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  Questions of scientific knowledge aside, whatever the shambling abomination asked of him, he was determined to do without question. He had worked too hard and too long to be snuffed out like a candle flame. He didn’t understand the degrading, inhuman treatment he was receiving—it was as if the creatures were trying to break his spirit. Or maybe they just didn’t give a damn. At that thought, his face flushed with outrage. What manner of certifiable moron would cage like an animal the eighth most sought after neurosurgeon in the world?

  Then he recalled the little monster had said something about taking him a hundred years into the future. That was by far the most frightening threat of all.

  It made Ransom think he was in the grip of an insane cult targeting the uber-rich and uber-talented. Is that what the other cages were for? Good grief, he thought, were they going to murder him here in this overheated dungeon, in the deranged belief that it would transport him to the future? Like the thirty-nine Heaven’s Gate suicides thinking that in death they were going to be taken up by a spaceship hiding behind a passing comet?

  For a person so thoroughly grounded in the scientific process and the mechanics of neurobiology, in the purely rational, in experimental fact, the ultimate insult and irony would be to die because of a homicidal maniac’s delusion.

  That did nothing to explain the appearance of his captors, of course. The big ones were miniature Godzillas, with similar temperaments; the little monster was a demented version of Pinocchio. Nothing on earth looked like that. Nothing acted like that.

  And for sure, nothing smelled like that.

  Suddenly it occurred to him that the delusion in question might actually be his and his alone. A direct consequence of a brain strangled by an invasive and pervasive hostile growth. Perhaps he had acquired a big old tumor of his own? The possibility made him sag against the hard bars.

  Why hadn’t he thought of that before?

  It explained the hallucinations, both visual and olfactory. Was any of what he was experiencing real? Had a single cancerous cell divided and divided until its tendrils infiltrated his brain like tree roots? Could the beast he had fought for so long and so valiantly have taken residence in his own skull?

  He tightly shut his eyes and thought it through, step by step.

  If that was the case, if an undiagnosed tumor was causing the hallucinations, if there was no cage, then how had he hurt his aching hands? Why did the bars of the imaginary cage hurt his knees? Why couldn’t he stand up without hitting his head?

  Every turn in the logical analysis of the situation came full circle to the same dead end. If he was seeing things, he couldn’t have hurt his hands on the bars. If he wasn’t seeing things, then the mini-Godzillas and the Pinocchio from hell were real, which he knew was impossible.

  For a man accustomed to seizing Fate by the balls and squeezing, the situation was now reversed: the balls in the vise were his. The loss of personal control and critical understanding tipped the very Earth on its axis.

  “For God’s sake, someone please help me!” he screamed at the door. “Please!”

  The shrill cry seemed to mock him as it bounced back and forth off the walls of the empty room.

  No one was listening, or no one gave a damn.

  Chapter Seventeen

  His Steyr in hand, safety off, Ryan ran up the three granite steps under the sign that said 18th Precinct and through the double doorway. Four feet ahead of him, the foyer ended abruptly in a block wall. The building’s exterior wall was on his right, so the only path was to the left. He swung the longblaster in that direction and turned down a cramped corridor lit by a flickering bank of ceiling fluorescent lights.

  The carnage started just inside the turn. It reminded him of what the enforcers had left behind at the nameless mountain ville.

  How many people lay dead in the narrow entry hall, he couldn’t even hazard a guess. Detached arms, legs, torsos and heads lay in a sprawling, gory jumble on the floor—creating a bottleneck of the slaughtered. Some were in black uniform; others in civilian clothes. Some of the dead hands still clutched blasters, the slides locked back on empty mags. Some of the victims looked male; others were obviously female. Once enforcers commenced their chilling, they stopped only when they ran out of victims. Up to the border with the acoustic-tile drop ceiling, the grimy walls—and the posters pinned on them—were splattered with blood and other bodily fluids.

  Although the decapitated heads could be avoided or nudged aside with the toe of a boot, there was no way to advance past the entrance without stepping on a severed limb or two.

  The heavy glass doors to the station proper lay in huge, crazed sheets on the floor beneath their emptied frames—this was the barrier that had sealed the victims’ fates. With locked doors to their backs, they had nowhere to run. Wherever Ryan placed his boot soles, fractured glass crunched under his weight. Thankfully, the body-part carpet stopped at the station’s inner doorway.

  What Ryan saw instead was clear evidence of a fighting retreat. Spent blaster casings littered the scarred tile floor. Hundreds of them. The walls were pocked with sideways bullet holes from ricochets off armored hide. The floor farther down the hall, as far as he could see, was dotted with more casings. It looked as if the precinct’s defenders had fallen back room by room from a wave of enforcers.

  Were they acting in desperation? Panic? Or were they trying to lure the attackers into a trap? Did they have a contingency plan? Maybe a cross-fire or massed kill zone deeper inside the building?

  Neither was a good idea in this situation. Any kind of trap could backfire if the things being targeted didn’t stay trapped. Bullet impacts could keep enforcers at a distance for a while, but when the firing stopped, when the ammo finally ran out, there’d be a one-way ticket on the last train west.

  Good strategy or not, the spent brass the defenders had left behind was like that trail of bread crumbs Vee had talked about. He figured it would lead straight to the monsters they were chasing.

  Jak leapfrogged ahead down the hall, Colt Python in his right hand and a thermite gren in his left. As he passed Ryan, he gave him a rare grin. The albino enjoyed being on the short end of a lopsided fight. What others took for hopeless odds against superior strength, Jak saw as an opportunity to prove just what a hellscape badass he was. They had no other choice than to go for it. They couldn’t get to the vulnerable Magus without first taking on his almost invulnerable minions. In Ryan’s opinion, planning for an attack on an unrecced location, against an enemy that just wouldn’t die, was a waste of precious time. Surprise was their only hole card—surprise and thermite.

  The hallway and the rooms along it on either side were free of corpses and body parts. The defenders had to have been retreating quickly, or there would have been casualties. It worried him that the sounds of shooting inside the building had stopped. That meant either the survivors had barricaded themselves someplace the enforcers couldn’t reach—although considering the bastards’ strength that was a temporary solution at best—or there were no survivors left. Either the big battle was over and the defenders had lost or they hadn’t sprung their trap yet.

  Since this was the fourth in a series of similar attacks, it was also possible they’d had prior warning and a few minutes to gather their forces. They could have had a rear escape route set up. There was no telling whether the enforcers had gone to the trouble of covering all the exits before they began the assault. If all they wanted was the guns, they wouldn’t care about people getting away.

  Autofire clattered on the floor above them. A short burst brought down a rain of dust from the acoustic-tile ceiling, then another burst and another dust fall.

  Apparently not everyone had left.

  It wasn’t the massed, multiblaster trap he had been anticipating, and most likely, it wasn’t one of the enforcers cutting loose. Blasters were not their preferred style. The shooting rattled again, stopped abruptly. Heavy footsteps thudded overhead, and then a piercing squeal rang out. That didn�
��t last long, either.

  After a pause the ceiling began to creak and groan. Something really big was lumbering around up there. Something with four-toed feet, he guessed. It seemed pretty clear the shooter upstairs had been a straggler, maybe separated from the rest of the defenders by the initial attack.

  “You’ve got to locate the armory where the blasters are stored,” he told the others. “That’s where Magus is headed. Keep your thermite grens handy, and don’t stand too close when you toss them. Remember how hot these warty bastards burn.”

  After their trip through the entry hall, he didn’t feel the need to remind the others to stay focused and on triple red. A sign above a closed door on the left said Stairs and below the letters was a zigzag symbol representing steps. He reached out for the doorknob.

  “Ryan, wait!” Krysty said.

  “I’ll take care of the one upstairs,” he told her. “I don’t want it coming up from behind us when we’re occupied with its relatives.”

  “How do you know there’s only one?” Krysty asked.

  “Trying to think positive,” he said with a smile. “I’ll catch up with you when I’m done.”

  “Don’t make me come get you, lover.”

  Ryan winked at her, then pushed into the stairwell and began to climb, his longblaster angled up for a quick shot at the landing above if necessary. The job he had in mind had to be done. If they were going to survive, their rear had to be protected. Facing an enforcer alone wasn’t something he could let one of the others do.

  The shaft was dimly lit, but he could see scattered wet spots on the concrete steps where drips of enforcer sweat had fallen. The odor of the secretion in the enclosed space made him grimace. He wondered, and not for the first time, how the bastard muties could stand themselves.

  At the top of the landing, he pulled back the door, which opened onto a large room. He found the light switch on the wall and flipped it. Banks of fluorescents winked on one by one, revealing a couple of dozen gray metal desks, all of them piled with papers and file folders. Ryan scanned the room over the scope of his shouldered longblaster. Nothing moved. The room looked deserted.

  He sidestepped the rows of desks, pointing his weapon as he looked down the aisles between them. There was no sign of bodies or shell casings on the black-and-white-checkerboard linoleum floor.

  There were drips, however. They showed up better on the black squares of tile than the white. They led beyond the large room to a connecting hallway so narrow he could almost span it with extended arms. It was as tight as the entry corridor downstairs, and just as potentially deadly. If the enforcer decided to bull-rush him, there wasn’t much space to maneuver.

  The rooms off the corridor to the left were all dark. The ones on the other side had windows that overlooked the bonfire on the street out front. In the dancing light he could see single desks and chairs, filing cabinets and bookcases. The glass itself reflected leaping orange flames.

  On the floor ahead of him on the right, he saw a scatter of spent brass. Moving quietly, he slipped through the doorway into a room that reeked of burned cordite and spilled blood.

  This has to be the place, he thought as he searched for targets with his longblaster.

  Then the floor underfoot began to shiver and vibrate as if it was being dragged whole over a patch of rough ground. It was a grinding, undulating motion, an earthquake confined to the space of a twelve-by-twelve room. Bright points of light swam before his eye, like flurries of sparks from the raging fires outside, but the room’s large window was closed and the sparks were falling between him and the exterior wall. He fought back a wave of nausea as his vision blurred.

  Something big was hunkered on the floor in front of the desk. It was making a grunting noise. He put his sights on it immediately but didn’t light it up because he couldn’t identify what it was. Then his sight cleared.

  An enforcer had hold of a downed man’s arm and was twisting it around and around on the shoulder joint, in a way it was never intended to move, like wringing out a wet sock. With an audible snap, the tendons and sinews broke and the limb came free of its socket. The enforcer tossed the arm aside and set to work on the head.

  Ryan held the Steyr aimed at the creature as it turned to look his direction.

  The enforcer made no move to attack. It looked right at him, then as if his presence didn’t matter, it resumed the activity, putting a scaly foot on the chest for leverage, then twisting the head clockwise by its chin. When the chin rotated past the shoulder, the supporting neck made a loud crack. The creature continued to twist, turning the head around and around until the skin and connecting tissue snapped. When the object finally came free in its hands, it grunted in satisfaction. A torrent of blood poured from the head’s stump onto the unmoving torso.

  A preoccupied monster wasn’t what Ryan had expected.

  As he laid the crosshairs on its knobby head, the scope’s sight picture blurred. The grinding sound returned with a shower of sparks. Everything suddenly lurched, including his stomach. He had to blink to refocus and clear his head. They had shot enforcers pretty much everywhere, without effect. Everywhere but the eye. Ryan figured to give that a try first, on the chance there might be a fissure or weak spot behind it that connected optic nerves to the brain, like in a regular skull.

  The Steyr bucked and roared deafeningly in the little room.

  In the next instant, everything in his range of vision went out of focus, swimming so violently that Ryan was sure he was going to throw up. Then just as quickly, it snapped back into hard focus.

  Nothing happened.

  The distance to target had been less than five feet. It was fish-in-barrel range. He knew the round had discharged because his ears were ringing from the sound. Even if the slug had missed the eye socket, even if it had glanced off the brow ridge, the impact of a 175 grain slug should have at the very least snapped back the enforcer’s head.

  Nothing had happened.

  That wasn’t true, he realized as he worked the bolt and ejected the smoking hull.

  The bullet had disappeared.

  Somewhere between muzzle and target, in a span of less than sixty inches, the round had ceased to exist. So had the blurring and the sparks and the grinding sound. The entire room and contents jumped into such detailed focus that it made the memory of what it had been like all the more jarring.

  It was as if a veil had been lifted. The light cast by the fires on the street became twice as bright.

  The enforcer looked at him again, and this time its yellow eyes slitted with delight. It dropped the head, which made a hollow thunk when it hit the floor, and rose to its full height.

  Ryan locked down the bolt on a fresh cartridge, aimed at the eye and fired just as the creature started to move. This time as the longblaster boomed and bucked into his shoulder, the enforcer’s head snapped back hard, the bullet zinged off its skull, and slammed into the wall to his left.

  Before the creature could recover he fired again. Same aimpoint.

  At impact, the knobby head tipped back, the chin tipped up. To keep its balance the enforcer took a stagger step backward, flapping its arms.

  Cycling the action, Ryan advanced and fired, forcing the monster to step back and flail or fall on its knobby, double-wide butt.

  With a goal in mind, he shot the enforcer square in the head again and again. Trying for the eye wasn’t necessary. The bullets’ impacts were like sledgehammer blows to its skull, rocking it back on its heels. The 7.62 mm slugs drove the monster in reverse, shaking the window glass. Through it Ryan could see flames of the burning wrecks outside. He knew he had to keep shooting; he couldn’t stop to reach for the frag gren in his pocket. Under the circumstances, it would have been suicide anyway, and there was no guarantee a dose of hot shrap would stop the bastard.

  Despite his frenzy of rapid discharge, Ryan kept track of rounds fired.

  When he hit the monster in the head for the tenth time, emptying the Steyr’s mag, the enforc
er’s heels hit the wall and its broad back slammed against the window, cracking the glass. The enforcer caught its balance just short of falling out and stood there teetering, windmilling its arms.

  With no rounds left, Ryan did the only thing he could think of. He dropped the Steyr and threw his full body weight behind a shoulder strike into the middle of the creature’s chest. Under any other conditions, he wouldn’t have had the mass or momentum to budge it, but the creature was already off balance. The perfectly timed blow nudged it past the tipping point; the glass behind it shattered. The window frame exploded, and the enforcer toppled out into empty air.

  The follow-through, so essential in getting the most power out of the strike, left Ryan leaning forward and well within the creature’s reach.

  The enforcer’s taloned hand grabbed hold of Ryan’s wrist, and as it fell backward over the sill, it jerked him off his feet, headfirst through the emptied frame. A wave of blistering heat slammed his face, and locked together, they dropped into the leaping wall of flames.

  * * *

  RICKY MORALES HAD to admit he was feeling a little light in the knees and short of breath as he followed the companions down the police station hall. Who wouldn’t be after stepping on a path of severed limbs? Not that he needed further evidence their current opponent was nearly invincible and capable of inhuman violence. He was determined to make a better showing with his .45 ACP De Lisle carbine this time. He had ten shots in the mag, and no matter what else happened in the next few minutes, he was going to burn them all. He didn’t want Vee to think he was still just a boy. Or worse, a coward. Because he was neither.