Текст книги "The Chosen"

Автор книги: Алекс Арчер

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Chapter 13

Annja was already in motion, cocking the sword back to her right side, racing with all her speed at the leader. From her left she saw a man raise a shotgun. Then the leader lurched forward as if punched hard between the shoulder blades. His shirtfront blossomed blood. His head snapped back with blood starting from his mouth.

Eyes wild as a trapped animal's, the blood-soaked gang leader tried to shoot. He had no chance. Screaming in a release of terror and fury, Annja swung her blade savagely right to left.

Shots flashed and cracked all around her. She spun to her right, found herself confronting a gang member hammering futilely on the charging lever on top of an evidently jammed MAC-10 with the heel of his fist. He looked up and screamed as her blade flashed.

Ten feet beyond him another man pointed a shotgun at Annja's face. Before he could fire, a bellowing burst from an assault rifle took him and sent him spinning to the gravel.

The remaining gang members were fleeing, with the spraddling, loose-jointed panic of those who know death's gaping jaws are slavering an inch from the seats of their baggy pants. Attacks from at least two directions had finally shattered their morale.

Annja looked around to the south, from where the interloping shots had come. She had a feeling who her rescuer must be, improbable as it was.

"They will run until they literally drop now," Father Godin said as he tossed away a Kalashnikov and drew a bulky, short-barreled revolver with a black-gloved hand. "It will be weeks before they sleep through a night without waking screaming from the nightmares. If ever.

"No thanks are necessary," he added.

"Thank you," Annja panted. Her knees felt like overboiled pasta, and her stomach churned with exhaustion and after-action nausea. She staggered a few paces to brace herself against the swing set. "I can't believe they were that determined," she said.

"Evidently they were strongly motivated," Godin said. "One suspects both a large carrot and an equally large and heavy stick. You have made someone very powerful most unhappy, Annja Creed."

She lifted her head and looked at him through strands of loose chestnut hair. "Like the Pope?" she asked.

He laughed. "His Holiness doesn't find it necessary to operate through the agency of street gangs."

She watched him closely as he approached. He had opened the cylinder of his brushed-nickel gun, dropped six empties connected by a black spring-steel full-moon clip to his palm. He transferred them to a pocket, and came up with a fresh clip.

Despite the fact that he had come to her aid she felt uncomfortable at his proximity. Or even his presence.

"How is it," she said, still sucking in deep breaths, "that you happened by at such an opportune moment?"

"I was following you, of course," he said.

"Why?" she asked angrily.

He aligned the six cartridges gripped in the moon clip, slid them into the cylinder and snapped the revolver shut. Then he stretched out his arm, cocking it as he aimed it straight at Annja's head.

"Because I fear you have something that does not belong to you."

Deliberately she straightened. She forced her focus past weapon to meet his eyes with angry intent. "The sword?"

"Indeed."

Anger flashed inside her. "Why should you have the sword? Look what happened to the last sword bearer!" she shouted.

"Mistakes were made," Godin said. His voice was level, his eyes calm. They held hers. She realized he was trying to lull her. "Surely, they will be made again. Still, the church can be the only proper caretaker of such a holy artifact."

She held her hands out open to her sides. "Where is it?"

He shrugged. Somehow he managed to do so without the muzzle of his handgun wavering in the slightest. "An excellent question. Suppose you answer, and save us both a great deal of unpleasantness?"

She laughed. It had a frost-brittle sound in her ears. "If you kill me, how do you plan to find the sword? Using a Ouija board?"

"You frame a most astute objection," he said, and shot her in the leg.

Or tried to. As he dropped his arm, time seemed to slow for her. She'd anticipated his move and noticed the black-gloved finger as it tightened on the curving trigger with its longitudinal grooves.

She was moving, diving sideways to put a six-inch post of splintery gray-green pressure-treated wood between herself and her opponent. The handgun flashed. The bullet kicked up bits of porous white gravel behind the heel of her boot.

She put down a shoulder, rolled, came up crouching behind another upright. Godin stood placidly, regarding her with an odd smile on his face.

"Very good," he said, and snapped a shot for her face.

Again she read the intention in the ripple of the fine calfskin of the glove echoing the movement of muscle and bone in the finger beneath. Before he had completed triggering the shot, she had ducked back. The bullet sailed past her head and struck the grassy slope behind her with an audible thud even as the aftereffects of the painfully loud report rang in her ears.

As the ringing subsided she heard the crunch of his crepe-soled shoes on the pumice. He was walking clockwise, trying to flank her.

She sprinted right, straight out in front of him. She kept her eyes at soft focus so as to perceive the widest possible vision field. She saw his arm once again tense to fire.

She stiffened her left leg as she swung it out for the next step, dug her heel deep through the gravel to the soil below. She pivoted around her heel, away from him, as another shot cracked out – horribly loud, the noise like knitting needles driven into her eardrums. Wheeling through 270 degrees, she ran straight at him, trailing her right arm.

The sword appeared in her hand.

He was trying to shift aim to shoot her in the face. She ran fast. The sword sang through the air in a rising backhand cut.

Somehow the Jesuit managed to twitch his heavy revolver far enough that the mystic blade did not shear it in half. Instead it knocked the dull silver weapon from his grasp. It spun end over end, glittering in the light of the single streetlamp that illuminated the little depression beneath the hill with its curious gleaming statue.

It took her a moment to halt her disarming cut, which had passed over Godin's head as he recoiled. In that immobile instant he grasped her sword wrist with his own right hand and, using legs and hips, turned his body hard clockwise. His strength and mass were sufficient to complete the locking out of her already straightened elbow. He put his left palm on that elbow and applied pressure as his right hand yanked the trapped arm across his body and twisted the captive wrist cruelly counterclockwise. Annja was forced to bend double at the waist as pain shot up her arm.

"Ah, splendid," he said, puffing slightly. "I knew the sword would put in an appearance if I put your life properly in danger. Now, release it, please. I really don't want to hurt you."

"Is that why you shot at me?" she asked.

"I believed you would dodge. As indeed you did. I observed during your running fight with those young hooligans that you possess quite extraordinary physical abilities. But I'm afraid I have you at a decisive disadvantage."

"I guess so," she said. She relaxed her muscles in defeat. Her fingers opened. The sword fell from them.

It vanished halfway to the ground.

Not even the too clever Jesuit had anticipated that. In his astonishment he relaxed his own grip a fraction.

Annja threw her body forward and down, no longer resisting the pressure on her arm but literally rolling with it. She kicked her right leg out straight behind her, brought it up. Her long hair dragged across the pumice. Then she completed her walkover, freeing her arm from the terrible torsion.

Before she finished her rotation, Godin released her and danced back. He respected her strength and agility even if he didn't quite grasp the extent of them.

She planted her left leg as it descended, fired a right side-kick at him. He stepped back with his left foot, pivoting backward out of the way. She continued her spin, putting her right leg down and whipping her left foot in a blinding spinning roundhouse kick for his face. He leaned aside. Her corrugated sole just grazed his ear.

"Ow," he said mildly.

She threw a furious punch at his face. He got the back of his hand up against her inner arm, deflecting the piledriver blow just enough that it missed his face as he ducked into her. She threw a left. He fouled it with his elbow. She launched a furious flurry of punches, faster than he could possibly move.

Yet he fouled or deflected and slipped them all. His muscles could not match up to her youthful power. But he never opposed his strength to hers. He applied deflecting force at ninety degrees to her angle of attack, or simply closed inside the blows so they lacked force when they did make contact.

After an interval of wild but fruitless activity she stepped back, breathing hard. Her cheeks felt hot as a forge. Incongruously she wondered what her body temperature was, given her unnatural exertion.

"How can you dodge me?" she shouted. "I'm faster than you could possibly be."

"The same way you dodged my bullets," he said. "By reading your intent from your eyes, your breathing, the play of your muscles. Most of all, your balance. I salute you, by the way. It has taken me years of practice and brutal experience to become so proficient."

With a cry of frustration she charged him.

She had some vague intention of grappling him and taking him to the ground.

It was a poor choice. Rather than trying to dance away, Godin stepped up to meet her and jabbed her in the face with his right hand. The blow did not break her nose but it stung and filled her eyes with a rush of hot tears. It did break her momentum. He followed with a left cross to her ribs that sent a white-hot stab of pain through her chest and clenched her lungs like a fist.

She gasped and staggered past him at a diverging angle. Momentum carried her out of range of any intended third shot to his combination.

But not out of range of her long legs. She halted herself, did a little stutter step and pistoned a side-thrust kick into his ribs just beneath his right arm. The impact jolted her teeth together and sent fresh spikes of pain through her torso.

It lifted him into the air and knocked him over. He rolled over twice and lay on his face.

Annja almost collapsed. She just caught herself, bent over, bracing hands on knees, gasping and moaning as she tried to suck in breaths. She knew it was the worst thing she could do. The posture created both physical and mental stress that actually restricted her ability to draw in air. But she was momentarily overcome by a drowner's desperation.

After three heaving breaths she quit feeling as if she were about to die and began to force herself to breathe from her diaphragm, compressing her abdominal organs to create room to allow her lungs to fill all the way to the bottom. As she winched herself fully upright, she saw the Jesuit stir, then begin with obvious pain to pick himself up. As he did he was hit by a coughing spasm so violent that it sounded as if things were tearing within him.

He's an old man!she thought with a pang of self-reproach. She had to remind herself sternly that old or not he had given her as tough a hand-to-hand fight as she had experienced since coming into her destiny. He was a skilled, tough bastard.

Yet he didn't seem so tough as he spit something dark into the gravel from all fours then raised the back of one gloved hand to his mouth to wipe it. She wondered if she had broken his ribs.

" Ave Maria," he gasped. Another spell of coughing shook his body.

With a mighty effort he came up to his knees. He jackknifed forward, coughing brutally, stopping himself with hands on thighs. He forced his body vertical, raised a knee, got his foot planted. " Sancta Maria," he said, and thrust himself upright.

"'Mother of God,'" he rasped in English. His face contorted, his body began to buckle. He clutched at his side with a black-gloved hand, which seemed to arrest the spasm.

"'Pray for us sinners – '" he stood fully erect once more "' – now and in the hour of our death. Amen.'"

Without meaning to Annja echoed his final words. As he crossed himself, she did the same.

"You are a daughter of the holy mother the church," Godin said, with more than a touch of the raven's croak, "no matter how hard you pretend not to be."

"But I've seen how the church treats her daughters!" she retorted defiantly, the more because her cheeks were wet, for some unaccountable reason.

"And may God have mercy on my soul, child, for I do what I must – " He reached behind himself.

She charged him. The sword sprang into her hand. She brought it looping up into a side cut at his neck.

He snapped a black autopistol out right into her face. She heard the safety snick off as the muzzle aligned with her right eye. She froze.

For a few heartbeats they stood that way, her blade pressed into the skin of his neck, the barrel of his pistol almost touching her eye.

"You should come back by daylight and examine that statue up the hill," he said conversationally. A trickle of blood was drying down the right side of his chin, maroon in the bluish light. "It's a naive representation of popular Mexican myths. The warrior is the personification of Popocatepetl, the languishing maid his lover Ixtaccihuatl. I mention this because I believe you have recently seen the originals firsthand, yes?"

She had to smile. But she never relaxed the sword's pressure against his neck.

"Is it just me or are you even more full of bullshit than any man I've ever met, Father?" she asked.

His grin made him look almost boyish. "Given my order, and my life experience, I would most assuredly hope so," he said. "And now we seem to find ourselves at a New Mexican standoff."

"Now, you can blow my head off with that piece of yours," she told him. "It's possibleI'll just relax, and my arm won't twitch enough to sever your carotid artery before I fall. So you need to ask yourself just one question, Padre. 'Do I feel lucky?'"

He laughed incredulously. "You quote Clint Eastwood?"

"It was all I could think of," she said.

Sirens began to wail. They weren't far and they were getting closer in a hurry. From multiple directions, by the way the sounds surrounded the pair.

Godin tipped his gun toward the star-filled sky. His thumb let the hammer down and snapped the safety back on.

"If you want to cut my head off," he said, holstering the weapon behind the small of his back, "now's your chance. But I'd suggest you do whatever you choose to do quickly and leave with alacrity. The police will not care for any of the answers you will be able to give them."

For a moment she still stood, feeling the pressure of her steel against the skin of his neck through her hand and arm. Then she deliberately moved the blade sideways before making the sword disappear.

"I don't have it in me to kill a man who doesn't pose a direct threat," she said. "I hope I never do. But I also hope I'm not making a mistake not going ahead and taking your head off and letting my soul take the consequences."

"Refraining from burdening your soul with such a weight is never a bad choice, child," he said. "And now by your leave, I bid you adieu. You have given me much to contemplate."

She watched him walk away. Just before he passed out of the direct shine of the light illuminating the play area he stooped to scoop up his big, gleaming revolver and stuff it back inside his jacket. Then he continued on his way, moving along with no apparent hurry. Once beyond the circle of light he seemed to dissolve into the night.

She turned to run in a different direction.

Chapter 14

"Sit, sit," the big man in the herringbone coat with the black fake-fur collar said, gesturing her back down with a gloved hand. He beamed at her through his full salt-and-pepper beard. Cars choked the narrow street behind him. A horde of tourists, many wearing brightly-colored lapel pins in the shape of balloons, milled along the sidewalks to either side.

Halfway out of her metal chair on the small patio in front of the Purple Sage Coffee House, Annja halted. "You're Dr. Cogswell?" she asked.

"Affirmative, affirmative," he puffed. He was a tall man, heavyset, with round pink cheeks and lively brown eyes beneath extravagant black-and-white eyebrows. Like his beard his thinning hair was gray with a showy black streak down the middle. He held himself almost militarily erect and moved with brisk authority. "And you are the famous Annja Creed?"

"Not that famous," she said, resuming her seat. "I'm pleased to meet you, Doctor."

The coffee house was tucked back from San Felipe Street, just north of Old Town Plaza in Albuquerque. San Felipe Cathedral stood across the lane. It was a bright autumn noon. The sun was warm enough Annja had taken off her jacket.

"Puff," Cogswell said, taking his own seat across the round metal table from her. "The pleasure's all mine. I'm flattered you took time out of your busy schedule to meet with an old coot like me."

For a moment he sat regarding her. He had a keen gaze. His scrutiny could well have been taken as obtrusive and inappropriate, though she detected nothing sexual in it. She wondered if he understood that and was using the fact that his age and professorial mien made him relatively innocuous, or whether, like a great many scientists of her acquaintance, he knew too little of human interactions even to be aware of it.

Make no assumptions, she told herself sternly, behind a carefully bland smile.

He nodded his round head once, briskly, as if she had passed examination. He leaned forward slightly. "We live, it would appear, in interesting times."

He nodded to Annja's left, where a thirtyish brown-haired man dressed in slacks, a pullover and red-and-white athletic shoes sat reading an early-afternoon paper. The headline read, or rather screamed, Nine Die In Gang War.

Her smile crumpled a little. "Yes," she said. "I guess we do." She had never really thought she'd be grateful for the War on Drugs, but she had to admit it kept providing excellent cover for her. She wondered how long that could last.

Cogswell cocked his head to one side. "Ah, but I suppose you know that better than any of us," he said.

Her blood turned cold. She felt as if he had read the thoughts right out of her head. Her cheeks burned. What does he know?

The next moment he reassured her by saying, "You are acquiring quite a reputation in paranormal circles."

"Ah," she said. "Well. I hope they aren't too hard on me." Some people were, she knew. She had once made the mistake of wandering onto the public forum the Knowledge Channel maintained online for Chasing History's Monsters.

He smiled. "I suppose you've been quite occupied researching the remarkable events transpiring here in the land of enchantment. In fact, I gather you've been a firsthand witness of one of the more alarming phenomena."

"I'm afraid that's been a little blown out of proportion, Doctor," she said. "I don't think I saw anything but an eagle. The light wasn't very good."

"You maintain scientific detachment. Very good. But an eagle that flies without flapping its wings? An eagle that makes a sound like a baby crying? Or was it a woman screaming?"

She was getting those insects-crawling-down-the-spine sensations again. She searched her memory frantically. How much had the anonymous post from the San Esequiel dig revealed?

"A baby crying?" she asked.

"So what you heard sounded more like screaming to you," he said. "Reports vary. Still, the one seems rather similar to the other, don't you think?"

He smiled at her merrily. His coat had come open. Beneath it he wore a bright red vest and an emerald-green tie. It went beyond aging-professorial fashion blindness almost to the point of deliberate bad taste. Though the combination, she had to admit, lent him a certain cheery premature-Christmas air. And who am I to play fashion fascist anyway? My friends all accuse me of dressing like an archaeologist.

"Wait," she said. "An eagle has a pretty impressive wingspan. They glide pretty well. And while I'm no authority, I believe they have some pretty shrill, piercing cries."

"Could a bird as imposing as an eagle take off without flapping its wings?"

She shook her head. "I don't think so. But if you're familiar with my work on the show you know I'm sort of the house skeptic. I try to resist jumping to any exotic conclusions."

He nodded. "Commendable, commendable. But please, tell me truthfully, do you really think that all that's going on here is childish pranks and misapprehension of natural creatures?"

"Let's leave aside what I think, if we can, Dr. Cogswell. You have a most impressive résumé, I must say."

"Ah, the wonders of Google. You probably don't even remember the days when checking a person's bona fides required at least a trip to a well-stocked library, if not lengthy and tedious correspondence."

"My love for the past does not blind me to the advantages of climate conditioning and antibiotics and the other blessings of modern life. But you said you had some information for me. I'm very eager to hear it."

"Yes. Are you familiar with the works of Charles Fort?"

"I've heard the name."

"In his writings he maintained a careful distance between the anomalies he reported and his own belief system. Nonetheless, whether jocularly or not, he indulged occasionally in speculation."

"Didn't he write at one point that 'we are owned,' presumably by some nonhuman intelligences?" Annja asked.

"Yes. Which may have more merit than we like to believe, but does not bear directly, insofar as I am aware, on our situation here. Rather, I find fascinating his suggestion, later expanded in the sixties and seventies by American monster hunter John A. Keel, that a great many sightings of anomalous beings can be attributed not to undiscovered life-forms from our own Earth, but rather are strays from somewhere else."

"By somewhere else do you mean other planets, Doctor?" She felt her interest begin to slip. UFO conspiracy nonsense was all that needed to be added to the mix to turn it all into a hopeless web of confusion.

"Not necessarily. Rather, I suggest the possibility that some manner of small, localized dimensional shift allows beings to enter our world from, as I said, somewhere else – which for now must remain unspecified owing to a lack of data. Whether these slips are accidental or deliberate, or some mixture of both, is likewise speculative."

"With all respect, Doctor, it all seems pretty speculative to me. Are temporary holes between dimensions really a more plausible explanation than people seeing wild animals or escaped pets – or just shadows magnified by their imaginations?" Annja asked.

"Sightings worldwide, and over a very lengthy period of time – spanning centuries at least – show remarkable consistency. Such as the ability of these anomalous creatures to appear, sometimes do great harm and then simply disappear, even when hunted by professional trackers with dogs."

"Like the Beast of Gévaudan?" she asked blithely.

He chuckled. "Give me credit for doing my research, too, Ms. Creed. I watched that particular episode of your show. You did a most creditable job of getting across your reasoned hypothesis that the beast was some kind of unfortunate mutation of a natural animal, possibly a large wolf-dog hybrid."

She decided that she liked this older gentleman.

"The beast was reportedly killed," he said, "which seems to remove it from our particular anomalies. Not so with others. We have just recently seen another spate of mystery large-cat sightings in England, where no cats of any size have dwelled in the wild since before the last Ice Age. By comparison, in his book Strange Creatures from Time and Space,Keel reports that according to the records, in August of 1577, a beast like a giant black dog killed several worshipers at a church in Suffolk, England. The creature vanished without a trace. Incidentally, the British Ministry of Defense has repeatedly, if discreetly, dispatched experienced SAS sniper teams with the most modern night-vision equipment to chase down the phantom cats that have killed sheep, chickens and household pets. Without result, needless to say."

For some reason his words chilled her. She shook herself, annoyed at being susceptible.

"Certain other phenomena are repeatedly reported in such sightings," Cogswell went on. "One of the most persistent is the frightening sound associated with the creatures, usually described as sounding either like a baby crying or a woman screaming. A sulfurous smell is another. Black color, red eyes, flying without visible flapping of wings – the latter were common features of the Mothman sightings in West Virginia in the sixties, which Keel himself made famous, although they have likewise been reported in myriad cases before and since."

She stared at him. She willed herself strongly not to remember that last evening at the dig site. There was no future in that.

"What about the Santo Niño sightings, Doctor?" she asked, hoping her tone didn't ring as brassy false in his ears as in hers. "Do they bear some relation to these extradimensional phenomena you suspect?"

He smiled his big smile and bobbed his head. "Precisely! How else to account for the fact that our phantom hitchhiker has repeatedly shown a distressing tendency to vanish from people's automobiles? In the Murakami case near Acoma – which is the farthest west and south the Holy Child has been reported in this current spate – the family reported the child vanished from within arm's reach of the two children, sitting in the backseat of a minivan. What else could account for that, but an ability to travel dimensions usually debarred to us?"

He sounded so enthusiastic she almost felt herself going for it. "Well, since we have names and even video of real people who have reported the Santo Niño, it's hard to pass him off as an urban legend," she said. "Still...wouldn't you really think it's more likely that some kind of clever street magician, somebody like David Blaine, has come up with an especially ingenious disappearing stunt?"

"That would seem a high level of conjuring skill for an eight-year-old child."

She shrugged. "Well, then, a very small David Blaine. A little-person David Blaine. Who actually does, you know, tricks."

"Who's grasping at straws now, Ms. Creed?"

"That would be me," she confessed. "But – you've hit me with a lot, here, Doctor. I need some time to assimilate it."

She made what she hoped wasn't too much of a show of checking her wristwatch. "I have to ask you to forgive me. I've got another appointment coming up here – "

"Of course. Of course." He nodded sagely.

They rose together. "Should you uncover anything you find it difficult to account for," he said, "you have my contact information."

"Thank you, Doctor. I will remember that. And thank you for the time. What you've told me is highly intriguing." That was the truth.

"Just one thing," he said, arresting her as she began to turn to walk back to the parking lot to reclaim her rental. "These warnings the Holy Child issues – "

"Don't most of them involve immediate peril to the people who report seeing him? Like a flash flood, in that Murakami case?" she said.

"Yes. But percipients also report, rather unanimously, an impression that he was also trying to convey some greater danger, some common danger we all face. Here's the thought that makes myblood run cold. Could that greater menace possibly have anything to do with our own current spate of sightings of strange and very scary animals?"

I sincerely hope not, she thought. Aloud she said, "One thing's for sure, Doctor. It doesn't concern the Mayan calendar."

He laughed at that. "Indeed. A very good day to you, Ms. Annja Creed. And remember to look behind you."

Annja was standing in her motel room in her underwear trying to figure out what to pack in her overnight bag for her imminent jaunt overseas. The small stack of clothes on the bed beside her open case was not giving her any hints.

Damn that smug old bastard, with his look-behind-you bullshit, she thought peevishly. He got me so rattled I'm actually dithering about doing something I've done a thousand times. It was true. It seemed she had spent far more time moving from place to place than fixed at any given address. Even the Brooklyn loft where she'd lived for the past few years served as little more than a pied-à-terre. She should have been able to pack for a short trip in her sleep. As a matter of fact, she was pretty sure she had.

On the television, which she had on as a sort of background, a man with a young face and a richly coiffed head of silver hair was interviewing a lean, tanned man who seemed to smile perpetually.

" – really think there's nothing to these reports coming out of New Mexico, Don?" the silver-haired man asked.

"Just call me Mr. Skeptic, Miller," his subject said, grinning. The crawl beneath him read Donald "Mr. Skeptic" Triphorn, Editor, Skeptic EyeMagazine. "And the answer to your question is, of course not."

"How could so many people be mistaken, Mr. Skeptic?"

"I'm glad you asked me that, Miller." He turned the unrelenting grin to the camera. "I'd say it's a classic example of an overwhelming will to believe. We're inundated incessantly with fantasy – stories that take us out of our humdrum daily existence, reassure us that there really is magic in the world, regardless of what the mean old scientists say. From Harry Potter to Roswell conspiracy theories, it's very popular. The fact is, Miller, a lot of us wantto be fooled by easily explainable events. Or publicity stunts. Or simply to buy into urban legends."

"But don't urban legends usually have no traceable attribution, Mr. Skeptic? Don't these stories usually get told as happening to a friend of my cousin, third-or fourth-or sixteenth-hand? Whereas these stories have names and faces associated with them," Miller asked.