by Mark Jeffrey
When she fired them, she was them. More than that; she was even the bullets they uttered. She did not aim. Rather, in her tiny microbody of lead, she simply went where she wished. And she arrived swaddled in a cushion of blood and bone.
She did not know where Cody was, but she knew he had not been shot — so he was the primary danger now. If he was anything like the Cody of Arturo Gyp, he was lethal beyond reckoning. He had held his own agains even the mechanical perfection of Blackthorne — until sheer mortal exhaustion had taken him at last.
Gripped with a new insight into her eldritch weapons — and admiring the extreme beauty of their carvings and elegant lines and swirls, she thought of Cody.
She did not want him dead — God no! She only wanted his gun hand injured. She wanted him incapacitated.
Her weapon was a gateway of perception. And it spoke with her now on a subtle level it never had before. She had not yet been ready. And she had not had the need.
Now she did.
Where she aimed did not matter, she realized. Space was an illusion. Therefore, direction was an illusion. Everywhere was the center and the circumference at once. Only intent of target mattered. Aim did not. Aim was an illusion, a confusion.
Gripped by this new insight, she raised her weapon, pointed it at nothing. She thought of Cody’s hand — and fired.
If she could have slowed time, she would have seen a bullet leave the barrel and turn in midair and streak across the lobby, finding Cody Chance behind a floor desk, just now lining up a lethal shot on her.
She would have seen her bullet stop and turn once again — the proverbial magic bullet — and enter the back of Cody’s hand, shattering bone and tendons. His hand spasmed open as muscles were severed, snapping like cut rubber bands. The bullet came to rest, a lead pancake now, in his gun — which dropped from his punctured hand.
Of course a bullet could not stop and turn in mid-air. It didn’t. It couldn’t. The bullet did not traverse. Instead, it manifested an intention, a thought, a Word, which was more real than matter or space or time. It was just that the only rational, scientific explanation that could be applied to such a thing was that the bullet ‘turned’.
Back in the mundane three-dimensional world, Cody cried out in pain and surprise. Emboldened, Casey popped her head around the counter. Still no Siren. But she saw Sasha’s head pop around the other end of the counter at the same time. Their eyes met — she shrugged: No idea where he is.
And then Siren stepped up behind her, walking slowly, Tommy gun pointed at her head. He saw Casey and smiled like a co-conspirator, placing a finger up to his mouth: Shh! This will be really funny!
The sight shattered Casey’s concentration. The eldritch insight, the mindset that had just allowed her to neutralize Cody, went out like a candle in a sharp puff of breeze.
He was going to do it. Casey’s face went white with powerless horror. Sasha looked at her quizzically, oblivious. What?
Siren pressed the trigger …
… As he was wrapped in a tornado of barbed wire. It literally covered him from head to toe, Casey had never seen anything like it. It ripped the Tommy gun up, blasting away at the ceiling, and yanked Siren back with a particular viciousness that made his head literally snap like the end of a bullwhip.
Ian, in his ensorceled bloodmetal. He had Siren on the ground and was pounding him violently.
“Siren! Auuuugggh! How dare you touch Sasha! I’m going to kill you!”
Enki arrived then and jumped on Ian’s back, and began curiously whispering in his ear. Immediately, Ian calmed. After a moment, he rose — metal fists covered with Siren’s old blood — and just stood there, passive now, panting.
Siren looked more utterly surprised than hurt. Still — his face was pretty beat up. His nose was broken and the barbed wire had cut him all over. But he stared at Enki like he was seeing a ghost.
“You’re … you’re …” Siren gasped out. “But that is impossible! You cannot leave the Book!”
Enki’s eyes burned with that old soul searing gaze that only he could have. He threw this gaze now into Siren, who quaked with terror from his head to his toe tips — which was a very rare thing for Giovanni di Cyranus, Johnny Siren — these days.
“And yet, here I stand,” Enki said. “And yet, I am. Get up. Leave. Darken our door no more, or I will burn you in ways you never imagined possible.”
Struggling, but motivated by unmitigated terror, Siren did so. He was in the presence of one of the Olden Gods, and he knew it. Without any further question, but unable to keep from staring, Siren walked out of the bank as quickly as he could.
Next Casey ran to Cody, who held his hand in agony. She kicked away his gun for safety and then said, “Here. Let me help.”
Cody looked at her in surprise. “You? But you just shot me!”
“Only because you forced me to.” She examined the wound to make sure the bullet had indeed penetrated all the way through. Then she tore some cloth from her own sleeve and began wrapping his hand to stop the bleeding.
“Casey,” Enki said gently. “You have done what you can. Now. We must depart.”
“But he’s hurt!”
“As he has said. He has backup coming,” Enki insisted. “They will tend to his needs. We must leave. Now!”
Torn, but realizing the truth of what Enki said, Casey hesitated for only one more moment. Then she leaned down and kissed Cody hard on the mouth for a good long moment. At first he didn’t respond … but then something welled up inside of him he didn’t expect or understand and he returned the kiss.
Ah yes, Casey thought. There you are.
And with that, she pulled away and the foursome fled the Veerspike Regional.
“NO. I DID not locate Max,” Enki confessed back at the Rosewood Arms. “So the mission was in that sense a failure. But what I did not find also tells us something: he is not nearby in a reasonable radius from City 29. Marvin Sparkle must have taken him in the exact opposite direction than we headed. City 29 is inland and north of the Shell Hotel — it stands to reason he is inland and south.”
“So we’ll head there,” Ian said.
“Not yet,” Enki replied, pulling out a single coin from his pocket. He made it dance along the backs of his fingers like a magician — and as Ian had seen Gaspar Faliero do on many occasions. And Ian noticed that The Bondman’s face was on both sides — in this world there no tails, only heads. “For this coin was touched very recently by a man who can tell us beyond any shadow of a doubt who the Bondsman really is.”
Ten: Raffle’s Pass
THE NIGHT was electric, powerful. The hair on the end of Max’s arms stood on end. The stars were powdered diamonds in the deeps above, and a hot wind rustled the leaves all around him.
His escape from Snake Island had been a simple thing: Ulrich’s men had fired upon him; he had lit up his starfire and whooshed, exiting the base before anyone could lay a finger on him. Even Marvin Sparkle was no match for him under those circumstances.
He had sped back through the tunnel that wound below Mirror Lake and exiting on Mount Griswold, blasting through the Kissing Gate, knocking it off its hinges.
From there, he tried to recall the map that Sparkle had shown him — it appeared that the Nurvenback Ridge was his best bet. It led deep into the wilderness, away from everything else. He focused on heading in the general direction the map had revealed.
He had survived in forests before. The clipped and fragmented memories that flooded his brain told him that, told him how to do it. He could hunt small game, find water. He knew the signs. He could make fire with not very much at all. In the middle ages, he had done so on many occasions. In times unrecorded further back in the past, he had done so. It was easy. It was almost laughable that most people today could not do these things. They relied on supermarkets, convenience stores, silly things that did not exist in nature.
But Max knew better.
He knew how the natural world worked.
&nbs
p; The real world. The world humans were born to live in. Not the crazy world of television and Facebook and Twitter and iPhones from his own timeline. That world was, in a sense, a fiction: filled with electronic hallucinations of various sorts. Blood and water and bone and fur and stone: that was the real world. That was the essence — the meat — of reality itself.
AS THE NIGHT wore on, and he whooshed over the miles of wilderness with his power alight, he was surprised to find his power fading. Had he kept it alight too long? One thing was for certain: it had sapped his strength.
Well, he had never kept himself lit up for anywhere near this duration. Who knew what that would do to him?
Soon, he was out like a snuffed candle. He was exhausted — and found he could not even whoosh. He had been reduced to a mere mortal again. He could only shamble along the forest floor, out of breath and dizzy.
He tried to keep himself from panicking. He had come to rely on that power in a very short time — and now he found that it had a limit and a price.
But he was Max Quick, and he knew that he had survived a thousand lives without that power. He would find a way.
When the sun rose the next morning, it brought with it a fetid haze. A brown corona tinged the rim of the sun as it rose. The air was thick, choked, hard. He had been walking up a mountain all through the night; now he was high up, stepping along the spine of the Nurvenback Ridge, if he recalled correctly from the map he’d seen back in Camp Griswold.
And from this height, he saw that wherever the spreading shafts of first sunlight touched the forest, a mist of some sort rose. But he quickly discerned that it was not mist, it was too frenetic. It expanded and collapsed and expanded again.
Then he heard a low thrumming.
Bees? Wasps?
It was buzzing, whatever it was.
More of it rose from the forest at the touch of the dawn.
Aw, hell! He was on stone, and there were only small bushes nearby. Nothing really grew up here. But in the wilderness, in the trees below, it seemed, were millions of insects. The woods were infested beyond belief: he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
More spreading sunlight, more clacking insect wings and purring of tiny bodies made of dust and flax and furred little legs.
A dark seething cloud rose all around the Nurvenback Ridge. Waves rippled through it.
In his preternaturally long life, Max had seen several locust invasions. But that had been in Africa. Not here, not in the Northeast of what should be the United States!
He quickened his pace. What if those things came up here?
He snapped his head around from side to side. But he could see no shelter, nothing remotely like a cave. There was no stream in which he could hide underwater, breathing through a reed as the horde passed.
A lake of rippling shadow surrounded the Ridge. And it was rising, bubbling like a cauldron.
He was essentially immortal. But only if he was uninjured. He knew from his long, though still fragmented, memories that he could die if mortally wounded. He had almost done so on many occasions. The scar along his sternum where Marvin Sparkle’s sickle had ripped him open like a fresh fish was a reminder of that.
And getting stung repeatedly and mercilessly was certainly a horrible and certain way he could go.
What was wrong with this forest? Was this somehow yet another consequence of the Bondsman’s reign?
He thought it must be so. All of reality had been altered, infected, warped on some fundamental level. What should be a pleasant woodland was now a lethal charnel house.
The churning and buzzing grew closer.
Fire? Would smoke and fire work?
But he had no wood. There was nothing up here. There was no time, no way to —
Then, he spotted a pile of rocks off in the distance. It looked man-made. Quickly, he ran towards it. It was irrational, of course. How could a pile of rocks help him? But someone had been here before him. Whoever built that had to know how to survive those wasp things.
When he got there, he saw that it was not rocks. Instead he saw a giant pile of wood. There was a sign, rough cut flat wood with sloppy paint. It read:
For The Next Troop of the Bondsman’s Junior League
Together, We Are Strong!
Troop 253
He was so stunned for a moment that he didn’t move. This was an insane bit of luck.
But Marvin Sparkle had told Max that chance did not operate normally around him. It was how Sparkle had located Max initially at the Shell Hotel. It seemed that it worked in two directions, it seemed — good luck and terrible luck.
Max laughed grimly to himself. That described his life. No wonder.
He set about arranging the wood in a circle around himself.
His skills as a woodsman served him well: a fire was quickly lit. Troop 253 has also left a great deal of small twigs and sticks as kindling. Before long, the orange slap and crack of flames licked towards the heavens.
And not a moment too soon: for the first wave of the buzzing, flying hive crested the edge of the Nurvenback and flowed across the rockface upon which Max sat very quickly thereafter. Soon, the entire mountaintop was awash in black tiny flying things, eager to sink their venom into any available flesh.
The smoke and flame provided him with a shell, a small bubble of air mercifully empty of the terrible horde. He coughed and gagged on the smoke, and little floating on-fire particles bit his skin, but it was alright. It was better than the alternative.
He sat that way for several hours. The swirling haze of wasp tested the edges of his defenses, trying to penetrate here and there, but not succeeding, always retreating quickly.
But Max was running out of firewood.
He’d started with a hefty pile in the middle of the circle. But he kept feeding the flame-beast. It munched down log after log after log, greedily and without cease. And now there was a tiny pile, hours later.
Grimly, he fed the last of it to the circle.
The wasps dive-bombing the smoke were getting closer. The perimeter of his bubble was closing in. With each horrible tiny body pushing against its smoke-limned edge, it was starting to collapse.
And now he was seeing wasps very near his head. Max tried to scrunch himself down lower. The roof of smoke was collapsing …
Abruptly, the wasps fled the rockface. They dove down into the forests below the Nurvenback Ridge.
What the —?
All of the dark clouds of horror retreated to the shadows of the forest canopy below. Soon, they were no longer even seen.
Max stood. What could have caused them to flee like that? He was relieved but more frightened now. He knew from his long life that when things like that flee, that only means something worse is coming.
He snapped his head to the north, then east, then west. What? What was it? Where was it? Was it coming up the mountain? Was it already here, invisible somehow?
Three lights, out the Southwest. They were headed his way.
Aw hell! Sky Chambers. Or worse.
He kick at the dying logs, stamped on the lava of coals that remained. Goddammit! He had to get this fire out, he could not be spotted by Sky Chambers —!
He danced a fire-killing jig as fast as he was able.
The lights approached. He could see now that without a doubt, the were Sky Chambers. But whose? The Bondsman’s? Or those of the Resistance?
Didn’t matter. Both parties hated him now. He didn’t have friends on either side.
Still, he managed to stomp out the fire just before the Sky Chambers were in range to probably see it. He ran nonetheless, just in case they’d spotted the fire from afar. He ran harder than he had in a long while and dove into a copse of bushes at the edge of the rockface, somewhat down the mountain range.
The Sky Chambers passed overhead. Max watched, their peculiar silence bizarre as always, as the vehicles of ancient stone sailed by overhead. They were so odd! Not a stitch of technology in them, or so it appeared. How did they wor
k? How could they fly?
He shook his head. Ian might understand this, even if he did not.
And then they were receding into the Northeastern sky. Seemingly, they had not noticed Max Quick huddled in the copse.
Now what? Would the wasp throngs return? Something about the Sky Chambers had frightened them, but now that they were gone —?
But he didn’t have long to wait. Not that far away, a battle had already broken out. The Sky Chambers that had just been above him had engaged a horde of other Sky Chambers beyond the edges of the forest. A battle in the heavens ensued. Slaps of lava and power exchanged back and forth between them in the distance. The battle took place so far away that Max could hear no sound: it was fully visual.
Sky Chamber slammed into Sky Chamber. Some of them fell from the sky.
This went on throughout the afternoon. The wasp-hordes had seemingly vanished; the Sky Chambers must still be close enough to frighten them off, Max thought. He redoubled his pace to take advantage of this.
Sometime late in the day, more Sky Chambers arrived and joined in the fight: both sides were calling in reinforcements.
As the sun set on the heavy battle in the Northeastern sky, he slipped into the woods once again. A wood thankfully free of wasps and buzzing and sawing.
MAX JOURNEYED all through the chilly night. He was exhausted. He had come across a few streams, so he had been able to drink and avoid dehydration. But he hadn’t eaten. He’d kept his eye out for plants and berries, but there were none — or they’d been picked clean by the wildlife.
Now he was seeking game. Even small game would do. He had carved a stick into a crude spear with his machete. One thing from his jumbled memories that stood out very clearly was how to make and throw a spear effectively; he had done so on many occasions. But no animals appeared.
As he descended off the Nurvenback Ridge, he was extra careful to keep his eyes open for wasp or hornet nests. Those things had to be somewhere during the night, and they’d seemed to live at the lower elevations, right where he was just about now. And there was a chance they were bees, which meant honey would be plentiful — if he could get to it.