Chapter 47
47
Those words from Willow about a secret were ill-timed, Rutger decided. All they’d done was stir everyone, especially Cyn, who would have to be the most impatient person ever. She grumbled while they showed her through the rear segments of Big Daddy. Luckily, they’d kept her pink jeans and black shirt, or she’d be butt-naked, which would’ve made following her a cock-tease and a half. His cock was totally on board with doing her even minutes after she awakened from a damn coma.
There were benches in this first part. One side had computers and screens as well as porthole-like windows similar to those on a plane. On the other side was a bench with reagents, bottles, centrifuges and Lord knows what else that Maura was using to make nanites. The table Cyn had lain on had been recently bolted to the floor and as they went deeper into Big Daddy he noticed other things that must have been recently added.
“If she wants the Lure to be controlled, it’s obvious what that means. And you knew nothing of this? Either of you?”
“Yes. It means we forget about it for now. When Willow wants to say, she will.” She’d become their leader by default. Mads could have stepped up but had chosen not to. So far it was working out well.
“I cannot forget. I feel all fired up.” Cyn rolled her shoulders and stumped down the corridor, using the broom he’d given her for a crutch. Upside-down with the brush under her arm, it did the job.
Vargr smiled at him over her head as if to say, yes, she’s back to normal. Maybe the man hadn’t noticed the fine trail of red scales on one of her arms. It’d been extending as the days passed and now seemed to be twining up her biceps. It could be mistaken for a tattoo.
“Are there no weapons on this thing?” She turned to frown at him.
“There are.” He gestured at the next door as Vargr opened it.
This was a makeshift armory with semi-automatic weapons lining the wall on new racks. The screw holes still showed metal filings. There was also a shower and bathroom facilities. The bathroom was being used to store ammunition.
They trudged on, past a bedroom with crates piled up to the ceiling, even on the bed, though much of that seemed canned food. It was useless to stock up on food, unless you were afraid to leave this bastardium- shielded cube.
Unless you were a plain old human, as Doctor Nietz had been.
He did like the way the man had chosen names. Bastardium had a ring to it. If he was allowed to name anything, in this terrifying era, he’d call it fuckonium.
At the very rear was the last room, where he twisted the handle, pushed the door, and stepped through.
“Here are the papers.” These were stacked to the ceiling like the crates. A desk held another PC, as well as more papers. Some stacks had neat, color-coded folders, or notepads with coded names on them. Some were fully in code, and about half appeared to be printed copies.
The floor was strewn with loose sheets of paper. From behind some of the stacks peeked a hexagonal glass-fronted, ceiling-high display case. Inside that were what he assumed were antiques—vases, bottles, a sword and a dagger, an old pistol that might be a flintlock, jewelry.
If this were the doctor’s study, it made sense. He had been a known collector, fascinated by history as well as science.
From the antique desk, Cyn picked up a folder of print-outs. “Printed yet no digital record?”
“Not that we know of. Big Daddy was wiped or never had access. When or if he wakes, we can ask for clarification. Mo has limited access to the files that would help us make sense of this.”
“I see.” She gnawed on her lip then dropped the papers. “Phew.”
“Phew?”
“Tired. I guess. I’m not ill anymore, though. I think healing, yes. I need to do that so we can get Willow to cough up her secret.” She pursed her lips, as if by thinking it that would happen faster. “Hey. I can have my gun?” She planted her free hand on her cocked hip, while her other hand clutched the broom crutch.
“You’re not well enough!” Vargr sounded exasperated.
He chuckled at his beaster friend. “Let’s get you to a bed, Cyn, so you can rest. After some rest, okay, maybe you get that gun.”
“Maybe? In this land of desperate times? With those above doing fuck knows what that Willow knows about and we do not?” she said, challenging them both, with her hand out, palm up.
“It’s only a pistol.” He made a what-the-hell face at Vargr.
He eyed her. “Okay. When we get out of here, but then you rest.”
“Done.” She grinned triumphantly. “Though… you two need help with the reading too, yes?”
It was a point. “We do.”
Willow was going to take some papers away but the mountain of documents might take them a week to read. They’d been sleeping outside, but there was a bed in the adjacent room. “I think some homework won’t hurt you. We can use the bed next door, if we clear it. Get your pack and her gun, and we’ll read in here?”
“Sure. The ground outside is hard.”
He planned to make her sleep soon, even if he had to gag and hogtie her, and wouldn’t that be nice. Fucking had been off the menu for days. If anywhere was comfortable, it would be the bed here. But neither of them was going to suggest sex today.
“Are you getting dirty ideas?” She winked and clomped around with that broom, to face him more fully.
“Huh.” He scrubbed at his chin. “Never.”
Even with a broom under her arm, a bandage on her arm, and the marks on her face from days of unconsciousness, Cyn was sexy enough to rev up his cock.
“Wait. Wait.” She frowned. “Three days and no fucking for ages, yet the Lure did not grab me?”
“Well,” Vargr halted as he was about to exit. “The Lure isn’t supposed to get through the bastardium . Besides, you were mostly unable to walk.”
“Mostly? I’m getting a severe dodging the topic vibe from that answer. What did you two do?”
“We didn’t fuck you while you were out, girl.” Rutger couldn’t help grinning. It was almost poetic justice what they’d had to do. “But we knew it worked, and we weren’t one hundred percent sure about these walls, so they nasal tubed some of our jizz down you.”
Her groan was pretty impressive. “I’d hit you with this broom if I didn’t think I’d miss and fall over.”
“Try tomorrow. If you heal like you should, tomorrow we can look at playing on that bed, with you, dodging brooms. I claim her ass.”
Vargr looked dubious, his eyebrow rising. “It might be too soon. I think we should just get her to suck up more jizz.”
They ended up sprawled on the bed with Cyn between them. He wasn’t sure he could concentrate on reading with her this close, but he managed, especially since she did fall asleep soon after they gave her some food. Canned food.
God he was so tired of this shitty canned food. Five years, apart from a few vegetables grown in the Parklands. And the rat meat most pretended was from lost chickens with A-grade survival talents.
Rutger paused in his reading to watch her sleep with her face half-buried in the pillow, her foot tucked almost under his thigh. She was in a screwy position and Vargr had her butt to admire, but he decided he preferred seeing her simply lie there, breathe, and sleep.
For a while, he’d wondered if she was going to die. They’d all thought it.
He stirred a dark curl on the pillow and restrained himself from touching her lips, for it would surely wake her.
After their teasing, it was perhaps karma that she woke them in the middle of their normal sleeping time.
He cranked open an eyelid and saw she was dancing quietly, to the side of the cleared floor, and only clutching the wall a few times as he watched her. When she saw him watching, she stopped.
“I can jump and do this—dance,” she whispered, but in a loud whisper. “And I really am well again!”
Vargr turned over with a moan. “Da fuck. What?”
“She can dance, you ass.”
Hilarious to watch the annoyance dawn.
“Oh gawwwd.” He dragged a pillow over his eyes. “Show me tomorrow.”
Tomorrow, though only a few hours later, Rutger woke again to find her squatting on the floor, looking at him. He sat up slowly, swung his legs over the edge, and smiled at her smiling at him.
“What, pretty girl?”
“I went outside. I can run though I’m still wonky. Teensy limp.” She held up her finger and thumb, close together. “I’m properly healed, or very close to it, and… I can see and use the Lure again.”
Outside? Of course she’d gone there. It didn’t get through the walls of the cube.
He nodded. It was good, but it did also mean Willow was going to want to tell them her secret. Yesterday, something about how she’d informed them she had one to tell had chilled him to the damn bone.
Once they told Willow, her face fell into a familiar grimness, mouth firm, and he swore he saw sadness in her eyes.
“I’ll take you up then. With enough of us to be safe.”
What was she aiming to show them?
Which was how, only a few hours later, they were trekking higher in the quarter, going around and around a metal set of spiral stairs built inside a vast well that looked as if it ran up about twenty stories past where Willow said they were going—the fifth floor.
Why the fifth?
This was War Quarter, which was an interesting name. If it came about from the usual, there would be a large number of gun shops here… Or a lot of ads for them on the edge of the quarter.
Up the stairs, carrying their weapons, with the wing-soldiers flying overhead and scouting each new story. He was ready to aid Cyn if she needed it. Though the broom crutch had been discarded, she still had balance problems and a small limp.
The beaster escort looked hyper alert and ready for battle at any second. If anything, Willow was being overcautious.
He caught up to her, striding ahead up several steps at a time, leaving Cyn with Kiko the weaponsmith and Vincent, a half a flight of stairs below.
“Have you reason to expect attack?”
“No. Not exactly.”
“Then, why this?” He waved at the heavily armed beasters.
“This?” She glanced at him, her mouth twisting into a guarded smile when she realized he wasn’t letting go of the topic. “I’m nervous.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see soon. On fifth floor there is a good view.”
“Uh-huh. So you’ve spoken to the beasters in this War Quarter?”
“On comm only. They don’t come this low, the same as us. We’ll meet them but not today.”
“Okay.”
He let people pass him until he was once again beside Cyn.
Vargr swept in and landed with a clang on the stairs, cursing as he did so and sending him a black look. The shadows on his face ran deeper than usual. “When we get up there, you will want to remember I said this—what you see will leave a scar.”
“Oh?”
He inhaled and fell into step with Rutger and Cyn. “Hearing about something bad is never the same as seeing. I don’t know how this was kept quiet.”
That silenced them both. Cyn looked thoughtful and took Vargr’s hand. The contact of skin on skin could be far more comforting than words.
He walked out onto the fifth-floor balcony with the others, Cyn then Willow to the left, Vargr to his right. Most of the rest of those accompanying them were strung out equally to either side. This was an edge of War Quarter. Before them the chasm between quarters spanned the gap from these buildings to the buildings of a different quarter with an unknown name. It was close to midnight, a dark time for humans like Maura, who’d stayed behind in Big Daddy with Mads and Locke.
High above a predatory bird circled. An owl perhaps.
He had the grim intuition that Willow was deliberately splitting up from Mads when danger was nigh, just in case she was killed. It would leave Mads to carry on.
The bird dived, a black speck flitting across the night sky.
“There!” someone said, as they stepped to the railing and glass at very edge, and they pointed. The gasps of horror began.
To their right, in an interrupted stream, people were falling from above, silhouettes dropping rapidly and zipping past the level they were on, falling all the way down until they stopped, smashed into the ground. There were no sounds of screaming, only muted thuds when they hit. Some were arching as they dropped and stretching out their arms, as if they strived to march upward to where the Lure called them—to the Top.
A multitude of curses reached him, a backdrop to this evil.
“Jesus.”
“Fuck.
“Oh my god. Oh my god, no. No!”
“What can we do?!”
Nothing.
This might have been one of those clever flick-the-page drawings with stick figures. It wasn’t.
It was the silence of these soon-to-be dead that bothered him most. The silence wormed in. Cyn’s mouth was open and yet she said nothing, her eyes clearly following the line of the falling. He moved behind her, placed his hands on her shoulders.
“Why,” she finally asked of Willow, shaking her head as she said it.
“I don’t know. All I can say is that something is happening above, where we cannot see. Something bad.”
As if it could be worse than millions of humans being eaten by aliens.
“There must be a reason,” Cyn insisted. “Are they being pushed or are they accidentally led on some path that goes to the edge. Is the Lure doing this?”
Willow wrung the round railing with both her fists. “That is what I want to find out.”
How could they?
“I have never said this before,” Rutger began, quietly. He wasn’t quite sure why he wanted to say this. “I kept it locked away from myself even. It’s a part of my life I decided to give up, but I was raised by several foster families, and each of them had a different religion they believed in absolutely.”
Cyn looked up at him, sliding up her hands to cover his where they lay on her shoulders.
“This,” he continued, “I’m sure would be regarded as Hell on Earth by all of them. Even the ones who did not believe in a Hell.”
A great silence lowered as all of them absorbed this tragedy they could not stop, even as it continued with more dying each second.
Someone wept loudly, gasp-crying as if they could not breathe.
“This is why I propose to go upward to below the Top, short of there by a few stories,” Willow said firmly.
What?
“We found a drone inside a compartment in Big Daddy, and Locke has devised a way for us to launch it and see what it sees and to record. We’re going to find out what is really happening at the Top.”
That was a stunning statement. For five years they’d been ignorant of what the Ghoul Lords were doing to the people they’d trapped. Only Cyn had brought back news, and much of that had been lost due to her amnesia.
“I… remember terrible things up there.” Cyn shivered, and he felt it where she touched his body, and her hands tightened on his. “There were piles of bodies, stripped bones, blood…” Again she shook. “I’m with you, all the way.”
“Okay.” Willow turned to assess her then said quietly, “Would you be okay with doing this in twenty-four hours? I have been holding onto this information for days already.”
And she flicked her gaze to him for a moment—as if he could stop Cyn. Well, he might be able to, by tying her down.
“She can judge.”
“I am okay with that, yes. I have a slight limp, but I’m close to back to normal, whatever my normal is.”
At that he couldn’t help looking at the back of her wrist where it curved over where she held his hand. Those red scales reminded him of many things, and some of them he was sure were impossible. Normal was no longer the norm.
A quote came to him, his mind urged him to say it.
People were falling, thousands, before his eyes, though he refused to follow their flight path to the ground. Every word they said, every flickering figure, marked a death.
This compelled him to speak.
“Those who the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” This would not drive him insane, but Hieronymus Bosch with his paintings of macabre hells with tortured people would have been thoroughly inspired.
Vargr clapped him on the shoulder and left his hand there, gripping hard. Cyn turned in his arms and hugged him.
“I’m not mad like the quote says,” she said into his chest before she looked up. “I’m just mad . Fucking mad. We will do this, and we will end this war, take back our planet and murder every one of those aliens above who are trying to destroy us.”
“Amen,” added Vargr.
“You are sure you are well enough?” He had to check.
“I have my mojo back, Rutger, Vargr.” She smiled like the deadly, kickass babe she was, and showed her teeth. “I wanna blow away some bad motherfucker aliens.”
“Yeah, baby. Yeah,” Vargr breathed. “They do not know what is coming for them.”
Which was how it came to be that he stood with Cyn and Vargr at the back of the assembled members of this small part of the beast horde. He listened to Willow give a grand speech about how they were about to embark on the first stage of their renewed attack on those who dared to violate this Earth— their beloved Earth.
The hall was on the first floor of War Quarter. The moon had risen and shone in through many small square windows just below the twenty-foot-high ceiling. Whether by chance or not, moonlight cast a strong shaft of light over the stage where Willow stood before a podium. The wall behind her was blood red. She wore a white, long-sleeved smock, and pale gray tights. The sleeves trailed cloth as if mimicking medieval princess fashion. Against the red wall, she brought to mind an avenging angel, if it wasn’t for her rabid speechifying.
He smiled.
The speech itself and her shouting, those reminded him of a radical dictator. The arm gestures nailed it. This event deserved that sort of crazy speech. Who wouldn’t yell and spit and carry on?
He’d never seen her so worked up, but if this was the beginning of the end—of them finally taking the initiative in this terrible game of genocide the Ghoul Lords were playing, he’d do anything. Fucking anything.
They must win. Must.
The hall echoed with her words, and the crowd became restless, stirred by her vehemence until they too shouted, raised their arms and shook them, vowing allegiance to this renewed cause.
“We will take back Earth from the invaders!” she screamed.
Rutger whipped around and arm-wrapped first Cyn—hoisting her higher so he could kiss her cheek and squeeze her—then Vargr, except he couldn’t pick that heavy beaster up. He felt the wings ruffle where his arm fell across Vargr’s back.
He kissed Vargr’s cheek too, loudly. “Let’s fucking do this!”
Vargr chuckled then hugged and kissed him back, just as wetly and loudly. “Anything to get you to stop putting those lips on me!”
“Hell, yeah,” Cyn added in a quieter tone. “We do this, and we watch each other’s backs. And Willow’s, especially her. I think she’s more important to this than anyone.”
Though he nodded, he disagreed. Cyn was more important. And Vargr… He was beginning to feel as if they were inextricably bound together. All three of them.
He’d heard Cyn say a few times how bondmating was just chemicals, but it no longer was, not to him. He hugged them both, tighter, inhaling their mingled scents.