MirrorWorld

46.

After meeting Cobb, Blair, and Stephanie, we race to the airport. While Allenby coordinates with Winters’s CIA contact, Cobb tends to her shoulder. Stephanie, who’s already done everything she can to help, parts ways with us at the airport, taking the car and heading west to stay with family in Vermont, one of the few places on earth to still be largely free of violence.

After passing through a security check, we’re escorted onto the tarmac by two silent men in suits and head for an open hangar. Blair stops, mouth open, when we reach the doors. “Is that a—”

“Concorde,” Allenby says.

The plane’s sharp, downward sloping nose makes it easy to identify. The Concorde is the fastest passenger plane to have every crisscrossed the Atlantic. It was decommissioned after a few well-publicized crashes and more than a few complaints about the sonic boom generated when the plane breaks the sound barrier, tearing through the sky at Mach 2, more than twice the speed of the fastest troop transport.

Ten minutes later, we’re in the air, cruising at 1500 miles per hour and escorted through the FAA-emptied skies by three F-18s. Our man at the CIA is getting things done, and quietly. Lyons will have no idea we’re coming.

I spend part of the three-hour flight catching up on global news, which is dramatically grim. The way global events are being presented leaves little doubt that a nuclear holocaust is imminent; the government is days, if not hours, from being overthrown; and better make friends with your gun-carrying neighbors because militia frontier life is the only hope for survival in the soon-to-be nuclear wasteland. For once, all the drama is justified. Cities are imploding, the violence chaotic and without reason. Militaries are still largely under control, but there are troop movements on the borders of too many countries to count. The Dread need to be stopped through whatever means necessary, meaning there is a chance that Lyons’s aggressive option is justified. It is, after all, a proven tactic. If Maya is safe and her father really has a way to remove the Dread threat from our world, then I hope he succeeds. And when he’s done, he’ll answer for Winters.

Violence has escalated out of control in major cities around the world, and tensions between nations are reaching the point where a few navies and air forces have skirmished, leaving nearly two hundred dead and a Japanese maritime self-defense force destroyer limping back to port, courtesy of the Chinese. If it weren’t for the trouble brewing in the major cities of most nations, I think the world would have already rushed headlong into war. The threat of civil war seems to be the only thing tempering militaries, just in case they’re needed at home. Alliances are breaking down as paranoia runs rampant. An every-man-for-himself mentality has taken hold of governments.

It’s a brilliant strategy. No one outside Neuro would even think to consider the real cause of all this chaos. People are afraid and, like good mammals, are focused solely on the clear and present dangers, rather than the ones lurking just beyond perception. All the Dread need to do is pull their influence from one area and apply it to another. Send the rioters home, and the world goes to war. Turn government attention inward, and the riots become civil war. Maybe they’ll do all of the above?

Allenby thinks that the only way out of this for the human race is for the Dread to back off. I’m not totally convinced, and the memories of what they took from me and how they did it fuel a deeply personal desire for vengeance.

When I’m not watching the news, I’m remembering.

This isn’t my first trip to New Orleans. In a cruel irony, the city is where Maya and I spent our honeymoon. Not the usual place for a pair of newlyweds, but we both like the food, music, and atmosphere. We spent two weeks exploring the bayou, the city, and the culture. When the memory returned, it felt like recapturing some of the happiest days of my life… a life I want returned.

My childhood is almost a complete picture, much of it fading back to the recesses of my mind. My years as a young man are spotty, but I remember my training and a good number of special ops missions, and CIA… assignments. More recent memories are fewer, but several early years of my life with Maya and Simon are nearly complete. Each new memory—a birthday, anniversary, quiet night at home—stabs a fresh pang of sadness into my gut. But the knowledge that my sweet boy was brutally slain by his own mother’s forced hand transmogrifies grief into rage.

And I welcome it.

I’m going to need it. The memory of what the Dread can do, the kind of fear they can push into a human mind, is still fresh. But anger, I’ve learned, is one of the best ways to overcome fear. And right now, I’ve got anger to spare.

The most recent years of my life, a year ago, are still full of holes, some small, others gaping. I decide not to worry about them. My path is already set and they’ll come in time, if I survive.

Allenby pulls my eyes away from the TV, showing what appears to be a vicious gang fight, but is actually the British Parliament. I point to the small screen mounted to the seat in front of me. “Have you seen this?”

She glances at the screen but seems almost uninterested. Her downturned lips hint at grim news. “What is it?”

“I’ve just got word,” she says, motioning for me to move over. I do, and she slumps into the seat beside me, wincing from the effort of sitting down. “The president has given Russia an ultimatum.”

“Let me guess,” I say. “Putin needs to pull his troops back from the borders of former USSR states.”

She shakes her head. “I’m afraid it’s too late for that. Russia invaded Ukraine, Georgia, and a handful of ‘stans’ this morning. They’ve been waiting for the chance, so it didn’t take much prodding. The only silver lining is that those nations were smart enough, or maybe too afraid, to fight back. The real problem is that, as of twenty minutes ago, Russia’s nuclear arsenal went hot.”

She doesn’t need to finish the thought. If Russia was prepping for launch, so was every other nuclear nation in the West. Things are escalating. “The Dread know Lyons is coming,” I guess.

Allenby says nothing, which I take as agreement.

“How long did the president give them?” I ask.

She looks at me, fear in her eyes despite the absence of Dread on this plane. “Three hours.”

“How long until we land?”

“One hour.”

“Shit.”

“Indeed.”

“And if they don’t back down?” I ask. “What was the threat?”

“Open-ended,” she says, meaning that all cards were on the table. In two hours, things are going to get out of hand.

I set a timer on my watch. Two hours and fifty minutes, adjusting for the time it took for the news to reach me. Then I say, “I’m going to sleep,” knowing I’ll need all the energy I can get when we land.

She chuckles, pats my knees, and grunts as she stands. Despite the news she’s just delivered, I’m out in five minutes.

Cobb wakes me as we begin our approach. I look out the windows, shifting my vision into the mirror world. The world above is purple, the land below hues of darkness, pocked by several small colonies, almost the size of houses, but nothing significant. In the real world, it’s all swamp. Our approach to the airport brings us in east of the city, and flying around it for a look will take time we don’t have. We’ll recon from the ground, I decide.

According to Allenby and corroborated by my returning memory, Lyons had identified New Orleans as the location for what could be the largest Dread colony in North America. Allenby believes he’s out to destroy it with the hopes that the loss of a large colony will essentially switch off the smaller colonies and hordes of Dread in the same way that the destruction of our local colony did to the Dread in the area. But it’s not really the colony that needs to be destroyed, it’s the Dread mole hiding inside. They’re the task-masters. If he’s right, and this can be done, it could work, instantly freeing the United States from their influence. But then what? Could we act fast enough to free other nations, focusing on the ones with nuclear arsenals? Or would the attack have the same effect on the Dread as the nuclear assaults on Nagasaki and Hiroshima had on World War II imperial Japan? That’s what he’s hoping for, I think, and wonder if I shouldn’t resume my roll in his plan—after Maya is secured.

Knowing New Orleans might someday become a target, Lyons kept a fleet of oscillium-encased vehicles in the company’s private hangar. One of them, a red SUV, is waiting for us. As the door opens and the staircase descends toward the tarmac, I take my first breath of city air tinged with the rot and salt of the nearby bayou and ocean. The familiar smell brings back memories of my honeymoon and nearly relaxes me.

Ed Blair gives me a slap on the shoulder. “Let’s move.” He flew in the cockpit, making sure the pilots went where they were supposed to. Had they received conflicting orders from Lyons or his friends in the military, they would have completed the flight at gunpoint. The short man hurries down the stairs, gets behind the wheel, and starts the engine.

“Here,” Cobb says, handing me the black duffel bag that holds my assortment of weapons.

“You can wait here,” I tell him. “Stay with Allenby.”

He lifts a large first-aid kit complete with a portable defibrillator and gives it a pat. “You might need me. And your aunt is fine here without me.”

“But not well enough to join you?” she asks from the top of the stairs.

“Not a chance,” I say. “That’s a bad wound and if you move around too much, you’re going to reopen—”

“I’m a doctor,” Allenby grumbles. “And I can—”

“You’re also on morphine.”

“Oh,” she says, and grins. “That’s why I feel so good.”

“Riiight,” Cobb says.

I head back up the stairs and help Allenby to a seat. “I’ll be fine. I’m going to find her and bring her back.”

She smiles and pats my face twice. “Always such a good boy. Don’t dally.”

I kiss her forehead and head back to the door, stopping to glare at the two pilots looking back out of the cockpit. “If she leaves this plane, it’ll become your coffin.”

Their rapid nodding reminds me of bobbleheads.

The SUV horn honks twice, beckoning me down the stairs. Blair is all business.

We drive in silence, following interstate 10 west, heading toward the tracker’s mirror-world position and avoiding the clogged streets of the city’s core, where large angry crowds fight each other, loot storefronts, and burn the city. Police vehicles, SWAT trucks, and other emergency responders are everywhere, sirens blaring, lights flashing, racing in multiple directions. I can’t tell if they’re helping or simply joining the fray. There’s more tension in the air than humidity. But there’s no sign of the Dread. I have no doubt that they’re out there, moving among the crowds, but they leave the SUV alone.

We exit the highway, turning left past a car that’s been left to smolder. Whatever happened here has moved on to another part of the city.

“Whoa,” Blair says as we pass under the highway. “That’s not good, right?”

I look ahead. There’s a cemetery on the right, known as a “city of the dead” in this part of the world because of the rows of sun-bleached, aboveground tombs. New Orleans is below sea level, built atop land that should be a swamp. Dig a few feet down and you hit the water table. So you have three options for burying the dead: weigh the bodies down and let them sink through the four feet of water filling their six-foot grave, bury the dead in shallow graves to be uncovered by harsh weather and floods, or build them a concrete, granite, and marble city aboveground. Since no one wants moist cadavers floating around the city every time it floods, the dead reside in endless rows of bleak structures ranging from economy stacks to opulent mansions, the inequality in life retained in death.

But this city of the dead is not our destination. That doesn’t mean it’s not populated or a risk, however.

I steel myself for a fright and gaze into the mirror dimension, noting that the shift in my vision now causes no pain at all.

There’s a colony at the center of the graveyard. A small one. And while the swamp has been held at bay in our dimension, the mirror world is under a layer of water. Trees, laden with heavy coils of black gunk, rise from the liquid, which is reflecting the dark purple sky. Despite all the water, there isn’t a ripple of movement. There are no Dread here and haven’t been anytime recently.

“They’re everywhere,” Cobb says as we pass another small colony. I look ahead, to the right, and see more, all just as empty as the first. Turning my eyes back to the real world, I see what Cobb does. Cemetery after cemetery. Drawn to bury our dead on the colonies, this stretch of swamp held back by concrete has become littered with tombs and mausoleums. Tall willow trees, heavy with hanging Spanish moss, sway in the wind, creating a landscape that is eerily similar to the mirror world. I find myself trying to slip farther out of that place, but the trees are here, rooted in my home frequencies. There’s no escaping them.

“It’s just up ahead,” Blair says, turning right. The tracking device last showed Maya in this part of the city. It uses GPS positioning, so once she was pulled back into the mirror world, it stopped working and, since there are no satellites in the mirror world, won’t work there, either. If we get within a half mile, a local transmitter in the embedded device will do the job, but until then we’re relying on her last-known location.

“Stop,” I say. “Pull over.”

He stops short of a bridge that crosses one of many ocean inlets cutting into the city. On the other side of the bridge is St. Louis Cemetery No. 3. Of the three big cemeteries in New Orleans, this is the largest and most opulent in terms of crypt construction. Just two miles from the French Quarter, it was flooded during Hurricane Katrina, but, thanks to the heavy stone tombs, the dead stayed where they were supposed to.

I climb out of the car, eyes on the still-distant cemetery. It’s a typical summertime New Orleans day. Mid-nineties. Humid. The sky is blue and clear. But there’s no denying something feels off. While this part of the city is relatively quiet, I can hear sirens in the distance. The drone of an angry crowd rises and falls with the wind.

But not here.

I take a deep breath, count to seven, let it out for seven, and then let myself see the mirror world again.

Something’s wrong.

I climb atop the SUV, its roof bending beneath my feet. I have a clear view of the mirror world beyond the inlet, which is now pea-soup green and clogged with glowing seaweedlike veins extending out of the muddy banks.

“What is it?” Cobb asks. I hear his voice and the car door opening, the shift of the vehicle beneath my feet as he exits, but I can’t see him. “What do you see?”

“This can’t be the right place,” I say. There’s a colony, but it’s just like the others, small, devoid of life, and partially lost to the swamp. Abandoned. I turn to look at Cobb but forget to shift my vision.

That’s when I see it.

The colony.

It’s so vast that I take a step back and slip on the SUV’s windshield. I tumble back with a shout, landing on the hood and rolling to the concrete. When I open my eyes, I’m under the bleak water of the mirror world. For a moment, I panic, but then remember that I’m only seeing this world. I haven’t fully entered it yet. I shift my vision back to the real world and stare at the blue sky above.

Blair and Cobb appear above me, their concerned looks blocking out the sky.

“What happened?” Blair asks.

“It’s not at the cemetery,” I say, and point back the way we came. “It’s behind us.”

They both turn around.

“The park?” Cobb asks.

Maya and I spent two full days exploring the park and its variety of tourist-friendly locals. Twice the size of New York’s Central Park, the thirteen-hundred-acre City Park is a massive collection of park greens, willow and oak trees, two stadiums, botanical gardens, an art museum, Storyland for the kids, a lake, several golf courses, and more, all featuring New Orleans’s telltale old-world style mixed with hints of bayou. In the mirror dimension, it’s populated by one single structure.

The colony.