See These Bones

by Chris Tullbane

  She tossed down her saddlebags on the far side of the fire and took a seat next to them, riding gear creaking noisily with the motion. She had yet to take off the helmet, and that giant yellow face—reflecting the flickering flames between us--wasn’t doing a damn thing to calm my nerves.

  It didn’t help that we had company.

  Mom stood nearby, smiling as usual, and taking very little notice of the fact that she was partially standing in the fire… but I was used to that much. The other ghost though? That was a new development. In fact, he’d been alive less than an hour earlier. Hell, it was his fire we using to warm ourselves.

  Unlike Mom, the Pyro’s ghost was plenty angry. He stomped soundlessly around Smiley, screaming silent imprecations. Naturally, she couldn’t see him. More importantly, there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to her. Ghosts couldn’t touch the real world, couldn’t do much of anything except annoy the fuck out of Crows like me. Thank god, that second bit never occurred to Mr. Recently Slaughtered. Instead, he focused his impotent rage on the woman who didn’t know he was there. Eventually, he threw up his hands, mouthed what looked like a truly impressive chain of expletives, and stalked out of view.

  I hoped that’d be the last time I saw him. One ghost following me around was bad enough.

  “Get some sleep, Bakersfield. If we can’t find the hill trash’s transport when the sun’s up tomorrow, it’s going to be a long walk to the Academy.”

  “You mean you can’t fly?”

  I couldn’t see her expression behind the visor, but her words communicated it just fine. “If I could, do you think we’d have putt-putt-putted up this hill for the last few hours?”

  It was a good point. “You are a Power though, right?” Shifter, I was guessing, although I’d never heard of one quite like her before.

  “More of one than that asshole was.” The helmet nodded.

  “Cool.” Now that the episode was behind us, and the bodies—and the ghost—were safely out of view, I felt some of my equilibrium returning. It wasn’t the first bit of violence I’d witnessed. The messiest, sure… but far from the first.

  It wasn’t the last one, either… but I guess that goes without saying.

  “Cool, he says. Fucking teenagers.” She shook her head. “Guess I should just be thankful you didn’t try to help.” I could barely see her, but apparently, she could read my expression just fine. “Don’t get your panties in a knot, kid. Nothing worse than an amateur trying to contribute. Sort of thing that gets the wrong people dead.”

  “Instead, I just lay there like an asshole.”

  “Most assholes are too damn stupid to stay down.” Another sound as she shrugged slim shoulders. “Anyway, you’re not a Cape yet. Once you’ve swallowed their Kool-Aid and been molded into a proper…” She paused. “What kind of Power are you anyway?”

  “Crow.” I didn’t know what Kool-Aid was, but it sounded illegal.

  “Once you’re molded into a …” She stopped a second time, and her voice went oddly soft. “You’re a Necromancer? And you grew up in Bakersfield? Did Dr. Nowhere have something against your ancestors or were you just fucked over by complete random accident?”

  I… wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that.

  “And since when does Cape University take Crows?” she continued.

  “Since tomorrow, I guess. Mr. Grey says I’ll be the first.” I peered through the fire. “Shouldn’t you already know all this, seeing as how you’re such a professional?”

  “In my line of work, there’s a time for asking questions, and there’s a time for taking the money and shutting up. This was definitely the latter.”

  “Oh yeah? Was there a welding torch involved?”

  Her laugh was sharp and jagged. “There are scarier things than torches out there, kid. Scarier than me even.” I heard as much as saw her shake her head. “If I’d known, I would have charged triple. I mean… a Crow Cape from Bakersfield? It’s like a black cat spilling salt on a broken mirror. Or a unicorn’s exact opposite.”

  “Am I supposed to know what any of that means?”

  “It means you’re bad news and even worse luck. No wonder that hill trash gang picked today of all days to claim the route.”

  “Luck had nothing to do with it. They were waiting for me.” I told her what Dale and the Pyro had been saying when I first came to.

  Her Majesty’s silence was profound, eventually broken by a single, quiet word. “Motherfucker.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she eventually replied. “Nothing we can do about it and once I get you to the Academy, you’ll be their problem, not mine. For now…” She scooted slightly away from the fire, and sprawled out, using her saddlebags as a lumpy pillow. “For now, get some sleep.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that. Way your life is going, you’d better learn to rest while you can.”

  The way my life was going, I wasn’t sure I could sleep. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot else to do, out in the middle of nowhere, with my only companion—only living one, anyway—already taking her own advice. I curled up, using my arm as a makeshift pillow, and closed my eyes.

  Ten or so uncomfortable and not-at-all-restful minutes later, Smiley spoke again. “Cold, Bakersfield?”

  “I thought you were asleep.”

  “Hard to sleep when I can hear your teeth chattering.” Her rough voice went liquid for just a moment. “Want to come over here and… warm up?”

  My mind flashed to the shredded pieces of the Pyro’s skull, a skull I’d been forced to carry down the hill. “Thanks, but I think I’m good.”

  “You’re gonna hurt a woman’s feelings, kid. Don’t you think I’m sexy anymore?”

  Whatever I was going to say in reply was pre-empted by the long, strangely sensual sound of a zipper being pulled open. Might have been her jacket. Might have been her pants.

  Come to think of it, the Pyro had gotten exactly what he deserved. Hell if I was going to let his memory get in the way of… staying warm.

  I had just made it to my feet when the zipper was drowned out by another, now-familiar sound; the low scrape of razor blades, a saw grinding against a tire iron, or a thousand armored hornets having the world’s most terrifying orgy.

  On third thought… fuck that shit. I dropped back down to the ground, as close to the fire as I could get without actually getting anywhere near Her Majesty.

  Mocking laughter serenaded me to sleep.

  CHAPTER 10

  I’d tell you about my dreams that night, but they were horrific… some in ways I still don’t want to think about. So, let’s take a bit of a breather instead. Most of you have probably kept up just fine so far, but I’m guessing a few of you lived your lives pre-Break, and wouldn’t know a Cat One from a Five, a Shifter from a Spark, or even what I’m talking about when I say things like “pre-Break.”

  The story goes like this; eighty-some years ago, a guy had himself a dream. Less awful than mine, I’m guessing, but strange nonetheless; he dreamed of a world where people had powers like those he’d read about in comics, a world of bright and shiny possibilities far beyond the usual day-to-day rat race.

  No idea why they raced rats back then, but it does seem like the sort of thing to drive a man to dream of something new.

  Anyway, nothing too weird about any of that, right? Guy goes to sleep, guy has a dream, guy wakes up. Happens all the time. Thing is, when this guy woke up, his dream had become reality. Across the world, people—not all of them, just a percentage of a percentage—had been granted powers. Flight, strength, invulnerability, laser-fucking-eye-beams… you name it, it made an appearance, bestowed on a random sampling of strangers across the globe.

  The aspect of his dream that didn’t become reality was the bright and shiny part. Turns out, most people are dicks. Even the ones that don’t have dicks. Give those people powers and… well, shit goes down.

  The world changed forever
in the course of a single man’s dream… but the Break itself took longer. Can’t speak for countries on the other five continents, but according to the history books, the United States of America tore itself apart over the course of several bloody years. The government fell. New regimes sprouted up like weeds, and all the while, new people kept developing powers, and everything kept getting worse.

  Most people are dicks, sure enough… but the corollary to that rule is that some people aren’t. None of us would be here if it weren’t for one of the first Powers, a guy who won the metaphysical lottery and decided not to use it to shit all over his own species. He called himself Dominion, and as the rest of the world fell into chaos, he fought to save one small piece of it. Others came to join him, the handful of Powers who chose to protect rather than enslave. Collectively, they helped what was left of the military eke out a territory encompassing California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona with pieces of Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico. The new country called itself the Free States, and the Powers who chose to defend it became known as Capes.

  East of us is the Badlands, a sort of free-for-all where nothing rules but chaos and fear. Past that, you start getting to the more established regimes; Steel and his fascists up in what used to be New England, Legion lording over Old Baltimore, and the procession of warlords that come and go in the dirty South. Places that make the Badlands look good. Places that make Bakersfield seem like paradise. A shithole, yeah, but still paradise.

  In the early days, some scientist had the bright idea of grouping Powers by class and magnitude. Class is mostly self-explanatory; Flyboys fly, Druids grow stuff and obsess over trees like nature-loving stalkers, Necromancers do… whatever the fuck it is we do. Others are less obvious; Stalwarts and Titans both have combat gifts, but manifest them in different ways. Shifters… well, shift… sometimes into beasts, sometimes into minerals. Never heard of one that could do what Her Majesty did, but… we’ll get to that, eventually.

  As for magnitude? Even before the Break, there were legends of a Weather Witch named Mother Nature, the sort of bitch that loved to watch the world go pear-shaped. She got sad, rivers flooded. She got irritated, droughts and quakes happened. And when Mother Nature got well and truly pissed… well, then she unleashed holy hell in the form of earth-fucking storms. People called them hurricanes and scientists measured their strength from Category One to Category Five.

  I can see some of you nodding your heads already. Yeah, the post-Break eggheads looked at those old-world rankings and decided what worked for hurricanes would work just as well for Powers.

  It’s an imperfect system—which is why those categories are further broken down into Highs, Mids, and Lows—but it stuck anyway. Don’t blame me for that; I wasn’t around when decisions were made, and nobody would’ve asked my opinion even if I had been. Likelihood is, I’d have been born somewhere else, and wouldn’t have survived long enough to learn all the ways my life had been fucked by one man’s dream.

  As for the dreamer himself? He’s the only Cat Six Power the scientists have ever classified… and nobody knows for sure who he was, if he’s still among us, or what the hell he was thinking. All we have is a name—not his real name, but something the newspapers coined, back in the days before the world finished breaking.

  They called him Dr. Nowhere.

  CHAPTER 11

  While I was asleep and dealing with dreams we still won’t be discussing, Her Majesty was off looking for our attackers’ car. My first clue that she’d found it was when she parked the fucker right next to my head and leaned on the horn like it was some kind of toy.

  I was halfway to the other side of the road—and three quarters of the way to pissing myself—before I fully woke up.

  “Up and at ‘em, Bakersfield.” The yellow smiley face across Her Majesty’s visor looked a little bit more maniacal than I remembered… but it’s possible I was projecting. “We’ve still got a drive ahead of us.”

  “Is that thing safe?”

  The vehicle Smiley had found was technically a car, in that it had four wheels, belched black fumes, and didn’t fly, but if Mr. Grey’s vehicle had been a death trap, this thing redefined the word. It was little more than a frame and an engine. No doors, no roof, no windows, no chance of survival if we got in any sort of accident, and no guarantee it wouldn’t explode the first time we hit a pothole.

  Her Majesty shrugged. “It runs. And the brakes must work, or I’d have hit you. What more do you need?” Her rough, gravelly voice echoed from within the helmet, quietly mocking. “Now let’s roll. Places to go, children to deliver, paychecks to earn.”

  My hesitation, surprisingly, had little to do with the car. I hadn’t had much to eat or drink the previous day, but even so… “I have to take a leak.”

  “So what’s stopping you?” That yellow face kept smiling away. “The world is your toilet.”

  I wasn’t going to admit that I’d never been out of Bakersfield before and that the idea of finding a tree to piss on was as foreign as… well, sleeping around a campfire a few hundred feet away from fresh corpses. I was halfway convinced that the moment I took my dick out, some snake was going to leap out of nowhere and try to bite it.

  Thankfully, we seemed to be in a snake-free zone that morning. Maybe Smiley had murdered them all before going to find the car. I zipped up my jeans and limped back to the road, feeling every ache and scrape I’d picked up the previous night.

  Her Majesty nodded to the backseat, where she’d already loaded her saddlebags and the mangled remains of the electric motorcycle. “Grab a change of clothes from your bag while you’re at it. Pretty sure your precious Academy has rules against showing up in bloody clothes.”

  “You didn’t go there, I take it?” Anyone rated Cat Three or above was supposed to, but I had a hard time seeing Smiley in superhero school.

  “Academy’s for Capes. You see any Capes around here?”

  I admitted that I didn’t and climbed up to dig through the saddlebags for my own small pack. I pulled out one of my two remaining shirts and, conscious of her unseen gaze, swapped it for what I was wearing.

  She pointed at my jeans, which had been torn in half a dozen places when I was thrown from the bike. “Pants too. Can’t imagine the Academy wants to see your chicken legs any more than I do.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” I felt my cheeks flush. It was bad enough that Jeremy had more or less counted my ribs, I didn’t want Her Majesty knowing I only had the one pair of jeans. “You and the Academy can suck it up.”

  “Fair enough.” That smile seemed amused now. “If you want to walk around school with your sweet little ass hanging out for the world to see, that’s your business, kid.”

  Since leaving Mama Rawlins’, I’d been out of my depth and mainly focused on not dying, but her vaguely condescending tone sparked some of the anger that had gotten me all those years at the orphanage. I glared at her yellow, cheerful face. “I’m not a kid, Your Majesty.”

  “Seems to me you passed up the chance to prove that last night.” Her amusement seemed to have only deepened.

  “Seems to me,” I parroted, not wanting her to know that I’d been kicking myself over that very decision most of the night, “that you’d have murdered me if I did anything else.”

  “I guess that would have depended on your performance, kid.” She didn’t move at all, but I was suddenly uncomfortably aware of the way her pants clung to the twin curves of her hips and inner thighs. “Maybe I’d have eaten you alive,” she added, “or maybe a whole different kind of eating would have taken place.”

  The good news is, I wasn’t blushing anymore… but only because all my blood was elsewhere, and I was hard as a rock. I swallowed twice, my mouth suddenly dry, and tried for a casual tone. “I don’t have to be at the Academy before tonight…”

  Smiley’s laugh was sharp, loud, and vaguely metallic. “You had your chance. Post-battle horniness is over, and with it any chance of me jumping your skinny bones. No
w put some fresh-fucking-pants on. If I see even a hint of penis, I’m cutting it off.”

  The organ in question deflated like one of those balloons you see in birthday parties on vids. If it hadn’t been attached to my body, it might have even made a desperate dash for safety. As blood fled to safer regions, I found myself embarrassed all over again.

  “These are the only pants I have,” I finally admitted.

  Her Majesty stopped dead. After a very long and uncomfortable moment, she shook her head, muttering something under her breath. Then she shrugged. “Well, unless you’re packing a peanut, nothing I have is gonna fit you. I guess you’ll have to go as you are.” Her voice regained its smile. “I always wanted to moon the Academy… just never thought I’d find a Crow to do it for me.”

  •—•—•

  Los Angeles was exactly like it appeared in the vids… and nothing like it. The skyline was instantly recognizable—gleaming towers rising to dizzying heights as if they were trying to touch the sky—but the cameras hadn’t captured the sprawl that lay beneath; concrete and metal and glass and dirt in every conceivable direction. It took us three hours to reach that mess, and then another two hours to get to our destination.

  Part of that was the traffic. There still weren’t many cars on the road, but bikes—from electric motorcycles to human-powered bicycles—were everywhere. Part of it was the fact that the tunnel we needed to take had been shut down as a result of some sort of battle the previous week. But most of it was just that the city was fucking huge.

  Seen up close, Los Angeles was kind of a dump.

  Still better than Bakersfield though.

  As we drove west, pedestrians scrambling to get the hell out of Her Majesty’s way, the urban sprawl started to fall away. Barred shop windows and curb-side parking gave way to franchise chains and outdoor malls and then finally to walled estates and the sort of lawns nobody managed without a Druid or a Weather Witch on staff. Even so, I remained unimpressed with the City of Angels. Right until we hit the top of the last hill, and the ocean spread out before us like a white-capped reminder of the planet’s potential.