by T. A. Pratt
“I am sorry that you deem me insufficiently tough –”
Someone knocked on the door of the RV. Rondeau frowned at Pelham. “Did you order pizza? No, wait. Thai?”
Pelham sighed. “Don’t be foolish, Rondeau. It is likely a park ranger coming to demand we leave the area. We have no magic at the moment to hide us from such attention.”
“Yeah. I just figured the RV being entirely covered in filth would work as desert camouflage. Shows what I know. Still, better safe. Got your sword cane?”
Pelham reached down for his stick and slid out an inch of steel.
The knock came again, harder. “Who is it?” Rondeau called.
“Me!” It was a man’s voice, but even muffled, there was something familiar about it.
“Me, who?” Rondeau said, and opened the door.
Someone hit him, hard, driving him down onto his back. The newcomer moved with a leap and a growl toward Pelham. Rondeau tried to turn his head to track the assault, but he was too stunned to make much progress. He’d had the wind knocked out of him, and the earth and fire too. He caught a glimpse of Pelham slashing out with his sword, but the intruder was too fast, and Pelly collapsed from a blow across the face.
The figure turned toward Rondeau. His face was familiar. Just about as familiar as a face could be. “Me,” he said, and grinned.
“You,” Rondeau agreed, and then the light ran out of the world and he sank into the gray.
Crapsey in a Cave
Crapsey stood in the cave, humming to himself and scratching obscene graffiti into the stone walls with a switchblade, his artistic efforts lit by camping lanterns. Pretty soon, he’d have the opportunity to deliver some bad news to a goddess, and he was really looking forward to it. He’d been spending his days and nights in Rondeau and Pelham’s stinky RV for too long, and it was good to be doing something again. Marla wouldn’t be happy to see him, and Crapsey was never happier than he was making other people unhappy. He realized that was probably indicative of some profound psychological problems, but what could you do? He was what he was.
It was funny – back when he’d been the dogsbody/factotum/confidential assistant/amanuensis/body man/personal slave of a world-conquering supervillain in another dimension, and later when he’d been part of a revenge squad run by a redheaded incarnation of devastation and chaos, he’d wanted nothing more than a quiet place to sit and read comic books, and his big dreams had included eating food that wasn’t raw and bloody or scooped from the inside of an expired aluminum can.
But once he got free of his assorted monstrous entanglements, with total liberty in this beautiful reality where you could buy fresh food and diverting literature just about anywhere, and getting money to buy said hamburgers and comic books was as easy as hitting a guy over the head in an alley and taking his wallet, he’d found himself yearning for some of the stuff he’d always thought he hated. Like stepping out of the shadows and giving a grin that made would-be revolutionaries shit themselves. Leaning against a wall in the background playing with a knife while an incredibly dangerous woman tortured victims in the foreground. Chasing guys down and unhinging his enchanted prosthetic jaw and threatening to literally bite their heads off if they didn’t behave. Making moves. Fucking shit up. Leaving his mark on the world, and if that mark was a metaphorical (or, often, literal) smear of blood, so what? Crapsey had reasons to want the world to bleed. He’d had a rough childhood, and it had only gotten worse when he’d stopped being a child.
So when his old comrade-in-arms Nicolette got in touch – projecting her image into the cracked mirror of the single-room-occupancy hotel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district where he’d been living – to make him an offer, he’d jumped at the chance. The chance to hit his evil twin Rondeau – the version of Crapsey native to this reality, and a smug and coddled and conniving son of a bitch he was – over the head had been the most enticing part of the offer, of course, but he’d been looking forward to this part, too. Nicolette had promised him plenty of opportunities for organized mayhem once he got Marla back to Felport and into Nicolette’s clutches. Nicolette was well on her way to becoming a world-conquering supervillain herself, it seemed – or at least city-conquering one – and while Nicolette didn’t have the native power that Crapsey’s old boss the Mason had possessed, and she wasn’t half the chaos witch their mutual ex-employer Elsie Jarrow had been, she was good at breaking stuff, and he’d hang around until she inevitably fucked things up for herself. He tried not to think too far ahead. The future had never been too full of bright and shiny things for him. Better to live in the moment.
The bed of soft sand at the far end of the chamber began to stir. Crapsey grinned and picked up the chrome pump-action shotgun he’d taken from the trunk of a drug dealer in Oakland. He’d been informed that Marla Mason couldn’t be killed, that she’d become some kind of half-goddess, but he’d also been told she could still feel pain, and he was hoping for the opportunity to perform a little shotgun experiment.
A woman sat up in the sand, probably naked but so covered in dust and earth that it was hard to tell. She turned her head and spat brown muck onto the cavern floor. “This has to be the worst possible way to wake up.” She blinked at him and wiped dust from her eyes. Crapsey had arranged the lanterns to make himself a backlit shadow before her. Super dramatic.
“Rondeau, is that you?” she said. “Where’s Pelham? Any report on that monster that escaped from the chamber below? If that thing is still on the loose, at least we know what we’re doing today. I should take a shower first, so I hope the RV’s tank is full –”
“Rondeau and Pelham aren’t here.” Crapsey pumped the gun, loading a cartridge into the chamber with that wonderful “ka-chunk” sound so beloved of action movie directors. “Last I saw them, they were tied up in the back of a van, but that was days ago. They’re all tucked away, now, probably crying and wondering when you’re going to save them.”
“Oh, I so do not have time for this bullshit.” Marla stood up, shaking off dirt as she did, though she still looked like the avatar of some particularly earthy deity, her hair sending down showers of dust with every step she took toward him.
Crapsey pointed the barrels of the gun at her. “You can keep walking, and I’ll blow a hole in your middle, and you can listen to what I have to say while you lay there knitting your guts back together, assuming you can really do that. Or you can stop where you are and listen to me without getting major abdominal damage. Personally, I’m not bothered either way – in fact, I’d kinda prefer the bit where I get to shoot you, but I’ve been instructed to play nice until you force me to do otherwise. So which is it, option one, or option two?”
“I’ll go with option C. I’m going to walk over there and get a drink.” She pointed to a dusty cooler against one wall of the cavern. “Because you don’t know what a dry mouth is until you’ve woken up from your own grave. Then I’m going to put on one of those black robes hanging on the hooks over there, left by my former cultists, because you’re lecherous and I’m not in the mood to give you a free show.”
“You’ve literally got sand in your vagina. You are the opposite of alluring.”
“Yeah, you say that, but didn’t I hear you fucked Nicolette? If so, your standards are as low as they can be without recourse to bestiality. Anyway, shoot me if you must, but I’ll make you eat a bucket of scorpions if you do. That’s not an empty threat, either. I’m feeling very literal today.”
Crapsey couldn’t help but feel he sacrificed some of the initiative by acquiescing, but he let her put on a robe and then guzzle a bottle of water while sitting on the cooler. She poured water on her face, but that just made the dirt streak and darken, giving her a very war-paint sort of visage. Her gaze was calm. She’d clearly faced things a lot scarier than Crapsey and come out of it okay. He knew she had; once or twice, he’d been in the vicinity when she did the facing.
She stretched, rolling her head around on her shoulders. Sleeping for a month
probably put quite a crick in the neck. “Who talked you into being an idiot this time, Crapsey? I know you don’t have the initiative to kidnap my friends and point a gun at me on your own. You’ve tagged along after some high-quality monsters in the past – the Mason, Elsie Jarrow – but I’m drawing a blank trying to figure out your current employer. There aren’t many big scary people with a grudge against me left.” She swished more water into her mouth, then spat it out. The water was still brownish. Marla met his eyes again. “There aren’t many left because they’re dead. Which you know. And yet, here you are, throwing in your lot with someone trying to oppose me again. Call it the triumph of enthusiasm over experience, huh?”
“Read this.” He reached into the pocket of his blazer, pulled out a folded sheet of paper, and tossed it toward her.
She bent, picked the letter up, and read it aloud, in a showy, declamatory voice. He knew that Marla could make anything sound contemptuous if she tried, and she was trying pretty hard. Crapsey had found the letter in the RV, among Rondeau and Pelham’s crappy possessions, and handing it over spared him having to tell the story himself. Nicolette had written it – or rather, since she’d been a conscious severed head in a birdcage at the time, she’d dictated it to a mind-controlled hotel maid who’d done the actual writing – in her usual gloating-and-crowing-and-boasting tone. In the note Nicolette explained how she’d learned that Marla was a goddess. That she’d sweet-talked and lied and turned Marla’s hired muscle, a cursed and lethal goon named Squat, against her. That with Squat’s help she was going to escape and spend the month Marla was down in the underworld wreaking havoc, or plotting revenge, or researching how to murder gods. And how she was going to finally make Marla take her seriously as a nemesis.
When she was done reading – “Thugs and pisses, Nicolette” – Marla snorted and threw the letter on the ground. “Gods, Crapsey. You’re working for Nicolette, now? You used to be a henchman for queens of villainy, and now you’re, like, assistant dogcatcher. You’re working for a head in a cage –”
“I don’t think she spends a lot of time in a cage anymore,” Crapsey said. “I hear she got herself a new set of legs, and all the stuff in between, too, I imagine. The thing you don’t get it is, you’ve made Nicolette dangerous, more so than she ever would have been without you to prove herself against. I get that Nicolette’s ambition has exceeded her ability in the past, but you’re the standard she set herself against, Marla. All she wants is for you to take her seriously. It’s sad, but at the same time, it’s pushing her to do great things, for a certain fucked-up definition of ‘great.’ She’s determined to become dangerous enough that you can’t just snort and roll your eyes when she comes to cause trouble.” He shrugged. “I don’t know her whole plan, but from what she’s told me... hating you has given her some real inspiration. She’s making some moves.”
Marla closed one of her nostrils with her finger and blew, spraying dirt and less sanitary things at Crapsey’s feet, making him jump out of the way. She cleared the other nostril the same way, then said, “I really don’t have time for this, Crapsey. Do you know why none of my cultists are hanging around right now, ritually sacrificing you to me? It’s because they discovered something in the caves down below, something that ate them, and then flew away. At least, we think it flew. It’s some kind of serious primal monster from out of deep time, imprisoned here by ancient wizards or some shit, maybe not even human wizards, at that. I told Rondeau and Pelham to get started on trying to track the thing, and now you tell me Nicolette has kidnapped them? I am just so not in the mood to make a side trip to smite her.” She sighed. “Crapsey, it’s stupid. Nicolette, by all rights, should be dead. She even admits it in the letter. Elsie Jarrow decapitated her, and her original body is literally fish food now. The only reason she retains her consciousness is because I called in a favor and had death.... withdrawn from her. I kept Nicolette alive and conscious because I thought she could be useful to me, as an oracle and a bloodhound for dangerous badness and chaos. I needed her as a compass for my monster-hunting trips, that’s all, and there are other options for tracking down big bad beasties. If Nicolette annoys me, all I have to do is let nature take its course again, and she’ll get bounced right off this mortal coil. Plus, as she may have mentioned, I’ve got some connections in the underworld – I don’t mean the mob, I mean the land of the dead – and once Nicolette’s a corpse, she’s pretty much entirely in my power. She’s lucky I don’t take her seriously, because if I did, she might have an eternity of unpleasantness ahead of her, but the fact is, when Nicolette is not actively pissing in my face, I don’t even think about her. So, fuck it. I’ll just let her die, as soon as I can get word to Death, which will be shortly.”
Crapsey shook his head. “Come on, Marla. Even if you think Nicolette’s stupid, that she’s a joke, you know she’s not that stupid. She’s taken steps to keep you from just letting her die. She said that in the letter, too –”
“Yeah, she kidnapped Pelham and Rondeau, and she’ll arrange for them to be killed or maimed if I let her die, I get it. I’m going to rescue them, or send people to rescue them, assuming they don’t just rescue themselves. But I don’t have time to deal with Nicolette myself. If that hurts her feelings, tough.”
Crapsey shook his head. “I’m taking you with me, Marla. You are going to see Nicolette. Rondeau and Pelham, kidnapping them was just to get your attention, and to keep them out of my way while I had this little talk with you – they are not Nicolette’s dead-man’s switch. I don’t know what she did, exactly, or what her plans are, but she’s pretty pleased with herself. She was straight-up chortling last time we talked, and she wants to give you the big reveal herself, let you know exactly how she outsmarted you.”
“I’ve never gone wrong yet underestimating Nicolette, and I don’t intend to start.”
Crapsey thought she sounded doubtful, though, or at least concerned. With Marla it was hard to tell how much of her act was bravado and how much was actual bedrock self-confidence. The woman was often wrong, but rarely uncertain. “Fine. You can keep right on underestimating her, just as long as you get in the Jeep I’ve got waiting and behave yourself on the way to the airfield.” He hefted the shotgun and pointed it at her. “You can walk, or I can drag your bleeding and screaming carcass. I don’t care which.”
“Will you go ahead and do something already?” Marla said. “How long are you just going to stand there and watch?”
Crapsey frowned. “What the hell are you – “ His eyes suddenly felt heavy, like they were window shades being dragged down, and he blinked and swayed. How had Marla managed to cast a sleep spell on him? She didn’t have anything with her, no charms, she’d spoken no incantation, and she was no more psychic than your average kumquat, so how... He yawned as widely as he could – and with his magical jaw, that was very wide indeed – and felt himself falling forward, but was deep asleep before he hit the ground, sparing him the indignity of feeling the impact.
Bradley on the Road
“I didn’t know you could do that,” Marla said. “I figured you’d just throw a rock at his head or something, make a distraction so I could take the gun away and feed it to him.” She nudged Crapsey’s unconscious form with her toe.
“I’ve learned a few new tricks.” Bradley stepped from the mouth of the tunnel where he’d been hiding, into the pool of overlapping lantern light. “I’m not much good when it comes to mind control, and that’s kind of a gross and evil thing to do anyway, but making somebody really sleepy is a lot easier, and handy, too.” He moved to stand beside Marla, looking down at Crapsey, who was curled up and snoring outrageously. He wore a blue sharkskin suit, perhaps the most impractical desert attire Bradley had ever encountered.
“I’d hug you, but I’m covered in filth,” Marla said. “Oh, screw it, the robe is covering most of the filth.” She threw her arms around him and squeezed him tight. “I know you’re not my B,” she said into his ear, “but it’s good to see you an
yway.”
“I’m very, very close to being your B,” he said. “I’m from a branch of the multiverse just half a degree distant. Your Bradley arrived at the scene of a crime in time to get himself killed. Me, I was a little late, so by the time I got there, everything was over.”
“Rondeau didn’t take over your body, then?” she said. “I mean, demonstrably. So, what happened in your branch?”
“Remember that guy Danny Two Saints, the thug? Rondeau took over his body instead. Nobody much mourned his loss, I must say. I stayed on as your apprentice for a while in that world. Admittedly, from that point on, my timeline and yours diverged... a lot. Where I come from, you’re still chief sorcerer of Felport.”
She grunted. “Sure. I didn’t ruin everything by trying to bring you back to life over there.”
He nodded. “I appreciate the effort, though. We all do. Anyway, when Bradley Bowman became the new overseer of the multiverse, I got uplifted along with all the other versions of us from throughout all the branches, consolidated into a single consciousness...”
“So what are you now, standing before me? Like, a pseudopod? The Over-Bradley sticking his pinky finger into my reality?”
He shook his head. “I’m more like an autonomous vehicle. A single instance of Bradley, cut loose and sent here on a mission. The reason I’m here –”
Marla cut him off. “I bet I know. The thing my cultists found in the caverns, it’s from elsewhere, yeah? Something from another, inimical universe? Like my old cloak?”
Bradley shivered at the mention of her cloak, which had seemed like a powerful magical artifact, but had actually been an intelligent parasitic entity from a place with entirely different physical laws. The cloak had caused him trouble, even after he was elevated to his position as overseer of the multiverse. “Like that, but not identical. As far as I can tell, this new creature, this Outsider, doesn’t need a host to survive in this universe, but it doesn’t have much of a body, either – it’s almost ethereal, looks like a creature made of shadow. Probably once upon a time it had a more concrete form, but the centuries or millennia it spent imprisoned took a toll. It’s traveling around now, consuming humans as it goes, and its ontological mass – it’s reality – is increasing with each kill. I think it’s building itself a body that can function in this universe. Maybe learning about us by devouring us. Maybe taking memories or other properties from its victims. Who knows? I’m just here to kill it, and since you’ve always been infinitely better at killing things than I am, I figured I’d ask for help.”