Ascendance by John Birmingham Page A

answered the call, pissed off and short. ‘What? Stop. Slow down and say again . . .’
    He took in what the caller had to say, listening more attentively, and second time around the shock and dread on his face looked more deeply etched. He muttered a few words that sounded like ‘thank you’ and cut the connection, unseeing and oblivious. He passed the handset back to Delillo and drifted back to the tourist map weighed down on the hood of the patrol car by a couple of police radios and a riot baton.
    ‘What?’ said Dave.
    ‘Lieutenant Trenoweth?’ Karen grabbed him by the arm and turned him around with force enough to make him stumble.
    ‘Hey!’ Delillo protested, but Karen ignored her, focusing her gaze on the senior officer. Dave blinked as he thought he saw her connect to the cop, but not because she’d laid hands on him. It was in her eyes. They held Trenoweth at some level below the physical.
    He came awake all at once, as though slapped, or splashed in the face with ice water.
    ‘You gotta get over to Park Avenue,’ he said, his voice insistent but strong, completely unlike the stunned abstraction with which he’d spoken only a moment earlier.
    ‘Five hundred and thirty, Park. There’s monsters over there . . .’
    He stopped for a second and looked at Karen as though seeing her for the first time and not much liking what he did see. But he pressed on.
    ‘Hunn, Sliveen, two Threshrend and leashed Fangr. A couple of war bands. Not a Talon, maybe a cohort at least.’
    She nodded and started to turn away, ‘We’re on it,’ she said.
    ‘Wait, I need to brief you,’ Trenoweth called after her, the confident timbre of his voice faltering again. She was already striding away.
    ‘No, you don’t,’ she yelled back over the crowd noise. ‘Come on, Hooper.’
    Dave was still staring at Trenoweth. He looked like a man who’d seen something he could never understand, or knew something now that he hadn’t a few seconds earlier. Something deeply wrong with the world, or within himself.
    ‘She was in my head,’ he said so quietly that nobody else could possibly hear him. Only Dave, and only because he was dialled in on the cop’s channel.
    ‘Yeah, she does that,’ he said.
    ‘No,’ Trenoweth said. ‘You don’t understand. She was . . .’
    But he trailed off, unable to explain. ‘You better go,’ he said, moving onto something he could account for. ‘There’s monsters. Lots of them, inside a building. They’re inside. Pulling people out of their homes. Pulling them apart.’
    The horror was leaching back into his expression.
    ‘She’ll tell you,’ said Trenoweth, his gaze troubled, following the retreating figure of Karin Varatchevsky. ‘She knows about it now.’
    Dave was about to say something stupid, like goodbye or good luck, but Trenoweth could not hear him. He had been stilled, caught outside whatever strange, unknowable quantum stream Dave and Karen slipped into when they warped. She’d hit the accelerator again.
    Hefting Lucille, aware of her sub-aural humming again, he found Karen halfway up the block, headed west. She held a couple of mountain bikes aloft, one in each hand, as though showing off a clutch of shopping bags, triumphantly secured at a difficult sale.
    ‘Come on,’ she cried out, her voice easily pitched over the background rumble and whine of the city’s soundtrack on pause. ‘We trashed our last ride. Need some new wheels.’
    The foot traffic was definitely lighter, and he had an easier time of it, hurrying through the living statues. He could see in their faces and the resolved aspect of their flight – suspended as it was – that these people were not blindly scattering and fleeing in terror. Most of them seemed to have destinations in mind. Specific paths to deliverance. Karen came out to meet him, stepping down from the sidewalk where she’d taken the bikes. Stolen them, to be clear about it. One looked like it belonging to a courier. It sported tote