Bride of Death (Marla Mason)

by T. A. Pratt

  I unhooked the trailer from the truck, then climbed into the cab. I put Nicolette down on the passenger seat, and after I took her cover off she looked around and whistled. “Do you know how to drive this thing?”

  “I know how to do everything worth doing,” I said.

  She snorted. “Sure you do. What are you going to do about the kids?”

  I took out the pad of stationery I’d liberated from the motel room, then turned on my cell and dialed the number on the letterhead. When the bored-sounding clerk answered, I said, “Hey, this is the lady in room 6. I came back from dinner and found six little kids in my room. What the hell?”

  The clerk squawked in disbelief and surprise and annoyance but I cut him off. “Look, I don’t care, that shit was too weird. Consider this me checking out.” I hung up, and just to be safe, I dialed 911 – confident my cell couldn’t be tracked or called back, since it was magicked up one side and down the other – and told them I’d seen a guy in a mini-van dump a bunch of little kids in the motel parking lot and then drive away. I disconnected before the follow-up questions got too personal. Between the two calls I was confident somebody would look into things and get the kids back to their parents.

  “You’re not going to deliver them personally?” Nicolette said as I started up the truck and eased out of the lot, trying to get the feel for the sticky clutch and loose gearshift. “You’d be a terrible mother.”

  “No argument there.”

  “So where are we going now?” Nicolette said.

  “To park this truck someplace where it won’t be noticed for a little while. I can do some divination magic, figure out where it’s been, maybe track the Eater that way –”

  “Of you could come screaming into the present century,” Nicolette said, “and just check the fucking GPS.”

  I noticed the LCD screen on the dash. “Oh. So I could just look at his travel history and see where he’s been, and maybe where he’s going, if it’s a place he’s been before. This ‘farm,’ the kids mentioned, or the house of the Eater.” I shook my head. “Kids. He was stealing kids. Shit.”

  “The great savior on a children’s crusade,” Nicolette said. “Let’s say you save, oh, twenty kids. Make it thirty. Will that make you feel better? Wash away some of the guilt for all the people you’ve killed and screwed over?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You think I’m stupid, don’t you? I know you’re on some kind of quest for redemption, or atonement, or whatever.”

  “Like I’ve got anything to feel sorry for. I enjoy beating things up, that’s all, and if I beat up monsters, I make the world a better place in the process, so why not?”

  “Now who’s spouting bullshit?” Nicolette chuckled nastily. “There are two dozen ways you could track down monsters to kill, Marla. You’re not the most talented sorcerer in the world, but even you can do the kind of divinations that would lead you to disturbances in the Force or what-the-fuck-ever. You’ve got rich and powerful contacts, gifted sorcerers who could line up worthy victims to keep you busy for decades. Instead, you wander around like a vagrant, with the head of your worst enemy in a cage, choosing to travel with somebody who hates your guts. And you want me to believe you aren’t punishing yourself? Of course you are. Don’t get me wrong – I’m glad. You deserve to be punished. I’m no angel, but you’ve fucked things up for people on a scale I could never match. But don’t pretend I’m the only one in a cage here. You’re bad, at least as bad as I ever was, but you don’t have the guts to live with yourself, to embrace it, so you do all this bullcrap to convinced yourself you’re good –”

  I braked as hard as I dared – with no trailer hitched up, there was no risk of jackknifing, and the street was pretty empty here. The truck lurched, jerking me forward hard, banging my chest painfully against the oversized steering wheel. Nicolette’s cage flew forward, hit the dash hard enough to dent the bars, and then fell into the footwell on the passenger side, bouncing her head around a lot in the process – painfully, I hoped.

  Nicolette started cursing like she does, and I turned up the radio loud enough to drown her out, and felt a lot better. For a little while.

  A mile later I took the GPS unit off the dash – it was one of those portable ones, not built-in, so I didn’t have to break anything – and left the truck parked not far from where I’d stashed my motorcycle.

  I couldn’t do anything about the Eater right then, though. I needed sleep – I’d spent the past day driving, which was exhausting enough, and my recent exertions hadn’t exactly re-energized me. I needed sleep, but the motel I’d paid for was obviously no good anymore. I wasn’t too far from Lubbock, so I got Nicolette strapped in, dragged myself onto the bike, and set off along the hated freeway, rumbling along in the full dark.

  I prefer to stay in that vanishing breed, grungy little roadside non-chain motels – the clerks tend to value your privacy there – but I was sufficiently tired that I pulled into the first gleaming chain motel I reached on the outskirts of Lubbock. The clerk really wanted a credit card, but I bullied him into accepting a cash deposit with a sob story about how I’d had all my cards stolen. I snuck Nicolette into the room – no pets allowed, natch – and stuck her in a closet, then collapsed on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

  I couldn’t sleep, tired as I was. I was on the hunt, now, I had the scent, so I picked up the GPS and tried to make sense of its history, which went back months. A lot of destinations had been punched in, but one got returned to several times, a tiny town in New Mexico called Moros. (Not to be confused with El Moro or Mora County, both also located in New Mexico – a stunning lack of originality on the part of place-namers there.) Moros was practically next door – I’d damn near driven past it on my way to Texas in the first place. I could check it out the next day, and see if there was anything worth murdering there.

  I still couldn’t sleep. Too keyed-up. So I started writing again instead, filling more pages in the notebook that Pelham was kind enough to leave for me.

  And, uh, here we are. This is getting crazy long. Luckily, I’m done – that brings us up to date, dear me. I’ll write more after I’m done wiping the Eater, whoever he is, off my boots.

  DEADER THAN EVER

  Reader, he killed me.

  I took the fight to the Eater, but I did not know what the fuck I was getting into. Fortunately, he didn’t know how to deal with me properly, either, or I’d be down at the bottom of a well in captivity instead of writing this from the comfort of Pelham’s RV.

  So let me back up and tell you how I got into this situation:

  I got a call from Squat shortly after I finished the last chunk of this real-time memoir. He’d settled whatever he had to settle – somehow I doubt he had to sublet an apartment or cancel a newspaper subscription, but we’ve all got our shit to deal with – and was ready to come roaring across the state to see me. I told him to meet me outside Moros instead, and we’d formulate a plan of attack.

  That was a lie, pretty much. My plans can usually be summed up in a single word: attack. I’m good at improvising, and plans always fall apart anyway – witness the debacle in Tolerance – so why waste a lot of time formulating an approach that’s going to be rendered irrelevant by circumstances anyway? Sure, rampaging into a town and trying to find a hornet’s nest to knock down was arguably foolhardy... but I was immortal, and so apparently was my new assistant Squat. I could make the earth move and call up hellfire with a wave of my hand (as long as I didn’t think about it too hard). I was armed with a dagger that could cut through ghosts and an axe made of a shard of moonlight (probably). I had a bag full of nasty enchantments I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to employ. How could I lose? I was the Terminator. I was Freddie Krueger from Nightmare on Elm Street.

  I was an idiot.

  •

  Moros, New Mexico was a little piece of nowhere, and it was surprisingly hard to find. In the course of my frustrating travel across the state I saw signs for plac
es with names like Angel Fire and Elephant Butte and Bottomless Lakes and Wink and Texico, but no Moros. Eventually I got closer to my destination, in a part of the state that was more woods and mountains than rocks and sand, but despite trying to follow the directions on the GPS, I kept getting turned around. Roads would curve in great slow loops, sending me back where I started, the dot on the map on my phone drifting around aimlessly instead of moving consistently toward my destination. “Shit, Nicolette,” I said. “There’s some kind of topological crumpling going on here, or a spatial distortion field. But it can’t be absolute, obviously the truck driver was meant to make his way through with his cargo – maybe there’s a magical beacon on the truck, some fetish-bag stuck under the hood that lets it penetrate the border. Think you can see your way through to the center?” I was stuck in a repeating pattern of asphalt and curves, and chaos witches have a knack for tearing patterns apart.

  “Oh, fine. Let your conscience be your guide,” Nicolette said. “In this scenario I’m your conscience. And, by the way, speaking as your conscience, I’d just like to say, you’re a terrible person.”

  “If you guide me off a cliff or into a tree and send me to my doom, you’ll be stuck in a cage in the middle of nowhere,” I said.

  “And yet, it’s still so tempting. Okay, turn left up here, in about a hundred yards.”

  “Turn left onto what?” The road was a straight shot, lined by pines, with a soft shoulder on either side.

  “I’m stuck under a drop cloth back here, so I’m not distracted by what you see with your lying eyes,” she said. “I see what’s really here, and there’s a path through the trees.”

  I slowed the bike to a crawl, then a stop, parking it on the shoulder near this supposed left turn. I walked into the trees, frowning – and then I was through the illusion, standing on a well-maintained blacktop road that branched off the path I’d been following around and around. I walked back out again, and the illusion didn’t recur – once I’d gotten past it once, I was immune, apparently. I gave Nicolette a grudging “Good job,” then called up Squat.

  He answered after a few rings, the sound of his idling engine almost drowning out his words. “Where are you?” I said.

  “Driving in fucking circles!” he said. “I’m parked on the shoulder now, and I swear I’ve been past this same spot four or five times already. I recognize this beer bottle in the ditch.”

  “It’s good to have old friends,” I said. “Keep riding, you’re sure to run into me eventually. I think I’ve been circling the same loop, but I found a way in.”

  “Will do.” He hung up, and I busied myself checking my supplies, casting occasional glances down the newly-revealed blacktop track – it ran straight as a rich man’s teeth for a quarter mile or so and then dipped over the horizon and dissolved into the blur of distant trees. After ten minutes I heard the big aggressive growl of Squat’s engine. His bike had been nice once, but it hadn’t been well maintained, and when I’d asked him about it, he’d shrugged and said he won it off a guy in an arm-wrestling contest and didn’t know shit about motorcycles, really. I had the distinct impression that if it ever stopped running he’d leave it where it fell and acquire other wheels by a similar method. I wondered if the guy he’d arm wrestled still had his arm attached.

  Squat saw me and pulled over, and I walked him through the illusion, too, holding his hand, even though touching him was repulsive in some deep way I couldn’t articulate. He grunted when he saw the road. “One way in, and hard to find. Even so, if I was a hypothetical bad guy, and this was my home base, I’d have somebody watching this road, just in case.”

  “Good thing we’re indestructible,” I said.

  “You know how some tombstones say ‘Too beautiful to live?’ Mine would say ‘Too ugly to die.’ Except I guess I’d never get one, on account of not dying.”

  “You could write it on a welcome mat or something. Maybe one of those samplers people sew and hang on the wall.”

  “I am full of inspirational teachings. So what’s the plan?”

  “Drive into town,” I said. “Look around. See if Nicolette’s chaos-sense can lead us to the guy we’re looking for. I doubt we’ll find a sign that says ‘Here Lies the Eater,’ but you never know.”

  “What are you planning to do when you find him? Or it?”

  I shrugged. “The guy stole a bunch of kids, and from what you’ve told me about Sarlat’s dealings with the Eater, he’s stolen other people, too. I doubt he’s rounding them up for an ice cream social. ‘Evil’ is a slippery word. People have called me that, for some pretty defensible reasons. But for me, the definition of evil is simple: it’s treating people like objects, and working against life. I’ve got every reason to believe the Eater’s doing that. I could try to threaten, or bargain, or whatever, but... probably I’ll just kill him.”

  “Simple and direct, I like it,” Squat said. “Mount up?”

  “Mount up.”

  •

  So then we rode into utopia.

  Moros was nestled in a valley surrounded by hills and trees. It was a picture-postcard kind of small town, the kind that doesn’t exist anymore, and maybe never did, outside of the movies. I’m talking picket fences, lush green lawns – yeah, in New Mexico – perfectly maintained streets, every building freshly painted and pristine. The weather was gorgeous, and people were out enjoying it, riding bicycles, trimming hedges, mowing the grass. The place was so familiar-looking, from a thousand TV shows and paintings, that your eyes kind of slid across it without friction, but there were a couple of jarring notes. We passed a church, but it didn’t have a cross on the steeple, and instead it bore a strange sigil – a single vertical line that split into a Y-branch at the top, and then each branch split again, and each of those branches split yet again, so it looked like a child’s drawing of a tree or a diagram of a neuron.

  There was also the way everyone looked at us, from every front porch and sidewalk, through the windows of the diner and the hardware store – children, adults, old people, teenagers, they all turned their heads in unison to silently follow our progress.

  “Nicolette,” I said, as we rode slowly through the streets, obeying the posted twenty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit. “What’re you getting?”

  “You’re heading in the right direction,” she said. “There’s something up ahead, like a tumor growing on reality.”

  “You’re not getting... I don’t know, a weird vibe about the whole town?”

  “I don’t get even a whiff of chaos here,” she said. “In fact, it’s weird how little disorder I’m sensing. It’s almost like nobody lives here at all. It might as well be a town in a model train set.”

  I paused at a stoplight – the only one we’d seen so far, at a four-corner intersection with a gas station, a grocery store, a gym, and a bank, though the latter was closed, the windows boarded up. I noticed there were no prices on the sign at the gas station, either. Definitely weird. People came out of the gym and store and garage, sauntering with no great haste in our general direction.

  “This is some Stepford wives shit,” Squat said, drawing up beside me. “Also Stepford husbands, sons, daughters, neighbors, mailmen –”

  “No mailmen,” I said. “Or so I assume. Because there are no mailboxes. Didn’t you notice? Not in front of a single house, and this is the kind of town that should have lots of mailboxes, novelty ones shaped like covered bridges and St. Bernards and shit. No mailboxes, the bank is closed, no prices on the gas station sign, a weird church...”

  “I am missing a lot being under this stupid cloth,” Nicolette said.

  “That stop light isn’t changing,” Squat said. “It’s just sitting there, red.”

  “I noticed that, too,” I said. “Let’s be scofflaws before the welcoming committee reaches us.”

  We drove off – it’s not like there was any other traffic, though there were plenty of gorgeously gleaming cars in the driveways – and the crowd converging on us all seemed to
lose interest and wandered back toward the buildings they’d emerged from.

  Okay. What the fuck. This was more like a model of a town than a real town, like Nicolette said – not a place where real people, with their families and dreams and jobs and adulteries and stupid hobbies, would live, but a place that would pass for a town at first glance, but not much beyond that. A dollhouse sort of place. So were the citizens of Moros the dolls? If so, what was the nature of their particular damage? Hive mind? Kidnapped slaves under mind control? Androids? Just cultists worshipping the Eater the way my own handmaidens (and, I guess, footmen?) of Death tried to worship me? There were various explanations, all terrible. If these were real people in some kind of thrall, then maybe killing the Eater would free them. It was a a theory worth testing, anyway.

  “Up ahead,” Nicolette said. “There’s something like... a spiderweb made of tumors, it feels like, but there’s this M.C. Escher vibe, impossible shapes, angles that don’t make sense, strands that appear from nowhere and go nowhere...”

  We were approaching a beautifully landscape central park with a bandstand, surrounded by civic buildings. The city hall was done in neo-Classical style, columns and marble, and it was way too big for a town this size. I had a suspicion that was our ultimate destination. Maybe the Eater was mayor of this place, or god king, or whatever. Beyond the city hall there was a hospital, much more modest in size, and seemingly appropriate for a community of a couple thousand, tops. The hospital didn’t interest me much, then. It would later.

  But in order to reach the city hall, we had to ride past an elementary school. I assume it was an elementary school, anyway, because of all the children. There were at least a hundred of them, ranging in age from five to ten years old (as I mentioned, I’m crap at judging stuff like that), standing in front of the school in neat ranks, seemingly ordered by size. They were all dressed in the same school uniform, white shirt and blue pants or skirt, and they were holding... well, all sorts of things. Yardsticks. Hockey sticks. Flutes. Wooden spoons. Brooms. Rakes. Hammers. Clarinets. Some of them had rope, and some had what looked like fishing nets, and one kid, who seemed big for his age and uncomfortable in his body and uniform both, was just holding a large damn jagged rock.