Pandemonium (31 page)

“We know!” said Nastia.

They rushed behind Nell as she ran. “This is one of Stalin’s escape routes,” she said. “It leads straight to his palace.”

“I told you!” Nastia said with relief. Then, to Nell, she said more quietly, “You know you’re topless, right?”

“Yes! I know! I’ll care about that later, OK?”

Nastia nodded. “Just making sure!”

06:43:22

Geoffrey and Sasha watched through the camera outside Stalin’s secret train landing as the battle ensued in the tunnel—but they could see no sign of Nell. When the spigers arrived, Geoffrey felt his hope sink: Sector Seven had been breached.

“Yay!” Sasha said as she saw Nell open the door and step out onto the platform, waving at the others.

“She made it!” Geoffrey whispered.

The others retreated into the passageway and left the train tunnel filled with smoke and fire. “Thank God,” he sighed; he had been gripping Sasha’s arm the whole time and now apologized to her as he let go.

“You’re really strong, Geoffrey,” Sasha said, rubbing her arm. “Was Nell wearing a shirt?”

“Um.… I don’t think so,” Geoffrey said, wondering what could have happened.

06:41:08

“Are these ‘ghosts’ related to ghost slugs?” Nastia asked.

“What are ghost slugs?” Nell asked.

“Carnivorous white slugs discovered in Wales a few years ago that are believed to have evolved in caves.”

“No.” Nell shook her head and laughed darkly. “You must be a scientist, too.”

“Yes,” Nastia said.

“They’re mollusks, but these things have suction cups. They’re land octopuses,” Nell said.

“Incredible!” Nastia said. “Are they from Henders Island?”

“No! There weren’t any mollusks there!”

Abrams checked his rearview headcam and immediately saw bad news: the spiger had somehow squeezed through the hatch behind them. Elastic diaphragms between three bony rings inside its body enabled the giant invertebrate to inchworm behind them through the tight tunnel, extending its head and snapping its jaws like double doors as it drew closer in four-foot lunges. “Heads up, that frigging thing got through!”

“Damn!” Bear said.

A translucent silhouette of a man reared up in the tunnel ahead.

“A ghost!” Nell warned.

“Oooh!” Hender trilled, disappearing as he reacted to the figure whose flesh effulged prismatic colors in the beams of their flashlights.

Nell stopped next to the tunnel that headed east toward the city.

“Just shoot it and let’s keep going!” Nastia said.

“I’m out of bullets!” Nell cried, unnerved and visibly shaking.

Dima fired at the ghost and it folded down, dropping to the ground, revealing a dozen more hanging or standing in the corridor behind it. He kept firing, revealing one after another in an infinite regress.

Nell shone her flashlight up and saw two large ghosts peeling off the ceiling above them. “There!”

Bear glanced behind them as the huffing and puffing spiger pushed toward them up the tunnel. “Come on, man! That thing’s coming!”

“This tunnel should go to your honeymoon suite, I think, Nell,” Galia said.

Nell looked back at the man who had spoken, wondering who he might be under his helmet. She remembered that Sasha had referred to their suite as Stalin’s love nest.

“Come on!” she shouted, and darted right into the smaller tunnel that headed east, the others following.

06:38:02

They emerged through a hatch that opened to a hidden room behind their bridal suite on the second story of their honeymoon cottage. The mule barely squeezed through as it followed them through a second hatch that opened into their bedroom. Dima closed both hatches behind them.

Nell looked at their unmade bed as she grabbed a T-shirt and pulled it on while the others took off their helmets, turning away. “Yeah, this was our room,” Nell said, noticing the wilted pink rose on their bedspread. She reached into her bag by the bed and pulled out some banged-up sneakers, pulling the one shoe off her foot and slipping into the new pair. “I took these to go spelunking in Hawaii,” she muttered, tying them on with trembling fingers. She looked at the faces that were now revealed around her and noticed Galia Sokolof, Maxim’s chief of operations. “Well, hello, Mr. Sokolof.” She scowled. “What brings you here?” She rose to confront him.

“I brought them to rescue you, Dr. Binswanger,” Galia said, his deep-set eyes full of remorse.

“We came to get you, Nell!” Hender said.

“I’ve no doubt that you did, Hender.” Nell smiled at him, squeezing his hand and kissing his soft-whiskered cheek as he embraced her with four aquamarine arms.

“Where is Sasha?” Galia asked.

“She’s at the palace with Geoffrey,” Nell said.

“Oh,” Galia said in surprise. “Thank God! And the others?”

Nell scowled once more. “You mean Maxim? Everyone in the city is dead now. But Maxim? Well, he may still be alive, I think, Galia, if that’s what you’re concerned about.”

“I tried to stop him.”

“Not hard enough!” Nell shouted bitterly.

“All right, now!” Abrams said, raising his bionic arms gently. “There’ll be time for that later.”

“Come on,” Nell said, leading them to the split-level dining/living room of her honeymoon condo, the dining room of which viewed the city and the living room to their right the phosphorescent waterfall.

Abrams powered down the XOS and detached its grips from his armored suit, stepping out of the machine. “Pretty swank honeymoon suite,” he quipped.

“Yeah,” Nell said.

Kuzu rushed to the window and looked over the city. On the street below, a stream of glowing Henders species flowed, in the same direction, flying, rolling, and leaping past the window from right to left, clockwise around the city.

“We should be safe here,” Galia said. “The windows are bulletproof.”

“Yeah, sure,” Abrams said.

“We better look around and make sure no ghosts are in here, or anything else,” Nastia said.

They all inspected the walls and ceiling carefully and finally were convinced the room was clean.

“Turn the light off now,” Hender warned with a soft, sing-song voice.

“Hender’s right,” Nell said.

They doused their lights immediately and gathered behind Kuzu, who was peering through the window at the dark metropolis.

Glowing swarms of bugs and iridescent eight-legged “rats” charged up the street, followed by giant spigers with fluorescing stripes rippling light on their frilled skulls. At several intersections in the distance, they could see spigers clashing and locked in mortal combat, causing grisly pileups like traffic accidents. Henders “trees” had already begun to sprout on the sidewalks, their palmlike branches dangling red and blue fruit over the streets.

“Look
, Shueenair
,” Kuzu said.

“Oh,” Hender sighed sadly.

“Like home,”
Kuzu said in his own language.

The first bloom of Henders clover was visibly spreading, encrusting the streets and buildings, intermingled with patches of glowing colors that Nell recognized as rainbowfire. Great glowing patches of rainbowfire had spread across the high ceiling of the cavern, as well.

Nastia noticed the glowing patches with alarm, remembering the phosphorescent splotches on the walls of an abandoned Soviet uranium mine she had explored a few years ago. It was the scariest place she had ever seen, until now. “Is that uranium?” She pointed at the roof of the cavern.

“No!” Nell said. “It’s a fungus that grows here. It must like eating clover.… They were trying to get it to grow in here, but there was nothing for it to eat before.”

“Nell,” Hender interjected, clasping her shoulder. “Andy is …
gone
!”

Nell was gutted by the news, finding it difficult to believe. “No! What was he doing here?”

“He didn’t want us to go without him,” Hender said. His fur flickered dark colors as he reached another trembling hand out to her.

Nell gasped as Hender squeezed her hand. “How?” She looked at Galia furiously.

“A ghost got him,” Hender said.

Nell bowed her head, gritting her teeth from the blow of grief that punched her.

Abrams peered through the window on the other side of the apartment overlooking the river. To the right, a waterfall of blue light bounded, formed by water that had percolated through the bedrock from the slopes of Mount Kazar from a reservoir of bioluminescent algae that fed the subterranean cascade. Nastia looked with him through the window. “That waterfall looks like the waves back home in San Diego, when the algae are blooming,” he said.

“There must be bioluminescent organisms in the water,” Nastia said, marveling at the blue cataract.

“It looks like we’re safe here for the time being,” Bear said. “Let’s sit down for a second and get our bearings.”

They sat on the leather couches around the glass coffee table that reflected the waterfall in the window. The headless mule twitched behind the couch where Nastia, Bear, and Dima sat. Nell sat across from them, exhausted and grief-stricken, her eyes glazing over as she stared at the strange machine that continuously balanced on four legs like a foal behind the couch across from her. “That thing’s a robot, right?”

“Yeah,” Nastia said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “It gives me the creeps, too.”

“OK.” Nell nodded.

Abrams reached into a pack on the side of the mule and fished out a fresh Dragon Skin tunic, tossing it to Nell. “There ya go, Rambo. Put that on.”

“Thanks.” Nell pulled on the heavy jersey. “A ghost ripped my shirt off.”

“You did damn good for a civilian,” Abrams said.

“Yeah.” Bear nodded. “And you saved our asses.”

“Da.”
Dima smiled. “Thanks.”

Abrams pushed several buttons that snapped open his body armor, and he stepped out of it. “OK, we just lost four men. And it looks like we just lost our only known escape route. What’s our plan?”

Nastia pulled out the city map and unfolded it on the coffee table between them.

Hender sat on the couch and typed into his phone:

The 14th Darkness

26,439 years ago, a long night came again, and sels came together, peacefully this time, at last. Only five were left.

“Write now?” Kuzu chided Hender as he sat beside him.

“The Books are written to remember, when darkness comes,” Hender reminded him, and he finished typing his final entry:

The 15th Darkness

Today, the 15th Darkness came.

Kuzu read it before Hender put the phone back into his belly pack.

Nell pointed at the southwest corner of Sector Six on the blueprint. “We’re here, in the main cavern of the city.”

“Yes. Where is Maxim Dragolovich?” Dima said.

“Do you want to rescue him,” Nell asked. “Or kill him?”

“I want to capture him,” Dima said. “And bring him back alive.”

Nell laughed, weeping. “So this whole thing is partially
your
fault,” she said. “Maxim said the government was persecuting him.” She shook her head weakly. “Though I think he was probably insane already, too.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Dima said.

“He was mad,” Galia said sadly. “But they drove him mad.”

Nell pointed at the dormitory inside the hospital sector, which was located on the opposite corner of the map from where they were. “Maxim is trapped here on the second floor of this hospital,” she said. “He was trying to turn on the electrical plant up here.” She pointed to Sector Four. “His men were seconds away from pushing the button and feeding this place with perpetual power. Can you imagine what would have happened if they had succeeded?”

“What, Nell?” Kuzu asked.

“With light and steam and heat down here…”

“Yes?” Kuzu’s deep voice vibrated the air. Purple sparks flashed in his blackened fur like lightning in a storm cloud.

The others regarded him apprehensively.

“The Henders ecosystem would explode, swiftly multiplying until it found a way to spread to the surface, Kuzu,” Nell said. “And kill us all.”

“Oh.”

“As it is, they have already infested the sectors between Maxim and the power plant,” Nell said, pointing. “They’re the only thing now that is stopping him, thank God. He’s trapped and surrounded.”

Galia looked pale, staring inwardly, his shoulders falling. “He was a great man, a great hero. You have no idea.”

“He may have been. I’m sure he was,” Nell said. “But he might be the greatest villain in human history, Mr. Sokolof.”

“They have more blood on their hands than all the villains of the world,” Galia scoffed with a ragged grimace of irony.

“You still don’t understand, do you?” Nell asked. “If
any
Henders species reaches the surface, not one flower or insect will survive longer than a few more decades on any continent on the face of the Earth. The entire world will look.… like this.”

“I have bad news,” Nastia said. “It is believed, by Russian authorities, that the railway line we just set charges in was completed, after all. It may still connect all the way to Metro-Two in Moscow, and from there may well reach points throughout Eastern Europe. I believe I am authorized to tell you this now, considering our situation. It is a secret that the Russian government did not want to reveal, even to this small group, unless it was absolutely necessary. But now that Sector Seven has been breached, you must know. Unless we detonate charges in the train tunnel immediately—”

“Shit!” Bear said.

“They’re set to go off in less than seven hours now,” Abrams said.

“Those incendiary grenades have probably burned out, man,” Bear said. “Those things can move now! There’s nothing stopping them!”

Abrams exchanged the heavy lithium battery pack of the XOS suit with a fresh one. “There’s enough poison gas in that tunnel to choke a herd of wildebeests.”

“Like what?” Nell asked. “What kind of gas?”

“I threw in a cocktail of everything from tear gas to chlorine to tabun gas.”

“Great,” Nell said. “Tabun works only on mammals, tear gas probably won’t have any effect on Henders organisms, but—chlorine gas, you said? That’s good. That should work. But it buys us only a little time before it is dispersed and no longer lethal.”