Doomsday Exam [BUREAU 13 Book Two] (4 page)

Snarling myself, I put a couple more .357 distractions into the mottled head, Jess gave it a spray of mace from a fountain pen, and Raul shot by on his jet-powered roller skates for the last time. Mages are mighty useful folk, but so damn weird.

Sheathing her sword, Mindy swatted the thing across the throat with the scabbard. Both eyes bulging, the beast began hacking and coughing. Personally, I thought the monster was damn lucky it didn't have external genitalia. That was always Mindy's favorite target, and magical or not, it was one attack which stopped the male of any species.

"...!” the wizard shouted, gesturing grandly.

Jumping for the mage, the creature rebounded from the immaterial barrier of the pentagram it was now trapped inside. Glaring an almost tangible hate, the beast slammed its resilient body against the magical forceshield. The ruined apartment reverberated from the strident impacts, pictures danced off the walls and a mirror cracked.

Breathing a sigh of relief, I holstered my lightweight Magnum, and reloaded the 66 with Glaser Sure-Kill Safety Slugs. The miniature shotgun rounds should at least annoy Lumpy if he got free again.

"Good work,” I complemented, as the team gathered round. “Where's the van?"

"Parked outside taking up four spots,” Mindy said, patrolling around the pentagram. Lumpy matched her movements and they growled menacingly at each other. Beauty and the beast.

"What's the plan, Ed?” Jessica asked unhappily, returning her taser to its holster. “Cement and the lake?” She sounded sad, but then telepaths were such sensitive folk. Killing anything bothered them, I even had to be gentle turning off the television.

Unwrapping a beef stick, George placed it in his mouth as if it were a greasy cigar. “No way,” the soldier grunted. “Laughing Boy would be free and running amuck within the hour."

On cue, Lumpy launched itself at the ceiling and cracked the industrial-grade concrete with its head. Sheesh! I wanted to toss this thing a dictionary so it could discover the meaning of the word surrender.

"Then we send it to the Holding Facility,” Raul said as he slowly diminished in height, his superskates converting into sneakers once more. Transparent plastic sneakers with the socks underneath woven to resemble bare feet, but that was only to be expected. I'd seen worse.

"Check,” I said, closing the cylinder of my gun. “I'll call ahead saying that we're sending in a problem child and have them prep an Omega Cell. Technical Services can puzzle over how to kill this boojum in their copious spare time."

"What do we do about the folks outside,” George asked, jerking a thumb towards the hallway.

At a nod from me, Jessica touched her forehead and scrunched her face in concentration. Soon the shouting and bewildered cries from the other side of the portal slowed, then stopped and we heard people casually chatting and walking away.

Going pale, Jessica wobbled on her feet, so I helped my wife into an easy chair missing its cushions. “Wiping ten minutes of memory from fourteen people is something of a strain,” she admitted. “Luckily nobody was a natural immune."

Affectionately, I gave her a pat on the arm and a kiss. In her prime, my bride could have Brain Blasted the entire state of Illinois. But she was still recuperating from our battle with the Brotherhood of Darkness last week. Those yahoos had even less intelligence than Lumpy here.

Sprinkling powders while chanting, Raul Horta formed a huge, meter wide, rune on a smooth section of the floor. I busied myself feeding the appropriate code phrases into my watch to relay a priority signal to the big radio in our van and on to the headquarters of our organization. Wherever that was. We had once found what I thought was Bureau HQ, but by the next week the office building had been converted into a parking garage. I guess the chief didn't trust anybody, even us, and not without cause. On rare occasions, Bureau 13 agents did sometimes go bad.

In less than a minute I got an answering bleep on my wristwatch, just as the mystic letter of power began to glow and a shimmering oval portal formed in the air. Lumpy snarled and spit, but we paid the prisoner no attention. He was going nowhere inside that deudonic forcefield.

Tugging on my sleeve, George pulled me aside.

"Something wrong?” I asked puzzled.

He tried to appear casual. “I may be mistaken,” George whispered around his beef stick. “But when you said we were going to send Felix over there to the Holding Facility, I could have sworn I saw it smile."

Contemptuously, I arched an eyebrow. “Eh? You're nuts."

"Could be. Yet I saw, what I saw."

"And why would anything be pleased that it was going to be incarcerated in the most escape-proof jail in the history of the world?"

The soldier shrugged. “Beats me. Maybe it's trying to pull a Briar Rabbit routine. But I don't like the very concept."

Me neither. George may be paranoid, most Bureau agents were, but that was only because we did have so many enemies, and they were everywhere.

"Raul,” I said. “Cancel the portal spell, we're hauling Lumpy in personally."

And damn me if the beast didn't maintain the most amazingly neutral expression that I have ever seen this side of a poker table.

Hmm.

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"Brace yourselves!” I cried, tightening my grip on the steering wheel. Everybody grabbed whatever handhold was convenient and scrunched low in their seats.

As I maneuvered past a red sports coupe with vanity plates, our lumbering RV and trailer hitch went by the designated signpost on the Iowa Turnpike and in a wild burst of pyrotechnics, we shunted out of this universe. Momentarily blinded by a violent explosion of colors. I drove by sheer instinct as the van was buffeted from side to side by swirling constellations of stars. There came a curse, a metallic crunch, a shattering of glass, and we were through!

When vision cleared, I gently tapped on the brakes, easing the RV to a squealing halt on the dirt road. The van stopped only a scant meter before a simple wooden crossbar that was blocking the road. The rigidly motionless bar wasn't supported by anything visible on either end. A square black-n-white sign hanging from the middle of the oak bar bore the brutally plain international NO symbol. The words ‘or else’ had never been deemed prudent, or necessary. Only Bureau personnel knew about the small thermonuclear bomb under the crossbar. It was our way of discouraging unwelcome guests. Worked just fine, too. Nobody we nuked ever returned again. At least, not in this life.

Now surrounding us instead of the lush summer greenery of the Iowa farmlands, was a dead flat plain of sun-baked mud stretching to the horizon, the sky a featureless vista of gray. Ah, there was no place like home. And this was no place like home.

Discernible solely by its lack of cracks, the slim roadway we were on was the only safe area to traverse. The rest of the landscape was a billion dollar deathtrap, littered with anti-personnel land mines, acid pits, napalm geysers, telescoping pungi sticks, nerve gas, lasers beams, and exploding cactus. Even touching the crossbar, much less going past it, would have flipped over the road and squashed us like bugs on a pancake. It was a toll few wished to pay.

Ahead of us was a high stonewall topped with electrified, poisoned, concertina wire. There were angular turrets every ten meters crowned with rectangular missile launching pods, Gatling Guns, squat flamethrowers and who-knew-what-else. This was the secret location of Bureau 13's hidden training Academy and Holding Facility, code-named: Bangor-Maine, for some reason lost in antiquity. Knowing the gang at HQ, it was probably an obscene joke from the 1880s.

Literally off-the-map, civilian drivers simply went past the appropriate milemarker. But with proper Bureau ID, approaching the sign would shunt you into a small pocket universe hidden between the front and back of the roadpost. Speed was not essential to traveling to this miniverse. I only did that to reduce our time in dimensional transit. For some reason, it reminded me of visiting Cleveland. Lord knows why, because I've never been there.

Finding the correct signpost was always a pain. I had to call an ever-changing 800 number, at 13 past any odd-numbered hour, properly identify myself with half a page of code phrases and countersigns, to eventually get the current location of the milemarker. Being a pocket universe, the damn doorway was constantly shifting. Last time it was in the middle of a forest preserve in Colorado. The time before that it was in the washroom of a Tasty-Freeze in downtown Boston. Boy, the stares the seven of us got from the staff as we piled into the lavatory stall together! Whew, talk about embarrassing.

Bangor-Maine was one of the few Bureau locations that survived the Slaughter of ‘87 when 80% of all the Bureau agents were killed within a four hour period by an unknown enemy. Our darkest day. Just recently, the legendary J. P. Withers himself had been assigned to the case. He would search forever until he caught and killed the people responsible. Since J. P. was immortal, when he said forever, Withers meant it. Nuff said.

Checking on the trailer behind us in the rear view mirror, I released my safety harness and thumbed a transmit switch on the dashboard sending our recognition code. Unlocking the door, I climbed to the ground. Eagerly, the rest of my team scrambled from our armored vehicle.

Ever the lady, Jessica daintily stepped out and straightened her white summer dress. Slim enough to do it, Mindy hopped through an open window. Fat boy George dramatically kicked aside the rear door, and Raul phased straight through the side of the RV. The big show off. He loved to play with new spells, the more dangerous they were, the better.

Judiciously, I checked the load in both of my .357 Magnums and coldly scrutinized the battered yellow trailer hitched to the rear of our vehicle. Our guest had been suspiciously silent for quite awhile. I only hoped the tricky bastard wasn't planning something. Lumpy's last escape attempt had destroyed an overpass, an underpass, two off-ramps, and a tollbooth. While annihilating the latter was not an altogether bad thing, attempting to eat the attendants had been definitely out of line. Damn near rude.

"Hey, Ed!” somebody called from the other side of the van. “What was that metallic crunch?"

"Ran over our own hub caps,” I replied, glaring annoyed at the flattened disks lying crumpled on the hard mud.

"Yet another example of your splendid driving, Mr. Alvarez."

In a polyglot of Spanish and Japanese, I muttered an appropriate riposte. Chuckling, the gang encircled the trailer in a standard ***3 defensive pattern. Mindy Jennings stood directly before the doors in a martial arts crouch, her indestructible sword held in muscular hands, its long curved blade glinting in the harsh sunlight. She was now properly dressed for action in loose fitting, neutral colored clothing and military sneakers.

Wearing US Army fatigues and combat boots, George Renault stood to the left of her, the lengthy barrel of his huge M60 machine gun pointed steady at the side of the trailer. Dangling from his humongous weapon was a glistening belt of linked, steel-tipped, .30 combat rounds. A Colt .45 hogleg was holstered at his hip, along with an ammo pouch bulging with grenades and candy bars.

Hovering a few feet in the air, Raul casually held his silver wizard's staff in one hand. He was incongruously dressed in leather sandals, neon orange pants, and a sleeveless T-shirt that said on the front ‘NOT A MEMBER OF A SECRET GOVERNMENT AGENCY'. Why do mages have to be so weird?

Standing nearby, Jessica had drawn a taser stun pistol from the shoulder holster under the short brocade jacket of her summer dress. From the clothing locker in the van, I had obtained a spare sports jacket that happily matched my black slacks and blue shirt. Plus, lots of ammunition. With Magnums in hand, I was maintaining a discrete distance, attempting to watch everything.

"Also heard glass shatter before,” George said, the stick of a lollipop extending from his mouth. The breast pocket of his green shirt bulged with spare sweets. Because of his time served in Viet Nam as a tunnel rat, George refused to become thin again. “Anybody see what broke?"

Adjusting his Phillies in ‘86 baseball cap, Raul pointed with his staff. “Taillight on the trailer."

"Nothing important then?"

"Nope."

"So long as it wasn't the padlock again,” Mindy grunted. “We had quite enough trouble getting the muscle-bound lump here."

"Where are the guards?” George asked, glancing about.

Raul proffered his Bureau wristwatch. “Ed, should we put in a call?"

"No need,” Jessica announced, touching her temples. “They're on the way.” Her lovely face had that faraway expression which meant she was in mental communications with somebody, the fingertips of a hand lightly touching her forehead the only indication of direction.

Turning towards the stonewall, I saw a billowing cloud of dust starting to come our way. Soon, I could identify an F22 Raptor stealth jumpjet skimming along the ground on her bottom jets. Whew. That was something new. Sleek, fast and ultra-maneuverable, the fighter/bomber was a flying arsenal; its delta wings, needle prow and wide belly bristling with weapons.

Landing a few meters away from us, the canopy retracted with a hydraulic hiss and a figure stood up in the cockpit, his face masked by the mirrored visor of the attack helmet. As his head turned to face us, the guns and missiles tracked along, slavishly copying his every move. I would have loved to sneak a peak at it through my Bureau sunglasses to see what magical armaments the jet carried, but I knew in advance the machine was shielded against such an intrusion.

"Alcatraz,” the pilot snapped, his hands ominously out of sight.

"Joliet,” I replied, giving the Chicago pronunciation.

There was a pause, then a gloved hand raised the hinged visor and I saw the dashingly handsome features of Gilad Lapin, the warden of the Holding Facilities. Removing the helmet entirely, the weapons of the F22 automatically returned to pointing straight ahead.

"Hey, Ed!” he waved.

"Hi, Gil. That's some fancy go-cart you're riding these days."