"Die in a hole, or die on your feet. Those are your choices," Elroy had said. A bit pretentious, if you asked Blake.
Well, Elroy had been eaten by an Arachnotron two days ago, and he hadn't died on his feet. He'd been on the ground, impaled by one of its biomechanical legs. So now Blake felt more than a little gullible for letting his old boss talk him into this trek.
Gullible, footsore, and as terrified as the rest of the refugees who were on the run from the demonic horde that had been tracking them into the lower-oxygen environment of the High Plains. There had been more than four hundred people in the caravan when it set out from Amarillo. Now there were eighty-four.
The only people left were single, childless, and either on the young side or in really good shape. Their caravan of vehicles had been ambushed outside Dumas by a squad of Hell Knights and Mancubi, forcing the humans to escape on foot. Infants, small children, the elderly and their protectors were the first to be captured or killed. Anybody who couldn't run, or who was defending someone who couldn't run, didn't even make it to the Texas-New Mexico border.
Blake was going to hear screaming toddlers and suicide gunshots in his sleep for the rest of his life.
If he lived.
The survivors of the Dumas ambush had alternated running and walking for the last two days without sleep, food, or even taking a moment to sit down. You stayed in motion, even if it was only a shuffle, or you gave up and died. The runners had lost two dozen people that way, mostly when the group slowed to drink water out of a river or stream. Some people sat down and simply did not get up again. So far the ones who stayed behind to try and help them had a 100% fatality rate, too.
You kept going. You left them behind. You didn't turn around to look when you heard the screaming begin, and you didn't blame yourself for being relieved that someone else's violent death would occupy the monsters long enough for you to escape. Survivor's guilt would have to wait.
Denver was northwest, and its skyscrapers would make it hard to miss even from miles away. It was going to take them three more days of constant running to get there because they had to avoid roads. Blake couldn't picture his life three days from now. He could only think as far ahead as the next Rattler attack.
The unseen creature made plenty of noise, sounding a lot like someone shaking a pair of giant maracas. It sent up dust when it moved across open ground, but nobody could spot anything more than a shimmer in the air before it was gone again. Once an hour, the rattle would sound and flames would rip up the ground in a straight line toward them. Then a human would fall apart in pieces. They could never see it in time to avoid the whip. The lash? Chain? It hardly mattered. The metallic rattling never failed to make the weary refugees break into a sprint again, like sheep being herded by a Border Collie.
They still had enough people that they tended to run in 'wolf packs': groups of three to five who jogged together, keeping pace like buddy athletes in a 10k charity race, even though they maintained a distance of three meters so that if a demon caught one of them the others weren't close enough to be grabbed.
"Portal!" one of their self-appointed spotters shouted hoarsely, pointing off to the right.
The survivors wheeled away from it like a flock of birds and picked up speed north-by-northwest, flowing around the clusters of sagebrush like streams of water.
Two days ago they were still naive enough to watch the flickering red streaks, curious which variety of monster would come through. Today they didn't watch. Watching got you killed, and they could identify the demon species by sound now.
Blake heard the roar of a Mancubus behind them, but it already sounded tired and breathless. It would not be able to catch up to them, unlike the persistent horde of Gargoyles, Imps and Prowlers that was following them at the distance of about two miles. If he turned around, he'd be able to see their pursuers as uneven spikes on the horizon.
A portal began to form to the northeast. "Seven!" hollered one of the rear guard, indicating what speed they should run at. 'One' was an energy-saving walk. 'Ten' was a flat-out sprint: every ounce of speed you had. No waiting for anyone. No stopping for a stitch in your side. No holding back. Just run.
After two or three minutes, the same voice called out "Four!" and the group slowed to almost a walk.
Nobody who was left had known each other before starting out. Anyone who had any attachment to another person in the human herd had already perished trying to save each other. The remainder were all strangers. Too traumatized to speak, too dehydrated to cry, too tired to interact beyond shouting a warning whenever their pursuers appeared on the horizon again. Blake didn't know even one of these people by name, so he'd made up nicknames in his head.
Someone a few yards to his right stumbled to a stop. It was the guy with the Nike jacket tied around his waist.
Blake knew that stumble, and he knew that stop: Nike Jacket had lost the resolve to continue.
The invisible rattle sounded again, and the man turned toward it with a kind of terrified relief. He was as good as dead.
Blake kept running.
"Ross! You're alive!" Philips practically shouted as he hopped out of the stealth helicopter onto the White Sands landing pad.
"Was there ever any doubt?" he chuckled.
"Yes."
Ross's laugh cut off with a frown.
Philips pulled an attaché case from under the aircraft's bench seat. "Here's your laptop, man."
"Perfect."
"Why do you have so many encrypted files on it?" Philips asked as Agent Bailey came out of the building with that blue staff.
Ross's eyes narrowed. "Philips, did you and Jessie crack my passcodes?"
"No," he reported, unstrapping his flight helmet.
"Okay, good."
"It was Darren."
"Dammit."
"He didn't come out of there for 12 hours, and when he did he had a huge smile on his face and wouldn't tell us anything. What's on it? Something sketchy?" Philips wiggled his eyebrows.
"No, it's Minecraft Infinite. Please tell me Darren started his own game and didn't mess with my Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. I just got the Colossus of Rhodes to reflect light the way it's supposed to when you sail underneath it in VR."
"Dunno. He wouldn't tell me about it. Wouldn't give me or Jessie the password, either."
"Speaking of passwords," Bailey reminded them.
"Oh, right. I'm John Philips. I've got the thingies." He presented his White Diamond pass and read from a scrap of paper. " 'Some are born heroes, some achieve heroism, and others have heroism thrust upon them.' " I didn't realize Oppenheim was re-writing Shakespeare."
"Entry clearance accepted." Bailey shouted the customary, "Clear!" over his shoulder and then continued, "Come on inside and Tucker will do the access check."
"Where are Jessie and Darren? I thought I asked Hayden to send them," Ross questioned as they did the rest of the security clearance song and dance.
"The air feels weird in here. Anyway, they're back in Switzerland, packing. Hayden's sending Sandeep, too. He wants a well-rounded team: me for physics, Jessie for computer hardware and surveillance equipment, Darren for drones and mechs, Sandeep for research and development, and you for … whatever it is you do."
"Hey! I'm useful. I do … stuff."
"It's not that you aren't smart, Ross. You'd have a specialty if you could quit getting kicked off project teams for showing up the lead researchers."
Agent Tucker made an amused noise inside his security booth. Ross gave him the glare of a friend who doesn't think your joke is very funny.
He liked Bailey and Tucker. He guessed that they'd been chosen specifically for their even temperaments and good cheer. 'Can't have a pair of stir-crazy paranoids loose in a high-tech weapons depository.'
"Maybe analysis is your calling," Philips offered. "You are good at puzzles."
"Speaking of puzzles, you're never going to believe what we're working on here."
Philips yawned as they began following Agent Bailey through the maze of hallways. "Hayden wouldn't tell us, and I'm too tired to guess."
"A mysterious supersoldier project." Ross waved his fingers like a magician about to pull a rabbit out of a hat.
Philips yawned again. "Those never work. We always end up with 'roided-out rage machines or sad sacks crippled by failed augmentations."
Ross grinned. "Not this time, my friend. This time we've got a functional supersoldier. I cannot wait for you to see how much ass he kicks."
Some of the travel fatigue left Philips's face. "Wait, a functional one? Field-ready?"
"Oh, yeah. He's got superhuman … well, superhuman everything. Strength, speed, coordination, endurance, reflexes, you name it. I've seen him punch a Dread Knight so hard that its head disappeared. And he's got some sort of advanced armor tech, too."
"Some sort? You don't know?"
Ross had been mulling over how to explain The Slayer to the uninitiated. "Almost everything about him is top secret. He basically dropped out of the sky two months ago at the North Pole. No name, no rank, no insignia. Won't tell us a damn thing about himself. Hayden gave Oppenheim a file on him, but he doesn't work for Hayden, or any government or organization we know of."
"A random stranger turns up and tells the Denver ARC to take him back and forth to White Sands and everybody just goes with it?"
Ross held up fingers one at a time. "First: Hayden knows him personally somehow, and has instructed Oppenheim to give him the run of the place. Second: he's got VEGA and hasn't used him to bring down the last of the world's computer networks, so we know he's not one of the Cultists –"
"VEGA?" The expression on Philips's face could only be described as 'painful hope'. "VEGA's still alive?" Everybody knew about VEGA, even schoolchildren. He wasn't just another AI; he was the first artificial soul. The day the authorities confirmed that VEGA gave off detectable soul energy was magical. "I thought he died in the Mars incident."
"He's alive, but mostly in hibernation without the power and hardware he used to have. I think the only part of him awake right now is the one giving the marine instructions for his project. Somehow VEGA is stored in his hardsuit."
"That's incredible! The first good news I've heard since the war started."
"Right? Totally made my day when I found out. Anyhow. Third: he clears out Gore Nests like a shark going after minnows. Fourth: he's letting us watch him build a Slipgate."
Philips tripped and almost fell. "He's building a what? Are you all insane?"
Ross halted in alarm. "What do you mean?"
"Those devices have done nothing but implode, taking out entire cities –"
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Philips, what happened?"
His friend took a steadying breath before answering.
"Paris is gone."
"What? When?" Even the unflappable Agent Bailey stopped in his tracks.
"A few hours ago. The Paris ARC set off their Slipgate."
"Holy shit."
"They were getting overrun. You know what happens if you get hauled off by a demon. They eat you alive or drag you through a portal to Hell. I don't know what they do with you when you get there, but it can't be anything except torture."
Ross nodded mutely. There was a kind of dividing line past which you ceased to be food and were taken prisoner instead. The line seemed to fluctuate somewhere between thirty and forty years old, and the older you were, the more keen they were to capture you. Ross had seen drone footage of Hell Knights tearing a small house apart to get to the elderly couple inside, then picking them up almost tenderly before disappearing through a portal. He went cold every time he remembered it.
Philips continued soberly, "So Paris fed all the power they had into their half-built Slipgate and turned it on. Vaporized everything in a seven kilometer radius of the ARC."
"But the ARC was in the city center," Ross almost stuttered. "That means the Louvre museum, the palace, Notre Dame, the Arc du Triomphe –"
"Even the Eiffel Tower. All gone."
"Shit," Bailey whispered.
Stunned, Ross mumbled, "The Mona Lisa was at the museum this year. And King Tut. Oh, God."
He should be grieving the loss of life. Fifty thousand people had barricaded themselves in the ancient catacombs under the city when the demons first attacked. The enemy forces had focused on chasing the above-ground populace into the surrounding towns, and left the undercity alone for months while the ARC supplied the survivors with the necessities. Ross hadn't personally known anyone in Paris, so it was hard to fathom. But the artworks … everyone knew those pieces. A large chunk of humanity's creative legacy. Gone.
"All that history…"
"Well, that's a bright spot," Philips informed him and Bailey with slightly more cheer. "Obviously they couldn't move Rodin's The Thinker – that thing weighed a literal ton – but most of the moveable art pieces were evacuated weeks ago. Mona's fine. They saved Tut's solid gold death mask. Most of the Van Gogh and Picasso collections. The stuff that could be hand-carried, basically. The tech team in Switzerland is working on heavy-duty drones to lift things like sculptures. Maybe even the Statue of Liberty or Christ the Redeemer. God knows why those two are still standing when New York and Rio de Janeiro are total losses."
Ross said quietly, "I hadn't heard about Rio. I've been so focused on the supersoldier that I've been tuning out the rest of the world."
"Don't be too hard on yourself. There was nothing you could have done about any of this except grieve."
"I suppose you're right."
"But what is Denver thinking, letting a grunt mess with the forces of time and space? Did somebody at White Sands piss off the president?"
"He's got VEGA, remember? And he seems to know exactly what he's doing. No hesitation. No pauses. No checking notes or running simulations. He dug in and immediately started fabricating pieces. They take forever to cool down to a solid, but you can already see they're very advanced pieces of tech."
Now that the shock of Paris was beginning to ebb, the trio continued toward The Forge.
"For some reason he doesn't talk, but he understands English perfectly, so it may just be a personality thing. Comes back to Denver every evening and seems to spend the whole night killing demons dumb enough to wander into the metro area outside the walls. There's a lot less of them these days; I guess they finally got the memo. We've actually been able to start salvaging stuff from the surrounding towns. Even Boulder is almost habitable, and more and more refugees are making it to Denver."
Calmer now that he knew VEGA was supervising the Slipgate's construction, Philips slipped back into science mode. "Can't you send one of those micro-drones to video him? Find out what he's doing at night?"
Ross shook his head. "He shoots 'em down. His visor detects them even in the dark, and he's an incredible shot. After a dozen losses, Oppenheim nixed any more attempts to follow The Slayer. With most factories outside Denver gone, we'll have a hard time replacing any tech we lose."
"Is 'The Slayer' a code name or something?"
"Probably. It's what Hayden calls him. Only Oppenheim has the clearance to read The Slayer's file, and if he found his real name in there, he isn't telling." Ross held the door open for Philips as they headed deeper into the complex. "Come to think of it, the director's been awfully quiet since he received that data."
Someone shouted wordlessly. A ripple of energy went through the herd. When it was his pack's turn, they saw a beautiful, gorgeous, heavenly sign declaring, "Welcome to Colorful Colorado!" Blake's pack shared half-hopeful smiles. He let himself wonder for a moment if all eighty-three of them – no, scratch that. Eighty-two. The Rattler had killed Nike Jacket a quarter of an hour ago. They were due for another death in less than forty-five minutes.
All eighty-two of them, plus Blake, crossed into Colorado and trotted onward across the loose dirt and dry grass like subsistence hunters running an antelope to ground. Except they were the prey, and the only thing they were chasing was the hope of reaching Denver.
Nike Jacket had been in Blake's pack. Now they were down to four. A woman with a long cut on her cheek eventually broke off from a group of six and joined Blake, Super Tan, Shiny Hair and Acid Burn. The four nodded to her. Cut Cheek nodded back.
They'd taken a right at Folsom about three hours ago, and if he remembered correctly, this part of New Mexico was even higher than Denver. The radio network back in Amarillo had said the government was telling people to move to higher ground, and that the demons seemed to need lots of oxygen to function properly. The larger ones did seem to run out of steam almost immediately. The smaller ones teleported randomly around, trying to find the human herd, occasionally getting lucky enough to take one of them down before they got winded and had to retreat.
The Rattler was having the most success due to its invisibility making the humans unable to see it and run the other way. It seemed to be almost keeping pace with them, taking about an hour to teleport back to its comrades and report their position, then returning for another kill.
At the thought of the Rattler, the hair on the back of his neck stood up and Blake involuntarily increased his speed. The super-tan guy in Blake's wolf pack put a restraining hand on his arm when he started to pass.
"Four," Super Tan reminded him of the current speed limit. He was telling Blake not to wear himself out unnecessarily. You never knew when you might need that extra bit of energy.
"Right," Blake croaked through his dry throat. "Four."
"Whoa." Philips stopped short upon entering The Forge.
"Yeah." Ross smiled proudly, as though he'd had anything major to do with setting up this impressive workspace, other than anticipating what materials The Slayer would want next.
"He's big."
"Some of that's the armor, but yeah. Big dude. The only taller people I've seen in person are Hayden, who doesn't really count, and Bruce down in Fabrication. You'll meet him soon. Great guy. Super nice."
"Does your supersoldier always keep his helmet and gauntlets on when he's working?"
"Never seen him without them. It's entirely possible he's sealed in there and needs special equipment to get out."
"Like the Master Chief?" Halo Eternal had come out only a year ago, although it seemed like much longer now.
"Yeah, except ours is real, so he's way cooler."
Philips watched The Slayer rapidly dismantling an induction coil and straightening the thick copper tubing with just his hands. "Way cooler."
Ross pointed out items of interest. "Those two pools have pieces of the Gate in them, and I think that device he's working on right now is going to be the power source."
"You think?"
"Honestly, it doesn't look like any design I've seen before. It's not a control module, battery, reactor or fusion chamber. But the Gate is unpowered in its current state, and nothing in our universe works without the dynamic exchange of energy. Electricity, gravity waves, heat, solar –"
"Ross, I'm a physicist."
"Right." He winced in embarrassment. "Sorry."
The power source was some kind of barrel-shaped chamber suspended a centimeter above a translucent box of something that looked like plastic but was definitely not. The Slayer was currently soldering the copper tubing onto one of the box's sides in a pattern that almost looked like art. The not-plastic cube was going to look like stained glass when he was done.
"So, Ross …"
"Yeah?"
"If he's building a teleportation device, where is he going?"
Ross blinked. "I actually hadn't thought about that too much. I assume he's going to punch through to the Hell dimension and set off a nuke, or something like that." He frowned at The Slayer, who was completely absorbed in his work. "It's not like we can ask him."
" 'Can't' or 'haven't tried'?"
"Uh …"
"Mmm-hmm. I can see why you asked Hayden to send me."
Ross did smile at that. "You're one of the few people who can put up with my bullshit. And we're a good team."
Philips patted his shoulder. "We sure are." He walked boldly over to The Slayer and said, "Whenever you're ready, we'd like to know where you'll be traveling with this Gate."
The Slayer ignored him.
"Take your time. But we might be able to help you get this done faster if we knew your ultimate goal. That's all." Philips began to circle the device. "Interesting choice of wiring you've got here. Copper, zinc, chromium and lots of polymeric sulfur nitride alloy. That's pretty rare stuff."
"Not here," Bailey interjected from his monitoring console on the raised platform that ran the length of the far wall. "We've got vats upon vats of Polythiazyl." He pointed. "That's what that machine over there is for. Extruding liquid materials into wire form."
Philips whistled. "Nice. Why scrounge around in the Hellified Zones when you can make your own?"
"Yeah," Ross agreed. "Bailey and Tucker have been nice enough to make us a lot of the wiring we need for the mega-mechs, too."
"More like 'ordered to make', but: potayto, potahto. Happy to help either way."
"What do you guys need mega-mechs for if the demons stopped assaulting Denver?"
"Putting up more walls to extend the fortified zone. Aurora and Lakewood still have a lot of people living there because they don't like the idea of martial law. Oppenheim wants to bring them back into the fold where we can protect them. The demons won't stay away indefinitely. Someday they'll come back to finish harvesting Denver."
The Slayer's tinkering stopped, and he stared at the two of them. Ross cleared his throat.
"No offense, sir, but if you're traveling somewhere using this Gate, that means you don't intend to hang around forever. And it won't take long for the demons to notice your absence."
The Slayer gave a tiny shake of his head that Ross couldn't quite interpret, and returned to his task.
"Wait, wait, wait," Philips said. "Are you telling me that the reason the demons stopped attacking Denver is him? One guy?" He was clearly skeptical. "One soldier to patrol 100,000 acres of land? Sorry, dude, but there's got to be something else going on. It's the altitude, or landmines or something."
"All I can tell you is that the demons made regular attempts to breach Denver's walls until he showed up. The big demons moved slowly, sure, but they were still right outside the walls, wrecking shop. Then he came through town, and the ones that didn't immediately bolt got slaughtered over the next few days. He never gets tired. He never sleeps. As far as we can tell he doesn't have any biological needs, not even water."
Philips sounded a little taken aback. "There's no life form on Earth that doesn't need water."
"Was no life form on Earth," Ross corrected him.
But then Philips eyed The Slayer like he was a ticking bomb, and took a half step toward the door.
From the corner of his eye, Ross saw Bailey's right hand pause what it was typing and slowly move to hover over a certain section of his control panel, like someone about to press a button labeled Launch Missile.
A little chill of fear ran down Ross's back when he realized The Slayer was staring at him again.
'What the hell was I thinking?' he asked himself. 'Why did I never question the water thing? Everything needs water. Everything. Even the simplest bacterium requires water molecules. His heart wouldn't even be beating if there's no water in his tissues. If he doesn't require water, then he's not … even …'
"The suit must have some kind of water reclamation system," Ross said, too loudly. "Uh, does it? Have a water reclamation system?" he asked the supersoldier.
It was a long, long moment before The Slayer nodded.
The three observers relaxed.
Blake's chest was burning. He wasn't sure if it was from the altitude or if the scorching-hot air was actually doing something to his lungs.
It was still early April, but unseasonably hot. Apparently the weather was trying to kill them, too. Stopping to cool off was not an option, however. You ran. You ran, and when you got so unbearably overheated that you almost passed out, you would hear demons screeching from not-far-enough away. Instantly you had all the energy you needed because the excess heat that had been cooking your organs rushed out to power your limbs. The hot blood was diverted to your arms and legs and, coupled with the chill of fear from having those nightmarish things right behind, it cooled you down enough to keep going. You ran, even when stumbling from heat exhaustion, or you dropped behind and got eaten. Those were the options.
Everyone light-skinned was terribly sunburned, adding to their already high body heat. 'Why couldn't I have gotten my mom's complexion?' Blake grouched to himself. 'I'm lucky my sunburns turn into tans. Tomato Face over there has full-on blisters.'
Blake envied Acid Burn, the guy in his pack who had skin so dark that it was almost blue-black. He did not envy the guy's wounded arm, though, which had been chewed right down to the bone by Gargoyle acid. Acid Burn couldn't really move it, and had to cradle it against his chest with his other hand when they needed a level 'Ten' sprint.
Several feet to his right, Shiny Hair broke her foot with an audible snap. She cried out in pain as she fell. Some of the nearby runners slowed down or turned their heads to look, but most were so hardened to loss that they barely batted an eye.
Blake was not yet that numb. He halted with a little puff of dust and jogged back to her. Surprisingly, Acid Burn joined him. Cut Cheek and Super Tan left them behind.
"Ankle?" Blake's voice sounded like the rustling of dry leaves.
"Foot." A whisper was all she could manage.
"How bad?" asked Acid Burn.
More runners streamed around them, but at a distance, as if her doom were a virus that they could catch.
"Bad enough. I can feel the broken ends scraping on each other. Damn prairie dog holes."
Impressive Beard shook his head at Shiny Hair as he passed. It was against the unspoken rules to ask someone for help. Tantamount to saying out loud, "Hey, do you want to stay here and die with me?"
She was slightly-built, like a lot of people from Southeast Asia. If Blake carried her piggy-back and he traded off with Acid Burn every few miles ….
"Maybe we could –"
She cut him off. "No. There's no way the three of us could move fast enough." Her brown eyes were hazy with impending heat exhaustion. "I won't let you die for me. Not after you've come all this way."
"But –" tried Acid Burn.
"Listen, guys. I'm going to stay out here in the sun. I'm not going to hide in the shade until they find me. I'll die from the heat before they get here." Shiny Hair was so pale-skinned that her sunburn hadn't faded over the past few days. Underneath it, she had the flushed cheeks of someone in the first stages of heatstroke. She was probably right; without the breeze, chills of fear, jolts of adrenaline and re-routed core heat, she wouldn't last very long.
"I –" Blake protested.
"No. I mean it. But thank you for offering." She gave them a brave, quivering smile. "It's nice to know that someone was thinking of me at the end."
Acid Burn extended his good hand and she shook it. Blake did the same.
"It's been nice running with you, Shiny Hair."
She smiled a bit. "That's my nickname, huh? Not too shabby."
Acid Burn tried to smile too. "I've been calling you Those Sonsofbitches."
"Huh?"
"You said that about a hundred times on the first day. Got stuck in my head."
"Makes sense." Her smile faded and she addressed them solemnly. "I won't tell you my real name. It'll make it easier for you to leave me behind. But listen…" She made eye contact with each of them in turn. "Burned Arm. Very Buff. Do me a favor."
"Anything," Blake said.
"Don't look out for each other."
He and Acid Burn blinked in surprise.
"Not until you get to Denver. Don't stop for each other like you did for me. Let the other one fall, and keep going. Please."
"Will do."
"You got it."
"Thanks … and goodbye."
"Goodbye," Acid Burn said softly.
"Don't take care of yourself," Blake advised. "Die as quickly as possible."
She gave him a tiny, rueful laugh. "I'll do that. Now go. Run. Just run."
Philips reached out for an odd-looking bright blue wire. "What kind of alloy is this? Never seen anything like –"
The physicist's voice cut off in a squeak when The Slayer lifted him off the ground by his upper arms. Now at eye-height with The Slayer's visor, Philips smiled nervously at the reflection of his own dark face and said, "Uh … hi?"
With all the effort of someone moving a floor lamp, The Slayer walked Philips over to the furthest corner of The Forge and set him down.
"Ross?" Philips asked anxiously.
"Don't move." He and Bailey also paused in mid-motion.
The Slayer lifted a fist in front of Philips's face and lit the welding torch with a popping hiss. The blue flame was reflected in the physicist's wide eyes.
They let it out their collective breath when the marine used the long flame to scorch a line in the concrete floor instead of in Philips. Little wisps of vaporized limestone and silica drifted upward.
"Ross?"
"I'm pretty sure that means, 'Stay behind this line.' "
Philips lifted his palms placatingly. "Hey, no problem. Whatever you say, big guy."
The Rattler was back, right on time.
"Ten," screamed someone on the western fringe of the herd. "Ten, goddammit! Ten!"
Blake, Acid Burn, Super Tan and Cut Cheek were closer to the western edge than he would have liked. A small hill in their path restricted their speed to a 'Six' while they climbed it.
The incident with Shiny Hair had weakened Blake's resolve to be a cold, emotionless running machine. He made the mistake of looking back.
A line of fire zipped toward a random victim not too far from Blake's pack, leapt from the ground as it reached Shirtless and cut him in half at an angle through the upper thigh and pelvis. There was surprisingly little blood as the pieces of his body dropped away from each other.
Just as Blake was about to turn away from the horrid sight, the eyes in Shirtless's slack-jawed face rolled around and locked gazes with him. The poor bastard wasn't dead yet.
He expected the man to have a pleading or terrified look. Instead, Shirtless silently gave him the same message as Shiny Hair: Run. Just run.
Blake ran.
"Hey, you guys want some sandwiches? I realized we haven't had any lunch."
"Sure, what have you got?" Ross's stomach was reminded to growl now that Bailey had mentioned food.
"Almost anything that can be canned or frozen. Tuna-fish, or we could thaw out some smoked turkey slices. Peanut butter and jelly if you're feeling nostalgic. You get the idea."
"Got any gluten-free bread?" Philips asked. "I don't have Crohn's disease, I just like the texture."
"Yup. It's all frozen, but Tucker's a whiz at reheating stuff."
"Perfect. I'll have a PB&J on gluten-free bread."
"Tuna-fish for me," Ross requested. "Any kind of bread."
"Pepsi or 7-Up?"
"What, you even have soda-pop?" Philips asked.
"And real coffee!" Bailey smiled cheerily.
"Soda-pop?" Ross teased Philips. "What kind of barbarian calls it 'soda-pop'? It's 'pop', 'soda', or 'Coke' if you're in the Deep South."
"And 'soda-pop' in parts of the Mountain West," Philips shot back, "including Denver. Try to blend in with the natives, Friedmann."
Bailey turned toward The Slayer. "I'd ask you if you want anything, but …"
He got no response.
Bailey shrugged. "Your loss."
Half an hour later they were sitting in Philips's Time Out corner, noisily consuming their sandwiches as The Slayer continued to ignore them.
Ross had just taken a huge bite when a tiny blue-white spark manifested inside the clear plastic cube and was immediately sucked up toward the suspended barrel. Ross bit his tongue. He swallowed hastily and coughed, "Supernova!" almost unintelligibly.
The Slayer actually paused at this, giving Ross the same inscrutable stare as the day he'd guessed why the demons were leaving White Sands alone.
"Super-what?" Bailey asked.
Ross finished coughing and said with delight, "Supernovas! It's a cosmic ray accumulator, guys! He's going to power the Gate with the radiation from supernovas."
"Oooh …" Philips said eagerly. He began to stand. The Slayer shook his head once, and the physicist reluctantly sat back down. "Nobody's bothered harnessing cosmic ray energy because 99% of what you'll end up with is hydrogen and helium, which are already the most abundant elements in the universe."
Ross stroked his lower lip in thought. "It must be that other one percent of rare atomic nuclei that he's after."
Bailey was nodding with an appreciative squint. "I guess he's not in a hurry, then. Building up enough atomic nuclei to power a Slipgate is going to take months if he has to wait around for specific rare particles to be captured by his device. Especially when it's down here inside a building, and not flying in low Earth orbit where most cosmic rays enter our atmosphere and create particle showers."
Ross laughed. "Why, Bailey, I didn't know you had it in you."
The agent held up three fingers. "Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering, Master's in Metallurgy, PhD in Fluid Mechanics. They don't hire guys off the street to guard this place."
Even Philips was impressed. "Not just a pretty face after all."
It was Bailey's turn to laugh. "Tucker's prettier, and he's got two doctorates."
"Why, thank you," said Tucker's tiny voice from the pip on Bailey's collar. "Always nice to have my stunning good looks and brilliance acknowledged."
Bailey rolled his eyes as if he'd expected that response.
Something occurred to Ross. "Are we going to need radiation suits once the Gate is powered up with all this exotic matter?"
"No, see, that's the thing," Philips explained. "A functional Slipgate is meant to consume its own radiation before it can go anywhere. It's a sort of sideways whirlpool made of atoms that are simultaneously splitting and fusing at the same time. That's how the dimensional portals produced by Hell Gates work: the matter is exploding and imploding in perfect sync, and that lets the portal be both here and there at the same time."
"As long as it works properly we won't get irradiated?"
"Yup."
"Except perfect synchronization is extremely difficult to achieve. Hence the tendency to implode upon activation," Bailey reminded them.
"Maybe the type of fuel has been the issue all along, and it took VEGA's undivided attention to figure it out. The real trick will be making the portal connect to the right place in the right dimension."
"Because dimensional barriers aren't uniform, right?" Ross had been summarily dismissed from the Tokyo ARC's physics department before he even laid eyes on their Gate experiment, so he was scraping together what little he remembered.
"Oversimplified, but yes. They're like Swiss cheese, except even the holes are impenetrable to our current technology."
Ross hooked a thumb over his shoulder at The Slayer's project. "Hopefully we can reproduce this design when he's done, and if you learn to keep your hands to yourself, Philips maybe he'll even let you look at it."
Philips stuck out his tongue.
"Ten!" a runner yelled hoarsely. "Te–"
As one, the herd flinched away from the red flicker that suddenly appeared in its center. Blake executed what would have been a perfect "inside cut" if he'd been at his weekly soccer game, and turned his head to make sure Acid Burn was following. Cut Cheek and Super Tan headed in the opposite direction.
Because they spent most of their time hunched over, it was easy to forget that Prowlers were nine feet tall. One of the eyeless purple monstrosities leapt out of the portal and snatched up Blond Goatee by his neck and ankles. Blake was not able to look away quickly enough to avoid seeing the Prowler lift Blond Goatee over its head and take a huge bite out of his stomach, pulling out long ropes of something dark red and gleaming.
'Don't think about what those are, don't think about what those are, don't think about what those are,' Blake ordered himself. He grabbed Acid Burn by his good arm and shouted, "Run, goddammit!" in his new friend's ear as the man started to slow.
"The noises he's making –!" Acid Burn's eyes were wide with horror.
"I know! Keep running! You promised!"
"I know I promised, but –"
"Just run!"
The Slayer placed a barrel under one of the liquid materials spouts and thumped the large pipe twice with his fist.
"More magnesium alloy coming right up," Bailey confirmed.
"What do you think he's making now?" Philips asked Ross.
Ross peeked into one of the pools that didn't contain halves of the Gate. "Looks like a mold for curved panels. A container for the cosmic ray accumulator, maybe?"
"So he's making an interdimensional portal device, an exotic matter power source from scratch, and he kills demons?"
"Mows them down like grass," Ross confirmed.
Philips laughed with a kind of childlike joy. "It's like Buffy the Vampire Slayer went and got herself a physics degree."
The Slayer stopped with a tinkling of tools, turning his head toward Philips.
"You know," Philips said from the Time Out corner. "Buffy. That 2D TV show from last century."
The supersoldier cocked his head.
"The one with the blonde cheerleader who kicks ass?"
Silence.
"No? Ross, you want to show him?"
The Slayer cocked his head at Ross this time.
Ross raised his voice to be heard by Bailey over at his console. "Agent Bailey, could you get me an internet link?"
The agent asked suspiciously, "What for?"
"We're trying to explain Buffy the Vampire Slayer to him."
Bailey made a face as he came over with his command slate. "Is that really necessary?"
"Cultural enrichment." When Bailey was close, Ross hissed, "He's asking us for information. That's never happened before, and we have to foster engagement if we're going to get him to freely communicate with us."
"Yeah, okay, I get it." Bailey tapped a few buttons on his handheld data slate. "You're online with what's left of the internet. Hopefully your cheesy sci-fi show is still on there."
"More like urban fantasy, but … oop, here he comes."
The Slayer strode over to look at Ross's screen, almost bowling Bailey over in the process. Ross was coming to realize that The Slayer didn't bump into people out of rudeness, he honestly assumed they would get out of his way in time.
"Here it is. Turn-of-the-millenium mass-market entertainment. Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
The Slayer tilted his head at the 2D preview of a young woman in a white prom dress throwing a vampire through a skylight.
"I mean," Ross said, "obviously it's only fiction and nobody can toss a two-hundred pound guy over their shoulder with … one … hand … actually you probably could. Anyway, I mean that it was campy and low-budget and had no right to be as good as it was, and people loved it. They tried to make it 3D a while back, but all the quick cuts for the action scenes will give you vertigo."
The Slayer gripped the data slate at the top edge, producing a slight hum and buzzing in Ross's fingers. The Slayer lifted his palm and a holographic preview of the moving picture popped up in his hand. He nodded to himself and closed his fist, putting it away. Then he went back to work on the far side of the room.
"Did he just download something by touching it?" Philips asked incredulously.
"Oh, that is not good," Bailey whispered. "We've got a hell of a lot of classified data on our servers."
Ross made soothing motions. "Relax, Bailey. If he had wanted to damage or destroy anything, he and VEGA could have done it already. He's on our side."
Bailey frowned, unconvinced and watching The Slayer with narrowed eyes. He spoke into the tiny pip on his collar. "You hear that, Tucker?"
"Yep. Adding 1200 additional firewalls."
"Thanks. Give some of them secondary physical locks, and hide the keys."
"You got it."
Ross sighed. "I really don't think that's necessary."
"No offense, Friedmann, but you don't have any control over him. He answers to no one. I mean, if he went completely berserk in this building, we could –" Bailey glanced at them from the corner of his eye. "– restrain him, but outside of this complex you don't have a containment plan." The agent stalked back to his station with a furrowed brow.
"We won't need one," Ross insisted to Philips, repeating, "He's on our side."
"You sure?" Philips asked in hushed tones.
"Hundred percent."
"Because he told you so?"
"He … actually … hasn't said anything like that," Ross admitted.
Philips made an Oh, really? face. "Have you tried asking him?"
"Not in so many words."
"Go ask him. In so many words."
"Fine." Ross turned toward The Slayer and tugged on his shirt hem to make sure it was straight beneath the bulletproof vest. The vest which he suddenly realized he hadn't taken off after landing. Philips and Bailey hadn't removed theirs either.
And Tucker had taken to wearing a vest even inside his security booth.
They had a chance to learn about technology that might save their planet from total destruction, but they were paying for it with creeping suspicions about this inscrutable powerhouse who had no declared loyalties or allegiances.
This growing unease needed to be dealt with. Ross wouldn't put it past Hayden or the president to drop a nuke on The Slayer if they thought he was a threat. Or no longer useful.
Ross was taking the first hesitant step when the big man abruptly straightened up and strode toward Bailey's station.
This time Bailey stepped out of The Slayer's way in time. The supersoldier tapped on the screen for several moments. Bailey peeked around his shoulder as Ross hustled over.
"U-238. You want more depleted uranium?" The agent drew air through his teeth. "You've used up everything we had. Might have to beg some off of the ARC, and I'm pretty sure they want all of theirs for armor and ammunition."
The Slayer tapped so hard on the "U-238" that a crack ran across the screen from the tip of his finger.
"Hey, whoa, easy. No need to start breaking stuff. I'm sure we can get some without taking it from the ARC, all right?" Bailey said. "Depleted uranium is so common –"
Ross began to tell Philips, "It's a by-product of nuclear –"
"Ross." Philips pointed at himself. "Physicist."
"Sorry. Please continue, Bailey."
The smirking Bailey resumed. "As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted…"
Ross pressed his lips together.
"... we didn't keep much on hand, taking up storage space where we could be storing rare materials. We'd order some from another base if we needed it. So let's see…" The Slayer stepped back and Bailey tapped rapidly on the cracked screen.
"A-ha. Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site, back up in Colorado. One of the storage facilities there has a large cache of depleted uranium."
"Road trip?" Ross asked The Slayer.
The big man nodded.
"No!" someone shrieked at the front of the pack. They sounded more angry than afraid. "No!" Others took up the same call in their desert-dry voices.
Blake looked up from his shuffling feet to see half a dozen flickers begin a hundred yards in front of the herd. When the runners started to turn away from that direction, more flickers appeared in the west. Then the south. And east. Dozens of portals. The demons had clearly gotten a rough estimate of where the humans would be and were casting a huge net over several hundred acres of High Plains scrubland. Imps, Prowlers, Gargoyles, every variety of Possessed and Zombie humans, a Summoner and three Mancubi appeared with simultaneous roars of triumph.
They were surrounded.
A chorus of shouts went up from the eighty-odd humans as they stumbled to a stop. Some were made in fear, some in despair, but most were from outrage at the unfairness of it all. They'd come so far, seen so much suffering and death, overcome thirst and exhaustion and injury and the psychological pressure of being hunted relentlessly for days. Now they were all going to die.
Most of the herd bunched up, huddling so closely that Blake and Acid Burn were crushed against each other, but a few had apparently reached their limit for being scared. Wannabe Viking and Lady Wrestler pulled together final bursts of speed and launched themselves out of the circle from the nine and twelve o'clock positions. These two were going to go out fighting.
Something large and green dropped out of the sky right in front of Lady Wrestler, shaking the ground so much that she fell, and for a moment Blake's exhausted brain thought it was The Hulk. As the figure stood from the miniature crater created by its landing, Blake saw that it was a really, really big dude in armor, not an enormous green rage monster.
Bullets tore up the dirt between Wannabe Viking and the group he'd been aiming for. He skidded to a halt as the line of Gargoyles and Zombies disintegrated into piles of flesh and acid. Blake looked up, but all he could see was a long metal rod floating in mid-air, coughing out jets of yellow fire. The bullets chewed their way through the ring of demons counterclockwise and the huge soldier took the other direction.
The marine had a UAC Chaingun that unfolded like metal origami, becoming four different turrets with three barrels each. He braced it against his thighs for stability, firing bullets and tracer rounds in the hundreds. The gun spat empty casings off to the sides like the shells of sunflower seeds.
The soldier pivoted his lower body, raking the line of demons like he was using a flamethrower instead of a ballistic weapon. The entire row of monsters stumbled back, some because their limbs had been blown off, and some because the spray of bullets was taking large chunks out of their faces, if not removing them altogether.
When he ran out of Chaingun ammunition, it vanished and a UAC Heavy Assault Rifle replaced it. He made liberal use of the micro-missiles, advancing slowly as the surviving demons ran at him.
Two of the demons coming in from the south were not distracted by the soldier, and jumped through the rain of bullets from the overhead gun. One was a Prowler, the other an Imp.
The Imp crouched and began molding a fireball in its hands. The Prowler leapt straight into the crowd.
A lot of things happened at once.
There was hoarse yelling, both human and alien, the continuous roar of weaponsfire, and tearing sounds. Suddenly Blake was kneeling, his hands bringing a large chunk of granite down onto the Imp's head. The creature was pinned to the ground by no less than four humans per limb, and in addition to Blake pounding its head with a rock, there were two people with poles made of broken tree limbs impaling the hateful thing over and over again, digging into its body with the sharp ends like a farmer trying to loosen the dirt in a post hole. One guy got his fingers under the chitinous armor covering its left chest and started yanking. They were all shrieking like lunatics, including Blake.
The demon howled and thrashed, slashing with its razor-taloned fingers as much as it could, but as soon as one human flinched away to staunch their wounds, another took their place.
Blake smashed its face again, and heard a crack. The demon snapped at him with its needlelike fangs.
Red and black fog filled his vision. He heard a baby wailing in horrible pain, Shiny Hair telling him to run, Elroy begging for help, Blond Goatee shrieking as a monster ate him alive.
When Blake came back to himself, the Imp's head was a smear of pulpy tissue peppered with shards of bone, and Acid Burn was pulling him away from the grisly mess by his arm around Blake's waist.
"We got it!" he was shouting in Blake's ear. "We got it, Gym Rat! It's dead!"
Blake fell backwards, dropping the bloody rock, and Acid Burn knelt next to him to keep him upright.
The green-armored soldier leapt high in the air, and Blake saw little flashes of flame along his arms and legs, with longer-lasting fires on his back. They were a dozen tiny jets, he realized, allowing the marine to make micro-adjustments in the air and land exactly where and how he wanted to. Blake had heard the UAC was developing jump-jet boots, but most people were too uncoordinated to even remain upright with miniature rockets blasting them off the ground. This guy's suit was outfitted with so many that he could probably do acrobatics.
The soldier came down on a Gargoyle's shoulders, crushing it into the ground like stomping a beer can. A sword – an actual sword – jutted out from his left arm and he used it to bisect a Zombie, then chop off the Summoner's raised arms along with its head.
The flickering portals vanished. Someone had heard that the ambush was not going well, and stopped sending troops.
Blake heard a deep feminine bellow rise above the general chaos and saw Lady Wrestler's enraged face snarl down at something struggling under another heaving pile of twenty-plus humans. She twisted and yanked viciously, pushing with her foot at the same time, and came away with the entire arm of the Prowler. She roared down at it in manic victory, the whites of her eyes visible all the way around. This seemed to galvanize the rest of the Prowler's attackers. They jostled each other for a chance to tear at their enemy, and through a brief gap in the bodies Blake saw Wannabe Viking dig both hands into a long gash on the Prowler's bicep and rip the entire muscle group straight off the bone. The Prowler shrieked and spasmed, making the whole pile of bodies buck like vacationers on a raft.
On the fringes of this gory display, Button-down looked around wildly until his gaze landed on a Gargoyle that, although missing a leg, a wing and most of its left arm, was still alive and clawing its way toward a pile of boulders. A scream of pure hatred tore loose from Button-down's throat, and several others joined him when he raced to destroy the injured demon.
Acid Burn restrained Blake when he tried to get to his feet.
"You broke your fingers! You broke your fingers smashing that Imp with the rock! Stay down!"
It was over very quickly. The uninjured half of the herd had joined one fight or the other, and were soaked with demon blood from the wrists down. Blake thanked God that it didn't occur to any of them to actually eat the flesh they were tearing from the demons' bones.
The soldier was fighting with equal ferocity, although he was more efficient and didn't stop to rip apart every demon. One Mancubus remained, and Blake nearly cheered when he speared the vile creature's glowing heart out of its chest and rammed the thing down its own throat. The flabby abomination exploded into a bloody fountain of flesh and armor.
The humans roared in approval.
Then Blake heard a rattle.
'No. No, not when we're so close to surviving this.' He flipped onto his hands and knees, heedless of his broken fingers, and scanned the sagebrush for the Rattler's tracks.
The soldier saw the burning line of the shockwave zipping toward the survivors and dashed into its path, taking force of it on his right side. He rocked slightly from the impact, but did not fall to pieces like every other human had before him. The flames didn't even seem to scorch the paint.
"Snake!" Blake yelled hoarsely. The marine turned his head slightly toward him. "Giant snake!" he repeated, jabbing an unbroken finger at the dust trail. "Invisible!" That was as much information as he could force out of his parched throat.
The soldier's head returned to scanning the terrain with even more speed. His gaze locked on the S-shaped dust trail when the creature moved closer for another attempt.
Something light blue and crackling, about the size of a golf ball, launched out of the marine's shoulder rig and struck the ground in its path. The Rattler was flash-frozen in the icy explosion like a strobe-lit dancer.
It was as thin and snakelike as he'd guessed, but nearly twenty feet long, and most of that seemed to be metal. Right now it was poised like a cobra with about six feet of it raised off the ground, supporting a skeletal head that had the customary horns and fangs.
It had two arms, which surprised Blake. He'd expected the lash to be the snake monster's gigantic forked tongue. Instead the weapon was a mechanical claw at the end of a chain that had emerged from the creature's palm. The frozen claw was digging into the ground slightly behind and to the side of it, like it was about to fling dirt at the marine.
The soldier swaggered over and punched it directly in the face, shattering the entire creature like a weak pane of glass. Blake sagged in relief. He heard Acid Burn bark out a relieved laugh.
Dust and stillness settled on the scene, almost inappropriate in its lack of sound. He heard only harsh breathing and the whimpers of people having their wounds bandaged with strips of cloth.
Blake looked down at his hands. Both pinkies and his left ring finger were indeed dangling at weird angles, but he felt nothing.
Everyone flinched when a matte-black helicopter suddenly appeared on the ground ten yards away.
"Sorry, sorry," said a man's soft voice through a speaker. "My bad, I should have announced ourselves first. We're from the Denver ARC, and this is a stealth helicopter. More rescue helicop– okay, yes, Garcia, I apologize – more tilt-rotor aircraft are on their way to pick you up. We'll stay with you until they come. We will distribute water and first aid supplies in a moment. Please remain where you are, and do not attempt to interact with the soldier while he patrols."
The shock that started to set in for most of them was surprisingly beneficial because it cooled their core temperatures down to a safe range. Whether they'd ever come out of the shock again was anyone's guess.
Blake and Acid Burn stared at the scattered remains of the Imp and the Prowler. The monsters had been torn to actual shreds by the enraged mob. Even the individual bones of their ribcages had been wrenched off their skeletons, like tearing a wing from a roasted chicken. Their entrails covered a shockingly large area.
"I think we got, 'em, Acid Burn," Blake said, and fought back a hysterical giggle.
"Sure did. Listen, I can't keep calling you Gym Rat or Very Buff," said his running buddy.
"Blake," he told him. "Blake Armstead. You?"
"Samba Ndong. No jokes, please. Nice to meet you."
"Same." He jerked his chin at the marine. "Not that I'm not grateful, but what the hell kind of soldier is that?"
"Right?" Samba agreed. "No way that's a regular human being. Too fast. And the way the weapons appear out of nowhere."
The smallest of the five soldiers wandered over to Blake and Samba. "I've got one bottle of water left," he said apologetically. "Didn't really bring enough for eighty people." The slender soldier waited politely while they took turns gulping the water down. It was too bright for someone to take their sunglasses off if they had them, so they couldn't see his eyes, but he sounded kind.
"I'm Ross. We'll get you some finger splints as soon as Thompson and Philips are done with the med kits. Anything we can do for you while we wait?"
"Tell us who that guy is," Samba said. "Never seen anything like it."
Ross gave a reluctant sigh. "Yeah, guess our secret's out. Especially when we do rescue missions that involve dozens of people." He gestured in the marine's direction. "The military had a supersoldier project underway before all this craziness happened. He's one of them."
"Wow. I thought those didn't work."
"Hence the secrecy. No reason to blab about something until you're sure."
"How many are there?"
"There were only a dozen or so successes. Not everybody has the right stuff to become a Slayer."
"That's what they call themselves? The Slayers?"
"Yeah, sort of a team name, like The Spartans, or The Green Berets."
"How many in Denver?"
"Just this one."
"One soldier for an entire city?"
"Most Slayers are off guarding high-value targets like heads of state, fabrication plants and water reservoirs." He gestured to their assigned Slayer as the big man came close, patrolling the perimeter with a sawed-off shotgun tilted back against his shoulder. "Besides, you've seen him in action. One's more than enough. And at this altitude the demons aren't even a challenge for him."
"Where do all the weapons come from?"
"Sorry, guys. That's classified."
"Is it something invisible? Like the snake demon? Or your helicopter?"
"That's not a bad i-" The guy coughed. "Sorry. Dusty out here. That's not a bad guess, but I still can't tell you."
"Did you take care of the demons that were following us?"
"Yeah, we spotted them all moving in the same direction, wiped them out, and continued along that trajectory until we located you."
"Did you … find a young Asian woman? She would have been right out in the open."
Ross hesitated long enough that Blake knew they'd found her, and she was dead.
"Those Sonsofbitches," Samba whispered. "Those Sonsofbitches." He started to cry soundlessly. Blake hugged the smaller man around his shoulders.
"How?" he asked.
"Looks like heatstroke. We marked her body for pickup."
"Good. That's … how she wanted to go."
"I'm sorry."
"Thanks."
"This might be a bad time, but could I ask you a few questions about the demons' hunting tactics? While it's fresh in your minds?"
Samba sniffed back the last of his tears, and Blake patted his back. "Sure, go ahead."
"They couldn't have caught up to you on foot if you kept going. Not in air that's so thin. They must be teleporting back to some sort of hub and then returning farther along your estimated flight path. About how long is the turnaround time?"
"Fifty-three minutes," Blake said. He lifted his wristwatch. "I timed it. Every time the snake monster killed someone and then left to tell them where we were. Sometimes fifty-two or fifty-four, but always averaged out to fifty-three."
"Are you sure? I mean, a small sample size can –"
"Eleven times in a row," Blake informed him. "High as a Kite, Unfortunate Haircut, Lip Piercing, The Screamer, Widow's Peak, Diamond Earrings, Pink T-Shirt, Freckles, I Can't Believe It, Nike Jacket and Shirtless. All dead, fifty-three minutes apart. They were …"
Blake's voice trailed off as he started seeing their deaths in his mind's eye, noisy and bloody and uncontrollable, and knew the memories were going to happen every day for the rest of his life.
This time it was Blake's turn to burst into sobs. Samba hugged him as Ross made noises that were supposed to be reassuring words, but had no meaning.
It was over now. It was over. They'd survived. Denver was taking them in, and they were going to live.
God damn it.
