DOM#67A
LOSTON, COLORADO
AD 1999
7:50 AM TUESDAY
***ALERT MODE***
Light speared into the shaft as Malachi threw open the wooden door that marked the entrance to the mine. Jenna and Deirdre looked on, fingering their weapons anxiously, clearly nervous at what they might discover within the mountain's belly. Already the night had proven more difficult than anticipated, and with the town now on full Alert, and Malachi knew they could only expect things to get worse.
He looked at them. They looked like hell. Burnt, bruised, or both. He knew that he must look a fright himself, but there was no time to remedy that. There would be time after they killed John and then Fran.
There would be time.
There would be an eternity.
Beyond their injuries, the two women also looked tired; worn down. Malachi knew that he should feel the same, but he didn’t. He felt aware, alert. Alive. But it was a mad kind of life that glittered in his eyes, like a single photon trapped in glass ball of darkness, dancing back and forth in a manic hope for release.
Jenna stepped into the tunnel and Malachi covered her, though he didn’t expect either John or Fran to be so close. They would not wait in the tunnel's mouth, he knew. Ambush was not in John's nature. Rather, he would try to run, to hide. Above all, to protect Fran. But always running, because it would be ingrained in his nature to run. So he would be deep within the mountain, trying to escape notice in the murky blackness of a million tons of dirt and stone.
"Nothing," said Jenna. Malachi’s admiration grew for her just a bit. She hadn’t complained at all about her shattered mouth, and during the last few hours had started acting a bit more like Deirdre: silent, self-contained, with the quiet confidence of a tiger with the scent of blood in her nostrils. Perhaps she would turn out to be useful, after all, and not the liability that she had thus far proven herself to be.
Malachi and Deirdre stepped into the tunnel, leaving the door open behind them.
Deirdre pointed wordlessly at a shelf with hats on it and a row of hooks with jackets hanging off them. It looked as though two of the jackets and two of the hats were missing. Malachi nodded.
"Which way?" asked Deirdre.
Malachi pulled a tracker from his pocket. The size of his hand, it glowed a deep green, like an emerald, only larger and brighter than any natural gem could ever be. This was one of the trinkets he had taken with him when he ceased being a Controller and ran away to join the group he now called his family. It would home in on the beacon implanted on Fran's bracelet, and would lead them to her. The beacon had only a short range, but he thought it likely that they were within that limited area.
He pointed the tracker down the tunnel, and it changed hue slightly, shifting to a light shade of pink.
"She's in here," he said, and moved down the tunnel.
***
The pale rose hues and blue casts of the morning sky over Loston broke suddenly in half.
Or at least, an observer would have thought so at first. Of course there were no observers; all those below were busy searching for John and Fran, under orders that they didn’t know about but had no choice but to obey.
The sky, a peaceful blue with several clouds floating serenely through the air, seemed to crack open. A doorway appeared, allowing a view of a strange and disquieting sky beyond it: burnt red, the color of amber and flame. Then the sky beyond the sky was obscured as a ship dropped through the doorway between worlds.
Its engines hummed as it plummeted quickly through the opening in Loston’s sky, which sealed behind the ship, leaving no trace of the craft’s point of entrance.
Adam sat in the cockpit, next to the Controller who piloted the vessel. Both watched the nav-scopes intently. The ship had no windows whatsoever. Windows allowed too much of the deadly ultraviolet and gamma rays that pervaded the world of their time to enter the craft, damaging both equipment and personnel.
"Where to, sir?" asked the pilot.
"Resurrection," answered Adam. The name of the mine sent an icy insect scurrying over the nape of his neck, cold feet of dread tracking pinpricks of fear over his spine.
Resurrection follows death, he thought. Who will die tonight?
Unbidden, the answer also came to his mind:
All of us.
***
Malachi followed the deepening red of the tracker. The going was slow, for he had no way of knowing which of the offshoots were tunnels, which were rooms and which were dead ends. He had to follow the tracker, and in the catacomb of the mine system, their prey could be five feet away but impossible to find, standing on the other side of a thick rock wall that didn’t connect to their tunnel for miles.
Malachi hoped such wasn’t the case.
He wanted to find them. He would kill John immediately, of course. Fran was the prize. Deirdre and Jenna would want to kill her instantly as well, but Malachi hoped to keep her alive. He had plans for her, beyond mere death. He said a silent prayer:
Please, God, let her live. Give her to me.
A warm feeling spread through his soul as his body felt the answer. Peace overcame him and he knew what they would do: find the two, spray their hiding place with bullets. He had a deep conviction that they would kill John and somehow miss Fran, leaving her alive. He knew it was God speaking back to him, answering His most faithful servant.
God was giving him Fran.
And Malachi planned to keep the gift for a time.
She had to die, of course. That was the true endgame and the only thing standing between him and Heaven. But Heaven had waited for so long, he thought, that surely it would not begrudge him a few hours or days of time with her. She would scream beneath him, and he would spend himself on her.
When she died, so would they all, and Malachi intended to go out with a bang.
***
John and Fran slept on one cot. It was really too small for both of them, but neither had been willing to separate after the closeness they felt following their shared revelations. They lay so near to one another that each could feel the other’s heart beat, could feel the other’s breath.
They were exhausted, and slept deeply. Even so, John sat up suddenly, yanked from the depths of fatigue back into sudden wakefulness. He recognized the sudden transition as a defensive response he had come to rely on in Iraq. It meant that his subconscious, ever active even while the rest of him was near-comatose, had picked up on something important. Perhaps dangerous.
Had he heard something? He didn’t think so. The single light source in the room was still burning, and John found its low wattage glow distracting. He got up and turned off the switch in order to be able to concentrate more fully on his environment, on the tell tale sounds of approaching enemies, if any were nearby. After a moment in the pure blackness of the underground world, he was forced to admit he could discern nothing out of the ordinary, and so lay back down again. He kept the light off, knowing that it would permit Fran to sleep deeper and be more rested. Nevertheless, a moment later the complete darkness became too much for him. He turned on the flashlight he had confiscated from the mine entrance and rolled it under the bed, so that only a dim glow emerged.
Fran pulled even closer against him. He smiled and kissed her hair.
Then slept again.
***
Malachi stopped as they approached a doorway and the jewel in his hand abruptly red-shifted, turning almost crimson. Light shined through the entrance to the nearby room. They had passed several such lit chambers, evidently on some timer or just permanently illuminated for some reason, but Malachi knew that this time the light must signal habitation. Their prizes were beyond the doorway.
He put the jewel back in his pocket, then signaled to Deirdre and Jenna. They nodded, and he held up three fingers, counting down.
Two.
One.
They jumped into the doorway, firing everything they had into the room. He heard Jenna screaming as they each emptied their weapons into the room. Deirdre was silent in the deafening thunder, hardly blinking as she expended the clip in her Uzi.
Nothing in the room could possibly survive the maelstrom, but Malachi knew that they would find Fran alive. God had promised it. She would be his, to serve him and pleasure him in the final agonizing hours of her existence. But John would be dead.
Sure enough, Fran and John stood before them, and just as he had foreseen, their shots took John apart while leaving Fran unscathed. Blood splashed everywhere as John took round after round to the arms, legs, chest, and head. Fran screamed in terror and fear, covering her eyes with her hands as John fell at her feet.
Jenna and Deirdre stopped firing beside him, but Malachi continued shooting, emptying his weapon into the room, into John's body where it curled on the floor behind him. Fran wept and cried and sank to her knees in supplication, holding out her hands for mercy. But mercy would not find her here, not in the darkness below the earth.
John was dead, and Fran would soon follow.
DOM#67A
LOSTON, COLORADO
AD 1999
10:10 AM TUESDAY
***ALERT MODE***
His last shot spent, Malachi had the delicious sensation of pure victory. Godly triumph welled through him, marred only by the fact that he felt Deirdre and Jenna gazing at him quizzically. He glanced at them, incensed that they were stealing precious moments of his victory.
"What are you doing?" asked Jenna.
He frowned and prepared to deliver a scathing reply, one that would bring this woman to her knees next to Fran, but before he could do so he realized that the room was empty. John and Fran were nowhere before them, in spite of the fact that he had clearly seen John die mere seconds ago, leaving only a whimpering, broken woman on her knees beside him.
Malachi blinked rapidly, surprise registering on his face as he comprehended that what he had seen was not real. It was a vision, and it would become real, as sure as there was a God. But it had not happened. Not yet. Fran and John would fall soon, but Malachi and his two remaining helpers had not yet killed them.
Rather than explain all this to the women, who continued to look at him strangely, Malachi looked again at the tracker. Still bright red. Fran had to be here.
He scanned the small room for side exits, trying to spot a way she and John could have escaped. There were none.
"Where are they?" asked Deirdre. She appeared shocked for the first time. Malachi knew how she felt. The tracker had signaled that they were within mere feet. Had signaled that this was where they were.
Unless....
"Oh, no," he said, and cursed.
"What?" asked Jenna.
He repocketed the jewel. "Fran's beacon transmits her location to a satellite, which then interprets the data and resends it to a receiver in the tracker. But the tracker doesn't have a proximity meter for Fran herself."
"What does that mean?" asked Deirdre. She was still looking at him with a bit of dismay, as though observing a bug. Malachi decided that, win or lose, Deirdre would not be coming home with them. She was too self-assured, and not enough afraid of him to be a truly strict adherent of the way of God.
Still, he answered, "It means that the tracker doesn't really track Fran. It tracks a latitude and longitude transmitted to it by the satellite. So we're probably right on top of Fran, but she and John must be on a different level. We picked them up laterally but can’t find them vertically. We’ll have to split up and search each level. They’re somewhere right below us."
He left the room, heading back to the main shaft. There had to be an elevator somewhere nearby. They would find it and then find John and Fran. It was destiny, and it was his promise from God. They might have to tear the mountain apart looking for their prey, but Malachi would not be stopped. Not now.
***
The room remained as it had before the three entered it. The small addition of bullets meant nothing to the vast and ancient stone of the mountain. A few more bits of iron and lead and steel were nothing to it. They would be absorbed into its rocky self over the years, and would eventually become one with it, joined as truly and as firmly as if they had been born in the walls, rather than hurled there by the force of exploding gases pushing them through weapon muzzles.
Still, with the bullets had come noise. And with the noise the mountain sighed. A few small pebbles dislodged from where they had remained for eons, tumbling to the floor of the room.
A shower of dirt followed. It made hardly any noise, being merely a small shift, as ethereal as a whisper in a desert.
But whispers could quickly become shouts.
The mountain trembled, on the verge of movement.
Then quieted.
For the moment.