“Figured you’d be royally pissed once you realized how I duped you.”
“I was. It lasted for a split-second. But the truth is, I’m enjoying family time too much. You should try it.”
Victor checked out the carnival hosted by the kids. He made a face like he might be growing seriously nauseous. “Each to his own, I guess.”
Player ambled over. “Hey, you’re not going to let this guy steal all my glory, are you? No way, I’m standing by for that.”
“No one and nothing is interrupting our family time,” Soren said.
Strangely, Player upon hearing him say that, became entirely acquiescent. It was the first time he’d ever experienced family, good or bad, and he didn’t want family time to end either. Still, his nature being what it was, he was torn. “Don’t worry, Player,” Soren said. “Victor will be calling us in soon enough. Nothing ever goes this easy in real life, trust me. It’s just a matter of time until he’s over his head again, and without us, the world will be doomed.”
“Yeah, you keep telling yourself that,” Victor taunted.
Soren had to hold Player back. Player had taken a step toward Victor, as always all-too intent on bluster over any real sense of awareness as to his actual limitations. “Why is it, buddy, I trust him more than I trust you?” Player said, taunting Victor back. “Could it be because I know a faker when I see one?”
Even Soren had to smile. At least the kid was showing an ounce of self-awareness, which might make all the difference between his surviving his next encounter with a heavy hitter and being turned into toast.
Victor smiled back at the kid, surprisingly. He must have been learning a bit about maturity and self-control himself.
There was an explosion in the distance so severe that by the time they looked they could see the mushroom cloud rising in the air. “Don’t let it spoil your family fun,” Victor said. “Something tells me it’s going to get a little loud around here until these beasties are all back in the bottles.” He snapped the one bottle out of the holster, beamed it back to his collection at home, and snapped in another bottle. Then he was off to collect his next ghoul; surfing a sidewalk that arched into the sky, made out of mandala magic. It pulled him along so fast, he was out of sight before they knew it.
“You heard him, Player. Don’t let the distractions spoil your fun or anyone else’s. You’re the real hero here today. Just look at all those happy kids’ faces, and the parents, if you doubt that.”
Player smiled and went back to being the ring master of the carnival—at least in his mind.
FIFTEEN
Victor was getting a sore back leaning over and supporting himself on his knees, just so he could stare into the pissed-off countenances of all his trapped ghouls. His little collection of genie lamps was all but full now—just one more to go.
“Tell me what I need to know about The Tillerman, guys, ladies, assuming you freaks even have genders.”
Suddenly they weren’t looking so pissed anymore. They were starting to chuckle back at him. Victor didn’t like that at all.
He rushed back to the Soul Searcher. He figured, of any of them, he’d find it the hardest to restrain himself from putting the fear of God into Victor. Victor’s skin was already prickling. There could only be one reason for this sudden turnabout. But he had to hear it with his own ears before he could believe it.
The Soul Searcher smiled at him. His words, spoken aloud, created the subtlest of vibrations within the bottle, that Victor’s hearing was able to decode with the help of his mandala magic. “The Tillerman is the one we all feared on the other side. None of us messed with that guy. You thought I was a handful; have fun getting him into a bottle. But you do that, you win the prize. For sure then the cosmos’ master wizards will have to take note and pay you a visit, just to see who to thank.
“They’ll have little choice but to welcome you into the federation of wizards, in charge of keeping peace throughout the cosmos. Though, what you’ll do amidst that bunch of do-gooders, I’ll never know.”
The Soul Searcher laughed a haunting, humorless laugh. “Looks like we win either way, big guy. You fail to put him away, he’ll bust us out of here himself. The guy loves anyone dedicated to murder and mayhem. You put him away, the only way to not get chewed up by the master wizards of time and space is to pass yourself off as one of the good guys—for a very, very long time—until you’re powerful enough to possibly take them on. By then, you’ll have gone entirely mad. I know your type. Even playing at being nice is entirely toxic to you.”
Victor stood upright again and stared into infinity. Damn the Soul Searcher if he wasn’t right. Victor was fucked either way. He should have seen this coming. Well ahead of time.
Now what?
ACT FOUR
A BETTER CLASS OF FRIENDS
SIXTEEN
Soren woke up to a dead world. The air was stale and stagnant. And there was a jaundiced yellow painted across the sky; it was more than ordinary smog. People were burning anything they could get their hands on just to stay warm. The air was frigid—laced with ice particles; the very tears of Allah. Soren could smell the un-combusted pine particles in the atmosphere.
It didn’t take a genius to put two and two together. Victor was behind this, or more aptly put, some entity that had gotten past him.
Soren was coughing. That had actually been the first sign something was seriously wrong. Chi masters don’t cough because they don’t get sick. The coughing had led him outside his home in search of fresh air—a chi master’s first go-to tonic. What he found wasn’t a tonic for the soul exactly.
The pine particles in the air… . Well, the pine was just the fire-starter. What they were trying to burn—the ones still alive—were the piles of bodies. The streets were lined with the corpses, the rooftops, too, as he gazed upwards at the columns of fire rising from the heaps of bodies it was just easier to carry up than down, if the parties in question were closer to the roofs than the first floor of the buildings.
This being the Victorian London Reenactment district, the first thought was plague. You’d think if anything drove people to take a break from the play acting and run to the nearest pharmacy in one of the more progressive districts for a shot of penicillin, it would be this. But these people took their period-appropriateness very seriously. So plague couldn’t be ruled out, not with the primitive defenses they had in Victorian times.
Soren grabbed the first arm to put itself within reach. It was attached to a woman dragging her dead husband behind her by the foot. It wasn’t much of a burden for her—not physically, at least; she was built like an ox, he more like the flea on the ox’s back. “What happened overnight?”
The woman looked back at him, considering her response, wondering possibly if answering him would be a kindness, or just more cruelty. Her eyes were black as coal—not just the irises—there were no whites of her eyes. A CRISPR retrofit? Otherwise, her face was strangely angelic. “Only the death masters have a chance now. Pity the rest of you.”
He’d heard of them, though he’d never actually met one before. They tended to hang out in their own district, sort of a novel take on the whole survivalist idea. The belief that the apocalypse was near was a kind of religion with them. So they had turned their wizardry to surviving it in advance of it getting here. “I thought you guys could thrive by eating the dead. You’re immune to the darker effects of cannibalism. So why burn the bodies?”
“The Tillerman.”
“The who?”
“A master of oblivion; not like these earlier hacks that have been coming through the portals.”
“How’s burning the bodies supposed to stop him?”
“He gains strength from the dead that are turned into the soil, from their natural rot and decay. All these bodies fertilizing the ground… just what he needs to charge him up. We’re trying to get the word out. But most people believe we’re in league with him.”
“How do you even know about him?”
/>
“Some of my kind meditate on hell worlds to learn what we can to make the best of hell when it comes a knocking. There have been whisperings of the masters of oblivion for some time now; the ones who escaped hell. There’s no prison that can hold them, regular Houdinis of space-time, they are. Your friend Victor’s mandala magic won’t do him a damn bit of good against them.”
“You know about Victor?”
“We know all the heavy hitters; they’re the guardians at the gate, the gate to hell, as it turns out; as we prophesized. We had high hopes that if anyone could forestall Armageddon, he could do it, by closing the door with his mandala magic on anything trying to get to us. But then we started hearing about these guys, and we knew it was just false hope.” She had evidently said all she felt worth saying, and resumed her march with her husband’s body scraping the pavement behind her.
If she was right, and not just spilling hot air, then they were truly fucked. Their planet’s master wizard had been neutralized; like taking out the queen on a chessboard in the first move.
Soren had to find Naomi and the rest of his makeshift family. By all rights, she should have been the one reaching out to everyone in an effort to bring them together. She was the one with the telepathic chops to do it. Away from his tank, he didn’t have the range or the power. And she’d hardly need to be coached. So why couldn’t he feel her presence in his mind? Dear God, don’t tell me she’s already among the fallen? Maybe she’s just retreated into herself again, questioning her abilities in the face of all this. Yeah, that must be it. Knowing her, what else could it be? That was going to make it that much harder to find her.
He headed in the direction of their lair in the basement of Victor’s building. Just as well; he could kill two birds with one stone. Speaking to Victor was still a high priority; even if his magic couldn’t do them much good right now, he was still the smartest guy Soren knew.
The burning fires illuminated his way more than the morning sky; henceforth they’d be living under a perpetual twilight, from the looks of it. When he checked heavenwards again, the truth was worse than he imagined. That was a night sky he was looking at, not an early morning sky. The prominent yellow was coming from the trapped, glowing embers, caught up in the smog and smoke of so many fires burning across the city.
***
Soren ran into the vampire that had helped them what seemed so long ago with fighting off Dr. Dark, the nanite entity pulled in from another dimension. The vamp’s startle effect was every bit as good as before as he landed right in front of Soren, his wings flapping, from end to end with the reach of one of those control-descent parachutes.
This was the Shelly’s Frankenstein take on Victorian England, riddled with werewolves and vamps and Frankenstein’s monsters. By rights, it’s where Soren should have made his home; he belonged here. He had, in fact, lived here once, but it became too troublesome fending off advice seekers looking to pick his brains on how to get into character better so they could be real, honest-to-goodness monsters, as opposed to the pretend variety. Since his departure, those poor bastards were pretty much down to screwing with themselves by way of CRISPR-gene altering machines if they wanted to be both Dr. Frankenstein and his monster at once, like Soren. And if not, they were digging up dead bodies to see if those bodies could be restored to life some other way, using a combination of electricity and whatever the missing X-factor was that they all wanted to get their hands on.
“How are you holding up, friend?” Soren asked.
The vamp’s clawed feet grated against the cobblestones worse than fingers across a chalkboard. “I can no longer morph out of this form. Those of us with powers are just taking a little longer to die, that’s all, but our fate is as sealed as all the rest.”
“Have a little faith.”
The vamp flew off without comment; though his damning expression, which seemed to lay all that had followed since last they met on Soren’s shoulders, may have been all he had to communicate, short of, “Fix this.” Soren should have guessed that faith didn’t rank high with his kind; they’d do anything to extend life and to avoid facing what was on the other side. Someone with faith would probably welcome death about now just to get to the glorious afterlife.
The guardian at the gate to Victor’s district was standing only with the aid of a respirator. The raspy sounds he was making breathing through it made him scarier still; they were an imposing lot as a rule, big and brawny to a fault.
He took one look at Soren and stood aside for him. “Thanks, pal,” Soren said.
“You’d do better thanking me if I refused to let you pass. It ain’t any prettier on the other side, trust me.”
Soren got the distinct sense the poor guy did feel cowardly for agreeing to subject him to the vagaries of the other district, and hated himself accordingly. Ordinarily, his small, beady eyes, so well recessed behind his plunging forehead and equally buried behind the prominent cheeks, would have gone unnoticed. But the mask, illuminating his face in a gelatin-filtered yellow light, played up the fear in the eyes.
When Soren stepped through the portal—the wall turning out to be nothing other than mirage magic—the city looked unchanged; at least at first glance, just the way you might expect it at a slow time of night, say around three in the morning. But upon closer examination, the only people making use of the buses and the taxis, the remaining bicycle messengers, were the Armageddon types from the Armageddon sector. It was Soren’s guess they felt no need to keep themselves contained anymore, now that the entire planet had succumbed to the effects of the Tillerman. At least, Soren assumed it was the entire planet; he’d find out soon enough if that was just sloppy thinking and the conjecture of the feeble-minded or not, and an abandonment of his more rigorous, scientific procedure of testing his hypotheses thoroughly before accepting anything as self-evident.
One of the bicyclists stopped to chat with him, his package destined for delivery sticking partly out of his backpack. He was an emaciated man with Kaposi’s Sarcoma lesions all over him. Dead men lying in a tray in a morgue were several shades of color more alive than this guy. “You have AIDS?” Soren asked.
“And cancer and syphilis and Ebola, among others.” He coughed. “I’ll spare you the full recital. There’s no such thing as being too prepared for Armageddon.”
“I gather you can’t be killed by any of these things.”
“My body feeds on them to sustain itself. But it can’t cure me of any, not without starving to death. So I still feel the symptoms.”
“What’s in the satchel?”
Kaposi’s Guy threw a glance over his shoulder. “An amulet. Supposed to grant immortal life, even if you likely won’t fare any better than me on your tour through eternity.”
Several bike messengers pedaled by; they didn’t look in any hurry, or if they were, in any state to do anything about it. “I gather you guys are doing a brisk business in that kind of magic.”
“Yeah, now that surviving Armageddon is the only gig in town, people are warming up to the thinking of my lot. I hate to break it to them, but surviving End Times isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I’m sorry now I even bothered trying.”
“Have you tried to kill yourself already?” Soren said, returning his eyes to the man. Soren realized too late that his scientific curiosity had gotten the better of him, and that the question was both callous and rude.
“Only in a half-assed sort of way.” They both glanced away at the sound of the screaming guy who’d just jumped off the top of a skyscraper to land like a Jackson Pollock a few yards from them; the impact had put an abrupt end to the sustained wailing. “No sense of genuine commitment, like this guy.”
Jackson Pollock started crawling off, and re-agglutinating, slowly. “Yeah, I was afraid of that,” Kaposi’s Guy said. “Most of the wizards in our district, the really gifted ones, in an effort to be generous, cast spells on the rest of us who weren’t powerful enough, to protect us, if all else failed. It was damn decent of
them, at least so I thought, at the time.”
Soren erupted in laughter. He tried to gag himself by shoving his fist in his mouth and biting down on it, but it didn’t do any good. Shame on him.
“Yeah, go ahead and yuck it up. I’d join you but laughing makes my lungs ache like nobody’s business.”
“Sorry, pal, I was thinking about that adage, ‘nothing fails like success’.”
“Hope you and Victor have some luck with this Tillerman fella.” Kaposi’s Guy dinged his bicycle bell at Soren to snap him out of the daze he’d slipped into, staring at Pollock prowling the asphalt on all fours. Soren returned his attention to Kaposi’s Guy and gave him a two-finger salute as a sendoff.
Somewhere along the way it looked like Soren and Victor had become celebrities. When random people stopped to chat you up, there was really no better term for it.
Soren brisk-walked the few blocks up to Victor’s building. As it turned out, he didn’t have to take the elevator to go up or down. Player found him, blowing in on his own private tornado, and landing yards from Soren. “Where are the others?” Soren asked.
“Don’t know. They’re not in the basement, if that’s where you were headed.”
“Take me up to Victor’s then, please.”
Player dialed up the tornado again to whirl them up to the roof. They just hovered there before the invisible penthouse until Victor dropped his magic. Player whirled them inside. “Maybe you should let the grown-ups talk in private,” Soren said to Player, who snorted back at him, but managed to avoid feeling all that condescended to. Probably because he was feeling too self-absorbed by his own impotence right now, and the inability of his magic to affect things to give much mind to anything else. “Thanks, Player. Do me a favor, and find the others, will ya?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said, before whisking off.
Soren turned to take in Victor better. Apparently feeling sorry for yourself was the in-thing. He was swilling the cheap stuff now that he’d given Soren the last remaining bottle of his good booze. “This Tillerman… .”
Reborn (Frankenstein Book 1) Page 14