Death Cry, page 18
“You’re very thoughtful,” Brigid said as he worked at the graze that ran down her left cheek. She looked closely at the man; he couldn’t have been much more than nineteen or twenty years of age. He had thrown his whole life away, albeit unwittingly, on this fabulous project.
“Dr. Djugashvili tells me,” Yuri began, trying to appear matter-of-fact, “that you have come from the future.”
Brigid smiled. No, she thought, you’re stuck in the past. But it didn’t bear explaining. “It’s true,” she responded, “a long way in the future. The twenty-third century.”
“It is incredible,” Yuri said. “A modern wonder. My mother would never believe such a thing possible, that I, her son, met a visitor from the future.”
“Your mother must have seen a lot of change,” Brigid said. “You must miss her.”
“Not so much,” Yuri told her. “Mostly I miss my brothers and sister. My mother would have much difficulty comprehending where it is that I work. This whole research facility is an exceptional construction.”
“I can’t argue with you there,” Brigid agreed.
Yuri smiled tentatively as he worked at the cut on Brigid’s cheek, apologizing for the stinging sensation that the ammonia water caused. “The future—what is it like?” Yuri asked finally.
“It’s…” Brigid began, and then she halted, considering her words. Finally she spoke once more. “The future is very different from what you remember, Yuri. There was such a flurry of achievement in the twentieth century, it must have seemed that the miracles would never stop coming. But one day it ended, literally in the space of a few hours. There was an atomic war, a war of such incredible destruction that it stunted humankind for two centuries.”
“But where you are from,” Yuri asked as he recapped the ammonia bottle, “what is that like? What is it like to live in the future?”
“It’s a struggle every day,” she admitted. “Did Dr. Djugashvili tell you why I’m here?”
“He says that you have come requesting our charity,” Yuri told her.
She nodded, and it started the chain that held her swinging slightly. “Man may have fought the war that started the twenty-first century, but it is an alien race called the Annunaki who have reaped the benefits,” she explained. “We have struggled with their opposing army, which has superior technology—aircraft and guns and things that you couldn’t begin to imagine. The device that you have constructed here, the Death Cry, could change the face of that war. With it, we could end two hundred years of exploitation, millennia of manipulation.”
“You believe that the Death Cry could do this?” the young man asked.
“I have read Dr. Djugashvili’s original reports,” she told him. “I think it’s worth a try.”
Yuri nodded, considering her words. “My mother saw many changes in her homeland,” he said after a few moments’ thought. “She said that brave men changed things for the better.”
Brigid considered the young man’s subjective age. His mother would have lived through the October Revolution, the dethroning of the czar, the rise of the Soviet Socialist Republics. He himself was probably too young to remember those changes, just a child when Russia’s identity and her people’s way of life had changed so utterly. Yuri himself had a strange kind of immortality in this realm, a useless kind of eternity that meant nothing ever changed for him and the other people working there. “I need brave men,” she told him, “men who can make brave decisions.”
“You have come here at great personal risk to fight for what you believe in,” he told her. “I think, perhaps, that all brave men are not men at all, Miss Brigid,” and she felt the blush rise in her cheeks.
THERE WERE SO MANY PEOPLE surrounding Domi that there was no chance of pulling her Detonics pistol clear of its holster or getting the 9 mm Uzi out of her coat.
The tired-looking woman in the filthy clothes was grasping for her wrist again, eyeing her fingers. Domi’s fist drove forward, caving the woman’s nose in a burst of blood. She spun on her heel, surveying the mob around her.
Upward of thirty people surrounded her, their feral eyes watching her closely. All of them looked emaciated, their faces sallow, their limbs thin. She doubted that any of them had much strength left, but they could overwhelm her by sheer numbers. And the leader, the woman in the red dress and tall hat, she looked pretty handy with that meat cleaver.
Something glinted in the corner of Domi’s vision and she spun just in time to see a bearded man swinging an ax toward her head. She ducked and the heavy blade swished through the air above her, the attacker stumbling as his blade unexpectedly met nothing but air. Domi thrust her left leg forward in a sweep, hooking the man behind his ankle and pulling him over onto his back with a crash.
The rest of the crowd stepped back warily, watching the albino stranger with newfound caution. Domi leaped up from the dusty floor, holding her empty hands open for all to see. “I mean you no harm,” she told them in a loud voice. “I’m not here to hurt you. It’s just a misunderstanding.”
The woman in the tall hat, clearly the group’s leader, snarled and shouted something that the Commtact translated as “Kill the meat angel.” The rallying cry was taken up by other members of the mob as they closed ranks and moved toward Domi from all sides, giving her no chance to escape.
Domi’s gaze darted across the mob, trying to find a way to break through. She could see windows along one wall and a set of wide double doors toward the end of the vast room. Other than the mat-trans, that doorway was the only exit from this place. Hanging above her, attached to the ceiling, was some kind of metal hook, a big thing that had once been used to lift moored boats for repair work on the underside of their hulls. The hook was attached to some kind of mobile crane, pitted all over with orange spots of rust.
As the crowd surged forward, Domi crouched, then leaped into the air like a coiled spring, her hands reaching for the hook that was nine feet off the ground. She grabbed it, yanking herself up as the mob reached for her, pulling herself just out of reach.
She stood atop the hook, looking down at the angry group. Their eyes and teeth glinted along with the smattering of blades that many of them had now produced. She could go up, use the thick chain that held the hook to reach the top of the crane, and from there climb into the rafters of the high-ceilinged chamber. That was a possible way to keep moving, but where would it lead her? She would still be stuck in the room, the crowd beneath her. Could she break a window maybe and get out that way?
As she balanced on the hook she heard a loud report, and a bullet zinged past her head. One of the crowd was shooting at her! It was time to move.
Domi clambered up the chain, arms and legs wrapped around it as she pulled herself up into the dark rafters of the room. There was another report, and a handful of buckshots slapped into the chain just below her feet, making the hook sway in a little circle.
Still clinging to the chain with her knees, Domi swung her body outward and grabbed one of the wooden rafters that crisscrossed the room, pulling herself up onto it. More shots were being targeted her way, ripping through the air and taking chunks out of the rafters around her. Balanced on a rafter, she hunched into a ball, making as small a target as she could while the bullets embedded themselves into the ceiling above her. Domi reached into the parka and pulled out the Uzi. “Screw this,” she muttered as she flipped off the safety catch and reeled off a stream of bullets at the crowd.
The 9 mm bullets zipped through the air, felling two of the crowd members and clipping a third before the crowd dispersed, running in all directions from the immediate area that Domi had targeted. She watched them scamper away, eyeing her fearfully as they backed into the shadowy corners of the vast boathouse.
A noise drew her attention, and she turned to see the woman in the hat and red dress had produced some kind of hunting rifle from who knew where. The laser targeter put a red spot on the ceiling by Domi’s head as she tried to locate the albino woman through the rifle’s sight. Domi ducked and began running across the thin bar of wood that she was balanced on as the woman fired her first shot.
“Kill her,” the woman shouted triumphantly. “Kill the meat angel!”
I’ve been an angel for less than five minutes, Domi thought grimly, and already everybody wants to clip my wings.
A second shot from the rifle slapped into the rafter, splintering the wood just a step in front of Domi’s left foot. As the bullet struck the rafter, she slipped, her arms windmilling as she struggled to keep her balance. Another bullet cut through the air, whizzing past her ear and into the ceiling just above her head.
Domi recovered her footing and surveyed the crowd beneath her, trying to pick out the woman in the tall hat. A volley of bullets streamed past her a little farther along the rafter as other members of the hostile group took aim at her. Domi held down the trigger as she blasted a stream of shots randomly toward the floor below her. Cries and screams came back as the crowd panicked once more.
One voice came translated over the Commtact, louder than the others: “Tough damn angel you called down, Minister.”
Domi recognized the screeching voice of the woman in the hat as she replied, “But all of God’s own taste heavenly, make no mistake about that.”
Domi sprinted the length of the rafter and turned as she spotted a long beam that reached toward the windows. It was light outside, early morning.
Suddenly the loud, angry bellow of a shotgun cut the air and a great chunk of the roof beam disappeared just as Domi was about to step onto it. Her foot trod into thin air, slipping through the gap as she overbalanced. She threw her arms out as she sailed over the edge, letting go of the Uzi as she desperately reached for something to hang on to. Her right arm wrapped around a roof beam, pulling her body after it. She slammed into the roof beam with the top of her chest, driving the breath out of her in a weighty gasp.
Domi hung there, twenty feet above the floor, trying to recover her breath as a crowd of feral cannibals circled beneath her like sharks scenting blood.
GENERAL SERGE STOOD at the radio unit in the communications room of the astral factory feeling despondent. He had been trying for thirty minutes to hail the monitoring facility in Stalingrad to no avail. It was inconceivable that no one was on monitoring duty, whatever hour of the day or night it might be there. Utterly inconceivable.
As he sat staring at the silent radio unit, Serge became aware that someone was watching him from the open doorway to the lightning-walled room. He turned to see Dr. Djugashvili, his face a picture of concern. “Anything, General?” Djugashvili asked.
“I posted sentries and asked not to be disturbed,” Serge growled, shooting Djugashvili a fierce look.
“I told them that I needed to see you immediately concerning a personal medical matter,” Djugashvili explained hesitantly. “You have been in here for a long time, General.”
“It appears,” Serge said steadily, “that there may be a fault with our communications equipment, Doctor.”
“You have been unable to raise headquarters?” Djugashvili asked.
“That is correct,” Serge told him. “We will get Yuri to look at the radio set and see where the fault lies.”
“Listen to yourself,” Djugashvili barked, his voice loud in the vast, empty room. “Excuses. You are making excuses. After everything that the woman told us, you are making excuses, trying to rationalize her story away as though it could not possibly be fact.”
“She may have sabotaged our equipment,” Serge told him evenly.
“I do not believe that,” Djugashvili spit, “and neither do you, General. If her story is true, then we have been stuck here in this awful, soulless place for three hundred years. And we have nothing to show for it but dead colleagues and a weapon that no one has ever asked us to use. Until today.”
“If her story is true,” General Serge agreed, his emphasis showing his skepticism.
“I see no reason to doubt her story,” Djugashvili announced firmly, “and I believe that we should now proceed forward, albeit with caution.”
“Yes,” General Serge whispered as he produced the Tokarev pistol from its hiding place in his lap, aiming it at Djugashvili, “with caution.”
With that, Serge pulled the trigger and the gunshot sounded harsh in the empty, echoing room as the bullet ripped through Djugashvili’s body between his second and third ribs.
Djugashvili didn’t even have time to cry out, the shot was so sudden. He just slumped to the floor, mouth open, clutching at the wound in his chest as his blood stained the lightning-white floor of the room.
“And now, Dr. Djugashvili,” General Serge announced as he rose from his seat, “I shall deal with your counterrevolutionary friend for good.” Pistol in hand, he strode from the room.
Chapter 18
Still hanging from the pipes, Brigid cocked her head as she heard the sudden pop.
“What was that?” Yuri asked, turning to the open doorway of the room.
“Gunshot,” Brigid said with the certainty of experience.
Yuri turned to her, a shocked expression on his face. “Do you think?”
Brigid nodded. “Yuri, you have to help me now,” she told him quietly. “You must get me down from here, untie me.”
“But,” Yuri began, but Brigid cut him off with a stern look of her emerald eyes.
“Everyone’s life in this facility is in danger,” she told him firmly. “If you do not help me now, everyone here will die.”
Yuri looked at the chain that held her to the pipe. The chain was looped over the pipe and attached to a hook on the far wall at Brigid’s back. It would be a simple job to free her. He glanced over his shoulder, looking for the sentries he knew were waiting just outside the door. “I do not know that this is the right thing to do, Miss Brigid,” he admitted sorrowfully.
“I believe that General Serge has just done something very, very stupid,” she whispered, “and if you don’t get me out of here, I think he’ll continue doing stupid things until everyone in this facility is dead, yourself included.”
“Why would he do such a thing?” Yuri asked, consternation furrowing his brow.
“Please,” Brigid urged, “there’s no time to discuss this. Get me down from here before—” She didn’t bother to finish her sentence. The large figure of General Serge was standing in the open doorway flanked by the two sentries.
“Do continue,” Serge encouraged, gesturing to Brigid with his handgun.
“What happened?” she asked forcefully as Yuri backed away from her and stood against the wall, as far from the discussion as he could get, too terrified to push past the general and his sentries.
Serge smiled that awful, humorless smile of his. “A little difference of opinion,” he told her. “Nothing to concern you.”
As the general raised the pistol in his hand, Yuri cowered from the military men, pushing himself against the back wall.
“Where is Dr. Djugashvili?” Brigid asked. “I think that I should speak with him. Right now.”
Serge took a step forward, weapon pointed between Brigid’s breasts, just inches from her sternum. “He is in-disposed, kitten,” Serge told her, the malicious smile still on his lips.
Brigid could feel her heart pounding faster now, the pulse pumping in her ears as the gun was held on her. “Did you contact your superiors as we discussed?” she asked, struggling to keep the tremor from her voice.
“That need not concern you any longer,” Serge stated ominously, and Brigid watched as his gray eyes narrowed infinitesimally. It has to be now, she realized.
The general was pulling the trigger as Brigid moved, pulling herself upward from her pendulum position and kicking her legs out before her. There was a flash of light and a loud recoil as the gun went off, but the heavy heel of Brigid’s boot had already knocked into the general’s wrist, throwing his aim.
She saw the look of shock on his face as the bullet went wide, drilling into the white wall off to Brigid’s left. The twin sentries were lifting their Fedorov rifles now, even as General Serge regained his position and swung the pistol back toward her, targeting her face as she dangled at the end of the chain.
The general pulled the trigger for a second time just as Brigid’s face disappeared from his line of sight and she dropped to the floor. Immediately afterward, a volley of shots followed from the sentries’ weapons, splitting the air above her as she fell.
Yuri, she realized. He had unhooked the chain once he had eased himself, unnoticed, to the back of the interrogation room.
She was on the floor now, wrists still clamped together, and she kicked upward, driving the pointed toes of both boots into the general’s groin. He grunted in pain, dancing on the spot for a split second as the sentries’ bullets whizzed around him.
“Cease-fire,” the general shouted, his voice suddenly strained. “Cease-fire!”
As the sentries stopped shooting, Brigid rolled to her knees and swept her bound hands outward, flicking the long chain cord like a whip. The chain cut through the air, and its heavy links slapped across the face of one of the young sentries, cuffing him across the ear with a blossoming of blood.
She spun to her feet, glancing behind her to make sure that Yuri was still safe at the back of the room. As she whipped around to her attackers once more, Brigid’s left leg stretched out, booting the general full in the face with a weak but effective roundhouse kick. The general howled, staggering to one side as Brigid’s foot came back down on the solid floor. Immediately she used the energy to kick off from the floor, driving forward with her shoulder down, right elbow pointing outward.
It was messy, brutal and quick, but her elbow connected with the side of the general’s head as he reeled from the kick. She thumped the fleshy part of his face between the eye and ear, knocking him backward. She had to disarm this psychopath. That was the first priority. And, after that, she had to disarm the others and get a gun for herself.
