Detonation Boulevard

by Craig Schaefer

  Tears rimmed Nessa’s squeezed-shut eyes, but she still let out an anxious laugh. “Tell it right,” she said, making her way to the edge of the flood.

  “Okay, okay.” Marie had to smile. “The Great and Terrible Owl faced every challenge in her path, laid her enemies to waste, and conquered the world. And she and her knight lived happily ever after.”

  On the final word Marie grabbed Nessa’s hand and pulled her from the mire. Nessa leaped onto dry land and fell into her arms. Their sodden clothes squished as they clung to one another, shivering.

  “Told you that you could do it,” Marie said.

  “I love you,” Nessa murmured, her voice breaking. Marie rubbed Nessa’s shoulders, trying to warm her up.

  “Love you more.”

  “Marie…let’s do it. That’s the way. The way to beat this curse, if we can’t find Wisdom’s Grave. That’s how we keep ourselves safe.”

  “Do what?” she asked.

  Nessa’s breath was a trembling gust against the curve of her neck.

  “Let’s do it,” Nessa whispered. “Let’s conquer the entire world. And when I’m in charge, they’ll never be able to hurt us again.”

  Act II

  Everybody Wants to Rule the World

  Interlude

  “I can tell Marie Reinhart was a fan of your work,” the interrogator said. He studied Carolyn from the opposite side of the steel table, both of them framed in the circle of hot light from the dangling overhead bulb. He’d been listening to her recount her story. Mostly in silence, interjecting now and then to ask about a stray detail and make notes on the legal pad in his lap.

  “Oh?” Carolyn asked. “How’s that?”

  “That story she told the Roth woman was just as misguidedly hopeful and woefully optimistic as the pabulum you sell to the deluded masses.”

  “Only a fool devalues the power of hope,” she told him. “When all else is lost, it’s the only thing worth clinging to.”

  The floor thrummed against the soles of her sneakers as the ship’s engines fired. Then came a groan, long and breathless and bleak, like the last sound a man might have made as he broke on an inquisitor’s rack. The sound drifted through the sealed door at Carolyn’s back and echoed off the vomit-green walls of the cell.

  “Tell me,” the interrogator said. “Does the world look hopeful from where you’re sitting?”

  “You don’t need hope when you have certainty. And I already know how this story ends.”

  “Ah, you see? We’re of one mind, then. That’s exactly what the kings are bringing to the entire universe. Certainty. Where they walk, all hope dies. Love shrivels, like dead roses on the vine, stripped of the illusion of beauty. All of these delusions, all these insane romantic ideals that humanity created so that we could pretend we were more than animals, purged at long last and replaced with perfect, cold certainty.”

  “You consider yourself a rationalist,” Carolyn said.

  “I consider myself a realist. I’ve walked alongside the King of Rust. When I saw his power, his truth, of course I bent my knee. You would do the same. Anyone with any sense would. The kings cannot be stopped, cannot be slain, cannot be deterred; their victory is a mathematical certainty.”

  Carolyn tilted her head. She eyed him like he was a door-to-door salesman hawking vacuum cleaners.

  “Would I really, though? Maybe we should find out. Is he here? Right now?”

  The interrogator waved his pencil like a baton, taking the room in. “Of course. This is his flagship. You’re a very high-value prisoner, Ms. Saunders. You should be honored. The King of Rust is always listening. Never sleeping. You’ll earn an audience, in due time. I’m sure you’ll be rewarded handsomely, once you tell us everything we need to know. You might even earn your own planet if you play your cards right.”

  She offered him a wry smirk and a small shake of her head. She clicked her tongue.

  “Please. Have you noticed that I haven’t asked, not once, if you’ll let me go when this is all over?”

  The interrogator nodded. “I did. What of it?”

  “That’s because I’m not stupid,” Carolyn said. “I was born on a Thursday, not last Thursday. And like I said, I know how this story ends. So please, don’t insult my intelligence by offering me a reward you’re never going to deliver.”

  He studied her, rapping the eraser of his pencil against his legal pad.

  “I find the carrot-and-stick method usually works best to motivate cooperation,” he said, “but if you’d prefer nothing but the stick—”

  “I’d prefer honesty. Isn’t that what you’re demanding of me? Absolute, complete honesty?”

  “Correct,” he said.

  “Let’s be honest, then. I’m never going home. This is the last story I will ever tell. And I die at the end.”

  The room fell silent, save for the thrum of the distant engines and the metronome tapping of the pencil eraser.

  “Continue,” he said.

  Carolyn rested her cuffed wrists on the table. She took a deep breath.

  “As I’ve said, this was far from the first time that Vanessa Roth indulged dreams of conquering the world. I think we all have fantasies, daydreams we retreat into in times of stress. Winning the lottery, living the lifestyle of the rich and famous—well, for Nessa, this was hers. Even as a little girl, she dreamed of reigning as Queen Nessa the Wicked, and she had a habit of decapitating dolls that displeased her.”

  “Slightly deranged behavior,” the interrogator said. “Her parents didn’t take that as a warning sign?”

  “You’ve never met any little girls, have you? At any rate, down in the bowels of the city, Nessa’s ambitions had to wait a bit. They had the more immediate problem of simple survival to deal with. A problem that was about to become considerably more complicated…”

  Twenty-Six

  “Little problem,” Daniel shouted from the opposite end of the flooded tunnel. “Al-Farsi’s digging his heels in. Says he won’t get in the water and I’m gonna have to kill him first.”

  “And?” Nessa called back.

  “And I was wondering if either of you had an opinion on the subject.”

  Nessa and Marie were still hugging each other tight, trying to massage the warmth back into their aching muscles. Nessa pulled back just far enough to look into Marie’s eyes.

  Marie shook her head.

  “Not really,” Nessa said.

  The tunnel fell silent. They waited, and watched, as a single glowing phone began its journey across the flood, held high in the tiny pocket of air. It was Daniel, who had found his own method of coping with the cold and the snakes: a steady, rhythmic, almost hypnotic stream of vulgarity.

  “—and fuck my life,” he hissed as he emerged from the floodwaters. He flapped his arms and sent icy droplets spattering across the ragged stone. Then he paused, looking at Nessa and Marie like he’d just realized he wasn’t alone. “You both okay? Nobody got bit?”

  “We’re peachy,” Nessa said.

  “What did you do with al-Farsi?” Marie asked.

  “Eh, I told him to get lost. Honestly, the Bast Club’s a Chicago tradition, and I didn’t want to be the guy who got the place shut down because he snuffed the owner. I figure right about now he’s pounding on the secret door, begging Nyx to let him out.”

  “What do you think she’ll do?”

  “Fifty-fifty odds.” He waggled his hand from side to side. “A lot of useful contraband flows through that club, and a lot of good intel. Losing it would be a waste, and Nyx knows that. On the other hand, she might skin him alive just for kicks. You never know with her.”

  They dried out, slowly, as they walked. The tunnel stretched on, bending like a piece of limp spaghetti with no apparent rhyme or reason. Then it ended, stopping dead at a utility door that stood firm on rusted hinges.

  “No worries,” Daniel said. He fished a damp oilskin case from his pocket. A long row of lockpicks nestled inside with a dizzying array of heads.
Diamonds, spades, needles bent at every angle. He crouched down, squinted at the lock, and chose his weapons.

  “So this…rule about concealing magic from the world,” Nessa said, standing at his shoulder.

  He slid a tension rake into the lock and tilted his head like he could hear the tumblers move. “Mm-hmm? Yeah. Don’t break it.”

  “I understand why the powers that be might be alarmed, but why would other magicians retaliate?”

  “Magic is the greatest con game in human history, and we’ve got a ringside seat for the final days of the grift. Get a light on this for me?”

  She shone her phone’s light onto the lock while he worked.

  “Ninety-nine percent of magicians end up working the criminal side of the street,” he told her. “Maybe it’s the rush of power, maybe it’s the knowledge that you can get away with things that nobody else can. Hell, some people say it’s the magic itself. That it changes a person. I don’t know. The point is, it makes us money. Blow the big secret and it’s game over for everybody. You don’t mess with a man’s cash flow.”

  “The final days, though?” Marie asked. “Why do you say that?”

  The lock clicked and the door swung wide, screeching on its hinges like fingernails on a chalkboard. Daniel put his picks away. Another tunnel lay beyond the first, running perpendicular, bigger than the last. Big enough for a train, tall and rounded and braced with old wooden support beams every ten feet. Weathered red bricks lined the tunnel walls, some of them engraved with mason marks: 1882, 1885… Daniel led the way along a curving, rusted-out stretch of rail.

  “Here we go,” he said. “These must be the old cable-car tunnels. They ran until the early nineteen hundreds. Got replaced by electric streetcars, and eventually the elevated trains took the lead and this whole network got sealed off. Anyway, I say we’re in the final days because there’s no other way it can go down. Ancient wizards and secret occult societies couldn’t have envisioned an age when everyone—and I mean pretty much literally everyone—carries a device in their pocket with a video camera and Internet access. It’s only a matter of time before somebody does something stupid.”

  “Such as?” Nessa asked.

  “Something that can’t be written off as special effects or a hoax or a mass delusion, which is usually how these things are handled when magicians get sloppy. Somebody’s going to conjure a demon on the Vegas strip, or fight a magical duel on Broadway in front of a few hundred witnesses and a live TV camera. At which point we’re all good and screwed, because that’s when frightened people will react the only way frightened people know how. If you thought the witch burnings in the old days were bad, just wait until they’ve got real witches to hunt.”

  “If they’re doing the hunting,” Nessa said, “that means they aren’t nearly frightened enough.”

  The pale glow of the screen lit Daniel’s cheek as he gave her a sidelong look.

  “Don’t get yourself killed,” he said. “And don’t get me killed, either. I didn’t ask for this job in the first place.”

  “About that,” Marie said. “Who is this person we’re supposed to meet, exactly?”

  “She’s called the Mourner. Don’t know her real name, or if she has one; you don’t ask. She lives out in the desert, and some people say she’s been out there longer than the sand. The Paiute Indians told stories about her, back in the day.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “The kind that scare kids into behaving. You don’t need to worry, I don’t think. She’s got a present for you. A present I got stabbed trying to steal from a bunch of cannibals for her. You’re welcome.”

  Marie looked to Nessa. “Your book, the mirror, the card…someone’s been sending us help from a distance. Do you think it’s her?”

  “Not sure. Seems a break from the pattern. Going to such elaborate trouble to stay hidden, only to demand an audience in person?” Nessa didn’t bother hiding her suspicion. She wore it like makeup, bringing out the fire in her eyes. “Nothing in this life is free. What does she want from us?”

  Daniel shrugged. “Above my pay grade, not that I’m getting paid for this. My advice is, whatever she asks you to do, do it. It’ll hurt less than the alternative.”

  “We’re not particularly fond of obedience,” Nessa told him.

  “Yeah, I gathered that. Maybe why you got cursed in the first place, ever think of that?”

  “Wait,” Marie said. “You know about us? You know what we are?”

  “The Witch and her Knight, right? You’re on Carolyn’s list. She could probably tell you a lot more than I could, but I’m on the list too. I don’t suppose you talked to her, before her house got raided?”

  “She was already gone,” Nessa said. “Tell us. Tell us everything you know. Do you know where Wisdom’s Grave is?”

  “I’m not exactly an expert in interdimensional—wait. Hold up a sec.”

  Daniel paused. He pressed his palm to the brick wall. While rats chittered, beady eyes gleaming red from every crumbling shadow, another sound rose up to swallow their scampering footsteps. It was a low, basso thrumming that shook stone dust from the tunnel roof.

  “Bingo,” he said. The women followed as he jogged along the tunnel bend. “Where’d al-Farsi say this passage let out? Division Station? Sounds about right. The Chicago underground is a spaghetti bowl of tunnels: pedway, water tunnels, the old cable-car network, CTA. A lot of ’em run tight together. That rumbling sound is an L-train passing by, and it’s got to be close.”

  “Doesn’t ‘L’ mean ‘elevated’?” Marie asked.

  “Mostly elevated. The system goes underground here and there. Which means we’re a few hundred feet and one flight of stairs from seeing the sunlight again.”

  He whooped at the sight of another door, steel painted police blue and set into an arch of brick. Marie spotted a tremor in his hands as he got his picks out again.

  “You don’t like it underground, do you?”

  “Don’t like being locked down.” He got down on one knee and worked fast, digging into the lock’s innards like he was mining for gold. “Let me get through this and we’ll go topside. You two like Italian? I know a good Italian place on the south side. We can split a bottle of wine and I’ll tell you everything I know about your, uh, situation. I’ll warn you, it’s not much. Might not be anything you don’t already know. For that, we’re going to need Carolyn.”

  He pushed open the door. It looked out onto another tunnel, this one walled in bone-white concrete with plastic bars of light to guide the way. They were on the far side of the train tracks, with the station platform a short sprint away: maybe twenty feet to the left, with a staircase in plain view and sunlight streaming down.

  Daniel jumped back and yanked the door shut. The flicker of elation on his face shattered.

  “What is it?” Marie asked.

  “Take a peek,” he said, stepping aside. “Carefully.”

  Through a two-inch gap of doorway, she saw what he saw. Nyx. She was standing, idle, just left of the stairway and watching the platform like a hunting hawk. She wasn’t alone. Men who weren’t waiting for a train milled up and down the length of the station; their hard eyes and the bulges under their windbreakers stood out among the commuter crowd.

  “Al-Farsi gave us up,” Daniel said. “Told her right where we’d be.”

  Marie pointed. “Station’s a public place, with cameras and people. They can’t use magic here, right? I assume that includes Nyx doing…whatever it is that she does.”

  “She and her boys can use guns just fine, though. Nyx doesn’t have a problem with shootouts in public—or collateral damage, for that matter. We can’t take them all on by ourselves. Going to need a little help here.”

  He held his arm through the open door, lifting his phone high.

  “Look at that. One bar. Just enough reception to get a call out.”

  “Call in a bomb threat,” Nessa said. “They’ll have to clear the station.”

&nb
sp; Daniel thought about it, then shook his head. “Good idea, but it doesn’t get us out. And Nyx knows we’re coming. She’ll just wait on the fringe of the crowd and take her shot the second we poke our heads out. We need an overwhelming force on our side. Something Nyx won’t want to tangle with, at least not here.”

  He froze. A flicker of emotions washed over his face—realization, dismay, resignation. And the faintest smile of admiration, like a prisoner who finally understood a sly joke on his way to the gallows.

  “Oh, you’re good. ‘It won’t be that simple,’ she told me. ‘Should things turn dire, seek what allies you must.’”

  Marie shook her head. “Who told you? The Mourner?”

  “See, she chose me special for this job. I just didn’t realize why until now. The fix was in from the start.” He stared at his phone. “This may take a minute. Don’t worry, I know exactly who I’m supposed to call.”

  * * *

  “Pennsylvania Avenue office on the line,” said a nasal voice. “We intercepted a call to SAC Walburgh’s office. Normally we’d route it to voicemail, but the caller is very insistent. Says it’s a matter of life or death.”

  “Put it through.”

  The line buzzed twice, then clicked. A wash of static hissed in the background, and a train’s air brakes let out a shrill squeal. Then came a man’s voice.

  “Agent Black. This is Daniel Faust. I think you’ve been looking for me.”

  Twenty-Seven

  They waited, hiding behind the tunnel door, leaving it open just a crack so they could keep an eye on Nyx and her men. Daniel slumped against the faded brick wall.

  “Funny story,” he said. “See, not long ago, somebody hit a drug dealer’s stash house out in Dallas. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to make it look like I did it. Which, considering I’ve been legally dead and living underground for a while, was a big problem for me. Only thing I couldn’t figure out is why.”