The Forsaken - The Apocalypse Trilogy: Book Two (56 page)

Menace passed over the Prime’s face.
“
I
need help?”

“Not in the least. But qualified assistance
that you can trust, is rare.” Tiny set his cigarette in the
ashtray. “I can tell that you’re feeling the pinch these days with
the Change and all. More than likely a time is coming when there
will be nothing but trouble.”

The Prime glowered.

“In exchange for the nun I can offer you
three guns.” Tiny watched for reaction. He knew he was taking the
path of least resistance, but he could tell the Prime was too tough
to break down for the quick sale. “You can check our files, you’ll
see we worked for the government as Regulators in the first
years.”

“I have Operatives, City Enforcement
Officers, the whole Westprime Defense Force at my disposal.” The
Prime took a drink. “I need
you
?”

“We’ll do anything
and
enjoy it.” Tiny
summoned up his most dangerous face. “We like to get paid for it,
but we’ll do whatever you ask.
You
decide where you can use
us.” Tiny walked around the bar. “Doesn’t get simpler than
that.”

The Prime shifted uncomfortably on his stool.
The salesman walked over and took the next seat.

“We’ve been living by the sword for over a
hundred years, Mr. Prime.” Tiny let that sink in. “And we’ve buried
every gunman who thought he was better.”

The Prime listened. A grin pulled at the
corner of his mouth.

“And sir.” The salesman sipped his drink. “We
have schooled ourselves in all the deadly arts.”

The Prime burst out laughing. “I can’t
believe you little shyster bastard!” He pounded the bar. “You come
here and pitch yourself and your partners like I need you more than
my entire defense force. Do you know we’re being monitored? If I
make a signal, twenty Enforcers will come in here and beat you
until you give us Sister Cawood.”

“But you won’t, Mr. Prime.” Tiny tipped his
drink until the ice cubes rubbed his nose. “You’re not a stupid
man. You’ve got to realize that I’ve survived in a very dangerous
business for a very long time. I wouldn’t come here like this
unarmed, without some kind of back up plan.”

“Bunch of talk!” The Prime looked around
nervously.

“Maybe, but if it isn’t?” The salesman
smiled.

“Mr. Tiny, you’ve got nerve.” The Prime’s
eyes grew dark, and then twinkled with frustration or madness.
“I’ll give you that.” The Prime’s manner hinted at absurdity.
“Fine, give me Cawood, and you’re hired.”

“Almost done.” Tiny reached out and shook the
Prime’s powerful hand. “As a sign of good faith, I’d like a
retainer of a hundred thousand dollars just to cover our expenses.
And so we can get set up in town.”

“Ransom too,” the Prime hissed. “You want a
job,
and
payment for the nun!” The big man chuckled and
gestured at the windows. “If you knew what was happening out there,
you’d laugh along.” He smiled sickly. “I’ll give you the money,
cash, when I see Cawood.” He chortled. “Money’s irrelevant.”

“Not to me, sir.” Tiny showed his teeth.

“Fine, I’ll have the money sent up.” The
Prime’s smile flexed unnaturally. His eyes glimmered like coals.
“Try anything and you’ll die.”

“Understood.” Tiny stepped off his stool,
releasing the Prime’s hand. “Thanks for the drink.” He wiped his
palm on his jacket pocket. “If I could make a call, I’ll tell my
partners to bring her up?”

“She’s in the Tower?” the Prime asked,
incredulous.

“Used her key too,” Tiny said and nodded.

79 – Primed for Action

The Prime needed, fuck,
yearned
to
question his captive.
When you know the God-wife Cawood before
me, all the world will tremble
. What the hell did that mean?
Knowing was Bible-talk for fucking, so that was easy enough. The
world trembling was another matter. Events were moving at dangerous
speeds and he had to deal with riddles. That could prove lethal to
his plans, even heaven forbid, to the leader of Westprime. Earth
shattering Powers were on the move and he was doing hostage deals
and job interviews with gangsters. He took a breath.
Was it
overconfidence
?

He had the First-mother. I can’t wait for a
piece of that. The Demon organ twitched with sinister anticipation.
Cawood was almost in his grasp.
Nice to get a piece of that
too
. With a single command, General Topp had orders to fry ‘B’
group targets in the other primes. And his Final Solution was ready
too. At the first sign of betrayal or defeat, the Prime would burn
the City to cinders.

So why so glum?

He just needed to check in. He needed
something concrete to work with. His plans were in place but this
was based on what his captive said or insinuated. Oh, never a
straightforward story. Nothing obvious—it was always fucking
riddles.
Oh, I taught him a thing or two about those fucking
riddles over the years
. But it seemed the Divine Compact
governed the beast even in bondage. Which meant that so much of
what he had set in motion had depended on augury and coercion.
And you know what they say about confessions gained from
torture
.

“Stop it!” he growled to himself and hurried
along the corridor to his office. His Demon organ twitched to life
as he thought of his captive and the day they caught him.

Fifty years before, he received a call from
Westprime Radar Defense alerting him to a “situation.” Two objects
flying twice the speed of sound were spotted approximately two
hundred miles south of the City of Light and closing. None of the
other cities would lay claim to them. F-45 jetfighters were
scrambled. They were the top of the line in reverse engineered
battle technology. They closed on the targets in minutes.

And things got weird.

Colonel Nathan Grant, a veteran of three
pre-Change wars reported seeing Angels flying in a south to north
trajectory at close to Mach 2.
Angels
. Everybody had a big
laugh about that one until he clarified.

“Angels you assholes,” he reported: “Angels
like you’d see in the Bible.” And a quote: “Nasty fuckers too with
Roman armor and swords.”

The chuckles stumbled awkwardly around
defense control until Grant’s wingman Cubby Livingston confirmed
the sighting.

Two Angels—one flying in hot pursuit of the
other were locked in mortal combat. That was confirmed later by
radar operators who watched the two blips on the screen perform a
fantastic dogfight. The blips engaged again and again at incredible
speeds and altitudes. The pilots reported flying through shockwaves
and seeing blasts of fire. Then one of the targets disappeared from
the radar. The Prime later watched tapes of the fight on monitors
in his office.

Then the pursuing Angel engaged the
jetfighters.

After one pass there was nothing on the
radar. Half the Westprime Air Defense was in the air minutes
later.

Rescue and fire crews were dispatched toward
columns of thick black smoke. The F-45’s were scattered over a
couple miles of blackened terrain. They found Grant writhing in the
remains of his parachute. He was severed across the legs and one
arm. The wounds were cauterized. He reported that the Angel had
taken his jet out with one chop of a flaming sword. He would
survive but the Prime didn’t think there was much point. The sword
didn’t just remove his legs. The wingman’s body was never
recovered.

It was supposed that the blip that vanished
had somehow slipped under the radar but the Prime saw another
possibility. He ordered up one of his personal helicopters and gave
its navigator the information regarding the unidentified aircraft’s
last location. The navigator set up a search grid in an area fifty
miles from the City over which the second blip had flown before
disappearing.

They reached the location in less than twenty
minutes. For aircrew, the Prime had chosen his own pilot, navigator
and two Operatives he kept as constant bodyguards. They all died
later in an unavoidable and catastrophic accident. The Prime
chuckled, remembering. You’ve got to be careful around jet
fuel.

When the pilot saw a naked man draped over
the low branches of a scorched and smoking cedar tree, the Prime
ordered the helicopter to land. He remembered the scene very well.
The injured man had a great mane of dark brown hair. His features
were European, definitely European. He was without apparent
injury—a masterpiece of muscle and sinew—a beauty so profound the
Prime immediately recognized its supernatural underpinnings. But he
wasn’t breathing.

The Prime ordered the corpse taken to the
Tower for dissection. The Tower was under construction then, and
his offices were rising with it. On the way back to the City—the
corpse took a breath, and showed signs of returning to life. It was
brought in through one of the Authority safe houses on Zero because
the Prime didn’t want competing interests to know about his
discovery. The creature did not regain consciousness for three
years.

A good thing too, the Prime remembered, since
it had taken his Demon Ally that long to teach the incantations
that would keep the thing captive. They installed its prison at the
base of the Tower and there it stayed for decades—probably going
mad in isolation.

In time the Prime had learned new and better
techniques for drawing information from it. The thing could see the
future, had told him about the First-mother, and the importance of
knowing
the God-wife. It foretold the coming Apocalypse and
saw the Prime ruling the world.

It was all coming together, and that made a
certain sense, but the Prime barely trusted his own eyes any more,
let alone prophesy tortured out of a captured Angel.

80 – Fugitives

The way out of the Tower and away into the
dark and scary tunnels was too much for some of the forever
children. They were strange creatures with long and often troubled
pasts; so many of them were reduced to near catatonic states by the
dark, by their time imprisoned in the Tower, and by the possibility
that they may actually be free. They were afraid to believe it.

So Dawn and Meg did their best to encourage
any of the frightened kids they came across,
the Squeakers
,
as the Quinlan boys called them. Eventually, Meg got busy helping a
group of scared kids ahead, and Dawn got caught encouraging a group
of little ones who were crying behind, and so they lost track of
each other as they ran through the dark.

But they both had their hands full. No sooner
would Dawn get one forever child running again than another pair
would turn to the tunnel wall and start crying.

She’d whisper to them about Nurserywood.
She’d tell them about Arthur the giant and most came around pretty
quickly. She was afraid that some of the kids who felt the worst
would panic and run off in terror, but then the grownup voice in
her head just told her to do the best she could.
You’ve got to
get away too, Dawn
!

And her memories of Nursie scared away any
argument over that.

As she carried on, Dawn was amazed to see
other kids appearing at the sides of the tunnels and on ladders,
others like Liz and the Quinlan twins and that curious Conan with
the helmet and finger-thing. These kids also wore plastic, metal
and fiberglass armor and carried steel cutting weapons and small
guns.

They also referred to the more frightened
kids as
Squeakers
but were quickly silenced if Dawn gave
them her worst and angriest look.

Then Liz came back to her. The little girl
chain-smoked her way through the dark, pushing past all those
little white nightshirts.

“Come on,” Liz puffed, grabbing Dawn’s arm.
“Sorry to let you slide back.” The little girl looked around
worriedly. “Where’s Conan?”

But Dawn had no idea where the little
Nightcare fighter was. He moved like a ghost in the first place,
and running in the dark had left her disoriented.

She winced and pulled away when Liz grabbed
her roughly by the arm. Dawn stopped and pointed a finger at Liz’s
little chest. “That’s enough pulling.” Tears started in her
eyes—but she steadied her voice. “And enough pushing.” When she saw
the tough girl’s worried expression she softened. “I’m coming.”

They’d been jogging for some time already,
and the tunnels were full of forever kids and electric and fear
smells and none of it was very pleasant. At a certain point where
the underground lights were brighter Dawn saw the horrible stains
on her nightshirt and realized some of the bad smells must be
coming from her. She kept her mind from the ugly idea by turning
her thoughts to running. Dawn was a good runner and she smiled when
Liz had to stop lighting cigarettes to keep up.

“Who are the new kids?” Dawn asked pointing
at a surly looking black boy with a handgun and motorcycle
helmet.

“Nightcare fighters,” Liz puffed, her weapons
clanking, “sent by the Creature to get stragglers.”

And Dawn was suddenly encouraged by the
notion that the scared kids, the ones who might get lost would be
helped by these more experienced fighters.

“What’s the Creature?” she asked, realizing
with dread that she already had her fill of
creatures
.

“You’ll see,” Liz said, then hacked and
spat.

It wasn’t long before they had to slow, as
the way through sewers and tunnels got crowded with forever
children. They hurried as best they could, past groups of kids
sitting and huddling, and further on some eating and drinking being
tended to by Nightcare fighters and strange grownups.

“Nightcare workers,” Liz explained, noticing
Dawn’s dismay at the adults. But she didn’t say more.

Then as the going got thick and crowded, she
started to recognize some of the forever kids she’d known during
her stay at the Tower. These stood up, some even clapped and
cheered when they saw her—before being hushed.