Chapter 16

  Alan Sheppard

  “You’re coming here? To Chicago?” asked Alan.

  “I suppose. Hrm. Yes. I expect I’ll be there soon, providing…”

  “Providing what? Is something wrong?”

  “Yes, there seems to be a bit of an issue with the sky , Alan. It is breaking apart, rather. Or some such nonsense. I swear, Alan, I should have shot Riley. Years ago. Ah…well.”

  “Ms. Carter, I—“

  “Rebecca, please.”

  “Rebecca. Things are getting messy here.”

  “What was that noise?”

  “What?”

  “I thought I heard someone screaming on your end.”

  “You did. I was just saying that things are getting bad in Chicago.”

  “Well, what on Earth is happening, Alan?”

  “I…I don’t know. There’s a fog. You’ll see it when you land. Where will you be landing?”

  She laughed. “You seem to be under the misconception that I am flying this machine. It is not so, Alan. It is flying itself. I imagine it will land wherever Kaitlyn’s phone is. Why did you answer her phone, incidentally?”

  Alan Sheppard was standing at the open space in the wall where the balcony had been. He looked down at where he had last seen the body of Kaitlyn Carter. Now he saw only fog. He did not know if it was still down there or if the police had taken it away. He did not know many things, and this set him on edge.

  “Her phone works,” he said. “We’re in Walker’s apartment building. We’ll meet you on the roof.”

  “Hrm. I see.” Alan could tell that she knew something was wrong. But she continued, “and then?”

  “I’ve got to meet up with Michael Whyte,” he told her. “Also, I have a child with me.”

  “Yes, I know. Heidi, correct?”

  “No…it’s Leah Walker.”

  “And?”

  “We’ll be taking her with us.”

  “Doesn’t she have parents?”

  “I don’t know,” said Alan, aware that the girl in question was within earshot, and probably listening closely despite appearing to be occupied playing with the stuffed turtle. “I don’t think so. Not anymore.”

  “Dear god, what is happening down there? No matter. Plenty of room on this jet. I only wonder how much longer the airspace will be navigable.”

  Alan heard in her tone that she had more to say, so he waited. Somewhere nearby, something heavy slammed. The floor quivered and dust sifted down from the ceiling. Leah whimpered softly and hugged the stuffed turtle. At least there were no screams this time. Alan quietly and carefully moved to stand by the door. Its lock was broken.

  “Hrm,” Rebecca continued. “Say, Alan. Have you been contacted by a rather dramatic individual who goes by ‘Christmas’?”

  “Yes, I have. He’s connected to October Industries.”

  “And do you trust him? Or her, I suppose, but I get the sense, you know.”

  “No.”

  “Hrm. Good.”

  “But he helped me. Got me out. I think he’s an inside man trying to shut it all down.”

  “Well he’s been telling me to find you and a few others. There’s some place we need to go, according to him.”

  “Understood. When do you expect to arrive?”

  “Well. I must say that–oh, just a moment…yes something is happening now. I believe I am close.”

  “Good. Then we’ll plan for the roof.”

  “Quite.” She hung up.

  Alan pocketed the phone and took a quick inventory of his assets. They weren’t many. For weapons, he had several knives he’d taken from the kitchen. For supplies, he’d gathered together bottled water and food items from the Walker’s home and packed them into a duffel bag he’d found in a closet. He had rope, cord, matches, towels, a first aid kit. All this besides his own light pack containing little more than toiletries and a change of clothes.

  Something slammed again somewhere nearby, shaking the floor and walls. This time Alan thought he heard a low growl that went along with it. To the roof, then.

  He took a moment to write a note to Leah’s parents, should they return. He made it as thorough as possible. It was a hard note to write. What if they did return? What if they came home to find their daughter and son missing? It reminded him that he was going to have to provide more than a note to Rebecca Carter. He swore under his breath as he pinned the note in an obvious place in the middle of the floor where the table used to be.

  “Come on,” he said to Leah, who had assembled her own small purple backpack of necessities. He hadn’t told her to do that; she had been watching and copying him. “It’s time to leave.” He slung the duffel bag around his shoulder, then on second thought held it dangling loosely in one hand so that he could drop it in an instant if he needed to move fast. The other hand took hold of Leah Walker’s. She looked up at him with an unnervingly intelligent gaze, as though she understood the entire situation as well as he. It was a trusting look, and it only hardened his resolve to protect her. He sure as hell had to protect something, and this girl reminded him of Heidi around the age he had begun taking care of her.

  “Eric and Heidi will be okay,” she whispered to him. He nodded back, not sure who she was trying to reassure.

  She squeezed his hand. He squeezed back, gently. He put a finger to his lips, then led her to the front door and opened it.

  The man on the other side had been reaching for the knob. He had not been expecting the door to open, nor a threat to emerge, because he was not even looking at Alan when the door swung, nor was he in any kind of ready position. Alan thought, for a brief moment, that this tall broad-shouldered man might be Leah’s father. Then he saw the orange and grey jacket.

  The man had impressive reaction time, given that he was caught flat-footed. His hand was halfway to a hidden weapon at his back when Alan’s charge drove him across the hall and pinned him to the far wall hard enough that both the wall and several of the man’s ribs cracked under the impact.

  Alan’s hand snaked around behind the man’s waist as he checked the situation. Two other people to his left; the man had been looking at them when reaching for the door. Alan didn’t have time to look in the other direction; he had to deal with the visible threats at once before turning to the hypothetical ones. His right hand found what the man had been reaching for: a handgun. Semi-automatic, low-caliber, long and heavy barrel. Silenced?

  He lunged toward the other two. One was close, a mere two paces away. The other was thrice as far, therefore more of a threat. That one held a weapon in his hand already.

  Alan targeted the closer one. It took two steps: a long one to close the distance, a short one to generate power. He plowed into this man, forearm against neck, but he wasn’t at an angle to ram him effectively against a wall. No space to incapacitate him. No time. Only one choice: the gun. Alan whipped its barrel up into the man’s torso as his weight bore the man staggering backward. He pulled the trigger as soon as his finger found it. Nothing happened; not even the click of an empty chamber. The goddamn safety was on?

  Alan began to worry. His element of surprise had slipped away, and two-on-one was not good odds against professionals. He considered calling to Leah, telling her to stay back, but he stopped himself. If she was smart, she’d know to keep quiet and out of the way. If he called to her, they’d know she was there.

  The man he’d charged this time was smaller than Alan, but not by a great deal. He’d been steady enough that Alan’s charge hadn’t taken them to the ground. A mixed blessing–Alan was confident in his groundwork, but the ground was no place to be when another enemy several paces away had a firearm.

  The man fought back, brought one arm up to shove against Alan, make some space. The man’s other hand, the important one, reached for a weapon at his leg. Alan dropped the useless handgun–no time to find and turn off the safety–and gut-punched the man, jumping into it with all the strength of his legs. The man doubled over but did not fall, and his fist came up with eight inches of sharp black steel. He slashed blindly at the air, a sweeping slash meant to drive Alan back. Alan stepped into the blow, blocked the arm at the elbow, turned his step into an elbow to the skull, and tore the knife from the man’s loosened grip.

  A loud cough, and something tugged at Alan’s left shoulder. He heard plaster spray down the hall as a bullet chewed into it.

  He crouched, used the groaning man’s body as a shield to cover himself from the next few shots, took this opportunity to drive the knife up under his opponent’s ribcage, piercing his heart. The man gasped, his arms flailing feebly, still weak and dizzy from the gut-punch and the knock to the head. Alan wrenched the blade out as the shooter paused to assess the situation.

  Alan stood, turned, and used the momentum to fling the knife. It was a kind of Bowie knife, not meant for throwing. His aim was sure; the knife struck the final target directly between the eyes. It struck hilt-first. She cursed and clutched at her head with one hand, but the other held out the handgun and sprayed bullets.

  Alan had begun moving as soon as the knife left his hand. He heaved up the sagging body of the dying man in his arms and charged forward. The woman realized this too late to react effectively. Alan gripped her gun hand with his left; he planted his feet and heaved her about with brute strength, lending the leverage of his other arm to slam her thin body into the floor as he swept her off her feet. She struck the carpet so hard that she bounced, grunting in pain.

  He straddled her in an instant, pinning her upper arms with his knees. He removed the weapon in her hand and aimed it down the hall at the first man who had been opening the door. That one was slumped against the wall below the cracked crater of his impact, groaning softly, dazed, but not for long. He was still a threat. So was this woman beneath him. The deadliest enemy in combat, he had learned long ago, was overconfidence. It had been shouted at him until it echoed in his dreams. Every living enemy is a threat. Treat every foe as the one that might kill you. If you don’t, they might. And they might regardless. That’s just how combat goes. It was a game for fools, or any who cared to gamble their lives on an activity governed largely by sheer luck.

  The woman beneath him twisted under his weight. She tried to bring her legs up, to catch them around his torso and leverage him off, but he crouched beyond their reach and showed her the gun in his hand. “Any more?” he asked as he took a quick glance up and down the hall. He didn’t sense anyone coming. Leah was quietly peeking around the door of her apartment, glancing at him and the groaning man not five feet away from her. She seemed more curious than afraid.

  “I said,” Alan growled, ignoring Leah for the moment, “are there any more of you?” He pressed the silenced barrel of the weapon against the woman’s temple.

  “Do it,” she hissed, glaring up at him. A trickle of blood from where the knife had struck had run into one of her eyes.

  “Why did you come back?” he asked. “Was it for the girl? For me?”

  “Girl’s fucking dead,” the woman spat. “So’re you. And me.” She meant Kaitlyn. And she didn’t seem to know who he was. He certainly didn’t recognize her, nor any of her friends. The woman closed her eyes and lay her head back down against the carpet as though resting. She even looked strangely peaceful. “Just pull the trigger,” she muttered. “We’re all fucking dead. Goddamn mad scientist fucked us all.”

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Alan did consider pulling the trigger. He didn’t like the idea of leaving her alive behind him. Able to follow, to take vengeance. On the other hand, he was only going to the roof.

  The noise he’d been hearing for the past ten minutes, that slamming, grunting noise, came again. It was louder than before; it shook the floor, made the lights flicker. This time it sounded like…what? Like a wall being broken through somewhere on the floor below. Sitting as he was atop the woman, he felt her breath catch. She was afraid. And Leah was still there, peeking around the door. That decided the matter. He couldn’t shoot someone in front of her.

  “Look,” he said. She opened her eyes. He held the gun and the knife so she could see them both. “I didn’t miss with the knife. I won’t miss with this.” He wiggled the gun. “Don’t follow us. Don’t try anything. We’re just leaving.”

  “That’s what we were trying to do,” she said, and her voice broke a little. She blinked, and Alan saw wetness in her eyes as well as blood. “Would’ve just…let you go.” She slumped, limp and defeated.

  Alan checked her thoroughly for weapons. She had a knife of her own, but was otherwise clean. He motioned for Leah to come join him. She hurried down the hall, pausing only to stare at the corpse heaped in a blood-soaked circle of carpet.

  Alan stood, aware as he did so that his own hands were red with blood. He wanted to wash them off, but that was not what mattered right now. He grabbed his duffel bag and backed away from the woman on the floor. She reached a hand up to touch the place on her forehead where his knife had struck, but did not move apart from that. Down the hall, the first man finally began to stagger to his feet, grasping at his broken ribs.

  Leah led the way to the stairs. Alan backed the entire way with an eye on the two OI agents. Another sound came when they reached the door to the stairwell. It was a deep, rumbling growl. A lion, but deeper, and so loud that they heard it clearly from the next floor.

  He led Leah up the concrete steps, stopping for a moment one floor up to retrieve a towel from the duffel bag and wipe most of the blood from his hands and forearms. The stairwell was misty with that peculiar fog. It was thick and cohesive, like smoke or steam rather than the haze of regular fog, and it swirled about them in an unsettling way as they ascended.

  He wondered about what the woman had said. Did she mean that they had been deserting? He had attacked at once, convinced that anyone in an October Industries coat meant him harm. But what if he and Leah could have simply walked past them? But then, why had they returned to the apartment?

  He pushed these thoughts from his mind. No use worrying about them now. That was when he saw the figure on the landing up above.

  The duffel bag hit the floor, his gun out in an instant, his body in-between the woman and Leah. But she wasn’t there. Nothing was there but a vaguely humanoid clump of the fog.

  Leah clung tightly to his leg. “What is it?” she whispered.

  Alan blinked at the spot where he had seen her. Rebecca Carter. It had been her. Had his eyes been playing tricks? His imagination carrying him away? If so, it was a novel experience. Alan’s imagination had never carried him away like this before.

  He shook his head, scanned the stairs a final time, and resumed their ascent, now with more haste. Another half-minute and they were at the top. Alan had to break the lock on the roof-access door, which proved more troublesome than he would have liked. An excited gasp from Leah made him turn partway through this work. She was staring, wide-eyed and smiling, at several creatures flying in a cluster further down the stairwell. They were dragonflies, huge blue ones, and they left glittering trails in the air as they swept back and forth, chasing each other.

  Suddenly, they were gone. Just puffs of vapor, drifting and swirling, dispersing down the stairwell.

  He and Leah looked at each other. Alan could only imagine that his own expression was one of incredulity, but Leah’s was a mask of fascination. “Dragonflies,” she informed him.

  Alan wanted to respond, but found a lack of words. What would Eric Walker say to his sister? “Better keep that turtle close,” he said, giving the stuffed turtle in her arms a poke.

  She nodded vigorously and held the turtle up for him to see. “It is a giant monster turtle. Its name is Short. It will protect me.” She demonstrated by making the turtle growl at him. He held up his hands in surrender and turned back to the door. Another minute and he had it open.

  And then they were out, stepping from the chilly stairwell into the cool damp fog that obscured vision beyond twenty or thirty feet. The top of this apartment building was in a cloud. “Careful,” he said to Leah as he made his way to the center of the rooftop, duffel bag in one hand and handgun of unknown make in the other.

  He came to a broad space in amongst the ventilation shafts, the HVAC units, the many assorted pipes and chimneys. Leah followed close behind him, looking around with nervous curiosity. “Mr. Sheppard,” she said, “I think that–”

  A roar interrupted her. It was a strange, hoarse, gargling kind of roar, the likes of which Alan had never heard. And it was very, very close.

  Alan dropped the duffle bag and spun, gun outstretched, toward the sound. A shape descended from above, and the rooftop of the building shuddered with the impact of its landing. Alan thought he heard the infrastructure groan, threatening to delegate the duty of ‘rooftop’ to a floor one story lower.

  The fog swirled around the shape with a flap of its wings, clearing enough for him to make out the huge batlike wings, the round gray-green turtle-like body the size of a tank, the long neck terminating in a head as large as Alan himself, the flipper-like appendages supporting its weight.

  “What the hell?” Alan whispered. Leah said something too, an awed whisper, something like, “giant monster turtle.”

  It bore down upon them without hesitation. The practical necessities of survival overruled Alan’s disbelief. He snatched up Leah and sprinted to a nearby cluster of pipes and vents. “Hide,” he said.

  He ran from her, across the path of the oncoming monstrosity, shouting to make himself obvious. It worked. The thing roared again as it approached, crushing the vents and all other obstacles in its path. Metal groaned, squealed, snapped; escaping steam hissed. The grainy surface of the rooftop shuddered as the beast dragged itself forward on clawed car-sized appendages. Somehow, impossibly, the evidence pointed to the reality of this creature.

  Treat every enemy as the one that might kill you. Right. No problem.

  He was marginally faster than the monster, and when he had gained a few seconds of ground, he turned and pumped five rounds into its neck and head. The creature paused, turned its monstrous reptilian head to get a better look at him. It didn’t seem to be injured by the shots. Perhaps the noise had given it pause.

  Alan reached down with his left hand and drew the black knife, aware that this would probably be useless if bullets didn’t work. But he had to stall. He had to tell Leah to get back down the stairs, where this thing couldn’t follow. And he needed to warn Rebecca. They could work out a new—

  He darted to the side as the monster rushed in with a surprising burst of speed. Alan mounted a ventilation unit in two quick leaps, pivoted, and jumped past the monster, back along its left side. It tried to track his movements, but he had been right–it couldn’t turn quickly. If he could stay behind it…

  The wing caught him off-guard as it swept down from the grainy fog and clapped him into an awkward sprawl against a ledge, the very ledge which marked the edge of the rooftop. There was no railing.

  Now it had time to turn. Now it was facing him. Now it was approaching.

  Alan rolled to his knees, then crouched up onto his feet. He’d dropped the gun; he had only the knife. He would try to get inside its reach next, right up where the neck emerged from the shell. Maybe it was weak in there.

  Another sound emerged from the fog above. It was a high-pitched whirring like one of Heidi’s computers malfunctioning and running too fast, too hot, filling the computer room with an acrid smell. The noise built up to a scream in the space of a second, and a blue column of light pierced down from above, directly upon the front end of the turtle monster as though a helicopter had caught it in a searchlight. The monster screamed, but only for a moment. Its head crumpled and blackened, burning to a crisp in fast-forward. The surface on which it stood melted away as the blue light vanished, and the monster’s weight began to drag it down into the floor below. But as it fell, between one glance and the next, it was gone, replaced by a dense mass of vaporous fog that dissipated over the next few seconds.

  Alan crouched low, perfectly still, trying desperately to think. What new threat was this? That blue beam had October Industries tech written all over it.

  A machine descended from the fog above, a sleek silvery vessel as large as a city bus, its streamlined body flanked by four dimly glowing spheres where wings would normally be. It came rapidly down through the fog, generating no wind as a descending helicopter would.

  A hatch opened in its side only a moment after landing. Through the hatch came Rebecca Carter.

  A minute later they were together: Alan Sheppard, Rebecca Carter, and Leah Walker, safe in Riley McFinn’s technological marvel of a jet. They sat in the craft’s comfortable lounge compartment. Leah hugged that stuffed turtle and bounced nervously on a chair as Alan and Rebecca spoke standing near the open hatch.

  “Where is Kaitlyn, Alan?” asked Rebecca Carter. She was trying to keep her voice steady, but was only marginally succeeding.

  Alan remained silent, thinking how best to say it.

  “Where?” Rebecca whispered, the cool expression on her face betrayed by the twitching muscles of her jaw and the tears she blinked back. She already suspected. She already knew. Why else would Alan be here without Kate? Why would he have her burn phone?

  “Rebecca,” he said, and the tone of his voice was all it took for Rebecca Carter to sob once, loudly, and bring a hand up to her mouth. She bit the knuckles of that hand so hard that Alan feared she would hurt herself. “Listen. We…”

  “Where?” she shouted, composure lost.

  Alan took a deep breath. He had feared this moment ever since he’d first seen the body of Kaitlyn Carter. He had tried to prepare himself, had tried to assemble a comforting way to put it. But there was no comforting way. He knew that. What if Heidi had died? How would he like to be told?

  “Dead,” he said. “Fallen. From this building. It was quick, I’m sure.”

  Rebecca sobbed again, and was joined by a smaller but similar noise. It was Leah, watching them, now also crying, cramming her face against the stuffed turtle.

  Before Alan knew what was happening, Rebecca had caught him in a tight hug. He gently placed his arms around her, surprised to feel the layers of muscle there on her quivering back, wiry and hard. He did not require this evidence for her surprising strength, as her grip around him felt less like a hug and more as though she were attempting to crush his ribcage.

  Leah, not to be left out, hopped off her chair, abandoning the turtle, and seized one of Alan’s legs. She did not even come up to his waist.

  After a long interval of quiet, gasping sobs that cut Alan as much as if they had been agonized wails, Rebecca regained some self-control. “W…was it…them?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I wasn’t…it had already happened when I arrived.”

  “You saw her?”

  “Yes,” he whispered. “She fell.” This made Leah start crying again.

  Rebecca muttered something that sounded like a string of profanities with the word “Riley” mixed in. She straightened, released Alan from her death-grip, and wiped her tears. Alan marveled at her composure. It was temporary, no doubt. Yet it allowed her to do what had to be done, to store away the grief for later. Alan wondered whether he could react this way if he learned that Heidi had been killed.

  A phone in his pocket vibrated. Kate’s burn phone. Alan removed it almost reverently, moved to look at it, then held it out to Rebecca. She took it with a trembling hand. She swiped it on, read the message. Her expression became one of rage. She flung the phone back to Alan, who caught it out of the air.

  The message read: “There is a safe place. You must meet with Amber Jane Eddison, Michael Whyte, and Dwayne Hartman. Do not lose hope.—Christmas.”

  The open hatch closed, and the aircraft ascended into the air. “You say it’s flying itself?” asked Alan.

  Rebecca was too angry to respond. “‘Do not lose hope?’” she spat. “Just who the hell…”

  Alan quietly pocketed the phone and moved toward the front of the plane. He took Leah’s hand and brought her with him. Probably best to leave Rebecca Carter in peace for a while.

  He checked his own phone, where his last message from Heidi was an assurance of her safety, as was the most recent message from “Christmas.” Heidi and Eric were safe for now, it told him.

  Although Alan had some objection to mysterious individuals directing his actions, he could think of no reason not to meet up with others, particularly Michael Whyte. He could guess who Amber Jane Eddison was, but couldn’t place Dwayne Hartman.

  He and Leah entered the pilot’s compartment at the forefront of the jet. Sure enough, it was empty. Nothing but gray fog outside the windows. He set Leah in one chair and collapsed into the other.

  “Please fasten your seatbelts,” said a professional female voice, making Alan jump. “We will be accelerating shortly.”

  Alan saw that he still had spots of blood on his hands and arms. He hadn’t done such a good job of cleaning it on the stairs. He might have smeared some on the back of Rebecca’s shirt. But at the moment, he couldn’t bring himself to care.