“I know,” she said, but her voice was very far away.
Ghost came running toward them. Top tried to ward the dog away. There was a sharp scream and suddenly Ghost was falling, his white fur turning the same slick, oily black.
Everything went perfect. Until it didn’t.
The truckers and militiamen came thundering along the road, racing toward the shed with the ferocity of men answering a call. Bunny knew that it had to mean Captain Ledger was in the middle of it. They were coming from the hills, though. Only a few were going to pass between the trucks, which was where the majority of the traps were set.
“Shit,” cried Tate.
“I know,” growled Bunny as he snatched up his drum-fed combat shotgun. “Guess we do this old school.”
They opened fire. Seven militiamen went down in the first barrage, but the rest turned and the sounds of gunfire — booms and bangs and cracks and pops — filled the night. Bunny and Tate ran for cover, but there were simply too many hostiles and they covered too wide an area. There was no safe place left.
Behind them the first of the smaller band of truckers kicked their way through the Toybox trip wires and the world turned from dark night to fiery day.
From his shooting spot, Duffy did not have the challenge of finding a target, but of having too many targets. He fired and fired, killing or at least dropping someone with every shot. More kept coming.
A dozen yards to his left, Smith was lobbing grenades with great force, sending them arcing down into the mass of shooters. The blasts blew apart the truckers, but more ran forward over the dying and the dead.
Smith screamed and fell back, and when Duffy looked he saw his friend sprawled like a starfish, mouth gasping like a fish, eyes white and staring upward at the night.
Duffy reloaded and fired. And fired.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FORTY-TWO
The bullet hit me between the shoulder blades and knocked me against Valen. The punch was so hard my gun went flying and the barrel cracked one of the Russian’s goggle lenses before falling out of sight.
I dropped, trying to breathe. The spider-silk-laced body armor stopped the round and sloughed off some of the impact, but I still felt torn in half. I flung myself down and rolled toward the God Machine. The next rounds missed me and struck the device. Metal wires burst apart and the reinforced glass over the green crystals shattered.
“Stop! Stop!” cried Valen, waving his arms and throwing himself between the shooter and me. He backed up and stood with his shoulders against the panel, arms wide, screaming. “For God’s sake— stop!”
Three militiamen came running out of a side tunnel, guns up, ready to kill. I had no gun and no damn chance at all.
And then there was a sound. A huge, deep, bass hooooom sound that shook the whole cavern. Massive chunks of rock cracked and fell from the walls, smashing themselves to pieces all around me. I rolled all the way against the machine and curled up, trying to use its structure to protect myself.
Another earsplitting hooooooooom!
The floor split and jets of steam and gas shot upward. One of the shooters was caught by one and instantly burst into flame. The other two skidded to a stop, then turned and ran for the stairs, but a piece of rock the size of a Greyhound bus leaned out from the wall and smashed down on the stairs, crushing them like soda straws and obliterating the two men as if they’d never existed.
There was one more hooooom sound and the whole world seemed to shiver. I saw sparks burst from the damaged circuitry on the God Machine. Valen, who still stood with his back to it, began to turn. I was on my belly, leaning against the base of the thing. There was a burst of green light so intense that its brightness stabbed me through the head. I screamed and reeled back.
And then I was falling as the world vanished beneath me.
I fell and fell.
And Valen Oruraka fell with me; and the Italian words kept running through my head. Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FORTY-THREE
I woke up nowhere.
A nameless place. Empty and colorless and unreal.
I’m in hell, I thought. But that wasn’t right. There was no heat. No fire. Nothing. I’m dead .
But that was wrong, too. I hurt too much to be dead. So I sat up. My protective suit was ruined, torn, hanging in shreds. How it had been so thoroughly slashed and my skin beneath untouched is something I’ll never know.
I stood and stripped it off. My clothes were soaked with sweat and felt cold in the wind.
Wind? I realized that it wasn’t that there was nothing to see, but that my eyes could not penetrate the thick and cloying mist that surrounded me. Almost at once I realized that the mist was not empty. Something moved in it. There was a clumsy, heavy thump as if the bare foot of something vast stepped down a few yards away. I crouched and tore the fighting knife from the combat harness I’d shucked. It was a double-edged British Commando-style weapon, but it felt absurdly small in my hand.
Stupidly I called, “Valen…?”
Another soft thump. A little closer, and with it was a rasping breath, but if it came from the mouth of some animal, then that mouth was forty feet above my own.
I turned then and ran away. Something buzzed past me and I caught a mere glimpse of it. It was like a moth or dragonfly, but the size of it was impossible. The wings were easily five feet across, and the head of the creature was a deformed nightmare mask.
I fled into the mist.…
Hoooooooooom!
I tripped on something in the sand. There hadn’t been sand beneath my feet a moment before. Or light. I fell and rolled and came up onto fingers and toes, the knife still held in the loop of thumb and index finger. In front of me was a beach. Vast, stretching to either side of me until it vanished in the distance. There was something wrong about it, though.
Two things. One, the sand on which I crouched was not tan or white, or even Hawaiian black. It was green. That green. Miles of it. The other problem was the horizon. I’ve been on beaches all over the world. I’ve seen bare ones and mountainous one, dunes and flats and rippled sand. This one was green with traces of mud, but it was wrong. There didn’t seem to be enough curve to it. Same with the ocean when I looked at it. I could see an impossible distance, even from sea level. The curvature of the Earth was wrong. Not flattened out, but warped, as if I had shrunk down or the world was so much larger that the anticipated and familiar curves were changed.
“No,” I said.
A voice said, “You see it, too?”
I turned, and there was Valen. He had also shucked out of his protective garment and wore a plain T-shirt and jeans. His face was different, though, and it jolted me every bit as badly as the horizon line. Instead of the face I’d seen back in Washington, a man of roughly my own age, this Valen was older. Years older. Decades. He wore a heavy, unkempt beard and his hair hung down to his shoulders. His clothes were filthy and threadbare.
Then my brain played back what he’d said. I’d heard it wrong. What he said was, “You see me, too?”
I licked a salty dryness from my lips. “I see you.”