Bookburners: Season One Volume One

by Max Gladstone

  “How do you stop it?” Sal asked.

  “You don’t.”

  Sal turned the Humvee around and drove frantically to the edge of town. She screamed at everyone to get out, turned back around, and headed straight into town again. Back to the intersection where they’d first pulled into Tanner City.

  The street was filled with hunks of flesh, car-sized pieces, that looked like fatty lobster. The pavement was slick was something clear and viscous. And there was all of Team One, in tight formation, waiting for that third Tornado Eater to show up.

  “Sal,” Bouchard called. “Please tell me you have endangered your life because you have intel.”

  “Yes,” Sal said. “It’ll attack when it thinks you’ve won.”

  “Look around,” Bouchard said. “I think we just did.”

  He smiled. Not cocky. Just ready.

  But he wasn’t.

  A long, thin, curved tooth, a row of them, erupted from under the asphalt, one of them right between Bouchard’s feet. It speared upward and through him, slid out of his back in between his shoulder blades. He slid down it until something inside him caught on it; then he was borne upward, like a puppet, and died without another word.

  The rest of Team One had a chance to jump back and draw their weapons. They watched the row of teeth rise in front of them, and turning around, saw another set rising through the street at the next corner.

  The mouth was as big as the block, and was about to swallow it.

  Which is when Sal saw what Team One could really do.

  They ran to the middle of the block, into the middle of the mouth. Three of them chanted something, and the right hands of their suits grew. They curled them into fists, until they looked like wrecking balls. They swung them down on the pavement, again and again, faster and faster, until the hands were blurs and the pavement yielded to dirt. Then the hands opened and started digging, with the same blurry speed. They were drilling through the earth, down to the underground creature’s throat.

  The teeth were still rising, and the broken earth rolled off them and gave way to dark gums, the edge of a long, dark, hairy lip, caked with dust and rocks. Sal swore she could see all the buildings on the block lifting and shuddering, their foundations cracking. Windows shattered in their frames as the wood around them shifted and closed in.

  Then Team One hit bottom and broke through, made a hole to the last Tornado Eater’s open throat. They didn’t even have to talk about it. As Sal watched in awe, the smallest of them collected a handful of vials of something from the others, gave a quick salute, and jumped in. The rest of them ran, leapt over the teeth, leapt past Bouchard’s impaled corpse. One of them picked up Sal like she was nothing and kept running.

  They didn’t so much hear the explosion as feel it, a rumbling jolt through the ground. It knocked all of them down. The man from Team One who had picked Sal up fell on top of her to shield her. But there was no need.

  There was a smell like burning, rotten seafood.

  They looked back.

  The windows had stopped breaking. The teeth had stopped rising. They just stood in a row across the street like a fence. Bouchard was still there, hanging like a doll. The other soldier, whose name Sal didn’t even know, lay buried below the street.

  “Two men down,” one of them said.

  Three of the soldiers slid Bouchard off the tooth and lay him in the street. They all saluted where they stood. No one shed a tear.

  • • •

  The National Guard found Menchú and Grace in the wreckage of the buildings in the middle of town. Menchú had a broken arm and a broken leg. Grace had two broken legs. They’d both been trapped in the debris, like earthquake survivors. They’d lost some blood. They were dehydrated and starving. Neither of them was entirely sure how they had gotten there. They both remembered ear-splitting noise, a rushing dust cloud under the bright sun. They both must have lost consciousness for a while, and then found themselves pinned under parts of the the ceiling that used to be above them. Paramedics got them into an ambulance and to the county hospital before Sal or Liam had a chance to tell them how glad they were to see them alive.

  “It’s a miracle,” Liam said.

  Team Two’s Hilary Sansone had mastered the blank, friendly face of a career diplomat. There she was, standing amid the rubble in the main intersection in Tanner City, in a work jacket that she somehow managed to make fashionable. She announced herself as being from Catholic Relief Services, called in by Tanner City’s parish priest and now helping to coordinate services for the victims. Somehow she had made herself point person for the authorities coming into town now who wanted to find out what had happened. The event of a few days ago, she said, according to eyewitnesses, had been another tornado. The weather service personnel interviewed on the news were unsure of that. There hadn’t been any evidence of a storm in the area, they said, and shrugged their shoulders. But the guys in the National Guard called in to clean up the wreckage didn’t need any convincing. Looks like a tornado to me, they said.

  “It’s not an airtight story,” Sansone told Sal even then, when they had a quiet moment. “There will always be questions, loose ends, things that don’t add up about what happened here. If conspiracy theorists ever get ahold of it, they’ll blame it on UFOs or the mining companies—you know, because of what happened in Picher—or they’ll say it was some weapon the government was testing. Who knows what they’ll come up with? Those people can be so imaginative. The only thing that matters from our perspective is that they don’t come up with the truth.”

  “But the people who live here know,” Sal said. “They all do.”

  “It’s easier than you think to get them to cooperate,” Sansone said. She gave Sal a thin smile, as if to suggest that she was getting a little tired of talking about it. That maybe Sal was overstepping her bounds.

  Sal thought of Ray and Sharon and Jacob.

  “Did you pay them off?” Sal asked.

  “We like to think of it as donating to reconstruction efforts.”

  “And they all agreed.”

  That was when Sansone did . . . something. Sal couldn’t even say for sure what it was. Maybe she looked away slightly, or hesitated a little too long when she answered. Maybe her breathing changed. It was hard to say. Whatever it was, though, Sal picked up on it, and she was sure then that Sansone was lying.

  “Yes,” Sansone said.

  Then what are Balloon and Stretch doing here? Sal wanted to ask. She had seen them, talking to a few of the people in town. To Ray. To Sharon. To Jacob. She had seen them take each of the residents aside, put an arm around each of them. Confidential. Protective. Maybe abusive. And she had seen Sharon crying; seen Jacob looking stunned and pale. As though he’d seen something horrible, or maybe something terrible had been done to him. She’d wanted to see them afterward, to make sure they were all right. But when they saw her coming, they just shook their heads. Get away from us.

  “I’m sorry for what happened to your team on this mission. And to Team One,” Sansone said. What she meant was: You’re done here.

  “Me too,” Sal said.

  • • •

  For the first time, Cardinal Varano gives Sal a smile. The next words come out of his mouth with an audible sense of relief.

  “Thank you,” he says. “You’ve been very forthcoming.”

  He nods to the clerk next to him, who’s taking notes. Making the official story. He then turns to the monsignor for Team Two.

  “Monsignor Usher, Please report,” he says.

  The monsignor turns to Hilary Sansone, who has the same blank, friendly face on that she had for the Red Cross, the National Guard, the state police. It projects cool competence, a sense of command of the situation without allowing any misconceptions about how in control anyone can be. She gives Usher a small, questioning look, and he gives her a nod. Proceed.

  “First of all,” she says, “Team One did a remarkable job of disposing of the remains of the magical
creatures. By the time secular authorities arrived, there were indications of the fires that Team One had set to dispose of the remains, but no indication of the remains themselves.”

  Monsignor Fox gives a small, grateful smile.

  “We were lucky,” a member of Team One says. “They turned out to be all soft tissue, somehow, and the fires we set consumed them quickly.”

  “And we are told by Team One’s personnel,” says Sansone, “that it was intel from Team Three, gathered by Miss Brooks, that allowed Team One to be ready for the final creature’s attack. They lost two of their men that day. According to Team One’s personnel, however, they could easily have lost more if they had been less aware of the details of the situation. So we are all grateful for that.”

  There is a small round of applause for Sal. It feels perfunctory. The cardinal doesn’t clap.

  “And the cover story?” Varano says. “Is it holding?”

  “As I discussed with Miss Brooks at the time,” Sansone says, giving Sal a nod, “it is holding to the extent that any of our cover stories do. There is, of course, still no meteorological data to back up our claim of a second tornado, which is problematic. But a second tornado remains the most plausible explanation to secular authorities. Competing theories from government officials and scientists still fall under the realm of natural disasters. Someone is examining the possibility of an earthquake. Someone else is poring over the data looking for the chance of a windstorm of some sort, not a tornado but still strong enough to do a lot of damage, particularly to buildings already buffeted by the tornado they do have evidence of. A particularly dogged scientist is building a theory that Tanner City was the victim of a simultaneous earthquake and windstorm.”

  “Sounds unlikely to stand,” Varano says. “It makes Tanner City the most unlucky town in the world.”

  “But it does explain the destruction with the evidence they have. The theory hasn’t been dismissed altogether yet. My guess,” says Sansone, “is that the inquiries will end up being vaguely conclusive. Maddening to a few people, but plausible enough to everyone else that they just move on to the next problem they can’t solve.”

  Sansone takes a breath.

  “Forgive me if this sounds callous,” she says, “but I think in the end we are very fortunate that a calamity of this scale—one that taxed the Society perhaps to the limits of what it can contain—occurred in a place with very few civilians, and that almost no one outside of the town’s limits has paid much attention to. If this had been Tulsa, or Oklahoma City, to say nothing of any major metropolitan area on either coast of the United States, we would have a great deal more work to do. As it is, the only people requiring any kind of real focus from us are the few who were left in Tanner City after the tornado. And some of them didn’t even see anything.”

  “But some of them did,” Cardinal Varano says.

  Sansone looks at Sal again.

  “Yes,” she says, “some did. Again, fortunately for us, it turns out that our relocation program, and some substantial financial remuneration, is solving the problem. Almost all the families are moving out of Tanner City, starting new lives in other towns, other cities. In some cases other states. To put it crudely, we have bought their silence. But to take a larger view, as the people of Tanner City rebuild their lives, their self-interests and our self-interests converge. They know that no one will believe them if they ever tell the truth. And the social costs will be extraordinarily high if they persist. They stand to lose their jobs, their new friends, everything. So in a sense, we’re helping them realize what their futures entail a little faster, and with less drama. Yes, they’ll have to spend the rest of their lives knowing something huge about the world that almost no one else knows. But we’re all used to that by now, aren’t we?”

  An appreciative chuckle ripples across the room. Sal feels a little ill.

  “What about Jacob?” she says. “What about Sharon?” She blurts it out almost before she knows what she’s saying.

  “Miss Brooks,” the cardinal says. “This is, technically speaking, an inquest to document and explain the deaths on Team One.”

  “So the people in Tanner City don’t matter?”

  “That’s not what I’m implying,” Varano says. “Only that we have procedures to follow.”

  “I want to know what happened to them,” Sal says. “You all just told me what a great job I did. Can you answer my question?”

  Sal catches the smallest glare from Sansone.

  “Some always prove harder to convince,” Sansone said. “But they came around.”

  “As the box is safe in the Archive now, can we consider this matter closed?” Cardinal Varano says. He sounds a little impatient.

  “I would,” the monsignor from Team Two says. The other monsignors give their assent.

  “Let the record state that the inquest into the fatalities that the Society suffered in Tanner City is declared closed,” Varano says. “It is the greatest challenge the Society has faced in some time. But we have held the line. There are, perhaps, tactical changes to consider within Team One and Team Two. But the core of the mission held strong and all personnel performed with the utmost ethical consideration.”

  Sal remembers the looks on Jacob’s and Sharon’s faces after Balloon and Stretch were done with them. What did they do?

  “Thank you, everyone, for your time,” the cardinal says. “And thank you again to Miss Brooks, for your exemplary work.”

  The room begins to empty.

  “Monsignor,” Sal says. “Permission to be blunt?”

  Monsignor Angiuli’s eyebrows rise. “You’re asking for permission now?”

  “I know I’ve overstepped my bounds here,” Sal says. “But I can’t think of any other way to ask it.”

  “Ask.”

  “This whole thing was just a CYA boondoggle?” Sal says.

  “CYA?”

  “Cover your ass. As in, we’re here just to cover our collective asses?”

  The monsignor gives her a long sigh. As if to say, you expected something else?

  “It’s been a long day,” Angiuli says. He heads down the hall.

  But Sal can’t let it go.

  She sees Balloon and Stretch heading down the hall in the opposite direction from everyone else. She follows them. Recalls their names, though she likes her nicknames better.

  “Desmet. De Vos,” she says. “Hold up, you two.”

  Balloon and Stretch turn.

  “What did you do to Jacob and Sharon?”

  “Who?” Balloon asks.

  “You know who they are.”

  She’s coming on as strong as she can without actually threatening them. But Balloon and Stretch don’t seem threatened at all.

  “I think you have some idea what we did,” Stretch says.

  “Stop fucking around,” Sal says.

  “Profanity! So quickly!” Balloon says. “I like this one.”

  “Yes,” says Stretch. “Very promising. You would enjoy working with us on Team Two.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” Sal says.

  “But then you would already know what happened to those two little rednecks you seem to care so much about,” Stretch says.

  “Just so you know, they’re still alive,” Balloon says.

  “But you’re right that they didn’t want to leave. And money was not going to be enough to get Jacob to stop practicing magic,” Stretch says.

  “So we divided and conquered,” Balloon says.

  “He took the boy,” Stretch says. “I took the woman.”

  The way Stretch says the word took makes Sal’s stomach flip.

  “We didn’t really have to touch them,” Balloon says.

  “We just had to talk to them,” Stretch says. “It was easy. I told the mother the kinds of things I was willing to do to her boy if we ever heard that they spoke a word.”

  “And I did the same to the boy, about his mother,” Balloon says.

  “Now and again we’ll stop by
when we happen to be in their new neighborhood, just to make sure that they still believe us,” Stretch says.

  “And it will work, too,” Balloon says. “All we’ll have to do is stand outside their house now and again, and smile and wave when we catch them looking.”

  Stretch assumes an almost philosophical tone. “It is amazing,” he says, “the kind of violence you can inflict with words alone. After all, your body doesn’t remember physical pain. It remembers the ghost of it. It remembers what it was like. When you recall a time you were physically hurt, you don’t feel it all again. Not like you did then. Words, though—spoken words—are different. You think back to those times someone said something truly awful to you, and you can hear it in your head, can’t you? Just like you did the first time. If you’re not careful, and most people aren’t, your mind can even make the memory worse. Those voices from the past can sound even crueler. You can put words in those memories’ mouths to make them say even worse things than were said, so the memory matches the pain you felt, every time. For our line of work, it’s a beautiful mechanism.”

  “Truth be told, though,” Balloon says, “we don’t mind getting dirty, either. When the job demands it.”

  “Do you understand?” Stretch says.

  “Perfectly,” Sal says.

  “So we’re done here?” Stretch says.

  She turns to go. She’s not even sure how to get out of the building in the direction she’s headed. But it doesn’t matter. She can’t look at either of them.

  “Be seeing you,” she hears Stretch say.

  • • •

  It takes even Grace a few weeks to heal. She is not happy about it. Angry, in fact. More angry than Sal’s seen her, even when she’s in danger, even when she’s fighting someone trying to kill her.

  What is with her? Sal wonders.

  They’re reconvening for the first time as a full team since Oklahoma. The Orb has been mercifully quiet. Menchú is out of the hospital at last, though he’s on crutches. Grace had to carry him down the long spiraling stairs into the library. He’s insisting now on standing, though he’s still a little wobbly.

  “How are we all?” Menchú says.