Dragon City

Behind him, Sinclair pulled the trigger a second time, aiming her blast at Farrell’s rapidly retreating form. The loud report of the gun echoed in the empty street, and Farrell dropped, crumpling to the ground like a felled oak.

“He’s still alive,” the man in the robes insisted as he scurried toward the fallen figure.

Farrell was more than alive; he wasn’t even wounded. Just as Sinclair’s shot had blasted from her pistol he had caught his foot on something hidden in the long grass and tumbled to the ground, the bullet shrieking its angry trail over his head. Lying there now, Farrell looked all around him as he tried to scramble away. The grass was so long that it hid his prone form. And there, less than a foot from his right leg, he spotted the thing that had tripped him—it was a rusted old exhaust pipe, caught up in a tangle of grass and sod. The pipe was perhaps eighteen inches in length and about an inch and a half across. His mind racing, Farrell grasped for the pipe and yanked it from the earth as he drove his body forward toward the house once again. Rusty pipe in hand, Farrell powered onward to the house, keeping his head ducked and his body bent.

“He’s running,” Farrell heard a woman shout, but he couldn’t discern if that was Sinclair or the woman in the robe. It didn’t matter now, as he was at the door to the house, launching himself at the wooden barricade and powering into the sudden darkness of the hallway beyond.

He had lived in this house for forty-two days, knew every ghastly, rotting inch of it. As footsteps clattered on the porch behind him, Farrell darted left into the living room that ran one half the length of the building.

Something had happened to Sinclair, he realized, something that had maybe been there since before they had gone into hiding. That spot on her head, it was his mark—Ullikummis’s. Farrell had heard rumors about other members of Cerberus turning, siding with Ullikummis and his people. It was like a cult, a growing movement that relied on the belief that Ullikummis himself was a god from the stars. Which was ridiculous, of course—Ullikummis was Annunaki, a cruel and heartless race of aliens who had held humankind in subjugation thousands of years ago. But Sela Sinclair knew this. Everyone at Cerberus knew this; Lakesh himself had held an information session in the canteen just a few months before when they had discovered the first evidence that Ullikummis had returned to Earth. And yet Sinclair was under his sway somehow, something physical inside her twisting her will, instructing her like an entheogen.

Behind him, hideously near, Farrell heard Sinclair and the other two pushing through the house, shouting instructions to split up and find him. The blood was pounding in his ears, and his breath felt warm in his throat, pumping past his gritted teeth like sandblasting. The room was full of old furniture. A settee had collapsed in on itself to become a sculpture of rusted springs and wood that showed the familiar signs of woodworm. A table was splintered against one wall, while another sagged to the floor with two legs bent out of shape. Farrell vaulted it as the figure came through the door after him, the man in the robes. The man was pulling something from an innocuous pouch he wore at his waist, loading the slingshot in his hand even as he leaped the broken settee and rushed through the room. The enforcers of Ullikummis didn’t use guns as a rule, but relied on a more basic weapon, a slingshot-style catapult that launched vicious stones with the force of bullets.

Up ahead, Farrell saw the second door of the room, the one that broke back into the hall opposite the closet, and he drove himself to it as his pursuer launched the first clutch of stones from his catapult rig.

Farrell reached out with his free hand, striking the far door frame with his forearm as he ducked through it. Behind him, a scattershot of rocks struck the frame where Farrell had been, their pitter-patter like hail on a window.

Out in the hallway once more, Farrell found himself face-to-face with Sela Sinclair, the dark metal of the pistol still clutched in her right hand. Farrell caromed into her, slamming both of them against the far wall in a crash of crumbling plasterboard. Sinclair sank back to the floor, spluttering as the plasterboard disintegrated to powder all around her, Farrell landing astride her in a tangle of limbs. Farrell saw the stubby nose of the Colt Mark IV snap up, and he lashed out with the rusty pipe in his hand, knocking the muzzle aside even as it flashed with another ear-splitting shot.

Then Farrell was on his feet again, driving himself along the corridor as Sela Sinclair brought the pistol around for another shot. Beside her, the man in the hooded robes appeared from the main room, the slingshot in his hand spinning over and over, picking up speed before he launched another clutch of pebbles barely bigger than grains of sand toward the retreating figure.

Farrell sidestepped into another room to his right, a chunk of plasterboard turning to dust just three inches from his face where the stones struck. He was in the dining room now, once able to accommodate a six- or maybe eight-seat table. It now housed a pile of broken furniture amid scarred, moss-covered walls. Worse yet, it stank of rainwater, the kind of rainwater that perhaps had been mixed with urine somewhere along the way. Farrell ran through the room, leaping over the shattered remains of a glass-fronted cabinet that had been used as the set for a family of badgers. The robed man hurried through the open doorway behind him, his slingshot whining in his hand as it spun through the air.

Farrell sprinted onward, aiming himself for the twin doors of the serving hatch that stood closed at the far end of the room. The wood was rotten, light cutting through it in bold strips. Farrell heard the robed man unleash another clutch of stones as he leaped, and he used the pipe like a club to smash his way into the serving hatch doors and powered himself through. A smattering of tiny stone flecks peppered the wall around the hatch as Farrell disappeared through it, and his pursuer stopped in his tracks.

Farrell crashed through the serving hatch into the kitchen, tumbling onto the cracked terra-cotta tiles of the floor and rolling forward, bringing himself back to an upright position. He was breathing heavily now, his heart pounding like a jackhammer against his ribs.

The kitchen was a mess of stained surfaces and mold, the faucets and drains overgrown with plants that had climbed through the pipes once human habitation here had ceased, everything going back to nature in the end. There was another door there that led to the backyard, or whatever had once been the backyard. Now it was just as overgrown as the front, a little jungle in the forgotten strip of land. Sela Sinclair had locked this door when they had arrived here, making sure it was secure to stop anyone sneaking in—or that’s what she had said. Now Farrell wasn’t so sure. He wondered if she had done it to lock him in for the day when her allies in the New Order arrived. Was she even conscious that she was serving them?

Farrell figured he had maybe five seconds to escape. His only advantage was knowing the layout of the building, knowing about the serving hatch to the kitchen. He took the heavy pipe in his hand and smashed it against the ragged boards that Sinclair had placed over the gap of the window. The boards were tough enough, but the nails were brittle and rusted, and the whole door shuddered on old hinges as the makeshift panel crumpled apart.

Farrell was through the window in an instant, wedging his body into the gap before clambering through it with all the grace of a beached fish. Didn’t matter—just had to get out of there, to stay alive.

Outside, the backyard was just as overgrown as the front and the street beyond. Farrell was slowing now, the momentary safety giving him a chance to think. He needed to contact Cerberus, find Ohio Blue or locate the nearest mat-trans.

In a moment he had engaged his Commtact, the subdermal communicator that was located just below his ear. “This is Farrell out in the field. Do you read? Over.”

As he spoke, a figure came hurrying around the edge of the house, chasing after him through the long underbrush. It was the woman in the robe, the one who had accompanied the man to the deserted street. She must have doubled back. Her arms were pumping as she chased Farrell, and he drove himself onward, confident he could outrun her by dint of his longer legs. Her teeth were gritted and her eyes looked fierce as they fixed on his back, while Farrell darted across the jungle of the backyard.

A moment later Farrell saw the boundary fence that had once marked this property, a simple chain-link line running just above waist height. He kicked his left leg out, leaping high and vaulting over the fence in a swish of dirty white clothing. Beyond, he guessed he was in an access road—probably the kind that had once been used by garbage trucks—though it, too, had been given over to the wilderness, with fronds and reeds growing as high as his waist, some up to his chest.

“Farrell, this is Donald Bry.” The voice from the Commtact device reverberated through Farrell’s mastoid bone so that only he could hear it. “What’s the situation, over?”

Farrell looked behind him, saw the woman jump the fence in pursuit, the familiar form of a leather slingshot now grasped in her fist.

“Bit busy,” Farrell explained over the Commtact.

He didn’t wait for Bry’s response, just turned and faced the woman bearing down on him. She plucked a palm-load of stones from the leather pouch at her belt, loading the slingshot in a swift, practiced movement. With a sound like an angered beehive, the slingshot began to whir around and around, picking up speed in preparation of launch. Farrell looked all around him, searching for cover, some way to get out of the line of fire. He could still see the back of the house through the raging underground, saw Sela Sinclair and the robed man come out the back door chasing their prey. There was nowhere to run.

“And when there’s nowhere to run, you stand and fight.”

That’s something else Edwards had drummed into him in those training sessions.

Farrell was upon the woman in a flash, driving the heavy exhaust pipe at her chest where the crimson shield glinted in the sunlight. The pipe hit with a hollow thunk, knocking the breath out of Farrell’s opponent. Surprised, the woman toppled backward, the stones dropping from her slingshot as it momentarily lost all momentum, like a child’s bucket-of-water trick.

Farrell stood over her in the long grass, feeling the ghastly weight of that hunk of metal in his hand. She looked up at him, her dark hair in disarray around her face, blue eyes fixed on his. “I am stone,” she uttered, the words like a mantra.

It would be so easy, Farrell thought, to hit her again, to crush her skull in a single, savage blow. But no, that wasn’t him. That wasn’t how he did things.

So he turned and he ran, the breath heavy against his chest as his booted feet pounded against the compacted earth and leaves.

* * *

THE DARK-HAIRED WOMAN, whose name was Tanya Stone, struggled up from the grass, urging her body to follow Farrell as he sprinted away. She plucked the leather loop that formed her slingshot from the ground, wiping the dirt from it as she stood, began moving after Farrell. She had taken two paces when her partner, Jackson Stone, called for her to halt.

Tanya turned, seeing Jack and the ebony-skinned newcomer, and she gave him a quizzical look. “I can catch him.”

As she spoke, a chill seemed to cut through the air, and Tanya became aware of another presence. She turned around, searching the brush for a moment before she spotted the other figure, the woman with the red-gold hair and eyes the green of the ocean—Brigid Haight. In her late twenties, Haight was poised in the bole of a tree, prowling from its shadow like a stalking cat, her black leather suit covering her entirely, clinging to her limbs like a second skin. It seemed somehow appropriate that Haight had dressed in the dead flesh of animals, surrounding herself with their ghosts.

Haight was the chosen of Ullikummis, his first priest in the New Order, and while Tanya had not met her before she recognized her instantly. And she shivered in the woman’s presence as something seemed to crawl along her spine.

Beside her, Sela Sinclair looked at the slender, red-haired woman stepping from the shadows and she felt a stab of recognition. Inside her head, the drums were beating louder and faster than ever before, louder and faster and far more brutal.

* * *

FARRELL SPRINTED DOWN the overgrown access road, glancing back over his shoulder to see if he was still being followed. The woman was on her feet and she had been joined by Sela Sinclair and the man in the fustian robes. They seemed to be talking, watching as Farrell ran from them. Their confidence irritated him, made him angry.

He turned back to face the path he was running along, with its tangles of briars and reeds, the moisture heavy in the air where the plants breathed. There was a wall ahead, reaching up almost to head height but crumbling in places, a sickly green creeper clinging to its surface. He stopped when he reached it, conscious of the ache in the muscles of his arm where he was hefting the heavy length of exhaust pipe. He glanced fearfully behind him once again, back up along what was left of the old road. Another figure had joined his three pursuers. This one was dressed in black, a bloom of red hair haloing its head. From this distance with the sun in his eyes, Farrell couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. But he knew one thing for certain—it meant they had added another member to their hunting group, another body to chase him and capture him and presumably indoctrinate him into this cult of Ullikummis.

“Cerb-er-us,” Farrell said, the syllables broken by his heavy breathing now. “I need a way out of here, right now.” To his right he saw another low chain-link fence, this one bent out of true and with a gaping hole in its center. Farrell moved toward it, keeping one eye on the gathering group at the far end of the little road.

Donald Bry’s voice came back to Farrell over the Commtact link. “What’s the problem, Farrell?”

“Hostile types just tried to kill me or indoctrinate me, I’m not sure.”

“‘Hostile types’?” Bry repeated, and Farrell suspected that, wherever he was, the man had raised an eyebrow at the phrase.

“The stone nuts,” Farrell grunted, clambering over the sagging fence. “Ullikummis’s people. They tracked me down—I don’t know how.”

“Is Sinclair okay?” Bry asked, the consummate bookkeeper even in times of stress.

“She’s one of ’em, man,” Farrell said. He was running now, arms pumping, the pipe swinging in his hand as he pelted across the overgrown expanse of garden toward another shell of a building.

“What do you—?” Bry asked, mild surprise in his voice.

Farrell sprinted past the side of the house, pushing himself on. “I can’t explain how,” he interrupted. “I think maybe she’s always been one of them, like she was just biding her time waiting for the right moment to strike.”

He hurried on, out past the churned-up tarmac of the drive where an ancient automobile waited, its red paint bleached white by the sun across its roof and hood, rust marring its bodywork like ringworm.