by Alex Wells
Another unearthly, shattering scream came from the Weatherman. Geri’s arm came up, combat knife black with more sticky fluid, slammed down. The Weatherman thrashed unsteadily under the onslaught of the Wolves and went still. Coyote sat up, his round face a half mask of blood from nose to chin.
Maybe he wouldn’t be so damned thirsty all the time after this, Hob thought numbly. Now if only she could actually inhale and enjoy her last damn cigarette. “Never wanted to die abed anyway,” she muttered, beginning to droop forward over the motorcycle. No one needed to be in bed to sleep when they were this damn tired.
The crackle of gunfire strung out, blurred, and at first she thought it had to be death clouding her ears, but it was a rumble in the deep, a rumble made of time and space and pure witchiness.
A spark of light – a bullet – stopped bare centimeters from her cheek.
And then the world sang.
Chapter Fifty-Four
The church’s doors boomed inward, splintered, and still held, somehow. Mag leaned against the pew that she and the other miners held, every bone in her body aching from the blows of the battering ram. In the pitch-black back of the church, in the odd silences, she heard Brother Rami praying with a small group of the injured. His words were a blur she could not make out, but she still found them comforting. Maybe she’d been wrong to avoid Ludlow’s church for so long.
Boom. The doors shuddered, held.
Omar, next to her in line, laughed sharply. “Keep trying, assholes. We could do this all day and all night too.” A ragged bubble of exhausted, near-hysterical laughter echoed through the church.
Boom. They dug in their feet and pushed back.
The flavor of the air coming through the cracks in the doors changed, to something more chemical. She couldn’t quite place her finger on it; Papa had always kept her out of the mine and away from the blasting in particular, and Clarence had done the same. But the miners recognized it. A low moan swept through them.
“What?” Mag whispered.
“Ignition gel,” Omar said. “They’re bringin’ it out. I don’t know if they’re gonna try blastin’ the doors…”
One of the miners on a pew abandoned her post, and scrambled over another pew against the wall to look out the window, just peeping over the edge. “They’re sprayin’ the walls,” she called back. “I see… Longbridge. That fucker. He’s sittin’ and havin’ him a drink while he watches.”
Mag didn’t need an explanation for that. “They’re going to burn us alive,” she whispered.
“They still working the ram?” Omar called.
Before the woman could even answer, another boom shook through them. A man stumbled, collected himself, and lunged back in to put his shoulder against the pew.
Mag closed her eyes. There wasn’t any death out of this that would be good. But perhaps the worst would be burning. Like what they’d done to Mama. “Then we let ’em in,” Mag said. “We got the timing. Let ’em run on through. Slam the doors behind them. Then we got some of their people hostage.”
Omar laughed sharply. “You’re as crazy as your friend.”
“Learned it from her.”
Omar counted them off, and they waited for the doors to shudder one more time. Then both teams of people pulled back, ready to catch the doors as they swung open and slam them back shut with reinforcements. Every other able-bodied person waited with a weapon, ready to spring. And the woman at the window slipped down to pull the bar from the door.
It worked too well. The doors burst inward, shattered beyond recognition, not enough there for them to catch and put back together. The waiting miners jumped on the battering ram team as they slowed in confusion, beating on them with hammers and shovels. More greenbellies came into view, and Omar shoved the pew forward to block them. Not twenty meters away, Longbridge rose up from his chair like it was a goddamn throne, a glass held in one shining metal hand.
And somewhere, in the distance but approaching like a roar, Mag felt the world shift, change, in a seismic wave as fast as thought. As the ground moved under her feet, she screamed and surged forward with Omar.
Longbridge raised his revolver. The greenbellies in front of him raised their rifles. The muzzles flared and spat fire.
The world stopped. A voice that was not a voice, that was bells and shifting tectonic plates and an ocean – how did she know it was an ocean, there were no oceans on Tanegawa’s World, but she tasted the salt spray in her throat – said in words that were not words: No. These are my people.
The bullets, hanging in the air centimeters in front of Omar, puffed into dust. A fresh breeze, impossible to imagine after hours of drowning in burning and chemical stink, blew the billowing smoke back, carrying the orange-pink dust with it. As the dust touched the greenbellies, the color spread across them, until they weren’t Mariposa men at all, but statues of orange, red, and pink. They burst into gouts of sand on the wind and spiraled up into a sky just starting to go deep purple with the promise of dawn.
A soft noise behind her in the frozen world where only wind and sand existed made her turn. The Bone Collector stood at the center of the church, his staff in his hand, and regarded her with eyes as blue as that impossible ocean.
“What did you do?” Mag whispered. It was a stupid question, but she couldn’t find anything else to combat all the impossible things she’d just seen.
He smiled, that damn mysterious smile that Mag suddenly knew was the one Hob had once punched off his face. “This is your moment, Mag. What would you have me do?”
Shige came back to himself in a pained rush, like layers of gauze had been lifted away from his awareness. It cleared away the remnants of improbable sadness he’d felt, seeing Mr Yellow turn his back – what had that been about? He’d been a tool, Shige realized coldly. He’d been built to be a tool, and the Weatherman had used him as such. Had twisted his thoughts, had been the source of those strange urges, and Shige had never quite picked it up. Perhaps because he believed he could not be suborned, perhaps because the call had been coming from inside the house and all else had seemed impossible.
But he had greater problems to face than his emotional upset, and the unbearable vibration and jolting of the jeep under him brought that into intensive focus.
Another jarring thud echoed through the bleeding rupture in his body, but Shige bore it. He didn’t dare shift enough to call attention to himself, from where he’d been stuffed in the cargo space of the vehicle. There wasn’t anywhere he could have moved to that was comfortable, anyway. All he could do was press his left hand against the hole in his chest and struggle to breathe. With his right, he extracted the rest of his small arsenal of weapons and took stock.
The garrote was unlikely as a solution. He might be able to summon up the pure desperate strength to take down one of the guards, but the other two would kill him in the meantime. Same problem went for the knife. More promising were the four microinjectors he’d retrieved from the cuffs of his trousers. They weren’t made to be thrown like the darts, but he’d have his opportunity to use them when the guards came to pull him out of the back of the jeep. He could just pretend to be nearly dead and limp, and sneak in a hit of poison with a little theatrical flopping.
Though really, who was he kidding? He wasn’t nearly dead yet, but he was on his way there. He’d done the field medical classes and self-first aid as required. He knew that he was likely developing a pneumothorax, and could only hope that they’d consider themselves far enough away from the camp to dump him before it fully incapacitated him.
The plan was simple: kill the guards, use the onboard medical kit to its best advantage, and then steal the jeep. He’d have to take a look at the vehicle and its onboard supplies before he could decide his best destination, since his only options were either far-off Newcastle, or the camp – which was an iffy prospect for obvious reasons. It was a plan made entirely of holes, and held together by a thin web of wishful thinking. It was also the only plan he had right now, alon
e and bereft of resources.
An extra vibration seemed to pass through the jeep, and Shige gritted his teeth. There was a sharp whine from the engine, a jerk, and the vehicle rolled to a stop.
“What the fuck?” one of the guards said.
“I don’t fucking know,” another, presumably the driver, shouted. “It just fucking jinked.”
With much cursing and swearing, the guards opened their doors and piled out. Shige rearranged his microinjectors so he could reach them easily and readied himself.
More cursing and slamming around outside, probably them puzzling at the engine. “Fucking radio is on the fritz too.”
“They know which way we were headed,” the third guard said. “Even if we can’t raise them or fix it, they’ll send someone after us.”
The voices started coming closer. “Let’s just dump the traitor here, then. Don’t want his corpse stinking up the jeep if we’re to be hunkering down in it.”
The one he’d identified as the driver laughed sharply. “Give us a bit of entertainment when the eagles show.”
Shige went carefully limp, eyes half-closed and head lolling, as the door to the cargo space opened. He stayed dead weight as the guards stared at him, poked at him. “Think he’s already dead,” one said.
“Does it matter?”
“Not really.”
One grabbed his legs to start dragging him out. He let his hand fall to brush over their wrist and trigger the microinjector. They didn’t even seem to notice. As the guard started to drag him, grunting, “Come on, some help here?” Shige let himself be pulled over. There was a moment of red, distracting pain, and then the second guard grabbed his wrists. Before they started pulling, he tagged them with the second microinjector.
Because after that point, it hurt too much for subtlety. Over the ringing in his ears, he heard the third guffaw, “C’mon, little back office wimp like him can’t be that heavy.”
“Yeah, fuck off,” the guard at his legs said. The walked him out onto the salt flat. The sky above was unimaginably black, with more stars than he’d ever seen in his life – and he’d thought the view in Newcastle was fantastic, so different from the polluted atmosphere on Earth. The air above was shockingly cool, while below he still felt the salt radiating the heat it had collected through the day.
The two guards made it about twenty steps from the jeep when they dropped Shige, their hands coming up to clutch at their throats. Each took a few more steps before collapsing gracelessly down. There were no words, just strangled gasps of closed-off throats, then the scent of bowel and bladder giving way in death.
“No joking!” the driver, still at the jeep, shouted. After a minute, she cursed and her footsteps approached. Shige slipped another microinjector into one hand and the garrote into his other and tried to imagine a universe in which he could be fast enough.
The steps suddenly stopped, but there was no further sound, no breathing, no cursing, no weapon being drawn. Shige counted to one hundred, then cautiously turned his head to look: the guard had stopped, still as a statue, some five meters away. But there was something strange about her indeed, which he could not quite define while she was only a shadow with the headlights of the jeep at her back.
Bemused, Shige moved a hand. No reaction. He dragged himself to his feet, and when there was still no movement, staggered forward rather than trying to run in to attack. He got in close, and saw no movement at all, not even breathing. He stepped around to see her back in the headlights – she’d become entirely red-orange, the color of the sand on this benighted world. Curious, he reached out to touch her…
She collapsed, blowing apart into sand and dust, leaving him ankle deep in a drift. Shige inspected his finger with bemused suspicion. Grains of orange sand had stuck to the tacky blood.
He had no explanation. And even if he had, it wouldn’t stop him from bleeding out. Practical considerations were in order first, and the rest could wait until he was no longer at the edge of death. First aid, then see if he could fix the jeep, then… he’d figure out the next step later.
He staggered back to the jeep and dug until he found the medical kit. It was dishearteningly basic, but there was little he could do about that. There was at least a sharp scalpel, and he could get the tube off his pen to let his chest drain. And there were pain meds, and a blessed unit of universal synthetic blood that was past its date by three months, but given the alternative, he’d take it. Shige swallowed all the meds he could safely take, then a few more, picked up the scalpel, and set about giving himself the fuel of nightmares for years to come if he was lucky enough to survive this.
That pure song faded into a silence, with no more shouting, no more gunfire. Seemed fair enough to Hob, since it was easier to sleep without all that shit going on anyway. She felt the weight of her motorcycle vanish off her leg, and that was a relief. Maybe the part where she flew up to heaven or down to hell and told Old Nick to go fuck himself in person would soon follow.
Cool fingers touched her cheek, tilting her face up. She managed to open her eye to find the Bone Collector looking at her, his eyes fit to swallow the world. The sight of him was welcome, and then goddamn infuriating – which gave her enough strength to choke out strangled, pissed-off words: “You son of a bitch, I fuckin’ told–”
He rested his fingers over her lips and she debated if her last earthly act should be biting him. It was tempting.
“You won,” he said.
“What?”
“You won. And I’m not done with you yet.” His lips quirked in a smug-ass smile that for just this moment, she could admit to herself that she loved. He leaned in to rest his forehead against hers, and then like that wasn’t enough, kissed her.
Hell of a way to… not die. It wasn’t a normal kiss, even the fumbling kind she’d expect from herself being years out of practice, let alone from him having no idea what to do. He breathed into her, and it was a cool river, it was fire, it was strength. For a moment, all the pain that had faded out into fatigue flared back up, and she screamed into his mouth. Then he kissed her again, with a ferocity she’d never known him to have, and she felt her guts shift back into place, the bullets get pushed out of her skin by muscles knitting back together, and it was strange and painful and horrifying and beautiful.
When he drew away, only a quick grab at his collar saved her from falling back onto the salt. He laughed, the bastard, and wrapped an arm around her to steady her.
Maybe she should have been thinking about how good that felt, and a part of her did, and thinking about kissing him back in the hopes that a second time wouldn’t feel that passing strange. But she remembered seeing her people in bloody heaps, and that was more important than any other thoughts she had. She jerked him closer. “You better be fuckin’ plannin’ on doin’ that trick for everyone else.”
“I am,” he agreed. “I have.”
“…What?”
He nudged her cheek to get her to turn her head. She looked across the now-haphazardly lit camp and its wreckage. New drifts of orange sand sat in the distance, but the question of where the hell any of that had come from was less important than the people still flat out on the salt. And near all of them, the Bone Collector, pale and glowing and ghostly, knelt. She saw a hundred different hims touching faces and chests and stomachs, straightening legs and arms.
“Fuck me,” she whispered. “I can’t hardly handle one of you.”
He laughed. “There is still only one of me, I assure you. But I wanted to see to all of my people who were still alive as soon as I could… in order to keep them in that state.”
“Your people?” She turned to look back at him. He’d never talked about anyone like that except her, and maybe–
“Mag can be very convincing, when she likes,” he said.
“Mag’s good at that.” She eyed him, glanced at the ghostly replicas, eyed him again. “What happened?”
“I stand at the bottom of the Well now. At the eye of the storm, I suppose
. And in so doing, I have become the storm.”
She stared at him, and then gave him a firm poke. He felt solid, for all he was a mass of ghosts scattered across the wildcat site. “Say it in plain dummy talk.”
He looked slightly pained. “I am the Well now.”
She tried to wrap her head around that, and found it too big to swallow all at once. So she focused in on the selfish thing most important to her. “But you’re back out of it now?”
“No,” he said quietly. “Not like you mean.”
“But you’re comin’ back out.”
“I don’t think that I can.” He took one of her hands, lifted it, and wove their fingers together. She wished she wasn’t wearing gloves. “This isn’t really me you’re touching.”
“You lying son of a bitch.” She took a careful breath. “So you’re goin’ away?”
“I don’t know.” He squeezed her hand. “But I suppose we’ll find out. I need to go now. I can only split my attention so many ways, and there’s much I need to do.”
She opened her mouth to protest, to ask another question, because none of it made a bit of goddamn sense, then gave up and pulled him forward until their lips met again. For one beautiful moment, he was alive and kissing her back, tasting like blood and vanilla. His hand cradled the back of her head, as hers pulled the collar of his shirt open…
And then he went still like she’d seen him do before, going from flesh to stone. Hob leaned back to see him fade from pale to orange pink like sand. Then he burst into a cloud of dust carried away by the wind.
Hob curled up around the sudden emptiness and pain she felt. She hated it; she’d rather be angry, and in a minute she might be. But all she felt now was the absence of someone who she’d never wanted to be important to her. Was he dead? Was he the next best thing?
She should get up and see how many of her people he’d saved. She needed to get everyone organized, and figure out how the hell to get them back home. Maybe there were more cargo ospreys that hadn’t been destroyed in whatever explosion she’d missed while laid down by the witch fence. But this moment was hers, to feel something as human as pain and sadness and loss.