was worth checking, in case anything new was brought to light. Mariah formed one-third of an investigation team, along with Clem Bryant, for moral support, and Edwards, who was assigned to bodyguard duties. Together, the group had swiftly jumped to a nearby military redoubt, leaving them with a short hike to reach the mountain peak.
As she stood there, gazing at the reddish peaks that jutted around them, Clem Bryant’s rich, soothing voice broke into her thoughts. “You seem pensive, Mariah. Is something wrong?”
Mariah slowly turned to look at Clem. He had been following a few paces behind her on the narrow path, showing no signs of exhaustion as he hefted a large backpack full of supplies.
“I was just remembering the last time I was here.” Mariah smiled. “Must have been Christmas 1978, or maybe ’79. I came here with a group of college friends, did some skiing at Coconino, probably hiked along this very trail.”
“How was it?” Clem asked. “The skiing, I mean.”
“Dreadful.” Mariah laughed. “No sense of balance, scared of going fast, convinced I was going to break both legs. I was pitiful.” Mariah stood wistfully, looking out at the snow-dappled peaks of the far mountains, and she giggled once more. “Just dreadful.”
From a little higher up the path, Edwards cupped his hands to his mouth and called to them to hurry. The former Mag had shaved his hair to a severe crew cut that showed off his bullet-bitten right ear, and he wore an olive-drab undershirt that clung to his rippling muscles. “You two girls finish your slumber party and let’s get moving!” he shouted.
Mariah turned back to the path, shaking her head and preparing herself for the last half-mile trek to the site she had identified, but Clem stopped her, brushing his hand lightly against her arm. She looked at him and he smiled.
“I miss ‘dreadful,’” he told her.
“Me, too,” she said, nodding before beginning along the trail once more.
“I DON’T KNOW WHAT it is you two girls find to dawdle over,” Edwards growled as the three of them finally reached the epicenter of the quakes.
Clem raised his eyebrows in amusement.
“Something funny?” Edwards asked Clem, a threat in his tone.
“I detect an air of tension, Mr. Edwards,” Clem replied after a moment’s thought.
“And I wonder why that is?” Edwards growled as he stomped away to check their immediate surroundings. “Off on a wild-goose chase with a rock lover and a cook. Un-fucking-believable.”
Clem watched as Edwards left the clearing and rustled through the undergrowth, checking for traps or watching eyes.
“That man certainly has a lot of anger,” he said as he turned to Mariah. She was working at a sextant on a tripod, comparing its readings to the notations she had penciled onto her map.
“He’s got a good point, though,” Mariah observed, not bothering to look up from her work. “It could be a wild-goose chase, Clem.”
“A walk in the fresh mountain air could never be anything less than a profitable use of one’s time,” Clem countered.
Mariah looked up at him then with her ingratiating smile. “You know what I mean.”
“I do,” Clem agreed, stretching his arms around and spinning slowing to absorb the wonderful scenery. “But just look around you, Mariah. Feel that cool air in your throat. It’s all frightfully invigorating, isn’t it?”
“We live on a mountain, Clem,” Mariah reminded him.
“No, we live in a mountain,” Clem responded. “And most of the time, we simply work in a mountain.”
Mariah shook her head. “You love all this, don’t you?”
“Me?” Clem said innocently. “I’m a diver—under the sea is my chosen habitat. This is about as far away from that as one’s likely to find.”
“Which doesn’t answer my question,” Mariah reminded him as she ticked off the readings and moved the sextant on its retracting tripod legs.
Clem laughed. “It’s nice to get away from the office early once in a while,” he admitted.
As Clem finished, Mariah raised a finger to get his attention, her nose buried in one of the maps she had brought with her. “We’re about four hundred yards from where we need to be,” she decided.
Clem stepped across, reaching for the sextant. “Then allow me to do the carrying,” he insisted, “while you lead the way.”
Mariah and Clem pushed through the rugged terrain, with Clem wielding the long-legged sextant like a staff.
“Do you realize that this was all a hot zone less than a century ago?” Mariah asked as she led the way.
“You wouldn’t think it today,” Clem replied. “It’s remarkable the way that nature humbles even the most forceful of humankind’s attempts to destroy her.”
Once they had traveled a little way down the slope of Humphreys Peak, Mariah pointed to her left. “There—do you see it?”
Clem looked where she was indicating and saw a shadowy crack running across the surface of the mountain, cutting through the scrubby grass there. “That looks like our quake site, all right,” he agreed.
The crack ran more than a quarter of a mile, and was wide enough to drive a tank through at its largest divide. It looked ancient, as if it had always been a part of the mountain, but Mariah pointed to the striations in the visible rocks and a few other things, explaining that it had opened up very recently.
“There’s shearing here,” she explained to Clem and Edwards when the latter joined them from his patrol. “The quake literally pushed half the mountain up by perhaps five feet.”
“Five feet isn’t so much,” Edwards argued.
Clem looked at the man, the tone of his voice never mocking as he asked, “For a mountain?”
Edwards looked to Mariah for confirmation. “Are you saying that the whole mountain has moved?”
Mariah nodded. “It’s not so unusual,” she said, trying to sound reassuring.
Clem looked at her. “I detect a ‘but’ coming along,” he encouraged.
Mariah sighed, looking frustrated as she gazed at the crack in the earth. “Would you accept ‘woman’s intuition’ as a good enough reason to explore this crevice?”
Edwards looked doubtful, but Clem just nodded and smiled. “I can’t think of a single better reason,” he assured Mariah as he reached for his backpack and began unloading climbing gear.
Edwards still looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know, guys,” he said, “I’m not real happy about going in there if we don’t know—”
Clem slapped the well-muscled man amiably on the back. “Come on, Edwards, where’s your sense of adventure?”
“At the rear of the queue behind my sense of caution and my sense of self-preservation,” Edwards growled.
“I’ll tell you what,” Clem said. “I’ll go in first, and if you hear me screaming you can all run for the hills.” He looked around as though seeing the mountains for the first time. “Or, perhaps, away from the hills.”
