Fade (Paxton Locke Book 1)

by Daniel Humphreys

  So, yeah, if you’ve got a water heater in your basement or a closet, it can turn into a SCUD missile when you least expect it. But only if someone messes with something they don’t understand.

  Suddenly, plumber’s rates seem all the more reasonable, don’t they?

  Making the cylinder do anything other than going straight up was the real trick, of course. For that, I was going to need the telekinesis spell. On the bright side, this was going to be a different — and less intensive — application. That difference was the only reason why I thought I could pull it off since it wouldn’t take as much out of me as it would if I were using the spell in an active fashion.

  The first time I used the spell in this way was when I’d been trying to fight off Ray the serial killer. The description of the method had been a footnote, basically, but it imprinted on me just as firmly as the rest of the spell.

  In the movies and comics, magic is big on symbolism — runes and all that jazz. In my brief study of the grimoire, I’d learned that the actual structure of the symbol wasn’t so important as the intent behind it. It was an external focus, in much the same way that my imaginary control panel was an internal focus.

  Who’s got time for runes? Maybe the old-time guys did, but I preferred a nice, simple circle with an X slashed through it.

  My leg was still a little on the weak side. I staggered into Cassie as she helped me to my feet. She grunted, but she was surprisingly strong and managed to keep me from falling back down. “Sorry,” I managed as I shifted more of my weight onto my less-injured side. “You got keys, a pocket knife, anything?”

  “They took my keys.” She glanced over her shoulder. Uno, Dos — or whichever the heck it was — still stood impassively. As I’d suspected, if we weren’t actively trying to escape or were stupid enough to attack Melanie, it maintained watchdog status.

  That was an oversight on her part. Next time I confronted her I’d chide her for not reading the evil overlord’s guide.

  “Hold on.” She dug in the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a stylized, blue-painted coin with a number one stamped into its face.

  I studied it for a beat, noticed the hard stare she was giving me and gave her a half-nod. “Works,” I said.

  With Cassie’s help, I shuffled closer to the water heater. I had to balance against her, but with the blue coin clutched in my fingers I could reach up and scrape the rafters. Every foot or so, on the rafters lying parallel to the water heater, I scraped a quick sigil into the wood and imbued each with a little bit of mystical oomph. The second daisy-chained off of the first and so on. By the time I made it to the wall, the effort required to continue the chain had increased to the point that I gasped and nearly staggered again.

  Despite that, I wasn’t done. I released Cassie’s shoulder and knelt down on the floor. Here, thankfully, I just needed anchor points, one at each corner of a rectangle extending out from the base of the tank. I backtracked and scratched at the concrete to finish up the outer points. When my task was complete, the air fairly well thrummed with potential energy, though it wasn’t visible to the naked eye.

  That might have been something useful to learn if such a thing had been in the grimoire. Hindsight, you had to love it.

  What I had created was basically a mesh of mystical rubber bands, for lack of a better term. The energy requirements weren’t too bad because they weren’t so much intended to create force as they were to reflect it. It made a handy trip wire.

  When Ray the serial killer had charged me with a sharpened gardening trowel, I’d only had a pair of linked lines across the door to my refuge in his house of horrors. One line was at chest-height and the other at his knees. He’d come at me with such a head of steam that he bounced back into the wall opposite the door and knocked himself out. Score one for the good guys, there. It was still no certain thing and is one of the reasons I’ve armed up so heavily in the interim.

  This time, my construction had taken a shape a bit like an upside-down playground slide. When the water heater reached its failure point, it should launch upward and follow the path I’d described with the lines of force.

  Our watchdog at the foot of the stairs wasn’t in the path of my impromptu rocket, but I didn’t think that would be too difficult to manage.

  No, as the song went, the waiting was going to be the hardest part. I was already dead on my feet. If and when we got out of the basement, I was looking at another fight at some point. I needed to recharge.

  “Let’s take a load off.” I pointed to the corner of the basement next to the furnace. There was plenty of room there for us to sit side by side, in view of Melanie’s minion. The Trane’s reassuring bulk should offer some measure of protection if the water heater went before I was ready.

  I settled down and handed the coin back to Cassie as she sat down beside me. She wasn’t close, but she wasn’t as far away as she could have been, either. I hoped that signified trust because I was going to have to call on it before too long. If she hesitated, I didn’t know if this would work.

  “So, what’s the plan, Snowflake?”

  I chuckled. “Nice, pick on the guy with the white hair.” I ran a rueful hand through it and fingered the knot. “Well, I’ve been called worse, I guess.”

  “It’s not so bad,” she observed. “You kind of look like a younger Race Bannon.”

  I frowned. “Who?”

  “You’re joking, right? Johnny Quest?”

  I shrugged. “I missed that one.” I made air quotes with my fingers. “‘Cartoons are for an uncouth mind.’ Words of wisdom from Mother Dearest. If it wasn’t for sleepovers and Mr. Toft I never would have seen any. It was hard enough for my dad to chill her out enough that we could go to the movie theater.” I pointed across the basement and grinned. “She about had a stroke when he got me an Xbox.”

  “You always seemed so happy. I guess nobody ever realized how screwed up your life was.”

  “Thanks,” I laughed. “No, I was happy. Dad usually redirected most of her weirdness when I wasn’t around. Her job helped, too, what with the commute and all. What’s funny is, when she was really going off the deep end, she pretty much just ignored us. Guess we should have picked up on that.”

  Cassie sat for a moment in quiet consideration, then said, “It was weird after your dad died. I can understand why you left. They had this big assembly in the auditorium. A bunch of people talked, that sort of thing.”

  I smiled. “He would have liked that, I think. He loved teaching. Mother kept trying to get him to move on, closer to the city, but he told her he never wanted to leave. Me, this is my hometown, sure, but . . . I just felt like I had bigger fish to fry.”

  “Exterminating ghosts. You’re a regular Dean Winchester.” She grinned. It was one heck of a smile.

  “Hey, that reference I get. I do have Netflix, you know. I’m no longer an ignorant television heathen.” I considered. “My ride’s not as cool, though.”

  She opened her mouth to say something else, but there was a low, dangerous groan from the water heater. Finally.

  “Do you trust me?” I murmured.

  She met my eyes and didn’t look away. After a bare moment, she gave me a tight nod. “I’m still torn on the whole sanity thing, but yeah, I trust you.”

  “Good.” I jerked my head toward the nearest window. “I need you to get out of here.”

  Cassie stared at the window for a moment then turned back to me. Something on my face must have told her that I was serious, because all she said was, “What about you?”

  “I’ll be fine. But you have to move, now.”

  I’d stiffened up from rest, but I waved off her offer of help. “Don’t look back,” I said. “Get across the street.” I thought for a moment. The house on the opposite side had been dark when I’d come in. “I guess the Waverlys are out of town.” The retired couple and tended to head toward warmer climes this time of year. “If you don’t see me in five minutes, run like hell and call the police.”
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br />   “What about you?”

  I gave her a grin and hoped that it looked more confident than it felt. “I got this.”

  Cassie must have felt better about it than I did because she nodded and moved to the window. She struggled with the latch for a moment, but it was in good repair. The window unlocked and fell outward after a delay that felt much longer than it really was. She grasped the outer edges of the frame and pulled herself up while using the wall for leverage.

  The minion’s head snapped in her direction. He broke out of his unwavering watch and strode across the basement without making a sound. The creaking of the water heater was a constant, now. He reached the line I’d mentally defined as the point of travel, then passed over it.

  I needed to get him back in the line of fire. I tucked my head down between my shoulder blades and hobbled away from the corner toward the minion at the best speed I could manage. All the while I was uncomfortably aware of the pressure building up behind me.

  At times like this, you need a battle cry. If nothing else, it’s added sound and fury. Overwhelm your opponent with input, force him to pause and have to think about his actions. The military calls it an ‘OODA loop’ — observe, orient, decide, and act. By disrupting the last action of the loop, I forced the clone to pause and restart the process in reaction to my assault.

  My time with the De La Rosas proved educational in a wide variety of topics.

  Would it have worked on a smarter attacker? Maybe not, but thankfully, I didn’t have to deal with that.

  I came up blank at first, but as I dove and rolled for the minion’s legs, I went with, “Leeeeeeeroy Jenkins!”

  If it’s stupid, but it works, then it ain’t stupid.

  I bounced off the minion’s legs and staggered him back a step. That, combined with my cry, shifted his attention. He jerked his head down to look at me. I gave him a winning smile as I rolled onto my back and snapped a hand out toward the water heater. I gathered my focus, found the weakening seam at the bottom of the cylinder, and put everything I had into one last mental shove.

  I didn’t have much left.

  Thankfully, it didn’t take much.

  As the seam gave way, the tank lifted off on what looked like an inverted mushroom cloud of water. One thing I hadn’t thought all the way through was the spray that thoroughly soaked and singed me as the basement floor was suddenly awash with boiling water. I screamed before I even realized that I’d opened my mouth.

  Near the floor joists, the ersatz bottle rocket hesitated. Wood cracked and splintered as the force lines I’d described absorbed the vertical lift of the heater. Restricted from rising further, it began to turn to the horizontal, following the magical raceway like an out of control locomotive.

  If anything, it gained speed.

  The minion was leaning over me with his right side toward the wall. The water heater took him between the knee and rib cage with the wet thwack of metal on meat. One moment he loomed over me, the next, dust from the shattered concrete block of the foundation billowed out of the built-in.

  I lay there stunned with ringing ears in a puddle of cooling water. The level dropped as it gurgled down the floor drain near where the heater had once stood. Less of a mess to get cleaned up, at least. In a daze, I wondered how much repairing the foundation was going to set me back if fixing it was even possible.

  Across the room, debris shifted.

  I was starving, this side of exhausted, and every square inch of my body from the soles of my feet to the top of my head ached with some sort of pain. Despite the discomfort of lying on the concrete, the cooling water was actually beginning to feel comforting. It took everything I had to turn my head to look at the far end of the basement. I did it just in time to see the battered remains of our former watchdog crawl out of the crater in the wall.

  The minion’s legs hung useless — one of them nearly severed at the hip — but the blood from his wounds was more of a black sludge than crimson liquid. It seeped rather than flowed, as though it were loath to leave the creature’s body. The copper inflow pipes on top of the water heater had speared through his chest. Breath whistled through the gaping wound like an intermittent tea kettle as he dragged his ravaged body toward me. His face was stony with determination and he gave me zero indication that he felt any pain at all.

  I don’t know how Melanie made them, but it was becoming obvious that these guys were something other than fish, fowl, or good red meat.

  “Well, shit,” I managed.

  Get up. Get up and fight.

  When I doubt or question myself, the little voice in the back of my head sounds like Mother. This time, though, the voice was pure Dad. There wasn’t time for it now, but later I could wonder if I’d heard the voice in my head or if the sense that the voice had sounded as though it came from a far-off distance had been a real one.

  Now, though, I got up. I got up and fought.

  My half-hearted hobble sped up as I clambered to my feet and headed toward the couch. I don’t know if the adrenaline rush had pushed the pain away for the moment or if I’d just reached the point where I couldn’t hurt anymore.

  The minion pivoted on his stomach and reached out for me as I passed, but I pulled away and left him grasping only air. I reached the couch and took up the reassuring weight of the Mossberg.

  I flipped the safety off with my thumb and took aim. As though he recognized the threat I now posed, the minion redoubled his efforts, scuttling across the floor like a dismembered crab.

  The boom of the shotgun in the enclosed space was deafening. My already-abused ears started ringing all over again. The minion’s jerking motions moved his head just as I fired, so the first shot took him in one shoulder and pulped the side of his face that was already in ruins from the impact of the water heater. The wound slowed it, but the maimed clone came implacably on. I pumped the slide, aimed, and fired again.

  This time, my shot took it right in its head. The less said about that, the better. With the body lying still and lifeless on the floor, I dry-heaved a little but there was nothing left for me to purge. Safe for the moment, I sagged onto the arm of the couch and took a deep, shuddering breath.

  Three more.

  And then I remembered that Mother was still on her way.

  Chapter 13

  When I limped out the front door, I half-expected cops or emergency vehicles spread across the yard and the neighborhood.

  To my surprise, the night was empty. The only noticeable change from the time when I had entered the house were the cars in the driveway. A navy-blue Pontiac sedan — Cassie’s, I guessed, sat in the exact center of its lane. By contrast, the parking job of the RV was questionable. The passenger tire sat on the driveway but the driver’s side tire was off in the grass.

  I supposed that I should be grateful that Melanie hadn’t wrecked it on the way back to the house. I glanced around and noted the dark windows in the Waverly house across the way, but little else. If — hopefully — Cassie was still hiding, she’d done a good job of it, because I didn’t see her. I waved my hands over my head and figured that was as good a signal for all clear that I was going to make at this point, then hobbled over to the Itasca.

  I figured the interior would be bad, but I wasn’t prepared for just how bad. Debris covered every square inch of the floor — containers of food, articles of clothing, and all the other odds and ends of a life on a road. At some point, they’d hurled my laptop, shuriken-style, into the wall. It was stuck there, embedded in the paneling. Melanie may have been college-aged, but she could throw a fit to put any toddler to shame.

  Where the carpet wasn’t completely covered, the wrecking crew had torn it up to inspect the subfloor. Scattered junk covered that, as well. They'd slashed my mattress open and thrown it to one side. My carefully-designed hatch sat a drunken angle. They’d discovered the hidden cubbyhole and pried it open somehow. I knelt in a pile of shredded clothing and dug through the layer of junk on top of the hidden compartment. I bre
athed a sigh of relief as I felt cold metal. Not finding the grimoire, Melanie had taken nothing. Cocky of her, but then again, I didn’t have a trio of magical bodyguards. Two now, but she probably had a right to be cocky.

  I had several boxes of shotgun shells stashed in the compartment as well as another shotgun. This one was much more compact, though it had started life as something similar to the larger Mossberg. The Serbu “Super Shorty” could only hold a total of five rounds, but the barrel was nice and short, keeping it just bigger than a very large handgun. The entire package was perhaps half the length of the Mossberg, which meant it was much easier to handle and aim.

  It also reduced the weight and made the recoil feel like a kick from a mule, but I was already hurting. I could deal with a little more pain. If I could get the shorter barrel on target while the remaining minions tossed me around like a rag doll it would be worth the sore wrist. I preferred the Mossberg as a better all-purpose weapon. At close quarters the Shorty’s advantages made it a better choice.

  If I survived this, maybe I could talk Kent into helping me get a machine gun. Dealing with ghosts wasn’t nearly as hardware-intensive as whatever Melanie’s goons were.

  I loaded the Serbu’s tubular magazine, racked the vertical grip attached to the pump, and topped it off with another shell. All five rounds were slugs, solid chunks of lead nearly three-quarters of an inch in diameter. At the close range that I anticipated, they’d be devastating. I added a few more to the pockets of my slacks, then stiffened as the RV settled slightly on its springs.

  I turned at the waist and kept the Serbu tight to my body. As the figure in the doorway came into view, I relaxed. “Hey. Sorry about the mess. I wasn’t expecting company.”

  Cassie shook her head with a slight jerk as she picked a path through the RV and moved closer to me. “Man,” she drew out. “Guess she got a little pissed when she couldn’t find what she was looking for.”