Shuttered Sky

vault. The chair was occupied: their Honored Guest.

The Corridor A guard was next—Gerritson used the guard’s own momentum to slam his head into the edge of the open vault door, and he collapsed in a heap at the threshold.

Up above, one of the sharpshooters took aim.

Maddy ran toward Gerritson, scrolling through all the possible ways she could disable a battle-trained, adrenaline-pumped officer be­fore a bullet could do the job first.

Seeing the gunman above, Gerritson rolled, and the bullet rico­cheted off the vault door. Then in a second Gerritson was moving again. This time he was behind the wheelchair, his legs sprinting as he pushed the wheelchair in an erratic serpentine path toward Corridor A.

A second shot cratered the concrete beside him, but the third shot caught him in the shoulder. Still it did not slow his momentum, or dampen his determination.

“Stop! They’ll kill you!” Maddy yelled, standing in his path—but as he approached, she realized it wasn’t madness or rage in his eyes. It was peace. A calm transcendence funneled into action.

“Out of my way, Maddy! I know what I’m doing!” He knocked her out of his path with the strange wheelchair.

“Stop him!” She couldn’t see Bussard, but recognized his voice. His footsteps clattered down a metal staircase on a catwalk up above.

The Corridor A guard, his head still bleeding, got up, then raised his pistol with the practiced calm he had been trained for, and fired. The bullet whizzed past, inches from Maddy’s ear, and entered the base of Gerritson’s skull, detonating the right side of his head. A spray of blood left a red arc across the mouth of the corridor, and splattered across Maddy’s face.

He was dead before he hit the ground, and the wheelchair careened forward, smashing into the food cart before skidding to a halt.

Maddy reacted with a directed wrath that arrived too late to make a difference. As the corridor guard ran past her, she grabbed his arm and snapped it at the elbow, then jabbed her fist into his epiglottis, so he couldn’t even scream from the pain of the broken arm—only gasp for air as he collapsed to the ground. Now that Maddy’s own adren­aline had shot into the red, she would have gone on decimating the guard for what he had done, had not Bussard’s voice begun to boom in the space around her.

“Stand down, Lieutenant!” He crossed the floor toward her. “I said stand down!”

Maddy forced her arms to her sides. Damage control, she thought. While Bussard did his, she would effect her own. Gerritson was dead. Nothing could be done to change that. Now she had to divorce her mind from the context—belay the emotional imperative, and talk her way out of a court martial. Damage control now. Assess later.

“Yes sir. Protecting the guest, sir. The guard’s aim could have been off and—'

“Enough!” Bussard turned to one of the recovering members of Zero Team.

“McCall! Get Gerritson out of here. Take him to the loading dock for now. We’ll deal with him after this situation is under control.”

“Yes, sir.” The officer turned briskly and ran off.

“Wait!” shouted Bussard. The officer halted, then turned hesi­tantly. “You heard my order, McCall?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then carry it out.”

The exchange baffled Maddy, until she realized something. He wasn’t supposed to hear the order. No one in Zero Team was. They had begun their jobs deaf.

“Haas, get the prisoner. Bring him back to his cell.”

“Don’t you mean guest, sir?”

“Just do it!”

She followed McCall, realizing with a swell of horror that she would have to step over Gerritson’s body to get to the wheelchair. The cement floor was slick with blood and brain tissue. A gurgling sounded bubbled in Gerritson’s throat. Maddy felt herself getting sick, and silently scolded herself. She stepped over the body. All at once Gerritson’s hand shot out and coiled itself around her ankle. She turned to find there was life in his eyes, that seemed to be growing stronger, rather than weaker.

“W . . . w . . . wonderful,” bubbled Gerritson’s voice through bloody lips.

“Jesus!” McCall turned to retch on the lunch cart.

Half of Gerritson’s cranium was gone, and still he spoke. “Won­derful, Haas. Wonderful.” But didn’t that gaping fissure above his right eye seem smaller than it had just a moment ago, Maddy thought. Wasn’t his cortex now showing a maze of convolutions where there had been nothing but pulp? And didn’t the blood seem to be soaking back into him, instead of spilling out?

Bussard grabbed her and turned her away from the sight. “Secure the prisoner! Now!”

Following orders was suddenly the easiest, most appealing thing to do. Her military training bypassed her conscious mind, and before she knew what she was doing, she was back in the dome, pushing the heavy wheelchair toward the open door of the vault. On her way, she passed the corridor guard, who was flexing his arm absently, as if she had done little more than tweak his funny bone. But she had broken it—she knew she had. Still there was no sign of the damage.

She crossed through the vault’s threshold, into the cubic cell. Only once she was inside the claustrophobic chamber did she dare to look down at the mysterious guest.

The first thing she noticed was the true nature of his conveyance. It was less a wheelchair and more an Iron Maiden. Heavy steel bars came across his arms and legs. A plate molded to conform to his chest covered his whole upper body, and was welded to the chair. And yes, he did have a mask, but it was hardly iron. The alloy was a polished titanium composite, like the vault door. It covered his entire head, and the holes for eyes, nose and mouth gave him the eerie semblance of a somber jack-o’-lantern. The entire apparatus had a fine seam right down the middle, as if it could be cranked open, but there was no sign of a release or keyhole anywhere. She thought she had never seen anyone quite so helpless.

And then he spoke.

“He was trying to free me,” the voice said, much younger, much gentler than she expected it to sound. “I’m sorry. He meant something to you, didn’t he?”

“I . . . I barely knew him.”

Then she caught his eyes in the small sockets of the face-plate. They were piercing gray, and seemed to float before his hidden face, rather than reside within it.

“Don’t torture yourself,” he whispered. “This isn’t your pain to bear.”

The words reached right through her, and her reeling mind came clear. It was as if he had reached into her soul, removed the shrapnel and sutured up the wound left by the day’s nightmare. And then, in a quiet twinkling of revelation, it occurred to her who he was—who he had to be! It was there in his eyes, and in the flush of presence that steeped the room. It was the same atmospheric charge described by those who had stood on the rim of Black Canyon, and watched as Dillon Cole stood on the canyon floor, and shattered the great dam with the mere force of his will. More than four hundred perished in the canyon before the Backwash began, carrying their bodies back up into Lake Mead—But his body was never recovered. Now Maddy knew the reason why. And the reason for this fortress within a fortress.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” she asked.

Silence for a moment, and then a gentle response. “You could scratch my nose.”

And so she reached in through the small breathing hole, and did.

* * *

Once Haas was escorted out and the vault sealed, General Benjamin Bussard cleared the area of all other personnel. Then, standing alone in Corridor A, he fired a full clip of hollow-tipped bullets into Ger­ritson’s face until he had no eyes to see, nor mouth to speak; until his body held neither memory nor a glimmer of life. And when he was done, Bussard stood there watching and waiting, to make sure his death took.