by Butcher, Jim
I got to the front of the building before I heard something click in the fenced area of the garden center. I swallowed and pointed the Colt at it, noting that I wasn’t sure how many rounds the gun had left.
As I came closer, through the mist, I saw the chain fence around the ruined area where I’d been trapped with the chlorofiend. It had been torn down in a swath ten feet wide, and from what I could see of the inside, the tree-thing wasn’t there anymore. Great. I took a few steps closer to the break in the fence to stare at the ruined chain link. I’d expected bent and stretched wire, still hot enough to burn where it had torn. Instead, I found edges cut off as neatly as with a set of clippers and coated with frost.
I checked around on the ground and found sections of wire, none of them longer than two or three inches. Steam curled up from them, and the cold in the air near the fence made me shiver. The fence had been frozen, chilled until the steel had become brittle and then shattered.
“Winter,” I muttered. “I guess that wasn’t much of a stretch.”
I swept my eyes around through the mist, left my ears open, and paced as quietly as I could toward the dim, flickering lights that lay somewhere ahead in the parking lot. I’d parked the Beetle in an aisle almost even with the front doors, but I didn’t have a reference point through the mist. I just headed out, picked the first row of cars, and started prowling silently along them, looking for the Beetle.
My car wasn’t in the first row, but a thin stream of some kind of yellowish fluid was. I traced it to the next row, and found the Beetle sitting there in its motley colors. Another leak. They weren’t exactly unheard of in a wizard’s car, but this would be a hell of a time for the Beetle to get hospitalized.
I got in and set the gun down long enough to shove my keys in the ignition. My trusty steed wheezed and groaned a few times, but the engine turned over with an apologetic cough and the car rattled to life. I put it in gear, pulled through the empty space in front of me, and headed for the back of the building to get Murphy.
I had just passed the garden center with its ruined fence when my windows abruptly frosted over. It happened in the space of a breath, ice crystals forming and growing like plants on a stop-motion film until my view was completely cut off. The temperature dropped maybe fifty degrees, and the car sputtered. If I hadn’t given it a bunch of gas, it would have stalled. The Beetle lurched forward, and I rolled down the window, sticking my head out the side in an effort to see what was going on.
The chlorofiend loomed up out of the mist and brought one huge, knobby fist down on the Beetle like an organic wrecking ball. The force of it crumpled the hood like tin foil and drove the shocks down so that the frame smushed up against the tires. The impact threw me forward against the steering wheel and drove the breath out of me with a shock of pain.
The impact would have rolled any car with an engine under the hood. Most of the mass of the car would have been driven down, the lighter rear end would have flipped up, and me without my seat belt would have been bounced around like a piece of popcorn.
The old Volkswagens, though, have their engine in the back. Most of the weight of the car got bounced up a little in the air, then came back down to the ground with a jolt.
I slammed my foot on the gas harder, and the Beetle’s engine sputtered gamely in response. As big and strong as the chlorofiend might be, it wasn’t solid and it wasn’t as heavy as a living mass of the same size. The Beetle bounced up from the blow that had crumpled the empty storage compartment under the hood and slammed into the chlorofiend without losing much of its momentum.
The beast let out a shriek of what might have been surprise, and was definitely pain. My car hammered into it with a flickering of scarlet static and a cloud of smoke from the substance of the faerie creature, swept under its legs, and drove the cholorofiend atop its hood.
I kept my foot on the gas, held the wheel as steadily as I could with one hand, and stuck my head out the window so I could see. The chlorofiend screamed again, the magic around it gathering in a cloud that made the hairs on my neck stand up, but the Beetle rattled through the attempt to hex it down, carrying the chlorofiend the length of the Wal-Mart garden center and to the back of the building.
“Think of it as payback for all those telephone poles,” I muttered to the Beetle, and slammed on the brakes.
The chlorofiend rolled off of my car, skidded on the asphalt, and slammed into the side of a metal trash bin with a yowl of pain and an exploding cloud of dirt clods. Only one of my headlights appeared to have survived the attack, and even it flickered woozily through the mist and the cloud of dust and dirt rising from the chlorofiend.
I slammed the car into reverse, backed up a few more feet, then put it back into neutral. I raced the engine, then popped the clutch and sent the Beetle hurtling at the monster. I braced myself for the impact this time, and pulled my head in before I hit. The impact felt violent, shockingly loud, and viscerally satisfying. The chlorofiend let out a broken-sounding creak, but until I backed the car up and whipped the wheel around so that I could see out the side window, I couldn’t tell what had happened.
I’d torn the thing in half at about the middle, pinching it between the battered, frost-coated Beetle and the metal trash bin. Thank the stars it hadn’t been a Fiberglas job. The legs lay against the trash bin, now only a pile of twisted saplings and earth, while the arms flailed toward me, a dozen long paces away, uselessly pounding the asphalt.
I spat out my window, put the car into gear again, and went to get Murphy.
I jumped out of the car and had to wrench the passenger door hard to get it to open. Murphy pushed herself up, using the wall for support, and stared at the frost-covered Beetle with wide eyes. “What the hell happened?”
“The plant monster.”
“A plant monster and Frosty the Snowman?”
I got on her wounded side to support her. “I took care of it. Let’s go.”
Murphy let out another small sound of pain, but she didn’t let it stop her from hobbling along toward the car. I was just about to help her in when she shouted, “Harry!” and threw her weight against me.
The chlorofiend, the upper half, had somehow clawed its way out of the mist, and one long, viny limb was reaching for me. I fell back, away from it, and tried to shield Murphy with my body.
It got me. I felt fingers the size of young tree trunks wrap around my throat and jerk me away from Murphy like I was a puppy. More branch-fingers got one of my thighs, and I felt myself suspended in the air and pulled slowly apart.
“Meddler,” hissed an alien voice from somewhere near the chlorofiend’s glowing green eyes. “You should never have involved yourself in these affairs. You have no concept of what is at stake. Die for your arrogance.”
I tried for a witty riposte, but my vision blacked out and my head felt like it was trapped in a slowly tightening vise. I tried gathering forces, attempting to push them through my shield bracelet, but the moment I did there was a rustle of wood and leaves, and the bracelet snapped off of my wrist, broken. I tried to gather another spell—and realized as I did that my concentration had wavered too much and that my defense against the insidious enchantment of the mist had begun to fail. My thoughts broke apart into irregular pieces, and I struggled to reach for them and put them together again as the pressure on my body increased, became a red-hot agony.
I only dimly heard the chain saw start up again, and Murphy’s scream of challenge. The charm she wore wasn’t relying on my concentration. It wouldn’t last long, but it would keep the mist away from her for a few more minutes. The chlorofiend let out a shriek, and I heard the saw biting into wood, felt wood chips hitting my face.
I tumbled free, sapling branches tangled all around my head and shoulders, leaves and dirt scratching my face. My leg was still in the chlorofiend’s grip, but I could breathe again.
The mist pressed close to me, giving me a sense of detachment and disinterest. It was hard to make any sense of what happened
next. Murphy hopped closer, her weight on the one leg, and swept the chain saw through the chlorofiend’s other arm. I fell to the ground, more inert tree parts around me.
The chlorofiend waved its arms at Murphy, but they didn’t have the crippling force I’d seen it use before. They merely jostled her and knocked her down. Murphy snarled, crawling on her hands and knees, dragging the chain saw with her. She lifted it again and drove it at the creature’s head, engine racing, blade singing through the air. The chlorofiend screamed in protest and frustration, lifting the stumps (hah hah, get it, stumps?) of its arms in feeble defense. Murphy tore through them with the chain saw, snicker-snack, and then drove the blade directly between the chlorofiend’s glowing green eyes.
The monster shrieked again, writhing, but its arms never managed to do more than shove Murphy around a bit. Then it let out a final groan, and the eyes winked out. Murphy suddenly sat atop a mound of dirt and leaves and gnarled branches.
I lay there, staring stupidly at her, then heard a gunshot, the sharp, cracking report of a rifle. Murphy threw herself down and rolled toward me. A second shot rang out, and a puff of leaves a foot to Murphy’s right leapt into the air.
Another sound cut through the night—police sirens, getting closer. Murphy dragged me and herself over the ground toward the car. I heard a harsh curse somewhere in the mist, and then a pair of footsteps retreating. A moment later, I thought the mist was starting to thin out.
“Harry,” Murphy said, shaking me. I blinked at her, and the relief showed in her worried expression. “Harry, can you hear me?”
I nodded. My mouth felt dry and my body ached. I fought to clear my head.
“Get us in the car,” she said, enunciating the words. “Get us in the car and get us out of here.”
The car. Right. I hauled Murphy into the Beetle, got in myself, and stared at the frosted windshield. The heat of the summer night was already melting the frost away, and I could see through it in spots.
“Harry,” Murphy said, exasperated, her voice thin and shaky. “Drive!”
Oh, right. Drive. Get out. I put the Beetle in gear, more or less, and we lurched out of the parking lot and out of the mist.
Chapter Twenty-two
“You’rekidding ,” Billy said, his voice touched with disbelief. “A chain saw? Where did you get the gasoline?”
Murphy looked up from her wounded leg and the willowy Georgia, who had cut her jeans away and was cleaning out the long gashes she’d acquired from ankle to mid calf. “Gas generator, backup power supply for all the food freezers. They had a ten-gallon plastic jug of it.”
Billy’s apartment was not a large one, and with a dozen people in it, even with the air-conditioning running full blast, it was too hot and too crowded. The Alphas, Billy’s werewolf accomplices, were out in force. We’d been challenged by a tall, thin young man in the parking lot and shadowed to the door by a pair of wolves who kept just far enough away to make it difficult to see them in the shadows.
When I’d first seen them, the Alphas had been a collection of misfits with bad hair, acne, and wanna-be tough guy leather outfits. In the year and a half since, they’d changed. None of them had that pale look anymore, none of them looked wheezy, and like Billy, the kids who’d been carrying baby fat had swapped it for lean, fit muscle. They hadn’t become a gang of Hollywood soap opera stars or anything, but they looked more relaxed, more confident, more happy—and I saw some scars, some of them quite vicious, showing on bare limbs. Most of the kids wore sweats, or those pullover knit dresses, garments that could be gotten out of in a hurry.
Pizza boxes were stacked three deep on the table, and a cooler of soft drinks sat on the floor nearby. I piled a plate with half-warm pizza, picked up a Coke, and found a comparatively empty stretch of wall to lean against.
Billy shook his head and said, “Look, Harry, some of this doesn’t make sense. I mean, if they could really run around doing this mind fog thing, shouldn’t we have heard about it by now?”
I snorted and said around a mouthful of pizza, “It’s pretty rare, even in my circles. No one who got hit with it will remember it. Check the paper tomorrow. Ten to one, emergency services showed up after we left, put out the fires, pulled a bunch of confused people out of the building, and the official explanation is a leaky gas line.”
Billy snorted. “That doesn’t make any sense. There’s not going to be evidence of an exploding line, no leak is going to show up at the gas company, no continuing fire of leaking gas—”
I kept eating. “Get real, Billy,” I said. “You think people are going to be taken seriously by City Hall if they tell them, ‘We really don’t know what messed up all these people, we don’t know what caused all the damage, we don’t know why no one heard or saw anything, and we don’t know what the reports of gunshots at the scene were about?’ Hell, no. People would be accused of incompetence, publicly embarrassed, fired. No one wants that. So, gas leak.”
“But it’s stupid!”
“It’s life. The last thing the twenty-first century wants to admit is that it might not know everything.” I popped open the Coke and guzzled some. “How’s the leg, Murph?”
“It hurts,” Murphy reported, considerately leaving out the implied “you idiot.”
Georgia stood up from attending Murphy’s leg and shook her head. She was nearly a foot taller than Billy, and had bound her blond hair back into a tight braid. It emphasized the gauntness of her features. “The cuts and bruises are nothing major, but your knee could be seriously damaged. You should have it checked out by a real doctor, Lieutenant Murphy.”
“Karrin,” Murphy said. “Anyone who mops up my blood can call me Karrin.” I tossed Murphy a Coke. She caught it and said, “Except you, Dresden. Any diet?”
I put several slices of pizza on a paper plate and passed them over. “Live a little.”
“All right, Karrin,” Georgia said, folding her arms. “If you don’t want a twenty-five-thousand-dollar surgery along with seven or eight months of rehab, we need to get you to the hospital.”
Murphy frowned, then nodded and said, “Let me eat something first. I’m starving.”
“I’ll get the car,” Georgia said. She turned to Billy. “Make sure she doesn’t put any weight on her leg when you bring her down. Keep it straight if you can.”
“Got it,” Billy said. “Phil, Greg. Get that blanket. We’ll make a litter out of it.”
“I’m not an infant,” Murphy said.
I put my hand on her shoulder. “Easy,” I said in a quiet voice. “They can handle themselves.”
“So can I.”
“You’re hurt, Murph,” I said. “If you were one of your people, you’d be telling you to shut up and stop being part of the problem.”
Murphy shot me a glower, but its edge was blunted by the big mouthful of pizza she took. “Yeah. I know. I just hate being sidelined.”
I grunted.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Finish this Coke. I haven’t planned much past that.”
She sighed. “All right, Harry. Look, I’ll be home in a few hours. I’ll keep digging, see if I can turn up anything about Lloyd Slate. If you need information on anything else, get in touch.”
“You should rest,” I told her.
She grimaced at her leg. Her knee was swollen to a couple of times its normal size. “Looks like I’m going to have plenty of time for that.”
I grunted again and looked away.
“Hey, Harry,” Murphy said. When I didn’t look at her, she continued, “What happened to me wasn’t your fault. I knew the risks and I took them.”
“You shouldn’t have had to.”
“No one should. We live in an imperfect world, Dresden. In case that hasn’t yet become obvious enough for you.” She nudged my leg with her elbow. “Besides. You were lucky I was there. The way I count it, I’m the one who put on the boots.”
A smile threatened my expression. “You did wh
at?”
“Put on the boots,” Murphy said. “I put on the boots and kicked some monster ass. I dropped the ghoul, and I’m the one who rammed a chain saw through the head of that plant monster thing. Crippled the ogre, too. What did you do? You threw a can of Sterno at him. That’s barely an assist.”
“Yeah, but I soaked him in gasoline first.”
She snorted at me, around more pizza. “Shutout.”
“Whatever.”
“Murphy three, Dresden zero.”
“You didn’t do all of it.”
“I put on the boots.”
I raised my hands. “Okay, okay. You’ve . . . got boots, Murph.”
She sniffed and took an almost dainty sip of Coke. “Lucky I was there.”
I squeezed her shoulder and said, with no particular inflection, “Yes. Thank you.”
Murphy smiled up at me. From the window, one of the Alphas reported, “Car’s ready.”
Billy and a couple more laid out a blanket and then carefully lifted Murphy onto it. She tolerated them with a roll of her eyes, but hissed with discomfort even at the gentle motion.
“Call,” she said.
“Will.”
“Watch your back, Harry.” Then they carried her out.
I picked up some more pizza, exchanged some more or less polite chitchat with some of the Alphas, and made my escape from the crowded living room of the apartment to the balcony. I shut the sliding glass door behind me. Only one light in the parking lot provided any illumination, so the balcony was mostly covered in sheltering shadows. The night was a close one, humidity cooking along at a lazy summer broil, but even so it felt less claustrophobic than the crowded apartment.
I watched Billy and the Alphas load Murphy into a minivan and drive off. Then there was as much silence as you ever get in Chicago. The hiss of tires on asphalt was a constant, liquid background, punctuated with occasional sirens, horns, mechanical squeaks and squeals, and the buzzing of one lost locust that must have been perched on a building nearby.