Detonation Boulevard

by Craig Schaefer

  “Damn good and don’t pretend otherwise,” Nessa said. “Don’t forget who taught you.”

  Violetta burst up the staircase, breathless. She cradled her violin like a weapon.

  “Trouble,” she said and pointed. They followed her line of sight, out the ragged hole in the wall and to the rain-swept city beyond.

  There were shadows swarming in the dark. Scampering over salmon shingles, climbing walls like spiders in female form, their boneless fingers clinging to stucco and stone. Closing in fast.

  “The Sisters of the Noose,” Hedy said. “They found us. Damn it.”

  “What do we do?” Violetta asked.

  Hedy looked to Nessa. Nessa gave her a grave, firm nod.

  “We follow the plan,” Hedy said. “We fight until we win, or we fight until we die.”

  Forty-Five

  The pulse of the storm echoed the pounding of Marie’s heart as she thundered down the spiral staircase. No time for caution now, with the sky sounding off like the clash of cymbals in a symphony and their hunters closing in from every direction. The rain boomed down, washing the city streets in an ice-cold torrent. It wormed its way through the charred shingles of the old mansion, flowing down the steps in a finger-wide river, pattering onto the water-stained remnants of rugs and bloating the rotten wood beneath.

  Lamberto stood beside the empty shell of a window, crouched low and squinting into the drowning dark. “I see three coming this way—no, four, maybe—”

  A figure in gray robes and veils fired through the window in a blur, foot-first, shattering his ribs like glass under her heel. He barely hit the floor before a silken noose snared his throat. She kicked him onto his belly, planted a foot on his spine, and heaved on the noose with both hands. Gazelle’s rapier sang from its sheath and she charged to the rescue.

  A second assassin plummeted from the balcony above. She landed on Gazelle’s shoulders and hauled her to the floor as Lamberto choked, his helpless fists pounding the wood.

  Marie was five feet away when his neck snapped. His attacker was uncoiling her noose as Marie hit her in an all-out run, slamming into her shoulder-first and throwing her against the wall. One of Marie’s sickles shot up in an underhand swing, tearing into the assassin’s robes, into her belly, and ripping upward one brutal inch at a time. Steaming blood guttered onto their shoes as the creature shrieked behind her veils.

  Two voices rang out as one, crying out to the storm. Nessa and Hedy had begun their spell, raising the chant, and the pressure swelled behind Marie’s sinuses as their power rose up on the cold, whipping winds.

  A witch in a moth mask went sliding past, dragged by the noose around her throat as if a wild horse was hauling on the other end. Her body buckled over a shattered windowsill, flesh tearing on jagged shards of glass, and vanished into the dark. Up on the balcony, two of their coven-mates were in a pitched battle with a single assassin, who held them both off with a flurry of whistling punches. The Sister spun on her heel and lashed out with a kick that sent one of her targets up and over the railing, plummeting down to break his back on the floor below. He twitched, his feet thrashing, then fell still.

  A silken knot dropped down from the rafters, flipped over Marie’s head and pulled taut around her throat, cutting off her air in mid-breath. She wrenched her sickle free, dropping the dead assassin at her feet, and spun as the noose tried to drag her off her feet. Her blade swung against the tether and sawed into it, fibers fraying one by one while she lifted onto her toes and her vision faded to red splotchy blurs.

  The line snapped. She gasped as she tugged at the sawed-off noose and tossed it aside, catching her breath. Gazelle had gotten to her feet, but her back was against the wall, two of the killers coming at her at once. She drove one off with the edge of her rapier only for another to lay into her with a flurry of bone-jarring punches that forced her to her knees. Marie swooped in to even the odds. Her sickles drew blurring lines in the air as they carved twin arcs, meeting in one of the Sisters’ throats—and passing through to the other side. A veiled head went flying as the stump of her neck, swaddled in a shredded robe, spouted a torrent of gray blood.

  Marie held her weapons firm, arms crossed over her chest, and hunted for her next target.

  There were too many to choose from. The assassins were boiling in from the windows, the broken eaves, leaping off the walls and dancing along the roof timbers like acrobats. The witches were doing their best, fighting to hold every inch of ground, but it was a losing battle. One by one, the coven was dying.

  The double doors of the ruined manse billowed open on a torrent of rainwater. Savannah Cross crept across the threshold, hunched and leaving a trail of ink-slime in her wake. The arms that sprouted from her back, thorn-studded twists of raw muscle and metal, snapped hungrily at the air.

  One of them zeroed in on Marie, pointing like a finger of accusation.

  “That one,” Savannah said, “I want alive. And the one upstairs. We have…unfinished experiments to attend to.”

  Gazelle ripped the blade of her rapier from a Sister’s heart, kicking her rag-doll corpse to the floor. She stepped up and to the left in one smooth motion, getting between Savannah and Marie.

  “No,” Gazelle said. She turned her head, keeping her eyes on the mutated scientist as she spoke to Marie. “Get upstairs. Cover the attic. We need to buy as much time as we can.”

  A pair of Sisters fell in slowly, closing on their flanks, cutting off any avenue of escape. Any but the foot of the winding staircase.

  “We have people upstairs,” Marie said. “I’m not leaving you—”

  “Yes, you are.”

  Gazelle turned to meet her gaze now, eyes fervent as her blood-soaked hand tightened on the grip of her sword.

  “If we both stay here, we both die. If I stay, I can cover you long enough to get upstairs. You and Nessa and my liege can still get out of this alive. I can hold them here. I can hold the line.”

  “You don’t need to die here,” Marie told her.

  “I can hold them. One life, traded for many. This is what we do, Marie. This is what being a knight means. Now go. Please.”

  Marie ran to the foot of the spiral stair. She climbed the first step, the second. Then she froze.

  “Of course,” Savannah said as she closed in on Gazelle, her pincer arms clacking over her shoulders, “I won’t say no to a bit of preemptive vivisection.”

  Gazelle held her ground, knees bent, her rapier braced. Prepared to die.

  A blur whistled through the air. A sickle, whirling in a razor-edged arc. It made a wet crunching sound as it punched through Savannah’s skull, buried hilt-deep.

  One of the Sisters spun, just in time for Marie’s other blade to carve her throat open. Marie grabbed Gazelle’s arm.

  “I’m the Knight,” Marie said. “And I decide what that means. Today it means we’re both getting the fuck out of here, alive and in one piece. Let’s go!”

  More assassins swarmed in through the waterlogged doorway, the shattered windows, their robes sodden with stormwater. Marie and Gazelle were halfway up the stairs, waging a fighting retreat, when the lightning struck.

  The entire world froze in the space of a white-hot flash.

  A clap of thunder devoured Marie’s senses. She felt like she was outside of her body, stunned but still moving, watching herself charge across the balcony and slice down every enemy in her path. The magical energy from the attic became a real, tangible thing: a soap-bubble sphere that cut through the floor, glistening, pregnant with terrible power. Glowing violet runes coursed across its face. She and Gazelle took the attic stairs two at a time, and they were almost at the top when

  the bubble

  burst.

  * * *

  Fire alarms wailed as an old sprinkler system rattled and shook, its tanks dried out long ago. Daniel ran across the tile floor, acrid smoke wreathing around him and—

  —suddenly he was flat on his back, reeling from a world that had gone sid
eways, lurched beneath him, and wrenched his balance away.

  There was a mansion in the department store. Part of a mansion, its timbers burned and waterlogged and draped with wires of copper and gold. A broken bell tower thrust up into the shopping mall’s roof and fused with the ceiling tiles. Daniel pushed himself up, sitting on the floor, staring shell-shocked at the apparition.

  Figures moved in the rubble, groaning, hands helping each other up onto wobbly feet.

  “Fuck me sideways,” Daniel muttered, rubbing a hand along his sweaty jaw.

  “You’re still here?” Marie asked. She had her arm around Nessa’s shoulder as they stumbled out of the wreckage, helping her walk. “How long were we gone?”

  “Thirty seconds? A minute? I don’t know.” Daniel jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Mall’s on fire. We should leave.”

  More shapes were stirring. Seven, maybe eight more people in all, most of them with their faces shrouded behind carved masks of bone.

  “We brought some friends,” Marie told him.

  Daniel took a quick head count.

  “We’re going to have to steal a bus,” he said.

  “Great.” Hedy smoothed her rumpled dress, her leather satchel dangling along one torn and smoke-blackened sleeve. “What’s a bus?”

  Forty-Six

  They stole a bus.

  Their new ride, dusty and taxi-cab yellow, slumbered at the end of a row of its siblings in a school-bus depot. Daniel knelt beside the driver’s seat, a plastic panel dangling loose and hands buried in the exposed guts of the steering assembly, while the others kept watch.

  An hour ago, the Pallid Masque had numbered sixteen witches. Seven remained. Hedy had been silent since they fled the burning mall. Marie and Nessa gave her space and time to grieve.

  “The air is thick in this world.”

  Those were the first words she’d spoken since they fled the fire. Nessa gave her a sidelong glance.

  “Thick?”

  “Can’t you feel it?” Hedy reached up, snatching at the air like she could wad it up into a ball. “No wonder there’s so little magic here. Back home, the Shadow permeates everything. It’s close as breathing. Here it’s…muffled. Distant.”

  “Does that explain why people on our world don’t get infected?” Marie asked.

  “No. But it points toward possibilities.” Hedy frowned. She pointed at the bus. “This thing…it really moves? Like a wagon? And there’s no magic involved?”

  “The engine works by internal combustion,” Nessa explained.

  Hedy’s eyes went wide, as if Nessa had just confirmed an old theory. Before she could speak, Daniel cut her off.

  “Once upon a time,” he said, “there were big, scary monsters called dinosaurs. The dinosaurs all died, and over the centuries their bodies transformed into a very special magic potion deep beneath the ground, called oil. Now, our scientists—which you would probably call court wizards where you come from—take that oil and refine it—”

  “You are an adorable child, and if I need you to speak again, I promise I will let you know.” Hedy turned back to Nessa. “Small explosions in a controlled chamber, driving pistons which in turn rotate the wheels?”

  “Bingo,” Nessa said.

  “Knew it was possible. So much to learn in this world, so much to understand. I need information. I need books.”

  Nessa held up her phone. “Oh, we can catch you up to speed even faster than that. Let me tell you all about the Internet…”

  Wires sparked in Daniel’s hands, and the bus finally revved to life. The engine growled, throaty, ready to roll.

  “Here we go,” he called out. “All aboard. Next stop: fabulous Las Vegas.”

  Marie stood beside him as everyone climbed aboard. Most of the witches were wide-eyed and silent as they took uncertain steps along the rumbling rubber mat that lined the center aisle.

  “Pyramid Lake,” Marie said.

  “What?” Daniel said “No. Vegas. The Mourner said to deliver you and Nessa alive and intact, assuming I want to stay alive and intact. And I do. I really do.”

  “She can wait. Ezra is holding Carolyn at Pyramid Lake, and no matter what he claimed, she’s not there of her own free will. And he knows we need her; we can’t take the chance that he’ll move her deeper into hiding. We have to go on the attack.”

  “On the attack. Against the guy who owns one of the biggest arms manufacturers in the world.”

  Marie crossed her arms and stared at him.

  “Fine,” Daniel said. He hauled on the door lever, and it folded shut like an accordion. “We’ll argue about it on the road.”

  The bus lurched forward, almost throwing Marie off her feet. Then it wheeled around like a beached whale trying to thrash its way back to the water. It fishtailed until it finally straightened out, long yellow nose wobbling toward the open depot gate.

  “Have you ever driven a bus before?” Marie asked.

  “Once,” Daniel said.

  “Did you crash it?”

  He glowered at the windshield.

  “Yes.” He paused. “But in my defense, I was breaking out of prison at the time.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “People were shooting at me. There were helicopters. Under the circumstances, I was a great driver.”

  “Next time we pull over,” Marie said, “I’m taking the wheel.”

  * * *

  For one dizzying, blinding moment, Savannah thought she had been reborn into hell. Thick black smoke choked her exposed lungs as she wrenched herself through a crack in the world, one agonizing inch at a time, and flopped onto a filthy tile floor. Flames roared in her ears, and her body, what remained of it, was already boiling—boiling off into the ethereal web between worlds, fueling her passage.

  She’d felt the bubble in space-time erupt above her head, and she’d felt it collapse with a pop that echoed across a hundred Earths. The energy sucked her in, an implosion in the fabric of the universe, and she clung to its tail like a spider on a web strand doused in gasoline.

  Her body rebuilt itself, piece by piece. Broken bones snapped together, knit by tendrils of bubbling ink. Her fractured skull pressed outward and forced the blade of Marie’s sickle out of her brain with a slow, burbling splorch. It clattered to the floor under Savannah’s slumped head. She felt her ink-blood surge, flooding the wound, forming neural nets and connections as it took the place of her failing organs.

  Can’t do that again, she thought, when the pain finally dulled to a bonfire roar and allowed her to think clearly again. Lost…nine percent of my biomass, at least. I think my spleen is missing. Definitely ruptured a kidney. One more transition like that will kill me for certain.

  Her bones rattled like dice as she rose to her feet. Her robe’s ragged hem swayed drunkenly and her hips wobbled, her spine clicking into place in a web of muscles turned to black gelatin. She paused long enough to crouch and scoop up the fallen sickle. She’d be returning that to its proper owner in good time.

  Fire licked along the ceiling tiles of the shopping mall, wreathing the air with specters of smoke. Savannah strolled through the conflagration like a curious tourist. She couldn’t leave until she found what she was looking for—and there he was.

  Scottie Pierce was still alive, against all odds, flat on his back with one hand scorched like charcoal and his useless fingers—ivory bone showing through the sloughed-off flesh—clutching at the air like a plea to heaven. His designer clothes were burned away in spots, fused to his body in others, fibers knitted into raw burn tissue. He was trying to speak with half an upper lip and a throat reduced to a tube of scarlet gristle.

  Savannah crouched at his side, leaning in. “What’s that?”

  It took him a while to form the words and force them out, wheezing, but he managed.

  “Kill me.”

  “Oh. Oh, Scottie. No. I don’t believe in wasting valuable resources. I realize that was never a problem for you, seeing as you were born into an obscene leve
l of wealth, but I assure you: spend enough time in the halls of academia, scraping and begging for grants, and you learn to appreciate everything you have.”

  She ran her gloved hand through what was left of his hair. A tuft peeled away on a strip of lobster-red skin and dangled from his scalp by a thread of flesh.

  “I can fix you,” she told him. “I can fix you the way Adam fixed me. The ink, Scottie. The ink is life. You’ll see.”

  He looked to her hands, hunting for a vial, a syringe. Nothing.

  “We’re going to have to do this the…crude way,” Savannah said. “I apologize for that, but I promise, you’ll thank me later.”

  His head twitched, a look of confusion on his flame-seared face. She leaned over him, almost intimate, as if she was about to give him a kiss.

  Then she slid two fingers down her throat.

  * * *

  Marie drove the next leg. She kept the school bus steady and smooth, across the border from Iowa into Nebraska and through the heart of Omaha.

  The coven had migrated toward the back of the bus, sitting in a tight clump. Half of them were glued to the windows, the other half hanging on Nessa’s every word or the latest discoveries Hedy made on the Internet. For people getting a crash course in modern civilization, they were coping surprisingly well.

  Daniel grabbed a seat up front. He nodded back over his shoulder.

  “Your friends are nice,” he said.

  “Was that sarcasm? I can’t tell.”

  “That was sarcasm. Also, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say your girlfriend is coked out of her gourd.”

  Marie took a quick glance in the security mirror. Nessa was standing in the aisle, holding court, and bouncing on the balls of her feet while she drew grand gestures in the air.

  “That’s just her tonic,” Marie said. “Don’t worry, it wears off pretty quick.”

  “I reserve the right to be as worried as I want. So what’s your strategy here?”

  “Drive to Pyramid Lake,” she said. “Find Carolyn Saunders. Hope she has some answers for us.”