The Breaking

by Marcus Pelegrimas

  “What I want is to set things in their proper order. The strong are supposed to prosper through strength! Not by keeping their heads down and staying away from gnats who’ve survived through sheer procreation and strut like kings because they can throw lead pellets in mass quantities or burn their own cities to the ground. We know how to take the machines out of the picture. We know how to knock the humans back down to where they need to be. All we lack is the will to put this knowledge to use. I may have forced our hand, but can you honestly tell me that a part of you doesn’t want to thank me for it?”

  After a heavy pause, Minh sighed and said, “This will get bloody. Bloodier than it already has. Bloodier than anyone could anticipate. Bloodier, even, then you may anticipate. What will be left when all that blood is spilled? What will be left when the humans retaliate and start those fires they’re so fond of? What will be left for us when the world finally stops burning?”

  “I don’t know,” Liam said with an eagerness that Paige could feel from where she hid. “Let’s find out!”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Twelve miles north of

  Raton, New Mexico

  “So what now?” Cole asked.

  Paige’s voice came through in a rush. While telling him the basics of what she’d learned, she’d been running down side streets and hopping fences from one backyard to another. She’d listened to his update without panting more than Cole after climbing too many stairs. “Now, we get our asses to another safe house and prepare to clean this city out. I need to mix up a batch of Half Breed bait to try and draw enough of those things away from here and give the locals a chance to get out.”

  “Anything other than that? This sounds like some pretty big news.”

  “I was kinda hoping to hear a good idea or two from you,” she said. “I hate to say that I’m out of my depth here, but . . .”

  “Yeah,” Cole sighed. “Even with your Army buddies we may be out of our depth. Have you tried calling them again yet?”

  “No,” she snapped. “I sent Rico to check them out and I’m leaving it at that. After what happened with you, Adderson deserves to deal with him. And what about your wolf girl?”

  “We’re meeting her somewhere in New Mexico.”

  “Jessup’s idea?”

  “Yep.”

  Although the rattling on her end of the phone had stopped, Paige’s breathing was getting heavier. “He’s kind of a hick, but that backwoods stuff of his may be what we need right now. Should keep you off anyone’s radar. Let me know what you come up with.”

  “Will do.” Cole tapped the front of the phone, realized it wasn’t his own touch-screen beauty, and put the sparkling monstrosity away. The scenery flowing past him on the other side of the Ford’s window consisted of dusty rock and shrubs that were tough enough to survive the punishment doled out by a sun that only grew fiercer as it shone farther south of Chicago. “Why the hell is your window open?” he grunted.

  “Because the fresh air feels good,” Jessup replied. “Don’t tell me you expect there to be AC blowin’ on your face no matter where you go. Besides, it’s a dry heat.”

  “You know what else is dry heat? The middle of a freaking oven. Crank the AC.”

  “So what’s Paige got to say?” Jessup asked without even looking at the control to raise his window.

  She’d told him the highlights of what she’d gleaned from the conversation between Liam and Minh, so Cole relayed that to Jessup while staring out the window.

  Finally, Jessup said, “No need to stare outside like a mooning hound. If that gal was around, we’d feel her.”

  Cole’s scars weren’t burning and he couldn’t see Cecile anywhere outside. Still, he couldn’t quite get himself to lower his guard. “Are you sure she’s going to meet up with us?”

  “If she wasn’t, there ain’t a lot we could do about it.” Since he wasn’t taking any comfort from that, Jessup added, “Sometimes you just gotta do your thing and have faith that whatever you set into motion before will keep on turning.”

  “You think she heard anything I said about what Paige found?”

  “They can sniff out quite a lot, but I don’t think it’s the same for hearing. At least, not for one as inexperienced as her, especially since she’d have to hear past this damn powerful engine to put any pieces together. I still can’t believe Paige heard all of that from two Full Bloods without them knowing she was there.”

  “There was some sort of interference. She says it messed up a little bit of everything, including cell phones. Whatever it was, it distracted the Full Bloods long enough for them to have their meeting and leave before they noticed she was there. She got away and was still running when I talked to her.”

  “I suppose that ain’t too surprising. Considering how everything’s been going, the Full Bloods don’t have to worry if we hear them talking or not.” When Cole stared at him, Jessup added, “Time to face up to it. We’re scrambling just to see another sunrise. The quicker we wrap our heads around that, the better. We’re almost in town, so I’d better tell you what I got in mind for when we get there. You do much hunting lately?”

  “Do werewolves count?”

  “You think I let that Full Blood girl run out on her own so we could get enough privacy to talk about hunting squirrel? Of course werewolves count! Have you been out hunting since the Mud Flu cleared up or not?”

  “Actually, no,” Cole admitted. “We’ve been busy with the Lancroft business, the Nymar, and then I was locked up. The whole prison thing happened when I was hoping for some time to rest.”

  “Typical Monkey’s Paw scenario.” Seeing the blank look on Cole’s face, Jessup scolded, “Don’t you ever read? ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ is a short story about making wishes. It’s this charm that grants ’em but turns them around to bite you in the ass through some loophole. You wish for a million dollars, it gives you a million that was stolen from some bank. You want time away from hunting, you wind up in prison.”

  “Now I see why Cecile was so quick to get the hell away from you.”

  “The reason I brought up hunting,” Jessup said without trying to disguise the sharpness in his voice, “is because it’s been getting mighty crazy out here. A lot of Skinners, me included, have been stumbling onto plenty of things that even we thought was bullshit or myth. Some of them were just laying low because of Half Breeds in the area. Just so you know, Half Breeds love the desert. Wide open spaces, plenty of room to run, folks living out in trailers or cabins that nobody’ll hardly miss.”

  “Tons of little caves to use for dens?”

  Jessup raised his eyebrows. “Very good. Most of the critters out here hid because they didn’t have what it took to survive a pack of Half Breeds. What’s so funny?”

  “Did you just say critters?” Cole said through a persistent chuckle. “Why not just call them varmints, Yosemite Sam?”

  “I can see why Paige likes you. Smartasses travel in packs. Anyway, after the Mud Flu cut the Half Breed population, the things that were hiding from them didn’t have to hide no more. What we’re after in Raton is something you ain’t gonna find in any Skinner journal. At least, not one from this century. I checked.”

  When they passed a green sign on the side of the interstate that told them they were within ten miles of Raton, Jessup eased his foot off the gas and leaned forward to scan the horizon. “Cecile wants to hide and Randolph wants us to guard her, but we’re not playing this by any Full Blood’s rules. I sent her ahead to sniff out some Half Breeds in the desert. When she finds ’em, she’ll have to bring me a few of their hides in one piece so I can get a few of their sweat glands and mix up something that will make her smell like one of them and not a Full Blood.”

  “Can we really make that?”

  Jessup let out an exasperated sigh. “What the hell did Paige teach you, boy? Anyway, that won’t keep her busy for too long. She should find some Half Breeds, but bringing back pieces large enough to use will be tricky.”

&nb
sp; “What if those things kill her?” Cole asked.

  Stabbing a finger at Cole, Jessup said, “Just because that girl is scared and young, don’t forget what she is. She’s a Full Blood, so she can handle any Half Breeds. We also need to watch her to see if she’s setting us up for another fall. Understand me?”

  Cole nodded, but hesitantly.

  “When we get to town, you’ll follow my lead,” Jessup said. “You’ll just have to trust me on the rest because there ain’t time to tell you every little thing.”

  “The hell there isn’t,” Cole said while opening the glove compartment and digging beneath the receipts, napkins, tire pressure gauges, and Handi Wipes to find a snub-nosed .38 revolver.

  “How’d you know that was in there?”

  “Skinners are more likely to have one of these in the glove compartment than they are a pink slip.”

  “So you know all about us, huh?” Jessup asked. “If you know so damn much, you should know there aren’t a lot of us left out here and that we have to stick together no matter how badly we got along before. Oh yeah,” he added when he saw the expression that drifted across Cole’s face. “I remember what a dick you were to me in Philly.”

  “Actually, I remember you as the dick.”

  “We need to put that aside. More importantly, you need to put that gun aside.”

  Cole tossed the revolver back into the glove compartment and slapped the little folding door shut. “There. Now since I’m willing to go along with you, the least you can do is show me the same respect and tell me what the hell you’re dragging me into. If you can’t trust me that far, then I might as well get out of this truck right now.”

  “All right. But first I need you to tell me somethin’.” Placing his hands on the steering wheel at ten and two, Jessup turned to point a cockeyed stare at Cole when he asked, “Ever seen a gargoyle?”

  The road circling around Mt. Calvary Cemetery ran straight along the eastern border of a burial ground surrounded on all sides by a cement wall that angled steeply up or down to accommodate the natural flow of the terrain. Naked trees scattered among dry scrub, making the barren stretch of land look as if it had been scooped straight from the desert. Unlike the lonely outside of town, this one’s graves were marked.

  Jessup parked on the northern edge of the cemetery on Hillside Road. From there he led Cole around the perimeter of the cemetery like a Scout leader taking his troop on a tour of the Grand Canyon. “See there?” he said while waving his hand to a chipped stone statue erected on the cement barrier.

  As he had with all the other statues he was shown, Cole nodded. “Yeah. I see it. It’s a statue of a dog.”

  “What about that one?”

  A few yards away from the knee-high statue of Man’s Best Friend, there was another, much larger, statue. Those two were part of a collection were set up around the cemetery that included a few wolves and one old man whose features had been worn away by the elements. Examining the next one Jessup pointed out, Cole could only find a few hastily spray-painted words on the side of the sculpture. “It’s a horse. So what?”

  “So what? Take a look at those up there. Don’t they strike you as peculiar?”

  He looked at the row of statues scattered unevenly near the wall. The cement barrier was barely as tall as he was and seemed to be there not so much for decoration as to keep drunk drivers from interrupting the peaceful slumber of residents interred on the other side. While they weren’t exactly works of art, the statues on the wall itself were of birds, and one winged creatures that had enough detail for Cole to make out ridges of skin above the claws it used to grip its perch. One wing was outstretched and the other was partially folded against its back. Its eyes were blank. A stumpy beak was partially open to reveal poorly chiseled teeth.

  “It does seem kinda weird that these would be here at all,” he said. “There aren’t any other decorations that I can see.”

  “Very good. Always trust your instinct. You’re a Skinner. If something feels off-kilter to you, it probably is.”

  “You’ve never been to Chicago, have you? The off-kilter alarm has to be shut off sometimes.”

  “Don’t let the twang in my voice fool you, son. I’ve been to plenty of places, and when it comes to hunting the things we do, chasing them in the cities is easy. Never gets too dark. Out here,” Jessup said as he placed a hand on the wall and let his eyes wander upward, “once the sun goes down, it’s just you and the stars.”

  “I’ve been in the dark too,” Cole said. “Are you going to tell me what I should be looking for or do we wait until Frank and Lambert get here?”

  Ignoring that, the older Skinner approached the horse statue, looked it over for less than a second and slapped its flank. “See this here? No artistic value. I’m not going to say that every gargoyle on every rooftop is somethin’ special, but take a look at this one. First of all, the placement. Gargoyles on buildings mean all sorts of things, from good luck to keeping bad spirits away. Those are usually up high and made to look nice or scary or whatnot. Like, for example, that one there,” he added, waving at the stone creature on the wall with the birds. Turning his attention back to the spray-painted horse, he said, “These others aren’t anywhere near a roof. There aren’t any other decorative type things about. Even the wall looks like it took all of two minutes to build. Second, the way it’s standing. Decorations are made to look nice. See how the muscles on this one’s back are all swollen and straining?”

  “Look at the eyes. It looks scared.”

  “Very good! Now touch it.”

  Cole looked closer and reached out to tap a finger against the spot on the statue’s back that Jessup was staring at. It felt like rock.

  Since Cole wasn’t impressed yet, Jessup led him to the next statue. “See the way that dog is cringing? And that crow’s obviously squawking at something.”

  At the third and forth gargoyles, Jessup pointed out how some layers of rock were thicker than others in similar spots on each sculpture’s chest and ribs. They’d gone all the way back to the horse when he proudly said, “But this is the best one of them all! This is why I parked here, so you could see this one for sure. You would’ve scored big-time bonus points if you would’ve spotted this on yer own, but we’ll see.”

  “Bonus points?”

  “Yeah. You’re a video game guy, right?”

  At first only Stu seemed to know about his former life in Seattle. Slowly but surely, ever since he and Paige had monitored the comings and goings at Lancroft’s old house in Philadelphia, more Skinners got hold of that bit of news. Needless to say, a bunch of gun-toting monster hunters weren’t impressed with the multiplayer maps of Hammer Strike’s lava level.

  “Okay, I’ll skip the bonus points,” Cole said. “Just tell me what the hell I’m supposed to be looking at.”

  Jessup stepped up to the statue as if sneaking up on a sleeping cat. Pointing to its ribs, he asked, “See these scratches here and here?”

  Cole didn’t step right up to the statue because a car was approaching from Hillside. Already imagining how bad it looked to have the two of them lurking outside a cemetery to size up its statuary, he kept his distance and waited for the car to turn north and head farther into town.

  “Stop being so squirrelly,” Jessup scolded. “Look at these scratches. It’s important.”

  “More important than a Full Blood charging into town in a matter of minutes?”

  “Could be.”

  The scratches in question were right beneath Jessup’s finger. “Let me guess,” Cole grunted. “No artistic value?”

  For the first time since he’d met Jessup, the grizzled Skinner looked genuinely impressed with him. “That’s right! There ain’t no chips along the edges and the texture is smooth, which means the scratches are part of the statue and not just wear and tear. They’re in the wrong spot and go in the wrong direction to have been made by anything flying off the road. That, combined with these thick patches along the sides and bac
k, tell me there are real gargoyles here!”

  “And how did you know these statues were here at all?”

  “Spotted ’em while passing through town a few months ago,” Jessup told him. “Gotta keep yer eyes open for this sort of thing.”

  “How slow do you drive?”

  “See, here’s the tricky thing with gargoyles,” Jessup said without paying any mind to Cole’s sarcasm. “It’s the same tricky thing that has to do with a lot of the smaller beasties that have been surfacing lately. Since things like these have been hidden away or sleeping or whatever the hell else, Skinners haven’t seen them for years. And,” he added just as Cole opened his mouth to hurry him along, “since these things ain’t bloodsuckers or shapeshifters, there’s no way for most Skinners to feel them in their scars anymore.”

  “So Skinners have seen gargoyles before?”

  “Gargoyles were mentioned in almost every Skinner journal from the 1750s all the way through the 1800s. That’s when a Full Blood claimed this whole continent and drove ’em underground. I spotted the first one for myself when I was scouring graveyards for more Half Breed dens or Shunkaws. Did some research and now I’m spotting them all over.”

  Pulling open his vest, Jessup revealed a harness that might have started off as a shoulder holster but had been modified to carry two wooden clubs that were each just under a foot long. He pulled one out by the handle, using the tips of his fingers to avoid the thorns. “Shapeshifters and Nymar are the most common things out there. Wasn’t always like that, though. Full Blood’s closin’ in.”

  “I know. I can feel her.”

  “Can you feel the Squam?”

  “No,” Cole said warily. “Can you?”

  When Jessup tossed him one of the clubs, Cole reflexively snatched it from the air. The thorns bit into him, sinking like needles through the toughened skin of his palm. As soon as the little spikes touched his blood, something else flowed through the scars. It was a cold tingle that felt as if he’d accidentally gotten window cleaner into his blood.