Genesis Sinister

“Something I can help you with, Lakesh?” he asked cheerily.

Lakesh looked up from his calculations and smiled. Bry had been overseeing much of the reconstruction work for the redoubt over the past four days, which meant that the two of them had spent little time in each other’s company. “Donald, how are things progressing?”

“Slowly. Ever so slowly. But we’re getting there.”

Lakesh nodded. “I’ll be glad when I can see my old map properly again.”

“Ullikummis did a real number on this place,” Bry said. “We’ve found things that look like carcasses up in the canteen area, round and as big as a dog but all withered up and dead now. The disturbing part is, they’re made of rock.”

“That sounds hideous,” Lakesh said solemnly. “I fear what other surprises we might yet find.”

Bry took a steadying breath, placing his hands on Lakesh’s desk. “We made it back here, and that monster won’t be coming again,” he said. “We survived everything he did, and we’ll make it through this, too. Whatever we find.”

“I know,” Lakesh agreed. “I’ll just be glad when things are finally back to normal. I’ve spent too much of the past few months living out of a suitcase, not knowing what new horror the next day will bring.”

“Life goes on,” Bry conceded, as he glanced at Lakesh’s screen. “But you look like you’re puzzling over something there.”

“Brigid,” Lakesh said, ignoring the screen. “I fear that something has broken inside her, her spirit, if you will. What Ullikummis did took so much from her, and one can ill imagine what the effects of that are with her incredible memory. If she won’t let us help her, I fear we could lose her forever.

“Am I an old fool to worry so, Donald?”

Bry chuckled. “If you are, then I am, too,” he said. “Brigid’s not herself....”

“She’s more herself than she’s been in months,” Lakesh corrected. “That’s the problem. She’s grown—experience has shaped her. She almost bit my head off when I proposed she talk things over with Reba.”

“Maybe therapy isn’t the answer,” Donald said after a moment’s consideration. “One time when I was eight, my cat—Tiger—died. I really loved that cat, and my mom fussed and worried herself silly at what his passing would do to me. She asked if I would like a new cat, but I didn’t want one. Eventually, she tried to get me to see a child psychiatrist.”

“For a cat?” Lakesh asked.

“For a cat,” Bry confirmed. “So, I saw her—a nice enough woman, though I’ll be damned if I can recall her name after all these years. And we talked some, life and sorrow and all that. And it just made me realize that—you know, all I wanted was for people to stop asking me how I felt, to stop going on about it. I knew Tiger wasn’t coming back, and it wasn’t that I wanted a new cat. I just wanted to put that behind me and do new stuff.”

“What happened?” Lakesh asked.

“Eventually the therapy sessions stopped,” Bry said. “I probably only went for about four weeks, but that’s a long time when you’re eight. I think the shrink gave up when all I would talk about was some movie that I’d seen a trailer for. I can’t remember what the movie was now, either. Go figure.”

Lakesh laughed. “It was always something when you were a child, wasn’t it?”

Bry nodded. “You’ve tried to help, Lakesh, but maybe Brigid can just figure this out in her own way. No matter how much people care, probably all the questions aren’t helping her right now. Nor is being here, with reminders of what Ullikummis did to us there to see on every surface.”

“Perhaps not,” Lakesh said, his eyes flicking back to the image on his computer terminal.

Bry watched as a smile crept across Lakesh’s face. “I know that look,” he said. “What is it?”

“You may have provided the solution to two problems,” Lakesh said. “Rosalia requires the interphaser to travel to her next destination, but I am reluctant to leave it with her. However, if I were to send Brigid along for the trip, she could retrieve the interphaser and take a little time away from everything that’s happening here.”

Bry smiled. “Happy to help. Shall we say ‘eureka’?” he asked.

“Oh, why not?” Lakesh laughed, and the two men punched their fists in the air.

“Eureka!”

Chapter 5

Those old stones were a-rattling.

In the darkened area beneath the stage in the old aircraft hangar, Domi pulled her hand back from the box. Her eyes widened as a sound came from it like the clip-clopping of hoofbeats. But already she was too late. A rush of stones came with her, racing over her hand and up her arm like insects, moving under their own power.

“No!” Domi cried out, scampering backward with her eyes fixed on the dark shapes running up her flesh. Before her, the box continued to tremble just slightly, as though it had been knocked, its contents rattling like cooking kernels of popcorn.

* * *

ON THE STAGE ABOVE, the Stone Widow was speaking of salvation. “The future will need strength,” she proclaimed.

From his position in the jostling crowd, Kane watched as one of the three robed figures who were acting as the woman’s assistants brought a wooden box over to her from its place at the edge of the stage. The box was roughly one foot square, and though Kane couldn’t know it, it was an identical match to the one that Domi had just discovered beneath the raised stage.

“You all shall be that strength,” the woman on stage continued joyously.

The crowd cheered in agreement, pushing ever closer to the orator. On stage, the robed man nudged the lid of the box aside, opening it so that the Stone Widow could reach within. From where he stood, Kane could not see what was in the box but he could tell it was heavy.

* * *

JUST FEET BELOW, Domi gasped as the strange stones ran across her skin. She brushed at them as their dark shapes moved along her right arm, watching in horror as they clung to her hand, ringing her wrist with a caking of stones. She grunted as she tried once again to pluck them from her flesh.

Several of the stones were sinking into the flesh of her right arm where they had first touched her, digging in with their sharp edges, forming the beginnings of a shell across Domi’s skin. And all Domi could do was grit her teeth against the pain.

* * *

CLOSE TO THE FRONT of the stage, Edwards felt the pull of the box as the Stone Widow reached within. It seemed to be tugging at his mind, magnet to magnet.

“We are all grieving,” the woman on stage proclaimed. “Ullikummis ascended, and we are left to grieve the passing. But the future is right here, within me. Within us all.”

With the crowd transfixed, the Stone Widow plucked a handful of stones from the box, each one no bigger than her thumb joint. Kane balked as he realized that they were shards of Ullikummis. He searched the crowd for Edwards, saw the man reach a hand to his forehead and wince as if in pain.

The Stone Widow held her arm outstretched and, before Kane could do anything, opened her hand, palm down, above Edwards’s head. A single stone—just a pebble really—dropped from her hand, falling onto Edwards’s shoulders and the back of his neck. Edwards fell back, sweeping at the stone and brushing it away over the heads of the crowd. Beside him, another crowd member was receiving one of the living stones, arms outstretched to accept this precious gift from a god. But as the Stone Widow handed over the stone, there came a crash from below the stage and she turned.

One of the robed security men turned also, his brow furrowed beneath his hood. “What the heck—?”

Then there came more bumping from the underside of the stage as Domi bashed her head against it in her haste to get out, the living stones pouring across her skin, all the way up her right arm.

In front of the stage, Edwards shook his head to clear it of the buzzing before searching the crowd to locate his colleagues. “Kane—? Grant—?”

From his right, Kane came hurtling forward, swept along by the surging crowd eager to accept the eerie, living gifts. “Edwards, what’s happ—?”

He stopped, spying the commotion at the far end of the stage where Domi had come barreling out from her hiding place. She had chosen to wear a light summery dress that left her chalk arms bare, and Kane could see immediately the dark spots rising along the right arm, rolling up it in some weird perversion of raindrops. Two of the robed acolytes were moving toward her, each of them reaching inside his billowing robes and pulling something free. Kane already knew that each of those figures would be packing heat.

“Domi, look out,” Kane called, placing his left hand on Edwards’s shoulder and using it to propel himself over the crowd and onto the stage. With his other hand, Kane gestured forward, and the specific flinch movement of his wrist tendons activated the hidden holster he wore under his right sleeve, powering a weapon into his hand. The Sin Eater was a compact handblaster, roughly fourteen inches in length but able to fold in on itself for storage in the hidden sleeve holster. Once the official sidearm of the Magistrate Division, the Sin Eater fired 9 mm rounds. The trigger had no guard, as the necessity had never been foreseen for any kind of safety features. The absolute nature of that means of potential execution reflected the high regard with which Magistrates like Kane were viewed in the villes; their judgment could never be wrong. Thus, if the user’s index finger was crooked at the time the weapon reached his hand, the pistol would begin firing automatically. Though no longer a Magistrate, Kane had retained his weapon from his days in service at Cobaltville, and he felt most comfortable with the weapon in hand.

Ahead of Kane, the two robed figures had brought what appeared to be slingshots into their hands, just simple coils of leather. Despite their primitive appearance, the slingshots could launch rock missiles at speeds that rivaled a bullet from a gun. These were the default weapon of the troops for Ullikummis, and Kane had been on the receiving end of their lethal projectiles on more than one occasion in the past three months.

“Kane, they’ve got stones,” Edwards warned, recovering from his momentary loss of concentration.

“I see them,” Kane muttered under his breath.

In unison, the two hooded forms spun the slingshots in their hands, gathering speed in a fraction of a second before unleashing the first of their stone ammunition. No larger than a knuckle each, two stones fired from the whirling slingshots like bullets, cutting through the air toward Domi’s writhing form. At the same instant, Kane drew a bead on the hooded figure to the left and stroked the trigger of his Sin Eater, sending a single 9 mm bullet into the back of the man’s leg. The man went down in a flutter of robes, crying out in pain as his leg gave way in a burst of blood.

Concentrating on protecting Domi, Kane was dimly aware that chaos was erupting in the main room behind him, the crowd startled by the gunshots in the enclosed space. But there was not time to worry about that now—Grant and Edwards could take care of it.

Kane charged across the stage as the figure to his left fell, bringing the Sin Eater around to take out the second. The figure in the robe surprised Kane with the swiftness of his response, spinning and bringing his arm up, batting away the muzzle of the Sin Eater even before Kane could pull the trigger a second time.

“Put the sling down,” Kane demanded as he was knocked two paces to his left by the savage blow.

In response, the hooded figure simply smiled, reloading his simple but effective weapon in a blur of movement.

Down on the floor behind the stage, Domi was writhing in pain as two dozen stones rushed over her body, rolling like snail shells and leaving bloody welts in their wake. A complete line of the tiny stones had encircled her arm just below the elbow, forming a second skin there. “H-hurts,” Domi hissed as she tried to pull one of the shell-like rocks from her limb. It pulled away with an audible popping sound, releasing her flesh with a spit of blood. Around it, the other stones shimmered and throbbed, shuffling to take its place.

Among the crowd, Grant and Edwards were calling for everyone to calm down.

“Just a little mix-up,” Grant said, forcing that old Magistrate authority into his tone. “Everyone keep calm and no one’s going to get hurt.”

“Screw you!” yelled a man from just behind him, and Grant automatically ducked as his peripheral vision caught something being thrown at his head.

The powerfully built ex-Mag turned then, commanding his own Sin Eater into his hand from its hidden wrist holster. “We’re busting this scam open, people,” he shouted, targeting the man who had thrown his shoe. “You need to calm the hell down—right now.”

Grant swept the blaster over the crowd at head level, warning them back as he backed toward the stage. Edwards was beside him, a smaller-caliber pistol now in his hands from its hiding place at the small of his back. As the two of them reached the stage, the Stone Widow and her remaining acolyte leaped over them, launching into the crowd and hurrying for the doors.

Dammit, Grant thought. Why was it that wherever he went with Kane he always ended up in situations like this? It was Kane, he was a magnet for trouble.

“Edwards, grab the box,” Grant commanded as he chased after the woman.

Edwards charged after the retreating robed figure who was hefting the box of stones, shoving members of the crowd aside in his urgency to reach the man. Sensing the danger, the figure turned, his face a patchwork of wrinkled lines and puckered skin.

“You’re one of us,” the robed man hissed as he saw Edwards barrel toward him.

“Used to be,” Edwards spit, pistol-whipping the man behind his ear.

The robed figure lurched forward, dropping the box at the strike, and its contents spilled across the room.

“Everyone back,” Edwards ordered, skipping away from the strewed rocks. “Get back!”

Behind him, the crowd raised their voices in confusion.

* * *

AT THE REAR OF THE STAGE, Kane ducked as a volley of stones hurtled toward him from the shooter. As the rocks zipped over his head, Kane powered himself forward, charging at the man.

As he saw Kane charge toward him, the robed figure said one ominous sentence that Kane had heard time and time and again in the past few months: “I am stone.”

Kane plowed into the man, knocking both of them back and off the stage. Although only a small drop, the robed man slammed against the floor with a loud crack of bone. Kane landed on top of him, and he brought the clenched fist of his left hand down in a swift, sharp jab. The punch struck the man full in the face, and Kane watched with satisfaction as his eyes flickered and he fell unconscious.

“No, you ain’t,” Kane muttered as he pulled himself off the fallen figure, moving to help Domi.

Back on the stage, the robed man’s colleague was just recovering from the gunshot. An expert marksman, Kane had targeted him perfectly, clipping the top of his leg and hobbling him just long enough that he could not reload his sling.

Kane scurried across the stage to where Domi lay writhing on the floor. The albino woman was rolling back and forth, hissing like a cat as the living stones ran across the flesh of her arm and up toward her shoulder, affixing themselves quicker than she could remove them. Domi snatched for another as it clambered toward her throat, wrenching it away with a tear of her skin.

“Okay, Domi,” Kane said calmly, “I’m right here.”

Domi’s scarlet eyes glared into his. “Kane, get them off me,” she begged through gritted teeth.

Commanding his blaster back into its hidden holster, Kane kneeled next to Domi and reached for the shifting stones. Hands just a couple of inches away from her body, he stopped himself, staring nervously at the semi-living things. Like a swarm of tiny-shelled insects, the hard backs of the stones had massed against Domi’s arm, creating solid bands there that wrapped over her skin like bangles.

“Kane?” Domi squealed. “They’re pushing into me. I can feel them.”

Kane had had a similar stone embedded in him just a few months earlier, and he could still recall the pain it had caused. Like leeches, Kane knew that the insidious things needed to be wrenched from the body before they gained any greater hold.

“Okay,” Kane said, “let me work.”

* * *

ON THE STAGE BEHIND KANE, the robed figure was pushing himself up, careful not to put pressure on his wounded leg. As soon as he was standing, the slingshot began to revolve again in his hand, cutting through the air with an audible whoosh as he targeted the man who had shot him.

Still standing over the spilled stones like a barricade, Edwards saw the hooded figure rise, saw the slingshot picking up speed in his grip. Edwards assessed the situation in an instant and concluded that taking a potshot at the man was too dangerous in this crowd. So he ran, knocking aside several of the congregation as he rushed for the stage and leaped. Before the robed man could launch the stone projectile, Edwards threw himself at him.

“No way, buddy,” Edwards growled as he slammed full force into Kane’s would-be attacker. “Fight’s over for you.”

The hooded man dropped to the stage with a crash under the weight of Edwards’s attack, crying in agony as his wounded leg was wrenched painfully to the side.

Edwards turned to the crowd that was warily approaching the spilled stones he had been guarding. “Nobody touch anything,” he warned, “for your own safety.”

The Stone Widow weaved through the crowd, hurrying toward the main exit of the hangar with the last of the robed guards stumbling after her, recovering from Edwards’s attack. “What happened?” she asked. “The stones...”

“We’ll come back for them,” the robed man said. “Let’s just get out of here.”

They both looked up as Grant stepped from the shadows to block the door. “You ain’t going nowhere,” he warned.

Beside the Stone Widow, the robed figure turned on Grant, throwing a handful of stones in the ex-Magistrate’s face. Grant lifted his arm to protect himself, batting the stones aside as they slapped uselessly against the Kevlar of his coat sleeve.

Before the robed figure could follow through, Grant had his Sin Eater pressed against the man’s forehead, whip fast. “You try that again, you’ll be doing it without a head on those shoulders,” Grant warned ominously.

Seeing the futility of arguing, the robed man slowly raised his hands in surrender.

* * *

OVER THE NEXT FIFTEEN minutes, Kane used a knife to pluck the stones from Domi’s arm while she lay there, biting her lip. “Evil things,” she hissed, and Kane was inclined to agree.

Removed, the stones moved only for a few moments before lying still on the floor. It seemed that contact with flesh triggered them, and separated from the warmth of Domi’s body they ceased functioning, returning to their dormant state.

Once he was done, Kane produced a little medical kit from a pouch in his belt. The kit included several antiseptic wipes, and he used these to clean the grazed sections of Domi’s arm where the stones had tried to bond.

“Does this mean Ullikummis isn’t dead?” Domi asked.

“He’s dead, all right,” Kane assured her as he wiped at one of the grazes. “Saw it with my own eyes. Just a few last bits of his crap to clean up.”

Domi watched the unmoving stones for a few seconds. “They tried to—” she began and Kane nodded.

“I know.”

While Kane nursed Domi’s wounds, Edwards guided the confused congregation to the doors, assuring them they had been duped and that this was just another old-time scam, the kind of thing their grandfathers were either pulling or falling for in the Deathlands.

“Go home and find a better life for yourselves,” Edwards told them. “’Cause you won’t find it here in a bunch of empty promises.”

Whether the congregation took his warning to heart, no one could say, but the sight of a man with a bullet-bitten ear brandishing a blaster and ordering them from the hangar was enough to dissuade them from asking too many questions. Once they had left, Edwards carefully retrieved the spilled contents of the other box of stones, piling them together with his booted feet, careful not to let them touch his skin. They seemed dormant now, dead things, but he had felt them call to him earlier, deep in his skull where Ullikummis had touched him.

While his companions were clearing up the mess, Grant brought the Stone Widow to the rear of the stage along with one of her robed assistants. The other sec men had been disarmed by Edwards, and both were still unconscious. Edwards proceeded to tie them up with strips of their own robes while Grant interrogated the two who remained awake.

“Where did these stones come from?” Grant asked, fixing the Stone Widow and her guardian with a no-nonsense stare.

“What’s it to you?” the robed figure challenged.

Beneath his hood, he looked tired and drawn, a man of twenty-five with the skin of a man of sixty or seventy. It was as if something was eating him up from inside. Grant had seen this before when he was a Magistrate, drug users hopped up on jolt or some other stimulant, burning through their own bodies in just a few years. In the case of the robed man, Grant suspected he knew what it was. His robe indicated that he had been one of Ullikummis’s elite guards, the people whom Cerberus had dubbed “firewalkers.” Each firewalker had a sentient stone embedded within his or her skull that could simulate the physical properties of Ullikummis, turning flesh to stone during bouts of incredible concentration. The stones had been linked to Ullikummis himself, and with him destroyed they were withering and dying, eating away at their hosts like parasites.

“Come here,” Grant said, grabbing the man by the scruff of the neck and marching him over to a window of the hangar.

Edwards remained with the Stone Widow, sitting on the edge of the stage and holding his blaster ready in case she tried anything. She looked defeated, biting her lip in futility.

“See this?” Grant said, shoving the robed man facefirst toward the window. “Your face, you see that?”

The man looked at his reflection in the glass. “What of it, man?” he replied contemptuously.

“You’ve got a stone inside you, right?” Grant said. “Just like the ones that attacked the white girl over there.”

“Mitra?” the man said. “She shouldn’t have been—”

“Never mind what she should and shouldn’t have been doing,” Grant cut in. “How old are you?”

“What? Twenty-three. What’s it matter to you?”

“You’re even younger than I’d guessed,” Grant said sorrowfully. “Take another look at your face.”

The twenty-three-year-old man looked at his reflection in the dropping-spattered glass of the window.

“You’re looking old,” Grant told him. “No escaping it.”

The robed man look irritated, but he seemed unsure of where to direct his anger. “Is there a point to all this?”

“You have a stone inside you,” Grant told him. “Just like the ones that tried to attach themselves to Mitra there. They’ve burned out, my friend. They’re past their due date. Whatever that stone used to do for you, now all it does is eat you up. You need to get it removed. Your god is gone and he ain’t coming back.”

“You have no idea of the power—” the man began.

“Yes, I do,” Grant said solemnly. “Try it. Go ahead, tap the stone field and show me what you can do.”

The man glared at him, suspecting a trick. Grant encouraged him with an incline of his head. “Go on.”

Standing there by the wall, the man clenched his fists and spoke three words: “I am stone.”

Grant drew back his fist and, without warning, smacked the man in the jaw. The man was knocked back by the force of that blow, staggering backward until, three steps later, he slammed against the wall behind him.

“Stone, huh?” Grant taunted.

The robed man wiped at his chin, swiping blood away from a loosened tooth. “What...?” he asked, confused. “You... What happened?”