The Enclave (63 page)
Cursing as fluidly and coarsely as any sailor, Swain threw down the scalpel and flew out of the cage to seize Cam by the front of his coverall. “Did you do this?”
“I knew they would be coming eventually,” Cam said calmly.
Swain shoved his face into Cam’s, teeth bared, free hand clenched into a fist, which Cam thought he might swing at any moment. He was interrupted by a loud ripping sound behind him, as of a huge zipper being worked.
Cam’s gaze flashed to the pod in horror. It was now bulging and shivering, as if someone inside was pushing out. Another rip broke the silence; then a long, clawed hand covered with tarry ooze protruded from the pod, groping the air. It was not nearly as large as Cam had expected it would be.
In moments the Nephilim had fully emerged, covered in black goo, a scrawny, bony, stooped-over thing half the height of the pod that had held it—which still made it taller than any man in the room. It leaned weakly against the pod, then took a sudden gasping breath and coughed out a gout of black phlegm. Immediately its crest stood upright; its eyes opened and it turned to look at the people standing around its cage, mesmerized with disbelief.
In that moment Cam realized Swain had left the cage gate open. The web-spinner tech, who had gotten out of his chair when the intercom announced they were under attack, now stood directly in front of the opening. He seemed to realize his peril at the same moment Cam did and was reaching to close the gate when the Nephilim charged out of the cage to seize him and bite away his face. In seconds it had torn off the man’s coverall and ripped away an arm, spraying blood everywhere. Cam watched in horror as fat droplets fell onto the neighboring pod, sizzled, hissed, and disappeared.
Swain was already moving for the floor-level doorway beyond the foot of the metal stairway, his security guards closing in around him. The Nephilim, not about to let his food sources escape, dropped the first tech and lunged for a second, tearing off his head. The decapitated body fell spinning, blood pulsing out in long bright streams that fell upon the remaining pods. Meanwhile the Nephilim ignored a third tech, who was seeking cover behind the cage, and went after the group fleeing for the tunnel.
Heart pounding so hard he thought it would burst from his chest, Cam backed slowly away, sidling between the chains in the hope they might obscure him from the eyes of the frenzied Nephilim. By the time he stopped backing up and made slowly for the offside of the observation booth, Swain and most of his guards had escaped, as had all the observers in the booth. The rest—all the techs and a third of the guards—were dead. And now, finally, the Nephilim fell to feeding.
It was shortly interrupted by the emergence of a second and then a third Nephilim, both of whom immediately challenged it. The feeding stopped, and the battle for dominance erupted in a din of bellowing and shrieking. This, Cam knew, was his chance to get around the booth and back to one of the only points of exit. He’ d noted earlier that a space large enough to crawl through lay between the line of steel drums and the front wall of the observation booth, but it was as if the sound of the battle held him pressed to the side wall, eyes closed, fighting panic.
By the time he’d nerved himself to move, the contest had subsided. A peek around the corner showed the first Nephilim to be discernibly larger than when it had emerged and clearly distinguishable from the other two—not only by its greater size but by its warm golden skin, the black goo having completely disappeared. It still had most of its kills piled around it, though its two companions had managed to steal a couple for themselves. For the moment the monsters’ need to eat overrode questions of how many corpses each would acquire and keep.
What they had would not be nearly enough, though, so if Cam stayed where he was, he would not survive. The fourth and fifth Neph-ilim would soon emerge from their pods, both having been sprayed with sufficient blood to initiate the opening sequence. When they came out, he would go.
That moment came sooner than he expected. As the challenging began all over again, he dropped to hands and knees and crawled as fast as he could behind the drums. Reaching the end of them, he dashed across the remaining five feet of wall and around the metal scaffolding to crouch at the foot of the stairway, thanking God he’ d not been spotted. Though the whole of the stair support frame now stood between him and the Nephilim, its open slatted structure provided only moderate cover. He couldn’t stay there long, and now he had another choice to make: should he bolt across the twenty feet of open floor separating him from the tunnel Swain had disappeared into, or climb the stairs to the almost certainly locked door into the observation booth?
Neither was terribly appealing.
Well, Lord? What do you want me
to do?
Suddenly another great boom sounded, this one the loudest and strongest of all. The concussion blew out the “impact-resistant” windows of the booth above him, shook the walls, and rained glass, dust, and bits of rock upon him. The blast startled the Nephilim out of their quarreling, and to Cam’s horror all five turned to stare up at the booth.
Was that Rudy’s team blowing the heavy doors between the orange and red sectors? Probably. For a moment he thought to warn them lest they come blundering into the fray and certain death, then realized Rudy would know better. . . .
When nothing further happened, the Nephilim turned back to each other, and the bellowing began anew. Seconds later, seven soldiers in full body armor came rappelling out of the empty front window frames of the observation booth, even as its side door exploded outward. Two more soldiers exited through the latter and raced down the stairway, past Cam and around into a flanking position, firing their weapons as they went. Meanwhile the rest of their team laid down covering fire from the booth, all of which was, of course, useless, as the Nephilim’s skin sent the bullets ricocheting every which way.
Cam watched the monsters rise to meet the intruders, the younger ones energized by the entrance of fresh meat yet unclaimed. Then someone from the booth fired a rocket-propelled grenade right at the feet of one of the recently emerged Nephilim. It blew the scrawny, black-coated monster ten feet into the air and backward across the steel tables and their now-empty pods. Knowing there was nothing he could do to help the soldiers, Cam charged up the stairway into the gutted observation booth, pushed through the unlatched door into the meeting room, and pulled up in shock to find Rudy slumped against a wall, bright red blood glistening in a huge splotch across the front of his chest.
“Rudy?” he cried, his voice lost in the chaos of noise.
His friend looked up at him just as the thunderous booming of multiple explosions set the floor jumping and bucking. Cam was knocked off his feet by a powerful blast wave as the prep room disappeared beneath a mound of stone and dirt and the lights went out.
New Eden
As Lacey and her companions returned down the tunnel from the physical plant and the familiar form of the mall’s island appeared at the end of it, she prayed that Zowan was right about the alternative route through the Sanctuary. And that it had survived the earthquake.
It still irked her to think of all the time they’d wasted trying to convince the wives to leave. Only Andrea was with them, and she hadn’t needed persuading. If they’d left when Rudy had told them to, they’d have gotten away. As it was they had just reached the intersection below the physical plant when the world heaved beneath their feet and the tunnel had collapsed before them.
That was when Zowan recalled the small robing room he and Cam had found off the Sanctuary, which he thought might lead up to the surface.
There were more people in the mall now than before, and it was from them Lacey and the others learned that the entire Justorium had collapsed in the tremor, burying all who had been inside. Lacey thought it was a miracle the mall hadn’t collapsed, as well, given all the cracks and gaps that now marred its ceiling plaster. As she examined it, she noted the wives standing at the Residence’s now glassless window, barely visible in the darkness behind the metal scrollwork, stubbornly holding to their prison.
Zowan led the way up the mall, glass crunching under their feet as they hurried toward the Sanctuary, which appeared to be intact— though the statue at the foot of the ramp had fallen over, and one of its pair of large frosted glass doors hung askew. They told those they passed of a possible exit from the Enclave, but were met with the same hostile obstinacy they’d encountered with Father’s wives. Even with their world falling down around them, the Edenites refused to believe there might be something better elsewhere, clinging to the familiar and the comfortable.
Lacey and her group had just reached the front court when the crunch of feet on rock and glass echoed out of the lower corridor, and a bright circle of hand lamps approached rapidly through the dusty darkness. Soon the party was revealed to be a cadre of dust-coated Enforcers and black-tunicked Institute security guards moving en masse around Parker Swain. Swain was much the worse for wear—face and hair spattered with blood, clothing torn and dirty. His expression was one of livid fury.
He and his group surged past Lacey and her friends, heading straight across the court for the upper corridor. Either he didn’t recognize any of them—entirely possible given their own coating of white dust—or no longer cared.
Seeing him, though, the others in the mall, mostly older folks and children, cried out with joy, and hurried to meet him. “Oh, Father! At last you’ve come! We have prayed and prayed for your return!” They told him about the Justorium and all the people killed and trapped.
Swain blew by them all, telling them he had more important things to deal with. He left them standing openmouthed in his wake and was only brought to a stop when he came face-to-face with one of his zig security officers. “The tunnel to the helipad is blocked, sir,” the bodyguard gasped. “We can’t get through.”
Swain swore emphatically, did a half-turn back, then barked, “What of the chopper? Is it intact? Is it flyable?”
“I don’t know, sir. We’ve had no communication with the helipad at all since the cave-ins. The lines are all down. But people in the hall near the Justorium said they were using it to evacuate the injured.”
“
What
? By whose order?”
“I don’t know, sir. I don’t even know if it was true. It’s a moot point now if we can’t reach the helipad. I suggest you take the Sanctuary exit.”
Suddenly Theia and her coterie of terrified wives appeared out of the lower corridor and hurried toward them. “Oh, Husband,” Theia cried. “Here we are, ready for you to take us to safety!”
If Swain knew Theia was addressing him, he gave no indication, angling past her toward the Sanctuary ramp. “Keep them all away from me,” he commanded his Enforcers. They immediately formed a line between him and the others as he and the Institute security guards stalked up the ramp. Halfway up he turned, lifted the assault rifle Lacey had not noticed he’ d been carrying, and opened fire, shooting first into the backs of his Enforcers, then raking bullets across the crowd at large.
Hardly believing her eyes, Lacey saw Theia and all her girls flung backward as the bullets tore into them. People started to run or dive for the floor, Lacey one of them. The moment she hit the ground, someone fell half upon her, and then someone else.
Her ears buffeted by the thunderous reports, she clenched her eyes shut and prayed. The weapon seemed to fire forever, but finally its hideous blasts devolved into a series of clicks as Swain kept the trigger down, though the gun’s magazine was empty. Then those, too, stopped, leaving only the cries and moans of the wounded.
Terrified he would reload and start again, Lacey lay where she was, trying to breathe in slow, shallow breaths, feigning death. A sharp pain pierced her right hip, and a warm sticky wetness ran down the side of her face. The body upon her was crushing to the point it stimulated waves of claustrophobic panic.
Please, God, let him leave now!
Instead, Swain and his guards started shooting the wounded. The moans soon turning to pleas for mercy and screams of terror cut off by short bursts of gunfire. She was shaking uncontrollably now, biting her lip to keep back the sobs of terror that wracked her.
Finally Swain cut it off. “That’s good enough,” he told his men. “If we don’t go now, we won’t get out at all.” Multiple pairs of boots gritted on glass and rock as the men congregated by the ramp, then moved up into the Sanctuary and faded away. She heard the faint, distant sound of a door opening and closing, then nothing except a soft, rattling moan not far from her. It carried on for a few breaths, then silenced, and she lay there, her ears ringing, afraid of moving, though the body atop her seemed as if it was slowly crushing her.
It was many long, tortuous moments before she dared lift her head. The smell of burned flesh and blood and the sulfur of gunpowder flooded her nose and mouth, and she coughed. That provoked the person lying on top of her to move, and she soon saw that it was Terra, who had been sandwiched between Lacey and Zowan. As Lacey pushed herself to her knees, a middle-aged woman stirred not far ahead of her, wriggling out from under a dead man in a field of bodies drenched in blood and broken glass, dust still swirling gently through shafts of light from the sky holes.
Every Enforcer lay dead, sprawled in the ring they had formed to protect their “Father.” Theia and her girls also lay where they had fallen. Poor Andrea Stopping had been shot dead where she’d stood just behind Lacey, perhaps by the same bullet that had skipped along Lacey’s ribs. That and the glass cut on her hip from when she’ d fallen were her only injuries. The blood on her face was Zowan’s, who had a bloody bullet track along his temple and a big chunk of flesh blown out of his upper arm. Terra had come through with no more than a few cuts and bruises.
Parthos had not been so lucky. His body lay almost immediately in front of them, and seeing how badly he’ d been shot up, Lacey thought he might well have been the salvation of the rest of them. Finding him, his two friends stood over his body and stared down at it dumbly, as if they couldn’t believe what they saw. Terra was first to break, sagging to her knees beside the corpse with a moaned, “Oh, Parthos . . . ” Moments later, Zowan fell beside her, wrapping his good arm around her as she wept while tear tracks glistened down his cheeks.
