FOURTEEN
DECEMBER 18, LATE
THE MONSTER
WYLIE SAW REPTILIANS, GORGEOUS LIKE snakes are gorgeous, their scales shimmering in a bright room with white tile walls, fluorescent tubes lining the ceiling, a metal autopsy table.
Where was it?
Then he knew, and he wrote: The entrance to their lair is in Cheyenne Mountain, but the place itself is right here, right beneath us. It has to do with the mass of the planet and the power coursing through its veins, which are the ley lines, and the great confluence of lines in this place.
Twelve miles from this house lay the geographical center of the continental United States. In the other human world, their base was beneath it. And in this world, if there was anywhere that they could break through, it would be in this area, where the veil between universes was thinnest.
Wylie’s hands flew. He hardly noticed that Nick and Brooke stood behind him, with Kelsey asleep in her mother’s arms.
The little team rode thus deep into the night, on the tide of Wylie’s words.
He watched his own hands, then watched the screen as the words appeared:
General Samson injected himself, sucked air through his teeth as the familiar agony spread up his arm, then burned through his chest, then invaded his face and head, his whole body. It was a hateful, miserable thing to have to do every day.
Today, he did not expect to expose himself to the human earth’s atmosphere, but he was doing it under an order that he could quote precisely: “You will maintain a physical state that allows you free movement in existing planetary conditions at all times.” There was nothing about not being prepared for a day because he didn’t expect to be in their raw damn air.
“Time?” he barked as he entered the abattoir. His feet squished in blood. The place stank of raw human meat.
“01044,” Captain Mazle replied.
Lying before them on a steel table was a body. Samson looked down at it dispassionately. General Al North, big deal. He’d despised the eager creature with its idealism and its pathetically uninformed mind.
He looked at the mouth, noted the drying along the raw line where the lips had been removed and the clotted blood in both eye sockets.
“Mazle!”
“Yessir!”
He gestured. “If you fail—”
“We won’t fail.”
“It’s you, Captain. You. You will fail or you won’t.”
“Don’t threaten me, General.”
She came from a powerful family. He didn’t like it, but he must not forget it. “I’m doing nothing of the kind.”
“You’d like to, though. Anyway, I’ve already told my father what a complete piece of shit you are.”
He tried not to take her threat to heart. Her father could order death to a man in Samson’s position. “Captain, I’m sorry if you don’t like my style.”
“Your style? You have all the charm of a skerix, and you smell a lot worse.”
“It’s the anitallergens, as I’m sure you are aware. Please be reminded that my responsibilities leave me no choice.” He gestured toward General North’s ravaged body. “If we’re going to get this thing through that gateway, we have no time, so let’s get started, Captain, if you don’t mind.”
“You’d be delighted if I failed, General, of course. But I’m not going to fail.”
“This whole operation is in danger of failing, and if it does, not even your father will be able to save you. We still don’t have enough slaves and we can’t get the personnel in to control the ones we do have because the lenses are old and barely functional. We’re losing 20,000 humans a minute and we need another billion in four days.”
“Well, that’s not my issue, General. My issue is this little writer sitting in the other human earth—you know, the one you people haven’t been able to enter usefully for the past fifty goddamn years!” She strode over and slapped the chest of the inert human. “If we don’t succeed in this, we will both stand before Echidna herself. You and me, General Samson, and not all the power of Abaddon will save us.”
She crossed the room, moving toward a male who stood in silence, waiting. “Doctor,” she said to him, “it’s time for you to do your duty. Assuming that you can.”
The doctor gleamed in the light, his scales tiny and creamy. She didn’t know his name, but his appearance confirmed his class. She would be polite to him. He’d no doubt paid a lot for this job, in hope of sharing in the spoils of earth.
However, the doctor didn’t do anything.
“Let’s get moving, okay?”
Samson chuckled. “The loyal retainer. Your personnel are as promising as your plans.”
“I need more power,” the doctor said. “Forty thousand volts at least.”
“Do it with twenty.”
“Captain—”
“You do it, all you have to do is use care instead of brute force to cover your incompetence. So do it with twenty or you’re going on punishment report. I’m sick of your excuses.”
“Captain, for this to last—”
“We don’t need it to last, we need it to work for a few hours.”
The doctor threw a look of desperation toward General Samson, who did not react.
“Okay,” Captain Mazle said into her phone, “how much can you give him?” She looked at the doctor. “Compromise: you can get your forty, but only for one minute.”
“I applied for two, Captain.”
“Do it! Now!”
The doctor drew a narrow silver case from his pocket, opened it, and took out an instrument with a black, tapering handle and a long blade so thin that it was no more than a shimmer in the air. “This specimen has mild arterial damage from cholesterol,” he said, “typically associated with advance of age in this species. Do we want to invest—”
“This species,” Jennifer snarled. “Where do you get off? It’s the only other intelligent species we’ve found across a billion parallel universes and throughout our own.” She gestured toward the remains of Al North. “This creature, if it can successfully do what it’s being designed to do, could save us all.”
“I hardly think—”
“Because, Doctor, have you heard the news from home? Have you heard what’s happening there?”
“It’s an aged specimen.”
Samson broke in. “I don’t want you two sniping at each other, not when we’re working against time and there’s so much at stake. We are behind schedule so MOVE.”
“I won’t be responsible if I’m rushed!”
“Doctor, I’ll hand you over to the soultechs.”
The doctor’s scales shuddered and flushed yellow. Everybody feared the soultechs and their skills to capture the soul and to destroy the soul.
“Under what regulation? You have no right.”
“Maybe and maybe not, but I will do it, of that you can be sure.”
“You ought to do it anyway,” Mazle added.
“Shut up, bitch,” Samson said, his voice deceptively mild.
“How dare you!”
“Gonna tell on me again? Daddy’s getting old. Daddy’s not who he used to be. So maybe Daddy loses his power soon, and I get to kill your fucking little prune of a soul.”
