“But what about this guy who multiplied?”
“Ah, now there was a tricky thing. It seemed to happen at odd times, not under the young man’s control. I saw it once, as we were closing in on him. It was as if he’d walked in front of a mirror … first, it was just him, and then just like that there were two of him. Then four. Well, three of them attacked us while the real him ran away. Again and again this happened! Eventually, I managed to create enough of a distraction that Eugene could chase down the fool and end his multiplication once and for all.”
“If Seth was here, he’d point out how cool that sounds.”
We reached the top of the incline, where the path snaked its way around an old fallen tree with a thick trunk that had been hollowed out by various microorganisms. It was big enough that I could fit myself inside, if need be. Useful thinking when there are monsters lurking about.
Chase sighed. “Briar, I miss Seth.”
The sadness in the boy’s voice walloped me, and I felt that familiar lurching in my stomach. “Me too, my boy. Me too.”
“What do you do? Like, when a hero dies … how do you cope with it? Is it tough, or do you just move on?”
“Eugene created me to be the hero’s helper,” I explained, “but he said nothing about how I might deal with the death of a hero. Especially not Eugene, whom I consider to be my first friend.” I sighed. The memories ran deep. More than a hundred years of them, piled up inside my head. “I have a place where I go. It’s not far from here, actually. If I run, I can get there within a day. It reminds me of the Briar Patch, which of course is my home in all the Br’er Rabbit tales.”
“So it’s a briar patch?”
“Er, no. You see, in all my years on this earth, I’ve never actually found my real home. I’m sure it must exist, because the briar patch is where Br’er Rabbit lives and so it is part of my story. But I haven’t found it. So I made my own little place tucked away in an old forgotten quarry. I keep … things. Little trinkets that remind me of heroes past. Photographs. Journals. Diaries. Keepsakes. Each new hero that dies … well, it hurts to a varying degree.”
“I can’t imagine.” Chase shook his head, grabbing the armrests of his chair as I led us down a short decline. Gravel and chunks of dirt crunched underneath his chair’s rubber tires. We were deeper inside the forest, the only natural sound coming from above: birds, singing to one another. Alice was still missing. “Do you throw things?” Chase asked. He grunted. “Alice seems to like throwing things.”
“Mostly I enjoy sitting in silence,” I confessed. It felt strange, admitting all of this. Rarely did such a topic spring up in conversations with heroes. Rarer yet did I have another human being to confide in. But talking about it felt quite nice. “I like to work it all through my mind once things have settled down. I have so much to do after the unspeakable happens. I must ensure the pen is safe, which can be tricky since I cannot touch it. I must keep a careful eye on whoever may be the next hero. When that’s all said and done, I often find that a few moments of reflection help. What could I have done better? I’ve asked myself that many, many times.”
“I doubt anyone would ever blame you. You’re a pretty selfless dude. Heroic, too. Sometimes.”
“Heh.” My whiskers twitched. “Indeed. But the sad truth of it is that it has gotten easier with each new hero. I fear sometimes that I’ve grown numb to it. With Juliette, the last hero, I missed her terribly for a few days. Then I set about keeping busy, setting up shop in an old abandoned factory in downtown Milwaukee where I could continue scouring the newspapers and mapping out potential Corrupted activities. You know … preparing for the next hero and all.”
We wheeled deeper into the forest. The pines were giving way to more maples, and more fallen trees that were lying on their sides, slowly rotting away. The birds had stopped singing.
“But with Seth it was different.” My long ears fell back as I spoke. “He was a friend. Not a hero in the most technical sense, but—yes!—a hero on some level. And I mourned him.”
“That’s why you were gone for a week.”
“I admit, it was not easy. But I’ll have you know that in my warren in the abandoned factory, sitting at my little round table next to my little lamp, is Seth’s Risk board. His armies are frozen in time, valiantly defending Europe.”
Chase snickered. “He always loved taking over Europe.”
“And then you would attack him from Africa and I would attack him from Asia,” I finished, allowing a very rabbitly smile.
Suddenly, there came an inhuman scream from somewhere deeper inside the forest. Then a thump. Then another thump. I felt my tail fur puff up in alarm.
“It’s Alice!” Chase said. “Briar—!”
“Right-o!” I dug my toes into the gravel, pushing Chase up the next hill. “Hold on, my boy!” I shouted, weaving him around another fallen pine tree that was partially blocking the path. Alice was still nowhere to be seen, but even over the sound of Chase’s wheels we could hear more thumps.
Thump! Thump … tha-thump!
“Clearly something is afoot,” I murmured, turning Chase left and squeezing the handles as best I could—my paws have limits, of course—while we cruised down a small decline.
“Faster, Briar!” Chase shouted. “Something’s wrong, I can feel it.”
I sucked in a deep breath and pushed as hard as I could, wheeling Chase up the next steep incline. There were more dead trees here. Dead pines, mostly, with lots of rotted branches, their brown needles littering the forest floor and choking any grass that was attempting to grow. I was getting a bad feeling about the whole thing. Whatever had been living here had not been a fan of wildlife.
More thumps. Chase’s pink fingers tensed, like he was ready to jump right out of the chair.
“Easy,” I told him, weaving around another fallen tree. “There! Up ahead! What is it?”
It was difficult to tell … something in the middle of the path far ahead, near a cluster of dead pine trees that had begun leaning, forming a sharp arch over the path … the figure was clutching a weapon of some kind … covered in green goo … walking toward us. No doubt some kind of terrible monster with a hunger for human flesh …
“Alice!” Chase exclaimed.
My ears stood straight up. “Alice?”
We wheeled closer. It was indeed Alice. Alice, clutching an axe. Alice, covered nearly head to toe in green goo that dripped from the tips of her fingers and matted her hair to her head. She looked, quite frankly, like some kind of monster in one of those horror movies Seth had been so fond of.
I pulled Chase up in front of her. She’d been staring ahead, the whites of her eyes pretty much the only part of her body that hadn’t been splashed in the green goo.
“What happened?” Chase asked frantically. “You … are you bleeding? Or is that slime or what the heck?”
She turned to look at him. My fur stood on end. I had this horrible feeling, as if she might raise the axe and end both of us right there. Instead, she held up one arm, staring at the goo coating her slightly tanned skin.
“The Corrupted … it bled a lot.”
My stomach lurched again. “Ooooh, I think I might be sick.”
“What was it? Is it dead?” Chase asked.
Alice took a deep breath. “It was a Corrupted feeding off the trees. It’s dead.”
“But … this goo …” I waved a paw at a thick glob of the stuff that was currently running down her right leg, coating her sweatpants.
“I didn’t use the sharp end right away.” She let go of the terrifying goo-coated axe; it landed on the path with a metallic thunk. We all stared at it a moment. Then, before either of us could stop him, Chase reached down, grabbing it. “Be careful!” Alice cried out, reaching. The green slime dripped like … like … like thick snot (pardon my vulgarity).
Chase held the axe a moment, holding it up as if to display it to Alice. Then he shifted in his chair and threw it into the forest.
Chapt
er 6: Alice
It was as if my nightmares had been waiting for me to snap out of it. For so many long months, all I dreamt about was the little golden boy. The little golden boy begging for money. The little golden boy carving statues and then breaking them apart. The little golden boy sneaking into some dark place he shouldn’t be, cupping his hands under a drizzle of dark goo and taking a long drink.
Now, a few weeks into the summer, my nightmare took me somewhere new and unfamiliar. Outside. The air was cool and the stars above looked brighter than I’d ever seen them.
I wasn’t near a city. No bright lights to wash away the night sky.
But there were lights. Hundreds of little orange lights on the horizon. I moved closer—not by choice. My ethereal form was in full-on autopilot. The lights got bigger, swaying side to side. They weren’t lights at all.
They were flames.
I flew closer, feeling the wind on my bare cheeks. It cut through my pajamas, making the fabric flap silently against my legs. I was soaring a good twenty feet over the ground, moving quicker now so that the cool air seemed to flow through my ghost-like body, chilling me right to the bone. But then I was over the first of the flames, and I could feel the heat rising up. I could smell a tangy bitterness in the air.
There were tall, dark shapes near the flames. Black towers, each one shaped kind of like a smaller, thinner version of the Eiffel Tower.
Oil derricks.
Near each one was a sickle-shaped pumpjack that moved up and down, a beating heart that pumped oil out of the ground. I recognized it easily enough—gas prices had been climbing all year, and so there was always video of oilfields playing on the nightly news that my dad and Chase watched together. Whenever I saw one of those things on the news as a child, I’d always thought it looked like a giant horse bobbing its head to take a drink of water. Now it reminded me of Death’s scythe, trying to stab the earth.
There were hundreds of pumpjacks dotting the flat, arid landscape, each one nodding up and down. Some of them moved in concert with each other. Others were off-beat, dancing to their own slippery song. The flames sprung from tall, narrow pipes near the pumpjacks, illuminating the area and the men in overalls who moved from derrick to derrick.
I flew over the last of the flames. The orange light diminished, leaving only the half-moon’s light to illuminate the landscape.
More black towers. More pumpjacks, their scythe-shaped heads still. No flames. This area was dead. Used up. No more oil under the earth here, please move on to the next spot. Now the rusted black towers of steel were nothing more than gravestones.
I moved closer to the ground, landing in front of one of the towers. It stood four stories tall, twice the height of my house. Part of its structure had rusted and broken, leaving the top half bent at an angle so the tower looked like a crooked finger. The area at the base of the tower was dark, but it was clear I was being pushed toward the old metal door at its base. Instinctively, I closed my eyes as I passed through the solid object into a pitch-black room that smelled like rusted metal and raw oil.
Before my eyes could adjust, I felt myself moving down. I reached out, willing my hand to touch something, anything. My fingers grazed something cold and smooth. I grabbed for it—a railing! I was in a staircase, unable to will my body to stop. The unseen force that guided the hero’s nightmare was in full control; it had a purpose.
And that purpose was at the bottom of the staircase. When I reached it, I felt my bare feet land on the cold concrete floor. I cursed myself for not wearing socks to bed, then fumbled blindly in the darkness. My fingers touched rusted steel, searching for a handle of some kind. I found it, pulling hard.
The whiff of sickly sweet air nearly knocked me backward. My eyes adjusted to the flickering candle flames inside the next room that seemed to be dancing in the darkness. For a moment, I felt as if I was back in the Malevolence’s lair, and all the terrible feelings came with it. I had to steel my nerves, forcing my legs to step through the doorway and into the room.
Not candles. They were rusted steel pipes jutting up four feet from the ground, and at the top of each one was fist-sized flame. Gas. Natural gas from deep inside the earth, rising up through each of the pipes and burned off to illuminate the large, mostly empty room. The pipes protruded from the floor about fifteen feet apart from each other. One row ran along the wall to my right. Another row ran along the wall to my left.
All along the walls were shelves. On each of the shelves were … body parts. But not human body parts … only human-looking, made of stone and metal. Some parts were rusted, made of pieces of metal that had been hammered and molded together haphazardly.
Legs with big screws at the knees. Arms with rusted bolts at the elbow joints. A stone hand clenched into a fist. A marble hand with fingers spread wide. A hand with one finger pointing.
I moved farther down the room. The shelves of arms and legs and hands gave way to heads. Heads sculpted out of stone, formed with pieces of metal or sometimes a combination of the two. Some looked like Greek sculptures, each face with its own expression. Anger. Fear. Happiness. Other heads were more hastily carved, offering only vaguely passive expressions, as if whoever had carved the stone had simply wanted it to resemble a human face and lacked the ability to create intricate details. Others yet were definitely not human. One looked like a deer head, with white antlers fastened in place with bent and twisted nails. Another looked like the face of a Transformer, right down to the /-shaped plate over its mouth and nose.
There were rows and rows of them, all staring at me.
The tinny sound of metal-on-metal echoed in the room. I turned my attention to the far end. A figure stood between the last of the burning gas pipes, still as a statue, a good two heads taller than me. I walked closer, ready to will myself back into ghost form at the first sign of trouble. But the figure didn’t move, didn’t acknowledge me at all. It was clutching a black hose that disappeared into the floor. Black liquid dribbled out, gathering at the statue’s feet.
I moved closer.
The statue’s head looked chiseled from stone, with a distinctly bored-looking expression, its mouth open just a bit. It was a half-human, half-cat face, with cat’s ears and a human nose and big, cat-like eyes, the kind of thing you might see on an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph. The statue’s torso was box-shaped, made of a rusted metal that had been soldered together. So were the arms—a thin metallic rod ran from the forearm to the bicep so that each arm was bent at a 45-degree angle. The legs looked newer: melted steel molded like legs, the joints held in place by finger-sized screws.
I stood there, taking it in. Wondering.
And then the head turned, looking right at me.
Chapter 7: Briar
The look on Alice’s face that morning said it all.
“Corrupted?”
“Corrupted,” she said, exhaling and tossing aside her purple blanket. She went to the desk, opening the drawer and pulling out the curious little Juniper seed. The moment she did so, my keen rabbit ears picked up faint music.
“That dang song gets stuck in your head if you listen too long,” I pointed out.
Alice ran a finger across the surface of the seed. “I forgot about the music … I kind of like it.”
“A bit too folksy for me. No, I think it’s been clearly established by this point that Foghat created the best music of all time.” The hero cracked a smile. My ears perked up. “Now there we go. What better way to start our day than with a smile?”
She groaned, shuffling to the closet. I took the opportunity to check my email, tapping my paws softly on the keyboard so as not to arouse suspicion.
“What are you doing?” she asked over my shoulder.
“Oh! I … er …” I gave up, rolling the chair aside so she could see the screen. “I bought you a case of mangoes. I was checking on its shipment status.”
A half-laugh, half more than she’d done in quite some time. “What for?”
“You mention
ed once that you used to enjoy eating mangoes, but you could never find the really sweet ones at the supermarket. I found the sweet ones.”
“Briar, I told you that, like a year ago! And how did you buy them?”
“Credit card.”
“How … what …” The poor confused girl rubbed her temples. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a blue t-shirt, which meant we would not be doing any cardio-related hero activities today—Alice did not like to run around in jeans and would not take my suggestion to purchase a fine pair of trousers. “Briar, you don’t have any money.”
“Says you!” I hopped off the chair and smoothed out my vest. “I’ve become more technology savvy, if you haven’t noticed.”
She sighed. “Thank you, Briar. It’s a nice gesture. Gawd! What is wrong with me? I should be thankful that you’re even still hanging around me at this point.”
“I have to … That is to say, I still would even if I didn’t have to.”
She looked down at the scratchy carpeting. “Thanks. For everything.”
“I’ll call us even if we can find the source of that delicious breakfasty smell.”
We went downstairs and immediately solved the mystery: Chase was sitting at the coffee table with a stack of some of the most glorious-looking pancakes I’d ever seen. I swear, they were head-sized, so big that one corner of the stack was literally hanging over the plate.
“I do say …” I cleared my throat, controlling the urge to snarf them all down. “I haven’t seen such delectable looking pancakes in a long, long time.”
“Chase! How did you make these?” Alice asked, staring down at the stack. Chase had also been kind enough to provide two extra plates, syrup, and three cups of orange juice.
“It wasn’t easy,” he said. “But I got up early.”
“Hmmmm … that would make sense,” I murmured, taking one quick look into the kitchen. Yes, he’d managed to whip up the pancakes … and positively made a mess of things in the process. “Save me a few,” I said. “I’ll tidy up a bit.”
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