Fantasmagoria

by Rick Wayne

  “Hello.”

  Kane didn’t speak. He knew exactly what she was, but he couldn’t believe it. He stood, mouth agape, gripping the wall for support, and stared at a creature of legend.

  The white woman scowled and felt her bare stomach. It rumbled. “I’m very hungry.” Her voice was thick and syrup-sweet, almost like a child’s. She studied Kane’s face. “I must eat.”

  (NINETEEN) Assault with an Instrument of Learning

  When Vernal and Velma were teenagers, they blackmailed a math teacher, but not for money or good grades, although they ended up with both. They were in danger of being expelled a second time, which left only the gender-segregated workhouses, and that meant Velma couldn’t consummate her as-yet unrequited love for a certain varsity boy, or anyone else for that matter. The teacher, Mrs. Jankins, was the chair of the disciplinary committee and a stickler. But without her consent, the siblings would never be expelled.

  The pair orchestrated detention, repeatedly, until they were alone with Mrs. Jankins, whom Vernal—a stub of a boy even then—assaulted with a slide rule, forcing the woman to defend herself, which, as expected, she did a bit too vigorously. Armed with their dad’s old 35mm, Velma recorded the woman choking Vernal with both hands, teeth bared, face contorted with the frustration of twenty years’ teaching.

  The following week Mrs. Jankins learned that Vernal’s voice was permanently grated as a result of her actions, and that, should the kids ever be up for review, they should always be given another chance lest the film make its way to the authorities. (This was later expanded to include cash and passing marks in math.)

  And so it went for the better part of the school year until the former Mrs. Jankins happened to get divorced and decided she’d had enough. She admitted to the assault but suggested to the police that the presence of camera equipment in Velma’s backpack proved it had been staged, and asked for leniency. The police came and searched the Wort household, a dirty old flat in Parkus, along with the trunk of Velma’s jalopy where the irresponsible teens had left the film through months of scalding hot weather.

  Without any physical evidence to back up her story save some melted film, the former Mrs. Jankins lost her job shortly after losing her husband and shortly before going to jail. The Worts were expelled at the end of the year, but not before Velma consummated her amorous affair with the meat-head Dobie in the school parking lot, the same Dobie who, years later, became a prize fighter and introduced Velma to his best friend and fellow boxer, Cecil Mays.

  All of this flashed through Vernal’s mind in the last seconds of his life. As the saurus’s foot landed on top of him, he contemplated how none of this would have happened—Cecil’s horrible crime, the Jackals, his backhanded dealings with Dobie, his sister’s drug addiction—if he had not assaulted a teacher with an instrument of learning. And yet here he was, lying naked in a street, missing a finger, covered in his own vomit, and about to be squashed by a giant dinosaur.

  It was some small consolation to him that, shortly after his death, the world was going to end anyway.

  But Fortune is not without a sense of humor, a fact Vernal realized as he saw “Blackjack” Fulcrum travel overhead strapped to the belly of the rampaging megalosaurus, the very man Vernal had been trying to find, the one who’d gone missing from his roost at The Dive, the gunslinger, the Murderling, and the absolute only means of escape from a world on the brink.

  The saurus’s massive heel spike pierced the pavement between Vernal’s legs, and he felt it press against his squirming manhood, still half-erect from the bugbear intestine. His head, cocked sideways on his neck, was crammed against the inside of the creature’s foot pad. It felt like high-grit sand paper, and Vernal lost some skin off his prominent forehead.

  But as the giant foot lifted off him, its splayed toes curling for the next stride, Vernal was alive—very much alive—where a taller man would have, like LaMana, been castrated and squashed on the street.

  Vernal’s conviction sprang anew. He was going to get off this rock before the Travelers erased it.

  Vernal reached to his crotch to feel if he were whole. Satisfied, his adrenaline surged. He jumped up and screamed for joy. It was a sing-songy yelp—half hymn, half roar.

  This caught the dinosaur’s attention, and it stopped and turned and Vernal was staring at its massive horned head, the size of a city bus. He couldn’t see Jack, only the beast’s yellow, bloodshot eyes. It smelled the little man, and Vernal felt snot from its bloody nose splatter over his face and chest. But he still reeked of citrus, and the saurus turned and marched back down the street with ground-shaking steps, head high, sniffing the air. It was after something, but Vernal wasn’t it.

  The little scoundrel had held his breath through the encounter, and it was only the sight of Dobie crawling away from the crumpled car that brought it back. Dobie’s neck and half his face were covered in blood. The dinosaur’s kick, which had thrown Vernal free, had impaled the vehicle on a snapped telephone pole, like a beetle on a pin, sideways and tilted to the sky.

  Vernal couldn’t see the mechanoid woman. His face contorted in a snarl. He growled and ran at the fighter, bare feet slapping on the pavement. He wasn’t aware of it, but the stirge larva’s numbing agent was well at work, and Vernal didn’t feel the sand-like glass he trod at full gallop.

  Dobie stumbled forward, mouth agape, staring without comprehension at charging, snarling, naked Vernal. The boxer watched as the little scoundrel picked up a mangled, hockey stick-shaped bit of metal debris from the road. Vernal swung with a vigor for life he hadn’t felt since he was a boy. He hit the big man as hard as he could, right in the balls. Once. Twice. Three times.

  Dobie hit the ground clutching his crotch as Vernal beat his skull. The first blow bounced the fighter’s head off the pavement like a basketball. The second left it there. The third, fourth, and fifth knocked him out. Vernal wanted to think he had done real damage to the man, but the truth was he was not very strong, and Dobie had a boxer’s brain.

  Vernal dropped the bar with a clatter and dug through Dobie’s pockets, pulling the ancient brass key from his shirt along with a balled wad of cash. He wondered who Dobie had stolen it from. He shrugged a naked shrug and for a moment stood proudly over his fallen enemy, half-erect penis dangling in the breeze.

  A roar.

  Vernal turned as the saurus, two blocks away, disappeared around a corner. “Damn!” He heard more sirens in the distance as an autogyro buzzed overhead, jockeying amid the nearby skyscrapers for some clear news footage. The good citizens in the buildings above were standing at windows and pointing at the unfortunate people panicking through streets and alleys. No one wanted to be anywhere near the rampaging monster.

  Vernal looked up at the autogyro chopping the air. Channel 5. “Damn!” he repeated. He couldn’t be on TV. Too many powerful people were after him.

  Vernal ran into an alley. He would cut through Gunnerson’s Park. The short, chubby scoundrel took off in a sprint, numb and pumping adrenaline, belly bouncing in stride.

  He emerged from the alley and ran right into the street as the scaly behemoth strode down Lexington, scraping office towers, raining glass on the pavement, and roaring at the fleeing pedestrians below. There was a constant buzz of terror, the whirr of the autogyros overhead, and rumble of the monster’s every step. Vernal could see its head bounce over the top of some loft apartments. A car slammed on its brakes behind him.

  A white-haired grandmother in a flower print dress rolled down the window of the round-topped clunker. “Get out of the road, cocksucker.”

  Vernal turned. “Cocksucker? Don’t you realize there’s a dinosaur loose, you old hag?”

  “Who you calling a hag, you limp-dicked buffoon?” The old crone opened her door. “I’ve seen bigger wieners in a can of baby sausage.”

  Vernal, heart pounding, would have none of it. Nothing could stop him now. Not Dobie. Not Pimpernel. And certainly not some sailor-mouthed octogenarian. Burdened wi
th the dead Traveler’s memories, Vernal saw what was coming. Machines. Great flying discs a hundred meters across. They would level everything, the entire planet, and there was nothing in the world that could stop them. But he was going to live. Dammit. One way or another, he was going to get off this feral madhouse.

  Vernal clenched his jaw and bore his teeth like a lion. He had a single inch on the stooping senior, but he rushed her all the same. She swatted with her cane.

  “Ow!” He grabbed his stinging arm. She was stronger than she looked. Vernal snarled and popped her in the face like a boxer.

  Her head danced and she lost balance. The old granny fell backward and braced herself against the car as the saurus crushed a jungle gym. Parents were herding their slow-moving schoolchildren out of the park with all deliberate speed. Everyone was screaming.

  “Why you little . . .” Granny lifted her cane and whacked Vernal right in his bare sack.

  He went down, but his body was numb. He smiled up at her. “You shouldn’t have done that.” Vernal grabbed her feet and yanked.

  The old woman fell to the pavement with a yelp, banging her head against the car on the way down. Vernal grabbed the shoulders of her dress and tugged hard.

  “Wha--” The old woman’s arms flailed up and down as Vernal tugged repeatedly. The dress came free.

  In the distance, the megalosaur crushed a police car in its teeth and threw it into the sky. It crashed into a school.

  Vernal threw the dress into the car and jumped naked into the driver’s seat.

  “You motherfucker!” the old grandma screamed in a shaky voice. Her hands were wrapped around her ample bra. Her legs were covered by bloomers. “You dog-faced shit-eater! Come back here so I can shove my fist up your ass!” She released one hand to flip him the finger.

  Vernal hit the gas and took the corner of the park on two wheels, tires screeching.

  Over the din, he heard the old woman curse.

  (TWENTY) Enter the Dragon

  A shadow fell over the city.

  Jack looked up to see the spread wings of a steel-armored war dragon blot the sun. The light shone through tiny tears in the leather as it fell between buildings and landed on top of the drug-addicted megalosaurus, pushing it through the facade of a nearby brownstone. Glass and brick fell amid competing roars—the dinosaur’s like a waterfall, the dragon’s an explosion. But Jack could still hear the children scream over the din. They had been hiding in a second-floor bathroom, half of which was now gone. If any adults had been with them, they were pancaked in rubble.

  “Shit.” Jack kept his ass clenched tight.

  The dragon perched on the half-prone saurus with its hind legs, its batlike arms spreading its wings wide in triumph. It seemed surprised to find a man underneath.

  “You asshole!” Jack screamed at the dragon.

  Its jaws snapped once, then twice. Then came the great rumble, like the bellows of an industrial furnace. The dragon was inhaling. It bent its long neck.

  “There are kids--”

  There was an eruption of flame. With wings lifted over the rubble, the dragon bathed the horn-rimmed dinosaur in the ejecta from its fire-organ. Jack was doused. He screamed and kept screaming as the dragon’s breath blew white-hot.

  When the inferno subsided, most of the pseudoflesh had been burned from his body. What remained was black and smoking and clung to his metal exoskeleton, the tips of which glowed red. The air around him shimmered with his own heat.

  Jack couldn’t remember ever seeing himself fleshless. He stared at his exoskeleton. It was gilded, etched in ornamentation, and riddled with swooping gaps that teased him with glimpses of the writhing mechanisms underneath. It was beautiful.

  The straps broke. Jack fell two stories to the basement and landed with a crash. His metal frame cracked the concrete.

  “Fuck.”

  Everything hurt. He wasn’t sure he had the energy to stand. He looked from the basement up to the second floor but couldn’t tell if the children were alive or dead. The megalosaur was smoking. The horns that crested its body were still on fire, but it was breathing. Organic armor doesn’t conduct heat, and the animal’s plates were thick and all-encompassing. Jack figured it probably wouldn’t survive its wounds, but it wasn’t dead. And it wasn’t done.

  The dragon was only two-thirds the size of its opponent, but its head, neck, breast, and forelimbs were covered in segmented metal armor, a gray-scaled white knight. It stayed perched on the behemoth underneath, trying to use its weight to keep the saurus down.

  In their element, war dragons were the top predator, and they knew it. Most were bred for aerial anti-tank combat. One well-trained war dragon with a good plan of attack could single-handedly eliminate an entire column of mobile artillery. They were fast, and their angled metal armor was designed to deflect and detach, meaning they were impervious to any shelling other than a straight kill shot.

  Jack looked up. The winged soldier was gloating. It had no inkling of the street brawl it had started.

  The saurus lunged. It wasn’t one-tenth as smart as the dragon, but it had a hunter’s instinct, and it went straight for the throat. Its massive jaws clamped around the dragon’s slender, extended neck. Metal bent. Detachable armor clattered to the street under an immeasurable bite-force. The dinosaur pushed forward on legs three times as thick as its flight-worthy opponent and, without letting go of the dragon, rammed it into the opposite row of buildings. Glass and signage fell as smoke billowed from the saurus’s still-smoldering plates.

  Jack didn’t wait. He lifted himself as fast as he could and climbed the cracked remnants of a concrete staircase. He still couldn’t move his draw arm, and, like the dinosaur, he was smoking. His left leg had trouble pivoting, and he dragged his foot like a tiny corpse. Each step was hard labor.

  But the children were still alive, and when he heard their sobs, Jack collapsed with a sigh against the smoldering ruins of the building’s street-level entryway. Mail from the shattered metal box lay on the ground. Wires sparked.

  Across the street, the dragon was whimpering through its half-closed throat. It flapped its wings and scratched at the saurus with clawed feet. It gouged the heavy plates and scraped the ash away in inch-thick grooves, but it was almost breathless and panicking and the damage was haphazard. The saurus wasn’t letting go.

  A car screeched to a halt next to the dinosaur’s spiked feet.

  “Jack?”

  “Verrrnaa-a-a-a-l.” Jack’s voice box stuttered a mechanical drone. He was out of energy. He couldn’t even lift his hands. This was it. The end.

  “Jack!” Vernal leapt from the idling car wearing a flower-print sun dress. He had no shoes, his hand was bloody, and his neck was caked in vomit. “Come on, Jack. We gotta go.”

  The dragon inhaled as best it could and forced a futile volley of fire into the sky. Its armor was the only thing keeping its neck attached to its body. Its wings flapped and blew dust from the street.

  Jack shook his head. He couldn’t move. The gears behind his jaw, just visible through the carved gaps in his skull, turned the corners of his mouth slowly, slowly into a smile. “D-y-y-y-i-i-n-n-n-g-g-g . . .”

  Then the shelling began. Twin artillery shots ripped through buildings on both sides of the street like bullets through water. Debris flew and Vernal covered his head.

  “Fuck!” The force of the explosions lifted the tiny hairs on his skin and shook his bowels.

  The saurus kept the dragon pinned as another shot narrowly missed its flank and cratered into the street, sending chunks of asphalt through the car’s windows. A car alarm sounded as Vernal went down. The saurus pulled the dragon free and spun it by its neck. Vernal looked up as the dragon’s full body flew in an arc overhead. Its tail whipped through the air and struck a bank of windows.

  “Like hell!” Vernal lifted his dress and pulled the key from his ass. He pushed Jack, who fell sideways like a rag doll, and stuck the key into the exposed hole in his back. Jack was st
ill hot, and Vernal almost burned himself.

  “Ow!”

  He wound. One. Two. Three. Four.

  The building shook loose dust as another shell landed nearby. The children screamed.

  Jack heard—and felt—those wonderful, sputtering clicks as the key turned and turned. He filled with energy. He hadn’t been this strong in weeks. He’d almost forgotten.

  Vernal removed the key and stuck it back between his ass cheeks.

  Jack scowled at the little man, a head over half his height, and bounded up the stairs to the second floor, dragging his gimp foot. He ripped a blanket off a debris-covered bed and wrapped it around the cowering children as the saurus rammed the dragon with the horns on its head. Two more shells landed nearby.

  The reports of the cannon fire were audible now. Jack looked up to see an Imperial zeppelin make a lazy turn in the sky. It was covered in white, Corinthian-carved armor punctuated by artillery bunkers from which tiny cannons peeked. The halls and towers on the roof looked like a small city, a miniature skyline that mirrored the one below. The ship was held aloft by a striated white bladder. Large fans propelled it with force.

  There was a puff and a crack and a single shot whistled in an arc of smoke across the sky right toward the melee.

  “Damn!” Jack leapt from the shattered-tile bathroom and fell through the hollowed opening of the building, landing in the basement again as the shot missed its target and ripped the upper floors from the brownstone. He covered the children in their blanket with his body. They screamed amid falling brick.

  The dragon stumbled in the street, tripping over its wings and trying to flee. The smoking dinosaur charged for a kill strike.

  A shell struck the megalosaur in the side. The creature barked and 90 feet of flesh twisted in the air, end over end, from the force of the blast. Blood and bone splattered onto the road as the carcass fell with a minor earthquake.