Текст книги "The Chosen"

Автор книги: Алекс Арчер

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Chapter 28

A black thing flew level, straight for her eyes. Black wings seemed to span the corridor. All she could make out of the head were the two huge red eyes that shone upon her like malevolent lamps.

Annja screamed in response. She met it with a wild forehand slash. The blade caught the left eye, extinguishing its glare. She sheared clear through the beast, her blade exiting just behind the right wing. It fell thrashing and shrieking.

She ran, vaulting writhing black ruin. Before her a creature the size and shape of a natural wolf, but with a coat of that light-sucking black, looked up from the torn-out throat of the hapless Yee with red, glowing eyes. She raised her sword. But a second creature, longer and leaner and feline in outline and sinuous motion, attacked the wolf from behind. Squalling and snarling, they turned into a furious ball of fangs and claws. She ran past them.

Without looking back she sprinted to the door to the stairs, yanked it open and went rabbiting up.

The truck tunnel was all Bergstrom had suggested and more. It was another glass-walled circular bore big enough to accommodate a full semitrailer rig.

Annja began to realize how the huge facility was supplied. The tunnel was so wide that various crates and containers were stacked high to either side of the level floor, or roadway. Two hundred yards away she could see double concrete doors illuminated by the jittering light of fluorescents.

There was just one thing wrong with the tunnel that Annja could see. It was full of screaming red-eyed men fighting screaming red-eyed monsters.

The battle lines were anything but clear-cut. The black monsters seemed as ferociously – or desperately – eager to battle one another as the black-clad humans. The humans, meanwhile, seemed almost as inclined to turn their guns, knives and fists on one another as on the animal horrors.

Guns flashed and roared. Men howled as their flesh was torn by great taloned paws. Empty cartridge cases crashed on fused stone, adding a madly whimsical wind-chime effect to the aural horror show.

Annja climbed to the top of a stack of crates. On the far side a security operator stood firing down into the melee. As she moved toward him he was distracted. Two wolflike creatures seized him by an arm and a leg and commenced a snarling tug-of-war.

With a shrill scream something glided toward her from the ceiling. She ducked out of its way. It wheeled, buffeted her with its wings. She took a stunning blow across the face, reeled. She felt her right heel come down on nothing, just caught herself with the corrugated toe of her shoe.

A wing struck her again. She windmilled her arms briefly. Her balance training saved her; she caught herself, lashed out with the sword as she moved toward the middle of the flat upper surface. The blade slashed a leading edge of wing. The creature recoiled with a shriek. Annja ran the sword through its belly.

She twisted her blade and tore it free. The winged attacker fell brokenly to the floor.

Bullets smashed into crates below Annja. She dropped flat. More bullets cracked over her head to punch holes through the plastic walls.

She crawled across more containers. She could see a smaller door beside the outsize truck doors. She began to hope she might see the sun again.

As she reached the end of the row she jumped down. As she hit the ground she encountered an eight-foot apelike creature. She ran straight at the monster, which seemed momentarily stunned by her appearance out of nowhere. She cut it across the belly, left and right then darted past.

A man with his helmet askew confronted her with a mad eye glaring through the combat sights of his shouldered MP-5. "You bitch," he shouted. "I'll – "

She raced past him to his left. As she did she snatched his loose-hanging sling with her left hand. Her momentum as she passed tore the weapon right out of his gloved hands and cracked him sharply across the face. She pulled him over backward to slam him heavily on his back on the stone. The thin rubber mat on the walkway did nothing to cushion his landing.

The air was knocked out of him but his helmet protected his head. He wasn't even stunned. As he moved to rise, one of the wolflike creatures pounced and pinned the man's lower leg between black, slavering jaws.

Annja reached the door with a last grateful bound. Her lungs burned so fiercely she wondered if some toxic fumes had been released. She reached for the door handle.

There wasn't one. There was another alphanumeric keypad. She was trapped without the code at the mouth of a seething bottle of raging violence.

A low sobbing sound, deceptively soft, made Annja spin away from the door.

A trio of catlike monsters approached her, slinking with their bristling belly fur almost brushing the tunnel floor. Their fangs gleamed against their black faces. Great, she thought, they're smart enough to flank me.

Her best shot was to try to race past one and disable it with a sword-cut. But that would mean charging right back into the midst of the frenzied man-and-monster scrum. She steeled herself to do it anyway.

Just then the smaller door blew off its hinges behind her with an end-of-the-world crash.

Chapter 29

Dr. Nils Bergstrom looked away from his monitor at last. Mad Jack Thompson crawled, broken and bloodied, toward him. With arms outstretched, desperately clinging to the sides of the door, he screamed in terror. A black immensity filled the doorway behind him, trying to drag him out into the corridor.

Thompson's mad eyes met Bergstrom. "Help me," the security chief groaned. "Please."

Bergstrom's smile was ghastly red. "As you wish."

Turning back to his keyboard, he pressed Enter.

Annja staggered from the force of the explosion. The door flew off to one side, smashing to the floor ten feet away.

Annja turned and was through the door like a shot. Outside, the sun had already dropped behind the high peaks to the west, filling the valley with purple-gray shadow. She ran as fast as she could, down a road graveled with crushed white pumice toward a tree-lined ridge a quarter mile away. Midway between the door and the ridge a familiar figure stood and cast away an antitank missile launcher. Annja ran toward him with great bounds.

"How did you know I'd come out this way?" she asked Father Godin, slowing as she came up to him.

"I had help," he said. Though he smiled his voice was ragged. He bent forward to unlimber a heavy rifle from his back. "Mad Jack called about the security breach. He thought I might come and help out my old comrade. I did, but not the comrade he'd hoped."

She stopped to breathe hard and glance back at the exit. The great gray doors seemed to have been carved in a hillside, out of sight beneath a jutting slab of what looked like and might have been natural rock. Black shapes poured out through the lesser opening beside them.

"Run," Godin suggested. He pulled a long, heavy-looking weapon to his shoulder. It roared like a cannon and rocked the well-braced Jesuit back on his heels when he fired it.

An impressive tongue of orange flame licked toward the animals in the twilight. Several fell howling and snapping at themselves.

Annja fled to the top of the slope, stopped, turned back. Godin was laboring behind her, face ashen. "They're gaining," he said.

A wolf shape bounded up the hill almost on his heels. He turned, dropped to one knee, bringing the rifle to his shoulder again. When he fired, the rifle's muzzle was barely a yard from its target.

The black canine shape fell thrashing and voicing its horribly human cries. Annja stared wide-eyed.

The sword sprang into Annja's hand. She moved past Godin and struck down another monster. The flat skull split.

Annja braced herself and prepared to face whatever might come next.

Suddenly she saw a shaft of intolerably white light thrust upward into a sky of deepening blue from a ridge a thousand feet beyond the entrance to the hidden complex.

She grabbed Godin and flung him to the ground. She landed hard on top of him. She hoped it didn't hurt him half as much as it did her. He wasn't looking good.

An immense white glare washed everything out as Annja buried her face in Godin's clerical collar and squeezed her eyes tight. The earth shook as the underground facility imploded.

As quickly as it started, it was over. The valley seemed plunged into stygian darkness as Annja opened eyes that swam with afterimage.

"What's that smell?" she asked.

The priest's hands beat at the back of her jacket. "You. You're on fire."

She rolled off him and squirmed around on her back like a dog, hoping the autumn grass retained enough moisture from the recent snowfall that she could smother the fire before it really caught.

Godin had hauled himself to his feet. He reached down and helped pull her upright. Her heart jumped to see his old familiar grin.

But her joy was short-lived. The skin of his face was gray, grayer than the light could account for, and seemed to sag.

Old soldier that he was, he conscientiously reslung his rifle. "I'm surprised your lovely hair did not catch fire," he said.

"Me, too. The backs of my hands and my neck sure feel sunburned, though. I hope we didn't just take a lethal dose of radiation, after all that."

"The good Lord willing," Godin said.

She frowned over his shoulder. "Why are we casting a shadow," she said, "on a south-facing hill?"

He lifted his chin. "Look behind you."

She did.

A thousand yards away a great circular hole gaped in the top of what had been a ridge. A beam of white shot up into the sky like a colossal spotlight.

"The earth has fused to glass," Godin said. "It still glows white from the heat."

She shook her head. She could hardly believe what had happened. Much less that it was, at last, over.

"The creatures?" she asked.

"Dead," he said. "Along with any people who were in there."

A sudden coughing fit doubled him over. She held him as his body shook.

"We have to get you to a doctor," she said. "Where's your SUV?"

"It is parked just over this hill." Bracing himself with a hand on his knee, he handed her the keys. "You will please drive. But not to a doctor. It is much too late for that, you see."

The story came out as she raced east.

As she drove higher and higher into the Sangre de Cristos on the east side of the river, she crossed the line of darkness and then stayed just above it. Down below where the exit from the underground lab had been, with mountains rising hard to the west, evening came early. On the western face of the peak day lingered far longer.

The snow still lay thick on the ground and clotted in the branches of the trees. Annja drove as carefully as she could, mindful of the risk of black ice, for all that Godin kept gently urging her to hurry.

He had cancer. It was terminal. It had riddled his body. Although he was a lifelong smoker, ironically his lungs were the most recent part of him to be invaded. He had kept himself going from sheer force of will.

Annja could not conceive of the agonies he must have undergone. He assured her it wasn't bad – most of the time.

On a wide pullout overlooking a sheer drop to the west he asked her to pull over. He got out of the car.

"What are we doing here?" she asked.

"I have come to the end of the road, my dear," he said.

"I won't give up the sword! No matter what you say, I can't."

His smile was strangely sweet for a man so hard, who looked so haggard. "No, you must not," he said. "Not ever. It is where it belongs."

"What makes you say that?"

"You have proved it, have you not? Now help me walk, if you will, please."

The sun had become a blinding ball of brilliance, almost level with them. At the same time snow began to fall, fierce and hard. A wind rose, whistling, driving flakes with stinging force into Annja's eyes.

He guided her toward the edge of the cliff. Uncertain of what he intended, she went reluctantly along.

A few feet from the brink he pulled away from her. "The sword is where it belongs," he said. "And a very great threat to the world is ended."

He dug a thumb in his collar and pulled out his silver medallion. "And now the time has come for me to pass along my own burden," he said, lifting it over his head. "I'd say I deserve a vacation."

Despite herself she recoiled from it. "Take it," he said. "Whatever it once stood for, this medallion now stands for what I have stood for. And what you now stand for, whether you wish to believe it or not."

Numbly she reached out her hand and took it.

He turned his face to the sun. Its light shone beneath the clouds and struck him full in the face, lighting his tired features despite the swirling snow, his own personal floodlight. He smiled.

"I have done many terrible things in my life," he told her. "All of them for what I believed to be the greater good. And all scarred my soul. But there is a child within me, still pure after all. I hope today I have redeemed myself."

And it seemed that as he spoke the last words his voice was the voice of a child – of the innocent he had once been.

He turned a smile toward her. "Goodbye, Annja," he said. "Go with God."

He turned and walked away from her.

"No!" she shouted. Yet she made no move to restrain him. She knew she lacked the right.

The snow was alive with glare that seemed to enfold him. It blew against her face with redoubled fury.

Yet it seemed to her that she saw him walking on, impossibly, beyond the point where earth gave way to air.

Annja fell to her knees on the gravel and cried.

Epilogue

Albuquerque

"Let me guess," the beautiful young man with the unruly black hair said. "What happened up in Rio Arriba didn't have anything to do with any long forgotten WWII stockpile of bombs going up. And you were right in the middle of it."

Byron Mondragón traded glances with the young woman who sat beside him. She was a plump, pretty, pale girl with dark brown hair. He had introduced her to Annja as Dorothy Enright, his fiancée. Dorothy giggled and sipped her limeade through a straw from her old-fashioned flare-topped fountain glass.

Sitting sprawled into the corner of booth and wall in the Frontier restaurant, Annja turned away from the window to look at her companions.

"You've got that about right," she said. "Except for the me being in the middle of it part. I wasn't. Or I wouldn't be here talking to you."

Annja told them the story. More than perhaps she should have, but far from all. She reckoned that after what he'd been through Byron was entitled to at least a major helping of truth. And if he chose to confide in his fiancée, she didn't feel like second-guessing him.

"I think I've figured out the creatures," she told the young couple. "The researchers used animals in their experiments. Maybe they even genetically-engineered some. They might have been intending to use them as living weapons. They were designed and probably tortured to be vicious."

She didn't mention the Holy Child. She knew Byron truly believed he'd seen him and tourists were still reporting sightings. Were all the sightings the product of overeager imaginations or the power of suggestion? She had no answers and knew she might never get any.

At the last, she left out what had become of Father Godin, as she left out certain details of what had passed between them. She gave the impression they had shaken hands and parted ways after the covert lab blew up, their work done.

Annja had called in an anonymous tip to 911 from a payphone in the valley. She'd claimed she had seen a man fall from a scenic overlook up on the mountain. There had been no reports of a body being found.

When she was done Dorothy said, "Wow." Annja couldn't tell whether the girl believed her or was merely being polite.

Byron just nodded, smiling. "I knew you could do it," he said.

A vibration at her hip made her jump. Then she remembered she had set her cell phone to buzz her instead of ring.

"Hello?"

"Annja, baby," a voice said. "Remember me? Doug? Doug Morrell?"

"Of course I remember you, Doug," Annja said with a sigh.

"Doug, pleasedon't tap on the damned mic."

"Where's the feature on that epic monster rally down in Nuevo México? See? I even learned the real name of the country. That's how much this story means to me. Now where's my show? I need it yesterday..."