Power Mage 3

by Hondo Jinx

  Making out the beginning, he felt a thrill.

  Welcome, Son.

  He rubbed at the dust covering the remainder of the message.

  The RV pulled up.

  “You okay?” Frankie hollered over a blast of classic rock. “Sage was worried.”

  Behind her, the other girls’ faces jostled like wayward moons untethered from their orbit.

  “We’re fine,” Brawley said, “but we have to get out of here. Now.”

  To her credit, Frankie didn’t panic or ask for clarification. She gave him a quick thumbs-up and pulled away, headed for the highway.

  The RV pulled onto the highway, Texas-bound.

  Riding the center line, Remi twisted the throttle and zoomed after the shockingly fast Winnebago.

  They whipped past a brightly illuminated billboard, and Brawley finally worked out the rest of the inscription. Shoving the key into his pocket, he muttered the phrase aloud. “Welcome, Son, to Red Haven.”

  The red taillights of the RV disappeared.

  And with them vanished the world.

  22

  Suddenly, they were tunneling through thick fog spangled with shimmering motes of light and bright orange flashes. All that remained of the world was the highway beneath them.

  Remi buried the throttle.

  They hurtled into the unknown, colorful streaks of yellow light whipping away to either side.

  Now, Brawley thought. Now it’s coming. The danger. The thing I’ve been dreading. Not the punk in the restroom. Something bigger, something stranger.

  This was it.

  He pulled both pistols, ready to fight.

  And out of the sparking, swirling mist tumbled a terrible thing. Black and leathery, the creature made no sense. A wing here, a clawed hand there. Several lumps bulged like boils from the mass.

  Heads, Brawley realized when the lumps split, exposing jagged teeth and waggling black tongues.

  The thing raced toward them, jagging and spiraling erratically.

  Brawley fired the XDS.

  The tumbling thing burst.

  One piece fell away and disappeared into the fog.

  Other sections shot away in separate directions, fluttering and spinning like so many bats.

  That’s what they looked like. Bats the size of vultures, their leathery wings six or seven feet across.

  Remi hunched over the handlebars and raced straight ahead.

  Brawley fired both pistols.

  One creature jerked stiffly and spun away into the mists. Another folded its wings and corkscrewed out of view.

  Another lurched, most of its head disappearing in a puff of black particles. It dropped like a stone, hit the road, and popped into the air, flopping and fluttering like a broken umbrella.

  A bat-thing flashed by, strafing Brawley. Its claws sliced through his shoulder, carving him to the bone. Then it was gone, whipping away into their wake.

  Another creature slammed into the motorcycle, and they almost went down. The thing clutched the front of the Harley.

  Brawley tried to get a shot, but the thing leapt away, springing at Remi with its toothy mouth yawning wide.

  Remi drove a quick jab into the creature’s chest. The blow knocked the bat-thing aside, and it tumbled away into the sparking ether.

  The final creature slammed into Brawley’s chest, almost knocking him from the bike. It was like getting hit by a suitcase fired from a catapult.

  He felt his sternum crack, felt ribs snap away. The air rushed from his lungs, and suddenly, he was folded backward on the bike, holding on only by his legs, his will, and years of bull riding.

  Brawley’s back was flat against the seat, and his shoulders were hanging off the back of the bike.

  The bat-thing latched onto his body. Its claws punctured his thighs, his sides, his damaged chest.

  The thing’s neck stretched like that of a snapping turtle. The head, an eyeless lump covered in bristly black fur, lurched forward. Its toothy maw opened wide and whipped toward Brawley’s face.

  Brawley shoved the Glock forward.

  The mouth enveloped his hand halfway up the forearm. Dagger-like teeth plunged into his flesh, punching through the meat and snapping his bone.

  But in the same instant, Brawley pulled the trigger. The pistol bucked. The creature’s back exploded. Its body went limp, released him, and sailed away into their back stream.

  Brawley’s arm yanked back hard, snagged in the dead thing’s razor teeth.

  For a terrible second, he lay flat against the seat of the bike, trying to tug his arm free as the teeth of the dead thing, still locked onto him, sliced his flesh.

  Roaring, Brawley yanked hard. The bat-thing snapped free and disappeared into the swirling mists behind them.

  Unfortunately, Brawley’s forearm, hand, and Glock went with it.

  Brawley jerked upright, threw an arm around Remi’s waist. For a second, he stared in primal horror at the fountain of blood spraying from the stump where his arm had been.

  But even as he watched, new bones sprouted from his abbreviated arm. A second later, he was flexing a skeletal hand already disappearing beneath writhing layers of vein and tendon and muscle fiber.

  Then he was whole again.

  Amazing.

  But he had no time to dwell on this incredible event, because at that moment the fog shifted, thinning and breaking apart. The motorcycle raced from the clouds like an aircraft coming in for a landing.

  Just like that, everything changed. The Harley was racing atop a crimson highway crossing a dusty wasteland.

  Brawley squinted, sandblasted with grit, and inhaled through his nose, breathing the hot air and recognizing its otherworldly smells.

  Remi slid to a stop, kicking up a cloud of reddish dust that drifted off into the parched wasteland. “Where the hell are we, handsome?”

  “My dream,” he said.

  With a pang of unease, Brawley glanced down and was pleased to see no corpses staring up from the crystalline road.

  Then he looked up. No eyes, no tiger. Just the churning purple sky.

  Dead ahead stood the little adobe building from his dream.

  “What do we do?” Remi asked.

  “Keep going,” Brawley said. “I got a hunch about this key.”

  They drew up to the windowless red structure, which looked like a crude frontier house. Its beams were black, reminding Brawley of the dream forest he’d navigated.

  He looked behind them.

  The land stretched away in a flat pan interrupted only intermittently by the scattered and twisted silhouettes of lifeless trees.

  No buttes or mesas. No hill. No forest of black spikes tipped with impaled humanoids.

  The dream in the RV had been a lie just as Sage had proposed. Somehow, the Tiger Mage had tinged it with horror.

  But those things weren’t here, and neither was the Tiger Mage.

  Thunder rumbled across the sky. The wind picked up, blasting them with grit and filling Brawley’s nose with strange smells like spices from another plane of existence.

  That’s what this was. An alternate universe.

  “Why would your parents bring you here?” Remi asked.

  Brawley shrugged. “The house, maybe. Or something inside.”

  “All things considered,” Remi said, “I have to say I like my parents’ wedding gifts better. Speaking of which, I wish we had those grenades right now.”

  The building had a low porch decked and roofed in dark planks and a door hewn of the same wood.

  Pistol in hand, Brawley crossed the porch, clocking hollowly across the planks like an old-time gunslinger.

  He pressed his ear to the door.

  All was silent.

  Overhead, thunder boomed, growing louder.

  The sturdy door was fitted with a brass knob and plate.

  Brawley slid the key home and turned it experimentally. The lock clicked. The door swung open.

  For a fraction of a second, Brawley saw th
e whitewashed floor of the crude little cabin and a rough table surrounded by wooden stools.

  Then he stumbled backward, raising his gun.

  Beside him, Remi cursed and brought the stubby shotgun to her shoulder.

  A robed figure had materialized just inside the doorway. A woman, judging by the shape of the body hidden beneath the emerald green garment. From the shadowy interior of its obscuring hood spilled curly locks as red as fresh blood.

  “Welcome to Red Haven,” the woman said.

  “Thank you, I—”

  “Your parents created this place for you to study The Tome of Seven Strands.”

  The woman’s image wavered, and Brawley understood that he was witnessing another holographic clip. But who was this woman? Some friend of his parents?

  “Cross the threshold. Enter Red Haven, and I will tell you my name and how to find me in your world.”

  With a deafening crack, a bolt of lightning struck just beyond the porch, making the hairs on Brawley’s arms stand on end.

  Normally, he would hold the door for Remi, but under these strange circumstances, he reckoned he had better go first. After all, the apparition was talking to him not Remi, and the house might be tuned to his psionic signature.

  “Come,” the robed woman said with another gesture.

  Brawley stepped through the door with Remi at his heels.

  “Welcome,” the woman said. “My name is—”

  Then all hell broke loose.

  The woman’s image broke apart, smashed by the figure that charged through it straight at Brawley.

  23

  Hands seized Brawley’s throat, and for a fraction of a second, he stared into the sneering face of his attacker. It was a human face. A face he’d seen before.

  It was one of the thugs from Tammy’s trailer park in Marathon. Only it had changed. All the color had vanished from the thug’s face. The tattooed teardrop contrasted sharply with the snow-white flesh. The thug’s eyes glared into Brawley’s, full of malice. There were no irises, no whites, nothing but uniform darkness as black and shiny as beetle shells.

  Brawley shot from the hip.

  The thug’s body buckled, but the cold hands continued squeezing Brawley’s throat.

  Other attackers slammed into Brawley from both sides.

  Remi’s shotgun boomed.

  Crunching blows slammed into Brawley’s head and body. Fists slammed into his face, his ear, the side of his neck. A flailing forearm crashed down across his back, and a foot stomped down on his knee.

  Brawley’s leg buckled.

  Brawley dropped into a crouch and snapped free of the choking hands. He was surrounded by a forest of legs.

  Hands seized his shirt, his shoulder, his hair. One cold hand raked across his face narrowly missing his eyes. A finger shoved into his mouth trying to fishhook him.

  Brawley bit down hard and yanked, tearing the offending finger away, then drove forward, breaking free of the grasping hands and slamming into one of the assailants, bowling him over and knocking him across the room.

  Brawley shot to his feet, mind reeling.

  Because he recognized this attacker, too.

  It was the guy from the gun shop in Marathon. The nice guy, the PBR fan who’d recognized him.

  Holy shit.

  But whatever had happened to the thug had also happened to this man. His skin and hair were pure white, and his eyes were all black.

  The man started to rise.

  Brawley pulled a mental trigger. A telekinetic round punched a hole right between the shining black eyes of the gun store owner.

  A powerful blow smashed into the back of Brawley’s head, filling his skull with sparks and sending him sprawling to the floor.

  Thanks to his crackling Carnal energy, Brawley reacted with superhuman speed and twisted as he fell. In the same instant, he fired the XDS.

  His attacker, another of the thugs from Tammy’s neighborhood, fell back, shot through the chest.

  Another attacker raced forward.

  An unholy trident of recognition, revulsion, and regret skewered Brawley’s heart.

  It was Maypole. A pure white Maypole with obsidian eyes.

  Flanked by thugs, Maypole rushed forward with his scrawny arms raised and his bathrobe fluttering behind him like a terry cloth cape.

  Brawley’s first instinct was to clean them with a telekinetic blast, but he couldn’t risk striking Remi, who was fighting near the door. Remi’s body could recover from damage, of course, but if a blast struck her skull, he would kill his love.

  So he whipped his head from left to right, ripping a line of telekinetic rounds across the abdomens of his attackers.

  They jerked with impact.

  Maypole folded and dropped.

  The thugs stumbled but kept coming.

  Then Maypole’s wife, her thick blond locks now white as mayonnaise, charged in from the side, glaring at Brawley through obsidian spheres.

  The crumpled paper sack fluttered from one fat fist. Her other hand bucked, billowing flame, and a tremendous roar filled the room.

  Brawley’s eye squinted shut as the round burned across his cheek, splitting the flesh and sideswiping the cheekbone hard enough to twist his head around.

  The pistol barked again and again. Bullets pounded into Brawley’s torso, knocking him backward.

  Brawley returned fire, pulling his mental trigger.

  The face of Maypole’s wife collapsed in on itself, and the woman dropped.

  The undead thugs had dragged themselves onto their feet again and were already lumbering toward him.

  Brawley blasted them with telekinetic rounds, knocking them back and buying space and time. He used this slight advantage to rise, steady himself, and assess his environment.

  Remi was off to one side, holding her own against two thugs. With a blur of speed, his Carnal wife swung the sawed-off shotgun, crushing one attacker’s skull with a powerful stroke. Bringing the weapon back around, she slammed the butt into her other attacker’s throat and sent him reeling.

  Then several other pale, black-eyed lunatics were rushing Brawley again.

  With a shudder of revulsion, Brawley recognized among them Maypole’s wife and the gun store guy, both of whose heads were blasted out of shape.

  He’d been thinking of them as zombies, the undead versions of people he’d known. But they were worse than zombies because even headshots didn’t stop them.

  Brawley pivoted, cutting an angle to make sure Remi remained outside his field of fire, and released the wallop of red force crackling in his arm. He imagined the blast spreading away. His brain, true to form, reacted under pressure with more precision than he could have expected during a calmer moment.

  The force leapt from his arm and spread away in the telekinetic equivalent of an open choke shotgun blast.

  The main mass of his attackers dropped, shattered by the blast, which broke bones and tore open torsos, and calved away chunks of pale flesh.

  Only the gun shop owner, shielded by the others, survived. He charged mindlessly forward.

  Brawley lashed out with a powerful kick that struck the man in the gut and tossed him across the room.

  As the man dragged himself once more to his feet, Brawley squeezed his mental trigger half a dozen times, punching holes in the zombie and sitting him down.

  Still the man labored to stand again.

  Meanwhile, the gory mess on the floor was doing its best to launch another attack as well. Decimated bodies flailed, flopping toward Brawley. Severed arms crawled in his direction.

  He drew his arm full of fresh energy and glanced toward where Remi was stomping the remains of her opponents.

  “Die fuckers!” Remi shouted, smashing their wriggling remains.

  Satisfied that she had them under control, Brawley turned back around and put the gun store owner out of his misery with half the force in his arm.

  Then he set to plinking the various limbs and body parts crawling doggedly towa
rd him. The zombies’ blood, thick and brown as old motor oil, filled the air with the ripe sweetness of summer roadkill.

  “You had a point earlier,” Brawley called to Remi. “This is the shittiest present I ever received. Now step back, darlin, and I’ll finish them off.”

  Remi glanced in his direction, fierce and beautiful. Her fighting spirit was in full bloom, and her eyes glowed like furnaces. She spat on the floor. “I got it,” she said, and stomped the wrist of a hand reaching for her. “I’ll turn their bones to soup.”

  But then a thin black line raced across Brawley’s vision and struck Remi in the chest. She froze like a statue in mid stomp, her beautiful face twisted in surprise.

  The attack had come from behind Brawley.

  He whirled to fight, but halfway around, something jabbed him in the chest. He froze in place, paralyzed but still able to see and think.

  Before him stood a short man in a baggy bowling shirt and Wayfarer shades.

  24

  It was the man’s hat, however—a little fedora that looked dumber than hell—that reminded Brawley of Callie’s warning.

  This was Dutchman’s Cosmic assassin, Uno.

  Before even registering these revelations, Brawley tried to kill the man. But he couldn’t shoot or strike Uno because his muscles were locked in supernatural paralysis by the thing that had jabbed his chest.

  One of Uno’s fingers, he realized. From the middle of the assassin’s left hand, a finger had elongated several feet like a thin tentacle.

  Unable to physically attack, Brawley attacked psychically, pulling his mental trigger and targeting the nose piece of Uno’s sunglasses.

  The air in front of Uno’s face rippled like the surface of a pond struck by a small pebble. The assassin himself didn’t so much as flinch.

  “The power mage,” Uno said. His voice was strange, almost matter of fact. But the corners of his mouth lifted in what was almost a smile. “You will serve me.”

  That’s what you think, asshole, Brawley thought. Maybe he couldn’t attack the guy physically or telekinetically, but he still had another option.