Bookburners: Season One Volume One

by Max Gladstone

  A new creature was above them, far above them, like an aircraft in flight. She couldn’t even tell what shape it was. The five legs descended from it to the ground somewhere—in town, outside of town. It was impossible to say. One of the legs moved and its end, a foot shaped like the head of a hammer, reared up and crashed down into the intersection in front of them. From far overhead, the monster screamed again.

  And two monstrous voices answered. One from the triangular head. The other from somewhere else. They couldn’t even place it.

  “Good God,” Menchú said.

  The monsters were even closer now. Within striking distance.

  “Grace,” Menchú said, “give Liam the keys.”

  Grace shot Liam a glance and tossed the keys to him. He caught them almost without looking.

  “Liam,” Menchú said, “get far away from here and call Team One.”

  Grace eyed the giant at the end of the block.

  “Don’t, Grace,” Menchú said.

  Liam was already behind the wheel of the van. He started the engine. The giant at the end of the block unleashed a roar and charged.

  “Sal,” Menchú said. “Take care of the people here, okay?”

  The next thirty seconds were hard for Sal to remember later. Somehow a billowing wall of dust raced out in front of the giant as its feet cracked the pavement beneath them. Maybe it was taking off pieces of the buildings around it as it crashed down the block. Maybe it was something it could just do, like summoning the elements. She remembered Grace leaping forward toward that giant, arms out, hands clenched into fists. If she was going to go out, she was going out fighting. Sal sprinted for the music store. The man was still there, behind the glass door. Sal gave him the most pleading look she could muster, and the man opened the door. She glanced toward the intersection, where their van was careening toward the gigantic foot, trying to get around it. The foot gave just a little twist as the van passed, knocking it up onto two wheels. Sal didn’t have time to see if it landed again, if Liam got out. She dove through the open doorway and the man slammed it shut behind her. The last thing she saw, before the street was choked in dust and roars, was Father Menchú, still standing in the middle of the street, watching Grace, watching Liam, as a father watches his children, horrified and proud. Then there was a rumble that turned to a roar, and everything in the street went dark.

  “This way!” the man said. He led her to an interior office with no outside windows, and they waited in the howling gloom while the walls shuddered around them. It seemed to go on forever. Then at last it was over.

  Sal ran to the glass door.

  “Don’t open it,” said the man. “Please don’t.”

  “I won’t,” she said.

  The street was littered with bricks and dust, broken timbers and glass. The buildings on both sides of the block were wrecked, as if another tornado had come. The traffic light that had hung over the intersection now lay on top of the rubble. The monsters were gone. No sign of Grace or Menchú. The sky was clear again, as big as ever.

  “I’m so sorry about your friends,” the man said.

  “Don’t say that,” Sal said. It was welling up inside her. She fought it back down.

  “I’m Raymond,” the man said. “Ray.” He extended his hand.

  “Sal,” she said. She took it and they shook.

  “What are you doing here?” Ray said.

  “I can’t tell you,” Sal said.

  “I saw what you did,” he said, “before the big ones came. You’re here to fight them?”

  “You could say that,” Sal said.

  “Are any more of you coming?”

  Sal looked out through the glass door again. It was cracked. There was no trace of the van. Maybe Liam had made it. Maybe he had been swept up into the sky.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “How will they handle those things?”

  That was when Sal found a way back.

  Investigate, her brain said. Do what you’re good at. Do what Menchú put you on the team to do.

  “Those things,” she said. “You called them Tornado Eaters?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know where they came from, Ray?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But it’s better if the person who brought them here tells you himself.”

  “Someone brought them here on purpose?”

  “Yeah. The idea was to protect the town.”

  “Some protection,” Sal said.

  Ray didn’t say anything, but looked stung. She’d crossed a line.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Ray said. “Let me take you to the person you want to talk to.”

  • • •

  Sal looks at Cardinal Varano again. It occurs to her that, sitting there behind the bench, he reminds her of the first giant Tornado Eater they saw, the one with the frowning, triangular head. As far as she knows, Varano doesn’t have any arms, either. It’s impossible to tell under his robes.

  “You have amazing recall,” he says. It doesn’t sound like a compliment.

  “I’m a cop,” she says. “What do you expect?”

  The cardinal’s eyebrows rise, and she can read on his brow the disdain he has for cops. Sal decides right then that she hates him.

  “And that was the last you saw of Father Menchú or Grace in Oklahoma?”

  “Yes,” she says. It hurts to say it.

  “It’s very lucky that you emerged without more than a scratch,” he says.

  “Yes, it is,” she says. She knows he’s implying something. That she ducked and ran. That she’s not going to tell him everything. But she’s not nibbling on that bait. If he’s trying to catch her out, he’s going to have to try harder than that.

  “Go on,” he says.

  • • •

  They waited until it got dark. Ray led Sal to the back of the store, to the door to the parking lot.

  “Across the lot,” he said, “you’ll see a little brick house. It’s maybe seventy yards away.”

  “Ex-football player?” Sal said.

  Ray smiled. “Yeah. But we’re not running those yards. They’ll hear us if we do, and we don’t stand a chance at night.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Walk. Very slowly. Without a word. No matter what. Got me?”

  Sal nodded.

  “Okay,” Ray said. “Let’s go.”

  He opened the door.

  The lot behind the store was empty, and ended at the next street. Across the street was a brick house, just like Ray had said. The stars were out all over the wide, clear sky, the moon three-quarters full. Ray started across the lot in a slow, quiet walk. Sal followed.

  A breeze kicked up, small but insistent. Sal watched it move through the trees near the brick house. Then she realized it wasn’t moving through them. It seemed more to be pushing them, as though a giant hand were pressing against the branches.

  Ray looked back at her. She could see that he was nervous. Sal looked back up at the moon and it was wavering, as if through smoke or water. Something was passing in between them, up in the sky, and it was smearing all the light from the moon and stars. Though near the horizon the stars were clear again, all around them. It was then that Sal understood that a monster was walking over them, something even bigger than the monsters they’d seen during the day, and some part of it, a hand, a foot, a finger, was reaching down, feeling its way close to the ground.

  The big trees on the other side of the street near the brick house all bowed over at once, groaning, as if they were caught in a hurricane.

  We have to stop, Sal thought.

  Her step must have changed, because Ray looked back at her, without breaking his stride, and shook his head. She kept moving.

  The trees snapped back, popping, and shook it off. But the moon was still wavering.

  How can something so gigantic be so close to us without us seeing it? Sal thought. How have these things not shown up on radar? How have they not
been spotted by satellite? Forget Team One; why isn’t the National Guard here right now? Why haven’t they declared a national emergency? Where are the helicopters and tanks? Where are the fighter planes?

  For a moment, it occurred to her that maybe a national emergency had been declared. Maybe the area around Tanner City had been cordoned off for miles and the world was watching. Everyone knew what was happening except the people it was happening to.

  But then she would have at least seen a helicopter.

  No, the truth was that, somehow, everything in Tanner City seemed normal to the outside world. Nobody had seen anything unusual. It was impossible, but it was true. Which, Sal realized, was her newest and most miserable definition of magic. Because it meant that the few of them left in this town were on their own.

  Liam, she thought. Grace. Menchú. Where are you?

  They reached the steps to the house. The front door opened for them. They hadn’t needed to knock on the door. Someone in the house had seen them coming. Someone in there was always watching.

  • • •

  The people inside the brick house had put blankets up over the windows and kept most of the lights out. Word had apparently gotten around the house that Ray had brought in a stranger and everyone came downstairs. They had a lot of questions for Sal, but stopped asking when they realized she didn’t have many answers. She counted nineteen of them, three families, a married couple, and a handful of others. Ray was one of the others, and one of the few who risked going outside at all.

  They had maybe a week’s worth of food and water in the house. There were bags of groceries everywhere and packages of non-perishables stacked behind the couch. It looked like a lot of food, but Sal knew nineteen people ate a lot. They were washing their clothes by hand and hanging them up to dry all over the place. There was a clothesline strung across the living room; a short row of drying racks in the dining room. A damp blouse hanging from a doorknob, even though the house had a washing machine and dryer. They were afraid the noise, or the exhaust from the dryer, would bring the Tornado Eaters. They didn’t really know why Ray and the others who were willing to go out weren’t snatched up right away, given the havoc the monsters had wrought when they first came to town. But Ray and the others had gone out and come back—slowly, quietly—many times now and were still all right. Ray thought maybe the Tornado Eaters just had bad eyesight. Great hearing, incredible sense of touch. But half-blind all the same.

  “They don’t need to see,” he said, “for what they were made to do.”

  “And who made them?” Sal said.

  Ray pointed at a kid, about fifteen years old. “His great-grandpa did,” he said.

  “My grandpa,” said his mother. She looked to be in her mid-forties. “I’m Sharon. This is my son, Jacob.”

  “It’s good to meet you both,” Sal said. She was remembering her manners. Realizing, too, just how much being on Team Three had made her forget them.

  “This is Sal,” Ray said. “I watched her kill one of the Tornado Eaters herself, with a pistol.”

  “So the rest of the world knows now?” Sharon asked. “And they’re coming to help us?”

  “I’m not sure,” Sal said. “But if you tell me what you know about these things, maybe I can do something.”

  Sharon took a deep breath.

  “How much trouble are we in?” she said.

  “You’re not in any trouble with me,” Sal said.

  Sharon nodded. “All right,” she said. “My grandpa . . . was a magician. A real magician, do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Sal said.

  Sharon looked at Ray. He nodded. She still hesitated. A look came over her face that Sal had seen dozens of times before, on people about to confess a secret they’d been carrying a long time, now that it didn’t matter anymore. The secret was out anyway. But it still hurt to be letting go of it.

  “All right,” she said. “He came out here when he was a little boy, just before World War I. There wasn’t much of anything around here, then. Oklahoma had only been a state for a couple years. They hadn’t discovered the zinc in the ground around Tanner City yet. There were already some big farms, but my grandpa told me he still remembered parts of it were just grassland. An ocean of grass. Like it must have looked before any humans ever laid eyes on it, he used to say. But they did have tornadoes.”

  Sharon paused for a second. “You’re from where, again?” she said.

  “New York,” Sal said. “Before that, South Carolina.”

  “Ever seen a tornado?”

  “No.”

  “Until last week, me neither. Most of us, even here or up in Kansas, go our whole lives without seeing a single one. But you hear about them. When my grandpa was a boy, he said, his parents had a friend who worked for the Indian mission schools, and my grandpa had the misfortune of hearing a family acquaintance tell the story of what had happened in Vireton in 1917.”

  “Which was . . . ?” Sal said.

  “A tornado hit a mission schoolhouse full of kids, something like twenty of them and their teacher, and only a couple of them survived. That family acquaintance got into some details, I guess. And after that, my grandpa could hardly sleep. Evening after evening, as the sun went down, he’d look toward the horizon for tornadoes coming. After it was dark, he’d lie in bed listening for them until he fell asleep, and then he had nightmares. This went on for a couple weeks, he said, at which point he finally decided to do something about it. And he did. He made the Tornado Eaters.”

  “He made them?”

  Sharon nodded. “When he was a kid. Named them, too. Why else would the name be so ridiculous?”

  Sal smiled.

  “How did he make them?”

  “I asked him the same question once,” Sharon said. “You know what he told me? Out of thin air. Same stuff that tornadoes are made of. Then he patted me on the head.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Sal said.

  “You’re telling me,” Sharon said. “I’ve been trying to make things happen out of thin air for years and it hasn’t worked for me yet. I’ve just had to get them the old-fashioned way.”

  “Did he ever do any other magic?” Sal asked.

  “People said he did it all the time, but they never caught him at it. So either they were making things up or he was just really good at it,” Sharon said. “The only magic anyone saw for sure were the Tornado Eaters.”

  “When?” Sal asked.

  “1921,” Sharon said. “Grandpa said he’d had them for a couple years by then. A couple years of good sleep, I hope. But he still kept a lookout for the day he might need them. And then that day came. A storm came rolling up on Tanner City one June evening, just after supper. Sky turned green. Wind picked up. A bunch of people went out in the streets. They knew the warning signs. So they all saw it. Little by little, just outside town, the clouds were spinning into a funnel, and they all watched as it let down a finger to touch the ground. It got wider and wider, and headed for town. Which was when Grandpa let the Tornado Eaters out.”

  Sal thought of Menchú, his village in Guatemala. There’s no way this ends well, she thought.

  “What happened?”

  “No one who saw it really ever knew how to describe what they saw. But Grandpa said they did just what he asked them to do. They jumped out of the box he’d put them in, grew up into the sky, raced out to the field, and . . . well, ate it. Then back they went into the box. You’ll never even find a record that the tornado happened. Because, well, it didn’t.”

  “You said they went back in a box?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is it?” Sal asked.

  “Here,” Jacob said.

  Sal hadn’t even noticed he was holding anything. It was a just a little green wooden box, and it fit in the palm of his hand.

  “This is it?”

  Jacob nodded.

  “Speak when you’re spoken to, Jacob,” Sharon said.

  “Yes,” he said.

/>   “So who let them out this time?” Sal asked.

  “I did,” Jacob said.

  “He didn’t know—” Sharon started to say.

  “I knew, Mom,” Jacob said. “I knew.” He looked straight at Sal. He’s going to speak when he’s spoken to, Sal thought. He’s going to do better than that. His mom’s going to be so proud, and so scared all at once.

  “Everyone around this town knows the Tornado Eaters story,” Jacob said, “but they all thought it was just a folktale. How could it be true, right? And my family never let on that we still had the box Great-Grandpa had made for them. Nobody’d ever tried to use it. Great-Grandpa was a magician, and nobody after him was. Until me. Because I have Great-Grandpa’s gift,” Jacob said.

  Sharon moved closer to her son, as if to protect him. He inched away.

  “Mom, she said we’re not in any trouble.”

  “I know,” Sharon said.

  Jacob turned back to look at Sal.

  “I almost never used my gift, and then only in the smallest ways. Only when I knew that I could make a difference by moving something an inch to the left, and not more than that. Never more than that.”

  Which is why the Society didn’t find out about you years ago, Sal thought.

  Jacob smiled. “But I saved a friend from being hit by a car that way once. Sometimes an inch is all it takes.”

  Sal smiled back. “You’re a good kid, Jacob.”

  “But then, after the tornado came, I realized I’d made a mistake. I’d gotten so good at doing small things, not letting anyone know, that I’d forgotten to do what Great-Grandpa did. I forgot to do big things when I needed to. And I decided not to let it happen again. I knew what to do when I opened the box. I knew how to get the Tornado Eaters out of it and keep them waiting for my orders. Just like Great-Grandpa must have.”

  “You were worried about another tornado coming?” Sal asked.

  Jacob nodded.

  “Isn’t it a little unusual for tornadoes to hit the same place twice?”

  Sharon shook her head. “We certainly wish that were true,” she said.

  “Okay,” Sal said. “So what happened?”