“Please, Mr. Kelly,” begged the radio voice. “She is not harmed. Please, we must speak with you while there may be time.”
“Christ,” muttered Tom Kelly as mottlings of shadow and light from the roadway quivered across the fully-human face of one of the strangers. The rain on his own face and forehead felt good because it both cooled and dampened skin which felt as though it had been parching in an oven. He had feeling throughout his body again, an ache radiating from his groin in steady pulses with random flashes of pain to add piquancy.
Gisela’d done her usual professional job. If this trio didn’t want to shoot him the way they had her, they’d have plenty of time to stomp Kelly down into the muddy gravel before he, in his present state, could clear the snubbie.
Hell, he’d needed to talk with ’em anyway. And if Gisela was as dead as her boneless sprawl implied – there’d be a time to fix that, the only way a man like Tom Kelly knew to fix things. . . .
“The neuroreceptors of her brain are blocked,” said the voice of the stranger, who/which might either be reading Kelly’s mind in good truth or making a shrewd estimate on the basis of file data. They must have files, or they wouldn’t have found reason to track him across Anatolia; though the Lord knew what those reasons might be.
“She will be well in half an hour,” the central stranger continued as Kelly rose carefully to his feet. The other two figures in dark overcoats, darkening further as the rain wet them, minced in slowly from either side. “You must believe me, Thomas Kelly, that we will not kill even to save a world. Even to save your world from itself.”
“Keep away from her,” Kelly grunted to the silent figures as they began to kneel beside Gisela. He stepped to her, steady enough, though the muscles in his thighs trembled as if with extreme fatigue.
The stranger across from him paused, looking up at the veteran with a bland face that almost certainly emanated from the medallion on the figure’s chest. Kelly shouldered the other one aside. He could feel the give of bones and joints that were as inhuman as the corpse in the freezer back on Fort Meade.
“Alive, is she?” Kelly said as he, himself, knelt, and touched the woman’s throat. The carotid pulse was as strong and steady as Kelly’s own.
“Oh, boy,” the veteran said. He rocked back on his haunches and exhaled the breath which he had not realized he was holding. Gisela’s throat felt warm, not hot, and that reminded him that his own bare skin was chilled by the rain. The woman needed to be under shelter, or her final state would be the same as if the – hell, the aliens – had used .45’s.
“Look – ” Kelly began.
The two silent aliens knelt again, reaching for the woman, and the radio’s speaker said, “We will carry her within the office of her organization.” The central alien pointed with his whole arm past the hedge and road to the two- and three-story building facing the walls.
“There is no one there now,” the alien voice continued as the figure refolded his arm against his chest with a motion which was grossly wrong for what he appeared to be. “But she will be warm and dry and recover quickly.”
Kelly frowned, but he stepped back to allow the other pair to lift Gisela. They were lighter than men and Kelly had assumed they were frail, but they handled the dancer’s solid form as easily as two humans of the veteran’s own build could have done.
“Another time,” the alien voice said as his companions walked the woman through a gap in the hedge like men with a friend who had drunk herself insensible, “we would have held her as we hold others of her organization, so that they could not execute their Plan. But we did not hold enough of them. Now it is too late for prevention, Thomas Kelly, and the cure is something that we cannot do for you.