Mayhem

by Michael MolisanI

  Margaret wished she could reach her own home, procure her personal armor. She’d only be wearing modest ballistic protection over all this blacksmith grease, inferior to the modular gear that Janet had created with the help of a German armorer. It was layered support and protection that utilized linothorax and leather. She could swap out various pieces to support a wide array of climates and opposing witches. The German had also created a full over-bust corset and plate carrier, tailored to her frame and breasts, which could sustain direct rifle fire, called rüstung sklaverei.

  The bathroom walls were tiled in cobalt and argent, brass rails mounted specifically for her to clutch and pull herself up and out of the bath, the tools of a woman long ago crippled. Grateful for Lady Owens' rails, Margaret used them to carefully retract herself from the tub. Erin didn’t need to be instructed to begin wrapping her left arm, she had the good sense to know why she was here.

  “You ever hear about moose? Big fucking deer-creatures, up by Canada.” Margaret raised her brows, vision blurring as oil dripped into her eyes, “I’ve seen them. They’re as big as an em-wrap, and twice as stubborn. Want to hear a joke?”

  “Is it funny?” Erin answered, as she tied off the linen at Margaret’s shoulder, turning to retrieve armor. Erin would need to lace rib plates from a full-size carrier across Margaret’s chest and stomach, before wrapping those in another layer of soaked linen. A standard plate carrier would never have fit. It would be loose in all the wrong places, and a protruding tit bulge would only spray hot lead shards into Margaret’s face, if hit.

  Margaret raised her arm so Erin could work easier, “There’s a captain newly assigned, up north, 4th Army. During inspection, he notices a moose tied up outside the barracks. He asks his lieutenant, ‘Why is that moose there?’ The lieutenant says; ‘There are four-hundred men here and no women. Sometimes we get urges.’ A month later the Captain gets some urges. He puts a ladder behind the moose, drops trousers and fucks the moose. His lieutenant happens by, giving him a weird look. So, he says, ‘Is that how the men do it?’ Lieutenant shakes his head and says, ‘No sir, they usually ride it to the whorehouse!’”

  Silence.

  “Was that all?” Erin asked, lacing a bound plate over Margaret’s abdomen with soaked leather straps.

  Yes, that was all!

  “Did you get it? The Captain thought the moose was for fucking. Right? Right? So, he fucked a moose!” Margaret was grinning, stiff and still, but finally cracked up laughing at the idea. Her long chuckle ended in a gasping, low-throated wretch that made it sound as if she might even vomit.

  “It’s not really that funny,” Erin shook her head, nose scrunched up, and eyes narrowed as she paused to wipe off her hands with a gray-green towel of supple cotton.

  It’s plenty funny, Margaret thought. Erin shook her head a second time, signaling that the young woman had heard this stray thought.

  By the time Margaret was fully armored, they’d used most of the tub of blacksmith grease. Layers of woolen sock kept her feet from sliding around in boots a size too large, and a modified linothorax skirt donated by Lady Owens was glistening in the viscous gilt.

  “Erin,” Margaret summoned her Corporal back as she leaned over the sink, grinding a chunk of charcoal across her eyes. The grease and oil had turned the black carbon to a thick mud, “When we find my niece, I want you to run. Do you understand?”

  Erin’s kit was roughly the same as before, shotgun slung over her shoulder, barrel pointing skyward, “Why? She won’t be paying attention to me.”

  With chunks of carbon dripping from her eyes and lips, the expression Margaret flashed couldn’t have been more intimidating, “My mother could burn a man alive with a glance. Plague Dog suffers none of my mother’s flare for the dramatic. She won’t be waving her hands around, shouting ‘burn.’ You’ve never seen a fully trained battlewitch fight.”

  In her final words, Margaret allowed power to reverberate in her throat. She didn’t do it to force or command the former brassboy. She was wielding her own theatrical flair, a manifestation of her very role since she was a teenager. Erin didn’t need to assume that Margaret was a kind and harmless woman who offered fair trade for services rendered. She needed to know that she was standing in the company of another fully trained battlewitch.

  Erin tilted her head, then looked away, one had clasping the door frame and her eyes focusing far away, “That’s strange,” she whispered, then lowered her eyelids as if she was falling asleep.

  On the western wall of the bathroom, rays of the morning began to chip through painted glass. Lamp light flickered then faded, leaving only golden green-blue light cast across the waxed tile. Erin was cast in a shadow from Margaret’s small frame, her head lowered, and shoulders sloped.

  I know what this is.

  Margaret exhaled, her breath a thick wisp of vapor.

  Under wrap and oil, her flesh was warm, but the temperature dropped suddenly. There was a bubbling fizz beneath Margaret’s nails, as if her fingers were alive with ants or ticks. Perspective no longer applied. The door frame could have been a dozen feet away, or so close to her that she’d have kissed Erin. The floor seemed a matte pallet, a limitless horizon. Vertigo rushed up Margaret’s spine, clawing into her skull and pressing at her ears. She wanted nothing more than to sit.

  When it almost seemed too much, it was over. Physics and sensation worked like they were meant to. Erin straightened up, shoulders rolling back, and her fingers running up the wooden frame like spiders. When her eyes opened, her lids betrayed golden orbs deep in her skull, reflecting aurelian light across ceramics.

  “Love the fish-flesh, Margaret.” Erin’s lips parted for a smile too wide to fill her face.

  Margaret took a step back to keep Eris’s golden eyes from blinding her, “Last time you came to visit, my niece tried to burn me alive.”

  Eris was now soul-deep in Corporal Erin Abid. She waved her hand away, as if the idea was a humming gnat that had annoyed her, “Repercussions of chaos. With a taken-name like ‘Mayhem,’ I would assume you were intimately acquainted.”

  Margaret hadn’t appreciated Aphrodite borrowing Ramona’s flesh any more than this, but there was nothing to be done for it. Erin was too inexperienced to keep one out of her mind.

  “Are you here to tell me how fucked I’m about to be, or to tempt me as your creature?”

  Eris held up Erin’s hands, lifting and dropping them, right to left, “Little bit of Choice A, little bit of Choice B.”

  “Fuck,” Margaret exhaled, aware that a clock was ticking. The assault on Amy’s 9th Battalion would begin shortly.

  “Dite-Dite doesn’t understand us, does she Margaret?” Eris laughed, her hands reaching up the door frame, allowing Erin’s body to lean in. Falling under shadow again, her golden eyes glowed, “Offering you beauty, as if you’re such a simple ape. Didn’t you ever dream of the Mississippi? After you killed that old Missouri bitch, didn’t you wish you could just be swept downstream, to the ocean? No fighting, no blood, no more graves to dig, washed away where the universe commanded.”

  Of course, Margaret knew she had no secrets before a god, and she gave one stern nod to Eris, begrudging the loosed discretion.

  “Maybe,” Erin’s voice drew the syllables out, long and low, “that wasn’t a dream. Maybe that’s your right. Ever think of that? You and good ol’ Condatis holding hands in a river.”

  Margaret had no idea how to react to this. She’d never been a particularly structured woman, and for that matter neither was Maggi Lopez. Saint Louis had been unmitigated suffering and chaos, and until she quit trying to control it, the lessons she learned there had been painful.

  Margaret tossed up her hands, “And?”

  Eris cackled with Erin’s head falling back to expose her pale throat. She snapped forward again, clicking her mouth shut. “Have you experimented with the gift I gave you?”

  Thump-thump-thump.

  Margaret glanced away from Erin’s body, the f
amiliar report of mortars going off behind her, eastward.

  The Maul has started their siege of the eastern gate.

  “The liquid charcoal? No, I was a little busy.” Margaret twisted back.

  Erin’s arms dropped from the door frame, then snapped her fingers, pointing at Margaret with thumbs extended. “Too bad, little butcher. Remember that one time you met your arch-nemesis, Ramona, in a bar? And, you couldn’t kill her? All you witches and your fancy mind-walls. That ‘liquid-charcoal’ as you call it forms a bridge between you and anyone else. Their mind will belong to you.”

  Under the chunky, thick mask of soot that wept from Margaret’s eyes and mouth, a sneer slowly twisted up her face. “You couldn’t have told me that, weeks ago?”

  Erin’s head shook fast, then stopped, palms pressed together, “I could have. But it wouldn’t have been nearly as funny.”

  “Gods be fucked!” Margaret screamed, forgetting she spoke with a god, “I could have slapped Amy in the face with that inky-shit! I could have already killed both of my brother’s fucking twins. That’s funny to you?”

  Margaret’s yelling bounced off the tile in Aurora’s bathroom, reverberating and barking back at her with a quick, chirping echo. Just as before, with Ramona, her voice cracked and rasped through syllables.

  The whole time Eris was laughing, Erin’s face coiled up in uncontrollable glee, long past when Margaret’s tirade was over. When she stopped laughing the room turned chilly, once more. Erin’s face falling grim and starkly lit under painted glass and hammered umber.

  “Now you’re annoying me,” Erin’s voice turned low and metallic, pitch creating a painful echo off the bathroom tiles, “I thought you, above anyone, would get it. If Amihan wasn’t allowed to burn you, how would we have our war, you and me? Dite-Dite is on about restoring an age of gods. I just wanted to dance with you one more time. I thought you’d understand that.”

  Margaret had no idea how to answer this either. Without thinking, Margaret asked, “We’re friends. Aren’t we?”

  Eris nodded with Erin’s chin, “I’ve been your best friend since you were a little girl. Do you remember the day we first met? You heard the guns outside, and you tasted the ash of a fire eater. They left you unchained, didn’t they? Why did you decide to run?”

  It was just a whisper, Margaret thought, I thought I was whispering to myself.

  Margaret wasn’t standing proud in Aurora’s bathroom anymore. She was a little girl again. Dried tears on her face, raising hands, fingers releasing the clasp at the back of her neck, dog collar falling. All around was the grocery store that she lived, behind battered and empty beige shelves. Her mouth was dry, and she gnashed at ash, an effect that Maggi Lopez caused. It was midday, and the men who held the gutted building rushed for the exits, shouting as they heard the popping of guns.

  Run away. Stand up and run.

  Margaret was listening to a terrible hiss, vibrating deep in her chest. She tried to stand up, but her legs wobbled. How long had it been since she ran? Or stood under her own power? Weeks? Months?

  Run away. Stand up and run.

  Wearing nothing more than pajama bottoms covered in kittens and puppies, Margaret pulled on a big coat from the cubby she lived and ran. Her legs didn’t want to move under her, and she had to focus on each step, each knee twist and footfall. The light outside was blinding, and there were rifle barrels pointed at her as she dove into the turned-up maze of broken cars and twisted metal.

  “Whoah! Whoah! Barrels down, it's just a kid!”

  A man from the lines ahead yelled. His voice was robust with command, as if his very words would arc like electricity and ignite the switches that could be turned in the minds of his subordinates.

  Another man grabbed her and she almost toppled, face first into the ground. He was wearing gloves with armored knuckles, she remembered. Jamming them in her coat pockets, then up behind her back and down her pajamas finally. His heart was beating in her own chest, and he relaxed, thinking; no explosives, thank god.

  Those hands were rough, but devoid of the lecherous sadism she’s come to understand as part of her life. Saying nothing, he pointed at his eyes, then Margaret’s, and finally back at a woman who carried the flank. She was slim, wearing blue jeans and a white tank top stained in hues of rust and ink.

  Run to her, came the whisper from Eris, run one more time.

  Margaret did as she was commanded.

  “What’s your name?” asked a young Maggi Lopez, offering a smile before twisting up her nose in a mix of horror and disdain. Her skin was hot to the touch and covered in embers when Margaret blinked. There was something bright and magnificent that beat in her chest, an ethereal power that Margaret didn’t yet understand.

  The memory cracked, and fell away like heavy chips of paint, leaden under the weight of years. Unceremoniously Margaret found herself still standing, where she had never left. In the bathroom of Aurora Owens, pressed against wooden foundations, supporting a tin basin, sobbing. If questioned on that moment, she’d have denied her own tears. There were some moments too intimate for Margaret to have ever shared, sacrosanct deep in her mind. This was one of them.

  Erin stood over Margaret, fingers running through her oil slick hair, hushing her. Worms crawling under her fingernails promised Margaret that a chaos god still wore the young woman’s skin.

  “I never forgot what Maggi’s soul looked like that day,” Margaret whispered, sniffing hard at mucus demanding release.

  You ushered chaos into Maggi’s life that forged her into the steel everyone would come to remember, didn’t you Margaret? Eris was in Margaret’s mind, under her skin, flowing in veins and flexing with her tendons.

  “Get out,” Margaret ejected the words with no emotion.

  “As you wish it,” Eris said, moving Erin’s lips, “I told you, we’ve been friends a long, long time. It was just hard for us to share the world with you.”

  Thump-thump-thump.

  Perhaps two seconds later, thump-thump-thump.

  The Maul was getting ready to bring down the eastern walls of Stockton and assault the Dogs of War. Amihan’s soldiers were about to meet an opponent more dangerous than any they’d known before.

  “What do you want from me?” Margaret asked, refusing to meet the golden globes that seemed to hum like cicada this close.

  “The others will offer you gifts. I’ve given you all the gifts you could ever need. Now I just want your worship.”

  Margaret took a step toward the painted glass behind her, blinking her eyes clear. Erin’s body lurched over, lips peeled away and teeth parting. Her muscles tensed, betraying neck, pulse hammering at her temples. Fingers curved in like claws. Elbows and shoulders twisting and jerking. The skin Eris wore was human, but it ceased to move like one. There was lust in her snarl and hate across her brows. Aurora’s bathroom was turning as dark as it was cold.

  “Gods be fucked, if I refused to worship Aphrodite, I will refuse to worship you too.”

  Margaret didn’t retreat, she leaned in, and imagined Erin biting into her own flesh, ripping away skin and chewing down the meat of her face and neck like a starving dog.

  Whatever remained of Erin’s voice was traded for an uneven pallor, drifting from the girl’s lips, into syllables, drawing nails on chalk. “Where was Aphrodite when you were a child? Did she help you?”

  No.

  The beautifully tiled bathroom turned claustrophobic for Margaret. A confine she only wanted to escape, a tight space she shared with something as mad as it was dangerous. Eris was all about her, gnawing and demanding for something Margaret could never give up. Finally, she closed her eyes for a dozen seconds, the scratching at her mind falling silent as she focused to speak.

  “I won’t worship any of you, and you can tell them I said that. This wasn’t my mother’s way and it won’t be mine.”

  I saved you, Margaret.

  Aurora Owens' bathroom ceased to exist. There was no dawn light or distant artillery
wailing. Margaret and Erin ceased to have relevant bodies, nothing tactile in their wake, merely god-sliver souls coiled up in something like an embrace. There was no tidy little shelf that Margaret could display her feelings with an embossed docket.

  I know, and I fed you chaos for twenty years, Eris.

  Somewhere between the physical world and twining brambles beyond the Veil, Margaret and Eris embraced. With no sky and no ground, it felt like falling, a torrent of vertigo.

  “Be careful, little butcher. You’re not the only witch who the gods court.”

  Somewhere in this entanglement, Eris turned away, withdrew herself. Or the fraction of herself that stretched out and filled Corporal Erin Abid. It was casual and quick, and the young woman’s body remained standing for a dozen seconds. Human eyes bolted to Aurora’s painted glass as her marrow shivered and her jaw ticked, no bit to bite.

  With only one arm, Margaret was neither strong enough, nor large enough, to keep the girl from collapsing. All that she could do was make sure that Erin’s skull didn’t impact on the wood basin. To her credit, Erin herself kept her mind square and clear, regardless the improbity her body had just sustained.

  “Hi.” Was the first word she spoke, looking up at Margaret’s grim war paint.

  “You okay, candy-striper?” Margaret asked, a smile lost somewhere in the chunky charcoal stew of her face.

  “I think a god just borrowed my skin,” Erin tried to move her arms, her fingers convulsing as she regained control of her own nerves.

  “Yeah,” replied Margaret, drawing her syllables out, “Good thing for you they always leave behind a favor, a boon, payment for your skin. With experience you’ll learn how to keep them out, if you wish.”

  Erin shuddered, “I saw you, as a child.”

  You don’t want to keep speaking, candy-striper.

  Margaret didn’t reply, the words wouldn’t move. There was no shame to Margaret’s mind in Erin’s understanding, but the look that would come next, made her nauseated.