Aftermath (6 page)

“Which explains why I can’t find anyone. There’s no one
to
find. At least not on this plane,” Michael said.

“How the hell are you doing that?” I asked Shaw.

I’ve traipsed through Limbo a few times but the place was a total void, one big reenactment of Stephen King’s
The Mist
without all the warm and snuggly critters to make a guy feel at home. Every time I went in I had to have specific directions marked in literal footsteps and a source beacon to keep me headed the right way. For Shaw to have stuffed an entire prison there was remarkable. It certainly showed her organization was playing with way more power than I’d ever given them credit for.

“Let’s just say it’s classified and leave it at that, shall we?”

Rachelle, fortunately, was more forthcoming. “It would have to be encased in a pocket of the dimension rather than physically sent to Limbo. Otherwise there would be no way to retrieve it.”

“And the explosion set off in Louisiana was intended to fracture the magic that held the bubble intact, overwhelm it,” Rahim added.

“Which explains why the prison was unharmed except for the damage inflicted by the horde of supernaturals breaking in,” I finished, still awestruck by the concept. While Limbo was an impressive prison on its own there were ways to get out, though that usually resulted from someone opening a portal at the wrong place and time or willfully freeing them from the outside; someone who knew the exact location of the person they wanted out. Shaw’s way cut out the first option entirely, bringing a piece of Limbo to Earth to swallow up a section of the real world. It clearly wasn’t foolproof or we wouldn’t be there but it was damn inventive.

“So much for secrets, huh?” Shaw shrugged. “Oh well, we still have work to do. Should anyone approach the installation it falls to us to stop them before they get close enough to trigger another bomb.”

“How do we know they aren’t being launched from somewhere distant?”

Shaw glanced to the wizard. “Several reasons. First, our AWACS would have tracked such a direct attack and countered it long before it hit and tracked its source. Secondly, the weapon used at the previous installation was a suitcase bomb, one reported stolen from our friends the Russians during the Cold War. It’s small and nearly undetectable, until it’s triggered, of course.”

“And our bad guys can teleport, just in case you didn’t already know that.”

“We’ve placed wards about the prison to slow incoming teleporters. It won’t stop them but it will give us sufficient warning that someone is coming.”

“Then we rush off and confront someone carrying a nuke?” I asked.

“Have a better plan?”

I had several, all of which involved more alcohol, more heroin, and maybe swallowing a shotgun’s load to avoid playing take with a nuclear bomb. Unfortunately none of those would stop the threat to my child. As such, I shook my head.

“Good, then we wait.”

And wait we did. And wait, and wait, and wait…

The first three hours were an inconvenience. The second three had become both mind
and
ass numbing torture. Sitting there with Shaw and her flunkies was like having sex with your in laws: disturbing in ways you just don’t want to imagine. We kept our distance but Thud’s voice carried and his every inane comment made me cringe. It also made me a bit self-conscious. Every time he said something stupid, which was all the time, everyone turned and looked at me.

“Seriously? That’s not how I come across to you guys, is it?”

Shaw hopped to her feet in a frantic scramble right then, her eyes glazed. I’m not sure if I was relieved or upset that her pee-pee dance had silenced the answer to my question.

“Incoming telepathic message,” Michael said, stating the obvious.

“What is it?” Rachelle asked as Shaw’s expression went from annoyed to furious in zero seconds flat.

“The assailants, they’ve hit a different installation!” She looked ready to bite her lips off she was so pissed. “Meet us there now!” Shaw barked out the coordinates and she and her people vanished.

Rachelle peeled back the dimensions and I wrapped our group in a shield of energy that would deflect the radiation. While I could handle it I didn’t think Rachelle or Rahim would fare so well being bombarded with nuke juice. As soon as I gave them the go ahead we went through the gate and appeared smack dab in the middle of another abandoned, backwoods locale that had met an ugly end. This time Shaw had given us a direct line to the prison, and the great metal door had been ripped from its hinges just like it had at the last place. We were too late.

The air was warm and fetid despite my attempt at filtering it, and the landscape was a ruined, sizzling mess. Shaw and her cohorts didn’t give us any time to examine it though. They barreled inside the prison without hesitation. I was about to warn them off when I noticed the reverberating flutter of helicopter rotors and spied a military chopper through the cracks in the smoking foliage.

“This didn’t just happen,” I said and ran off after Shaw. Rahim and Rachelle followed me in silence, no doubt expecting an ambush. I felt I knew better.

Shaw had fucked up and needed us now more than ever.

We hurried down the stairs and slipped past the interior door, mangled much like the outer door, and I felt the tingle of energy once more. This time, knowing what it was, I recognized the remnant energies of Limbo and told myself to take a better look this time to see if I could decipher how she’d surrounded the place with pockets of the hazy dimension. It would come in handy.

As soon as we burst through the second door we damn near ran into the backs of the DSI monkeys. Alexander Poe had joined the party and stood off to the side from the others. He gave me a shallow nod and repeated the gesture with Rachelle and Rahim as they stepped into the room behind me, but that was as friendly as he got. Not that I expected even that much. My telling Marcus D’anatello that Poe was alive kind of put a hurting on the trust between us, not that there’d been a ton to begin with. But my relationship with Poe was neither here nor there right then. I looked away from his front of cold indifference and surveyed the installation.

From the doorway we could see that all the cell doors had been peeled open already and there was no sense of anyone in the prison, not even a body this time. There was a measure of blood right inside the doorway that pointed to some hapless guard having been there recently, but that was it. Everyone had fled the coop before we arrived.

“No, no, no,” Shaw repeated, fury leaking out with each successive exclamation. She paced at the far end of the hall, her hands held out before her, fingers gnarled and wiggling as though she were choking the Invisible Man.

“Lose something?” I couldn’t help myself.

Her goons turned and glared at me but Shaw didn’t bother. She whirled on her people.

“Search the cells,” she shouted, storming into the one closest while her people jumped to follow the order. They split up and went into the others nearest the one she had.

“Might as well,” I said, remembering all the shit I found in the first place that I hadn’t shown anyone or looked at yet, “though I would prefer someone stand guard outside so none of the goons get the wise idea to lock me inside.”

Rahim huffed and waved me inside, taking up a position that allowed him to see both the DSI people and the front door. Once he was in place Rachelle and I went into the nearest cell and started to toss it. The cell, I mean.

There wasn’t much there, the resident nowhere near as artistic or pent up as the old man from the first prison. What few papers had been left behind were your typical down in the dumps jail journal that did nothing to explain why anyone would be busting out supernatural entities let alone this particular one who happened to be a whiny bitch. And with nothing else to be found we went back out into the hall to pick another cell to rifle through. Thud came out of the one alongside ours, tossing a handful of papers onto the floor.

“This is a wild pecker chase,” he complained, stomping off to roll the next cell.

“I found a huge one,” I said, pointing at him. He snarled, flipped me off, and kept walking. “You make it too easy, Spud.”

Rahim reached down past me and snatched up the papers the demon had discarded. His dark eyes narrowed as he took them in, his gaze snapping upwards to see where Shaw was.

“What is it?” Rachelle whispered.

He handed her one of the sheets and she held it so I could see it. Rachelle gasped under her breath.

“You have got to be kidding me,” I muttered as Rahim held the others up for us to look at. “Clearly there’s a prison theme going around lately.”

Across all of the sheets was the same kind of writing that made up the book that Lucifer had given me. The same one that had opened a mystical portal into God’s trash dimension where we’d come across Judas and a whole population of beings that had been discarded by the Almighty as flawed only to have them breed and further pollute the bloodlines to evolve into their own species, never before seen outside of the mystical prison realm. And now we were staring at that ancient alien language again, which had caused us nothing but trouble recently. The book, at least, sat somewhere in Heaven, likely under lock and key or burnt as heresy.

“What have you found?” Shaw asked, coming to stand before us.

Rahim growled. None of us had seen her approach, caught up as we were with our discovery.

“Neolithic porn. Nothing you want to look at, I’m sure, but boy does that cavewoman have an impressive fur coat. Gives a whole new meaning to the term wooly mammoth.”

Shaw reached out and snatched the sheet from Rachelle and glared at it before turning her ugly look on me. “This is the language from that accursed book of yours. What do you know about this?” She waved the paper in my face.

I pushed it aside. “Just as much as you know about the folks you’ve locked up in here and why our bomb buddies hit this place rather than the one you thought they would.”

She growled and inched closer like she wanted to rip my throat out. My power welled up and froze her in place, a less than subtle reminder that I wasn’t the same weakling she’d shot in the head a while back.

“Unless you come clean with us you won’t get shit regarding this.” I gestured to the stack of papers Rahim had rolled up and held behind his thigh to keep out of her reach.

Admittedly I wasn’t all that sure the writing would tell us shit. It could very well be some dude’s erotic adventures in prison land for all I knew. Rala might well be able to translate it for us but we were as ignorant of what it meant as Shaw was, though I wasn’t going to admit that.

“This open communication goes both ways, Trigg.”

I nodded. “And we’ll gladly tell you what these pages say as soon as we have them translated. Now tell me why you had an alien locked up in your little prison system.”

“We didn’t,” she answered. “The woman in this cell was from Earth as far as I was led to believe.”

That didn’t jibe. “Who was she?”

Shaw shrugged. “A witch as far as I know.” I started to bitch but she raised a hand to ward me off. “Whether you wish to believe me or not, most of these prisoners pre-date my role as head of the Department of Supernatural Investigation, Trigg. I received very little information regarding them when I was placed in charge. In fact, I only learned there was more than one of these prisons by accident, stumbling across the information, which had been deliberately withheld from me by my
superiors
.” She sneered at the last word.

“How many more are there?” I asked.

Shaw grinned and remained silent but her snide smile died on her lips a moment later.

“There are three remaining, Mister Trigg,” Poe said from where he leaned against the wall.

She whirled and offered him a withering glare. “You will remain quiet, Poe…” She let the rest of her warning hang in the air.

He offered up a congenial nod and feigned examining his fingernails. It was clear he’d yet to mend his fences with Shaw and planned to be a thorn in her side regardless the consequences. I found it amusing.

“Where are they located?” Rahim asked, drawing Shaw’s ire to him.

She swallowed back her fury before answering. “I’ll provide the location of the next nearest installation, which will be yours to defend. My people and I will deal with another.”

“And the last one?”

She shrugged. “We’ll have to hope I’ve chosen correctly.”

“Which means you still don’t have a clue what’s going on or why your prisons are being attacked.” I groaned. We weren’t getting anywhere with her.

“Put your little alien to work at translating those papers and maybe we’ll learn something before they hit the next target.”

“Working with you is like having a non-romantic colonoscopy.”

“Then let us get on with it so we can be done with each other sooner.” She pushed past us and stormed up the stairs.

Her minions followed her without a word. Poe nodded to us all once more and made his way through the door and up the stairs. We trailed behind him and emerged once more into the crackling air of wherever we were.

“Here is the location,” Shaw said, handing Rachelle a piece of paper with scribbled GPS coordinates. “I presume you telepath is in touch?” Rahim nodded. “Good. Have him reach out to Poe so we are in constant contact.”

Either Rachelle or Rahim must have sent a message to Mike while we were talking because Poe spoke up right after. “Contact established.”

Shaw nodded and continued. “We do not have the benefit of our resources being applied at either of these locations so you’re on your own as far as determining when or if the assailants are inbound. Should they strike at your location, have your telepath inform ours and we will come and assist. We ask the same of you, of course. Are we clear?”

“We are,” Rachelle told her before Rahim or I could answer.

Shaw grunted, then waved to her people. They were gone a second later.

“There’s more to this than we’re being told,” Rahim said.

“No doubt, but what?”

“I wish I knew but I can guarantee it’s not going to end well.”