Broken Crescent (3 page)

That line of thought did as much good for his peace of mind as it had when he opened the last five messages. In other words, no good at all.

There were other possibilities.

Blackmail for one. Nate had precious little in the way of assets, but he still had a wealth of information buried in his head, things Azrael knew that Nate Black shouldn’t. . . .

But there was another, more frightening, possibility.

The nightmare scenario had the FBI, Secret Service, CIA or someone, arresting some schmuck from six years ago who hadn’t learned Azrael’s lesson and had gone on with the “black hat” hacking past the time where his luck ran out. A schmuck who had known Azrael back in the day. A schmuck who’d known enough to connect Azrael to Nate.

It would take time; the schmuck and the Feds negotiating their deals; the Feds checking the schmuck’s background details to assure themselves that if they pleaded this fish it would hook them a bigger one.

Nate stood up and shakily put his PDA in his pocket. “I’m freaking
myself
out.” He looked up at the clock on the wall of the lounge and saw it was ten after one. “And late for class.”

Nate shouldered his backpack, left the lounge, and started walking down the corridor toward his networking class.

It wasn’t fair. He’d been a “white hat” for six years. He shouldn’t have to spend every waking moment worrying about ancient history.

The halls felt eerily empty to him. The squeak of his boots on linoleum was too loud and echoey. His breath tasted of copper, and he felt his pulse in his neck.

He was thin and wiry, high-strung at the best of times. More than one past girlfriend had compared his body—not his face, thank God—to Iggy Pop. Right now his body was tense and trembling, as if someone had taken pure caffeine and had injected it directly into his hypothalamus.

When he passed a classroom, he had the urge to thrust the door open and yell at them,
“Yes, I was Azrael, damn it! I did things that would make you never trust your social security number again!”

It was almost a relief when he turned the corner and saw a guy in a cheap suit standing outside the door to his classroom. He didn’t even slow his steps at first. All he could think of was how mundane the guy looked. Just a rumpled brown suit. Not even a pair of shades, or an earphone . . .

The guy turned to look at Nate, and for a moment Nate thought that he might be wrong. This guy could be here for something completely different. He might not be a Fed, or even a cop.

A blare of incomprehensible static echoed through the hallway and the guy raised a walkie-talkie to his mouth, taking a step toward Nate.

That was more than enough to get Nate to turn tail and run away as fast as he could.

All the adrenaline that had accumulated since @’s last warning let loose in a single spastic jerk. He spun around so fast that his boots nearly slid out from under him. He slammed into the corner and started running back the way he had come.

He tried to tell himself that this was insane. The guy couldn’t be a cop waiting there for him. Not
now
.

But Nate was close enough to hear the words the guy was shouting into the walkie-talkie, “—pursuit of Caucasian suspect, six feet, one sixty, brown hair, brown leather jacket, black denim jeans, red T-shirt—”

Where the hell was he running? It was over now. Even if he got away. They would have his apartment. He couldn’t use an ATM or a credit card without letting them know where he was. He couldn’t go home to his parents. He should give up now, take what was coming. It would be what? Ten years a prisoner against a life as a fugitive. . . .

And what would his life be like after that?

He kept running.

Nate slammed his way into a stairway and looked behind him. Brown suit was right on his heels, less than ten feet away. Nate swung his backpack behind him, at the guy’s feet. The suit tried to jump it, but he got a foot tangled in a shoulder strap. Nate turned his head away when he saw the guy falling. He heard him plow face first into the linoleum as the stairway door hissed shut behind him.

Nate headed up, because that wouldn’t be the way they’d expect him to run.

Nate couldn’t fool himself. The cops probably had the exits pretty well covered right now. Paranoia gripped him. He
knew
they’d have a helicopter watching the escape routes. The Feds would be here. Any moment now they’d start lobbing tear gas at him.

Two floors up, he slammed though the door.

“It was just one guy.” Nate said, panting. “He’s spitting teeth out on the second floor. You’re away . . .”

If there weren’t dozens of cops here now, there would be in three minutes. And if anyone knew anything about what they were doing, every guy on campus security was converging on this building.

And on top of everything else, they had him on assault of a police officer. They weren’t going to be gentle when they caught up with him.

His thoughts were running as wild and spastic as he was. He turned corners on the corridors, heading toward the opposite end of the building, and the exits farthest from the guy in the brown suit.

His feet pounded along the corridor. His breath burned as he sucked in lungful after lungful of air. His head and his side throbbed in time to his machine-gun pulse.

Uncontrolled and frantic, he couldn’t quite stop when the world went black.

One moment he was running down the hall, the stairway and the glowing red exit sign tantalizingly within reach—then it all was gone. Classrooms, exit sign, fluorescent lights, linoleum. Everything was replaced by a flat unbroken blackness as if he was suddenly struck completely blind.

The shock made him lock his legs, but momentum carried him forward to fall . . .

And fall.

And fall.

Eventually he stopped falling. At least, it seemed as if he stopped falling. There was no impact. No
ground
as far as he could tell.

He could picture it all too well—a vein balloon swelling between pieces of thinking meat, waiting for the stress of the moment to blow like a hand grenade buried in a cow’s dead carcass. Tearing away vision, touch, even the sense that there was a world around him . . .

For a few moments he kept hyperventilating and his pulse raced even faster. By increments he calmed down, his gasping breath slowing, pulse easing.

There was absolutely no sense of motion, no breeze, no sense of where up or down might be. He could move his arms and legs freely; they met no resistance, no ground or wall. It was almost as if he floated in water, but his breathing was unaffected. He touched his body with his hands and everything seemed intact, including his sense of touch. He sat up, though in this strange void he couldn’t tell if it was his head and shoulders, or his legs that actually moved.

“What the hell’s happening to me?” he whispered into the darkness. The words were flat and perfectly audible.

He reached down and pressed the light on his digital watch.

He could see the milky green glow of the watch’s face. It read one-fifteen. Beyond where the glow touched his hands and wrist, the world was darkness.

From out of the void came a voice. Deep and wet, the tone was ugly and disturbing, unclean in a way that Nate couldn’t name.

IT WAS THE first time that Nate had ever heard anyone call him by that name. It made his bowels shrink and become water.

“Who are you?”
Nate yelled into the darkness at the voice. The sound seemed to die as it left his mouth, to vanish without an echo.

Something had changed in the darkness around him. It wasn’t a void any longer, there was a thick sense of presence around him, as if he might reach out a hand and feel slick skin and undulating flesh. He felt as if any moment something heavy and damp might wrap around his throat, strangling him.

“Which road?”
The words were heavy, cloying, and came from organs that were not meant for human speech.

The darkness resolved into something. Two some-things. Nate started to have a sense of direction again, of up and down, left and right. Behind him, he could dimly see a corridor in the classroom building. In front of him was what might have been a hill or a lawn, backed with blue sky. Both views seemed incredibly distant. At the same time they felt intense enough that he need only reach out to one or the other to touch it.

The sense of alien presence was overwhelming on all sides, as if cascades of rippling flesh were about to engulf him.

A searing anger gripped Nate. This
thing,
this invisible alien meat, it had to be @. This
thing
whether it was real, or some brain-damage induced distortion of what was really out there, was the source of the e-mails.
Take the road when it is offered. . . .

It
was
blackmail.

The corridor swelled in his peripheral vision, and when he looked directly at it, it seemed to grow, as if he was falling toward it.
Don’t buy into it. It’s pushing you. Go back. Take the evil you know.

The presence was upon him with a sense of imminent suffocation. Nate’s pulse was racing again, thoughts firing a mile a minute. He had to take some concrete action
now
or this thing around him would envelop him, absorb him, take him apart from the mind outward.

All he had to do was reach out and touch. He knew his hand would touch cold linoleum. He would be back where things made sense . . .

. . . and where cops waited to put him away for ten or twenty years.

Nate reached out, but in the impulsive way he acted when panicked, he put his hand backward, away from the corridor—

It touched grass.

Sunlight blinded him as a sense of normalcy returned to the space around him. There was ground beneath him, and sky above him. He lay on his back, his arm thrown backward above his head.

He sank his fingers into the dirt, and stared up at the clouds above him.

“Some sort of stressed-out nightmare,” he whispered to himself. He thought of several possible scenarios. Making his escape outside, and being so strung out that he fainted. The blackness, and the alien presence, just some paranoid dream—one intense enough that it wiped out the memory of him collapsing here in the grass.

Maybe the e-mail, and the cop outside his classroom, were part of that same dream. That would be a relief, though Nate thought
that
might be too good to be true. . . .

Of course, that left open the question, where was he?

He sucked in deep breaths, calming himself, staring at the clouds sliding over the intense blue above him. There were no sounds of traffic or people, just the wind rustling the grass around him, and the sound of water nearby. His peripheral vision was blocked on his left by the slope of the ground, and on his right by an old black stump covered in shelf fungus.

Somewhere a bird let out a piercing call.

This wasn’t anywhere on the Case campus by University Circle.

The initial relief of finding himself in this quiet spot, not surrounded by Feds, gave way to unease. The idea that he traveled here with no memory was almost as disturbing as the thought that the alien presence in the darkness was real.

He stood up and felt a cold, salty wind bite into him. When he looked down at his feet, he froze.

Less than three feet away from him, the ground fell away. If he bent over, he found himself looking down a cliff of black rock that descended a hundred feet, maybe more. At the foot of the cliff, gray-green surf crashed against boulders the size of small houses.

“My God,” Nate whispered, taking a step back.

He looked to where the water met the horizon. It didn’t seem like Lake Erie. No sailboats, no buoys, and the waves crashing on the rocks carried no more than seaweed and driftwood. Not so much as a single floating beer can.

Nate stared at the water a long time. He had been to the East Coast twice, and he could smell the salt—almost taste it. Wrong. He had to be wrong. He was hundreds of miles from the ocean.

The surf crashed with enough force to send spray as high as he was. Nate stumbled back from the precipice, looking behind himself to keep from tumbling over the stump.

Behind him were mossy hills resembling a crumpled sheet of paper that wouldn’t lie quite flat. The occasional twisted tree clung to the rocks, only gathering into something that could be called woods in the far distance.

Beyond that, mountains hovered over the landscape. They were far enough away, and rose high enough into the sky, that the snow on their flanks took on the bluish cast of unmoving clouds.

“What the hell happened?” Nate couldn’t dismiss what had happened as a nightmare—if he ever believed that explanation in the first place.

“Where am I?”

He stared at the mountains facing him.

He had never experienced blackouts or hallucinations before. But he didn’t know what to believe. Moments ago, he was thousands of miles away from any terrain like this. And the mountains were undoubtedly there, like the salt spray sticking to his skin.

Nate felt his skull, prodding for the head wound that would explain his blackout and the landscape in front of him. His scalp was untouched and the only pain in his head was the cognitive whiplash of finding himself in a place so far removed from where he had been.