Shimmer: A Novel

by Passarella, John

  He was vaguely aware of Grainger calling him off, but he was committed to this course of action, as foolhardy as it seemed at the moment. Dropping, he slid forward on the polished tile floor and slammed the point of the dagger into the taut tentacle, inches from Julie’s trapped ankle. The blade sliced the proto-flesh and the demon roared, more in outrage than in pain, Logan suspected.

  Throwing his arms upward, Carnifex hurled aside the roof of the carousel. Poles clanged, horses and carriages crashed and bounced and shattered around them. Nearby display windows, struck by debris, exploded in a rain of glass.

  Julie scrambled to her feet. Logan caught her hand and started to pull her to the relative safety of the radio station table when he felt her body lurch in his grip. Carnifex had formed another tentacle to replace the first, terminating this one in a twelve inch black spike. The tip of that spike now protruded from Julie’s throat, in the center of fresh, foaming blood. Her hand slipped from his grasp and she fell forward.

  Logan’s ears rang with the sound of useless gunfire.

  The floor shuddered behind him.

  Fallon screamed a warning.

  Logan hurled himself to the left, feeling a whoosh of air pass dangerously close to his body an instant before the curved blade of the battle-axe smashed into the floor, shattering tiles and wedging itself several inches deep. Without pause, Logan rolled and didn’t stop until he slammed into the wall of Tunes Style. Then he scrambled to his feet and raced for the table. The battle-axe swooshed overhead and destroyed the stage. The microphone stand fell, eliciting a painful screech of feedback from the large speakers.

  Sergeant Albano fearlessly squeezed off shots with her .40 caliber Glock 23 and though the slugs rattled the breastplate of bones, the demon suffered no visible damage.

  Patrolman Lintz yelled, “Everybody out! Now!”

  Carnifex roared. “Nobody leaves!”

  A series of distant bangs preceded a sudden change in air pressure. People began shouting that the doors wouldn’t open, the glass wouldn’t break. Carnifex lunged toward Lintz and, before the police officer could react, gripped the man’s head in his massive hand and pulped his skull with the ease of someone crushing a raw egg. Carnifex hurled the ruined body into the upper level and laughed at the fresh outburst of screams.

  “Sergeant!” Grainger called. “Get those doors open.”

  Albano nodded, turned on her heel—

  —as a frightful whistling sound swept past her.

  She tried to move, but her legs no longer obeyed her brain’s commands. The wide battle-axe blade had sliced through her abdomen. She collapsed—in two separate pieces—her torso falling to the right, her legs toppling forward.

  Grainger’s other patrolman, Mark Gossett, joined the chief. Together they tried to provide cover fire for the escaping crowd. Unfortunately, their cover fire was futile and the crowd could not escape the magically sealed mall. People crowded into the temporary shelter of stores, huddling behind or under displays. Logan realized with awful conviction that Carnifex intended to kill every man, woman, and child in the Renaissance Mall. The demon lord took several lumbering steps to one side and then the other, swinging his axe back and forth. And with the ease of a scythe cutting through wheat, he began to harvest his blood crop.

  Beside Logan, Fallon silently wept.

  He wrapped his arm around her quaking shoulders but had no words of comfort. He’d never felt more helpless in his life. The dagger clutched in his hand seemed as dangerous as a child’s toy.

  “He’s coming back this way!” Gossett shouted.

  Logan looked up and stared into the hideously grinning face of a lord of hell. Gnashing teeth slathered with blood and raw human flesh. While Logan tried to comfort Fallon, the demon had fed.

  He felt a tingling in his leg, suspected a wound, but suddenly realized the sensation came from his cell phone—on vibrate! “Hello,” he whispered frantically. “Who’s there? We need you—!”

  “Logan, we’re here,” Gideon’s said calmly into Logan’s ear. “Be ready. We’ll fight Carnifex. You need to go through the rift. Take Fallon. You’ll know when. Find them!”

  “Who—what—are they coming?” Fallon asked.

  Almost in answer the recessed lighting in the mall flickered and crackled, winking out for a terrifying moment. In the brief darkness, screams rang anew from the panicked crowd. When the lights winked back on, Carnifex looked around curiously, battle-axe held high. A bolt of blue lightning ripped through the air and struck the demon in the chest, shattering the breastplate of bones. Carnifex staggered, stunned, as oily black smoke billowed off his chest. “Show yourself!”

  A second bolt of blue lightning arced through the air, this one blasting the demon in the face, specifically targeting one of his four remaining good eyes and melting the orb in its socket. Carnifex roared in genuine pain, lumbering in a circle, his free hand pressed to his scorched face. “Show yourself, coward!”

  “Who’s the coward, Carnifex?” Thalia shouted, emerging from behind the ruins of the pretzel kiosk. A pearlescent blue glow surrounded her body. Logan guessed that she had absorbed some of the mall’s electrical energy into her own aura, either as protection or as a power reserve, like a spare clip of ammunition. “About time you picked on someone who can fight back?”

  Carnifex took the bait. Lowering his head, he charged her.

  Grainger and Gossett separated, with the former diving into a clothing store and the latter rolling under the remains of the stage. Most of the trapped mall patrons continued to cower in the stores, behind and under display tables. None of them would remain out of Carnifex’s reach.

  Logan saw a flash of movement from the upper level. A man launched himself off the safety railing—a man with a sword—in a perfectly timed jump. He landed on Carnifex’s shoulders, crouching for balance as he plunged the sword downward in a two-handed grip and took out another good eye. But Carnifex was quick to react, howling as he swept his forearm up to strike Gideon with the shaft of the battle-axe.

  Gideon sailed through the air and hit the floor hard. Though he tried to roll with the impact, his shoulder took the brunt of the fall. When Carnifex stormed toward him, Patrolman Gossett scrambled out from under the ruined stage and took aim at one of the demon’s two remaining good eyes with his Glock 23. Unfortunately, he underestimated the speed of the demon. Logan had to wonder if the bullet would have had any effect on the soft tissue of the eye. He never found out. Carnifex swung his foot as if he were kicking a soccer ball and the tip of his heavy boot struck Gossett right below the ribs, shattering bones and propelling the man twenty feet through the air before he crashed among the bulk of the carousel debris.

  “Logan,” Thalia called as she hurried around the pretzel kiosk toward the overturned table. Logan rose from his crouched position and saw Thalia holding something toward him, dangling from her fingers: the protective amulet he’d given her the previous night. “Take this. Find Liana. Bring her home.”

  “How?” Logan asked desperately.

  Thalia pressed her other hand to her forehead, wincing in obvious pain. The blue electricity swirling and crackling around her body might have been responsible for her discomfort. But Logan worried that her time out of the darkness was leaking away.

  “Take Fallon. She’ll boost you. Douse for them.”

  “We don’t know if she’s alive,” Logan said. “I should stay here to he—”

  “She is alive, Logan. I sense her now. Through the rift. But when we destroy Carnifex, it may close forever. We can’t lose her—them. Bring them back. Hurry!”

  “O-okay,” Logan said nervously, taking the amulet gingerly from her sparkling fingers. He felt a slight tingling sensation, nothing more. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

  “I said your time would come, Logan,” Thalia said, grimacing with another wave of pain. “This is it. Now go!”

  He nodded, tried to swallow but his throat was too dry. To present a poor targ
et for Carnifex’s wrath, Logan stayed low as he caught Fallon’s hand and said, “Show time.”

  “What?”

  “Follow me!”

  They dashed toward the shimmering rift, which hovered a foot in the air like a pulsing bruise where the carousel had stood. Logan caught a glimpse of Gideon swinging his sword and dodging a mighty axe blow. The lights flickered and dimmed again. A third lightning bolt erupted, slamming into Carnifex’s back and scorching away one of the tortured human faces sewn into his vest.

  “Logan, are you sure you know what—”

  Before Fallon could finish voicing her concern, he pulled her through the fold in reality, exchanging hell on earth for another hell altogether.

  Chapter 51

  The moment Barrett lost his arm to Carnifex’s axe, Liana knew the battle was lost. Of course, she also understood that Barrett would never admit defeat. He would continue to fight in a hopeless cause. And die a horrible death. She was not self-delusional enough to think she stood a chance against the hell lord in his own domain with her meager magical ability. She made her decision after Barrett lost his arm. She prepared her spell, which was neither offensive nor defensive in nature, but rather diversionary.

  While she had dangled from Barrett’s hand over the precipice and the surging river of lava, she had plenty of time to visualize plunging to a fiery death. Indeed, the thought had consumed her for a while. So now she visualized that image and added Barrett’s tumbling body to the mix. As easy to imagine two people tumbling to their deaths as one. Then, with her forearms raised and the spell traced, she waited for Carnifex to come in for the kill, to get close enough to the edge to see what she wanted him to see.

  The illusion was vivid but mercifully brief. One more widening crevasse among many was easy to believe, but this one appeared to spread under them, and of course they tumbled down to their deaths, consumed in a heart-stopping moment by the molten river of rock and… forgotten.

  Or at least that’s what she hoped.

  Since she hadn’t been able to forewarn Barrett, she lunged at him and dragged him down, just enough of a prelude to the image of falling bodies to sell her vision to the impatient demon. The image and sound of her illusion played out and she waited in silence in the faux crevasse, the appearance of which she had to maintain for a few moments longer while she desperately prayed her ploy would work.

  With a hand clamped over Barrett’s mouth—unseen by Carnifex—she warned him with a fierce look to remain absolutely still and silent. In full health, he might have protested, unwilling to surrender, but apparently shock was setting in. He was pale and cold to the touch. With a weak nod, he complied.

  Carnifex was disappointed in losing them to his own treacherous landscape, but he accepted that they had died and continued on his way—toward the rift to Earth, where others in the family would have to resume the fight. She waited a few minutes before dispelling the illusion. Then she collapsed with a shuddering sigh of exhaustion.

  She couldn’t afford the luxury of rest. Forcing herself up to hands and knees, she looked down at Barrett lying beside her. “I can’t heal this,” she said miserably, indicating the bloody stump where his arm had been. “I’m sorry. I don’t even know if there are spells.” What she left unsaid was that Thalia and her mother might have had the ability. They would have known. Barrett should have been stuck with a better sorceress.

  Barrett nodded slowly and swallowed hard, grimacing in pain. “That’s okay,” he murmured. Though he kept his left hand pressed to the stump at his right shoulder, his grip was slipping, from weakness, lethargy, the free flow of blood, or a combination of all three. “First aid kit’s under the seat.”

  She smiled for him. If he still had a sense of humor, maybe he wasn’t too far gone. Of course, he might be delusional. But she refused to allow herself to sulk. She had to find something positive out of this mess. They had survived a battle with a hell lord. That had to count for something.

  The ground rumbled around them, destabilizing again now that Carnifex had departed. They were the enemy here. The environment itself seemed determined to snuff out their lives. They had to keep moving. That was their only hope. If they could get out of the danger zone, past the literal killing ground, she might have time to locate the rift back to their world. She could do that at least. “Barrett, I want to try to stop the bleeding with static compression.”

  Again he nodded, gulped, and said, “Go for it.” He coughed, wincing as the spasm pulled at the wounds in his chest. “My life… in your hands.”

  Liana traced the patterns, cast the spell, creating a magical compression against the bloody stump, and uttered the command “Permanos!” to hold it in place. The compression was absolute, pressing against every severed blood vessel better than if they had been surgically clamped or sutured. She couldn’t restore the arm or heal the wound, but she had stopped the bleeding. “We can’t stay here,” she told him. “Have to keep moving. Do you understand?”

  Again, the nod.

  Liana dismissed her feeble light sphere, and created another one, much smaller than the first for fear it would give away their continued existence, let alone their position. The new sphere had the size and luminous intensity of a nightlight. For an added precaution, she commanded the sphere to travel with them at knee-height, where it could do the most good, lighting the way in front of them.

  After placing another static compression over the chest wounds caused by the tentacle claws, she helped Barrett to his feet. “Where?” he asked.

  “We’ll follow Carnifex,” she said. “If I can’t find a rift of my own, we’ll go home through his.”

  They walked carefully at first, with her arm wrapped around his lower back to steady him. He held his sword in his left hand, though she doubted he had the strength to use it. Her legs felt leaden, but she had a simple strategy to revitalize herself. She took one look at Barrett’s ghastly complexion and the stump where his arm had been. That was enough to make her forget about her own aches and pains. Until he regained some semblance of his former strength, she had to be the strong one.

  Weaving, and occasionally staggering when the ground shifted or began to crumble beneath their weight, they gradually put distance between themselves and the site of their illusory death. They were never in danger of catching Carnifex, unless he chose to stop and wait, but soon the ground appeared less fragile. The black rock assumed its former implacable, unyielding nature. Their pace quickened. During infrequent and brief breaks, Liana would seek a rift on her own, but she lacked the energy or concentration for success. As the rift remained elusive, she employed her locis revelis spell to determine Carnifex’s location and adjusted their course as needed.

  After hours of walking and stumbling, she collapsed exhausted. She couldn’t recall falling. One moment she’d been lumbering along on wooden legs and the next she was looking up into Barrett’s perspiring face. “You passed out,” he said with a gentle smile.

  “Sorry,” she said. Then added inanely, “Hadn’t planned on that.”

  He chuckled, grimaced, and sat wearily beside her. “Let’s take a few minutes.”

  As if ready to pop up for some wind sprints, Liana said, “If you insist.”

  “We’ll never catch him,” Barrett said eventually. “You need to find the way out. Right here. Right now.”

  “I’ve tried,” she said petulantly, disappointed in herself. “And failed.”

  “We’ll rest,” he said. “Then you’ll try again.”

  Liana took a deep breath. “Rest sounds positively sinful right about now.” She pushed herself into a sitting position and propped her back against a smooth outcropping of rock. As comfortable a spot as she was likely to find in hell. “It’s not as if I don’t practice.”

  “What?” Barrett said, frowning. “You lost me.”

  “Magic,” she said. “Practicing is definitely a part of it, but there is innate skill involved. Everyone is not equally talented. Thalia and my mother are b
oth better at this. It’s why I’ve stayed behind so much.”

  “Now you tell me,” Barrett said, feigning shock and disappointment. He shook his head and chuckled. “The ranks are thin. I get it. We do what we must. Life according to Ambrose, right?”

  Liana nodded, smiling. “Facimus quem nobis faciendum est.”

  “I’ll stick with English, thanks.”

  “Don’t blame you,” Liana said. “I just wanted to tell you…to let you know that my magical incompetence—”

  “Hardly incompetence.”

  “Whatever,” she said, waving away his defense of her shortcomings. “Not all of us magical types have the same level of ability.”

  “Like an MQ?” Barrett said. “Magical Quotient?”

  She laughed. “Exactly! And my MQ is hardly genius level.”

  “Good enough for me,” Barrett said. “You saved our asses back there.”

  “Thanks, but all I—”

  Rapid clacking sounds approached from the direction they had fled. Soon Liana heard chittering mixed in with the clacking, almost like an insectile language. Barrett climbed to his feet, sword hanging from his left hand as he squinted into the darkness. “Time to move. Now!”

  Adrenaline coursed through her, momentarily trumping exhaustion. She pushed herself off the cold hard ground and immediately saw what was pursuing them.

  Sickly yellow and almost bioluminescent in the darkness, the creatures ambulated like spiders, but with a dozen or more spindly legs supporting their hassock-sized bodies. The undersides of their lumpy bodies split down the middle, exposing a row of chitinous teeth, which clicked together incessantly, as if eager for their next meal.

  Barrett made a preemptive strike against two in the vanguard, slicing off their forelegs to knock them over, then hacking the edge of the sword into their pale bodies. He jumped back as the next few fell upon the wounded, pinning their squirming forms with their legs, while they lowered their bellies and extended fleshy, hollow tongues into the wounds to suck out the exposed meat.