“What weapon?” said Wodan.
“If you fail, and the Ugly grow in power, we’ll cut off all loans to every farm surrounding Pontius. We’ll drive the farmers off their land and destroy the irrigation channels. Within a year, Pontius will face starvation – and no one will notice before it’s too late. One way or another, the Ugly will be destroyed. It’s up to you to determine whether or not tens of thousands of innocent people will die as well.”
Wodan felt faint. “You said… you said that you don’t want any blood on your hands.”
“I said that taking lives is against our code. If we commit genocide, then we’ll disband. Some of us will move to Sunport, some of us will move to Hargis, and only skeletons will remain in Pontius. Just remember that, Wodan. If your gamble fails, every innocent person you have ever met here will die.”
“I won’t forget,” said Wodan.
Wodan rose and left the circle of Businessmen. The wounds on his arm and along his chest burned as if his blood was crying out. It was strange to him that, if he were in Haven, a group of bankers and wealthy elitists who made plans for a possible genocide would be considered evil. But here, in a city-state ruled by violent, sadistic, power-hungry gangs, the Businessmen were, by comparison, the good guys.
* * *
As Wodan passed through the lounge, he saw Jens at the open bar, surrounded by a crowd of young men and women laughing at one of his stories. Virgil and Hari sat in a dimly lit, private corner. Wodan approached and saw that Hari was feeding the misshapen cat and telling some tale which was causing Virgil’s jaw to drop further with each word. Virgil glanced over at Wodan and he instantly knew that Hari was telling the detective about Wodan trying to stir up the slaves against the Ugly in the wasteland. Wodan thought about giving them some distance, then an idea struck him.
“Hey, Hari,” Wodan interrupted. “What sort of work do you like to do?”
“Something easy, I dunno. Hey, I was just telling Virgil how you-”
“Easy - like what? Something calming? Relaxing?”
“Yeah, sure, something that won’t stress an old man out. But that kind of work don’t tend to come along when you wear a collar and a lock, you know?”
“Did you do anything you liked before you were enslaved?”
“I used to tend a garden. Before then I was an ironsmith. Well, more of an assistant, I just repaired stuff. But damn, I hated that. It was always so hot, as if cooking in just the sun wasn’t hot enough... but after I got old, I tended gardens. I helped out this guy… I guess you’d call him a doctor, in these parts. I... I really liked that! Gave a man time to think, to relax, it did.”
“And would you like doing that sort of thing now?”
“Sure!”
Wodan turned and went directly to Pelethor. The man was still staring ahead in his cold, still manner. “Sir,” said Wodan, kneeling beside him. “Just how rich are you?”
“Rich enough. Why?”
“Rich enough to have a garden?”
“No. That is, my wife had a garden, but that... I guess it’ll just go to ruin.”
“What if I gave you an older man, a slave. Would you take him on and let him putter around in your garden?”
“Why not?” said Pelethor, smiling oddly.
“He’s here now. Could you take him immediately?”
Pelethor nodded. “Have him wait near the entrance. I’ll take him with me when I leave.” He turned away from Wodan and resumed staring into the distance.
Wodan walked back to Virgil and Hari. “Hari,” he said, “I just gave you to a wealthy Businessman who says you can chill in his garden. Is that cool?”
“Wealthy, say?” said Hari. “Really? Well, I... yeah, that’s great! Th-thanks, Wodan!” He looked straight at Wodan, eyes full of something he had not felt in years. “Boy... and here I thought... that things were just going to get worse, somehow. You know, in a way, you ended up taking me out of the wasteland after all, son.”
“To the hero of the wasteland!” said Virgil, raising his drink.
“Right!” said Hari, throwing an arm around Wodan. “I’ll second that!”
Wodan tried to smile, but he kept seeing an image of Pontius covered in heavy clouds of black smoke, with armed Ugly bashing in doors and looting what little food they could out of homes filled with skeletal, dying civilians.
“You know?” said Hari, laughing. “I think things might turn out okay in the end!”
Chapter Nineteen
Countdown
“Harder to hit than you’d think,” said Ullrich, replacing a few bottles on the wooden wall they’d set up. “Your turn, Wodi.”
Wodan passed their jug to Hunley, then took his absurdly decorative Coil automatic handgun from Ullrich and loaded a fresh magazine. The three sat relaxing on the roof of their Floyd Street headquarters while the sun set, casting a dim blue shroud on the abandoned neighborhood.
“Shooting a gun inside city limits,” said Hunley, laughing. “Isn’t that a death sentence if you get caught?”
Wodan aimed down the sights of the handgun. “Pretty soon, all the old limits will be gone.” The gun barked six times, shattering glass with each shot. On the seventh shot, the final bottle jumped and did a slow, circling dance before Wodan shot once more and shattered the target.
“Damn, Wodi,” said Ullrich. “You’re getting ridiculously good at this.”
“You must have gotten practice in your homeland,” said Hunley. “When did you start?”
Wodan smiled and laid fresh bottles on the wall. “The first time I ever shot a gun was in a wooded valley east of here. It was a shotgun. I was deep inside an abandoned mine and a flesh demon with a purple glowing belly was trying to kill me…”
Hunley laughed loudly, drowning out his words. The door to the roof suddenly shot open, then Pete came through and said, “Gods below, Wodan, I thought Jens was bad about telling stories.”
“I didn’t even get to the part about the reptilian monster yet,” said Wodan, clapping a hand on Pete’s shoulder. “I put the shotgun in his mouth and, well…”
“Probably one of those deals where you had to be there, right?” said Jens, arriving behind Pete. Wodan could tell that the two newcomers were already drunk. There was something wild about them. “Speaking of not being there, where were you today?”
“I just felt like making my Captain sweat, so I figured I’d take the day off,” said Wodan. The truth of the matter was that the Businessman’s plan for Pontius weighed on him, and he wanted to stay at home and blow off steam. In the background, they could hear Hunley shooting at the targets, missing, and cursing violently.
“So you didn’t talk to anyone yet?” said Pete, jerking his head around.
Wodan shook his head, then Pete and Jens looked at one another in shock.
“What’s going on?” said Wodan.
“War, that’s what,” said Pete. “There’s no official word yet, but there’s a rumor going around that the Coil are going to move against the Ugly two weeks from today. The Lieutenants are saying that more Captains are dying. We’re not doing it this time, so I don’t know how the Ugly are finding these guys.”
Wodan glanced at Jens, who smiled slightly. It’s that list of names I gave Boris! he thought. They’re doing our work for us now.
“From what I’ve gathered, the majority of our forces are gonna hit Senki’s fortress. With Sera dead, those Left Leg berserkers are the most dangerous threat. While that’s happening, the Cognati are going to hit Boris, and at least one of the Hands, head-on.”
“Two weeks,” said Wodan, leaning against a wall. “It’s finally happening.”
“No shit,” said Pete. “Now you’ve got what you wanted, and I have to figure a way to get out of this horse shit.”
“You could come work with me,” said Ullrich. “When the Coil inevitably get their asses handed to them, we’re gonna need some help fending off Ugly berserkers going wild in the streets.”
“Bad idea,”
said Jens. “It might be better to be on the front lines and get killed as quickly as possible. Can you imagine how bad it’ll be for everyone when the Coil get plowed and the Ugly are calling all the shots?”
“Demon’s balls!” Hunley shouted. Wodan turned and saw that the wooden wall was still topped by a line of neatly arranged bottles. Hunley strode up as he loaded a fresh magazine, then executed each bottle at point-blank range.
* * *
On the second day of their two week wait, Wodan sat alone in his room while the others partied nearby. Jens and Pete were driven nearly mad by the prospect of all-out war breaking out in Pontius, and were drinking as if they knew for certain that they would be killed. Wodan understood how they felt; Jens had seen the inside of Boris’s stronghold, and Wodan could guess that Pete had seen enough laziness and incompetence among his Coil peers that he did not relish following any of them into battle. But Wodan could not drink with them. He had worries of his own.
Wodan sat at his typewriter, considering his next move. The misshapen cat perked up suddenly and banged its head into the typewriter platen, then locked one eye on the doorway.
“You okay?” said Wodan, stroking the cat’s ears.
“I’m fine.”
Wodan turned quickly and saw Anne stroll through his doorway. She sat on the bed, then looked around at his room.
“What are you doing?” said Wodan.
“Nothing. Do you mind?”
“Oh… of course not.”
The two looked at one another. Besides a few greetings, this was the most that Anne had ever said to him. Wodan had not tried speaking to her for weeks; whenever Pete wasn’t around, she only appeared bored, distant, and vaguely annoyed by her surroundings. Just as Wodan was wondering what she was doing in his room, he heard Jens cry out, then Pete laughed and there was a terrific impact on a distant wall.
They must be getting too wild in there, he thought.
“I don’t see how you can stand to touch that cat,” said Anne.
“He’s a good boy!” said Wodan, smiling.
“Aren’t you afraid he’ll shit on your papers?”
“He can’t get around so well, but we gave him a whole room for a litter box, so we don’t have to worry about him making a mess. He likes to sit by the window and see what’s going on. I’m sure he’s happier than he was before. Uh, you want to pet him?”
“No.” Anne continued looking around, then her eyes settled on Wodan’s typewriter and papers. “What are you writing?”
Alarmed, Wodan removed the page he’d been working on and rolled up a fresh sheet. He did not want Anne to see that he’d been writing instructions for the others concerning what to do if the Ugly defeated the Coil. The Businessmen’s plan of cutting off the food supply for the entire city haunted him; the idea that his friends might find out that the farms were devastated after it was too late to evacuate was intolerable. He knew that if the Ugly won then he would most likely be dead, but there was a good chance that Pete or Jens would find a way to place themselves far from danger during the battle. If that happened, they needed to know where to go and how to get there. Instead of bringing up a worst case scenario that could cause her to lose sleep, Wodan spotted an old story he’d been working on and rambled on about it.
“I got the idea from a dream,” Wodan said finally.
“I had a dream the other night,” said Anne. “I told Pete about it, but he said that dreams are just memories reworking themselves while you’re asleep. He said they’re nonsense.”
“Oh, that’s not true at all!” said Wodan, turning to her. “Pete’s going to end up being controlled by internal forces he doesn’t understand, if he keeps thinking like that. Sleep puts you in touch with worlds inside of yourself that you don’t even think about while you’re awake. Where I come from, some people devote their whole lives to mapping that stuff out. Haven’t you ever read stories about people being contacted by gods while they were asleep, and having realizations that they would never have while awake? There’s plenty of cases of the dream-world having an effect on this world. Why, thousands of years before the Smiths put chains on our creative spirit, some wise man devoted years to studying the atomic structure of matter. He hit a brick wall, so he took a nap. Sounds lazy, right? Well, it wasn’t, because he had a dream that explained how atoms dance and form into molecules. The same thing happened when another wise man was trying to understand the genetic makeup of…”
“The what?”
“Oh… the instructions inside living cells. They tell the body what it’s supposed to be, how to grow, when to die, stuff like that. A wise man learned that from a dream, too. But it goes beyond practical stuff. The you that you think you are is just a thin film laid on top of a deep, dark pond. So communicating with those deeper forces… I mean, it’s like a pantheon of gods, or other selves, you know?” Wodan noticed that Anne had a strange, shocked smile, so he laughed at himself. “Anyway, I guess some dreams might be nonsense, but some of them aren’t. Plenty of people from my homeland try to have them interpreted. I’ve read a little bit about it. What was your dream?”
Anne shrugged, then said, “I was on a bus, the kind that wealthy people use to drive slaves from one site to another. I was… this sounds dumb, Wodan.”
“So? Who cares? Go on!”
“Okay.” Anne covered her face with both hands, then continued. “So I was trapped on this bus. But it wasn’t driving in the city, it was out in the wasteland. I don’t remember seeing any driver. I looked out the window because I heard a terrible shrieking sound. It was from an animal… I saw a bear, and other animals too. The bear dived into a river, and the river swallowed it up. Other animals jumped in too. Bears, then a lion. It happened over and over again. The river swallowed them all.”
She peeked at him through her hands, then said, “What do you think it means?”
“That one’s pretty easy,” said Wodan. He wondered if the general dream landscape for every human outside of Haven was so streamlined. The inner garden had been neglected for far too long. “I think the bus was probably you, your shell, your life. The observer was a deeper part of yourself, and it was trapped. There’s no driver in your life; you’re not really in control. The river…” Wodan pointed towards the distant room where the drinking was still in full effect. “That’s that Pontius hedonism, making animals jump into oblivion every night. The two types of animals are considered pretty tough animals… that may be because you only hang out with guys. The bears might symbolize… well, you know, men in your past. Each one is disappointingly similar. The lion might be your ideal guy, since he came in last. He might even be Pete. But did you notice that the king of the animals was doing the same thing as the bears?”
Anne laughed, then said, “You’re a pretty good dream interpreter. I guess. But do you really think Pete is my ideal?”
Wodan shrugged. A door slammed nearby.
“Maybe he is,” she said, putting a hand over her eyes. “Disgusting.”
“Why?”
“Because I hate him.”
Wodan was shocked into silence. Anne left the room. Wodan sat for a moment, then wondered if it was safe to continue working on his “worst case scenario” instructions. He rose and stood at his doorway. His eyes adjusted to the darkness and he saw Hunley passed out on a couch with one leg thrown over the back. In the distance, Jens explained something to Ullrich, shaking his head and throwing his arms around in exasperation. Wodan looked in the direction of Pete’s room, then heard voices behind the door.
* * *
“I dreamed I was eating a cactus,” said Anne.
It was the third day since the rumor of war had spread. Anne laid on Wodan’s bed while he sat at his desk, arranging notes for a story that he wanted to complete before Pontius was thrown into the fire.
“It was a really nice color, and it tasted good. But the spines… they hurt really bad. But I kept eating more anyway, because it hurt even worse if I stopped eating. Then I felt si
ck. My stomach was going to explode... I threw up and it felt like my throat was going to burst into flames. And then I looked at what I’d thrown up. It was another cactus. A perfectly formed cactus.”
Wodan stopped, suddenly intensely uncomfortable.
“What do you think it means?” she said.
“Anne… are you pregnant?”
Anne posture of relaxation fell away as she sat up and curled her arms around her legs in a strange, spidery gesture. She rubbed her knees, then quickly stood and left the room. For a split second, Wodan saw her face – contorted and demonic, as if a mask had been stripped away revealing something true and terrifying. He heard Pete’s door open and slam shut. A few minutes later the door opened and slammed shut again, then he heard feet pounding down the stairs, then he heard Anne’s shoes clicking on the pavement outside.
Wodan rose and stood at his doorway. Eventually Pete came out and stared at him, haggard and terrified.
“Wodi,” he said. “Anne just said she hasn’t had a period in over a month.”
They two stared at one another for a long time.
“That means you’re going to be a dad,” Wodan said simply.
Pete slapped both of his hands onto his face, then turned and walked back into his room.
* * *
On the fourth day since the rumor of war, Wodan stepped lightly through the darkness of Hunley’s apartment. He’d skipped work once more to finish his project, a detailed explanation for all his friends, as well as Jarl and any Entertainer he could contact, and how his own money should be divided in the case that Pontius faced imminent destruction. He wanted to unwind and enjoy a movie with Hunley and Ullrich, but the thought of all those lives in the balance still hung around his neck.
Hanging out with Pete and Jens was out of the question. Since hearing the news of Anne’s pregnancy, a sort of madness had spread among the numerous young males connected with her. Wodan hadn’t seen either of the two all day, and had no idea if they’d gone into work or not.
[Demonworld 3] The Floyd Street Massacre Page 21