The Fold: A Novel Part 53

FIFTY-FIVE.

Even at his angle, Mike saw Jamie stumble in the sand on the other side of the Door and stagger away. He took a swaying step to the right, but she was already gone.

He counted five minutes, twenty-two seconds until the charge went off. He made a mental countdown timer and gave it the ants to hold for him.

The patchwork man glared through the rings after Jamie for a moment. Then he reached down and poked at the seraph. He shifted his fingers, looking for some sign of life. He sighed, and his crooked shoulders heaved.

Mike considered reaching for the pistol on the floor and rejected the idea. Crouching or bending over would not be advisable. He took a few moments to find his balance. The gash on his side was longer than his hand, but he didn't think there was any danger of anything falling out or getting worse. He could still move.

The seraph with the chunk of metal in its head took a few quick steps up the ramp and onto the pathway. It walked through the Door without hesitation. Mike saw it march off across the desert, following Jamie's footprints. He heard her yell in the distance.

The patchwork man still glared into the rings. On the far side of the ramp, hidden from the creature, Sasha lay in a heap. She'd been thrown down by the explosion. He saw a small cut below her ear, another on the side of her neck, and some seepage on her st.i.tches, but not much blood. He counted to four and watched her chest expand with a slow, steady breath.

Mike took a few deep breaths of his own. The air tasted wrong.

He pushed himself away from the workstation, and fishhooks of pain tore at his side. The temperature in the room had dropped ten degrees already. The nitrogen was stealing all of the heat. Which also meant it was displacing all the oxygen in the room.

He forced himself to move. His attempt to run was more of a controlled stagger. Every time he swung his right leg the fishhooks pulled at his ribs and threw his balance off. He was pretty sure Arthur would've outrun him. He glanced back. Twisting his neck and shoulders didn't make his ribs feel any better.

The patchwork man came after him in long strides. It was like watching an old cartoon character move, rolling its legs forward one after the other. It flexed its half-frozen arm.

Where was the other seraph? Was there one? Was it just the patchwork man?

Mike hobbled toward the door, then cut back between the small forest of tool chests. The black one banged again as he moved past it. One of the rivets burst and the side panel pushed out a bit.

On the other side of the tool chest was Staff Sgt. Jim Duncan. His body was half covered by the seraph he'd killed as he died. The monster's corpse had forced the Marine's rifle away from him as it fell.

Mike dropped to his knees and pushed Duncan's cold finger off the trigger. He yanked at the rifle. A strap bound it to his arm in what was probably a very efficient way under other circ.u.mstances.

He heard sounds behind him. The slap of a bare foot on concrete. The tap of toenails that were too long. The wheels squeaking on a tool chest as it was pushed out of the way.

Mike pulled at the rifle again. The strap shifted, twisted, but didn't come loose. The ants diagrammed the strap, studied the body, traced lines of tension. His finger darted out to stab at a clasp, and the rifle was in his hands.

He rolled over, making his wounds shriek, and fired a burst of shots into the hand reaching for him. The patchwork man snarled. Two fingers spun away. Another swung on a trio of loose st.i.tches.

Mike squeezed the trigger again and again and again. The rifle bucked in his arms as he tried to mimic the Marines' firing stance while laying on the ground. Half his shots went wild. Three more skimmed the creature's flesh. Two of those plucked at the st.i.tches holding the thing together. The rest drove the creature back a few steps.

The rifle snapped empty after the sixth burst.

Blood leaked from half a dozen wounds across the patchwork man's body. It didn't seem to notice any of them. A single finger came up and bobbed side to side. The creature made a clucking noise, the sound of a disappointed teacher.

A roar of wind came from the rings. Behind the patchwork man, sand blew out of the Door. It pattered against the pathway and the floor and the bodies.

The patchwork man froze. Its expression softened and its eyes widened, even the tiny ones. The shredded lips quivered and flexed on either end.

"At last," it whispered. "My Lord has arrived."

Under the sound of wind, Mike could hear something else. A thrumming, rippling sound, like air pounding against a huge kite or flag. As it increased, the wind picked up.

The patchwork man turned to the rings and Sasha cracked it across the jaw with the rifle stock. The blow wrenched its head around. It straightened back, and she hit it again. This time a few teeth pinged against the toolbox.

Mike struggled to his feet.

Sasha tried to swing a third time, and the patchwork man grabbed her arm, squeezing the line of st.i.tches and bandages. She screamed. The rifle clattered to the floor. The creature grabbed her by the throat, sinking its jagged fingernails into her flesh.

Mike grabbed his empty rifle by the barrel and swung it like a baseball bat. It cracked into the back of the patchwork man's skull. Mike ignored the pain in his side and swept the rifle back to hit it again.

The patchwork man staggered. Sasha dropped to the floor and slapped her hands over her throat. Her fingers were wet and red.

It turned to look down at Mike. Its human eye was dilated. "I will beg my Lord's forgiveness," it muttered, "for having no worthy food for his arrival. You are not worthy of joining with him."

Mike drove the rifle stock up into its face. The patchwork man stumbled back and crashed against the toolbox. Then it tumbled to the ground and tipped the steel case over on top of itself. A rain of fuses spilled over it.

It didn't move. It was still breathing, though.

Sasha wheezed. Mike dropped the empty rifle and kneeled by her. "Did it cut an artery? Your windpipe?"

"Can't breathe," she croaked.

"It's the nitrogen in the air. Try to be calm." He touched her fingers. "Let me see."

She shook her head and flinched back.

"Can you feel it pulsing against your hand? If it cut your carotid, it should feel like you're blocking a hose."

She shook her head again, a little slower.

"Trust me," he said. "Let me see."

Sasha closed her eyes. Her fingers pulled away from her throat. They were sticky with blood, and more of it ran down to stain the collar of her shirt.

It was a steady stream, though, not a pulse.

"You're going to be okay," he said. "It looks a lot worse than it is. Come on." He pulled her to her feet.

She pressed one hand against her throat and pointed at the patchwork man with the other. "What about Frankenstein?"

"Why didn't you just shoot it?"

"Because unlike some supposed f.u.c.king geniuses," she said, "I wasn't going to spray gunfire in the direction of one of my friends."

"Sorry."

"Forget it."

"So now we're friends?"

"f.u.c.k off. What are we doing with him?"

"Nothing for now. We've got four minutes nine seconds until that charge blows." Mike hobbled toward the Door. The new wave of adrenaline and endorphins were helping to hide the pain.

She glanced at the patchwork man, scooped up her rifle, and followed Mike. "It's not enough. It won't destroy the Door."

"I know. But we need to get Jamie first."

"How?"

He crouched down and grabbed one of the nitrogen hoses. The blast had flung most of it to the far side of the room, but the heavy f.l.a.n.g.e that had connected it to the rings was still near the ramp. He stood up and dragged more of it over. The far end was ragged from the explosion, but there was still over forty feet. "I'm going after her."

Sasha looked at the sand and dust whirling out of the wasteland. The winds on the other side of the Door weren't hurricane strength, but they didn't look much lower. She'd read stories about sandstorms cutting people apart and wondered how much truth there was to them.

And then the light shifted in the wasteland. She looked up through the shimmering haze around the rings and saw something dark stretch across the sky. It could've been a cloud, but it seemed too solid and too fast. Under the noise of the wind she thought she heard something, like a rumbling voice, and it was- "Take this," Mike said. He shoved the end of the hose closest to the f.l.a.n.g.e into her hands.

She blinked and looked at it. "What? Why?"

"I'm going to run the hose through the Door." He pointed at the whirling sand. It seemed to be dying down, but there was no way to be sure. "I'm hoping it'll act like a lifeline. Give me something to follow through all of that. Maybe it'll help keep the Door open, too. Keep it from switching to another reality."

"And if it does switch?"

"Then I guess we'll end up somewhere else."

There were five dead Marines near the ramp. None of them had a sidearm. Mike didn't trust himself with a rifle. The ants had enough reference pictures to switch out the magazine on Black's pistol, but the pistol was two yards to the right, Black's body was to the left, and Mike didn't have time to search for the magazines.

He took a deep breath. The air by the rings smelled dry and dead, but there was more oxygen in it. He took another breath and his head cleared. He hadn't realized it had been fuzzy.

"Three minutes, forty seconds," he said. "If I'm not back in two, you should run for the parking lot. Maybe keep running."

"I'll be here," she said with a firm nod. She wrapped one hand around the hose and held her rifle one-handed with the other. "Go."

Mike gathered a loose coil of hose under his arm. He took three quick steps up the ramp and took one more breath. Sand was pouring out of the rings and sifting down through the expanded steel of the pathway. He tasted dust and concrete on his tongue.

He stepped through the Door.

FIFTY-SIX.

Mike stumbled in the sand. It was two feet higher on this side. The wind was burying the rings.

He marched forward. He didn't run. He didn't have the time or strength to fall and pick himself up again and again. When he had something to run to, then he'd run.

The hose stretched out behind him. It was eight feet, four inches from where Sasha stood to the threshold of the rings. He had just shy of thirty-four feet on the wasteland side, depending on if there was any stretch in the hose.

Pattern recognition kicked in fourteen feet from the rings. His eyes pa.s.sed over a series of ridges and folds in the sand. The ants conjured up models and extrapolations based on wind direction and acc.u.mulation. There was a body buried there, just a few inches down.

It had three arms. He considered the possibility that it was the rifle Jamie had grabbed, but all three limbs were crooked. And the body was too long.

He moved through the sand. The wind was dying down, but visibility still sucked. The wasteland had been drained of all color. All life.

Thirty-four feet of hose ran out very fast. He looked back at the rings and then out at the desert. The sandstorm was rolling off toward the horizon, but it was still dense enough to hide the canyon.

Something moved in the sandstorm. A shadow up in the air. He tried to reconstruct the glimpse he'd seen, but the ants kept shredding the images. Nothing could have wings that big.

"Jamie!" He counted to three and yelled again. The wasteland swallowed it up without a single echo.

A pair of black ants held up the mental timer. Three minutes, thirteen seconds.

He let the ragged end of the hose drop and kept walking. When he last saw Jamie she'd headed off to the left, so he headed that way, too. The ants kept track of steps and angles and direction. The few landmarks were mapped and cataloged.

The sun was in the wrong place. It was too high in the sky for late afternoon. And too far south. He didn't trust it for figuring directions.

He trudged through the sand. Jamie had been wearing a white shirt and faded jeans. Not an ideal combination to pick out of the wasteland, but he was pretty sure the same mental skills that let him pick out camouflage would let him spot her.

In the distance, the sandstorm swirled into a series of dust devils the size of tornados. The ants focused on certain lines and shadows near the twists of wind and sand. He felt a twist, thinking he'd found her and she was too far to make it back to the rings in time. Then he realized there were too many figures.

Eleven seraphs stood off in the distance, all but hidden in the wasteland by their cloaks. Some stood, others seemed to be kneeling. Their arms were held up to the sky, toward the sandstorm that had just blown over them. They were all facing away from him. The winds died a little more and he realized there were another dozen of the creatures past the first line he'd seen.

The ants replayed moments of the seraphs running across the sand as they charged the Door.

"Jamie," he shouted again. He looked behind him and saw nothing.

He started forward again.

A full minute pa.s.sed. One hundred-seventeen feet away from the end of the hose, one hundred-fifty-one feet from the threshold of the rings. He set his simple map of the wasteland against his memories of the area around the Door campus. He'd been heading north-northeast. He stood where an old east-west access road, not much more than a path, ran in his world.

Mike veered more to the north. Jamie hadn't pa.s.sed back into his line of sight, so she had to have gone farther that way. He made his way over a dune and called out her name twice. He marched for another thirty seconds. One minute, forty-eight seconds left on the clock.

Barely enough time to get back to the Door.

"Jamie," he yelled again.

"Mike?"

He spun around. She lumbered over a dune through the loose sand with another woman. Someone tall with a bright red shirt and dark hair that had a white stripe.

The ants spent a few seconds figuring out hypothetical paths. Ways Sasha could have gotten into the desert and out to Jamie without his hearing or seeing her. Then she looked up and he saw the lack of st.i.tches on her arm and her unmarked neck. Blood covered the white of her right eye.