by Laura Bickle
Whispers circled around the fire, sobs of joy, and brilliant smiles flashing white in the darkness.
“The Great Mother is here!”
“She has returned to Earth.”
“What shape do you think she’s taken?”
“She will be a force to be reckoned with!”
“What now, boss lady?” Tria, her lieutenant, asked. Petite and blond as a doll in a toy catalog, her waist was circled with a belt full of knives. When she crossed her arms over her chest, her fingers unconsciously dipped down to trace the hilts. A twitch formed above her right eye, as always happened when she was anxious. The man who had attacked her at the gas station was not the first to have done so, and it had opened an old wound. Still, it had been cathartic for her to cut him into pieces to be carried away for the fire.
Bel reached out and touched Tria’s chin, activating a decade-old hypnotic suggestion that she’d implanted in Tria’s psyche. The magic in Bel’s touch crept up her face and sank deep into her brain. The twitch softened and faded, and Tria smiled.
“Better?”
“Better. Thank you.”
Bel turned to the space in the sky where the sun had set hours before. She pressed her hands to her heart to contain its racing.
“West,” she said, with certainty. “We head west.”
“Ms. Dee?”
Petra jerked awake, nearly falling out of the hospital chair. She’d been dreaming—dreaming of a shadow too remote to touch stretching over her like a storm cloud. It smelled of grave dust and sunshine and made her chest ache.
She struggled to hold on to her plastic zipper bag of personal effects and twisted around to see the doctor from the ER sitting down in a chair opposite her.
“Yes?” Petra tucked the hem of her gaping hospital gown around her knees and leaned forward. “Dr. Burnard?”
“We have your lab work.” She flipped a page on her clipboard. “No traces of heavy metal poisoning, so you’re clear.”
Petra nodded. “Thanks. That’s a relief.”
“You should make an appointment with your primary care physician at your earliest convenience, though. Your white blood cell count is abnormally high.”
Petra’s brow crinkled. “What does that mean?”
The doctor shrugged listlessly, and Petra thought that this must be the time of night that nothing got sugar-coated. “Might be nothing. Most likely a routine viral or bacterial infection. But you should get that checked out, just to rule out immune disorders.”
Petra nodded quickly. “Okay. But . . . how is Cal?”
The doctor’s left eye twitched. Petra wondered how long she’d been on duty. Her scrubs looked like they’d been slept in, and there was a rusty stain on her pant leg that Petra chose to assume was coffee.
“He’s not well. We found mercury in his system . . . so much that I don’t know how he’s still alive.”
“But can you help him, can’t you?” Petra hugged the plastic bag to her chest.
“No. I can’t. We’ve done all we can to stabilize him, and we’re going to transfer him to the university. There are some experts who deal with heavy metal poisoning there, who might be able to properly filter his blood. But we just can’t do that here.”
Petra nodded. “I understand. Can . . . can I see him?”
Dr. Burnard seemed to hesitate. “Yes. But only for a few minutes. MedFlight will be here for him soon, and we have to be ready to move him right away.”
“Thank you.”
She led Petra through a warren of green-painted halls with swinging doors. Personnel in scrubs scurried right and left, pushing wheelchairs, linen carts, and stacks of paper. The doctor weaved around the flow like a fish in the water, while Petra clutched her plastic bag and tried to ignore the sticky feeling of her slipper socks on the waxed tile floor.
Dr. Burnard paused before an open doorway. “He’s here.”
Petra’s heart dropped down into her slipper socks. Cal lay in a cocoon of plastic. A clear plastic tent surrounded him, head to foot. Hoses and tubes snaked from IV poles into his scrawny arms. A tube had been installed in his throat, taped to his mouth. He lay motionless, eyes taped shut under the glaring fluorescent light.
“Can I go in?”
“You can, but don’t open the isolation tent.”
Petra went inside. She stared down at Cal. His skin was grey, pallid as canned tuna left in a refrigerator too long. The machines whirred and buzzed and beeped around him, and his chest flexed in a mechanical rhythm.
She brushed her fingers against the plastic, swallowing hard. “Cal. I don’t know if you can hear me. It’s Petra.”
Cal’s artificial breath continued its regular rhythm, with a whoosh and a click.
She went on: “They’re going to take you to the university hospital, where there are people who can help you. They’re going to help you.” She bit her lip and her vision blurred. She didn’t want to lie to him. But she kept going: “It’s gonna be okay. Really.”
She didn’t believe it. But she wanted him to.
If he didn’t, if he didn’t believe enough to fight, he was good as dead.
Something was choking him.
At first, Cal thought it was something out of a bad hentai movie. A dark, viscous tentacle had wrapped around his neck. He struggled, gasping, trying to unwind it from his throat. But the creature had his body enveloped in its cold, slimy grip. The tentacle around his throat slipped up over his lip, and he whimpered, fingernails clawing into its slick skin. As his fingers dug into it, the flesh congealed like concrete. The viscous substance forced itself past his teeth and crawled down his throat, frigid and twisting.
Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.
Cal gagged, trying to hurl it back up like bad sushi. But it wormed deep in his throat, behind his ribs, rising behind his eyeballs . . .
He tried to howl around the arm in this throat, but couldn’t make a sound. A flash of silver dribbled over his vision—the mercury—loosening the tape over his eyes. Bright light flashed over him—fluorescent lights, and a murmur of voices. He was lying down but moving, moving fast, and a dozen tubes and wires and hands were digging into his skin, jammed down his throat.
Oh, God.
He struggled and thrashed, but he couldn’t move his hands and legs. He rolled his eyes downward, and he could see Velcro restraints around his wrists. Someone was shouting at him, over him, and hands were pressing against his shoulders. A woman in green was struggling to uncap a needle. The cart on which he was tied clattered along, through a hallway and into darkness, deafening darkness.
He smelled fresh night air, felt the roaring of a machine and impossibly strong wind. He thrashed again, panicked, trapped, and helpless. It was the feeling he’d had at Stroud’s Garden, at the mercy of the drug-dealing alchemist who’d made him his errand boy. It was the first feeling he woke up with in the morning and the last one at night.
Something cold twisted within him. The mercury.
He could feel it unwinding in his veins, seeping through his pores. It leaked through his hands, soaking the Velcro restraints. Cal whimpered, flopping like a fish.
And one of the restraints popped free.
He reached up for the tube in his throat. Someone was screaming at him, and bodies in green and blue scrubs were struggling to pin him back down. But the mercury climbed over his arm. A woman shrieked and backed away.
He gagged and spat out the tube, gasping in pain. Jesus . . . how had they gotten something like that down him? Someone had let go of the gurney, and it spun at a lazy angle, pushed by the wind from what he saw were helicopter blades.
Jesus. They were gonna take him away. Away to . . . where? A military base? Like in Area 51 or something? Experiment on him? A guy dressed in black hopped down from the helicopter bay.
Oh, no. Nonononono.
Panic flooded him. He ripped open the last of the restraints and jumped down from the gurney. He was conscious of gloved hands trying to shove him back, but he popped free of the wires and tubes in his arm, stumbling and bleeding.
A man in green scrubs tried to grab him. Cal howled. The guy was much stronger than he was, and tackled him to the ground hard enough to drive Cal’s breath from him.
This was it. Tears leaked from Cal’s eyes, blurring his vision. He was caught, and he was doomed. He could lie here and wait for them to wrap him up in a nice package to be delivered to the Men in Black, or . . .
. . . or he could fight.
Cal wriggled up his right hand, coated in silver. He reached up to claw at the guy’s face, hoping to startle him into letting up . . .
. . . but the mercury had a mind of its own. It leapt from his fingers, reaching toward the nurse’s face. His face twisted in horror, and he opened his mouth to shout. Like a snake slithering through a forest floor, the mercury slid into his mouth. It poured into the man, overflowing from his lips. He gagged, flung his head from side to side.
Cal’s eyes narrowed. He could feel his fingers crawling into the guy’s mouth, choking him. His throat bulged and swelled, like he’d swallowed a brick.
For the first time in his life, Cal felt powerful. It sang in him, like a soaring song at a concert with a ton of bass, swelling his chest and quickening his pulse. He felt . . .
“Gahhh!”
A column of water hit him, shoving the hapless nurse away. Cal flopped on the pavement, spying a couple of security guards wrestling with a fire hose. The hose writhed and seethed uncontrollably in their grip, shooting at the helicopter blades and flinging water in a torrential arc across the pavement. One of the helicopter rotors was hit—it began to thump, unbalanced. The stream knocked the man in black from the helicopter off his feet and tangled him around the landing gear. The helicopter was pushed back six feet, scraping on its skids, wobbling.
Now was his chance. Cal scrambled to his feet and ran. Disoriented, he sprinted away from the helicopter, stumbling through the asphalt parking lot. To the south of the helipad, the dark parking lot stretched, half-full of cars. He crouched as he ran, trying to find cover. Shouts echoed behind him, and flashlight beams bounced into the darkness.
Cal ducked and rolled beneath a van. He held his breath as feet pounded past him. His fingers flexed on the ground. He stared down at them. They were no longer silver—just flesh-colored and bleeding from a torn-out IV on his right arm. The blood was red, which was encouraging.
He crawled beneath the next car, through an oil puddle and antifreeze. It sounded like the voices were receding. They’d gone toward the road, where blue and red cop car flashers were approaching.
Shit.
He kept crawling on his elbows and forearms on the pavement, determined to get as far away from the cops as he could. He whimpered as the large tires of a van pulled up beside him. More cops!
Maybe. Maybe not. He could make out a bit of green paint at the edges of the mud flaps. He inched over to the van and peered up. The side of the van was marked SPECIALTY LINENS AND UNIFORMS.
He could hear the driver through the open window, sitting in the driver’s seat and talking on his cell phone: “ . . . yeah, I’ll be a bit. Holdup on the road, but I should be at the nursing home soon . . .”
Cal scrambled out from under the car he was using for cover and wormed around to the back of the van, careful to stay out of the driver’s line of sight in the side mirrors. He reached up, a prayer on his lips, hoping to hell that the back latch of the van was unlocked . . .
Yes! He opened the door and slipped inside. He shut the door firmly behind him and collapsed in a heap on the metal floor, heart pounding.
It smelled like piss. He wrinkled his nose and looked over his shoulder. It was dark, too dark to see. But he could reach out and feel the wheels and frames of linen carts around him. On hands and knees, he crawled as far as he could to the front of the van, wedging himself between a cart and the wall. He winced as the truck lurched forward, praying that the cops wouldn’t have their shit together enough to start a checkpoint to search for him.
The engine of the van ground forward, and he felt it pick up speed. His heart lifted, and he could very nearly imagine freedom coming closer as the tires crossed the pavement and bounced over three speed bumps that rattled carts and clothes hangers around him. The truck made two right-hand turns, then accelerated into the night.
Cal took a deep breath, scraping his throat. He put his head on his arms and fought the urge to sob in relief and terror. His body screamed in pain, and he had no idea what to do. The cops might take him away somewhere awful if he let them. He had nowhere to go.
A dribble of fluid escaped his nose, and he knocked it away with his knuckle. He didn’t want to know if it was snot or mercury.
He had to get it together. Somehow.
As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he spied something glowing on the wall, like letters. He pushed the cart hiding him aside and crawled to it. The word FIRE was wrapped in Day-Glo letters around a fire extinguisher on an alcove in the wall between the cart area and the walled-off driver in the front. Cal groped around the fire extinguisher and came up with a flashlight. The batteries were half-dead, but it worked if he whacked it hard enough.
He swept it around the interior of the van. Four large linen carts of dirty laundry took up the majority of the floor space, and there were some garbage bags with biohazard stickers slung against the walls. A rack against the right side held plastic dry-cleaning bags. Cal shined the light on scraps of paper taped to the necks. Some were going to a nursing home, others to a restaurant. Feeling the draft on his bare ass, Cal ripped open the plastic to find something to wear.
He succeeded in finding a grey shirt with the name CLAYTON embroidered on the chest pocket, a pair of black pants, and a brand new Carhartt jacket. He figured that would be slightly less obvious than the parcel of pastel-colored scrubs that were due for the nursing home. He had no idea who Clayton was. Maybe a mechanic, maybe a security guard. Could be a professional bowler. But Cal was eager to get out of his drafty calico gown and into something that approximated street clothing. The best he could do for shoes was a pair of flip-flops that looked like they were worn by jail inmates.
As Cal changed, he glanced down at his arms. They were still bleeding from where he’d ripped out the IV lines. He tried to staunch the blood as best he could with a nicely folded stack of hotel towels. At least, he told himself, the blood was red.
For now.
What was happening to him? His hands shook as he raked them through his hair. If Stroud were alive, he could have asked the stringy old alchemist. But he didn’t know anyone else with that kind of mojo. A hospital wasn’t going to solve his problem. They’d poke him and prod him and slice him up to put under a microscope. But he was sure that they’d just turn him over to the Man in Black he’d seen with the helicopter.
After a half hour, the van slowed, as if coming to a stop sign or stoplight. Cal crept to the back door, cracked it a hair, and peered out.
“Damn,” he breathed. “All roads lead to Rome. Or some such bullshit.”
The van was idling at the one red stoplight in Temperance, on the main street. From his vantage point, Cal could see the hardware store, the gas station, and the post office standing across from each other, all buttoned up for the night. But Cal knew better. There was one place that would be open this late, where he might be able to rustle up a proper ride.
Cal sidled out the back of the delivery van and dropped to the pavement. His feet hit the broken concrete with a jarring that he felt in the back of his teeth, nearly losing the plastic flip-flop on his right foot. In a belch of sooty exhaust, the uniform truck chugged away.
Cal straightened up painfully and walked across the
street to the Compostela, his flip-flops smacking on the pavement behind him.
In its earlier incarnation, when Temperance was founded, the Compostela had been a church. It still retained some of that Gothic charm during the day: peaked windows, stained glass, its stately façade. At night, it was just damn forbidding. The stained glass was lit from within, giving the appearance of strange fires burning behind red and yellow glass.
It was a busy night for the Compostela. At least a dozen beat-up old cars and trucks were ranged along the street and the nearby alley. Cal tried the doors of all of them. Two car doors opened, but he struck out on finding any keys in the dash, under the floor mats, or behind the visors.
Damn. But he came up with about ten dollars in change and half a donut. He pocketed the change and greedily devoured the donut.
He skulked to the front door of the bar, head lowered. His pulse pounded in his throat. Maybe he could get in on a card game and get lucky, maybe lift a wallet or steal some scratch from a table. Maybe he’d run into someone he knew who would be able to hide him or help him. Maybe.
Cal pushed through the doors into the dimness of the bar. Church pews had been converted into booths arranged along the walls, with tables in the middle. Cards fluttered and pool cues clicked against ivory. Cal shuffled to the back of the bar, the former apse, now occupied by a long bar hewn from a single massive tree. He squirmed up on a stool at the corner and scanned the crowd.
At this hour, the bar was full of gamblers, drunks, and the forever dissolute. A man with an obvious tan mark around his left ring finger, but no ring, sobbed into his hat down the bar. Some younger men took turns drinking from a pitcher of beer, dribbling alcohol on the floor. A couple of the card games weren’t going well, and two players had just folded at a table with a volley of swearing and threats.
Sweat prickling on his forehead, Cal watched. He rubbed at his brow with his sleeve. It was dark enough that he couldn’t tell if it was sweat or metal. Maybe no one else could tell, either. He dipped his fingers into a bowl of peanuts and ate them all in one gulp, licking the salt from his fingers.