“That’s just it,” the man said. “Don’t you have ... other stuff ... to worry about?”
“I’d be a damn fool to worry about something I know is coming. I’d be an even bigger moron if I stopped caring about my friends just because I’m about to die.”
The man stared at Bob as if he’d just arrived on a spaceship. Bob shook his head. He stalked over to a table and swept a golf-ball display to the floor before jumping on the table. “Good evening,” Bob shouted in his “I’m a teacher and you must pay attention to me” voice.
Everyone in the room stopped to look at the crazy, dying man standing on the table.
“I’m not doing this to save myself,” Bob said. “It would be pointless. I’m not glad you’re here because I might find some last minute way to get out of death. You all know what I’ve been up to the last few years, and I never once told a Transport there was a way out of it. I’m not disillusioned.”
The group began to shuffle closer to Bob’s table. Great, they think I’m giving some sort of motivational speech.
“I’m not doing this just to stop Grimm. I want him stopped more than most things. Truth is, I’m here because of a girl.” Bob felt Patience‘s soul surge. He swore he could feel her laugh. He couldn’t hear the gesture, but he felt the strange warmth her laugh gave him. “I’m here because Drisc needs me. If you’re all here to watch me avoid death, you’re going to be disappointed. I’m mortal, and I’m going to die soon. The question is, are you all here to watch a Journeyman die, or are you here to stop a monster?”
A number of the Journeymen shuffled their feet and looked down from his gaze.
“We send souls to their next destination, and who knows if that’s their last stop? I didn’t get here because I broke the rules. I broke the rules because life matters. I got fed up with death being that quiet thing people know is coming but they’re too afraid of to do anything about. I wanted people to accept death so they could live life. I wanted people to live as happily as they could because I hated seeing them so afraid to die. So I refuse to die afraid. I lived. I loved. So if this is my time, then I expect whoever Collects this soul to remember that. We’re not in the business of Death, people. I coined the term ‘Journeymen’—because it’s all just another stop along the way. We help people move on. We’re walking, talking proof that there’s something after this existence ends.”
He looked at Archie, then at Pip, Robin, and, finally, at Drisc. “So don’t watch me die. Watch how I ended this life that I was given, and don’t let the people you serve die without knowing how I feel right now. Don’t let them die; help them move on.”
“And if you could stop the ever-living homicidal maniac, that might be good, too,” Drisc said. Thirty or so heads swung from Bob to Drisc.
Bob looked at him flatly. “Did you have to steal my moment?”
“What?” Drisc asked. “I’m just trying to keep us on-point, lad. Ye have a tendency to ramble.”
Bob couldn’t help but chuckle. The crowd didn’t cheer or chant Bob’s name. They stood quietly for a moment before slowly resuming whatever task they were doing before Bob had interrupted. It was fine in Bob’s opinion. He didn’t want to inspire a moment; he wanted to inspire a generation.
In the movies, the director always seemed to cut straight into the heart of a battle, or moments before. Perhaps they’d show the approaching army marching to a slow, tension-building drumbeat. Bob imagined they did this to increase the drama. If they knew the first thing about war or battles, they’d film the hours leading to it—the “hurry up and wait.”
The Journeymen had set everything up by seven. By eight, the group started to get antsy. Drisc separated a pair arguing over who decided to lie on a table first. Drisc resolved the issue by lying on the table and falling asleep amidst their complaints. Bob watched Todd, Robin, and another Journeyman—Bob thought his name was Norm—go over scenarios together. Archie fiddled with his watch. They had a trump card of sorts there, if they needed it. That would only last a few moments, and it would probably signal their defeat. But it would give the others a chance to escape.
The group around him formed smaller cells. Some slept; some talked; others argued; more still sat isolated, holding their legs to their bodies to keep from shaking nervously. In a fight, you could get lost in the chaos. Bob had been on more missions than he cared to think about during his time in Vietnam. During the missions, there was too much going on to think. He’d fall into morbidly pleasant routines. Find a body; Transport the soul; find an injured soldier; get him on a stretcher.
But the hours of nothing before the fight? Bob felt like he wanted to jump out of his skin. Waiting for a battle that he knew he was going to die in made him even more irritable. He remembered being in the warehouse with Patience. She’d known what was coming, and now Bob knew exactly how that felt. No wonder she went out to face it.
Bob felt an almost comedic sense of relief when he heard the first Blacksoul’s scream of rage. Everything teetered on the edge of collapse. Most the Journeymen had some sort of training, but it was as far from combat-skills training as it could be. Oh, sure, some half-dozen of them had seen combat, but most of them were some sort of martial artists. Unfortunately, this wasn’t some sort of Bruce Lee movie.
“Get to your places,” Robin ordered.
“My team with me,” Norm said. The Journeyman led his team out to join the perimeter squads.
“Maybe this is a bad time,” Todd said. He probably didn’t mean to sneak up on Bob, but he did. Bob jerked at the sudden sound of Todd behind him. Todd shrugged in chagrin. “Sorry. But I just wanted to say, there might be another trump card.”
“Really?” Bob asked excitedly.
“Probably not,” Todd said. Bob wished the man would make up his damn mind. “I’m just saying, if we can hold on, we might pull it off.”
“What?” Bob asked. They’d gone over the plan six or seven times. Todd didn’t mention a second trump card once.
“I’m just saying, don’t go after Grimm right away. Hold out as long as you can.”
“How long do you need?” Bob asked. It wasn’t as if Bob was in a hurry to die.
“I don’t know.”
“You’re just full of information, aren’t you?” Bob asked.
“Trust me. If we hold out, you’ll know it when you see it,” Todd replied
“Well, I’ll be happy to try not to die until I’ve seen this wonderful surprise.”
Normand Villisea didn’t expect to be in the front line of any battle, much less in a battle against an army of, well, for lack of a better word, demons. The first scream was every bit as haunting as Bob said it’d be. Whoever said fear is the only thing to be afraid of never looked at a rotted soul determined to eat its way inside him.
He had a squad of nine other Journeymen with him, which only meant there were ten people ready to shit themselves. That was before the shadows seemed to come alive and charge at them like a wave of darkness.
“Hold,” he told them. Each of them held a light of some sort, ready to switch on. The wave came closer, and Norm could make out individual Blacksouls. They seemed about the size of children. Emaciated to impossibly thin forms, they reached out with arms that were too long for their small torsos. Equally oversized claws stretched out, and each individual finger ended in what Norm was certain was a razor-sharp talon.
The wave came closer. Afraid the horde would crash over them, Norm decided to cut away the onslaught’s base. “Aim for the base!” he shouted above the din of screaming Blacksouls. “Now!”
Ten beams of light slammed into the base of the creatures. On the upside, it worked exactly like Norm had thought it would. Blacksouls toppled over one another as if a rug had been pulled out from under them. The creatures the light hit hissed as if they were injured. On the downside, instead of hurting or crushing anything under them, the top portion of the wall of Blacksouls tumbled to the ground, shook themselves loose of their partners, and charged at the s
quad.
“Squad two- now!” From the corner of Norm’s eye, another set of lights slammed into the oncoming hoard. Norm’s squad was pretty much bait to get the Blacksouls to focus on him. From there, teams to the side flanked the group and created a wall of light that gave the tide of Blacksouls the tiniest column of shadow to pass through along the center. The creatures were bottlenecked. Great; the only problem is, I’m the fucking bottle cap.
The groups on each side of Norm had set up as many lights and generators as they could. Whatever they’d managed to set up, it looked as if they had enough juice to light a city. Norm pulled out a barbecue torch and a can of hairspray. If these things didn’t like light so much, how would they handle burning light?
A pair of Blacksouls charged at him like dogs. He popped the cap of the hairspray off with a thumb, lit the barbecue torch, and pressed the nozzle. He closed his eyes and turned away, in case his plan failed and he turned out to be the first casualty.
He heard the flame ploof to life as the chemical combined with it. He heard a shrieking noise and turned his gaze to see the creatures burning in agony. They seemed to melt into each other and glowed like coals. Like some strange insects, the remainder of the horde of Blacksouls attacked their burning counterparts. It looked like they were eating them. Whatever had happened, the burning creatures were gone, and the attack resumed in the blink of an eye.
“Fire at least holds them up!” Norm yelled, turning to run to their first modified bunker at a sand trap on the third hole of the course. “Bring out the big guns!”
Bottles of gas flew over his head; burning rags were tucked into the tops of the Molotov surprises his squad had prepared for the fight on Archie’s orders. Norm dove into the sand-trap bunker. “Contact home base and tell them the news.”
Drisc must have been smiling like an idiot when he hung up his cell phone.
“What?” Bob asked, looking around at Drisc, Todd, and Archie to see if they knew the answer.
“Fire hurts ‘em,” Drisc said. A single grunt of humor burst out of him. “I tink da beasties just gobble up their partners until they heal, but it slows them down.”
The group smiled at one another. Drisc felt a surge of hope. “Fire actually hurts ‘em,” he said, getting used to the idea that they had an actual weapon to use against the creatures.
“They fear light, so why not assume fire hurts them?” Bob said.
“I can’t believe we didn’t think of it before,” Drisc said, looking at Archie. The Clockmaker had told each of the front line squads to try fire out. Leave it to the genius.
“I can; you’re not exactly the kind of person to think logically,” Archie said, as if pointing out that Drisc’s fly was down. “Or at all, for that matter.”
The guy was a genius, but he didn’t always have to be a complete dick about it. “So we can win. We can win!” Drisc said, slamming a hand on Bob’s shoulder.
“No,” Archie said. “I’m afraid thirty Journeymen with a handful of makeshift flamethrowers won’t be enough, but it may buy time.”
Yeah, Archie was definitely a buzzkill.
Robin liked the idea of her job. By filtering the Blacksouls into a column, they knew it would force Grimm, the man behind the facade, to get involved personally, hopefully before he wanted to. She watched as Norm’s squad continued to try and hold its position. They’d hold for a while, at least.
An odd noise drew her attention toward one of the generators. She almost didn’t notice the Blacksoul gripping the electrical box that powered their perimeter, but the deeper black of the creature was darker than even the darkness of night. She reached behind her back to her kodachi blades. Each curved blade was a little less than two feet long. She had studied in Japan. Some proudly claimed to have studied under Miyamoto Musashi’s lineage; she had studied under the author of The Book of Five Rings himself.
He taught her everything she knew about honor, discipline, and fighting. Since then, she had trained under every master she could during her 434 years as a Journeywoman. But Kensei Musashi was her greatest teacher. Though, she had to admit, Drisc never let her down when she needed him. She hated that about him. He never met a rule he didn’t break, but he never failed to do the right thing. It was mind-boggling.
Now she was using one mentor’s skill set to help another. She stalked toward the creature, striking; one form flowed flawlessly into another. She only aimed for slashes, not wanting the creatures to catch or slow her strikes. After three slashes, the creature skittered back, apparently not injured, but it moved away from the generator.
She reacted to the sounds of other Blacksouls and flowed back in that direction. Allowing her training to take over, she recited the five techniques over and over in her mind, striking with each one. Chudan to Gedan; Waki Gamae Hidari to Jodan; she stepped around a pair of Blacksouls to end with Migi Waki Gamae, using one curved blade to move a Blacksoul’s taloned arm aside and control it long enough to cut at both the creature’s arms with one strike.
She was never a lady. She didn’t care for dances or beauty. This was her dance, and she was never more beautiful than when she held her kodachi. As she flitted from one form to the other, she allowed a glance to check on her team of five Journeymen, each of whom were defending a generator.
Another creature lunged at her. She rolled out of the way just in time. She jammed one of her blades in the dirt long enough to pull a child’s toy out of her pocket. It was a simple ball that glowed. Thanks to Archie, it glowed a bit brighter than it used to. She tossed what Archie called a light bomb into the air, sending the horde of creatures skittering back for a moment.
From the darkness, another form approached. He wore his cloak of Blacksouls, but she could see his face. He was the man she’d taught the rules to, and he was the man who spat in the face of everything she stood for. He was her humiliation and her failure. She smiled. It was time reclaim that honor.
“Should we do this your way?” Grimm asked. From his cloak, two Blacksouls crawled along his back and down his arms and formed into ebony-dark kodachi blades. Robin stood and pulled her second blade out of the ground. She took her chudan stance and prepared for his attack.
“You never showed much interested in martial arts,” she said.
“Very true,” Grimm replied. He smiled. A pair of Blacksouls popped out of the ground. She only had a moment to roll backward and felt the creatures’ claws scrape against the soles of her shoes.
She came up out of her roll slashing at a group of creatures to press them back. She turned and blocked an inelegant but brutal downward strike from Grimm. Just as she blocked his attack, his cloak came alive and split into a group of Blacksouls that swarmed her. They bit and clawed at her hands, wrists, and face. More came from the ground, attacking her knees and ankles. She fell to her knees; Blacksouls held her open and vulnerable.
“I thought you’d like to die before the old man,” Grimm said. “I’ve been dreaming about cutting you since the day I first awoke in this form.”
He brought his twin blades down into her chest. They hit her with the force of a boulder, but they didn’t pierce her skin. “Keep dreaming,” she said, using every ounce of strength she could muster to throw one of the Blacksouls at one of the lights behind her.
Grimm called his army back to him. She heard some sort of electrical surge and knew her unit’s wall of light had been taken out. She charged at Grimm, hoping to plunge her sword through the Blacksouls and into Grimm’s mortal flesh. It was an instinctive strike that she realized was a mistake as soon as she’d done it. She was a Journeyman. Even if her blades could reach Grimm, she could never kill him.
The blades didn’t even reach his flesh. Grimm’s Blacksouls wrapped around her arms. Grimm punched her square in the face while his creatures held her arms. He hit her a second and third time before the creatures hurled her through the air. She only had enough time to feel ashamed. Then she remembered what Drisc had told her.
“Don’t forget,”
he had said. “Bob’s the only one that can hurt him. What we need you ta do is to make sure ‘e can’t kill anyone who isn’t already supposed to die.”
“What if he can?” she had asked.
“Would you refuse if you thought he could?”
She smiled an instant before she struck a group of light stands. She wouldn’t have refused. She found her honor in the sacrifice of not knowing. She redeemed herself, not in killing Grimm, but in verifying that he wasn’t quite the monster he wanted to be, at least not yet.
She opened her eyes. She didn’t know how much time had passed. She tried to bolt up to her feet, but sharp pains in her leg, hip, and shoulders caused her to recoil, grimacing.
“Try not to move,” someone said. “At the very least, your leg and hip are broken.”
Robin tried to clear her thoughts, and the man’s faced cleared enough for her to recognize Norm.
“How long?”
“Long enough to miss the fall of our front line,” Norm answered. “As soon as the perimeter generators went out, they just took off toward the clubhouse.”
“Casualties?”
“Like you: broken bones, concussions, and whole mess of people who won’t walk right for maybe the rest of their lives, but no deaths. Those of us who know how are making the rounds to patch everyone up. Someone should be here to help you soon.”
“Pass the word to Drisc,” Robin said as she tried to sit up. Norm planted a hand on her uninjured shoulder.
“I already have,” he said. “It’s in their hands now. I’m regrouping everyone who isn’t hurt too badly. We’ll try to flank his backside, but he’s after Bob now; we’re just a distraction.”
“Then make sure you do a good job of it,” she said.
He looked at her with a strange strength in his gray eyes. “I will. You’ve done your part.”
She felt something well in her throat; a tear escaped her eye. “I can still—”
Something Always Remains: Part Three of The Journals of Bob Drifter Page 10