“You didn’t tell me you were on SWAT,” Ree said.
“Before today I wasn’t. Turns out there are more clued-in people in the department than I knew. Get settled, then let me introduce you to the captain.”
There were a dozen SWAT troopers by the building, sitting in wait under one of the mostly-intact tents, riot shields stacked up against the wall like Roman scutum.
That display alone put the stake through the idea that the Pearson PD was anything but clued in as to the weird. The officers nodded to Ree as she walked by, also choosing to ignore the hundreds-of-years-out-of-date sword she carried.
She pondered stopping to talk with the officers, maybe try to get some answers out of them. Were they a full-blown Black Cat/Special Investigations/Initiative kind of squad, or just a SWAT team where the S in SWAT was even more special than expected?
Danny stood guard with the rest of One Tough Mama’s security at the door to the warehouse set, loaded to the teeth.
It’s like Attack the Block meets The Artist . . . Ree thought, her mind’s Hollywood-Pitch-O-Tron kicking on.
Inside, Jane and company had changed the set dressing to make a small theatre viewing area against an interior, the mirror set against a wall and two projectors fifteen feet back into the main room. One was an old-style multireel projector, the other was a portable joint connected to a laptop computer.
The mirror was easily eight feet tall, in a shining silver frame with metallic roses and thorns encircling the mirror’s surface. A dozen photos ringed the inside of the frame, head shots of Hollywood sweethearts from Rachel MacKenzie through Audrey Hepburn, all the way back to Shirley Temple.
Off to one side, Drake stood at the ready, decked out in full adventurer mode, goggles and all. His rifle was slung over one shoulder, and he held the Hellboy-sized pistol in his hands, the weapon approximately the size of his head. He’d prepared, though, and wore an equally heavy-duty wrist brace, complete with gears and pistons.
Ree scanned the room, seeing the nervous techs and PAs dressing a set, decking the wall out to resemble one of the grand old theatres in L.A., a three-hundred-square-foot version of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Sure, some of the wallpaper was scorched, and the candelabrum they’d hung up was missing three of its arms, but Ree guessed the effort and the base trappings were all that was needed, and the best they could do in a rush.
Yancy emerged from behind one of the false walls, wearing a freshly pressed suit that was old enough that it jumped clear past retro to pure vintage. He wore wide-rimmed glasses and had his hair slicked back and parted to the side. The net effect turned him from a late-twentieth-century director to a midcentury would-be contemporary of Cecil B. DeMille.
But his transformation paled to the marvel that was Jane Konrad.
The star came out of nowhere, and as she walked, a phantom spotlight followed her even before the lighting team picked her up. She wore a revelation of a dress, an all-black throwback to the Golden Age with matching gloves that reached past the elbow, making her the spitting image of Rita Hayworth.
It didn’t look like anything she’d seen in the star’s closet, and given the rays-of-the-sun-level of magical energy rolling off of Jane, it seemed as likely as not that the dress itself was spun from pure magic, the star wreathing herself in the adoration of her fans made manifest. Her hair was curled and pinned in a walking waterfall of curls, shimmering like rubies.
Ree discovered that her mouth was open and consciously closed it with a soft click of her teeth.
Be still, my machine-gun heart.
The room was silent as Jane crossed to Ree. The woman’s beauty glowed even brighter as she approached, and Ree raised a hand like she was blocking out the sun.
“Holy crap, Jane. You could put someone’s eye out with that.”
“That’s the idea. Let’s see Alex try something today. I’m pretty sure that right now I could upstage Justin Bieber in a stadium full of ten thousand preteen girls.” Jane turned to Yancy. “Are we all set?”
Yancy looked up, not meeting Jane’s eyes, either. “Very nearly. The police are handling first response, and we get anything after that. I want to send the rest of the crew home now, keep anyone else from getting hurt.”
“That includes you,” Jane said.
Yancy shook his head. “Not going to happen. I’m seeing this through. And you need at least one assistant during the ritual. Ree’s good, but if Alex sends another attack, she’ll be busy.”
“What’s with the second projector?” Ree asked.
Jane smiled. “The tools on the table are old, the traditional trappings of the working actress. But celebrity has gotten a lot more complicated since Norma’s time, and so has the magic.
“I put the word out on Twitter, Facebook, and my blog that all my fans should watch and live-tweet their favorite movie of mine, and I’ll donate a dollar for every tweet with the #JaneDay hashtag for the next two hours to my charity, Open Arms.”
“And aside from getting you to spend money you don’t have, how does that help?” Ree asked, trying to process what Jane’s reference to Norma meant.
“When we start the movie, we’ll also project the #JaneDay feed. Every tweet of attention will be a bit more fuel, pooling the collective positivity and attention to power the ritual.”
Ree whistled, thinking back to the Twitter feud that had gotten Jane into this mess, but also remembering similar campaigns by other stars. A single call for retweets from Neil Gaiman, Justin Bieber, or Lady Gaga could snowball into dropping the entire Internet on an issue. That’d be a lot of attention, even in 140-character chunks. “Wow. But didn’t the last thing you did with Twitter backfire?”
“This is a bit different. Plus, the Twitter part wasn’t the problem. I know it will work, I just need you to buy me the time to finish the ritual without Alex or Rachel screwing things up.”
So there it was. Ree imagined the here’s the plan scene in her mind from a Spider’s-eye view. The SWAT team was spaced out around the building, covering the entrances, backed up by Danny and the company security. Inside, it’d be her and Drake. Not much, but it would have to be enough. Plus, she’d gone toe-to-toe with a Dork Lord of Hell, and how much could Alex have left after sending a fucking dragon their way?
Famous last words, girl, said her worried voice.
But, Spider-powers! responded a bouncy voice, her inner twelve-year-old who thought being Spider-Man was the coolest thing ever.
Ree helped finish up the preparations and watched as the last of the crew packed it in. And because the universe couldn’t resist a little atmospheric foreboding, a rare Pacific Northwest thunderstorm rumbled its way in.
Jane stood in front of a table, a strange assortment of foci in front of her. But if dice, old modules, and action figures worked for a Geekomantic ritual, it only made sense that a Celebromancer working big mojo would use lipstick, a marked-up script, one of her awards-show dresses, a 35mm film reel, and a makeup set laid open around a compact. Jane’s glow had narrowed, focused into the ritual tools, which beamed with energy like glow sticks.
“Start the film,” Jane said, standing between the projector and the screen. Drake flicked the lights off, and Yancy started the reel. The lights beamed out, casting a Jane-sized shadow on the mirror, the film showing around her. At the same time, the modern projector showed a slow scroll of Twitter posts.
It was hard to read the credits with Jane blocking the screen, but Ree recognized the film as soon as she saw the black-and-white figure facedown in a pool beside a neglected mansion: Sunset Boulevard.
Whelp, Ree thought. Not the most encouraging film.
The story arc fit, mostly, but in a totally creepy way. It also explained Yancy’s retro getup. He channels Cecil B. DeMille, and Jane taps into Norma Desmond’s white-hot desire for a return (never comeback) to the big screen.
A cluster
of memories hit Ree all at once. The famous lines, the exaggerated costuming, and the tragic ending.
The symbolism worked for Yancy and Jane, but for Ree, it was more than a little problematic. Norma Desmond never gets back into film, and the manipulation of the screenwriter she hires leads her further into dementia until she shoots him dead after he tries to shatter her illusions and escape his gilded cage.
Ree knew that with Geekomancy, you could focus on one aspect of a film or show without getting all of the side effects of another part, but that didn’t stop a shiver from rippling down her spine, draining all the warmth out of her skin.
Ree looked to Yancy, but he avoided meeting her eyes, keeping his gaze locked on Jane.
Oh, that’s not good.
Her Spider-sense went off like a string of firecrackers behind her neck. She listened, trying to figure out if something was happening outside or if she was just freaking out about the movie choice. This was Swanson’s most famous film, and if hers was the only mirror they could find that fit, wouldn’t they have to make do? Jane’d had several chances to screw Ree over, why change her mind now? Right?
While she tried to calm her frayed nerves, she heard gunfire outside. She turned to Drake, who was already heading for the door closest to the noise.
Ree let him go, continuing to scan the room, looking for other intruders. Ree heard a whistle, then a crash that she felt as much as heard. She bounded to the door and swung herself up and out of the door, sticking to the outside wall with Spider powers.
Outside, the SWAT team was clashing with several dozen orcs from the Ralph Bakshi Lord of the Rings, which Cosmic had bought out from Warner Brothers. They might not be as fearsome-looking as the Uruk-hai of the Jackson production, but there were at least forty of them, and they were close to surrounding the police.
The squad had dropped into a proper Roman phalanx, forming an impenetrable square of transparent plastic and black Kevlar®. The shields turned back the arrows and spears, but the soldiers were pinned down, none of them fighting back.
Let’s see if I can’t do something about that. Ree sheathed the sword and let loose a double dose of webbing, covering a half-dozen orcs and plastering them to the concrete.
“Forward!” called a voice from the team, and they pushed against the weakened flank, knocking orcs aside and breaking the line open. The orcs moved to adjust, but their lines were thinner now, less constant assault raining down on any point.
Ree jumped into the fray wearing an ear-to-ear grin as she hopped and bounded, cutting swaths across the orc line, moving just too fast for the orcs’ counterstrikes.
This is fucking awesome! she thought, instinctively dodging a thrown spear by flipping backward. She nailed a three-point landing straight out of a McFarland panel, save for the sword she held out, ready for another run. The SWAT went on the offensive, pushing the orcs back onto one flank, driving the mob into the walls.
Ree hit the opposite flank with another burst of webbing, and the team polished the orcs off in short order, leaving behind a running river of ichor and Ree’s webbing.
After checking for more nasty yet to come, she hopped down from the wall and approached the team.
“You guys are awesome!”
One of the team stepped forward, an older man of fifty-ish, with close-cropped black-and-silver hair that peeked out at the temples under his shield. “Thanks for the assist.”
Ree offered a hand, “Ree Reyes, screenwriter.”
The policeman chuckled, then met her with a hand that would have been big without a gauntlet. “Captain Brandon Chu. Washington said you had some skills.” Behind him, the SWAT team dropped the phalanx formation, some of them pulling water bottles from their harnesses while the others watched the campus. These men and women were rock hard. Ree saw Washington’s face behind the visor, and the officer saluted with her truncheon.
“This is your squad?” Ree asked, assuming she already knew the answer.
“It is. I’ve led this team for going on ten years. What’s a screenwriter doing with moves like Parker?”
Ree gestured like a bad stage magician with both hands. “Maaagic.”
Chu grinned, taking a drag from his water bottle. “You going to be able to keep that up?”
The music in her mind had dimmed, but was still going strong. “For a while. You?”
“We arrived about five minutes after you’d cleaned the clock of that dragon. Shame. Most of the younger officers haven’t ever faced down a full-grown dragon; they were climbing the walls on the way over.”
Ree gave Cap Chu the eyebrow of circumspection. Most of them? So presumably some of them have? I may have underestimated this town’s basely crazy level.
Chu shrugged. “This job takes a special kind of crazy.”
“True story. Send up the signal if something else shows?”
“Will do,” Cap Chu said. “Let’s just hope this thing works. My girls are madly in love with Mermaid High School, and it’s hard to tell a seven- and nine-year-old to stop paying attention to their favorite actress without having to either deal with tantrums or share entirely too adult details about someone’s rap sheet.”
Ree managed a polite smile, not having been in any sort of position like that and not sure if she was being indicted as part of that rap sheet and associated behavior. She left the conversation and checked inside again, where Jane was in full-on ritual mode, locked into the film, strobing light like a number at the Grammys. She nodded to Drake, and the two of them changed positions, then settled in to wait, while Yancy stood at Jane’s side, her silent assistant.
The only sound in the building was the hum and spin of the projector and the steady drone of Jane’s litany, which sounded to Ree like a tabloid and historical survey of the careers of starlets across the years.
And I thought my magic was weird.
A few minutes later, another wave hit the campus, this time it was an even larger pack of apes from the Planet of the Apes knockoff film De-Evolution.
The apes broke the ranks of the SWAT team, so Ree swung into action once more, getting a smaller pack to chase her around the campus in a Spider-power-enabled re-creation of the scene where the heroine parkours her way through an industrial park to get to the secret formula for reversing the De-Evolution virus.
Cap Chu managed to rally the SWAT team, reposition, and call weapons free, which led to dozens of gorillas dissolving into ichor and the side wall of the office building used for the Awakenings set being shot up to the point of looking like it belonged in The Walking Dead or Children of Men.
By the end of the second wave, Ree’s Spider-powers were nearly depleted. She tagged Danny in for door duty and tried to top off her tank again using clips from her phone, but only got a few minutes before a flood of rats hit the campus.
They didn’t have much in the way of area of effect weapons, which meant that Ree had to dig deep into her sideboard, flinging fireballs and acid bursts and ice-rays like a level 20 Wizard from atop a wrecked car. When the wave subsided, the concrete was covered in ichor, and Ree stood in the center of a one-person ticker-tape-parade hangover. She was out of Spider-fu and nearly out of cards, which left her with her mostly-charged blasters and her swords. Drake had run through three-quarters of his charge crystals, and the ritual was only just now half-done.
Ree wished that Sunset Boulevard could have been a tight ninety minutes instead of an intense and lingering hundred and ten, but she cast her quibbling aside when wave four hit. Front ranks of orcs, with gorilla heavy infantry.
She watched the horde push forward, standing on a table to see over the phalanxed-up SWAT team.
“Fall back inside and bar the door!” Cap Chu ordered, and the team shuffled back, forming a pocket inside the door to receive the orcs’s charge. A group broke off to one side, so Ree ran to another entrance, shouting to Drake as she went.
“Status?” Ree shouted back to the SWAT team.
“This door won’t hold,” Chu said. “I need you to keep the others off our ass.”
“Got it!” Ree pulled out her blaster and kicked over some tables to make herself a low-rent fence for cover.
Something hit the door, and the shelving unit shuddered. “They’re heeere!” Ree shouted to everyone and no one, channeling Heather O’Rourke from Poltergeist. Ree set out her phaser and sword beside her, wishing she had a gun bunny in bed beside her to keep the weapons coming like the irascible Jayne Cobb. But then again, as much as she liked that idea, or the notion of finally getting herself a copy of the Cunning Hat, she liked her solid moral compass and triple-digit IQ even better.
The cabinet shuddered again, and then she heard wood splinter. The shelf flopped forward, landing just short of her table fence. Ree popped her head over the bench and fired as soon as she established the visiting figure was of the wrong genus to be human, even counting some of her harrier exes from the college hippie days.
She fired as fast as possible, trying to plug the door while someone came to back her up (hopefully). But a pair of orcs jumped in at an angle, knocking over the table to Ree’s left and opening a path for others to follow. One of the leading orcs jabbed a spear at Ree. She ducked behind the table for cover, then held the blaster over the table and fired indiscriminately, scrambling back and groping for the sword. Her hand wrapped around the leather strapping and she pushed herself to her feet, still firing as she backed up.
“A little help here!” she shouted again, panic not so much creeping as barging into her voice. She parried the orc’s spear-thrust as it tried to circle her, then dropped it with a blaster bolt. She didn’t have the time or the space to switch her weapons, so she fired right-handed and parried southpaw. She abandoned all pretense of containment, backing off step by step as a gorilla pushed the cabinet aside so that the monsters could stream in.
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