MirrorWorld (39 page)

48.

The distance from our parking spot in front of the art museum and the edge of Couturie Forest is nearly two miles if you follow the roads. I reduce the distance a little bit by cutting through patches of woodlands, but there is no avoiding the several bridges along the way, not without going for a swim. The trip takes me fifteen minutes, all of it spent in the real world, visually monitoring nonhuman frequencies. Each passing minute weighs on me, drawing my eyes to my watch again and again, watching the timer tick down to ninety minutes. So far, I seem to be moving unnoticed. The colony is either not afraid of being attacked, has defenses I can’t see, or is too busy elsewhere. Possibly all of the above.

I stop at the edge of the forest, hiding in the foliage at the center of a roundabout, the last real road I’ll see once I enter the trees on the other side of the street. But before I do …

I take out the phone and, with a swipe of my finger, open the tracking app. Maya’s position hasn’t moved. She’s definitely inside the colony, smack-dab at the middle but still registering on the GPS, still in this world. Or maybe it’s just the tracking device. They could have taken it out of her. I slip into the mirror world and watch the signal disapear. I nearly drop the phone in the foot-deep water when someone speaks behind me.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

The voice is distorted, gravelly, and deep.

Hair on the back of my neck stands tall.
The Dread can speak?

“Turn around,” says the voice. “Slow.”

I comply, hands out to my sides.

I’m expecting a bull to lunge or tendrils to stab into my head, but the figure behind me, while all black, is human. The oscillium armor matches mine, but the man’s head is covered by a mask and he’s wearing the round goggles that allow humans to see the Dread, which is generally a very bad idea. He’s pointing a sound-suppressed handgun at my chest, shaking slightly.

“The hell are you doing here, Crazy?”

While I’m glad he’s not Dread, the gun at my chest makes me nervous. I have a hundred memories of situations far worse than this. In them, I’m cool, collected, and thinking about solutions, most of which are absolutely nuts. Now, I’m having trouble looking away from the weapon’s barrel.

“Who am I talking to?” I ask.

The man tugs his mask up with one hand.

Katzman. And he looks even more nervous and squirrelly than me. So much so that I ask, “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” he says, his head twitching. “It’s the drugs.”

I nearly ask, but then remember BDO, the mix of benzodiazepine, dextroamphetamine, and OxyContin. Makes the user feel invincible, even in the face of the Dread. That’s when I realize something startling:
Katzman is in the mirror dimension
. He’s got split pupils just like me.

He sees the surprise in my own Dread eyes and explains. “All of Dread Squad can move between worlds.”

“How long have—”

“A year. We’ve been training for D-day ever since.”

A year …
I think, but ask, “D-day?”

“Dread-day. You were supposed to lead this little party, but last I heard, you had lost your marbles, which makes me wonder, why are
you
here?”

“You mean, why am I not dead along with Winters?”

He’s genuinely startled by this news. They had, after all, been his colleagues. Maybe even friends.
“What?”

“Lyons had her killed. They tried to get Allenby, too.”

“Bullshit.”

“Right after they restored my memory.” Speaking of which, I have a few memories of Katzman. There was a time when he served as my second in command. Dread Squad had been my idea. “You were already on your way here.”

He doesn’t argue the point. The timing fits.

“I don’t blame you,” I say, letting him know I’m not here for personal vengeance. I hold up the phone, allowing him to see the tracking app. Since we’re in the mirror world, there is currently no signal, but it’s still a useful visual aid. “Maya is here.”

He shakes his head. “She’s dead. Lyons wouldn’t lie about that.”

“There’s a chance he believes it,” I admit, “but there is no proof. He could be wrong. Why would they bring her here if she was dead? Also, he killed Winters and tried to kill the only family he has left. I’m not sure he’s seeing things clearly.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he says. A thick vein on his forehead twitches. “We’re doing the right thing, and I have my orders. We’ve been planning this for—”

He closes his mouth.

“Planning
what
?”

I follow a subtle shift of his eyes and see the strap of his backpack. When he looks back at me, his face is twitching, his mouth pulling in and out of a smile. He shakes his head like he’s having a seizure, but I think he’s refusing to answer.

“Destroying the colony might not stop a war with the Dread,” I tell him. “It could start one.” I don’t know if Allenby’s position on this matter is right or not, but if it hasn’t been considered, it needs to be.

You’d think I just told him I was pregnant. He gapes at me, the drugs exaggerating his reaction. Then his mouth slaps shut, and he pulls himself together. “We’re
already
at war. Once upon a time, you knew that, too.”

I can’t argue about what I don’t yet remember, so I ask, “What if everything happening around the world is a warning? A shot across the bow.”

“A warning?” He scoffs. “For who?”

“Who do you think?”

It takes him only a moment to understand. “You think all of this … everything that’s happening around the world is a warning—for Neuro?”

“Not Neuro. Lyons. You don’t find it odd that they took his daughter? That they brought her here, to his first target?”

“If she really is here, they’re using her as a human shield. They’re desperate. Afraid. We can end this today, and they know it.”

I don’t argue. He could be right. The tracker signal might just be exposed to let us know she’s here, because they think that will stop Lyons. “I’m not going to get in your way, and I hope you’re right about all this, but if there’s a chance she’s alive, I need to at least try to get her back. How long do I have? Give me that much.”

“Ten minutes,” he says.

“Until what?”

“Let’s just say we’re going to do this the old-fashioned way first.”

“World War Two–style,” I guess, and he doesn’t argue. “Just tell me it’s not a nuke. There’s already enough talk of that.”

“Not a nuke,” he says, lowering the weapon. “What do you mean? Enough talk about what?”

“Russia’s nukes are on standby. Ready for launch. Which means everyone else’s are, too. The president issued an ultimatum: stand down in…” I look at my watch. “Eighty-six minutes, or else…”

“Or else what?”

“Nothing good,” I say, “but it won’t take much more than a nudge from the Dread to make sure it’s the worst possible ‘or else.’”

Katzman slowly shakes his head. “Then we need to stop them. Here and now.”

He’s right about the here and now, but the method is still up for debate.

“Look,” he says, “if you’re not out of here in ten, you probably never will be.”

“Anyone else I should worry about?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “We’re holding a perimeter until the—” He closes his mouth, realizing he almost gave me too much information. “No. Beyond me, it’s just th—”

His eyes go wide. The weapon comes up. I dive to the side as he fires, feeling the zing of bullets passing inches from my cheek. My roll is slowed by the foot-deep water, but I manage to get my feet under me and draw my sound-suppressed P229 handgun. Too bad it’s the wrong weapon for this fight.

Four bulls charge through the swamp, their massive mouths hanging open with worm-covered tongues, and green veins pulsing with energy, charge through the swamp.

“Oh my God,” Katzman whispers. “Oh my God.” The drugs do the trick. Katzman stands his ground and fires. The problem is, he’s about to become a mirror-world pancake.

49.

Katzman pulls what I like to call “a Hudson.” Like the space marine in
Aliens,
he stands his ground, firing and swearing, out of his mind while still inflicting damage. The drugs he’s on keep him from running but, mixed with adrenaline, are sending him into a manic state of mind.

“Fuck you!” he shouts, emptying his handgun and
dropping
it into the foot-deep water. To his credit, the bull he emptied the clip into is now limping and slow, but it’s still coming. “Fuck you!” he shouts again, unslinging his assault rifle and spraying an arc into the rushing monsters.

While he’s doing a horrible job killing the Dread, he
is
drawing their attention, freeing me up to act, which I appreciate because, unlike him, I’m not on any fear-fighting drugs. I suppose that’s lucky for both of us. It wouldn’t do anyone any good if we both fearlessly drained our magazines into a mirror-world swamp and died.

I consider leaving Katzman to face the bulls alone. Both fearless versions of myself probably would. I wouldn’t have been afraid to let Katzman face the result of his actions, even if he died. The ramifications of making a morally wrong choice wouldn’t scare me. For the first time in my life, I’m afraid of what the choice will mean for my soul. So I take a moment to think about it and come to a different conclusion.

I draw my Vector assault rifle, take aim, and pull the trigger. A full magazine peppers a Dread bull’s gaping mouth, shredding its innards and dropping it to the ground. A cascade of water explodes around the monster, sending sparkles of luminescent blood in all directions.

One of the three remaining bulls turns on me. The other two, including the limper, continue toward Katzman, who is struggling to reload his weapon. I have no trouble switching out the magazine but am very aware that if it takes a full magazine to take down a bull, I’m going to run out of ammo very quickly.

Think,
I tell myself with just seconds left to act. The Dread bull is thirty feet out, pulsing fear at me. A wave of nausea sweeps through my body. I fight it, strategizing. Aiming. I pull the trigger, popping out a three-round burst. Bright green geysers of blood erupt from the bull’s right knee, just as it puts its weight down on the limb. With a warbling shriek, the creature spills forward and to the side. An arcing wave of water rises up to engulf me, but I slip out of the mirror world and move forward. The bull flinches as I reenter the mirror world, weapon already aimed down. Once again, I realize the Dread, while physically superior, are not accustomed to combat—their world is all about mental warfare, psyops. Nor are they used to using multiple dimensions in a strategic way. It catches them off guard. While they are comfortable with humanity in general, they’ve never seen anything like me, and it scares them, maybe as much as seeing a Dread in the flesh would frighten a person.

I pull the trigger. At close range, all three rounds punch through the eye on the side of the Dread bull’s head, shoving the monster’s brains out the other side. A plume of glowing green bursts into the water beneath the bull’s head.

A cough of sound-suppressed gunfire, drowned out by the wild shout of a man, turns me around in time to see Katzman’s final moments. The bull, even if it was shot and killed, will plow into him.

Katzman’s eyes go wide as even he realizes this. And then, he’s gone.

Not dead. Just gone. Returned to his home dimension. The bull passes through the empty space.

But Katzman, perhaps just reacting without too much thought, slips back into the mirror world before the bull has fully passed by. As a result, he reenters this world partially
inside
the bull. His legs are yanked up off the ground and pulled along for the ride, but the bull, whose gut has now been replaced by a panicking man, spasms and topples forward.

Get out of there,
I think.

Katzman’s kicking legs suddenly disappear, leaving a gaping wound behind. The bull splashes into the water, dying slowly, mewling pitifully. I feel a moment of pity for the thing and then turn to the fourth bull, already injured by Katzman. It has pulled up short, shifting its four eyes between the most recently slain bull and me.

Whispering fills the air.

I take aim and fire, emptying the clip. The bull flinches back, turning to run, but then a round hits something vital and the monster falls limp. The whispering stops.

Katzman hasn’t returned, so I chase him back to the real world. He’s on the ground, coughing and sputtering, panicked and furiously wiping at himself. He’s covered in bright green gore, viscous slime, and chunks of Dread organs. When he left the second time, he took a lot of the Dread with him. I note that he’s not writhing in pain, either. They’ve trained for this but, unlike me, lack the ability to push fear. I volunteered to be the first guinea pig. I remember that now. The rest of Dread Squad must have received a more-refined batch of the DNA-altering retrovirus, leaving them more human than Dread, not fully both like me and not able to do everything I can.

“Calm down,” I tell him. He flinches when I stand over him but slows down a bit when he sees it’s me. “They’re all dead.”

I don’t know if he hears me. The foul-smelling guts covering his body have his undivided attention.

“Katzman!”

His eyes lock onto mine, wide with fear and drug-induced focus.

“You can leave all this behind when you slip between worlds.” I’ve been leaving the blood of dead Dread behind. Katzman, it seems, needs a little practice. “Just focus on what you want to take with you. Everything else will stay behind.”

He stares for just a moment, then gives just a hint of a nod.

“Go to the world between first,” I tell him.

“I—I don’t know if I can.”

I crouch beside him. “I trained you better than this. I remember that now. Just focus.” I shrug. “Or you can stay covered in gore.”

Strands of florescent-green slime dangle from his arms as he lifts them up, inspecting his situation. His stomach lurches. He’s about to wretch. I put my hand on his back and do the job for him.