Hellgate London - Exodus Part 26

"After everything you've seen even in the short time that you've been here, if you don't see a difference in these people, you never will." Simon's voice had an irritated edge to it that he hadn't intended.

"Point taken." Leah took a breath and a new tack. "What about the people who choose to ignore the high command and decide to have kids anyway?"

Simon kept his voice neutral, getting the feeling that she was testing him for some reason and not knowing what that was. "There are consequences. People get pa.s.sed over for promotion. Housing needs are met, but wants are ignored. Special privileges are revoked."

" *Special privileges'?"

"Some of the Templar are permitted to work outside the Underground." "Why?"

Simon sipped his tea and found it still almost too hot. "To observe." "Observe what?"

"Politics. Economics. Developments in technology."

"The Templar seem withdrawn from society. And their technology is ahead of anything anyone else seems to have."

"When it comes to weapons, yes. But the Templar know they're too focused when it comes to tech development. Medicine is just as important, but they don't have the resources to follow up on it. The Templar exist separately from the rest of the world, but are not cut off. They're here-we'rehere-to guard the rest of the world against the demons."

Simon had realized how much he'd cut himself off from the Templar and had tried to change that. But it sounded awkward acting like he was one of them as well. That had been the way it had always been.

"Then why aren't the Templar bringing the other survivors in the city here? Why are they leaving them out there to fend for themselves?"

"Because coming here isn't the answer. If we brought them back here, the demons would follow." Simon breathed calmly even though he was angry because she didn't already see the answer to her question. And perhaps he was partly conflicted with memory of those hard-pressed survivors he'd seen while trekking into the city. "The sacrifice those warriors made on All Hallows' Eve will have been in vain. We have rations here, a plan in place that will carry us through the fight with the demons, but we can't afford to take on a lot of untrained personnel."

Leah looked at him. "What happens to me? I'm untrained personnel." Simon sat back and didn't answer. He honestly didn't know.

"Simon Cross."

Waking immediately, groggy from the lack of sleep and achy from the pounding he'd taken the night they'd been attacked, Simon looked up and spotted Bruce Martindale pulling on his armor next to the bed. Bruce was Derek's second-in-command. He was young and arrogant, everything a Templar should be.

Taking the man's lead, Simon sat up and started pulling armor on. "What's going on?" Simon asked. "We pulled an a.s.signment." Bruce shrugged into his breastplate. "We're going outside."

"What is it?" Simon stepped into his boots.

"When you need to know," Bruce replied, "you'll be told."

Simon nodded. He hated the abrupt manner the other Templar showed toward him. But there was nothing he could do to change it. He concentrated on the promise he'd made to his father. That was the most important thing. He didn't intend to break it again.

The readout on Simon's HUD showed the time as 3:14 a.m. He'd gotten a little over two hours' sleep after his conversation with Leah had dwindled away to nothing. When he'd returned to the barracks, he hadn't been able to sleep at first. He dampened his audio and yawned, a real jaw-creaker that bordered on painful. It was enough to make his eyes water.

Traces of white snow gleamed on the streets, windowsills, and buildings, and on the wrecked cars, double-decker buses, and military vehicles and tanks mired in the street. Weak moonlight barely chased back the pitch-black shadows draping the urban landscape. There were no lights, no flames or lanterns or candles to light the existence of anyone who still lived in the city.

After two years of guiding clients through the wild outside Cape Town, the city of London looked strange. And dangerous. Gargoyles sat atop some of the buildings, and Simon knew it would be hard to separate them from the demons that might be lurking.

The Chelsea district where they were now was generally thought of as well-to-do. Residential houses in the area were very expensive. Simon had pa.s.sed through the district with his father.

"There's a house just off King's Road," Derek announced in a quiet voice to the twenty Templar ma.s.sed in the tube station. "I'm giving you the location now."

A light pulsed on Simon's HUD, signaling the upload of a map. Superimposed on the viewscreen, a street map took shape. King's Road was clearly marked. The Thames was only a short distance away. "This is our target," Derek said.

A red dot formed on the map half a block off King's Road seventeen long blocks from their present position inside the Sloane Street tube station.

"One of the lads in the research division sniffed out an artifact we're supposed to lay hands to," Derek went on. "A book."

A few of the men shifted tensely. "A book?" one named Waverly asked with a trace of doubt. "They want us to risk our lives for a book?"

"It's rumored to be a memoir," Derek went on. "Supposed to be written by a mad monk that escaped demonic captivity."

"Never heard of the like," Waverly said. "Neither had I," Derek admitted.

"Brother Cargill," Simon said before he realized he was going to speak. The Templar's helmets turned toward him.

"That's right," Derek said. "I was given an image of the book."

The image of a large leather-bound book popped onto Simon's viewscreen.

"What do you know of it, Simon?" Derek asked. "I wasn't given any real information. Just that they wanted the book."

"Brother Cargill was the man who discovered the Ravager corpse in a display case in the Rorke Museum." Simon couldn't believe no one else knew the story. "I remember Brother Cargill," Amanda Peyer said.

Simon vaguely remembered the young woman from school days. She'd been more successful with the sword than with the pen.

"My father told me the story," Simon said. "Brother Cargill was supposed to have traveled with King Richard I in 1189 during the Third Crusade. Cargill maintained that Frederick I, the Holy Roman Emperor, called Barbarossa for his red beard, was murdered by a demon rather than dying by accidental drowning as everyone believed."

"We don't exactly need a history lesson here," someone growled.

"Frederick's untimely death put an end, more or less, to the Third Crusade," Derek said. "Philip II of France decided to leave. After he did, Richard couldn't do anything more. He had to make a truce with Saladin."

"Cargill returned to England with Richard," Simon said. "But he was supposed to have a fabled book that told of Frederick's murder at the hands of the demon."

"If the demons could come through a thousand years ago, why didn't they come through then?" No one had an answer.

"Cargill said he'd been taken prisoner by the demon," Simon went on. "The way he told it, the demon took him to their world for a time." When his father had mentioned that, he'd had nightmares that night imagining what that must have been like.

"Why did they take him?"

"Cargill didn't know. He made his escape shortly after that when the demon brought him back to our world."

"Can't believe the fiends didn't kill Cargill outright," someone said.

"The Templar reported that Cargill was crazed by his capture," Simon said. "They didn't believe anything Cargill said about being taken to the demon world. They didn't doubt the Ravager corpse because they had it, but the things Cargill had claimed to have seen, a burned and scarred land, was beyond anything anyone wanted to believe." "Like h.e.l.l itself," Bruce said.

"Like what they're doing to London," someone else said.

"On the way back to England," Simon continued, "the Templar joined up with Richard I. They were shipwrecked during a storm and beached in Austria. Duke Leopold, Richard's longtime enemy, captured him and ransomed him to Emperor Henry VI, who had taken over Germany. Cargill finished his memoirs in Austria while they were waiting to be ransomed. But the book went missing there, too." For a moment no one said anything.

Simon stared out at the long, dark street.

"Well," Derek said, "that book's supposed to have turned up in Chelsea now. At that house on King's Road. And it's up to us to get it. Ferrell, you've got point."

Ferrell moved out at once. The other Templar followed a slight distance behind.

Twenty-Nine.

Feeling suffocated and trapped inside the MRI machine, Warren willed himself to remain calm while the medical people inspected the changes taking place within his body. The itching was almost unbearable, making it even harder to lie still while they moved him around with the aid of the conveyor belt that ran through the machine.

He thought he could actually feel the scales growing and multiplying across his body, sliding under his old skin and locking into place. He knew-he hoped!-that wasn't true and that it was only his imagination.

At first he'd thought the scales might be some kind of scab, something that could be removed. In fact, with the aid of a knife that Tulane had lent him, Warren had tried to remove one of the scales. That was when he'd found out the scales were as much a part of him as his skin was. Had been,he reminded himself.

He'd succeeded in removing the scale, but it had proven incredibly painful. It had bled only for a moment, though, then had sealed off. By the time Tulane had convinced him to come to the medical lab, a white blister had formed over the area where the scale had been. Warren felt certain a new scale was already growing there to replace the one that he'd torn away.

The machinery hummed and buzzed around Warren. He forced himself to concentrate on his breathing and not act on the panic that filled him.

Then, mercifully, the conveyor belt rolled him back out of the MRI machine.

The physician pointed at the image of Warren lying naked in the air on the tri-dee projector as he spoke. Warren guessed that the man was around forty, old enough to have a lot of experience with medical ailments, but young enough that he was still up on breaking information.

Not only that, but if Warren could even find another trained physician to examine him, that physician wouldn't have been trained in the ways of monsters as Tulane's man was. In the end, there was nowhere else to go for answers. Or help.

Feeling somewhat nauseous, Warren stared at his image. The tri-dee rendered a ghostly image of his body-although on a two-foot scale-that floated naked in midair. He felt embarra.s.sed over that, but the horror and worry about his physical condition outweighed that.

"As you can see," the physician said, "the third-degree burns have obviously replenished lost tissue as well as coating those areas with the scales."

"How do you know tissue has been replenished?" Tulane asked. He stood at the head of the table and looked on with keen interest.

"From the nature of third-degree burns," the physician replied. "Any time a patient suffers one of those, there is tissue damage and loss."

"Doesn't the body normally replenish lost tissue? I've suffered wounds myself that have healed up and filled in."

"Yes. But only to a degree. Burn scarring tends to impede such a recovery. That's why one of the treatments is to strip the dead flesh away and encourage new flesh to grow. It's not always successful." The physician shook his head. "And never like this. If you look at those burn areas, you'll see that the flesh has filled in, returning Mr. Schimmer's body and features to normal." "Only with scales."

"Yes." The physician punched keys on the board. The view tightened up on Warren's left arm, focusing on the burn area covered with greenish-black scales. "Interestingly, though, those new patches of flesh-as well as the scales-possess a different DNA from Mr. Warren's."

"A different DNA?"

The physician nodded. More b.u.t.tons were pressed and two DNA marking charts showed up on the tri-dee. "Here is Mr. Warren's." The top DNA string glowed.

"And this is the-well, theother DNA." The bottom string of DNA glowed then.

Warren didn't know much about DNA or how it was charted. He remembered from school that there was something about a double strand that coiled around and around that made it unique, but that was all.

He sat there feeling helpless, hating every moment of it. "Have you identified the DNA?" Tulane asked.

"No. But I can tell you what it isn't."

Tulane waited.

The physician licked his lips and raked his hair back with his fingers. "It isn't human, or from any species that is logged in the computer files."

Not human.Warren stared in growing horror at the scales that covered his skin where the burned areas were.

"Warren's DNA is not human?" Tulane asked.

Concentrating, Warren summoned his attention and tried to listen to Tulane and Haggarty, the physician. The two of them had continued talking between themselves, never seeming to notice the mental shape Warren was in.

"Yes," Haggarty replied. "I can't detect anything untoward or different about it."

Warren stared at Tulane, wondering how it was the man might think he wasn't human. Then he realized that growing scales was a good argument that he wasn't.

"Warren's body now has two different DNA signatures?" Tulane asked.

The physician nodded. "That's not impossible even for a normal human. Say for instance that Mr. Schimmer had been a twin within the womb. If a chimeric resolution had come about-that's where one twin literally absorbs the other twin after it died-that could account for the differing DNA."

"But you would have two human DNA signatures," Tulane said. "Exactly." Haggarty shook his head. "This second DNAisn't human."

Warren stared at the scales, wanting nothing more than to get a knife and sc.r.a.pe them away like a fisherman cleaning a fish. Even if he'd been able to stand the pain and didn't mind risking losing the use of his arm, he remembered how hard it had been to get a single scale away from the crust that covered him. "We have DNA samples from demons that you can do comparisons with," Tulane said.

"I know," Haggarty said. "I did comparisons. The second DNA is close to those samples we have, but they don't match."

"You think they're demonic in nature." "I do."

Tulane stared at Warren's image. Breathing out slowly, Tulane whispered, "Fascinating."

Warren looked at the two men, not believing how quietly and calmly, howthoroughly, they conducted their business. Then again, they weren't the one who had been infected.

"I don't understand how this happened," Warren whispered.

Glancing over his shoulder at Warren, the physician said, "Nor do I, Mr. Schimmer. I've never seen anything like this." He returned his attention to the image. "But it is my belief that the scales grew there to heal you. Maybe even to protect you."

"Protect him?" Tulane echoed. "Protect him from what?" Notwhat,Warren thought anxiously.Protect me from whom. "How much have the scales spread?" Warren asked.

"I believe the original catalyst took root in the burned areas," Haggarty said. He tapped keys and the burned areas on Warren glowed. "Those areas also show the highest concentration of the scales."

Warren let his breath out as he stared at his injuries.

"But the scales are spreading," the physician said. "For the moment they're content to remain subdural, except in the heavily damaged areas. There they've surfaced." He paused. "Maybe they're more protective in those areas."

"As if they recognize a weakness?" Tulane asked.

Haggarty hesitated. "To say something like that would be like calling them an ent.i.ty." "Perhaps they are."

"You mean like a parasite?" "If you will."