by David Estes
Dried blood, tatters of ripped clothing, and discarded personal items, like purses and hats, are everywhere. We even see a dirty stuffed animal, a white bear with a sewn-on smile, crammed between a hubcap and the wall. Did the child it belonged to drop it while being dragged to safety by his or her parents? Or was it only in the child’s final breaths that his or her hands opened, letting the favorite toy drop to its final resting place?
Trish picks up the bear and hugs it to her chest. I’ve never seen her look so child-like.
Laney fires me a look that I interpret as See? She’s just a kid. I don’t care if she’s a witch.
I look away because I don’t know if she’s right.
Clunk, clank, thunk, thump…
THUMP!
Our metallic footfalls echo through the tunnel, the latter being caused by Hex jumping from the hood of a red Nissan to the trunk of a blue Honda, his claws skittering on the metal.
“Quiet!” I hiss. Hex just looks back and wags his tail and then thump-skid, thump-skid, thump-skids! his way to the next car in three large bounds.
I roll my eyes, wishing once more for a stealthy lightweight magical cat.
“Where should we stop?” Laney asks.
I consider the options, wondering whether it’s safer to be closer to the city or to the highway, but before I can respond, a voice says, “Hello, Rhett Carter,” and Hex barks madly in the dark.
~~~
In the first moment I draw my sword with my right hand, and in the second moment I thrust Laney and Trish behind me with my left, which sends razors through my shoulder.
“Who’s there?” I shout, trying to be heard above Hex’s nonstop barking.
My dog also appears to be running in circles, because his light is flashing around like a strobe light, illuminating the walls and then the cars and then the ceiling, and then…
A shadow, walking calmly toward us.
Chook-chook!
“Stop or I’ll shoot!” Laney shouts, roughly pushing her shotgun muzzle past my injured arm, my wound erupting with blinding pain.
“Relax,” the voice says, even as Hex’s barking stops and the movement of his light slows, zoning in on the intruder.
That voice. So familiar…and yet so different than the last time I heard it, when it was full of insanity and barely restrained violence.
“Bil?” I say. “Bil Nez?”
“In the flesh,” the Native American witch hunter says, even as Hex leaps in front of him and shines his light in Bil’s eyes.
Chapter Forty-Four
“You again,” Laney says, refusing to lower her shotgun despite my three polite requests to do so.
“Sorry to disappoint,” Bil says, shielding his eyes from Hex’s light. His hands are empty, weaponless, but the sharp angles of his crossbow rise above his shoulders, almost like strange, skeletal wings. “I’m unarmed.”
“That didn’t seem to matter when you almost shot me the last time I saw you,” I say.
Laney’s lips tighten at the memory and she says, “Want me to do him?”
I gape. “Laney, no. Just no. Lower the gun. It’s okay.” She doesn’t. If anything, she raises it slightly so her aim is on his head.
“Yeah, after I saved your life,” Bil says.
“I was fine,” I say. “I had things under control.”
“The End was about to end you,” Bil says, chuckling lightly at his own joke. “All of you, including your hot new girlfriend.”
“You shut your mouth, Running Bull,” Laney growls. Her grip on the shotgun is so tight all the blood has drained from her fingers, leaving them a pale ghostly white in the dim lighting.
“Can’t take a compliment, can you?” Bil says. Turning back to me, he says, “Look, I know I might’ve seemed…out of sorts…the last time we were together, but I want you to know that’s not me. Not the real me. We’re on the same side in this. I want the witches—the Necros—dead as badly as you do.”
“And The End?” I ask.
“Murderers and mercenaries,” he says. “But we can’t deal with them until we’ve dealt with the witches.”
He seems genuine enough, but he’d seemed himself when he saved me, too, and then…
“Hey,” he says, drawing my eyes to his. “I’m sorry about before. I really am. I barely got out of there alive, and I realized what a fool I’d been, how stupid I was to push away one of my few friends. I’ve just been through a lot lately.”
I can’t help but relate to that. We’ve all been through a lot, and Bil’s story about the girl he met who turned out to be a Siren was certainly horrific. It’d change anybody.
“What happened in Waynesburg?” I ask. “How’d you escape the missile that destroyed the city?”
His answer shocks and takes the breath out of me.
“I’m the one who ordered the air strike,” he says.
~~~
We all need a minute to calm down and process things. We sit in the bed of a large truck, a Ford F-250 I think. Laney’s got her shotgun resting across her knees, but at least she’s not pointing the double barrels at Bil anymore. Bil sits across from her, sipping from a bottle of water. I ease down next to him, but not too close where I can’t go for my weapons if I need to. And Trish is across from me, next to her sister, her wide white eyes not missing a thing.
Hex poses in the middle, like a sphinx, glowing brightly enough for us all to see, but not so brightly that someone looking into the tunnel from either end would see the light. Good boy, I think. Smart dog.
“Start over,” I say to Bil.
For a moment I see a flash of irritation in his eyes, but the look disappears as abruptly as it appeared. “What do you want to know?” he asks. “That I was born on protected Native American land? How I grew up learning to shoot arrows and throw knives while most kids were playing Xbox? Or how my family was slaughtered during Salem’s Revenge, and I was spared only because I’d gone for a walk in the woods after getting in a fight with my father over whether I’d go to college?” I detect a hint of the same crazy in his voice I heard back in Waynesburg, but not the same level. Even so, I inch my hand to the hilt of my sword, ready to draw it if necessary.
“No, Bil,” I say evenly. “Start with how you’re able to order a missile strike. Who are you working for?”
For a second he stares hard at me, the tension thickening into a heavy soup, and then he breaks into a huge laugh, shattering the dark vibe. “I was just messing around,” he says. “I knew what you meant.” He pauses, takes another sip of his water.
“Well?” Laney says impatiently.
“You’re a real firecracker, aren’t you?” Bil says. “No wonder Carter here’s got a thing for you.”
Anger burns hot through my veins, but I know he’s just baiting me. Calmly, I say, “Bil, just answer, okay? You say you’re on our side…then prove it.”
“Well, technically I’m on New America’s side,” Bil says thoughtfully, “but they’re generally pretty friendly toward witch hunters, so I expect you’d side with them, too, if you had the chance.”
“New America?” Laney and I say at the same time.
“Yeah,” Bil says, looking at us strangely. “Surely you know about…” He trails off, recognition flashing in his eyes. “You don’t know? This is too funny! I thought of all people, Mr. Rhett Carter would know about New America.”
“Just tell us what it is,” I say, growing frustrated.
“The new government,” Bil says, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. “After everything went down and the witches mostly took over, the surviving government leaders fled to a safe zone that was made for just such an emergency.”
“Where?” Laney asks.
Ignoring her, Bil rambles on. “I’m pretty sure the whole thing was set up in case of civil war or terrorists or something, not witches, but hey, you can never tell what the U.S. government really knows, can you? Maybe they were preparing for aliens.”
“Where?” I ask.
“Who’s calling it that?” Laney again, her eyes fixed on Bil.
“The government of New America. President Washington—”
“You mean Vice President Washington,” I say, picturing the blond-haired woman with the striking pale blue eyes who, before Salem’s Revenge, held the second most powerful position in the U.S.
“President Bartlet didn’t make it,” Bil says. “A gang of Destroyers took her and the entire Secret Service out as they tried to make it to Air Force One.”
“The President of the United States of America is dead,” I say in utter disbelief.
“Former president,” Bil says. “President Washington is the president now. New Washington is named after her, although obviously it shares the name with its predecessor.”
“Wow,” Laney says, blowing out a breath. “But at least someone in leadership survived, right?”
“Yeah,” I say. “But what does that have to do with you, and why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”
Bil winks. “I was going to, but our conversation got cut a little short. Look, when I headed east, I eventually made my way to D.C. I thought if anywhere had managed to organize our defenses, it would be the nation’s Capital. Turns out I was right. They knew about witch hunters and all the good we were doing in the fight against the enemy, and they were actively hiring, so I agreed to work for them.”
“Work?” I say. “Work how?”
Bil licks his dry lips. “At first it was just carrying out specific hits. Killing witch gang leaders who the government considered high value targets. I did well, so they gave me a promotion.”
“Promotion?” Laney says, and I hear my own incredulity echoed in her question. The word sounds so foreign, like Bil’s just been sitting at a desk, churning out reports, climbing the government ladder.
“I guess you could call it that,” Bil says. “One of the major challenges of fighting the witches is that they’re so spread out, splintered into gangs with varying motivations. My new job is to locate large pockets of witch gangs, ensure the civilian presence is insignificant, and call in a strike. What’s left of the U.S. army shoots off a missile from some secret silo and then…”—Bil fills his cheeks with air and blows it out sharply, pantomiming an explosion with his hands—“boom. Bye bye, witches.”
“You blew up Waynesburg,” I say. A statement, not a question.
He shrugs. “There was a large gang of Necros there. They had one of their largest skeleton armies with them, and they’d been—”
“You mean the boners?” Laney interjects.
“Huh?”
“By skeletal army, you mean those boney reanimated people who try to kill everyone in sight?”
“Yeah, that’s them,” Bil says, looking slightly confused. “The Necros had been marching them from city to city, killing anyone still alive, harvesting the bodies.”
“Necros don’t kill,” I say. “Mr. Jacks—uh, someone told me that they let others do the killing for them, and then they scavenge the dead.”
“That’s generally true,” Bil says, and suddenly I feel like I’m just a stupid ignorant kid being lectured at. Bil seems to know so much more than me. “But now that they have dead warriors, the Necros can use them to do some of their killing.” Duh.
My head spins as I let in a swell of truth. There’s no reason for the Reaper to have kept Beth or Xavier alive. They deal in the dead. If they really did take my friends, it would’ve only been because they’d been killed by other witches. I close my eyes and try to breathe, forcing myself to remember that I’ve always known they were dead. That any hope I had was of my own foolish creation.
Laney continues the questioning. “Earlier you said you barely got out of Waynesburg alive… why is that? If you were the one who ordered the air strike, then surely you’d have been miles away before the city was destroyed.”
“I don’t know,” Bil says. My eyes flash open and I push away the shadowy claws of depression trying to grab me. I need to focus. “At first I chalked it up to a government screw-up. That’s certainly not unheard of. I mean, I talk to someone who talks to someone…up and up the chain of command it goes, until someone orders the missile to be launched.”
“So you think something got lost in translation, like the time you wanted the strike to occur,” Laney says.
“At first,” Bil repeats.
“And now?” I ask.
Bil sighs and suddenly looks the most uncertain he’s looked since we ran into him. “I’ve talked to other witch hunters working for New America. There have been unexplained deaths, designated as ‘accidents’ by those we report to. Witch hunters have died, but some people think the deaths were planned.”
“New America is killing witch hunters?” I say. The intrigue seems to get deeper with every word out of Bil’s mouth.
“It’s just a rumor,” Bil says quickly. “Look, I made it out—that’s all that matters. And then I set up another strike, and it went exactly according to plan.”
“In Washington, Pennsylvania,” I say.
“Yes. There was a large gang of Pyros. But how do you know that?”
I smile, glad that I can turn the tables on Bil and surprise him for a change. “We were there,” I say. “You almost blew us up.”
Laney rises to her feet, props her shotgun against the side of the truck bed, and whips out her magged-up Glock. “You’re going to pay for that,” she says, and points it at Bil’s head.
Chapter Forty-Five
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I say, rising quickly and positioning myself between Laney and Bil.
Bil takes advantage of the distraction and swings his crossbow in front of him, a bolt already in position. For just a moment, I wonder what it would feel like to be shot by a cursed bullet and an arrow, also likely full of magic, at the same time. And by two people who are both supposedly my friends.
“Move it, Carter!” Laney says. “He tried to blow us up.”
“Tell your new girlfriend to get her gun out of my face or she’ll have a lot more to worry about than getting blown up!” Bil shouts.
Technically, Laney’s not my girlfriend and her gun is in my face, but I don’t think correcting him will help, so I say, “Everybody just calm down,” something that cops always say on TV to diffuse a group of gun-wielding baddies. Just like on TV, my words have no impact, almost seeming to make things worse.
Laney pushes forward, jams her gun over my shoulder, as if using me as a human shield. I’ll have to talk to her about that. “I should shoot you right now,” she says, her face so close to mine that I almost feel like she’s talking to me.
“You’ll die before you pull the trigger. I’ve been doing this a long time, sweetie,” Bil retorts. I’m stuck, unsure of what to do, waiting for the shooting to start with me in the middle, Hex barking around my feet, when—
A deafening scream rips through the tunnel.
“Ahh!” I yell, covering my ears and dropping to the truck bed. I hear similar shouts from Bil and Laney, and am vaguely aware of the clatter of their weapons on either side of me, but most of my focus is on pressing the flesh of my hands to my ears to block out the horrible keening that’s exploding in my eardrums.
In the background, there’s the sound of tinkling glass and crackling sparks, and although my eyes are jammed shut, I see a blaze of bright light behind my eyelids, flaring like the sun rising over the horizon, and then vanishing as quickly as it came.
The scream stops, echoing down the tunnel and into the night. My ears are ringing. There are voices, but they sound like they’re underwater. I realize it’s like when Trish blew up the missile. While we were arguing and her sister and Bil were about to do so
mething hasty, Trish silently decided to do something about it. Something bold. And effective.
Slowly, I lift my head and swivel it around. Bil is lying on the truck bed, craning his neck. Hex is licking Laney’s face and she’s making a futile attempt to push him away. Trish is standing over me, watching my every movement. She points two fingers at my eyes then at hers. Watch me, her motion says. Then she points down the tunnel. Follow me.
“We’ve got to go!” I say, and I know I’m shouting because I can’t hear myself. Laney says something, but she doesn’t shout so all I see are her lips moving. “No time to argue!” I shout, even though I don’t know whether she was arguing. “The noise is going to draw every last witch in Pittsburgh to this tunnel!”
Trish takes off, her short legs carrying her from the truck bed onto the next car. Ushering the others forward, we follow her. “What’s going on?” Bil shouts, his voice sounding far away and muffled. “What was that scream?”
“No time to explain!” I shout back, pushing him onward. Some of the previously burnt-out tunnel lights above us are sparking. Glass crunches underfoot. Trish’s scream must have impacted their wiring and shattered their bulbs. And yet…
Didn’t kill us.
She has more control over her power than I think Laney or I realize.
Laney’s little sister traverses six or seven vehicles, hopping from car to car like a frog crossing a lily-pad-covered pond, and then climbs down to the left, disappearing into a shadowy doorway. Tunnel maintenance staff only, a small red-lettered sign reads.
“Wait,” I say, when she pauses outside a metal door. “Let me open it.” Just in case, I think.
“You haven’t changed,” Bil mutters. “Always got to be the hero.”
I ignore him and tug at the handle. Locked. Won’t budge, even when I brace myself and give it a hardy yank.
Trish motions me aside with a tiny wave. She turns the handle and pulls, and the door swings open.