by Aaron Crash
She was in a black dress that barely covered her skin and was designed to make her look more naked with it on than off. Her arms were so muscled that when she poured herself another shot of the nameless hooch, you could map most of the Central American countries on her flexing triceps.
Though she had her back to him, Blaze knew her face would close the deal and he’d have to love her forever. She was lust and trouble mixed with an unhealthy dose of old-time religion and untreated alcoholism. She might call herself Granny, but she looked like a newly christened MILF, and in a certain light, she could pass as the high school cheerleader that cheated off you in geometry and broke your heart. She would’ve been the kind of girl who always seemed about fifteen minutes away from having sex with you, but in reality, was never gonna close the deal.
The rumors were true, all of them, and for the life of him, Blaze felt like he was in the presence of an archduke of hell.
She spoke in a husky, deep voice. “Little Ramon Ramirez. You’re all grown up. You smell like a man who has loved and lost, fought and won. Suits you. And I like what your CO named you. Blaze. As in going in guns blazing. As in a blazing trail while spineless pendejos wet themselves and beg for their mamas. Arlo did good with you. You don’t believe that, but then, you’re so wrong about so many things, mijo.”
“Don’t call me that.” The unease in Blaze grew.
“Why not?” Granny stabbed into the salad and shoved green leafy vegetables into her face, chewing with all the class of a jungle orangutan.
“It’s what our mom would say to us,” Blaze said. “You’re not my mom.”
She gulped and chewed and smacked until she got the mouthful down. Lettuce and raw red bell pepper with a beer chaser. “I’m everyone’s mother. You get to a certain age and people become your children. Makes it awkward in the bedroom. Or better, depending on your kink.” She finished off her beer and added it to the pile. Then she screamed shrilly, “Dammit, barkeep, you aren’t doing your fucking job!”
She shoved the bottles away from her, and they crashed off the other side of the bar in a spray of glass and noise and the stench of beer. She turned.
And Blaze gazed into the same face he’d seen on Chiang Mai Prime twenty-four years earlier. She’d not aged a day, though with her, that didn’t mean much. She had the crow’s-feet of an older woman, but her cheeks were smooth and bright, pink even. Might as well be a blushing chica in her twenties. Her lips were slutty red. Her jawline was firm but her neck was starting to droop. Her eyes were a dark brown and older than time. She might’ve been Mexican, maybe Brazilian, maybe Middle Eastern, maybe Maori. It seemed she was little bit of everything and nothing at all.
She smiled. “Blaze Ramirez. The badass.” She threw him a beer and he caught it. “Come and sit next to Granny and talk to me. Do you think you came to the ass-end of this world by accident? I used a little telekinetic magic to adjust your descent in the torpedo. I brought you to me, which brought the Gorebacks here, and we’re all right where Chthonic wants us. Not a lot of coincidences on Hutchinson Prime, not when the world is about to end and shit’s about to get weird. Calls for a drink.” She pulled a cigar out of her cleavage, a thick Cohiba Churchill. “And a smoke. You like cigars, I warrant. Following in Arlo’s footsteps, no doubt. He came to my bed so often with a cigar between his teeth that now I get horny when I smell an ashtray.”
Blaze chuckled. “And I thought Elle didn’t have a filter. You pretty much say everything you think, now don’t you?”
“I’m too old to care what you think. But no, I don’t say everything that skulks around in my perverted mind. If I did, you’d run screaming. Time twists us. The evil that men do does the twisting. Come and sit next to your depraved old Granny and tell me why you fought your way through the IPC blockade, space dragons, colliding suns, Chthonic’s toys, and Elle’s fears to come and talk to me.”
Blaze sat down on a stool, propped his shotgun against the bar, and cracked open the beer. He took a sip and grinned at the bite. The barkeep wasn’t doing his job because his throat was cut. He looked up at them with a white film covering his dead eyes.
“You kill that guy?” Blaze asked.
Granny shot another whisky down and wiped her mouth. “I really don’t think so, but it’s hard to say for sure. It’s a definitely maybe but probably not. Chthonic’s been trying to dick with my head. Like the yellow-dress girl and her puzzle and her rhyme. ‘Here’s the church and here’s the steeple. Open the doors and see all the people.’”
She popped the cigar into her mouth and went through the motions with her hands, which were wrinkled and spotted with age, totally breaking the illusion of her as a young woman wanting to claw the eyes out of the world and eat men while doing it. No, they were grandma hands, veiny and colored.
Fingers on the inside, that was the church, thumbs together, those were the doors, and her index fingers were the steeple. Opening her palms, she wiggled her fingers inside, and those were the people.
Granny spoke around the cigar, and she was as practiced at that as she was at doing shots and draining beers and sitting on barstools with dead bartenders lying in a pool of their rusty-brown blood. “The dead lie to us, Blaze. Death is the biggest lie there is, and it parades around as truth. Death and taxes, right? I’ve never paid taxes, and I don’t plan on dying, and it’s all utter nonsense. Do you know what the one reality is in this universe?”
Blaze was getting tired of her prattling. But at least he could rest for a bit, wet his whistle with a dark beer, and get a little more nicotine into his bloodstream. He plucked the cigar from her mouth, snatched his ax from his side, lit the blades, and got the Churchill going. It was a good two-hour smoke if you took it slow. With the way Granny was going on, it might take that long. But damn, he didn’t want to dick around on this crappy planet for that long. He wanted to get the info and get gone before the stars exploded.
He exhaled sweet smoke and sipped his rich beer. Cigar lit, he laid his ax on the bar next to him. “Okay, Granny, what is the one great truth in the universe?”
“Love,” Granny said. “I loved Elle like Arlo loved you. Like Arlo and I loved each other, back when we first met in the desert. It’s why the great religions of Earth started in the deserts. Ain’t no love in a dry waterless place that wants to kill you except for the love you bring. Love don’t care about death. Love don’t care about taxes. Love cares about caring.”
“Arlo didn’t love me. He beat the holy bejesus out of me and drove me to train until I bled,” Blaze said. “And I didn’t come here to talk to you about clichés—”
“Clichés are eternal truths lying on their deathbeds. Why do you think they are clichés? Because they are so fucking tired, and they want to die, but we can’t let ’em go. Because they’re the truth.” Granny went back to attacking her salad like she hated it. Probably did. But she ate it anyway. Sure, from what Elle said, that was Granny—drink a case a beer, get drunk on whiskey, but eat a salad and go to Mass and pray to Jesus before dancing with the Devil. Inside her paradox city, she was the mayor.
Blaze drained his beer and threw it onto the floor behind the bar where it smashed to pieces. “I’m cutting to the chase right here and now. I need to know where the Onyx Gate will be on March sixteenth of this year. So you’re gonna tell me, I’m gonna leave, and have a nice eternal life. If you ever see Arlo again, kick him in the balls for me.”
Granny laughed with her mouth full and then spoke. A hunk of lettuce hit the bar. “That’s rich. You and Miss Elle think to close the Onyx Gate? You think that’s going to give your life meaning?” She swallowed her greens and slammed back another shot of brown. “I told you life, death, taxes, evil demons from another dimension, none of that shit matters. It’s love. And you and Elle don’t know a thing about love.”
“And you do?” Blaze asked. He wanted to grab her, shake her, get her to tell him the truth. But that would get him killed. Elle was powerful, but she was still the apprentice. Blaze
was facing the master.
“I know everything there is to know about love, Gunny.” Granny hawked up snot and spit it onto the floor. “I’ve been at this game for a helluva long time, messiahs and satans, stars in the desert and pilgrims coming with presents, and God is silent until he screams so loud we are driven insane. My love is a terrible, terrible thing, and when I hold you, I kill you. I don’t mean to, but I’m so Human. The Sloths and the Clickers are right to wonder at us. Being Human is to be magically insane.”
The door opened behind them. Blaze turned. Elle came in, her armor up because she knew she was coming in to a fight. It was going to be a battle to get Granny to tell them anything. Why, Blaze didn’t know. Maybe Granny just liked dicking with them. Arlo would be like that. When Arlo had information, he liked to dole it out a little at the time so he could feel special and needed. Arlo and Granny were always planning out then playing their stupid little games.
Blaze wanted to warn Elle away. Seeing Granny would only split her open.
Granny staggered off the barstool. Her stiletto heels threatened to either break on their points or slip out from underneath her. Blaze helped her, and Granny slapped his hands. “Don’t need your fucking help, Gunny! Stand down. At ease. Or whatever other bullshit military crap you men love.”
She stumbled but caught herself. Then she tried to walk over to Elle, tripped again, and Elle was forced to catch her.
Granny held her. “Oh, mija, oh, it’s so good to see you. You’ve grown so much, and you’ve become so powerful. You and Blaze are going to do such wonderful things for this universe.”
Elle guided Granny back to the stool. Both had tears in their eyes and Elle couldn’t talk. The pain in her face made Blaze want to hit something.
“Granny,” Elle started. Her eyes went to the beer bottles, the half-gallon of hooch, the murdered bartender on the other side.
Granny lifted her chin and gave Elle a defiant look. “Elle.”
Elle turned her head and set her mouth. “We heard you know the location of the Onyx Gate. Blaze and I want to close it. Will you tell us where it is?”
The defiant look on Granny’s face melted and tears streamed down her cheeks. “I had to leave, Elle. It was time. You were grown. It was hard doing it. And I was an awful mother to you. It wasn’t our plan to raise you both. Your real mother, we wanted Maria Sandra to do it, and we would train you on the side. She agreed. Then the Clickers killed her and it all went to shit. This universe is always sliding into chaos. It’s hard to remember love. I was telling Blaze, love is the answer. It’s all about our love for each other, even when it’s an awful love.”
Elle fisted both her hands and cocked her head, and it was clear she was trying to control herself. She rubbed her fists into her eyes, her cheeks, struggling. Then she dropped her hands. “Granny, we’re running out of time. If you ever loved me, you won’t make this hard.”
“It has to be hard.” Granny stole away the cigar and shoved the spitty end into her mouth. She took in a drag, held it in her lungs, and then let out the smoke. It was like she was smoking dope, not a fine Cohiba. Still holding her breath, she said in her best stoner voice, “It’s going to get horrible for you both.” She exhaled, and hardly any smoke left her lips. “And at the very last minute, you’ll get what you need. I don’t know why it has to be like that, but it does. Maggots in the meat, that’s what Xerxes, Chthonic, Nauzea are, maggots in the meat of the universe, and their master, the father of flies, the lord of rot, decay, and evil, such evil, he is void. The opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s void. And the beast lives in the void. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you.”
Blaze growled, “I’m done with the drunk tears and the drunk lecture. Either you’re gonna tell us now or you’re not. If not, we’ll go find Arlo in Meelah space. He knows.”
Granny laughed. “Knows when. Doesn’t know where. And if you think you’ll survive to March sixteenth, you’re high or stupid. This Satan thing isn’t going to wait for you to shut its favorite door. Arlo knows when the gate will appear. I know where.”
“Tell us, Granny, please,” Elle said. His badass sister was gone, and she was back to being a young girl with a psychotic caretaker.
Granny, holding the cigar in her fingers, smiled warmly at Elle. “We had to leave. Arlo and I, we’ve continued the work that was given us by the angels so long ago. But you and Blaze had to find your own way. Now, you are important. I’m not. It’s like it was before…I stopped being important. They would say my name, but that wasn’t me. I was a symbol, but it wasn’t me. Candles and prayers, and I was a goddess and not a woman.”
Blaze stood up from the barstool and attached his ax to his hip. “Okay, I’m done. I’m going to get on the ship and go find Arlo. This has been a monumental waste of time, and Granny, buddy, you gotta get yourself together. I’m thinking some kind of rehab program for drunk witches, or maybe group therapy for demons, or maybe a clinic for angels. Not sure what you are, but you are crazy.”
“Crazy sexy,” Granny laughed. And that change, from jaded to tearful to laughing, it was jarring. It felt chaotic. Blaze didn’t have time for that amount of crazy. Patsy needed to get back to her people, and they needed off the planet. As impossible as it felt, Arlo might be easier to deal with.
“Please, Granny,” Elle pleaded.
And that was one more thing that put razors in Blaze’s gut. Seeing Elle so helpless, reduced to a child, pissed Blaze off like nothing else.
Granny took another drag off the cigar, held it in her lungs, eyes shut, and then breathed out the smoke. “Okay, Elle. But it’s not so easy as where. I can tell you where, but—”
The ageless woman was going to do it, tell them what they needed to know. The most powerful Onyx witch in the galaxy opened her red lips.
Trina and Ling screamed into comms, “Blaze, Elle, we have company!!!”
Then an undead dragon tore the roof off the dive-bar roadhouse.
FOURTEEN_
╠═╦╬╧╪
Claws the size of Buicks appeared in the top of the drywall, making the dim lights sway and shutting off the murmuring jukebox. Plaster shook loose from the ceiling to snow down on the green pool tables, the ripped red upholstery of the booths, and the beer-sticky tabletops.
“No!” Granny screamed. “It was just getting good! I had them! They wanted me to tell them the big secret. Goddammit, Chthonic, you’ve been evil for six million years. Couldn’t you have waited fifteen seconds before continuing your stupid evil?”
The roof of the Dew Drop Inn was tossed away, and rain gushed down from the dark sky, as twilight as ever, with storm clouds the color of an amateur boxer’s black eyes. Ghosts with open mouths and pale gowns whirled around and started for them.
Granny shoved the cigar into her mouth and dug into her purse like an old woman looking for her pepper spray.
Elle started a spell.
Blaze retrieved his shotgun and lifted the muzzle.
The dragon who’d murdered the Dew Drop Inn rose above them, and it was sucking in air.
Blaze could see its lungs expanding through the thing’s bloody ribs.
It was an obsidian dragon, not the moon-sized one they’d seen before, but his scrappy little brother. Still it was the size of a skyscraper—a ripped up, slashed up, skeletal skyscraper. It had the dark stone-like skin, but most of that had been torn off its black bones. Cali, surely Cali, had shredded the dragon until nothing but bones and internal organs were left. Through the flaps of bloody skin, the rib cage of the massive thing was visible as were the gray lungs and obsidian heart. The stomach, however, was a churning grisly green sack of man-shaped shadows and shapes. What the hell?
The bony, half-rotted dragon opened its maw.
The first of the ghosts reached out long hands to touch them until Granny cast a shield spell. The magical barrier bashed away the incoming ghosts. The shrieking wraiths broke against the shield like a phantom ocean hitting a cliffside.
The dragon’s mouth puked zombies down onto them, some half-eaten, others whole and covered in stomach acid that sizzled their skin. The torrent of vomited zombies rolled down the shield, but the things climbed to their feet and hit the barrier, clawing at it, mindlessly trying to get at them even as the acid burned their skin.
The undead dragon drove a claw into the roadhouse and scooped up the floor, half the bar, several stools, and Blaze, Elle, and Granny. Granny, clenching the cigar in her teeth, rescued a beer bottle from falling. She wrenched open the cap. “Goddamn shit-stupid demonic motherfuckers.”
The dragon held the bar in midair, at chest level. Blaze could see the thing’s black heart beating. Wait, it still had a heart, so they could kill it, but it looked dead. Who knew what kind of evil anatomy these dragons had? Regardless, this thing was fueled by Onyx and ruled by Chthonic.
The caves of darkness that were the dragon’s eyes flashed lightning, and Granny’s shield spell failed. Blaze, Elle, and Granny stood on the floor of the ruined roadhouse, gripped in the paws of the monstrosity, high above the landscape. Rain battered their faces and the sky grew dark.
Granny plucked handcuffs out of her purse, fuzzy handcuffs, and tossed them. A second later, she cast the stasis spell, and the undead obsidian dragon froze. Was it Chthonic? Had they found the archduke’s true shape?
The zombie horde from the farmhouse had found them, millions of the dead, staggering down the highway. Trina was out of the crane’s cage, back with the minigun, keeping the undead from overwhelming the truck.
“Trina, hit the crane holding the starcycles. We’re going to need them,” Blaze said through comms, even as he tried not to fall off the platform held by the dragon.
The vampire whirled and blew off the top of the crane. Both starcycles fell to the ground, but the auto-engines clicked on, preventing them from cracking apart on the asphalt. Their blue-fire engines glowed in the gloom.