Chapter 5
Come On, Horsie
The bike screamed as Cass wrenched them both sideways, rubber smoking; a low wavering shadow in the road snarled, its eyes chips of diseased moonlight and the tentacles on its back moving like stop-motion seaweed.
She’d rarely seen one of these so close before, and Grik was right—any dog looking like that needed to be put down.
It wasn’t so much the weird rubbery things festooning its back as the splattering foam from champing jaws—and the rabid alien semi-intelligence in its glowing pupils.
Bogey on the road. The thought was tinged with a mix of sudden heart-thumping terror and a variety of icy, smoking glee. The first was a reasonable, rational reaction. The second was adrenaline, a metallic burst on the back of her tongue and every nerve, bone, muscle completely alive.
Usually it was only in dreams that she felt this clarity.
The Ducati growled, sensing excitement, and grabbed hungrily at the road with both tires.
Her knee almost, almost brushed pavement as she leaned, and a single miscalculation would wreck both her softer frame and the bike’s more robust, beautifully engineered metal skeleton.
A wringing effort, her midriff nearly cramping, and the iron horse righted himself. He didn’t shake her off, didn’t protest—the machine sensed carnivorous danger nearby, its throbbing mechanical heart in complete accord with hers. So long as they understood each other, nothing could catch them.
Or so Cass hoped.
The Ducati leapt forward, no longer on a pleasant nighttime stroll but let loose to do the only thing that mattered, the thing it existed and hungered for. Its thrum deepened; slipstream flowed over Cass’s shoulders, tugging at padded seams, whistling at tiny irregularities on her helmet’s shell.
The bike knew the way to go, darting into an opening slightly too large to be a proper alley.
It could have been a dead end, but he wouldn’t let her down like that; they shot across another street, barely missing the front bumper of a brown Volvo sedan creeping along without lights.
Whoever was driving might have been drunk, because they didn’t even tap the brakes—Cass was already past, the bike zigzagging swift and sure as another bogey coalesced across the street, a pale noseless smear with eyes burning bright unholy blue, its blurred shape sprouting more than the usual number of arms for a human being.
Could normal people see those abominations?
Some of the creatures flickered in and out of corporeality, only condensing just before attack; part of finding a working scenario was helping the guys catch bogeys in the physical phase.
The problems generally began when the soldiers didn’t listen, or refused to train hard at the sequence of movements she worked out to keep them safe.
Dismissive or arrogant bogey-hunters died first.
The Ducati let out an angry snarl; Cass shifted, clutched in, gave him plenty of fuel just before they shot through a crowded intersection with a luxurious half-second to spare.
Horns blared, a crunch of metal swiftly lost in the windroar before streetlamps on either side of her died.
The cold spot intensified, traceries of frost blooming at the edges of her visor.
Physical freeze. Which meant bad, bad bogeys.
Come on, horsie. Let’s leave ’em in the dust.
The city’s university district had one more necessity for a bank job—plenty of exits, especially to the freeways.
If she could reach one and really open up the bike, she’d be hell and gone before the bogeys could say boo.
Throw them off the scent, make sure her trail was clear before heading back to the campsite, and within five minutes—seven tops—of her disheveled gasping arrival they could be on the road.
By dawn they would be at another campsite; Cass wouldn’t need a second recon if she’d gotten enough subliminal information tonight. If all else failed, despite the fact that they were on their last legs, they could hit a bank in another city.
There were always more.
Her warning system for bogeys didn’t stop once it alerted her—oh no, that would have been too easy. Invisible needles rammed through her temples, the furious ice seeping into her bloodstream threatening to make her clumsy, but she was used to the sensation.
Just have to push through.
The bike responded, threading instinctively through a complicated snarl of side-streets, some broad and one-way, others narrow and choked with parked cars.
The piercing psychic howls were closer together now, and flashes in her peripheral vision were creatures straight from the worst nightmares, places she sensed while in scenarios but would never dare think about too hard lest the awareness yank her sleeping self from its carefully constructed surroundings and—
A screech, another howl of burning rubber, and the bike nearly bucked her loose, throwing up a cloud of acrid white smoke.
She barely registered the figure in the middle of the intersection, a long gleaming bar in its hands and its shape vaguely familiar.
Had she seen something like this while drifting in sedation, past and present blurring together?
No, it was a man with a long two-handed sword, the blade reflecting failing streetlamp stuttershine, and she was going to crash right into him.
* * *
Nobody should’ve been able to yell so loud it went right through the helmet while she was struggling to stop the bike from taking out a pedestrian, but somehow he did.
Except the words didn’t make sense; they sounded foreign, and the ragged man leapt catlike, a gleaming blade whooshing neatly over her head.
Even Cass, used to seeing the bizarre on a nightly basis, could barely believe what her optic nerves were passing along to an overworked brain.
Blazing icy eyes, a pale flicker at his right temple, a ragged T-shirt with straps over it, a torn jacket, tattered jeans and heavy boots, the man moved with the thoughtless, eerie speed of a bogey.
Bright popping lights from Cass’s right—later, she could swear she felt something pass right in front of her helmet, traveling supersonic and cleaving warm night air.
A tentacle-dog had somehow birthed itself from a tiny gated alley to her left, barreling through locked-together chainlink panels that crisped and cringed away from its hide, and the flashes to her right were from a second guy dressed in similar rags, moving like a bogey, and shooting past her at the thing.
What in the good goddamn? It was one of Steve’s favorite expostulations, only uttered in moments of surpassing weirdness.
The Ducati miraculously didn’t stall. Training took over; Cass hit the clutch, downshifted, popped back into gear, and felt the engine settle like a needle dropping into a wax groove.
Her visor was fogging, but the bike knew hesitation meant death for both of them and was breathing once more under her hands and booted toes, vibrating in her thighs and arms.
She might have made it, too, if the shooting guy hadn’t leapt right into her, knocking her from the saddle and nearly out of consciousness altogether.
He landed with feline grace, his arms snapped out straight; more stutter-flashes of gunfire, reports cracking through her helmet and a thick soft layer of shock as she crunched on pavement and rolled, struggling to breathe.
Her helmet shivered, hopefully doing its duty to protect the brain-case underneath; the bike hopped, jerked along a few feet, tipped over as the engine decided it couldn’t run without her coaxing after all, and Cass didn’t even have the wherewithal to swear.
The sudden cessation of motion was more stunning than the hit itself. Something else was wrong—she suddenly couldn’t see, the physical world receding with a clicking whoosh, like outgoing tide on a pebbled beach.
No. Goddammit, no. Was she falling asleep despite the mild bump taken just before setting out on recon? A quarter-dose of stimulant, more than enough to keep her awake unless her tolerance had truly—
The pulse came then, spreading outward in concentric rings.
Invisible force poured through her, a giant pipe-organ chord vibrating on a much deeper register than the bike’s growl.
The impossible sound intensified, overlapping and reflecting from two nearby sources, and for a dizzying moment her vision returned, but oddly mutated.
The street lay before her, witnessed from two separate angles, lamps blinking randomly, the bright silver arc of a sword swinging so fast it blurred, the body of a tentacle-dog twitching as bullets plowed through it and steaming stripes opened on its heaving sides.
Dreaming, while completely awake? That’s a new one even for—wait, it’s called hallucination. Oh shit.
The confusing double vision was mercifully brief.
It snapped off all at once, and Cass found herself sprawled on unforgiving pavement next to the tires of a parked van, a glaring crack across her helmet’s visor and the dull unhappy ache of rising bruises calling in from every part of her body.
For a moment none of her limbs would answer, merely giving disconnected twitches, and the brief thought—am I paralyzed?
—was enough to ignite a burst of fuming purple terror inside both stomach and skull.
Then she was somehow on her feet, hearing Bern’s barking commands. Get up, girl! Move! Them bogeys ain’t gonna stop!
Training once again paid off. She scrambled for the downed bike, her nose full of burnt-rubber reek plus a different, far more terrible smell, forcing its way through the visor and God alone knew what other damage done to her helmet. The chinstrap was now cruelly tight, and her eyes watered.
But Bern had insisted she practice getting back to her transport over and over again, drilling until each movement was burned below conscious thought. Now, in the heat of terror, her body did what it was supposed to—when she got back to camp, she’d have to thank him.
“Wait!” a man was yelling. “Wait, don’t!”
But she ignored the plea. No way was she sticking around.