Anjali walked into the Flight Control Center.
Twenty minutes spent yelling at Lieutenant Jacobs about sexual discrimination, male chauvinism, and glass ceilings—Anjali figured the lieutenant had experienced all the above during her career—and the officer guarding her was called off.
All she had with her was a flashlight and a cell phone—nobody had bothered to pack a rocket launcher or some holy water.
Are you there, Vishnu? It’s me, Anjali.
She’d barely taken a few steps when a powerful wave of dizziness struck her. She would have fallen to the floor if the wall hadn’t been behind her.
Alien thoughts beat against the walls of her skull.
The entity. Invisible but powerful, like a toxic gas.
Okay, she’d expected this.
She closed her eyes and envisioned the dizziness as something solid she could just push out of her head, out of her body.
It worked.
Something to be said for sheer mental brute force.
Flickering lights bathed the interior of the center. The place was cold and she didn’t see or hear anyone.
But they had to be in there. Unless they’d all run away and she was walking around like a fool while they were at the High Desert Inn bar getting drunk.
No, they were there—possibly possessed, possibly skulking around corners ready to pounce on her or dismember her or…
Stop it, she told herself. You can’t die now. You finally have a functioning relationship with your parents.
The silence was absolute, falling heavy and thick around her shoulders.
She spoke too soon.
The sound of someone singing reached her ears. The voice was sexless, high-pitched and heavy at the same time. The words were unintelligible, but there was a tune, one she wouldn’t want to whistle in the future.
She moved cautiously along one hallway after another, passing open doors and forcing herself to look inside and see if anyone was there.
Ten minutes after it began, the singing stopped. This time she heard footsteps, slow and methodical. Right behind her. She gripped her flashlight.
She held her position in the darkness. She knew she had to turn around, see what or who was there. She took a deep breath and swung around, the light from the torch bouncing down the passageway.
Empty.
What was up with demonic presences that wanted to play hide and seek like children?
She turned back around and started walking, swinging the flashlight back and forth like a blind man with a cane.
She’d gone no more than six or seven paces when the footsteps started again, this time moving toward her at a run. On pure instinct, she took off. Racing down the corridor. But her pursuer gained on her and slammed into her from behind. She fell, banging her knees painfully on the floor. The flashlight rolled away in a squiggle of light.
“I think I hit him!”
Anjali recognized the nasally tones of one of Vivica’s minions.
“I’m not a him,” she snarled. Crawling, she grabbed the flashlight and turned it on the man behind her.
It wasn’t Maddox but one of the others. Fitch?
“What are you doing?” she snapped, standing up.
Another minion came to stand beside him. “We thought you were it,” he said.
“Who? The entity?”
“It has a body now.”
She felt sick. “Hans?”
Fitch’s eyes were wide. “We don’t know.”
“Where is everyone?” she asked.
“We were all separated on the second floor,” Gaspar said. “Fitch and I headed downstairs and started walking toward the entrance. We knew the way; it was impossible to get lost. But we couldn’t find it. We couldn’t find the way out.”
“Everyone’s dead,” Fitch said.
“Dead?” Anjali croaked.
Gaspar nudged him and he shrugged. “Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating. We really don’t know if everyone’s dead. But I bet they’re all servants of Lucifer now.”
“I’ll show you the door,” she snapped. They huddled behind her as she retraced her steps.
At the entrance doors, Fitch and Gaspar shoved each other in their haste to leave.
“Hold it!” They turned around and she glared at them. “Tell Lieutenant Jacobs everything and make sure she sends in a fleet or whatever the hell the air force does. And,” she added in a steely voice, “if I find out that you two ran off without doing what I just said, I will find you. You thought Hans was scary. You haven’t seen what I can do.”
They nodded and ran out the doors into the night.
Anjali found the two officers in one of the offices, huddled under a desk and whimpering about a monster. She led them out.
She found Maddox with a large gash on his forehead in the cafeteria. He drifted in and out of consciousness, and it took a long time to get him outside. She left him there, propped up against the building.
There were five more people still inside the center—Scott, Eddie, Coulter, Vivica, and Hans—and one more floor to check. She headed upstairs, trailing her fingers along the railing and periodically looking down into the atrium of the lobby in case she’d missed somebody.
The odd singing started up again when she reached the top, followed by a loud screeching noise like the tearing of metal.
Too late she turned and saw the heavy metal light fixture disconnect from the ceiling and swing toward her.