“You can question him in the hospital,” Matt offered.
Wylie laughed scornfully. “Oh, for shit’s sake, Matthew, this cat needs to be waterboarded at the very least. He needs a live rat stuffed in that eye socket. At the very fricking least. Hospital. Do you put a goddamn cobra in a hospital?”
“If you’re me, you sure as hell do. In an animal hospital. Departmental requirement, all injured animals are provided treatment.”
“That is not what I meant.”
The ambulance was coming soon, so Al had to make a maximum effort here, a supereffort, or this was not going to come out right. He had more than one job to do, he knew that now, because he had to kill every one of these damn people, especially the ones from the his own universe.
How had things gone so wrong? He had to kill them and get back and warn General Samson that things were out of control, they were way out of control.
Then the cop came down into the crawl space. Just like that, he was standing over him. This was his chance, his only chance.
As the fool bent down, he reached up and pushed the pistol out of the holster with the heel of his hand.
It hit his thigh with a thud that shook him but which he didn’t feel.
“Excuse me,” the cop said, reaching down.
Al was faster. Al got the butt of the weapon between thumb and fore-finger. He felt along the side of it, and got his finger around the trigger.
He raised the weapon.
“Shit, he’s got my gun! He’s got my fucking—”
He shot upward wildly, through the floor. There were cries from above. He had no way to know if he’d hit anybody, so he shot again and again, until there was only one bullet left.
By now, the cop had skittered back up there, too, and they were all yelling.
He knew what he had to do because he knew the stakes. They needed information that he did indeed possess and it sounded as if they were going to drag it out of him with pliers. They would succeed, too. Our expertise at torture was child’s play compared to what these bastards sounded capable of.
Give it to them! Tell them everything!
There was one gateway they knew nothing about. But he knew about it, because he’d been taken through it, and they were not going to find that out.
They couldn’t destroy the seraph, not even close, but they might slow things down, and that was the issue, wasn’t it, because every day after the twenty-first, things were going to get harder, and around the twenty fifth, the gateways would once again close, and Abaddon would be denied all but minor access for another thirteen thousand years. They’d have to go back to sending through agents provocateurs to derange human civilization, cause wars, spread starvation and greed and confusion, and keep the bastards weak.
Keep YOUR people weak, you mean. Listen to yourself, General, you’re thinking with the enemy.
He got the barrel of the gun nestled under his chin, prayed to the good lord above that he had killed the man he’d been sent to kill, and pulled the trigger.
Then he climbed up out of the crawl space and into the kitchen. Wylie, whom Al had been sent to kill, was unhurt. They were all unhurt.
And Al was elated.
The next second, he understood that the person still lying down there in that crawl space with a splayed head was him. And, all at once, he realized what he had done. “Uh, hey! Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry. Sorry!”
He remembered the Mountain, going down into the rock with that woman, Captain Mazle. He realized that she had been seraph. Samson was one of them, too. They were heavily disguised and they used drugs to enable them to live in our air, and they had stolen his will.
Needles, sharp scissors, clipped flesh wobbling in silver trays—brain being removed, brain being installed.
They had stolen his memory. They had subverted his honor.
This soldier owes his duty to his country, NOT TO THEM!
He’d been working for the enemy.
As he watched, EMS technicians came running in. He watched them jump down into the crawl space.
“I can tell you what you need to know,” he said.
The cop hurried out behind the EMS doctors. Wylie and his family came together, holding each other. Martin and Trevor left, and began to move off down the hill.
Al ran outside. “Wait! Listen to me! I made a mistake, but I can help you!” He went up to them. He shouted into Martin’s face, “Listen to me! I can help you!”
Nothing. He grabbed Martin—and his hands went through him. Martin shuddered and said, “I feel like a goose just walked over my grave.”
“Dad, we have a problem here, because when we go back, we’re gonna hit really fast water. Remember, in our world, the Saunders is in flood.”
Al could hear every word. “Can you hear me?” he bellowed.
“Yeah, that’s right, we can’t cross, not with the flooding on the other side.”
“What about the Hummer?”
“Yeah!”
No! NO! You fools, it’ll float right down the river!
They started back up the hill. “It’s full of dead seraph.”
“Take ’em with us, save Wylie and Matt a lotta trouble.”
“Plus, the back’s caked with venom. They must’ve brought that busted up outrider with them in it.”
Al had followed them. He was right with them, just inches away.
LISTEN TO ME! LISTEN NOW!
They set about pushing reptile bodies into the back of the Humvee.
Al inventoried his situation. You still exist, you can think, you can see and hear, you can move effortlessly wherever you want to go. But how in hell do you communicate? A quick review of his knowledge of ghosts and such, and the answer was immediately clear: you don’t.
He was a damn ghost, was what he was.
But no, this ghost was no cute little Casper and—he hoped—no raging banshee. He had a much larger vision of his life than before. His conscience was very, very powerful now. He saw deep into the arrogance that had made him who he was, the entire falsity of it, and how profound feelings of worthlessness were the foundation of the ego that had led him across all his life, all the way to this final predicament.
He knew now who he was, he knew the mistakes he had made, and he knew just exactly how to help the people of his world turn everything around. They could completely defeat Abaddon—these people, this man and this boy, if only they knew what he did. He had to tell them—but he couldn’t make them hear him or see him.
Martin and Trevor opened the doors of the Hummer and shoved two gray, lifeless seraph bodies into the back, then, as an afterthought, Trevor pocketed one of their hand weapons. Al knew those weapons, electrical- centrifugal handguns that could propel thousands of light-weight plastic rounds at five thousand clicks an hour. The only sound they made was the crackle of the rounds breaking the sound barrier, but they could slice a man in half a mile away. Or a dozen men…or a thousand.
“How do these work?” Martin asked.
“Let’s test ’em.”
Holy shit, be careful!
“It doesn’t look very lethal,” Trevor commented.
Martin held one of the black disks away from his body, pointing its three short barrels in the direction of some trees. He pressed the two triggers, top and bottom. There was a brief snarl, and three of the trees literally flew apart, a foot-wide chunk of their trunks turned instantly to sawdust.
“What is this thing?”
The U.S. military has the same thing. Bigger, vehicle mounted.
“It’s a seraph weapon,” Trevor said, producing a dark blue box with seraph hieroglyphics on it. “Here’s some ammo.”
