She heard someone whimpering. She turned around to see who it was.
One of the Kazakh soldiers was trying to tear his hazmat mask off. She ran to him and grabbed his wrists. “Stop!” she cried. “You’ve got to keep your mask on!” Idiot, she thought with a stab of anger. Why the hell am I stuck with all these fucking idiots?
“He doesn’t speak English, miss,” one of the other soldiers said. “I can translate.”
“And you are?” Another pain in my ass.
“Nurlan. He’s Dasha.”
It would be so easy to just kill you both, she thought. And for a tiny moment, that thought horrified her.
“Tell Dasha everything is fine,” she said, though she didn’t believe it for a moment. They hadn’t been in the fog zone that long, and already the stupid behavior was starting. And that pissed her off to no end. The soft buzzing in her head was getting louder.
Nurlan spoke to Dasha. When Dasha answered, Nurlan got an odd expression on his face.
“He says the faceless god is coming.”
Michelle was perplexed, then utterly exasperated. She’d known they would be a drag on the mission. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” Nurlan said. He licked his lips nervously. “He’s just babbling now.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Michelle said. Her annoyance grew. And grew. Part of her realized she was overreacting, but she couldn’t stop herself. She didn’t want to stop this terrifying anger. And the buzzing grew louder.
“Oh, good grief, we don’t have time for this bullshit. Look at those corpses. They’re real. Some invisible whatever is bullshit. Talk him down. Do whatever you have to do to get him moving.” Her gaze swept across the other soldiers. They appeared to be okay, but a couple of them did look a bit twitchy.
Just what I need, she thought bitterly. Babysitting some wet-behind-the-ears nats. Fabulous.
I could kill them, she thought. I could kill them and make all this easier. They’re nothing but a burden slowing me down. Just like Adesina. A wave of nausea swept over her. Oh, God, how could I think that? I’d never think that. She’s my baby. My little girl.
But she couldn’t dwell on Adesina. Not now. There was something in Talas that needed to be done, or her baby would die. Jayewardene had been specific about it. She had to go to Talas or her daughter would die.
“Okay, people, we need to keep moving toward Bugsy’s last location, and we’re not doing that by standing around,” she said. Her voice was tight with annoyance. Her anger felt like an itch she wanted to scratch, and it swept away her fear about Adesina. She felt the tingling of a bubble forming, but balled her hand tight and popped it.
Earth Witch and Aero flanked the soldiers, and Recycler took up the rear. Michelle was on point. She turned and started off again, not bothering to see if any of them were following.
With each step, the fog obscured more of their path. A cold drizzle began to fall. In the distance, she heard shouts and screams. Occasionally, there was gunfire. There was also a static squawk on her com. Klaus checking up on her, no doubt. Checking on her as if she were some rookie who didn’t know what the hell she was doing. Screw him, she thought. All the fucks I give about Klaus and his band of pussies. I’ve got a batch of useless nats to drag around.
Up ahead, Michelle saw a blurry, vaguely human shape standing in the road. Then it began to change. Tentacles grew out of it, and it began slithering toward them.
Dasha’s whimpering got louder. “For God’s sake,” Michelle snarled. “Get him to knock that off!” She turned around. Six of the soldiers looked fine, but the other four had horrified expressions on their faces. Then they bolted, heading back in the direction they’d come from.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Michelle snapped. “This is just a joker of some kind. Good Lord, you’d think they’d never seen a joker before.”
There was a burst of gunfire. Aero screamed, “No!” as the soldiers who hadn’t fled began firing at the ones who had. The fleeing soldiers collapsed. They didn’t move.
Then they turned and opened fire on the joker who had advanced on the group.
The joker—for what else could it be—gave a hideous scream, and everyone cried out in pain. It felt as if someone had jabbed ice picks in her ears.
“I can’t believe you killed them!” Aero exclaimed. His face was twisted into a mask of rage. The soldiers looked back at him.
“Why not?” Nurlan asked with a shrug. Sweat was running down his face, and the whites of his eyes were turning red. “They were deserting. They were running away from that.” He pointed at the dead joker.
“You don’t shoot someone in the back! Jesús Christo! You animals!” His voice deepened and took on a dangerous growl. Michelle saw him reach into his pocket and pull out one of the steel balls he used to create shrapnel with his air-manipulation power.
“Cesar! No!” she shouted. But part of her was perfectly fine with Aero killing the soldiers. Part of her wanted to help him do it.
“They’re subhuman,” he snarled. “They don’t deserve to live.”
“You don’t get to be judge and jury,” Ana shouted. Her face turned red. The cords in her neck bulged. “How would you like it if I judged you the same way?” She spat the words out.
The earth at Aero’s feet suddenly bulged upward and encased him up to his neck. He couldn’t move, much less release his weapon. But Michelle knew he didn’t need his weapons to kill Ana.
“We’re not them,” Ana said. Her eyes were wild, and she was breathing heavily. “We’re better than that.”
Nurlan looked at Ana with a cold, indifferent expression on his face.
“Why are you better? That one”—he pointed at Michelle—“has killed before. I believe you have, too, Earth Witch. I don’t know about Aero. However, the slum dweller—” He jerked his thumb at Recycler. “He doesn’t have the balls to do anything. Unless it’s stabbing someone in the back.”
Recycler immediately pulled more debris onto his already large trash armor. Broken tables and chairs sailed through smashed windows. Cardboard boxes ripped apart, then were reconfigured on his body. Stinking, rotting foliage flew toward him, leaving foul, ropy streams of water behind. As his armor grew, he uttered a single harsh laugh.
“You cadela,” he said, fury twisting his voice. “Stupid asshole.” He started toward the soldier. In an instant, the ground opened under him, and he dropped into the hole.
“When I get out of here, you’re dead!” he yelled at Ana. “I’ll tear your head off just to see the blood squirt from your neck, you whore.” Ana shrugged and laughed. He began climbing out of the hole, but she just made it deeper.
One of the soldiers turned his rifle on Ana. Michelle grabbed her and turned around, shielding Ana’s body from the flying bullets. Just like Ana, she thought sourly. Always needing to be rescued. Useless. Not a man jack of them who deserves to be on this mission. It would be so easy …
As the bullets hit, Michelle grew fatter. But today, the impacts hurt. She screamed in pain. “What the fuck?” she cried.
There was another hail of bullets, but they didn’t hit Michelle. She released Ana and turned around to see the soldiers firing on each other. They giggled like children at a party, and one by one, they fell. The dead solders were unrecognizable now. Eyes hung from shattered sockets. The bullets had ripped off cheeks, exposing teeth and gums. Scalps flapped off skulls like bad toupees.
Only Nurlan remained standing. He turned toward her and Michelle saw blood dripping from his eyes.
He pulled off his hazmat mask. Then he removed his holstered Makarov PM and shot himself in the head.
Secretary-General Jayewardene sat at the conference table across from Barbara. At the front of the room, at the head of the table, screens were set up with a few live feeds: one from the lead tank in the Kazakh squad, another from the officer leading the Kazakh assault, and another—on the largest screen directly in front of Barbara—from a body cam attached to Klaus.
A screen to one side held General Nabiyev, so that the three of them could consult during the operation. Ink was in the office with Barbara. It was nearly five-thirty in New York; well after midnight in Kazakhstan. Headlamps from the tanks and accompanying vehicles swept over mostly empty streets, with abandoned cars on either side of the roadway, most of them pushed aside by dozers earlier. The image from Klaus’s body cam was tinted heavily green; his camera had a night-vision lens. “We’re getting close to the edge of the disturbance,” she heard Klaus say. His voice was heavy with his breathing; in the night-vision view, his ghost steel armor looked emerald, and his sword gleamed like a CGI weapon in a science fiction movie. Ahead of them, the fog extended sickly green tendrils high above the roadway. The video was jumpy and unstable, moving with each of Klaus’s strides. “Nothing’s moving out there that we can see, though listen…” His voice went silent except for his breathing and the video stilled as Klaus stopped. Barbara could hear the sound of the tanks’ motors and the metallic clanking of their treads on concrete, but, faintly, they also could hear screams in the distance, more than one, and at least one of the voices sounded entirely nonhuman. “Did you get that?” Klaus said a moment later, and the video jumped as he started walking again. “There’s something going on not too far ahead.” An electronic chirp followed: Klaus shifting to the private communications channel for the aces. “Aero—want to check it out? See what we’re heading into before we split up?”
Another chirp, and a voice answered from a speaker set on the conference table, set to that private channel so she and Jayewardene could overhear their communications. “Sure, boss. Be right back…” and a moment later, they saw his form flit by overhead.
Then there was nothing but the static of the satellite relay for several seconds, then a click: “It’s damn hard to see in this soup, and with this damn thing strapped to my head…” Aero’s voice, muffled by his filter mask. There was a scraping sound, then. “God, it smells horrible, like dead things rotting everywhere. What the hell…” They heard a shriek, a banshee-like howling, then more cursing, and a scream that was all too human, followed by a sickening thud.
“Aero?” she heard Klaus say, then again, more urgently. “Aero?” Silence answered, and in the video feed, Klaus’s body cam swayed wildly as he started to run. “Everyone! Let’s go. Michelle and Ana, find Aero. Inkar, you’re with me…”
Barbara’s hands curled into involuntary fists on the table as she saw Klaus racing ahead of the slow-moving tanks and into the puke-green haze. Inkar, in her Tulpar form, a golden winged horse, raced ahead of Lohengrin. The video quickly became nearly useless. She could see shapes looming in the gloom, some of the buildings and cars, but others moving. An antlered head … a waving, sucker-laced tentacle that Klaus’s sword severed … a crowd of howling figures running …
On the video feed from the lead Kazakh tank, a thing came out of the fog: taller than a house, great spidered legs gouging the concrete of the roadway like gigantic pile drivers, its carapace above seeming to be composed of a dozen or more naked human bodies, writhing and wriggling like maggots inside a gelatinous sheath, their heads staring as one toward the tank, mouths open in screams of rage. Barbara could hear the creature, howling like a crazed mob, as the front two spider legs grabbed the turret of the tank, lifting and swinging it, sky and fog and ground spinning madly in the video, then that feed went dead.
The voices on the communications channel were equally chaotic, coming fast and on top of each other, so that Barbara could barely determine who was speaking and to whom; there were horrific sounds intermingled among the words. But what was oddly most terrifying was that someone started singing, and the voice was Klaus’s.
“… Ein Jäger aus Kurpfalz…”
“… Aero, is that you? Aero, what the hell are you…”
“… der reitet durch den grünen Wald…”
“… I … I can’t feel my hands…”
“… So komm ich weit umher…”
“… Who are you? Damn it, answer me or I swear…”
“… bis dass der Kuckuck ‘Kuckuck’ schreit…”
“… one little cut, two little cuts, three little cuts…”
“… Juja, Juja, gar lustig ist die Jägerei…”
“… Klaus? Where are you?… Oh Christ! Oh God no!”
“… allhier auf grüner Heid’…”
“… I’ll kill you, you bastard. I’ll kill you…”
On Klaus’s screen, there was suddenly a lessening of the fog, and Barbara could see a child—a little girl in ragged, torn clothes, her dark hair scraggly and matted, her large eyes circled in bruised flesh. “Help me,” she said in English, in a pitiful, weak voice. “Please help me.”
“… allhier auf grüner Heid’.” On the screen, she saw Klaus stop, his song ending. His armor-clad knee came into view: he’d knelt in front of her. “I have you, kleines,” he said. “I can help you. Just come here. Come to me…” She saw Klaus’s arm reach out to the child … and the child smiled, her mouth opening wide and wider still, impossibly, like a snake unhinging its jaw, and in the bloodred maw of the girl’s mouth there were rows of needled teeth dripping a grey ichor. She lunged at Klaus, hissing, as the video feed tumbled into chaos and went dead.
Over the communications channel, she heard Klaus scream: a long wail of agony, and the sound pulled Barbara from her chair.
“Get them out of there!” Barbara shouted, at Jayewardene, at the flat screens, at General Nabiyev, and especially at the flickering, static-laden screen that had held Klaus. “Get them out! Klaus!”
She could feel Juliet’s hand on her shoulder, pressing hard. “Klaus!” she shouted again. She was sobbing, not caring that Jayewardene and General Nabiyev could see. “Klaus, get out of there! Oh, God … I let him go there. I let him go there without me…” She sank back into her chair as Ink murmured unheard words, her arm around her, as Jayewardene asked General Nabiyev what was happening.
There was no answer beyond the static.
There had been armored limos waiting out front of Teterboro. Franny had hoped the caravan of Russian mobsters would be stopped, but Grekor was efficient. The people at Teterboro had been relieved of their cell phones, the landlines cut, and they’d been tied up. Eventually the lack of response from the tower would get someone’s attention, but it was a quick trip into Manhattan and they had reached the clinic before that happened.
Franny had been handcuffed to a door handle in the limo and left with one guard while Grekor’s goons entered the small hospital. Franny had jerked at the sound of gunfire, but it was only two shots. He prayed no one had been killed.
After some time had passed a thug arrived at the car, unlocked the cuffs, and dragged Franny into the clinic. He was taken to a room where Baba Yaga was ensconced in a hospital bed propped up by a mountain of pillows.
Dr. Finn was at her bedside, his hooves beating out a nervous tattoo on the floor. The joker’s expression was mutinous and he kept throwing glares first at the man holding a gun on him and then at Baba Yaga. Grekor was seated in a chair looking very much at ease.
Finn reacted when Franny was pushed into the room. “Detective Black! Why are you…? Do you know…? Are you…? Are you with these people?”
“Not willingly.”
“I’ve been treating some of the kidnapped jokers. They said you rescued them.”
“Yeah, I just didn’t manage to rescue myself.”
“Enough!” Baba Yaga snapped. “Time for you to do your job, errand boy. You will—”
Finn interrupted. “You have invaded my clinic, threatened my staff, locked up my security chief after you shot at him. You want medical care? Go find it someplace else. I won’t do a damn thing for you.”
Grekor looked over at one of his guards. “Start killing a patient every fifteen minutes.”
Finn gaped at the man. Franny grabbed him by the upper arm. “They’ll do it, Doc, trust me.”
Baba Yaga fingered the sheet wi
th her remaining hand and studied Finn. “I am certain there are other doctors here and I have always wanted a horse hair sofa,” she mused. Her mouth began working.
“And don’t piss her off,” Franny added urgently.
“I know what she can do. The jokers told me.” Finn had recovered his equilibrium. He approached the bed with mincing steps, placing each of his four hooves with elaborate care. “Yeah, you can kill me horribly, your thugs can shoot patients, but while we’re treating you we can also kill you in a hundred different ways.”
Baba Yaga leaned back, swallowed the accumulated spit, and studied Finn. “You’re stupid brave. And what about your Hippocratic Oath, Doctor.”
“It’s flexible in your case. And I’m not so much brave as I have leverage. We have each other by the short hairs. You want care? Stop issuing threats.” They stared at each other for a long time. It was a ludicrous sight. The ancient one-armed crone in the bed with her dual-colored hair, and the paunchy torso of a fifty-something man in a Hawaiian shirt and white coat set atop the body of a palomino pony. “So shall we call it a stalemate and move on?”
Baba Yaga cracked one of her wintery smiles and nodded. “All right.” She looked at Franny. “Go, bring me the Secretary-General of the UN and the head of the Committee. It is time they knew what they’re facing.”
“You’ve got a phone.”
“You don’t think I’ve tried?” she snapped. “They are all in a panic and no one will take my call.”
Franny jerked a thumb at Grekor. “Send him. I’m going home.” He turned and started for the door, only to hear the distinctive snick of rounds being chambered. He looked back at a phalanx of guns.
“No, you will go. Grekor is a known criminal. People think you are a hero. They don’t know you are the hero who has destroyed the world. So why don’t you go and try to undo some of the harm you have done? Also, I’ll kill you if you don’t,” she added prosaically.
Dr. Finn was staring at him in confusion. All of Baba Yaga’s taunts and accusations came crashing back: “You’re a fool, boy.” “… you blundered in…” “You think you’re a hero.” “… destroyed the world. I hope it was worth it.”