Death Cry, page 25
“Kane? We’ve isolated the mat-trans device that your enemies are accessing. Over.”
“Can you switch it off?” Kane asked. “Over.”
There was the brief silence while Kane waited for the response, and he ducked into the grass muttering, “Come on, come on,” under his breath.
LAKESH’S FINGER TRACED across the analysis of the single jump that the surveillance satellite had captured.
“No can do,” he told Kane. “We can’t access the specific mat-trans they’re utilizing from here, but maybe you can shut it down at your end. The device travels with them, generating a specific frequency that allows them to step in and out of gateways,” he explained. “Do you see anything obvious that might contain this generator, a box perhaps, or maybe a radio device of some sort? Over.”
KANE’S EYES NARROWED as he listened to Lakesh. “Something generating a frequency, you say?” Kane asked. “Like a loud note, something like that? Over.”
Lakesh’s voice came over the Commtact again a few moments later. “It may be outside of the range of human hearing, Kane,” the Cerberus director said. “You might not be able to detect it by sound alone. Over.”
“Oh, I’ve detected it,” Kane growled as he kicked away from the ground and moved into a fluid sprint across the grass and onto the cracked blacktop of the little road, rushing toward the three warriors. “Sly son of a bitch had it in his hand the whole damn time!”
As Kane said it, two of the warriors winked out of existence, leaving only the old man and the bull roarer spinning through the air above his head.
WHEN HE HAD BRIEFLY materialized in the underground tunnel, Rock Streaming had said two words to his field leaders, Good Father and Bad Father: “It’s here.”
On hearing this, the two men had sliced into the Dreaming momentarily, metaphorically hanging on Rock Streaming’s coattails as he cut a path to outside the bunker, back in Realworld. Once there, the two field leaders had seen the huge black shape that dominated the sky, and Good Father had nodded his approval as he spun the bull roarer overhead.
“We take it,” Bad Father confirmed, and he stepped back into the Dreaming for a fraction of a second, Rock Streaming at his side.
The two men reappeared in Realworld atop the Death Cry, eighty feet in the air. It was glowing now, a cascade of colors rippling over its surface, and the men could feel the thrumming of its power through the soles of their feet.
Balancing with ease on the vast, curved shell of the weapon, Bad Father crouched and placed both hands against the device. He looked up at Rock Streaming, encouraging the young man to join him.
Rock Streaming crouched beside his mentor, placing the palms of both hands against the skin of the massive weapon as colors streamed brighter and brighter across it. He looked up at Bad Father, and the old man nodded once, solemn.
“It’s ours,” the old man said as he and Rock Streaming activated their implants and sliced into the Dreamworld once again.
AS HE SPRINTED ACROSS the cracked tarmac toward Good Father, Kane kicked off, leaping high in the air.
Still spinning the bull roarer, the old man turned in time to see the mighty figure of the Cerberus man barreling toward him from overhead.
Kane’s left arm drew back, then his fist rushed forward toward the old man’s face below. Kane wailed as the tough cord of the bull roarer whipped around his wrist and up his arm and its morose song came to a sudden halt. Then, as the bull roarer circled his arm, tightening around it, Kane’s knuckles connected with the old man’s jaw, knocking the man’s head back with an audible crack.
ABOARD THE DEATH CRY, Yuri stopped struggling within the safety gloves to right the controls. The whole of its great length was shaking, ready to unleash its terrifying banshee wail.
At the control panel, Yuri cursed General Serge’s foolishness, firing shots in the enclosed area like that. Sitting there, within the unit, he could feel the scream building.
Reluctantly, fearfully Yuri closed his eyes. “I’m sorry, Brigid,” he muttered as the Death Cry built to a crescendo, and the scream shattered the world about him, tearing him apart.
GRANT PULLED HIMSELF over the lip of the ventilation grille and climbed out to the surface above with Brigid just two seconds behind.
As he stood there he saw the glowing object in the sky, as huge and bright as a full moon, shaking as it emitted a beam of sheer brilliance from its coned front end.
Still climbing out of the ventilation shaft, Brigid shouted an instruction to Grant: “Look away!”
But he didn’t need to. The whole, incredibly proportioned cylinder, along with its devastating, bright scream, winked from existence, leaving a vacuum of imploding air in its absence.
There was a loud clap as air rushed to fill the void, and branches, leaves, rocks and birds were sucked upward, toward the space that the Death Cry had occupied a moment before.
GOOD FATHER FELL BACKWARD as Kane’s left fist slammed into his jaw with pile-driver force. The spinning bull roarer in his hand was tugged away by momentum, ripped out of his hand as it whipped around Kane’s arm.
The older man’s body met the broken tarmac, the impact jarring every bone in his body, and he tried to focus on the implant, urging it to dreamslice once again.
As he called on the implant, he felt the drag above him and there was a loud pop from overhead, an implosion of air as the Death Cry winked out of existence.
Above Good Father, Kane roared as the cord of the bull roarer tightened around his outstretched arm, cutting through the sleeve of his jacket and cinching into the corded muscles beneath. Legs cycling through the air, he felt himself dragged upward into the vacuum that had suddenly replaced the Death Cry. Then he began to fall earthward once again, and his right foot suddenly connected with the ground.
Still moving, he trotted forward in an ungraceful, sliding turn. Kane reached out with his right arm as the ground hurtled up toward his face. With a final crunch, Kane landed in a heap on the ground. The silenced bull roarer was wrapped around the whole length of his left arm, and blood was oozing around the device’s cord, seeping into the torn sleeve of his jacket. Kane’s head rested on his outstretched right arm, his teeth gritted against the pain of the wrapped cord on his left, his legs a tangle behind him.
He lay there, unwilling to move, excruciating pain racking his left arm, and felt the early-morning sun beating down on his back. The shadow in the sky, the Death Cry, was gone.
HIS BODY CRYING IN PAIN, Rabbit in the Moon lay on the sandy plateau of the Dreaming, struggling to catch his breath. His face was ruined. The woman’s savage blows had deadened nerves, and at least three of his teeth felt loose when he probed them with his tongue. The vision in his right eye was obscured with a red wash, and his left eye kept trying to close.
Down in his belly, Rabbit in the Moon could feel where the gunshot wound had reopened. He had moved too quickly, the recovery incomplete, undoing the miracle that had saved him.
He lay there, ignoring the aching sensations from every part of his battered frame. I’m safe here, he told himself. Nothing can touch me here. No one is coming to the Dreaming.
He opened his good eye once more, looking across the plain, as he heard the old man approach. Good Father had dreamsliced, but his neck was crooked and there was a swelling on the right side of his jaw. The old man stumbled, falling to his knees as Rabbit in the Moon watched. “Good Father?” he asked, his voice a pained whisper.
Then he saw the other thing, behind Good Father. It was incredibly large, looming in the sky, awash with colors, and Bad Father and Rabbit in the Moon’s blood brother, Rock Streaming, were crouched on its shell. With all those colors running through it it looked so pretty, so pretty as it shrieked an impossible pain that wrenched apart the very fabric of the Dreaming.
I’m safe here, Rabbit in the Moon remembered as his body was ripped to shreds by the lethal, tortured scream of the Death Cry.
KANE TRIED TO LIFT HIMSELF from the ground, forcing his muscles to move, when he heard the woman’s voice behind him.
“What did you do to yourself this time, Kane?” It was Brigid Baptiste.
“Can you get this thing off me?” he asked through gritted teeth as he struggled to a sitting position. “I can’t feel my damn arm.” He saw Brigid and Grant approaching him from the direction of the broken ventilation grille. Both of them were armed, checking the area for hostiles.
“Okay,” Brigid told him. “Just sit still. You look like a bear caught in a trap.”
She leaned close to him, and Kane examined the patches of antiseptic weave that he had taped to her face as she carefully unwound the bull roarer from his arm. “The weapon, the Death Cry—it was here but it’s gone now,” he said, confused.
“We saw it start to glow, to spit something,” Grant explained, his eyes still scanning the area for movement. “Then it just disappeared.”
“It went off,” Brigid said solemnly. “I don’t know why, but the Death Cry activated. It was about to blow when it disappeared, caught up in some kind of dimensional jump. Maybe Yuri sent it back to the factory.”
Kane shook his head, wincing at the pain of movement. “It wasn’t a dimension jump, Baptiste,” he told her. “They were trying to hijack it, take it with them. But I cut the mat-trans they were using at the last second.”
“So where are they?” Grant asked, looking around the deserted clearing that surrounded the road. The three of them were alone; even the old man who had swung the bull roarer was gone.
His left arm numb, Kane closed his eyes, feeling the weight of exhaustion come over him. “Contact Cerberus,” he said. “Maybe Lakesh can track them now that his equipment is up and running.”
Chapter 22
Thirty hours had passed since the field team had returned from Georgia to the Cerberus redoubt in the Bitterroot Mountains, and a rich orange sun was resting low on the horizon as it slowly set. Lakesh found Brigid out on the plateau by the redoubt’s main doors, sitting alone on the ground with her legs stretched out before her, watching the sun making its languid descent.
“Are you okay, Brigid?” he asked quietly, not wishing to shock her.
She turned and showed him her open, warm smile. There were several adhesive strips across her face, and her left eye still held a distinct bruise, but she looked healthy, all things considered. “I’m fine,” she said, thanking him for his concern. “Just thinking about everything that happened back there.”
“In Georgia?” he asked, sitting down beside her on the dry soil.
“Georgia and the astral factory in Krylograd,” she replied. “You know, those poor people are still stuck in there, living their lives in that hidden recess in the human mind, ignorant of time’s passage.”
“But there’s no weapon for them to work on anymore,” Lakesh pointed out.
Brigid shrugged. “I didn’t have time to check every room of the facility. Maybe they had the Death Cry Mark II tucked in the next room over.”
“Or maybe they’ll stop building arms and try to create something of their situation. Another world, a whole new society,” Lakesh suggested.
“With ten soldiers and a handful of lab technicians?” she said incredulously. “You have the heart of a poet, Lakesh.”
They sat there in silence, watching wisps of cloud lazily drift across the sky as the sun sank toward its in evitable meeting with the horizon. After a while, Brigid spoke again. “How’s Domi?” she asked.
“I left her in bed asleep,” Lakesh replied. “Reba gave her some lotion for her face, a mixture of lavender oil and chamomile. It eases the burning sensation, which Reba assures me will pass of its own accord in a few days. In the meantime, Domi is behaving like a caged lion who can’t wait to get back out into the wild, of course.”
“Of course.” Brigid laughed.
“She was lucky,” Lakesh added. The night-vision lenses that Domi had been wearing had protected her from the worst of the hot powder. According to Reba DeFore, that was the only thing that had saved her eyesight.
“Well,” Lakesh said with a sigh, picking himself up off the ground, “I should be getting back to the ops center to check on things.”
Brigid nodded. “Maybe I’ll pop in a little later,” she told him, “help find somewhere for the new rug.”
“There’s no rush,” Lakesh assured her as she turned back to watch the sunset. “You’ve earned a break. All four of you.”
As Lakesh made his way back to the entrance to the redoubt, Brigid called out to him once more. “Lakesh?”
He turned, infinitely patient with the singular woman.
“Have you heard anything about Kane?” she asked.
Lakesh smiled reassuringly. “He came out of surgery a couple of hours ago. I thought you knew,” he explained. “There was some nerve damage to his arm, but Reba repaired it. He’ll be fine in a few days. One hundred percent.”
Brigid stood, brushing soil from her backside as she jogged over to join Lakesh at the doors.
“You’re really not needed in the ops center, Brigid,” he assured her.
“I’m not coming with you,” she replied. “I’m going to go find Kane and see if he wants to arm wrestle! Opportunities like this don’t come along every day.”
Lakesh laughed as the two of them entered the redoubt together.
IN A BROKEN AIR VENT, in a bunker hidden beneath the Caucasus Mountains, a woman dressed in strips of material was waking up.
Almost two days before, when she had awakened to find herself beaten and bloody on the floor of the bunk room, Cloud Singer had immediately engaged the implant at the base of her neck and tried to dreamslice. But, to her horror, nothing had happened. No jump, no trans ferral, nothing.
She had strained her ears, listening for a trace of the singing bull roarer, its promising salvation, but all had been silent. Then, as she listened, she had heard voices, people in the underground complex, walking along the corridor, and the beam of their flashlight danced in the open doorway.
She had moved quickly, despite the pain from all over her body, clambering into the broken vent on the wall of the bunk room, the one that Kane had shot to pieces. Inside, she had hidden herself from sight while the enemy went about their cleanup operation, sweeping the bunker for stragglers but failing to find her.
And she had tried, periodically, to dreamslice, to step out of Realworld and into the Dreaming, but nothing had happened.
Tucked there, in the absolute darkness, beside the room full of skeletons, she had slowed her breathing and willed herself into a healing coma, her heart beating at an eighth of its usual pace.
Almost two days later, conscious once more, she found herself alone.
Cloud Singer blinked, bringing her electrochemical polymer lenses to life on the nictitating membranes that slotted over her eyes, granting her night vision in the pitch-dark bunker.
On silent feet, she walked from the bunk room, checking each doorway in turn, confirming her suspicion that she was totally alone in the complex. Alone except for the corpse of Neverwalk, a bloody ruin where his neck had been.
With none of her strike team left, no access to the Dreaming, Cloud Singer was utterly alone.
Alone but alive.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-2446-3
DEATH CRY
Copyright © 2008 by Worldwide Library.
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James Axler, Death Cry
