Love and Darkness (The Cause Book 2)

by Randall Farmer

  The White Witch neither vanished nor got carved into snowflakes.

  Carol Hancock: December 5, 1972

  Haggerty charged, tire iron and hubcap ready to crap on my day and remind me she was my boss.

  I burned juice into my movement and metasense. Haggerty became fully metasense visible to me, because of my burn, and I moved, likely faster than any Arm not named Eissler had ever moved. I had a lot of juice ready to burn, on purpose, and I needed to burn down my juice fast before I started any real combat. I burned a lot of juice into my movement, enough to heal the muscle and tendon strains I accumulated as I burst-accelerated. Haggerty continued her charge, unable to stop her momentum. I leapt around her, over her, behind her, through her legs, back over her, pinwheeled over her head to the left, ducked behind her and ended up on her back right. As I danced around her I rattled her head nearly two dozen times with the side of my hands, my fists, the hardened skin of my elbows and knees, and my special boots. I had gone through her legs too fast to hurt her below her waist, and I certainly didn’t want to waste any chances at bashing at her head, my goal in my new attack methodology. I kept my aerial ballet going by using various I-beam supports, expensive cars, a rack of luxury tires, and any other bit of nearby car repair shop item heavy enough to give me things to kick off. I’m not sure I touched the ground more than four times in my initial attack run.

  My new human superball combat method achieved what I wanted, complete tactical surprise. Heh. Haggerty tumbled out of her charge and smashed into the side of a flat black armored limo. Before she got to her feet I was on her, still burning, still focusing on her head, ending with a tumbling move I had picked up from Lori, a flip in the air to put my feet on a vertical I-beam eleven feet off the ground, then a push off from the I-beam and a full force kick to the side of Haggerty’s head. Her neck snapped sideways and she rolled first to the ground and then to her feet. She started a burn of her own, self-healing, exactly what I needed her to focus on.

  The ghost presence still shadowed me, still to my back left. The ghost presence had stayed at my back left during my entire tumbling run and initial attack sequence, which meant the metasense presence wasn’t real, but a perceptual ghost, a mental attack. This wasn’t in Haggerty’s arsenal, and the presence didn’t make me feel any worse than normal. This had to be connected with something Van said, or hinted at, or something I forgot.

  Save that I never forgot anything.

  I dropped the speed burn and approached Haggerty with my normal combat tactics – dash in, punch hard, dash back. Repeat. Repeat. Behind me and a room away, her people finally got the steel bar across the door to their safe room. Bully for them.

  Repeat, repeat. I went for more than her head, and on my fifth dash in I knocked the tire iron from her hand with a spin-kick when she foolishly swung at me. My early burn attack staggered her, exactly as I wanted, in preparation for this:

  “You no longer deserve to lead me,” I said. “You’re too easily fooled, and I have no desire to die because of your never-ending foolishness.”

  My words, in my true voice, did more damage to Haggerty than my earlier head pummeling did, damage to her resolve and stature. I had fooled her badly with my crazy Rayburn act, and by analogy, so had everyone else.

  “Your shame at Keaton’s reneging on her deal with you, the shame that kept you from telling me what Keaton was up to, nearly got me killed. Because of your pride and hubris, you put your beloved trusted underling, me, in a position where I had to accept Bass’s screwy tag just to survive.” Saying the last cost me 3 points of juice. Bass’s damned tag still tried to hide. “You failed me, bitch, and failures don’t get to lead other Arms.”

  Dash in, punch hard, dash back. She scraped my left arm with her hubcap buckler and I switched back to my speed burn attack, feigning left, zipping right, followed by a tumbling run over the top of her back that allowed me to grab a grease gun and use it baseball bat style against the back of her head. She anticipated, tumbling forward to lessen the blow, but she missed her counter at me and had to increase the burn into her self-healing.

  “Where’s your Focus tags, Amy? Where’s your Crow tags? Where’s your tagged household, Amy? You talk a good game with your desire to push the Cause, but you didn’t follow through. Gail gave me juice, Amy. Gail gave me juice!”

  I stumbled, undone by the pain of a figurative icepick in my mind. I shouldn’t have stumbled. This was my victory strut. Amy wavered, ready to give in, beaten by my psychological games and my stature. All my tags, Arms, Focuses, Crows, Transforms and normals, along with Gail giving me juice, gave me enough stature to easily humble her after I proved my case.

  Someone didn’t want me to win.

  Before I burned out the effects of the mental icepick on my mind Amy was on me, tire iron back in her hand, a typical Arm predatory snarl on her face and fucking winning the fight.

  I hadn’t seen her move. The icepick in my mind had cost me at least a second, perhaps more.

  Her momentary what the crap? expression, when I stumbled, meant this wasn’t her attack. I was fighting two fights at once, one with Amy and one inside my own mind.

  Amy beat on me far too many times before I leapt away. I skidded to a stop in a crouch, not in good shape. I had deflected one of her tire iron blows with my left arm, and I thought I had broken it, but not badly.

  I was in trouble.

  “Where’re your fancy words now?” Haggerty said. “You paid off your debts to Keaton and her sadistic coterie of Arms by reopening your basement. Did you think that wouldn’t come with consequences? Hasn’t Gilgamesh ever told you how much you hurt your own juice structure when you fall into your beast? Oh, right, he can’t, he’s too busy screwing Focuses to take care of his Arm.”

  “You’ve done squat,” I said. I burned juice at the icepick in my head, both healing and metasense. I wanted the icepick gone, and I wanted it gone, now. Nothing. Amy would consume me like yesterday’s lunch, and I felt an involuntary illness in the pit of my stomach, the feeling of months of effort wasted.

  “Anyone ever tell you you’re a reckless idiot?” Amy said. She bent down, warily eyeing me, and dropped the hubcap to pick up a pry bar to use as a second weapon.

  Another icepick poke at my mind, another several seconds lost. I came back to myself with Amy on me, her left arm and pry bar invisible, about to dent my head. I ducked down, punched her in the kidneys and rolled. The tire iron clocked me in the left hip, hard enough to bruise bone. Now I was the one burning into my healing.

  I refused to believe Bass was my second enemy. She didn’t have the necessary skills. My second enemy felt like a Focus, and she would use Amy to destroy me.

  Desperate, I burned at the hole in my memory as I sprinted away from Amy, who followed, close. Success! Van’s voice in the car on the way to the Branton: “You’re not listening to me! Gail says she can’t find you in the Dreaming and she’s afraid Patterson’s gotten to you. And when anyone tells you this, you forget!”

  Patterson. Fuck. This I didn’t need.

  Out of room, I flipped to pirouette off a six foot tall metal tool box, tipping it over and sending socket wrenches flying away from me in a spray of chrome. I ducked a combined tire iron plus pry bar attack and rolled. I didn’t know how Amy got both of them spinning in her hands, and spinning opposite directions at that. She had always been a better technical fighter, and since her trip to Europe to help (and learn from) Arm Eissler of East Germany, she was the best fighter of us Arms. Technically. “You sent everyone out to push the Cause and did nothing but sit back and collate the results!” I said, back to regular Arm challenge tactics. “What dangerous heroic Cause pushing did you do?” Patterson camped out in my mind. Making people forget things was Patterson’s style. She must have found a way to turn Bass’s tag into her tag; that would certainly explain why I couldn’t shuck the fucking thing. I even remembered when she had infected my mind, as I had hallucinated Patterson attacking my mind while I halluc
inated, under the effects of Bass’s juice drugs. I had fixated so much on Bass I never gave the hallucination any credence, likely another effect of Patterson’s mental attack.

  My realizations left a deeper empty pit in my stomach, revulsion mixed with terror. I remained Arm-wary of Keaton and Bass, but my instincts made me fear Patterson and her insane Pittsburgh multi-Focus household. I can beat Arms all by myself, thank you very much. With Patterson, I always needed help.

  “You always blame your failures on others,” Haggerty said. She circled me and burned to heal head damage as I crouched, partly penned in by the fallen tool chest and a concrete wall, examining my options and burning away my hip damage. “When others fail you blame enemy action. You never get results because you’re too tolerant of everyone’s failures.”

  And they called Amy the ‘nice Arm’. Shows you what they knew. Why behind my left shoulder, though? Why didn’t Patterson put her mental attack locus in front of me, hogging my vision and metasense, where it could distract me, perhaps fatally? Did this mental apparition have a real world component, despite my earlier analysis?

  “I’ve certainly been too tolerant of your failures,” I said, my voice flat and tuned to a Noble’s terror roar, enough to make Haggerty hesitate. “My tolerance ends today.” She charged. My hip patched up, I burned into speed again, my juice count now down to the broad optimum point where Arm activities are at their best. I ignored the flaming icepick in my mind as best I could, grabbed Haggerty and used the momentum from her own charge to toss her behind me. Behind my left shoulder, and into the concrete wall. Did Patterson put her attack locus behind my left shoulder simply because of the fact that no Arm in her right mind would ever let anyone get behind her in a fight?

  I swiveled my head as I kept my shoulders still. Yes! When Amy tumbled through the apparition, she flinched. As did the icepick effect in my mind.

  Her flinch gave me an opening to use, and I did, burning again into my speed. I closed on Amy, pinning her against the concrete wall. When I reached her, I burned into my muscles for the strength I needed to take Amy down. My strength was below average for an Arm, the tradeoff for my speed benefits. I got inside her defenses before she could react, an impossible move to her, her read on my juice count nearly fifty percent off. By the amount I had burned, my juice reserves should be sucking empty. I took her tire iron from her and beat her, head, arms, torso, head, head, torso, left leg, right hand, head, neck, head and down Amy went, spitting teeth.

  A third major icepick blast lost me several more seconds, not long enough this time for Haggerty to recover. Victory neared, but I needed more. I tried another gambit, and positioned myself with Amy at my back, until she overlapped the apparition. Amy screamed and thrashed. Perfect. I concentrated on removing the Bass tag. I burned juice into removing the Bass tag. Nada and nada. I burned juice into my metasense and faintly saw another fight, a Dreaming fight, where ninja samurai whatever Sibrian and a winged angelic Gail battled a white-clad white-haired medieval woman who had to be Patterson. Mary and Gail had two allies with them, an unknown Crow wearing a star-studded black cloak and a beautiful but deformed bear. I couldn’t help them, but I mightily appreciated the help they gave me. Help that might allow me to defeat Patterson and win the fight in my mind. Gail had come through again. I gave her my most fervent prayers.

  Gail Rickenbach: December 5, 1972

  “You have bought yourselves death today, a death you will suffer for years,” the White Witch said. “The Glory of God is not yours, and you will be cast down to the depths of Hell to suffer with the Monsters, the Traitors and the Sycophants.” She raised her hands and they all fell. Gail got knocked off the bear and the bear skidded to a halt at the foot of the rose bush.

  The bear Roared and the world changed. Instead of Gail’s Dreaming garden, they appeared now in a snowy arctic hell, with droopy fir trees instead of dark gloomy pines, and a wondrous full moon shining through the trees, illuminating the blowing snow. The rose bush vanished and became a hole in reality; in the hole they looked over Carol’s shoulder as she fought Haggerty in her challenge fight. The White Witch appeared as herself, not as a flock of aphids.

  “Witness my victory, as I show an Arm her true Monster form,” the White Witch said.

  “Never. Never!” Gail said. She flew up from the snowdrift, noticing her shadow on the snowy ground below now had wings. The game at play wasn’t what any of them thought; the White Witch wanted Carol to be more beastly and sadistic. Gail beat about the White Witch with her wings while raising Matt Narbanor’s cross in her right hand to ward off evil.

  The White Witch sneered at her. “I’ve had enough of your juvenile interference. You I own now.” A tag. In the Dreaming. Gail shrieked, and with an instant of shock she realized she had broken the barrier and learned to speak in the Dreaming.

  The bear grabbed the White Witch from behind. The White Witch sprayed black goo at the bear, a horrific attack akin to liquefied gristle dross, but worse. The bear Roared again, spraying the goo away from him. He forced the White Witch to the ground and sat on her. The attack on the Witch disrupted the hold of the Witch’s tag on Gail. The stress lost Gail her wings, though, and she fell knee deep in the Dreaming snow.

  “No! Stop this!” the White Witch said to the bear. “You’re not real!”

  The bear flickered for a moment, and then Roared for a third time. No more flicker, and this time an aurora appeared around him and above him, pulsing strongly. Gail understood. The bear did what he did because the Progenitors backed him. He was their anointed one.

  In the real world challenge fight Carol did something to make Haggerty scream; in the Dreaming world the White Witch echoed Haggerty’s scream. The real world vanished from the hole in reality, as did the hole, the challenge fight not yet over, leaving just the bear’s arctic forest.

  The bear raised his scimitar claws and struck, killing the White Witch’s dreaming form without a moment of hesitation.

  Carol Hancock: December 5, 1972

  Bass’s tag vanished in an instant of icepick pain, as did my vision of the Dreaming fight, Amy’s screams, and about half of my remaining supplemental juice. As the tag vanished some formerly lost memories rushed back into my head: a bunch of failures by Bass to break me as I laughed at her pathetic work, and one particularly interesting memory of Rayburn attempting to interrogate me while Bass took a torture break. Only this wasn’t much of an interrogation, but an attempt by Rayburn to figure out how…how I supposedly beat Bass’s tricks. Hell and damnation! Bass had done the same thing to Rayburn she did to me, and Rayburn wanted out from under.

  In a way I won the Bass fight retroactively. Bass had needed to edit my memories to make me think she broke me, deleting all recollection of what turned out to be my substantial resistance. I only accepted her doubly false tag because I thought I couldn’t counter her tricks.

  I walked over to Amy, hiding the unsteadiness in my legs, and knelt. Her eyes showed fear, as did her body odor. Yes, Patterson’s vileness had hurt Amy as much as Amy’s purity hurt Patterson. At least the icepick in my mind had vanished after Bass’s tag faded. There was nothing wrong with Amy a little firm leadership, my leadership, couldn’t fix.

  “When you started to push the Cause, you sneered at the possibility of enemy reactions,” I said. Her blood pooled around her head, and my nostrils flared when I caught her submission scent. Success! “You said ‘bring it on’. You said we would fight. Only when our enemies did show their faces, you didn’t fight and you kept on pushing the Cause. You allowed yourself to get addicted to the research success and forgot that you’re an Arm, and forgot that anything we gain can be taken away from us by our enemies if we don’t fight back.”

  “Bitch, you’re one to talk about not fighting back. Not after you let Keaton and Bass do…”

  I put my elbow into her lower spine and pushed, hard, bruising her spinal column, immobilizing her legs and shutting her the fuck up. She would be a paraplegic for a few
hours, until she healed. Until then, I would get to play. She needed to be humbled, and she wasn’t, not yet. Not even close. I got up, found a pair of pliers, and sized up Amy’s fingernails.

  No, I hadn’t lost my sadistic urges just because I no longer wore Bass’s tag, and this was business, where I had always been comfortable with my beast. I owned my own darkness, my own beast, and I would put her back in her cage someday. Eventually. Not now. Haggerty’s mistakes had tossed me to the wolves, and she would pay before I rewarded her with a tag.

  In a moment the screaming started.

  I was the number two Arm again.

  Gail Rickenbach: December 5, 1972

  Gail came back to herself in the empty closet in Zielinski’s abandoned apartment. She still held the child-like Polaris, but now Gail knew ‘him’ and understood.

  “Lori?”

  Lori snuggled deeper into Gail’s embrace. “Keep holding me,” she said. “That was rough. Concentrate on your healing. I smell blood, both mine and yours.”

  The White Witch had hit Gail hard enough in the Dreaming to force Gail’s real-world body to split open with self-induced wounds. Lori tagged Gail, something quick and dirty, and began to pass juice to her, one juice buffer to another. Lori’s juice buffer could hold nearly four times the juice of Gail’s, one of Lori’s tricks, and Gail’s hovered near empty. The tag was about the most disgusting juice effect she had ever suffered through, making her want to vomit. Gail healed herself as fast as she could without going into a healing trance. “This insanity turns you on,” Gail said, metasensing Lori’s arousal. Lori had already healed her own wounds.

  “Of course it does. I was made for combat like this, for combat against evil,” Lori said, uncharacteristically emotional and proud. “Patterson’s our enemy, the bane of the Cause. We hurt her, she hurt us, but we freed Carol from her. Metasense our spilled blood. The blood carries Patterson’s taint, making it her blood, allegorically, from her wounds.” Lori wiggled around in Gail’s arms to face her, and kissed her. Gail didn’t back away, but she didn’t respond, either, save to the joy of victory and the power of the juice.