by Geoff North
“I can’t go any further,” the robot called out after the first thirty feet.
“You stuck?” The marshal asked.
“No, I’m claustrophobic!”
“A singing washtub—scared of closed-in spaces.” Lowe held his rifle in one hand and balanced it on Reginald’s head. He fired three times, dropping three wannasee behind the robot. “Now I’ve heard of everything.” He fired a few more times and the bodies started to pile up, blocking the path and making it difficult for more to follow.
Brinn covered her ears as the shots were fired. The noise it made in such close quarters was tremendous and terrible, the light from the rifle barrel almost blinding. It was like thunder and lightning smashing together at the same time. She looked up and saw a strip of dull brown light. It was the sky, she realized after a few seconds of disorientation. It seemed to be moving back and forth, twisting and shifting. She tore her gaze away—fearful the buildings were beginning to fall in—and started after Oscar. Lowe and Reginald hurried after; the marshal’s wall of dead wannasee was already being trampled over.
“Shoulda stayed in the alley,” Lowe said as they spilled out into the next street.
They were closing in from all directions, plummeting from floors above, and crawling over the rusted frames of ancient cars and buses. They dragged busted legs and arms. They shuffled and lurched and stumbled and fell, but nothing distracted the wannasee from their primary target. The mournful, desperate whistle made from a thousand pinprick-sized mouths echoed off the buildings and reverberated through the streets and into the advancing night.
The circle tightened around Brinn and her friends.
Less than ten feet away.
“Reginald—your flamethrowers!” Oscar yelled.
The robot wriggled his wormlike fingers. There was a clicking sound inside his arms that reminded Brinn of someone trying to start a lighter. And that was it. “They must have been damaged during transport.”
Five feet.
Marshal Lowe had dropped his box of bullets. He didn’t bother to check for more ammunition on the ground. There wouldn’t be enough time to reload. There was one shell left in the rifle.
Oscar held Brinn against his chest so she wouldn’t see what the marshal had in mind. Lowe aimed the rifle at the back of her head. He thought of Sally again. It was the right decision then, and it was the right decision now. Something pushed up beneath his cowboy boot. He stepped back. A manhole cover he’d been standing on shifted open a few inches.
A set of yellow eyes glowed up at them from the darkness.
“This way.”
Chapter
15
“How much longer will the spell have effect?” Esme held her hands out towards the warmth of the rock. Although she could sustain extreme temperatures longer than a warm-blooded human, her undead reserves weren’t limitless. She too would eventually freeze after Paris, Selma, and Bertha had all succumbed to the cold.
The boy wizard was rubbing that side of his face where his eye had disappeared and grown back with less-than-desired results. “You know there’s no real magic to magic. I draw power from the environment around me to pull it off.”
Selma sat across from Paris with her arms buried up into the hoodie sleeves and tucked beneath her armpits. “I guess it’s too much to expect rapid global warming on Neal’s world?”
Bertha stood above them, her arms crossed beneath her chainmail-covered breasts; the great sword beside her was plunged into a foot of hard snow. She didn’t trust any of them and the blade had been left out on display as a reminder. “A child talking gibberish… A wizard talking nonsense… It’s what I’d expect from his kind.”
“It isn’t nonsense,” Paris snapped. “There’s more science to the art of magic than there is wizardry. The trick is not letting anyone see how it’s done.”
Bertha swore beneath her breath and walked off to the edge of the cliff overlooking the transport pad and frozen lake beyond. Esme watched as the wind whipped snow through the woman’s hair. They had spent the better part of the last three hours arguing amongst themselves and not trying to figure a way out of their dire situation.
Esme turned back to Paris. “So how much longer?”
“How much longer what?”
“The rock—how much longer can you imbue it with heat?”
He pulled the felt marker out of his robe with shaking hands.
“Fennas-snaigle.”
The gray trash-basket-sized stone in front of them began to glow yellow at its center. Paris and Selma backed away from the heat until it was more bearable. “Another hour…maybe less…and that will be it. Drawing heat from these surroundings is almost impossible.”
Esme remained where she was. It was the third time Paris had heated the rock. The first time had melted all the snow and ice away in an eight-foot-wide circle. That had revealed they were actually on a mountain, and not a glacier as originally believed from below when they’d stepped off the transport pad.
“We shouldn’t have tried climbing this thing,” Selma said. They were on what appeared to be a ledge steadily winding up along the face of ice and drifting snow.
Paris took the hand he was rubbing against his eye again and swept it out in front of him, encompassing the cliff edge Bertha was standing on and the white expanse of frozen lake below. “Where else were we supposed to go? Maybe once we get to the top we’ll have a better idea of what to do.”
Selma stared at the dying yellow glow in the rock. “I should’ve stayed down there… Brinn and the others are probably looking for us. If they show up now, we won’t be there to meet them.”
Esme sighed. “Up here, down there—it makes no difference. You three will never make it to the summit without more heat.”
Paris was about to speak again but decided to remain quiet. He felt around the ridge of his eye socket with fingers that weren’t getting any warmer.
“That transport pad must have been placed here for a reason,” Esme pondered, taking a more proactive approach. “Someone or some thing must live around here…and to live here, they would need heat.”
Selma made a grunting noise. “Polar bears seem to manage alright without heat.”
“You’re not being very helpful.” Esme didn’t care much for the girl. She was self-absorbed and constantly complaining. What had Brinn ever seen in her?
Paris stepped in closer to the rock. The heat had already begun to dissipate. “When were you going to tell me you were pregnant?”
“I’m not that far along… And I’m not even sure I’ll be able to carry it full term.”
“Why not?” He wasn’t happy with her but his voice was filled with concern. “Are you sick?”
“No, I’m not sick. I’m a vampire.”
“Duh. I knew that when we started dating.”
She pulled him back down next to her. “I’m a vampire…and you aren’t.”
He tapped the puncture marks on his neck. “I am now.”
“So what kind of child will we have? You weren’t exactly normal to begin with yourself.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“You know what I mean.”
Paris and Esme lived in the same world created by Brinn. And although Brinn’s power was immense, her capabilities paled next to those of her dead uncle. She wasn’t able to visit the worlds she had made. Brinn could only draw the people there into hers. Paris grinned.
“What’s so funny?” Esme asked.
“The look on Brinn’s face when she found out about it.”
“Yeah…I feel pretty bad about that.”
“Well, you shouldn’t. She used us, and when she was finished…she just tossed us away.”
“Don’t be so hard on her. If it wasn’t for Brinn, we never would’ve found each other. We wouldn’t even exist.”
Selma remained quiet. Would Brinn eventually become sick of her as well? Had it already started?
Paris sighed heavily. “I know, I know. But sometimes I wonder
what it would’ve been like if she had visited our world… What would she have thought of your City of Drehdia? Or the Arcanhist’s Province of Lazar?”
“Sounds like you still love her.”
“I loved her the same way you did.”
Esme’s black eyes narrowed, as if what he’d said had stirred up more troubling thoughts of her own. “She’s seventeen years old. How does that even work? The Followers of Lazar came together thousands of years ago—Drehdia centuries before that.”
“Commander Gunnarson could tell you. It probably works on the same principle as immense distances being traveled by turning over the right atom. Maybe a thousand years lived on Brinnia is only a few minutes on Earth.”
She rested her head on his shoulder. “It still doesn’t explain how our world which has been in existence for millennia could have been created by someone less than two decades old.”
“I just explained it...sort of.”
“No, you didn’t. Brinn created us first—our world came second… How?”
He wrapped his arm around her for warmth and felt none. They were so very different. They came from the same world imagined by Brinn—they were primary characters, like Bertha—but the three had nothing more in common than that.
“Did Brinn ever tell you the story about the chicken and the egg?” Esme asked.
Paris shook his head.
Selma spoke. “It asks the question, which came first? The chicken or the egg.”
“The chicken had to come from somewhere, so it would have to be the egg.”
Esme shook her head. “But who made the egg?”
“I don’t know… Maybe the cold’s getting to me. It hurts just thinking about it. Why does it even matter?”
The vampire pressed on. “What were your parents like? What were their names?”
Selma sat closer to the rock, listening intently as the two spoke.
“I…they were…I don’t remember.”
“And I don’t remember mine. History was made for us. There was nothing before Brinn brought us into the world.”
“So that would make her the chicken.”
Bertha returned from the cliff’s edge and drew her sword from the snow. “And it makes us just three yolks in one shell.” She pointed the end of it inches away from Esme’s abdomen. “There’s a fourth yolk now—a new egg. The world we thought we knew might not really exist—my homeland, an ocean away from yours, may not really be there—but the child you’re carrying wasn’t imagined by Brinn.” She withdrew the blade. “Quit trying to disprove our existence, vampire. Perhaps we aren’t as real as the people from Brinn’s world, but we are what we are. And right now we’re freezing to death.”
She started up the snowy trail away from them. Paris called after her. “The rock is still warm, get back here!”
Bertha didn’t answer.
Esme stood. “I needed to hear that.”
“Hear what?”
“About the baby—that Brinn had no part in it. We really do exist, and we can make this work, together.”
“But the world we come from isn’t real…you said so yourself.”
She pulled him up. “Then we’ll just have to find a new world to live in.”
The wind blasted snow into his face. “This isn’t what I had in mind.”
“Me neither. We’re going to raise this baby on Brinn’s world—Earth.” She held another hand out to Selma. The girl tightened the drawstring of her hood beneath her chin and stood on her own.
The cold went to work faster than their newfound enthusiasm. Paris sunk to his knees after fifteen minutes of climbing. Esme tried getting him away from the cliff’s edge and onto his feet, but he refused to budge.
He pointed to a small gray speck, half blown over with snow over a thousand feet below on the icy banks of the lake. “The transport pad… I-it’s almost covered.”
“Don’t worry about that! We can’t go back that way.”
Selma was behind her, using the vampire as a partial shield against the biting wind. “We never should’ve tried this. We’re all gonna freeze to death up here.”
Esme snapped at her, “Save your energy for walking instead of bitching.”
Paris looked out beyond the pad. At this new height he could see the lake wasn’t endless. A ridgeline of mountains—an almost indistinguishable ragged, gray strip—surrounded it. He could even see the point where the mountains narrowed into a valley and the lake turned into a river. He recalled the quick geography lesson Reginald had given them the day before. This had to be Artica Land. And there—thirty, fifty, perhaps a hundred miles away was where the Jang-Geez River started. They were silly, childish names given to horribly inhospitable places. Why would a little boy create such lands?
“I can’t g-go any further… Leave me…catch up with Bertha.”
“Never!” Esme pulled at him again.
Paris remained planted in the snow. “I can’t feel my feet. The rest of me aches a little but it isn’t as bad as I thought it would be… Go.”
Esme managed to drag him on a few feet. “At least conjure up some warm clothes!”
He shook his head defiantly and his body shuddered involuntarily along with it. “Nothing left to draw on…t-too weak to try.”
Bertha returned and pulled him up over one shoulder before continuing up the trail. She paused by the defiant Selma. “Do I need to carry you as well?”
“I don’t need anyone’s help.”
Bertha sneered at her and carried on.
“Thank you,” Esme called out, but the wind and ice crystals blew her words away.
The trail steepened and after another three hundred feet the barbarian woman’s strength finally succumbed to the elements. She fell face first and remained that way. Paris toppled over the cliff ledge. Bertha’s frozen hand still clung to him stubbornly, wrapped into the stiffening fabric of his robes. Esme climbed over her and started to pull him back to safety. “Give me a hand!” she screamed at Selma.
Selma either hadn’t heard or was unable to help. Or she was unwilling to. She was backed up against the mountain wall, her legs tucked up into her chest. Icicles had formed all around the rim of her hood and stuck to the colorless skin of her face.
Esme finished pulling Paris back to safety. She took turns dragging the three stiffening bodies further up. The ledge was dangerously narrow now, an icy path less than eighteen inches wide. She moved Paris four feet, and then went back for Selma. Bertha was the heaviest and the hardest to move.
This went on for another fifteen minutes and fifty feet.
They must be dead, Esme thought. They must be dead. They must be dead.
Her back gave out first. There was no pain. It simply stopped working in a half-bend over Paris. She crawled on top of him and had to guide her numb fingers with her eyes to undo the zipper of his robe. The metal was frozen and with her last bit of strength, Esme tore it open and nestled up into his exposed skin for the remaining warmth.
They were finished.
The vampire girl and her wizard boyfriend would die together on a frozen mountain trail with a barbarian warrior and a whining teenager at their feet. What would Brinn think of that? She turned her head up to the gray sky and watched the snow blow and swirl against the wall of mountain next to them.
It had been silly to think they could have a life for themselves.
They weren’t real.
The sky turned black. Esme felt something warm and wet poke into her eye.
She blinked weakly and felt the mini icicles break apart on her eyelashes. An immense hairy face was staring down at her. The heat expelled from its snout steamed against her face.
Selma almost had it right.
Not polar bears…
Black bears.
Chapter 16
A hand wrapped around Brinn’s ankle and pulled. She fell to her knees and tried to resist the force yanking her into the manhole.
Marshal Lowe pushed her further in. “Get going, Brinn! Wh
atever’s down there can’t be any worse than what’s up here.” He butted a wannasee in the face with the end of his rifle; the bone beneath its featureless face caved in. It staggered back into another one but remained standing. The tiny hole at the center of its face puckered and squealed and it came on again.
Brinn descended into the darkness; the hand below helped her feet find the rungs of a ladder. Lowe and Oscar followed down seconds later. Reginald remained where he was. The wannasee were beginning to claw and pound at his colorful blinking surface. The robot had already calculated that the radius of the opening wouldn’t allow him access.
“Go on without me,” he called down.
Oscar’s head and shoulders were still above ground when he saw the wannasee overwhelm Reginald. The robot toppled over onto his side under a wave of clutching flesh. One by one, the lights blinked out.
His final action was to push the manhole cover back into place with a twitching arm. Oscar had no choice but to duck under before it decapitated him. He tried pushing it back up. It moved an inch or two but the crush of bodies slammed it back down. He put all of his android strength into it again. It wouldn’t budge. A low groan echoed through the tunnel. Dust trickled down into his face as the pavement above threatened to give way under the sheer weight of wannasee pressing against it.
“Get down here!” Lowe yelled from somewhere below.
The android paused a moment longer, resting his forehead against a cold iron rung, and shut his eyes in regret. A loud crack followed by a stream of crumbling cement had him moving again. Oscar’s eyes snapped open—the infrared mode automatically activated—and he navigated his way into the cool, damp depths below.
Lowe’s cowboy hat came into view, a pink glow with lighter patches of sweat and dirt near the center. He looked up at Oscar and held a hand out to help. The marshal’s eyes were disturbingly black in this light, the deep wrinkles of his face like ragged fault lines. “There’s nothin’ more you could have done,” he said, pushing Oscar along into the darkness.