Scithe said, “You were in Torah’s Sweetness last night. Got rowdy.”
“So? Wanna make sumpin’ of it?”
“I do.”
I said, “He does, Penny. Everybody there ended up a drooling moron after you left.”
“Huh? Crap. You ain’t gonna put that on me.”
Her eyes glazed.
She settled on the nearest chair afterward. “There must’ve been twenty kids in there. They didn’t have nothing to do with any of this. Why would somebody do something like that?”
“She wasn’t after them. She expected me to bring that coin home. When her curse homed in on it, Old Bones and I would stop being the threat we turned into when she found out that we didn’t have the Shadow.”
“She would’ve got Singe and Dean and me, too.”
“Yes.”
“Aren’t you glad you didn’t get all hard-ass about me going with Bottle?”
Her heart wasn’t in that, though.
“I am. That worked out nicely.” Neither I nor the Dead Man chalked that up to luck, though. We believe in intuition. Something down deep had moved me to shed that coin.
I could have done a better job than I did, though.
Scithe asked, “You coming with, Garrett?”
“You inviting?”
“If you don’t get underfoot and don’t run your mouth.”
“I agree for him,” Singe said. “I will smack him if he gets out of line.”
Scithe considered her with eyebrow arched.
“I’m coming, too.”
“Me three,” Penny added.
Scithe sighed. Civilians.
WE GOT STARTED AFTER THE SPECIALS ARRIVED. THREE TOOK CHARGE OF Rock Truck. The rest went to the Benbow with us.
BUNNY WAS UNHAPPY. MISS GRÜNSTRASSE HAD DECAMPED DURING THE night. Her tab was not in arrears but she had left her suite a wreck. It looked like a fight had taken place.
Singe reported, “The fat woman had words with her niece.”
I asked, “Can you track her?”
“Under water. She was extremely distressed. It did not go well for her.”
THE TRAIL LED FIRST TO WHERE THE FAT WOMAN HAD INTERCEPTED THE Specials taking Rock to headquarters. That resulted in a kidnapping, not a rescue. Witnesses said she made it quick and ugly, with no assistance from children. Her trail ran on to the waterfront, ended on an empty wharf. The ship that had been tied up there was out of sight, current carrying it out of the Guard’s legal jurisdiction.
It began to rain again.
“They get away too often.” Scithe hunched to keep the drizzle from running down his neck.
“They’ll cut each other’s throats.” Unless the Specials caught up first. They recognize no limitations in times of murder.
“Maybe.”
“My first platoon sergeant used to say, some days you eat the croc and some days the croc eats you.”
“Yeah.” He smiled grimly. “The bitch left the kid to face the music. Let’s go find her and play a few bars.”
NO MYSTERY, NO MIRACLE
by Melinda M. Snodgrass
The problem with opening a crack in the world is that you never know what’s going to crawl through it. Which can be dangerous if it’s your job to close that crack back up again . . .
A writer whose work crosses several mediums and genres, Melinda M. Snodgrass has written scripts for multiple television shows, including Star Trek: The Next Generation (for which she was also a story editor for several years). She was a writer/ producer on Profiler. She has written a number of popular science fiction novels, and was one of the cocreators of the long-running Wild Cards series, for which she has also written and edited. Her novels include Circuit, Circuit Breaker, Final Circuit, The Edge of Reason, Runespear (with Victor Milán), High Stakes, Santa Fe, and Queen’s Gambit Declined. Her most recent novel is The Edge of Ruin, the sequel to The Edge of Reason. Her media novels include the Wild Cards novel Double Solitaire and the Star Trek novel The Tears of the Singers. She’s also the editor of the anthology A Very Large Array. She lives in New Mexico.
THE RACKET OF THE WHEELS OVER THE TRACKS WAS HYPNOTIC. MOONLIGHT trickled through the slats of the boxcar, and, inside, a kerosene lantern lit the faces of the men reclining on their bindles. The warm golden light gave the illusion of health to sallow, stubbled skin. The lantern’s presence would have raised the ire and the fists of any passing bull, but fortunately none of the railroad police had checked the train at the past two stations. Cross leaned against the back of the car and listened to the basso drone of male voices, and watched the magic that sang in their blood coruscate around them.
He had left New York City three months ago, looking for the origin point of a mysterious hobo symbol. Usually such symbols were simple affairs—a code that hobos left for other ’bos to guide them as they crissed and crossed a desperate country. An empty circle meant there was nothing for you here. A triangle with two lines thrust out like arms, and four smaller lines like fingers meant that a man with a gun lived there. A cat meant a kind old lady, and a cross meant if you listened to some religious talk you’d get a free meal. This one had a cross, but it also had a serpent. The head of the snake nestled in the angle between the upright and the cross’s arms; its mouth was open, showing fangs, and there was something about the eyes that Cross found eerily familiar and disturbing.
His boss, owner of Unique Investigations, suspected that it marked the place of an incursion from another universe, and after loading up the money belt with cash, Conoscenza had sent Cross out to find it. Cross had spent weeks in hobo jungles, walking the roads, riding the rails, talking with hobos and being attacked, but he thought he saw an end to the journey. What the old man had told him in St. Louis sounded promising.
The old man had seen the mark in Buford Fork, a small town near Tulsa, Oklahoma. They would be coming up on it soon, and Cross would jump and go in search of the tear in reality and the creature that had made it. It was a warm June night, but still Cross shivered and pulled his suit jacket closer around him. He had come up against one of his own kind in West Virginia and it had shattered him. He’d lost days piecing himself back together, and he was still fragile as hell. He sensed that he could shatter at any moment, so he feared the coming confrontation.
Cross unlimbered his hip flask and gulped down a mouthful of brandy. Prohibition added to the woes of a desperate country, but Conoscenza had it smuggled in from Canada, and it was quality. After it was gone, Cross would have to find a speakeasy and buy whatever crap they were selling. Unlike a human, Cross wouldn’t go blind from bad bootleg.
“It wasn’t my fault.” The adenoidal tones of Ed Bloom came drifting back to Cross. “My management principles were fine . . . no, better than fine, they were great. But the owner couldn’t see that, and he closed the store. The employees had no cause to blame me.”
It was the nineteenth time Bloom had told this story since Cross had jumped aboard the side-door Pullman back in St. Louis. It made Cross wish he’d dipped into his supply of cash and bought a seat in a passenger car, but after what had happened in West Virginia, he feared to try. If he were to splinter in a freight car among a gang of hobos, no one would listen to them. No authority figure would heed a wild story from lost and forgotten men about a man who had shattered into hundreds of slivers of multicolored light and flown away in all directions. But if it happened in front of respectable citizens—no, he couldn’t risk it.
The train slowed. Cross gathered up his bindle, stuffed his fedora into the pocket of his suit coat, moved to the door, and slid it open a few feet. The spikes at the ends of the railroad ties flashed like a code. The train slowed again, the wheels giving a metallic squeal, and Cross jumped. He lost his footing but managed to get his shoulder down to take the brunt of the fall. The cinders next to the track crackled and sent up the smell of coal soot. Regaining his feet, Cross walked away.
NIGHT HAD FLUNG ITSELF OVER THE SMALL OKLAHOMA TOWN OF BUFORD Fork in a way
that reminded Cross of a vast maw snapping shut. It also reminded him why he hated rural towns. He loved the glow of big cities, with electricity to hold the darkness at bay. He looked longingly at the glow of Tulsa on the horizon, but turned his back and continued down the main drag of Buford Fork. Up ahead he saw an oasis of public lighting, four gas lamps that lit the front of City Hall.
Across the street was a diner, but it was closed up tight, probably because there wasn’t enough custom to make it worth the effort of opening. A handwritten menu in the window touted chicken fried steak with cream gravy and hush puppies. Cross realized the flesh he wore was hungry. He pressed a hand against his belly and felt the bulge of the money belt. Did he continue to play the hobo or offer some homeowner money for food?
He passed a movie theater. Ironically, the marquee read City Lights, Starring Charlie Chaplin. There was a Ford Model A truck, the black cab coated with dust, parked out front. The whitewall tires were like the flash of a smile in the dark. There were two ancient Model Ts, and several bicycles leaned up against the wall. Cross considered going inside. He liked movies, but there was no ticket seller in the kiosk.
He moved on and saw the black silhouette of a cross against the sky. It perched incongruously on the roof of a house. A mission, then. He walked up to the gate in the faded white picket fence. A hand-lettered sign read The Blood of the Lamb Mission. Shadows near the bottom of the gate’s upright caught his attention. He bent, flicked on his lighter, and froze. The old man in St. Louis had been right. The symbol he’d been following across the depression-wracked country was carved deep into the wood. The drawing had been disturbing; the original was terrifying.
Now he regretted that he had been flippant in Conoscenza’s Harlem office. The big man had skated the drawing across the polished surface of the desk. Cross had studied the cross and the snake, met the dark gaze of the man who offered him a chance for oblivion, and asked, “I’m guessing this doesn’t mean there’s a doctor in the joint.”
Conoscenza stood, an impressive sight, because he was at least six foot six and three-hundred-plus pounds. He paced to the window and clasped his hands behind his back. The sunlight shone on his ebony skin. Cross joined him and they looked down on the throngs of humans bustling along the sidewalk. “It’s a bad time,” Conoscenza said. “Could be there’s enough desperation out there to finally allow them to tear open the membranes between the dimensions and return.”
The them referred to Cross’s kind, creatures that masqueraded as gods and preyed on the inhabitants of this world. Just as Cross now masqueraded as human, though he no longer fed on the hapless monkeys of Earth.
“We’ve seen worse,” was Cross’s laconic reply. “Economic depression and drought can’t really stack up against the Black Death, Genghis Khan, or the Albigensian Crusade. If this generation of humans is going to embrace the Old Ones over this, then they’re pussies.”
Now, confronted by the symbol, he was scared. Their opponents had found enough death, violence, and pain to shatter Cross. It was only because of hundreds of tiny acts of kindness that he had been able to paste himself back together. Despite being devastated by economic collapse, many people were actually worshiping the loving version of God embodied by the mythical Jesus. They were applying the principles that Conoscenza had grafted onto the previously murderous cult of a war god.
Some of this kindness was intrinsic to man—evolution tended to cultivate empathy—but some of it was due to Conoscenza’s meddling. The Old Ones might have afflicted humankind with religion, but Conoscenza had tried to guide it and shape it into something that could potentially do good. And Cross had joined him in this effort because, in the distant past, Eolas, as Conoscenza had then been called, had found Cross, created by human compassion and weakened by human cruelty, and Eolas/Conoscenza had offered Cross a bargain. Cross would help against the alien creatures, and, in exchange, Eolas/Conoscenza would help Cross die. They just never seemed to get around to the dying part. For an instant, existence lay on Cross’s shoulders like a crushing weight.
He lifted his head and faced the building. There was a flutter in his gut that had nothing to do with hunger. If this was a point of contact between the Old Ones and this world, Cross would have to handle the situation, and he was weak, so weak. Once again, he wished that they had a paladin, a human who could use the ancient weapon and kill an Old One. Instead, he had to match his strength against his own kind. He sucked in a steadying breath and pushed through the gate. Dead grass, blasted by years of drought, crackled beneath his feet. He walked up the stairs onto the wide, screened porch, complete with a swing, and knocked on the front door. He hoped the obligatory service would be over, and that no one currently in residence was actually religious. When people started praying and testifying and calling on Jesus, it made it damn hard for him to keep his hair short and his face beardless. His physical form tended to reflect the vision of the believers.
A woman answered. Thirties, pretty, brown hair piled on her head, and built like a brick shithouse. She wore a skirt and white blouse and a pair of perky open-toed red shoes. She stared at Cross for a long moment, and then a smile clicked on. He allowed a sliver of his power to flick out and touch her. Magic flared around her, and there was something very wrong with the large amber ring on her right hand. He studied the band formed of braided hair, and the undulating black shadows that flowed into it. Something was trapped and he feared it might be her.
“Evening, ma’am,” Cross said. “Am I right in thinking this is a mission?”
“Yes . . . yes, it is. Welcome, do come in. I’m Sister Sharon.” She stepped back and Cross stepped across the threshold. The oily taint of his kind permeated the walls and hung in the curtains. Cross’s muscles tensed in preparation for an assault, but then he realized that it was faint and muted; the Old One was clearly no longer present.
“You’re our only guest tonight. Most people seem to be riding on through.” She had a good voice, clear and vibrant. She took his bindle and set it by the door. “If you’re hungry, there’s stew on the stove and I baked bread this morning.”
“Yes, ma’am, I could eat.”
She led him into the living room, which had been transformed into a mess hall with trestle tables and benches. Cross settled onto a bench; she disappeared through a door. Cross jumped up and hurried back to the entryway. He had the power to see magic, and the tear between the dimensions should be like a flare. He swung his head from side to side, trying to locate it, but the ring was a constant buzz, interfering with his ability. He moved toward a set of double doors and had his hand on the knob when he was startled by a sharp voice.
“Here, now, what are you doing snoopin’ around?”
Cross turned and met the irate gaze of a short, rotund man. Standing behind the bristling fat man was a heavyset youth in his twenties. The flat facial features betrayed his mongolism. He smiled at Cross and bobbed his head happily.
“Sorry, just getting my bearings,” Cross said.
“Looking to rob us, no doubt,” the man huffed. He reached up and grabbed Cross by the ear, and tugged. “We’ll see what Sister Sharon has to say.” Now the idiot was looking concerned, catching the anger in the fat man’s words.
“If you don’t let go, you’re going to lose that hand,” Cross said in a conversational tone. The man met his gaze and yanked his hand back. Cross walked into the mess hall. Sharon was just emerging from another door with a bowl of stew in one hand and a loaf of bread in the other.
“Sister, I found him slinkin’ around.” The words were infused with the kind of self-importance only heard in palace eunuchs or majordomos. The mongoloid hung back at the door, shifted nervously from foot to foot, and cast glances at Sharon.
“I’m sure he meant no harm,” Sharon said soothingly.
Cross sat down on a bench, and Sharon deposited the food in front of him. He gave the stew an experimental stir. It was thick with chunks of meat, and even held a few green beans among the carrots a
nd potatoes. This was far better fare than was found at most missions. Sharon sat across from him. The little man stood behind her and glared.
“My husband, Marshall, and stepson are on a crusade,” Sharon said. “They do the preaching, so I haven’t been encouraging folks to come since there aren’t services right now.”
“You’re just as fine a preacher as Brother Hanlin,” the man said. “The spirit fills you, Sister Sharon.” She smiled up at him, and he puffed out his chest. Cross stared at the darkness circling the ring and wondered what else might fill her.
“You’re too kind, Stanley.”
“The lack of a parson is probably an attraction for most people,” Cross said as he slurped up a spoonful of stew.
“I take it you’re not a godly man, Mr. . . .”
The irony nearly made him choke. He gave a short laugh. “Cross,” he said, supplying the name. “And I’m more godly than you can imagine. I just know it’s all snake oil and wishful thinking.”
“You don’t think people need the comfort? Especially in hard times?” Sharon asked.
“I’m all for comfort. If they would just leave it at that, but they never do. People always decide that everybody else has to get some comfort too, and it better be their version of comfort. And if it’s not, they generally make their point on the sharp end of a sword or the business end of a gun.”
Sharon jumped to her feet, her agitation evident in her writhing fingers as she clasped and unclasped her hands. “Perhaps we could take a walk in the night air and continue our talk, Mr. Cross.”
“All right.”
Cross tore off a hunk of bread and carried it with him as he escorted her to the front door. The retarded man scuttled out of the way. Behind him, the majordomo emitted gargling sounds that never fully resolved into words.
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