The man smiled, shook his head, and touched his ear. “I can’t hear. Speak slowly so I can read your lips.”
I did.
“You’re Joe Ledger, aren’t you?” he asked in a voice that was cracked from disuse, and badly pronounced the way deaf people sometimes speak.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m Ledger. Which means you know why I’m here.”
“I had to do it,” he said, and tears rolled from the corners of his eyes. “You understand that, right? I had to. I had to.”
“No,” I said, “you didn’t. You made a choice to do it.”
“It was for my country.…”
I hit him. Not a punch, not a killing blow. I hit him across the face with my open palm. I didn’t want him to die. I wanted somehow, impossibly, to literally knock sense into him. He staggered, his cheek turning a livid red. Then he began to cry.
“Did you stop it?” he begged. “Did you find a way to stop the machine?” His weeping suddenly changed to a high-pitched laughter that was so fractured it scared me. He laughed and wept, and tears and snot ran down his face.
“God damn you to hell,” I said.
“I prayed to him every night that you stopped it,” he replied, eyes wild.
That’s what I heard. That’s what I understood. But the actual words that came out of his mouth were: “Y’ vulgtlagln h’ nilgh’ri n’ghftyar cahf ymg’ h’ mgepmgah.”
It was a language that I’d heard before. In dreams. In nightmares. A language not spoken by human tongues. A language never meant for us to speak. I’d heard it in the mad wastelands of Antarctica and when I was dying of that impossible version of the flu. And in my dreams at the Warehouse. I’d heard it when Rafael Santoro and I got lost in the God Machine in the laboratory of Prospero Bell.
It was the language of another world. Of this world in which we both stood.
A cloud shadow passed over the beach and I turned, knowing that it was not a cloud at all. Valen fell to his knees and buried his face in the sand, weeping and praying and beating his head with his knotted fists. I looked up at the thing that rose from the vast sea. A shape out of nightmares or the prayers of the damned. A body that was only vaguely humanoid, topped by an octopus head and whose face was a mass of writhing tentacles. Monstrous wings and claws that could tear apart mountains. Behind it I saw ships slashing their way through the sky. T-craft. Sleeker and faster than anything man could ever build.
“Ymg’ mgepah h’ mgah?” cried Valen.
Did you stop it? He screamed it into the sand as the god of this world threw back its head and howled.
Hoooooooom.
Valen Oruraka and I stood on the slope of a long valley. He was my age again. We were stripped to the waist and we both held knives in our hands made from gleaming crystal.
Both of us were crisscrossed by dozens of shallow cuts, and on some of them the blood had already crusted over. We were both running with sweat, our chests heaving. It was as if we had been fighting here for hours. Days.
Forever.
Valen was weeping but he raised the knife and slashed at me. I parried him easily. He cut again and I parried again. I don’t know how he’d managed to injure me so easily, but he was no bladesman, and I was. I could have killed him outright, but I didn’t.
I stepped back.
“Stop this,” I said.
A voice spoke and I turned to see two figures standing higher up the slope. Both of them dressed in the same lizard-skin armor. Except that I knew it wasn’t armor.
“Fahf ah ahf’ ymg’ ah,” said the taller of the two. My mind could still understand the language. I heard it as, “This is who you are.”
Those words hurt me more than I could explain. Worse than any of the cuts that had been sliced into my skin.
“No,” I said.
“Ymg’ ah h’ mgathg?”
Do you deny it?
I looked at the knife and the blood smeared along its length. I looked at Valen, who was panting and wild and terrified. Then I turned back to the Reptilians.
“I know who you are,” I said.
They studied me.
“In Maryland, on the road, you tried to tell me something. You told me that I was making a mistake.”
They said nothing.
“You told me that you were not my enemy. I didn’t listen. I didn’t understand.”
They said nothing.
“I was the one who got the Majestic Black Book for you. I stopped Howard Shelton from using it to build those.” I pointed to T-craft that scraped the ceiling of the world. The two creatures did not look up. “I thought we’d given all of it to you. I believed that. That’s why you tried to talk with me in Maryland. You knew that there was more of it and that someone was using it. You wanted me to stop them again.”
They said nothing.
“I can’t stop it. The machine is running. It’s going to blow up the volcano under Yellowstone and everyone I love and care about is going to die. I can’t win this for you and I can’t win it for me.”
I held out the knife, opened my hand, and let it fall, then pointed at Valen.
“He already won. I’m done.”
The taller of the two took three steps down the slope, stopping inches from me. When he spoke, though, he and the shorter one both opened their mouths. They both spoke at the same time, with the same voice, even though their lips did not move. They spoke in my language. In English.
“You are a hunter. You hunted. We followed. You found the machine that was hidden from us.”
“Yeah, well goody for me. I got there too late. Now you can take your toys and go home and let me die.”
The two creatures glanced at one another, then at Valen, then at me.
“We are not your enemy,” they said. “We are not your friends. Your world is your world. Ours is ours.”
The shorter one reached into a pouch on his belt and removed a slender piece of that damn green crystal. He showed it to me and nodded. I nodded back, though I don’t know why.
Then the son of a bitch stabbed me with it.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FORTY-FOUR
Top Sims knelt on the ground with Tracy Cole’s head in his lap and a pistol in his hand, the slide locked back. He had no more bullets. Cole was alive, but fading. Going away from him, just as hope was leaving him. Ghost lay where he’d fallen and Top couldn’t tell if the dog was dead or not. Probably dead.
They’d all be dead soon. He looked at his empty pistol and let it fall. No soldier wins every battle. Top eased Cole’s head down onto the ground and rose, drawing his knife. The old joke about never bringing a knife to a gunfight occurred to him and he actually laughed. Militiamen closed in from all sides. Grinning, raising rifles to their shoulders, fingers slipping into trigger guards.
Bunny crawled along the ground, fat drops of blood hanging from his slack lips and falling to mark his slow passage.
Tate was behind him somewhere with a sucking chest wound that was going to kill him as surely as Bunny’s injuries would end his own run. Duffy’s rifle fire had stopped and all the brush up on the slope where he’d been was burning. Smith was down, too.
It was over. The militia had won from sheer force of numbers, even though more than half of them were dead. The rest would punish what was left of Echo Team. Maybe they would make it quick. Maybe the fucking volcano would blow and burn them all.
Bunny stopped crawling when he reached the AK-47 he’d seen lying by a burning truck. He leaned back on his knees, hissing with pain, checking the gun. Half a magazine. Shapes moved toward him.