"What the fuck?" Shadow said, and Dylan snapped out of it.
He whirled, ready to punch, but Shadow pistol-whipped him across the jaw. Dylan fell, and Shadow sprang. Sunlight glinted along his knife.
Dylan blocked. The blade slipped away from his neck and pinned his ear to the concrete. He yowled at the sharp, white pain.
Shadow pulled out the knife and went for the throat. Dylan blocked again, pushing his arm against his adversary's, but the steel tip poked his Adam's apple; he couldn't swallow without getting cut.
Shadow grinned wide, and his eyes jittered and glowed. His breath reeked of excrement. "You're dead, Dylan Bradley. Your luck's run out."
The knife penetrated skin-and Friday brained the punk with the briefcase. He rolled off Dylan, and she hit him again, pulping his lips. He screamed something like, "Bitch!" and threw the knife. She blocked it with the case and landed another blow to his temple.
He batted the weapon out of her hands and tripped her, then slithered on top of her and started to bite.
Wincing, Dylan hobbled to the knife. He turned just as Shadow pulled away from Friday's throat, stretching a piece of skin between his teeth. She shrieked and wriggled beneath him, trying to knock him off. His limbs constricted around her like snakes.
Dylan drove the knife into Shadow's eye. Wet heat splattered his knuckles. He almost puked, but managed to keep it down.
With the blade wedged deep in his eye socket, Shadow stared up at Dylan, his one good eye wide with surprise. His and Friday's blood drizzled down his chin. He opened his mouth to say something, moving his split lips like a suffocating fish, then he slumped to one side. Urine soaked through his pants and he shit himself. The smell was horrible.
Dylan helped Friday stand. She pressed a hand against her neck where Shadow had chewed it.
The punk curled up in a ball and babbled to himself as yellow puddled beneath him. Dylan hadn't killed him. He had lobotomized him.
"Please," Friday said. "Do something."
So Dylan shoved the knife in, and Shadow lay still.
Thirty.
Because Friday asked him to, Dylan dragged Shadow into the strip of woodchips along one of the buildings. He retched up bile-he swore he wouldn't do it; not over this piece of shit. But he did, and it left a burning film in the back of his throat.
Afterward, he and Friday sat on the steps that descended to the sidewalk through the pines, and Dylan stared at Minnie's front door. Friday caressed his arm and told him it would be okay. He barely heard her, lost in his own fog.
Slowly, as if performing a ritual, Friday set Geoffrey's briefcase on her lap and stroked the surface, circling her finger around the scuffs. Dylan had risked his life for it on the granite cliff below the bus, and it had returned the favor, had saved his life in the fight with Shadow. In all this time, they had never opened it.
Friday rested her thumbs on the latches. They clacked open, and she lifted the lid.
Inside, Geoffrey had packed a bible, a pistol, and a suicide note, dated before the world had begun to burn. He had addressed the note to his wife, who divorced him after their three-year-old daughter died from leukemia. In the last few sentences, Geoffrey begged God's forgiveness. He wrote, "I know I'm damned, but if You forgive me, at least I'll know I still have Your love." He ended it with, "Please take care of my daughter. She was my heart and soul."
"He thought this was the rapture," Dylan commented.
Friday looked up at him, turning the gun over in her hands. It contained two bullets. Had they known about it before, things might not have gotten to this point.
"He thought he had been left behind," he said. "He thought God had damned him because he was going to kill himself."
Friday nodded and put everything back in the case except the gun. She smiled at Dylan with soft, sympathetic lips, and tears brimmed in her eyes. "Come on," she said. "It's time."
She took his hand, and they walked together to Minnie's apartment. Dylan took a deep breath, exhaled a quivering stream, and opened the door. A gust of spring air greeted him, clear of smoke, but Minnie did not answer his calls.
Thirty-one.
They checked her entire apartment, from living room to broom closet. They found neither Minnie nor her remains.
In her bedroom, surrounded by posters for Dawn of the Dead, Hostel, and other horror movies, Dylan slumped on the edge of her bed. She was gone. They had found no ashes, but Dylan could feel her absence, a deep hole in his stomach, an ache like homesickness he could never soothe. She was out there somewhere, dust in the wind.
On her nightstand, Minnie had placed a photo of her and Dylan, hugging by Lake Selmac at sunset, where garnets bled over the water. He felt a pang in his eyes, but no tears would come.
Friday came to the door and set down the briefcase. "Dylan?"
"She's gone," he said. "She's gone." And then he curled up on the bed, shriveling around the ache.
Friday snuggled up against his back and held him, her warm hands pacifying his shivers. She whispered and swaddled him in white noise. His eyelids grew heavy.
"Why?" he asked, feeling a hot tear roll down to his temple, feeling nothing. "Why did this happen?"
Friday's hand stopped massaging him, and she was quiet for a long time. Finally, she said, "It doesn't matter," and she was right. It didn't matter how the world died. It didn't matter whether it was germ warfare, rapture, or some pig blotting out his creations. It didn't matter because knowing wouldn't change a thing. All that counted was what remained.
Dylan fell asleep in her arms, in the very bed he had shared with Minnie one year ago, just before he moved away. They had made love for the first time and hadn't seen each other since. He dreamt of nothing.
Thirty-two.
In the end, Friday took her own life as her skin began to blister and smoke. She did it in the bathroom, and Dylan's ears still rang with the shot.
He lay in Minnie's bed for a long time, staring at the wall, feeling as if he couldn't move. Minnie's scent was still in the covers, something like strawberries and creme, and atop that, a hint of rice.
The silence grew its own breath, heavy with Friday's absence, all the words she never said, all the words she might have.
Dylan thought about using the last bullet in the gun on himself, but he didn't want to see Friday's body. He didn't want to take that image to his death. He would just wait his turn to blaze, if it ever came.
On a shelf above her bed, Minnie stored several books, mostly Dean Koontz, Richard Laymon, and Stephen Crown, a local horror author. Dylan ignored them and grabbed the pink radio acting as a bookend. Minnie had decorated it with a flaming skull.
Outside, on the steps where he and Friday had sat, Dylan extended the radio's antennae. The world felt terribly empty and full of echoes. He sighed and switched on the radio.
The first station was static.
But he thought he heard something in it.
Voices.
Dylan turned the dial and hunted the sound of human life.
Silence in Heaven.
John Sunseri.
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart: the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity."
-W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming.
The Demon forced its way through the filter with a spray of rusty metal. Along with the rust, bad air poured into the substation. .The monster latched onto the top of Cameron's skull and ripped his head. Blood geysered from the neck stump and spattered the walls.
Without rising from her seat, Bess grabbed her pistol and spun from the control panels. She was blasting away before her co-workers could recognize that something horrible was happening. A swarm of smart bullets exploded in the Demon's body and Cameron's corpse crumpled. Pieces of the Demon sped from the blooms of fire toward the oxygen converters.
"Code Red!" screamed Dylan, slamming his hand onto the shutdown button. The klaxons began their warble as the blast door clanged shut. Bess stood abruptly, causing her chair to clatter to the floor. She calmly aimed her pistol. Methodically, she fired on the dirty bits of the Demon that were still able to move and scramble for escape. They were trying to get to the rich air above the converters. Within seconds her blasts were joined by those of the other workers. She ignored the small swarm of Demon bits that were swooping into and sipping from Cameron's blood. The lights flashed ,alarms blared and explosions flowered in the air. Bess took careful aim at the last clump of mucus rising toward the vent, she let the smart bullet lock onto it, and fired.
"What's going on down there?" a frightened voice shouted from the radio clipped to her shoulder. She ignored it. She watched the last sputter of electricity, hearing the splat as the dead bits of Demon flesh hit the stone floor. Then, and only then, did she turn her attention to the corpse of her former lover.
"Someone answer Curtis," she said, holstering her gun and walking toward Cameron.
Dylan lifted the mouthpiece. "Breach in the Alpha vent," he began. "But the situation's under control..."
Situation under control, thought Bess. She walked ten steps, and stood over the twitching body of Cameron. She watched the blobs of gray-brown Demon sucking greedily at his oxygen-rich blood. The activity was yanking his limbs in spastic patterns as though he were a marionette. His head was in pieces all over the room, carried there by the shattered Demon and her own bullets. The gore didn't bother her and she felt oddly detached from the body before her. She knew he was not there anymore. She didn't find it difficult to watch his body jerk and spasm in a grim parody of life.
Billows of yellow air shot into the room from the vent above. Her nose wrinkled and her lungs twitched from the poison that slowly suffused the chamber. The "bad air" as she had come to think of it. She knew the Code Red would have shut the sphincters further along the intake pipe, and the deadly vapors wouldn't be coming in for long. She could handle the foul stench for the few minutes it would take to finish her task.
She bent and grabbed one of the shreds of the Demon, it felt greasy and stuck to her fingers when she rubbed her fingers across it. The blob searched along her skin, the mindless thing was sensing the oxygen in her blood and wanting to sip from it...Finally, she closed her fist and squeezed, she didn't wince as the horrible slurry of the burst Demon and her boyfriend's blood splashed across her face. She wrung the creature in her fist until it stopped moving. All of the hair on her body tingled when she paused for a moment to consider that pieces of the Demon were able to survive after the gunfight.
She pushed down the split second of fear and reached for the next one.
"Where am I going?" asked Bess as she gazed down at her bloody hand. She wasn't sure how much time had gone by since the Demon attack. When the radio squawked she was brought out of her reverie.
"Level Two," said Curtis over the walkie-talkie. "The nursery."
"And why am I going there?" she asked, wiping her left hand on her pant leg, trying to get off the blood and slime.
"Talk to Doctor Sandford," he said. "And then come up and see me on One."
"Chief," she said, "I'd really rather go back to quarters and take a shower. And then maybe sleep for a few hours. Is this really necessary?"
"How many vent breaches have we had in the last six months?" asked Curtis.
"Nine," she said automatically. She was Head of Security, and the numbers were blazoned on her forebrain. In the year before, they had two breaches. The year before that, they had none.
"Things are breaking down, Bess," said Curtis, and his voice was strangely quiet as he spoke, making him hard to understand over the static on the radio. "Things are getting worse."
"So, I'm going to the nursery," she said wearily. Things were always getting worse. Since her parents had moved underground, things had gone from worse to worse to worse. She remembered when they had animals in the caves with them-and she remembered the year she turned seven, when all the animals died.
She'd cried when they served that last of the meat, knowing that her beloved Thumper had gone to the galleys with the rest of the dead animals. She had eaten nonetheless, preferring to believe that the Morlock Council wouldn't serve people their own pets for dinner. Thumper had probably gone to some other family. Probably.
There had been the collapse of the Sixth, when she was fifteen. Over a thousand people had died when the earth had rumbled and broken. Her brother had been one of the dead. Hank was a miner, six years older than she. He had all the glory and mystique the miners reaped here, in New America. She hadn't seen much of him in the few years before he'd died-he'd spent most of his time in the nether levels, doing his work and spreading his seed. She loved him and when word had come that he'd been crushed in the collapse, she'd been crushed as well.
She spent a week in mourning, staying in her room, staring at the dark walls and remembering their childhood. The next week she drank all of the booze she could get her hands on, working all day in the processing chambers, and all night fucking every man she could find. Finally, she'd gotten most of it out of her system and signed up for Security.
Now, she was the age her brother had been when he died. Her job was waiting for the next catastrophe.
"You're going to the nursery," confirmed Curtis. "Come see me when you're done."
"Out," she said, hitting the squelch and replacing the radio on her belt next to her pistol. She reloaded and wiped the blood and Demon guts from the piece. Walking down the service corridor, the swaying of the killing hunk of metal hit her hip with every step. The arms instructors had found her skills with the weapon a bit unnerving; anyone could hit a target with the smart technology the Brains had come up with for the bullets-but she was fast and sure at acquiring targets. She knew that there was no one in the Warren that could take her in a gunfight.
There was no pride in that knowledge. She hadn't been fast enough to stop the Demon today, and eventually she wouldn't be fast enough to stop whatever killed her. There were four or five people in New America who could beat her in a fistfight or a knife battle, and there were thousands who could kill her in her sleep.
She was comforted by the thump of the pistol on her hip as she walked down the rough-hewn corridor toward the stairs. An oxygen mix hissed from the vents at ten foot intervals along the passage and it's freshness replaced the stink of the upper air. Unfortunately, the reek of chemicals that remained in her nose was triggering the memories of what she had seen. The image of Cameron's body jitterbugging beneath her as she ripped the Demon from his wounds and his blood seeping into his clothes was perfectly clear in her mind. She could still hear the klaxons, the yells and gunshots of the battle.
She shook her head trying to shake the images as she grabbed the door to the stairwell and pulled it open.
She was supposed to see some babies now.
"It's not working," said Sandford.
"What's not working?" Bess asked, following the doctor past the closed doors of the nursing chambers. Most of the Warren was rough-cut stone and dirt floors, but the Medical Wing was all tile, plaster and steel, designed to allow as much sterility as was possible. Even the lights were brighter, actual fluorescent tubes flickering along the joists between ceiling and walls rather than the weak, coiled bulbs dotting the rest of the Warren.
"The gill project," he said.
His words stopped her short, She stood in the middle of the hall with closed doors on either side. The wailing coming from behind the door on her left reminded her of a newborn struggling to clamp onto a nipple, a new mother trying to guide it to her breast.
"Dear god," she said. "Is that what this is about?"
"It's not working," repeated Sandford, stopping and looking back at her, his eyes were red with weariness, his posture trembling with defeat. "Maybe if we had another four or five generations to work with..."
"Why am I here?" Bess asked, her voice quiet, her face still.
"The latest one is from your eggs," said Sandford. "We thought, in the womb, that it was going to work out all right, that we'd finally had our breakthrough. Your genetic material was very strong, very adaptable, but..."