The Terminals Read online

  Ming’s father was a leader and so would his daughter be.

  But the hours dragged so slowly by. The hollow hunger in her stomach grew to unfathomable depths. At first, she had merely desired food. Hunger burned in her stomach. She thought of all the things she’d eat, a sundae split with her mother. A pizza that would sear the roof of her mouth because she ate it too quickly. Food was all she thought of, and when her kidnapper had torn the wrapper from a bar of some kind, Ming would have said anything to have a single bite. But now the craving had begun to diminish, and she wasn’t sure if that was a good sign. One thing was certain; the need hadn’t diminished for the kidnapper. When last the kidnapper stared at Ming with emerald eyes, hunger shone in them.

  Ming jerked her wrists an inch and the scrape of metal rang out. She hung from cuffs looped over a metal hoop, a circular bar that joined either side of the ladder to form a safety cage so that a climber wouldn’t fall far if he slipped. Ming’s legs wouldn’t keep her upright much longer, and they trembled with effort. To keep them strong, she bent her knees, lowering to the limit of her handcuffs and then straightened, bent and straightened. If a chance to escape arose, she’d be ready.

  Alistair sobbed.

  Ming spat the rag cloth on to the floor. “It’s going to be okay … Alistair …”

  Something shifted in the darkness. Alistair quieted. Their remaining captor climbed the ladder from time to time, as if to check for her partner. But he hadn’t returned. With the chloroform finally dispersed, Ming could smell properly again. The woman had smelled of lilac soap as her hands gripped Ming’s forearms and dragged her to be sewn, but now the woman’s scent was tainted by the lingering sweet drug and her body odor.

  Someone began to cry again, a boy, and this time it sounded like Nate. He never cried. Ming didn’t know whether the tears which swept down her own cheeks were from the stitches, or the fear, or from keeping her eyes open, and it didn’t matter anymore. The kidnapper shook Ming briefly, moving on when she whimpered. The woman checked each child until finally halting with a grunt of satisfaction.

  Ming didn’t hear the sound of the wrapper opening, but the woman had found something to eat. Her lips smacked, and slurping and licking noises filled the chamber. Every so often, she’d retch and then go back to her feasting. A low keening burst from Ming’s chest, blocking the sounds of the wet meal.

  Chapter 13

  On my notepad were written the letters recited by Attila: GO TO HELL.

  I suspected that Attila didn’t really need me to write them out as he gleaned the note from Charlie; he only wanted to ensure I got the message. If Charlie’s first words made me flush with guilt, his final comment—LONGER THAN THOUGHT—filled me with dread. It was like sending a troop into combat and being incommunicado. I had no control. My fingers pressed the pencil into the pad until the lead snapped.

  Up until now, Attila had been intently focused on his doorknob and the corpse of Charlie. His hands clawed the crystal like a crow clutching a jewel. With Charlie’s last dispatch, Attila smirked at me, and then shook his head as if savoring an inside joke. The heart rate monitor screamed murder. I looked down upon Charlie’s body and wondered what could possibly be funny.

  “They all say go to hell or something like that.” Attila snorted. “My theory is that it’s Deeth’s last words. No pain at all, he always says.” He laughed again. “As if you won’t feel anything in hell, right?”

  “You think he’s in pain?” I asked.

  Attila sobered. “When he first got there, he …” He regarded me and I knew he was about to lie, but I let him anyway. “He seemed pretty happy actually. No, I don’t think he’s had much pain.”

  “Really?” I folded my arms across my chest.

  “Yeah.”

  I glanced back at the carcass; it seemed as though it had shed twenty pounds. It already smelled dead.

  “This is all he said, so far?” I asked, tapping the words on the clipboard and feeling guilty that I’d run out after injecting Charlie. The steady whine of the monitor made me wince.

  “No sign of Hillar,” Attila replied.

  “What’s Charlie doing?” I peered at the body as if by doing so I could figure it out.

  “Trying to solve a puzzle,” Attila replied and waved away further questioning.

  On the black side of the room, the general watched. “Don’t gyp us, eh?”

  Attila ignored him and cast me a knowing look. “General’s always searching for reasons to use that word. I think he’s jealous.”

  “Can we shut that off?” I pressed a thumb to my temple.

  Attila reached over with a long-nailed finger and pressed the mute button on the heart monitor. The line still stretched out eternally.

  “I like to leave it on. The drugs don’t always work,” Attila explained. “I’ve seen people pop back after a few minutes.”

  The walls of the room swelled and pressed with the throbbing in my head, making Charlie’s chest appear to rise and fall. Gritty from my crying, I clenched my eyes shut and tried to focus.

  “Wake me when you know something, gypsy.” The general disappeared back into his office.

  Attila shook his head after him and seemed to relax. He pocketed his doorknob and walked over to the espresso machine.

  “You and the general don’t seem to get along,” I said.

  “We’ve got history.” Purgatory appeared to double as a coffee house, replete with the industrial bean grinder, which Attila worked.

  “The general is a Christian, right?” I thought about the prominent cross he wore. “How is it he’s lasted so long without a mission?”

  Attila shrugged. “He’s never drawn the lucky straw. That and improvements in medicine, I suppose.”

  He tamped coffee grinds into a puck and loaded the group handle on the machine.

  “How’d he recruit you?” I asked.

  Attila appeared to ignore me, but finally he pressed the switch that started the machine heating and turned. “That’s our history.”

  I held up Charlie’s final missive, and Attila wrinkled his nose, but he didn’t respond immediately. Instead he waited as the espresso machine pumped the oily, fragrant coffee into his black mug. I rolled my eyes at the ritual, but waited, drawing on the pad without direction, and then scratching out the doodle when it started to resemble a syringe.

  He shook the last drop free and offered the drink to me, cupping it between his palms like I’d seen him hold the crystal. He barely waited for me to shake my head before drawing a deep swallow.

  He drew the aromatic coffee into his nostrils. If the Terminals had taught me anything so far, it was that people can worship anything. When he was done with his coffee orgy, he continued. “You people come and go pretty quick. I don’t like to get friendly.”

  If he were Army, I’d have busted him down to asshole, but I remembered his hand on my shoulder.

  “Learning more about you on the other hand,” he smiled, “that helps me keep in contact when it’s your turn.”

  I sat on the edge of Charlie’s bed and pressed my back against Charlie’s hip, leaping off when I remembered he was a corpse. Attila chuckled, and I was grateful for it.

  “Takes some getting used to,” he said, his smile fading. “I’m not used to it, and hope I never will be.”

  I flushed. This was a different Attila than the one I knew from his interactions with the general and I wondered if I could encourage him to talk.

  “I’m a lieutenant colonel in the U.S.—”

  He waved his hand as he sipped again. “Where’d you grow up?”

  “Vermont.”

  “Nice.” He arched a brow and rocked back on the heels of his Doc Martins.

  “It was.”

  “I guess I’ll have to read your case file for the juicy details,” he said finally.

  “I
’m not secretive,” I said. “I’m accustomed to a command environment, where I don’t divulge too much to my men.”

  “Let me ask the questions then,” he said, and I shrugged. “Lower, middle or upper class?”

  “Upper.”

  “Brothers or sisters?”

  “Only child. My dad was in the Army and they didn’t have many chances.”

  “Upper class, only child, but with an Army dad. Don’t hear that often.” He tapped the side of his cup. “So you could be wearing D & G and slumming in Hollywood.”

  “Maybe, but that’s not me.”

  “The name Christine, is it a family name?”

  “Nurse picked it.”

  “Say again?”

  “My parents,” I replied. “They wanted a boy. They only had boy names picked out, so they let the nurse choose one for them.”

  “So that’s why you entered the Army. A tomboy.”

  I thought about that. “No, my parents were high society. My mom was an at-home mom, and after my father died, she didn’t need to work. She embraced motherhood, and I did the whole debutante thing. I tried to be good at it, but I hated it.”

  “Smothered in lamé and lace.”

  “That’s about it. I was a chronic disappointment. I strove to be better and so nothing seemed good enough. Without friends or a steady boyfriend, I wasn’t on a mommy or society track.” I ran my hand across my brow as if to say I was relieved, but the creases of scar tissue reminded me that I could be sporting tennis armbands instead of scars if I’d chosen a different path. “I wasn’t on any track,” I continued. “Not until I received my first letter from my godfather. He wouldn’t tell me who he was, only that he knew my father. He told me stories about him that I’d never heard, but ones that rung true. He supported me in applying in secret to West Point. I figured it would be easier to please a dead father over a living mother.”

  “Rest is history.” Attila looked into his cup as if reading the grinds.

  I nodded. “My dad had joined the Army without his family knowing, too. Probably could have joined as an officer if he’d had their blessing.”

  Attila chewed on that before asking: “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever done?”

  I swung my hand around the room and looked back at him meaningfully.

  “Fair enough,” he said. “What about as a kid—sometimes memories are powerful. Take Charlie here, I don’t have much to go on; I need the visual of the doorknob to keep us connected between realms. Memories are like fingerprints.”

  “I swam with my fish.” I smiled, remembering. “I had a pet betta fish, one of those blue and red ones, you know? I wanted to swim with it in the pool, so I put it in a little jar, put the lid on and took it swimming. See, the chlorine would have killed it, but not in the jar. For a few minutes it must have felt like it had the whole ocean to swim in. It died the next day, back in its bowl. I wonder if it died of a broken heart, unwilling to accept its tiny world after seeing such a big one?”

  I looked up to see Attila’s reaction, his face was purpling, and the cup tumbled from his hand to shatter on the floor. I snatched up the pencil and paper.

  Charlie was getting back to us.

  Charlie drew deep breaths as he stood before the Archon; at least that was what he supposed it was. Surrounded by crackling flames, blue-black lips stretched into a circle, like a lion tamer’s hoop. But teeth filled this ring through which no lion would dare to leap. The mouth curved upward and filled Charlie’s sight. From each lip hooked thick fangs, which converged in the middle to form a sphincter of ivory. At the very centre wriggled a leg, a soul, maybe a bit of caught gristle. Sulfurous air drew in and blew out. This was the only mesa with a fiery mouth on top, and if that wasn’t enough to suspect its purpose, then Hillar was Charlie’s second clue.

  In a cloud of dive-bombing bone-bats, Hillar folded arms over his chest. Besides the sideburns that now glowed as real lightning bolts, his transformation was somewhat more impressive than Charlie’s. Standing easily twice Charlie’s height and with limbs clad in muscle, he looked as though he could pry open the Archon’s mouth with his fingers. Where Charlie’s chest swelled with a bluish glow, Hillar’s blazed with scarlet light. Hillar’s head was oddly elongated and a great saber hung at his side. If what you feel is what you are, Charlie thought, then being a narcissistic sociopath had its advantages.

  Charlie groaned and spun to rip a bat out of his side; he swung a fist and walloped another before it could embed itself in his thigh. Despite the swarm, Hillar appeared unfazed. Whenever a bone-bat neared, a shadow shot out from Hillar and swatted it away. Charlie shambled closer, sore from the long ride and his many punctures. His body felt as though he hadn’t quite found all of its parts—and those he had didn’t fit quite the same as before. Dead, he suddenly felt older than ever.

  As Charlie drew closer, a bone-bat lanced toward Hillar’s shoulder, but before it could impale him, a lion head shot from where it was tattooed to his back and snatched it from the air. Now, Charlie could see that Hillar’s head wasn’t odd-shaped; it was the tattoo of a woman on his scalp wrestling to free itself, hauling at his flesh, which gave his skull the ovoid form. Given the lives Hillar had lived, Charlie wondered if the woman wasn’t indeed a trapped soul.

  Charlie’s chest tugged him toward Hillar, as if mated to him. Charlie had felt this pull before with Jo Wentworth. The memory of Charlie mistaking that connection for a love match flooded back to him, sickening him, for it meant a twisted kinship with Hillar.

  “Seth,” Charlie said aloud. “It has been too long.”

  “You again,” Hillar’s voice rumbled like thunder. “I do know you.”

  Just then a figure, thin as a pencil, slipped between them and ran for the gate. Hillar swung around and began to sprint after it. Charlie stood, clutching his chest as the blue light beneath his ribs attempted to follow. The eyes of the tattoo-woman stared at Charlie as Hillar ran. Her eyes widened, the mouth open in a silent plea. Charlie gripped his chest tighter.

  The thin figure looked like a racing wire. Its voice was similarly fine, inaudible to Charlie, but the sphincter relaxed enough for it to slip between the teeth. Hillar slammed into the mouth and was struck by two bone-bats. He collapsed before its tight smile. Slowly, Hillar stood, plucking the first bat from his shoulder and leaving a snake tattoo to strangle a second. He rose to his full height and turned to Charlie, his hand gesturing to the toothy portal. A snakehead writhed at the tip of each finger.

  “Age before beauty,” Hillar’s voice boomed.

  At the flap of wings, Charlie whirled and fired his shotgun at an approaching bone-bat. Other shadowy figures strode across mesas in the distance. Gnostic hell wasn’t entirely devoid of other souls. When Charlie turned back, he cocked his head at Hillar, hair falling before his eyes. He had not expected Hillar to wait at a gate, and he took a moment to reflect.

  “You don’t know the Archon’s name, do you?” Charlie asked. He tried to hide his rising glee. If Hillar didn’t know the names of the Archons, then he surely had not discovered gnosis, and he couldn’t pass through the underworld. He could never be reborn. The cycle of his life, his killing, was over and perhaps too the shackling of Charlie’s spirit.

  Triggered by Charlie’s voice, the crystal sparked to life: “We missed that, Charlie.” Reception seemed to be pretty good now.

  The wild flapping of bone-bats grew riotous.

  Charlie frowned and cupped the crystal in his palm. Hillar peered at it with a quizzical smile.

  “You’re following me,” he said. “And this …” Hillar squinted and rubbed at his chin. “This allows you to talk with someone …”

  Charlie curled about, dropped to a knee, and pulled the trigger of his gun. Runes exploded with light and three bone-bats dissolved into dust.

  “We’re all just trying to reach the other side,” Ch
arlie stated.

  “You first,” Hillar said.

  Charlie bit his lip, resting the shotgun barrel over the crook of his arm. “Sure, but you tell me the location of the bus filled with children.”

  “Ah.” Hillar nodded, eyes drifting back to crystal. “This is why you’ve come.”

  “The location of the kids,” Charlie repeated, “And I’ll tell you the Archon’s name.”

  “Deal.” Hillar smiled and held out a hand of twisting serpents. “I won’t be needing them any longer.”

  “First,” Charlie added, taking a step back. “You tell me first.”

  Hillar harrumphed and narrowed his eyes at Charlie. “I tell you, and then you give me the Archon’s name.”

  “Agreed, but only after I’ve confirmed the kids are safe.”

  Passage through one deep was a fool’s trade; if this Archon didn’t stop Hillar, then the next surely would.

  The snakes hissed and wriggled as Hillar shook Charlie’s hand.

  Chapter 14

  I was halfway through the door, Attila shouting at my back.

  “Iowa—don’t think I’m not jealous!” he called after, his good-natured tease tailing me as I plunged into the general’s office.

  “General,” I said, before realizing that the soldier was comatose. “I see you’re at ease.”

  The general’s face was buried in a James Rollins’s novel on the desk. His limp fingers rested on a bottle of Jack Daniels like a lover’s hand over a sleeping thigh.

  “Or perhaps in full retreat,” I muttered and flipped open the file on Hillar to find the number of the FBI agent assigned to the Hillar the Killer case, Agent Volt. I dialed, shaking my head at the general as he failed to rouse and headed toward my cell. Since meeting Charlie, I thought of my quarters as my cell.

  “Hello, Agent Volt?”

  “How did you find this number?”

  I blinked at the snarky response. “I got it from our case file. My name is Colonel Christine Kurzow and I’m with the U.S. Army.”