Mayhem

by Michael MolisanI

  One by one, 9th Battalion officers fell out of focus, watching a horizon that no longer existed, their jaws hanging free, tshoulders slouching. It was only four, five, then finally six and seven that Margaret could fully control. Among them was Amy’s one-eyed adjunct boy, all of them shifting their slumberous gaze on Amy, turning with the same ease Margaret might offer as she filled a plate with food or opened a door.

  All of them leveling weapons on Amy.

  “Amihan,” Margaret’s voice was certain, “I don’t want to do this, but I’m no traitor.”

  Pop, someone fired a pistol in the room. Margaret could hear screaming, followed by two more concussions, pop, pop!

  “Funny story,” Amy nodded, calm, unblinking, and it seemed to Margaret, unbreathing, “You’re not a traitor, yet you have the guns of my men trained on me now. And you’ll shoot me? If I don’t release you?”

  Margaret nodded, “Yeah.”

  Her shields offered her a modicum of safety against Amihan’s fire; she couldn’t reach past them as easily as she’d boiled Henry Franc’s saliva.

  “No,” Amihan replied.

  Where are Amihan’s poltergeists?

  Margaret realized the ghostly bodyguards had manifested when Margaret pointed an unloaded pistol at Ramona. Amy’s twin claimed those guards protected both her sister and father. Right now, there were seven chambered bullets, aimed at Amy’s skull, it should have triggered them.

  What the fuck was Ramona Lopez doing?

  Amy proved herself the granddaughter of Maggi Lopez and lunged, a brawler uninterested in the limitations of magic. Their defenses erupted in mottled glow, grinding, shattering embellished fields, Amy physically slammed into Margaret with her full weight. The corner of a banquette table stabbed Margaret’s lower back, her knees gave way and both women toppled to tarmac.

  Amy struck her aunt in the face with a balled left hand, so hard that her knuckles cracked under the force. Margaret was clutching at the other woman’s neck, pressing her away with all the strength she could muster. She’d never grown as large as the daughters of Alexander Lopez, she’d never been strong, nor had she been good at fighting. It was no matter at all for Amy to overpower her, left hand bloody at the knuckles, forcing Margaret’s face to the concrete and her right knee pinning her leg. With focus broken, her attention spread, Margaret could no longer maintain control over the 9th Battalion officers.

  Weapons fire filled the hanger like a flooded pitcher, cascade reports became a jump of messy cracks and pops. From her vantage point on the ground, Margaret could see bodies cast apart, blood erupting from wounds, men screaming.

  Chaos, Margaret thought, remembering Eris.

  Amy braced her weight on her right hand and struck Margaret in the face again, and again, and again. Each impact was hateful, her maw snarling, a stream of drool reaching down.

  Despite Margaret’s best efforts to fight back, her body refused to press. An impact dropped down on her exposed temple, stunning her. Amy’s left hand opened, grabbed Margaret’s face, thumb across her lips and fingers spread wide.

  “I loved you.”

  Amy seethed, her voice raw, chin quivering, and her throat enfeebled to produce the degree of rage that Margaret could feel burning in her chest, white hot, blistering.

  Blistering, like Margaret’s face.

  Margaret didn’t feel the pain immediately. Whether that was a side effect of the temple strike, or whether it was her own nerves rebelling at the notion. It took seconds to realize that she was on fire. Her chest, ribs, and shoulder, flame was eating her alive, a hungry animal falling upon an injured prey. Flesh twisted and turned black, pulling away from the muscle. Oil and sweat sizzling, grease on a griddle, as her ligaments began to burn. The hiss and pop of meat, fat loosed from bounds, charring her skin, dripping toward the floor. She’d heard men burn before, she’d watched her own parents burn alive, but nothing prepared her for what it would feel like, or sound like, as her own body was caline and ablaze.

  For the first time since she was a child, Margaret was afraid.

  Margaret began screaming, something like a caged animal, guttural, no longer human. She was thrashing under Amihan, pushing her hand away as flesh began to tear lose, cooking under a fire eater’s embrace.

  This was the Collapse made manifest, the day they came to her parents’ home. Beating her father, raping her mother, holding her down and demanding she watch as her parents burn on the pyre of furniture and clothes.

  For the first time in years, Margaret could remember their faces, screaming, screaming, screaming so loud, as flesh fell from bones turned black. They didn’t cry out for her, they begged for mercy, and finally they begged for death. They wanted to escape torture, and in their final moments, the daughter they left behind was inconsequential.

  In all her years of abuse, Maggi had never considered Margaret inconsequential.

  Somewhere in those memories, in hysteria of scalding pain, Margaret knew that Amy was shot. She’d heard two rounds empty, the pop of hammer on primer, and the keening dance of brass on concrete. She felt Amy’s blood, freezing on her burns, sizzling on fire. When her face was released, she looked up to see Amy’s coat was tattered at the shoulder, and she clutched her own neck with a hand of rose red, face twisted up in a cauldron of loathing, falling, standing, stumbling as she withdrew.

  Blood was in Margaret’s eyes, blood across the tables, the floor, everything that Margaret could see was coated in thick cruor.

  This isn’t the Collapse.

  Margaret began to retreat, crawling toward the shadows, out of the madness that was unleashed. She knew she’d been on fire, so it confused her now that she was freezing, shivering.

  I’m in shock, Margaret thought in a haze, I’ve seen dying men shiver. I’m dying.

  December 4th, 32 Veilfall

  Saint Louis, Missouri

  The wave that swept over Eads Bridge was ugly, so swollen with mud that it became a tangible force of will, a great claw rising from the Mississippi River, dragging down perhaps a hundred 3rd Army soldiers.

  One of those pulled under the river’s surface was Lady Mayhem.

  Oscillating sludge wrapped around her, flowing like a spigot, whipping at her armor. She was being wrenched deeper by coiling liquid and silt. It was dark, void of light, freezing and hollow. She wanted to scream, to gasp for air, but there was none. As others drowned, they radiated bright needles of terror, clutching and swimming against the current, desperate for breath and sky. The Mississippi was a living gullet, yanking at her ankles and wrists, ravenous as a starved animal.

  It wasn’t fear that inspired Lady Mayhem. That was something she couldn’t feel. At the back of her mind was an angry woman screaming, “I swear to fuck Margaret, I should have fucking left you in that parking lot seven years ago.”

  Lady Mayhem’s barriers were manifest, bright orange lines twisting around her, withering and dimming, illuminating the mud as it thinned and parted. When she breached the Mississippi’s spiteful surface, the barriers exuded an auditory crack before they dimmed, quiet.

  A poor swimmer, bound in armor, Mayhem had barely escaped the great hand of mire and loathing. Clinging to the soft and dingy shore on hands and knees, her gown of yellow tattered, coated in sludge, plate carrier loosened. Her combat helmet had vanished, and her hair was slathered around her face and shoulders, glued in place as she retched up blood and fine rocks. Hungrier than the river had been, Mayhem bit at the air, filling her lungs as best she could, feasting on a broth of simmering sewage, freezing rain, and black smoke, hanging in her throat like a chicken bone.

  My brother will never forgive me if I lose, here and now.

  Behind her was abject insanity. The 3rd Army fought with bayonet and pistol across Eads, a direct assault that Ozark troops contested each step of the way. She could hear their screams, and she could feel the fray expand, breathing, undulating with sour fright and lascivious cruelty.

  “Surrender.” Came a shout, fr
om ahead.

  Lady Mayhem looked up slowly, wrists and knees sucked down into pregnant Mississippi banks. An old woman stood before her, flanked by a great golem.

  She was The Missouri Witch. Brown leathers and green fatigues soaked, her hair was pulled back in a silver-white braid. Her arms bled from a hundred cuts, washing pink farrago in heavy rain. Diminished by years, her face was scrunched up, her neck skinny, yet she still cast a wholly robust form. A woman of great strength and total confidence in the powers that she had wielded since the Collapse; an aquaphilia, a water witch.

  The golem was wrapped in mud and steel, a dozen feet tall, a giant ape, dragging its knuckles. Old rubber tires created gnarled maw, jerking up and down, belching fallow algae. Molding meat spilled across its broad chest, as it sang a loathsome wail of hatred with every seizing step.

  I should surrender, the 3rd Army will be lost, thought Lady Mayhem, but she did not give reply. Instead she stood, slush sucking at her boots with each step, knees quivering.

  The Missouri Witch stepped forward, a few paces, flexing her fingers, lips curled up in a gawking grin, front teeth missing. “Surrender.”

  I can’t reach into her mind. I can’t kill a golem. My mother would be ashamed of me.

  A golem required a complex and dedicated series of rituals to raise. Once summoned, they existed forever. One golem could walk through a thousand trained soldiers, her soldiers, rending them apart like wet tissue, swallowing blood and bone whole.

  The Missouri Witch rolled her tongue out, cackling in a stuttering rasp. She was bursting with unquestioned faith.

  “Surrender.” The old woman shouted, a third time.

  Swallowing cruor and sludge, Lady Mayhem shivered.

  “No.”

  Launching into a languorous stride, Mayhem reached for her plate carrier’s breast, fingers groping at a pistol or knife, only to find them stolen by the Mississippi. The old witch saw the fumble, and laughed, her throat gasping for air, braying like a donkey. With one arm, she directed the abomination behind her, and the golem tripped forward into a run, using knuckles of broken stone to carry its balance forward. Each apathetic blow to the river banks was a vibration resounding up Mayhem’s knees and ribs, toward her larynx and uvula.

  It had launched itself toward Eads Bridge.

  They can’t stop it. My men can’t stop it.

  Lady Mayhem had nothing to throw at it. No flame or muddy waves, no spinning tornedos. She was crippled against the power of such creation.

  Turning away from the monster, Mayhem extended her mind out, seizing for The Missouri Witch, raking down her barriers as blade on granite. The lurid terror that she could command bled in a weary drizzle. Ink turning opaque and kissing mud with impotent splatters. Against a witch this powerful, Mayhem could not call herself nightmare mirror, she was just a cold little girl with bloodied gums.

  Fuck you, fuck this river, fuck it all.

  Unable to break the old woman’s defenses, Lady Mayhem allowed nightmares to consume her. That chilly, primitive magic, fetid paint on hide canvas, she turned her own magic inward. Her proto-human instincts begin to take over. Reason was now an abstract concept that she could no longer fathom, as she launched into a keening charge, screaming.

  Eyes dripping with glee, The Missouri Witch pulled a switchblade from her belt, and began to slough forward. Drawing first blood, angling her knife up, and under Mayhem’s plate carrier, she planted steel between ribs. Skin parted with little effort, ruby drizzles spiraling to the wind, a silk scarf drifting for a lost love.

  Mayhem only felt a hard tug at her side and cared little. She answered The Missouri Witch with a small fist planted into the old woman’s face. The blow was backed with a rage most people could never feel, a deep apoplexy summoned from her stomach.

  A tooth tumbled from the old witch’s mouth, followed by another gurgling cackle.

  The knife still planted in her side, Lady Mayhem grabbed The Missouri Witch’s face, jaws driven for her throat. Whatever nobility this fight had held was gone. Mayhem could taste loose and drooping flesh against her tongue, feel teeth wail against tendons, and flexed her jaw to bite, again and again. Mayhem’s mouth was awash with copper syrup, choking her. Like an axe felling a rotten tree, she gnawed against a jugular, cruor in her nose and eyes.

  She ate mouthfuls of The Missouri Witch, raw.

  The old woman fought back, trying to press Mayhem away, driving the switchblade into her ribs, repeatedly, but no dominion was found. Eyes darting with madness, Mayhem stood awash in sanguine treacle, shreds of skin and muscle dripping off her lips, down her plate carrier, and into her cleavage.

  The Missouri Witch lurched forward, a sack of organs and bone, falling limply, and her face pulled across Mayhem’s plate carrier, fusty lips bouncing along molle web.

  Lady Mayhem’s eyes rolled back into her skull, and she was racked in seizures. Her hands vibrated, and her jaw scooped at the air impotently. She could hear the siege of Saint Louis, each staccato dance of automatic weapons tossing her nerves, flashes of powder and fire causing an involuntary jerking in her fingers.

  Ankle deep in mud now, her stomach retched, angry at what she’d consumed. She vomited corpus delicti and flesh, colored a shade of dead roses. She wanted to force her fingers back into her esophagus, pry out the bitter gristle. Adrenaline and memories of primordial anguish gnashed against her flesh and puckered her eyes. It was more than she could tolerate, and the Mississippi demanded penance for the murder of her mistress.

  Falling forward, the impact vibrated up Mayhem’s spine and caused her head to tilt back until she was looking up, up and up.

  She could see the golem standing over her.

  “I suppose I’ll die now,” the words passed between her lips, a mumbled curse.

  To neither her expectation, nor surprise, the golem began to melt. Although the rain was slowing, offering a quiet capitulation, droplets slid down the monster’s broad chest and bulbous shoulders. Wrought iron bars that twisted up into the creature fell. Shattered stone and broken rocks trickled, a thousand rough tears. The creature was collapsing in on itself, folding up, bit by bit, returning to the bank.

  It occurred to Lady Mayhem that this was impossible. A golem would live a hundred lifetimes after its creator turned to dust, an automated memory.

  Unless it was never a golem.

  “You shall not die.” It was a collection of noises and chirps, clipped and glued together to become real syllables. Whatever was left of the golem had boiled to a shivering bipedal. Not quite human, arms a little too long, legs a little too squat, and only a bit taller than Mayhem herself. She could make out no eyes, no mouth, no face. It spoke with the drizzle of rain and splatter of river rocks, tumbling into soft mud. “I was bound to this place. This river. You bested the old Bête Noire. Killed her. Butchered her. You freed me.”

  Lady Mayhem watched the creature stumble towards her, perhaps a yard away. “Now what do we do?”

  “I owe you a favor. The favor of a god.”

  “You don’t seem much of a god.” The small witch answered, her chin tilting back to her sternum, words flavorless on tattered tonsils.

  “Is not your belly empty? Are you not weak? So may a god be.”

  “Name yourself.” Mayhem accepted.

  “I name myself Condatis. I will see you again. I will repay this debt, and we shall part ways forever after. I speak no more, Bête Noire.”

  The god calling himself Condatis fell into mud. All that he had been was nothing more than a pile of tide pool wreckage, flotsam and run off.

  Unable to move or shift her aching knees, Mayhem felt ballast drag at her jaw and breasts. Gods didn’t belong to the waking, they pressed apart Veil scraps as children might kick aside prized paints or sculptures to make merry.

  It was a long time before the little witch with auburn-red hair could shake heft and sorrow. She’d never unlocked the madness of her own hindbrain before, and she had no idea the physical toll it
created. Her eyes darted about the saturated ground and festering rain, hypervigilant to peril. The base of her skull ached; her shoulder blades burned, and she wanted to peel apart flesh to tend sore muscles. It wasn’t the traditional kind of fear she knew as a child, the trepidation and recoil that had burned out of her soul. It was an earthen terror, a rusted trinket buried in deep forest and stained tawny. There was no place in the world for that primal horror, a leftover from her prehistoric ancestors, a place full of secrets and forbidden knowledge.

  Limping away from the river, Margaret clutched a bloody hand to her lips and forced back an overpowering weight of regret. Summoning up primordial panic was a weapon that carried a grave price tag. She wanted to scream at the gray skies, she wanted to end this awareness that seemed to drag at her heels like a great stone.

  Only in its absence did she realize the peril offered by her blood loss, and only in its wake did the world begin to feel like a place she wanted to live.

  Margaret’s mother had told her the stories, of why men created fire; kept it burning at night and slept close to its glowing kisses. Out there, in the darkness, were things that no mortal could fight with stick or steel. Out there were things that taught humans the true meaning of fear, an imprint so deep, so twisted in scars, that eons would not see it erased from their minds.

  More than she worried for blood loss, Margaret prayed to any power who heard her, an unspoken hope, that she would never need to turn to that awful weapon again.

  12:02am February 28th, 39 Veilfall

  Stockton, California

  “Fuck me.”

  The ragged cry came out, half choked.

  Margaret attempted to roll over, off her back, but her right shoulder didn’t respond. She took a moment, blinking at the dreary rafters, to take inventory of her limbs. She could drum the fingers of her right hand to thigh. They worked. Her wrist rotated, and she could feel muscles twist, yet the shoulder remained silent.