Gabriel’s Watch - Book One: The Scrapman Trilogy (29 page)

Those who awaited their forced participation sat along the edge of the wall. The first was maybe twenty feet from us.

Mohammad walked ahead, studying the row of women to our left. Each of them was sitting, naked, with knees tucked to their chests. Every expression matched the next, as if they were the perverted product of some grisly assembly line. There were about twenty-five women, just waiting there. That was when I saw her, fifth from the end, her body much smaller than those beside her.

Despite Hazel’s petite stature, she looked too old to be the meager age of fourteen, for her face had surely matured with the intimate knowledge of evil—the kind that steals away the precious innocence of a child.

A single trashcan lit the room, sending its flame licking and spitting as its heat resonated throughout. It doused the women in its gloomy, orange glow while illuminating their shiny flesh. Lacerations were visible on some, along with thin, red marks that spanned the circumference of random wrists and ankles.

Hazel was no different.

None of the women spoke a word. They continued to sit, staring blankly, when Mohammad motioned toward an opening at the end of the room. The three of us entered that space and found we were alone.

“I’ll set the door up here,” Mohammad said. “It’ll only take a second.” Mohammad pressed his index finger to the four corners of the wall and programmed something into his wrist device.

“It’s ready,” he said.

I pointed back toward the room. “What now?”

“We’re just going to have to grab her. There’s no way around that. We grab her and go ... explain everything once she wakes up on the Vahana.”

Alice and I nodded, and then moved to reenter the room.

But there was a man standing before us. He’d risen from the throes of lust, allowing the woman he’d been using to sit with the rest along the wall. She lowered herself to the floor, assuming that same brainwashed position. The man stood there, slimy, erect, and naked, ready to select the next woman for his twisted fantasy. He walked casually in front of them, letting his hand glide along the tops of their heads as he passed.

Until he got to Hazel.

The man rested his hand on her head for just a moment ... before tapping her twice with a damp index finger.

She looked up at him, disdain present in her shadowed features—her fighting nature not yet fully driven.

Enraged by this, the slimy man struck her. It was a sharp, crisp sound, one that was followed by his grabbing her by a fistful of hair and yanking her to her feet. She yelped in pain as he pulled her upward, elongating her frail and slender frame as he hissed at her to be silent.

And then the man, releasing her quite suddenly, took a staggered step backward, reaching down to investigate something that had surely stung. When he withdrew his hand, he discovered it to be covered in blood. The man attempted to shriek, but his jaw swung open without the addition of any strenuous vocals. He let out a barely audible wheeze in its place.

With its blade shoved all the way to the hilt and its edge reaching vertically toward his navel, the man found a hunting knife protruding upward from his erect penis. He reached down, placing his hand on the bloodied handle, and fell to his side to wail in agony.

Although the sitting women looked at the injured man with a kind of collective interest, they did not move to aid him.

Even Hazel stood frozen in place, mouth gaping, unsure how the knife had found its way into their midst, then ultimately into the screaming man before her; but the man would not be in pain for much longer. Once a separate light illuminated the area, his cries ceased along with it, silenced by the simmering hole that had been cauterized into the side of his head.

Alice released her finger from the Hellburner and diminished her invisibility mechanism. She knelt to yank the knife from the dead man, igniting her shield as everyone in the room became distinctly aware of her impossible presence.

“Remember me?” she asked the remaining men in the room.

The one closest to the exit rolled from his mattress and tried to leap for the door, but Alice caught him in midair. His body flailed stupidly, smashing hard onto the concrete floor, as the other men hid behind the women they’d been preying upon. Alice struck them in various appendages, making them release the women, before she separated them from the life to which they tried so desperately to cling.

It seemed to take just a matter of seconds before she narrowed them to only one.

He held his injured arm, kicking away from her as he pleaded for mercy.

“Mercy?” Alice asked, approaching him. “You think you deserve mercy?”

The man, finding himself in a corner, resorted to crying.

“Yes!” he sobbed. “Please!”

“Shut up,” she hissed, utterly disgusted by the man. “Tell you what. I’ll make you a deal, which is far more than I offered them.” She motioned toward the smoldering carcasses on the floor, then to the women who had shuffled to their feet, huddling together in a twisted ball of fright. “If those women have it in them to grant you mercy, then I will give it to you.” Alice turned to them as they hid their faces from her. “What do you say, Ladies?” She diminished her shield to press the barrel of the Hellburner to his forehead. “Live or die? You choose.”

But the women said nothing, just continued to whimper.

“Hey!” Alice shouted as they all startled in unison. “Answer me! Live or die?”

“Die,” one of them whispered.

“Kill him,” said another.

“No!” The man shook his head, squeezing his eyes shut as Alice turned back to face him.

“There you have it,” she said, blowing out his brain matter as his body slumped slowly over. “You reap what you sew, asshole.”

“Alright,” Mohammad huffed, “let’s go.” Hazel’s naked and fragile body was curled in his arms. “This has been more than I bargained for already.”

I nodded and followed him into the small room where our door was waiting, but Alice hadn’t complied.

She stayed in the room full of women, staring at them as they stared back at her. “Alice, let’s go,” I called for her.

But she shook her head. “I can’t.”

“Dammit, Alice. We have to go.”

She said nothing, just continued to stare at them.

“Alice!”

“I’ll go back the way we came in.”

“What?”

“The way we came in,” she repeated, igniting her shield once again.

“Alice, no!”

She smiled at me as she stepped over the men she’d killed—their newly spilled blood bringing a salty, metallic quality into the air—and walked back toward the Cherrybrook entrance.

“Shit,” I said.

“I’ll meet you on the Vahana,” Mohammad agreed.

“Just get to that door.”

I
took off after Alice, igniting my shield as well. She was already on the sidewalk when I came to her side. Alice had wasted no time at all, creating a path of complete and utter destruction, as she made her way back toward the street. The aura of energy around her would glisten once struck by a bullet or falling fragment, while she released entire waves of blue plasma, along with the fire of her Hellburner.

Taken completely by surprise, those closest got the worst of it. It was as if the Gyges glove had been pressed to their abdomens, launching their bodies into a cascade of thick and bloody pieces. Alice’s laser swept through the background, its reddish whip parting several appendages and igniting just about all it touched.

Still invisible, I provided cover for her, but soon discovered my presence was not entirely necessary. The agents were indeed swarming, but only in an ill effort for escape. They crawled over each other as Alice came after them. There was not a death she’d dealt that was anything but swift. Those who rose in opposition were lucky just to irritate the energy cocoon woven around us. Several bursts of plasma from my weapon ended their short-lived resistance.

We were soon stepping over mounds of bodies as we reached the entrance and walked out onto the street. A few agents made it to the next block, sprinting as fast as they could. Alice lifted the Hellburner in their direction.

“Let them go,” I told her. “Someone’s gotta be left to talk about it.”

She let out a sigh and lowered her weapon, only to raise it the following moment, taking down the agent on the far left. The beam cleaved through his head as he toppled and flipped, skidding to a stop as the other two screamed. We watched as those final two survivors disappeared into an adjacent alley—the only two to narrowly escape the wrath of Alice.

They were indeed lucky.

“Two will be enough for talk,” she insisted, lowering her weapon for good.

We came to the molecular-door and pressed our palms to it. The wall was still solid.

“I guess we wait, then,” I said, pressing my back against the brick to get a better view of the street and carnage left in our wake. “You call that discrete, Alice? What’s the matter with you?”

“What’s the matter with me?” she hissed. “We walk into a place like that, and you ask what’s the matter with me?”

“We were told
specifically
not to blow the place up!”

“They should have known better! How could you live with yourself if you would have just walked away?”

I shook my head. “You should engage your invisibility again, Alice. I think you made your point.”

She did as I requested, letting the liquid metal creep across her skin, making her imperceptible to the naked eye once again.

That was when something grabbed us from behind and pulled us through the wall. We were aboard the Vahana the following second, turning to find a gigantic creature clutching our arms.

It stood incredibly tall—although it seemed to be hunching a bit—its eyes a solid black and its skin pale to almost a white. Its hands were strong and its frustration even stronger. The thing’s lips were curled inward as it glared at us, letting go with a shove.

“Impossible,” it said, its mouth barely moving, then turned to walk away. “Come,” it beckoned angrily. “There is much to discuss.”

“Gabriel?” Alice asked, as if it could be any other.

“The same,” it said.

He was not like the Travelers I’d remembered. He was dressed differently—covered in a tight, black material as parts of his body seemed to be either made of or aided by mechanical devices. His legs were reverse-jointed, like that of a wolf, but didn’t seem to be of organic design. His lower half, upon further examination, seemed to be some kind of futuristic prosthetic, wrapped in a durable, artificial skin. Gabriel’s torso, propped above that device, was slender at the waist with broad and awkward shoulders, sprouting arms that he kept atop his mechanical abdomen.

“I’ve sent Mohammad back to clean up your mess,” Gabriel announced, taking us down a new corridor. “You have no idea the trouble you have caused me.”

I said nothing—could only say nothing; but Alice, as always, was braver, and addressed the thing with a sharp tongue.

“Oh, excuse me, your highness,” she snarled at him. “Did we break another one of your
precious
rules?”

Gabriel turned at her words as his massive body swayed. He lowered himself to look directly into Alice’s rebellious green eyes and stuck a long, pale finger out at her. “Don’t mistake me for whatever you’ve heard of the other Travelers, Alice,” he warned. “I’m not the ignorant pacifist they are. I’m a bit more tenacious than the ones who made the others.”

“The others,” Alice began, “you mean like
me.”
There was no question in her statement.

Gabriel laughed softly to himself as he turned away, proceeding farther down the corridor. “No,” he said. “No, that is not what I mean at all.” He came to a door that slid open upon his arrival and lumbered within. We followed him through the passage.

The room looked very much like the area in which I’d awoken earlier, only much larger. There were multiple tables over which suspended a few of those multi-jointed, mechanical appendages, with the rest of them appearing to be lodged in their overhead compartments. The walls were lined with those large, liquid-encasing capsules—at least thirty surrounding the area.

I noticed a body occupying the far table as one of the arms, humming and clanking, worked busily at it. The arm was deep within the man’s mid-section, twisting and articulating, when I realized the body was not actually that of a man.

The body was Zeke.

“What are you doing to him?” I asked, motioning toward the machine.

Gabriel turned to look, then back to me. “It is none of your concern,” he said. “The machine is mine now, is it not? Wasn’t that the arrangement you made?”

“It is.” Alice nodded.

Gabriel turned to Alice and studied her for a moment. “Does this place look familiar?” he asked.

Alice looked around, but then shook her head. “Should it?”

“This is where you were made,” the Traveler revealed, “but you were not meant to remember.”

She leaned against one of many tables, resting on the palms of her hands. “I don’t.”

“You are different, Alice. I know you say you are the last of your kind, but you must understand ... that would have remained true whether the others had survived or not.”

“You made me?”

Gabriel nodded. “And I’ve watched you ever since.”

I shook my head.
We are standing in the very room where the woman I love was created.

“You were lucky when I found her,” I told the Traveler. “Her life was almost cut short.”

“Luck
is not a word that I am familiar with,” Gabriel said, turning back to me. “Perhaps you are referring to the way in which you found her?”

“Exactly.”

“Ah,” said Gabriel, “of course.”

He waved a gigantic, pale hand between us, ignoring me completely, as he moved to change the subject. “You must be dying to know what this means, Alice,” he said, sliding his finger over the tattoo on her right arm.

“For the longest time,” she agreed.

“Then I will tell you.” The Traveler placed his palm over the marking, concealing it completely; but when he removed his large hand, Gabriel held the holographic image of the tattoo. It floated an inch or so above his palm, rotating softly counterclockwise as Alice and I stared.