Free Those That Wake by Jesse Karp Page A

that only stray words and images were readable: "lost" and "desperate" and "failed"; blurry pictures of a woman's face weeping; the limp arm of a body, presumably dead. Brath stamped on it, making sure he had missed nothing.
    "What the hell is going on?" Mal pleaded to him.
    "Let's go find out," Brath said, then turned to Isabel. "You're on the next train."
    She stood on the platform and watched Brath lead Mal back up to the sidewalk.
    "Do you think we should maybe get your uncle or something?" Mal said, his gut churning as they approached the building.
    "No," Brath said in a tone that left no room for consideration. "You don't ever want my uncle in on anything with you. He doesn't fix things. Not the way you want them fixed."
    Mal let it go. He escaped to Brath's apartment sometimes, to escape his various foster parents, but had met his uncle only once, on account of the bizarre hours he kept. The man had not said a word, regardless of what was addressed to him, but merely stared back with shining eyes that suggested something hideous and barely contained.
    They went back to the building, and Brath made sure he got to the doors first, not even pausing before he pulled them open and slipped in.
    It was still a blank place. Mal had forgotten how removed it felt with the street noise cut off. Maybe, he thought just then, this wasn't such a good idea after all.
    Brath went at a brisk pace past the elevators and looked down into what, for lack of a better designation, could be called a lounge, confirming that the lobby had no one in it. He made less noise than Mal when he moved, though Mal's heavy footfalls negated the accomplishment.
    "Let's see these doors," Brath said, his voice always low.
    Mal nodded and led him to the elevators and reached out and lit the button. The elevator they were standing directly in front of dinged almost immediately.
    Mal had a tall, powerful build, two inches over six feet, with broad shoulders. The figure that came out of the elevator was not only taller, but bigger. Mal had to bend his neck up to look at the figure's face. It was dark and, in this brief instant of action, somehow without detail, and the figure itself swooped rather than walked.
    Brath was exceptionally fast, his hand went to the small of his back and whipped out his gun. There was a flash from the muzzle and a crackling hiss of discharge just before the figure's hand swept by and the gun sailed away, echoing a metallic
whang
as it met the door of another elevator. The figure's hand swept back along the same path and smashed Brath's face so hard that his body spun around and he went straight to the ground.
    Mal moved fast, too, but before his fists even met a body, the figure's hands snapped around his throat. They were huge hands, encompassing Mal's entire neck easily, and they were strong, compressing his thick and instinctively flexing neck muscles without trouble.
    There was no percentage in grasping at the hands, trying to pull them away. Mal threw an abdomen punch with his right and landed hard. There was no give beneath the blow, and the figure remained silent. Mal couldn't find any air. Little explosions of light were invading his vision and—it was shocking in a dull, distant sort of way—he realized his feet had left the ground. He kicked with one of them and believed he landed dead center between the figure's legs. The fingers, though, didn't loosen.
    Darkness swallowed him whole.

GREY
    LAURA JOLTED AWAKE from a dream, her heart thumping fast with paranoia and her stomach heavy with nausea. She opened her eyes with effort, sticky as they were with sorrow and sleep, and found herself on the train, the last echo of its horn fading as it left a station. The figures around her were sparse, but she saw their faces turn back down to their cells. She wondered for a nervous moment just what they had been looking at while she slept.
    She blinked the remnants of the disturbing dream away, and everything still seemed far away