by Lee Hayton
Julius raised his gun further, the barrel now pointing straight between Tyler’s eyes.
“Go on, then. Do your worst.”
Tyler flung his hand out towards the group. “Freeze,” he commanded.
Each member of the assembly froze in place. Tyler lowered his hand and shook out his arm.
“What now?” Gary said. “We still don’t know which one of this lot is meant to get the stone.”
Tyler shrugged. “I guess we start sorting through them. Find out who they’ve trapped there in the middle.”
He pointed to where a curve of a metal bar could just be seen in the gap between Julius and one of his henchmen. A hand grasped the bar, belonging to someone trapped inside.
Gary stepped forward, reaching out to take the gun from Julius’s hand.
“I don’t think so, Warthog.” Julius turned the gun to aim at Gary’s face but looked back toward Tyler as the room exploded with laughter.
“The stone doesn’t work in here, fool,” he said, spitting at Tyler’s feet. “And really? That’s all you’ve got? You’ve had the stone for five days now, and you’re still using the command you learned in the first two minutes?”
Julius stepped forward, forcing Gary to withdraw an equal distance.
“If I’d had something with the stone’s power for that long, I’d own half the world by now.”
Wilma ran up and kicked Julius’s ankle. His henchman stepped forward and slapped her out of the way.
“Do you want to just hand it over now?” Julius asked, shoving the gun forward until it pressed against Gary’s forehead. His breath stank of alcohol, softening the harsh consonants of his words into slush. “Save us all some bother with a side-helping of death?”
Tyler looked around the room. Each one of the men or women who’d been standing around the center point had moved. Now they advanced on him, Wilma, and Gary like the front of a gathering storm. In their hands were the weapons of lightning and thunder ready to rain chaos and destruction down upon them.
They were outmanned, outgunned, and outmaneuvered. Tyler felt himself curving in towards Julius’s logic. He’d come here to pass on the stone, did it really matter that much who he gave it to?
A flash of light caught Tyler’s gaze, and the gun flew out of Julius’s hand. He looked down at the stone, expecting to see a pink glow responsible for the damage. Then Wilma pushed past him, her glove compartment gun once again at the ready.
Gary scrambled for Julius’s weapon as it skidded across the floor. He stood up, moving to stand shoulder to shoulder with Wilma. Even with the new addition, it was an impossible fight.
Fuck it.
As the swarm of men fell upon them, Tyler rose to the challenge. He’d come here to give the stone to someone—a person meant to be in charge of its power. Damn it if this mess of dangerous fools and imbeciles would thwart him. They could pull the stone out of his cold, dead hand.
Chapter Eighteen
Wilma fired again, this time on one of Julius’s henchmen. Tyler threw himself into the gap that opened, bending double. Bullets whistled above his head. Men on either side of him dropped to these knees or sprawled on the ground. Two shrieked with pain. One lay dead.
In front of him, Tyler saw the woman held in the cage. Candy. No sign of her little boy. He screamed with rage and powered toward a man who held his weapon out ready to fire.
The bullet struck the stone, knocking Tyler’s arm back with such force that it tore his shoulder muscles. His forward momentum slowed but still carried him into the man, beating him back. They both tripped, landing on the ground. The air whooshed out of Tyler’s lungs.
Oh, you’re doing a great job.
“Give me the stone, son!” Tyler’s dad thrust his hand in between the tussling men. “I’ll look after it. You can trust me.”
A laugh erupted from Tyler, and he gasped in a breath on its heels. “Get the fuck away from me!”
He picked up the head of the man pinned below him, smashing it down into the concrete floor. The bare gray expanse turned into a Jackson Pollock painting. Crimson spatters everywhere.
When his dad stuck his hand in front of Tyler’s face again, he grabbed it, sinking his teeth into it and whipping his head back and forth. His dad screamed and thumped him on the back of the head, then tried to hit him in the eye. Tyler jerked backward, teeth still buried in flesh and bone. The punch glanced off his brow.
Tyler let go, his jaw aching. He struggled to his feet and while his father bent double, cradling his wounded hand, smashed his head against the wall.
“That’s for leaving,” Tyler shouted. He smashed his father’s head into the concrete again. “And that’s for turning up again.”
The man sank to his knees, one eye pointing to the far wall, one investigating the ceiling. Tyler backed away, breathing hard, straight into the blade held by a man standing behind him.
Enraged, he caught the man’s jaw in his hands and pushed himself backwards, ignoring the pain. In front of him, Tyler saw the flashes as Wilma shot another hapless member of his clan. Where before, twelve or more men and women had stood, now most of them were on the floor. Some shrieking. Some whimpering. Some still and silent.
He drove the man against the wall. The blade bit forward, pushing deeper into Tyler’s side. It felt like someone had punched him with a burning fist.
He roared and tried to jam the man’s head back, but he didn’t have the leverage. The man twisted his head free, pulling at his knife. The pain as it turned and came out of Tyler’s flesh sent starbursts of dizziness igniting inside his head.
“Let him go!”
Wilma stood in front of Tyler, pointing the gun at the man’s head. He held the knife up. “Put the gun down, or I’ll stab him again.”
Every cell of Tyler’s body told him they wanted out. Time to quit. Out of his mouth came the words, “Shoot him.”
The blade bit into the side of his chest this time. It tore through the cartilage binding his ribcage. Stabbed into his lungs. Wilma’s shot sounded like the pop of a finger in a mouth. As Tyler fell forward, succumbing to the pain, his body was joined with another body’s weight.
He hit the floor. Tyler tried to get his hands up, to protect himself. They belonged to another person, one who wouldn’t pass on his commands. He crashed face first into the concrete floor, breaking his nose, teeth and bone exploding shrapnel into his skin, his eyes.
“Gary!” Wilma’s voice terrified Tyler more than his pain. It sent a shiver up his spine until the growing weakness of his body refused even that movement.
“Gary. Help!”
The world disappeared, plunging into blackness. Thought you were a hero? His brain mocked him as the circuitry began to turn off, pain tripping the breaker switches.
“Tyler. Don’t you dare die.” A slap on his cheek startled him into opening his eyes. The world crowded back into focus. “Stay with me,” Wilma shouted. “Stay with me.”
“I’m fine.” Tyler reached up to brush away the burning log attached to his side. His hands refused to obey. “Get me closer to the woman!”
Gary’s face shoved into view. There was blood staining the tusks on either side of his misshapen snout. Tyler felt grateful not to be on the wrong end of those things.
“Get me close to the woman so I can hand the stone over to her.”
He couldn’t feel them pulling his arms. Coldness became the only sensation Tyler could register. Why is concrete always so cold?
The curved bars of the cage came into view. Candy reached out her arm toward him. The fingers of her hand were stained with rust where she’d gripped the twisted iron holding her captive.
A hiss traveled across the room. Even that most dreaded of sounds couldn’t mobilize Tyler into action. His limbs were heavy. Too heavy for him to lift. Lead weights that would drag him down into the darkness if he closed his eyes for a second.
“Gary? Can you lift my arm with the stone in it? Give it to Candy.”
“How do you know my name?” the woman asked. Surprise shone in her face, twisting her brow and highlighting wrinkles that she’d worked hard to cover with foundation.
“I saw you,” Tyler said. He tried to add, in the trials. I saw you in the trials. Instead of words, a glut of blood came up to stain his lips and his teeth with dark red.
“Quick!” Wilma said. She helped Gary to position Tyler’s dead arm so that Candy could pluck the stone out of his palm.
Coldness filled the gap. The bullet hole scar from Tyler’s first battle turned into icicles stabbing their chilly spikes into his flesh.
“Can you heal him?” Wilma asked. She was hoarse from emotion, her voice thickening down the octaves until it sounded like she was a forty-year-old pack a day smoker once again. “Can you heal him?”
“Sure.” Candy closed her eyes and Tyler struggled.
“What?” Wilma asked. “What is it?”
“We need to get outside. The stone doesn’t work in here.”
“Shit!”
Tyler looked at the despair in her eyes. He remembered trying to drag a dead cop close to a dumpster. The weight of him. What an utter failure that had been. Gary grabbed hold of his arm, ready to try his best.
“You need to let me out, too.” Candy pointed across the room, well out of Tyler’s limited view. “There’ll be a set of keys in that one’s pocket.”
Wilma scurried to fetch them. Tyler closed his eyes in a long blink, feeling the engorged darkness opening around him, wanting to suck him deep inside. He gave a small cry and opened his eyes again. Gary patted his shoulder, a pinpoint of warmth in the cold. “Steady on, dude. We’ll have you sorted in a minute.”
Tyler turned his head and saw a snake slithering across the floor toward him. Another appeared from a tiny slit in the wall and joined its mate. Traveling together, just like Tyler had journeyed with his friends. Sorrow clogged up his throat. He remembered Wilma drumming her hands with excitement on the dashboard, shouting, “Road trip!”
A snap sounded close to his ear, and Tyler opened his eyes. He couldn’t remember closing them. The view was straight up Gary’s nostrils. It looked like mucus was throwing a congealing party up there.
Tyler smiled and tried to say, “Don’t snort on me,” but nothing moved. Not his lips, not his mouth, not his tongue. The coldness bored deeper into his flesh. The heat of his blood poured from his body, making more room for its icy chill.
A key rattled in a lock above his head. The door squeaked as it opened. Tyler saw the flash of leg as Candy stepped out over him. She turned to Wilma and Gary, “Ready?”
Together they pulled Tyler out of the room. Their uneven progress made his head bump as though going over invisible sleeping policemen. As they dragged him, his wounded side caught on the outflung arm of a dead man. Julius. Tyler stared into his cousin’s unseeing eyes with horror. For a second, he seemed like his closest friend.
A thought surged up through Tyler’s body, giving him renewed energy. His friends had been trapped inside their own versions of broken bodies for far longer than him. He tugged on Candy’s arm, and she bent over his prostrate body.
“Change my friends back first.”
“Don’t be silly,” Wilma said, catching his whispered words. “We’ll live. You won’t.”
Candy shook her head, though, and Tyler smiled. “If it’s what he wants, then it’s what he gets. This can be the reward for returning the stone to me.”
Propped up against the wall, Tyler watched as Candy raised her hand, the stone glowing with pink fervor. “I wish these two to be returned to their previous forms.”
The glow zapped out in a line, encircling Wilma and Gary before heading back to enhance the brightness of the stone. Tyler closed his eyes. It was working. After all they’d gone through to bring the magic home, it was a perfect ending to their adventure.
Then Candy repeated the instruction. “I wish this warthog and this child to recover their former adult human bodies.”
Tyler cracked an eye open. Wilma and Gary looked the same, except a lot more frustrated.
“Let me guess,” Wilma said, her sarcasm doing little to mask the exasperation. “He broke it. Now stop dicking about and heal him while the stone still has any use at all.”
Fear struck into Tyler’s belly, an icepick digging deep and spreading cold throughout his torso. He should have had the stone reinforce him into a superhuman while he had the chance. Instead, he’d done nothing. Too lazy to learn. Too unimaginative to experiment.
Candy looked worried. With the amount of pain he was in, Tyler really didn’t want her to look so upset.
“Heal Tyler.”
A pink glow enveloped him in a hug. Tyler could feel it moving across his body, fighting back the creeping chill with steady persistence. For a second, he thought it would win. He smiled. Then the cold blackness surged in a wave across his body, and his leaden limbs dragged him down into the depths.
Chapter Nineteen
Freshly discharged from hospital half a day later, the dejected group went back to the Almighty Hotel bar. The barman cast a suspicious eye over Wilma, and she glared back, baring her teeth in a snarl. He looked away, serving a customer at the counter. When finished, he turned back to face Wilma again. She was still staring from the first time.
“I suppose it’s out of the question for me to slip you a shot.”
Wilma finally broke eye-contact with the bartender, turning to look at the warthog instead. “Good comprehension skills, Gary. Keep it up, and people will mistake you for being smart.”
He nodded, betraying not an ounce of hurt on his features. Of course, the snout and tusks made him a difficult read.
“Seems a bit stupid to be in here at all,” Tyler said. “Since you’re the only one drinking. I’d rather take my chances on the pokies than watch you guzzle down another beer.”
“You’re just jealous.”
“Yes, Gary. That’s my point.”
“No one’s stopping you from joining me. Those antibiotics guidelines are just that: guidelines.”
“When you’re the one with two gaping wounds in his side, I’ll happily let you make the call.” Tyler ran his fingers over his T-shirt, feeling the mesh covering his wounds underneath. “Until then, I’ll just play it safe.”
“That’d make a nice change.” Wilma yawned, her jaw opening so wide that it clicked. “God, I’m bored. I never thought I’d say that in Vegas.”
“Not a town renowned for its activities for children.” Tyler reached over and ruffled her hair, earning himself a scratch on the back of his hand. “Ow. Remember, I’m an injured man!”
“Could be worse,” Wilma said, an edge in her voice. “For a while there, I thought you were a dead one.”
Tyler had missed out on the excitement of being carted up endless flights of stairs by two and a half people. When the stone proved ineffective, there’d been no option but for them to try. Wilma’s arms had shaken so severely after the trek that the hospital had checked her in, too. For hours afterward, she’d stayed hooked up to a drip while the nursing staff checked her for signs of shock.
Gary was fine.
The glowing stone might have kept him from passing over the horizon into death, but it had done bugger all to heal him. After waiting so long to find someone who knew how to use the damn thing, it had pissed Wilma and Gary off no end that Candy couldn’t get the stone to reverse their changes either.
“Here she comes,” Gary said, pointing with a beer in his hand. He skulled it back in one long draft, licking the foam from his snout with a curl of his enormous tongue.
“Hey.” Candy pulled up a chair and sat down. Tyler noticed that the barman’s intense interest in Wilma immediately faded. He started to wipe down the countertop with a vengeance instead of as a ruse to keep his eye on them.
Bloody sexist! Although Tyler supposed he should just count himself lucky that the CPS wouldn’t be called on him again.
“You have any luck?”
Gary asked, hope filtering into his voice.
“Nope.” Candy pulled her chair closer and bent forward, lowering her voice. “There’s no one there knows a damn thing about anything. It’s a pity. I think that was our last hope.”
The instruction manual that Tyler had fought for in the desert was already in Candy’s possession. A massive tome, it contained almost no relevant information. Instead, it provided a history of how the stone came to be and the extended family history of scumbags who fought to possess its power. Great reading, unless you wanted actual knowledge of how to apply a fix for a warthog and a girl.
Even the commands were now going hinky. The ease with which Tyler had stopped a bunch of gunmen was lost, never to return.
“I’m grabbing a beer. You want anything?” Candy raised her eyebrows at Tyler. He thought of how wonderful a cool draft would be. If he had just one beer inside him, the itches emanating from the wounds in his side wouldn’t irritate him half as much.
“Go on, then,” he said, reaching into his back pocket.
“Don’t be silly.” Candy stepped over to the bar. “You don’t have any money, remember?”
Gary glared at Tyler. Despite his ill-health, Tyler had already been on the receiving end of a tirade pointing out that Gary had told him to get more money before giving the stone back.
Tyler glared back at him, unmoved. If they’d used up more of the stone’s capability, then its weak ability to heal Tyler may have been none. Then he’d be dead.
The thought chilled his flesh into ice and blackened Tyler’s vision. A quick snapshot memory of how it came calling for him before.
Candy attracted the barman’s attention faster than Gary had, but had to endure his small talk for far longer as he made a meal of pouring out two beers. Tyler didn’t know which bartending school he’d gone to, but surely it wasn’t necessary to let the beer settle after pouring each quarter.
Finally happy with the brimming result, the man waved away Candy’s money. Tyler grinned. If the guy thought he was staking out a prize for later tonight, he’d be in for a rude shock.