Windslinger

by JM Guillen

  I took another step backward and tried to gauge the easiest way to get my weapon.

  That’s when I realized the truth.

  I whipped my head south. I had the option to turn and run. My bike lay less than half a block away now. If it came down to it, I could sprint to my bike and take off. I didn’t know if I could outrun run these yahoos while I drove, but I didn’t need to finish this fight if I didn’t want to.

  Of course, I would have to leave the Beretta behind.

  Fuck that. I reached into my jacket and pulled out two more knives, one for each hand.

  I needed the Beretta. If I had the opportunity, I planned on introducing it to the Gaunt Man.

  I stood and faced the kenku.

  “Iss sshe ready then?” It rubbed one blade against the other to create a skin-shivering sound. “Death comesss only once.”

  “What! The fuck is that!?” A woman had begun to step out of the sub shop, apparently ignorant of all the shenanigans happening in the city street. The moment she set eyes on Birdy Mcbird face, she screeched and stepped back inside.

  It turned, startled at the sound.

  I leapt, springing to one side.

  The kenku expected me to attack, and brought one of those sickles up in order to parry my knives. Its second sickle swung right toward my head.

  At least, where my head would have been.

  I rolled quickly, parkour-ing my way past the asshole. Even as it attempted to remove my head from my shoulders, I side spun, snatched the Beretta, and rolled into a crouch.

  I’d rolled a nat twenty Dexterity check.

  “Trickss!” It lunged toward the street and stretched its wings as if prepared to leap into the sky. Apparently, it felt the gun changed the situation.

  I fired, a neat double tap. With an explosion of feathers and blood, the kenku screeched, its back arched into a bow as it stumbled into the street.

  The woman stared at me in horror, still inside the sub shop.

  “What is that?” Her voice sounded hollow through the glass.

  “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  “Bullshit.” She stared at me, eyes wide.

  “Thanks for the assist.” I lifted one hand, nodded at her, and took off in a dead, panicked run.

  Mass Combat

  Less than two minutes later, my Valkyrie roared to life.

  “I’ve got the bike.” I pushed out of the parking spot and lurched forward. “I’m on my way to you guys. Stay safe.”

  I briefly considered fastening the straps on my helmet before deciding against it. I still had no idea if I might need sudden visibility.

  “You stay safe.” I could hear the wry humor in Rehl’s voice. “There’s only so many times we can hear gunshots before we start freaking out.”

  “Copy that.” I waited for the inevitable.

  “Are we back to saying ‘copy that’?” Baxter asked. “Over.”

  I laughed to myself and gunned the motorcycle down the street.

  It only took me a moment to come to the obvious conclusion that perhaps I should ignore Flatbush. Thanks to the actions of a murderous murder of crow-strocities, traffic had come to almost a complete standstill. Furthermore, the creatures lurked back that direction, probably waiting to slaughter the cutest gamer girl they had ever met.

  “Smart place to go back the other direction.” I considered it for a moment. If I went a couple of streets to the east, then I could cut south. From there I could ask Rehl for the name of the street he had parked on and meet up with them.

  “Except…” I looked for signs. “This is a one-way street.” I frowned. That took me back in the direction of Flatbush. I could get going the other direction, of course, not take the left towards Fallen Leaves.

  But…

  One block past Flatbush, Lincoln Road dipped into Prospect Park. Even if I knew my way around that place—which I didn’t—I felt certain that the Department of Parks and Recreation didn’t typically allow motorcycles along their paths.

  As if to accentuate the situation, I heard the wail of police sirens in the distance.

  “Fuck.” It seemed as if I didn’t have all the choices that I had believed I might. Resolutely, I turned the Valkyrie back down Flatbush and peered ahead.

  It actually looked as if traffic might have started moving again.

  In the little planning that we had done, we had specifically attempted to keep things narrowed down to a few short city blocks. I didn’t know exactly how far I had to go to hit Chester Court, but I didn’t think it could be far. On a typical day, this might be a ten-minute ride.

  This was not a typical day.

  I gunned the Valkyrie forward, taking her less than halfway back to Maple Avenue before traffic had again come to a halt. It looked as if, in the midst of everything, a couple of cars had crashed into each other up ahead. Now it snarled everything up.

  “Great.” I peered down the side of the street. Did I dare cut down Flatbush by hanging to the far right-hand side of the road? If things got too dense, I could always push the motorcycle up onto the sidewalk.

  Though, the legality of that move would certainly only draw more attention to myself.

  I kept my eye on the sky, I truly did. As far as I knew there were at least three more of the kenku out there. Even though one of them had been badly injured, the creature still might fly.

  “Move it!” The guy driving a taxi next to me yelled out his window. “This isn’t the fucking Cineplex! There’s nothing to look at here!”

  In that moment, one of the kenku swooped down from above and swung one of those sickles at my head.

  I hadn’t seen it coming, my attention taken by the taxi driver.

  The creature swirled from my right and threw the entire force of its descent into the strike.

  My head snapped to the left, and I heard something crack into my helmet as it ripped it from my head. I tumbled off my bike and fell to the ground, injured shoulder first.

  That hurt.

  “Holy shit!” Someone, possibly a taxi driver, yelled from what seemed like impossibly far away.

  I couldn’t tell. Something had absolutely rung my bell. Even so, panic and adrenaline burned in my body. Almost the moment I hit the ground, I scrabbled backward, looking around wildly for what had struck me.

  Fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck-fuck!

  I pulled the gun from my jacket, my hands trembling wildly.

  Nothing.

  Move, Liz. I groggily pulled myself to my feet. I took a breath and frantically peered around the sky.

  Why weren’t they finishing me off? I stumbled, more than a little bit off kilter.

  “Are you okay?” The taxi driver yelled out the passenger side window “What was that?”

  “Nothing.” I staggered and peered wildly around. When I still didn’t see any of the kenku, I wobbled drunkenly over to my Valkyrie and picked it up.

  “Are you okay?” The man asked again. “Are you sure you should be driving that thing?”

  “I’m fine.” I waved at him not realizing that I’d waved with the gun.

  If don’t move, they’ll hit me again.

  “Oh fuck!” the man cried. “Don’t shoot!”

  I didn’t answer him, but turned away, intent on sending a message to the murder birds. I needed to act quickly, needed to show them that I was strong.

  “You think I’m done?!” I yelled into the September night. I looked up into the sky and fired the Beretta. I shot once, then three more times in various directions in the sky.

  Everyone. Went. Apeshit.

  I hadn’t exactly meant to send everyone running out of their cars or diving into businesses. My somewhat muddy thinking process simply wished to keep the kenku at bay. However, in my addled and panicked state, I hadn't considered what might happen if the citizens of New York saw a woman standing in the middle of the street screaming into an empty sky while shooting her Beretta into the air.

  “Reduces innocent bystanders, I suppose.” I bit my lip
.

  People fled their cars, left doors half opened, in some cases, left the cars running. With that one action, I had guaranteed that traffic would remain at a standstill.

  It might take me two or three times as long to work my way down the street now.

  “Okay.” I angled my Valkyrie so that I could drive down the side of the road, between the cars and the sidewalk. Perhaps not the safest maneuver in the world, but I felt like I had little choice.

  Anything had to be safer than sitting still.

  2

  I rode the bike down the street, swerving between the cars and the sidewalk. More than once, I actually pulled the bike up onto the sidewalk, just to avoid a place where stalled traffic had grown too dense.

  Believe it or not, I actually took a few moments to prepare what I might say when Rehl or Baxter started lighting me up about the gunshots. I didn't consider it exactly ‘funny’ that I had been the one to spend her evening shooting up the city, but just as soon as they messaged me—

  Oh.

  “Well, damn…” I realized what had happened, what I hadn’t had the attention to notice only a few moments before.

  That strike had done more than ripped the helmet off my head; it had pulled the walkie-talkie off as well. Somewhere behind me, on the road, lay my damaged helmet and the walkie-talkie headset.

  Still, I felt lucky. If I hadn’t left my helmet unfastened, that strike might’ve ripped my head off.

  In fact, that might've been the point.

  “Fine,” I muttered, not sounding at all like a crazy person. “Just fine.” In a matter of moments I would join back up with my group and then we wouldn’t need the walkie-talkies anymore anyway. I sped up. I couldn’t exactly gun the Valkyrie while shifting back and forth between driving on the sidewalk and driving in the gutter, but I made decent time.

  Now, Chester Court only lay minutes away.

  As I pulled the Valkyrie back down the street—wedging it between a blue courier van and a taxi before I hopped back on it—I heard gunfire in front of me.

  “Oh, fuck!” My eyes grew wide, and my pulse began to thunder in my chest. My head realized what was happening approximately half a second after my heart did, and the ramifications made me sweat.

  The crows had attacked my friends.

  I revved the bike and charged down the street as quickly as I could. As I drove, my thoughts raced. Had the kenku realized we were talking on walkie-talkies? Had that been the whole point of ripping my helmet off?

  Mister Lorne had shown that he didn’t mind taking people who I cared about. Perhaps I’d proven a little bit too dangerous for his murder birds. He might have considered it to be far simpler to take my friends and throw them into a cell next to Simon.

  It wasn't a bad play. How many people could I allowed to be taken before I gave up?

  “I don’t have that many people left,” I muttered as I swerved through standstill traffic.

  Somewhere to the north I heard police sirens wail more loudly for a moment, and then stop. I had no doubt that at this point the NYPD had made it to the northern end of Flatbush and were beginning to set a perimeter.

  Even worse, it occurred to me that perhaps the safest place to hide from the vanilla police might be inside Fallen Leaves itself. Is that what Mister Lorne had intended? For the police to drive me into his store?

  Shit. I heard a gunshot, followed by two more. I needed to hurry. I had no doubt that two of the bird brains were more than a match for my friends, and that assumed that the one I had shot wasn’t still somehow in the action.

  Although…

  The creatures had only taken me on one at a time. A poor strategy, for sure. I often teased Baxter when he ran a game because his creatures behaved in a similar fashion.

  So were they toying with me? I’d been surprised that one of them seemed eager to slice my heart out of my chest. However, the moment I had been knocked off my bike would have been the perfect time to go for the killing blow.

  They hadn’t even tried.

  And now, after they had destroyed my head protection, they’d stopped attacking me altogether.

  And that meant…

  “We’re being played.” I bit my lip in frustration as I zipped along down the median. We’d figured out that the Gaunt Man had been aware we had arrived on site. However, even though we hadn’t had much of a plan, he undoubtedly had several contingency plans in place.

  He had attacked me. He had scared me, caused me to fire a weapon that had summoned the authorities. He had cut me off from my friends, and now attacked them.

  The only safe place from the cops lay inside his that creepy little store.

  I felt herded, like a cow down a chute.

  I needed to change the game, to do something that he couldn't possibly expect. I needed a plan that would throw him off balance.

  Damnit. Jax had warned me of Lorne’s extreme cleverness. What had he said exactly? I furrowed my brow in thought, and spoke the words to myself as I swerved past cars. “The Gaunt Man is no man… not in truth. Yet he bears a mastery of yearnings, of the human heart.”

  That hadn’t been it, not exactly, but I remembered close enough. He’d said more though, something about a second weapon that I could use against him.

  It will come to you under great duress… I shook my head at the memory.

  I felt plenty of fucking duress right about now.

  Overhead, a police helicopter buzzed by the neighborhood, likely trying to get a fix on exactly who the shooters were.

  “MAKE YOUR WAY INTO A BUILDING!” A voice boomed from the helicopter loudspeaker. “SEEK COVER UNTIL THE INCIDENT HAS BEEN BROUGHT UNDER CONTROL.”

  Then the helicopter veered away, headed back toward the north side of the street.

  “Worse and worse,” I muttered.

  I pulled my bike past the spot where the accident had originally happened, a truck that had plowed into a small car. Their owners were nowhere in sight; it seemed like they had crashed into each other while trying to escape some kind of rampage going on up the street.

  Rampage? I thought his might have been more of a spree, tops.

  Beyond this point, the road cleared considerably. I could easily peer down the way without my vision being obstructed by a line of stopped cars. And as I did—

  “There you are,” I snarled. One of the kenku had perched on a nearby building. I watched as it swooped down out of sight, veering towards another street which branched off to the west.

  If I had been close enough, I would bet my lucky dice that the street sign on the corner read ‘Chester Court.’

  Not that I owned any lucky dice.

  “That was the moment that Liz came up with her brilliant idea,” I desperately narrated. As guns fired again, I winced instead.

  I had nothing. Nothing.

  I swore to myself, practically crying. This had all gone wrong. I had no doubt that if I hit the gas and tore over to Chester Court, I might be the difference between my friend’s lives and their deaths.

  I also had no doubt that the entire thing had been laid as a gargantuan trap.

  “This is where the character needs a favor from the game master.” I eased my bike forward to get a better view. Perhaps I should just bolt in there. If that stopped my friends from getting slaughtered by evil crow people—

  Wait. Something nagged in the back of my mind. Something about a favor from the game master…

  “A favor…” I chewed the thought over for a moment before I realized, in full Technicolor, what piece of memory poked me. My chest tingled, just as it had when I recalled Jax’s riddle.

  “Your second weapon will come to you under great duress….” Jax’s voice faded, drifted. “You’ll come to understand the value of one who asks of you a boon.”

  “Not that someone owes me a favor…” I muttered to myself, my eyes wide and my heart pounding with terror. “But someone who wants a favor of me.”

  That—

  “Oh God.” I sho
ok my head, almost unconsciously.

  For an eternal moment, the implication sank its icy fingers into my heart. I thought about every possible variation of the idea, and what it all meant. A burning flash of inspiration, of reckless insane stupidity dawned in my mind.

  Suicide. Ridiculous.

  In the distance, I heard Rehl yell. I couldn’t tell if it was in fury or pain, but I didn’t like it either way. I needed to kick it into high gear, take control of the situation.

  The plan I half-crazily conceived felt like foolhardy perfection. We were either going to go out in a glorious burst of gory insanity or we were about to make Blake Runner look like a kids’ cartoon.

  I smiled, chuckling just a little at the idea.

  Game on.

  3

  In the distance, I heard two more gunshots. Someone cried out in pain, and in horror I recognized it as Baxter.

  Now. It had to be now.

  I closed my eyes and relaxed into the uncanny power that surged inside my blood. It ran cold and sharp, yet it tasted like red wine, like desire.

  It capered and twirled and gamboled through me.

  Mine. Primal glee burned in my heart. Everything I was, everything I had ever been, exploded into a tempest around me.

  The autumn leaves shot away from me, hurled by a fierce and sudden zephyr. My dark hair danced in it, tousled and teased.

  More. I delved deeply into my heart, feeling the breath of eternity there. I inhaled deeply, delighting in sweet susurrus, in savage cyclones.

  I drifted within it, my mind surfing and cavorting. I relaxed there, letting all other things drift away. I tuned out the world, and delighted in the swirling, savage dance of the Wind about me. I waited for one sound in particular, one sound that meant things were about to get… irrational.

  It did not take long.

  When it came, the wind carried it to me. It began with an otherworldly crackling sound, followed by three separate loud POPs.

  I opened my eyes. There, on the east side of the street, three scarlet bursts of light shone, wicked and threatening. In the dark of night, their radiance flickered menacingly on the face of the buildings and cars. They had exploded into existence, a trio of shimmering, warbling gateways that sang a soft and eldritch song.