If the Incredible Hulk had a bastard love child with a cement mixer, an ogre would be most likely be the result. Up to twelve feet tall, built like a Chevy with legs, covered in hide thicker than a rhino’s, and with a face not even a nearsighted mother could love, ogres have only one redeeming quality: they hate everyone equally.
“Be vewy, vewy quiet,” I subvocaled. “It’s hunting BSI Agents.” I did my best to add a little machine gun burst of laugher. “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.”
Soft groans ghosted through the bone-induction patch behind my ear. As they faded away, Wesley Ng’s voice came through. “Hope this is over soon, boss, because I can’t hang here forever.”
I looked up in time to catch a drop of his sweat right in the eye. It stung like a bitch, but what can you do? It’s not like he was aiming for my baby blues. “Hold on, Ng, the elevator has to descend a couple dozen more feet. Last thing we need is for a pressure wave to kill us now.” I patted my waist where the Bat Belt used to be.
My clever idea, the one that had my team more scared than a mouse at a cat convention, was to use the explosives that comprised our belts.
You see, about three years ago, Special Branch came up with a clever invention, an explosive with the look, feel, and tensile strength of leather. Incredibly stable, the explosive, dubbed ‘boom leather,’ only reacted to a magically (but was not magic in and of itself) created acid called … well, the technogeeknerds gave it a long, twenty-seven syllable name that even I, with a master’s in chemical engineering, can’t pronounce or understand. I call it ‘boom juice.’ Safe to say it takes a Magician the better part of a day to produce a gram of the stuff so it’s not like there are gallons of the liquid lying about waiting to react with boom leather.
I’d used four belts, a little over one pound of boom leather with an expansion rate of 25,800 feet per second upon detonation. The belts were tied in a Gordian knot and placed on the floor of the car, a gram of boom juice (formerly hidden in the heel of my boot) and radio detonator in the center of the bundle.
“Now Kal!” urged Dove.
“Wait for it.”
The ogre lifted a fist the size of a four-cylinder engine and hammered it completely through the top of the elevator, a stomach-wrenching deep roar of victory blasting through its mouth.
“Boss!”
“Now kids, let Daddy work.” Some people have no patience, a hindrance to careful planning and homicidal precision.
Metal tore and ripped and the ogre dropped from sight into the car. I tapped a virtual icon on the DRAFTlite. The glasses sent out a weak radio signal to the detonator far below.
Twenty-five thousand feet per second sounds like a lot, when in fact it’s a little less than the expansion rate of C4. However, when you’re right next to a pound of boom leather, a little less than C4 doesn’t count for beans.
The elevator disappeared in a bright flash of energy and a clap of thunder as the boom leather cooked off. The minimum kill radius on that much explosive is about ten feet, but when the pressure wave is stuffed into a ten-by-ten elevator shaft, it has only two places to go, up or down.
Hot wind scorched my face as the pressure wave hit us, fortunately dissipated by distance, though the blast was strong enough to rattle my teeth. The cables, not more than three feet away, swayed heavily as the weight of the car suddenly disappeared. From below, carried with the wind, a spherical object flew up, up, and up until it flew past, but not before I caught of glimpse of torn and burnt leathery skin and empty, blasted eye sockets beneath a thick shelf of bone.
“That’s one big-ass head,” commented Rat.
I grinned. “Big as a basketball.” We watched as it sailed back down and fell out of sight, down the shaft toward the wreckage of the car. The echoes of its crashing still bounced along the cement walls.
“Okay,” I said aloud, feeling pretty chipper. It’s not every day you kill an ogre, especially with such flair. Showmanship matters. “Let’s go.”
Ng hesitated. “How far?”
“We’re on the twenty-fifth floor, so let’s see what the twentieth looks like. Nice round number, that.”
They groaned and grumbled, but in the end where else were they going to go?
In short order, we made it to the twentieth and pried the door open while trying not to fall head over heels into the shaft.
Another hallway greeted us, curving to the left along the outside wall. It was the mirror image of the area we’d left above, except no dead Agents and no ugly orbs to shriek in our ears. Thanks to Ghost, it looked like the shrieking no longer posed a problem.
Ng leaned against the wall and slowly collapsed until his cheeks hit the carpet. “What’s down here?” He didn’t bother with subvocaling.
I knelt at his side. “Answers, Wesley.” My mouth felt dry as toast, but I kept speaking, trying to keep him focused on the here and now. “The Angel didn’t want anyone down below the twenty-eighth, so maybe, just maybe, the way to beat him is here.”
“Gimme a second, I need to catch my breath.”
He needed a vascular surgeon and four straight days of sleep, but I merely held out a hand to Rat and he set two off-white tablets on my palms. “You mean to continue, Wes?” I asked.
That earned me a weak nod.
I held out the tablets. “Take.”
“Oxy?”
“Yeah.”
He dry-swallowed the pair.
“Need some rest?”
Ng considered that for a moment. “Nah, the Oxy will kick in soon.”
Onward then. We headed along the outside wall, guns and knives at the ready. The only person still in possession of bullets was Rat, and he had pistol in hand. Considering that we were after a Supernatural with the ability to shapeshift into a screaming beach ball along with other unknown magical and physical abilities, our weapons seemed kind of pathetic. We were bringing knives to a magic fight, but what else could we do? Where could we go? The op needed to get done and sometimes all you can do when the odds are piled high against you is grin at the devil and spit in his eye.
We passed several branches leading toward the guts of the building, but it wasn’t until we’d traveled a good hundred or so yards that we took one. It made sense that whatever the Angel didn’t want us to see lay deeper in. Slowly, carefully, we made our way into the belly of the beast, tensions running high. Several times I blinked sweat out of my eyes, and I could see that my team members’ nerves were strung tighter than piano wire. It’s hard to maintain that level of alertness. The human body and mind can only function like that for a short while before becoming distracted by other needs or events. Still, all of us had practice dealing with stress, so we managed to stay bright-eyed and bushy-tailed despite all that had occurred. Except for Ng, who, judging by the glassy look in his eyes, was starting to feel the Oxy.
We arrived shortly at a wooden office door with the words BARTON AVIONICS stenciled in black, smack dead center. Why would an avionics … never mind. I shook my head and opened the door wide.
And here I’d thought things were weird before.
Imagine a rope made of translucent bluish flesh a foot thick and a couple hundred yards long. Now take that rope and tie the ends together seamlessly. Got it? Well then, you’re better at this than I am because my mind still wobbles. Take that rope and cover it with a jillion tiny mouths with perfect ruby lips—lips that should be on the face of a beautiful Hollywood starlet, glistening and beckoning. Now have those lips move in strange sinuous ways that no human lips could imitate and have them cover teeth like a lamprey’s, all bone-white needles around the edges of the mouths leading down into the depths of the flesh cable.
Still with me? Good, now have that ring of blue flesh hang in midair, a circular horror that spins and rotates while it spins, a hula hoop from your worst nightmare. Now add another, smaller circle of flesh inside that one, also rotating on its axis while spinning. Then add a third, smaller ring about twenty yards in diameter in the center, spinning and rotating. In the center of this ring, where there should be nice, clear, sane air, add a shimmering nothingness that eats light and spits out a grayish aura I could only describe as not-light. Not blackness, not darkness, more like a negation of vision, as if the blind spot in your eye were to expand to hover in the middle of that center ring.
You expect something of that size, all spinny and such, to be noisy, to cleave the air with a great whoosh, but the flesh rings were eerily silent and that in itself added to their horror.
It was pretty trippy.
There we stood, staring at the rings as they hung in the chilly air, barely realizing that the entire center of the Quint Building had disappeared, had been hollowed out like a pumpkin for Halloween from floors five to twenty-seven. The internal structure had all been sheared away neatly as if by a giant laser scalpel, leaving pristine, antiseptic terminations to the interior structure. As to where the rest had gone—all that material such as wood and concrete—I didn’t know. There was no rubble, no dust. Nothing. Despite the fact that several thousand tons of debris should have been lying on the floor of the chasm … nothing.
“Boss,” said Rat, “I sure am hatin’ what I’m seein.’ ”
“For once I agree with the little skink,” Dove added.
Ng shook his head. “Please tell me this is a drug-induced hallucination.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I quipped, “please put your tables and seatbacks in their upright and stored position.”
Moving carefully to where the floor ended and a whole big span of nothing began, I peered out over the drop. Whoa! Way farther down than I really wanted to consider. My stomach crawled up to my throat as I estimated the interior of this hollow to be at least twenty stories tall and far enough across that it was hard to see the other side.
It was then, as I stared out into the hollow of the building, that I heard the voices. Whispery things that slid through my ears, a soft babble that at first didn’t make any sense. The more I listened, the more I felt the need to move closer to the spinning flesh ropes, to touch them, to caress those twisting lips. Something deep inside me, the primitive limbic animal, began to squeal in dismay. I took a step closer to the edge, to where the carpeting had been sliced clean. Just a few feet away, a glistening ribbon of blue flesh spun, spouting those whispery, almost intelligible words that caressed, urged, drew me closer.
“You feel that, boss?”
What? Suddenly I was back to myself, right foot a bare inch from eternity, the flesh rope spinning close, no longer rotating, but staying oriented toward me, multiple ruby lips quivering as if in excitement. I quickly backpedaled and tried to think about Rat’s words. “Feel what?”
“That thing. It’s radiatin’ so much magic …. Can’t you guys feel it?”
Dove and Ng shook their heads, but I shut my eyes for a moment in an effort to feel what rattled Rat’s cage. There. At the edge of my mind, like a half-remembered dream, an almost inaudible buzzing. Soft, subtle, and easy to overlook.
“What is that?” I asked.
I received a reply, not from Rat, but from Ng. “That is the voice of the Engine,” he said aloud, startling all of us. “Only Magicians can hear it. The Angel summoned it to bring Those Who Dwell Between to our world.”
“Subvocal, Wesley!” I hissed.
He failed to heed my urgency. “You see, the Angel has escaped from Hell many times, and each time he’s been caught, dragged back to suffer more than we can imagine. This time, however, he came upon the idea of using us, the BSI, to call the Engine, to bring into the world beings even Hell fears more than the wrath of God. Not to kill mankind, mind you, but to destroy civilizations and to distract the Lords of the Abyss so they will be too busy fighting these new monsters to deal with him. When the first team arrived, the Angel sucked out their magic then killed them one by one to harness the energy generated by their deaths. All to bring the Engine here. The terrible power of Necromancy. Even Sixer, driven mad by hallucinations, gave the Angel tremendous power when he killed himself. This power, coupled with the weakness in the fabric of reality that lies beneath St. Louis, allowed him access to the pocket dimensions you were in. These pocket dimensions, had you died there, would have funneled magic directly into the Engine, making it unnecessary for him to use himself as a conduit. Had you died in those dimensions, the gateway would already have opened and we wouldn’t be talking right now. We would be screaming.”
I was starting to get creeped out on a major scale. “How do you know this?”
The confidant, smug smile he turned to me seemed awfully familiar. “If the Angel can bring these beings through to this world, millions, perhaps billions will die and then he can kill to his heart’s content while mankind and all the forces of creation battle them in an effort to save the universe. It’s a win-win for the Angel of Mass Murder, a being as old as mankind. He can skip through the rubble of this world, gathering worshippers and shedding blood.” Ng showed all his teeth. It wasn’t a smile. “Did you know he’s the creator of the Kali cult? The Thugees? He’s got quite an imagination, that one.” He shook his head, teeth still bared in a not-smile. “Only thing is, you all proved much too resilient; you didn’t die when you should have.”
Rat took a step back from Ng, fear written on his face, while Dove looked like she wanted to sock him in the mouth. I took a step forward, keeping my voice low. “Wesley, or whoever you are, what’s going on?”
Sweat ran from his skin in such quantities that I thought he’d desiccate in seconds. “I’ve given you enough information, Kal. It’s time for me to pass out now.” With that, he closed his eyes and fell to the floor. Or would have if Dove hadn’t caught him and lowered him gently. Although a good foot shorter than Ng, she packed enough solid muscle on her tiny frame to give a linebacker pause.
“What is wrong with him?” she asked once Ng was settled. His face still dripped sweat, but not as much as before.
“Someone is messin’ with us,” said Rat, staring at Ng’s prone form. “I bet that Angel fella took over his mind, just to screw around and twist us all about.”
I considered Ng for a moment, moving the last bit of my cigar from one side of my mouth to the other before spitting it out onto the floor. It hit me then, as that moist hunk of tobacco rolled to a stop, where I’d seen that smug, crap-eating smile before, and a slow burn of anger began in my gut.
“Goddamn it,” I muttered to myself, “played like a rube.”
That got Dove’s attention. “What are you talking about?”
I shook my head, still staring at the remains of the cigar. “Not relevant now.”
“Urrk!”
My head swiveled up in time to see Dove folding over and falling to the floor. Billings stood over her in the doorway, bloody knife in hand, his perfectly muscled bare torso gleaming with sweat. A large fist blurred and cracked Rat on the jaw, lifting him up off his toes. He hung there for a split second before crashing to the floor.
“Very good, Mr. Billings,” said a voice from behind. I turned to see a man dressed in a black waistcoat, a lime cravat, and dark gray pants floating in the void next to the fleshy Engine. On his head rested a black silk top hat. In one hand he twirled a cane, topped with an amethyst the size of a baby’s fist. “Do you think you can kill Agent Hakala?”
Billings’ bushy beard split to show teeth grown pointed. “Of course.”
“The Angel, I suppose?” My voice remained neutral, as if I were discussing the weather, but my mind was racing, calculating the odds and inventorying the weapons secreted around my body.
A tip of the top hat to me. “Of course. I commend you on your resilience.” To Billings, “Sir, I appreciate your inestimable skills, but I respect Agent Hakala too much to leave him to a single agency to dispatch.” A horrid, wet smile split his face. I couldn’t tell whether he was handsome or not; the more I looked at his face, the less I saw. “Let us do this together. Let us kill a legend.”
And they attacked.