Max Collins - After the Dark

Lips peeled back over that terrible smile, he said, “My son won’t live to rule... but I will. Your death at my hands assures me of that immortality.”

She watched in seeming slow motion as his finger squeezed down on the trigger. She could almost see the bullet ready to ride the black tunnel from firing pin to her skull. In that instant a thousand thoughts coursed through her mind, all at once and yet each one clear, concise, easy to see.

The people who were important to her, the things that made her happy, what she would do with her life, her life with Logan Cale, if just somehow in the next second this bullet failed to blow her brains out...

Above the cacophony of the battle, she heard something primal and horrifying, and then a beast loomed above and behind Ames White...

Joshua.

The gun fell with a thunk next to her, and she heard the cry from White... Was it pain? He couldn’t feel physical pain... could he? Was it rage, or sorrow, or just some gargling horrible sound that a man might make, should a beast grab him by the skull...

... and yank.

She did know that White’s head disappeared from her view, and the weight of him lifted off her.

She was on her elbow, propping herself up, when she saw White — or anyway, White’s body — on the ground next to her, red pumping out of the pipelike opening of his neck, a wide geysering spigot where his head had been.

And when Max sat up, she saw where that head was now — six and a half feet above her, where Joshua held the detached cranium, by the hair, at eye level, staring into White’s lifeless face.

“You shouldn’t have done it,” Joshua said, and his voice was strangely gentle, scolding the blood-dripping head, as if warning a child. “You shouldn’t have killed Annie.”

Annie... the ordinary Joshua had loved, and who loved him, a gentle blind girl who White had slain out of sheer meanness.

Joshua was staring at White’s head, as if waiting for an apology.

Then, when no apology came, a cry of anguish rose from deep within the leonine figure, and he swung his arm, like an airplane propeller, and cast the head into the dark night, where it landed with a distant plop.

Suddenly Joshua was leaning down over her, saying, “Sorry, Little Fella. Kinda lost my head.”

She just looked at him, wondering if he knew what he’d said. Then Joshua was pulling her up to her feet, and she inspected her wound — the shoulder was stiff, but the bullet seemed to have gone on through, and her transgenic body was already working at repairing itself. Rolling the shoulder a little, she said, “Gonna be all right.”

Joshua helped up Logan, too.

She quickly surveyed the battle — transgenics outnumbered Familiars now — looking for that silver-haired ghost, Matthias.

She spotted him, on the run, the long robe flowing behind him, the tippet flapping, as he headed up the stairs and back inside the asylum.

“Stay out here,” she told Logan and Joshua, “till the building’s secure... Alec! Mole! Follow me!”

Max waded into the sea of robed Familiars. Behind her, in an impressive display of martial-arts prowess, Alec was handily dealing with a pair of the cultists. Mole was off to the one side, taking care of another of the armed three-man TAC patrols, blasting away at them mercilessly, and they fell like camouflaged bowling pins.

But soon the two warriors — in answer to her call — were at her back, as she plowed her way toward the steps to the front entry of the hospital.

The tide of the fight had turned decisively toward the transgenics. Those Familiars who weren’t already lying in broken heaps on the ground were taking flight, a few literally heading for the hills, others around the building, presumably for another way inside or perhaps to make it to the parking lot — and, in either case, the ragtag transgenics gave chase.

Once they were up the short flight of steps, Max, Mole, and Alec went inside unimpeded. For all the frenetic and violent activity outside, the asylum itself seemed deserted. Initially, they found themselves in what had once been a reception/waiting room area, with a double-door elevator, but no chairs lined the walls, and the nurse/receptionist window was vacant; otherwise, it was just a big empty slab room, cut through the middle by a long hallway.

Though voices could be heard, the cries of prisoners, these did not emanate from this floor — in fact, they sounded more like they were coming from the walls. The effect was ghostly, troubling, but this floor was clearly administrative, small tidy offices with computers and desks and chairs and files, as you might find in any institution of this type. The thought of the inhabitants of these neat offices being cultists with pagan facial markings, parading in flowing hooded robes, chanting ritual gibberish, seemed utterly absurd... or would have, if they hadn’t just pushed their way through a throng of them out on the battlefield that the asylum grounds had turned into.

The building was old and badly in need of renovation, yet the place was neat, floors dust-free, no cobwebs, the walls and ceilings clean, the entire facility smelling of pine cleaner and disinfectant.

Moving cautiously, Max signaled for them to split up, Alec and Mole each taking one of the side halls while Max went down the middle.

Max found fire stairs at the end and started up.

The second floor was cells — cries for help, shouts for attention, echoed down the hallways. No guards were around, no robed Familiars — no one home but the inmates. She had a good idea who they were: prisoners of the Conclave, perhaps ordinaries who’d tipped to the evil practices and intentions of the Familiars, or betrayers among their own ranks, possibly even transgenics — mixed with the real mental patients who’d provided the cover.

On the third floor landing she found another small reception area, this one not so spare — nicely paneled, with comfortable chairs and magazines on end tables, another window (empty, of course) where a nurse and or receptionist could sit.

She pushed through double doors down a short corridor of examination rooms and more small tidy offices. The medicinal scent was strong, making her nose twitch, but that was well in keeping with what seemed a clinic of some kind. This section of the building seemed to her a facade designed to fool state inspectors and those families who really were committing their loved ones (unwittingly) to snake-cult care.

At the end of the short hall was a windowless metal door, with no knob — just a slot for an ID card. In bold red letters on the gray door it said:

NO ADMITTANCE

Well, surely somebody could go in there, she thought. What was the point of a place that no one could be admitted to?

So she kicked the door down. It was solid and took two tries, but on the second it went flying and clattered to an obsidian floor.

She got a quick look at the room — a large rounded chamber, with a planetarium-type dome, a vast curved viewing window that made the starry sky, in effect, the room’s ceiling. The circular room, dimly lighted by recessed fixtures, was wall-to-wall stacked monitors; a dozen seats — empty at the moment — faced these monitors, with computer stations at each post. About a third of the monitors were security cams — showing inmates in their cells, views of the grounds and hallways and stairs and the downstairs reception area, and the area she’d just come through, for that matter.

The rest of the monitors were satellite images from all around the world, each boldly labeled with a red-letter readout that identified the city shown, as well as the local time — she glimpsed Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Seattle, Toronto, Moscow, London, Lisbon, Sydney, and on and on. On the screens were live pictures of the cities, in populous areas — Chicago’s cam was on Michigan Avenue, near the Water Tower, and New York was, of course, Times Square, where Christmas Eve had turned into something approaching New Year’s Eve, people with little glowing candles in hand, watching the sky, waiting for the comet to come.