CONTROL HQ - RUSHM
AD 3999/AE 1999
Adam looked over sheet after sheet of readouts. Jason and Sheila stood at his side, reading over the same information as he had.
"Two more bits down," he said.
"And John and Fran are apparently staying away from the streets, out of sight," said Sheila.
"So we can’t see them until someone else does," added Jason, finishing his wife’s sentence for her.
Adam’s shoulders slumped. The situation was quickly spiraling into ever worse scenarios. Things were getting out of hand. If they ever had been in hand to begin with.
"All right," he said. "Activate her tracker."
Sheila paled. "That’ll put the whole place into second stage alert mode. They’ll all go after John."
"I know!" said Adam. He paused and took a deep breath, then said the words they all knew were coming but none of them wanted to hear: "We need to get her back. And he’s expendable."
With that, he pushed the button that would mean John’s death. But perhaps it would also mean Fran’s continued life, and so it was an action he had to take. The good of the future and the continued existence of the human race might depend on it.
DOM#67A
LOSTON, COLORADO
AD 1999
9:10 PM, MONDAY
***ALERT MODE***
John and Fran darted from bush to bush, trying to keep out of sight as much as possible. He knew he was moving fast, pressing her to keep up, but noted that she was doing well. In fact, she was doing better than a lot of the guys with whom he’d been through basic training. She was a survivor, a rare mixture of strength and beauty and intelligence. He wished he could kiss her again, but time did not allow for that. Besides, surrendering to the pleasures of her embrace would mean a withdrawal from the vigilance he knew would be required to keep them both alive. Still, the memory of her lips against his was a sweet one, and one not easily thrust out of mind.
"Why couldn’t we take my car? Or Gabe’s?" asked Fran during one of the short moments when they rested in the shelter of a larger bush behind yet another darkened house.
"Because they probably know what they look like," said John.
"Who’s ‘they’?"
"Damn good question," he replied, and took off again, trusting her to follow his movements. He had no answer for her, but somehow knew that he was right. It was not only important for them to stay away from the cars, it was imperative that they remain completely hidden. He had no plan beyond that, though. He was merely moving to keep putting distance between them and Gabe’s house.
Gabe. Tears welled up behind his eyes as he thought about his friend. He was dead. One more person gone from his life. John blinked rapidly, pushing back the tears. Like love, grief was an emotion he could ill-afford to indulge in right now. There would be time for weeping later, if he managed to survive this night.
A few minutes later they stopped again, kneeling in the shadow of a tree some twenty or thirty feet from the back porch of yet another dark house. They had passed several dozen such edifices, and with each one John grew more convinced that, whatever mysteries this night held, they were more all-encompassing than he had first supposed. It seemed as though the whole town was involved in some way. He could not understand how that could be, how it could be that the people he had known all his life were involved in a grand conspiracy without him so much as suspecting such a threat existed. But each darkened house proved his ignorance anew; demonstrated that, though all the houses had extinguished their lights and the whole of Loston sat in shadows, only John and Fran were truly in the dark.
What’s going on? he thought. What is happening to us? What mystery have we stumbled into, and why is it worth killing us?
Suddenly, the old scar on his shoulder twinged, and a strange thought flew through his mind with sparrow quickness.
Daddy, why you walkin’?
He grasped mentally at the thought, but it flew too quickly to be halted, and was gone as suddenly as it had come, leaving only new questions in its wake.
"Where are we going?" asked Fran, pulling John out of his thoughts.
"We’ve got to hole up for a while until I can figure out what’s going on," he answered.
"Your house?"
He shook his head. "If they know our cars, they’ll know where we live, too."
Fran opened her mouth to speak, but before she could utter a syllable, another voice pierced the night.
"John! Fran!"
John heard the voice and paled. He knew the voice, knew who it belonged to, and somehow knew instinctively what was about to happen.
If he had had the time, he would have started crying.
He spun around and saw Mertyl Breckman coming at him. Not to help him with filing or to find out why a student had been absent from his class, though. No, she ran at him to attack, sprinting off her nearby porch with a large kitchen knife clutched in her old fingers. Her spindly legs pumped back and forth under the folds of the nightgown she wore, and John had a split-second to notice how fast - impossibly fast - she ran before she was upon him.
"Mertyl," he managed before she lunged at him with the knife. She moved quickly. Too quickly for a woman her age. The old woman slashed at John like a blood-maddened cougar. He held her off with his rifle, using the barrel to blunt her attacks. He didn’t want to kill her. And the way she was moving, he didn’t know if he had the skill to do so, even if he had the desire. She moved so quickly that he almost did not have time in to block her manic slashes with his rifle.
"Mertyl, please," he gasped as she cut at him again. He knew it would be no use; that she would be deaf to him as everyone else but Fran had been this night. Still, he had to try. He was getting tired, and a large part of that was the emotional toll that came with every act of violence he committed. He wasn’t a hateful man or an angry one, not the kind of person who found destruction therapeutic. Rather, violence saddened and weakened him, so he was feeling more and more strained as the night continued.
The combat took them around the small clearing that lay behind Mertyl’s house, John losing track of time and his surroundings in that peculiar tunnel vision which takes hold of instinctive fighters. The world slowed to a crawl and centered itself around the gleaming edge of the wickedly sharp knife with which Mertyl lunged at him. Moonlight flashed off its surface in jeweled gleams, throwing spiderweb wisps of glinting light around them. John skittered aside, allowing the sparkling steel to pass beside him – too close, she would have him in a moment – before again blunting the follow-up attack with his rifle.
He was peripherally aware of Fran, trying to keep her behind him, to keep her safe. But Fran apparently would have none of that. When Mertyl lunged again at John, he parried it, jabbing Mertyl lightly on the arm, knocking her a bit off balance. Fran pounced then, jumping on the old woman’s back.
Before she had sufficient purchase, though, John saw Mertyl spin in Fran’s grasp. He gasped. The old woman hadn’t just moved fast, she had moved impossibly, turning so quickly that she was a blur, grabbing Fran’s arms and pulling them off her neck as easily as John might have separated a mosquito from his skin.
John felt his heart sink as Fran was instantly under the power of the crazed old woman. She was dead, he knew. Fran was dead. With the insane speed and power she was possessed of, it would be the work of a moment for the old woman to snap Fran in two. John was powerless to halt what would come next, and his heart sank in despair.
But Mertyl didn’t do anything except put Fran down. John noticed that, though the school secretary moved Fran with firmness, she took great care not to hurt the younger woman.
The same consideration did not apply to him, apparently, as Mertyl returned to the attack on him with vicious fury.
John felt himself tiring, but Mertyl wasn’t even breathing hard.
What’s happening? he thought. What’s going on? His mind moved at a furious pace as he strove both to unravel the ever more tangled mysteries that presented themselves and to keep alive.
He knew he was tiring, and would have to end this quickly or fatigue would surely trip him up, so he attacked Mertyl in earnest, now driving her back, drawing on reserves he didn’t know he had.
He saw an opening and clipped her hard with the muzzle of his rifle, striking her knife hand along the wrist. He heard bones crack with a withering, brittle finality. The knife fell from Mertyl’s hands and he snatched it out of the air.
At the same time, her other hand extended toward him, fingers curled into old but deadly claws, like those of a harpy out of myth or nightmare. John swung the butt of his rifle around this time, swinging the weapon one-handed like a bat. The stock of the gun connected, snapping his assailant’s other wrist.
He thought that would end it, but still she came, gnashing at him with yellowed teeth, kicking him with her old woman’s legs that somehow had the power to break his skin and bruise his bone with every contact.
John held her off, and then something happened that frightened him badly. Worse than anything that had come before. Tal and Gabe rising from the dead had been one thing....
But Mertyl’s wrists healing up in minutes was something else.
And they must have healed, for now she attacked him with her hands again, fingers snapping at him as he waved the knife in front of her eyes, crisscrossing deadly patterns of steel through the air before her. He saw that the wrists, limp and hanging at impossible angles only seconds before, were now strong and unbruised, as though he had never touched them. Thankfully, his horror at what was happening was pressed out of his mind by the pressing matter of how he would survive. He still continued to weaken, while Mertyl looked as fresh as ever.
She couldn’t quite break through his defense, and he didn’t want to kill her. They were at an impasse, but each passing second brought a greater likelihood of an unhappy ending to this encounter.
"Mertyl, please," he whispered, his voice hoarse.
The old woman stopped and backed off. For a moment John believed it was over; that he had found an island of refuge from the sea of terror that he floated in.
Until she opened her mouth.
"They’re here!" she screamed. "Fran and John are here!" Her voice was louder than he had thought possible, almost shattering his eardrums with its volume and intensity.
Even as he reeled from the vocal blast, the neighborhood came alive as lights flashed on in all the houses. Doors began slamming, and John felt as though he was in the middle of the Red Sea in the moments before it crashed down upon the soldiers of Pharaoh.
In seconds he and Fran would be engulfed.
Without pause, he swung his rifle, snapping Mertyl’s chin back. She dropped, unconscious, and John grabbed Fran’s hand and they ran.
***
Mertyl regained consciousness a moment later, dimly aware of dark shapes rushing past her, like specters in the black night of a haunted graveyard.
Her head throbbed, but not where John had hit her.
No, it throbbed throughout, an incessant, rhythmic beat that slammed through her skull with the force of a jackhammer.
Each pulse seemed to carry a feeling. Not one that she could articulate, but the closest she could come was one word:
Follow.
Follow.
Follow.
She clutched her head and squinted. Gradually she could make out the shapes that sped by her prone figure. They were her friends and neighbors. They were the people she had known all her life. They were the ones she loved.
They were strangers.
They ran with awkward, unsteady paces, and she knew they were all feeling the beat of that super-liminal cadence that Mertyl was hard-pressed not to dance to herself. They held guns, knives, bats, any kind of weapon at hand. Small children ran in the crowd, holding not play toys, not plastic guns painted bright orange, but knives and forks, small implements of death.
The pounding in Mertyl’s head continued, and she rose, pushing herself up on hands and knees and then shakily standing.
But that was wrong, wasn’t it?
What was wrong?
Something’s wrong.
Her thoughts muddled about in her head, mixing up and becoming incomprehensible. She looked at her hands.
That was it. Her hands. She couldn’t have pushed up on hands and knees. Her wrists were broken. John had broken her wrists.
And why didn’t I scream when he did that? she thought. Why am I not screaming now?
She clenched a fist. Then the other. There was no pain. Her wrists were healed.
The confusion of her thoughts heightened to a dizzying altitude. Nonsense phrases from her youth mixed with the memories of yesterday. The differences between what was and what should be grew more pronounced in her mind, the thoughts more jumbled, the confusion greater.
A great, heavy blanket of darkness seemed to coil around her consciousness, like a gruesome amoeboid preparing to envelope its prey and consume it at leisure. The darkness spread, and Mertyl felt herself going, losing control.
The darkness was madness.
And when it had completely captured her, Mertyl danced. She danced in a river of her loved ones as they ran past her, not seeing her, not caring about her as she no longer cared about them.
She danced, clawing herself, tearing at her eyes, raking cracked nails across her breast.
She danced to the maddening beat that was the only sense in the blackness.
Follow.
Follow.
Follow.
But she couldn’t. The blackness held her firm, gripping her in an excruciating embrace that restrained her urge to follow.
Follow.
Follow.
She reached out and plucked a rifle from one of the passing mob. His fingers grabbed for it, but then he was past, swept away by the current.
Mertyl pressed the rifle barrel under her chin. Then something told her to move it lower. To the soft tissue where the jaw met the neck.
She pressed it there, feeling the cool roundness of the barrel penetrate the dark fog of her mind.
She pulled the trigger.
Most of Mertyl Breckman’s head disintegrated in a splash of bone and blood, and her decapitated corpse fell to the ground. Her legs twitched spasmodically, her old ankles kicking the soft grass beneath.
Even in death, it seemed, Mertyl continued to dance.
***
Malachi heard the sounds grow, and it frightened him.
He knew he was in no danger, but if the town had been alerted, that meant that the Controllers were trying to actively track Fran through the bracelet on her wrist.
Standard practice, really. A bracelet, a gem, a ring. The Controllers planted them through a friend or loved one, who always gave the bauble with an admonition never to remove it.
In this case, Malachi knew, the bracelet had come from Fran’s husband, Nathan. His lip curled as he thought of Fran, lying with her husband, never knowing her glorious destiny, never knowing the creature - no, the thing - that Nathan was.
So the sound of neighborhoods waking up frightened Malachi, because things were getting out of hand. Besides, though he was protected from the townsfolk, he knew Controllers would be coming soon. And he had no guarantee that all of them would respect his divine nature. Some of them might find themselves as powerless to harm him as were Loston’s citizens. But others might discover that they were able to raise their hands against him. If that happened, Malachi might be killed.
He was outside the house where they had trapped John and Fran, and now he hurried to Deirdre’s form, so still in the light of the fire that John had set with his lantern bombs. Deirdre moaned as Malachi approached, surprising him. He thought for sure she would be dead.
Not dead, though. Wounded, but Malachi could tell instantly that the bullet had merely scratched her, taking a layer of skin off the outside edge of her left shoulder and cauterizing as it passed.
She would live.
God is watching out for us, he thought. He always believed that, of course, but sometimes it was nice to have proof. It cemented his conviction more firmly: they would triumph this night. John would die, and with him Fran. And when they were gone, the future would die also. The Dream would become reality, and the world would burn.
Malachi helped Deirdre to her feet, and Jenna, who’d been standing nearby, reached out a hand to steady her.
"What’s going on?" mumbled Deirdre, blinking unsteadily.
"They’ve put Loston on Alert," whispered Malachi.
Deirdre straightened as if shocked by a spear of white hot lightning. "What?" she whispered.
Malachi nodded and started leading her back to Gabriel’s house. "Come on. We’ll sit you down inside for a moment. You’ll need all your strength to keep up.
"Things are about to get messy."