Apocalypse Unseen. James Axler
man was bent over until he almost kissed the deck.
“I said they’re blind,” Grant elaborated. “Both operators, I think, plus their guards.”
Grant’s captive squirmed in his arms, spitting saliva on the floor as he issued a cruel curse on Grant and his family. The man’s eyes were unfocused, darting wildly in their sockets.
“The Commtact’s not doing a great job with their language,” Grant continued. “Whatever it is they’re speaking seems to be a combination of Bantu, French, slang and some local patois it can’t decipher. But from what I can tell, they’re either blind or only partially sighted.”
“And they’re operating big guns,” Kane responded, with a clear edge to his voice.
“Maybe by luck,” Grant said.
* * *
BRIGID SPOKE UP without taking her eyes from the repair work she was doing on the interphaser. “Shoot off enough bullets and you’re bound to get a few lucky shots, right?”
Kane shook his head, not disagreeing but just trying to piece everything together. The two soldiers he had dealt with had seemed—well, not real aware of their surroundings, that was for sure. Could they be blind, too?
Kane scanned the area beyond the little enclave, counting the trickle of soldiers still bumbling about amid the fortress ruin. At first glance they seemed normal enough, the usual fretful stalking of people on the edge of stress. But look again, and Kane thought he detected more of an aimlessness to their progress, as though they perhaps couldn’t see where it was they were headed, were just drawn to the noise of battle.
Kane scampered forward, reached for one of the two soldiers he had dealt swift justice to mere moments earlier. They looked normal, and even their eyes looked normal. How do you know a man’s blind?
“Baptiste, protect the civilian,” Kane instructed, referring to Mariah.
Before Brigid could so much as look up, Kane was off, hurrying into the wreck of the fortress, head down and blaster in his hand.
“Dammit, Kane, do you always have to be so blasted impetuous?” Brigid muttered, shaking her head. Then she called over to Mariah, working the catch on her hip holster where she housed her TP-9 semiautomatic.
“Mariah, you know how to use a gun, right?”
Falk looked uncertain, her eyes fixed on the pistol in Brigid’s hand. “Um...kind of.”
Brigid handed the geologist the gun. “Point and shoot,” she summarized. “Anyone gets too close that you don’t like the look of, just blast them. Not Kane, though. He can be annoying sometimes, but he’ll only get more annoying if you put a hole in him.”
Then Brigid turned her attention back to the interphaser, hoping to be able to trigger a pathway out of this mess. Lakesh had programmed in a half dozen escape vectors if she could just get the wretched thing functioning.
* * *
KANE SCRAMBLED, GLANCING up at the mounted cannon and seeing Grant’s shaved head peeking up over the angle of the deck.
Five ramshackle soldiers were trekking over the ground, finding their way past the wreckage that littered the terrain. Kane dodged past them, spotting a straggler who had opted to stick to the shadows that ran alongside the walls. The young man’s rifle rocked in one hand as he felt his way along the wall with the other.
“Kane, that you down there?” Grant’s voice came over the Commtact.
“Gonna try something,” Kane explained without slowing his pace. “Cover me, okay?”
Kane reached the lone figure in a few loping strides, coming around and behind him to reduce the chances of the guy shooting him. The man was young and dressed in a loose, dirt-smeared top which billowed as the wind caught it. The AK-47 rifle in his hands was scuffed with dirt.
Sending his Sin Eater back to its hidden holster beneath the sleeve of his jacket, Kane sprinted at the man before dropping low so that he connected with him in a long slide across the loose, dry sand. Kane’s legs caught the soldier’s, tripping him so that he caromed headfirst off the wall that he had been feeling his way along.
The soldier grunted sharply as he struck the wall.
Kane was on top of him in a flash, grabbing the barrel of the AK-47 and angling it away from him even as he pressed his weight onto the man’s torso.
“What are you doing? What’s going on?” the man spat in a foreign tongue, the real-time translation coming to Kane almost instantly. It sounded like French.
Kane shoved his free hand against the man’s jaw, pressing his hand across his opponent’s mouth. “Keep quiet and I’ll let you live,” he snarled, hoping the man knew enough English to follow his gist.
The man struggled beneath Kane, trying to bring the rifle into play. It was a poor weapon for such close combat, its 16-inch barrel too long and too unwieldy for close quarters. Kane fixed his grip on it and yanked hard, whipping it out of his opponent’s hand. He slung it to the side behind him, just far enough out of the man’s reach that he couldn’t grab it.
“Quiet,” Kane warned the man, checking around for possible attackers. No one was approaching—the group of soldiers Kane had spotted was close to the edge of the fort now, where the walls had tumbled away.
Kane looked back at the man beneath him, watching his eyes. They were hazel and they seemed normal enough, a little wide in panic maybe but otherwise normal. The man struggled, and Kane pressed his hand harder against his mouth in an effort to hold his head still.
Kane brought his right hand around, clenched it and extended just his index finger. He waved the index finger before the man’s eyes, running it swiftly to the left, then to the right across the man’s field of vision. The eyes did not follow Kane’s finger—not proof positive, but enough to make Kane suspect that Grant’s weren’t the only soldiers who had lost their sight.
“Can you see?” Kane snapped, using his Commtact’s translation mode to convert the words into stuttering French.
The man’s eyes remained wide and he refused to answer Kane’s question.
“You want me to kill you right here?” Kane snarled at the young soldier. “Answer the damn question. Can you see? Are you blind?”
“I can see,” the man replied in French with an edge to his voice that Kane noticed even if the translation program of the Commtact failed to pick up on it. “I see the face of god before everything, lighting every step and every move, showing me the path of salvation.”
“Blind men fighting a war,” Kane scoffed. “What part of that even makes sense?”
The battle had moved on. Now Kane, still standing over the soldier he had disarmed some minutes earlier, had been joined by Brigid—still tinkering with the interphaser as she tried to piece its internal mechanism back together—Mariah and Grant. Grant had brought the remaining gunner with him, held in his strong grip in such a way that he was forced to walk pigeon-toed as he was partly shoved and partly dragged across the stone-strewn battlefield.
“It doesn’t,” Grant confirmed, screwing up his face.
“Maybe it does,” Brigid said from where she sat in the shade with the ruined interphaser spread before her. “Perhaps we shouldn’t ask about their blindness, but concern ourselves instead with what they do see, or think they’re seeing.”
The others looked at her, bemused. Brigid had always been “the smart one” of the CAT Alpha field team, and sometimes her leaps of logic took a little bit of explaining before everyone caught up on the same page.
“You said that fish-face here said something about seeing the face of god,” Brigid reminded Kane as she worked