by Alex P. Berg
The rippling shield flickered again, more noticeably this time. The thumping music shifted to something more beat heavy and aggressive. Sweat beaded on Larry’s brow as his hands blurred, spells flying. Even Dawn sported a look of concentration mixed with a splash of fear. Then she paused, blinking as she gazed toward the DJ booth. “Wait. This is Skrillex. “Bangarang.” I love this song.”
“Not the time, Dawn,” said Larry.
“No,” she said fiercely. “It’s absolutely the time. Everyone, follow me! TANK!!!”
Dawn grabbed Larry by the arm and darted through the barrier as it gave. Larry cursed and fired something into the crowd, a crackling electrical stasis field combo punch he’d apparently been saving for a rainy day. It blasted the vamps back, opening a narrow path before us. Dawn didn’t hesitate to sprint along it. I released the pressure on my bat and took off after her, imagining her ass as first base and the oncoming vampires as rival players. I didn’t bother to check if Larry was coming, but by the continued barrage of compartmentalized mini-stasis blasts, I knew he was right behind me.
The combo punch only gave us a moment. Within seconds, the dazed vampires sprung from the ground, eying us with newfound rage. Before they dove at us, I heard an ear-splitting roar. Vampires scattered, the earth shook, and out of nowhere Tank leapt into the sky, soaring over us in his furry glory. His arms spun in giant arcs and his teeth flashed, spraying flecks of spittle from his powerful jaws—until one of Larry’s mini-stasis spells slapped him in the underside of the jaw. He fell to the ground, rolling and crushing vampires underneath him like an overturned car.
“Oh, shit!” said Larry. “Sorry, Tank!”
I kept sprinting after Dawn, the DJ booth approaching rapidly. “Dude. Did you just kill Tank?”
Larry blasted two more vamps as we ran. “Kodiaks are very stout. He’ll be fine.”
Dawn leapt onto the DJ platform and shoved Cheyev, who was still working the turntables, into the bushes. She lifted the nearest speaker, which was at least two and a half feet tall and must’ve weighed eighty pounds, and pointed it toward the vampire horde.
She screamed at full volume. “Alright, Larry. Let’s do this!”
“Do what?” yelled Larry as the two of us hopped onto the platform alongside her.
“Two words. Weaponized dubstep. I’ve wanted to do this ever since I played Saints Row IV. Now quick, juice me! While Bangarang is still playing!”
“Weaponized dubstep?” said Larry. “I can’t turn dubstep into a weapon! I mean, some of it is pretty god awful, but I can’t kill people with it.”
“Don’t you dare criticize dubstep, Larry,” said Dawn. “Now do something! Blast these fuckers with sound!”
In the distance, Tank stumbled to his feet. Half of the remaining vampires rushed him, but that left the other half in a race to see who could disembowel us first.
“Do something. Right.” Larry glanced at the undead ravers. He darted to the turntable, a digital version hooked up to a MacBook. His fingers tapped frantically at the keys. Dawn grunted as she lifted the speaker overhead, like John Cusack in Say Anything except the speaker was blasting overwhelming bass and drum samples with hopes of murdering undead instead of finding love.
The air blurred as the vampires burst into another run. I squeezed my demon tooth bat back to full size, my heart hammering harder than any dubstep rhythm.
“Now, Larry!” yelled Dawn.
Electricity crackled through the air, and I thought the man had conjured another spell. A gout of sparks erupted from Dawn’s speaker. She swore and dropped the thing as flames erupted from the other speakers. Sparks and smoke filled the air as every electronic device connected to the booth—the turntable, the computer, the amps, the speakers, the fog machines—exploded in a violent fireball.
The vampires hissed and screeched. I jumped off the DJ booth, batting at my sleeve to smother the fire that had caught there. I couldn’t see clearly with the thick smoke choking the air, but it seemed as if the vampires were retreating.
“Fire,” I said. “Of course. Vampires hate fire. That’s a well known trope, isn’t it?”
Dawn waved her hands, trying to clear the air. “It’s true. Why the hell didn’t you think of that earlier, Larry?”
“To be honest, I didn’t even think of it now,” he said. “I was trying to switch the dubstep to Celine Dion. Figured that would drive them off.”
One of the fog machines roared and flared again. The fire crackled as it spread into the surrounding brush, sending up a fresh cloud of smoke. The vampires hissed, backing away from the spreading flames. Some of them screeched and darted into the woods.
They weren’t the only ones. Tank bellowed and dashed into the forest, trees shattering and flying as he ran. His fearful cry echoed over the moans of the vampires and the roar of the flames.
“Right,” I said. “Bears hate fires, too, don’t they?”
“No time to worry about it,” said Larry. “He can take care of himself. Right now we need to get the hell out of here.”
“Right,” I said. “To the Nytemobi—I mean, to the truck.”
Larry smiled. “See? It sounds good, right?”
“Shut up,” I said as I broke into a run.
24
I turned onto a street somewhere in the Westlake Hills, glancing at my phone to get a sense of our direction, while Larry kept his eyes trained on the lavish homes at our sides.
I sighed. “Look. It’s pretty clear we’re not going to find him this way.”
“And what would you suggest we do?” said Larry. “Leave him in the woods? What happens when someone calls the police to report a Kodiak bear roaming west Austin? They’re not going to send animal control, I guarantee you.”
“Why do you assume he’s still in bear form?” I said. “If he can transform into a Kodiak at will, can’t he transform back whenever he pleases?”
“Well, about that… Remember how I hit him in the jaw with that stasis spell?”
“Wait,” said Dawn from the backseat. “You did what?”
“It was while you were sprinting toward the DJ booth with dreams of a dubstep cannon dancing in your head,” said Larry. “Trust me, I wasn’t aiming for him. I’m worried the spell might’ve not worn off yet.”
Dawn sighed. “Now I understand why we’ve been driving around these hills for the last half hour.”
“Can’t we call him?” I said.
“Even in human form, Tank doesn’t carry a phone,” said Larry. “As you saw, his clothes get shredded when he transforms. As a bear, where do you think he’d carry it? In his prison wallet? Bet that would feel great when it rings.”
I grimaced. “Eww.”
“Even if he did have a phone, how would he answer? You saw his paws, right?”
“I get it. Bad suggestion. But you’re the one who asked me to drive around looking for him. It’s up to you to come up with a way to track him.”
Larry took off his hat and ran a hand through his greasy hair. “Believe it or not, this isn’t a problem I’ve had to deal with before. Tank’s usually very good about staying nearby. Just head to the house for now. I’ll think of something. Maybe I’ll call in some favors.”
I turned the Suburban around and headed back downtown. Even at night, Austin traffic could cause headaches, so it wasn’t until twenty after nine that I pulled in front of Larry’s place. We all hopped out of the truck, headed around the side of the house, and through the back door.
I froze the instant I stepped foot inside. While I never would’ve called the home clean and tidy, it hadn’t been a war zone when we’d left, either. Papers, pillow fluff, and glass shards littered the floor. The side table in the entry hall lay on the floor, a deep crack running through it, and glimpses of the living room showed similar signs of furniture abuse. The light above us flickered twice and died.
My jaw dropped. “What the…?”
“Easy,” said Larry, holding out his hands. “It might’ve been Tank
. Tank? Buddy? You here? It’s Larry, Dawn, and Lexie. Don’t hurt us, okay?”
“Hurt us?” I said. “I thought he remained lucid while in bear form? He didn’t come after us at Romanov’s place.”
“Well, yeah,” said Larry. “But that was before the stasis chin tap. I have no idea how it might’ve affected him. He might be pissed off about it, to be honest.”
Dawn’s sword rang as she pulled it from her sheath. “It wasn’t Tank. Look at the floor. Those are bootprints.”
Larry reached into his coat and pulled his flintlock. “Damnit. Be careful.” His eyes widened. “Bill? Bill!”
He darted into the living room, and I followed with Dawn close behind. The place was as trashed as the front. The couch spewed bits of foam, the TV had been knocked to the floor, and Larry’s phone littered his desk in pieces. The side table at the wall was miraculously in one piece, but shy an occupant.
“Damnit!” shouted Larry, swinging his pistol through the air. “They took Bill. They took Bill!”
“And left his jar,” said Dawn. “Who does that? They must’ve reached in there and plucked him out, rotting flesh and everything.”
“I do that,” said Larry.
“Yeah, but he’s your friend,” said Dawn. “And you still wipe your hands with antibacterial gel afterwards.”
“Guys, perhaps more important than Bill being missing?” I pointed at the desk. “The tome’s gone.”
Dawn swore as she slid her sword back into its sheath. “We told you not to leave Bill in charge, didn’t we Larry? Didn’t we?”
“I’m not in the mood to hear it,” said Larry. “We’re talking about my friend here. He’s gone. Kidnapped. Abducted. Who knows what kind of danger he’s in, or what sort of twisted torture he’s being subjected to? Christ, this night has been a disaster. First Tank and now Bill? Shit.”
“Hey. Slow down,” said Dawn. “I didn’t mean it that way. I was just upset. We’ll find him, okay? Tank, too. It’ll be all right.”
“Yeah,” said Larry, returning his flintlock to his coat. “Sure it will. I’ll find some trace of the intruder’s presence. Maybe a hair, or mud off one of the boot prints. If I mix goat’s blood, wolfsbane, and salt peter and draw the proper sigils on the floor, I should be able to conduct a séance. Ask the spirits to show me what happened. Maybe I can even catch a glimpse of who broke in.”
“Or we could read the note the intruders left in Bill’s jar.” I pointed at a folded yellow note card, half hidden at the bottom of the jar under a few soggy leftover fries.
Larry snatched the jar and dumped the contents on his desk. He flipped open the note and scanned his eyes across the message. After a moment, he let out a sigh. “Well, there’s good news and bad news.”
“What is it?” said Dawn.
“The good news is Romanov and his band of sex-crazed vampires didn’t snatch the tome. The bad news is the people who did aren’t going to be any easier to deal with.” He held out the note for Dawn and me to see. “It was Los Desalmados. They want Melondrious Funk and the money they’re owed—ten million dollars worth—otherwise they’ll kill Bill and sell the tome to the highest bidder.”
“Which is Romanov,” I said, snatching the note. “And it gets worse. They want to meet at midnight. We’ve got to do something! We can’t let Romanov have the tome.”
“Correction,” said Larry. “We can’t let Bill’s brain be turned into scrambled eggs. But yeah, I’m with you.”
“Guys, I hate to break it to you,” said Dawn. “But we’re screwed. Melondrious is in police custody. We sure as hell don’t have ten million dollars. Heck, we don’t even have Tank.”
“Which means we need to find him,” said Larry. “Then spring Melondrious from prison, rob a bank, and save Bill, in that order.”
“I’m not robbing a bank,” I said.
“Change of plans then,” said Larry. “No bank robberies. We’ll figure out the money as we go. But we need Melondrious. We won’t be able to cut a deal with the bikers without him.”
“And how do you plan on getting him?” said Dawn.
“Same way we find Tank. We enlist Frank’s aid.” Larry pulled his not-a-phone from his pocket, opened it, and held it to his ear. “Hello? Frank?”
A tinny voice came through the device, but it was quieter than Frank’s and not as gruff. I couldn’t make out the words this time, but I got the gist of things from Larry’s reactions.
“No? Then who the hell are you? … Jerry? Well, where’s Frank? … What do you mean he’s not available? Find him. Tell him this is important. … I don’t care if he told you not to disturb him, this is a matter of life and death. … Well, then you’re going to have to help me instead, won’t you? I need a prisoner released to me. … No, I brought him in yesterday. I’m telling you I need him. … Well, what can you do for me, then? … Do you at least know anyone in the canine unit? … Alright, I’ll be there in fifteen.”
Larry returned the phone to his pocket and sighed. “Well, one for two. Better than nothing, I guess. Come on. We need to move.”
25
I walked through the woods, a flashlight in one hand and the leash to Betsy, a three year old police German shepherd, in the other. Dawn walked beside me, a rucksack stuffed with Tank’s clothes on her back. She’d used the clothes to give Betsy Tank’s scent, but as Larry had already made clear, Tank would need them once we found him, assuming he’d transformed back into human form. I didn’t relish the extra dose of nakedness on a night already filled to the brim with it, but given Tank had saved my life, I figured I could overlook it. He was also easy on the eyes, if I was being honest.
After poking around the edges of Romanov’s estate, we’d eventually found some trampled brush and a few broken tree limbs. It wasn’t conclusive evidence of Tank’s passage, but after giving Betsy a whiff of his scent, she’d started barking and darted into the darkened woods. Now she led the way, though she stopped every now and then to get her bearings.
Larry walked at my side, having refused a flashlight when we picked Betsy up at the police station, claiming that destruction of police property was a crime. Instead he’d opted to create his own magical nightlight—a foot long stick he’d found that now emitted a beam of light that could blind an airline pilot if pointed in the wrong direction.
“Any chance you could ratchet that down?” I said. “Given how you dispatched those nightmare beasts at the temple, I’m not entirely sure that thing won’t cut through me if you get spooked and take a sudden spin.”
“Sorry.” The beam dimmed to that of a battery operated version. “Better?”
I nodded.
“Let me know if it gets out of hand again,” he said. “Sometimes I’m blind to the strength of my own magic.”
“Like how Dawn had to point out your stasis field was weakening during the vampire fight?”
Larry shrugged. “I’d like to say it’s something about the magical forces I draw upon that have a Heisenberg-like quality to them—that I can’t judge both the nature and the potency of the magic at the same time—but that’s a load of horse shit. Fact of the matter is I’m not that focused. Probably something I should work on.”
“You can say that again,” said Dawn. “But please don’t. It’s a hackneyed joke.”
A branch crunched underfoot, but Betsy was too focused to care. I think she’d caught a good whiff of Tank recently. “Speaking of which,” I said. “There’s something about your magic that’s been bothering me for a while.”
“Being?” said Larry.
“How does it work?”
“What do you mean? It’s magic.”
“Well sure, but there’s got to be a rhyme or a reason to it. I mean, take tracking Tank. Why did we have to borrow Betsy from the police? Can’t you whip up a spell to magically sniff him out?”
Larry snorted. “It doesn’t work that way.”
“Which is what I’m getting at,” I said. “Your magic seems exceedingly selective, not to
mention arbitrary. There are things you can do and other things you can’t. You can shoot lightning from your hands, artificially accelerate fermentation, and talk to ghost spirits, but you can’t track a bear through the woods? You can create a magical portal device to talk to people, and you can create stasis fields that condense air or slow time or something, but you can’t figure out how to touch a computer without making it explode?”
Larry shrugged. “Magic is a mystical and unknowable enterprise.”
“But there’s got to be limits,” I said. “I mean, if you can shoot beams of white hot light from your palms, how about bigger ones? Like nuke-sized ones as hot as the core of the sun.”
“Oh, well, that’s easy,” said Larry. “Magic is exhausting. If I use too much, it’ll knock me on my ass for a week.”
“You haven’t seemed particularly tired after any of our fights.”
“I also lose a small piece of my sanity every time I access magic. Eventually it’ll drive me insane if I don’t stop.”
I squinted at the man. “You’re kind of a jerk, but you don’t seem crazy to me.”
“Magic also takes time. Preparation. Careful thought goes into everything I do.”
“Which explains the compartmentalized stasis spells you came up with on the fly.”
“Not to mention,” continued Larry, “that the use of magic attracts evil spirits who are desperate to consume my soul. The more spells I cast, the likelier it is they’ll find me.”
I shook my head. “You’re so full of shit.”
“Trust me, those are all very believable explanations for the limitations of my magic.”
Betsy pulled on the leash, and I walked a little faster to keep up. “Whatever. Can we talk about the tome instead?”
“What about it?”
“You know we can’t give it to Romanov, right?”
Larry frowned. “What makes you think I still want to sell it to him?”