Shutter (19 page)

Oliver continued: “Your anomaly’s still on the top floor—”

I didn’t hear the rest, Oliver’s words cut off by gunfire and an angry shriek. I glanced down and realized the necros were crawling up the stairwell’s inner flanks. Ducking pincers, Ryder shot one necro point-blank in the face. I leveled my Colt and sank a bullet into each pincer before the necro could strike again. Jude brought the butt of his rifle down on the necro’s finger-claws, the
crunch
audible from where I stood. It shrieked and lost its balance, knocking several of its companions off the walls and rails as it fell.

When I ran out of stairs at the twenty-sixth story, I stumbled through the doorway and into the top-floor lobby, praying nothing waited on the other side. Clear. Jude and Ryder scrambled past the threshold, slammed the door, and broke off the door handle with a rifle’s butt.

The relief my muscles craved was lost in a place like this, with death just footsteps away. I choked on air, every muscle screaming for oxygen. The boys didn’t look much better—heaving, breathless. Jude leaned over and put his hands on his knees, flinching when one of the necros banged into the door.

In the deep darkness ahead, something giggled. Not a girlish giggle, not a happy giggle, but a half-wheezed, radio-static, ghostly sound that froze us cold. No doubt the entity enjoyed watching us squirm. Maybe that’s why it hunkered down here in the PacBell—because it knew that even if we managed to locate it, we’d be beaten and exhausted by the time we reached the top floor.

“That door won’t hold long,” Ryder said, his words half coughed. Jude bobbed his head and pushed up. “Ollie, we need a path to the roof.”

My comm crackled in my ear. “Either you head north through the auditorium and deal with the anomaly, or you move through the south hall. You’ll find an emergency exit to the roof on either side of the building.”

One of the necros slammed into the other side of the door, denting it. The boys looked to me for a decision, a choice I didn’t have time to make the right way. If those scorpion-necros got through the door before I defeated our ghost, someone could end up dead. But to come all this way without even trying to exorcise our captor seemed even more reckless.

I went with my gut: “Let’s take out our ghost.”

Jude spat, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and bobbed his head.
Okay
. Ryder palmed his rifle’s barrel. Agreement enough.

“
Semper Vigilans,
guys,” Oliver said.

We moved forward like a unit, the boys lighting the way with their rifle-mounted flashlights. I walked into the darkness with more confidence than I felt, almost able to hear how hard Ryder gripped his rifle. His breath pushed past my hair, so close was he; I holstered the Colt and took out my camera, locking a lens into the casing. I tried not to think about how outnumbered we were and how under-armed I felt … or how we’d escaped a nightmare in order to walk into a circle of hell.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire
, as Mom would say.

The elevator doors glared in the low light, stamped with bloody, multifingered handprints and trails of black ash. Half-eaten corpses littered the floor. The hall on our right looked like a black hole, dark and just as hungry. I motioned the boys left—north—with my head. Windows rose on one side of the hall, their panes sealed in fog. Hardly any of the city’s light penetrated this high.

We made it a few steps in before Jude cursed and swung his rifle toward the windows. “Something moved out there,” he said softly.

“Did you get a visual?” Ryder asked.

“Just a shadow.”

Those monsters were already loose in the city, and we didn’t have the firepower to exterminate them all. We’d have to tip off dispatch, maybe get the Harker Elite to blast the nest with napalm or something. Or had Jude seen the ghost’s miasma, waiting for us?

“Keep moving, backs to the wall,” Ryder said. The boys sneaked sideways, keeping their weapons trained on the windows. Ambient light punched out the darkness ahead.

Behind us, metal squealed like a disemboweled animal. A necro shrieked. Without a word, we broke into a run, slipping into the auditorium. Ryder grabbed one door, Jude the other, tugging them closed soundlessly. Jude ran his hand over the lever handles.

“I can lock these,” he said, taking a knee and pulling out his picks. “It’ll slow them down.”

“Hurry,” Ryder said.

I turned to face the auditorium. The smell of decay sweetened the air. Ryder ran his rifle-mounted flashlight over the room, touching on cracked bones, maggot-infested flesh, and wisps of black fog that slithered back from the light. I’d seen this room before, in the vision back at the house, and the details rushed me all at once: the huge windows, the chandeliers, the delicate artwork inlaid in the ceilings.

I crossed myself and powered up my flash as the room’s pressure shifted, an impossible breeze moving through the air.

“Helsing,” our entity whispered. “Predictable. Little. Fools.”

Ryder’s rifle muzzle hissed through the air as he turned toward the voice, his leather holsters creaking. Jude glanced up, but kept working the locks with his picks.

Violet ghostlight sparked at the auditorium’s west edge, bright enough to illuminate a large stage before the black fog twisted around the entity again. My soulchains jerked in my gut, and I knew,
I knew
, this was the entity I’d fought last night.

“It’s here,” I said, swinging my monopod off and clipping it onto my camera. “Hold the doors and cover me.”

“Three minutes,” Jude said, pulling a steel chain out of his pack and threading it between the door handles. “That’s all I can guarantee.”

“I’ve got your back,” Ryder said to me. “Focus on the takedown.”

I nodded, not taking my gaze off the miasma.

Three minutes.

I’d make it enough.

SATURDAY, 3:02 A.M.

T
HE ENTITY LEAPT DOWN
from the stage, its miasma bubbling over the floor. The black fog touched corpses, slipping into their mouths and putting on their bones. Staticky groans split the air like bullwhips, the corpses rising, animated not by a bacteria but by the ghost’s own power. Instead of ghostlit beacons, they became voids. In one shaky heartbeat, I learned what it meant to face down the dead in the dark, to see the world through normal eyes and be rendered vulnerable by shadow.

“Corpses up,” I shouted. Ryder called my name as I sprinted toward the stage, dodging bodies. A rifle barked, taking out a half-gone corpse that lunged at me. Two steps more, and a crawling corpse grabbed me by the ankle. Catching myself, I pivoted and stomped on its wrist, breaking bones. Its fingers loosened. I jammed my monopod’s knife in its spine, spilling black miasma onto the floor.

As I zigzagged through the mob, I prayed Ryder would aim true. The dead thinned as I approached the stage, bullets singing and ricocheting around me, death on all sides.

My ghost waited for me, surrounded by miasma denser than bay fog.
Coward.
I lifted my camera and fired, cracking the darkness. The ghost bounded aside, splitting its miasma into two figures. The shadows charged me from both sides—I shot one and it dissipated into the flash. Dodging the shadow containing the ghost, I spun and shot it again, knocking the miasma away. Before I got off another shot, something tackled me from behind. Slimy hands scrabbled at my skin. With a grunt, I flipped on my back and elbowed the corpse in the face. A bullet shoved it off me—Ryder tracked my movements with his flashlight, covering me.

I recovered my footing, but the ghost’s miasma materialized close and lashed out. A physical pressure slammed into my chest, knocking me back to the ground. I rolled to protect my camera, keeping it in a cage between my body and arms.

“What do you want?” I shouted at the entity, pushing back to my feet.

“Vengeance,” it rasped. “I’ll rip the heart right out of Helsing, starting with you.”

I snarled. “Is that you, Luca?”

“Luca?” The entity’s laugh sounded like claws scraping chalkboard. It beckoned to me, making the soulchains bubble up and sear my skin with frostbite. “Are you stupid as well as blind, girl?”

“How’s this for stupid?” I aimed my lens and fired. The flash seared through the miasma, blasting it apart. Every window along the wall reflected the flash’s white brilliance. The ghost screamed, the sound grating against my frontal lobe. Gritting my teeth, I fired a second time.

When the shutter opened, I almost couldn’t process the scene:

The ghost stumbled back toward one of the windowpanes,

No more than a smear of light, and shrieking.

The glass crackled with violet-white sparks—

Like a reaping mirror would spark while absorbing a ghost.

I wasn’t sure what it meant, and I didn’t care. Whatever happened,
however
it happened, I’d finally scored a hit. I advanced my film.

The ghost dove left, drawing its miasma close as a funeral shroud. Sidestepping, I lined up my lens with the next window, hitting the shutter just as the ghost moved between glass pane and lens. The flash detonated and the shutter cut, blacking out the world for an instant.

The ghost roared. A waterfall of sparks crashed over the windowpane—not absorbing them, of course, but somehow splitting the entity’s energy between the windows and my lens.

“Enough,” the ghost hissed, thrusting a ghostlit hand from its miasma. Its shadows exploded toward me, weaving into black chains. I ducked as a chain lashed at my head, then used my flash to stop another one from slamming into my abdomen.

“Micheline,” Ryder shouted. “We can’t hold the doors much longer.”

“A little busy,” I shouted back, the effort breaking my focus long enough for a chain to smack into my back. It whipped the breath out of me. A fourth chain wrapped around my ankles and yanked me skyward. The world inverted and I swung like a freaking piñata. Blood rushed to my head and almost knocked me out. I glimpsed the ghost’s miasma crawling up the wall, roach-like. Coming for me. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a wash of light near the auditorium entrance.

The boys backed toward the middle of the room, their rifles leveled at the pregnant doors. Ghostlight-tinged arms reached inside, doors bending inward under the pressure and only held closed by Jude’s steel chain. Curses mashed up in my head.

“Find the exit,” I shouted. The effort made me dizzy. They called out to me, pointed their flashlights right at my face, singeing my sight. “Just go!”

My night vision corroded, I barely saw the miasma slithering down the chain. With what strength I had left, I put my viewfinder to my eye, did an abdominal curl, and hit the shutter. The flash ricocheted off the ceiling, reflecting the light. The entity shrieked and the chain gave way, dropping us onto the auditorium floor. Pain rammed my spine, stunning me.

The metal doors squealed. A scorpion-necro breached the room, lifted its stinger, and screamed. Rifles barked, bullets whizzing over me and chewing into the creature’s back.

I tried to move, but cold shadows whispered over my knees and up my thighs, calling to me. Ozone sizzled in the air, and the ghost’s hand clamped over my ankle, its miasma rolling over my body. My camera lay faceup on the floor, my index finger on the shutter. If I could just move my finger an inch or so …

“You’ll be less curious without your pretty eyes, little Helsing,” the entity whispered, its fingers sliding over my cheeks. “You can’t die yet, but I can’t have you coming after me, either. Shush now—”

Nobody shushes me
. The thought triggered my index finger and I shot off wild, blinding light. The entity scrambled away, its shadows ripped to shreds for an instant, hidden to my burned-up vision. I grabbed my camera and rose into a crouch.

The auditorium doors gave way, spilling the necros into the room. A flashlight’s beam bounced over me. “C’mon!” Ryder grabbed me by the arm and pulled me to my feet.

“Let me finish it off—”

“No time.” Ryder pushed me ahead of him.

The entity shrieked, but I didn’t look back. Jude’s flashlight blazed twenty yards ahead. Ryder and I sprinted toward the light, bullets screaming by on semiautomatic. I plunged past Jude and into the fire escape stairwell.

I scaled the stairs on a breath and broke out onto the roof. The wind whipped at my face. Jude came through next, Ryder at his back. Ryder slammed the door closed and grabbed me by the hand.

We ran for the building’s edge. Jude leapt up beside one of the big eagles. “We’re on the west side,” he shouted over the wind. “We should have a clear landing if we jump due south, there’s a park.”

“Are you crazy?” I shouted back, uncoupling my camera and strapping my monopod across my back. “We can’t jump in this fog—”

The doors slammed off their hinges, the necros crawling out on a tide of black miasma. My breath caught in my throat. Ryder pulled me close, coupled our harnesses, and shoved a small cylindrical object in my hand. A trigger for a claymore mine—a
bomb
.

“You set the claymores?” I shouted. An explosion wouldn’t harm the ghost, but it would blow the scorpion-necros all to hell … along with the building’s top floor.

“Hit the trigger as we jump,” Ryder said.

“See you on the ground,” Jude shouted. He leapt off the building, disappearing into the fog’s gullet. My stomach somersaulted. We were so high up.

“Ready?” Ryder asked. I linked my arms around his neck, my thumb on the cylindrical trigger.

“Go,” I shouted.

We leapt out into the air—I hit the trigger reflexively. Wind screamed in my ears and tore at my skin, making me weightless. Our chute deployed with a
bang
and broke our fall, yanking us upright.

Ryder aimed the jump well, letting us cruise over the Museum of Modern Art and touching down in the park across the street. We fumbled the landing, tumbling over the ground in the ripstop parachute. I ended up on top of him, half sobbing, half laughing, and shocked to be alive.

Explosions rent the night, lighting the fog like blurry fireworks. Ryder uncoupled our harnesses and pushed up into a sitting position. I straddled his lap as we watched the flames gnaw on the building.