Two shrugged. “No idea. Wait, no, scratch that … I know exactly one place it’s taking us.”
“Oh?”
“Yep. It’s taking us to that bar, right over there, because I know they have a whole bunch of good bourbons, and it has been way, way too long since I drank good bourbon. I want to get drunk and find a dark corner and make out with a cute, tall boy with dark hair and light brown eyes. Know anyone like that?”
Theroen stopped walking, and when Two turned to give him a questioning look, he took her hand and brought it to his lips, kissing her fingers.
“I am glad to be here with you,” he said.
Two stood up on tip-toe, put her hand on his shoulder, and kissed him. “Good, because I’m glad to be here with you, too. Let’s stay like this for as long as we can, OK?”
“That sounds excellent,” Theroen said, and after a moment more, still holding her hand, he began to walk again. Two held her ground and he stopped, turning to look at her in confusion.
“It’s really done, right?” she asked, looking up at him and holding his gaze with hers. “It’s really over?”
Theroen looked back at her with his luminescent eyes, and instead of his normal, careful calm she saw on his face a sort of transcendent joy. In it she read the answer to her question even before he spoke. Yes, it was done. They had come through the fire and lived to tell the tale.
“It is over and we are here,” he said. “There is nothing more in front of us except you, and me, and the future. We are now where I hoped we would be when I first found you and brought you to me. We have survived Abraham, and Aros, and the Emperor of the Sun. We have come out the other side and can, at last, together, truly make a life of our own.”
Two pressed herself against him, holding him tight, and after some time like that she raised up on tiptoes again and pressed her lips to his. Theroen put his hands in her hair, kissing, touching, holding her to him. She thought of the little hill where they had first made love, where he had bitten her and brought her into this strange, terrible, beautiful world.
Are you ready to leave? he had asked her, all those years ago, on the street in East New York. Sitting there in his Ferrari, she had heard in his voice a finality that had told her, for better or for worse, that her life was about to change forever.
Two thought of all the pain, all the despair, all the anger and hate that she had known since that time. She thought as well of the love and warmth and happiness that had come to her since the day Theroen had taken her away from the world she had known. Where would time have taken her, had she never met him? Away from Darren? Or only to a slow and agonizing death by addiction?
It didn’t matter; she would never trade it. She would never go back, even were the chance offered her to undo all of that pain. There was too much joy. Too much love. This place – this here and now – was where she belonged, and though she didn’t and couldn’t know what the future would bring, she was excited to find out what lay ahead.
She finished kissing her lover and put her head against his chest for a moment more. Theroen didn’t rush her. At last, when she felt she was ready, she looked up at him and smiled.
“Let’s see where time takes us.”
Hand in hand, together, they stepped forth into the crowd.
Epilogue
“Do you see it?”
“Yeah, man, I see it. What do you think it is?”
“… Think it’s a girl!”
“No fuckin’ way.”
“Seriously. Come on.”
They scrambled down the embankment, one after the other, coming to a stop in the rocky scree just before the ground became boggy. They couldn’t see the whatever-it-was anymore; the cattails were in the way now.
“Dude, I don’t think I wanna,” the blonde one said. He was eleven years old, thin and bare-chested, his tanned torso covered with scrapes and scratches from exploring the woods and marshes along the lakeside.
“Joey, we gotta see if it’s really a girl or not.”
“I said I don’t wanna.”
“Why not? Man … how many kids actually get to say they found a dead body? Come on!”
The other boy’s name was Angel, but he made everyone call him ‘Ainge’ because Angel was a pussy name. He was short and stocky, Dominican, with crew-cut black hair and a faded Paul Konerko T-shirt that he wore at least four times a week. He was eleven, too, and carrying a half-wrapped, foot-long submarine sandwich in his left hand.
“Fine,” Joey said. “But if it’s a … a person, we’re calling the cops.”
“Right, yeah, sure. We’ll phone it in! That’s what they say on CSI.”
“Just fuckin’ go, Ainge.”
They moved forward into the cattails, stepping lightly on the marshy ground, trying to avoid the pools of water and the thick, black muck that would suck the shoes off their feet. The tall plants rattled and shook with their progress. Ainge munched on his sandwich, holding his right arm out to part the reeds.
“Hold on,” Joey said, lifting a hand. “I think I see it.”
“Her,” Ainge said around a mouthful of bread and cheese and capicola.
“Shut up. Look, there’s a sandbar. If we go around …”
“Yeah, sweet!” Ainge stepped out onto the sand. His silver-black high tops sunk in a little, but it held his weight. Joey followed him, and in a moment more they passed through the last of the cattails and got their first good look at the whatever-it-was.
“Holy shit, it is a girl,” Joey said in a breathless voice, and even Ainge seemed stricken speechless by what lay before them.
She was pink and naked, lying on her side half-submerged in the mud, her face pressed into a thatch of cattail roots. She didn’t have any hair, and her skin was cracked and leathery, but she didn’t look gross or rotted like Joey had feared. One of her breasts was exposed, the brown nipple resting just atop the black muck of the bog, and he couldn’t help but glance down between her legs. They were crossed, and there was nothing to see. He looked over at Ainge.
“What do we do now?”
Ainge, apparently over his momentary shock, took a gigantic bite from his sandwich. “Poke her with something.”
“Are you nuts?!”
“Well what else are you gonna do? Push her over, anyway. I wanna see her face.”
“Dude, I am not touching that.”
“You are such a pussy,” Ainge said. “Hold this.”
He thrust his sandwich toward Joey, who took it, giving it a brief, disgusted glance. Ainge had asked for extra-extra mayo and it was oozing out the sides, practically dripping down on the sand below.
“Don’t know how you eat this shit,” Joey told him, and Ainge laughed, giving him the finger.
“There’s no sticks here. It’s just cattails. Wait, hang on …” Ainge plunged his hand into the water and pulled forth a long, waterlogged branch. He shook the muck off of it and stepped up next to Joey.
“After this we’re getting out of here,” Joey said, and Ainge nodded.
“Sure, right. Look … see her titty?”
“Yeah, I fuckin’ see her titty. Just do it, man!”
Moving at a glacial pace, Ainge reached out with the stick. Eventually it pressed into the girl’s bicep, and he lingered a moment before withdrawing it.
“Hmm,” he said. It was a noise of deep contemplation.
“What was that?” Joey asked. “I thought you were gonna push her over.”
“How am I supposed to push her over with a stick? It’ll break.”
“Well, what was the point of poking her then?”
“I dunno, to see if she was, like … gross. Gimme my sandwich.”
“You are such a huge idiot.”
“At least I’m no pussy,” Ainge said, and he gave Joey a huge, shit-eating grin before taking another bite.
“If you call me a pussy again, I’m gonna—” Joey began, and then the girl in the water shoved upward with both arms, pulling a ragged gasp of air into her lung
s and making a terrible, clotted retching noise. A thick stream of black, silty liquid poured forth from her mouth, and even as she vomited forth this noxious substance she turned to glare at them with bloodshot eyes. There was nothing whatsoever to be found in her gaze but raw animal rage.
“Mama!” Ainge shouted, and he dropped his sub on the sandbar, turned tail, and ran crashing through the cattails. Joey lasted a moment longer, but only because his entire body was held in rigor, as if a great electric jolt was running through him. The sole thing that seemed able to function was his bladder, which voided a good deal of its contents into his pants. Then he, too, was off and running.
The girl in the water finished expelling the filth that had filled her lungs and stomach and sat coughing, looking around, blinking in the daylight. She grimaced in pain as she flexed her joints, listening to her burnt skin crackle as it snapped and split with the movements. Her stomach, now empty, gave an audible grumbling, and she snaked an arm forward to pick up the forgotten remains of the fat boy’s sandwich. It was gone in three bites, leaving her mouth gritty with sand. She drank from the stagnant, murky water, unconcerned by the possibility of disease.
She was alive, and this was, for the moment, a fact of enormous wonder. It took her some time simply to remember who she was and how she had come to be here. At last, her mind began to piece the scattered shards of her memory back together. She thought of where she had come from, and what she had done, and what she had passed through to reach this point.
She thought of those who must now believe they had escaped her wrath. There were people still left who had been there, in that very house, on the night that those closest to her were held down and murdered for their blood. The Emperor and the Left Hand were dead and gone, yes, but the other two who had been there that night – Colonel Palowski and Major Davidson – had not yet met their fate. She would find them, no matter how long it took, and she allowed herself a moment to contemplate what she would do to them once she had.
Sitting there in the muck, naked and dirty, her extraordinary body burnt and broken but already healing, the girl in the water began to laugh.
The End
Keep Reading for a Sneak Preview of Christopher Buecheler’s next book:
The Broken God Machine
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Christopher Buecheler is a professional web designer / developer, a published author, an award-winning amateur mixologist, a brewer of beer, a player of the guitar and drums, and an NBA enthusiast.
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The Broken God Machine
By Christopher Buecheler
Sneak Preview
Somewhere, past even the thick jungle that spread wide across the eastern border of Pehr’s land, the metal thing stood keeping its sad and lonely watch.
Long since exposed by the ravages of time, its skeleton-like understructure – once sheathed in material cunningly designed to mimic the smoothness and elasticity of human skin – was now covered with a grey-green coating of moss and lichen. This substance had built up in microscopic layers over eons to form what seemed at first glance almost a furry, organic musculature, though in truth it was still the underlying handiwork of the original designers that gave weight and shape to the metal thing’s appearance. The overall impression it gave, now, was of a thin and wasted corpse left leaning against a canyon wall, long abandoned. Forgotten.
At its feet, and in a ring some fifty yards around it, lay countless bones, some so ancient that they had become nothing more than dust that mixed with the rich jungle soil to form a kind of chalky grey paste. No plants grew within this circle, and no living thing made its home there; no beetle crawled, no earthworm slid, no rodent scurried or ant clambered, no creature moved within the ring of bone. The earth there had been poisoned by some long-forgotten people, in some long-forgotten past, for some long-forgotten reason. The methods and materials they had used in this toxic exercise lived on, like the metal thing, even ages after the land it had been set to guard had become home to little more than the wind that screeched through its ruins like the wailing of ghosts.
Still, the metal thing was not completely forgotten, not completely abandoned. There were those who knew of its existence, and the majority of those typically gave it a wide berth. When the blessings of the gods were required, however, the metal thing would entertain visitors, and it would extract its payment in the blood of their chosen sacrifice. These offerings were not made lightly, and the metal thing had never yet failed to take what was given to it. The bones that formed the blasted, shattered perimeter of its arc of influence lay in testament to this fact.
Others, too, sometimes stumbled into the place the metal thing had made its home, and this was one such occurrence. One of the wild boars that Pehr’s people so prized had wandered deeper and further than its brethren usually ventured. Driven by a mad desire for the delicious fungus which grew sometimes below the roots of the jungle trees, the boar had moved ever inward and upward, its keen senses guiding it toward its prize. Now, at last, had come its moment of triumph.
There was nothing within this poison garden for the boar, of course. Nothing edible could grow within the metal thing’s circle, but on the far side from where it now stood, the creature could discern that most subtle of aromas, the delicious prize that it sought. It had only to cross, and while this land smelled foul to the boar, it was not so toxic as to be worth circumventing. The boar trotted into the field of bones at a brisk pace, intent on the delicacy that awaited it less than thirty yards away.
The metal thing’s response was instantaneous. Moss-covered and derelict though it might have been, its internal workings still functioned, and it jerked alive with the screech of metal on metal, moving from its leaning position to full standing, its arms thrown back. Tiny motors located below what had once been its cheeks whirred and spun, attempting to contract simulated skin and muscle that was no longer there.
“W-LC-M- FR--ND!” it howled at the boar, its voice a grinding, buzzing warble that might once have sounded human.
The boar stopped dead in its tracks, hunkering low to the ground in fear, preparing to flee. It could not have known, even had it been gifted with any such capability of thought, that it was for all intents and purposes already dead. It could not understand that the metal thing’s sensors and motors and inner workings allowed it to react – even now, after a millennia of disrepair – at speeds far beyond those of which the boar was capable.
“PL--S- PR-S-NT Y--R P-SS,” the metal thing screeched, and the boar turned to begin its lumbering attempt at escape, unleashing a terrified squeal in the process.
The metal thing lurched, knee-joints howling in protest as it dropped into a crouching posture, its arms swung low toward the ground for added stability. Its eyes were covered with a series of moss-coated, interlocking plates, and they opened now to reveal centers that burned red like the embers thrown forth by a volcano. Death poured from those eyes, even as it screeched its last words to the creature so desperately attempting to escape.
“P-SS N-T PR-S-NT-D. -C-SS D-N--D. PL--S- L-C-T- TH- V-S-T-R C-NT-R T- -BT--N PR-P-R CR-D-NT--LS.”
The boar was a sizzling lump of meat, its bristly hair smoldering, twin smoking craters bored through its side, long before this sentence was finished. The metal thing
cocked its head as if studying this scene and then, after a moment, returned to a standing position. It leaned against the canyon wall, eye-covers sliding shut, and its skeletal shoulders slumped.
“TH-NK Y-- F-R V-S-T-NG,” it said, and then it was silent, as it sometimes went for months or years between encounters of this type.
At a safe distance, yellow-green eyes took all of this in. The sacred circle remained unspoiled. The boar had passed into the arc of death and had paid the price which all that trod upon the ground there must pay. Everything was as it had ever been, since first the watch had begun.
Above the metal thing, past the canyon, the wind wailed its banshee’s dirge. A tiny bug came to the edge of the metal thing’s domain and stopped, sensing the polluted soil in front of it. Turning around, it trundled off the way it had come, and so was spared the boar’s fate, and the fate of all those whose bones littered that tainted ground.
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Table of Contents
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Book 1 • The Blood That Bonds
Dedication
Chapter 1 Darkness and Despair
Chapter 2 The World Within the World
Chapter 3 The Priest, the Seamstress, the Student
Chapter 4 Life in Shadow
Chapter 5 A Tooth for a Tooth
Chapter 6 Homecoming
Chapter 7 The Search
Epilogue
Book 2 • Blood Hunt
Dedication
Part I
Part II
The II AM Trilogy Collection Page 121