Wilde Stories 2018

by Steve Berman

  Wasn’t it enough to want a man who wasn’t afraid of getting burned?

  His hand went around my wrist then, his other on my shoulder; he pressed me back down to the earth, quiet as a tomb.

  “You afraid of a little fire?” I said, my throat dry and rough, knowing it to sound petty and small. I hated him and I wanted him at the same time.

  His voice came out raw; he seemed older than I’d ever thought of him. “It’s just not a good idea.” Around his neck, the shine of his silver chain blinded me.

  I wrenched my arm from him, and walked away right quick; didn’t want him to see me with my eyes leaking. Couldn’t give a body the idea that fire could be quenched.

  The next week, we lost a half a mile to the scale-folk. The bodies of their family had floated downstream, right to Momma Scales. They came surging out of the swamp, urged on by their mother, voices ululating and screeching with anger.

  I was only a boy when the sky opened up. I’ll always remember the swath of emerald light I saw on the other side, always remember the screaming wings that fell out of the hole in Dark Heaven. I remember the shaking of the earth, quake upon quake as beasts not of our world crashed, seeding themselves along the coast. From my vantage then, I could see two, maybe three, but as reports came in, more than twenty of the monsters fell from their world into ours.

  That’s when the scaled things of the swamps and jungles and deserts started up and moving, becoming more man than beast. The wings from beyond the sky were urging them up the food chain with an awful rapidity. But they weren’t the worst.

  Like any good infection, it started small. A scratch is sometimes all it took, though it could vary. “If the skin starts turning, you better get to burning,” is something Da used to say before he left for lands inland, lands unscaled.

  I think seeing his brothers rise out of the swamp, reptilian armor flying up their necks, their brown eyes going gold… I think it broke him to see his family become their family.

  I’ll always forgive him that, at least.

  But if you didn’t defend what family you had left with all you had, what were you?

  I hadn’t seen such a number of the scale-folk as I did the day we lost that half mile, surging forward, snapping jaws and stronger claws with a swiftness to make wind balk. Our toes dug into the swampy earth as we battered scaled ribs with plunging knives and pikes. But really, we were a shield for the Mayor, who fought like a man haunted.

  White-hot bullets flew with such speed as to shatter skulls, two, three in a row. The air was alive with the screams of his salamanders. He was an artist that made death.

  They were gunning for him. Momma Scales urged them on with her grief, and soon enough, we had fallen back. If I looked out of the corner of my eye, I could see the outskirts of town.

  But I couldn’t look away from the battle for fear I’d die if I did. So I didn’t miss the moment when the Mayor went down under a pile of snapping jaws.

  For a heart-wrenching moment, I forgot how to breathe.

  But in the next, he threw them off, pulling strength from where, only Bright Hell knew. Scale-folk scattered in the air, fell to the ground, and we were there to thrust steel through their bellies.

  I turned to smile at the Mayor, glad to see him alive despite any awkwardness that had come of my stupidity a few days before. Despite my hurt, he was a part of this town now; it would kill everyone to see him kiss the bottom of the swamp.

  We locked eyes from across the murky water and I lost my breath again.

  His green eyes were gone. In their place were thin pupils, vertical, bright as molten sunflowers, and his teeth had taken on a sharper edge than any man I’d ever seen.

  Years of combat instinct surged through me and had I a gun in my hand and not a pike, I would’ve shot a bullet right through him, faster than you can say “Gator-man gonna get ya.”

  He staggered to his knees in the water, and yowled like a cat whose tail had found the rocker. When he looked up, pale and shaking, he had recovered his green eyes; he looked at me, ashamed and exhausted.

  That night, I grabbed his hand after dinner, and steered him to my cabin. Some of the others threw whistles and whoops after us, but I paid them no mind. Upon entering, I threw him into a chair, and kicked him hard back into it when he tried to stand. I didn’t know if I was angry or frightened or both.

  “Show me.”

  Mayor stared up at me, grim. “You don’t want to see this, Copper.”

  I stared him down, arms crossed and feet wide, trying to channel my Momma as much as I could. Finally, he began to undo his shirt.

  The mossy green and bark brown scales that mottled his chest glistened as they caught the moonlight. They trailed up to his chest from a terribly sewn gash in his side, divots of teeth marks and puncture wounds running around the edges.

  I felt my muscles go hot, my throat tight. “How? Most men would be tearing out their lover’s throats after a day with a bite that big.”

  He fixed me with a gaze, hung up on my words. He fingered the necklace he wore, rubbing a silver feather. He winced as he buttoned up his shirt. “Smoking the scale seems to trick a body into thinking you’ve already turned. Slowed it down somewhat. But a body can’t be tricked forever.”

  “What in the world made you think to do such a reckless thing?”

  His eyes went glassy and the moonlight seemed to pass through them and illuminate some memory held in the back of his skull. “A lover, a…companion. Name of Adam. He was bit when we were crossing the Brollins Canal looking for mercenary work. Gator-gal snagged him off the side of the boat, tried to drown him, but we were able to kill her and drag him back on deck. Old healer onboard stuffed the pipe into Adam’s mouth, lit the scales, and said it would help. It did for a time. Adam held on, but—” and here’s where the glass of his eyes went dark, and he stopped straying down memory’s path, “After a few months, Adam couldn’t fight anymore. He liked the voice in his head, he said. He liked being a good son to Momma Scales, liked how it made him feel. So he let it happen, and dumb toad I am, I let him live. Thought I could appeal to him, my sandy-locked lover. But all that happened was he took a bite out of me and fled into the water. I been tracking him ever since, and well—”

  “He’s here. He’s come to the heart of the Nation.” I finished the thought for him, though by no means did it give me pleasure to deduce his intentions, nor did I feel superior knowing the full measure of his pain. My eyes roved the landscape of his body, its lean curves cutting the night to ribbons. My mouth wanted to taste his, but all I could do was imagine the pain racing through him like a panting hound. “Can you last long enough to find him?”

  Mayor had sunk into the high backed chair, refused to meet my gaze. “I’ll find him, that’s for sure. But living? Well, shit. If I’m as good a liar as I hope, then next year, a year after, if I’m careful. But—” he laughed then, his eyes getting fever-bright, almost yellow in the dark room. “I can…hear her, Copper. When I’m down at the border, pushing back my would-be brothers and sisters, I can hear her, right here.” He tapped his temple. “She whispers to me in verses of fire and smoke, seduces me with the promise of family, of living forever, I—” He stopped, put a shaking hand to his eyes. His breath rushed out of him, ragged and low. “She’s a compelling Momma, Copper. Broke my Adam like a piece of driftwood, and he was a saint compared to me. Whatever she’s doing to drive the scale-folk, it’s leaking into me, and I don’t know when I’ll be too full up of her to resist.”

  It’s a hard thing, watching the strong at their weakest moments. Saw it with Da when he wept at his brothers’ empty graves, saw it with my own Momma clutching her gut, trying to keep her insides on the inside. How do you build someone back up when they’ve gone as low as they can go?

  In my experience, you either kick ’em in the ass or let ’em work it out. And the Mayor? He needed a kick. “Well, you’re just going to have to hang on a little while longer, mister,” I said, with as much author
ity as I could muster, “because you still have work to do, and no lizard bitch momma is going to keep you from doing it. In fact, I say we kill two crocs with one bullet, if you catch my meaning.”

  When he looked back up, his smirk was wide, his evergreen eyes bright.

  We rode out the next day, our packs stuffed with

  as many knives, bullets, and pikes as we could shove into their confines. Mayor followed the pressure in his mind south and east, and we marched out behind him.

  A few bodies from the town had joined us, folk who found the idea of a suicide mission to rid Sunblooder’s Stand of the biggest progenitor of scaly bastards appealing. No use in telling them the story of Adam. Mayor would kill me if I revealed his secrets, and so I kept my mouth shut.

  Was it a dumb plan? Sure as the sun is bright. But Mayor was dying and I was lost. And if we had a way to find Momma Scales in the tangled heart of the Scaled Nation, well, we were just desperate enough to try to put her to rest.

  The mood was light as we crept past the border and through the swamp, with Felbrem and Ko betting on who would win themselves the heart of Momma Scales herself. Jocularity on the road to Bright Hell; who’d have thought it?

  Mayor walked in the front, sullen and gaunt. If he was smoking scale, he could have been fine. But every scale-folk in a mile would be drawn us to like gators to guts, and so he couldn’t stymie it.

  With every step, he fought the infection through sheer will.

  And with every step, he lost a little more.

  We passed through pools of murk and forests of reeds, keeping our eyes split for any scale-folk that may have been lingering. Mayor said we’d be fine for a few miles more.

  When pressed for answers, he tapped his temple with a pained look, turned back to the front, and shaded his eyes. Were they golden just then? Or was that the light being tricky with me?

  At night, Mayor and I shared a tent, where he went to the farthest corner, and wouldn’t look me in the eye. Did he think I’d hate him, to see those yellow eyes in the night?

  I awoke to guttural coughs, hissing whispers. Wrenching myself up, I saw Mayor curled around himself in the corner, shaking like a rattlesnake in the brush. He was covered in a cold sweat, and on his neck I saw scales creeping up behind his ear, brushing the back of his neck.

  He was all motion then, sprang at me, hands clamping down on my shoulders. His eyes were a totality of gold and they were never going to change back.

  “She was never meant to be here, Copper.” His voice was high, and shook like a willow in the wind. “Her, her brothers and sisters, they were thrown from their lands through a rent between spaces, denied any succor, say, or justice. Their enemies threw them through the sky and gifted them to us.”

  I tried to shake myself from his grip. “Damn it, Mayor, snap out of it!” His fingers dug deeper, the nails longer, his eyes twitching.

  “They’re changing us, Copper. She’s making us family, an army.” His gaze snapped up, and it was as though he could see through the tent top, into the sky and beyond. “Someday, they’re going to go back, and take back what’s theirs. And we’re going to go with them.”

  I slammed my fist into his gut as hard as I could and he let go, fell to the damp earth, lay there, sobbing and sobbing.

  Should I have gone close to sit with him, be there to lend him a little humanity, which was dying in his chest like a timid cinder caught in a storm? Should I have put my hand on his hand, and shown him he wasn’t alone, not even here, at the end of his life? Should I have kissed his brow, and promised that he still had a chance to live?

  Aye, maybe I should have.

  But I stayed in the corner, terrified, and watched him sob himself to awful sleep, remembering that iron grip on my shoulders, that piercing golden light in his eyes, the scales that were marching across his skin. To this day, it churns my gut to think of how I failed him in that moment.

  It wouldn’t have stopped what happened next, but Bright Hell burning, what in all this terrible world do I know?

  The next morning, Mayor wore a cloth around his eyes. When Ko asked him why, all Mayor did was smirk and say, “So those scale-folk see what I really think of them.”

  The group laughed at that. I shivered.

  It was no matter, because everyone forgot about his eyes when we entered the Scaled Nation proper. In the morning light, scattered across the thin reeds and fuzzy bulrushes and angular black trees of the swamp, there were scale-folk of every kind.

  They had taken a cue from their ancestors, and lounged along the banks of the swamps, letting the sunlight flood through them like liquor, making them drunk and sleepy. Some of the croc-folk had their mouths open, nestled in the cattails, jaws working against empty air, while pyth-people rubbed and coiled their long necks together, splashing in the muck. Gator-folk lay on their stomachs in the water among pink-flowered lily pads, nostrils just above the surface, while the iggies draped themselves across branches of heavy bald cypress trees.

  Mayor put a gloved finger to his lips, motioned for us to get close. When he started walking, I felt a pressure in the air, slight, and wondered if Mayor was keeping us safe, trying to hide us and disguise us with the other scale-folk.

  We walked slower than slow; slow enough that time could miss us if it wasn’t looking.

  Up ahead, through the density of green palm fronds and low-hanging cypress leaves, I spied a mighty crater deep into the earth, and saw something enormous shift in the shadows. I turned to confirm with Mayor it was Momma Scales, only to see he wasn’t there.

  The whole group stopped dead. I couldn’t feel the ripple in the air. The nearest gator-man’s nostrils flared. Icicles pierced my heart, eyes searching for the Mayor. I looked back the way we’d come.

  Mayor was standing over a gator-man.

  He had his gun drawn, aimed at the gator-man’s heart. His hand was smoking, he was holding the six-gun so tight. His arm was shaking, fresh tears rolling down his cheeks, staining the bandage around his eyes. His mouth opened, and it looked he was trying to say something, but his mouth would not obey.

  I read his lips, best I could: Adam, he said, over and over again.

  How does a body run as slow as they can? I moved as through spiderwebs, inching my body forward in the water, going to Mayor as slow and as fast as I could.

  I stood a foot from him, glanced at the sleeping croc on the ground, Adam, who had a silver chain around his neck, a feather at the end glinting in the light. Around the Mayor’s neck hung its twin.

  Mayor worked his mouth at me, unable to talk for the grief that blocked his throat. I shook my head at him, lips shut.

  Mayor thrust the gun out at the sleeping gator. The Mayor’s eyes were pleading with me, bleeding water like a stuck cactus.

  I pointed back at the group of frightened sunblooders, to the stirring figures scattered around us, at the viper’s nest we had walked into.

  I’ll never forget that moment, when he ripped the band of cloth from his eyes, turned his golden lights on me and mouthed, I’m so sorry, Copper.

  His arm went limp.

  He dropped the gun into the water.

  The sleeping gator-man, Adam, opened his eyes.

  As other scale-folk began to wake at the sound, Adam rose and seemed to see the Mayor, really see him.

  And then Adam remembered what he’d become, and did the only thing he knew how to do, did to the Mayor what he had tried to do so many years ago when he had first turned.

  His jaws clamped around the Mayor and then he dragged him under the water, blood already staining the air.

  I swear I saw Mayor smile, a smile as wide and sad and starless as Dark Heaven.

  It didn’t matter if I screamed at that point or not, because the air had become nothing but sound, nothing but motion and pain and teeth, as the scale-folk sprang from sleeping and saw how we had slipped past them.

  We pulled out our pikes and our steel and our guns.

  I screamed to move onward, to
ward the crater.

  The scale-folk were still groggy from sleep, but there were so many of them. How do you fight off a world of hate? I sent a pike through the neck of a pyth-person, and sidestepped the swipe of a gator-gal, whose needle teeth were flecked with blood and grime. Her tail sent me flailing, splashing down into the water. I could feel her moving towards me.

  I had never contemplated my death, only figured it would come when stupidity got the best of me. Never figured it on someone else’s stupidity, but that’s life, I guess.

  Then I noticed how the water near me was boiling. I plunged my hands into the mud, and found the scorching handle of one of Mayor’s salamander six-guns.

  I whipped the weapon skyward and fired. A lance of flame blew through the gator-gal in front of me, rocketed across the sky, and exploded over the crater.

  The echo of the gun caused the scale-folk to stop their attacks, and quirk their heads as though they heard something far off. Fine, let ’em listen. I searched the mud for the other shooter, found its hot handle and lifted it out of the water, steaming.

  In that pause, my heart broke to see Mayor’s silver necklace shine up from the muck. I snatched it up and put it in my pocket. Someone had to carry his ghost home.

  I turned just in time to see Momma Scales rise.

  Her shadow could’ve shrouded the town proper, and I had to put my arms up against the windstorm her wings whipped up, though I caught glimpses of scales the color of deep fire, a belly as white as fresh sand. She shrieked in a language of a land astride ours, and I didn’t have time to think as from her great jaws erupted a hurricane of heat.

  The spear of flame made for me and mine like an arrow. With no time, and no place to run to, I thrust the six-guns into the air, remembering how Mayor would nestle them in the coals to charge them, and praying to Shadow Matron, oh, how I prayed it would be enough.

  The fire slammed down on us, and arced around the guns in my hands. I could feel the salamanders drinking, deeper and deeper and deeper still, learning that their guts were not meant for so much power.