Child, p.21
Child, page 21
part #6 of Sam and Sam Series
Sam was relentless. Whatever was going on, he could scarcely tolerate the inevitable stops for gasoline. Samantha went on, gradually tapering off her physical need for rest until she couldn’t feel it any more. It always came at a cost, but Sam’s sense of urgency told her that it would probably be worth it. He didn’t jump at shadows.
When she turned south at Flagstaff, she pulled over again at an exit and waited for Sam to find her. He was impatient when he came back from checking in on wherever it was she was going and she raised her eyebrows at the vague space from which he watched her.
“Sam, am I going out into the desert?”
Yes, yes, she needed to go now.
“How far into the desert?”
Impatience. It was a question he couldn’t answer. She waited, hoping he would work it out. He didn’t.
“Sam, I’m not invincible. I’m not equipped for a desert venture, even a winter one. You’re not going to be much help. You can tell you do better inside the car, can’t you? You need a confined space. I’m going to have a really hard time following you out there. You could get me lost if I lose GPS coverage. I need to stop and get a stock of water and some good maps, better hiking gear… I should really talk to a guide about what I would be forgetting. Would I do better with a horse and a mule? How far off road are we talking about?”
He pulled harder, then signaled resignation. He understood, but she needed to do whatever she was going to do as quickly as she could. Important things hung in the balance.
“I get it, Sam. I’m sorry. I know you have to watch whatever it is and not be able to help, and that sucks. I can’t show up dehydrated. If I do, I won’t be any help, either. And if I can’t make it back out… Sam, there’s nothing you can do to send help after me.”
This brought her pause.
“Abby? Abby, I need you to back us up on this one. This might be stupid dangerous.”
She paused. Coordinating two psychics. She’d never tried it quite like this before.
“Sam, can she see what you’re looking at?”
Hesitation. He disappeared for a few seconds, then returned, boomeranging around the car like he was fighting a field of magnets. No. Partially. She grimaced.
“Abby, you’re not going to be able to find where I’m going. I have no idea where it is. I’m going out in the desert. Sam isn’t going to be able to tell me even what direction. Any help you can give me, I appreciate it.”
She waited, hoping Abby would have stopped by sometime in the past or future… It was complicated, and Sam hanging around made it all the more complicated. There was every chance Sam being in vision full time would scatter her so badly that she couldn’t see a thing of what was going on. She drew breath and sighed.
“All right. I’m going to go get some supplies put together. I’ll be as quick as I can.”
Sam sent her his insistent hurry-up signal, then faded as she drove back into town. She cast a wide net, purchasing as many supplies as she thought she could carry, while abandoning any plans of getting a horse as Sam faintly emphasized how pressing time was, then spent an hour reorganizing her backpack to prioritize for the temperature swings and the arid air against the complete lack of detail about what she was up against.
“Is it demons?” she asked.
Yes.
“Are they powerful?”
Ambiguous. Yes and no. Strong yes. Strong no. Confusion. She rolled her eyes.
“Sorry. That’s not very helpful. Um. Are there ghosts, witches, sorcerers?”
No, no, no.
“Are there other people?”
Strong yes. Excited.
“Other than Ashley?”
Yes.
“Bad people?”
Yes. No.
“Sam.”
Impatience.
“Okay. Good people?”
Yes.
She bit her lip.
Innocents, demons, other people of uncertain provenance.
“Possession?”
Yes. No.
She grunted.
“Sam, if I weren’t certain you were telling me the truth, I’d think you were putting me on.”
Urgency.
She sighed.
“Okay. That’s the best I’m going to do. Lead on.”
<><><>
She pulled the Mustang off the road when she stopped being able to find it.
“You going to be able to find that later?” she asked Sam. He was distracted, jolting away and back without paying much attention to what she was saying to him. She took the GPS out of her glovebox and wrote down the coordinates. She patted Justine on the front hood and set off in the vague direction Sam gave her.
“You better not jerk me around out here, Sam,” she muttered. “I’m not carrying enough water for that.”
Three gallons. Almost twenty pounds of water replacing twenty pounds of other gear. She’d slimmed down her backpack to under a hundred pounds to try to keep the effort down, in case she had significant hard hours of hiking ahead of her. It was mid-afternoon, now, and if she had more flexibility, she would have waited overnight to start earlier in the morning. She wasn’t sure just how cold it was going to get when the sun went down, but she didn’t think Sam would stand for the delay.
With only infrequent, imprecise cues from Sam, she trekked off into the desert, putting on clothes as she went. The temperature dropped quickly as the sun approached the horizon, now freezing her nose as wind swept across the unprotected space. She was approaching a mesa as the sun silhouetted the cacti on the ridgeline to her right, and she dearly hoped that this was where Sam intended her to go. She didn’t want to walk all night and then have to deal with the logistics of getting all of the survivors out after fighting demons in the cold.
Sam came back to her, edging her for more speed. He was very faint, now, struggling to keep himself together.
“Is that it?” she asked.
Yes.
“Go on,” she said. “You’re hurting yourself. You know I know it. I can make it from here.”
No.
“Do I have to climb that thing?”
No.
She pulled out a flashlight and picked up her pace as Sam got more excited. His emotion was tinged with anger, now. Whatever was going on, it was starting to get really bad.
“Sam, you aren’t going to be any good to me if you exhaust yourself.”
She secretly doubted he would be able to summon enough strength to help her fight, anyway, and she knew that doubt was perfectly transparent to him, but she kept it to herself. Saying it out loud didn’t help anything.
He went on ahead of her, his sense of self fading. She focused, trying to draw him toward herself to make the last bit of the journey easier, but for a moment she had a window into him and realized how sick he had actually become. Without physical self, illness had a strange manifestation, but there it was. He was staggering on, running on pure determination and anger, nothing else.
“Sam,” she murmured, and the window slammed shut. He wasn’t angry at her. He just didn’t want any commentary from her, no attempt to dissuade him from finishing this. She shifted her backpack to make sure she had a clear draw on Lahn and kept foward.
The sand started to slope down as the mesa loomed up high above her, and Sam had her follow it as it turned from sand to stone and curled along the side of the mesa in a strange wind formation. She kept a hand on the wall as she pointed her flashlight beam forward then switched that out for a lantern, needing the much broader light source. The ground continued to drop, and then the rock floor took a sharp turn to her right, into a crevasse that went up to the surface of the mesa, high above. This was where Sam waited for her. He was exhausted, confused, and as sick as ever, but satisfied.
“Go,” she said quietly. “You’ve done what you can.”
He vanished and she held up the lantern a bit higher, looking at a tunnel that someone had dug into the hard red rock. She heard nothing and she smelled nothing. The path curled off to the right, quickly falling into darkness out of the reach of her small lantern.
The design of it looked suspiciously like the compounds in hellcity.
She licked her lips and moved forward, drawing Lahn and staying against the outside wall of the path, eyes and ears alert.
There was a hiss, and a dark, winged body threw itself at her. She ashed the class two demon without incident, but it made her yet more suspicious.
There wasn’t anything to eat out here. It was hot, it was cold, it was dry, it was uncomfortable in every way a demon cared about, and it lacked anything with a bloodflow to prey on predictably. Sure, they were shy of humans because humans had a long history of throwing rocks at things that looked like them, but it didn’t mean they often went out into wastelands like this one and holed up.
What had Sam seen?
With the sound of bat-like wings, three more scab demons came at her, and one of them got away, screeching and squealing his way back into the depths of the cave. She sped up. Whatever element of surprise she had going for her was gone, and Sam had been aware of the cost even a minute or two could have, here. She needed to get where she was supposed to be, and do it now.
She pulled a vial of owl’s blood, complex anointing oil, and captured beeswax out of the holster on her ribs and poured the thick fluid across her hand, then went forward again at a trot. The mix was a canary of sorts; it would boil the instant it crossed a demonic protection spell, giving her an instant to stop and react before she triggered it completely. Ahead, she could hear a chorus of conversations, both articulated and of the lower sorts, as the splash demon made it to the heart of the hive.
The hallway split in the strange, curling fashion that standard demon architects favored, and she followed the inner peel down a tight spiral that doubled back.
Grass hawks.
She heard a human scream, but knew better than to assume it was actually a human. Demons mimicked screaming better than any other human noise, even the boggy ones. It was one of their favorite noises.
There was light ahead.
So far, none of this had actually surprised her. She hadn’t known what to expect, but demons digging into the heart of an extinct volcano - while not something she could explain - was something she had every expectation of figuring out. Demons did strange things, but they always did them for predictable reasons. Especially this level of demon.
The light surprised her.
It was white.
The sky in hell was red. No sun, no day, no night. Just dusky, gritty red, like living inside a cup. Lower level demons who crossed tended to strongly prefer red and orange light, because it was familiar. Sunlight was often terrifying to them. Higher level demons often shunned red light, all by itself, but they preferred unnatural light as far away from yellow and white as possible, often using a mix of purple or blue with red or green.
But there was no mistaking it. The light that poured across the red rock pathway ahead of her was fluorescent white. It would have been enough to stop her, to try to figure out what she was getting into, but for Sam’s constant urging forward. She wouldn’t disappoint him now, not after the sacrifice he’d made to get her here as quickly as he had.
She turned the final corner, a sharp edge where a pair of curling paths intersected, and blinked.
Around the edges of the room she saw demons, dozens of them, if not hundreds, arguing with each other and fighting. Large and small, some in human form but most of them not, they seemed to have been completely unprepared for her. This was something she could deal with. Easily.
It was the center of the room, the source of the jarring white light, that took her several seconds to come to terms with.
It was a hospital ward.
Weighted plastic sheets went from ceiling to floor, and men and women in lab coats stood in a fearful little cluster in the midst of a dozen beds, most of which were occupied. At the nearest one, a beautiful black woman was staring at Samantha with tears running down her face. She held a scalpel in her hand, and her white latex gloves were bloody.
As Samantha watched, the woman dropped the scalpel and put her hands over her ears, arching her back until she should have fallen over backwards, but the thing that had taken her didn’t need perfect balance to stay upright. Samantha recognized the expression in the woman’s eyes when they opened again.
She was aware that the room had exploded in chaos as she had stepped into it. Demons were rushing at her from both directions, and more were rushing at, through, under the curtains, animals barely contained by draconian measures set loose when Samantha shattered their authoritarian network.
Samantha stood still, though, watching the woman’s eyes. They were smug, unafraid, uncaring.
Possession.
Yes and no. In the instant before Samantha had arrived, the woman had been free of demons.
The room collapsed with dark bodies and scritching claws, and as far as Samantha knew, she stood at the only exit, the thing standing between the demons who weren’t powerful enough to glitch and their way out. Anyone who had ever been in a cage with a wild animal knew not to stand in front of the door. She knew this. But she didn’t move, watching the woman as she slowly dropped her hand and moved to the side, returning Samantha’s even stare.
Lahn flew of her own accord, long years of training and muscle memory cutting through demon after demon. Samantha felt the bead of rage that would blossom into a righteous fury if she allowed it to, a fireball of destruction that would tear through the demons in the room like so much flashpaper, but Samantha didn’t know what would happen to the demon inside the black woman, and she also knew that Sam had had to carry her out of the room the last time she’d experienced righteous fury. She’d been defenseless.
Everything in her bag of tricks was pointless against this volume of demon flesh at this level of chaotic un-control. With time bent, she could watch in detail as demons lit on the people in the beds and tore toward the group of doctors standing exposed and defenseless under the white lights. The demon in the black woman knew this. It grinned at her with a malice that communicated clearly just how well it knew that it was in control. Even if Samantha could shake it loose from the woman, it would take only moments for the demon to repossess her, if Samantha exhausted herself killing the rest of them.
The room swirled and spun with black and wings and rage. And then the demon blinked. As if released from a trance, Samantha had her plan forward.
Seconds meant death. She rushed through the demons like a wave, ashing the ones she could reach and petrifying the ones she couldn’t into a spinning, colliding retreat. She pulled four vials from the adapted shotgun shell belt she wore around her ribs, counting them from their slots by memory, and threw her backpack ahead of herself, cutting down demons in between slashing the vials open with Lahn. With a handful of broken glass, she reached into her backpack and pulled out a dagger formed of pure platinum. She closed her hand around the blade, ignoring the cuts to her fingers and her palm, and, standing over her backpack with piles of demon ash forming around her, she slashed a long slit in the plastic and stepped through.
The demon watched her, seeming unconcerned, and Samantha held up her hand.
“Eloi Anadidd’na Anu’dd. Anadidd’na anu’dd parroah’na lahn.”
There was a blanch and the demon fought to stay in the woman’s body. For a moment, and with great shock, Samantha thought that the demon would overpower her. All around her, people and demons screamed. Wings flapped and bones broke, black tongues hissed. The plastic curtains reflected light wildly, like the walls at a hockey game, or watching parasites pour out of their eggs. The black woman threw her head back again with a scream and the demon let go. Samantha closed her hand hard around the knife again and whispered in the woman’s ear as she put her arm around her waist.
“Trust.”
She tossed the dagger in the air and caught it by the handle, then slit the woman’s throat deep. The poor woman thrashed, trying to get away, trying to protect the thread that was her life - that was her only true possession - and Samantha waited as the woman’s thick blood sprayed and then poured down her neck and her chest. Three seconds.
It was a very long three seconds, and the chaos around her went on, gleefully, fatally ignoring her struggle with the woman and the demon who would take her again. The blood, the oil, the water, the fire, all of it mingled in the woman’s veins as her pulse slowed and her body threw itself into shock, not wanting to see the final moments. Samantha whispered the words that were written on Lahn’s surface and drew the great blade’s flat surface along the gaping wound she had made across the woman’s throat then, not having time to watch to make sure that the magic worked, she clutched at the anger in her chest, feeling it radiate through her as she let it bloom, out her arms, her legs, to her fingers, her toes, pushing her head back as the force, the sheer power of it pulsed.
For a moment, she contained it. Demons scrambled over each other, now fighting to get out of the white light, away from her as she floated slowly off the floor, hanging by power and great white wings of raw energy, then she felt the convulsion as the wings, fully visible, flapped, touching in front of her and exploding out in a flash of raw, perfect white light.
And then she was gone.
<><><>
There were very few fractions of time that she lost, after Carter trained her. She was aware of her sleep, aware of herself when she crossed, and nearly impossible to knock unconscious. Righteous fury stole seconds from her and left her afraid and confused as she opened her eyes, out of control of her own timeline and without Sam’s reassuring presence to tell her that he, at least, knew what was going on.
The doctors appeared to be real doctors. They were scurrying around, taking care. One of them came to her and helped her sit up and Samantha shook her head as the woman tried to look at her hand. The woman, Asian with tightly-wrapped black hair, was covered in self-defense wounds, scratches up her arms and on her face, and her lab coat was bloody. Samantha waved her off.
