Shelley was older than Rain by a few years, but had the bearing and eyes of someone a decade younger. Age came not with days passed, but with the life they carried. “So you think that should be it for Cody,” she said, writing out the check.
The mummy jumped a peg and removed it from the board. “If he cannot be trusted with his word, he cannot be trusted with your heart. Karaoke was important to you, and he chose to duet with—”
“Veronica.”
“Veronica. Promises should not be taken lightly. He’ll break more than those.”
She set the check down on the table and watched him claim a couple more pegs. Her manager called to her. At the window between the kitchen and the counter, hot platters waited. “I have questions, and I usually know the answers,” she said, heading for the meals. ”I just need to hear someone else say it.”
Porter watched her go. “I have questions, too, but only one of them counts.”
Po set down the sugar packet he’d been about to place on top of a tower. Ken stopped demolishing the puzzle. “Which one?” the mummy said.
“What do you think Paul is?”
“I prefer who, not what. Mythicals tend to be sensitive to semantics.”
Porter sat back in the booth. “I’m sorry if I’ve offended you.”
“You haven’t. I merely wish to be clear. Who someone is defines what they are, and the two are inseparable.” Ken began jumping pegs again. “Bona fides insist on two distinct classes—two worlds: one of the real and living, one of the dead and imaginary. Straight lines in a universe squared off. As an oft-quoted mythical once said, isn’t it pretty to think so? Spacetime is curved, and it is so because of what exists within it. The separations are artificial—distinctions drawn by those who insist on dominating that which is not a part of them. Except that it is part of them.”
Three moves later, the mummy was once again left with one peg in the center. He won the game even faster when he wasn’t focused on it.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that the ‘real’ world and The Commons are not so far apart as many wish to believe. Meaning that Brill thinks that what he is controlling is not only apart from him but beneath him. He is mistaken. We are all a part of it—and of one another. He controls what allows itself to be controlled. Who’s to say it will continue to do so?”
Ken filled the puzzle yet again and began jumping pegs even more rapidly. He did so with precision despite his huge hands. The plastic and wood never so much as clicked. “Po has a theory.”
The monk studied his packet project.
“My friend believes that Paul is Tzadikim Nistarim,” Ken said. “One of the Thirty-Six. And he thinks Brill knows it.”
“And you?”
“I am not certain that it matters.”
Po removed a wing of his sugar castle and began building up instead of out. The additional story rose into the air straight and sturdy.
“Who is the burned woman, Porter?” Ken said.
Porter stalled.
“You spoke with her at the Nightlights. The woman of a different fire.” He jumped another peg. “It’s our turn for an answer, is it not?”
“How long have you wanted to ask me?”
“You were also away from Paul and Rain for a time before our fight at the truck stop.”
Po stopped building.
Porter smiled. Beware the soft-spoken when secrets are kept, for they hear what the thunderers do not. “If you truly believe that everything is everything, as the song says, then you’ll understand why I can’t tell you. Brill already knows more than we’d like, and it’s only too easy for him to learn even more.” He upended his soda, draining it, and set the can down with a silence equal to Ken’s. “But know that it’s in our power to begin again.”
The mummy pushed the puzzle away from him.
One peg remained—dead center.
The fight wasn’t over.
The view of the tunnel returned to the floating monitors, and Mr. Brill sat up. The squeal of something dying pierced the silence of the office.
Mr. Brill gave a start. Then the one cry became many, and the many a wall of shrill termination.
Truitt had sat in the soundless spot for hours, waiting to see what would happen. He’d been certain that Mr. Brill would awaken—and sure that when he did, it would be very bad for devoted servant Gerald Truitt to be absent.
The boy had delivered a painful lesson to Mr. Brill and his creature. When the beast had died—or came as close as it could to dying—the last sight Truitt had witnessed through its eyes was one of sunlight and steam.
The Reid boy was even stronger than they had realized. He, his Envoy, and their little miscreant band had handed what could charitably be called an old-fashioned whupping to the big man.
Now Mr. Brill and the Shade were coming around, and the moonlight washing down through the hole in the tunnel roof revealed the cause.
A host of the rat-bug creatures had emerged from their holes to gnaw at the Shade’s bones and the stakes from which the skeleton was suspended. When enough of them massed, the monster drained them.
The ones that made initial contact with the bones had no chance of escape. The others might have been able to crawl back to their dens, but they were too densely packed together and had no room to maneuver. So life was taken from them in sequence and delivered to the Shade.
On the screen, they perished and withered in the pale light. Their keening was a sure sign that the process was not painless.
The bones swathed themselves in the musculature, tissue, and shadow skin that defeat had taken from the Shade. Soon it would revive, but there was still the matter of it being impaled on the wood.
As Mr. Brill continued to gather himself, Truitt quietly stepped over to him and laid his fingers softly against the back of the big man’s neck for a moment.
Mr. Brill gave another start.
For a short moment, Truitt had the sensation of his own head and hands being taken from him—of surrendered control.
A blink. Then two. He wasn’t steering himself. He’d been shoved over to the passenger seat. A separate force—unseen, so much larger than him—took the wheel.
A very old power climbed up his spine, coursing through him and into Mr. Brill. Generations of blood-swathed birth and death, creation and demise. Somewhere an infant cried. Elsewhere a grown man.
Truitt was but a conduit for an energy that felt as if it might burn his very eyes out. Something, someone—or several someones—with no choice but to break cover and reveal a heretofore unseen presence. Regrettable, but necessary.
Mr. Brill twitched several times as the force went through him in turn and into the Shade. A force to overcome that which held the beast fast to the stakes.
Then the transfer was complete.
Truitt returned to his seat. Forgetting about ever having gotten up at all, he watched the screen again.
Was that a staircase?
Po looked out the window and slid from the booth, demolishing his palace with his sleeve in a rare display of clumsiness. He hurried past Shelley, who was making another run at them, coffee pot in hand.
Before Porter could say anything to Ken, the mummy was up and following his friend out the door.
The Envoy pulled a wad of bills from his pocket and threw them on the table. “Please excuse us,” he told Shelley.
“Hey!” the waitress called after him when she saw the fat overpayment. “This isn’t New York!”
The helicopters were in the sky and in the room, their whup-whup-whup shaking the window glass and door. Paul thought he was awake, but realized he hadn’t been when he opened his eyes.
His hair and pillow were still damp from his shower. He’d been in a deep sleep, though not for long.
The choppers were coming. Someone was pounding on his door.
“Paul!” Rain shouted through the thick wood. She hit it with something harder than her fist. “Get up!”
He pulled on his pants,
opened the door, and squinted into the hall light. She had her shotgun out. The rotor beats outside grew louder still.
“They’re here.”
The trucks were close enough to be heard over the approaching choppers when Porter and Ken reached the parking lot. Po was crouched behind a maintenance van next to an old framed-glass phone booth.
Porter started to ask him where the Shade was, for he had a hunch that that was what had called the monk out here. He’d begun to suspect that Po had a way of sensing things that was beyond mere hearing. Then the beast’s squat darkness rose from the dry swimming pool, vaulted the fence, and came at them.
It closed in fast, aiming for Ken in a low charge. Po launched himself from behind the van in a two-footed kick that caught the monster dead center.
The monk bounced off and landed on his feet as the Shade hit the asphalt. The monster was up instantly, bellowing.
Porter assumed that it—and, through it, Mr. Brill—had tired of these skirmishes. Porter was sick of them, too, but was at a loss as to how they might make this the last, especially when they’d all thought the previous one was.
The three of them spread out to keep the Shade from the motel. Porter raised his staff and waited for the next round.
Paul and Rain pushed through the lobby doors and hurried out into the parking lot. Amid the cacophony of the arriving Ravagers, the fight a mere hundred yards away was a silent ballet.
The Shade charged Po. The monk flipped out of the way and kicked it in the back as it passed under him.
Paul ran toward them, unsure what he would do when he got there.
The monster went face-first into the cracked pavement and bounced to its feet.
Po stumbled as he landed.
The Shade charged him again.
Ken was there with a two-fisted blow that smashed the beast to the asphalt. It rose more slowly this time.
The mummy could hurt the Shade, but doing so took its toll. He staggered backward, and the Shade launched itself at him.
Po intercepted the monster with another kick, knocking it off course. It righted itself and landed. The monk hit the hard surface of the lot, crumpled, and stayed down.
Paul and Rain closed in, as did the choppers and trucks. Several Dew Drop Inn guests and staff members emerged to see what all the commotion was.
Porter caught the Shade down low with his staff, removing a chunk of its leg. Black blood ran like crude oil, but now it was the gray man’s turn to pay for his contact with the beast. He caught himself on his staff.
Ken ran at the monster, turning his shoulder into its chest like a lineman. The Shade struck the nearby van and bounced off, the vehicle’s side crumpling, and took out the adjacent phone booth. Glass exploded from both van and booth with the successive hits, showering the parking lot in sharp, clear gems.
The Shade hauled itself from the mangled frame of the phone booth. Its blood loss slowed and stopped, its leg reconstructing itself.
It turned toward Rain as she and Paul joined the fight, but Ken was too fast for it. He gripped it in a bear hug, raised it up over his head and drove it into the asphalt with enough force to send a network of fractures out from the impact’s epicenter.
Everything slowed. Despite the choppers and trucks, Paul would later remember hearing nuggets of glass crunch under foot—and would wonder what might have been different if he’d acted sooner.
The Shade struggled to rise.
Ken ignored the fatigue of his prolonged contact with the beast. Staggering over to the skeleton of the phone booth, he ripped the deformed steel from the pavement.
The Shade found its wobbly legs and stood just as Ken finished crushing the frame of the ruined booth. He gathered the flattened structure and clubbed the beast hard with it. The monster was stunned long enough for the mummy to bend the metal tightly around its shadowy form in a ring and twist the ends closed, imprisoning it.
The noise of choppers and trucks was so close now that it was almost its own quiet. Paul heard Ken clearly when he spoke, though the mummy didn’t raise his voice.
All else fell away.
“Paul.” Ken held the Shade tight. “We are none of us substantial, none of us big. That is thrust upon us. All of us. Do you understand?”
Paul thought he did. And with that comprehension came the ache of a loss he couldn’t yet identify. “Yes.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” As Paul said it, he knew that his answer wasn’t quite true. He didn’t understand entirely. There was a difference to the mummy’s tone—the quality of a decision having been reached.
Of finality.
Po recovered enough to get to his feet.
Ken said Rain’s name. Then Porter’s.
The Shade thrashed, attempting to free itself. The mummy reached into his pocket, pulled out his Wayfarers, and tossed them to Po.
“Goodbye, friend,” Ken told the monk. “If we should meet…”
The captive Shade raged and kicked, to no avail.
Full understanding came to Paul, to Po—to all of them—too late.
Ken let go of the imprisoned Shade. He reared back for momentum and rammed both fists into the night creature, reaching for its dark heart.
The monster howled and fell over backward, taking the mummy with it. Ken screamed, his volume matching the Shade’s as the beast was forced to absorb his Essence, an energy lethal to it.
He drove his arms in deeper. Po made a grab for him but was thrown backward by the exchange of forces.
The Shade’s cries and Ken’s became one, reached a crescendo. The two blurred into each other, wavering for a long time.
There was no send-off for the hero, no denouement to mark his noble passing. Mummy and foe simply vanished. Their fading echo became but a susurration. And then they were gone.
The air around the group pulsed with Ravager choppers, grated with the rumble of their trucks. A dozen vehicles pulled up, disgorging black-clad Ravagers in full battle gear.
Just as many Black Hawks circled the sky above.
Po, stricken, sobbed and fell to his knees on the asphalt. He collapsed into his grief, ignoring the broken glass. Chin to chest, he cradled the Wayfarers in his hands as if they were a baby bird.
The first of the Ravagers reached him and raised his rifle high, poised to slam its heavy heel into his head. The monk offered no defense.
True seeing.
Porter lifted his staff to protect Po but was unsteady.
Rain took aim at the Ravager as five or six of his fellow troopers drew down on her.
The wave of loss crested over Paul’s friends, whose only sin was to sign on to his Journey hoping to help him.
“No more.” His voice rose of its own volition, taking his control with it. The heat inside him hastened to meet that outside—hard and true.
Paul’s words ended in a thunderclap that deafened even him. Lightning flashed.
A ball of force issued from him in all directions.
Another followed, waves rippling outward.
The Ravager about to bludgeon Po flickered out, extinguished. Those preparing to shoot Rain were next—erased as they squeezed their triggers.
Paul felt them there and gone, drawn into the tide of Essence that pulled them in as it grew. It claimed Ravagers as it went. There, not there—the trucks and the troops they carried.
The sky crackled, fissured into wrath. Lightning ripped into helicopters, eliminating them in blinding flares.
Thunder followed, then sheets of rain from what remained a blue sky. There were no clouds; the Essence Paul sent upward returned in a sunlit drenching.
More.
Downpour bouncing around him, Paul raised his arms and gave further voice to his violence. The sound joined with the Essence.
It possessed him—and he it.
Neither was in control.
A distant chopper spun to the ground in a flaming eddy. He shaped its fire into projectiles and sent them into the next wave of trucks
. Ravager and vehicle alike were incinerated and added to the storm.
Porter dropped to one knee, unable to withstand the torrent. Po remained as he’d been when he’d first collapsed, removed in his mourning.
Farther away, choppers wheeled around and tried to escape. Their efforts amounted to naught.
Paul took them. He laid claim to all of them—truck, chopper, soldier—and Essence whose sources he didn’t even know.
The rain fell harder. The storm grew. It wouldn’t slow because Paul wouldn’t allow it—nor did it wish to.
“Paul!” Rain fought her way to him through the deluge. “Stop!”
He would not.
She would have to understand that. So would Porter and Po.
Stopping was the last thing he wanted to do. He was going to make it worse.
“It’s over!” She grabbed his shoulders. “You have to stop!” Shaking him now. “They’re gone, Paul! It’s just us!”
He summoned still more. The Dew Drop Inn trembled. The guests who’d come out to see what was happening scrambled back inside for shelter under roofs that were losing shingles to the wind.
“Stop!” She hit him, though that was only noted, not felt. “It’s us!” She hit him again. And again. “It’s us! It’s us!”
Us. Us. Who? All of them. The travelers who’d already been through so much together.
Somehow, he heard her. He heard, he listened, and he came back—to her, to Porter, to Po.
As it had started, the storm ceased. Its rain dropped to the ground in a final layer, bouncing in one last sheet.
“It’s us,” Rain said with the last of her voice. She cradled his face in both her hands, fingers light.
He blinked, returning to himself. The lights and darks of his eyesight restored themselves to normalcy as he looked around at what he’d done.
Porter rose to his feet.
When they saw it was over, guests emerged once more—the bravest first, then others.
Po remained on his knees. Paul could hear the monk crying now.
The grief made a small thing of the departed fury.
The Journeyman Page 20