Hardbingers

4

The pain awakens him.

Another Alarm—and so soon after the last.

Then he plunges into that other place, the flashing gray space where he is shown things yet to be—things that must be prevented, and things that must be done.

The pain knifes through his brain and the lights flash. He is aware of his bed under him and he grabs the mattress as he feels it begin to spin. The flashes cycle faster and faster until they coalesce into a vision…

A restaurant… a copy of The New York Times lies on the counter where an attractive woman is paying the cashier… the headline concerns a Bay Ridge apartment linked to terrorists and runs above a photograph of a building.

The woman has short blond hair and carries another life within her.

The Oculus has seen this woman before. She appeared in another Alarm… two months ago… in November. In that one she was standing on a curb, waiting to cross Second Avenue when a truck went out of control and struck her, killing her. He saw the driver of the truck: Zeklos.

That Alarm was stomach turning, but nowhere near as painful as the one that followed a month later.

But real life had not mimicked the November Alarm. Zeklos missed the woman—some of his fellow yeniceri said on purpose due to a lack of resolve—and crashed into another truck instead.

Now the same woman, still with child, but not alone. A dark-haired little girl stands beside her, holding a candy bar. She appears to be pleading but the Oculus cannot hear what she's saying.

The clock behind the counter says half past one.

The vision fades to gray, then lights up with the woman standing on the exact same corner as the last time, only now she is holding the child by the hand while the child munches happily on the candy bar.

As the light changes, they step off the curb… and then, without warning, a white panel truck runs the red light and slams into the two of them, sending them flying. If he were seeing this with his eyes, the Oculus would have squeezed them shut. But since the scene is playing inside his head, he is compelled to watch. And in the driver seat of the truck he sees one of his yeniceri: Cal Davis.

The vision fades to gray, and then the gray fades, and with it, the pain.

The bed stops its vertiginous whirl but the Oculus doesn't move.

A yenigeri in an Alarm means the Ally needs this done.

Why? he wonders. Why does the Ally want this woman dead? The little girl wasn't in the previous Alarm. Does it want her life too, or is she merely collateral damage?

How will their deaths affect the fight against the Otherness?

And why must it fall to him to order their deaths?

He wonders if the Otherness is behind an Alarm like this, if it somehow taps in from time to time. But that can't be. He's tuned in to the Ally, and that's where the Alarm came from.

But although the Ally has never in his experience been cruel, he knows it can be merciless.