Anna’s sleeping mind conjured up a wasp. The insect was stinging her bicep. Instantly she was awake, but, for a moment, she couldn’t remember where she was. Not Rocky. Acadia. No Paul, no roommates, yet a shadow, as wide as it was tall, clotted the vague light between her eyes and the ceiling.
“Hey!” Anna barked. Squeaking like a colony of bats, the shadow changed shape and squeezed toward the door. Not a shadow—this invader was corporeal in nature. Shadows were the stuff of silence. This apparition was making a hell of a racket.
“Who are you?” Anna yelled as she threw off her covers. There was a brief scuffle as the night creature tried to shove itself through an opening half its size.
Leaping free of the bedclothes, Anna yelled: “Stop!”
The black shape wrestled with itself for a moment, then popped through the bedroom door into the living room. Anna scrambled for the light switch. In the unfamiliar room, she was slow. By the time she’d flicked the light on, she could hear the sound of feet pounding down wooden stairs. More than one person, two, maybe three. A wave of dizziness overtook her; sound was behaving oddly; the light seemed to shimmer. She brushed her wrist over her eyes.
Hers was one of four apartments in the building used for employee housing on Schoodic Peninsula. The structure was divided in half, two floors on each side, an apartment on each floor, the two halves connected by an open-air breezeway and stairs. Though it often happened in cookie-cutter dwellings, these weren’t drunken neighbors wandering in the wrong door. Drunken neighbors wouldn’t run; besides, at present, Anna’s was the only apartment occupied.
It could be park visitors. As far as vacationers were concerned, rangers were always on duty, always there to stanch the bleeding or lend a cup of sugar. Since Anna—like a lot of the old guard—still refused to lock her doors, a couple might have wandered in and been scared into running when she awakened.
“Hey!” she shouted again. “Hold up.”
In three strides she’d crossed the small living room. As she reached the head of the stairs, two humanoid shapes careened through the downstairs breezeway, running out into the parking lot with more speed than grace.
Not tourists with bad manners. Sinister miscreants. “Damn!” Anna muttered. She staggered, caught herself on the railing, then turned and ran back into her apartment. For an instant, she stood beside her bed, trying to remember why she’d come back. “Intruders,” she said, and she pulled on her cordovan boots, grabbed her SIG Sauer from the drawer in the nightstand, and, stark naked but for boots and gun, hurtled out of the apartment, down the stairs, and into the night.
In the middle of the employee-housing parking lot, she stopped, eyes wide, ears open. Without warning a blackness as heavy and dark as igneous rock rolled over her brain, crushed her vision, and clogged her ears. Anna’s joints turned to water. She fell hard on her knees.
Pain cleared her mind. She could hear sneakered feet scratching on pavement; the intruders were headed across the access road toward the renovated Rockefeller building used as the Schoodic Education and Research Center. Beyond the Rockefeller building were the crumbling ruins of an old navy base’s housing wings.
Currently the research center was home to granite sculptors doing a summer workshop. Possibly her wee-hours visitation was from feral artists, but Anna was more worried about the artists as victims or hostages than as perpetrators. Though one or two of the huge, labor-intensive granite monoliths did look like the work of troubled minds.
As her vision cleared, she saw the two figures running hard toward the plaza where the sculptures were being carved. She heaved herself to her feet and, boots ringing on the asphalt, sprinted after them.
“Stop or I’ll shoot!” she yelled. She wouldn’t shoot. Rangers didn’t shoot fleeing suspects even if they had slithered up to one’s bedside in the dead of night.
The dreamlike sensation of running ever slower through air viscous as mud dragged at her legs. Distance—or her perception of it—underwent a sea change. The ruined barracks wavered, retreating in an undulating wreck of roof lines. The Rockefeller building, no more than two hundred yards from her apartment, refused to move closer as she ran; then, suddenly, the immense granite sculptures were looming over her.
Anna didn’t so much stop with intent as simply cease to move because her body chose stagnation regardless of what her mind ordered it to do. The retreating human-shaped fragments of darkness had run past the sculptures. Immobile, she watched as they reached the barracks where the wings of the ruined building came together. Her eyes told her they vanished like smoke; her mind suggested they’d probably run down one of the stairwells that let into the basement level.
Even if her legs had not ceased to function properly, and the night had not broken all the laws of physics to become a nauseating, undulating mess, Anna would not have given chase. Nothing short of a shrieking child or a mewling kitten could induce her to pursue bad guys into that haunted hulk in the dark.
The abandoned barracks was two stories of smashed desks, shattered walls, mirror shards, falling staircases, and other sharp-edged detritus. In that place, if fleeing felons didn’t kill you, tumbling down stairs or broken glass would.
Broken glass would what?
With sudden alarm, Anna wondered why she was naked, why she was standing in the shadow of lowering chunks of granite with her gun in her hand. She had no recollection of kneeling, yet she was on her knees on the stone.
Stinging in her upper arm claimed her attention.
Clumsily, she brushed at it. Something clinked to the paving stones of the sculpture yard. Stupidly, Anna stared down at it, eyes and mind disconnected. Part of her brain knew she should recognize the shape. Most of her brain was atomized, loose dust blowing in a windy night.
A syringe. The item that fell from her arm was a syringe. There was quarter of an inch of liquid in it.
Evidence of something.
She picked it up, holding it like a dagger. Forget evidence. Two weapons were better than one. Weapons against what?
People were hiding in the old barracks; she’d been chasing them. They had stuck the needle in her arm while she was sleeping.
Light. She needed light if she was going to go into the garbage- and rat-infested derelict building. Light and backup; she had to get a flashlight and a radio and a pair of underpants.
First she had to get up off of her knees. At one time she knew how human legs bent and flexed to execute this intricate maneuver. No more. She wasn’t even sure where her feet were. She could neither see nor feel them.
A clunk startled her in a vague way. Rolling her head carefully to the side, she looked down. Somebody had dropped a gun—a SIG Sauer—beside her right knee. Careless bastard. What kind of idiot dropped a gun?
Me, she thought. My gun. Bending at the waist to pick it up, she fell face-first onto the granite paving. A cracking jarred the interior of her skull. Nothing hurt. Her skull felt as if it had been hurled against a wall, but nothing hurt. Or if it did, she couldn’t feel it.
Straightening her arms, she forced her head and shoulders up from the ground. Sculpted works in progress, high as houses and cut into fantastic shapes, moved slowly around her, waving and leaning like grasses in a breeze. The brick and stone facade of the beautiful old building beyond rose as high as Half Dome, its many windows blank and lifeless.
“Help,” she creaked. The noise she made was so thin and tiny she thought of the Woozy in The Patchwork Girl of Oz, the creature whose roar was supposed to bring down mountains but in reality was a teeny squeak. It didn’t matter. Sculptors were artists. Artists didn’t go around rescuing people. When the shit hit the proverbial, nobody ever yelled, “Is there an artist in the house!”
Anna pulled her knees under her to sit on her heels. In an attempt to scrape off the toxic fog devouring her brain, she scrubbed at her face. Pain that should have come when she fell blindsided her. She cried out feebly. One hand came away black and wet. Blood was pouring down over her left eye, blinding her.
Paul will still love me, even if the corner of my head is smashed, she thought. The image of her husband, Paul, in all his strength and calm, centered her. She was able to find her feet and push to a standing position. Her pistol was still on the ground, an infinite distance from her eyes. Teetering sickeningly back and forth in her boots, she tried to decide if it would be worse to leave her gun and go find a radio or stay with her gun and … what?
Just stay with her gun.
Besides, she was naked. She’d been reminded of that when she looked way, way down at the gun. No clothes. Naked outside in the weird with no clothes. This had to be a dream. That was a relief. Peculiar dreams were not strangers to Anna. There was a foolproof test to see whether one was dreaming or not. It wasn’t pinching. That was silly. It was flying. If she could fly, that was proof positive she was dreaming.
Anna tried to lift her arms. They did not reach Superman-in-flight position, only zombie-seeking-edible-brain position.
No flying.
Not a dream.
Again she looked toward the ruins. The stairwell was disgorging its recent meal, bipedal shapes bulging forth to be delineated by the faint light of the stars. The creatures who’d put a wasp in her dream, a drug in her veins.
Anna raised her gun hand. “No further,” she said. “Move and I soowt.” She’d meant to say “shoot.” The bonk on the head, or the chemical they’d injected, turned her lips to rubber. The figures halted, murmured, then came toward her.
Anna pulled the trigger. Nothing. Her hand was empty, the gun ever so far away on the ground by her foot.
The figures separated, moving slowly in her direction. Ninjas, black clothes and hoods and faces, with four white hands, fake as plastic mannequins’ hands, floating along beside them. They were wearing surgical gloves.
Coming to butcher the kill, Anna thought as she tipped into nothingness.