A God of Many Tears (Hawker's Drift Book 4)

by Andy Monk

  He swallowed. When she put it like that… why hadn’t he spent more time looking into what was going on in this place?

  “What happened to you John, what fucking happened?”

  Cece erupted out of her chair. She stood, fists clenched at her sides, face suddenly red with fury.

  He didn’t remember her having much of a temper, save for the one time he’d tried to talk her out of coming here, but she seemed to have developed one now. He guessed destroying her home and stranding her in an alternate reality was enough to give her one. Probably enough to give anybody one.

  When he gave no answer, she made a wet choking noise and stormed from the room, he listened to her footsteps thumping down the stairs and waited for the sound of the door to slam as she disappeared into the night. It didn’t come.

  There was no point following her straight downstairs, best he left her to calm down first. Instead, he fixed his eyes on his machinery, the rudimentary gauges, dials and lights monitoring the fissures to alert him when something came through.

  The last spike had been a few nights ago, when the Carnival had left town. Same thing happened every year when it left, a low resonance spike, a spatial disturbance unlikely to be connected to another reality. It hadn’t been Cece, so he hadn’t paid it much heed, hadn’t investigated it. Hadn’t investigated anything other than whether a new arrival was Cece or not. When it had proved not to be, he’d gone back to sitting and staring at his little lights, still fuelled by the fusion egg he’d brought with him along with the weapons and other gear all those years ago.

  But he hadn’t asked any other questions.

  Something else turned in his stomach, not the jarring realisation Cece couldn’t even stand to be in the same reality as him anymore, but why his innate curiosity about the world had never once stretched to wonder about what was going on here? He’d always known something was going on. He’d always known the monsters were real, but he’d never cared to find the answers. Never wanted to know what kind of monsters lived under the bed.

  What happened to you John, what fucking happened?

  He sat back and scratched his head.

  It was a good question…

  The Songbird

  Cece retreated to the unnatural disaster area that was Quayle’s kitchen.

  She found a chair in the darkness and slumped into it. Probably better not to bother finding a light, the kitchen looked a lot better this way.

  Balling her fists together she rested her forehead against them, screwing her eyes shut in the hope it would stop her crying. She wore big girl pants these days and tears were not going to help much with anything.

  They certainly weren’t going to make John Xavier Quayle any less of an asshole.

  He’d come down soon. She knew he would. For a clever man, he could be stupid as hell sometimes. He always thought he could fix things, make things better by poking his nose in, rolling up his sleeves and getting some meddling going on.

  He couldn’t see that sometimes it was best to leave alone, steer clear and let the water come off the boil. Some things couldn’t be fixed by tinkering, be it the world or a hurt woman.

  Her head wouldn’t clear no matter how much she wanted to be able to think straight, the emotion was too damn raw. It was a mistake to have come and seen him, it was too soon, the wound too fresh. Once she had more distance and a better grip on things, maybe she could see him again. After all, she needed his help to get through this, as much as she hated to admit it.

  It would be best to leave before he came down and tried to tinker things better. Just disappear for a few days. Maybe get drunk, maybe get laid. Why the hell not? It even might help.

  Instead, she sat there in the darkness and turned it all back and forth in her mind, trying to make sense of it, put it in order and stop it clawing at her skin. That’s what she told herself she was doing anyway. In reality, she was waiting for John to come and find her, because that’s what she’d always wanted him to do. From the very first time she’d seen him in the lecture hall, full of swagger and wise-cracks and the hottest ass Mother Nature had ever managed to conjure up.

  Come and find her.

  And he had. And he’d kept on finding her. And kept being there for her. And giving her everything she’d ever needed. Until now. Now, for reasons she couldn’t grasp, he’d become an idiot.

  The sound of his feet on the stairs made her look up and she hated herself for the way her heart quickened. Would she sleep with him tonight? She shouldn’t, she really shouldn’t. But she suspected she would.

  She winced as the light came on. He folded his arms and leaned against the door frame, letting her squint up at him.

  “I’m sorry…” he said, before she could snap at him.

  “You should be… this place is a dump, you should leave the damn light off.”

  He smiled that quirky, off-centred smile of his.

  Yeah, I’ll be staying the night…

  Was that all it took? One little smile and Cecilia Jones was rolling over and wanting her tummy scratched?

  “I don’t know what I was thinking…”

  “Sure you do.”

  “…you can’t blame me for-”

  “Quayle I’ve trained for this for years! We met at the damn induction! This was always going to happen, unless I flunked something. And I don’t flunk much.”

  “This is true.”

  “You helped train me, you A-graded every test you run on me. You know I’m ready. As ready as anyone else who’s gone down the rabbit hole… so what’s suddenly changed?”

  Several expressions flickered across his face, but nothing settled and instead of answering he crossed to the refrigerator and found a beer amongst the food he’d left to compost inside it.

  “Just got real all of a sudden,” he took a long swig and offered her the bottle.

  She shook her head, she’d learned long ago never to let anything that had evolved in Quayle’s kitchen to pass her lips.

  “So now you suddenly try to talk me out of it? Just when I need your support the most?”

  “I’m scared that if you go down the rabbit hole you’ll never come back.”

  “That was always the deal. And it’s why I need you to support me, not try to talk me out of what I’ve wanted to do ever since The Facility selected me and I found out about this… wonderful shit!” She threw an arm out as if sweeping it over the detritus of Quayle’s kitchen towards the lights of Sacramento twinkling far below could somehow encompass all the wonders The Facility had discovered.

  “I… don’t want to be without you,” he took another sharp glug of beer as if he wanted to wash the taste of those words from his mouth. She knew his past well enough. He’d moved from one woman to the next, never staying anywhere for very long. Saying he wanted to be with her was hard for a commitment-phobic playboy like John Quayle. At least it was if he meant what he said of course.

  He had a romantic streak a mile wide, unfortunately it was buried under a mountain of testosterone-fuelled bullshit. She liked to think that was the real Quayle, the one that threw flower petals under her feet, danced with her on the rooftops and woke her up in the morning by singing her favourite songs. But maybe it was all just an act and the shallow asshole who’d bedded women from sea to shining sea was the real one.

  “I’ll come back. I promise…”

  “You better.”

  “Miss me, huh?”

  “I’d hate you to miss the wedding.”

  “Wedding?”

  Quayle necked the rest of his beer, tossed the bottle aside before pulling a small box from the pocket of his shapeless pants. Then he came over and knelt in front of her.

  “John…?”

  “Cecelia, I love you. Have done from the minute I saw you. Been planning to ask you this for a while and kept finding I was too scared. Now I’m more scared of you not coming back through the rabbit hole. I want you in my life. Forever. Will you marry me?”

  She kept waiting for the
goofy grin or the wink, but when he opened the little box and revealed the ring inside she knew if it was a joke it was a damn expensive one.

  “John…”

  “Just say yes…”

  “Yes...”

  Then he did smile, but it wasn’t a goofy smile or a quirky smile, it was just about the happiest smile she’d ever seen in her life.

  She laughed as he took the ring from the box and slipped it onto her finger. It fitted perfectly, obviously. That was Quayle.

  “It’s beautiful…”

  “So are you.”

  “I’m enhanced to the state of the art, y’know? Sure you can keep up, Mister?” She put her arms around his neck and kissed him.

  “Damn right I can girl.”

  She laughed again and let him hug her.

  She looked over his shoulder at the litter-strewn kitchen of his penthouse. What girl could refuse a marriage proposal surrounded by piles of rotting take-out? Maybe his romantic streak still needed a bit more excavating.

  But she loved him all the same.

  *

  Cece retreated to the unnatural disaster area that was Quayle’s kitchen.

  She found a chair in the darkness and slumped into it. Probably better not to bother finding a light, the kitchen looked a lot better this way.

  She rubbed the finger where her engagement ring had once sat. Now it resided in a safe deposit box in another reality and it was going to stay there forever because she’d never be going home.

  He’d given it to her in the luxury penthouse apartment half a mile above the endless sprawl of refugee-choked Sacramento he’d managed to turn into something more like a squalid, flea-bitten squat.

  She’d been mad at him for suddenly trying to talk her out of going on her first assignment to a newly discovered inhabited alternate where humanity’s progress had stalled in the mid-Victorian era. She’d been scared and excited and the last thing she’d wanted was for someone to try and talk her out of it, least of all the man who had played a large part in her training over the previous years. The man who also happened to be her lover.

  He’d got down on one knee and proposed to her. If anyone had asked her what her answer would be if John Quayle ever asked her to marry him, she’d have said she would tell him not to be so damn stupid. But she hadn’t. She’d said yes in a heartbeat. She hadn’t realised how much she’d loved him till that moment and all her froth and fury at him trying to talk her out of going down the rabbit hole had been washed away in a flash flood of emotion she hadn’t seen coming.

  That had been five months ago. For her.

  Now Quayle was an old man who’d destroyed everything he’d spent his life working on and believing in and he’d stranded her here in the process. Now he was a man she didn’t know, changed beyond recognition by all those years that had passed in the blink of an eye for her when she’d gone down the rabbit hole and emerged out the other side in another world.

  Maybe she should have let him talk her out of coming here after all. Maybe she should have quit the programme and just stayed in bed with him, watching the clouds dance across the sulphurous sky outside the superscraper’s windows and forget about exploring the worlds that existed on the other side of a heartbeat.

  But she hadn’t. She’d taken his ring and he’d taken her decision she was going to go and that they’d get married when she came back.

  They’d both said when, but they’d both meant if.

  The fissures in space/time – the rabbit holes – were unstable and the more mass that was sent through one, the more unstable and likely to shift, or collapse entirely, one became. So Facility scouts went through alone and with minimal gear to maximise the chance the fissure would still be there and still lead back to the same place and the same when for the return trip. But sometimes that wasn’t enough.

  Something had shifted in her rabbit hole. In her time, the beacon would still be there, John didn’t destroy them till decades after she’d left, but she could find no beacon. Her beacon or any other further along the timeline. That was why she hadn’t returned to her John. And this John had ensured she couldn’t return to anywhere/anywhen on her world. If she tried to jump back blind the shifting, treacherous tides of space/time could deliver her anywhere. And there were an infinite number of anywheres out there.

  But she was guessing there was another way. A way hidden on the Mayor’s ranch slap bang in the middle of all that screaming resonance. She looked up at the sound of his feet on the stairs, coming to try and tinker things right. That, at least, was like her John.

  She sucked in a deep breath and pushed her hair back. Beneath whatever had happened to him in all those years, deep down, she hoped this John was still as smart as her John, because she was going to need his help to get away from the monster he’d become…

  The Mother

  The Mayor came towards them, the little black bottle in his hand.

  It was such an innocuous thing, small enough to fit snuggly in the hand. But there was something terrible within it and the Mayor wanted to use it on Emily. There was a part of her, small and weeping, that wanted to believe her life, her old life, the mundane little life that had not so long ago made her run into the arms of another man, could be put back together again. But it couldn’t because it wouldn’t be her life at all. It would be something else.

  It would be somebody else’s.

  Mr Wizzle stepped in front of her, holding out his ancient dog-eared Bible towards the Mayor in a shaking hand. She wanted to believe it had the power to protect them from this madness, however it didn’t seem likely the God who had allowed all this to happen was going to wake up and intervene now.

  The best he’d come up with so far was a crazy old man in a clown suit carrying one of her flower pots. If there was an all-powerful, all-knowing God up there, he wasn’t exactly pulling out all the stops for her right now.

  Ash was still standing behind the Mayor with that awful empty smile pinned to his face.

  “Ash, please!” she sobbed.

  “Just drink it again Kate,” the Mayor said when Ash did nothing but smile his terrible smile at her, “and everything will be good, like it was before.”

  She found her hand was clutching Mr Wizzle’s arm, her fingers digging into the faded, dirty material of his yellow and black suit. Had she ever spoken to the man? Like the rest of the town she’d mostly ignored him. Hadn’t he always been preaching about the Mayor? Telling anyone who would listen that the man was evil. But no one had ever listened to him. Perhaps she should have.

  The Mayor stopped, his smile, the kind of overly reassuring smile that stank of syrup and bullshit, fading into a frown.

  “Begone demon!” Mr Wizzle cried, jerking his Bible in the Mayor’s direction.

  Somewhat to Kate’s surprise the Mayor turned on his heels.

  “Something important requires my attention,” he said to Ash, pushing the bottle into his hand, “make sure they both drink some of this and keep them here till I get back.”

  “I want to be happy again…” Ash’s face crumpled.

  “And you will… you will… just a little longer and everything will be good again.”

  He stared at Ash until her husband’s empty smile crawled back onto his face.

  The Mayor nodded and left the room, the door slamming after him even though he didn’t touch it.

  “Did you see that?”

  “It’s the power of God!” Mr Wizzle exclaimed, shaking his Bible.

  “I meant the door closing on its own.”

  “Oh, well, yes… I saw that too.”

  “What… is he?”

  “The Devil…” the old man whispered, the Bible dropping to his side “…incarnate.”

  “And the bottle?”

  “The Devil’s brew, he uses it to bend people to his will. It is why Emily accused Amos and then Preacher Stone of attacking her. Neither did.”

  Her eyes widened, “Preacher Stone?”

  Mr Wizzle slipped the
Bible back into his pocket, “I saw him the night of the attack, he was passed out on the floor of his house. He was innocent. Somehow, he was in the thrall of the Mayor’s black candy too, but he didn’t attack Emily.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “Would you have believed me?”

  She raised a shaking hand to her mouth.

  “Besides…” the old man glanced towards her husband who was still standing motionless, the black bottle clutched in his big fist, “…I did.”

  “Ash?” She took a step towards him, but Mr Wizzle placed his arm across her path.

  “He has supped the Devil’s brew. He is not himself.”

  She pushed his arm away and crossed the room.

  “You knew?” she hissed.

  Ash smiled and lifted the bottle towards her, “Just drink Kate. Then we can be happy again.”

  She knocked his hand away. There was something childlike in his voice, a simple and desperate need to repeat those words in the belief if he kept saying them long enough they would eventually become true.

  And perhaps they were true. Perhaps the Mayor could take their memories away and everything could be the way it had been before. Perhaps she would love Ash again, perhaps Emily would be the girl she’d used to be, perhaps they’d go back to having dinner at Rosa’s once a week and John would just be another face in the street. Perhaps her mind would be filled with nothing more than remembering to go and buy bread, what she should cook for dinner, Ruthie’s schooling and hoping Emily wouldn’t do anything foolish with a boy. And part of her wanted that. Wanted that more than anything in the world. But it wouldn’t be real and there would be a price to be paid for having it. Everything in life came at a price.

  And the price for this would be selling their souls to the Devil.