Twenty-seven
In the desolate hours that passed, Wallace managed to
drift to sleep. He awoke somewhere near dawn to find Sasha gone and
Melanie roaming the apartment. "Relax. She was up and about early and I
needed to talk to you. Nick volunteered to take her for a walk and answer
questions she might not want to ask you.
"Did you see what happened last night? Ghaedor was
here."
"We saw you having a bad dream." She nodded to
indicate the shattered alarm clock on the floor.
Wallace climbed to his feet. "Then you were right.
He's just something in my head."
"The how doesn't matter, only the why. What did he
have to say?"
Wallace recounted the conversation. It was as if
Ghaedor's visit had been indelibly etched in his memory. He spoke in a
monotone, repeating Ghaedor's message word for word.
"That's pretty heavy. We'll need time to think about
what it all means. We were going to suggest that you send Sasha away to
where she'd be safe."
"She wouldn't be safe anywhere,” Wallace said.
“Nobody's safe."
"Our sentiments exactly. After what happened last
night at the farmhouse, the ASG decided to bring in a small strike force,
so it's going to be a lot more nerve-wracking from here on out. We're
going to booby trap a local residential site and try to capture a specimen
of our predator. We're not really picky. We'll take a big or a little
one. But we're still something of a point team for the agency, you and me
and Sasha."
"A point team?" Wallace said suspiciously.
Melanie gave him a grim smile. "Nothing much happens
when I'm around so we're wondering if you and Sasha would volunteer."
"As bait?"
"We were hoping you wouldn't think of it that way."
Wallace sat on the edge of the bed feeling thoroughly
spooked and more than a bit panicky. "It's not like I could stop it from
happening if we refused."
"We'll relocate this evening," Melanie said. "Try to
get Sasha to talk to you as much as you can. We need to know what's going
on inside her head. Do you feel any differently toward her now?"
"I don't know what to think."
"Don't let Sasha know anything's wrong. We think
she's precariously close to a breakdown. Any little thing could push her
over the edge."
Wallace hadn't had time to think about what Ghaedor
had told him. Had he implied that Sasha was really dead? Two thousand
years had passed in the other world. The most recent excursions were
coming from a point in their future. In that unimaginable world, Sasha
was ancient history.
"I'll go before she gets back," Melanie said. "If
you need me, I'll be nearby."
Wallace called out and stopped her at the door. He
gazed at her helplessly for a time. “I'm sorry. About you and me."
"It's not your fault, Wallace. We probably never had
anything to loose to begin with."
Sasha returned to the apartment just after Melanie
left. She wandered the apartment, brimming with excitement. "I met one
of Melanie's friends. He explained what they wanted. I said it would be
okay. Maybe they can stop it from happening."
She awoke screaming during an afternoon nap. She
bolted upright in bed, her eyes wide with horror. Even when the screams
stopped, she sat staring off into space, gulping air, groping for Wallace
when he ran to her and folded his arms around her to soothe her panic.
"What did you dream about?" he asked when she had
calmed herself.
"Monsters," she said. "I dreamed of monsters and a
city on fire."
Wallace concentrated on holding a panic attack of his
own at bay. Even with Sasha in his arms and with Melanie and her friends
nearby, he was still starkly alone. His fear of losing Sasha was nothing
he could share with anyone, even the potential stranger in his arms.
Melanie burst into the apartment at dusk, frenzied
with excitement.
"Time to go," she announced. "We've bugged and
booby-trapped the unholy daylights of a farmhouse where the next breaches
should be occurring soon. You can't tell by looking, but a fly can't get
in and out without being seen, x-rayed, and shot down if it so much as
growls at us."
Melanie led the way downstairs to a waiting van,
jittery with nervous excitement. "We got the whole ASG working on this.
We got the best people and the most think tanks and state-of-the-art toys
to back us up of any project being undertaken. We'll show our nasty
little friends who's got the baddest bite in the neighborhood."
Sasha never bothered to look back as they drove away,
superficially calm and collected. Melanie Cass, on the other hand, had
become a dynamo of nervous energy.
The van took a thirty mile drive along
well-maintained county roads. The farmhouse in question turned out to be
an old, well-kept two-story surrounded on three sides by recently
harvested corn fields. Aside from a single whip antenna rising from one
side of the roof, Wallace could see nothing of the monitoring equipment
and booby traps that Melanie had promised.
The house was furnished. There was old silverware in
the drawers, and a TV Guide on top of an ancient console television. The
furniture throughout the house was deteriorating, but serviceable. There
were four rooms downstairs and three bedrooms and an extra bath up.
"I don't want to see," Sasha said when Wallace went
down for a quick inspection of the thoroughly cleaned basement, preferring
instead to wander the dining room and kitchen and explore cupboards and
the china cabinet.
"We bought it a week ago from a retired farm couple,"
Melanie said as he explored. "We kept upping the offer five thousand
dollars cash per hour until they willingly left with nothing but the
clothes on their back. Had they been unreasonably stubborn, they may well
have died here."
Melanie turned to face Wallace in the gloom. "You do
realize the risk, don't you? You've violated the conditions of Sasha's
return as you said Maligoth laid them out."
"Do you really think you can protect her?"
"If we're somebody's idea of dining out," Melanie
said solemnly, "it's our job to make it safer for them to eat at home."
"Where's our backup clear out here in the sticks?"
"There a pole shed down the road. CIA operators on
loan. They change shifts three times a day. If an alarm sounds, they're
no more than one and one half minutes away from us. The alarms in the
house are automatic. They monitor things like magnetic fields, radiation
levels, just about everything."
Melanie followed him back upstairs and paused
uncomfortably at the front door. "I won't be far." She studied Sasha
with a wrinkled brow. "As far as we can determine, you're safer here than
anywhere. Our think tank suspects those portals can appear anywhere, in
which case the slopes of Tibet would be just as dangerous."
"We'll be okay," Wallace assured the woman.
Melanie retreated gracefully. Wallace closed and
locked the door behind her. Sasha turned away immediately and went into
the kitchen. She stood looking at the closed basement door.
"Melanie and her people can handle it," Wallace
assured her.
"No, they can't," Sasha said. "They're all going to
die, and so are we."
