The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

by Tim Pratt

  “Prove yourself to me, son,” the godlet said, and put his hand on Beej’s shoulder.

  Beej raised the pistol in both hands, visibly trembling. He licked his lips. “Sorry,” he whispered, and pulled the trigger.

  Denis had never seen anyone shot before. It was louder than he would have expected. Hendrix flew backward, dropping his trash can, and fell. His arms and legs spasmed, and there was a great deal of blood—Beej had shot him in the chest—and then that was all. He stopped moving.

  “Good boy,” the godlet said, and took his gun from Beej’s unresisting hand.

  Jane put her arms around Denis from behind. “That’s it, then,” she said. “Now you’re the only one of us who hasn’t taken a life. I’m sure you’ll get your chance soon.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Denis said.

  “Pussy,” the godlet said absentmindedly. “Come on, Beej. Now I have total faith in you. You deserve what you’re about to receive. You’ll be . . . exalted.”

  Beej stared at Hendrix for a moment, then looked up, and Denis could see the switch flip in his old friend’s head. Beej just . . . shut Hendrix out. Made a little bypass in his mind that jumped over the experience of killing the man. It was a feat of repression that Denis almost admired. “I was thinking,” Beej said. “Maybe I could do something with the murals?” He gestured toward the Ocean Room.

  “You do whatever you think’s best,” the godlet said. “So long as you kill Marzi.”

  Beej nodded, but he looked unhappy. “I couldn’t just . . . keep her there? Make sure she doesn’t get out?”

  “Hell, son, that’s what she tried to do with me, and you see how well that worked. No, killing’s the only way. Half measures won’t do. You have to go, soon. I’m fond of you, boy. I’ll miss you.”

  Beej nodded. “Yes, god. I’ll miss you, too. I guess I should go in.”

  “Let’s take the door to the Desert Room,” the godlet said. “You should get a look at it first, you know.”

  “Of course,” Beej said.

  They went, Beej first, then the godlet and Jane, who carried the door in her extra arms, Denis last.

  They approached the Desert Room, passing through the kitchen. The godlet seemed to grow smaller as they walked, until he hardly had to stoop to pass through the doorway. The Desert Room was much less than Denis had expected—the paintings water-stained, the room itself filthy and junk-strewn. But who said portals to the medicine lands had to be impressive? Denis stood off to one side, wrinkling his nose to spare himself any odors, trying not to touch anything. Jane set the metal door down in the middle of the room.

  Beej looked around for a while, his forehead wrinkled in concentration, then sighed and nodded. “I’m ready.” He stepped toward Denis and extended a sweaty hand.

  Denis just stared at it. That hand had fired a pistol just moments ago. The godlet growled, faintly, and Denis decided he couldn’t afford the luxury of horrified indignation. He shook Beej’s hand. “Wish me luck,” Beej said.

  “Luck,” Denis said.

  Beej slid aside the bolt that held the metal door shut. The door opened with a squeal of hinges, and Beej looked inside. “It’s all . . . swirly,” he said, dreamy and content.

  “In you go, then,” the godlet said.

  Beej stepped through the doorway. He didn’t pass through and emerge from the other side. He disappeared.

  “Oh, fuck me,” Denis said. He really hadn’t believed it would work, but it had. They’d made a door to another place, a little primal pocket of unshaped void, and now Beej was there, presumably giving shape to the nothingness.

  Jane shut the door slowly and slid the bolt closed.

  “There,” the godlet said. “Let’s get a move on. We’re burning daylight. Pick up the door, Janey. And you, Denis, open the other door. The one in the wall.”

  Denis looked at him for a moment. He was terrified, though he’d believed his capacity for fear to be burned out. Beej was gone. Say what you would about him, he was human, not like these creatures, one who loved him, one who suffered him for his usefulness. But if he wanted to live through the day, he had to attend to the matter at hand, and do as the godlet said.

  At first, Denis couldn’t even see the door, and then it popped into focus like an optical illusion resolving—just a door set into a painting of a building, so that the door looked like part of the painting. He touched the knob gingerly: It was strangely warm.

  Denis hesitated, thinking. Could he shove this monster back through the door, into this prison? The godlet was smaller now, and seemed less powerful. That sense that the godlet’s presence extended through unseen dimensions was no longer so overpowering. Still, the godlet was made of chrome, it was strong, and it had guns.

  Denis gave in. This was not the moment, not his opportunity. He opened the door, which didn’t even have the good grace to squeak ominously, and a hot wind blew into his face. There was a Western scene beyond the door, storefronts and hitching posts, and a sun like molten gold. It was stark, bleak, and strangely inviting. Beyond this door was a place that burned away complications, a place where Denis could hide, from himself as much as anyone else.

  He could run there, and he knew the godlet wouldn’t follow.

  “Do it, then,” the godlet said softly.

  Denis stiffened, but didn’t turn around. “I thought you couldn’t read minds?”

  The godlet snorted. “Don’t have to read minds to know you’re thinking of running away. So do it. Door’s right there.”

  “I’d die, wouldn’t I? You’d like that.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Your sort is well equipped to survive over there. Artists.” He spat the word. “You’re experts at seeing the world as it’s not. Over there, the world becomes what you see, a little, anyway. Marzi’s got as much of that kind of power as I’ve ever seen, even more than Garamond Ray. She shines like the sun. Beej is good, too; he’s a bonfire, at least. And you . . . well, you’re less than them, but I reckon you can muster a few dozen units of candlepower when your juices are flowing.”

  Denis turned slightly and looked at the godlet. “Talent isn’t everything. There are contextual issues, learned skills, awareness of—”

  “Not over there. Over there, talent is everything. Well, talent, and practice, and self-control. You think you’re too good to bother with practice, and as for self-control . . . you’d probably prefer it if I didn’t go into that here.” He inclined his head a fraction toward Jane. “Still, you could get by there. So why don’t you go?”

  Jane looked at him, her eyes pleading with him to stay.

  Denis just looked at the godlet. This was his out, he realized. It was this, or stay with the monsters until the end. He looked through the door.

  If the world over there responded to him, became the place he dreamed of . . . it would be all pure and unblemished, chrome and grinding wheels and whiteness. Denis would be the only imperfection there, and as such, he would have to be destroyed, stripped into clean, component molecules, ground away to nothing.

  Denis shuddered. Better a dirty life than no life at all. Seeing Hendrix die had brought that point home. “No, I’ll stay,” he said. “I’m not ready to forsake this world yet.”

  Jane whooped in delight and rushed past the godlet, embracing Denis with one set of arms, while the other set held the weight of the metal door above their heads. “Oh, Denis!” she cried. “You stayed, you’re staying with me!”

  Denis began to regret his decision. Better a clean death, perhaps, than a messy life with Jane. But he’d made his choice.

  “Yes, Jane. I’m staying.”

  The godlet growled. “Enough, Jane. Put the door in place.”

  Denis looked at the godlet and grinned. He got it—Why had it taken him so long? The godlet had wanted Denis to bugger off through the door, because he was afraid to kill Denis himself! Sure, Jane loved the god, but it was readily apparent that Jane loved Denis, too. The god needed Jane, and was afraid to excit
e her wrath by killing Denis! If the godlet told Jane now that Denis had murdered her, Jane might not even believe him. Denis was safe, as long as they didn’t go back up into the hills, as long as the god couldn’t show Jane her own corpse, the evidence of Denis’s crime. Maybe he’d make it through this after all.

  Jane let go of him, shooed him away, and set the metal sculpture in front of the open door to the medicine lands. She pushed the sculpture toward the door, against it—the door frames were sized to match exactly—and then the metal frame went into the wall, melted into the painted plaster, became part of the painting. The buffalo skull lost its three-dimensionality and became a flat painting. Jane kept pushing and grunting until the door disappeared entirely into the wall. Now it looked like a comic book illustration of the sculpture he and Beej had made, a metal door frame set into a wooden wall.

  Jane closed the door, and now there were bars painted across it, to match the sculpture. The knob was gone, replaced by a sliding bolt.

  “Amazing,” Denis said, and meant it.

  The godlet grunted. “It’ll do. Now when Marzi tries to get out, she’ll actually go someplace else.”

  “Into a box canyon,” Denis said. “Just like in her comic.” In the issue Beej had given Denis to read, Marzi’s protagonist—Denis didn’t remember her name—had chased her enemy into a twisty box canyon and gotten lost there. Eventually she’d found her way out, and back to her own world—or at least, she thought she had, until her familiar home became surreal and monstrous, her friends treacherous, everything she knew twisted out of true. It turned out that she’d wandered into a magical box canyon, a place of illusions that mimicked whatever the victim expected to see. The heroine had eventually escaped, and dynamited the mouth of the box canyon closed.

  Denis rather doubted that Marzi had access to dynamite, and even if she did, it wouldn’t help her now. She’d be trapped in the box canyon, and she’d remain there forever, most likely. Her comic book protagonist may have been a wish-fulfillment doppelgänger, but Marzi herself was, after all, just a coffee jockey who drew comic books. She was doomed.

  “Now that Marzi is out of the picture,” the godlet said, “I can start getting my strength back without worrying about her interference. You know how you get strong, Denis? You exercise. And since you’ve decided to stay with us, let me ask you this: Have you ever made a Molotov cocktail?”

  With a heart full of sand and a head full of mud, Denis shook his head.

  “You’re a quick study,” the godlet said. “I’m sure you’ll do fine. Let’s go downtown. We’ll take your car. Parallel parking that dump truck’s got to be a bitch.”

  “What the hell is this shit?” the godlet said, staring up at the clock tower near the north end of downtown, where Water Street met Pacific Avenue. Jane lurked by one of the four pillars that made up the base of the clock, her body at its most human-looking—she might have been mistaken for someone merely insane and filthy, rather than recognized as an inhuman monster.

  “It’s a clock,” Denis said. “It’s used to tell time.”

  “Shit,” the godlet said. “This thing is still standing? It didn’t fall in the last big quake?” Denis wondered what the tourists and passersby made of the godlet, if they thought he was a street performer of some sort, like the man who dressed up in a bee suit and declaimed Beat poetry a few blocks up the street.

  “Apparently not,” Denis said.

  The godlet grunted. “I wouldn’t have thought it was built to last. Damn it. At least nothing else looks the way it used to—I must have wrecked things pretty good. If it wasn’t for that double-damned clock still standing there, I wouldn’t even recognize the place.”

  “Yes,” Denis said. “Downtown was pretty well destroyed. When people rebuilt, they didn’t slavishly re-create the former appearance of the place. Hence your sense of jamais vu.”

  “Sometimes when you talk, I want to punch your face,” the godlet said matter-of-factly. He crossed his arms and stared at the tower, spikes turning deep in his eye sockets. “I can’t believe they rebuilt after that quake,” he muttered. “Those bastards. They can’t take a hint.” He turned to Denis. “This time, it’s going to be different. Scorched earth, you get me? And this clock tower’s going to be the first thing to fall. I can’t knock it over on my own—not yet—so that means we need dynamite. Where can I get some?”

  Denis blinked. “Dynamite? Are you kidding?”

  The godlet stepped closer. “Cooperate, boy. You know what happens if you don’t.” He inclined his head fractionally toward Jane, who was fully occupied with thumping the bricks of the tower with her left hand.

  “I’m not resisting,” Denis said, holding up his hands. “But I don’t have even the vaguest idea of where to get dynamite. It’s not something I’ve ever had a use for.”

  For a moment, the godlet looked lost. There was nothing in his expression, of course—that was as blank and robotic as ever—but there was something about his posture, something in the tilt of his head, that indicated a profound confusion. The sight filled Denis with glee.

  Then the godlet sighed and said, “We’ll have to stick with the firebombs, then. Go make up a few Molotov cocktails, Denis, like I showed you.”

  The car was parked in one of the slanted spaces in front of the post office. Several small gas cans sat in the back, covered with a blanket, and there were glass juice bottles to be emptied and refilled with gasoline. Denis had purchased those things, along with the cleaning rags that Jane had deftly torn into long strips to act as fuses. “But . . . here?” Denis said. “There are people everywhere, witnesses—”

  “Don’t worry,” the godlet said. “We’ll get around to firebombing the people, but I want to knock some buildings over first, get things burning, bring this place down. Now go make the bombs, unless you want to find out what it feels like to have your head twisted off by your own girlfriend.”

  Denis trudged to his car and opened the door, hoping a cop would notice what he was doing and arrest him. Beej had told him that the godlet had “taken care of” the police before breaking Beej out of jail. Denis didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but it didn’t sound good. If there were dead police officers in the station house, their surviving fellows would be looking for the killer, and maybe, if he was lucky, they’d look here.

  But that wouldn’t really be so lucky, he realized, not for the cops or Denis. The godlet was about to start chucking firebombs at the buildings in downtown Santa Cruz. He wouldn’t be bothered by a few policemen. Denis, however, would very likely be killed in the crossfire.

  He stopped hoping a cop would notice what he was doing. Denis poured a bottle of orange juice onto the pavement and filled the bottle with gasoline, willing his hands not to shake, pouring the fluid into a bright yellow funnel. When the bottle was two-thirds filled with gas, he shoved a piece of white cloth into the mouth. One end of the cloth submerged in the gas, and the fluid began to climb up the fuse. Denis carefully set the bottle on the ground and filled another, then carried both back across the street to the clock tower, where the godlet was deep in conversation with Jane.

  “Ah, Denis,” the godlet said. “Jane was just making some suggestions to me about where to go when we’re finished here. I think we should take down the lighthouse, and then maybe wreck the boardwalk, but while we’re over here we should tear down that footbridge over the river, and the Del Mar theater, maybe burn all the stock in the bookstores. Oh, and at some point we have to brew up some napalm or something and get rid of the monarch butterfly sanctuary.” The godlet rubbed his hands together—honestly! The cliché!

  “It sounds like you have quite a day planned,” Denis said, carefully holding the Molotov cocktails by the necks. He wondered what would happen if he threw them at the godlet. Probably something very unpleasant, but he feared he would ultimately be the recipient of the unpleasantness, and so he refrained.

  “Oh, I do. By the end of the day, after wreaking that much havoc, I should
be able to do a few more spectacular things: spark wildfires by clapping my hands, cause tremors by stomping my boot, get a mudslide going by spitting on a hill.”

  “And then you won’t need me anymore, I suppose,” Denis said. “And you’ll kill me.”

  “She won’t hurt you,” Jane said, but she sounded preoccupied. She’d moved beyond thumping the brick support arches of the clock tower, and was now punching them, hard, repetitively. Denis found himself counting her punches, nine at a time, and then tried to stop paying attention.

  “That’s right, Denis. You keep Janey happy. She’s only going to get stronger. In fact, she’s about to test her limits right now, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes,” Jane said. “I’m going to tear this tower down with my bare hands.” And with that, she began slamming her fists into the monument’s base, arms moving so quickly that they blurred. Bits of brick and mortar flew where she struck, and with growing horror, Denis realized that she might be able to do what the godlet said.

  “We’d better move out of the shadow of the tower, boy,” the godlet said, and headed across the street toward the shops on Pacific, Denis reluctantly following. “Come on. There’s a nice store here, with a nice open door to let the breeze in. We’re going to light that bomb you’ve got, and you’re going to chuck it inside. Agreed?”

  “You want me to—”

  “Spare me,” the godlet said, and took a Zippo lighter from his vest and held it up for Denis to see. There was an insignia on the lighter, a shield with the words “To Protect and Serve.”

  “Got this off a cop,” the godlet said. “After I stomped his head through the floor.”

  “You can’t—” Denis began. He didn’t know where the sentence was going, and it didn’t get any farther than those two words, because the godlet flipped open the lighter and lit both Molotov cocktails in Denis’s hands. Denis was so startled that he nearly dropped them, which would have been an incredibly painful mistake.

  “Into a store, boy,” the godlet shouted. “Don’t throw them in the street, or I’ll fill your belly with gasoline, shove a rag up your ass, and make a bomb out of you.”