“Any suggestions for getting this door open, Duster? Any magic passwords you’ve been keeping in reserve?”
“No. And I suggest you leave it alone. You can always come back.”
“I don’t think so. Not before shit goes completely vertical in my world, with me at the bottom. Cash out.” I turned to face the others. “This is kind of like the Gordian Knot,” I said.
“Is not what?” Oxana asked.
“History lesson later,” I said. “Now, problem-solving.” And then I pulled out my new suppressed Glock and blasted the shit out of that card reader with some of the special ammo Orban had thrown in with the silencer. The subsonics were impressively quiet—I doubted anyone outside the hall heard a thing. I reached in through the smoking wreckage and started pulling bits out, then grabbed the pry bar Clarence had strapped to his pack frame and put all of my not-inconsiderable strength to it.
Clarence was getting a bit panicky. The bullets had been quiet, but the pry bar was making noises like the world’s biggest gopher chewing metal vegetables with metal teeth. “I thought we had to get out of here—shit, Bobby, I thought we weren’t going to make a mess!” He really was upset. He hardly ever swore.
“Plans change, my friend.”
I don’t know what I did, but something shifted inside the door lock and the thing popped out. The door slid about six inches to one side, enough for me to feel a waft of cool, air-conditioned air rolling out. No wonder Halyna had seen a cold spot with her infrareds. I got my hands into the opening and started pulling. After a moment Clarence realized I wasn’t going anywhere without getting past that door, so he leaned in to help, and together we dragged it open against the heavy inertia of the mechanism.
What we found on the other side was a dark stairwell. I went down it, and as I hit the bottom step a light came on above my head. The door in front of me was ordinary wood, with a latch but no electronic paraphernalia. Could it really be this simple? I clicked the latch down and pushed. The door swung open and a light came on inside. My comm-link made a scratchy, staticky noise in my ear, but I couldn’t understand anything Wendell was saying.
I had about five seconds to look around before Oxana, who was closest to me on the stairs, said, “Bobby . . .”
“Just a second,” I said. “We’re in.”
And in my earpiece: “Cash, this is Duster! Cash, please acknowledge!”
“Not now, Duster.”
“The hell with that,” Wendell was almost shouting. “Abort the mission! Abort the mission!”
“What are you talking about, Duster?” But I couldn’t raise him again—the signal was all noise now. I assumed the guards were coming, but I was damned if I was going to run when I had finally found what we were looking for. I’d think of some way to stall them. “Duster, please repeat . . .”
“Bobby.” Now it was Clarence calling to me from the top of the stairwell. “I really think you’d better come up here.”
I was losing my shit. “Will everybody just give me—”
“Now!”
I’d never heard that tone from Junior before. I legged it back up, pushed past Oxana and then stopped, amazed, beneath the mosaic that hung over the doorway.
The entire floor of the West Asian hall was alive with Nightmare Children. Dozens of the swastika-shaped things, hideous and hairy, scurried around and over the exhibits toward us like they were army ants and we were made of sugar.
“This is bad,” was all I could think of to say. Not my most original line. I’ll try to do better next time I’m about to be devoured in a museum in the middle of the night by a couple of hundred monstrous, spidery crawlers with babies’ fingers.
And another thing. When a bunch of them got together, you could hear the Children breathing. They hissed quietly, like poison gas spewing from the vents at Bergen-Belsen.
twenty-nine:
jam today
“OXANA!” I shouted. I should have been using code names, but since it was in the heat of the moment and we were about to be overrun by hand-spiders, I think I can be forgiven. “Hurry up and spray that shit!”
The first burst of silver nitrate solution came out in spatters, but the results were instantaneous. The Nightmare Children nearest us erupted in flame, like origami in a grease fire, and the air was suddenly filled with a howling so high-pitched I could barely hear it, like dozens of microscopic dental drills. Sadly, though, the swastikids were too basic or too brutal to be deterred by their burning comrades; the rest kept coming, although they avoided the bubbling wreckage of those the spray had hit.
I hadn’t necessarily expected to see the little bastards again, but I’d wanted to be ready for surprises, both human and otherwise, which was why the silver spray. In the seconds after the first wave had melted into puddles of hair and twitching fingers (making an entirely new, astoundingly foul odor I’d never encountered before, even in Hell) I had my machete out of its sheath, and I was wading into them. I’d economized by only having Orban silver-plate the edges of the blades, but they seemed to do the job just fine that way. Every time I managed to hack into the body, another of the creatures fell into burning, jiggling bits. Even when I only got an arm, it crippled the little horrors nicely.
Clarence had his machete out too, and together we were able to keep a clear space open at the top of the stairs, but the army of scurrying things seemed endless. Oxana sprinted back and forth along the wall so she could spray the contents of her tank across the hairy, skittering wavefront. It was like napalming them, but I knew that she couldn’t keep doing it forever. Even if it didn’t clog, the tank didn’t carry that much because the silver nitrate made it heavy as hell. I could only pray that no more of the things would show up.
Even as I was swiping away with my blade at the nasty, faceless creatures in front of me, tiny fingers clawed at my pants leg. I reached down and grabbed the nearest wire-haired squirmer and ripped it off me like a starfish off a rock, then threw it as far as I could. The exercise in clearance was pointless, because even as I pulled another away several more climbed the back of my legs. Within a second or two I could feel the terrible little fingers clawing at my neck.
I’m not a squeamish guy. You’ve probably guessed that by now. But being swarmed by those things brought me very near the screaming-and-running-in-circles stage. I was distracted from my growing fear when a great billowing cloud of flame rolled across the main force of crawlers. As they blackened and shriveled, the little monstrosities sent up an even higher-pitched chorus of inhuman shrieking that made my skull ache.
“No, Halyna! Save it!” I yelled. We weren’t really in terminal danger, not yet anyway, and I didn’t want her to set off the fire sprinklers, for oh-so many reasons, not least of which was the priceless works of art. I also didn’t know if Wendell had remembered to disable the fire alarms or not.
By now Oxana’s tank was spitting out little more than drips of silver solution. The Nightmare Children were still coming, but I thought I could see the end of them and felt pretty certain that we could hold them off at least long enough to escape the museum. Of course, it raised some questions—why were the crawling horrors here in the first place? Did Anaita use them too? And were they the only thing we had to worry about?
I was still making like Conan the Haloed Barbarian, hacking and slashing with my silvery sword, when I heard a wrenching noise from just above me, louder even than the shouts of my friends and the boiling-lobster squeals of burning swastikids. I didn’t dare look up, but I didn’t need to, because three seconds later several hundred pounds of living blackberry jam crashed through the vent in the ceiling and tumbled out of the air duct on top of me.
“Bird bug!” shouted Oxana.
While still thrashing around on top of me, the rubbery mass hit Clarence with a flailing appendage and tossed him across the room. He skidded and crashed into a display case with a noise like a grenade going off, flinging glass and irreplaceable ancient knick-knacks everywhere. As I writhed beneath what seemed to be at least two bugbears, I saw more large blobs force their way out of the ceiling through the ruined vent. You may remember that one of those bugbears by itself damn near killed me, and now it looked like at least a half-dozen were paratrooping in. Oxana vigorously blasted the newcomers, but their shiny hides only dimpled and blistered a little. Then the spray ended, and I knew her tank was empty. One of the hanging mucus-monsters swung at her like a pendulum, and although it didn’t hit her square, it still knocked her spinning into the near end of the Asian section. She slammed into a case containing a Buddhist thangka, fell, and lay motionless. Clearly, she had been knocked cold, but it looked like she was crouching at the Buddha’s feet. Yeah, Existence is Suffering, I thought. Stop. I get it, already. Oxana wasn’t an angel, and she wouldn’t get issued another body. I prayed she wasn’t hurt too badly.