And somewhere down in the drainage systems beneath Wal-Mart, the vampires responded.
Their earsplitting screeches gave even the ninjas pause as they turned to face a new set of enemies. Knowing how little time remained, Sister Jasmine stumbled toward one of the darkened panels of glass at the end of the aisle. “Einstein! Parking lot!” she yelled, not knowing if the dog would have enough time to respond.
Behind her she heard howls of fury as the undead burst into the room. Ninjas might be quick, but vampires were quicker. And they were also one of the few wasteland creatures that would not attack a nun on sight.
Sister Jasmine’s 9 mm Glock took out the window, and she threw herself into the dazzling sunlight of the parking lot. There was no time. She pressed a bloody palm to the touch lock and pulled herself into the driver’s seat.
Despite her training, she did not pull her Stallion away from the store. Not immediately. She waited outside the dark hole of the Wal-Mart for seconds longer than was necessary, listening to the shrieks inside. But there was no sign of Einstein.
A few minutes later she was on the road again, blazing a path back to the safe zone, a med-sponge pressed to her bleeding hand. She had no idea why ninjas would try to capture a member of the Weeping Orders, but it didn’t really matter. She’d lost her supplies and her dog. In the finest tradition of her holy order, there was going to be hell to pay.
Canticle 2: Actus Contritionis
Sister Jasmine recited her sins before the green glow of the Badger Grove auto-confessional. She could not, of course, be forgiven for her violations of the fifth commandment: she was not genuinely remorseful, and given the perils of the wasteland travel, she would probably kill again. Nor could she genuinely repent of her anger and grief over Einstein.
But she had entertained impure thoughts; she had taken the Lord’s name in vain; she was proud. If she died in the pursuit of Einstein, she wanted her soul to be as light as possible.
The priest on the screen dispensed her penance. As always, Jasmine felt a certain sense of relief as the burden of her sins was partially lifted. She made the Stations of the Cross, kneeling at the ash-gray foot of each bronze marker on the Road of Penance. Then she got back in the re-fueled and weaponized Silver Stallion, and went forth to bring the pain.
The information provided by the Whispering Orders suggested that the Wal-Mart attack had been masterminded by the so-called “Daimyo of the Wasteland.” The man who now held Einstein was a rumored telepath who had first entered the wasteland five years ago, and had since built up a cult following among the victims of cell-phone-induced madness. He had, the Whispering Nuns reported, been recruiting large numbers of the afflicted to dig for him in the Chicago Crater. A shantytown called New Tokyo had sprung up around the La Grange ridge of the crater.
Officially, Jasmine’s mission was simple: Infiltrate the New Tokyo settlement, determine the nature of the Daimyo’s interest in the Weeping Orders, and react appropriately. But unofficially, Jasmine wanted her dog back. She prayed that whoever had Einstein had yet to dismantle him. If they had . . .
Jasmine floored the gas pedal. The Silver Stallion raced along the remains of I-65, weaving in and out of the burnt hulks of cars and the half-stripped carcasses of giant robots.
At the Rensall exit, the road became impassable, and she had to switch over to tank treads. Jasmine fought free of the carnage of I-65 and turned the Stallion toward the burnt plains of the Rensall desert. The occasional cluster of cornstalks still thrust their way up through the night-black soil of Rensall, but mostly the horizon was clear of vegetation, save for an ungainly pack of triffids lurching across the horizon. The carnivorous plants seemed to be pursuing something. She hesitated, then turned the Stallion toward the triffids.
There had been times in the past when Jasmine had seen situations unfolding and decided it wouldn’t hurt to investigate. She was usually wrong. In the wasteland, investigation almost always hurt. But it was her moral duty; she couldn’t just pass by the scene of a triffid attack without checking to see if a human was in danger.
The Stallion rolled over the remains of a wall, and as the windshield lowered, Jasmine saw that the triffids were now circled around the twisted trunk of what had formerly been an apple tree. A tiny human figure stood in front of it, waving a small object at the approaching plants.
Jasmine shoved the Stallion out of tank mode and gunned the motor. There was a satisfying shredding sound as the first triffid went under the wheels in a splatter of green and yellow. The other plants turned, lashing out at the car with their whip-like stingers. One of the stingers slapped against the driver’s window, but the greasy venom trail it left behind was surprisingly thin. They must have exhausted their poison sacs elsewhere, Jasmine thought. The human by the tree was still standing, still alive.
Jasmine pulled up as close as she could and threw up the door release on the passenger side. “Get in!” she yelled through the Stallioncom.
The girl by the tree hesitated only for a second, then launched herself at the Stallion. She managed to scramble inside even as another snakelike stinger whipped against the doorframe.
“Ow!” the girl said. Then she turned to Jasmine. “Thanks a lot, Mrs. Nun!”
Up close, Jasmine could tell something was off about this girl. She wore a purple backpack and looked about twelve years old; her face was framed by carrot-red pigtails that stuck out in opposite directions. A splash of freckles decorated improbably bright skin. She grinned at Jasmine, displaying a chaotic herd of white teeth barely kept in check by the metal fence of braces. Her patched blue T-shirt was wet with venom.
Another triffid stinger smacked into the windshield. Jasmine reversed the car and aimed for what looked like an open stretch of desert. In a minute, they were clear.
“Who are you?” Jasmine asked, sliding her free hand down to her gun and laying her finger along the barrel. She kept her eyes ostensibly on the road, her left hand on the wheel.
“I’m Capers Williams, Girl Detective,” the girl said, “and this is my assistant, Flaminel Bell. Together we fight crime.” She extended a grubby hand in Jasmine’s direction. “Glad to meet-cha! Do you have any crimes we can assist you with today?”
“You’re an android,” Jasmine muttered.
“I sure am!” Capers said, putting her hand back on the window. “But don’t worry! We’re not like those uprising robots—although I’m sure they had valid political concerns!—We’re here to help people. By solving crimes!” She leaned back against the passenger seat and looked expectantly up at Jasmine.
Jasmine kept her hand on her gun. “Where’s your assistant?”
“Oh.” The girl’s eyes grew wide and Jasmine’s stomach tensed. “I guess he must still be hiding. You can come out now!”
There was a zipping sound from the girl’s purple backpack. Capers wormed out of the backpack’s straps and shifted the bag in front of her. A series of thin, string-like legs emerged, followed by a furry black mass.
“This is my assistant, Flaminel Bell,” Capers said as the black mass scuttled up her arm. “He’s a spider!”
The furry head of the animatronic toy peered shyly at Jasmine from the android’s shoulder. The muppetbot had a pair of large googly eyes that slid in different directions.
Jasmine grimaced. Androids.
“Who owns you?” she asked.
The girl’s grin faded. She looked at the floor. The furry spider followed suit, tilting its head toward the floor, its pupils clicking in a vaguely downward direction.
“We don’t know what happened to our parents,” Capers said quietly. “They were lost at sea when the comet hit. Personally, we believe they were probably washed ashore on an undiscovered island and became its king and queen. One day they will sail back to America and come and find us. Until then, we will do our part to restore civilization by traveling the post-apocalyptic wasteland and solving mysteries.” She looked up. “Do you have any mysteries for us to solve?” The spider
removed a tiny white cloth from somewhere and blew its non-existent nose.
“Sorry,” Jasmine said. She took her hand off her gun. Nothing happened. The girl and spider remained in the passenger seat, looking hopeful.
“I’ll give you a ride to Gary,” Jasmine continued. “It’s a safe enough town these days. I’m sure there will be crimes there that you can solve.”
The girl sank back in her seat and then jolted upright. “You’re lying! You’ve got a crime we can solve! Flaminel Bell is psychic, you know.”
“Really.” Jasmine spared a glance at the fuzzy shape on Capers’ shoulder. An idea was forming in the back of her mind. “What am I thinking right now?”
“You’re . . .” Capers cocked her head, listening. “He says you’re thinking that his psychic abilities might be useful against the telepathic cult leader who kidnapped your dogbot! Wait—there’s a telepathic cult leader?”
Jasmine grunted.
“Please let us solve your case, please, please!” Capers bounced anxiously in her seat. “Not only is Bell a psychic, but I have a photographic memory and encyclopedic knowledge and a magnifying glass! We could call it the Case of the Stolen Dogbot! It’ll be great!”
Jasmine considered her options. On one hand, androids could make useful allies; they were strong, fast, and completely committed to the task at hand. On the other, they did not share human concerns. They were slaves to their programming. They tended to focus on whatever their programmed specialty was, and lose interest once the relevant task was completed.
“Are you Asimovians?” she asked.
Capers made a face. “Of course not! Who wants to follow boring old laws? They’d get in the way of us solving mysteries!”
That would make combat situations easier, but it was not necessarily reassuring. Jasmine directed a sideways glance at the spider, and thought about the Whispering Sisters’ report about the telepathic Daimyo of the Wasteland.
She remembered Einstein yelping in the Wal-Mart.
“Okay,” she said, sending up a quick mental prayer. “You’re on the case.”
Canticle 3: Defende Nos in Proelio
Through the grace of God and the intercession of Saint Christopher, Sister Jasmine and her companions reached the outskirts of the Craterlands without encountering much more than the ragtag remains of a shambling zombie army. Jasmine took a certain amount of pride in the ease with which the Silver Stallion tore through the moaning horde, but without Einstein yapping beside her, it wasn’t the same.
They stopped to trade for water on the outskirts of Gary. From the edge of the Craterside cliffs, Jasmine gazed across the peculiar glistening plains of Old Chicago. Small pools of water still collected in the basin of what had once been Lake Michigan, before its vaporization.
“I heard they had really good pizza here,” Capers said, eying the cracked vastness of the Crater. “It must have been nice to eat pizza, huh?”
The girl detective was striding around with the most irritating cheerfulness. Jasmine bit down on her temper—do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouth, she reminded herself—and said, “Has your spider picked up any signs of psychic activity?”
“Flaminel Bell,” Capers corrected her. “And he’s not anybody’s spider. He’s a detective.”
Jasmine suppressed her irritation. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Has Detective Bell picked up any psychic activity in the area?”
Capers cocked her head. “He says there are definitely some telepaths to the north. And some other people he’s having a hard time seeing.”
Those would be the ninjas, Jasmine thought. She felt a flare of anger as she remembered Einstein disappearing under a black swarm of shinobi-no-mono.
“In The Secret of Red Gate Farm, Nancy Drew disguised herself in white robes and hoods to infiltrate a nature cult’s cave hideaway,” Capers said enthusiastically. “We could do that!”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Jasmine said. She checked her Saint Dymphna’s medal of psychic shielding to make sure it was still in place. “Can your—can Detective Bell shield both of your minds to make sure they don’t know we’re coming?”
“But they already know we’re coming,” Capers said. “They’re almost here.”
For a moment Jasmine forgot herself. By the time the first ninja assassin slipped over the ridge, she’d taken the Lord’s name in vain at least thirteen times. She’d also managed to get the modified Gatling gun out of the coffin in the backseat and onto its hood mount.
“Take that, bad guys!” Capers Williams howled while .50-caliber jacketed rounds tore through the air. She brandished a Borrible-brand slingshot. “Evil will never triumph!”
Detective Bell stopped cowering on Capers’ shoulder long enough to tap the girl detective on the arm and point at the ninja cartwheeling towards them. Capers took the approaching ninja out with a well-aimed shot to the eye. The Detective went back to hiding his fuzzy face in her synthetic hair.
Turning the Gatling gun on the hood mount, Jasmine cut down a line of approaching black figures and then swept the gun back again to eliminate those who had managed to backflip out of the way.
“Get in the car!” she shouted at the child detectives.
Thankfully the androids obeyed some orders. Capers flung the door open and dove inside. Jasmine flipped the hood latch up on the Gatling and moved around to the driver’s door, blasting cartwheeling ninjas with her Glock.
“Don’t worry!” Capers shouted from somewhere inside the vehicle. “I know how to hotwire cars! It’s essential detective knowledge!”
The image of Capers’ tampering with the Stallion’s precious circuitry alarmed Jasmine. She took her eyes off the approaching ninjas and turned towards the door, realizing even as she did so that she’d made a mistake.
The last thing she saw before the ninja’s foot struck was the toy spider pressed against the glass, waving its legs in warning, its googly eyes jiggling in alarm.
Canticle 4: Actus Spei
Jasmine woke. Her face was pressed into a cold surface. Every part of her body ached.
She twitched, about to roll over, then thought better of it. She listened instead.
The sound of her own breathing. Distant shouts and rumbles. The grate of stone on stone, and ringing clangs of metal.
“We know you’re awake,” a voice said. The accent sounded vaguely Irish, but not like Sister Brigid’s Dublin accent; the words were weirdly shaped, and the voice rose and fell in the wrong places.
Jasmine rolled over. Her face smarted as the blood rushed to it. She was lying on the floor of some kind of small cave. A torch in the corner cast flickering light through the grid of bars that separated her from the humans standing on the other side.
There were three of them. A tall, grim-faced man with a beard and wearing a type of battered leather armor aimed a gun at her. There was a bulge at the hip of the thin, frail-looking man on the far right, covered by the fabric of a gray overshirt. The mid-sized white man at the center had a knife in his belt, but no other visible weapon. His arms were folded on his chest. He carried himself with a kind of nervous authority.
Jasmine clambered to her feet. She tried to move slowly, and keep her muscles relaxed. The metal bars across the front of her prison were obviously scavenged, probably from the melted remains of skyscrapers. They’d been crudely forged together to provide a grid-like barrier; the gaps between the bars were uneven, and some sections lacked horizontal bars. She hoped that when she examined the door hinge that the work there would prove equally shoddy.
“Who are you?” Her voice was rough, and her mouth tasted of old blood. She needed water.
“I am the Daimyo of the Wasteland,” the central figure said, in his strange not-Irish accent. He looked less nervous when he spoke, but something about his posture still suggested discomfort.
Not a born leader, Jasmine thought. The man’s face twitched.
“I heard that,” he said angrily. “We removed your medal. All your th
oughts are open to me. I know all about you, Jasmine Brown.”
Jasmine stifled the thought she might have had in response. She focused on receiving information: noticing the hot, humid air drifting in from the tunnel, the relative youth of the Daimyo, the fact that there didn’t seem to be anything remotely Asian about him. Goddamn anime fans, a distant part of her brain whispered before she could snuff it out.
“But you know nothing about me,” the man continued. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his neck. “While you and your Order have been hoarding human knowledge in the wasteland, I’ve been bringing order back to the world. I alone can communicate with the cellular-psychotics; I alone formed the army that took over Mukwongo, and Elk Grove, and New Tokyo. My army grows at every stop. Once we have finished forging our weapons from the remains of Old Chicago, there will be nothing that can stop us! I already rule part of the wasteland, Ms. Brown. Soon I will rule it all.”
The grim-faced man did not look particularly happy during the Daimyo’s monologue. He darted a look at Jasmine, but she kept her face—and her mind—as blank as possible.
When the Daimyo seemed to have run out of steam, she prompted him with a question. “So what do you want with me?”
“Your mind,” the young man said. He looked vaguely uncomfortable. Apparently the threatening kind of histrionic boasting came less easily to him. “To complete the rebuilding of the wasteland we need the information your Order has been collecting. Technology, Ms. Brown,” he said, warming to his theme. “Technology that your Order has been unfairly hoarding inside your ‘safe zone.’”
“With respects, Tono—” the grim-faced man said.
“Daimyo,” the young man whispered out of the corner of his mouth.
The man grimaced in frustration. “With respects, she doesn’t need to know this. Take the information from her.”
The Daimyo frowned, then nodded, licking his lips nervously.
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