Pacific Fire

by Greg Van Eekhout

  “I don’t have a key to the safe, man, just what’s in the drawer, seriously, just take it.”

  Sam lifted the receiver. “I’m not going to rob … Oh, whatever. Yeah, give me what’s in the drawer.” Sam might need more cash on the road.

  While Chas scrambled to gather up the contents of the cash drawer, Sam dialed a number.

  From here, he could only see the top of Daniel’s head in the truck.

  “Do you want an envelope or a bag or what?” Chas said, showing Sam a meager stack of bills.

  “You got a rubber band?”

  Chas searched around a bucket of lollipops on the counter. “I got a paper clip. Is a paper clip okay?”

  “Sure, fine.”

  After seven rings, someone finally picked up the line.

  “I want to order a pizza,” Sam said before the person on the other end could speak.

  There was a long pause. Then, a woman’s voice: “What’s your address?”

  That was not a question Sam ever expected to answer over the phone, to a stranger.

  “I’m at a gas station about forty miles north of Thermal.”

  “Toppings?”

  That meant Are you being pursued?

  “Meatballs,” he said. “Sliced.”

  Yes. But current pursuers dead.

  “We can’t deliver,” the woman said. “It’ll have to be carry-out.”

  “Okay. Where’s your store?”

  “You know I can’t give you an address.”

  “We’ve ordered pizza from you before.”

  “No addresses over the phone. But if you can find us, there’s a twenty-five percent discount. Plus double anchovies and chicken.”

  Twenty-five percent. Double that, and it meant Sam would be looking for a place about fifty miles away. Anchovies meant look for a river. Around here, there was no such thing as flowing water, so he was probably looking for a dry gulch. And something to do with chicken.

  “This is urgent. Can you please just tell me where you are?”

  “Good-bye.” A click, and the phone went dead.

  Sam put down the receiver.

  “Oh, god,” Chas said. “You’re going to keep me as a hostage.”

  “What? No I’m not. Why do you think…?”

  “Because that’s what hostage-takers do. They make demands, and one of them is always a pizza.”

  Sam plucked the wad of cash from his hand. “You’re in luck, Chas. The pizza place doesn’t do deliveries.”

  * * *

  An hour of driving with Faith’s map as a guide brought Sam to a cracked-earth wash. Stacked boulders loomed over sparse scrub. He came to a granite slab with water-eroded hollows, forming the eye sockets and nasal cavity of a skull. Half a mile past that, he found a track cutting through fan palms and scrub oak. With only some darting roadrunners for company, he drove on until coming to a weathered rail fence, crowned in coiled razor wire.

  Three low buildings on the other side of the fence stretched in parallel lines the length of a city block. The chicken farm was no longer in operation, but the smell of chicken shit and slaughter clung to the earth. The odor wasn’t too strong, but thinking about its source made Sam uneasy. He didn’t eat meat, and especially not eggs. The sight of a golden, gelatinous yolk made him think of his own origins, a little nub of a person suspended in an electrified flask deep within one of the Hierarch’s workshops.

  “You take me to the best places,” said Sam.

  Daniel moaned softly and took a thin, wheezing breath.

  “Hang on a little longer, Daniel. Okay?”

  Daniel’s head wobbled.

  Tucked away from the chicken barns in a stand of piñyon pines was a sprawling log house. One of the trees had a tree house in the upper branches. A sniper’s nest. Someone was probably up there now, looking at Sam through crosshairs.

  Sam got out of the truck.

  A copper bell mottled with green patina was bolted to one of the gateposts. He jiggled the string hanging from it, making some rude-sounding clangs.

  A woman came down the path from the house and up to the gate.

  “Who are you?” she said from the other side of the fence.

  She was maybe in her early twenties. Sam took in her frank, gray eyes. Her long nose. The pale skin of her face and her prominent cheekbones.

  Sam recognized her. Or thought he did. Like him, she was a golem, in her case grown from the cells of the osteomancer who developed the art of golem-making, Emmaline Walker. How many Emmas were running around in the world, Sam didn’t know, but he and Daniel had stayed with Emmas in the past. They ran a sort of underground railroad with safe houses all across the kingdom, dedicated to helping as many other golems as they could.

  “I’m the guy who ordered the pizza. I’m Sam.”

  “And in the backseat?”

  “It’s Daniel.”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “You brought his body?”

  “He’s still alive. He needs help. Hydra and eocorn and someone who knows how to use them.”

  She did some business on the other side of the gate with bolts and latches and swung the fence open.

  “Drive up to the house,” she said.

  Sam parked in the shade of some trees. Four women came out with a litter and took Daniel inside. They differed in age, hair color and style, sun exposure, musculature, and clothing, but otherwise resembled each other. Feeling helpless, he followed them inside.

  Sam had never been in a nicer safe house. In fact, he’d never been in any kind of house this nice. The rugs gave a little squish when he walked on them. The log furniture was draped with blankets and throw pillows, and while the curtains were shut to prevent anyone on the outside from snooping or targeting, lamps cast a warm glow. This didn’t feel like a temporary place. It felt like a home.

  They took Daniel into a room and eased him onto a bed. A fifth Emma was already waiting there. This one had steel-gray hair and a keener face than the rest, softness hewn away by wear. She leaned over Daniel and pried open his eyelids to examine his pupils. She felt his pulse, smelled his breath.

  “We were attacked by some kind of osteomantics,” Sam said, handing her one of the bone-tipped spears.

  She smelled it and held it up to the light. Feeling Daniel’s forehead with ropy, calloused hands, she told one of the other Emmas—the young one who’d met him at the gate—to go fetch her red box.

  “I gave him some eocorn and hydra,” Sam said. “It seemed to help a little.”

  “You fed him raw, I suppose? From your own body?” The corner of her mouth rose in a half smile. Every Emma Sam had met wore some version of that smile. There was always something superior about it.

  “It’s all I had. It’s not like we go around carrying a pharmacy.”

  “You and Daniel can’t sneeze without spreading a cloud of osteomancy for miles. You especially, little Hierarch.”

  Sam ignored the taunt.

  “Can you help him?”

  The Emma’s expression grew kind, which scared Sam.

  The Emma she’d sent out returned with the box, and the old Emma dug out several tiny glass vials full of oils and powders. She arrayed them on a tray, and then, from the box, took a stainless-steel syringe the size of a road flare.

  “Let her work,” the younger Emma said, taking Sam by the arm.

  “No, I’ll stay with him.”

  “Do that and you risk being poisoned yourself,” the old Emma said. “This room’s sealed for fumes. You’ll wait outside.”

  The young Emma gently but insistently pulled Sam to the door. “She’ll do everything she can.”

  Reluctantly, Sam let himself be led away.

  FOUR

  The Venice Boardwalk was alive and festive on a warm Friday afternoon. Shoppers drifted in and out of the stalls, buying cheap sunglasses and gimmick T-shirts and bongs. Skateboarders slalomed around pedestrians. It was a day for getting henna tattoos on sun-browned legs and for dropping coins into
buskers’ guitar cases. Gabriel wished he could park himself at a café patio and order a fluffy iced drink and watch the sun set over the blue lifeguard towers. Instead, he and Max crossed the beach to a storm drain outlet exposed by the low tide.

  Gabriel showed his identification to a group of LAPD officers milling around a yellow tape barrier. The cops stood up a little straighter and lifted the tape for him and Max to duck under. There were no cops on the other side of the tape, only Gabriel’s Department of Water and Power people and a corpse.

  Gabriel went to the senior DWP officer, a woman named Tate, who’d worked for him for almost a decade. She wasn’t intimidated by him, but she was clearly perplexed that he was here.

  “Our chief is a poor delegator,” Max volunteered by way of explanation.

  “Any trouble from the police?” Gabriel asked Tate.

  “A little territorial pissing, but we straightened it out.”

  Homicide investigation wasn’t part of Gabriel’s portfolio, but this morning, a red light showed up on his mandala map, and a phone call revealed that lifeguards had found a corpse in the Venice Beach storm drain. Not in itself a completely unusual occurrence, but there were enough circumstances about this one that Gabriel decided to have a look, even if it put law enforcement’s noses out of joint. After the Hierarch’s fall, the LAPD reorganized themselves as an independent operation. Street-gang warfare and organized crime had declined, but only because the police supplanted them. And the cops weren’t reckless enough to declare war on the Department of Water and Power.

  Gabriel approached his workers, busy waving sand fleas away from the sheet-covered body. He knelt and peeled back the sheet himself.

  The powerfully built man lay on his back, blue eyes open, lips only slightly chewed by fish and bugs. His face was white, washed clean by the sea. A red, dime-sized hole in his forehead looked like a third eye. An execution shot.

  He took the man’s cold, white hand in his own and spread two of his fingers. A membrane of shark skin stretched between them.

  The man’s face wasn’t relevant to Gabriel’s interests, but he found himself lingering over it. He didn’t know this man, and few people did. He had no wife or known lover, no children, no living parents. His body would be incinerated and the ashes dumped in a landfill, ugly tasks that were merely small parts of an ugly business. He would never enjoy spending the very large sum of money Gabriel had paid him.

  He tucked the sheet back over him.

  “You know what to do?” he said to Tate.

  She nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “Thank you.”

  Max waited until they were halfway back across the broad beach before he spoke.

  “How bad is this?”

  So many ways to answer, but Gabriel chose to respond to the practical matters embedded in the question. “It’s not bad at all,” he said.

  “But now Otis knows you sent a spy.”

  “He already knew. This just confirmed it for him.”

  “You don’t seem worried, either that Otis is on to you, or that you lost an asset.”

  Gabriel didn’t answer. Max was his most loyal servant, and the closest thing he had to a friend, and sometimes Gabriel just wished he’d shut his face.

  Asset? He meant a person.

  “I guess he didn’t have a family,” Max said.

  “He did. A sister. She’s a sophomore at Loyola Marymount. Thinks her brother is a commercial diver. Scraping barnacles off boat hulls. That kind of thing.”

  “Should I have someone arrange a payment?”

  “No,” Gabriel said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  It was a little ridiculous that the LA’s chief hydromancer handle a clerical task, but Max knew better than to argue with Gabriel about it.

  Gabriel would type out the check himself. He’d put it in an envelope, and he would address it himself. He would lick the stamp.

  It would be a very large check. Because that would solve everything, wouldn’t it? It would make it okay that the girl lost her brother. It would assuage all of Gabriel’s guilt.

  And, yes, of course Otis would be suspicious of him. But he’d be even more suspicious if Gabriel hadn’t sent a spy to Catalina.

  And when Daniel Blackland got to Catalina Island, he’d need updated, current intel.

  Which was why Gabriel had sent two spies.

  FIVE

  “You’ll sleep here tonight.” The young Emma chaperoned Sam to a second-floor bedroom containing an oaken monstrosity with a mattress the size of a storm cloud and four towering posts that Sam imagined might be useful for hanging clothes or perhaps supporting a roof. There was a writing desk, a chair in the corner that served only to make sure the corner wasn’t too lonely, and a four-drawer dresser. Sam dropped his duffel on the bed next to Daniel’s.

  “Here’s your intel and money back,” the Emma said, handing him Gabriel’s diplomatic pouch. “Snuck a peek when you weren’t looking.”

  Sam checked the pouch. Everything seemed intact.

  “What name do you go by? Emma?” Most of the Emmas called themselves Emma, which Sam found hopelessly confusing.

  “We don’t need names among ourselves, but you can call me Em if that helps you.”

  “Em.”

  Strange how just giving her a semblance of a distinct name impelled him to look at her more closely, as an individual, not just as a variation on a theme. He may have overestimated her age before, fooled by something in her carriage. He revised her down to maybe a year or two older than him, eighteen or nineteen on the outside. Her hair was dyed blond, with typical-Emma chestnut at the roots. An effort to distinguish herself from the others? Or maybe something to do with one of their paramilitary operations. A very thin scar ran from her temple, along her sharp cheek, and down her neck.

  “When you’re ready, come down to the dining room and we’ll put some food in you,” she said.

  She left, and Sam stowed the pouch in his safe box, where he kept his papers for various identities. The box was lined with the vertebrae of a sint holo serpent, for the creature’s properties of visual confusion. Open it, and it would appear to be empty.

  After washing up, he took a circuitous route to the dining room. He counted the doors on the second floor, noted the locations of the covered windows.

  Footsteps thudded overhead. Attic space, probably.

  Downstairs, as he passed from room to room, Emmas gave him furtive glances. They knew he was the Hierarch’s golem.

  The Emmas were an industrious bunch, loading first-aid supplies into backpacks, examining maps spread over tables, cleaning rifles.

  “Looks like you guys are getting ready for war,” he said to an Emma replacing a radio’s batteries.

  “Just a little raid in Palm Springs. There’s a baron trafficking golems across the border.”

  “Routine stuff for you?”

  “Pretty much.”

  He found Em in the dining room, behind a massive, scarred oak table. The doctor was with her. Sam’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth when he asked about Daniel.

  “He’s still alive,” the doctor said.

  Not “He’s going to make it.” Just “He’s still alive.”

  She was a shade paler than her sisters and stooped, as if she’d endured years of hard labor. Knowing the fate of most golems, Sam wouldn’t have been surprised if she had.

  “I’ve never seen the kind of osteomancy that was used on him,” the doctor said. “It’s a toxin with elements of tsuchigumo. That’s a shape-shifting magic, and it’s been altered to make it even more complex. As soon as Daniel’s defenses key in on it, it changes shape and begins a new attack.” The doctor took a sip of tea. “Now, don’t lose hope. He was born strong and raised strong. He’s the man who ate half the Hierarch’s heart. He has a chance.”

  A chance of life meant also a chance of death. Sam felt all the blood in his arms and legs drain, a fear response to a world that didn’t have Daniel in it. He would gladly surren
der his own heart to avoid that.

  “Can I see him?”

  “Not for a few hours. I want to be certain he’s not venting poison before anyone else comes near him.”

  “Think you can eat?” Em asked.

  Eat when you can, Daniel always said.

  “Sure.”

  Bowls of chili were brought from the kitchen. The smells made him salivate, but he raked his fork through his bowl, cautious.

  “It’s vegetarian,” Em said. “No meat here, no eggs.”

  Sam took a spicy, succulent forkful and closed his eyes in bliss.

  They were joined by a couple more Emmas, one in her midthirties and obviously pregnant, and a slightly younger one with, of all things, an eye patch. Sam liked the eye patch, a considerate piece of equipment to help tell them apart. The doctor asked that the door be closed, and Sam understood this wasn’t lunch. This was a meeting. Maybe an interrogation.

  The questions bypassed the general and went straight for detail, in fine enough grain that it was clear Em had done a thorough reading from her little “peek” inside the diplomatic pouch.

  Sam told them everything he knew.

  The dragon was being built on Catalina Island, twenty-two miles off the coast of Los Angeles. Previously, the island had been used for ranching, smuggling, and tourism. And, for a time, it had been the Hierarch’s island fortress.

  The plan, as worked out by Gabriel Argent, called for a small team to take out the facility’s power transfer station to create confusion and shut down the pumps delivering osteomantic fluids to the dragon. The team would then travel through the large pipes to the dragon-assembly hangar, neutralize the guards, and destroy the dragon.

  “I imagine Daniel’s team would be Moth, Cassandra Morales, perhaps Josephine Alverado and the Bautistas,” the doctor said.

  “He didn’t mention any Bautistas,” Sam said.

  “They’re alfalfa farmers, not too far from here. They have a plane they can use for water landings. Mostly they’re smugglers working the Baja circuit, but they’ve done some work with us, too. Lovely couple.”

  Sam would have to take her word for it.

  “Where was Daniel going to acquire munitions?” she asked him.