by Chuck Wendig
The venom is quick like a jackrabbit chased by a hawk—
Lickety-split, it’s through Coyote. The world tilts. His chest tightens.
He’s hit in the face with a tidal wave made of his own unconsciousness.
Boom.
LOKI STANDS OVER Coyote’s body. Not corpse, of course—the mangy trickster isn’t dead, just resting. Gods don’t like to kill gods when they can help it. Put them out of commission for ten minutes, ten years, ten glacial epochs, fine. Death, though, is so permanent. Rude, too, though Loki has little concern about violating social norms.
Time is running out. The thread fraying, ready to snap.
Coyote would’ve taken too long. He always takes too long.
Loki pulls out his iPhone. Texts to Eshu: In progress.
Then he enters the police station, whistling.
ALISON SITS. THE jail cell is cleaner than she anticipated; some part of her figured this place would smell like body odor and other... fluids. But it doesn’t. It is, in fact, only one of three cells, and now she knows the difference between holding cells (‘drunk tanks’) and a full-bore penitentiary. This is the former, and thankfully not at all the latter.
Just the same, it does little to quiet her slow-simmering panic and despair.
Because the penitentiary—jail, prison, the Big House, the Hoosegow—is where she’ll be headed. She committed Grand Theft Auto. She stole a car, with the help of a man who was probably not at all a man, because he was, at least in part, some kind of rangy, mangy wolf-dog-dingo thing. She didn’t even bother telling the police what’s really going on. What’s the point? She’s already starting to wonder if this is the result of a complete and total breakdown of reality. Why chase the rabbit down its hole?
They offered her a phone call, but she didn’t know who to call. So she called her mother at the hospital. Her mother started crying. Said Barney still hadn’t woken up. Alison started to cry, too, told her where she was. Her mother said she’d get a lawyer. They’d figure this out. Mom says what Alison is thinking: “You just... had a nervous breakdown, is all.”
And now she sits. Empty of tears. Empty of most everything, it seems. A tray of fast food nearby that she hasn’t touched. The cops here have been very nice. Which she doesn’t deserve, but it is what it is.
It’s then that she hears someone yelling. Above her. In the station. Muffled, because, well, she’s in the basement surrounded by a whole lot of concrete.
Then: she’s pretty sure she hears goats.
Outside the cells, there sits a cop—in this case, Officer Masterson, a small, older fellow with a big gut hanging over his belt and holster. Bald on top, and a fuzzy red mustache, hanging on an outthrust lip.
She sees him peer in through the door window. Just a spot check.
He meets her eyes. She gives a little wave. He nods.
Then his eyes go wide. Like he’s in shock, or in pain.
Then, he’s gone. Just like that.
And just outside the door she hears the bleats of a goat.
The door drifts open. Sure enough, a goat comes tottering in. Head stuck up through a cop shirt. Back legs kicking off the uniform pants, replete with belt and holster. The goat’s belly hangs low. Fat.
The goat is Masterson.
Masterson is a goat.
It’s then another man walks through the door. Sharp boomerang smile. Glittery emerald eyes. Scruffy stubble, long hair, v-neck t-shirt.
He dangles a set of keys.
“Alison,” he says in a sing-song voice (Aaa-leee-sooon). “It’s time to go, doll. Your ride has arrived.”
The keys jingle.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Flight Plan
ANY LIQUOR YOU want. Complimentary hot towels. A lunch of Maryland crabcakes, steamed broccoli, a small tray of moist, homemade cookies. And it’s quiet here. Like someone put a gentle pillow over the engines and hushed them to sleep.
Cason’s never flown first class before.
He looks over, sees across the aisle that Tundu seems to be enjoying it. Digging into the crabcake with abandon, forkfuls into his smiling mouth, his head bobbing to some kind of music piping into headphones.
Psyche, on the other side, looks like she’s going to be sick.
“I hate flying,” she says.
“But you—” Cason suddenly lowers his voice. “But you fly. Like, with wings.”
“That’s different.”
“How is it different?”
“There I’m in control. And I don’t fly ten miles up into the atmosphere.”
“We’re not ten miles up. Five, maybe.”
She blanches. “I don’t fly that high, either.”
“It’s not like if we crash, you’ll die.”
“No. But it’ll be terrifying all the way down.”
It’s then on cue that the plane hits a pocket of turbulence. It rattles Cason. Then: another hit—whuh-bump. The luggage racks overhead shudder. Turbulence doesn’t really bother him in theory—he just tells himself it’s the equivalent of a pothole in the airstream. And it’s not like people die from turbulence—its bark is worse than its bite.
But then the plane hits another pocket. Not a pothole but a ditch, a pit—and Cason’s body lurches upward, straining against the seatbealt as his head hits the side of the luggage bin—
And he’s about to say something, about to try to laugh it off at just how spookily well-timed all of this is, what with him and Psyche talking about plane crashes—
That’s when the roof above his head rips off.
Peels back like the tab on a soda can. Suddenly it’s bright light. Clouds above, blue sky, screaming winds, screaming passengers, and the glint of the sun on the side of shredded metal and—
Nothing.
The roof is still there.
No sound of shearing metal or panicking passengers.
The plane glides along like the puck on an air hockey table.
“See?” she asks.
“What? Did you—did you just put that scene into my head?”
She shrugs, looking a little guilty.
“You’re sick,” he says.
“And you’re not worried enough.”
He pauses. Scowls. Lunch no longer looks very good, so he idly picks at a cookie, just pulling it apart and smooshing the moist bits back together. “Hey. So if I’m not, uh, human, exactly? What happens if we crash? To me.”
“You probably die.”
“But gods don’t... die very easily, and—”
“You’re not a god. Not all god, anyway. Divine parentage does not make you functionally immortal. It does, however, make you preternaturally tough. At least in your case. You can’t shrug off a bullet, but you can probably push past the pain and heal up. But if someone takes out your heart or your head, you’re still deader than a pocket of dust.”
“Oh,” he says. “Good to know. I probably shouldn’t let that happen, then.”
She shrugs. Chews a fingernail.
“Why are you doing this for me?” he asks her.
Distracted, she gives him a look. “Hm?”
“Helping me. I don’t entirely get it. You wanted me dead.”
“I thought you killed my husband. You didn’t. You served him faithfully for years. And then I took your wife and your son and...” She shakes her head. “I owe you. Besides, I’m not much of a fan of the gods, either. You deserve truth. And I’m a very curious creature.” She sighs. “Did you call her? Alison?”
“Tried her house. Just went to voicemail. Tried her cell phone, but that goes to voicemail, too. Tells me her inbox is full.” He shrugs. “Not that it matters much, I guess. She still wants me dead.”
“Maybe we can change that.”
“I hope so. Because I don’t know what I’ll do if we can’t.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Off To See The Wizard
THAT LINE KEEPS going through Cason’s head: Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore. Except th
at the opposite is true—Kansas is exactly where they are.
He loved and hated that movie as a kid. Something about it always felt off-kilter—men made of metal or stuffed with hay, monkeys with fangs and wings, evil witches, lying wizards, a cold city made of emerald. It never surprised him that all Dorothy wanted to do was go home. Other kids said, why does she want to leave? She just wants to go back to boring old black-and-white Kansas. But boring old black-and-white Kansas at least made sense. Home was where you came from. It had rules. Sanity. But Oz was a place of madness. Of dreams and nightmares, where impossible things were possible.
Even driving through the flat-plane empty-plain nowhere of Kansas in a rental Dodge SUV, Cason can’t help but feel unpinned and lost, like Dorothy—swept up by a funnel cloud, thrown into a land where the impossible was suddenly all-too-terrifyingly-possible. Gods and monsters, good and evil.
Like Dorothy, Cason just wants to go home.
Wants to find out this was all a dream.
He’s not sure he’ll be afforded that luxury.
“It’s empty, man,” Tundu says. “This place is dead nothin’.”
He’s right. It’s flat as a sheet of paper. Cason never much thought of Pennsylvania as having a real intense topography, but compared to Kansas, Pennsylvania’s the Rocky-fucking-Mountains. Some of it is green—corn or wheat, soybeans or sorghum. Some of it is blasted and brown: giant squares of dry, tilled earth growing nothing, not even weeds.
Couple barns and silos, here and there. Some of them run-down, rust-chewed, slowly sinking back to the earth. Sometimes they see a real big operation—metal buildings one after the next, big green tractors and threshers and other farm equipment churning along, leaving a line of black smoke in the air.
And then back to nothing again.
“It’s sort of peaceful,” Psyche says from the back of the car. “It’s like the end of the Earth. Perhaps somewhere ahead we’ll find the horizon line and drop off into nothing.”
Cason thinks but does not say: That’s what I’m afraid of.
The GPS they rented dings, calls out a new direction.
And they turn off the highway.
THE WIND WHIPS across the tall grass, hissing and shaking. Clouds like tufts of fur from a car-struck deer drift across the pale blue sky.
Beneath them, a concrete circle in the earth. Footprint bigger than a barn silo. Diameter of five cars lined up bumper to bumper.
About ten feet past the circle, a small red shack with a padlocked door.
Psyche’s eyes roll around behind her eyelids, like a jawbreaker pressing against the inside of a child’s cheek. They suddenly snap open.
“Something is trying to keep me out.”
“So, this is the address?” Cason asks, slinging his pack over his shoulder. It’s filled with a few provisions from Philly: food, water, a bit of rope, a telescoping baton, and a few other... mementos. “There’s nothing here.”
“Something is down there,” Psyche says, pointing to the concrete. “Down deep. That red thread, that bloodline—it ties you to this place.”
She shudders.
“I don’t like this,” Tundu says. “I think we should go. Maybe get a... a motel room. Think this through.”
Cason sighs. He knows his friend is right, but...
The Wizard of Oz again. What makes a king out of a slave? Courage!
He shakes his head. “No. I need to do this. You guys can go on ahead, though. Get the hell out of here. You got me this far, and I appreciate the company, but I don’t want to put either of you at needless risk. Go home. Or go get a steak somewhere. I’m good.”
Tundu laughs. “That’s some action movie bullshit, man. No way. I’m staying.”
“And like I said,” Psyche explains. “I’m a very curious girl.”
Cason stares at them. Finally, he nods. “All right, then. Let’s figure out how to crack this nut. This is an old missile silo, am I right?”
Tundu gives Psyche a look. Psyche just shrugs.
“I don’t know nothing about missile silos,” Tundu says.
Psyche agrees. “I don’t even know what that is—” But then Cason feels fingers plunging into his mind—a cold mental saline rush—and then she blinks. “Oh. That’s what a missile silo is. Yes, this looks like one. By the way, the human race is sort of terrible. Trying to explode each other with weapons of that scale?”
Cason frowns at her. “Don’t do that again without asking.”
“Yes, sir.” A twinkle of mischief in her otherwise icy eyes.
“Try that shack,” Tundu says.
The shack has paint peeling off in big leprous strips. The padlock isn’t particularly impressive, but it’s enough to keep them from opening the door. Cason rattles the door. Shoulders into it. Nothing.
“I didn’t bring bolt cutters,” Cason says. “Shit. We’re gonna have to find a... hardware store or a Home Depot or something.” In the middle of wide open nowhere.
“Back in the car?” Tundu asks.
Psyche touches Cason. “You’ve got godsblood in you. Maybe it’s time to start acting like it.” He feels her inside his head again, this time giving something a little push, like nudging a coffee mug off the edge of a table—
A blush of power blooms within him.
It channels to his limbs. He feels a rush, a steroidal high.
One hard kick shatters the door inward. The padlock thuds, unbroken, against the ground. Cason laughs, and Tundu just looks amazed.
“That was some shit, man.” Tundu nods. “Respect.”
Into the shack, then.
The shack is shoddy wood, but the ground inside is hard, clean concrete.
And in the center, a hatch. Cason kneels down, tries to turn it. It won’t budge. But he takes Psyche’s words to heart—he wraps his arms around it, puts his shoulder into it like he’s not just trying to choke out a human opponent, but trying to pop the head off a pissed-off grizzly bear. Sweat pops up on his brow, his bones and muscles cry out in pain—
The wheel barks, groans, then turns.
Cason spins it. The hatch opens.
A stainless steel stair twists down into the darkness. A breeze breathes up through the passage. Cason detects smells that don’t make much sense: musty mold, fine, but he also smells the scent of cut mushrooms, of dried leaves, and of a bestial musk like he smelled back in the house of the Sasquatch Man.
“I guess it’s time,” he says. “Into the belly of the beast.”
“I’m ready,” Tundu says.
“No. No way. You’re staying up here.” Tundu starts to protest, but Cason holds up a finger. “I appreciate it. I appreciate like hell you coming out here to help me. But I can’t have you going down there with me. Besides, I need someone up here. To watch our back while we’re down there and to get ready to drive us far, far away from here.” Cason grins. “And I figure you’re too damn big to fit down the tunnel, anyway.”
Tundu chuckles. “Yeah. Yeah, okay, man. I stay up top. You got it.”
Cason looks to Psyche, eyebrows raised.
“Ready?” he asks.
“Half-gods first,” she says, gesturing to the hole.
Down, then, into the dark.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The Spiral Forest
BOOTS ON METAL steps as they sink into darkness, clunnnng, clunnng, clunnnng. The stairs are a tight spiral, so that Cason’s elbows and shoulders are always colliding with the sides and the railing. He smells the must, the dust, the distant acrid tang of metal, but then sometimes that other breath rises from below—cold-yet-humid, carrying with it a pungent, musky smell. Of animal glands and human sweat. Of cut grass and pulped wood. Of life in its myriad forms. It’s dizzying.
Down, down they go. Cason first, Psyche second.
Ten steps. Then twenty. Thirty, forty.
The steps stop making the clunnng sound when they step upon them. Instead, Cason’s boots step on something soft. Spongy and almost slippery. He reaches into
his bag, pulls out a small flashlight.
Click.
Each step, a green brighter than he’s ever seen—a carpet of thick moss. The walls, too, are striated with moss and black mold, and lined with the occasional woody vine.
“I’m guessing this isn’t what the missile silo used to look like,” he says.
“A terrarium of atomic death?” Psyche says, voice echoing from above. “Certainly not, no.”
“Keep going?”
“I do not think we have a choice.”
“What? Why not?”
“Shine the light up.”
He does. Sees her staring down with her frizzled hair and pursed lips—
But above her. The steps are gone. The center pole to which they are attached remains, rising into shadow, but ten feet above her, the stairs just... end. Or, rather, begin.
Fear crawls into his heart, nests there. Has babies.
“I... guess we keep going.”
“I concur,” she says.
And they continue their descent.
ANOTHER FIFTY STEPS down.
Here, the stairs really do end. The last step hangs loose like a busted piano key, dangling into what appears to be a bottomless pit.
A pattern of orange mold clings to the wall near Cason’s head: a clumsy, crooked spiral, glistening in the torchlight.
He shines the beam dead ahead. Here is where their ride officially ends. A round metal hallway waits ahead, the floor a metal grate tented and dented by the intrusion of pushy thick roots growing from underneath.
The metal hallway emits a faint, eerie luminescence, like the light reflecting off a long-disused swimming pool—swimmy, sickly, shifting. Born of a chain of mushrooms growing up out of the walls like steps, or rungs.
“This is us,” he says.
He hops down. Careful not to, well, go falling into eternal darkness.
There’s a flutter of wings and Psyche stands next to him.
He sighs. “You can fly.”
“We already knew this.”
“The steps end, but we could’ve just... flown back up.”