Shadow Box, page 18
Brigid pulled the Sandcat around as they shot into the tunnel, taking the narrow, rock-walled passageway at high speed, flipping on the bright headlights automatically.
“You’d rather let your friends die?” Domi asked, reloading her pistol as they raced down the tunnel. “Nice.”
Smarts looked pensive. “No, of course not. In my experience there is always an easier solution than guns. You just need to consider what that solution might be.”
“Got to tell you, Mr. Smarts,” Brigid called over from her seat at the steering wheel as she raced around the sharp corner in the tunnel, “I don’t believe that this creature is going to be dissuaded from its rampage by any amount of smooth talking.”
Smarts looked aimlessly around at the interior of the Sandcat, considering everything he saw and everything that he had seen in the past couple of days.
Brigid’s foot slammed on the brake, pulling the Sandcat to a screeching halt at the end of the tunnel. She and Kane flung open the doors before dashing past the other parked vehicles and into the main area of the hidden cavern.
Sitting in the back of the Sandcat, Domi looked at Smarts with her strange, red eyes. “If I untie you, do you think you can play nice?” she asked.
Smarts nodded, but he appeared deep in thought. “What about the mat-trans?” he suggested, continuing the conversation with Brigid as though she had never left the vehicle. “Your portable mat-trans would be able to send the creature away, to an island. To…under the sea or into space,” he postulated.
Domi looked at him as she untied his bonds, and a wide smile crossed her white lips. “That may just be brilliant, you sly old fox,” she said.
“Ah.” Smarts nodded. “You like my idea?”
“If it can work,” Domi told him, running it over in her mind.
HER NAME WAS Nicola and she was fourteen years old, but small for her age. Nicola served Carnack’s gang, fetching them drinks and making them hot meals, and when she wasn’t quick enough or if she didn’t smile enough or, well, sometimes for no reason, one of the gang would beat her so that she might learn to do better.
Nicola never learned.
She was what her grandmother used to called “filled with skydark.” The radiation had gotten to her in her mommy’s belly and it had messed up her brain. Years earlier, they would have said she had learning difficulties, and before then, they would just have called her “slow” or—that beautifully poetic euphemism—“touched.”
Nicola had lived with her family, mother, father, an older brother and a younger sister, for a long time in Hope, back before the refugees had swarmed into the little fishing town like locusts, eating and destroying everything in sight. She had gone to church and she had gone to school and she had tried very hard to be good in the eyes of the Lord. One day, while she was out collecting groceries for her mother—Nicola loved to help—a pretty lady had come over to speak with her. Nicola knew better than to talk to strangers, but the lady was so pretty she looked a lot like a princess from a picture book. The lady had said that her name was Rosalia, and she had asked Nicola if she liked dancing.
“I love to dance,” Nicola said, nodding so much that it seemed her head might be shaken from her neck.
Somehow, Nicola had ended up going home with the beautiful princess lady instead, her mother’s groceries forgotten.
Rosalia had led Nicola through the shantytown on the outskirts of Hope, all the while promising to teach the young girl how to dance as she never had before. “I love to dance, just like you,” Rosalia had explained. “I’ll show you how to dance properly, so that you are graceful and beautiful and so that everyone in a room cannot help but watch you.”
When they reached Rosalia’s home, Nicola had been introduced to the beautiful lady’s friends, men who scared Nicola a little at first but seemed friendly enough. The men clearly approved of Rosalia’s protégée. She was pretty, her toothsome smile wide and bright, and she seemed compliant enough.
But when Rosalia showed Nicola how to dance, with beautiful, swirling moves like autumn leaves floating on the breeze, Nicola had stumbled and tripped and slipped and fallen and not really been much of a dancer at all, despite her passion to try. Somehow, in spite of these shortcomings, pretty Nicola had remained with the gang, helping them as best she could, but she would only dance when they asked, and then only when the gang members were drunk, and they would belittle her efforts and try to trip her as she listened to the music in her mind.
Rosalia had never spoken to her again, had not even smiled at her.
A nice man called Tom had befriended Nicola one day. She liked Tom. He was funny and he had a nice smile and he always seemed to be listening to what she told him, even though what she told him wasn’t always that interesting. His friend, the clever man with the olive skin, Señor Smarts, had once told Nicola that Tom was “a people person,” whatever that meant.
Tom had traveled with her when they moved to the cavern, and he gave her instructions about serving the men here while they worked at their special project. He had told her that her project was special, too, and that it involved fetching them meals and drinks and anything else they asked for.
There had been times, Nicola knew, when the men had wanted more than just food. One night, three of them had come to her, smelling of beer, and one had grabbed her and they had all done things, terrible things. She remembered lying there, among the crates where she liked to sleep, wondering what she had done to deserve that. She had turned her head away from each man as his body pounded at hers, and she read the writing on the crate beside her head a thousand times. Paquerette Dresses. She had never looked inside.
The first man’s name, the one who had grabbed her by the hair and held her down, was Barry or Barney, she thought, but most of his friends seemed to call him “Wretched,” a funny kind of nickname that she didn’t understand. She had seen him around the cavern after that night, and she had tried to keep out of his way.
Now, wide-eyed, Nicola observed as the tall, jet-black monster strode across the cavern, flicking bullets aside the way a normal person might flick aside insects. She watched as the huge creature stood before a group of brigands, blasting their rifles and pistols at it to no effect. One of the group was Wretched Barry. Nicola watched, a wide smile across her face, as the creature’s powerfully muscled arm darted out and shoved against Barry’s chest. The movement was so fast, so powerful, that the monstrous hand didn’t push Barry out of the way—no, it went clean through his chest, the clawed hand poking through the far side, wrapped in bloody gobs of Wretched Barry’s inner flesh and the bent remnants of his spine.
Nicola remembered, then, the sermons that the minister had given in church every Sunday, about the wrath of a furious God, and she knew what the creature was, at last.
Arms outstretched, Nicola walked forward, stepping ever closer to the imposing, coal-black giant. She closed her eyes as tears streamed down her cheeks, and the smile on her face was so wide, her beautiful white teeth glittering in the flashes of gunfire from all around.
“Nearer my God to thee,” she murmured as she placed her arms around the creature’s huge torso, pulling herself close and hugging it tight.
She felt it then, a beautiful enlightenment, dazzling in her brain, opening like the petals of a flower, filling her mind with such wonderment. As she felt the thing unfurling and squirming inside her head, pretty Nicola slumped to the floor. And in her mind, at last, she was dancing with such grace, such beauty that she would have made her mother weep with joy.
In an instant, the girl that had been Nicola was no more.
TOM CARNACK HELD the recovered Colt Anaconda, pointing it at the behemoth as it tossed the stupid backward girl aside, and he wondered what to do. All around, his men were unleashing salvos of ammunition at the great creature as it stalked across the cavern, but it didn’t seem to notice them, just occasionally flicking at the bullets that struck it.
“What the hell is this thing?” Carnack shouted, looking to Grant as if the ex-Mag held the answer.
Grant was studying the brutish thing from a distance, walking slowly around the outer edge of the cavern, keeping as much space between himself and the monster as he examined it from different angles, his Sin Eater raised by not firing. “I’m not sure,” he admitted, as Carnack chased to keep up with him.
“Well, it damn well followed you here, didn’t it?” Carnack screamed. “You brought this here—you must have done something to tick it off.”
“I don’t even think that it has a coherent thought process,” Grant said, watching as the creature speared one of the brigands with the sharp claw of its foot, tossing the man in the air with a kick.
“Eh?” Carnack asked, confused.
“Coherent thought process,” Grant repeated. “I think it just follows instincts, and its primary instinct is to…kill?” he finished, as though trying the final word on for size. “No, it’s not killing,” he realized. “It’s something more subtle than that—it just looks like it’s killing.”
DOMI RAN INTO THE MAIN area of the cavern, seeing the towering creature making its way across the far side, swatting bandits aside like snowflakes. She had the Detonics Combat Master in her hand, but she knew that it wouldn’t do her any good. This monster was absorbing and dismissing the impact of far more impressive ordnance than her little pistol; it seemed a pointless exercise to even try.
Still, with a gun in her hand she had a chance, at least, and they had come here primarily to save Grant and stop Tom Carnack’s insane plan to repopulate America with barons, not to go toe-to-toe with that monstrosity.
She kept her head low as she rushed through a series of cots and sleeping equipment, spotting a couple who incredibly had managed to sleep through the whole fracas.
Domi stopped beside them, crouching on her haunches and speaking in an urgent voice. “Wake up, sleepyheads. Going to get yourselves killed if you’re not careful.”
The woman, straggly blond hair sagging across her face, looked at Domi through heavily lidded eyes. “Wha—?” she asked, confused. “Who are you?”
Domi smiled, trying her best to be ingratiating despite her fierce appearance. “You have company,” she explained, “and me and my buddies are here to help you out.”
The man who had, until that moment, appeared to be sleeping beside the blonde, suddenly moved into action, producing a large-bore handgun from beneath the covers. “You want to run that by me again, freak?” he snarled, pointing the weapon at Domi’s face.
Domi’s hand moved like lightning, a blurred white streak in the air as she knocked the man’s pistol aside. “Here to help,” she told the couple, glaring at the man. “Get up, get dressed and either get in the fight or get out of here.”
Domi stood and moved on, her gaze sweeping the room as she tried to locate Grant, Kane and Brigid among the melee.
CHASING ALONG A LITTLE way behind Domi, his left leg dragging a little with the pain of the bullet wound, Señor Smarts watched the albino woman go about her work. As she exited the open sleeping quarters, Smarts made his way forward, his eyes on the gun that Domi had slapped from the man’s hand.
Smarts leaned down and picked up the weapon as the couple hurriedly dressed beside him. “I’ll need this,” was all he said before moving on.
As he followed Domi through the cavern, always keeping his distance lest she realize he was trailing her, Smarts checked that the gun was loaded. It was a King Cobra, six rounds and a short barrel, but it seemed to be in good working order, oiled and well maintained. A full complement of bullets resided in its chambers, waiting for the order to do their murderous work. This would do it. This would do the job. Head low, Smarts continued through the cavern, determined to finish the albino freak who had caused him so much pain and suffering.
AS GRANT considered the implications of his statement, that the monster wasn’t trying to kill at all, Domi’s voice was patched through the Commtact, directly into his head. “Señor Smart Mouth here has had an idea,” she explained.
ON THE OPPOSITE side of the cavern, running over heaps of boxes and canned food, Kane and Brigid made their way around the back of the monster. As he ran, Kane engaged his Commtact.
“Kane here. What’s the idea, Domi?”
“He says we could use the interphaser to trap the creature, move it to who knows where, somewhere it won’t be able to cause any more damage,” Domi explained.
Brigid Baptiste took up the conversation, her words piping through to the field team over their Commtacts. “Flawed,” she said. “We’d need a parallax point and someone to activate the interphaser unit. That’s something that couldn’t be done remotely.”
“Which would mean someone getting hairbreadth close to that thing,” Kane added, frustration in his tone.
“Plus,” Brigid pointed out, “we’d lose the interphaser. Not something I’d want to do if I could avoid it.” Brigid had spent many months, along with astrophysicist Brewster Philboyd, perfecting the operation of the mysterious technology of the interphaser. She wouldn’t relinquish the profits of all that hard work in a hurry.
AS THE CREATURE swayed under the impact of simultaneous fire from three shotguns, Domi saw Brigid’s red hair pop up from behind some crates, just twenty feet from her. From their Commtact conversation, it seemed that Kane was with her, so all it needed now was to find Grant and they could be on their way.
Domi looked around her, trying to locate the ex-Mag. As her head turned, she spied the glint of metal off to her left, and something instinctive was tripped in her brain, urging her to drop to the floor. Even as she was dropping, she heard the recoil of a pistol as someone began shooting at her.
“Die, you bitch conchita!” she heard, heavy footsteps running through the cavern. That was Smarts, come for revenge, no doubt.
Bullets were spraying everywhere, and off to Domi’s right the monster was howling in rage, that terrible, painful screech, and yet, despite all this, for an instant all Domi seemed to hear was Smarts as he ran toward her, his left leg dragging a little with the wound, the little handgun pointed at her.
He fired again, another shot from the snub-nosed little Colt that he clasped in his bunched fist, the flare of propellant as the bullet left the barrel. He was panicking, Domi could see, and he didn’t have enough bullets in the little gun to do a whole lot of that. She held her place on the rough ground as the bullet raced overhead, missing her by feet rather than inches.
As Smarts swung the Colt pistol around, trying to find his target, his teeth locked in a savage grimace, Domi kicked herself off from the ground and leaped at him, the Combat Master clutched in her right hand.
It would take a moment, that was all, less than a second to shoot the man in the head, put a bullet through his skull and finish him. But it would just have been a wasted bullet.
Smarts fired again, the shot going wild as the chalk-white woman leaped from the floor and plowed into him, her head and shoulders slamming into his chest, knocking the breath out of him in an awful spasm of pain. He tried to turn the gun on her as he felt himself falling backward, and agony fired through his leg where he had taken a bullet from her earlier that day. Suddenly, something hit the side of his head, crashing violently into his skull and making him see sparks before his eyes.
Atop the fallen Mexican, Domi bashed the butt of her Combat Master into his head a second time, putting all her strength into the blow. She felt the man’s body sag, and he lay there on the sandy ground, his eyes rolling back in his head, unconscious.
Domi reached across and plucked the Colt pistol from the man’s limp hand before standing up and skirting around the laboratory area as she continued her journey toward her friends. As she ran she glanced at the Colt King Cobra. One bullet left—not even worth hanging on to, she decided, tossing it to one side.
ROSALIA HANDLED the knockoff Heckler & Koch submachine gun the same way she handled a sword, spraying the approaching creature with bullets in a graceful swing of movement. She cursed as she watched the bullets impact against the creature’s hard skin, having no effect whatsoever.
This was a hopeless battle, and she knew it. Yes, Rosalia was a dancing girl, but the ability to dance—to cloud men’s minds with their own hormones, as her teacher had explained it—was but one of the talents she had learned from a young age. She was a sword mistress par excellence, an expert in knife combat, both thrown and wielded, and a crack shot, too. On top of that, she was versatile in the use of bow and arrow, bo-staff and lance, and she had even had some training in basic diplomacy before she had graduated from the never advertised school close to the Mexican border.
Tom Carnack had paid the school a small fortune to acquire Rosalia’s services and to keep her on retainer as personal bodyguard, assassin and companion.
Right now, Rosalia was recalling the words of Mother Superior about facing the most powerful of foes. “If a foe appears unstoppable, bat your eyes prettily and let others do the work, Sweet Rose. Your body is your weapon, but it need not engage in the battle to defeat your foe.”
Rosalia checked behind her as the creature took another step closer across the vast cavern, and she called to a group of armed brigands there. “Flank me and stay close,” she instructed.
They foolishly believed that she would lead a victorious attack, little realizing that all they were now were human shields to protect her from the unstoppable creature’s rampage.
IN THE CENTER of the cavern, the creature staggered under a grenade attack. The grenade slapped against its chest, blossoming in an explosion of red-and-gold flames, dark smoke pluming up toward the ceiling. When the smoke cleared the monster was still standing, and it tossed its head back, almost as if to laugh, before unleashing another of those uncanny alien shrieks.
“Could there be another way to use the interphaser idea?” Grant’s voice piped through the Commtact loop.
