Cloak Games: Rebel Fist (7 page)

“Master,” rumbled the orcish soldier in charge as they lowered their weapons. “You startled us.”

His dark eyes strayed to the AK-47 in my hands. I suspected the Archons did not sully themselves by carrying weapons of human design. 

“Why are you wasting time with human females?” I snapped, stopping a dozen paces away. I glanced further down the corridor, one part of my mind holding the Mask in place, the other calculating distances. I didn’t see any other orcish soldiers or Archons in the service corridor, and I took a step to the left, moving closer to one of the pallets of toilet paper. That should give Russell a clear line of sight to the orcs, and I could take cover behind the pallet if this went bad. 

The orcish soldier looked confused. “You…commanded it of us, master.”

“What nonsense is this?” I said. Lydia’s bloodshot eyes turned towards me, full of fresh fear. “This negligence is…beware!” I pointed the AK-47 in their direction. “The foe comes! Prepare to fight!” 

The orcs had been well-trained, and they spun to face the other direction, raising their AK-47s to cover the corridor. Lydia looked in that direction as well. It was absolutely perfect.

“Bookstore!” I shouted, letting my Mask dissolve, and I raised my gun and started shooting. 

I caught the orc on the left first, and the back of his head exploded. The orc in the center started to turn, and I put two rounds into his temple. The orc on the right roared in fury, taking aim, but by then Russell had come around the corner. His first shot caught the orcish soldier in the chest, and the orc staggered with a grunt, the ballistic armor in his harness deflecting the bullet. I started to turn my gun towards him, but by then Russell corrected his own aim. His second shot ripped through the orc’s neck, and the third bullet blew away the top of his head. 

Damn. Whoever taught rifle club at Russell’s school knew his business. 

Lydia stood frozen in the midst of the dead orcs, blinking in astonishment. Some of the blue blood from the dead soldiers had spattered on her green apron. 

“Good shot,” I said as Russell hurried up next to me. 

“They were focused on you,” said Russell, turning his gun’s safety on and slinging it over his shoulder with its strap. “How did you do that? I heard an Archon talking.” 

“Recorded it on my phone,” I lied. I stooped over one of the dead orcs and helped myself to his tactical knife. Lydia squeaked a little as I approached her, but I cut off the ropes. “Right. Let’s get out of here.” I pulled the gag away. “We…”

Lydia blinked at me, shivered, and started to cry. It wasn’t graceful weeping, either, but the full-throated sobbing of someone in desperate fear. 

I stared at her in disgust. For God’s sake! We didn’t have time for this nonsense. My first impulse was to slap some sense into her.

A flicker of shame stopped me. The girl had probably never seen anyone die. Certainly she had never seen anyone shot to death in front of her, and she had never seen an orc before today. When this was all over, I would probably go home and cry for a while in my shower, but I couldn’t fall apart right now. Neither could Lydia.

Before I could say anything, Russell gripped Lydia’s shoulders. She looked at him, blinking. 

“Lydia,” said Russell. “We’re going to get you out of here. But you have to do exactly what we say, okay?”

“Russell?” croaked Lydia. “What’s…what’s happening? Those monsters…”

“Orcs,” I said.

“They’re attacking the mall,” said Russell. “My sister and I can get you out of here, but you have to do exactly what we tell you. Do you understand?”

Lydia bobbed her head in a nod.

“Say it,” said Russell.

“I understand,” said Lydia. “Russell…what are we going to do?”

Russell looked at me. 

“We’re leaving,” I said. “We’ll take Mr. Loman’s car.”

“Oh, God,” said Lydia, tears filling her eyes. “Poor Mr. Loman. The monsters killed him…”

“Yes, they did,” I said, before she could fall apart again. “They killed him. But you’re still alive, and if you want to stay that way, we need you to keep quiet.”

“Can you do that, Lydia?” said Russell, more gently than I had.

She nodded again. 

Russell reached over and squeezed her hand, and for an awful moment I was sure he would insist on giving her a gun. There was no way I would let a girl who had been crying that hysterically carry a gun behind me, in front of me, or anywhere near me. Fortunately, Russell released her hand.

“Stay behind us,” said Russell. “Which way to the employee parking garage?”

“Um.” I watched as Lydia pulled herself together. “That way.” She pointed down the service corridor. “If we go down the stairs to the third level, there’s a walkway to the parking structure. Mr. Loman always complained about how far he had to walk.”

“Good,” I said. “Let’s go, and don’t talk unless it’s important.”

I led the way into the gloom of the service corridor, Russell and Lydia following me. 

Chapter 4: An Old Acquaintance

I kept my flashlight off, not wanting to draw attention, and strained to hear the sound of any enemies. The concrete walls and floor and the steel doors to the backs of the shops did a good job of muffling sounds, but from time to time I heard the distant thump of explosions, along with the stuttering pop of automatic gunfire. I wondered what was happening in the mall. I wondered what was happening in the rest of Milwaukee, if the entire city was under attack from the Archons. 

I glanced at my phone, but the network was still jammed. I had no way of knowing what was happening in the outside world until we got out of the mall. 

We didn’t encounter anyone else in the service corridors. I wondered what had happened to the employees and the shoppers. Maybe they had fled out the back and escaped when the orcs arrived and the shooting started. Maybe the veterans had put up a fight. Or maybe the orcs and the Archons had killed them all. 

I turned another corner and came to a stop. The corridor ended in two steel doors, both of them unmarked. A single emergency light cast a harsh glare from its metal cage in the ceiling. 

“Lydia,” I said. “Which door?”

“The right door,” she said. Her face was pale and drawn and her eyes bloodshot from weeping, but her voice only quavered a little. “It opens on the walkway to the employee parking structure.” 

I frowned. “Where’s the left one go?”

“Stairs up to the HVAC vault,” said Lydia. “The main air handler for the third floor is in there. It feeds into the vents for the food court, and opens to the recyclers on the roof.”

“How did you know that?” I said. 

“My grandfather works for the company that installed the air conditioning,” said Lydia, her arms folded tight against herself, her shoulders hunched as if she wished to make herself smaller. “I went to work with him a bunch of times when they installed the system.” 

“I remember that,” said Russell. “Didn’t he come talk about it on Career Day? Mr. Rochester’s class?”

Lydia blinked, then smiled a little. “Yeah, he did. Oh my God. I forgot all about that. Julie in fifth period fell asleep, and…”

“That’s just fascinating,” I said. Lydia swallowed and fell silent. I stepped to the door on the right and listened for a moment, but I couldn’t hear anything through the thick steel. I checked the handle, and it was unlocked. 

So I took a deep breath and pushed it open a crack. Sunlight spilled into the service corridor, and the smell of blood hit my nostrils. 

Suddenly I knew why we hadn’t seen anyone else in the corridors. 

The steel door opened into a covered skyway that connected the mall to the employee parking ramp. It had glass walls and a polished white floor now spattered with blood. Halfway down the skyway, a dozen orcish soldiers and a pair of black-uniformed Archons had set up a barricade. Maybe fifty dead human men and women lay sprawled on the floor, gunned down by the orcs. All of them wore uniforms or corporate polo shirts. They had been mall employees, fleeing for their lives, and the orcs had shot them dead. 

And if I moved the door another inch, they would shoot us dead, too.

Gently, gently, I eased the door shut, letting it creep into place so it wouldn’t click. I stepped back and let out a long breath, thinking hard.

“What is it?” said Russell. “What’s wrong?”

I was very glad that he had not seen all those dead people lying upon the floor. 

“Orcs,” I said. “Twelve of them, and two Archons. They’ve set up a little turkey shoot in the skyway.” 

“Oh, God,” said Lydia. “Oh, God. We’re not going to get out. We’re…”

“Shut up,” I said. Lydia flinched, and Russell frowned. “If you have a panic attack, they’ll hear you.” Lydia swallowed and fell silent. “Just be quiet and let me think for a minute.” 

I considered our options, but none of them were appealing. We could withdraw back the service corridors and head for the lower levels. It would be easy to get out of the mall on the ground floor, yet getting there would be the hard part. Sooner or later the Archons would send more orcs to sweep the service corridors, and the ground floor had to be crawling with soldiers. Maybe I could Mask myself as an Archon or an orcish soldier and claim that Russell and Lydia were my prisoners. The drawback of that plan was that any Archon would detect the spell, and I doubted all of them were as stupidly overconfident as the Elf I had killed in the bookstore. 

My fingers tightened against the stock of my AK-47, a darker idea coming to me.

There was an easy way out of the mall. I could open a rift way, enter the Shadowlands, and open another rift way back to Earth. I could use the rift ways to transport us away from the mall, maybe even far from Milwaukee, all in the matter of a few moments. 

That plan, though, had a number of practical difficulties. 

For one, I could not predict where the second rift way might go. The Shadowlands and Earth’s umbra are not contiguous. I might take Russell and Lydia into the Shadowlands and return to Earth in the middle of the Sahara Desert, or the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, or a slave market in some hellhole town in the Caliphate…or right in the middle of a group of orcs in the mall. 

Additionally, the creatures of the Shadowlands might kill us long before that happened. We might stumble into wraithwolves or bloodrats or worse things, and I didn’t have any way to fight them. The anthrophages were actively looking for me since I had pissed off the cult of the Dark Ones during the summer, and if I was in the Shadowlands for more than a few minutes they would find me and kill me.

I glanced at Russell and Lydia.

The final problem was that I would have to use magic in front of them, and I didn’t want to do that. I thought I could convince Russell to keep his mouth shut. Lydia would not keep quiet. If I used magic in front of her and we escaped, she would run screaming to the first Homeland Security officer or Inquisition agent that she could find. 

I was wondering if I could find a way to knock her unconscious when the floor shivered beneath my shoes and I heard a rattling hum behind the door on the left. For a frantic instant I wondered if a bomb had gone off, and then I realized that one of the air handlers had kicked on behind the left door.

A new idea came to me. 

I remembered the lunch I had eaten with Russell, the nasty greasy chicken sandwich in the food court. The food court had been a huge place, with balconies and dozens of restaurants and spotlights hanging from the ceiling. Thick metal ducts had gone through the beams of the ceiling…and I remembered seeing a narrow catwalk threading through the beams. The ducts wouldn’t support a grown man’s weight, so if somebody like Lydia’s grandfather needed to do maintenance, they would take the catwalk. 

And it was possible the orcs and the Archons hadn’t sent a guard to the catwalk. 

“Lydia,” I said. “Do you have a map on your phone?”

She blinked a couple of times. “A…a map?”

“When you started working at the bookstore,” I said, trying to keep the impatience out of my voice. I had to remind myself that a terrified fourteen-year-old girl would not have experience keeping her cool in a crisis. “They probably put an app on your phone, a welcome app or something.”

“Yeah,” said Lydia. “Yeah, Mr. Loman did.” She swallowed, trying to hold back the tears. 

“Bring up the map and let me see it,” I said. 

“But my phone isn’t working,” said Lydia.

I started to snap back an answer, but Russell spoke first.

“But the app’s already on your phone, right?” said Russell, calm as ever. “It’s already downloaded. You don’t need the network for that.”

“Oh,” said Lydia. “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that.” She produced her phone, tapped it a few times, and handed it to me. It was a cheap little phone with a bright pink case, the sort of thing parents bought their teenage daughter for her first phone, but she had installed the employee app and it did have a comprehensive map of the mall. 

“Thanks, Lydia,” said Russell. “That will be really helpful.”

“How are you so calm?” said Lydia. Her arms wrapped tighter around herself. “I just want to crawl into a corner and hide. Or throw up.”

“Don’t crawl into the corner after throwing up in it,” I muttered as I scrolled through the map. “The smell would be unpleasant.” 

Russell shrugged. “Everyone dies, Lydia.” He patted his white hair. “I just have a better idea of how I’m going to die than most people.”

“Oh,” said Lydia. “I hadn’t thought of it like that.” 

“I really don’t want to get shot, though,” said Russell, “and panicking will not help with that.” There was an understatement. “So we’ll stay calm, and we’ll get you out of here. My sister will figure something out. She’s the smartest person I know.” 

I glanced at Russell, smiled, and returned my attention to Lydia’s phone. 

I wasn’t that smart, though. If I was, I would have found a way to get myself out from under Morvilind’s thumb. 

Still, I thought I saw a way to save both Russell and Lydia.

“All right,” I said, handing Lydia her phone. “I think I see a way out.”

“How?” said Russell.