Fearful Symmetries Read Online Free Page B

without a shred of surprise.
    Five minutes at most, but it felt like an hour: things narrowed, got treacly, in that accident-in-progress way. Outside, the dust had thickened into its own artificial night; they could hear the thing inside Journee swooping high above it, laughing like a loon, yelling raucous insults at the sky. The other two drivers had never come back inside, lost in the storm. Katz stayed slumped where he’d fallen; Lao wept and wept. ’Lij came feeling towards Camberwell and Goss as the glow-sticks dimmed, almost clambering over Hynde, whose breathing had sunk so low his chest barely seemed to move. “Gotta
do
something, man,” he told them, like he was the first one ever to have that particular thought. “
Something
. Y’know? Before it’s too late.”
    “It was too late when we got here,” Goss heard himself reply—again, not what he’d thought he was going to say, when he’d opened his mouth. His tongue felt suddenly hot, inside of his mouth gone all itchy, swollen tight; strep? Tonsillitis? Jesus, if he could only reach back in there and
scratch
 . . .
    And Camberwell was looking at him sidelong now, with interest, though ’Lij just continued on blissfully unaware of anything, aside from his own worries. “Look, fuck
that
shit,” he said, before asking her: “Can we get to the trucks?”
    She shook her head. “No driving in this weather, even if we did. You ever raise anybody, or did the mikes crap out too?”
    “Uh, I don’t think so; caught somebody talkin’ in Arabic one time, close-ish, but it sounded military, so I rung off real quick. Something about containment protocol.”
    Goss: “
What
?”
    “Well, I thought maybe that was ’cause they were doing minefield sweeps, or whatever—”
    “When
was
this?”
    “. . . fifteen minutes ago, when you guys were still down there, ’bout the time the storm went mega. Why?”
    Goss opened his mouth again, but Camberwell was already bolting up, grabbing both Katz and Hynde at once by their shirt-collars, ready to heave and drag. The wind’s whistle had taken on a weird, sharp edge, an atonal descending keen, so loud Goss could barely hear her—though he sure as hell saw her lips move,
read
them with widening, horrified eyes, at almost the same split-second he found himself turning, already in mid-leap towards the descending passage—
    “
—INCOMING, get the shit downstairs, before those sons of bitches bring this whole fuckin’ place down around our goddamn—
”
    (ears)
    Three hits, Goss thought, or maybe two and a half; it was hard to tell, when your head wouldn’t stop ringing. What he could only assume was at least two of the trucks had gone up right as the walls came down, or perhaps a shade before. Now the top half of the temple was flattened, once more indistinguishable from the mountainside above and around it, a deadfall of shattered lava-rock, bone-bricks and fossils. No more missiles fell, which was good, yet—so far as they could tell, pinned beneath slabs and sediment—the storm above still raged on. And now they were all down in the well-room, trapped, with only a flickering congregation of phones to raise against the dark.
    “Did you have any kind of
plan
when you came here, exactly?” Goss asked Camberwell, hoarsely. “I mean, aside from ‘find Seven congregation site—question mark—profit’?”
    To which she simply sighed, and replied—”Yeah, sort of. But you’re not gonna like it.”
    “Try me.”
    Reluctantly: “The last couple times I did this, there was a physical copy of the
Liber Carne
in play, so getting rid of that helped—but there’s no copy here, which makes
us
the
Liber Carne
, the human pages being Inscribed.” He could hear the big I on that last word, and it scared him. “And when people are being Inscribed, well . . . the
best
plan is usually to just start killing those who aren’t possessed until you’ve got less than seven left, because then why