by Laura Bickle
Or not.
The blond woman took two more steps toward him, limping, extending the knife at arm’s length. “Look, mister. It’s been a long night. I’m going to do you a favor. You have exactly one chance to turn around, go back, and go have a drink someplace other than here.”
He cocked his head. “I can’t do that, ma’am.”
“Then we have a problem.”
The blond woman limped down the slope to Gabe, blades flashing in her fists. The other woman was not far behind.
The Hanged Men began to detach from the shadows, their eyes glowing, moving into the firelight. This didn’t stop the women—they barely broke stride as they called an alarm to the others.
The blond woman limped to Gabe. He tried to sidestep her, but she was still fast. She looked him full in the face and plunged a knife into his chest. She stood back, panting, clearly thinking the job was done.
Petra muffled a squeak. With the tree dying, would the Hanged Men be vulnerable? Would they succumb to such mundane things as knives and bullets, now?
The blond woman seemed to expect Gabe to fall neatly in a pile on the grass, but he remained standing. He twisted the knife out of his chest and threw it away.
The woman stood her ground, slashing at him with her other knife.
Enough of this dumb-ass, misplaced chivalry. Petra drew her pistol, aimed, and shot at her. The bullet caught her shoulder, spun her around, and she tripped. She landed on the ground in a tangle of bootlaces, still growling and swinging.
The Hanged Men had taken down the second woman, but more were coming over the rise, and these had guns. Petra aimed and shot at the leather-clad figures, catching up to Gabe. He seemed curiously wooden, and she dragged him behind a tree.
“Are you all right?” she demanded, running her fingers over the hole in his shirt.
“I should be . . .”
The Hanged Men always bled luminescent blood, blood that glowed in the dark. The blood that trickled from his chest was dull, with barely any shine. He brushed at it with his hand, staring at it.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, unconvincingly.
She turned back to the fight, though she doubted that he told her the truth. Muzzles flashed as the Hanged Men advanced toward the firelight.
She didn’t understand the women, why they fought so hard. Petra moved in the wake of the battle, aiming and shooting where she could get a clear shot. She ducked behind a motorcycle with Sig to reload, and a bullet dinged into its fender. The Hanged Men seemed to be winning as they pushed into the clearing of the camp.
She spied a familiar figure hiding behind the bikes. She reached out and grabbed his collar, dragging him toward her.
“Cal!” She impulsively hugged him. “What are you doing here?”
He blinked at her, seeming dazed or stoned. “It’s a long fucking story.” He seemed to focus on her fuzzy pink suit. “What the hell are you wearing?”
“Never mind. You look like shit. What . . .”
He pushed her away. “Look, you gotta get outta here.”
“Cal, we’ve got to get the snake, but we’ll take you with us, get you some help . . .”
“No. No. No. No.” He pressed his fists to his temples, and Petra was reminded of an old photograph she’d seen of Aleister Crowley—there was that look in his eyes. “You can’t. You can’t help me. Only . . . only she can.”
“Only who?”
A commotion rattled at the far end of the camp, near a mudpot. A figure walked through the mud, into the altercation.
“Oh. I’m betting you mean her.”
A woman emerged from the mud, looking like some kind of primordial creature. Her arms were covered in snake tattoos, and her mud-streaked skin had something of a green sheen. Petra had only seen that particular color in very old jade. Her eyes were dark, dilated in the faint light. Plastered to her skin, she wore what looked like the cast-off skin of a very large snake.
“Yeah,” Cal affirmed. “Her.”
Petra aimed her pistol at her, over the seat of the bike. The green woman turned her obsidian gaze to Petra and began to advance.
“No!” Cal yelped, and he wrestled with her for the gun. “You can’t.”
“Cal, what the hell?” Petra didn’t like the look in his eyes. Silver was beginning to leak around the edges of his irises. She wrenched the gun back, but didn’t aim it at the green chick.
“You don’t understand,” he pleaded. “Bel’s the only one who can help me, who can keep the mercury in check.”
“Cal, I don’t know what’s going on here.” And that was the God’s honest truth.
“You’ve got to get out of here. You have to get out of here, before she . . .”
The green woman pointed at Cal. It wasn’t the glad-handing gesture of a politician pointing at a fictional person at a rally. This was a gesture that Petra would expect to see in a courtroom, when a mobster promised revenge on a witness, or when a voodoo priestess leveled a curse on a soul dumb enough to have taken her parking place.
Cal began to howl. He rolled on the ground as if someone had shot him. Petra reached for him, turned him over, and gasped. The mercury had leaked out of his eyes and crawled over his face, dripping down his neck. It was quickly forming a mask that would surely suffocate him.
She grabbed his shoulders and tried to scrape the mercury off his face with her fiberglass sleeve, but it lashed out, clawing at her with metallic talons. She fell back on her ass, scrabbling for her guns.
The green woman. She had to be behind this. Petra drew down and aimed at her.
“Whatever you’re doing to him—stop it now!”
The green woman’s black eyes narrowed. “You haven’t got any idea what’s within him. I just dropped the leash.”
Cal flopped on the ground, kicking against strings of mercury tangling around him. “Bel! Help me!”
“Well, put it back on!”
Bel shook her head. “No. He’s done.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE ALTAR OF THE BASILISK
Petra pulled back the hammer of her pistol. “Put. It. Back. On.”
She didn’t know if she’d really shoot an unarmed person. Probably not. But Cal sounded like he was gargling lead, and he wasn’t going to last much longer. There was no choice. She ground her teeth, aimed for her adversary’s knee, and pulled the trigger.
But nothing happened. She stared down at her hand. It was frozen. She wrenched down again on the trigger, but nothing. Her fingers didn’t respond—it was as if she were paralyzed. Her eyes slid to the green woman. No light was reflected in those black eyes. She felt like the ground was shifting beneath her, as if she were standing on a beach and looking past the ninth wave to the horizon.
Her next thought was to duck, but she couldn’t make her body move.
“Don’t look at her!” Cal howled.
But it was too late. She was under the spell of those coal-black eyes. Numbness was trickling down her neck and arms.
“Priestess!” One of the women in motorcycle gear shouted and threw Bel a shotgun. Bel caught it easily, ratcheted it, and aimed at Petra.
A blur of grey tackled Petra, and she crashed to earth behind the motorcycle.
Bel fired without hesitation. Birdshot peppered the chrome like rain, and a piece of the wad pinged off the top of her welder’s mask. Sig stood over Petra, snarling. Beside her, the shot scattered the dirt and zinged into Cal’s skin—which was now encased in a metal hide. He was looking a helluva lot like Han Solo in carbonite, and that couldn’t be good.
Feeling flooded back into Petra’s arms, and she hugged Sig. “Good boy.”
She peeked out behind the front wheel, careful not to make eye contact with Bel. She drew down with both pistols, and got one shot off before something rose behind the green woman.
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br /> The basilisk. It roared out of the mud with a hiss like bacon grease on cast iron. It loomed behind Bel, eyes glowing, the feathers on its head bristling like a wet rooster’s.
Things had gone to shit awfully fast.
Petra slapped her respirator over her nose and the welder’s mask down over her face. Through slitted vision, she saw a figure in a dark coat run across the campsite, skidding in the dust beside her. Gabe. There was a bullet hole in the brim of his hat, but he held one of the copper spears in one fist.
“Jeez. Are you all right?” Petra touched the brim of his hat with her clumsy, gloved fingers. It was still smoking where the bullet had singed it.
“The Hanged Men are doing their best, but these women are going to die protecting . . . protecting that. It’s got to be some kind of a doomsday cult.” The camp was clearing out—Petra could make out gleaming eyes jerking in the darkness and gunfire echoing in the woods.
“We gotta get Cal out of here,” Petra said, turning. “If he . . .”
But Cal was gone.
He’d crawled ahead of them, to the green woman, on his hands and knees. Sig darted out from behind the motorcycle, tried to grab his pant leg and drag him back, but he shook the coyote off.
A leather-clad woman revved up on an ATV, slamming into the bike and toppling the frame over on Petra and Gabe. Petra squirmed in the space under the kickstand, and Gabe shoved back with his shoulder, denting the metal, and jabbed his copper spear at the rider. The rider jumped over the wreck and swung at him with a knife. Gabe took the hit in the shoulder and grasped the blade, twisting it away. His adversary reached for a pistol, shot him in the ribs, and they wrestled for the gun.
“Cal!” Petra shouted. She couldn’t get a clear shot from here; he was between her and Bel and the snake. She could only make out smears of movement behind the helmet.
Bel aimed her shotgun down at Cal and gazed at him over the sights. “You come to the Great Mother now, on your knees?”
Cal’s face was a smooth mirror, reflecting back at her. There was no knowing if he was capable of speech any longer. He reached with one hand up to Bel, the gesture of a supplicant.
Bel smiled.
“You come now, of your free will?”
His fingers strained, and she turned the gun away, reaching for him with her inked arm. “The mercury is now under control. Come to me.”
But it wasn’t. Cal reached up, his hand a pure silver glove. His fingers wrapped around her wrist, ribbons of silver climbing up her arm.
The snake lashed out, biting him, but came away with a mouthful of mercury. It tossed its head side to side, spewing droplets of poison like a dog with a chili pepper.
Bel struggled, hauling back with all her might, but the mercury held her fast with a claw of metal. She lifted the shotgun and aimed it at Cal’s face.
Petra lunged out from behind the bike and fired at the green woman. One bullet struck her in the chest, and the other in the shoulder. Bel flinched, but she awkwardly angled the shotgun over her elbow at Cal’s face and pulled the trigger with her thumb.
Petra screamed. Cal’s body fell away, tendrils of mercury opening limply around him on the ground like the legs of a dead spider. Where his face had been was a smear of silver, like a crushed aluminum can.
Bel fell to her knees. Where she’d been hit, black blood dribbled over her tank top and down the tattoo ink on her arms. The blood steamed in the dark, but she still clutched the gun in her hands.
The basilisk slipped out of the mud toward Petra, snarling, silver strings of drool sliding down to the dirt. It spewed a stream of venom and mercury toward her, and Petra reflexively threw her arm over her head. She could hear the acid chewing away at the ground around her and braced herself for the burn, but it didn’t come.
Through the visor, she saw the snake curl lovingly around Bel’s waist. It dragged her away, into the mud, down into a sedimentary cave at the end of the mudpot, and vanished.
“Petra!” Gabe was picking her up off the sizzling ground.
“Don’t touch me!” Green venom dripped from her fiberglass arm. With her other gloved hand, she stripped the soggy fiberglass sleeve off and dropped it to the ground.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m just . . . sticky. Is Cal?” She flipped up her visor, tugged down her respirator, and stared at his crumpled form on the ground. His metal hand was splayed open like a pair of scissors, and his head was a wrinkled can leaking silver into the dirt. Sig stood over him, whimpering.
Gabe shook his head.
Petra felt her lip quivering and bit it to still it. Through blurry eyes, she surveyed the rest of the camp. The Hanged Men had defeated Bel’s gang. None of the women were still moving; Petra didn’t know if any were still alive. A couple certainly weren’t, judging by the angles of broken necks and spines.
From the distance, a mechanical roar sounded, a thumping above. Petra’s brow wrinkled. “What’s a helicopter doing out here?”
“Douse the fire,” Gabe ordered. The Hanged Men plunged into the campfire, kicking it over in a shower of sparks. The vehicles left running were shut off, and they retreated to the edge of the tree line, out of aerial view.
“They must be looking for the basilisk. Or else they heard the fight,” he muttered.
Holding her breath, Petra waited for the helicopter to fly overhead. It was running dark, no lights, and she could only tell its position by its slightly darker silhouette against the sky and the way it stirred the top branches of the pine trees.
The helicopter churned overhead and disappeared over the woods.
“That’s a military helicopter. They want the snake,” Petra affirmed. The helicopter swept to the horizon, then turned back in a search grid pattern. “We can’t let them have it.”
“Then let’s get it.”
The most injured of the Hanged Men remained behind to keep watch for the military. One of them had a stick run through his shoulder, while another dragged one foot behind him in an oddly-mechanical limp. A third just sat upright with his back against a tree, unmoving. A handful of the others started the ATVs and ran them west, to draw the helicopters away with bright headlights glaring and radios blasting heavy metal music that sounded tinnier as the distance grew.
Petra hoisted the potato cannon over her shoulder, snugged the respirator over her face, and slapped the welding helmet back over her head. She followed Gabe and the remaining Hanged Men to the edge of the mudpot. The Hanged Men fairly bristled with the copper spears, some of them already stained from the fight with Bel’s gang.
Sig put one paw into the hot mud and made a face. He hopped back up to solid land and began chewing at his foot.
“Stay here,” she told Sig. Thankfully, this seemed like the one time it wouldn’t be a problem.
She loaded her potato cannon with some more hair spray and a fresh bottle, and they waded into the mud. Petra edged her way in front, figuring that since she had the biggest gun, she should go first. She carried one of the six-packs and handed off two more to the Hanged Men behind her. She wasn’t sure she could reload the contraption fast enough. If pressed, perhaps they could throw bottles at the snake, as if it were a trespasser on their lawn.
A deep groan rolled over the site, shivering the surface tension on the mud. Sig whined and flattened his ears as the tree branches stirred.
“Remember that seismic anomaly?” Petra hissed, feeling the hot mud soaking through her fiberglass pants, stumbling in the slop. It was hot, but it could be worse. The cold creek water was mixing with it, cooling it to a somewhat-tolerable temperature. If the mudpot had emerged in the middle of a field, it would have been well over boiling and unable to be forded at all.
But she pressed forward to the mouth of the cave. Hot, sulfurous air exhaled from the darkness ahead, and she could feel the sweat sliding down her
back and sticking fiberglass particles to her skin. She hoped that they’d find the snake quickly; it was unlikely she’d last very long in this heat.
Gabe swept a flashlight into the cave, which extended deep into a sedimentary shelf. She could reach the top of the ceiling with her fingers. Bits of sandstone gravel rained down, and Petra felt the terror of being buried alive in this burning, miserable place. It was more miserable and horrifying than her brief glimpse of the underworld had been. Gabe’s light shone overhead, illuminating deep fractures in the rock shelf. The bottles in Petra’s cardboard carrier clattered together.
This could, quite possibly, be the dumbest thing she’d ever done: pursuing a poisonous basilisk into a cave during an earthquake in the company of a bunch of dead guys, armed with a potato cannon and a six-pack of lye. Never mind her soggy pink fiberglass armor. This was going to be an epic way to die.
The cave ran farther than she anticipated. It didn’t feel particularly deep—there were no stalactites, and the level of mud hadn’t risen. It was a fresh cave, newly driven up by the tectonic activity below. Bits of broken sandstone and feldspar lay on top of the thick mud in a quivering mosaic. The smell of sulfur became overwhelming, even through her respirator.
“I think—” she began, but was cut off by a deep rumbling.
She turned, feeling the shockwave of the earthquake moving through the mud, bubbling and slopping it up to her waist. She struggled to keep the cannon above the surface as the ground heaved above and below her, and pieces of rock rattled down.
A deafening fracture formed above her, and she lunged forward into the dark, following the pitching beam of Gabe’s flashlight. In a roar of thunder, the cave rained shut behind her, flinging her spread-eagled into the mud.
She swore, casting about for the cannon. She found it, grabbed it with her clumsy gloves, but the pack of lye ammo had sunk away.
She waded toward the light glowing against the wall. With a sinking heart, she realized that Gabe wasn’t attached to the light. The plastic flashlight floated alone on top of the mud, and she snatched it up with her free hand. She turned the light toward the way she’d come. The sandstone slab had caved in, blocking the entrance. She swept the light back and forth, hoping that Gabe was all right, that the Hanged Men hadn’t been crushed. Panic rose in her throat as she realized that she was trapped.