Death Cry, page 23
Grant deliberately dropped backward, falling to the ground on his buttocks and kicking out with both feet. His heels slapped against the bowman’s legs, knocking the tattooed man off his feet. As his adversary fell, Grant was already driving himself back up, moving sideways in a crouch, like a crab, as he lunged at his enemy.
In his right hand, the Sin Eater was uncoiling, its parts snapping into place so that it could be used at full extension. Grant raised the weapon, his fist clamping around the butt as he drove it at his opponent’s face.
With brutal finality, Grant’s fist connected with Rabbit in the Moon’s face, whipping his head back with a painful snap. Already wrong-footed by the kick to his legs, Rabbit in the Moon fell back, feeling the pain exploding behind his neck where a muscle strained at the impact. The Cerberus warrior’s left fist swung into view an instant later, coming at him like a missile, driving into the hollow of his right eye. Rabbit in the Moon shook his head as his vision swam with blood, and he lashed out with arms and legs, struggling to connect a blow with his opponent.
Rabbit in the Moon felt it before he saw it; Grant’s right hand drove a savage punch into his gut but there was a solid weight there now, the barrel of a foot-long gun. As the nose of the Sin Eater jabbed into his gut, Rabbit in the Moon made the decision to dreamslice once more, activating the implant and stepping out of the dream.
Suddenly he was in the underground corridor again, just a few steps from the open doorway to the brightly lit office. But the pressure was still pushing against his belly, and he realized that he had brought the Cerberus man back with him to Realworld. As that realization struck him, Rabbit in the Moon felt the indescribable fire above his hip bone as Grant’s first 9 mm bullet drilled into him, followed by the rushing stream of its identical, steel-jacketed brothers.
DR. DJUGASHVILI LED Brigid and Yuri to a metal hatch at the back of the Death Cry. Close up, the weapon was all the more impressive, a long cylindrical construction of black metal that was at least the size of an aircraft carrier. Yet despite the scale of the construction itself, the door was small and Brigid had to duck to get inside.
Within, the Death Cry had a similar feel to that of a submarine—a perilously low ceiling, plates of metal across the floor, and a little array of controls wrapped around two seats lit from above by a dull electric bulb in a cage that cast an orange-amber light. The whole control room was perhaps twelve feet square.
“Well,” Djugashvili said, “here we are, Miss Baptiste.”
“I expected something more…bigger,” Brigid told him with a shrug.
“The functionality of the Death Cry is a two-man operation,” Djugashvili explained rationally. “One man steers the weapon into place while the other primes and fires its scream. We had no need for an expansive control room or living quarters.”
Brigid nodded, smiling apologetically. “I just thought, with its being so huge…”
“That is the weapon,” Djugashvili told her. “The gun you hold has enough free space to allow you to grip it and pull the trigger, nothing more. The rest is concerned with the mechanics of firing the bullet, storing and replenishing the ammunition, correct?”
She looked at the Fedorov Automat in her hands and nodded again. “So how does this baby work?”
Djugashvili gestured to the seats, and Yuri took up his post at one of them. “The Death Cry unit is pointed in the direction of the enemy flying object, a space vehicle, you understand, and bathes it in what we call its scream.” He looked proud as he explained this, and Brigid recalled that a lot of this had been developed from his own work. But she also noted that Djugashvili was fading before her, flakes of his very form drifting into the air like burning paper.
“But what’s the scream?” she urged.
“It is a blast of psychic matter,” Djugashvili solemnly explained, “a physical manifestation of the most dangerous thoughts of the mind.”
Nightmares. The Soviets had planned to fight the aliens, their so-called supraterrestrials, with nightmares.
“These thoughts will disrupt the brain of any living thing in their path,” Djugashvili told her. “We experimented a little with mice, rats, chimpanzees. A prisoner once,” he added, looking uncomfortable with the memory. “The man, he screamed and screamed and screamed and suddenly he was just ashes. He screamed himself to ashes, can you believe?”
Brigid nodded. “We’d better be careful where we point this thing.” She smiled. “We need to get it back to Earth, Doctor. How do we do that?”
Djugashvili pointed to the free seat with a hand that no longer had distinct fingers, just wispy trails of light. “There is a pattern there, at the control panel, you see it?”
Brigid took a step closer in the small room, but as she did so there was a crash and the door behind her opened once more. General Serge stood there, his face bruised and dried blood beside his mouth and nose.
“I knew that I would find you here,” he shouted as he revealed the pistol in his hand, this one a silenced piece with a long barrel. “Insurgents! Traitors!”
Brigid swept the barrel of the Fedorov around, slamming its weight into the general’s gun hand. She saw the trace of smoke as the gun went off, its noise muffled to a low stutter by the sound suppressor.
The general growled as his hand was knocked into the door frame and Brigid brought the Fedorov to bear on him.
“I’m sorry, General,” she told him, “but I’m done trying to reason with you.”
Serge roared as he brought his pistol around, pulling the trigger again and again as he swept it toward Brigid’s face. Bullets pinged around the tiny cabin, bouncing off the walls and control panels, and Djugashvili screamed as one hit him in the shoulder.
But Serge was too late. Brigid held down the trigger of her Fedorov autorifle, spraying a stream of bullets into the general’s chest. He rocked in place under the lethal impacts, and Brigid watched, revulsion welling within her, as General Serge disintegrated before her eyes. It was like watching ink dropped into water, a human body reduced to a cloud, then a mist, then, after a few more seconds, just a slightly darker stain in the air that dissipated to nothingness as Brigid ceased firing, the Fedorov out of ammunition.
As Brigid watched the stain fade away, the general’s pistol dropped with a clank to one of the metal plates that made up the flooring of the control center. There were two more soldiers outside on the scaffolding, the two that Yuri had chained together in the interrogation room, and they looked bewildered as they saw their leader disintegrate before their eyes.
Brigid tossed the spent rifle aside and stepped onto the creaking scaffolding, driving the heel of her palm into the nose of the soldier on the right while he was still standing there, astonished at what had just happened. The man stumbled backward, doubling over as he reached for the bloody smear where his nose had been an instant ago, and Brigid pulled the pistol from her holster and targeted the other soldier.
“Walk away and maybe you get to live,” she told him.
The soldier shook his head. “I’m sorry, but my orders—”
Brigid pulled the trigger and blew a hole in the man’s chest. He stumbled for a moment, and she saw the familiar horrifying mist that was his body begin to burn away from his form. She pointed the gun at the soldier with the caved-in nose as he struggled to a standing position. “You want me to do you, too?” she asked.
The soldier shook his head, wincing at the pain in his nose. Then he turned and made his way toward the ladder that led back down to the floor as his colleague continued to evaporate at Brigid’s feet.
When she was sure that he had left, Brigid returned to the control room and slammed the door closed behind her. The room had taken a few hits from the general’s final attack, and one of the control panels was sparking where a bullet had ripped through a plastic-covered display. Djugashvili lay slumped on the floor, his arms and legs gone, his chest and the remnants of his face disappearing into mist.
Brigid knelt before him, her emerald eyes locking with his. “Doctor, I’m so sorry,” she said, unable to think of anything better.
Djugashvili shook his head slowly, tears streaming down what was left of his disintegrating cheeks. “I thought I had longer,” he told her, “but the general’s shot must have…”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Brigid shushed him. “Thank you, Dr. Djugashvili. Thank you for your help. Thank you for maybe saving the human race with what you did here today. I’m so sorry that you never—”
“Don’t be sorry,” he insisted, cutting her words off. “It’s not so bad, this death. I remember the feeling now, something I had forgotten for so long.”
Brigid reached to touch his cheek, but her hand passed through it, the man’s face turning to a cloud of dust. “Doctor?” she asked.
“It is like being born, Brigid,” he told her, nodding as his head turned to nothingness and he ceased to exist.
Brigid turned away. Dr. Djugashvili was gone.
As she knelt there, willing herself to focus on the mission at hand, something caught her eye—a shining speck on her finger. Bringing her hand close, she saw a tiny trickle of water running along her index finger, where she had passed her hand through Djugashvili’s cheek. A single human tear.
ALONE IN THE BUNK ROOM, Kane bent to study the still form of his defeated foe. The man was covered in tattoos, swirling tribal markings with sharp, right-angle turns like the lines on a circuit board. The man had used twin metal boomerangs, razor-sharp along their edges. Kane realized that this foe had been employing some sort of matter-transfer device, adding an inhuman swiftness to his movements, creating an almost devastating attack. And the girl had done the same. But Kane had experience with matter transfer, and he knew that what you held tended to travel with you.
Kane stood and placed his foot on the man’s undershirt, pressing his weight against the man’s chest and rocking his foe just a little.
As Kane watched, the man’s head started to shake and Kane saw that he was about to wake up. “Let’s see you jump out of this, you slimy eel,” Kane muttered as he held the nose of the Sin Eater at the man’s face.
The man groaned, then his eyes popped open and saw the Sin Eater pointed between them. He glanced up and his eyes met with Kane’s.
“What say me and you have a little talk?” Kane suggested, holding his foot firm against the man’s chest.
Rock Streaming glared contemptuously at Kane in silence, so Kane pushed a little harder on his chest.
“I’m trying to help us both out here, brother,” Kane assured him.
Rock Streaming spit, still glaring at Kane with fury burning brightly in his eyes. “Then you are a fool, Cerberus man,” he said, sneering.
“My name’s Kane,” Kane told him, his gun still trained firmly on the warrior’s face. “What’s yours?”
“My warrior name is Rock Streaming,” the tattooed man replied, glancing away from the gun, trying to remember where exactly he was.
There was a slight rush of air then, and Kane turned as he saw the woman in the white strips appearing to his left, leaping through the air in a flying kick.
RABBIT IN THE MOON HOWLED as five bullets drilled through his torso at point-blank range. Grant’s free hand was reaching up toward his neck, grabbing for the torn streamers of his tattered blue-green jacket.
Rabbit in the Moon closed his eyes as he fell backward like so much deadweight. He dropped out of reach of the grasping hand and in the same instant faded back into the Dreaming as he listened for the song of Good Father’s spinning bull roarer. He was in the Dreaming as his body hit the floor.
He opened his eyes and saw the cloud of sand kicked up by his violent landing, but he had evaded the grip of the Cerberus man. He was alone once more. Lying in the dirt, Rabbit in the Moon dropped the bow and reached for the belly wound with his right hand. It burned like wildfire, and when he touched his gut he found a gore-smeared hole just above his left hip.
He closed his eyes, feeling for the bullets. There was a trick to this; Bad Father had showed it to him once when the older man had accidentally got a knife embedded in his arm during a hunt. That time, Bad Father had leaped quickly into the Dreaming before yanking the blade out. His will had stemmed the blood flow, and he had reappeared in Realworld with nothing more than dried blood to show where the knife had been, no wound beneath its smear. The whole operation had taken maybe thirty seconds, and Rabbit in the Moon had been in awe of the older man’s abilities and quick thinking.
He reached into the hole in his body and felt around for the bullets, snatching three of the metal invaders out of the hole and tossing them to the ground. The others had to have passed clean through him; he couldn’t feel them as he pushed thumb and forefinger into the wound in his small intestine.
His eyes still closed, his teeth clenched against the urge to scream, Rabbit in the Moon removed his fingers from inside his body and willed the wound to heal the same way he had willed the burn to heal during the multiplane practice battle with Cloud Singer. His flesh and all that was below reknitted, a process painful beyond belief, and suddenly he was whole again.
He lay in the dirt, his breath coming shallow and fast, as he felt the burning subside.
BACK IN THE UNDERGROUND bunker, Grant recovered his balance and blinked away irritation as the tattooed warrior disappeared in front of him. These tricky bastards kept pulling the same stunt on him, but there was no way they could keep it up forever. He had wounded the man armed with the bow. His fists had connected with the bone and muscle of the man’s face, and bullets from the Sin Eater had definitely caught the guy.
Grant looked around, assessing his location. He was back in the Project Chernobog bunker, almost two-thirds of the way down the corridor from where he had entered. From the far end he could hear the old man’s swinging pendulum making its strange, ugly song.
From a little way ahead of him he could hear the crashing and slapping of hand-to-hand combat, swift and furious. It was coming from the bunk room opposite the canteen, and Grant raised the pistol in his hand and pointed it toward the doorway.
Grant stalked forward in the darkness, keeping his body low, and reached the open door to the Cheka-KGB office, glancing warily inside.
Brigid still sat there, cross-legged, her eyes closed. He could see where Kane had patched up the cuts on her face, antiseptic patches taped to her left cheek and the cut above her eye. There was swelling around her mouth, and he could see the shining skin where she would have a black eye before the day’s end, but she looked pretty much okay.
Grant ducked into the office, swinging the Sin Eater around as he confirmed that no one was waiting for him.
Other than Brigid’s static figure, the small, low-ceilinged office was empty. Grant walked across to her, looking closely, checking that she was still breathing. “Kane,” he said in a hushed tone as he activated his Commtact. “I’m with Brigid in the office. You read me?”
Kane’s voice came back, staggered by hard breathing, a moment later. “I’m in the bunk room, but I’m a little busy here with some warrior chick. How’s Baptiste?”
“She looks fine,” Grant confirmed, turning back to the doorway.
“Great,” Kane grunted back, and Grant could hear the doubled report of his partner’s voice coming from the corridor and the Commtact. “Think you can spare a moment?”
“I’m on my way,” Grant told him as he walked to the doorway.
STRUGGLING TO FREE himself from beneath Kane’s heavy foot, Rock Streaming saw Cloud Singer’s blurring, swift attack. She thrust her right hand at the man called Kane’s face, perfectly aimed to drive the cartilage in his nose into his brain.
But suddenly something hit her in the side of the head—the skull of one of the long-dead occupants of the room, hooked at her from the end of Kane’s gun. The impact not only disrupted Cloud Singer’s aim, but it also knocked her hard enough that she toppled to the floor, hitting it with a resounding crash, the life going out of her.
As she hit the floor, Rock Streaming closed his eyes and activated the implant, slipping into the Dreaming for a fraction of a second before leaping out again into Realworld.
He heard the wind playing in the trees, whispering against the grass, the cries of birds above. He was outside. His dreamslice had taken him just fifteen feet upward, back to the surface of the mountain pass.
Rock Streaming opened his eyes and saw the Cerberus warrior—Kane—still standing over him, toe just pressing lightly on his chest, a wicked smile on his face as he whipped his gun back into Rock Streaming’s face.
WITHOUT WARNING, something heavy and fast smashed into Grant’s back as he stepped to the doorway, knocking him to his knees. He looked over his shoulder and saw that the tattooed bowman in the shabby blue-green coat was standing over him, reappearing from nowhere.
Grant’s eyes were drawn to the man’s belly, and he saw the unmistakable blot of red where he’d shot the man. “I shot you,” Grant snarled as he pulled himself up onto his hands and knees.
The warrior’s right leg lashed out and his booted foot collided with Grant’s head, knocking him back to the floor. “Yes, I wanted to talk to you about that,” Rabbit in the Moon bellowed as he lunged at Grant, his fist drawn back.
Chapter 21
Brigid dropped into the seat beside Yuri as he explained the basic controls of the Death Cry.
“I have the piloting and weapons controls for the Death Cry,” he said, and Brigid saw that his hands had been enveloped by twin sphincters in the console, like operating in a hazchem or radiation box, “but I require you to bring us into the corporeal world.”
