by S. M. Beiko
“Sure,” he said, fumbling for his smartphone. “We’re trying to get as many vulnerable types out while we can. We don’t know what to make of this.” He scrolled through his gallery until he clicked on a video. “These are the tailings ponds, where they dump all the muck. Well . . .”
Something had risen, smoking and huge, from the pond. Several somethings that seemed to be splitting up, crawling onto the land, and going after anything with a pulse. There was a lot of screaming. A lot of dark stains left behind. The guy tapped onto another video, showing the things chittering and throwing themselves headlong into the Athabasca River. Someone, a Fox, managed to stop one with its fire, but the creature exploded as if it were filled with kerosene.
“I didn’t make this last one,” the guy answered, a bit dismayed. “Buddy of mine sent it to me. It’s some crazy shit. Puts me to mind what happened in Winnipeg last spring. You hear about that? With Zabor?”
Phae and Natti cringed in unison. “Yeah, we heard of it,” Natti said, but she wasn’t about to say just how up close and personal they’d been. “But it can’t be anything to do with, like, darklings or whatever. Can it?”
The guy scratched his head. “Don’t know much about them, but . . . I hear there’s a lot of weirdness going on the world over right now. Everyone’s spooked. But we have to contain this before they spread. And we need all hands. You two coming?”
People streamed past, seeming to be heading for a group of trucks parked in the next lot over. Natti looked back to the trees, then to Phae.
“They’ll be fine,” she whispered. “Better they stay out of it.”
“And what are you?” the guy quirked an eyebrow at Phae, obviously a bit unsure but happy for any help they could get.
“I’m Natti, and this is Phae,” Natti said. “She’s damage control.”
The guy nodded. “I’m Evan. There’s enough damage to go around. Let’s header.”
“What about Aivik? And Aunty?” Phae asked, hanging back a few steps behind Evan as they made for his truck, others peeling away around them.
“Best they stay out of it, too,” Natti answered, flinching as the chittering seemed to get louder, however distant it still was.
~
As the truck approached the gates, Natti could feel it was ground zero.
The security gate was manned, but after the guard on duty and Evan shared a nod, they drove through without stopping.
“Pays to be an Owl . . .” Natti muttered.
Smoke billowed above the site, and the foul stench this close up was brutal. Phae choked. The landscape was ravaged, trucks and machinery and plants still going at full steam to tear the ground open and extract the oil, continue production, biting away minute by minute until all that was left was a smoking wound.
“You get used to it,” Evan sneered, more at the situation than the girls.
Natti scowled. “This place is a breeding ground for bad. Just surprised it took this long for something to crawl back out.” The bears had been right; she could feel it. The same devastation that haunted Maujaq. The infection that was crawling over the world and spreading. No one was to blame but humans, clearing the way for the demons they were here to blast back.
Natti shut her eyes. “There’s something else . . . the river . . .”
“These things are compromising the lines. That tailings pond I mentioned —”
Natti reached for the door. “Let us out here.”
“Huh?” Evan slowed down, and Phae pressed up against Natti as the door opened before the truck was put into park, and Natti dragged Phae out with her.
“What is it?” Phae asked, once Natti had brought them down a steep incline where a few other trucks had parked. Their shoes were quickly caked with muck and grime. They were standing at a ledge overlooking a canyon twenty feet below, a conveyor belt passing through it, terminating at a series of platforms where, above, enormous trucks the size of Aivik’s rig had been stalled, mid-release, in dumping their black payload.
“ — crushing plant,” Natti overheard one of the men from the trucks nearby, who glanced over at Natti and Phae. “Hey, what the hell are you girls doing here?”
“There,” Natti pointed, ignoring him. “Look.”
Black, slithering shadows were darting into the plant, sliding over the rock and seeping into any available crevice they could find. Too many to count. The chittering was aggressive, a horrible buzz behind Natti’s eyes. For a painful second she remembered Brother, but there was no use in following that train of thought — because with one last squiggling body writhing into a small crack in the ground, the earth shook violently, and they watched as the land beneath the plant’s platform splintered, one leg toppling into it.
And a great, oily black hand shot out, pulling the rest down.
“Shit!” one of the truck men cried, and his arm flared into fire, ready to blast.
“Are you crazy?” It was Evan, skidding down the rise Phae and Natti had just come down. “You’ll blow the place sky-high, you idiot! This entire site is leaching oil!”
The ground heaved and Phae slipped. Natti reached out and grabbed her, but she was halfway over the edge. A gust of wind raked rock and soot in a torrent around them, but it also yanked the two of them back up onto solid ground in a heap. Evan pulled them up the rest of the way.
“We have to —” he started, but there was an explosion as the monster heaved its shoulders through the world, screaming with a slanted mouth that bubbled black.
Natti reeled up, saw that great crack get wider, the conveyor and the huge trucks and power poles collapsing into it like a whirlpool. The fissure was a lightning strike, decimating the sands.
“There’s another one of those big suckers!” someone was calling from the rise above them. “Coming out of the tailings pond!” And without another thought to it, Natti was racing back up the rise, the noise and the stench and the destruction fading around her. She could feel the water in her blood, hear it, and it needed her.
It was just ahead, but she wasn’t even ten feet away before the pond, too, exploded, and the defending Denizens dove for cover.
“Christ!” Evan screamed as the three of them ducked behind a toppled crane, narrowly missing getting doused as the toxic leachings came down in a torrent. But for all their speed and Evan rebuffing the worst of it with a gale, he still caught some on his arm, and he hissed around the pain. “Stuff’s lethal . . . What the hell are these things?”
Natti risked a look around the crane. It wasn’t that the monster was in the pond — it was the pond, its hulking shape pulling the tainted water to it around a dark core, limbs and a face materializing in the muck. The quake that had thrown them here rocketed back, closer now, and they turned as one to the canyon and the crushing pit they’d just escaped, to see the huge gaping creature that had come up from the ground climbing over, up, and towards them.
Two beasts — one water, one oil, pincer-approaching from both sides.
“Right,” Natti said, and she took off towards the pond-beast.
Evan had a hold of Phae, his own panic intermingling with the need to keep her safe. “Listen, you need to stay —”
Her antlers shocked up in a wave, and she grabbed hold of his injured arm, the blue sparks snaking into the burn and righting the flesh. He stared at it in awe, despite the fact the world was coming apart around him.
“You need to stay,” Phae corrected, and she shot after Natti into the fray.
Natti stood her ground in front of the pale, nasty Pondzilla, its huge mouth cavernous and releasing a wail so vicious her throat tensed, struggling to breathe for the fumes it gave off. She lifted an arm, tuned out the noise, and felt deep only for the water — what little purity there was left — as the creature slithered for her.
It sent out a massive arm, slamming down like a wave, but she twisted, tore the wave from i
ts body, and threw it as far as she could, into the advancing oil beast on the other side. It howled, hissing, but kept coming.
“Dammit,” Natti grunted, and when she turned back to the pond-beast it had reared itself on its wavering body, a skyscraper about to topple right onto her.
Natti held up her hands, but the weight was too much to try to manipulate, and in seconds —
But the water smashed and splashed and sizzled off the force field Phae had conjured around them like a bubble, her eyes huge and white with the strain.
Once Natti recovered, she gathered the deluge at her fists, sent it careening to either side of them, and grabbed Phae before the next salvo could knock them both down as the force field guttered.
“Sorry,” Phae whispered, once they’d got the air that had been knocked out of them back where it belonged.
“We’re still alive,” Natti reminded her, surveying the scene. The pond-beast and the oil-beast had switched tacks now that the girls were out of sight, heading for Evan’s group of hollering Denizens, which were futilely sending ribbons of wind and fire and huge chunks of rock to no avail at the monsters.
“Those monsters just keep coming,” Phae said, leading the way across the open ground as they struggled up another rise, keeping back from the main conflict. “We have to contain them somehow.”
“It’s a lot of water,” Natti said, watching the pond-beast that was bearing down on some Foxes, whose overhand fireballs just seemed to make the water creature angrier, until it deflected one and the knot of flame slammed into the oil-beast with a molten flare that made Natti and Phae duck again.
“And it’s not like the Rabbits can just open the world up and put them into some crevice. I have a feeling that’s what started this in the first place.” Phae’s antlers flickered, and she shut her glowing eyes. “There’s so much pain here. From them. From this place.”
There was a scream. It was Evan, thrown into a pile of discarded shale. Phae dashed over to him, lighting up like a lantern as she composed the shield around her. But by the time she had reached Evan, it was too late. She tripped backward over her own feet, as his entire body was consumed by something black and sickening, his eyes flashing red, and he exploded.
The massive black oil demon that had wrenched itself free of the earth let out a terrifying roar, and when Phae lowered her arms from her face, she saw that all that was left of Evan was a spiking, dead tree — what had been his face twisted in the bark, his branch arms reaching.
“Phae!”
The thing that had climbed out of and become the tailing pond dragged itself across from the black demon, the two of them towering over Phae, reeling back to drop onto her. Natti reached with everything inside her to pull the water to her command, but it was too much, and she wasn’t close enough . . .
There was a flash. She felt water then. Too much of it. Pulled up from its moorings a few miles away and rushing the horizon like a tsunami. Is that the Athabasca River? The thought skidded across her awareness before it crushed the creatures in its fist, wrenching them into the air and smashing them back into the rock face that had birthed them.
It was a great power, coming from the two figures standing on the precipice of the tar pit they’d all been trapped in. Two figures clad in white, men of the same height, moving in perfect sequence as they lifted the creatures up again with the water, forcing their bodies together as the river crushed them, then froze. The crackling orb split like a seed pod from the rest of the water’s mass and smashed home like a meteor into ten thousand pieces.
What was left of the river receded from this toxic place, yet dark bodies separated from it all the same, skittering off to find deeper shadows to hide in before new, more heinous monsters could re-form again.
Natti got to her feet, eyes never leaving the two men on the crest. Even their hair was white, long down their backs. The only thing that distinguished the two was that the man on the left had a dark stain on his chest between the diving collar of his robes, coming up his neck . . .
Then the river washed over them as it retreated, and they were gone.
There would be time to puzzle it out later. Natti rushed to Phae’s side. “You okay?” she asked, not bothering to wait for an answer before hauling her up in her arms.
“Yeah . . .” Phae checked out the remaining bewildered Denizens who were slowly coming back to themselves, trying to figure out what had happened. She couldn’t look away from the tree that had once been Evan.
“What the hell is happening?” said an older Denizen who picked up a shard of what was left of the creatures. He dropped it just as quickly, as if it had burned his hand.
“Don’t!” Phae grabbed his hand, blue sparks shooting down it. But she, too, tore away from him, her hands fizzling.
“It’s the Cinder Plague, isn’t it?” Natti muttered, surveying both the damage and the people affected, who stared at her with a mix of terror and recognition.
“No, it . . . it can’t be,” said the man, staring at his hands. “That’s not possible. Denizens can’t —”
Natti threw up her arms. “Well, what do you call all this, then?” She pointed at the black tree they could all no longer avoid looking at.
The wind tore through the site. The world really was cracking open. And what was crawling out of it wouldn’t be satisfied until it was all burned away.
“We need to go,” Natti said, glancing back at the rise where the two men had been, the ones who had saved their skins. “North. Now.”
United Front
Barton was getting restless. The coalition had been organizing supplies and teams to go out, but all that activity had been called to a halt. They received a distress call, and an inbound flight was imminent. The barracks were buzzing, yet no firm details had come to light. The call had been from the Conclave of Fire. Only a couple of days ago, they’d given everyone a sense of hope — Roan was with them and under their protection. Now all contact with the Conclave had been shut off. No one knew where Roan was or if something horrible had happened. If it had been an accident or an attack.
“I hear it was the compound in Glencoe. You know, the one under the mountain.”
“Man, imagine a whole mountain coming down on top of you . . . too bad there weren’t any Rabbits there to stop it.”
“Maybe there were.” Barton had learned a bit more about the people he shared a bunk space with; they’d exchanged names, a few details from home. They’d all been curious about each other — him about their way of life submerged in this world of magic and danger, them about his resurrection, his Mundane existence, his heroics.
“Whaddya mean?” asked Xander, the guy on the bed across from him.
“Well . . .” Barton suddenly regretted speaking up. He’d read and absorbed everything he could on Ancient, on his own Family, since finding out he was a part of it. He didn’t want to seem like a know-it-all outsider. He took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt. “The Serenity Emerald is missing, right? Wouldn’t the person who had it be able to topple an entire mountain, if that’s what happened?”
The bunks went quiet.
“So you think it was that Seela thing the Commander mentioned.” Roslyn, the girl on the bunk above him, chewed the ends of her messy blond hair.
“Maybe,” Barton said. “Maybe I’m just getting tired of being in the dark.” The tremors shifting the earth underneath Eli’s crash site had been incredible, the first sign of something happening in days, apparently. Barton worried that they might be missing their chance.
Kita burst into the room, boots slapping against the concrete with her quick strides. “They’re here!”
Barton stood, balancing carefully on his carbon-fibre blades. “Who?”
“What’s left of the Conclave of Fire. And not only them — but the Council of the Owls as well.” Despite panting, her smile was wide and wicked. “Can y
ou imagine the drama?” She hooked onto Barton’s arm and virtually dragged him along with her. “C’mon!”
The others followed at a clip to the loading bay. Huge transport trucks were pulling in. On the way, Kita told Barton that the Fox leaders had just been evacuated out of Scotland and landed in Magadan airport. The Owls had been biding their time after being kept in a safe house in Busan. They, too, had suffered an attack. These infected children seemed to be spreading everywhere, tireless and destructive.
“Maybe these kids and their leader wanted to hedge their bets in case Eli made it to Korea, where that tribunal was going to take place. I have no idea how this Seela thing is able to travel across such wide distances so quickly, though . . .” Kita pulled them up short of the loading bay as the trucks parked and the rear doors clapped open. Rabbits rushed to help the members of the Conclave and the Council down from the trucks and onto solid ground.
Barton didn’t know what he was expecting — after spending time among the Rabbits in their fatigues, he figured that those at the elder level of the Families would all be Gandalf types. The people getting out of the trucks were battered, injured, and looked more like the teachers he’d had in public school than wise men. One large Black woman with a head wrap looked shaken. She was followed by a man with icy eyes and a beard, his cheek bearing a massive cut recently stitched. This man, in turn, helped down an elderly gentleman with a walking stick, who seemed to be the best put together of the three wearing red and gold tunics, torn trousers. Barton had been told to expect another woman — Mala, the Foxes’ de facto leader. But she wasn’t there.
Then came the Owls from the second truck. They wore silver and violet. There were four of them. Apart from their colours, the two opposing Families of Fire and Wind did not look any different — just a group of men and women who had seen too much and could do little about it.
Commander Zhou came out of the crowd behind Barton and Kita and the other Rabbits, shaking hands and embracing the Conclave and the Council in kind. They accepted his generosity with stunned looks, as if they didn’t expect to find comfort here or anywhere.