Warriors [Anthology]

by George R. R.

  The sun is just clear of the horizon. I can feel the dark clutching blindly and feebly at me, but it hasn’t the strength to carry me away. I am on my own. I look around to get my bearings; then push myself away from the garbage trucks and start wobbling off.

  A car horn close beside me, almost in my ear. I sense who it is before I turn my head and see the blue-and-white police car. He is alone, glaring at me as he pulls to the curb. “Get in, superhero,” he calls. “Don’t make me chase you.”

  I am too weak, too weary for flight. I open the front passenger door and sit down beside him. He raises his eyebrows. “Usually we keep the escape artists in the back, with no door handles. What the hell.” He does not start up again, but eyes me curiously, fingertips lightly drumming on the steering wheel. He says, “You look terrible. You look really sick.” I do not answer. “You going to throw up in my car?”

  I mumble, “No. I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “Because we’ve had nothing but pukers for the last week—I mean, nothing but pukers. So I’d really appreciate it, you know . . .” He does not finish the sentence, but keeps eyeing me warily. “Boy, you look bad. You think you ate a bad clam or something?” Abruptly he makes up his mind. “Look, before we go anywhere, I’m taking you to the hospital. Put your seat belt on.”

  I leave the belt catch not quite clicked, but as he pulls away into traffic an alarm goes off. He reaches over, snaps the catch into place. I am too slow to prevent him. The alarm stops. With a quick glance my way he says, “You don’t look crazy or anything—you look like a nice, normal girl. How’d you get into the hero business?”

  I am actually dizzy and sweating, as though I were going to throw up. I say again, “I don’t know. I try to help, that is all.”

  “Uh-huh. Real commendable. I mean, pulling whole families out of the river and all, the mayor gives you medals for that stuff. Rescuing abused children, taking down mall shooters—that’sour job, you’re kind of making us look bad.” He slaps the steering wheel, trying to look sterner than his nature. “But beating up the bad guys, that’s a no-no. Doesn’t matter how bad they are, you get into some really deep shit doing that. They sue. And somebody like me has to go and arrest you...not to mention explaining about sixteen million times to my boss, and his boss, why I didn’t do it already, you being right there on the scene and all. All the damn time.”

  My head is swimming so badly I have trouble making sense of his words. Something very bad is happening; whether to me or to Jane Doe I cannot tell. Could this hospital he is taking me to be her hospital? The policeman is speaking again, his face and voice serious, even anxious. He says, far away, “That vanishing act of yours, now that worries me. Because if you’re not crazy, then either you really are some kind of superhero, or I’m crazy. And I just don’t want to be crazy, you know?”

  In the midst of my faintness, I feel strangely sorry for him. I manage to reply, “Perhaps there is another choice...another possibility...” Even if it is the right hospital, if the darkness does not come again, I will never reach Jane Doe’s silent room—not in handcuff’s, which are surely coming, and with his hand tight on my shoulder. What must I do?

  “Another possibility?” His eyebrows shoot up again. “Well, now you’ve got me trying to figure what the hell that could be.”

  I do not answer him.

  He parks the patrol car in front of a squat gray-white building. I can see other cars coming and going: people on crutches, people being pushed in wheelchairs—an ambulance out front, another in the parking lot. He cuts the engine, turns to look straight at me. “Look, doesn’t matter whether I want to bust you on a filing cabinet full of assault charges or not. I got to do that. But what I’d way rather do is just talk to you, first, because that other possibility... that other possibility is I’ve got reality wrong, flat wrong. All of it. And I don’t think I’m ready to know that, you understand?”

  It is Jane Doe’s hospital. I can feel her there. This close, the pull of the darkness is still erratic but convulsively stronger. I know she is reaching for me.

  With one hand I reach for the door handle, very slowly, holding his glance. With the other I start to unbuckle the seat belt.

  “Don’t—”

  I start to say, “I never had your choice.” But I don’t finish, any more than I get a chance to throw the door open and bolt into the hospital. Between one word and the next the darkness takes hold of me, neck and heels, and I am gone...

  * * * *

  once again in Jane Doe’s room, standing at the foot of her bed.

  And Felicia has seen me appear.

  Her silence is part of the silence of the room; her breath comes as roughly as her patients’ through the tubes in their throats; the speechless fear in her wide dark eyes renders me just as mute. All I can do for her is to move aside, leaving a clear path to the door. I croak her name as she stumbles through, but the only response is the soft click as she closes the door and locks it from outside. I think I hear her crying, but I could be wrong.

  There is a little bathroom, just to the right of the door, with a toilet and sink for visitors. I walk in and wash my face—still dirty and bruised from my convenience store battle—for the first time. Then I take a moment to study the mask that Jane Doe made for me. The woman in the mirror has black hair, like hers, but longer—almost to the shoulders—and fuller. The eyes looking back at me are dark gray. The skin around them is a smooth light-olive. It is blankly cairn, this face, the features regular yet somehow uninteresting: easily ignored, passed over, missed in a crowd. And why not, since that so clearly suited Jane Doe’s purpose? Whatever terrified instinct first clothed me in flesh chose well.

  It is a good face. A useful face. I wonder if I will ever see it again.

  I walk back to Jane Doe’s bed. The strange near-nausea has not left me—if anything, it seems to rise and fall with Jane Doe’s breathing, which is labored now. She moves jerkily beneath the cover of her sheets, eyes still closed, her face sweaty and white. Some of the noises coming from the machines attached to her are strong and regular, but others chirp with staccato alarm: whether she is conscious or not, the machines say her body is in pain. And in the same way I know so many things now, I know why. The gift unleashed by the damage she suffered—the talent to give me life from nothingness, to sense danger, fear, cruelty from afar and send her own unlikely angel flying to help—has become too great for the form containing it.

  I sit down by her, taking her heavy, limp hand between my own, and the darkness touches me.

  There are too many.

  My lips feel too cold to move, so I do not even try to speak. All I can do is look.

  There are too many, and she cannot do enough.

  Images comes to me, falling through my mind like leaves.

  Red.

  Wet red.

  My feet in the red.

  She made me up to save her, but I was too late. So we saved others, she and I. We saved so many others.

  I look at the door. With every small sound I expect clamor and warning— gunshots, even, or barking dogs. I wonder whether Felicia will be back with the nice young policeman. I wish I could have explained to him.

  There is warmth in the darkness. I feel it in my head, I feel it on my skin. It is pain...but something beyond pain, too.

  On the wall next to the telephone there is a white board with words written on it, and a capped marker. Writing is new to me—I have never had to do it before—so it does not go as quickly or as well as I would like, but I manage. In a child’s block letters I write down the name I found in the darkness, and three more words: we thank you.

  Then I go back to her bed.

  Voices in the hall now—Felicia, and another woman, and two or three men. I cannot tell whether the young policeman is one of them. No sound yet of Felicia’s key in the lock; are they afraid of a woman who comes and goes by magic arts?

  I think I would have liked to have a name of my own, but no matter. I l
ean forward and remove the cables, then the tubes. So many of them. Some of the machines go silent, but others howl.

  Fumbling at the lock...now the sound of the key. It is so easy to close my hands around her throat, and I feel her breath between my fingers.

  <>

  * * * *

  Diana Gabaldon

  International bestseller Diana Gabaldon is the winner of a Quill Award (for science fiction/fantasy/horror), a RITA Award (for best book of the year, genre unspecified), given by the Romance Writers of America, and the Corine International Prize for Fiction—all for the same series of books. Her hugely popular Outlander series includes Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, Drums of Autumn, The Fiery Cross, A Breath of Snow and Ashes, and An Echo in the Bone. The bestselling Lord John stories are a subset of the main Outlander series, historical mysteries featuring Lord John Grey, an important minor character from the main novels. Lord John’s adventures include Lord John and the Private Matter, Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade, and Lord John and the Hand of Devils (a collection of shorter pieces that includes “Lord John and the Hell-fire Club,” “Lord John and the Succubus,” and “Lord John and the Haunted Soldier”). A graphic novel, The Exile (based onOutlander, with artwork by Hoang Nguyen), is due to be released in September 2010. She has also written The Outlandish Companion, a nonfiction reference/guide/addendum that covers the first four volumes of the series (the second volume of the Companion is due out in a year or so), and is working on a contemporary mystery (working title: Red Ant’s Head).

  Here she takes her swashbuckling military adventurer, Lord John Grey, on a journey to the New World, where at the Siege of Quebec, he faces dangers much more subtle than the usual shot, shell, and steel.

  * * * *

  The Custom of the Army

  All things considered, it was probably the fault of the electric eel. John Grey could—and for a time, did—blame the Honorable Caroline Woodford as well. And the surgeon. And certainly that blasted poet. Still...no, it was the eel’s fault.

  The party had been at Lucinda Joffrey’s house. Sir Richard was absent; a diplomat of his stature could not have countenanced something so frivolous. Electric eel parties were a mania in London just now, but owing to the scarcity of the creatures, a private party was a rare occasion. Most such parties were held at public theaters, with the fortunate few selected for encounter with the eel summoned onstage, there to be shocked and sent reeling like nine-pins for the entertainment of the audience.

  “The record is forty-two at once!” Caroline had told him, her eyes wide and shining as she looked up from the creature in its tank.

  “Really?” It was one of the most peculiar things he’d seen, though not very striking. Nearly three feet long, it had a heavy squarish body with a blunt head that looked to have been inexpertly molded out of sculptor’s clay, and tiny eyes like dull glass beads. It had little in common with the lashing, lithesome eels of the fish-market—and certainly did not seem capable of felling forty-two people at once.

  The thing had no grace at all, save for a small thin ruffle of a fin that ran the length of its lower body, undulating as a gauze curtain does in the wind. Lord John expressed this observation to the Honorable Caroline, and was accused in consequence of being poetic.

  “Poetic?” said an amused voice behind him. “Is there no end to our gallant major’s talents?”

  Lord John turned, with an inward grimace and an outward smile, and bowed to Edwin Nicholls.

  “I should not think of trespassing upon your province, Mr. Nicholls,” he said politely. Nicholls wrote execrable verse, mostly upon the subject of love, and was much admired by young women of a certain turn of mind. The Honorable Caroline wasn’t one of them; she’d written a very clever parody of his style, though Grey thought Nicholls had not heard about it. He hoped not.

  “Oh, don’t you?” Nicholls raised one honey-colored brow at him and glanced briefly but meaningfully at Miss Woodford. His tone was jocular, but his look was not, and Grey wondered just how much Mr. Nicholls had had to drink. Nicholls was flushed of cheek and glittering of eye, but that might be only the heat of the room, which was considerable, and the excitement of the party.

  “Do you think of composing an ode to our friend?” Grey asked, ignoring Nicholls’s allusion and gesturing toward the large tank that contained the eel.

  Nicholls laughed, too loudly—yes, quite a bit the worse for drink—and waved a dismissive hand.

  “No, no, Major. How could I think of expending my energies upon such a gross and insignificant creature, when there are angels of delight such as this to inspire me?” He leered—Grey did not wish to impugn the fellow, but he undeniably leered—at Miss Woodford, who smiled—with compressed lips—and tapped him rebukingly with her fan.

  Where was Caroline’s uncle? Grey wondered. Simon Woodford shared his niece’s interest in natural history, and would certainly have escorted her....Oh, there. Simon Woodford was deep in discussion with Mr. Hunter, the famous surgeon—what had possessed Lucinda to invitehim? Then he caught sight of Lucinda, viewing Mr. Hunter over her fan with narrowed eyes, and realized that she hadn’t invited him.

  John Hunter was a famous surgeon—and an infamous anatomist. Rumor had it that he would stop at nothing to bag a particularly desirable body—whether human or not. He did move in society, but not in the Joffreys’ circles.

  Lucinda Joffrey had the most expressive eyes. Her one claim to beauty, they were almond-shaped, amber in color, and capable of sending remarkably minatory messages across a crowded room.

  Come here! they said. Grey smiled and lifted his glass in salute to her, but made no move to obey. The eyes narrowed further, gleaming dangerously, then cut abruptly toward the surgeon, who was edging toward the tank, his face alight with curiosity and acquisitiveness.

  The eyes whipped back to Grey.

  Get rid of him! they said.

  Grey glanced at Miss Woodford. Mr. Nicholls had seized her hand in his and appeared to be declaiming something; she looked as though she wanted it back. Grey looked back at Lucinda and shrugged, with a small gesture toward Mr. Nicholls’s ochre-velvet back, expressing regret that social responsibility prevented his carrying out her order.

  “Not only the face of an angel,” Nicholls was saying, squeezing Caroline’s fingers so hard that she squeaked, “but the skin as well.” He stroked her hand, the leer intensifying. “What do angels smell like in the morning, I wonder?”

  Grey measured him up thoughtfully. One more remark of that sort, and he might be obliged to invite Mr. Nicholls to step outside. Nicholls was tall and heavily built, outweighed Grey by a couple of stone, and had a reputation for bellicosity. Best try to break his nose first, Grey thought, shifting his weight, then run him headfirst into a hedge. He won’t come back in if I make a mess of him.

  “What are you looking at?” Nicholls inquired unpleasantly, catching Grey’s gaze upon him.

  Grey was saved from reply by a loud clapping of hands—the eel’s proprietor calling the party to order. Miss Woodford took advantage of the distraction to snatch her hand away, cheeks flaming with mortification. Grey moved at once to her side, and put a hand beneath her elbow, fixing Nicholls with an icy stare.

  “Come with me, Miss Woodford,” he said. “Let us find a good place from which to watch the proceedings.”

  “Watch?” said a voice beside him. “Why, surely you don’t mean to watch, do you, sir? Are you not curious to try the phenomenon yourself?”

  It was Hunter himself, bushy hair tied carelessly back, though decently dressed in a damson-red suit, and grinning up at Grey; the surgeon was broad-shouldered and muscular, but quite short—barely five foot two, to Grey’s five-six. Evidently he had noted Grey’s wordless exchange with Lucinda.

  “Oh, I think—,” Grey began, but Hunter had his arm and was tugging him toward the crowd gathering round the tank. Caroline, with an alarmed glance at the glowering Nicholls, hastily followed him.

&n
bsp; “I shall be most interested to hear your account of the sensation,” Hunter was saying chattily. “Some people report a remarkable euphoria, a momentary disorientation ...shortness of breath, or dizziness—sometimes pain in the chest. You have not a weak heart, I hope, Major? Or you, Miss Woodford?”

  “Me?” Caroline looked surprised.

  Hunter bowed to her.

  “I should be particularly interested to see your own response, ma’am,” he said respectfully. “So few women have the courage to undertake such an adventure.”

  “She doesn’t want to,” Grey said hurriedly.