by Hondo Jinx
Not because of the shimmering portal but rather because of the huge creature emerging from it.
Hovering thirty feet in the air was a robed tiger man surrounded by a dazzling corona of crackling white energy.
6
Brawley held out his hand, and Ty handed him a few screws.
Earlier, they had pulled the sheetrock and lined the walls in bio-plate. The stuff was a dream to work with, went up fast and easy, and would bulletproof the bedroom.
Tammy’s son had been following Brawley around for weeks. He was a good kid. He didn’t talk too much, and he liked to work. He knew how to listen, showed good manners, and never cried or complained.
At seven, he was a better man than most adult males.
Brawley lined up the wallboard, braced it with his mind, and drove the screws, zipping them in one after another. Piece of cake. The girls would want to repaint all this, he reckoned. He’d leave that to them. Nina would take the lead.
Out of the blue, Ty asked, “Did you know my daddy?”
“Huh?”
The boy shrugged. “You’re friends with Mom. So I thought maybe you knew Daddy.”
Brawley shook his head. “I did not.”
Ty looked at the floor. Brawley could see he was disappointed.
Swinging another sheet of wallboard into place, Brawley said, “Wish I had known him. Sounds like he was a good man.”
“He was. My dad was the best ever.”
Brawley nodded.
They were quiet for a moment.
Ty said, “Do you have kids?”
“Me? No.”
Ty turned his head, giving Brawley an inquisitive look. “Why not?”
“Haven’t gotten around to it yet. Been kind of busy.”
“Riding bulls?”
“Among other things. You’re downright talkative today.”
The boy looked away. “I’ll stop asking questions.”
“You’re all right.”
“I’m all right?”
“Yeah, I mean, I was just jerking your chain was all. You go ahead and ask them if you want.”
“All right.”
“But scoop up some of them screws for me first. I feel like a government worker, standing around like this.”
The boy handed him another fistful.
Brawley zipped them in.
“Is Aunt Nina your wife?”
Here we go, Brawley thought. “Yeah, she is. Reach me some more of those?”
Handing him more screws, Ty said, “And Remi?”
Brawley nodded. “She’s my wife, too.”
“And Sage?”
“Yup,” Brawley said. “And Callie. And Frankie.”
“That’s a lot of wives,” Ty said.
“We get by.”
Brawley put up two more sheets in silence.
Then Ty finally got around to the question he’d been wanting to ask. “Are you going to marry my mom, too?”
Brawley told him the truth. “I don’t know.”
Ty crouched down by the screws, raking his fingertips over them with a light rattle.
When the silence stretched on, Brawley thought maybe that was the end of it.
Then Ty said, “You’re not my dad.”
“No, I’m not.”
“My daddy’s dead.”
“I know.”
“He was a good man.”
“I know. How about some more of them screws?”
The kid handed him another scoop without meeting his eyes. “I just wondered was all.”
Brawley drove a couple of screws. “Wondered what?”
“If you were going to marry my mom.”
“Well,” Brawley said, lining up the next screw, “I’d have to ask her first. I’m fond of your mama. She’s a fine woman. I’d be lucky to marry her. But I’m not sure she’d have me.”
Ty shrugged, still avoiding his eyes.
“But I won’t ask her without your blessing,” Brawley said.
“What’s that mean?”
“It means I won’t ask your mama to marry me if you don’t want me to.”
“Oh.” Ty nodded. He fell quiet again, handing Brawley more screws without having to be told. Then he said, “If you and Mom got married…”
The boy just trailed off.
Brawley waited a bit. Then he said, “If we got married…”
Ty turned his face up to him. Normally, the boy didn’t much resemble his mother, but Brawley saw the resemblance now in the determined set of the jaw and the tough hope gleaming in the boy’s eyes. “If you two got married, would you be my daddy?”
“No,” Brawley said. “You already have a daddy. He’s up in heaven.”
The boy was crestfallen. His features drooped, and he looked away. “Oh.”
“But I’d be your stepdaddy,” Brawley told him.
Ty looked up at him again, one eye narrowed. “What’s that?”
“I could never replace your daddy, but I’d do all the things a father does with his son. I’d look out for you and teach you things and take care of your mama and sister.”
Ty looked at his feet. He was quiet for quite a spell.
Brawley waited, not even bothering to drive more screws. Finally, he said, “You understand?”
Ty nodded without looking up.
“All right, then,” Brawley said, and they hung sheetrock across the eastern wall without a single word passing between them.
As they turned the corner, Ty said, “I reckon you should.”
“You reckon I should what?”
“I reckon you should ask my mom to marry you.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Tammy said, coming into the room. “That’ll be enough of that kind of talk, Ty.”
Tammy stood in the doorway grinning at them, almost knocking Brawley’s eyes out, she looked so pretty.
The Bender had changed a lot since coming to the ranch. Especially over the last week or so. Back in Florida, working three jobs and worrying about money had worn her to a nub.
Ranch life agreed with her. The extra sleep, outdoors work, and sense of community had straightened her back and brightened her eyes. She’d put on a little weight and picked up a tan working alongside Pa and the girls.
Tammy had grown up on a farm and she knew the work.
Today, she had her strawberry blond hair pulled back in a ponytail and shoved through the back of a camouflage ball cap that read Country Girl. She wore an outfit Nina had bought her. Pointy-toed cowboy boots stitched with pink, a pair of jeans that showed off her legs and butt, and a loose tan t-shirt that hid her subtle curves.
She was sweaty from working in the barn and had her short sleeves rolled all the way up, revealing toned arms crosshatched with pink scratches. Bits of straw clung to her shirt and hair.
“Darlin, you look pretty as a picture,” Brawley said.
Tammy smiled, blushing a little. “Yeah, right. I’m all sweaty, and I smell like a barn.”
“It looks good on you,” Brawley said.
“So you say, sweet talker,” Tammy said. “Hey, your dad asked me to drive into town and pick up some feed. You all right with Ty, or do you want me to take him with me?”
“You go on ahead,” Brawley said. “We’re good.”
Tammy looked to her son, who stood with his thumbs hooked through his belt loops in the manner of Brawley. “Ty, you want to stay here?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Tammy grinned. “Yes, ma’am, huh?” She started to say more, probably fixing to joke about his new way of talking, but seemed to think better of it, and reined in her reaction. “Good, then. That’s good.”
Tammy’s soulful eyes flicked back and forth between Brawley and Ty then came back to Brawley.
“You sure you don’t mind?” she asked.
“Mind?” Brawley said. “Hell, you take him away, I’ll have to fetch my own screws.”
Tammy laughed. “Heaven forbid. All right, then. Thanks. You need anything in town?”
“I’m fine
, thanks. You might could drop in on Mama and ask if she needs anything.”
“Will do.”
“You carrying what I gave you?”
Tammy sighed. Frowning, she lifted her shirt, revealing her flat abs and the compact SIG Sauer P238 riding on her hip in a pancake holster. “Yeah, I’ve got it. I hate it. But I’ve got it.”
Brawley nodded. “Good. You need to keep that on you. Just in case.”
“Just in case?”
“Just in case.”
She looked at him for a second, half smiled, and gave him a little salute. “Yes, sir.”
Brawley pulled out his billfold and handed her a twenty. “I did think of something. Why don’t you stop into the liquor store and pick up a bottle of that wine you like?”
Tammy waved off the money. “I’ll buy my own booze.”
“Let me just this once. I’m hoping you and me could talk soon. Just the two of us, I mean.”
Tammy hesitated.
In that brief moment, he saw much in her eyes and face. Excitement, fear, indecision.
He held out the bill again.
She looked at the money like it might bite her. Then she reached for it. Her fingers brushed his and paused there for half a second before taking the bill and stuffing it into her hip pocket.
“All right,” Tammy said, struggling against a private smile, and for a second, she looked downright girlish. “I’d like that.”
They just looked at each for a few seconds, aware of something taking shape between them, growing and strengthening.
“All right, then,” Tammy said. She crouched down and hauled Ty into an embrace. She kissed his cheek then leaned back, holding him by the shoulders and staring at him with something like wonder writ upon her features. “When did you get to be so big?”
Ty smiled awkwardly and shrugged. “You drive safe, Mom.”
“I will, little man. You be good for Brawley. What he says goes.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She studied her boy for a moment then drew him into a fierce hug. “I love you, Ty. I love you so, so much.”
“I love you, too, Mom,” Ty said.
And then Brawley’s phone vibrated. For a split second, he thought it was Jamaal calling again.
But then he realized his mistake. Wrong pocket. Wrong phone.
It was the burner phone Remi’s dad, Braxton Dupree, King of the Scars, had given him. And that could mean only one thing.
7
Alex gasped.
The tiger man levitating above Times Square was huge, easily ten feet tall, perhaps taller. Black stripes dappled his snow-white fur, most of which was covered by long purple robes that billowed around him as if he were standing upon an invisible steam grate.
And yes, she almost laughed to note, between the voluminous robes and the sizzling whiskers of purple light arcing from the ring of white light surrounding him, the tiger man actually did look sort of like a wizard.
Maybe all of these assholes weren’t entirely delusional after all.
And just like that, she felt a surprising kinship with the surrounding protestors around her.
With one marked difference.
Unlike these hysterical assholes, Alex did not want to know the truth.
Not at all. She just wanted to get the hell out of Times Square and do her level best to forget the truth was even out there.
She would tell Davidson to shove his meeting and the white whale promotion way up his ass, cash in her chips, and head home to the rural bliss of upstate New York. Retire early, maybe do some volunteer work and score some karma points, maybe start fishing or develop a drinking problem to pass the time.
Do what she’d always said, as a kid, she would never do and go full local. Anything would be better than facing up to this reality.
The tiger man snarled, revealing huge fangs, and stared down at the masses, his intense gray eyes filled with a contempt so deep that it made the loathing Alex had felt toward these sign-toting imbeciles look like adoration.
Then the floating tiger man roared, and for several seconds, that’s all there was. The roar was so loud, so terrifying, that it blasted her thoughts to bits, rattling her so badly that she barely registered the windows and electronic signs shattering along the towering walls of the storefront canyon that was 7th Ave.
Screams lept up, and glass rained down. Suddenly, everyone panicked, pushing and shoving, fighting to move, move, move!
Alex screamed, jostled first one way, then the other. Someone jarred into her, screaming, and knocked the suitcase handle from her hand.
Alex was dragged away from the bag, borne among a stampeding section of startled crowd, surrounded by screaming mouths and wide-flung eyes bright with terror.
People shoved and pushed and thrashed.
Beside her, someone toppled to the ground, and in a sickening moment of special horror, Alex felt her heel sink into something soft.
Flesh, she thought, flesh!
A panic of revulsion shuddered through her, but then a large man, driving backward through the crowd and whooping with almost comical terror, plowed into her.
Alex careened sharply away from him, felt the heel of her shoe snap away, and holyshitholyshitholyshit!
She was falling!
She lashed out frantically, clutching at hair, clothes, limbs… anything to stop her from falling, because collapsing here could mean only one thing: death.
And that, folks, was not pessimism. That was realism in the first fucking degree.
Halfway to the ground she came to an awkward halt, clutching a shirt with one hand and what she believed to be a ponytail with the other.
Terrified laughter tinkled out of her in a mad rush as she struggled to get her legs back under her.
But all around her, panicked assholes lurched and jostled, banging into each other like panicked microwave particles.
The cloth she’d been clutching tore away, and her grip slipped from the ponytail, and suddenly—holyshitholyshitholyfuckingshitAlex!—she was falling again.
Even as she hit the sidewalk, the crowd rushed forward into the void.
Alex screamed in pain and terror as feet crunched down on her ankle, her hand, her thigh. A tar-spattered work boot scraped across her face, tearing her cheek open.
Alex yanked and scrambled like an animal caught in a trap. Only she wasn’t caught in a single trap. Because no sooner had she freed a hand or ankle or dodged another boot than half a dozen other feet were crashing down on her.
There was pain, of course, wild and searing, but worse was the surreal, intellectual awareness of damage being done, an almost detached tallying of her bones breaking, her clothes ripping, and her hair yanking loose as some good Samaritan attempted to pull her up to her feet again.
“Help!” she screamed, grabbing hold of anything she could, trying desperately to follow the hand tugging at her hair. She had to get back to her feet.
Davidson didn’t matter now. The promotion didn’t matter now. The lost suitcase didn’t matter now.
Nothing mattered now except survival.
Even the damned tiger man didn’t matter now.
Or so she thought.
Then everything froze, trapped in a blinding flash that went on and on and on. Her body was completely rigid, locked in place and vibrating, and the whisper of conscious thought remaining to her wondered fleetingly if, in her floundering, she had invoked Murphy’s Law and somehow managed to make matters even worse by touching a live wire.
But if that was the case, everyone had apparently touched the same wire, because the whole world and everyone in it were frozen in place, paralyzed by an explosion of bright white light spiderwebbed in purple static. The explosion went on and on and on not with a chain of loud booms but rather a steady crackling hum that pulsed and pulsed and pulsed—and then suddenly cut away.
All around her, people fell. They were so tightly packed that they toppled into leaning piles like sloppily stacked cordwood.
&
nbsp; People lay across her legs, her arms, her abdomen.
Alex screamed, flailing about, trying to free herself from the dead weight of all these people.
And it was dead weight, she realized, registering their lifeless condition at the same moment that her panic lifted enough for her to notice the horrific smell filling her nostrils now, choking her… the nightmarish stench of burning hair and half-cooked meat.
These people were all dead. Their faces and shoulders were charred to a crisp. Their hair was gone, as were their lips and noses and clothes, save for a few smoldering strips of cloth half-melted into the barbecued flesh.
All that remained were sneering teeth, empty sockets where eyes had boiled, and occasional splits in the blackened faces, opening lines of pink beneath that looked like candy-colored smiles against the melted darkness of their incinerated skulls.
Alex screamed and screamed, riding a geyser of thoughtless fear and revulsion. But even while her mind whirled like a merry-go-round, piping its insane calliope of terror, Alex’s body worked, the old lizard brain calling the shots as her meat and bones yanked and tugged, pushed and crawled, struggling to extricate her from the heavy blanket of smoking flesh that threatened to smother her.
At last she rose, bloody and bedraggled, half-naked in a shroud of torn and singed clothing. She was vaguely aware of the pain filling her body and of the abrasions and broken bones she had suffered, as well as the cracked and blackened skin already peeling from the scorched mess of her left hand, which she could no longer feel.
She could only see out of one eye. But one eye was all she needed, with a single sweep, to read the situation.
Everyone was dead.
Everyone.
The protestors, the bystanders, the drivers in their smoking taxis, stalled forever atop pools of melted tire rubber.
Everyone for as far as the eye could see was dead, cooked alive by the bright light that crackled on above the intersection, where the tiger man still hovered, glaring down with his merciless gray eyes.
Glaring down… at her.
Alex knew that he saw her. Knew that there could be no hiding, no playing possum. So she fell to her knees and groveled before this god of death, begging for her life.
All logic was gone. Pleas for mercy rushed from her in a tumbling torrent like the wild, random jabbering of a toddler lost to a full-blown meltdown.