FOURTEEN

It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.

“What did you say?” Richards said, and then he heard—both of them heard—the sound of the alarm. The one that was never, ever supposed to ring, a great, atonal buzzing that ricocheted across the open compound so that it seemed to come from everywhere at once.

Security breach. Subject Containment, Level 4.

Richards turned quickly to look toward the Chalet. A quick decision: he swung around to point his gun at the spot where Doyle had stood.

Doyle was gone.

Goddamn, he thought, and then he said it: “Goddamn!” Now there were two of them on the loose. He quickly scanned the parking lot, hoping for a shot. Lights came on everywhere, bathing the compound in a harsh, artificial daylight; he heard shouts from the barracks, soldiers running.

No time to deal with Doyle now.

He raced up the steps of the Chalet, past the sentry who was yelling at him, something about the elevator, and took the stairs to L2, his feet barely touching the steps. The door to his office was open. He quickly scanned the monitors.

Zero’s chamber was empty.

Babcock’s chamber was empty.

All of the chambers were empty.

He hit the audio feed. “Sentries, Level Four, this is Richards. Report.”

Nothing, not a word in reply.

“Main Lab, report. Somebody tell me what the fuck is going on down there.”

A terrified voice came through: Fortes? “They let them out!”

“Who? Who let them out?”

A blast of static, and Richards heard the first screams coming over the audio, and gunshots, and more screams—the screams men made when they died.

“Holy fuck!” Another blast of static. “They’re all loose down here! The fucking sweeps let them all go!”

Quickly Richards called up the monitor for the sentry post on L3. A broad mural of blood was on the wall; the sentry, Davis, was slumped on the floor below it, his face pressed to the tiles, as if he were probing the ground for a lost contact. A second soldier stepped into view and Richards saw that it was Paulson, holding a .45. Behind him, the doors to the elevator stood open. Paulson looked straight into the camera as he holstered the gun and removed the grenade from his pocket, then two more. He pulled the pins, using his teeth, and rolled them into the elevator. Then he took one more look at Richards, who saw his empty eyes, drew the .45, raised it to the side of his head, and pulled the trigger.

Richards reached for the switch to seal the level, but it was too late. He heard the explosion, ripping through the elevator shaft, and then a second blast of sound as what was left of the car went sailing to the bottom, and all the lights went out.

At first Wolgast didn’t know what he was hearing; the sound of the alarm was so sudden, so completely alien, that for a moment it obliterated all thought. He rose from his chair beside Amy’s bed and tried the door, but of course it wouldn’t open; they were sealed inside. The alarm rang and rang. A fire? No, he reasoned, over the din in his ears, it was something else, something worse. He looked up at the camera where it hung in the corner.

“Fortes! Sykes, goddamnit! Open this door!”

He heard the pop of automatic-weapon fire, muffled by its passage through the thick walls. For an instant he thought hopefully of rescue. But of course that was out of the question; who would rescue them?

And then, before he could generate another thought, there was a great concussive bang, and a terrible roar that ended in a second bang, louder than the first, bringing with it a deep, sonorous trembling, like an earthquake, and the room plunged into darkness.

Wolgast froze. The blackness was total, an overwhelming absence of light, completely disorienting. The alarms had stopped. He felt a blind urge to run, but there was nowhere to go. The room seemed to expand and to be closing in upon him, all at once.

“Amy, where are you? Help me find you!”

Silence. Wolgast drew a deep breath and held it. “Amy, say something. Say anything.”

He heard, behind him, a soft moan.

“That’s it.” He turned, listening hard, trying to calibrate the distance and direction. “Do it again. I’ll find you.”

His mind began to focus, his initial panic giving way to a sense of purpose, the task at hand. Cautiously Wolgast took a step forward toward her voice, then another. A second moan, barely audible. The room was small, not twenty feet square, so how could it be that Amy should seem so far away from him in the dark? He heard no more gunfire, no sounds at all from outside. Only the soft notes of Amy’s breathing, summoning him.

Wolgast had reached the foot of her bed and was feeling his way along its metal rails when the emergency lights came on, two beams that shot from the corners of the ceiling over the door. Barely enough to see by, but enough. The room was the same; whatever was happening outside, it had yet to reach them. He sat by Amy’s bed and felt her forehead. Still warm, but her fever was down, her skin a little damp. With the power out, her IV pump had stopped. He wondered what to do, and decided to disconnect her. Perhaps this was wrong, but he didn’t think so. He had watched Fortes and the others change the drip enough times to know the ritual. He adjusted the clamp, sealing off the flow of liquid, and withdrew the long needle from the rubber stopper at the top of the tube buried in the skin of her hand. With the IV disconnected there was no reason to leave the port in place; he removed this also, pulling it gently away. The wound didn’t bleed, but to be sure, he covered it with gauze and tape from the supply cart. Then he waited.

The minutes passed. Amy shifted restlessly on the bed, as if she were dreaming. Wolgast had the curious intuition that somehow, if he could see her dreams, he’d know what was happening outside. But part of him wondered if any of it mattered now. They were well belowground, sealed away. They might as well have been locked in a tomb.

Wolgast had all but resigned himslf to their abandonment when he heard, behind him, a hiss of equalizing pressure. His hopes soared; someone had come after all. The door swung open to reveal a solitary figure, backlit, his face draped in shadow, wearing only street clothes. As the man stepped under the beams of the emergency lights, Wolgast saw somebody entirely new to him. The stranger had long hair, wild and unkempt, shot with streaks of gray, and a coarse beard that climbed halfway up his cheeks; his lab coat was rumpled and stained. He approached Amy’s bedside with the preoccupied air of an accident victim, or the bystander to some terrible calamity. He’d done nothing so far even to acknowledge Wolgast’s presence.

“She knows,” he mumured, gazing at Amy. “How does she know?”

“Who the hell are you? What’s going on out there?”

Still the man ignored him. An otherworldly feeling seemed to radiate off his entire person, an almost fatalistic calm. “It’s strange,” he said after a moment. He sighed deeply and touched his beard, sweeping his eyes over the barren room. “All of this. Is this … what I wanted? I wanted there to be one, you see. Once I saw, once I knew what they were planning, how it would all end, I wanted there to be at least one.”

“What are you talking about? Where’s Sykes?”

At last the stranger seemed to take notice of him. He regarded Wolgast closely, his face tightening with a sudden frown. “Sykes? Oh, he’s dead. I rather think they’re all dead, don’t you?”

“What do you mean dead?”

“Dead, gone, in pieces probably. The lucky ones, anyway.” He gave his head a slow shake of wonder. “You should have seen it, the way they swooped down from the trees. Like the bats. We really should have seen that coming.”

Wolfgast felt completely lost. “Please. I don’t know … what you’re talking about.”

The stranger shrugged. “Well, you will. Soon enough, I’m sorry to say.” He looked at Wolgast again. “My manners. You’ll have to excuse me, Agent Wolgast. It’s been a while for me. I’m Jonas Lear.” He gave a rueful smile. “You could say I’m the person in charge around here. Or not. Under the circumstances, I rather think nobody’s in charge anymore.”

Lear. Wolgast searched his memory, but the name meant nothing. “I heard an explosion—”

“Quite right,” Lear interrupted. “That would have been the elevator. Now, my guess would be it was one of the soldiers. But I was locked in the freezer, so I didn’t see that part.” He sighed heavily and cast his eyes around the room once more. “Not a moment of great heroism, was it, Agent Wolgast, locking myself in the freezer? You know, I really wish there was another chair in here. I’d like to sit down. I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I sat down.”

Wolgast shot to his feet. “Jesus. Take mine. Just please, tell me what’s going on.”

But Lear shook his head, his greasy hair swaying. “There’s no time, I’m afraid. We have to be going. It’s all over, isn’t it, Amy?” He looked down at the girl’s sleeping form and gently touched her hand. “Over at last.”

Wolgast could stand it no more. “What’s over?”

Lear lifted his face; his eyes were full of tears.

“Everything.”

Lear led them down the corridor, Wolgast carrying Amy in his arms. The air smelled burnt, like molten plastic. As they turned the corner toward the elevator, Wolgast saw the first body.

It was Fortes. There wasn’t much left. His body looked smeared, like it had been hit and dragged by something huge. Pooling blood glistened under the throb of the emergency lights. Beyond Fortes was another one, or so Wolgast thought. It took him a moment to understand he was looking at more of Fortes, just a different part of him.

Amy’s eyes were closed, but Wolgast did his best to cover them anyway, pressing her face to his chest. Beyond Fortes lay two more bodies, or three, he couldn’t tell. The floor was slick with blood, so much blood that he felt his feet sliding on it, the grease of human remains.

The elevator was blown away, nothing more than a hole, its darkened interior lit by the dancing sparks of broken wiring. Its heavy metal doors had shot across the hallway, caving in the opposite wall. Under the angular light of the emergency beams, Wolgast could see two more dead men, soldiers, crushed by pieces of the door. A third was propped against the wall, seated like a man taking a siesta, except he was resting in a pool of his own blood. His face was drawn and dessicated; his uniform hung limply on his frame, as if it were a size too large.

Wolgast tore his gaze away. “How do we get out of here?”

“This way,” Lear said. The fog had lifted from him; he was pure urgency and purpose now. “Quickly.”

Down another corridor. Doors stood open all up and down its length—heavy metal doors, identical to the one that led to Amy’s chamber. And on the floor of the hallway, more bodies, but Wolgast didn’t—couldn’t—count. The walls were riddled with bullet holes, cartridges lay all over the floor, their brass casings gleaming.

Then a man stepped through one of the doors. Not stepped: stumbled. A big soft man, like the ones who’d delivered Wolgast’s meals to his room, though his face was not familiar. He was holding a hand to a deep gash on his neck, the blood flowing through and around his fingers where they pressed into his flesh. His shirt, a white hospital tunic like Wolgast’s, was a glistening bib of blood.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey.” He looked at the three of them, then up and down the hall. He seemed not to notice the blood or, if he did, not to care. “What happened to the lights?”

Wolgast didn’t know what to say. A wound like that—the man should be dead already. Wolgast couldn’t believe he was even standing.

“Oooo,” the bleeding man said, wobbling on his feet. “I gotta sit down.”

He slid heavily to the floor, his body seeming to cave in on itself, like a tent without poles. He took a long breath and looked up at Wolgast. His body shuddered with a deep twitch.

“Am I … asleep?”

Wolgast said nothing. The question made no sense to him.

Lear touched his shoulder. “Agent, leave him. There’s no time.”

The man licked his lips. He’d lost so much blood he was becoming dehydrated. His eyes had started to flutter; his hands lay loosely, like empty gloves, on the floor at his sides.

“Because I’m here to tell you, I’ve been having the worst goddamn dream. I said to myself, Grey, you are having the worst dream in the world.”

“I don’t think it was a dream,” Wolgast said.

The man considered this and shook his head. “I was afraid of that.”

He twitched again, a hard spasm, as if he’d been hit by a jolt of current. Lear was right—there was nothing to do for him. The blood from his neck had darkened to a deep blue-black. Wolgast had to get Amy away.

“I’m sorry,” Wolgast said. “We have to go.”

“You think you’re sorry,” the man said, and let his head rock back against the wall.

“Agent—”

But Grey’s mind already seemed elsewhere. “It wasn’t just me,” he said, and closed his eyes. “It was all of us.”

They hurried on, to a room with lockers and benches. A dead end, Wolgast thought, but then Lear withdrew a key from his pocket and opened a door marked MECHANICALS.

Wolgast stepped inside. Lear was on his knees, using a small knife to pry loose a metal panel. It swung free on a pair of hinges, and Wolgast bent to look inside. The opening wasn’t more than a yard square.

“Straight on, about thirty feet, and you’ll come to an intersection. A tube leads straight up. There’s a ladder inside for maintenance. It goes all the way to the top.”

Fifty feet at least, climbing a ladder in pitch blackness holding Amy, somehow, in his arms. Wolgast didn’t see how he could do it.

“There has to be another way.”

Lear shook his head. “There isn’t.”

The man held Amy while Wolgast entered the duct. Seated, his head bent low, he’d be able to pull Amy along, holding her by the waist. He backed in until his legs were straight; Lear positioned Amy between them. She seemed to be poised on the edge of awareness now. Through her thin gown, Wolgast could still feel the warmth of her fever rising off her skin.

“Remember what I said. Ten yards.”

Wolgast nodded.

“Be careful.”

“What killed those men?”

But Lear didn’t answer. “Keep her close,” he said. “She’s everything. Now go.”

Wolgast began to scooch away, one hand clutching Amy by the waist, the other pulling them deeper into the duct. It was only when the panel sealed behind him that he realized that Lear had never meant to come with them.

The sticks were everywhere now, all over the compound. Richards could hear the screams and the gunfire. He took extra clips from his desk and ran upstairs to Sykes’s office.

The room was empty. Where was Sykes?

They had to establish a perimeter. Push the sticks back inside the Chalet and throw the switch. Richards stepped from Sykes’s office, his gun raised.

Something was moving down the hall.

It was Sykes. By the time Richards got to him, he had slumped to the floor, his back propped against the wall. His chest was heaving like a sprinter’s, his face sheened with sweat. He was holding a wide tear on his lower arm, just above the wrist, from which blood was running freely. His gun, a .45, lay on the floor near his upturned palm.

“They’re all over the place,” Sykes said, and swallowed. “Why didn’t he kill me? The son of a bitch looked right at me.”

“Which one was it?”

“What the fuck does that matter?” Sykes shrugged. “Your pal. Babcock. What is it with you two?” A deep tremor moved through him. “I don’t feel so good,” he said, and then he vomited.

Richards jumped away, but too late. The air tanged with the stench of bile, and something else, elemental and metallic, like turned earth. Richards felt the wetness through his pants, his socks. He knew without looking that Sykes’s vomitus was full of blood.

“Fuck!”

He raised his weapon at Sykes.

“Please,” Sykes said, meaning no, or maybe yes, but either way, Richards figured he was doing Sykes a favor when he pointed the barrel at the center of his chest, the sweet spot, and then he squeezed the trigger.

Lacey saw the first one come out an upper window. So quick! Like light itself! How a man would move if he were made of light! It was up and over in an instant, vaulting off the roof into space, sailing through the air above the compound, alighting in a stand of trees a hundred yards away. A man-sized flash of throbbing luminescence, like a shooting star.

She’d heard the alarm as the truck pulled into the compound. The two men in the cab had argued for a minute—should they just drive away?—and Lacey had used this moment to climb out the back and scurry into the woods. That was when she’d seen the demon flying from the window. The treetops where he landed absorbed his weight with a shudder.

Lacey saw what was about to happen.

The driver of the truck was opening the truck’s rear gate. Ordnance, the sentry had said—guns? The truck was full of guns.

The treetops moved again. A streak of green fell toward him.

Oh! Lacey thought. Oh! Oh!

Then there were more of them, pouring out of the building, through its windows and doors, launching themselves into the air. Ten, eleven, twelve. And soldiers too, everywhere, running and yelling and shooting, but their bullets did nothing; the demons were too fast, or else the bullets were harmless against them; one by one the demons fell upon the soldiers and they died.

This was why she had come—to save Amy from the demons.

Quickly, Lacey. Quickly.

She stepped from the edge of the woods.

“Halt!”

Lacey froze. Should she raise her hands? The soldier appeared from the woods where he’d been hiding, too. A good boy, doing what he thought was his duty. Trying not to be afraid, though of course he was; she could feel the fear coming off him, like waves of heat. He didn’t know what was about to happen to him. She felt a tender pity.

“Who are you?”

“I am no one,” Lacey said, and then the demon was upon him—before he could even point his weapon, before he could finish the word he was speaking as he died—and Lacey was running toward the building.

By the time they got to the base of the tube, Wolgast was sweating and breathing hard. A faint light was falling down upon them. Far above, he could see the twin beams of an emergency light and, farther still, the stilled blades of a giant fan. The central ventilation shaft.

“Amy, honey,” he said. “Amy, you have to wake up.”

Her eyes fluttered open and closed again. He guided her arms around his neck and stood, felt her feet clamping around his waist. But he could tell she had no strength.

“You have to hold on, Amy. Please. You have to.”

Her body tightened in reply. But still, he’d have to use one of his arms to support her weight. This would leave only one hand free to pull them up the ladder. Jesus.

He turned and faced the ladder, set his foot onto the first rung. It was like a problem on a standardized test: Brad Wolgast is holding a little girl. He has to climb a ladder, fifty feet, in a poorly lit ventilation shaft. The girl is semiconscious at best. How does Brad Wolgast save both their lives?

Then he saw how he could do it. One rung at a time, he’d use his right hand to pull them up, then hook that same elbow through the ladder, balancing Amy’s weight on his knee while he changed hands and moved up another rung. Then the left hand, then the right, and so on, moving Amy’s weight between them, rung by rung to the top.

How much did she weigh? Fifty pounds? All suspended, at the moment he changed hands, by the strength of a single arm.

Wolgast began to climb.

Richards could tell from the shouts and the shooting that the sticks were outside now.

He’d known what was happening to Sykes. Probably it would happen to him too, since Sykes had puked his goddamn infected blood all over him, but he doubted he’d live long enough for this to matter. Hey, Cole, he thought. Hey, Cole, you weasel, you little shit. Was this what you hand in mind? Is this your Pax Americana? Because there’s only one outcome I can see here.

There was just one thing Richards wanted now. A clean exit, with a good showing at the last.

The front entrance of the Chalet was all broken glass and bullet holes, the doors ripped half off their hinges, hanging kitty-corner. Three soldiers lay dead on the floor; it looked as if they’d been shot by friendly fire in the chaos. Maybe they’d actually shot one another on purpose, just to hustle things along. Richards raised his hand and looked at the Springfield—why would he think this would do any good? The soldiers’ rifles would be no use either. He needed something larger. The armory was across the compound, behind the barracks. He’d have to make a run for it.

He looked out the door, across the open ground of the compound. At least the lights were still on. Well, he thought. Better now than later, since probably there would be no later. He took off at a run.

The soldiers were everywhere, scattered, running, shooting at nothing, at one another. Not even pretending to make an organized defense, let alone an assault on the Chalet. Richards ran full tilt, half-expecting to be hit.

Richards was halfway across the compound when he saw the five-ton. It was parked at the edge of the lot, at a careless angle, its doors open. He knew what was inside it.

Maybe he wouldn’t have to make it across the compound after all.

“Agent Doyle.”

Doyle smiled. “Lacey.”

They were on the first floor of the Chalet, in a small, cramped room of desks and file cabinets. Doyle had been waiting there since the shooting had started, hidden beneath a desk. Waiting for Lacey.

He stood.

“Do you know where they are?”

Lacey paused. There were scratches on her face and neck, and bits of leaves caught in her hair.

She nodded. “Yes.”

“I … heard you,” Doyle said. “All these weeks.” Something huge was breaking open inside him. His throat choked with tears. “I don’t know how I did that.”

She took his hands in hers. “It wasn’t me you heard, Agent Doyle.”

At least Wolgast couldn’t look down. He was sweating hard now, his palms and fingers slick on the rungs as he pulled them farther up. His arms were trembling with exertion; the crooks of his elbows, where he held each rung when he traded hands, felt bruised to the bone. There was a moment, he knew, when the body simply reached its limits, an invisible line that, once crossed, could not be uncrossed. He pushed the thought aside and climbed.

Amy’s arms, crossed behind his neck, held firm. Together they ascended, rung by rung by rung.

The fan was closer now. Wolgast could feel a thin breeze, cool and smelling of night, spilling over his face. He craned his neck to scan the sides of the tube for an opening.

He saw it, ten feet above him: beside the ladder, an open duct.

He’d have to push Amy in first. Somehow he’d have to manage his own weight on the ladder and hers as well, while he swung her out from the ladder and into the duct; then he’d climb in himself.

They reached the opening. The fan was higher than he’d thought, another thirty feet above their heads at least. He guessed they were somewhere on the first floor of the Chalet. Maybe he was supposed to go higher, find another exit. But his strength was nearly gone.

He positioned his right knee to take Amy’s weight and reached his left hand out. A featureless wall of cool metal met his fingertips, smooth as glass, but then he found the edge. He drew his hand back. Three more rungs should do it. He took a deep breath and ascended, positioning the two of them just above the duct.

“Amy,” he rasped. His mouth and throat were dry as bone. “Wake up. Do your best to wake up, honey.”

He felt her breathing change against his neck as she tried to rouse.

“Amy, I’m going to need you to let go when I say. I’ll hold you. There’s an opening in the wall. I need you to try to get your feet into it.”

The girl gave no reply. He hoped she had heard him. He tried to imagine how this was going to work, exactly—how he was going to get her inside the duct and then himself—and couldn’t. But he was out of options. If he waited any longer, he’d have no strength for any of it.

Now.

He pushed with his knee, lifting Amy up. Her arms released his neck and with his free hand he took her by the wrist, suspending her over the tube like a pendulum, and then he saw the way: he released his other hand, let her weight pull him away and to his left, toward the hole, and then her feet were inside it, she was sliding into the tube.

He began to fall. He’d been falling all along. But as he felt his feet lose contact with the ladder, his hands madly scrabbling at the wall, his fingers found the lip of the duct, a thin metal ridge that bit into his skin.

“Whoa!” he cried, his voice ricocheting down the length of the shaft. He seemed to be clinging to the side of the shaft by will alone; his feet were dangling in space. “Whoa now!”

How he did it he couldn’t have explained. Adrenaline. Amy. That he didn’t want to die, not yet. He pulled with all his might, his elbows bending slowly, drawing himself inexorably upward—first his head and then his chest and then his waist and finally the rest of him, sliding into the duct.

For a moment he lay still, gulping air into his lungs. He lifted his face then and saw a light ahead—some kind of opening in the floor. He twisted himself around and held Amy as he’d done before, scooting along on his backside, clutching her by the waist. The light grew stronger as they moved toward it. They came to a slatted grate.

It was sealed, screwed shut from the outside.

He wanted to cry. To come so close! Even if he’d been able to reach through the narrow slats, somehow, to find the screws with his fingers, he had no tools, no way to open it. And going back—impossible. He’d spent the last of his strength.

He heard movement below them.

He pulled Amy tight. He thought of the men they’d seen—Fortes, the soldier in the pool of blood, the one called Grey. It wasn’t how he wanted to die. He closed his eyes and held his breath, willing the two of them into absolute silence.

Then a voice, quiet and searching: “Chief?”

It was Doyle.

One of the lockers was already resting on the ground at the rear of the truck. It looked like somebody had been unloading and then, in a panic, dropped it. Richards searched quickly inside the cargo compartment and found a tire iron.

The hinge gave way with a bright snap. Inside, cradled in beds of foam, lay a pair of RPG-29s. He lifted the rack to find, beneath it, the rockets: finned cylinders, about half a meter long, tipped with tandem-charge HEATs, capable of penetrating the armor of a modern battle tank. Richards had seen what they could do.

He’d placed the requisition when the order had come through to move the sticks. Better safe than sorry, he’d thought. Vampires, say aaah.

He fixed the first rocket to the launcher. With a twist it issued the satisfying hum that meant the warhead was armed. Thousands of years of technical advancement, the whole history of human civilization, seemed contained within that sound, the hum of an arming HEAT. The 29 was reusable, but Richards knew he’d only get one shot. He hoisted it to his shoulder, lifted the sighting mechanism into position, and stepped away from the truck.

“Hey!” he yelled, and, at precisely that moment, the sound of his voice streaming away into the gloom, a cold shudder of nausea burbled from his gut. The ground beneath him swayed, like the deck of a boat at sea. Beads of sweat were popping out all over. He felt the urge to blink, a random current from the brain. So. It was happening quicker than he’d thought. He swallowed hard and took two more steps into the light, swinging the RPG toward the treetops.

“Here, kitty, kitty!”

An anxious minute passed as Doyle scrabbled through various drawers until he found a penknife. Standing on a chair, he used the blade to undo the screws. Wolgast lowered Amy into Doyle’s arms, then dropped to the floor himself.

He didn’t at first know whom he was seeing.

“Sister Lacey?”

She was holding the sleeping girl against her chest. “Agent Wolgast.”

Wolgast looked at Doyle. “I don’t—”

“Get it?” Doyle lifted his eyebrows. He was, like Wolgast, wearing scrubs. They were too large, hanging loosely on his body. He gave a little laugh. “Trust me, I don’t get it either.”

“This place is full of dead men,” Wolgast said. “Something … I don’t know. There was an explosion.” He couldn’t explain himself.

“We know,” Doyle said, nodding. “It’s time for us to go.”

They stepped from the room into the hall. Wolgast guessed they were somewhere near the rear of the Chalet. It was quiet, though they could hear scattered pops of gunfire from outside. Quickly, without speaking, they made their way to the front entrance. Wolgast saw the dead soldiers sprawled there.

Lacey turned to him. “Take her,” she said. “Take Amy.”

He did. His arms were still weak from his ascent up the ladder, but he held her hard against him. She was moaning a little, trying to wake up, fighting the force that was keeping her in twilight. She needed to be in a hospital, but even if he could get her to one, what would he say? How would he explain any of this? The air near the doors was wintry cold, and in her thin gown Amy shivered against him.

“We need a vehicle,” Wolgast said.

Doyle ducked out the door. A minute later he returned, holding a set of keys. He’d gotten a gun from somewhere, too, a .45. He took Wolgast and Lacey to the window and pointed.

“The one all the way down, at the edge of the lot. The silver Lexus. See it?”

Wolgast did. The car was a hundred yards away, at least.

“Nice ride like that,” Doyle said, “you’d think the driver wouldn’t just leave the keys under the visor.” Doyle pressed them into Wolgast’s hand. “Hold on to these. They’re yours. Just in case.”

It took Wolgast a moment. Then he understood. The car was for him, for him and Amy. “Phil—”

Doyle held up his hands. “That’s how it has to be.”

Wolgast looked at Lacey, who nodded. Then she stepped toward him. She kissed Amy, touching her hair, and then she kissed him, too, once, on the cheek. A deep calm and a feeling of certainty seemed to radiate through his entire body from the place where she had kissed him. He’d never felt anything like it.

They stepped from the door, Doyle leading them. Together they moved quickly under the cover of the building. Wolgast could barely keep up. He heard more gunfire from somewhere, but it didn’t seem aimed at them. The shots seemed to be going up and away, into the trees, at the rooftops; random shots, like some kind of sinister celebration. Each time it happened he’d hear a scream, a moment of silence, and then the shooting would start up again.

They reached the corner of the building. Wolgast could see the woods beyond it. In the other direction, toward the lights of the compound, lay the parking area. The Lexus waited at the end, facing away, no other cars around it for cover.

“We’ll just have to make a run for it,” Doyle said. “Ready?”

Wolgast, panting, did his best to nod.

Then they were up and racing toward the car.

Richards felt him before he saw him. He turned, swinging the RPG like a vaulter’s pole.

It wasn’t Babcock.

It wasn’t Zero.

It was Anthony Carter.

He was in a kind of crouch, twenty feet away. He lifted his face and twisted his head, looking at Richards appraisingly. There was something doglike about it. Blood glistened on Carter’s face, his clawlike hands, his sworded teeth, row upon row. A kind of clicking sound was coming from his throat. Slowly, in a gesture of languid pleasure, he began to rise. Richards put Carter’s mouth in his sights.

“Open up,” Richards said, and fired.

He knew, even as the grenade shot from the tube, the force of its ejection pushing Richards backward, that he’d missed. The place where Carter had stood was empty. Carter was in the air. Carter was flying. Then he was falling, down upon Richards. The grenade went off, taking out the front of the Chalet, but Richards heard this only vaguely—the noise receding, fading to some impossible distance—as he experienced the sensation, utterly new to him, of being torn in half.

The explosion hit Wolgast as a white sheen, a wall of heat and light that slapped the left side of his face like a punch; he was lifted from the ground and felt Amy fall away. He hit the pavement and rolled and rolled again before coming to rest on his back.

His ears were ringing; his breath felt like it was stuck in a tube, far down in his chest. Above him he saw the deep, velvety blackness of the night sky, and stars, hundreds and hundreds of stars, and some of them were falling.

He thought: Falling stars. He thought: Amy. He thought: Keys.

He lifted his head. Amy was lying on the ground a few yards away. The air was full of smoke. In the flickering light of the burning Chalet, she looked as if she might be sleeping—a character in a fairy tale, the princess who had fallen asleep and couldn’t wake. Wolgast rolled himself onto all fours and frantically patted the ground for the keys. He could tell one of his ears was messed up; it was like a curtain had fallen over the left side of his face, absorbing all sound. The keys. The keys. Then he realized they were still in his hand; he’d never let them go to begin with.

Where were Doyle and Lacey?

He went to where Amy lay. The fall didn’t seem to have hurt her any, or the explosion, as far as he could tell. He put his hands under her arms and hoisted her over his shoulder, then made for the Lexus as fast as he could.

He bent to ease Amy in, laying her across the backseat. He got in himself and turned the key. The headlights blazed across the compound.

Something hit the hood.

Some kind of animal. No: some kind of monstrous thing, throbbing with a pale green light. But when he saw its eyes, and what was inside them, he knew that this strange new being on the hood was Anthony Carter.

Carter rose as Wolgast found the gearshift and plunged it into reverse and gunned the engine. Carter fell away. Wolgast could see him in the lights of the Lexus, rolling on the ground and then, in a series of movements almost too quick for the eye, launching himself into the air, gone.

What in the name of—

Wolgast stomped the brake, turning the wheel hard to the right. The car spun and spun and came to rest, pointed at the driveway. Then the passenger door opened: Lacey. She climbed in quickly, saying nothing. There were streaks of blood on her face, her shirt. She was holding a gun in her hand. She looked at it, amazed, and dropped it on the floor.

“Where’s Doyle?”

“I do not know,” she said.

He put the car back into drive and hit the accelerator.

Then he saw Doyle. He was running toward the Lexus at an angle, waving the .45.

“Just go!” he was yelling. “Go!”

A concussive thump on the roof of the car, and Wolgast knew it was Carter. Carter was on the roof of the Lexus. Wolgast hit the brakes again, sending all of them lurching forward. Carter tumbled onto the hood but held on. Wolgast heard Doyle firing, three quick shots. Wolgast saw a round actually strike Carter in the shoulder, a quick spark of impact. Carter seemed barely to notice.

“Hey!” Doyle was yelling. “Hey!”

Carter turned his face, saw Doyle. With a compressive twitch of his body he launched himself into the air as Doyle got off a final shot. Wolgast turned in time to see the creature that had once been Anthony Carter fall upon his partner, taking him in like a giant mouth.

It was over in an instant.

Wolgast stamped on the accelerator, hard. The car shot over a strip of grass, the wheels digging and spinning, then hit the pavement with a screech. They barreled down the long drive away from the burning Chalet, through the hallway of the trees, everything streaming past. Fifty, sixty, seventy miles per hour.

“What the hell was that?” Wolgast said to Lacey. “What was that!”

“Stop here, Agent.”

“What? You can’t be serious.”

“They will catch us. They will follow the blood. You must stop the car now.” She put her hand on his elbow. Her grip was firm, insistent. “Please. Do as I ask.”

Wolgast drew the Lexus to the side of the road; Lacey turned to face him. Wolgast saw the wound in her arm, a clean shot just below the deltoid.

“Sister Lacey—”

“It is nothing,” Lacey said. “It is only flesh and blood. But I’m not to go with you. I see that now.” She touched his arm again and smiled—a final smile of benediction, sad and happy at once. A smile at the trials of a long journey, now ended.

“Take care of her. Amy is yours. You will know what to do.” Then she stepped from the car and slammed the door before Wolgast could say another word.

He lifted his eyes to the rearview and saw her running the way they’d come, waving her arms in the air. A warning? No, she was calling them down upon her. She didn’t get a hundred feet before a swoop of light shot from the trees, and then another, and then a third, so many Wolgast had to look away, and he hit the accelerator and drove away as fast as he could without looking back again.

II

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 515