She had made a promise.
She saw a man in her direct path sprawled on the ground, in jeans and a denim jacket, his legs twitching. As she drew closer and the spotlight spilled over him, it revealed the man was already dead, with a figure clad in black hunched over his half-eaten abdomen. The Black Cadre lifted its bloody maw and blinked, disturbed from its meal. It charged, teeth bared. Lindsay neither slowed nor altered course. She swung away. She barely felt the resistance along her arm, the slice was so clean. She was already five lengths ahead before the redmouth’s head rolled off its shoulders and toppled to the ground.
“Drexler!” she bellowed and the earth shook.
She drew up to the side of the main stage. As she dismounted a redmouth charged from behind. Before she could turn around, Slip planted his forelegs and kicked it in the chest. She watched the redmouth rocket backward. It landed on its back and a tentacle snaked around its neck.
“Thanks, boy.”
She smacked him hard on his rump and yelled, “Ha!” The horse put the blooming pit behind him and was gone in a shot.
She took the steps to the stage three at a time. At the other end of the platform she saw another redmouth hunched over Ben, about to sink its teeth into his neck.
“Hands off my man.”
The redmouth looked up with Anson’s face and hissed. It saw the sword at Lindsay’s side and sprang for Anson’s disemboweled corpse. It jerked Anson’s blade from its scabbard and brandished it, slashing it through the air and listening to its whistling sounds. It giggled then and charged Lindsay.
She batted its blade away and ducked under it. She put herself between the creature and Ben.
The redmouth spun around in a slashing motion and Lindsay got her blade up just in time. She parried, the sound a sharp chime, and launched a riposte into the redmouth’s shoulder. The tip of her blade sank until it hit bone and she drew it back quickly.
The redmouth stopped giggling.
She reminded herself this wasn’t fencing class. There was no protective gear, no button on the tip of the blade, no right-of-way. This was not a duel, it was a street fight. One lucky shot and she was dead. On the other hand, her opponent was fighting like a wild animal. No technique, no discipline. No skill.
Her old coach’s voice floated up to her from her memory. You are hardwired to be one of two things: an attacker or a defender.
The redmouth with Anson’s face roared. She backed a step. She crouched.
It charged her again, rearing back with its blade. Exactly as she’d hoped. In that moment, she attacked. She put all of her weight on the front foot and extended her blade in a flèche attack. She brought her rear leg up and exploded forward, her body and blade fully extended like an arrow. The sword pierced the redmouth in the stomach.
Her momentum carried her forward, closer, and her blade ran the creature through. She had moved so quickly, Redmouth Anson just stared at her. Its jaw worked, making a clicking noise.
She winked at it.
It tried to raise its sword arm then, but she grabbed its wrist with her free hand. She let go of her own sword, deep into the creature, and smashed her fist into its face. It blinked at her. She punched it again, driving it back. She stayed inside and kept driving her right fist into its bloody face until she stripped it of its blade with her left. It stumbled backward then and she planted her left foot and brought her right foot around high. The roundhouse kick caught it in the jaw, launching the redmouth from the stage and out of the cone of light.
She walked to the edge of the stage and saw it had fallen beside Severance and Drexler. Drexler looked up at her, the feelers already pooling around him. He brought his hand up to shield him from the light spilling over her shoulders from above.
“I—I—” he said. “My God.”
She turned her back on him for Ben.
When she saw her friend, really saw him, his every bruise, every cut, every bit of hateful graffiti tattooed onto his face lit by the spotlight’s stark lumens, she dropped Anson’s sword, dropped to her knees.
“Ben,” she said softly.
“No,” he murmured.
“It’s me.”
He lolled his head from side to side. No.
She reached out a hand then, touched his face gingerly. He recoiled. His voice was distant, broken.
“Get away.”
“I came back for you.”
He closed his eyes.
“They always use Dad’s face. Every time. Now hers.” His face creased at the word hers.
“Go to hell,” he said.
She looked around, saw the feelers already creeping up over the rim of the stage. She grabbed him by his shirtfront and pulled him up to his knees. He struggled, grabbed her wrists with his broken fingers, but there was no strength in them. He swayed and his words were thick and slurred.
“Stop…”
“Listen!” she said, shaking him. “I saw him. I saw your father.”
“…torturing…”
“He said he heard you.”
“…me.”
“He said they can’t hurt you.”
The feelers inched closer, spilling over the stage, curling toward them. Lindsay grabbed one of Ben’s wrists and pulled his hand toward her. She placed something sharp and warm into his palm and closed his undamaged fingers around it.
“Let…”
“He said…”
“…me…”
“…to tell you…”
“…go!”
“…you dropped this.”
She released his wrist. He opened his hand and saw his prize. She watched his eyes fix on his father’s badge, then look up to find her.
“You really came back,” he said.
“There’s no one I’d rather watch the end of the world with.”
He laughed, tears streaming from his eyes.
“Ben,” she said, “your face…”
“I know.”
“No, it’s…leaking.”
He brought his hand up to his cheek then, feeling what she could already see. His eyes grew wide with alarm. The cuts, the bruises, the fresh tattoos…they were weeping. Then gushing.
And the water was of many colors.
Ben clutched his chest and doubled over.
“Ben!” she screamed. She grabbed him by the shoulders and when she pulled him back up, his eyes were glowing, luminous, getting brighter by the second. His teeth were gritted.
“Get. Back.”
Chapter 56
When he can no longer see her—the first person he could truly see in all his time here—Big Ben climbs atop the berm and stares down the other side for a moment. The rocks are piled high. He looks at his raw hands and begins the long climb down.
When he reaches the bottom of the dusty gorge, he looks up at his handiwork stretching overhead, casting him in shadow. He doesn’t know precisely how high it is, but then he corrects himself.
Two years high, he thinks.
Whatever compelled him to build this massive cairn in this waiting place is now telling him with equal urgency to pull it all down. He throws his shoulder into the base, kicks at it. Claws at the jagged rocks with torn hands, punches them, opening fresh cuts, until he is winded and bloodied anew.
He stops then, chest heaving, hands on his knees, and stares up at the cairn again. Reconsiders it. Reconsiders everything. After a lifetime of fighting people, things, himself, he thinks: Maybe it’s time to stop. To let go.
He reaches a hand out and places it on the smooth face of a stone.
He hears a sharp crack then, echoing in the valley like a gunshot. His eyes follow the sound and he sees rocks cleaving overhead, spidering up the steep face like splintering glass. At intervals, small stones fire like bullets. In their wake, jets of water spring forth. Water seeps down the face of the cairn in sheets.
It was never a cairn, Big Ben thinks. It was a dam.
With that the dam begins to rumble.
Big Ben looks up at
the lip and sees the sun cresting over its edge. He lifts his face to it and closes his eyes. Smiles.
Give ’em hell, guys, he says before the levee breaks and sweeps him to his reward.
Chapter 57
Ben felt something give way in his chest. It felt as if a herd of horses were thundering through him, charging up and outward until he threw his head back and screamed. What came out was not sound—he heard only a high-pitched ringing in his ears—but something between water and light. It poured from his mouth, his eyes, his lacerations, until his entire face opened up in a radiant, multicolored fount that arced up into the sky, higher and higher, until it hit the low ceiling of clouds and exploded in a colored shower. The glowing rain hit the feelers.
And it burned them.
Chapter 58
Severance kicked and struggled at the feelers tangling his feet. One finally wrapped around his ankle and trembled and four smaller vines burst from its flesh and seized his knee. It pulled him toward the pit. They had already taken Henry. It wasn’t the monster beneath them that had shattered Drexler’s mind. He had called that doom down upon himself, had reconciled himself to it, but he had not counted on Lindsay returning like a Valkyrie or some righteous angel, a sword at her side. That he could be wrong. Severance couldn’t quite understand how she had pulled it off, but he knew enough to never count Lindsay Clark out. When Drexler disappeared into the pit, he was jabbering, speaking in tongues, but offering no resistance. For a moment Drexler’s wide, horror-stricken eyes found Severance’s, then he was gone.
Severance struggled, but it was no use. He was next. He clung to one of the pillars of the stage, but when feelers wrapped around one of his wrists and pulled, he lost his grip. He closed his eyes, resigned. He lay on his back and let them drag him toward the pit; he prayed it would be over quickly and without too much pain, but knew neither would be the case.
Then he felt the rain on his face.
He opened his eyes to see sparkling jewels of every color falling from the sky—rubies, garnets, topaz, emeralds, sapphires, amethyst—but it was water. It felt like phosphorescent holy water, washing away the dirt and grime on his skin, beneath it even. He looked at the mass of tentacles climbing up his body. The droplets of wet light pocked their flesh and sizzled. He looked around him and saw that the mass of feelers that had found purchase on the ground were still holding on, but quivering in the deluge. The ones that had not yet anchored recoiled in a frenzy, curling in on themselves.
Severance had been pulled far enough away from the stage that he could now see the source of the beam that was piercing the night. McKelvie. He was almost too bright to look at. Severance brought a hand up to shield his eyes and saw Lindsay thrown back, gazing skyward as well, mouth agape.
Severance felt dirty, guilty, utterly unworthy, but he couldn’t help himself. God damn it, he thought, I want to live.
“Lindsay!” he screamed.
She heard him and snapped out of her reverie. In an instant, she understood. She got to her knees and slid behind Ben, wrapping herself around him. She looked like she had thrown herself on a fire hose. She jerked their bodies toward Severance and the pit. One moment, the beam was shining straight up into the night sky, the next it cut a curling swath of light toward him, until he was hit with it full force. The feelers fell away and he heard a horrendous bellowing, of something ancient and terrible moaning in agony, and he felt the earth shudder with its convulsions as the river of light shot forth from Ben like a hydrant, raced over the ground in a colored flood, and poured into the pit. It lifted Severance off the trembling ground and bore him along with it, and he felt himself following Drexler over the edge.
Chapter 59
Alex and Davis stood back-to-back, a score of sliced and broken redmouths at their feet. They were now hacking and slashing as the wriggling stalks choked the air all around them. When the light erupted, they lowered their weapons for a moment and stared.
“Did McKelvie just puke light?” asked Davis.
“Not the strangest thing I’ve seen tonight,” said Alex.
“Not even top five.”
Then Alex heard Severance scream. He followed the sound until he saw his friend being dragged toward the pit, clawing at the ground. Without hesitation, Alex charged across the field toward the maw, leaping over bands of anchored feelers. He dove headfirst, like he was sliding into home plate, his father cheering him on from the dugout. In fact, in this moment, though he couldn’t explain it, he felt his father’s presence all around him.
Severance saw him and reached, but he went over the side. Alex thrust his war club into the hole, careful not to gaze into the void, and Severance grabbed it with both hands. Alex felt himself toppling in after it, but felt Davis then, wrapped around his legs and pulling them both backward.
When Alex had his feet on the ground, they pulled with all of their might, the rainbow stream still rushing over and around them, singeing the feelers and batting them away. Finally Severance emerged from the hole, collapsing in a heap on the wet ground.
The floodwaters stopped and they hauled Severance away from the edge. Whatever was beneath them had been wounded. The earth shook again and a sound like a distant war horn emanated from far below. Still, pocked and scalded as they were, several tentacles were rooted to the ground and fresh feelers poked out of the pit.
Severance grabbed Alex. “Miranda?”
“She’s fine, but we need to have a serious talk about your taste in women.”
“Look,” said Davis, pointing toward the stage.
They turned and watched Ben and Lindsay collapse.
Chapter 60
Ben choked finally, then fell to the stage, gasping. Lindsay, still holding him, fell alongside him. She released him, then clambered over him, shouting his name.
“Talk to me!” she screamed.
He got to his hands and knees, trying to speak between gulping breaths.
She pulled him up, faced him, and gasped in shock.
“My God, your face…”
“I know,” he said breathlessly, looking away and bringing up a hand to block her view.
“No,” she said. “It’s healed.”
She reached out and touched the smooth skin, amazed. No lacerations, no bruises. No ink. “How do you feel?”
“Whole,” he said.
She grinned. “I was hoping you were still just a little angry.”
Ben gazed over her shoulder at the chaos below: the widening gyre and the monster beneath, stung, but gathering itself once more. “You punched it in the nose,” he said, amazed.
“Now we hit it with everything we’ve got.” She nodded at the badge in his hand. “That thing still have juice?”
He gripped it in a healed fist and smiled. “Only one way to find out.”
Lindsay slipped her foot beneath the forte of her blade and lifted her knee, and the handle sailed into her hand.
“All for one then.”
They dashed down the steps and joined the breathless trio of Alex, Davis, and Severance, whose suit was torn around his arms and legs.
Severance smoothed the front of his shredded suit jacket.
“I will concede that perhaps my plan got most of you, you know, killed,” said Severance, “so I will graciously defer to the next-best idea.”
“It’s wounded,” said Lindsay. “Now we have to—”
Ben sprinted toward the pit, his arm extended.
“Damn it, Ben…” she said, and chased after him. The others fell in behind her. Ben’s plan became apparent enough as she caught up to him. He charged right at the anchored feelers and when he swung his badge at them, they were shunted away as if they were opposing magnets. Lindsay heard the sound of ripping, a rapid, continuous unsnapping, as the roots were dislodged from the ground like ivy pulled from the side of a brick façade. With the feelers unmoored and wriggling, dislodged and swaying, Lindsay swung away with her blade, slicing them in two. Behind her Alex chopped the floating feelers apar
t with the serrated edge of his war club, Davis with his Galahad blade. Severance found one of the automatic rifles and sprayed bursts on either side of them along the ground.
They were clearing a path.
There was another final convulsion then, and the remaining tentacles released their collective grips and receded toward the hole. Ben continued his charge. Picked up speed. With horror, the extent of his plan dawned on Lindsay. She called after him, but it was too late. With his badge thrust forward in one hand and the other bracing it, he dove headfirst into the pit.
Chapter 61
Ben had been told once that his world was but one room in a grand, infinite palace, and that there were beings who could see beyond their own rooms. Great and ancient beings with endless eyes who were scratching at his door. And Drexler had let one in. As Ben plummeted, he felt the air around him alive with tendrils, but the badge shunted them away. He felt countless eyes on him, wild and rolling, trying to fix on him, but unable to. Thanks to Lindsay, they had punched it in the nose, blinded it. But they still had to push this being out of their room, out of their world, back to where it came from, once and for all.
Ben knew of only one way to do it.
He pushed the badge ahead of him as he plummeted. With his arms extended overhead, he tucked his head into his armpit and squeezed his eyes shut. He knew that if he saw those scalded eyes or the air around him teeming with mottled feelers, if he saw the size and the contours of the vast creature falling ahead of him, if he opened his eyes as he fell between rooms, he would go mad. And having jumped in the first place, he knew he was halfway there already.
He fell long enough to wonder if he would ever land or if he would just plummet forever between rooms. He had heard once that if you’re falling in your dreams—a dream he had had many times—the dream in which you land is the day you die. He thought it sounded like bullshit, but it felt this way now. The longer he fell, the smaller he sensed he was. He no longer felt choked in a tunnel. He felt like he had dropped into a vast, open space. He felt tiny, a speck in the cosmos, and keeping his eyes closed, he clutched on to the idea of himself as tightly as he held the badge. He thought of his father. He thought of Lindsay. But he could not help but think of the rooms he fell past, and the beings within them, and what they might make of this insignificant speck and the wounded colossus it drove before it, eyes blinded and tentacles unfurling, and he hoped the message was thus: Do not fuck with us.
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