Then the God Machine.
The device created by the young and tortured madman Prospero Bell. Getting caught in the energetic wave as the machine pulsed. Feeling myself being torn out of the now and into the nowhere. Fighting zombies after the world ended.
Walking on the beach of some other world, seeing alien spacecraft cut across the sky while some monstrous thing — a demon or god or something there isn’t a name for — rose above me, wings spreading, eyes burning red above a beard of writhing tentacles.
So much. Too much.
I screamed myself awake. I could feel the scream coming from way down deep inside of me. Deeper than the pit of my stomach, deeper than my lungs. Maybe from the bottom of my soul. I don’t know. It rose up, soared up, ripped its way up and burst from my mouth as I twisted free of whatever held me and the sound of it shattered the air as I fell to the cold floor.
I lay there, hearing the scream echo around me. It was not a wordless scream of pain or fear. No.
What I’d screamed was “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!” It was the prayer to the dark god of that other world.
I sat there on the floor. Ghost stood five feet away from me. Invisible in the utter darkness. Growling.
At me.
INTERLUDE EIGHT
It took Svoboda’s team, coordinating with Dr. Beaufort and Valen, two days to excavate the cavern wall. Most of that time was used in assembling timber-and-steel support beams for the ceiling. A separate team double-reinforced the exit tunnel in case the drilling caused a collapse. Once that was done, the jackhammers and pick-axes went to work.
The wall, even cracked, fought them. It was old stone, hard and stubborn, and they encountered anomalous veins of iron.
Valen and Svoboda tried to make sense of it, because as they cut their way into the wall, the cracks Marguerite had discovered made less and less sense. For one thing, they did not follow the standard irregularities and stress points in the stone. There were clearly preexisting fracture points and mineral weaknesses that should have been where some kind of tectonic shift would naturally create fissures. Those were untouched. Instead, the cracks were in what could best be described as random places. Svoboda kept urging Valen to stop, to allow him to do tests, take samples, document the phenomenon. Valen’s answer each time was to order the diggers to up their game.
They broke through into the pocket near midnight on the second day.
“Mr. Valen,” called the worker who broke through the wall, but Ari and Valen were there, pushing him aside, crowding past him. They froze in the ragged entrance, shocked to stillness by what they saw. Marguerite, Svoboda, and the others tried to crowd around them to get a look.
“No,” cried Valen, though to Marguerite it wasn’t clear if he was telling them to stop crowding him or making a statement of flat denial at what he saw in the pocket.
Then Valen sagged sideways against the edge and ran a trembling hand over his face. His knees buckled, and he would have fallen if Ari had not caught him. Valen grabbed his friend’s arm and clawed his way up it like a drowning man coming over the edge of a lifeboat.
“Ari,” whispered Valen in a hollow croak of a voice, “get them back. Get everyone back. Please, for God’s sake.”
Ari stood a moment, too shocked to move, then he blinked and whirled and roared at the others. “Get back. Get the fuck back. Everyone out of the tunnel. Now! ”
They retreated with great reluctance. Everyone was scared, confused. Marguerite tried to linger but Valen shook his head and she finally backed away, turned, and followed the others out.
When they were alone, Valen went into the hole and stepped gingerly into the exposed pocket. He saw that, although the plants had looked fresh through the fiber-optic scope, it was clear that they were dying. At first, he thought it might be because of exposure to different air quality now that the pocket was opened, but it became apparent that this, like so many assumptions, was wrong. All of the plants, and the roots of others, were severed. Every single one of them seemed to have been sheared through as if the whole pocket had been carved out of a natural landscape and somehow transported into the center of a rock wall. Impossible as that was.
“Are you seeing this?” he asked Ari, who stood in the tunnel mouth.
“Jesus Christ…” was Ari’s only reply.
Valen knelt by the crystal gun. It looked like something out of an old science fiction novel. Or a kid’s toy. All knobs and bulbs and blunt barrel with no opening. Valen’s eyes, though, were not fixed on the gun but on the thing that lay partly across the handle. Through the scope it had appeared to be some kind of dead animal. A lizard or something, but the foliage had blocked most of it. Now Valen and Ari could see the whole thing. It wasn’t any kind of small animal.
No. It was a hand and part of a wrist. Neatly severed. It had a thumb and three long fingers, each of which ended in a thick dark nail, sharp as any claw.
And it was scaly and green.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I held my hand out for Ghost to sniff but he hesitated a long time before he would even look at it. His dark eyes were filled with strange lights, but I knew that the strangeness was mine and he was merely reflecting it. Reacting to it. Fearing it.
“Please,” I said, and reached another inch closer.
Ghost finally took the tiniest of steps forward, moving with a mincing delicacy for so large a dog. Like he was stepping onto thin ice. His wet nose twitched as he sniffed. All the hair along his spine still stood up, thick and stiff as brush bristles.
Then his tail moved. A wag. Half a wag. Enough of one.
I slid off the edge of the bed and onto the cold concrete floor. Ghost came to me and I wrapped my arms around him and pulled him against my chest. A sound, not quite a sob, broke from my chest and I really could not tell you why. The dreams. Something about those dreams.
I’m a grown man, a skilled fighter, a practiced killer, and a special operator. But not at that moment. In that moment I was very young, and very small, and there were monsters. Not in my closet or under my bed, but in my dreams. In my head.
I clung to Ghost and the night closed around us like a fist.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
They ran toward the strange, booming voice. They ran toward the sound of men screaming in pain and terror. They ran toward the rattle of gunfire and the roar of something that was too alien, too weird, too big to exist down here. They ran.
Why the fuck are we running toward all this? That was the question pounding through Harry Bolt’s head. He was positive that he was completely unprepared for whatever the hell this was. And yet he ran.
The pillars were so many and so thick that they blocked the view of whatever was happening. Green light flung impossible shadows on the walls. Men, their outlines distorted to capering goblin shapes, fighting something that writhed and twisted like a nest of giant snakes. Gunfire flashed and thunder boomed. Violin, running far ahead, rounded a corner and vanished into the green madness. Her shadow loomed like a giant warrior woman from some ancient myth.