“I’ll go,” I said. “I mean, three will be better than two, right?”
“No,” Danny said. “You guys stay here and mind the shop. We won’t go far.”
“What if you don’t come back?” Evan said.
Danny gave him a withering look. “Then I guess you’ll have to come and rescue us.”
Gil and Jason emerged from the kitchen a few minutes after we watched Danny and Lisa vanish among the swirling clouds. I sat with Anna by the door, a bag of coffee in my lap, feeling thoroughly ridiculous. Evan was in a booth by himself, muttering darkly.
“What happened?” Gil said. “Did it work?”
“We think so,” Anna said. “We’ve got mist now. Lisa and Danny went out to see if they could find anything.”
“By themselves?” Gil said.
“She took the magic sword,” I said, a bit defensively.
He frowned. “You still ought to have gone instead. Chivalry and all.”
“I don’t know,” Jason said. “I think I’d back Danny in a fight over Brian.”
“Besides,” I said. “You try stopping her once she’s decided something.”
“True.” Gil pulled a chair of his own beside us and sat down, and Jason followed suit. “So what happens if they don’t find anything?”
“Then I guess we try again,” I said. “If you and Jason are up for another round.”
Jason blew out a long breath, and Gil chuckled. “That may take a few minutes. But I suppose we could try, as a sacrifice for the team.” He stared out at the mist. “It still doesn’t feel right, just sitting here and waiting. Maybe we should all have gone.”
I shook my head. For some reason I couldn’t quite understand, that felt very wrong. “Someone has to stay with the shop.”
There was silence for a few moments.
“So,” Gil said. “Do you know why Danny broke up with you?”
“Why is that what everyone brings up when they want to make conversation?” I said. “Have you people never heard of tact?”
“I’m just curious!” Gil protested. “I mean, it’s weird, right?”
“I thought so,” I said.
“She’s had plenty of time to discover your flaws. So why now?”
“If you must know,” I said, “she says it’s because I haven’t thought about what I’m doing after graduation.”
“Huh,” Gil said.
“It’s all right for her,” I said. “She’s got Apollo’s. My situation is a little bit more complicated.”
“I guess.” Gil shrugged. “We’ve got another year before I have to think about that one.”
“I’ve already got an internship lined up for this summer,” Jason said. “At Google.”
“I hear the food is great there,” Gil said. “And you get free massages.”
They kept talking, but I stopped paying attention. I watched the mist, strands of silver playing over one another, and thought about Danny.
Was that what she wanted? Someone like Jason? Obviously not exactly like Jason, but a hypothetical version of Jason who liked girls. Someone who had his shit together, in other words. Who had a job lined up, a future planned, a house picked out. That sure as hell wasn’t me.
“Brian?” Anna said.
“Hmm?”
I looked up at her pretty round face, framed by blond curls. She smiled.
“I don’t think I ever thanked you. For stopping the dragon.”
“What? Oh.” I shrugged. “I wasn’t even really thinking properly. If I’d realized what I was doing, I would have run the other way.”
“That would have been the sensible response,” she agreed. “Instead of trying to take on a mythical beast with a bag of coffee.”
“You don’t seem . . . worried by all this.” I waved a hand at the mist.
“I ought to be.” Anna shook her head. “It all seems a bit like a dream.”
“Hey,” Gil said. “Here they come!”
Danny emerged from the mist, magic sword in hand, with Lisa following close behind her. They weren’t running, but they were walking quickly.
“What—” I began.
“Nope,” Danny said. “Nope, nope, nope. We’re leaving. You two, back in the sex closet. I’ll start the machine up again.”
Lisa was pale, but her cheeks were flushed. Gil looked from her to Danny and back. “Come on,” he said. “You have to at least tell us what’s out there.”
“Nope.” Danny laid the magic sword on a table. “Come on.”
Gil looked pleadingly at Lisa, who stepped closer and beckoned. He bent down, and she whispered in his ear at some length.
“—shaped like what?” he said, at one point, prompting more urgent whispers. Eventually he straightened up, a faraway look in his eyes.
“I would have liked to see that,” he said.
“Gil!” Danny said, standing by the swinging door to the kitchen.
“All right, all right.” Gil took one last look at the mist, then turned to Jason. “Well, dear, are you ready to do our duty by captain and crew?”
Jason heaved a mock sigh, and the two of them went behind the counter arm in arm. Danny stepped out of the way and ushered them through. A moment later, I heard the clack of the big switch on the magic coffee machine.
Lisa was whispering to Anna, who was blushing and hiding her face in her hands. I left them to it, and Evan to his sulking, and went back to talk to Danny.
She was standing behind the counter by the kitchen door, leaning against the back wall, trying to look relaxed while all four foot eleven and a half inches of her vibrated with tension. When I said hello, she jumped.
“What?” she said. “What do you want?”
“I just wanted to talk,” I said. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” she said. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
“Well, I am.”
“Danny—” I reached out for her, but she batted my hand away.
“None of that. You could stand to take this a little more seriously, you know.”
I blinked. This from the girl who, as far as I could tell, had never taken anything seriously in her entire life. “I am! I get it. This is dangerous.”
“You don’t get it.” She ran her hand through her blue-and-purple hair. “Look. I don’t mean to be shitty to you in particular, Brian, but obviously I’m a little worked up right now.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “If you want to talk about it—”
“I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to go home.” She glared at the kitchen door. “Shouldn’t it be working by now?”
“I wasn’t timing it,” I said, glancing at the front door. There was no static obscuring the mist.
“I’m going to check the machine.” Danny pushed the swinging door open, and a moment later started swearing.
“What? What happened?”
“It’s not fucking working!” she shouted. “It’s just brewing a pot of goddamned coffee!”
We sat in a circle around one of the larger tables, with the pot of coffee between us. After a long silence, Gil got a styrofoam cup and poured himself some.
“You’re not really going to drink that?” Evan said. “The magic sex coffee?”
“It’s not sex coffee,” Gil said. “And it smells good. I’m not going to let it go to waste.”
He took a drink. We all waited. When he failed to magically transform into a badger or start glowing, everyone relaxed.
“It’s just coffee,” Gil said. “Not bad, though.”
Jason helped himself to a cup. After a moment, so did Danny.
“All right,” she said, sipping. “It didn’t work. Why didn’t it work?”
“I asked Twitter for opinions,” Lisa said, scrolling her iPad. “So far I’m not getting anything really useful.”
“Maybe Gil and Jason were too tired?” Evan said. “Maybe they didn’t impress the magic coffeemaker this time.”
“Wait, so now we’re being
judged on our performance?” Gil said. “All of a sudden I’m not comfortable with this. And for the record, Evan, tired or not, I—”
“Wait,” Jason said, in his quiet voice. “Gil. How did you feel, the first time?”
“What?” Gil looked around the circle. “I mean, good?”
“I felt like there was something different,” Jason said. “Like an . . . energy.”
“Like static electricity,” I said. “I got that too, when me and Danny were—”
“Yeah,” Danny interrupted. “Okay. So where does that leave us?”
“I didn’t feel that the second time,” Jason said. “No magic tingle.”
“Agreed,” Gil said.
“So, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, maybe Evan is right. Maybe there’s some . . . energy that gets used up.”
“Each time has to be a new couple?” I said. “That doesn’t leave us many options.”
Everyone looked at Anna, who blushed furiously and said nothing. Danny coughed.
“Maybe it doesn’t have to be two new people. It could just want to see a new combination.”
“So it’s a creepy voyeur magic coffeemaker?” Gil said.
“It’s a theory,” Danny said. “There’s enough beans left to try it.”
“So who’s going to be the guinea pigs?” Evan said.
Another silence, as everyone tried not to meet anyone else’s eye. Danny sighed and got to her feet. “Evan? Come on.”
“Seriously?” he said, shooting to his feet. “Okay.”
“I—” I began, then stopped when Danny gave me a look that would have melted glass.
“Gil, throw the switch once we’re inside,” Danny said.
“Got it,” Gil said. “Come back out if you don’t feel that special tingle. There might be time to put in a substitute player.”
I watched Danny and Evan disappear through the swinging door, and tried to keep the anger off my face. Lisa went back to her iPad, and Anna turned her chair around to watch the front door.
“Sorry,” Jason said. “I know that has to be hard for you.”
“He doesn’t have to be so enthusiastic about it,” I muttered.
“He’s always had a crush on Danny.”
“Really? He never told me.”
“Would you have told him?” Jason shrugged. “Besides, half the people who come into Apollo’s have a crush on Danny. It comes with the territory.”
This was a trend I had observed myself, but with my ex-girlfriend and my best friend in the sex closet, it wasn’t what I wanted to hear at the moment. I grunted.
Jason sighed and scratched his beard. “You know Danny’s story, right? How she ended up here?”
“As much as she tells anybody,” I said. “Her dad owned this place, and she took over running it when he got sick. When he died a couple of years ago, she ended up owning it.”
“Yeah. Think about that for a minute. She’s your age, right?”
“Just about.”
I twisted my lip. This lent further credence to the “Danny thinks Brian is an irresponsible fuck-up” theory. Here I was at twenty-three, tens of thousands of dollars in debt for a degree I wasn’t sure would get me anywhere, and in the meantime she’d been running a successful business while taking care of a crippled parent.
“I just don’t know what I can do about it,” I said.
Jason looked thoughtful. Before he could speak, though, Anna interrupted from the front of the shop.
“Hey! It’s happening!”
We got to our feet. The green static was indeed fading in, replacing the mist. Jason, who’d been occupied the last time, watched in fascination as it peaked and faded away, leaving another scene entirely in its place.
“Well,” Anna said after a moment, “at least it’s a bit more colorful.”
Lisa’s iPad chirped as she took pictures.
This time, Apollo’s had apparently landed in the middle of a swamp. Vegetation clung to small, muddy hummocks, with channels of stagnant water in between, covered in floating vines and algae. There were a few trees, but they looked limp and sickly, and other plants sprouted from them like blood-sucking ticks. These parasites bore huge, brilliant flowers: a riot of dark blues, muddy reds, and brilliant yellows. In spite of the bright colors, there was a vaguely unhealthy look to the whole affair, a sense of rot and decay that redoubled as the smell started leaking in. The ever-present aroma of coffee warred with the sick-sweet scent of overripe fruit.
“I’m not going outside for this one,” Lisa said, lowering her iPad. “Someone else’s turn.”
“We might need to build a boat,” Jason said.
Gil, coming out of the kitchen, took one look and made a gagging sound. “Florida again?”
“Florida’s got nothing on this,” I said.
“What I don’t understand,” Gil said, “is why we keep landing in such unpleasant places. How come we don’t get cute little towns or something?”
“Maybe the magic coffee machine hates us and wants us to suffer,” I said.
The door to the kitchen swung open, revealing Evan. He joined the rest of us, walking with a definite spring in his step, which made me want to punch him very badly. I could hear water running in the bathroom.
“This one looks interesting,” he said.
“It’s a dump,” I said.
“No, it’s fascinating,” Evan said. “Look at the flowers!”
“You’re just saying that because you got us here.”
“I have to agree with Brian on this one,” Gil said. “I’m not really feeling the Swamp of Decay myself.”
“Something’s moving out there,” Anna said.
We all moved up to the front door, looking out through the fronds and hanging flowers.
“Where?” Lisa said, iPad at the ready.
“Somewhere out there,” Anna said, pointing.
“Like, a big something?” Gil said. “Are we talking crocodiles here?”
“I don’t . . . think so.” Anna squinted. “It looked like—”
A new sound reached us—a droning, buzzing sound, like a computer fan with a bad bearing. Now we could all see the movement, a wave of flickering, darting things hovering over the water, homing in on the shop. They were constantly in motion, so it was hard to get a good look at them, but I got the sense of shivering wings and spindly, dangling limbs. It was disturbingly familiar, and Gil got it first.
“Mosquitoes!” he shouted. “Shut the door, shut the door, shut the door!”
They were mosquitoes all right, but bigger than any mosquito had a right to be—the size of terriers. I grabbed for the door, but they were on us before I could slam it, a storm of them pushing in through the doorway and flooding through the broken window. I threw all my weight against the door, feeling multiple impacts on the other side as the bugs hurled themselves against the glass. It swung home, bell tinkling, and one of the grotesque creatures crunched as it was caught half in and half out.
Unfortunately, the hole the dragon had made in the front windows was still available, and the huge insects continued to pour through it, hovering and darting. The room turned into pandemonium, everyone ducking and swinging at the things with whatever heavy object came to hand. Lisa smashed one against a window with her iPad, leaving both glass and tablet stained with cream-colored ichor. Gil had a chair, which he swung wildly, and Jason had retreated to a corner, pulling his jacket over his head. Anna pulled off her coat and wadded it up, swinging it by the sleeves like a makeshift mace.
I grabbed a heavy cardboard sign advertising today’s roast and swung it at any bug that came close, warding off a couple with glancing blows as I backed toward the counter. Evan stumbled in front of me, clawing at his back, where one of the things had settled. Its long proboscis was embedded in the back of his neck, and as I watched the body of the insect began to bloat and redden.
“Get it off!” Evan screamed. “Get it off!”
“Hold still!”
He duc
ked, just in front of me, and I took a good swing with the sign. The mosquito crunched, spraying bug guts and blood, and I hammered Evan to the ground for good measure. It’s possible I swung a little harder than strictly necessary.
“The window!” Danny shouted. She was jumping over the counter, scattering the donation animals, grabbing the magic sword as she came. “Help me get a table up!”
Anna, closest to the window, ducked underneath one of the big circular tables and lifted it onto its side. Danny made her way across the room, sword flashing out with a crackle any time a mosquito got near her. Severed limbs and wings fell like rain. I fell in behind her, guarding her back with my now-dented sign and feeling exoskeletons crack under my shoes. When we reached the table, I dropped the sign and took hold of one end, and Anna gripped the other. Together, we lifted it up and propped it on the booth against the broken window. With nothing securing it in place, it was a pretty flimsy barricade, but it covered most of the hole. I put my weight against it, feeling it shudder with the battering of more bugs from outside.
“Right,” Danny said, an odd light in her eyes. She raised the magic sword. “Now we just have to clear the place out.”
Over the next few minutes, the six of us—minus me, since I was holding the table in place—waged a genocidal war of extermination against the mosquito menace. Even Evan managed to get to his feet and take a few swings at the circling bugs. Fortunately, the electric lights fascinated the insects even more than the prospect of a warm meal, and Danny was able to stand on tables and cut most of them to pieces while they circled. With that accomplished, she ran back to the kitchen—crunch, crunch, crunch over the dead bugs—and came back with two rolls of duct tape, which she and Jason used to affix the table to the wall and make sure the window was completely blocked.
More mosquitoes hurled themselves against the other windows, mindlessly battering the glass in an attempt to get to the light. I sat down in the booth, adrenaline draining out of me in a flood, and looked over the battleground. Here and there, an insectoid limb still twitched.
“’Scuse me a sec,” Lisa said. “I’ve just got to go be sick.”
This she proceeded to do in one corner. Danny sighed.
Unfettered II: New Tales By Masters of Fantasy Page 28