The Paladin Prophecy (43 page)

“They were here eons before humans,” said Dave. “They’re our distant predecessors. Not ancestors.
Ancestor
implies lineage. They’re
not
human, but a different breed altogether. Hence
predecessors
. As in, prior
inhabitants
of Earth.”

An older race. Someone else told me something like this recently. Coach Jericho
.

“Back in their day,” said Dave, “these Old Ones made a thorough bollocks of the premises and ran afoul of the Hierarchy.”

“How?”

“They were smart. Wicked smart. They built empires and wonders that make humans’ great achievements look like squiggles in a sandbox. And the bigger they dreamed, the further they sailed off course. They lost their moral compass a million miles at sea, which led them into wrong thinking and the development of what we call
aphotic technology
.”

“What’s
aphotic
mean?”

“Without light,” said Dave.

In the flickering light of the dice, Will saw strobing images of vast laboratories filled with towering slabs of unfathomable machinery, manned by huge, shadowy inhuman figures.

“That’s when they stuck their skizzers in where they shouldn’t have mucked about. With their infernal tinkering, they abused the primal tool kit and brought all manner of unnatural creatures into this world that were never meant to be.”

Will saw row after row of transparent canisters filled with rank, roiling substances. Suspended in them grew shockingly deformed creatures of all shapes, species, and sizes.

“They twisted the earth’s flora and fauna into a catalogue of nightmares: bugs, beasts, bacteria, whatever they could lay their hands on. They tainted codes, perverted blueprints, and made the world a butcher’s picnic beyond the end of madness. Unable to stand idly by any longer, and in spite of our eternal hands-off policy to let locals sort things out for themselves, the Hierarchy intervened.”

“What happened?” whispered Will

“Suffice it to say, these bad boys did not go quietly.”

The visions bombarding Will shifted. Now he looked down on a grim, befouled earth where explosions erupted from a surface rent by titanic storms, earthquakes, and massive tidal waves. A global cataclysm.

“After a period of time referred to as the Great Unpleasantness, we banished the whole rotten horde of them to the confines of an interdimensional holding area. Or, if you will, a prison.”

Above a barren arctic landscape, a gigantic shimmering scythe slashed open a hole in the sky, revealing the hellish wasteland Will had glimpsed once before.

“Otherwise known as the Never-Was,” said Will.

“Yes,” said Dave.

Dark demonic legions driven by a gleaming host of warriors passed through the glowing, fiery portal. When the last of their shadowy masses had gone through, the portal slammed shut and vanished with a finality that made Will’s blood run cold.

The Gates of Hell
.

“So this lot isn’t
from
a different dimension; they’re from
here
. They’re now
in
a different dimension, very much against their will. Most of their misbegotten handiwork went with them, but we missed a few lurking in dark corners. When a new apex species emerged from the primordial kettle, the
human
race, those last, fugitive remnants became the monsters of all our early myths and legends.”

More images appeared, mythical creatures of land, sea, and air terrorizing primitive man: flying serpents, werewolves, deepwater leviathans, a complete zoology of horror.

“Over the last millennium,” said Dave, “the Old Ones have been trying to restake their claim on the planet. And they’ve recruited some of our own
—human
collaborators—to help them.”

“The Black Caps,” whispered Will. “The Knights.”

“The latest in a long line of strong men and women with weak minds,” said Dave. “For hundreds of years, the Old Ones have corrupted them with gifts of aphotic technology, ideas and inventions that make them worldly fortunes. That’s how they turn them against their own kind. And with every betrayal, the Other Team moves closer to breaking through and regaining control of Earth.”

The bright light and visions ended abruptly, withdrawing into the black dice. Dave stuck the cube back in his pocket and walked through the other side of the MRI machine.

“Okay, fine,” said Will. “But what do they want with
me
? I’m nobody. I’m just a kid. I have nothing to do with this—”

“That’s where you’re wrong, mate,” said Dave, leaning in. “Turns out they’ve got a bloody good reason that was in front of us this whole time.”

“Which is …?”

“You’re one of us,” said Dave. “What we call an Initiate. A member of the Hierarchy.”

Will’s mind froze. He couldn’t even respond.

“Think about it, Will. All those nasty bits sent across to take you out, all this relentless pursuit. There’s big doings in store for you before you’re home and hosed, my friend.”

“That’s why you’re here? To protect me because I’m an … an …”

“Initiate,”
said Dave. “And the baddies know that once you’re in training, as your case officer I can only intervene a limited number of times—”

“Training? What training? I haven’t started any
training—
”

“Don’t be thick, mate. The Hierarchy doesn’t hand out Level Twelve security clearances like raffle tickets. You’ve started whether you know it or not—”

“Don’t I have any say in this?”

“Not anymore,” said Dave. “And as an Initiate, there’s two rules you need to mind. One, you’re now bound by a strict confidentiality agreement. Don’t even tell your pals about the Hierarchy, and beyond them, I wouldn’t trust another living soul at this point.”

Will glimpsed a flash of the avenging angel in Dave’s eye. “What’s the second rule?”

“Stay alive,” said Dave. “During your probationary period, I’m allowed to save your bacon nine times. And since we’re nearly halfway through your allocation, you’d best learn how to look after yourself, and fast.”

“But we’re not ‘nearly halfway,’ ” Will protested. “We’re only at
three;
that’s a
third
of the way—”

“Not anymore.” Dave held up four fingers and drew his long hybrid sidearm from its shoulder holster.

The lights went out.

BATTLEFIELD CONDITIONS

The computers and monitors in the lab and observation room went down with a dying thump. Kujawa hammered on the keyboard of his control panel.

“Another power failure?” asked Dr. Geist.

“Apparently so,” said Kujawa.

“Is everything backed up? We can’t lose this data.”

Robbins spoke into the mic. “Will? Will, can you hear me?”

Will opened his eyes. Only a dim gray glow from the window on the far side of the room penetrated the depths of the machine.

His body was pinned above the knees. Will choked back the impulse to flail around. He flexed and extended his feet, gripped the edges of the sled and dragged himself toward the opening. The pad on the sled bunched up beneath him, making progress nearly impossible. Within seconds he was drenched with sweat.

He heard a door swing open behind him on the other side of the machine. Not the one to the control room. A door he hadn’t noticed before.

Will closed his eyes and called up that grid into his mind’s eye. It fanned open and a sensory image of the room appeared all around him. He found the door, leading to a back staircase. He saw a tall, stooped figure standing on the threshold, holding a long tube in its hands. He heard a vacuum seal being broken.

Lyle
.

When that familiar nauseating odor reached him, it became much harder to hold on to anything like calm or sanity. A bright light exploded as Dave fired toward the front of the machine. Another beam shot across the room …

 … toward long thin forms skittering across the floor with the sickening patter of a thousand feet. Dave retreated and kept firing, but there were too many, more than a dozen, and they were moving too fast. The things leaped onto the sled, bodies coiling with squishy plops around Will’s ankles. He felt vicious rows of serrated teeth all along the length of their moist bodies. Will kicked frantically with his limited range of motion but he couldn’t shake them off.

He opened his eyes as they crawled into the cramped cavity of the tube and saw them in the dim light, sliding over his thighs and hips, inching toward his upper body. They looked like three-foot-long flat worms crossed with millipedes, and they were heading for his face.

Will sensed Lyle’s image pulse in the darkness beyond the door, sickness, pain, and rage radiating from his malignant form. Will “saw” him draw up and fire a thudding hammer blow from his twisted mind, aimed straight at his. If it landed, Will knew he’d have no chance; by the time these crawlies choked him, they’d be strangling a senseless shell.

Time slowed to a moment of nuclear focus. Will closed his eyes and searched with his mind for the largest nearby object he could find: Just outside the big picture window, he “saw” what looked like a tall, bare tree. Will hooked into it and yanked it toward him with all he had. There was a bright flash and a tremendous explosion of breaking glass as air pressure in the room plummeted. Wind and frigid cold reached his legs.

“We’ve got to get him out of there,” said Robbins in the darkness of the control room. She felt her way to the door.

At the moment Robbins opened the door from the observation room, a blinding flash of electricity arced across the length of the lab. A dark mass flew out of the storm toward the picture window and crashed through the glass, shattering it. A blast of snow and howling wind knocked Robbins back against the wall. At first she couldn’t make sense of this incongruent object thrusting into the room. Then she recognized its shape.

It was a telephone pole.

The shock of the explosion broke Lyle’s concentration. His killshot dissolved before it reached Will. Lyle turned and scurried down the stairs, but his creatures crawled closer, four of them slithering over Will’s chest, closing in on his face. Screaming with super-human effort, Will gripped the sides of the sled and pushed a blank mind picture at the back of the tube behind him. With a wrenching crack, the sled’s armature gave way.

The sled shot out of the machine and hurtled across the room. Will rolled off toward the ground, slapping the worms away as he fell. He landed, turned, and saw Dave standing his ground, a still figure in whirling snow. It was snowing
inside
. Dave fanned the hammer of his gun, blasting the last of the worms. They exploded, clots of green acid splattering the sides of the MRI machine.

The lights came back on in the lab, ceiling fixtures swinging in the wind. A telephone pole jutted through the picture window, trailing torn cables like broken puppet strings. Dave was gone.

Will saw Lillian Robbins on the ground, near where the sled had hit the wall, staring at him. Power kicked back into the pole and electrified the loose black cables dangling around it. They arced and danced on the ground, thrashing in Robbins’s direction, inches from striking her.

Will scrambled to his feet. Without thinking, he created a mind picture that reached out and grabbed the lines like an unseen hand gripping a cluster of venomous snakes. Manipulating the picture, he coiled the sizzling lines back around the downed pole, where they landed and sparked against a transformer box before shorting out and dying.

Robbins rose to her knees. Geist and Kujawa rushed into the lab and helped her to her feet. All three of them looked at Will. He was shivering in just his running shoes and shorts, thick snow swirling around him. Fried electrodes dropped off his torso like burned buttons.

“Are you … all right?” Robbins asked.

“I think so,” said Will. “What happened?”

“The power went out and that pole came … through the window,” said Geist.

“Freak gust of wind,” said Kujawa.

“Had to be,” said Geist, out of breath. “Macroburst, or a wind shear …”

“Some kind of electrical explosion,” said Kujawa.

They looked at him, and Will thought, briefly, about telling them,
Well, when I’m about to die, apparently I can move things with my mind
. He turned and saw the rest of the lab, much of it ravaged and smoking from the acidic explosions, including big sections of the MRI machine’s shell.

Then he remembered Dave’s warning about their confidentiality agreement.

“Rotten luck with the machines today, Doc,” said Will.

Kujawa nodded, speechless. No one spoke. Wind whipped around the room, and as his adrenaline subsided, the cold hit Will like an anvil. Kujawa hustled him into an empty ward and wrapped him in blankets while he checked his vitals. Will showed no serious ill effects and warmed quickly, although he felt weak and dizzy. But he knew the reason for that, and he wasn’t about to tell them about it.

A crowd gathered outside when the fire department showed up. Will heard them calling for a construction crane to remove the pole from the third floor. Will had just finished dressing when Lillian Robbins came back into the ward.

“I’ve paged your roommates,” said Robbins. “You can leave with them when they get here.”

“Okay,” said Will, tying his boots.

“Your parents are scheduled to arrive at four,” said Robbins, “but the storm’s diverted them north to Madison. Mr. McBride will drive them down in time for dinner. I’ve made a reservation in the faculty dining room. Mr. Rourke will join us as well.”

“I’d like to bring Brooke,” said Will. “If that’s all right.”

Robbins scrutinized him. “That would be fine.”

Will saw a look on Robbins’s face that he’d noticed before. Studying him, quizzical, deep in thought.

“Anything show up on the brain test?” asked Will. “I mean, before the whole lab blew up?”

“I’m not a neurologist. The doctors should go over this with you.”

Will felt a cold rush up his spine. “So you did see something.”

She studied him again. “Were you talking to yourself, Will?”