Joey snapped out of her glassy concentration, though she still looked fairly distracted when she said to Mollie, “Okay. Let’s get this fuckin’ show on the road.”
Mollie slammed open a portal to the casino before she could think about what she was doing. Before she had time to chicken out. It was about the size of a pantry door, centered near where the slot machines had been. The space underlying the Talas side of the portal felt strange. Ripply, or jiggly. Almost organic. Mollie shuddered.
Wisps of oily, luminescent mist wafted through the hole in space. It smelled like rotting meat, and echoed with screams and non-Euclidean scuttling. Compared to the oppressive death-stink of the evil insanity zone, the diesel-fuel-and-zombies’ odor of the warehouse was like a rose bouquet and twice as welcome. The casino had become a foggy hellscape, as if the deepest subconscious nightmares of Hieronymus Bosch, M. C. Escher, and H. R. Giger dropped a metric shit-ton of acid and then fucked each other blind in an amphetamine-fueled three-way. She couldn’t recognize anything, much less tell if she’d hit the mark.
Mollie closed the portal. “Hold on a second. Let me try again. I can save you some time if I can get a portal on a street outside the casino.” She pictured the streetscape as seen from Baba Yaga’s window, just outside the casino, where she’d glimpsed the big snake guy.
The warped geometry inside Horrorshow’s sphere of influence made it almost impossible for Mollie to know if she’d successfully moved the portal. It could’ve been fifty yards, half an inch, or a light-year for all the difference it made. But she did manage to get it open again.
“Okay. Hurry.”
Joey closed her eyes. She fell quiet again. The zombies shambled forward at what, for them, seemed a bit of a hurry. But it wasn’t fast enough. They weren’t going to Talas faster than the evil was seeping through.
“Come on, come on,” said Mollie. “Hurry.”
“Keep your panties on,” said Joey, through gritted teeth.
The first ring of lights dimmed, flickered. Why wasn’t Joey hurrying? Didn’t she realize this was important? Didn’t she know what Mollie was putting on the line for her? Ungrateful little bitch. Mollie curled her fists. She ought to—
Joey slapped her across the face so hard it snapped her head aside. The portal disappeared; the lights came back to full strength. Mollie blinked away tears. Her ears rang. She rubbed her stinging cheek. It felt hot.
“Ouch! Jesus.” Joey had walloped her but good.
Mollie shuddered. She’d started to slip away far too quickly that time.
“You were mumbling to yourself,” Joey mumbled. “Didn’t like the … sound … of it.” She still had a faraway look in her eyes, as if eavesdropping on a conversation just at the edge of audibility. She frowned. When she spoke, the words came out slurred and distracted, as if she’d been to the dentist and shot full of novocaine. “I … uh … I can barely keep ahold of the toe tags.”
Mollie shook her head, tried to dispel the ringing in her ears. “Okay. Here.”
She concentrated on re-creating the portals she’d made a moment ago, but far smaller. Smaller than a horsefly, smaller than her pinky nail, smaller than a pinprick. The first hole in space came out the size of a basketball. She slammed it shut, tried again. The next was closer to the size of a plum.
Joey squinted. She leaned forward. Mollie flinched. The doorway blinked shut about a hairbreadth from the tip of Joey’s nose. The woman rounded on her, ready to unleash abuse, but whatever she saw on Mollie’s face defused her temper. “Fine. Fuck it. Let’s keep going. Just try not to give me a nose job.”
Mollie kept working to make the smallest portal she could. But she closed the new ones almost as rapidly as they opened—they were still too large.
“Fucking hell, I’m getting whiplash here,” said Joey. “It’s like the z’s are right in the room with me one second and then in a different country the next. Slow your roll before you give me fucking epilepsy.”
But Mollie couldn’t help it. Abject terror made it difficult to concentrate. But after half a dozen tries she managed to create a portal no larger than a pinhole. If she hadn’t made it with her own mind, and thus knew where to look, she might not have known it was there. She pointed it out to Joey.
“How’s that?”
The smaller woman relaxed visibly. She still spoke as if carrying on two conversations at once. “Okay. That’s much better. Still … hard … keeping track of them all, but they’re not so … far away now.”
Mollie watched the lights. They hadn’t begun to flicker. Yet.
There was a stone staircase leading up. Michelle climbed it. At the top was yet another set of stairs. They spiraled up out of sight.
They stopped at a metal door. She reached out and turned the knob. It can’t be this easy. The door opened. Afternoon light poured through, blinding her. She put her arm up to cover her eyes.
When she could see, she discovered she was in a courtyard surrounded by a fancy metal fence. She looked around and saw a sign in Cyrillic. No help there.
There was still some mist here, but much thinner. She let herself out the gate. There was still something in her head, but for the most part, she knew what was real. and that was bad.
How many people had she killed? She didn’t know. At some point she’d just killed because it felt so good. And it was so easy. And she knew she’d killed Aero. The way she’d killed him was terrible. And what she had done to his body afterward had been done with joy.
Her hands began to shake. There was a time when she knew who she was and what she was capable of, but now she had no idea. What kind of person could kill a kind person like Aero with such abandon?
She was as skinny as she’d even been in her life. There was carnage all around her. Dead bodies lay everywhere. There were cars and trucks abandoned in the road as if their drivers had suddenly just decided to stop for no reason. Some had corpses at the wheel, some just had blood on them drying in the sun.
She looked into the cars, hoping to find one with the keys still in the ignition. And a lot of them did, but none of them would start.
Shit.
She started walking. She had to find someone she could tell what was happening in Talas. But she wasn’t sure it mattered. She was pretty sure that whatever was in there was beyond the Committee’s—or anyone’s—ability to stop.
She kept walking. There was nothing else to do.
The Angel leaned back with a sigh, licking grease from her fingers contentedly. Her stomach was comfortably distended, and she felt a sleepy lassitude washing over her. For the first time in days she felt full and well fed. They had finished off all the meat. Of course, she had all she wanted, while she watched in some amusement as some of her weaker followers fought over the scraps of what was left. Tomorrow they would have to search for food again, but tomorrow was tomorrow and they’d worry about it when it was upon them.
Outside, night had fallen. The bloated greenish moon illumined the shadowy things that still slunk around the water pool. At the start of the feast the Angel had ordered her people to gather what utensils they could—there were still plenty of pots and pans on the household section—and she boldly opened a door leading outside, willed her new blade to her, and stood guard while her people gathered enough water for their needs.
Nothing had dared to attack them. The Angel had smiled scornfully. Even they recognized her power. Soon perhaps, they would willingly join her clan. For now it was enough to have their fear.
She was tired. She was sore. The thought of sleep was upon her, but she suddenly noticed a strange, somehow familiar figure stagger to the edge of the pool, fall down, and stick his face in the water, drinking thirstily.
Things moved in the darkness around him, as the Angel watched with interest.
One of the hunting spiders leapt high, but the figure at the pool suddenly rose to one knee and with a flourish of his arm pointed at the thing. Thunder peeled in the otherwise still night and a lightning bolt leapt
from his hand, incinerating the spider in midair.
The man suddenly stood and like a virtuoso directing an unseen orchestra, he gestured right and left, twisting and bowing his entire body in contortions that would have been ridiculous if the end result weren’t lightning bolts, punctuated by the occasional clap of thunder, streaming outward, picking off attackers with amazing accuracy and efficiency.
A name suddenly came to the Angel. Doktor Omweer.
She stood, her people watching, and strode to the door. The attacking spider pack had either been entirely destroyed or discouraged by the time she reached the banks of the pool and Omweer stood on his toes, his arms thrust into the sky, his back dramatically bent backward like a bow.
He heard her approaching step and whirled to face her. His full head of grey hair thrust wildly in every direction, his face was smeared with dirt and what looked to be caked blood. One lens was missing from his eyeglasses that lay crookedly upon his face and his eyes, the Angel saw, were mad. Stark, crazy mad.
“What is,” he asked almost conversationally, “the difference between the rational and irrational?”
The Angel edged a small step to her right. To her left was the open pool. To her right, the broken ground from which it was torn.
“I don’t know,” she replied, in a cunningly rational voice.
“The question is, which one are you?” Omweer replied. “There exists, irrational numbers a and b such that a to the power of b is rational.”
“Of course,” the Angel said.
“The square root of two is irrational, yet two is rational.” He approached her carefully. “Consider the number q which equals the square root of two to the power of the square root of two. Either it is rational or irrational.”
Omweer, she saw, was not going to take a chance. His right hand twitched at the wrist, giving her time to dive behind a pile of dirt that proved thick enough to protect her as his lightning bolt flashed outward, exploding it into a pillar of dust.
“If q is rational,” Omweer screamed, “then the theorem is true, with a and b both being the square root of two!”
The Angel leapt, taking to the sky as her wings appeared. Her wings beat twice as she gained height, then she suddenly turned and swerved as Omweer tried to track her flight path.
“If q is irrational,” he shouted to the sky, “then the theorem is true, with a being the square root of two to the power of the square root of two and b being the square root of two, since—”
She dodged a right-handed then a left-handed thrown bolt, though the latter singed the feathers of her left wing that were tightly clenched to her body as she barely rolled in a tight circle and willed the sword into her hand. Then they collided, the sword striking Omweer in the chest, and they tumbled together to the ground. She lay on his chest as her sword ripped through his body and the tip came out of his back.
“—the square root of two to the power of the square root of two to the power of the square root of two, in parentheses, equals two.”
He looked at her as if that were the most important thing in the world, but she had no idea what he was saying. He was completely mad. But he was also dead and no longer a threat to her or her new position.
The Angel went back into the devastated store and hands reached out to touch her as she passed. She wore a grim smile on her face and her beauty was terrible to behold. She had never felt like this before, like an adored queen, like a beloved sovereign. True, her following was small, but she would call more to her side and they would answer.
She drank in their adulation like a fine wine, and it was good.
She Who Must Be Obeyed had come into her kingdom.
SATURDAY
THE PINHOLE SLOWED THE seepage of evil from Talas to Baikonur, but it wasn’t foolproof. Sometimes the lights in the innermost ring would flicker. Sometimes the Andromeda Strain guys lurking at the edges of the warehouse with the big-ass guns would start to look fidgety. At those times, Mollie would slam the portals shut until everybody—mostly meaning her—could calm down.
But she wasn’t very good about warning Joey, which led to friction. Juggling control of a dozen different toe tags in increasingly disparate locations—assuming physical distance even carried meaning in the depths of Horrorshow’s sphere of influence, which was doubtful—taxed the ace from Louisiana. The closure of the pinhole portals effectively meant her zombies went from being in the same room with Joey to five hundred miles away in an instant, which, she explained, meant her reach over her scouts instantly became far more tenuous.
Actually, what she really said was, “God fucking damn it, you harebrained quim. When you do that without warning me it’s like snapping an overstretched rubber band against my brain. It fucking hurts, you cunt. Do you want to give me a motherfucking aneurysm?”
Michelle was heading away from Talas. At least she was pretty sure she was. Her sense of direction was completely screwed up. She supposed she should be using the sun as a guide, but she no longer trusted anything she saw or felt. That’s right, she thought. Maybe you didn’t kill Aero after all. But that was bullshit and she knew it.
The only thing she wanted was to get as far away from Talas as she could—and as quickly as possible.
Even this far away from what she thought of as the core of crazy, there was carnage. (“Crazy” was an adorably weak word for what was happening here. This madness was blocking out the sun.) Automobiles and trucks were scattered across the road like toy cars thrown by a toddler.
There were dead bodies everywhere. A young girl in a pale pink floral dress hung out of the window of a pale blue Lada. There was a bloody scalpel in her hands. She’d slashed her wrists and had gouged out her eyes, too. A small pool of blood coagulated on the road underneath her. Michelle wanted to feel something, but she was numb. Numb from what she’d seen already. And numb from what she’d done.
Glass from shattered windshields ground under her boots. The road here was buckled and cracked, too. And she tripped and fell occasionally.
There was a pile of corpses ahead. They were bloated and bruise-colored. Some of the bodies had already exploded, and maggots covered the entrails. With numb horror, she realized that festering dead bodies that hadn’t been changed into grotesqueries was the most normal thing she’d seen in a while.
There were so many ruined vehicles that Michelle despaired of ever finding one that ran.
She came upon a relatively intact Gaz with its driver’s-side door hanging off one hinge. She ran up to it and saw there were keys dangling from the ignition. The surge of joy she felt made her queasy.
She got in and turned the key. The ignition clicked, then nothing. She tried again, giving the gas a pump. Still nothing.
“Fuckfuckfuckfuck!” she screamed in anger and frustration. She pounded her hands on the steering wheel until they turned red.
She got out and kicked the one-hinged door three times, trying to make it fall off. All it did was make her foot throb with pain.
She wanted to kill someone. Anyone.
The influence of whatever was coming from Talas was still strong enough to be affecting her. She had to get all the way out of the corruption zone. Or Batshit Crazy Town, as she decided it should be called for now. Oh, the hysterical funny on that one. She was just distracting herself. Anything so she didn’t have to think about killing Aero. About blasting his head open and then making a bloody paste of his body. In the faint, lingering, crazy buzzing, she was filled with grief.
It was like being hit in the gut. She’d done the unspeakable. And not just what had happened to Aero. She’d killed wantonly. And she wasn’t even sure how many people she’d killed—or if they had even been people anymore. There were some she could remember, but she suspected—no, she knew—that there had been more. Given her power, there had to be so many more.
And Mummy. She’d killed Aero thinking he was Mummy. There had been multiple versions of Mummy, and she’d killed all of them. Or was it part of her madness that she
’d imagined doing that?
It seemed as if space and time were being warped. Her memory was slippery and confused. How else to explain the primordial things she’d seen crawling through the city streets? The way normal people were being changed into other vile things? How else could she explain the self-mutilations and suicides, and the glee with which so much of the carnage had taken place?
And she had been part of it all. She’d killed Aero. She’d killed those women in the forest. Killed the man in the catacombs. (Oh, he deserved to die, part of her whispered. They all did.)
She shook her head. She wasn’t out of the fog yet. Remnants of it lingered.
And whatever was causing the fog and the madness, she wasn’t sure the Committee could fight it. She wasn’t sure anything on earth could.
The hours dragged on. Mollie fed Joey orange juice through a straw to keep the semi-comatose woman hydrated while her zombies roamed an alien nightmarescape searching for survivors of the Committee A-team.
Mollie hated that she had to hold a portal to Talas open for so long. Even a minuscule one, even periodically closing it until the seepage of supernatural evil abated. She managed not to piss herself. It felt like an accomplishment.
But worse than the fallow time while Joey’s toe tags stumbled across nothing interesting were the times when she perked up and announced, “I think I have something.”
Because then Mollie had to open a larger portal to Talas, so that they could take a quick peek inside and investigate with eyes that weren’t, well, putrifying. Sometimes she had to make the portal large enough so that hazmat guys could use the magnifying scopes on their rifles to scan the view through the hole in space. After the first time a crab-like thing hopped through the portal, scuttling into Baikonur on legs covered in eyeballs covered in mouths, the SCARE agents and their Russian counterparts made a point of keeping their weapons trained on each portal.
They were good shots. But the tranquilizer darts weren’t terribly effective against the abomination; it didn’t stop moving until they put several high-caliber rounds into it.
High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel Page 46