by Leod D. Fitz
Before I could stare too hard, however, Talus rolled up his sleeves and… sort of unfolded. Connected at his wrist, and held hidden, running from there all the way back to his elbow was a sort of extension of his limbs. It was a long, pointed extension that reminded me of what one might see on a mantis, not simply from the jagged bits running along its inside, but by the way he held them up above his head, with the points oriented at my face.
“Oh yeth, bethore I thorget,” he slurred at me, barely able to speak with his body contorted for violence.
The lower set of limbs reached back and sorted through his jacket until they came back with a pair of thin bracers made of leather with plates of metal sewn into them which he wrapped around the edges of his lower limbs.
“Ready?”
I grimaced, testing the air, completely unsurprised to find the scent of magic coming off his bracers.
Now that I had three scents to compare, I could tell that they had something in common. The dagger that had hurt me so badly, the bracers and the knuckles were connected somehow.
I looked Talus over and sighed. “Any chance you could cut out the humming thing? I’ve got customers upstairs.”
He grinned… at least, I thought it was a grin. “Don’t worry, they’ll athume you have an ithe mathine running.”
Then he was moving.
He was fast. I’d expected that, but I hadn’t anticipated just how fast. As soon as he came forward, I shifted laterally, getting out of his way, but I only just barely managed to avoid the slice he aimed at my midsection. His momentum carried him past me, and he put one of his two upper limbs through my wall.
I cursed as a broken tile fell to the ground. And then I was swinging the sledgehammer at his head.
He pulled away in time to avoid the first blow, and for the second swing, he brought one of his bracers between us.
The hammer slapped against the thin metal. And simply stopped.
There was no jarring sensation running down my arm, and his arm, though it was thin and extended awkwardly, didn’t so much as bob from the blow. It just absorbed the attack.
A small part of my brain wondered, for a moment, what happened to the energy I’d invested.
And then I was too busy dodging blows to think about that.
His upper arms reminded me, rather oddly, of needles on sewing machines. They plunged down and yanked back in absurdly fast succession.
From the damage they did to my floor, however, they had more in common with a jackhammer.
I swung my sledgehammer a half a dozen times. I would have swung more, but about every third blow or so was interrupted by the bracer which stole its momentum and threw me off my rhythm.
As much as it was in my power to do so, I moved sideways, trying to keep Talus from being able to force me into a corner. All the energy that I didn’t spend trying not to get hit, I invested in finding a weakness in his defense, although it seemed that a six-limbed man with compound eyes had little trouble dealing with attacks from the side.
It became quickly apparent that I was fighting a losing battle. Though I managed to evade all of his attacks, the ground we fought on was becoming increasingly treacherous for me, while it seemed to have no effect whatsoever on him. Likely because his wings supported the majority of his weight.
Inevitably, I found myself stepping on infirm ground and tripping backwards.
Talus pressed his advantage, darting forward, his upper arms striking blows behind me to prevent me from moving backwards, while his dripping fangs moved in for the kill.
It was exactly what I had been waiting for.
I slammed the sledgehammer into his maw where, as I had anticipated, it was ripped from my grip.
But the time it took him to spit it out of the way was all the time I needed to pull the searing blade from inside my jacket.
Whether he realized what it was as I pulled it out, or if there was simply something in my expression which warned him that this was no ordinary weapon I couldn’t guess. Either way, he pulled back, preventing me from severing his head.
But he’d gotten too close to get himself entirely out of my reach, and I continued the swing twisting my blade so that I hit, and neatly severed, both of Talus’s extended forearms.
There was a moment of dead silence as his buzzing wings stopped.
And then he screamed.
My first instinct was to drop to the ground and cover my ears against the auditory assault, but I knew that my advantage might well be fleeting, so I forced myself to move forward, towards the painful noise, sword raised for a killing blow.
Talus reached up and caught both of my arms in his hands. His useless forearms flapped against me, and his grip was weak. But it was enough to hold me back as he pressed the bracers against my chest.
And that was when I found out what happened to all of the energy they had been stealing from my blows.
When I was a young man, right around high school, I was hit by a car once. It was an accident. One of the neighbors wasn’t paying enough attention as he drove home. I suspect he had been drinking. He struck me as I crossed the street. It threw me fifteen feet and broke a dozen bones.
My mother had a bitch of a time convincing the man not to call for an ambulance. Pretty sure that was night he gave up alcohol.
It had been one of the most painful experiences of my young life. It had definitely been the hardest I’d ever been hit.
Until now.
I flew across the length of the prep room and struck the wall hard enough to knock the door next to me out of the frame.
I fell to the floor where I sat, stunned.
A small part of my brain registered the motion as Talus, whose face looked as slack jawed and shocked as mine felt, forced himself to his feet and fumbled to throw on his jacket and goggles.
He turned to leave, then paused, turned back to the table and grabbed the coins and the ring I had stolen from the other chimeras.
I shook my head and pulled myself up, leaning heavily against the wall, but managing, somehow, to hang on to the searing blade.
Talus, who had been reaching for the knuckles, went white, his eyes following the motion of the sword. He stumbled away from me, towards the room’s other exit. The one that led down to the loading dock.
I moved to follow him, but my sense of balance wasn’t where it needed to be.
The sword was still in my hands. That was good. That was important.
The sledgehammer. I wanted to take that too. I paused long enough to retrieve it, then limped out of the room, sword in one hand, hammer in the other, leaning heavily against the wall as I headed down the hallway.
By the time I reached the loading bay, I had healed enough that I could walk without leaning.
The door was just clicking closed as I arrived. I pushed it open and headed out. Talus was about thirty feet in front of me. He’d gotten his goggles on and straightened his jacket a bit, and from the looks of things he’d recovered most of his senses as well.
He glanced back towards me, fear on his face, then turned and hurried around the corner.
I followed him.
It wasn’t until I had almost gotten to the top of the sloping drive that I realized I was about to emerge into view of the public carrying a sword and a sledgehammer.
The sword slid back into its sheath under my jacket, and the sledgehammer disappeared up my right sleeve, which unfortunately meant that I’d have to keep that arm straight, and slightly hidden behind me if I ran into any vanillas.
I started running into vanillas as soon as I emerged from the driveway.
They were all over the place, and from the looks of things, they were emerging from my business. Had I been human, they would have made an excellent cover for Talus, as it was, however, I followed his scent effortlessly.
Until a hand grabbed my arm.
I turned, tightening my grip on the head of the sledgehammer, ready to put it through my attacker.
Thankfully, before I made
that mistake, I realized that it was Tricia who had a grip on me.
“Walter! What’s going on?”
I looked around us as she spoke, half expecting Talus, or Eryx to emerge from the crowd to kill us where we stood. “I have him on the run! I finally have one of those pieces of shit where I want him!” I blinked and turned my attention back to Patricia. “What’s going on here? Why is everyone running out of the building?”
She flushed in annoyance. “What the hell was I supposed to do? First there’s all that banging down stairs, like someone is slamming a refrigerator against all of the walls, and then there’s that… that… that awful noise. Everyone was asking me what was going on. I couldn’t think of anything, so I told them it was an alarm and we needed to evacuate the building in an orderly manner.”
I grimaced. An evacuation during a viewing? That wouldn’t exactly help my reputation.
Then again, what else was she supposed to do? All the chaos going on downstairs had to be explained somehow. Some kind of accident, a mechanical failure, a faulty this-or-that, or a poorly secured piece of industrial which-or-what. It was the best possible explanation, really.
“Walter? What am I supposed to do now?”
I thought, fast. “Go inside the building, count to twenty, come back out and get everyone’s attention, tell them you spoke with the alarm company and they checked the system, and that everything is fine, we just had glitch in our alarm. Tell them the alarm has been turned off, and everything is safe and get them back inside to finish the viewing.”
Trish closed her eyes, her lips moving as she quietly repeated everything I told her.
“When Maria and Tom come to complain, and they will, tell them that management apologizes, and that their bill will be altered so that they’re only paying cost.”
“…only paying cost.”
I slapped her on the shoulder. “Good girl, I’ve got to go.”
“Walter?”
I paused. “What?”
“I think that we need to talk about a raise soon.”
I sighed. “Fine. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
I raced off, following the lingering scent of the chimera before Trish could ask me anything else.
Chapter 13
Talus’s scent led me through my parking lot and into the neighboring lot. It had been a gas station or auto repair shop or something until it went out of business a few years back. Now it just sat empty, the few patches of grass on the property growing steadily more unkempt.
Eryx had been watching from here. I could smell him. Talus had come here, met with him, and they’d gone inside the building.
I hesitated. Talus was injured and on the run, but even in his current state, I’d be a fool not to take him seriously. And Eryx was with him now, uninjured. According to Orrin he might be the least dangerous of all of his brothers, but that was like saying he was the slowest cheetah in the pack, or the dumbest person in Mensa.
Then again, I’d spent the last few days allowing them to control when and how we met. If I let them go now, I’d be giving them back control over the tempo of our encounters.
However slim my advantage might feel at the moment, it was better than what I’d get if I let them jump me again.
I licked my lips, cracked my neck, and entered the building.
It was dark and I, not for the first time, offered a prayer of thanks to whatever sad, wretched god watched over ghouls, that I wasn’t as reliant on sight as humans.
Then I ducked.
The metal bar that had been swung at my head embedded itself in the door frame.
I stood, putting every muscle in my body into swinging the sledgehammer.
Eryx grunted as the blow lifted him off of his feet and sent him flying into the grease pit.
I raised the hammer over my head and jumped towards the pit. That was when Talus hit me in a full body tackle that knocked the sledgehammer out of my hands. We bounced off of the wall and rolled across the floor.
The smell of venom filled my nose. I reached up and grabbed onto his head before he could sink his fangs into my face.
I felt a satisfying smooshing sensation as my thumb perforated one of his eyes.
But I didn’t fool myself into thinking that I’d accomplished anything more meaningful than annoying the chimera. His eye would be back to normal… or at least, his version of normal, in the time it would take me to re-inflate a soccer ball.
Talus grabbed my hands, trying to pull them away from his face, while his serrated middle set of limbs started working their way through my jacket, aiming either for my organs, or hoping to find the searing blade he knew I still carried.
Either way, I elected not to give him the time. I extended my jaw, catching hold of one of his fangs, which I began to twist.
Talus gasped in pain and pushed away from me.
I assisted him on his journey with a two-footed farewell to the sternum, then rolled to my feet, careful not to trip into the pit.
Talus shrugged free of his jacket and set his wings vibrating. In this confined space, in the dark, the vibration seemed to echo from every corner. It became too loud… too much noise for me to hear over, and too ubiquitous for me to pinpoint.
My eyes, at least, had adjusted to the dark. As much as they were going to, anyway. I could tell more or less where he was when he moved. That would have to be enough.
I saw some subtle movements coming from the insect-human hybrid, and could just make out the sound of metal scraping on cement.
He’d picked up my sledgehammer.
Well that wasn’t good.
The searing blade came free of its scabbard, and I felt a momentary sense of comfort from the scent of power that poured off the blade.
I covered the space between us in something less than a heartbeat, swinging the sword in an arc that should have connected with Talus’s sternum.
Instead the blow stopped dead a foot away from him.
The bracers. He’d gotten one between us in time to absorb the blow. That was not good. It meant both that I’d helped to recharge one of his weapons, and that he could perceive my motions a lot more precisely than I could see his.
I swung again, this time aiming for his legs.
Talus raised his feet up off the ground, and swung my sledgehammer at my head.
I twisted out of the way fast enough to avoid having my brains splattered across the room, but my forward momentum was broken.
The buzzing of Talus’s wings was forcing me to rely too heavily on my night vision. My nose, as useful as it was, could only tell me what direction the enemy was in, not what kind of punch they were throwing my way. This fight was rapidly becoming a lost cause.
As if to emphasize the point, Eryx slammed into me from behind.
I knocked him off of my back with a few well aimed elbows and swung hard as I turned. I was rewarded with the tug of resistance and a yelp of pain as the tip caught my opponent, but the wild blow cost me my balance. I stumbled backwards, unable to pursue the enemy as they retreated from me.
And then the door to the back of the building opened and my opponents slipped away.
I stayed where I was for a moment, trying to catch my breath. The last of the daylight might make it easier for me to keep track of them, but it would certainly make it easier for them to coordinate against me.
Oh, and I barely had enough energy to stand up.
That’s the thing most people don’t understand about violence. It’s absolutely exhausting. You spend the whole time completely tensed up, trying to be ready for any possible event, ready to swing at an opening, ready to block if they attack, ready to run, ready to chase. Five minutes spent in the company of people who might attack you at any moment is better exercise than half an hour on the treadmill, if you ask me. Three minutes in an actual fight can wipe you out for the entire day.
Add onto that the strain of having to regenerate from the hits I’d taken and I could do with a few days of sleep. Instead of curling into a ball,
though, I forced myself over to the door, where I stopped and listened, trying to figure out if the chimeras were waiting on the other side.
Instead of hoarse breathing, though, I heard some shambling footsteps, followed by car doors and an engine.
I burst out the back of the building, tripped on the sledgehammer they’d apparently dropped, and raced after them just in time to see their car peel around the corner and fly down the street.
Just before I opened my mouth to hurl curses at them, it occurred to me that I was now standing in public in a horribly mangled jacket and pants, holding a sword. It might not be the best time to draw attention to myself. I tucked the weapon into its sheath, under what was left of my jacket, tucked the sledgehammer inside the failed business, and hurried back to the funeral home.
As I reached the front door, I glanced around. The only person looking my way was a man in the Quick Pho U parking lot with shaggy blond hair and thick eyebrows. He seemed vaguely familiar, but the wind wasn’t in my favor so I couldn’t check his scent.
A terrified looking Trish looked up in surprise as I entered. “Oh, thank god you’re here, Mr. Walter! I tried to calm them down, I really did, but they’re so angry! I just— “
She stopped talking and blinked at me, standing as I was in a horribly mangled suit.
“What happened to you, Mr. Walter?”
I shook my head. “Not now. Who’s angry?”
“Maria and Tom? About all the noise?”
Oh, right, them. I rubbed my face. “Okay, I’m going down to the prep room, I want you to bring them down to see me in about five minutes.”
“Bring them to you?”
I nodded. “In five minutes. You think you can do that?”
“Yes sir.”
I grimaced and headed down the stairs to assess the damage. Thankfully all of the bodies had been in the freezer, and the fight had not done any damage to the major pieces of equipment. I’d have to do some work on the floor, obviously, and some of the walls, but it was work that I knew how to do. No pipes were broken, and no major electrical lines were effected.
All told, it would probably take me a week to get everything squared away. Less if I could guilt Simon into helping out.