by S. R. Witt
A yellow sign on the side of the road flashed bright lights, warning drivers that traffic came both directions over the bridge ahead of them. The road narrowed a moment later, shrinking to a single lane that climbed up to the top of a steep, tree-lined hill. Chase wondered how many accidents there’d been out here, how many drivers had slammed head-on into one another at the hill’s crown, oblivious of their impending doom.
A moment later, the van crested the hill it had been climbing and Chase took in the foreboding vista. The road wound down the other side of the hill like a snake with a broken back. A bridge crouched at the bottom of the hill, allowing a single lane of traffic to cross the ravine it spanned. Trees crowded on either side of the covered bridge’s wooden mouth, making it look more like a cavern plunging into the side of a mountain rather than a man-made structure.
Lights flashed behind them, and Chase cursed under her breath. There was nowhere to pull over, and stopping at the bottom of the hill seemed like a good way to get killed. Drivers emerging from the gloom of the covered bridge might not see them in time. “Stop now,” she warned Paxton. “Give yourself some space in front of the bridge, just in case.”
Her brother nodded and pulled on the hand-controlled brake, bringing the Dodge Caravan to a grudging halt. He set the emergency brake, killed the engine, and kept his hands on the wheel where the officer could see them.
Paxton rolled the window down slowly when he saw the officer approaching the van’s side mirror, using only his left hand to turn the manual crank in slow counterclockwise motions. He and Chase had both been taught that it was far better to be safe than sorry when dealing with police. Especially out in the middle of nowhere with no witnesses and no one who could say you’d ever even been in that neck of the woods. When the window was halfway down, Paxton turned to the police officer and offered a smile. “What can I do for you today, officer?”
Chase couldn’t see the officer’s eyes behind the reflective lenses of his oversized mirror shades, but she didn’t need to look into them to recognize the kind of man she was dealing with. Wrinkles at the corners of his eyes tightened, and his lower lip drew into a thin flat line as every trace of good humor evaporated from the officer’s face.
The man eyeballed them, long and hard, sucking up every detail of their faces and clothing as he silently judged them as strangers to his little piece of the USA. Outsiders.
Prey.
Chase kept her hand on her hip, using her palm to conceal the small top portion of the knife sticking out of her front pocket. She mentally measured the distance between the officer and her seat, calculating the odds of lunging past Paxton and dragging her serrated blade across the sheriff’s throat before he could get his gun drawn.
In the back of her thoughts, Chase’s mother’s voice admonished her against giving in to the violent instincts that had haunted her life.
That isn’t what we do, Chase, Eva Harrow whispered from the deep closet of memories she’d left wedged open in her daughter’s head. That isn’t who we are. Defend if you must, but only attack when there is no other choice.
Unless he messes with Paxton, Chase thought.
Her brother was the last good thing left in Chase’s life. Though he was a few years older than her, his condition made him dependent on his sister in so many ways. Chase had always protected Paxton, and she always would.
No matter what.
The officer broke his silence at last, his voice rough and gravelly as the road they’d been driving down. “You know why I stopped you, son?”
The sheriff put a heaping dollop of derision on top of that last word as if to say he knew they were not kin and never could be.
Paxton kept his voice calm and level. He hadn’t inherited the rage from their father, and Chase was eternally grateful for that small blessing. It was hard enough for her to deal with, if Paxton had it, too, they’d be a pair of wrecking balls looking for something to crush between them.
“I’m sorry, officer,” Paxton said, trying on a conciliatory tone. “I didn’t think I was speeding. The limit is 35 through here, isn’t it?”
The officer whipped his sunglasses off his face so fast Chase was sure she heard the wind crack around their wire stems. The sheriff’s narrow eyes focused on Paxton first, then tightened as they zoomed in on Chase. “Let me guess. Just married? City folk on your honeymoon in the boonies?”
Chase offered the sheriff a demure smile while her fingers fondled the knife through her jeans. The officer was closer now; he’d stepped into striking range when he’d lost his temper. She was sure she could draw the Citizen, lunge across the van and carve the smug asshole’s Adam’s apple out of his throat with a quick twist of her wrist. The shitheel would be dead before his fat-soaked brain even knew what was happening.
Chase wanted to do it. But she knew better.
Through her smile, Chase forced a pleasant tone into her words and hoped the man wouldn’t see the hate burning in her eyes. “I’m his sister, sir.”
That drew a nasty laugh from the officer. “If you had Arkansas plates I’d say that wouldn’t make any difference, but seeing as you’re from Texas, I guess that’d be rude of me.”
The sheriff leaned back from the door a little bit, letting Chase see his hand resting on the handle of his revolver. “You look a little young to be traipsing around the countryside in October. Shouldn’t the pair of you be in school somewhere?”
Paxton’s voice didn’t crack, but it certainly creaked as he choked out the rote response he and Chase had agreed on. “We’re taking a semester off from college. Family time. You know how it is.”
The sheriff said nothing as he slipped his sunglasses back over his eyes. “Well, let me just say that I clocked you doing fifty-five on the way into my county, which is twenty over what you damned well knew was the speed limit. I could write you a ticket, but seeing as it’s a Friday afternoon and the judge is spending every minute he can on his boat down at the lake, there won’t be anybody to hear your big city sob story about how confusing our rough li’l roads are. That means I’d need to lock you up. At least for the weekend. Maybe until Tuesday if the judge doesn’t come back from his trip.”
The fat fucker eyeballed them from behind the safety of his sunglasses, a shit-eating grin splitting his face in half like the crack in a dead man’s ass.
He’s shaking us down, Chase realized. Her temper boiled up from the hot spring in the middle of her chest and threatened to goad her into action. They didn’t have much money, and if this asshole took what they did have, they might have to head home before they could search for their parents. If he disrupted their search and rescue mission—
Paxton cut their altercation short before his sister could get involved. “Sure, we could just make an all-in-one stop, right? You tell me how much the ticket is, and I’ll pay it. Then you won’t have to go to all the trouble of getting us booked in your jail, and we can be out of your hair that much sooner.”
“Maybe so,” the sheriff said. “Let me see your license, and I’ll think about it.”
Paxton fished his wallet from the pile of toll road receipts littering the dash. Their journey had taken them from Dallas through Oklahoma into Missouri, and it seemed like every single mile of the highway had held another toll booth.
Paxton folded one of their precious few remaining fifty dollar bills behind his license and handed it to the sheriff. “Here you go, sir. I’m sure you’ll find everything is in order.”
The sheriff, his aging eyes failing him in the fading dusk light, had to pull his sunglasses down past the tip of his nose to read Paxton’s driver’s license.
When he did, cold shadows spread over his features like a bottle of spilled ink. “Harrow? You have family hereabouts?”
Chase didn’t want to let the sheriff in on her plans, but she didn’t want this to drag on for the rest of the afternoon, either. “We’re meeting our parents in Crucible. Jack, that’s my dad, is driving down with my mom from Chicago. We’re j
ust meeting at the halfway point, then heading over to Branson. I can’t wait to see the Castle of Chaos!”
Acting so chipper made Chase’s face ache, but she just wanted this to be over. If she had to smile real big and let the sheriff think she was some teen idiot, she was all right with that. Whatever.
But the sheriff wasn’t listening to Chase. His eyes kept flicking back and forth between the license he held in his hands and Paxton.
The sheriff was frozen in place as if he’d just realized he was holding a rattlesnake and not a bribe hidden behind a driver’s license. “Jack Harrow?”
Paxton nodded. “That’s my dad, and my mom is—”
“I know who your mother is, boy. I hadn’t heard Jack was back in town,” the officer said. “I should have figured he’d be bringing you all home, what with the game just about to start. Family tradition and all that.”
The sheriff adjusted his jacket nervously and handed Paxton’s license back. The fifty came with it, which surprised Chase almost as much as the badge pinned to the sheriff’s chest when he adjusted his jacket. It wasn’t shaped like a shield, but rather a series of three concentric circles with smaller circles riding their orbits. The glint of coppery metal tinged with a trace of venomous green light lodged itself in the meat of Chase’s brain like a splinter of ice thrown from a cracking glacier.
Something from her past rumbled at the intrusion, and a vague flicker of memory tried to unspool behind her eyes like a slideshow of her youth. She’d seen that badge, or something very much like it, on the night she’d killed those men in Austin.
“I didn’t know you were all here for the game,” the officer said, interrupting Chase’s reverie. “Might as well head on into Crucible, see if you can find a place to spend the night. Though I imagine one of you ain’t getting a lot of shuteye tonight.”
The man seemed much older than he had when he’d been trying to squeeze a bribe out of Paxton. Chase’s vision blurred when she looked at him, doubling and then tripling, before snapping back into focus. Pale auras surrounded her brother and the officer, like scratches of light showing through a torn window shade. Paxton was enveloped in a translucent gray glow, but the sheriff had a strangely venomous yellow hue clinging to his outline.
“Thank you,” Paxton said, his voice weak and nonconfrontational. He tucked his license and the fifty into his shirt pocket. “We’ll be on our way.”
Chase eased back in her seat and rubbed the side of her head with the fingertips of her right hand. Circles of light swam across her vision, obscuring the world behind a veil of interlocking rings.
The brilliant circles aligned themselves, one inside the other as they approached the covered bridge. Chase wanted to warn Paxton to turn back, they’d stay somewhere else tonight, head into Crucible in the morning, but she knew the sheriff was waiting for them to give him an excuse to fuck with them again. She doubted her family name would get her out of trouble the second time.
She also couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something waiting for her in the town ahead. She didn’t know what, but she wasn’t turning away until she found out. If she saw any evidence that her parents were in Crucible, she’d take it apart with her bare hands to find them.
The rings were thinner now, but their circuits were fiery as they formed a bullseye over the covered bridge’s narrow throat. Smaller circles swam onto their surfaces, uncoiling from the bigger rings to create an eccentric constellation of slowly churning circles filled with even smaller and more intricate designs. It reminded Chase of a fractal image she’d seen once, a repeating image that dared her to chase it down to its smallest level.
Chase cast a quick glance out her window at the mirror and saw someone standing in the middle of the road behind the van. Not the sheriff, but someone taller and thinner, their features hidden behind a featureless black mask.
And then the van was on the bridge, and the world behind Chase vanished into the shadows.
Chapter Three
Rules of The Nightmare Game: The Soul Orbs
The soul of every living thing is weighed by the Red God and its measure is held in spirit orbs. When a Slayer dispatches a man, the Red God rewards the sacred killer with a portion of the victim’s soul as his due for a job well done.
This portion is based upon the strength of the Slayer when measured against that of the victim. When their strengths are equal, the Slayer receives the Red God’s tithe of three soul orbs. A much weaker victim may only provide the Slayer with a single soul orb, but the most powerful of enemies may be rewarded with as many as ten.
The remainder of the orbs are the Red God’s due. Woe betide the fool who feels as if he is owed more than the Red God provides. That is the way of blasphemy, and the path to destruction.
It is written in the Temple of Bone that a Slayer with wits enough can learn to measure the strength of his foes at some distance by the strength and color of their aura. From weakest to most powerful, the auras are gray, white, green, yellow, orange and black.
Whether this is fact or fancy, I leave to those with more experience in the Great Game of the Gods.
—Alexander Shibley, 1743, from The Great Game of the Gods
Chapter Four
Room at the Inn
A wooden sign pitted with bullet holes greeted Chase and Paxton on the other side of the covered bridge. The words “Welcome to Crucible” were inexpertly scrawled across its faded white surface, the aged red paint streaked and smeared in places as if rain had fallen while the letters were still drying. Where most city limits signs displayed their populations, the wooden placard welcoming them to Crucible had been gnawed or rotted away, as if someone wanted that information kept secret.
“Easy on the gas,” Chase cautioned her brother. “That fat old fucker is probably creeping across the bridge right behind us, just waiting to light you up again.”
Paxton nodded and chewed on his upper lip. “Why do you think he didn’t take the bribe?”
Chase pondered the question as they cruised down the main road into Crucible. She watched the scenery roll past her window, but there wasn’t much to see. They were on the main street into town, but there were few businesses and even fewer homes visible. A Whistle Stop with a trio of old gas pumps flecked with rust greeted them on the left side of the road, while a drugstore had hunkered down in the shadows between a pair of towering oaks ahead and to their right. There was a shuttered florist, too, and a pet store next to a butcher’s shop. A dairy, its weathered sign dominated by the peeling image of a giant cow squeezing milk from her swollen udders into the upturned mouths of portly children, was the sole occupant of the next block. Trees made up the rest of the scenery. Their gnarled bodies hugged the road, and their skeletal arms stretched out over the road in a vain attempt to form an arch.
The town was populated with the kind of small-town businesses that Chase had never seen growing up, and hadn’t even believed existed outside of the old movies she loved watching on Netflix. She and Paxton had spent most of their lives in Dallas, or Austin before that. They were used to seeing 7-Elevens on every corner, and a McDonald’s across the street from that if there wasn’t a Starbucks already occupying the real estate. This was something else, something she wasn’t sure how to deal with.
There weren’t many houses she could see either, which was another change from living in the city. In Dallas, she was used to walking past a dozen homes on her way down the block. In Crucible, on the other hand, she hadn’t seen a dozen residences in two miles. The ones she did spot were surrounded by unruly lawns and walled off by strips of gangly trees. Many of the homes were trailers lurking at the ends of gravel driveways curling away from the main road or tucked behind tall fences. If the town had 500 people living in it, Chase would have been amazed.
“I don’t know why he didn’t take the money,” she said at last. “It’s not like he’s raking in the big bucks as this shitty little town’s lawman.”
As the words left her mouth, Chase no
ticed something strange. Crucible sat in the bowl of an old valley hidden in the shadow of an even older mountain at its western end. Lower hills stretched out along Crucible’s north and south flank, forming a natural barrier that ended when it reached the ravine on the eastern side of town. The only way over that chasm, as far as Chase had seen, was the single-lane covered bridge she and Paxton had come across.
Trees, evergreens and deciduous alike, did an excellent job of hiding everything off the main road, but the timber grew sparser as it marched up the sides of the valley. Midway up, the trees stopped altogether and revealed the valley’s stony slopes and scree-littered flanks.
But, while poverty reigned below the tree line, a scattering of impressive homes rose above it. Fashioned from clean lines of steel and glass, they looked otherworldly, like crystal meteors that had fallen from orbit. They reminded Chase of the covers of the old science fiction paperbacks she’d always loved, which made them seem more than just out of place. Those houses looked alien, like they didn’t and couldn’t belong in this town.
“It bugs me,” Paxton said, renewing their conversation about the sheriff. “Guys like that don’t refuse bribes unless they have a reason. You think he was setting us up for something?”
Chase shrugged. She did her best not to worry about things she couldn’t control. She dealt with threats and problems when and if they came at her. Worrying about hazards that hadn’t happened yet, or might never happen, seemed like a good way to drive yourself crazy. “Maybe recognizing our last name triggered his good nature, and he decided to give his xenophobia a rest.”
Paxton grunted at that. “He acted like he knew dad, but not like he wanted to know him,” Paxton retorted. “Jesus!”