Down These Strange Streets

PAIN AND SUFFERING by S. M. Stirling

Considered by many to be the natural heir to Harry Turtledove’s title of King of the Alternate History Novel, fast-rising science fiction star S. M. Stirling is the bestselling author of the Island in the Sea of Time trilogy (Island in the Sea of Time, Against the Tide of Years, On the Ocean of Eternity), in which Nantucket comes unstuck in time and is cast back to the year 1250, and the Draka series (including Marching through Georgia, Under the Yoke, The Stone Dogs, and Drakon , plus an anthology of Draka stories by other hands and edited by Stirling, Drakas!), in which Tories fleeing the American Revolution set up a militant society in South Africa and eventually end up conquering most of the earth. He’s also produced the five-volume Fifth Millennium series and the seven-volume General series (with David Drake), as well as stand-alone novels such as Conquistador , The Peshawar Lancers, and The Sky People. Stirling has also written novels in collaboration with Raymond F. Feist, Jerry Pournelle, Holly Lisle, Shirley Meier, Karen Wehrstein, and Star Trek actor James Doohan, as well as contributing to the Babylon 5, T2, Brainship, War World, and Man-Kzin Warseries. His short fiction has been collected in Ice, Iron and Gold. Stirling’s New York Times bestselling Emberverse postapocalyptic series (which is related to the Island in the Sea of Time novels) consists of the trilogy Dies the Fire, The Protector’s War, and A Meeting at Corvallis, and the subsequent sequels The Sunrise Lands, The Scourge of God, The Sword of the Lady, The High King of Montival, and The Tears of the Sun. He has also written the Lords of Creation novels, The Sky People and In the Courts of the Crimson Kings. His most recent work, the Shadowspawn series, consists of A Taint in the Blood and The Council of Shadows. Born in France and raised in Europe, Africa, and Canada, he now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In the suspenseful story that follows, he takes us along with an ordinary cop who finds himself trying to deal with a most unordinary criminal— one of extraordinary abilities, in fact, who seems impossible to beat.

I

DREAM.

Eric Salvador always knew it was a dream; he just couldn’t affect it or get out of it or do anything except watch and smell and taste and feel an overwhelming sick dread as it unfolded. There hadn’t really been a burned- out MRAP at the end of the village street by the mosque. That had been somewhere else, that little shithole outside Kandahar he’d seen on his first tour, and it had only been there one day. It was a composite of all the bads, building up to the Big Bad itself.

A couple of other things are right for the day, he thought.

The way Olsen flicked the little Raven surveillance drone into the air, and the buzz of its engine as it climbed to circle above them, and the dopy little smiley-face button with fangs he’d glued to the nose of the Corps’ thirty- five-thousand-dollar toy airplane. He’d tried to put little fake Hellfire missiles under the wings too, and Gunny had torn him a new asshole about it. The way the translator was sweating and his eyes were flicking here and there, you wondered if it was just the heat or generalized fear or if he knew something he wasn’t saying.

Christ, I’ve had this fucking nightmare so many times I’m starting to sound like a movie critic.

Smith always went into the door of the compound the same way, the way he really had. Regulation, the two of them plastered on either side, Jackson taking out the lock on the gate with a doorknocker round, whump- boom, the warped old planks smacking inward as the slug blew the rusty lock into the courtyard, Smith following, his M-4 tucked into his shoulder and Jackson on his heels.

The explosion was always silent. Silent, slo-mo, the flames leaking around the fragments of wood and the two men flying and just enough time to realize Oh, shit, this is a bad one before a giant’s hand picked him up and threw him backward until there was the impact and the pain.

Only this time was different. This time something walked out of the fire to where he lay with the broken ends of his ribs grating under the body armor that had saved his life.

The shape twisted and its wrongness made him want to scream out the bloody foam in his lungs, but the eyes were flecked yellow. And the voice slithered into his ears:

“Who’s been a naughty boy, then?”

He began to sink into the dry dusty earth, and it flowed into his mouth and nose and eyes, the dust of ages and of empires.

“Naughty!”

“Christ!”

He lay panting in the darkness, smelling his own sweat and waiting to be sure he was awake—sometimes he dreamed he was, and then the whole thing started cycling through his head again. It was blurring away already, details fracturing like sunlight through a drop of water. His hand groped for the cigarettes on the bedside, and then he remembered he’d stopped.

“Go back to sleep,” he told himself. “Dreaming’s no worse than remembering, anyway.”

Christ.

* * *

THE FIRE DEPARTMENT WERE TURNING OFF THEIR HOSES; DANK STEAM ROSE into the night, and chilly water dripped from the buildings to either side where they’d sprayed to keep the flames from spreading; there was a blank wall across the street. It was high-desert winter, cold, dry, moonlight visible on the white peaks of the Sangres floating off to the north.

“So what made it burn down, hey?” Salvador asked the investigator from the fire marshal’s office.

“Arson,” she said to the detective. “And it burned up.”

“Yeah, arson. Some specifics would be nice, Alice,” he said.

“That’s the thing. I can’t find any reason it should have burned. None of the usual indicators. It just did.”

“Very much.”

He ducked under the yellow police tape, a stocky man of thirty or so with a mustache and a blue jowl who’d put on a few pounds lately, not many, not enough to hide his hard outlines, with his coarse black hair still in a highand-tight. There was a deep scar across one olive cheek, and he rubbed at it with a thumb; it hurt a little sometimes, where the flying metal of the IED had cracked the bone. The scar ran down under his mustache, giving