Papa Lucy & the Boneman

by Jason Fischer

  Lanyard said nothing.

  “You’re hurt because of me.”

  “No. This is not your fault,” Lanyard said. “You’re just a kid, and we took that from you. Didn’t sit right with me.”

  He remembered another kid, this one not much older than the girl. Still wearing a noose around his neck, one end severed by a bullet, coughing and wheezing as an old fool gave him water.

  “That’s a nice lanyard you’re wearing,” Bauer had said, the day he both saved and damned a boy without a proper name.

  “I’m not some stupid kid, mister.”

  “Never said you were stupid.”

  More wind, the shifting of stone feet. Lanyard felt the words bubble up, a confessional that leapt from his lips. He’d hidden the truth his whole life, but it felt so easy handing the burden to this girl. The words poured out.

  “I…I lied to you. Back on the bridge.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m a Jesusman.”

  Tilly said nothing but lifted a heavy bundle from her shoulders and pressed it into his hands. Snapping a string, Lanyard peeled back the canvas to see Bauer’s old gun. He smiled at the familiar curve of the stock.

  Struggling against the grinding pain of his injury, Lanyard spent a while exploring the bleedthrough city. He noted the landmarks, places where vehicles formed bottlenecks on the street. The rooftops offered an excellent field of fire, but he didn’t like the idea of being trapped in a building. Street fighting, then, if it came to that.

  The Leicesters followed them everywhere, a silent band of bodyguards. They seemed protective of their human guests but could not communicate in any way. Lanyard didn’t understand their mobility and supposed that they were guardians, bound to the city in some way.

  Most of the Waking City was a perfect bleedthrough, frozen in the exact moment the Before fell. Entire blocks full of Before goods, cupboards full of food. It would take years to gather up everything and cart it across the Waste to the land of people. Assuming you could find a caravan mad enough to make the journey.

  The glass towers were something else altogether. Perhaps fifty of them, great monoliths that dominated the skyline and dwarfed the lesser buildings. As he watched, they stopped growing, one final aftershock shaking the street slightly. The towers reflected the sunlight more brilliantly than glass had any right to do.

  When Lanyard held his hand against a shopfront window, he felt a faint hum, as if the skyscraper contained a multitude of bees. The glass was hot. None of the doors opened, and the door frames seemed set in place as if fused together. Each building was seamless, closed in, as if in imitation of the original structure. He yanked on a door handle as hard as he could, and the doors did not even jiggle a little.

  One final test. A big gamble, but he had to know if Bauer was right. His heart hammering, Lanyard drew a pistol and fired at a ground-level window point blank. The bullet ricocheted, winging past his ear. He rubbed at the glass with amazement that the point of impact wasn’t scratched.

  “Good,” he said. “We don’t want these to open. That’s how the world ends.”

  It pained Lanyard to move too far, so he called a rest. He and Tilly shared the last of the food from his satchel and sat on a car marked “POLICE.”

  “These were the bailiffs, the lawmen,” Lanyard explained. “Back in the Before.”

  He used a crowbar to lever open the trunk of the car by snapping the lock. Tilly helped him pull out the lawman’s shotgun and a box of shells. She plucked out a vest, body armour for bullets, but when Lanyard tried to strap it on, the armour pressed against the metal shard anchored in his flesh. Crying out in agony, he shrugged off the heavy vest and left it on the ground for all the good it would do him.

  They experimented with strapping Lanyard’s wound, but the pressure of the cloth strip caused him excruciating pain. He took a slug of booze, and another when the pain began to spread. Tilly stared glumly into the distance.

  “My uncle was a physician,” she said. “He might have been able to help with that.”

  “No doubt he could,” Lanyard said. “If he was smart, he wouldn’t help someone like me.”

  “He would help anyone. Even a faithless or a criminal. He said to live in service however you can. That is what is right.”

  “That’s nice. The world doesn’t work that way.”

  “Liar,” she scoffed. “You’re a helper too. My Nona Joan said the Jesusmen saved people. They fought the monsters.”

  “The Jesusmen changed,” Lanyard said. “My master was a good man, but stupid. The family business wasn’t going well, but he signed up for it anyway.”

  He pulled out one of the pistols to check the clip and safety. Tilly took it from him, wide-eyed and running her finger along the etchings, Jesus marks from barrel to tip. He gave her a quick instruction in its use, and between them they peppered the nearest street sign with bullets.

  “My master never had his own kids, so he took me under his wing. I caught up with him the other day, had a good old chin-wag. Told me a bit about our mate here.” Lanyard put the cloth bundle onto the hood of the car and unwrapped Turtwurdigan for a quick moment, long enough to catch its chatter and bullying. The spirit fell back silence when the cloth descended.

  “Seems your mob and my mob were friends, secret chums back in the old war,” Lanyard continued. “Good old John Leicester found this glass afterwards and thought it might help the Jesus out of a jam. The heart of Turtwurdigan.”

  Once more he felt the pull towards Sad Plain, but Bauer had explained this for what it was. The spirit in the glass shard was powerful, but it had the faculties and patience of a child. Turtwurdigan was an alien intelligence, blustering and grandiose, confused from centuries of captivity.

  Quite simply, it didn’t know what it wanted. All it needed was a guiding hand, someone to correctly interpret its one desire.

  Turtwurdigan didn’t want him to visit Sad Plain, and in its roundabout way, it only wanted to draw his attention to that ruin. It needed the bearer of the glass to mark this location and form a bridge between the two places.

  Bauer’s instructions were simple. Lanyard was meant to summon a broken guardian and hold the fort until it arrived. Anything else was the world’s end. He could not fail.

  Working up the courage, Lanyard whipped the glass fragment out of the cloth and held it up high. He did not fight the pull; he let his body become a conduit to this ground, a flesh lodestone to guide in something that was broken and lost.

  Turtwurdigan drank deeply of the sunlight, and a message was sent.

  The city was laid out in a rough grid with the glass towers at the centre. Wide asphalt roads fed into the silent metropolis, and it was most likely that the Family forces would enter by the southern-most artery.

  It was here that Lanyard made his preparations four blocks south of the first tower. If Bauer was right, the enemy would be weakened and drained from their trip across the Waste, eager to reach the towers and open the gate.

  The sorcerers would have to pass this point. Here, Lanyard would do his best to stop them, down to the last bullet and with bare fists if necessary.

  If Papa Lucy reached those towers, the world would end in fire.

  Whether it was the slouch hat or the tattoo marking him as an old ally, the Leicester statues obeyed him for now. These mute soldiers helped to push cars and vans into place, blocking off many of the side streets. They used buses and a large truck to form a choke point to draw the enemy in.

  Lanyard used a spray can to paint giant marks of warding all over the road and the words of unmaking on the shopfronts. Certain vehicles were designated as fire points, and towels and bedsheets were jammed into the fuel tanks, crude fuses to transform these valuable artefacts into bombs.

  “My native friend was scared of something called a Grook,” Lanyard said, using his telescope to look down through the city, where the bleedthrough ended and the Waste began. “Kept pointing out that way. This mean anything?”r />
  He drew the wiggling snake shape into the dust of a car’s windshield. Tilly frowned as if trying to remember something. She finally shook her head.

  “Oh well, the plan is simple really. Anything comes up that road, I kill it dead. Take these,” and he handed her a pair of looted binoculars, “and sit back on top of that building. You’re the lookout.”

  The girl protested, but Lanyard was firm. He wanted her off the street and out of danger. Scowling, Tilly retreated through the foyer of a shabby hotel with a handful of Leicesters dogging her footsteps.

  Lanyard set up a deck chair behind his final barricade, an arsenal of guns laid out across the hood of a car. He lit another cigarette, trying to ignore the pain of his ruined insides. The last Jesusman got on with the business of waiting.

  Tilly was shouting at him from above, and he woke with a start, not realising he’d fallen into a light doze. He felt lightheaded and his whole stomach was sore to touch, the skin around the wound puffy and dark red.

  Bleeding inside, he realised. Dead by sundown, no matter what I do.

  Raising his telescope, he looked down the road where he saw hundreds of stone and bronze men rushing out of the city and into the Waste. The Leicesters swarmed all over the intruder, a lizard with a pavilion on its back.

  Lanyard swore. It was a monster three times the size of a normal stumpy. This twisted beast trod the Leicesters into the ground as it thundered through their ranks, the statue-men climbing all over it.

  On the lizard’s back sat a pavilion, now part of the creature itself. He could just make out a figure in the back hauling on the reins and firing a machine gun in all directions. The driver urged the lizard onwards, and it made for his position.

  “Look at the size of that thing,” he muttered. “It’s a bloody dragon.”

  Behind him, a set of double doors flew open, and Tilly raced onto the street, stone escort crowding close to her. He shouted at her to get back inside, but she ignored this to join him at the barricade.

  “Get off the streets, you stupid girl!” He growled, but she remained there, a stubborn expression on her young face. He smiled despite himself when he saw a little girl stoic in the face of this thunderous death.

  The lizard was close enough that he didn’t need the telescope to see it. It darted from side to side, smashing into the buildings on the city outskirts, shaking off stone men like fleas. Leicesters lost their grip and fell, and whoever drove the lizard onward hurled down the statues as they tried to board the pagoda. Pieces of shattered marble rained to the ground, heads and limbs torn from the Leicesters.

  “I got a feeling that’s just the appetizer,” Lanyard said. “Are you scared?”

  She nodded once.

  “Me too.”

  He felt the girl’s fingers lace through his own, and without another word they waited for the first of Papa Lucy’s creatures to meet them.

  — 22 —

  The lizard bounced along the street like an excited puppy, crunching cars underfoot. Lanyard stood nervously behind the final barricade. He wondered if the bank of trucks and buses would slow down the enormous monster.

  It was barely two blocks away when another wave of Leicesters swung out of a side street. It wheeled on the spot, infuriated as the statues hammered it with marble guns and drove their blunt bayonets into its flesh.

  Lanyard could see the driver now, a young woman perhaps half again the age of Tilly. She howled with anger, hunched over the controls of a weird machine gun.

  Lanyard was close enough now to realise the extent of that mutation. It was more of a gland than a gun, a boil erupting from the lizard’s back. The woman swept the gun across the attacking Leicesters, and a hail of bone and rock flew out of the spinning aperture, breaking the first row of soldiers into dust and shattered pieces.

  In all the excitement, neither woman nor lizard noticed Tilly running low behind the row of cars. She sparked a cigarette lighter in one hand, trying desperately to summon a flame.

  “C’mon,” Lanyard urged. He was useless at this distance. He checked the action on Bauer’s old shotgun and felt for the extra rounds in his pocket. He was ready.

  Tilly finally sparked a flame and set it to the very end of the bedsheet then ran as the fire crept along towards the gas tank of a van. She hid behind a flight of steps the way Lanyard told her to, but in her haste, she knocked over a rubbish bin that sent the iron lid ringing.

  The lizard turned at the sound, and its cruel eyes fixed on the little girl, her back to the wall. Thick ropes of drool fell from its metal fangs, and it ran for her, hissing and swift, climbing over the wall of cars.

  Then the van erupted into a ball of flame and flying steel, the explosion almost directly underneath the giant. With an ear-piercing shriek, the lizard ran around in circles, batting at cars in its confusion, blindly seeking its attacker. A mess of guts dangled from a hole in its belly, and most of a car door was deeply embedded in its rear leg.

  Above, the woman was trying to climb back into the pagoda, one hand hooked onto the fleshy railing. The gun hung limp in its harness with a dribble of bone falling from its tip.

  Lanyard was over the barricade and running, shotgun primed. He couldn’t see Tilly in all the smoke and feared the worst. The lizard stood between him and the burning wreckage, regarding him with rage. It snapped at him as if he were a fly, but the holy shotgun barked once, then twice. Blinded, the creature staggered backward. Cracks appeared in its face as the enchantments in the old gun told true.

  As it crumbled it continued to stalk him, sniffing him out with bloody nostrils. Lanyard dropped the shotgun and swept his pistol up and out. He sent a tight cluster of bullets into the lizard’s chest, and the corruption spread rapidly. As he loaded another clip with shaking hands, the monster fell apart, its flesh falling from its concrete bones, bubbling and hissing as the sun rendered it down to nothing.

  “Tilly?” he called out, scooping up his shotgun. He ejected the smoking shells, but as he reached for fresh rounds, the young woman climbed out of the wreckage and came for him calmly.

  She was beautiful, with the olive tan of a Riverlander. The woman wore crumpled travel wear and held out her empty hands. Lanyard hesitated as he snapped the breech shut with only one round chambered.

  “Stop,” he said, unwilling to shoot an unarmed woman. “No closer.”

  The woman smiled. Just as Lanyard realised that her healthy tan was actually a wood-grain skin, she struck. He fired the big gun but the strange woman was faster, her arm stretching out to an impossible length to bat the gun aside.

  The woman’s hand turned into a woody tentacle, circling the barrel of the gun like a treeroot grown. The symbols on the gun seemed to burn her, but she smiled against the pain, wrenching the gun out of his grip.

  She cast it aside with a clatter and stepped closer. Lanyard drew his pistol but the woman seized his wrists in her warped hands and shook the weapon from his grip. Her wooden arms stretched out like warm toffee, and she held him up effortlessly. She drew his arms apart, and he cried out in pain as she gently teased out his limbs as far as they would go.

  “Jesusman,” she said, smiling sweetly with wooden lips. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  It felt like she was about to pull his arms out of their sockets, and his pierced stomach burnt with a renewed agony. She licked her lips, and slowly her tongue crept forward, a sharp root tip that rested against his eyeball.

  “I’m only going to ask you once, Lanyard of Hesus. Where is the talking glass? Where is Turtwurdigan?”

  “Die in a fire, you wooden bitch.”

  The monstrous woman looked at him with disappointment. As he braced himself, the tongue-root moved away from his eyeball to slowly wrap itself around his throat like a garrotte. A first gentle squeeze cut off all his air, with the promise of enough strength to snap his neck.

  “I can smell the Mother of Glass, Jesusman. She’s close.”

  Her wooden tongue withdrew from his throat
, and he drew in a ragged breath. She poked into his pockets then smiled in triumph as she drew out the rag containing Turtwurdigan. She brought it towards her mouth with relish.

  Then a gunshot. The woman keened with pain and dropped the glass. She cast Lanyard aside, then wheeled to face this new threat. The wooden creature loped towards Tilly Carpidian, who held her gun steady and drove another Jesus-marked round into the devil that ran at her.

  The creature staggered, and Lanyard could see daylight through the hole in its belly. The magic spread, but something within the creature fought off the marks of unmaking and began to close the hole. It limped forward, wooden arms reaching for the young girl.

  “Tilly, no.” Lanyard wheezed. His pistol was underneath a car, the shotgun somewhere behind the dead lizard. Only one choice. Despite every step like a knife in his side, he dragged himself forward. Another shot from Tilly, this one a fluke head shot, and the creature was down on one knee, struggling to hold itself together.

  Still those murderous arms crept, the deadly tendrils mere feet from the terrified girl. Gritting his teeth, Lanyard jogged forward, gasping with the movement.

  He drew his bowie knife. As the woman embraced Tilly, he stepped behind her and drew the blade across her throat, driving it deep into the bark.

  She gurgled, her arms falling limp as the life ran out of her. It was sap that ran over Lanyard’s hands, not blood. He pushed the bizarre creature to the ground and stabbed again and again in the area where he thought her heart might be.

  The etchings in the blade held true, and soon the woman was still. The tentacles withdrew and reformed into arms. Lanyard watched, amazed as the corpse shrank, limbs and head becoming narrower until only a brass-shod staff lay before him, one end curved into a shepherd’s hook.

  As Jenny looked down on her body and watched herself die, she felt a strange detachment. She sensed the horror of her violent murder, but her last living thought was one of defeat. Her holy quest had failed. The Jesusman had been in her clutches but she’d failed Papa Lucy.