James Axler - Distortion Offensive

“More likely a midnight snack,” Brigid told him, gathering up several shells and peering at them. They were different sizes, and each had been burned so that they were streaked with black, but they appeared to be of the same creature type.

“What are they?” Kane asked.

Brigid peered at them for a long moment, turning them on the palm of her hand, her brow furrowed.

“Baptiste?” Kane urged when she didn’t respond.

“I don’t know,” Brigid admitted, mystified. In another person, this admission may have seemed innocent, but Kane knew that Brigid Baptiste had a phenomenal knowledge base, augmented by a rare natural quirk known as an eidetic memory, which meant she could visually reproduce in her mind’s eye anything that she had ever seen. And as an ex-archivist and natural scholar, Brigid Baptiste had seen quite a lot. In many ways, she seemed more like a walking encyclopedia than a person when challenged to produce theories.

When Brigid looked up, she saw Kane’s puzzled expression.

“No ideas?” he asked.

“It’s from the same genetic strain as mollusks and crustaceans,” Brigid assured him, “but I can’t place the type. Not off the top of my head, anyway.”

“And that’s a lot of head,” Kane mumbled.

As they spoke, Grant returned, accompanied by the church warden and a local medical practitioner called Mallory Price. Price was a tall, gangly woman with a gaunt face and thin blond hair, and she looked very much as if she had just been woken up.

“What do we have?” Mallory asked as she approached the two teenagers, glancing over at Kane and Brigid. Her voice was husky, as if she had spent a lifetime shouting or smoking. Kane couldn’t tell which.

“I found them in a trancelike state under the pier,” Kane explained as he joined the medical woman. “They just didn’t seem to want to wake up.”

“The girl said some stuff,” Brigid added as she walked over to join them, her boots back on her feet once more. “Unusual things, not what you’d expect from a teen.”

Price checked the two teenagers briefly, but other than their general disorientation, she could find nothing ostensibly wrong with them. “They’re both suffering a little bit from exposure,” she told Kane and the others, “but they’re young. They’ll be fine.”

“What about their altered state of mind when he found them?” Kane asked.

The woman shrugged. “Teenagers being teenagers,” she said. “Who knows what they’re getting hooped up on. You probably did the same when you were their age.”

Overhearing this, Grant laughed. “Oh, you don’t know Kane,” he muttered.

Kane opened his fist and showed the mollusk shell to Mallory. “Have you seen one of these before, Doc?” he asked, letting her handle the little shell.

The medical woman turned it over in her hands. “What is that?” she queried. “Some kind of snail?”

The church warden, an older man called Vernor, with thinning hair that was turning gray at the temples, had made his way over by then, and he sucked at his teeth as he peered at the shell in Mallory’s hands. “Could be a crab, maybe?” he suggested.

“Could be a lot of things, Vern,” Kane agreed.

The old church warden looked up at Kane with an expression of concern. “Seen a few of these things wash up just lately. You think this has something to do with how these kids are acting, Kane?”

“Let’s get these kids inside and see whether we can make any sense out of all of this,” Kane suggested noncommittally.

“I KNOW.”

The words came as a whisper from the thin gray lips of a creature called Balam. He was fifteen hundred years old and he had been born as the last of the Archons, a race that confirmed a pact between the Annunaki and the Tuatha de Danaan millennia before.

He was a small figure, humanoid in appearance but with long, thin arms and a wide, bulbous head that narrowed to a pointed chin. Entirely hairless, Balam’s skin was a pink so washed out as to appear gray. Within his strangely expressive face, Balam had two wide, upslanting eyes, as black as bottomless pools, their edges tapering to points. His tiny mouth resided below two small, flat nostrils that served as his nose.

He reached out before him, spreading the six fingers of each hand as if to stave off something that was attacking, and a gasp of breath came from his open mouth.

There was a child playing in the underground garden that spread before him. She was human in appearance and perhaps three years old, wearing a one-piece suit in a dark indigo blue that seemed to match the simple garment that Balam himself wore. The child turned at Balam’s words, her pretty, snow-blond hair swishing behind her in simple ponytail, her large, blue eyes wide with curiosity.

“Wha’ is it?” the child asked, peering up from the daisy chain she had been making on the little expanse of lawn before Balam’s dwelling.

Balam looked at the child with those strange, fathomless eyes and wondered if she might recognize the fear on his face, the fear that had threatened for just a moment to overwhelm him.

The child smiled at him, chuckling a little in that strange, deep way that human children will. “Uncle Bal-bal?” she asked. “Wha’ is it?”

“The Ontic Library has been breached,” Balam said, his words heavy with meaning, fully aware that the child could never comprehend the gravity of them. “Pack some toys, Quav. We’re going to visit some old friends.”

With that, Balam ushered the child—known as Little Quav after her late mother—back into their dwelling in the underground city of Agartha and prepared her for the interphase trip that would take them halfway around the world. It had been almost three years since Balam had last spoken with the Cerberus rebels, but the time had come to do so once again.

The Cerberus warriors made their way back to the church hall, along with Vernor and the two teenagers, while Mallory returned to her surgery. The kid with the dyed hair—Tony—was getting edgy, and he started to ask some awkward questions. He’d been in trouble before, Kane realized, recognizing the signs, and he wondered if the youth might bolt before they could question him more fully about his altered state of mind.

Noticing the teen’s discomfort, Grant took the lead. “Hey, Tony,” he said, “you want to see something cool?”

Tony looked at the towering ex-Mag, visibly swallowing. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.

“I know you didn’t,” Grant said reassuringly as they approached the stone steps that led into the church building. “Come on, we’ll catch up with these guys in a minute.” With that, Grant led the way off to the side of the two-story building with Tony tentatively following.

By contrast, the girl—Pam—seemed to have automatically slid into an air of unquestioning trust of the adults who were trying to help her. Kane reasoned that she had most likely grown up in a walled barony and was thereby indoctrinated to trust Magistrates and similar authority figures. Once again, Kane was struck by the difference between ville folk and outlanders.

Walking ahead, Grant didn’t bother to look back to check on his charge, thereby demonstrating his trust in the teen boy. They walked around the side of the church building, along a wide service road that led to a side gate that opened on an open-air storage area. Grant pointed to the gate. “Take a look inside,” he encouraged. “It won’t bite.”

Warily the plum-haired teenager worked the catch of the wooden gate, keeping one eye on Grant as the towering ex-Mag watched. “What’s in there?” he asked.

“Take a look, son,” Grant said, a smile on his lips.

Grant recognized the anticipation on Tony’s face, both excited and fearful, wondering if a trick was being played on him. When the boy didn’t open the gate, Grant reached over and pushed it gently until it swung open on a creaking hinge.