The Terminals (11 page)

“Volt,” I called and snatched at the man's flailing boot, feeling the skin of my palm tear beneath the leather.

“He blocked it,” Volt said and coughed. “Blocked it from me.”

Volt appeared to have missed the worst of the blast, but he fumbled dazedly with the man who was drenched.

I grabbed Volt by the arm. “We have to get him to the shower.”

Volt's face remained blank and then suddenly roused. “The shower!”

He caught the man's wrist and held firm as the man hollered. I fell across the injured officer's knees, landing upon him so that I could at last clutch an ankle, and together, we hauled him to the shower.

Others had found it now, and they grudgingly made room for the new casualty.

At some point the lights had flickered on and others in white masks rushed to help the injured. In the yellow glow, Volt's cheeks had begun to pit and blister, but he stood by until every one of his people had had their chance and only then did he plunge his head under the shower's cooling jet. I'd seen the look on his face before, on the faces of my own injured soldiers; it held the sting of betrayal, and it lingered over me, smoldering like the acid.

Like the blood already on my hands.

Chapter 16

Charlie didn't see Hillar move
until it was too late.

After Charlie sent the message through the crystal doorknob, he'd waited, hoping that he'd somehow receive word from Attila that the mission was accomplished. He couldn't even be certain that time passed here in the same way it did in the lowest deep of Earth, but saw no reason why it wouldn't. To mark the time, Charlie picked off approaching bone-bats. It became a game, fun even, and he'd wait until the last minute to blow them away. When the twentieth cloud of bone-bats disintegrated from Charlie's shotgun blast, Hillar pounced.

At first Charlie thought he was after the gun and turned to grip it in his armpit. But Hillar didn't want the gun; Hillar snagged the leather strap that held the crystal doorknob about Charlie's neck. With a jerk of Hillar's wrist, the thong snapped. Charlie gave a strangled cry and lunged forward, but Hillar skated away, dancing back until his shoulders pressed up against the Archon's teeth.

“No!” Charlie called out, realizing what Hillar had done. Charlie had been a fool—if he could sense Hillar, then surely Hillar could have sensed Charlie following him. Hillar had set a trap, and Charlie had blundered into it. “Hillar has the crystal!”

But Hillar loosed a great scream, which he held like a soprano holding a note, drowning out all else. As Charlie sprinted toward him, the lion that graced Hillar's chest sprang against the skin, engulfed the crystal in its jaws and pulled it into himself. Hillar's scream ended abruptly. He drew a deep breath, and shouted the very name of the Archon he'd bargained with Charlie to obtain.

“
ABRASAX!
” As if losing his balance, Hillar mock-windmilled his arms.

Charlie brought the shotgun around and fired into the lion-headed tattoo. A flash of blue at Charlie's chest was quickly followed by blood at Hillar's, and he toppled into the darkness beyond the mouth.

The teeth were shut when Charlie slammed into them, and a bone-bat needled his shoulder. Almost unthinking, Charlie cocked the gun over his shoulder and blew the bat into non-existence. He plucked the barbed beak out and tossed it to the ground in disgust.

If Hillar knew the name of the Archon, there could be only one reason why to trick Charlie. To add more bodies to his name, those of the kids, or whoever went on his wild goose chase. Charlie stopped and stared at his hands and forearms. They had thinned. Somehow, in the last several minutes, he'd shed pounds of muscle. The runes smudged. He recalled Attila's warning about his sense of self reflecting here. It went both ways. Failure diminished him.

“Attila!” Charlie's enfeebled cry dwindled into silence. The crystal was an aid, but perhaps not a requirement. Maybe if he tried hard enough he could still warn the psychic. He thought of coffee and soul patches. “Attila, Hillar has the crystal, don't listen to him!”

The only sounds were the claps of thunderous explosions, the flapping of bone-bats, and languid breathing of the mouth at Charlie's back. The longer he waited, the greater Hillar's lead.

“
ABRASAX
,” Charlie said. And the mouth rumbled. This close, he heard the fangs rasp over one another as they retracted. Gingerly, Charlie swung a withered leg over the lip, spared a look up at the looming stalactite-teeth and then entered the next deep.

The pain was immediate. Like nothing he'd ever borne.

Chapter 17

I lay on my cot,
staring at the ceiling and listening to my breath whistling from my nostrils. In my right hand was a four-inch Benchmade utility knife. I pressed the button on the grip, and the blade flicked open. My wrists gave a little twinge, as if responding to the memory of a similar edge parting their skin. In my left hand, I held a Beretta. My mouth and nose were raw from the acid.

So tired. I wasn't sure I could muster the effort to kill myself. My body kept wanting to sigh, but each time it tried, I broke into a fit of coughing. The acid vapor had seared my lungs. I lay still and let quiet tears slide past my temples. The burn ached, but it was a graze when compared to the suffering of the dozen men and women who had entered the pickling area. Handso had screamed, stripped nearly naked, and sprinted the length of the plant floor wearing only his body armor. Pulling and tearing off his clothes had spread the acid further over his body, causing skin to slough off as he removed his shirt and then his pants. In his desperate flight for water, metal shavings gouged crescents from his shins and thighs where he struck them. This man I'd mocked, I watched screaming, burning, bleeding …

Knuckles rapped on the door to my cell, jarring me from my thoughts. The doorknob jostled and turned. Attila stuck his head through the crack, eyes roving over the knife and gun, and then he licked his lip.

“Charlie?” I asked.

He shook his head. “The general.”

I looked away.

“Those kids are still out there, even if Charlie isn't.” He didn't cross the threshold into the room.

“This ever happen to you before?” I asked. “An agent just disappearing, AWOL?”

“Usually it's more gradual, a fading of the presence. I still feel the crystal, I just can't reach him—or he can't reach me. Listen, Christine. Sometimes … sometimes we fail.”

“What do you think we should do?” I sat up and fingered the edge of the black blade.

He stared at the knife as he entered.

I tucked the gun into its holster and then closed the blade.

“That's what the general wants to talk about. What to do next.” Attila pointed at the picture on the table. “Your dog?”

Julian was my German Shepherd. It was Fall in Vermont, the yellow of the leaves matching the yellow in his coat. I knew what the picture said about me, that I had no family, no lover, no one, not even Julian. My tears burned as they tracked down my face, seeming to hold residual acid.

Attila sat on the bed and wrapped an arm about my shoulders. His thigh was warm against mine, and I smelled the coffee that clung to him. I relaxed as I once had while breathing the pungent pipe smoke of my grandfather. This close, Attila's lips were full.

“Julian,” I said. “His name was Julian.”

“Nice.”

“He was my boy.” I sighed and tried pulling back, but Attila didn't and I was too tired to lever myself out of the depression I'd created in the mattress. “I … I gave him up when I received my deployment orders.”

“I don't have kids or anyone, either,” Attila said.

“No family at all?” I coughed, but speaking seemed to help a little, my tongue a stiff muscle requiring exercise.

“My mom,” he amended. “This is a tough business for getting close to people.”

His arm tensed, but it only drew me tighter to him.

“So you've said. How did you get here anyway?”

He grimaced, still not ready to share.

I pursed my lips and tried a new tact. “When I first joined the Army, I loved that I was accepted. I was more accepted in my first month at West Point than my entire life at home. It sounds unfair but it's true. It makes it so much worse that I'm here. Worse still, I feel like I'm the general now. No outside life, secrets and service, increasing estrangement from civilians. It has become us and them, but there's no us anymore.” I looked up at Attila, knowing that I was trying to push him to share by revealing myself, but still surprised at my disclosure. I held up my palm to him. “Your turn,” I said. “What's the big secret?”

“Didn't realize it was a trade,” he replied, but I didn't take the bait. Finally he spoke. “All right.” He swallowed and his eyes left mine to stare beyond me. “It started in World War II. You've heard of Nazi concentration camps using prisoners to forward the German war effort?”

I had. The Nazis had committed atrocities in the name of science, using Jews and Roma among others as test subjects as if they were white mice. I didn't get through West Point without learning how far down the path of wrong an ideological war can take you. It also reminded me what Charlie had said about the reincarnations of Seth and Theudas being Nazis.

“In the final two years of the war,” he continued, “the Allies had unexplained breaches in security. Witch hunts turned up nothing. They couldn't figure out who was leaking all of their secrets. It wasn't until after the war that the Americans learned that the Nazis used a woman to seek information from the dead. SS Oberführer Oskar Dirlewanger had no qualms about killing his men to go after the information they required to win the war.”

“The Nazis had their own Terminals group?” I asked, stunned.

“The woman was Maria Liltay, and her daughter was placed in a death camp. Maria had to comply or her daughter would be gassed along with the other hundreds of thousands of Roma and Jews. Once each day, she was allowed to view her daughter out of a window to see that the Nazis kept their side of the bargain. When the Allies finally broke through, Maria was murdered by the Nazis to cover up the operation, but her daughter lived on and moved to America as a refugee.

“Still, the Allies didn't know what had happened. They knew nothing of Maria Liltay. It wasn't until after the collapse of the Soviet bloc that the Polish government shared the results of Dirlewanger's interrogation. They were initially dismissed by the Poles as the insane ramblings of a man near death, but a colonel in the U.S. Army had a suspicion that Dirlewanger wasn't crazy. And when he started looking, he found documents detailing the dates of Dirlewanger's experiments to send people into the afterlife that matched with known security leaks.

“He traced the name of the woman, conducted a manhunt—or what he probably saw as a real witch hunt—and found the daughter living in New York City with another man and their son. The woman was tested, but she had no ability to understand the dead. The teenager, on the other hand, had already been the source of strange happenings.”

Attila's jaw flexed, teeth clenching as he considered the knife still in my hand.

“You,” I said, and his lip twitched upward. “You were the teen.”

“I was that boy.” He agreed. “Fearing that they would use me like they had my grandmother, my mother wouldn't let me help Colonel Aaron.”

“Shit.” I hadn't caught the general's involvement, but it made sense. This unit wasn't just a place to die for him; it was his legacy, which was why he'd do what was required to ensure its survival. “So why—” I glanced to the door, although surely the general knew all of this. “Why do you help him?”

“A couple years later, my mother got sick.” He stared at me with his so dark eyes, and I couldn't look away. Somehow, I felt guilty. Perhaps it was because I was a part of the institution that coerced him. Or maybe I had already decided that something wasn't quite straight here. “Her kidneys were ruined. She needs dialysis twice a week. Two grand a month. That's a lot of fortunes to read. A lot of cappuccinos to pour.” He exhaled sharply. “So here I am.”

“I'm sorry.”

“It's not your fault. The Roma have told fortunes for centuries, though never to their own people, only outsiders. We believe in predestiny, so none of this—”

Predestiny was a copout in my view, but I didn't want a fight. A sudden thought caused my body to tense.

“What?” He caught my suspicion “What is it?”

“You wouldn't help them until your mother fell ill,” I held up a thumb. “And Charlie was only diagnosed with cancer four days ago, two days before we needed someone.”

Attila glanced at the door and back at me with a sour look on his face.

“What about the Egyptologist?” I held up a third finger. “When was he diagnosed?”

“What are you saying?” His tone sharpened.

I regarded him before responding. The sudden intimacy between us was gone. Without him, the unit was nothing, so if something smelled, then perhaps he smelled of it too. I swallowed my concerns and shrugged.

“Nothing, I guess.” My heart pounded. What if not all terminals were found? What if some were made? Could Siam's file prove it?

He was silent and I needed to be the one to say something.

“Do the dead talk to you?” I smiled at his puzzlement, anger forgotten. “Can you shut them out?”

“You mean, are they all stumbling around the room shouting at me to do things for them?” His eyes lit like the night sky in farm country, and I felt greater pleasure in the return of his closeness than I should have. “Nah. It takes a lot of work to hear anything from the dead. It's why I usually need the doorknob and for them to be listening.” We sat in silence for a minute. “No kids then?”

I shook my head. It was strange but I was enjoying the clumsiness of the conversation. “No one. Career military.”

“No husband?”

I flushed. “I was a colonel, Attila. A woman may be able to make stardom on a casting couch, but not in the military.”

“Why the past tense? You said, I
was
a colonel.”

“Yeah.” A spasm of coughing wracked me, hair tumbling before my eyes. “I've decided this isn't the military anymore. It has new rules and I'm not sure I like where they're coming from.”

“I should let your voice rest.”

“You're doing the general a favor, making me talk,” I rasped. “No way can I yell at him now.”

He smiled at my joke, and I noticed the gentle touch of his fingertips against my back. When he stood, I missed the heat of him and I shook my hair so that it fell across my burn.

We crossed the hall and the silence hung awkward again. I felt like a teenager, uncertain as to our relationship, but sensing something. But nothing killed desire as quickly as confronting the general's ravaged face.