by E. A. Copen
Copyright © 2021 E.A. Copen
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed physically or electronically without E.A. Copen’s written permission except in the case of brief reviews or non-commercial uses. For permission requests, please email [email protected].
This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, people—living or dead—or places is purely coincidental unless otherwise noted.
Cover design by: MiblArt
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Chapter One
The overpass crumbled beneath me, plunging me feet-first into darkness. I scrambled to grab onto something, anything, but the only thing I could find were more falling rocks and rusty rebar. My fingers caught a handful of slimy fur and closed. I used the grip to pivot my body and leapt up onto a furry forearm. The creature’s arm was as wide as my body and belonged to the most putrid-smelling monster I’d ever encountered.
Lightning flashed in the darkened sky, briefly illuminating the creature’s crooked, bulbous nose, oversize, squinting eyes, and copious white body hair. He stood an impressive fifty feet tall, towering over the decaying overpass and the convoy of armored trucks trapped on one side.
Ugh, a troll. Why’d it have to be a troll?
The troll snarled at the sky and shielded his eyes from the brief flash of light before swatting at his forearm where I perched. I was already gone by the time his giant palm came down, halfway up the troll’s arm. The troll grunted and lifted his hand to swat at me again. I made it to the shoulder and slashed at the side of the troll’s neck. Sparks flew. Dammit, just my luck. Not only was he a troll, but he was a rock troll. No amount of slashing or stabbing was going to get through his granite skin. Time to move to plan B.
I narrowly avoided getting smashed by the troll’s meaty palm by sliding down his shoulder blade. The troll roared and spun, swatting at his back while I used handfuls of back hair to climb down. When the troll finally realized he couldn’t reach me with its hands, his tail whipped up and snapped at me. I let go to keep from getting smashed. Wind rushed by, burning my face as I fell, arms flailing.
I hit the ground and rolled. A burning pain surged in my shoulder where I struck concrete. I didn’t have time for pain. The troll lifted its foot. The air chilled as the giant foot hovered over me, bathing me in shadow. I rolled to one side, and the ground shook as the troll’s foot came down inches from me.
A rope dangled over the side of the broken overpass. I pushed myself up and ran for it, ignoring the worsening pain in my shoulder. The troll spun and roared at the same moment as I grabbed the rope and yelled, “Pull!”
The rope slid steadily upwards, but not fast enough. I gripped a section of the swinging rope above my head, grunted, and pulled myself up.
The troll swatted at the edge of the broken road. Someone above screamed. The rope stopped moving. All I could do was pull myself up the rest of the way. Agony burned in my shoulder, worsening with every inch. Blood raced down my back from the deep gash, and tired muscles screamed. My lungs burned with the need to catch my breath. The ground trembled as the troll rampaged. Guns fired and flares burned to life, painting the smoky ground blood red. Dammit, I’d told them not to light the flares except as a last resort.
With one last pained grunt, I pulled myself up and over the edge onto the road where the convoy waited. Three armored trucks sat abandoned, their drivers in the road, shooting flares and fumbling to nock arrows with shaky hands. They fired, and enchanted arrows struck the troll, creating a shower of sparks.
The troll swept his hand along the line of drivers and their escorts, knocking one of them to their deaths far below.
“Stop shooting, you idiots! You’re just pissing it off!” I waved them back from the edge, but they were too panicked to listen. I doubled over for a second to catch my breath with a huff before standing straight and limping toward the rear truck. “Guess if you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.”
I hopped up onto the side of the truck and fought to pull myself up onto the roof. A huge cloth tarp covered the back of the truck. I cut the ropes holding it down and jerked the cloth away to reveal a huge, circular light mounted atop it. Three car batteries powered the light, but they were disconnected to keep them from overloading, which meant I had to attach the cables before it’d be of any use to me. I wiped sweat from my forehead and rushed to attach the clamps in the correct order while people shouted behind me.
One more… Blue sparks erupted as the metal teeth of the clamp latched onto the battery terminal. I lifted an arm to shield my eyes. The giant spotlight blinked to life, casting a brilliant white column of light into the night.
I stood and slid behind the spotlight, scanning the darkness for the troll. I gritted my teeth and gripped the handholds, swinging the light around to shine directly on the troll.
The troll roared and dropped the broken man he’d been holding onto to put both hands in front of its face.
“Smile, asshole.” I pulled the lever.
The spotlight strobed.
The troll bellowed and swung wildly until his movements slowed. White powder coated the tips of the troll’s fingertips, quickly spreading over its skin and freezing the troll in place. Inch by inch, the strobing light turned the marauding fifty-foot troll to stone. Less than a minute passed before the murderous beast was only a stone statue, fingers just inches from the front car in the convoy.
I let out a relieved sigh and bent to unclamp the battery cable before the light drained the batteries completely.
The convoy leader was waiting for me when I climbed down off the back of the truck. His nostrils flared. “About time. We lost two good men, no thanks to you.”
I glared at his haggard, blood stained, and bearded face. He was a dwarf, a short and stalwart people prone to quick tempers and rash decisions. Namely, challenging me while I still had my sword bared.
“That’s a funny way to say thanks.” I touched the wound on my shoulder and pulled my hand away bearing a thin line of blood. It felt a lot worse than it probably was.
The convoy leader followed me as I limped toward the middle vehicle. “I’m filing a petition to deduct their hazard pay from the escrow.”
I spun around. “The hell you are! It’s not my fault you didn’t listen when I told you not to fire arrows and flares, and it’s not my fault we ran into that thing. I told you not to take this route!”
“It cut an entire day off the journey!”
“And it cost you two people.” I stepped up to stand face to face with him.
His face hardened, but he was breaking inside. They always did. For whatever reason, they always thought they could renegotiate my fees. Maybe it was because I was a lone woman; maybe it was because I charged the same as a three-man team. Then again, I’d just done the work of three men. Why shouldn’t I be paid like it? If he filed his petition, I wouldn’t get paid at all until after a thorough investigation by some bureaucrat, and I couldn’t afford that.
I folded my arms. “I did my part, so I’m taking full pay. Unless you want to take it up with the bounty office when we get to Atlanta. Maybe next time you’ll listen to me when I say we should avoid overpasses after dark.” I turned my back.
He spat loudly on the concrete. “Poacher.”
“You don’t like it? Hire a guild next time.” I grabbed the passenger door to the second truck and yanked it open. The driver was already inside, waiting for the convoy to move.
It took him a minute, but the convoy leader eventually realized I wasn’t open t
o further negotiations. He spat again and stomped to the front truck. With one foot inside, he made a sweeping circular gesture. The trucks purred to life and the armored convoy made a u-turn.
It was another twenty minutes before we found our way to the desolate ground below the freeway, headed south through the edge of No-man's-land. Convoy wheels rolled over the skeletal remains of pre-Cataclysm yards and overgrown cul-de-sacs. The rotten carcasses of houses that hadn’t been built to withstand waves of magic and mutated monsters cast sharp shadows over the land. Above, a waxing half-moon hid behind silver clouds and their constant threat of rain. Humidity stuck to everything like a damp blanket.
Some things never changed.
No one alive remembered a time when those houses, yards, and cul-de-sacs formed the suburbs of Atlanta, or when the land had been a place called Georgia. The Cataclysm was ancient history for me, taught in my elementary lessons along with the extinction of the dinosaurs. I’d grown up learning about the founding of the twelve kingdoms, how they had all grown from being lone city-states, each of which had once been a part of the larger United States. It had seemed so impossible that a single legislative body governed both Pacifica and Appalachia.
The one thing every generation could agree on was that southern humidity was a beast all its own, and the Kingdom of Atlanta was famous for its sticky nights.
I spent the last part of our journey using the truck’s mirror to bandage my shoulder wound as best I could. Proper treatment would have to wait until I completed the job. I could’ve done a better job if I were willing to strip off my shirt in the truck cab, but I knew better than to do it with anyone watching. If anyone found out the truth about me, I’d be as dead as the troll I’d just killed.
It was roughly eleven o’clock when the first lights of Atlanta reflected off the cloud cover, and another thirty minutes before we saw the city walls. They jutted a hundred and twenty feet into the air in a massive octagonal shape, with anti-aerial beast cannons on the battlements. Spotlights on swivels swept the ground in front of the city for threats so the two million souls within could sleep soundly.
As soon as we were within range, the radio on the dash buzzed to life as the convoy head called into the city to announce our arrival. “Kingdom Control, this is postal convoy echo-zeta-Charlie en route. ETA twelve minutes. Requesting permission to enter. Over.”
There was a brief pause before the radio crackled back to life and a female voice said, “Convoy echo-zeta-Charlie, please transmit FOF code. Over.”
“Roger that, Kingdom Control. Code is two-one-seven-four November-foxtrot-India. I say again, code is two-one-seven-four November-foxtrot-India. Over.”
“Confirming code. You are cleared for entry, convoy echo-zeta-Charlie. Please proceed immediately to gate four and onto decon. Thank you for your service and welcome to the Kingdom of Atlanta.”
Massive gates cracked open like a hungry mouth, spilling light into the night. Our convoy crawled into the opening and into the outer city, a wide space with several stables, stalls, and smaller outbuildings. Potholes jostled the truck roughly back and forth. Anyone who might have fallen asleep immediately woke.
During the day, the place would’ve been crawling with lines of traders checking in their goods and waiting for permits, or to be cleared by decontamination. There were still a few people standing about after dark, but definitely not the crowds I would’ve expected in the daytime. There was something to be said for coming into the city late rather than at the height of the day.
Road weary men and women looked up from their lantern-lit tables or the shadowy corner stalls where they bent over dice games with cigarettes hanging from their lips. Dark eyes locked onto me as I climbed down from the convoy to retrieve my bag. I glared back until every one of them turned away.
The convoy leader busied himself dealing with the bureaucrats, their forms, and procedures while I went to collect my equipment from the back of the truck. Several dock workers had already started unloading crates marked with red postal service stamps. I bypassed them to grab my black duffel bag. The weight of their eyes followed me all the way to a door. A small wooden sign hung over the door, announcing it was the Kingdom Jobs Office. I pushed the door open, and a string of jingle bells announced my arrival in the darkened office.
The smell of fresh wood polish tickled my nose as I looked around. It was a small office with only a few folding chairs as seating. A few feet ahead, the night shift jobs secretary waited behind a wall of impact-resistant glass. She was a tiny lady with sharp features. Her hair had been pulled back into a harsh bun, her face frozen in a bored stare.
“Welcome to the Kingdom of Atlanta Jobs Office,” she said, sounding as bored as she looked. She lifted a clipboard from a hook on the wall next to her, licked her finger, and thumbed through the first few pages. “You’re with the mail convoy?”
“Name’s Ember Dixon,” I said, leaning on the counter. I dropped my bag on the floor by my feet while I waited.
Her eyes flicked up to my face for a moment before dropping back to the page with a snort. “You’re early.”
“Not by choice.” I shrugged.
Her pen scribbled across the page. “That covers the name. What guild?”
“None.”
She eyed me again. Her nose twitched, probably from all the effort that kept her from spitting “poacher” like a curse. Then she turned back to her sheet and wrote my answer. “Anything to declare?”
“I killed a bridge troll about an hour northwest of here. Other than that, it was a pretty uneventful ride.” Would’ve been even less eventful if the convoy leader would’ve listened to me. I rolled my shoulder and winced.
“Injuries?” She didn’t look up.
“Nothing serious.”
She finished filling out the form and slid it through the tiny slot. “Please sign here, initial here, here, and here.” While I signed and initialed the half dozen forms, she opened the lockbox and started counting bills onto the table, her face sour.
I didn’t care how she felt about paying a poacher. Money was money to me, and a job was a job. I hadn’t traveled all over the eastern half of the continent to make friends. I did it to make enough money to buy what I needed to live. Still, it would’ve been nice to get a thank you occasionally. It’d never happened, not so long as everyone got hung up on the poacher thing. While I could mitigate the whole thing by joining a guild, doing so would require me to submit to a physical, one that I would never pass.
I slid the clipboard back to her, and she passed my money to me, careful not to touch me. I thanked her and tucked the money safely away in my money clip, which I attached to a chain, and slid into my pocket. Pickpockets were an epidemic in cities.
Outside, the air felt even more oppressive than before. The convoy leader was still going through his paperwork with the locals, and I didn’t want to be around when he finished. Last thing I needed was to get yelled at some more for his mistakes. The only way into the city proper from the outer city was to pass through decontamination. Not only would that take forever, but I could never clear decontamination. Not without setting off a city-wide alarm.
I slid into the shadows at the edge of the outer city yard and worked my way along a wooden fence until I found a loose board. A couple of well-timed strikes and the board moved easily to the side, providing a space just wide enough for me to slip through.
More shops and closed food stands lined the street on the other side. Their lights were dimmed or darkened, signs flipped to closed. Aside from a few stragglers and some feral cats, the streets were empty. I took two steps before the sky opened and rain fell. Just my luck. At least I couldn’t complain about the humidity anymore.
I put a hand over my shoulder and limped through the street while raindrops ran through my hair, down my nose, and sank into my bones. The main streets would provide more cover via their awnings, but I stuck to the back alleys. It wasn’t just practical; it was a necessity to find what I needed.
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My feet and shoulder ached from the long walk. Water seeped into my clothes. Even as the rain intensified, I kept going. There was no other choice but to move.
Atlanta’s broken midtown skyline rose in the distance, the jagged upper floors of long-abandoned skyscrapers dark reminders of a world that once built up instead of down. The sky was safer then, home only to birds and planes. Now, the old Westin Hotel on Peachtree looked like something had taken a bite out of it. Massive claw marks scarred the exterior, and the building sat lopsided. The other buildings were just more of the same, protruding from the ground like old headstones in a forgotten graveyard.
I turned away from midtown and stayed to the eastern side of the city, ducking into low-running alleys and through narrow arches. Iron gates blocked off some paths, but there was always a way forward for someone who knew how to look.
I paused next to a cracked wall of concrete and crumbling brick. Stamped into a single brick at the corner was the image of a serpent eating its own tail. The head faced the alley, pointing the way. I ran my fingers over the rough surface of the image and followed the way it indicated.
The further I went into the sleeping city, the more awake it became. People sat on broken garden walls, smoke drifting up from small, sparkling rolls of paper pinched between their fingers. Cigarettes laced with low-quality potions. It wouldn’t be enough to give them powers, but for an hour or two they’d feel like they could see further, move faster, and understand deeper.
I passed through a thick cloud of the smoke on my way down a pair of smooth, stone steps and waved it away. At the bottom of the stairs stood a wooden door with a Caduceus painted on it. Anyone not in the know would think it a strange symbol, the two warring serpents coiled around Mercury’s winged staff. Then they’d pass on by, none the wiser. That was, if they found the place at all. I’d only found it the first time by following the tiny ouroboros carvings placed on inconspicuous surfaces around town. Like the hobo signs of old, these symbols were hard to spot if you weren’t looking for them, and even more difficult to decipher. Only the initiated understood their meaning.