Mayhem

by Michael MolisanI

  She was there and she was raging back at Margaret.

  This pause allowed Amy the time she needed to ball a fist and punch back at Margaret’s face. A solid blow, enough to make Margaret’s teeth click together loudly and drop her sideways off the still horse.

  I need to rest a moment, anyway, Margaret thought, sliding off the animal, then struggling back up to her feet. She couldn’t shake the spinning in her head, and she wanted to throw up again. She hadn’t hurt earlier, but now there was a dull ache at one of her ankles, and her ribs had begun to chirp in dismay.

  Struggling back to her feet, Margaret ran fingers through her wet hair. They came back bloody. As she studied those fingers, rain cleansing her cruor, more than anything Margaret just wanted to lay down. Close her eyes. Maybe take a nap.

  Blinking hard, more for her sake than any need to hide from the rain, Margaret twisted and turned back to see Amihan standing, out from under her calmed horse.

  She wasn’t quite standing. Her left knee was bent to one side and the leg of her trousers were black and swollen. Much of her weight was shifted against her good leg, and her hands were clenched fists that still shook at the wrists.

  You killed my father, Amy whispered, her lips clamped shut, her throat tattered, she was projecting a sound into Margaret’s mind. Just as the eyes looked like a young Amihan, so too did her voice, a sing-song tambour, the same as when she was eight or nine years old. Begging for flan before bed, leaning across every syllable she thought might gain her the slightest favor.

  You killed my father, Amy repeated in Margaret’s mind.

  “I’m sorry,” Margaret said, her words an echo in her own mind, lips moving, speaking. She remembered what an apology was, after all.

  Just a selfish act to relieve a person of their own guilt.

  I loved you, Mayy, did you ever know that?

  Margaret watched part of Amihan’s chest separate, just above her plate carrier. The dark fabric tattered out, and something zipped through her, trailing a long stream of dark mist, before impacting into one of Margaret’s plates. The force pushed her back. Most of the impact was absorbed across ceramic armor, buried beneath a layer of molle and leather. The smack seemed to reverberate through her body and Margaret could hear her teeth grind.

  The tracer fire looked like stuttering flame. Extruded, dripping horizontally, molten hot. A dozen more rounds whistling past Amy and Margaret.

  This is no man’s land, Margaret remembered. How could I have forgotten?

  Head still spinning, ears ringing, her lips cracked and dry, Margaret set into stride. Each foot fall planned and coordinated as she rushed Amihan. They could talk all day about their feelings, or Margaret could finally end the witch who had traded flame for rot.

  She could feel the warmth of Amy’s dying horse under her toes as she lifted up and past the prone animal, wet gravel digging into her heels, rain sweeping her face, the bitter smell of sulfur around her. Margaret leaped at the zenith of her lunge, throwing all her weight into Amihan, thrusting her back into the dirt, the vibration of the impact sending shivers up Margaret’s arm, past her shoulder, and rattling her mind to the point where she almost blacked out. There was no time for this. She didn’t have a knife, she didn’t have another pistol, but she did have her teeth.

  They killed The Missouri Witch, and they would be plenty fine to kill Plague Dog.

  Amihan’s skin had turned rough, collapsing under Margaret’s teeth like gristle. Her thick and languid blood was a vile taste of copper and spoiled milk, mixed up in chalk and bitter roots, spilling around the edges of Margaret’s lips. Once more she turned her own magic on herself, allowing proto-human instincts to seize her mind, clutch her throat and fight Amihan harder than logic pled reasonable.

  She ate mouthfuls of Plague Dog, raw.

  Amihan didn’t go without a fight. Her fists pried and pressed the smaller woman away from her, punching at her face, her temple, her skull where she bled across auburn hair turned dark. She quaked, blood no longer drawing close to her skull, ceasing to power her body. Death should have claimed her when she was shot in the throat, death should have claimed her now, but the body simply kept plowing ahead, more crippled by the second.

  There was no more thought between the two.

  Margaret’s primal madness had reached out and spread across Amy’s oyster skin, shriveling in the mud. One of Margaret’s molars tore clean from her jaw, around Amy’s neck, suckled deep inside, swallowed whole, and lost to twisted tendons, fetid and blossoming in pure black sludge.

  In her final moments, Amy was able to slip to one side, twist her weight over and roll away from Margaret. Heaving herself up, she pulled herself over the smaller woman’s chest. Grabbing her one, flailing arm, Margaret’s knuckles were forced back into soused mud. Amy’s neck was no longer straight, it fell to one side, cartilage and trachea flopping forward to her chest and tattered armor. Her eyes didn’t work right anymore, her jaw was open, and her tongue fell like a snake cut in half by a wide shovel.

  Seconds passed, and Margaret screamed into the bile and ruin that disgorged from her lips, down her cheeks and throat, threatening to suffocate her. She saw Amihan withdraw the knife from her side, right hand clutching it like a monkey would hold a foreign tool. Her fist dropped, hard, hammering the fixed edge directly into Margaret’s sternum. The first strike was caught in molle and leather, no plates to protect her.

  The second strike penetrated Margaret’s armor, but didn’t bite skin.

  The impact was stopped by the Eye of Shahr-i-Sokhta. It cracked under Amy’s force.

  Releasing Margaret’s left arm, Amihan lifted the blade high, both fists clutching it in a mottled array of ill-placed fingers and slick gore. The tip curved up, and a glint of tracer fire made it sparkle for a fraction of a second.

  Amy brought the knife down, a third and final time, into Margaret’s chest.

  Rüstung sklaverei gave way, and the Eye of Shahr-i-Sokhta shattered into a hundred pieces, turning hot for a second, then ashen. As the knife plunged down, ten, eleven inches, it didn’t break through Margaret’s sternum. The metal grew soft and powdered, the grain disintegrating.

  Margaret was overwrought with rage and nausea. The world was silent and still. Amy was collapsing forward, her fists pressed together at Margaret’s sternum, their foreheads meeting and Amy’s muddy drool flowing across Margaret’s lips. Amihan’s eyes fixed on Margaret’s.

  I still love you, Mayy.

  It was all Margaret heard before an unmitigated beam of light shot up, erupting from where the Eye of Shahr-i-Sokhta had shattered. It thrust Amy up and off Margaret, bathing her ruined throat in blinding syrup, a thick and malleable thing that reached for the storm, and past the clouds. The glow was blinding as it spread, a complex network of roots that divided, multiplied and dimmed.

  It looked like the very world around Amihan had fractured. A fracture that flowed in all directions, far above Margaret, stabbing her deep in the throat and mind, washing away her disorientated vertigo.

  Something was happening. Margaret could feel it under her flesh, yanking at her eyelashes, twisting her nipples, sawing against flesh and melting her teeth where they sat inside of her jaw. It was an uncensored glimpse of the world beyond the Veil, something a human mind wasn’t engineered to understand. That Margaret could lay under the Veil fracture and watch it consume reality, without losing her mind, was an act of endurance beyond imagination.

  The veins of liquid gold soon faded around her, and so too did the strength of Amihan's body. Her eyeballs had washed milky, and her skull tipped down, dead, before falling.

  All Margaret could do was lie on the ground, clutching at her sternum with one good head, screaming. She screamed until her voice turned raw and fell silent. The fractures and cracks in the world were dim now, and everything felt quiet. She didn’t know how much time had passed, she couldn’t fathom a measurement like that. She had no physical connection to the universe. Reality had become a c
oncept so distant and foreign, that the notion of sky, ground, and rain, almost terrified Margaret to apoplectic frothing.

  Forcing back the symphony of madness, Margaret braced herself on an elbow, rolling to face the ground. She tugged thick and ragged gallimaufry free from her lips. Skin had lodged itself in her throat, tendons and cartilage. She ejected all of what had once been Amihan from her mouth, throat, even her stomach. Her breathing was desultory, broken, and she was blind with tears and blood.

  What the fuck? What in the fuck? She repeated, a quaking mantra, each word deconstructed until she could remember language and what it was to think like a human.

  Covered in carnage and dire entrails, Margaret stood up and away from Amihan’s cold corpse. Around her a battle was raging in a strange kind of slow motion ballet. She could see the blurs, wisps of motion, flame, expulsed dirt, and engorged organs. It was a whipped spiral of color, dark and intense, jerking across a spectrum of understanding.

  This was reality, but it was not the reality Margaret stood in.

  Every inch of her body shook. Her auburn-red hair had fallen across her face, and part of her armor glowed with the residual energy.

  Was that all it took? To shatter the eye? It couldn’t be so simple.

  Bordering on madness, Margaret laughed at herself, a fragile cackle that steadied her mind and whispered things at her ears she couldn’t possibly understand.

  With her left hand outstretched, just as she’d held the pistol earlier, Margaret pressed her thumb, index, and middle fingers together and did the only thing that seemed prudent.

  She snapped her fingers.

  2:02pm April 15th, 39 Veilfall

  Manteca Reach, California

  Snap.

  Less than fifty-feet away from Margaret, an armored vehicle from the 1st Army struck one of her own heavy tanks at something close to full speed. Part of its opposing treads caught the other vehicle head on, ripped free, and unwound across the field in spinning pieces. The impact launched a sixty-five-ton monster up and over the ground, shearing off the 3rd Army tank’s main gun. Mud, sparks, shattering plate, gear and equipment, expulsed up before the first tank rolled to one side in clamorous ruin. The sound was a deep belly-punch, a noise that could only exist between two unbreakable objects meeting each other. Cheap toys, painted in acrylic, torn asunder at the hands of gods.

  Gods.

  Margaret could see and hear clearly again, though the battlefield around her had become a vociferous curtain of bedlam. She could sometimes catch the staccato pop of small arms fire, but it would melt into the heavier reports, tank-killing guns, and artillery. Men were shouting commands from both sides, but that bled into screams of the dying.

  Against all logic, she simply stood in the center of the fray under a cool rain, pelted by falling lumps of earth.

  This isn’t the same. This isn’t right.

  There was a boundary to existence, at least as the mind could observe. When the Veil first collapsed, many boundaries had been lifted, creating something like a ledge that could not be crossed. Beyond that border, past the waking world, things existed beyond the Veil. Some had names, gods possessing flesh, djinn powered mechanisms, and skulking creatures at city foundations. Language had never expanded to understand others, and every witch knew that there was still a wall staving off the unknown.

  What was the story, mother? The story of the dark?

  A round smacked into Margaret’s corset, shattering one of her ceramic plates, and likely fracturing a rib. She didn’t wince, she could barely feel the pain now, her mind was so far removed that the battlefield ceased to matter.

  “When man discovered fire, he would never let it grow cold.”

  Margaret could hear her mother’s voice, remember her face illuminated by the dancing flames over crisscrossed twigs, the kiss of wood smoke and warmth at her fingers and toes.

  “He kept that fire burning, as he traveled, as he migrated. He slept by that fire, with his back to the darkness. He knew for a fact that if the light would ever go out, should the shadows rule, he may never wake.”

  Another round caught Margaret on her largest back plate. This one shoved her forward but didn’t penetrate.

  Margaret spoke to a ghost, or perhaps simply herself. I think the Veil is gone.

  “Lady Mayhem!” Someone shouted into Margaret’s ear, close, so close that she could feel their spittle coat her cheek, hands on her arm, jerking her back to a physical body, the sounds of battle winding up around her, louder and louder, until she wanted to claw her own ears off just for a hint of silence.

  When she spun, Margaret was looking up at a painted face, deeply shaded around the eyes and nose, with stripes down his lips, redolent of a skull. Brows were set low and his eyes were tiny, angry, and familiar to her.

  “Sammy?” Margaret asked, her voice a shriek in melee.

  “You can’t just stand here, we hav’ta get’cha behind cover!”

  Sammy’s booming voice didn’t ooze nearly as much rage as those tiny eyes and Margaret imagined tugging them from his skull, suckling them in her mouth, past her lips and tongue, like skinned grapes.

  Glancing past her, Sammy lifted his lips in a snarl, then shoved Margaret to one side, so hard that she lost her footing and fell to the mud once more. Amy’s horse, now dead, was next to her, but the young woman’s body was gone.

  A soldier from the 1st Army, wearing muted sage and dark tan, with animal skins across his shoulders had launched directly for Sammy. He was a foot shorter than the big man, but his eyes were drunk with lust, an antique AK-47 clutched with no magazine. The bayonet hilt and barrel were caught in Sammy’s right hand, a curling hunk of flesh colored steel, jerking the 1st Army man forward. Sammy’s left hand laid into the Antecedent with one and two hammer strikes, and Margaret saw the smaller man’s nose shatter like a rotten apple.

  Rifle protruding from the ground, bayonet buried deep in mud, Sammy lunged, hands wrapped around the Antecedent’s helmet, jerking him forward and slamming his face into the butt of the AK-47. Rain caressing her face, Margaret could see the man’s skull collapse like a paper mache doll, skin taunt at his cheeks, eyes bulging free, and teeth expunged. The man was dead before Sammy tossed him to the earth.

  I’m so glad we fucked, Margaret thought in a penultimate gasp, a momentary distraction from the real danger she and Sammy were in.

  “You still ain’t no Owens daughter,” Sammy shouted down to the prone woman below him, offering her one of those big, strong hands, “but yer’ all we got!”

  Margaret accepted Sammy’s hand. The large man tugged her up with one, effortless jerk. He was wearing a single plate carrier strapped up with two knives and a rifle dangling off his chest. In Maul fashion, his shoulders and arms were bare, painted in mottled charcoal patterns.

  Margaret rapped knuckles against her chest plate, focusing herself, preparing to join the fight. “If you walk with me to hell, I will give you such a glorious death that your Maul shall sing of your deeds for a hundred years to come.”

  Sammy remembered that promise. Something at the edge of his jaw told Margaret that he hoped she wouldn’t forget. She also suspected he’d cut his way through the battle in search of the little witch he’d met in San Francisco, who once offered him glory.

  Chin tipped up and tiny eyes lifted, something akin to awe ran across the muscles in Sammy’s face. Margaret didn’t follow right away. She could feel something tighten in her spine, pulling her close to the ground, as if every vertebra was being tugged apart. It was physically painful and made her aware of every nerve in her body. The twisted ankle, cracked ribs, and the blood that didn’t dry on her scalp. All of it burned bright, magnified for a brief second of agony.

  With her face gnarled up like a dying olive tree, Margaret finally let herself turn toward the gaze that captivated Sammy.

  A hundred feet or more above the 1st Army lines, the very air and wind pulled back on themselves, twisting into a gouge that glimmered golden lig
ht and bled liquid night across burning vehicles. The anomaly hurt to watch, like needles pressed into Margaret’s irises, pushing deeper and deeper until she began to weep.

  “Gods be fucked,” Margaret whispered.

  The light ebbed and warped around something that resembled labia, then burst out in a violent quake, blurring air in jarring shimmers. From the eruption came a physical form, impossibly feminine. She was twice the height of Sammy and proportioned like a child’s drawing, neck extended, arms twisted, and bosom curved at the wrong angles. All of her was wrong, undeniably impossible, and entrancingly erotic. Her flesh was golden, shimmering liquid, as bright and true as any polished coin, flowing like water, lighter than air, and granite solid.

  Margaret had seen gold like this before. The apple Eris had offered at Stormair. She already knew who this was, she remembered it all.

  “Do you know what I look like free of this flesh and bone I wear, free of costumes and lies? Those are my terrible wings.”

  Those wings spread up from Eris’ spine, unfolding, piece by piece, extending hundreds of feet in either direction, midnight cuneiform, a thousand feathers, drooling void and weeping night. In her wings, Margaret could see night skies of untold eons, a million whispered dreams, falling abandoned.

  Eris screamed.

  It was noise beyond imagination, and perhaps hearing. It was a howl of ultimate satisfaction, as if every orgasm Margaret had known in life were bound up in a heavy ball of clay and projected into her mind, every mind, around her. Chattering clatter, uncontrolled anxiety, something like fear and adulation.

  Uncontrolled and unsustainable chaos.

  Margaret closed her mouth suddenly, aware that she too howled in unison. It was only now, under the anodyne of her own self-control, that Margaret looked down to see the liquid gold running off Eris’s legs, breasts, and hands. It was burning through tank armor, falling upon the 1st Army, molten and glowing, so hot that the air bled. Men were screaming and running in all directions, begging for their lives, begging for death, hot metal scalding their arms and legs, blinding them, crippling them, pooling on the ground, an inglorious beauty.