by Molles, DJ
Perry swore, but then charged out, crossing the street and then sticking close to the buildings on the other side, in case they needed to dive for cover again. Sagum kept pace with him and Stuber took up the rear, looking over his shoulder for a tail.
“Also,” Whimsby began again. “I should tell you, I’ve discovered some very intriguing things about The Source—”
“Contact!” Stuber shouted, firing his rifle.
Perry spun, shouldering Sagum out of the way. There, up the street, two demigods had taken the corner that they’d just relinquished, their longstaffs up.
Perry planted his feet beside Stuber. “Run!” He fired a single bolt in the direction of the paladins, just as the one in the lead—was that Rixo?—sent one rocketing towards Perry.
For a split second, Perry considered attempting to deflect it as he’d seen Mala do, but he didn’t trust himself. His shield bloomed in front of him, and the energy bolt crashed into it, taking his shield down a few pegs.
Perry turned, keeping the shield covering his back, and sprinted after Sagum and Stuber. They approached another corner. “Turn right!” Perry yelled. “Right!”
Three blasts in rapid succession struck Perry’s shield as he hit that corner and skidded around it.
“Godsdammit!” Perry seethed. His shield had been taken down to half-strength now. He really needed to learn how to deflect with his longstaff. His shield couldn’t continue to take this much damage.
But it’s a big ask to face down a demigod’s energy bolt and try something you’ve never done before.
He kept the vestiges of his shield up and charged down the street, gaining on Sagum and hollering as he did: “Whimsby! We had to make a right on a different street!”
Sagum was a fast runner when he was unencumbered by extra weight. A lifetime of skipping around Wasteland mountains would do that. Perry had to put a lot of energy into catching up with him. Stuber’s enormous stride put him in step with Sagum as Perry came abreast, and the three came to another intersection.
“That’s fine,” Whimsby replied, his tone calm. “Just take your next left, heading west, and continue on. You’ll still want to look for that circular tower.”
Perry thought he saw it protruding from the skyline above shorter buildings, several intersections away.
“As I was saying,” Whimsby continued as the three humans huffed and gasped and stamped their feet far past the brink of their lactic acid thresholds. “I’ve discovered some things about The Source that I think you need to hear.”
An energy bolt ripped the air right over Perry’s head, leaving a streak of green in his vision and smashing into the side of a building ahead of them.
“Gods!” Perry hazarded a glance over his shoulder, still keeping his shield at his back. “Can it wait, Whimsby? I can’t really pay attention right now!”
“It’s rather important, but if you can’t retain the information right now, I suppose I can wait.”
“That’d be fucking great! Left right here!”
They shot left down the next intersection, heading back towards the original street. Perry couldn’t get enough air. Stitches formed in his stomach, stabbing at his abdomen, and his legs had gone beyond burning now, and had simply become two columns of cramping muscle.
Perry hit the intersection first. He came around the corner and looked left.
A pair of paladins were already there. Green bolts lanced the air and Perry ducked back behind the building in time for the corner of it to explode.
“Hey, whoa!” Stuber yelled at him, smacking his shoulder. “Watch where you’re winging that shield! You almost cut me in half!”
Perry had no choice but to extinguish the shield or risk killing his two companions. “They’re on both sides of the street! They’re blocking us in!”
“Fuck it!” Stuber grabbed Perry by the back of the neck and pointed him at building across from them. “If we can’t go around these buildings, then we’ll go through!”
Perry understood it instantly. It was a wildly dangerous idea, but so was trying to go toe-to-toe with a squad of paladins. He leveled his longstaff, gathered one large burst of energy, and sent it careening into the center of the wall across from them.
Before the smoke and rubble had cleared, the three of them pushed through the breach.
Stuber’s weaponlight stabbed the darkness. They sprinted across a large, open space, coming to another wall. Perry didn’t even slow his stride, but fired as he ran, blowing the wall to pieces ahead of them.
The cloud of dust billowed and swirled, flashing with Stuber’s weaponlight like a thunderhead.
“Whimsby!” Perry yelled as he ran. “I know you’re busy, but if you got any tricks up your sleeve, we could really use some help to get these paladins off our ass!”
Another wall. Another blast. The rubble from this peppered Perry’s face, and pinged off his bare teeth, knocking a piece out. Light ahead. They plunged through, tripping over concrete blocks and stumbling out onto another street.
Perry gasped, then choked as dust clogged his lungs. He cast his gaze right, saw a flash of movement. Stuber fired on it, still moving across the street.
Movement overhead.
Perry’s eyes darted upwards as he dodged a crumpled street sign and ran into the road. One of the paladins flew across the gap between the buildings and alighted on the top of the roof ahead of them. Perry winged off a shot as the paladin’s feet hit, and sent a section of the roofline up in fire and ash.
He juked around the falling debris, and had to slow his run in order to blaze another hole into the side of the building. As he did he oriented his shield ahead of him to soak up some of the explosion. It weakened by another increment, barely having recovered from the series of blasts it had taken.
He plunged into darkness again. “Whimsby, did you hear me?”
No response.
The swirling gray cloud thinned, and Perry stamped to a halt inside a tile-floored room, Stuber right at his side. Perry spun in a rapid circle, eyes searching through the haze in the breach behind him.
“Where’s Sagum?”
“Godsdammit, Smegma!” Stuber stamped back towards the breach, but before he reached it Sagum came shooting through the hole and slammed into Perry. He rebounded, then toppled to the ground.
Stuber immediately grabbed him up. “Gods in the skies—”
Sagum tried to stand but his right leg went out from under him.
“Stuber, he’s injured,” Perry grabbed Sagum’s other shoulder, the tall, slender man now pinned between him and Stuber.
A glance down at Sagum’s right leg showed a jagged tear in the muscle of his thigh. Blood welled out and muscle fibers squirmed. Specks of debris peppered the gaping wound.
“I’m okay,” Sagum said, in a high-pitched voice that didn’t sound okay at all.
“Whimsby!” Perry yelled at Sagum’s collar.
“I heard you, Perry,” Whimsby said. “I’m trying to work something out. If you can just hold on for a moment or two longer…”
“I don’t think we have that kind of time!”
“You’re going to have to make that kind of time.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
TERROR AND WRATH
Teran knew nothing of what was happening. She understood that Whimsby spoke to her and the guys separately, but she didn’t realize anything had gone wrong until Whimsby’s massive Guardian body stopped in the middle of the street.
He spun, the legs retracting up into his body.
“Teran,” Whimsby’s polite voice came through. “You’re going to have to go on without me.”
“I don’t know where I’m going!”
“You’re nearly there. The Guardians are converging on this location as we speak, so you need to be very quick. Listen closely: There’s a building, one street over, and one street up. It’s on the side of the circular tower. Get inside that building. There should be a door at the very back of the atrium, and when you open it you
should find stairs leading downwards. Go down those stairs. Continue as far as you can. You’ll eventually reach a large portal that you can’t get through. Wait for us there.”
“Okay,” Teran stammered for something else to say, but she thought she understood the directions. She would’ve loved to go over them one more time, but even Whimsby’s level voice seemed tightened with haste.
“Now, run, Teran. The Guardians are almost here.”
***
All that Mala had left was her shield.
Her plans had been laid to waste by Rixo and his rebellious crew, but Mala couldn’t simply walk away from it. That was anathema to her. So she pulsed, and she flew. She bounded across the tops of the buildings, working her way higher and higher, the closer she drew to the center of the East Ruins.
She had no plan anymore. No strategy. She had been relegated to the very thing she’d chastised Rixo for: She was now entirely reactive.
Pulsing her way across the rain-slashed sky, she supposed that she’d been wrong about Rixo. He’d had a strategy all along.
You’ve done a wonderful job getting stabbed in the back, Mala rebuked herself.
She perched on the top of a spire, clinging to it one handed and looking down over the cityscape all around her. Even as her eyes scanned her environment, her mind was directed inward, railing at her own weaknesses and how they’d come to bring her to this point.
Her self image was one of strict realism. She’d always viewed herself as someone who did not trust easily, and who saw through people’s poor deceptions, able to pluck their true motivations out of the air.
And yet, three times she’d allowed herself to be taken advantage of.
Was there something hidden inside of her that was not as it seemed? Was her self-perception so wrong? Was she gullible, or were these people just phenomenal liars?
And did it make a difference?
She’d never trusted any of them. And yet, she’d put herself in vulnerable positions that enabled them to take advantage of her. Was this something that demanded correction, or was this another one of those happenstance that simply couldn’t be avoided?
Once was a fluke. Twice should make her start to think. But three times? Three times was a pattern.
Who am I if I’m not who I thought I was?
It was a poor time for self-reflection, but she feared that if she didn’t correct something horribly and obviously wrong with her, then it would only happen again.
Happen how? She didn’t even know what she was doing. She didn’t even have a plan.
Clinging to the spire, she saw the other paladins racing along the rooftops, a few miles distant from her. They seemed to be swarming around one particular area. That would be where Percival was. Ten of them, flanking, out-maneuvering, and in moments, they would have the halfbreed surrounded. And they would give no quarter.
Could she save him?
She did not think that she could.
At this point, Percival McGown was as good as dead.
***
Teran sprinted down the street, the circular tower looming just ahead. It had been glass in its ancient life, but was now just a grid of steel supports. She saw the building connected to it. Squatter, and less decorative, looking like it had been hewn out of solid stone.
She hit the corner of a building, dashing across the intersection. She cast a glance to her left. In the center of the street, still perhaps a mile or two away, she saw a flash of copper hurtling towards her through the gloom.
She realized that one of the rifles would have been useless against it, and yet she hated to be in so much danger, with no weapon. To calm her spiraling panic, she repeated Whimsby’s instructions like a mantra.
Get inside the building. Go to the door in the back. Go down the stairs, into the tunnel, until you reach a door you can’t pass.
But then what? Sure, Whimsby had said the others would meet her there, but if she couldn’t get through the door, would they? Was there some special code to get in? Did you need a particular skill that she didn’t have?
She hit the sidewalk beside the circular tower, slammed her feet another several yards and then stamped to halt at the only door on the side of the building. It was a single man door. Corroded steel. One door latch.
She grabbed the latch. It was rusted in place. She wrenched at it, and it gave, then seized up again.
“Godsdammit,” she hissed at the door, and at Whimsby. “Just go inside the building, he says! Like the fucking thing’s just open and waiting for me!”
She kicked the door in the center, creating a reverberating bang. She tried the door latch again, but the kick hadn’t loosened anything up. Was it locked? How as she going to get around that? Was there another entry that she hadn’t seen?
She swiped rain-sodden hair out of her eyes, panic mounting, fraying at the tethers that kept her wits about her. Her gaze scoured across the face of the building, but it was just an unending surface of concrete. No other doors. No windows. Nothing.
Had she just felt a rumble? That deep, basal thrum of a Guardian close by?
It was like her adrenal glands couldn’t kick anything else into her system. Her heart was already going at max capacity. Her breathing already ragged in her throat. There was no other option. Either get inside the door, or run and find some place else to hide.
And she didn’t think she had time for that.
She let out a cry, reared back, and slammed her foot down on the latch with an axe-kick.
The door latch cracked, unlatched, and the door shuddered open, swinging inwards a few inches.
Feeling the danger at her heels, Teran shoved her way through the door into pitch blackness, and swung it closed behind her. She didn’t wait, didn’t try to hold it closed and see if the Guardian might pass her by.
She took two steps forward and realized that the pitch blackness wasn’t an effect of daylight still in her eyes. It was truly lightless in this place. She couldn’t see her hand in front of her face. Not even an inkling of shape or structure.
She tried hard to control her breathing, to make it quiet, but her lungs screamed for more air. Prickles of light appeared at the corners of her vision, but she knew they were only hallucinations from her oxygen-starved brain.
She thrust her hands out in front of her and began putting one foot in front of the other. Whimsby had said the door she was looking for was at the back of the building. So now, her only concern in the world was getting to the back.
If I’d carried a rifle I would have a weaponlight.
Her whole world became the air in front of her groping hands.
Her feet shuffled along, waiting to strike something, or to go over a sinkhole in the floor. She heard the quiet, steady dripping of something in the dark, but that was it, besides her own breath and the scuff of her boots on the floor.
She kept waving her arms about. A blind woman with no spatial reference to where she was.
That Guardian would be close, if it wasn’t outside right—
She slammed into a wall. She hadn’t even realized she’d been moving that fast.
Okay. You found the back of the building. Now what?
She began working her way sideways, prodding at the wall with her fingertips. It was cold, like stone, but smooth, like glass.
Her fingers slid across a crack.
Yes. A doorjam.
Her hands flew in wide arcs until they connected with another door latch. She grabbed it, twisted, and this time the action was smoother, but still gritty with age. The door opened, though it made no difference to her sight.
She could definitely feel it now: The hair-prickling thrum of a Guardian hovering closeby.
She moved through the open doorway, felt the ground disappear beneath her feet, and only at the last second remembered that Whimsby had told her there would be a stairwell going down. She clung to the door and managed to keep herself from tumbling down into the darkness.
She found her feet on the first trea
d, and closed the door behind her.
The second it touched home, the building shook. For a split second she thought that she’d slammed the door, but the sound was too violent, too all-encompassing to have been the door.
The thrum of the Guardian grew louder. Pulsing now.
It had crushed its way into the building.
And now Teran did freeze. She stood there, plastered to the door, because she didn’t know if they had a way to see through walls and doors, but she knew for sure that they had a way to hear, or to sense vibrations, and she knew that if she tried to run down those stairs, it would give her away.
Staying still was her only, tiny chance.
The darkness drew in on her. Close and claustrophobic.
Her lungs demanded air. She opened her mouth and forced herself to take it in slowly, silently, not allowing her hitching chest to be the thing that undid her.
The thrum of the massive machine on the other side of the door pressed at her ears.
She breathed out, just as slow.
Rainwater dripped down her face. Gathered on her nose. She tilted her head back so that it wouldn’t drop onto the ground. Her wet hands clutched the doorknob, unmoving, but threatening to tremble.
Somewhere out in the East Ruins, something exploded, sending a reverberating shockwave, dimmed by distance and concrete walls.
The pulsing hum of the Guardian raised in pitch.
And then faded.
Another distant explosion.
Had the Guardian left?
Teran eased her grip off the door latch. She heard the ancient springs in it ticking as the tension released. At any moment, she expected the door to blow open and her body to be scattered to bits. But then she had her hand off the doorknob.
Nothing had reacted to the tiny sounds.
Breathing more rapidly now, Teran turned to face the empty blackness of the stairs to the underground, and began to descend, one careful step at a time.
***
Perry moved as fast as he could, but he knew it wasn’t going to be enough.
Sagum was on his knees, sandwiched between Stuber and Perry, and firing his own rifle in short bursts as paladins spun and dodged, their shields absorbing the rounds, then shifting to provide them with an angle of fire, and blasting off energy bolts.