Frost (11 page)

Barry laid a hand on her shoulder. “Like
I
said, we don’t know you. There ain’t going to be any more questions from you until you answer a few of ours.”

She turned that gaze on him again. “We don’t have time for a pissing contest.” She gripped his hand and pulled it from her shoulder, as though flicking away something slimy. Jack knew Barry let her move his paw, that if he had resisted then it would have been tantamount to her lifting Thor’s Hammer. “Touch me again, and I’ll scoop your eyes out of your head and shove them up your—”

“Are we done?” Jack yelled.

Scot-but-not and mystery woman glared at each other a moment longer, then she took a small step back. “He’s on the move. We haven’t much time. Come with us, or it’s game over.”

“We’ll be fine without you,” Barry snapped.

“You don’t get it. He set us on this path as much as he did you.” She pointed to the brick wall behind Jack, where
Laurent’s
had stood not a minute before. “He knew you’d need our help.”

“That slippery son of a bitch,” Barry hissed over his shoulder. He met Jack’s eye. “Neutrality, my shitty arse.”

Jack shrugged. “I’m not complaining.”

Barry scowled.

The woman seemed nervous now, looking up and down the street. “We’re not alone in this. Harper has people too. His fingers are in everything. We’ve held them off until now, but this is the last play. You have to come with us.” She searched them both, her stance softening a touch. “Please, come with us, now.”

Jack licked his lips. “You got a name?”

Another measured pause. Jack felt himself being scanned down to the last hair by that cold, calculating gaze. “Kat.”

He tried to say, “Nice to see a friendly face.” In the wake of her dragon-like stare, all that emerged from his mouth was a flaccid, “Goo… uh.”

A glint of something that might have been tempered contempt lanced in Jack’s direction, and Kat grunted. “We better get off the street. You freaks might be invisible to most people, but we sure aren’t. People tend to notice a bunch of people screaming around New York, armed to the teeth.” She headed back to her cycle. “Climb on. We’re set up nearby.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Barry said

“Not until we get our answers,” Jack said.

She gave them both a withering stare. “You’ll get your answers. Now come on. We’re on the clock.” She nodded to the other riders, and they gunned their engines.

“Tell me about it,” Jack muttered. He exchanged an uncertain glance with Barry, then they were heading for the motorcycle.

Barry was so heavy he needed a cycle to himself, displacing its rider onto the back of one of his companion’s. Ungainly and disgruntled, Barry fingered the controls gingerly, but within the minute he was ready. “It’s just been a few millennia, that’s all,” he roared.

Jack climbed on behind Kat. He half expected something stupid and cliché, like catching a whiff of rosy perfume from her hair, maybe a quiver in his chest. Instead, all he caught was a sharp, blue pain in his groin as he sat on himself.

Eyes watering, he glanced back in the direction of where
Laurent’s
had been. The brick wall remained, but now even the trestle tables had vanished, taking the old man with them.

They rode hard in the night, and several times Jack’s underwear came in danger of getting a fresh coat of shit. Clinging to Kat’s leather-clad waist, struggling with the urge to dig his fingers into her side, he concentrated on matching the rapid swing of her torso as she threw them into insane slaloms and pirouetting skids around corners.

The city passed by in a blur, a liquid slurry of neon ribbons and endless Yellow Cabs, interspersed with faces caught in mid-action, a tapestry of frowns and smiles and high-strung scowls.

Somewhere nearby the other bikes whined like a swarm of wasps in pursuit, dark shadows that occasionally overtook or were overtaken, otherwise hovering somewhere on the edge of his narrowed perception. They, too, punched through the heart of the city without regard for traffic or pedestrians. Half the time they mounted the pavement or dived down into underpasses, or launched over low brick-walls and into parks, scattering pigeons and gaggles of squawking night-strollers.

More than once he heard Barry’s disembodied voice above the drone of the engine, the honking protests of car horns and the screams of diving bystanders: an unbroken stream of pseudo-Scottish babble, lost between wordless fury and swears strong enough to make Jack’s eyes water.

For a brief moment, Jack was laughing, a full-body roar that he felt might shake him apart.

Down, down, into the fires of hell
.

They pulled off the road without warning, swooping down into an underground garage that popped open seemingly of its own volition, all half-dozen of them screeching into a murky greenish concrete shell in quick succession. The engines died and the riders dismounted, stripping off their helmets and unzipping their leathers.

Jack was left sitting atop Kat’s bike, blinking under harsh halogen lights and the roar of sudden silence. Beside him, Barry dismounted his own bike, which bounced up several inches on its suspension once free of his weight. He looked shaky, his beard hilariously windswept into a devil-may-care quiff, like a proud bird of prey ruffled after a close call with a freight train.

The garage door banged shut behind them. Jack exchanged a glance with Barry. An unspoken question lanced between them.

You good?

Satisfied, Jack lifted himself free of the bike, wishing for grace and receiving none. His groin was so numb that, for an irrational terrifying moment, he worried that he would thereon be known as Miss Shannon.

Kat and the others had gathered in front of them. Her companions, free of their gear and standing there in black vests, took him by surprise. Jack had expected a snarling squad of ex-Navy SEALS, or skin-headed goons.

Instead they were disarmingly… normal. Two men and three women, Kat included, ranging in age from early twenties to somewhere in their sixties, their eyes frank and alert, markedly undisciplined. There was nothing military or hardened about their pose or countenance. They slouched, standing in a rag-tag bunch.

Kat and one of the older men, a round-shouldered silverback with a long braided goatee, looked like they could hold their own. But the others could have passed for any group of strangers on the street: the other man was bald and sweaty-faced, almost certainly a banker; the young girl’s face was riddled with acne and was pale enough that Jack was sure she was a student of something that meant spending a lot of time indoors. The other two could have been anything from middle management to greengrocers.

Before him, they visibly withered. Their collective stance shifted with discomfort.

Kat seemed to sense his thoughts. A wry smile spread over her face, lost somewhere between amusement and derisive satisfaction. “Not quite what you thought we were, are we?”

“Not quite.”

Barry took it upon himself to display his mastery of tact. “You look like shit!”

The silverback gave a muted grunt befitting a true gorilla, and started forward. “Who you callin’ shit, you piece a’ shit!” He held up a fist the size of Jack’s head, his Bronx accent touched by the kind of slur that came with decades of heavy drinking.

“Ah, a poet,” Barry sang in mock delight. His face became sour as he looked down the line of them. “No wonder you played dress-up. Look at you. You can’t be serious.”

Kat’s hazel eyes flashed. Jack could have sworn a blast-wave of heat washed over him, born of her sour intensity. “If you knew anything about us, you’d never stop thanking us,” she said quietly, and with that quietness came a gravity that brought Jack’s skin out in goose-flesh. “You have no idea what we’re capable of.”

Barry considered her carefully. “I’m sure.”

Her lips twisted into an ugly tangle.

“Show us,” Jack said.

They all looked at him.

“Show us. We’re on the clock, right? Either you can help, or you can’t,” he said.

“We can help,” Kat said.

“Then let’s get to it.”

The others looked at him with undisguised surprise, though fell short of appreciation.

“Fine,” Barry said. He took a heavy breath, and Jack felt Barry send a displeased gaze in his direction. “Show us.”

Kat regarded them, then motioned to the others, who filed towards a door set at the rear of the garage. The group vanished, leaving the two of them standing in ringing silence beside the bikes.

Jack made to follow, but Barry put out a hand to stop him. “These people are a joke. You’re wasting our time.”

“And you’re still trying to save the world on your own.”

“I took you on board, didn’t I?”

Jack leaned close, for the first time stabbing at Barry’s chest, ignoring the doom that would befall him if Barry retaliated. “Dragged me. You dragged me into this insanity. You might have some pithy quips about
creatures of destiny
, but you’re just holding onto me like some damn totem. Well, I’m not! You said it yourself: you can’t win this. You’re going to need my help.” He nodded to the room ahead. “And you’re going to need theirs.”

A beat passed between them, Jack’s finger pressed precariously to the Scot-but-not’s chest, the latter’s beady black eyes ablaze with the fire of ages, and wrath that in ancient times, on some far-away forgotten world, might have levelled forests and mountainsides.

Then, before Jack’s eyes, chocolate mirth trickled in to fill the void. Barry looked down at Jack’s finger, not threateningly but with new respect. A small smile invaded the undergrowth of his ginger beardscape. He nodded. “You’re right.”

Jack stepped back, took a deep steadying breath, and nodded in turn.

For the first time in his life, Jack Shannon felt strong.

They filed into a much larger room beyond, a hulled out booming space, dusty and ancient and mildewed. Jack led the way, guarded, feeling exposed with Barry behind him instead of ahead. But he wasn’t playing sheep any more. If he was important, if he had a role to play, fine. He was going to play this his way.

As he proceeded over creaking floorboards and a freshly-laid tarpaulin floor, he realised it wasn’t a room, but the atrium of a grand town-house. A sweeping marble staircase spiralled up to a shadowed upper floor, echoing and hollow. Every recess sparkled with decayed, decadent furnishings. Wealth lay slathered over it all like paint. Somewhere high above, a chandelier caught odd glitters of light through a carapace of rust and wear.

A fine rain of dust showered down, sticking to Jack’s sweat-stained shirt. This place was old, too old and undisturbed to have been forgotten. Manhattan didn’t leave such valuable real estate to rot like this.

No, somebody had bought this place up, and kept it closed to the world, even if they had let its innards run to ruin.

But for how long?

Judging by the inch-thick slabs of dust atop lampshades and armchairs and ancient chaise-lounges, it had been many decades.

“It might have seen better days, but it’s what we need,” Kat said from the centre of the atrium. Amidst the antiquity lay a nest of modernity: an encircling mass of monitors, snaking cables, banks of servers, cabinets of weapons and rails of clothing.

“Looks like Q’s workshop,” Jack said glibly. He came to a standstill in the centre of the parabola of glowing screens alongside Barry, and shrugged heavily. “Who are you people?”

Kat jerked a thumb over her shoulder, indicating silverback and the acne-ridden young woman. “Joblonsky and Gant.” Then she pointed to the other two, who had sunk into chairs by the terminals. “Hartree and Forman.”

“No. Who
are
you?”

She seemed ready for that. Without a word she threw him something dark and small.

Jack caught it and took it into both palms, squinting in the poor light.

Beside him, Barry made a noise of bitter amusement.

Jack ignored him and held it up to the light of the nearest monitor. By the harsh blue glow he picked out a smooth dark stone, around the size of a marble but longer, flattened. It looked much like obsidian, only more reflective, sparkling almost like diamond, though it was black as total darkness; it almost seemed to emit light of its own making.

“Is this supposed to mean something to me?”

“No. But it will.”

“I’m getting tired of all the vague references.”

“Get used to it,” Kat said. “Something we all learned a long time ago is: once you get close to the truth, straight answers dry up fast.”

“Try.”

She smiled, a coy yet long-suffering expression. “Eighty years ago, a couple of people who had nothing in common, had never met, never had any contact with one another at all, woke up one day and realised something was different. They
knew
things. Bad things.”

Jack’s internals thrummed, a resonance of every cell, stemming that strange inner power that had awakened in him since Barry’s arrival, as though his inner divining rod had been pinged by some aberrant RADAR.

Kat continued. “A few ended up in asylums, screaming about cold and darkness, and a great black spider. They didn’t last long. A few weeks later they all killed themselves.”

“And the rest?”

“They kept seeing things. Every night, something new. Soon they started believing they might be seeing something real. Slowly, they found one another. It took years to come together. By then, they were all sure that they’d be warned. Something terrible was coming.”

“So, what? They were chosen?”

I think some people are sensitive somehow. They can see more than most people.” She shrugged. “To be honest, I have no idea. None of us ever have. I’m pretty sure it’s almost impossible to tell any of us apart from the rest of the crazies who talk about alien abductions and the rapture and faking the moon landing.”

She pulled a wry hitch to her mouth. “A few of our forerunners were rich or had influence. They put together a small underground movement, a sleeper cell, of sorts, just in case. Awaiting instructions. Even when the years went by and their efforts seemed wasted—they kept watch.