Guardians of the Gates - Part 3, The Osiris Gate by Jeff Schanz (best book club books for discussion .TXT) 📖

his own little storm, he had forgotten that Jillian was now spinning inside that tornado with all the other potential casualties.

So, if Ashe already knew this, why didn’t he press that advantage yet? Maybe he didn’t really know, and the assumption was merely paranoia. Maybe Sebastian was giving him too much credit. No. Ashe couldn’t risk not bugging her apartment. He knew. He knew that Sebastian was still alive. He knew they were plotting to stop him. He knew that Harris knew. He may have been the one to call Severinus. He could’ve supplied Severinus with some special muscle to help take care of the problem. Someone like Lucian. Ashe would be still one step ahead of them.

And there was one more thing.

Ashe now knew Jillian was a traitor. Or a mole. Whatever else she might be, she was now a liability. She knew too much and was too close. Though she had no proof, and there was no paper trail, she still knew the truth. And she knew Sebastian. Maybe loved him. Or Ashe might assume so even if she didn’t. Sebastian was feeling a little sick in his stomach knowing he had been too distracted to notice this earlier. He should’ve seen this and been more cautious. At very least, he didn’t have to put the woman in jeopardy by disclosing what he knew and turning her into possible leverage for Ashe.

A liability or leverage, that’s what Jillian was now. Liabilities get eliminated, and leverage is a threat to do the same. Either way, Jillian was in severe danger and Sebastian had been oblivious to it, going so far as to intensify her jeopardy. He knew he was responsible and he started to shake from the combination of anger and despair.

What could he do now? Tell Harris to turn this plane around and go rescue her? They wouldn’t do that. And even if they did, would Ashe’s goons be there at the apartment waiting for him? Did they already have her? Ashe could’ve taken her somewhere secure, and that would be one more goose chase, one more maze to run through. There was no easy answer to this problem. If it really was a problem.

Am I overthinking this?

There remained the possibility that none of this had happened yet. Maybe Jillian wasn’t important enough. Maybe Ashe wouldn’t bother with her. Maybe Sebastian was overestimating both of their values, and Ashe was too confident in his plans that he wouldn’t ultimately regard Jillian or Sebastian as a real threat.

No. Sebastian knew that wasn’t true.

He turned to Harris, unsure how to tell him these suspicions. Intention was easier than action, and he hedged, searching for the best way to explain.

He wouldn’t have to. The cell phone in his pocket rang. The vibration made him jump like a scorpion was in his pocket. He dug out the phone and looked at the screen. “Call From Jillian Stewart.” His spine felt like a frozen iron pipe. This wasn’t a coincidence. He hesitated to answer it, somehow sure it wasn’t Jillian on the other end. She wouldn’t have called him first. She would wait for him to make the first return contact. Only she and Harris were the only two that had the number of his burner phone, except that the number was written down in plain sight on a piece of paper in Jillian’s apartment.

Jillian’s phone was calling him, but that’s not who was on the line.

Don’t answer it. He didn’t. The vibration stopped, and a moment later, the phone gave a sharp buzz that it had a voicemail. Sebastian breathed deeply and tapped the phone to access the voicemail. He held the phone to his ear, keeping his eyes closed in anticipation of hearing what he feared to hear. As the message played, Sebastian’s hand gripped the phone with trembling fingers. When the message finished, he handed the phone to Harris who was confused by the gesture. Harris eyed Sebastian waiting for an explanation, but Sebastian couldn’t speak. He slumped in his seat and buried his head in his hands.

 

Chapter 2

Justin should have been tired after hauling Jude’s big-screen TV up two flights of stairs to the attic office, then helping set it up. On the top edge of the giant screen was an HD webcam, on the sides were speakers, and on the table in front of the couch was a conference phone unit. Jude had owned most of these things for a while, though rarely got to use them. Everything except the TV, of course, which was the usual focus of the living room downstairs. The Guardians decided that if they were going to do a conference call with “End of the World” importance, it should be on a sixty-inch LCD screen. So they hauled it upstairs and created a conference room that consisted of their beat-up Goodwill couch, a plywood table supported by milk crates, a particle board TV stand, and thousands of dollars worth of technology. Jude and Valentine were giddy from creating their big-boy conference space. Justin was more anxious than giddy.

The top Saint scientists would be calling them in a few minutes to do a full discussion of the situation, which, despite the Guardians’ excitement, was grave. Justin had found a mathematical pattern in the documents, confirmed the association of several groups and events that had been suspected of being related, and were now identified as indeed related due to the newly found latitudinal and longitudinal grid pattern. Add to that a mysterious hypothesis by Valentine about something he found among Ashe’s documents, and the result was a reluctant, yet official, inclusion of the Guardians into the scientific round table discussion of Ashe’s impending evil plot.

Justin rubbed his knees frenetically, leaving a slightly darker smudge on his jeans from skin oils. He was excited, nervous, petrified, and stoked all at once. He had less anxiety running into the Tierra Perdida ranch compound with an assault rifle against freaky bat monsters. These were the top scientific minds in the world (at least, he thought they were the top minds), and they were going to be conferring with him. Him! And, of course, Valentine and Jude, but – him!

Valentine finished making sure the connections worked, then took a seat next to Justin on the couch.

“Dude. You ready?” asked Valentine.

“I’m going to throw up,” said Justin.

“Cool, bro. Can you do it before the call? It’ll look embarrassing.”

Justin gave Valentine an icy stare. Valentine smiled.

“Messing with ya, dude,” said Valentine. “Relax. You don’t even have to present anything. I do.”

Valentine was referring to his mysterious discovery that had something to do with physics in reference to the pattern Justin found. Whatever summary he had given to the Saint scientists, he hadn’t bothered to explain it to Justin and Jude. Valentine wasn’t a physics wiz, though he did have a peculiar background in theoretical sciences that he gave up to pursue computer sciences. He would occasionally offer that knowledge to explain some strange problem, but most of the time it just sounded like fantasy gibberish to Justin. Apparently, he had teased the Saint scientists’ interest enough to be a big part of the discussion today.

Jude joined the two men on the couch and held the TV remote in his hand. Other than using his house and his equipment, he was just along for the ride in this discussion.

“You guys ready?” asked Jude.

Justin nodded.

Valentine said, “Justin’s gonna puke.”

Jude raised a brow. “Need a bucket?”

“Goddamnit. I’m fine!” said Justin. “You two assholes aren’t helping.”

“Geez. Alright,” said Jude.

He mashed a remote button, the TV popped on, and a moment later all three of them were looking at themselves on the screen. Jude was just checking their feed, which looked fine, then he reversed the feed back to outgoing. The TV screen had the call window up, waiting for the incoming notification.

Valentine had a goofy smirk on his face watching Justin struggle with his calm. Jude shook his head and said to Valentine, “Please tell me you’re not going to get us all laughed at by whatever theory you have. You do understand how big a deal this is, right?”

Valentine kept his smirk, but his eyes darkened. Justin had never seen that look in Valentine’s eyes before, and it shocked him.

Valentine said, “Better than you do, bra. But if I’m going down, I’m going down with a grin. I’ll try to save the world, an’ all that. But if I don’t? Screw the world.”

Jude breathed slowly in and out for a pregnant moment, probably deciding whether to cuss out Valentine or just roll with it. In the end, Jude nodded subtly and said, “Ok, then.”

The green icon that signified an incoming call blipped onto the screen. Jude pressed “answer.”

 

 

 

Justin’s head was about to explode. Not from the influx of amazing information as he expected, but from the monotony of the way it was presented. Five scientists had gathered around the screen during the call, and each one had a vocal tone that resembled burned-out professors teaching quantum physics to uninterested jocks. The monotone and disdain in their voices got progressively worse as the call persisted. Jude and Justin were trying very hard to keep up with what was being said without asking too many questions, regardless of how many questions Justin wished he could ask. Valentine, on the other hand, acted like he had a hot date waiting at the end of the meeting. He nodded and made thumbs up, finger guns, and yatta-yatta gestures.

The discussion began by revealing the test results of the drugs that Justin, Kasey, and Mars had pilfered from K & D Labs. The critical drug in question, the one that was code-named Osiris, had yielded a lot of expected results, confirming a few hypothetical guesses. There was no doubt that it was engineered to selectively draw in certain kinds of radiation and energy, while shielding cells from other types. If no one had known about the effects of rifts, the accelerant would’ve been hypothesized as a kind of DNA manipulator, or an affecter of base pairs. In a number of years, maybe the scientific community could’ve drawn provable conclusions that would’ve matched the realities of human hybrid entities, but since the clock was most definitely ticking, and they already had the resulting creatures as the answer to what happens when dimensional energy interacts with the drugs, they made a few leaps that they would normally dissuade.

The other drug, the one referred to as Oscar, was a surprise. It had already been widely tested, and studied by countless scientists, and so seemed a waste of time to study any further. But a comparison of Oscar with the baseline findings of Osiris, and comparing the interaction with healthy cells versus cancerous ones, a few new conclusions could be drawn. The one that was hardest to stomach was that the Oscar treatment would create a kind of shield against the damages of dimensional energy exposure. It altered the cells enough that it made the body like Teflon against radiation. And since just living under the earth’s sun slowly wore down a human body with small doses of fatal radiation and soaked in damaging chemicals through the air, this drug treatment could be considered (in larger doses) as a kind of regenerative formula, or fountain of youth. But taken in the doses that were delivered for battling cancer, it had no ulterior motive other than to give cells the power to ward off the attacking mutations, and brace against the damage of radioactive therapy. So, in summary, the cancer treatment seemed to do the opposite as Osiris. It offered a chemical levee against whatever came from a rift. That seemed too big a coincidence to believe that the Oscar drug had no connection to Ashe’s global plot.

At first, Justin’s head was swimming trying to keep up with the bio-chemical talk, then he gave up and just