Dead Harvest

9

"Are you all right?" Anders asked. "You don't look well."

"I'm fine," I lied. Truth was, my head was fucking killing me.

"You're slurring. You need to sit down."

I opened my mouth to argue, and then closed it again. Anders was right. We'd been hobbling along for what seemed like hours, and I was exhausted. My leg was throbbing, my mouth was dry as dust, and my head felt like it was full of angry bees.

I looked around. The world lurched — my vision was slow to respond. We were heading north on Church, a few blocks south of City Hall. At the corner was a mounted cop, lazily scanning the crowd from atop his steed. I looked away. Beside us was a family of tourists, decked out head to toe in New York gear, and walking hand in hand. Their youngest, a girl of maybe six, caught my eye as they passed. Her eyes flickered with black fire as she spotted me, and her smile faltered, replaced by a look of pure hatred. As soon as it appeared, though, it was gone. She shot me a quizzical glance as though I was to blame, and then she smiled again, turning her attention once more to the sights of the city.

"I think maybe I should sit down," I said, "but not here. We need to get off the street."

Anders led me through a narrow parking lot to a side street. Beside a rusted metal door marked as the service entrance for the deli around the corner sat a battered dining-room chair, curlicues of green vinyl arching skyward from its cracked and peeling seat. Anders dropped me into the chair and plopped down onto a milk crate beside it.

I closed my eyes and willed the throbbing in my head to stop. It seemed my head had other plans. But at least sitting down, my leg was tolerable, and after a couple dozen blocks serving as a human crutch, I'm sure Anders was grateful for the rest. Crazy or not, he sure as hell never signed on for this.

We sat in silence a while: me stock-still as I waited for my head to clear, and Anders rocking gently back and forth, his gaze fixed at a spot just in front of his shoes. Eventually, though, his curiosity got the better of him.

"The men who attacked you," he said. "They were cops?"

"Not exactly."

"Then who?"

"That, I'd rather not say."

Anders nodded, as though that were answer enough for now. "But you're not fond of the cops — I've seen the way you look at them. Watchful. Wary. Always quick to look away before they see you."

The kid was nuts, maybe, but not stupid. "I guess I like them fine," I said. "Only right now, they're not too fond of me."

"Why?"

"I took something that didn't belong to me."

"So you're a thief."

I smiled. "I guess you could say that."

"And the others?"

"What others?"

"The lady throwing bread to the pigeons. The man at the window in the coffee shop. The little girl, just now. All like you — like someone else behind the eyes — but only for a moment. They've been watching you. They've been watching you, and you've been terrified."

"Not like me," I said. "Not themselves, but not like me."

"Then what?"

Ah, hell, I thought. If he can see them — Anders deserves to know. "They call themselves the Fallen. But demons, devils, djinn — you can call them what you like."

He fell silent a moment, as if processing what I'd told him. "These demons — they're looking for you? Hunting you?"

"I don't think so," I replied. "These creatures, they're powerful, and clever as well. Any of them could've taken me if they wanted. No, I think they wanted me to see them. I think they wanted me to know that they were watching me."

"Watching you — why?"

I thought back to what Merihem had said to me. You think either side wants a war? When last it happened, one-third our number fell — and all because a son of fire refused to kneel before a son of clay. You couldn't begin to understand the world of shit that would rain down upon us all if one of our kind was caught damning an innocent soul to rot in hell for an eternity. My guess was, whoever Merihem had been leaning on had got to talking. Not that I should be surprised — if this morning was any indication, my days of flying under the radar were over. "It's complicated," I said.

"The men who attacked you — were they demons, too?"

"No."

I could have told him, I guess. That they were angels. I told myself then that he wouldn't have believed me, but I'm pretty sure that's crap. I think I was worried that he would have. I mean, Anders was a little off-kilter, yeah, but he seemed like a good kid. Who's to say he wouldn't have taken the angels' side? The way I figured it, the shape I was in, I needed all the help I could get. If that meant keeping the knifewielding crazy person in the dark, then so be it.

He shook his head. "You don't seem very popular."

"It's been a rough couple of days," I agreed. "You didn't ask for any of this, you know. You wanna walk away, now is the time."

"The pills they gave me, they said they'd make it better. The fear. The worry. The things I thought I'd seen. They told me it was all in my head. But that wasn't entirely true, was it?"

"No, I suppose it wasn't."

"Closing your eyes won't make the world go away. I'm in if you'll have me. Besides," Anders added, looking me up and down, "you seem to be doing pretty lousy on your own."

By the time we made it back to Chelsea, day had evened into dusk and the lights of the city reflected amber in the overcast sky. It felt like we'd been walking for days.

Though this time there was no fire, no billowing bacon-scented smoke, the front door of Friedlander's building was unlocked. In retrospect, I should've seen that stroke of luck for the warning sign it was. At the time, I was so damn tired, all I wanted was to get upstairs and get some sleep.

The stairs themselves were tricky. With one hand on Anders' shoulder and the other on the banister, I half-hopped, half-hoisted myself to the top. By the time we reached the third floor, my lungs were burning, my face and neck were slick with sweat, and my chest and good leg ached from exertion. I collapsed to the floor beside Friedlander's door, exhausted. From somewhere down the hall, a dog yapped, driving into my temples like a furry little ice pick. I wished to hell it'd shut up.

Anders jiggled the doorknob. "Locked," he said. "You got a key?"

I shook my head. Anders shrugged and took a knee. From his jacket, he produced a small screwdriver and a scrap of metal wire. A bit of fiddling, and the lock clicked home. I pushed myself up off the floor and limped over to the door. This time, the knob turned fine. I pushed open the door and threw an arm around Anders. Together, we shambled across the threshold into the darkened apartment.

Inside, the place seemed deserted. The lights were off, the curtains drawn; the only illumination was the wedge of light that spilled into the apartment from the open door. My heart fluttered in panic as I opened my mouth to call for Kate, but the word died on my lips as the darkness was pierced by an animal scream. I was peripherally aware of a flash of movement, a glint of metal, and then I was falling. I slammed into the floorboards and skittered across the room, watching as Anders dove for the open door, his arms thrown up to shield his head. Our assailant followed, a cry of raw fury escaping her lips.

It was Kate, I realized. And as she drew her hands high above her head, I realized the glint I'd seen was a knife.

"Kate?" My voice had abandoned me, and all I could muster was a hoarse whisper. Anders was backed against the doorjamb — his eyes pleading, his hands raised in defense. Kate brought down the knife.

"KATE!"

At the sound of her name, she wheeled. Too late to stop the knife, but not too late to deflect it. Anders rolled sideways, and Kate drove the knife into floorboards instead of flesh. Her eyes went wide with horror and she released the blade, backing slowly away from it as though it were an animal poised to strike. "Sam?" she said. She sounded suddenly small and afraid.

"Yeah, kid, it's me."

"But I thought — I mean, you were gone for hours, and then the door was rattling… I figured they'd gotten you — that they'd gotten you and come for me." She looked me up and down. "God, Sam, you look like shit!"

I laughed. The effort made me wince. "Lay off the funny, kid — laughing makes my everything hurt."

"Who the hell is this?" Kate jerked her head at Anders, who was staring up at her from the floor with a mixture of awe and terror.

"Long story. Why don't you close the door, and I'll tell you all about it."

She closed the door and helped me up. Together, we made our way to the couch. Anders collected himself from off of the floor and headed to the kitchen. He got a glass of water from the tap and handed it to me with shaking hands before taking a seat on the armchair, as far away from Kate as he could manage.

I took a sip of water and began to talk. I told Kate of my meeting with Merihem, and about the run-in with our friends in the Crown Vic. I told her of my rescue by Anders, and our subsequent trek across Manhattan. I left out the fact that Merihem claimed there was nothing I could do to save her, the identities of the folks who tried to run me down, and the attention my little field trip had garnered from the demon realm. The way I figured it, she'd had a bad enough week already.

Through it all, Anders sat listening quietly. When I finished, he spoke. "I know you," he said to Kate. "You're the girl on the TVs. Ten of you in every storefront. They say you killed your family."

"Sam here thinks I was framed."

Anders' gaze settled on the knife still jutting from the hardwood floor.

"Yeah," Kate said, following his gaze. "I'm really sorry about that. It's just that Sam had been gone so long, I was worried he'd been caught or something, and then things got really creepy here-"

"Creepy?" I interrupted. "Creepy how?"

"I don't know — just creepy. I mean, there was all kinds of commotion next door earlier, and I swore I heard a scratching in the walls. Then that damn dog started barking for no reason…"

Scratching in the walls. I leapt to my feet and hobbled to the wall that abutted the apartment next door, gritting my teeth against the pain. "Which wall — this one?" I asked.

"Yeah, how'd you know?"

"The others are either exterior or they face the hall." I scanned along the wall until I found what I was looking for. A heating vent, nestled in the far corner between wall and ceiling. My stomach dropped as I caught a flicker of motion like a snake receding into its hole, only this snake glinted like glass, like metal. Like the kind of camera a SWAT team would use to monitor a room.

"That dog wasn't barking for no reason," I said. "It's time to go."

But I was too late. As I hobbled toward the couch, the lights cut out, and the apartment was plunged into darkness. Anders found his feet and wandered over to the window, pulling aside the curtains and peeking out.

"It doesn't look like an outage," he said. "The rest of the block is fine."

"Anders," I said, "get away from the window."

"What? Why?"

"Get away from the window now!"

Anders must've heard something in my tone that rattled him; he leapt back from the window as if stung. In that moment, the window imploded, spraying glass and wooden splinters through the darkened apartment. Something clattered to the floor, and the room began to fill with thick noxious smoke, ghostly white by the reflected glow of the street lights. The hall outside the apartment echoed with a chorus of shouts. The floor resounded with the force of approaching footfalls, coming toward us from down the hall and up the stairs.

I realize now that someone must've tipped 'em to our presence — our faces had been plastered all over the news, after all, and with me in scrubs, carrying Kate's robed form down the street, we weren't exactly subtle getting here. No doubt some busybody neighbor spotted us and called it in. Cops were probably camped out all damn day, keeping an eye on Kate and waiting for her accomplice to return so they could spring their trap and snatch her back.

Like I said, now I get it. Then, though, all I knew was they were coming. They were coming, and I couldn't let them take her.

My leg erupted in pain as I sprinted across the darkened room. I paid it no mind. The gas was thicker here — it burned my eyes and clawed at my throat and sinuses like a rabid animal. All I wanted was to curl up on the floor and wait for the pain to go away. Of course, that didn't seem like much of a plan. So instead, I grabbed Anders and Kate by the arm and dragged them through the darkness toward the bedroom, slamming the door behind us.

The air in the bedroom was a little better. My eyes and throat still burned, but I felt a little more human — a little more in control. I pulled them close, shouting over the din of the raid. "Listen very closely. They're coming in, and if I don't do something to stop them, they're going to take us all. I can't let that happen. I'm going to need to create a diversion. You two stay in here and count to fifty. Then you go out the window and down the fire escape. Don't stop for anything, you hear me?"

"Won't they be watching for us?" Anders said to me.

"Not if I do my job."

"No!" Kate shook her head. "We're not going to just leave you here!"

"Kate, there isn't any other choice. My leg's shot — I ain't going anywhere. And without a diversion, you wouldn't make it five steps."

In the other room, the front door thudded. The jamb held, but it wouldn't for long. We were running out of time. Kate looked at me a moment, her eyes red and streaming from the gas, and then she leaned toward me, planting a kiss on my cheek. "Be careful, OK?"

I smiled. "You just worry about staying alive, all right? Once you're safe, I'll follow, I swear. There's a park at the corner of Ninth and Twenty-eighth — do you know it?" She nodded. "Good — I'll meet you there. And Anders?"

"Yeah?"

"You keep her safe."

The front door splintered inward with a sickening crack. It was time. I closed my eyes and concentrated, my lips moving in a silent prayer that this would work. Swapping bodies takes strength, strength and focus, and the shape I was in, both were in short supply. Not to mention the fact that possessing the living is not without its price. Still, my only alternatives were capture and death. If I were captured before I did my thing, then they'd get Kate, and she was as good as damned. As for death? Just because in my case it isn't permanent doesn't make it any more of a picnic. If ever I were gonna dig deep, now was the time.

They stormed the apartment. From my hiding place in the bedroom, I touched each of them in turn. The rookie, all fear and nerves — no use to me. The jaded old-timer, just looking to get through this so he could get back to banging his wife's sister. Ditto with him. The commanding officer who knows deep down he's thought of as an officious prick. Nope. But the one who was first through the door? Quiet. Competent. The one they all trusted. He was exactly what I was looking for.

I threw my mind at him with all I had. The Friedlander body convulsed around me as I struggled to pull away. Every muscle clenched as one. Tendons snapped like rubber bands. I shrieked in agony, but still I pressed on. My nose erupted in a torrent of blood, and for a fleeting moment everything went red as a vessel in my eye burst under the strain. Then, suddenly, the pain evaporated, and all went dark.

Friedlander was gone.

My mind slammed into the cop's like a freight train. He buckled, but kept his feet. His stomach clenched, threatened to purge. By force of will, I kept it down.

I wheeled around. Just the three of them inside with me, armored up like they were heading off to war. A lot of effort for such a little girl. My earpiece crackled with static and shouted commands, but I ignored it. Instead I raised my firearm, a mean-looking fully automatic assault rifle that looked to weigh about a ton. This guy handled like a dream, his muscle memory doing all the work. He let out a panicked wail inside my head as I pulled the trigger, three quick bursts. Just like that, the advance team went down. My guy had decent aim — one of 'em took a stray bullet in the shoulder, but the rest hit them square in the breadbasket. If the vests had done their jobs, breathing was gonna hurt like hell for a while, but all three ought to live.

I approached the open doorway to the hall. A thousand shouted questions in my ear. I considered yanking the earpiece, but then I thought better of it. The better to hear you with, my dear.

A rustling to my right. One of my teammates was scrambling to get to his knees, his gas mask clouded with condensation from his labored breathing. His rifle lay useless halfway across the room. I watched him as he groped for the piece strapped to his ankle. Not on my watch. I cracked him hard in the face with the butt of my gun, and he fell limp to the floor.

I took a moment to check the others. They were both out. Best not to disturb them, I thought — they look so peaceful when they're sleeping.

The front door lay in the center of the floor, the hinges a splintered mess. I pressed my back tight to the wall beside what was left of the door frame and listened. If anyone was right outside, I didn't hear them. I rolled along the wall onto my belly, gun at the ready, and sprayed a few rounds into the darkened, fog-laden hall.

Again, the radio squawked. "Jesus Christ, what the hell is going on up there? Flynn! Jenkins! Skala! Fischer! Anybody — report!"

"We've got shots fired, and three men down," I replied, injecting what I hoped was the appropriate amount of panic into my voice. "They got past us, sir. Send all units to the front entrance — suspects are armed, and I think they mean to shoot their way out!"

I let off a few bursts into the hall to punctuate my point. From somewhere below me, I heard the pop, pop of return fire. The radio filled with chatter as cops were redeployed. I hoped that Kate and Anders were on the move — they were never going to get a better shot. I fought the urge to fall back and join them — for this to work, I was gonna have to keep the pressure on.

I crawled into the hall, pausing at the top of the stairs. If anyone had seen me, they didn't let on, and anyway, they had no reason to shoot at me if they had — I looked like one of them. Still, bullets hurt, so you can never be too careful.

The stairwell wound around a central shaft that cut clear down to the first floor. I rested the barrel of my gun between the wooden balusters and squeezed off a few shots toward ground-level. No response this time — they were either waiting me out, or they were already on the move. I slinked down the stairs to the next landing and tried again. Still no response.

The second-floor hallway was bathed in eerie white light, streaming in through the transom above the front door from the spotlight they'd trained on it from their position on the street. I steered clear of the beams, hugging tight to the shadow-clad floorboards. From where I lay, I had a clear shot at the front door. Gritting my teeth against the possibility of actually hitting anyone, I took it. Shafts of white light poured through the holes I'd punched through the door and swirled ghost-like with the settling remains of the tear gas. It was oddly beautiful.

I lay there a while, occasionally loosing a round or two on the poor innocent door to keep this standoff going. I wanted desperately to retreat and check on Kate and Anders, but they couldn't have been taken or I would've heard it over the radio. No, the best thing I could do for them was to stay put and give them time to run. When this was over all I had to do was find a quiet corner while they stormed the place and walk right out that front door. No one would be the wiser.

It was a decent plan. A solid plan. And all it took was a creaky floorboard to let me know it was never gonna happen.

The floorboard in question was about five feet to my right, just three steps up from my second-floor perch. By instinct, I rolled away from it, bringing around my gun — incessant yammering aside, this guy sure beat the last meat-suit for handling — but I was too late. It was the rookie, his face stripped of his gas mask, his eyes wide and frightened. He had his 9mm trained on me, the barrel bobbing between my head and chest in his shaky, unsure grip.

"Drop it, Mike."

I did what he said, setting the rifle on the floor beside me. I wasn't wild about my odds, lying flat on my back as I was, so I rose slowly to my knees, my hands raised in what I hoped was a placating gesture.

The rookie said, "Stay put, Mike — I don't want to have to use this."

"And I don't want to make you. Why don't we talk about this?"

I stepped toward him. He retreated.

I reached for the rookie's name. It wasn't hard to find — old Mike here was shouting to him at the top of his imaginary lungs. I said, "C'mon, Owen, it's me — why don't you put that thing down, and we'll walk out of this together."

"But you — you attacked us!"

"I'm sorry. I wigged. I thought they were behind us. This is all just a big misunderstanding."

Owen looked incredulous. "You wigged?"

"That's right."

"You wigged and took out your team?"

"Look, it was an accident. I said I was sorry." Again I stepped closer. This time, he didn't back away. "Just put down the gun. I mean, you're not really going to shoot me…"

I took another step, made a play for the gun. Owen screamed and backed away.

The last thing I remembered was a flash of white light, and the thunder of gunfire.

And then falling.

And then nothing.