Sleeping Late On Judgement Day (28 page)

“No. Listen. He's down.”

“What? Try that again, Duster. Did you say ‘down'? What do you mean?”

“He's lying on the floor. I'm looking at him, and I can only see the bottom half of him, but he's lying on the floor near the stairwell where you came in. Did you do it?”

“What, club a guard? Hell no. Are you sure it's not just a shadow or something?”

“Cash, he is
down
and I think I see blood. A big puddle, getting bigger. Time to abort.”

“Shit. Copy.” I thumbed off the walkie-talkie and hurried to find Clarence and Oxana, who were down at the far end. I signaled for Halyna to come with me, but when I looked back she was still staring at the mosaic of Anaita. I knew she hated the immortal bitch, but this was a really bad time to be dwelling on it. I hurried back to get her.

“We've got a problem,” I whispered. “We have to get out of here.”

“Something is wrong with that picture,” Halyna said as if I hadn't spoken. She took off her infrared goggles, stared at the eight-foot tall mosaic, then put them back on again. “There is a big cold place in the middle of it.”

“We don't have time right now,” I said. “We have to get to an exit. We may have to
make
an exit.”

Halyna stepped forward, still not paying any attention to me, and began sliding her fingers up and down the slab, reaching up as high as she could, then down to floor level. She moved to the other side and did the same thing. She must have touched something hidden, because suddenly Anaita took wing.

Well, at least that's what it looked like when the goddess Anaita and her big kitty-cat companions rose into the air. They kept on until they'd risen six or seven feet straight up the high wall, revealing a door that had been hiding behind the mosaic slab. It had a card reader, but I was pretty certain that the poor slob of a curator whose information we'd stolen didn't know anything about this particular door and had no privileges for it. I slid the card in the slot several times, but I was right: no good.

Clarence and Oxana rejoined us.

“What's going on?” Clarence asked.

“Emergencies and craziness all over the fucking place,” I said in a low voice. “Wendell says there's a guard down on the floor above us, and he thinks he can see blood. But look what Halyna just found.”

“Is that . . . ?”

“It was behind that mosaic. What do
you
think? As for me, I think we've got about zero time left, but we're here, and I can't just walk away. How do we get this door open?” I got on the walkie to Wendell and told him what we'd found. “Any more information on that guard?”

“Nothing. He's still not moving. I've got a real bad feeling, Cash.”

“So do I, Duster, but I'm making a command decision. Whatever happened to the guard, no one else has noticed yet. Are you still looping the security cam footage?”

“Yes, but maybe that's why he showed up. People notice eventually . . .”

“Any suggestions for getting this door open, Duster? Any magic passwords you've been keeping in reserve?”

“No. And I suggest you leave it alone. You can always come back.”

“I don't think so. Not before shit goes completely vertical in my world, with me at the bottom. Cash out.” I turned to face the others. “This is kind of like the Gordian Knot,” I said.

“Is not what?” Oxana asked.

“History lesson later,” I said. “Now, problem-solving.” And then I pulled out my new suppressed Glock and blasted the shit out of that card reader with some of the special ammo Orban had thrown in with the silencer. The subsonics were impressively quiet—I doubted anyone outside the hall heard a thing. I reached in through the smoking wreckage and started pulling bits out, then grabbed the pry bar Clarence had strapped to his pack frame and put all of my not-inconsiderable strength to it.

Clarence was getting a bit panicky. The bullets had been quiet, but the pry bar was making noises like the world's biggest gopher chewing metal vegetables with metal teeth. “I thought we had to get out of here—shit, Bobby, I thought we weren't going to make a mess!” He really
was
upset. He hardly ever swore.

“Plans change, my friend.”

I don't know what I did, but something shifted inside the door lock and the thing popped out. The door slid about six inches to one side, enough for me to feel a waft of cool, air-conditioned air rolling out. No wonder Halyna had seen a cold spot with her infrareds. I got my hands into the opening and started pulling. After a moment Clarence realized I wasn't going anywhere without getting past that door, so he leaned in to help, and together we dragged it open against the heavy inertia of the mechanism.

What we found on the other side was a dark stairwell. I went down it, and as I hit the bottom step a light came on above my head. The door in front of me was ordinary wood, with a latch but no electronic paraphernalia. Could it really be this simple? I clicked the latch down and pushed. The door swung open and a light came on inside. My comm-link made a scratchy, staticky noise in my ear, but I couldn't understand anything Wendell was saying.

I had about five seconds to look around before Oxana, who was closest to me on the stairs, said, “Bobby . . .”

“Just a second,” I said. “We're in.”

And in my earpiece: “Cash, this is Duster! Cash, please acknowledge!”

“Not now, Duster.”

“The hell with that,” Wendell was almost shouting. “Abort the mission! Abort the mission!”

“What are you talking about, Duster?” But I couldn't raise him again—the signal was all noise now. I assumed the guards were coming, but I was damned if I was going to run when I had finally found what we were looking for. I'd think of some way to stall them. “Duster, please repeat . . .”

“Bobby.”
Now it was Clarence calling to me from the top of the stairwell. “I really think you'd better come up here.”

I was losing my shit. “Will everybody just give me—”

“Now!”

I'd never heard that tone from Junior before. I legged it back up, pushed past Oxana and then stopped, amazed, beneath the mosaic that hung over the doorway.

The entire floor of the West Asian hall was alive with Nightmare Children. Dozens of the swastika-shaped things, hideous and hairy, scurried around and over the exhibits toward us like they were army ants and we were made of sugar.

“This is bad,” was all I could think of to say. Not my most original line. I'll try to do better next time I'm about to be devoured in a museum in the middle of the night by a couple of hundred monstrous, spidery crawlers with babies' fingers.

And another thing. When a bunch of them got together, you could hear the Children breathing. They hissed quietly, like poison gas spewing from the vents at Bergen-Belsen.

“O
XANA!” I
shouted. I should have been using code names, but since it was in the heat of the moment and we were about to be overrun by hand-spiders, I think I can be forgiven. “Hurry up and
spray that shit!”

The first burst of silver nitrate solution came out in spatters, but the results were instantaneous. The Nightmare Children nearest us erupted in flame, like origami in a grease fire, and the air was suddenly filled with a howling so high-pitched I could barely hear it, like dozens of microscopic dental drills. Sadly, though, the swastikids were too basic or too brutal to be deterred by their burning comrades; the rest kept coming, although they avoided the bubbling wreckage of those the spray had hit.

I hadn't necessarily expected to see the little bastards again, but I'd wanted to be ready for surprises, both human and otherwise, which was why the silver spray. In the seconds after the first wave had melted into puddles of hair and twitching fingers (making an entirely new, astoundingly foul odor I'd never encountered before, even in Hell) I had my machete out of its sheath, and I was wading into them. I'd economized by only having Orban silver-plate the edges of the blades, but they seemed to do the job just fine that way. Every time I managed to hack into the body, another of the creatures fell into burning, jiggling bits. Even when I only got an arm, it crippled the little horrors nicely.

Clarence had his machete out too, and together we were able to keep a clear space open at the top of the stairs, but the army of scurrying things seemed endless. Oxana sprinted back and forth along the wall so she could spray the contents of her tank across the hairy, skittering wavefront. It was like napalming them, but I knew that she couldn't keep doing it forever. Even if it didn't clog, the tank didn't carry that much because the silver nitrate made it heavy as hell. I could only pray that no more of the things would show up.

Even as I was swiping away with my blade at the nasty, faceless creatures in front of me, tiny fingers clawed at my pants leg. I reached down and grabbed the nearest wire-haired squirmer and ripped it off me like a starfish off a rock, then threw it as far as I could. The exercise in clearance was pointless, because even as I pulled another away several more climbed the back of my legs. Within a second or two I could feel the terrible little fingers clawing at my neck.

I'm not a squeamish guy. You've probably guessed that by now. But being swarmed by those things brought me very near the screaming-and-running-in-circles stage. I was distracted from my growing fear when a great billowing cloud of flame rolled across the main force of crawlers. As they blackened and shriveled, the little monstrosities sent up an even higher-pitched chorus of inhuman shrieking that made my skull ache.

“No, Halyna! Save it!” I yelled. We weren't really in terminal danger, not yet anyway, and I didn't want her to set off the fire sprinklers, for oh-so many reasons, not least of which was the priceless works of art. I also didn't know if Wendell had remembered to disable the fire alarms or not.

By now Oxana's tank was spitting out little more than drips of silver solution. The Nightmare Children were still coming, but I thought I could see the end of them and felt pretty certain that we could hold them off at least long enough to escape the museum. Of course, it raised some questions—why were the crawling horrors here in the first place? Did Anaita use them too? And were they the only thing we had to worry about?

I was still making like Conan the Haloed Barbarian, hacking and slashing with my silvery sword, when I heard a wrenching noise from just above me, louder even than the shouts of my friends and the boiling-lobster squeals of burning swastikids. I didn't dare look up, but I didn't need to, because three seconds later several hundred pounds of living blackberry jam crashed through the vent in the ceiling and tumbled out of the air duct on top of me.

“Bird bug!” shouted Oxana.

While still thrashing around on top of me, the rubbery mass hit Clarence with a flailing appendage and tossed him across the room. He skidded and crashed into a display case with a noise like a grenade going off, flinging glass and irreplaceable ancient knick-knacks everywhere. As I writhed beneath what seemed to be at least two bugbears, I saw more large blobs force their way out of the ceiling through the ruined vent. You may remember that one of those bugbears by itself damn near killed me, and now it looked like at least a half-dozen were paratrooping in. Oxana vigorously blasted the newcomers, but their shiny hides only dimpled and blistered a little. Then the spray ended, and I knew her tank was empty. One of the hanging mucus-monsters swung at her like a pendulum, and although it didn't hit her square, it still knocked her spinning into the near end of the Asian section. She slammed into a case containing a Buddhist
thangka
, fell, and lay motionless. Clearly, she had been knocked cold, but it looked like she was crouching at the Buddha's feet.
Yeah, Existence is Suffering,
I thought.
Stop. I get it, already.
Oxana wasn't an angel, and she wouldn't get issued another body. I prayed she wasn't hurt too badly.

Bugbears aren't Hell creatures, I'd learned since the first encounter, but something older and stranger. They can be summoned and put to work, as some demons and most fetches can, but they have very little mind of their own. That means they're limited but also fairly foolproof, since they're not actively trying to figure out how to eat their summoner. The average bugbear really is about the size of a smallish bear, but beyond that the likeness is pretty shaky. They're made of something heavy but soft like jelly, can stretch and even break apart before reassembling themselves, and wrestling with one that's wrapped itself around you is like trying to pull apart a car tire by brute force.

So are they constrictors, I hear you ask? Shit, I wish that was all they did.

See, the weirdest thing about bugbears is that they can harden selective bits of their gummy selves, as I'd already discovered while fighting for my life inside my late Datsun 510. A blobby hole of a mouth can suddenly grow sharp, jagged edges; a flabby, fingerless paw can sprout hornlike claws. The only reason you know it is because the bit that's hardening goes from the usual near-black to a sort of purple-white. But even if you chop those harder bits off, they just turn back into the rubbery dark stuff and then flow back to the original, which is why even in this extreme situation I wasn't bothering to waste bullets on them.

So, General Dollar's battlefield report: one unconscious Amazon, Clarence at least momentarily out of action, Halyna (and her flamethrower) somewhere in the darkness behind me, hacking gamely away with her own silver-edged blade. Which left me struggling by myself against two bugbears the size of young hippos, with more jelly on the way. The one nearest my face had gone toothy as a hagfish and was armoring itself with pale purplish spikes like a giant rubber sea urchin, but it was the one coiled around my chest that was squeezing me breathless. I got my machete into it and cut off as much as I could (which was about as much fun as sawing through old chewing gum that hates you and wants to hurt you) but at last it fell away. I staggered back a few steps, doing my best to saw away the parts of the other one that were biting me. Nightmare Children were still swarming me too, but I could only deal with one shrieking horror at a time.

You could slow the bugbears down by chopping them into pieces, but eventually they'd pull all their bits back together. Fire worked, but Orban had reminded me several times that Halyna's flamethrower only had three good bursts in it, and she'd already used one.

I had the strange experience of watching my machete pass through what would have been the face of the bugbear trying to eat my head. I almost cut my own nose off, but twisted the blade and managed to do enough damage that the thing slid off me and dropped to the floor, already repairing itself.

I backed toward Halyna so that we could protect each other while we fought. Clarence (who was proving to be pretty darn tough) had recovered, and although he was limping and dribbling blood from his cuts, he picked up unconscious Oxana and then dodged and slashed his way through the swastikids and bugbears to join us. The three of us put our backs to each other and waited, weapons raised. For a moment it almost looked like a stalemate, except for the fact we were clearly losing. Three or four more bugbears oozed out of the ceiling and plopped to the floor, then raised themselves up on pseudo-legs so they looked like larger, hairless versions of the Nightmare Children. This was turning into an evil-jelly jamboree, and I really didn't like the odds.

“Save the fire, Halyna,” I said as she aimed the nozzle.

“Why? They will kill us!”

“Trust me. It's the only thing we know that works. We may need it to make an escape route.”

“Escape route!” Clarence's voice was hoarse, and he sounded like he was close to losing his composure. Fighting supernatural creatures can do that to you. “That's a good one.”

“Hang in there, Harrison. We've still got blades. I've still got a bunch of silver bullets and so do both of you. I'll tell you when to go to the guns.”

And then the nearest bugbears suddenly rose up like cobras, spreading themselves at the top as they surged toward us, humping up and down like fast and furious caterpillars. I slashed at the leading attackers with my machete, but the bugbears were wedged together so tightly it was like trying to chop the top off an entire ocean wave made of putty—I'd get through one and the blade would get stuck in the next, or the next. Also, the silver bothered them, but it didn't kill them like it did the Nightmare Children.

We gave ground, but they were forcing us back against the nearest wall. I grabbed the first shieldlike object I could find, a broken Chinese screen, and used it as a bulldozer blade, trying to shove a way through them so we could make a run for it, but although it kept the nearest of the rubbery creatures off my face, the screen was too flimsy. One of the bugbears just reared up and flowed over the top of it like an octopus pulling a crab out of a hole. The monster's weight nearly collapsed everything on top of me, so I let go and scrambled out of the way. A few seconds later the Chinese screen broke and disappeared under a mass of rampaging jelly.

Just when the wave of purple-black death had risen up so high in front of us that I was about to let Halyna buy us a few more seconds (because long-term planning takes second place to short-term not dying) the bugbears around us started to erupt in flashes of fire, a stitchery of sparkling little explosions that blew them instantly into smaller pieces, some of which continued to burn. A man-sized figure was running toward us through the flailing, smoking blobs. Our savior wore a shabby overcoat, and waved a pistol with a big silencer on the end. No, not just big, immense. I mean, it looked like something you'd see in specialty porn.

I confess to being surprised. “
Sam?
What the—?”

“Sam!” yelled Clarence. He sounded like a kid spotting his dad in the Little League stands.

My old buddy leaped over a bubbling pile of bugbear glop. Watching Sam jump is a bit like watching a rhino trying to fly, but I have to admit he got pretty good air, even though he didn't quite stick the landing. “Talk later,” he said as he skidded to a tumbling halt beside me, almost knocking me over. An ugly, rubbery tentacle had wrapped around my leg, and I was busy hacking it off before its owner could get a more intimate grasp on me. “I've only got one more clip of these incendiaries,” Sam said, panting as he climbed back onto his feet. “If I'd known you were fighting the fuckin' Shmoos I would have bought one of those crazy-ass drum magazines.”

I cut myself free, then got out my backup blade, a big old Bowie, and handed it to Sam. God, it felt good to see him, even if it just meant we were going to get fatally slimed together. “Silver-edged. It's great on the spidery guys, not so much on the jellies. Give 'em a little more fire when you're ready, and we'll make a break for it.”

“I told you I'd try to make it to your party,” he said.

Even in the midst of the ongoing nightmare, I was irritated. “You did no such fucking thing! I left you about a hundred messages.”

“I wasn't talking to you, I was talking to the kid.”

“Thanks,” said Clarence.

I decided to let the matter slide for now. “Let's get going before we destroy any more of our priceless cultural heritage, people.” I wasn't really making a joke—what had happened to the West Asian collection was pretty horrifying,

Oxana was still unconscious if not worse. I unbuckled her empty silver nitrate tank, then lifted her. She let out a moan of discomfort as I threw her over my shoulder, so at least she was still alive. “Light 'em up!” I shouted. “We're getting out of here.”

Sam swung his Glock toward the thinnest part of the wall of ugliness before us. I don't know what kind of suppressor he had on it, but for something that looked like it should be mail-ordered from the Big Jim Steele catalogue, it worked damn good. Even right next to him, I could hardly hear the sound of the shots, but I could see what they did, and I liked it. When they went off inside the gelatin-monsters, the monster blew to bits. Some shots cut through the nearest bugbears without exploding, but then blew up others farther back. Blazing jelly was flying everywhere, and some of it landed among the remaining Nightmare Children, who scurried away in flames.