The Heavens Rise (30 page)

“What?”

“He’s turning for the east bank. He’s headed for Spanish Plaza.”

Spanish Plaza. The spot where Marshall Ferriot’s death plunge had been broken by his own father. How fitting.
How fitting, you monster
.
And that’s what this is about, isn’t it?
You’re not just taking out Anthem. You’re sending Nikki a message. And Ben had no choice but to relay it.

To Nikki, he said, “Spanish Plaza. The Hilton.”

Her eyes flashed, but then her icy calm returned, even as she drove like a kamikaze pilot.

“Have you evacuated the riverfront?” Ben asked.

“A tactical alert’s been sent out. NOPD’s been mobilized. But we’ve got the Hilton, One River Place . . . It’s the middle of the night. Those folks are asleep.”

“Then wake them up!”

The Jeep rocketed down the long expanse of the Ernest M. Morial Convention Center, and then Nikki pulled a hard right, tires screaming, before she could plow into the sidewall of Harrah’s Hotel and Casino. Cabs swerved out of their way as she careened into the large circular carport of the Hilton Hotel and Riverwalk Shopping Mall.

A woman in a bathrobe was staring into the Jeep’s headlights. Nikki slammed on the brakes, came within a foot of hitting her. The woman didn’t care. She took one look at Ben and kept running. She was too busy trying to get away from the Hilton’s entrance. And she wasn’t alone. Several bright lights were flashing above the hotel’s entrance doors, and more guests—most of them sleep-rumpled and in their nightclothes—were pouring out into the night while security guards
directed them away from the entrance and the fire alarm let out a series of bloodcurdling, automated screams.

Several NOPD cruisers squealed into the turnaround behind him, but they didn’t give two shits about the speeding Jeep that had beaten them there by a heartbeat. The uniformed cops sprang into action, directing guests away from the building.

Ben struggled out of the car, grateful that adrenaline had caused his nausea to wane. But his head was spinning, and the crowd of evacuees from the hotel was threatening to throw him off balance. Nikki was calling out to him from the other side of the Jeep, but he ignored her, focusing instead on a dazed-looking man in a half-unbuttoned plaid shirt and loose-fitting jeans. Plaid Shirt was doing a half-stumble, half-trot away from the lobby doors, because he was scanning the crowd around him for someone important.

 . . . and then he was a ten-year-old boy, standing at his mother’s bedside, reaching for her hand, and she was pale and gaunt and bald from chemo, but her fragile smile and her reach for her son’s hand was enough to comfort him . . .

He felt Nikki’s hand on his shoulder, but the world had gone silver, the crowd surging through the hotel’s circular driveway casting off ghostly impressions, and Plaid Shirt stood frozen, awaiting Ben’s commands.

“Let him go,” Nikki whispered into his ear. “Let him
go,
Ben!”

It wasn’t ego that had made him hesitate, but the same rich, delicious pleasure she’d described in her journal. It was like the peak of an orgasm, softened and sustained. And letting it go felt like yanking a half-chewed bite of ambrosia from his mouth.

The world returned to its normal, everyday colors in a seamless instant. And then it was just him, and his nausea, and the screaming fire alarm, and his best friend, back from the dead and glaring at him with a schoolteacher’s anger and intensity.

“I think I’m good to go,” Ben whispered.

She started pulling on his shoulder, then she ran for the opening in the concrete floodwall up ahead that served as the entrance to the Riverwalk Shopping Mall.

As soon as they entered the courtyard, they saw the ship. Its wheelhouse was tall enough to block out part of the glimmering Crescent City Connection bridge it had just left in its wake, and it was on a direct course for the riverbank, its approach silent but undeniable. The fire alarms from both the Hilton and One River Place, the condo high-rise just west of the hotel, sounded eerily distant now, like sci-fi sound effects from a neighbor’s television. The fountain behind him was off. And the plaza around him was just an expanse of empty concrete. No one to scream, no one to warn. Just wind-rattled tree branches and the deceptively gentle swish of the river water breaking across the approaching ship’s giant bow.

“We can’t drive him,” Nikki gasped, struggling for breath. “We’ll turn him into something so much worse than what he is now.”

“Then what the hell are going to do?”

Nikki started to spin in place, surveying their surroundings. He couldn’t tell if she was looking for something specific, or if it was panic that propelled her now. Then she went rigid. It couldn’t be the ferry landing that had stilled her. What could they possibly do with— Then he saw what was just beyond it and rising over the ferry landing’s elevated concrete walkway; the great parabolic sweep of green glass that enclosed the jungle exhibit at the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas.

•   •   •

“Sorry, folks. I wish I could do this another way. But I guess y’all just don’t want to get the message. Hell, if Katrina didn’t deliver it, I’m not sure I can. But I’ll try. I have to try. So here’s what I say to all those folks who called me a—” But Anthem’s voice sounded weak, and a small seizure shook Marshall’s sternum in time with Anthem’s every stammer.

Something was wrong. His ribs wanted to burst from his chest, he was sure of it.

Their speed had been over fifteen knots right before they went into the turn. Now they were crossing the current, which was slowing them down, but not by much. And he’d been fine then, his fears about Anthem’s overpowering soul flash seemed to have been for naught.

Then suddenly, it was all gone. Marshall had fallen to his knees on the metal floor and the world had been returned to its bleak, everyday colors, and several feet away, Anthem Landry’s entire body was shuddering, so severely it was visible even in shadows. It looked as if his shoulders were about to jerk up and out of their sockets, and Marshall realized the chattering sound was the man’s teeth knocking together. And his hold on him was gone. And when Marshall went to hook him again, the shadow that had been Anthem Landry turned on him, and in the green glow of the radar screens, he saw that the shoulders poised to lift free from Anthem Landry’s body had blossomed into impossible, dual swells that surged upward from the man’s arching back. Anthem’s eyes were gone, caverns of blackness that seemed to be devouring his entire face. But there was a channel of suddenly molten flesh pouring down the bridge of the man’s nose, lengthening it. And his stooped pose wasn’t correcting itself. He was standing upright. In fact, the man’s silhouette was expanding, lengthening.

It’s his spine,
Marshall realized.
His fucking spine is getting longer. That’s why he’s not standing up.

And then there were two clattering sounds, sharp and subtle given the nightmare unfolding before him, and in the radar screen’s glow, Marshall saw what had made them; two giant, matching talons that had slapped to the floor of the bridge in unison. And that’s when Marshall could no longer deny what the twin surges of shadow emerging from Anthem Landry’s rapidly lengthening back actually were.

“Wings,” he muttered aloud, before the wave of shadow surged toward him across the deck, emitting a piercing, shrieking sound that
emptied Marshall Ferriot’s bladder instantly. And then it felt as if he was being dragged across the metal floor by darkness itself.

•   •   •

The police officer had just finished shooting out four of the glass doors in the entrance to the Aquarium of the Americas when the ship’s great bow slammed into one corner of the ferry landing. The two-story skeletal steel structure gave way like kindling. And then, just as the pilot on the phone had predicted, the ship’s bow jerked upward, riding up and over the descending maelstrom of struts and support beams, driving them down into the maelstrom of muddy water. The ship kept going, the giant chains attached to its four loading cranes swaying.

Nikki drove the police officer to run in the opposite direction, toward Woldenberg Park, away from where Ben and Nikki now stood clutching each other just outside the now shattered entrance doors to the aquarium. The ground underneath their feet was trembling as the ship tore through yards of red bricks emblazoned with the names of the aquarium’s donors. Its approach across the water had appeared so lazy, it was almost impossible to believe that the deafening sounds of splintering wood and collapsing concrete were the results of its hull devouring the dock front.

Ben glanced over one shoulder, just as Nikki drove the cop to toss his gun over the railing into the river. Then, once he was a good sprint away from them, she released him and he literally spun in place, he was so disoriented.

Then he was knocked off his feet, and before he could think twice, he pulled Nikki down with him. The ship’s bow had slammed into the two-story wall of green glass that enclosed the Amazon Jungle exhibit, and the vast sweep of shattering glass was so loud and piercing, it was like a thousand children screaming at once.

Now that it had been stopped at a forty-five-degree angle with the bank, Ben scanned the length of the ship. The wheelhouse was still a
good two hundred feet out into the river. A dark shape was trying to fight its way out through the broken windows, but it was caught on a long series of empty metal window frames. Then, with one powerful thrust, the dark shape hurled itself forward and the entire row of empty window frames popped free and somersaulted through open air down to the main deck.

A pair of wings pushed their way through the new, elongated opening, unfurling suddenly to a span of at least fifteen feet, as dark and solid as the hull of the ship itself. Then the creature dropped from the front of the wheelhouse, revealing two legs shaped like those of a giant human but covered in the same glittering, obsidian feathers that plated its enormous wings. On its way down the thing buoyed itself with several awkward wing-pumps, then it landed feet-first atop the grain hatches.

Ben glimpsed the creature’s foreshortened arms, crossed against the chest as if it wasn’t quite sure how to use them, enormous talons latticing each other. Five curving nails on each claw? Could it be possible? The same number as fingers on a human hand. Then the giant creature raced down the length of the ship, wings spread to keep the disproportionate body upright as it ran.

Nikki had seen it too, and she was getting to her feet, slowly, using both hands to brush her hair back from her forehead, as if she thought the creature might be a trick played by her bangs.

He was visited again by the same two words that had coursed through his brain when he’d seen those awful photos.
Mind monster.
And Nikki was shaking her head, her hands gripping the top of her skull now.

“Come on,” she said.

When he didn’t move right away, she grabbed him by the hand and pulled him to his feet, then she turned and kicked out the remaining glass in the bullet-pierced door, all the while holding his hand as if he were a child who might try to flee.

M
arshall had been so sure the creature was going to drop him in the river, he started kicking the second he hit the water, determined to keep himself floating above the treacherous currents that flowed just beneath the surface. But now his feet brushed sand and when he broke the surface, he heard screaming emergency alarms all around him, along with the wet, thwacking sounds of debris slamming against concrete.

He was inside the aquarium. The damn thing had flown right into the soaring Amazon Jungle exhibit and dropped him into one of the open-air fish tanks. The glass wall had been cracked in a dozen places, and water was spewing out onto the debris-strewn walkway so fast the level inside the tank was dropping. Marshall threw his arms over the steel rim in an intact portion of the glass wall and managed to swing one leg over the side, then the other. When he dropped to the walkway, he sensed a great movement high above him. A shifting of something
massive and not quite steady. It was up there, somewhere, perched atop the giant thatched tree house that hung high above the exhibit; a dark shadow, wings folded against its newly formed back.

Silent, watching.

There was a sharp, high-pitched crash from high above. Marshall thought it might be the creature, until he saw the thing’s shadow jerk in startled response. A quadrant of steel framing and shattered glass had pulled free of the shattered ceiling, sending daggers plunging into the jungle foliage a few feet away. He heard a soft pop nearby, another tank giving way. But the creature was still up there, the creature that had been Anthem Landry just moments before. It was still Anthem. It had been made from him. He’d watched it happen. What would happen if he—

Something seemed to explode in the air right in front of him, and his first thought was that the creature had descended on him, and he was preparing to hook the damn thing when there was an explosion of white-hot pain in the center of his skull, piercing and flowing. Feathers slapped his face and there was a blast of wild, rank stench. A bird. A real bird, normal size, and it had just taken a bite out of his face. There was another explosion in the air a few feet away; this one right behind him. Feathers slapped his neck. And another. He was still spinning. They were attacking silently, one after the other. Three were as many as he could count from the blasts of their wings. He focused on their blasts, tried to hook them, but he couldn’t. It was like scraping his hands against a steel door. Because they were already hooked.

Another one landed a searing, direct hit, tearing a chunk of flesh from his eyelid. He screamed despite himself, felt his knees slam to the concrete.
They’re going for my eyes. She’s here. She’s here and she’s trying to blind me.
Then he heard one of them slap to the concrete next to them, and then another. And a third, and the air around him felt still suddenly.

He was wiping the blood from his eyes, blinking furiously, telling himself they hadn’t pierced his eyeball, that he would be in agony if
they had, and that when he was able to see again, he’d see them littering the walkway around him, their skulls exploded like all the animals who were subjected to a power like his own.