he fires, say. People in the movies can dodge bullets, so why not me? I don’t get a chance to ascertain the feasibility of this plan, which is good as I really don’t think it’ll work. A shot rings out, but again it isn’t Bob shooting. And this time Clara hasn’t aimed at his feet.
The bullet glances off the side of his shoulder, and the impact causes him to drop the handgun. I dive for it, snatch it up and scramble to my feet, but of the two of us, Brutus is a good deal quicker. He picks up his wounded boss, pulls him into a hug, and starts running back toward the center of the compound. I don’t even get a shot off.
But Clara does. Quite a few shots. Bullets are flying all over the place and at first I’m thinking she’s just shooting indiscriminately, but no. She’s hitting her target. The lead is just bouncing off Brutus’s tough hide.
With friendly fire all around us, I dive at Eve—who hasn’t moved at all during any of this—and carry her into our erstwhile grave until the shooting stops.
Long silence. Except for the siren, which is still wailing away in the distance.
“Are you wounded?” I ask Eve once I’m finally certain Clara’s finished.
“No,” she says, adding, “please get off of me.”
I pull myself out of the hole, then reach down and give her a hand out. She looks a touch perturbed by the whole thing, which just annoys me. I wasn’t coming on to her. I was trying to save her life.
The alarm has been joined by the far-off reports of automatic gunfire and the occasional piercing scream. It’s begun. And I’m about as far away from the lab as I can be while still inside the fence. Not good.
“Okay, what the hell is going on?” Clara asks, lowering herself to the ground from the roof of the hut with what looks to be an M-16 on her back.
“Rampant chaos,” I say. “And if we’re lucky, it’s going to get worse pretty fast. When did you learn how to throw your voice?”
She lands clumsily, then pulls herself to her feet and ambles over. I notice she’s wearing the same kind of uniform the security team wore the last time I saw one of them. Not sure what’s stranger, seeing her in a uniform or seeing her in any clothes at all.
“When did I what?” she asks. “Oh.” She holds up a radio. “I set it to an unused frequency and put another one in the window.”
“Smart girl,” I admit. But Clara isn’t paying attention to me any longer. She’s too busy staring at Eve. “All- mother,” she says reverently.
Tchekhy’s warning about militant feminists springs rather suddenly to mind. That, coupled with the realization that I’d have saved myself a bunch of trouble if I’d asked him to hack into the All-Mother website, is enough to make me nauseous.
“Child,” Eve says. “Tell me you didn’t come all this way…”
“Of course. I’m here to save you.”
“Uh, hello?” I interrupt. There would be time for this later. “Ladies, we’re a bit exposed out here.”
Clara, still entirely ignoring me, genuflects at Eve’s feet. What the hell, I ask myself, is going on here?
“Oh, my dear. Get up, please,” Eve says. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. I was never in any real danger.”
We are saved further elaboration on the matter of Eve’s apparent inability to comprehend a life-threatening situation by a scream from the center of camp. A terribly loud, achingly horrible scream that one cannot help but to turn toward. Which I do.
“What was that?” Clara asks quietly, getting to her feet and looking in roughly the same direction. I think she’s finally getting it through her head that we’re in a spot of trouble. Plus, she’s acknowledging my existence again, which is nice.
“Something I haven’t heard in a very long time,” I say, which is true. Not something I’m bound to forget, either. “We have to hurry. Eve, if you…” I trail off, as it appears Eve is no longer standing right next to me. And, when one finds out one is talking to an empty space rather than a person, one is disinclined to finish one’s sentence.
“Where’d she go?” Clara asks, turning.
We’re standing in an open area fifty feet from any building and with a clear view of the lit perimeter road a hundred feet in either direction. Straight ahead, the other side of the chain link fence offers a view of the desert that extends nearly that far before fading into darkness. (The fence is entirely too tall to scale anyway, and topped with barbed wire that actively discourages any bold attempts to do so.) Eve is nowhere.
I peek over the edge of the grave, but she’s not in there either. And there’s no way she’s fast enough to have escaped from view in three seconds. Not if, as Viktor reassured me a couple of times, she and I are the same sort of being.
“Where did she go!” Clara shouts, repeating herself.
“She’s just… gone,” I say, as nothing more clever is coming to mind. I find myself staring at the ground where she’d been standing a moment earlier. The imprints of her shoes are still there. It’s just that Eve has ceased to occupy them.
“How?” Clara asks. She’s getting a tad hysterical.
“If I knew how she did that, I’d do it myself,” I point out.
“But—.”
A second alarm sounds, up near the front entrance of the camp. This snaps me back into the situation like a slap across the face. There will be time later to ponder the implications of what we had just witnessed, but to get to that point I’m going to have to figure out a way to survive the next few hours.
Clara’s not quite there yet. “It’s impossible!” she insists.
“Oh, absolutely,” I agree. “But we can talk about it later. Like, not when we’re about to get killed. We have to get out of here. Now.”
“She—”
“Clara. Now.”
Running from building to building, we use the cover each structure provides us as well as we can. And each step that takes us closer to the center, also brings us closer to the sounds of utter mayhem. Alarms are sounding, guns are firing, people are screaming. It seems like it’s happening all around us.
“Are we under attack?” Clara asks as we run.
“You could say that.”
“By what?”
We reach the corner of one of the larger inner buildings. An unused physics lab. I peer around the corner to see if the center compound is occupied. It doesn’t appear to be.
“What made that noise?” Clara continues. “The screaming you said you’d heard before. What was that?”
“That was the sound of a demon being eviscerated.”
“Jesus.”
More gunfire, to our right and pretty close. We hear a man scream before abruptly losing his voice and— based on the somewhat sickening noise that follows—his life. It’s nice to imagine I’m hearing Bob Grindel being killed, but more likely it’s a security team member. They’re probably all over the place by now, as one’s patrol assignment tends to go out the window when one is fleeing for one’s life. It’s another variable to consider.
“It’s eating,” I say, noting the sucking sounds. “Quickly.”
Taking Clara by the hand, I lead us in a sprint over the remaining distance to the center. Clara pulls free and stops when she sees the four huts.
“You had Iza open all the doors,” she notes. “I didn’t know you were going to do that.”
“She didn’t need to tell you,” I say.
“You didn’t trust me?”
“Of course I didn’t. Would you?”
She thinks about it. “Maybe not.”
A noise, that might be described as howling on multiple frequencies, cuts through the air. It’s from behind
