by S T Branton
The Philosopher stared at me for a few seconds, then seemed to come to terms with my decision. He walked over to a cabinet and pulled out a small glass bottle that looked like it might have been sitting on the shelf since Prohibition.
“Drink this.” He shoved it into my hand. “It’ll help.”
“You should know that according to Near laws, it’s a serious offense to offer alcohol to minors…which would be applicable to this situation if I wasn’t twenty-five years old. Damn. That hit me hard. Am I getting old?”
I punctuated my deflated question with a swig from the bottle. It burned going down, but immediately a sense of warmth flooded through my body, making my arms and legs feel heavy. He reached up onto a pegboard and took down a pair of pliers. My hands tightened around the ends of the chair arms as he approached.
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
I tossed my head back.
“Lay it on me. Or…out of me.” I opened my mouth.
Everything in me told me to close my eyes, but I wouldn’t. There had been too many times when I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping to block out the world or whatever threat was coming my way. It was the grown-up equivalent of a little child covering their eyes when the thunder came because they thought it would protect them, only it really wasn’t all that grown up. I wasn’t doing it this time. I was done letting other people push me around and tell me what to do, and offering up control in situations because it was intimidating. I was facing whatever was coming for me on my terms now.
Archie stood over me and looked down into my mouth. His eyes flickered up to mine, and I stared back at him without flinching. Whatever he’d given me to drink made me feel like someone was holding my body down, and I realized that’s what he meant. It would help him because I wouldn’t be able to move.
The pliers moved into my mouth, and I tasted the metal on my tongue. The sharpness flowed down my throat as the tool clamped down on either side of a molar. Archie hesitated.
“Do it,” I growled over the pliers.
Without another second of hesitation, he yanked.
My tooth wrenched from my jawbone, and blood filled my mouth. Archie stumbled away from me and I sat up, catching the blood in my palm. He ran a towel under the faucet of a sink attached to one wall and pressed it to my mouth.
“You are hardcore, Slick.”
I made my way upstairs to the bathroom to clean up and rinse my mouth. After plugging the new hole in my gums with toilet paper, I headed back down to the workshop and discovered Archie hard at work. He rushed around adding things to his equipment and manipulating various bits of the Farstuff. I watched him for a few moments before settling back into the chair.
“Why are you helping me? You know who I am and what everyone says about me.”
“Charleston is my town, too.” He didn’t look up from his work. “I might live on the outskirts, but I consider this my home. I don’t want anything to happen to it. Or to me, frankly. I’d really prefer not to get hurt because of Hobbes’s cult. Don’t mistake me. I’m not part of your quest and I won’t stick my neck out for you.”
“I get it. You have to look out for yourself and do what’s needed to survive. I can understand that.”
Archie straightened and looked at me.
“Don’t take it personally. It’s the way it’s always had to be for me. In this world, I’m not accepted by either side. I have to go through life on my own.”
“Maybe it won’t always have to be that way. Maybe someday there’ll be peace and you’ll be able to live your life the way you want to. You may not feel like you fit in anywhere now, and that both sides reject you. But with a major change in the way things work, you never know. You could be a Rune Philosopher out in the open, not in hiding anymore.”
“It’s easy to dream about that, but I can’t really believe it. Not yet.”
“You know, if the end of the entire damn world rains down on us, you might wish you had stuck your head out…if only a little,” I added.
Before Archie could say anything, a stone on a nearby table glowed and emitted a deep, throbbing sound.
“It’s Ally.” He rushed over to the stone and scooped it up. “She’s activated her distress beacon.”
“Where?” I shouted, already grabbing Splinter off the stool where he sat nibbling breakfast leftovers. I shoved him into the pocket of my leather jacket and started toward the stairs.
“Take this with you,” Archie called. He tossed the stone to me, and I caught it. “It will guide you to her.”
I looped the stone’s leather strap around my palm before running up the stairs and out of the house.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Following the rune Archie gave me felt like playing a messed up, high-stakes game of Hot and Cold. The stone changed temperature against my skin as I ran, guiding me with searing shocks of heat and icy blasts of cold while continuing to occasionally make the throbbing sound. I wished I could talk to Ally, to hear her voice and find out what was happening.
Fear pumped adrenaline through me and kept me running, following the directions of the rune until I reached a different part of town. It was an older neighborhood, like Archie’s, and the quiet that should have seemed peaceful was eerie and unnerving.
Night had set in during my race to find Ally, and the deeper the shadows around the houses got, the more afraid I felt for her. Finally, the rune brought me to a nice, well-maintained home in the middle of the block. A bright white glow emanated from the stone on my palm.
“I’ll take that as a ‘tag, you’re it’,” I muttered to it.
I crept around the side of the house and tried all the windows. They were closed and locked, and nothing seemed strange or out of place. It was a simple cookie-cutter house. That might be harboring Far terrorists. No big thing. I checked the rune again, and it sent up another blinding white glow. Yup, she was here. Now I had to figure out where. It was only a one-story house, which meant there weren't many places to hide her.
A tinkle of glass crunched under my foot, and I stopped cold. It was small, and looked like it was a dark green color, like the kind that beer bottles came in. My eyes followed the side of the house and saw what looked like an odd door on the back of the building. It was wooden, and small, small enough that a normal-sized person would have to bend halfway over to get inside, and there was a padlock on the outside. Nothing says suspicious like someone padlocking a door on their house.
After creeping over to it as silently as possible, I looked at the tracker again. If she was here, she was only feet away from me now. But the house seemed silent in the darkening night, and this door looked like it was only for a crawlspace.
I steeled myself and drew on my locket’s power. I channeled all the strength the rune gave me and pulled hard on the padlock. The whole damn handle ripped off. So much for the quiet approach. I yanked the door open and stared into the darkness. My eyes took a moment to adjust. What they saw when they did made my stomach drop.
The crawl space was huge, dropping several feet below the ground level, and creating a large basement with a dirt floor. Shelves lined the wall and were filled with oil cans and canned food from ages gone by. Boxes were in piles in various places on wooden pallets, and chains with shackles at the end hung from the walls.
Ally and several other humans were chained up, beaten and bloodied, and several had visible puncture wounds on their necks, dried blood caking their collars and fronts of their shirts. I drew a deep breath and jumped inside, prepared to meet an onslaught of the living dead, but nothing happened.
Ally's head slowly rose, and she turned toward the sound, her eyes opening wide and muffled sounds coming from her handkerchief-gagged mouth. I darted over to her and assessed her damage. She was bruised and had a deep gash above her right eye, but otherwise seemed fine. Dirty, but fine.
"Mmph-umm-umm phumph," came the voice from behind the fabric.
"What are you trying to say, Ally? Let me get this hanky out of the
way." I pulled the gag away from her mouth.
"Behind you!" she gasped as soon as the fabric was gone.
I turned and saw a creature unfolding itself to a full height of roughly six feet. His body was hairless and he was thin as a bone except for a large paunch of a stomach. He looked vaguely human, except for the giant gaping hole where his face should have been. I saw a ring of teeth and nearly yacked.
I didn't have time to think, so I charged the human-leech hybrid and pushed hard on its chest, and didn’t stop until we hit the wall. Its deceptively strong arms pushed me back, and I fell onto a pallet covered in decades of dust. A shard of wood broke free, and I grabbed it as the creature jumped down on top of me. I pulled the sharp piece in front of me and aimed at its chest. It landed on the makeshift stake, and blood exploded from it. It covered me, the wall, Ally, and everything within several feet. It was the grossest thing I had ever seen.
I spat its blood out of my mouth as I pushed the thing off me. When it hit the ground, a new round of blood shot from it, straight up in the air like a fountain. I looked at Ally, who was now absolutely drenched and looked like she was about to throw up.
"Are Gushers still a thing?" I thought of the raspberry-flavored treats that used to rule my lunchbox.
"Yes," she managed.
"I'm never eating them again."
"Oh, God, that's the worst freaking thing I have ever seen in my life," she said as I rushed over to her and undid the shackle holding her to the wall. "He was like a swollen tick somebody stomped on."
Several of the other prisoners were coming to, and a few were frantically gesturing to be the next ones unhooked. Ally worked on the person next to her as I moved across the room to help another. Once everyone was free, and had run screaming through the crawl space door, I looked around the room. Three small, rickety steps led to a door to the inside of the house.
"Are there others?" I kept my voice low. I didn't know why I was almost whispering. If something was up there, it would have heard the people running outside.
"Not like that." She gestured to the dead creature. "They wore robes like the other Harbingers, but they brought that thing down here to drain us," she shuddered before continuing, "of blood."
"Yeah, thanks. I'm pretty clear on the whole draining part. What are they doing?"
"They were making runes, I think, but then they would let that thing feed off us when they got what they wanted."
"Did it get you?" I checked her neck for signs of puncture wounds.
"No, but it was about to. Right before you came, they pointed me out as the next one."
I didn't have much time to contemplate our luck, because the door to the inside of the house creaked open. Instinctively, I pulled Ally behind me and took a fighting stance.
"Ally, get in the car," I called to her over my shoulder.
"What about you?" she yelled back, already on her way out the door.
"I have business to take care of," I said, mostly to myself. Ally was already out of the door and I heard her feet pounding across the yard to where she’d parked her car. That was fine. I knew it sounded badass.
Three figures stood in the shadow of the door and looked down at me. They wore robes, like Ally said, but their heads and arms were green and scaly and they hissed at me.
Freaking lizard men.
There was mild hesitation in the way they stood there, so I kicked the feet of the creature that had attacked me.
"I killed your leech thingie. I'm Sara Slick, and I'm not here to fuck around. Let's go, already." I gestured for them to come at me.
One of them took the invitation. He shot toward me, his speed catching me a little by surprise. I backed up a step, then pushed off the wall and leapt over him, my back scraping the roof of the basement, and landed behind him. As he turned, I grabbed his head in a headlock and flung him over my hip, smashing him into the ground. I felt his neck snap as I twisted with my arms, and his body went still. I stood and saw the other two circling me, one brandishing what looked like a small pipe and the other a short blade.
I reached behind me for my switchblade and pulled it out as the knife-wielder stabbed at me. I dodged it and smashed an elbow into his face. While ducking, I ground my heel into his toes and swung my blade upward. My foot kept him from avoiding me as I sliced all the way up his chest, and he fell in a crumpled heap in front of me.
Before I could get my bearings, the pipe guy hit me hard in the back. I stumbled forward and hit the wall where they’d shackled Ally. Even with my locket protecting me, that one hurt. I grabbed a chain in my hands and waited until I thought he was behind me, then lifted it. I caught the pipe in the chain and pulled to the side, snapping it out of his grip. He fell forward with the momentum and I jumped, then kicked sideways and contacted his right temple. It was enough to send him headfirst into the wall without being able to protect himself. A solid thud accompanied the meeting and he slid down, unconscious.
I scrambled out of the basement and ran across the yard toward the street.
“Sara!” Ally’s voice beckoned me from the darkness.
I looked around and caught sight of her waving at me from in front of her station wagon, parked a few houses down. I ran toward her and we jumped into the car.
“You okay?”
“I will be. When I first got down there, I saw them taking the blood they had drained and putting it in bags. Like a freaking hospital blood bank. The old lady I interviewed must have seen them piling those bags in the yard to be transported.”
“Holy shit,” I muttered.
“That’s only the beginning.” Ally started the car and skidded out onto the street to drive toward Archie’s house. “I know what their plan is. And it’s about to happen. Now!”
Chapter Thirty-Five
I learned an important life lesson that night.
A few months with a learner's permit and ten years of not practicing does not a good driver make.
Unfortunately, there wasn't another choice. Ally’s adrenaline wore out a couple of blocks away from where she had been held and she could no longer drive. So I took over the wheel. It involved a lot of lurching, screeching, decided recklessness, and a mailbox casualty, but we finally made it back to base.
I pulled up in front of Archie’s at an angle that would piss off some neighbors and ran around the passenger side of the car to scoop Ally out. She could walk, but barely, and I had to support her as I brought her up to the house.
Archie opened the door and reached out to wrap his arm around her waist and help me bring her down to the basement.
"Certainly took you long enough," he commented.
"Oh, I'm sorry. Did it take me too long to kill a couple of lizard men, squash their weird walking leech, and rescue my best friend? If I'd known we were going to be late for high tea, I would have gone a little faster."
"And the driving," Ally groaned as we lowered her onto a cot in one corner. "Oh, the driving."
"You drove?" Archie asked incredulously.
"Sort of," Ally muttered while curling up on her side.
"I operated a motor vehicle to the extent that I got us back here," I corrected. "Both our asses are still alive and we won’t end up the visual aid for a public service announcement aimed at teens on prom night. I'll take that as a personal victory."
Archie seemed to think for a few seconds, as if debating whether he was going to continue to pursue that line of conversation, then decided against it. He looked down at Ally and started examining her injuries. She was pretty banged up and my stomach turned each time he moved aside a piece of clothing or she shifted and revealed another bruise. I ran upstairs to the kitchen and dug through all the cabinets until I confirmed he didn't have any plastic bags. A drawer offered me dish towels and I took one, filling it with ice from the freezer before rushing it back down to her.
It seemed fairly futile to give her only one ice pack, but if we were to ice all the bruises and cuts, we'd have to submerge her in the bathtub and
that didn't seem like a good choice.
"What happened? What did you see?" Archie prompted her.
"I went back to a neighborhood where I had interviewed a woman a while back. I was looking into kidnappings and murders and ended up having a long conversation with her. She told me she thought the people next door were vampires because of their nocturnal behaviors and seeing a lot of blood. It seemed like a decent lead for our current situation."
"That's an understatement. They've set up shop in a little house in a neighborhood closer to the center of Charleston. The humans they kidnapped had been half drained of blood and they were getting started on Ally. But, as you can see, she put up a fight." I looked down at her while running my hand back through her hair. "I'm proud of you."
"I learned from the best, Slick," she said with a painful smile.
I shook my head.
"No, I learned from the best. But I’m glad you were able to learn from me."
She laughed.
"Don't sell yourself short. You're a badass."
"This is a beautiful moment, but can we wrap it up? Ally needs to rest."
Archie had gone over to his cabinet and was gathering bottles. Some he deposited on his work counter and others he brought over to Ally. After piling them up on a small table beside the cot, he went to another cabinet and gathered another armful of items.
“There’s no time for that,” she groaned.
“What did you hear?”
"They were talking about a gathering of humans. They said it would be huge, that most of Charleston would be there. I didn't catch where it was, but they said that's where it's all going to happen. Harbingers will be there with that Spinoza asshole at the lead, and they're going to reveal the existence of Farlings to the human world in what they said was a spectacular fashion. And they said there would be enough blood spilt to drown the world.”