“I think you will come with us, Princess. You have one, maybe two shots left. Come with us and we’ll even let your friends escape; there’s nowhere for them to go but up, otherwise. But there is no escape for you.”
“There is always another way,” she shouted at him with surprising defiance. Her words echoed through the large room.
He gave Bithia an apprehensive look. “Put it down, girl.”
Bithia fluttered her eyelids slowly. “Yes,” she groaned.
Regorik looked at her confused. Unsure if she was cooperating.
“Yes, Zabe. My answer was yes!” She suddenly stared at Regorik with piercing, cold eyes and flipped the knife at him with unsuspecting force. The blade pierced his eye socket and buried itself up to the hilt, severing brain from stem and killing the general instantly.
The circle of vyrm charged her, but they were too late. She had already raised the blaster to her head. “Yes,” she whispered again, “a thousand times over, yes.” She pulled the trigger before any enemy could stop her.
. . .
Claire and Zabe reached the top step and launched forward, down the final hall. Only the door at the end concealed their ultimate goal.
Suddenly, Claire cried out and pitched forward. She moaned with a panicked pain, trying to still crawl forward, trying stay on mission.
Zabe rushed to her side and rolled her onto her back. Her breath came in jagged, agonizing gulps and her eyes zipped back and forth as if she had fallen into REM sleep.
“I am… who… me… who am I…” she shot straight up and groaned against some unseen weight. “Yes!” she shouted out, and then collapsed under the strain and shock that overwhelmed her system.
Zabe scooped her up in his arms and scrambled towards the room of mirrors. Hot tears streamed down his cheeks. He knew exactly what was happening, and it meant that Bithia was dead.
. . .
In her mind, Claire focused on her one task—get out! Nothing else entered her mind, Zabe was five feet ahead, and suddenly the pain cut through her. Every nerve ending in her body burned with lightning force.
Her mind screamed as if some cold probe forced its way inside of it, tearing open her softest, most precious sanctuary with its intrusion. In her own inner-voice, she kept hearing I’m sorry… I’m so sorry! It was the only way to stop him…
Claire suddenly understood. Some aspects were similar to when she’d merged with Bithia in the ether, but this was more visceral: a more real kind of merging. This time severe pain accompanied it—she felt the agony of Bithia’s death and the transfer of all her life energies into Claire’s already taxed psyche. Bithia’s very soul downloaded into Claire!
Her mind spun out of control as a split second stretched into a lifetime. Instead of Bithia sharing the memories that she chose, every part of her was dumped into Claire with traumatic force. It was as if Bithia had fallen from the sky and landed on Claire while she drove a convertible: who was steering—who was the passenger? We’re going to spin out and crash!
Even at the mental analogy, the foreign voice wondered, What is a convertible?
Uncontrollable mental energy rippled through Claire’s body and reached her limbs. They shook and trembled, A seizure? The trauma overwhelmed her, triggered a total shut down.
She saw Zabe, Rob, rushing towards her, and then both sets of eyes rolled back in her head and went dark.
. . .
Weaponless, but not hopeless, Zabe kicked the door open and rushed within. The old, dry boards splintered and the handle clattered to the floor.
This spacious room contained nothing but sheet-covered mirrors and dust. Footprints walked in part way from when the vyrm did an initial sweep of the premises, looking for prisoners who hid from the earlier onslaught.
The center of the room was the trigger point. All thirty-two mirrors faced the one central location.
He laid Claire gently in the middle and flung off sheet after sheet until he found the one that he needed. Each mirror’s frame was engraved with decorative symbols to mark the different potential gate locations in a realm; each mirror led to a separate different plane of reality. The mirror room was a nexus location. Locating Earth’s mirror, he activated the portal and instinctively touched the first location he recognized.
Twitching, Claire jerked her head up, trying to continue onward. She spotted the immense mirror nearby; it rippled silver and metallic like a pool of molten mercury.
Zabe tore an old sheet into long strips and tied them to the severed iron doorknob. He glanced down at her. “I’m getting you out of here,” he reassured her, kneeling by her side. “Can you walk?”
“I’m…who… maybe,” she said, struggling to crawl up on her hands and knees. She stuttered and twitched like a malfunctioning android.
He helped her to her feet. Claire clung to his left side, leaning on his strength, barely able to function independently. He walked her through the mirror, slowly entering it himself. At the last second he snapped his wrist and yanked the heavy, metal knob towards the mirror as they fell into the ether.
Just as they stretched and shot through time and space, transformed into a shimmering bolt of energy, the mirror solidified back into glass. Just in time, the knob smashed into the mirror’s glass and shattered into a million pieces, prohibiting any immediate pursuit from the nexus.
The fabric of space and reality ripped open and dumped Claire and Zabe onto the ground in the middle of a huge church sanctuary; they spilled out right behind the main lectern. Overhead, the glowing, azure portal snapped shut with the sound of breaking glass and the rematerializing duo tumbled to a stop and looked up.
It was Sunday. More than a hundred men and women were seated in the church pews. Zabe wasn’t fooled for a moment. Each wore dark, uniform clothing and a pin depicting a seven pointed star.
Zabe stood and kicked over the podium, blocking Claire from the small army which even now leveled weapons upon them. Claire got control of her shaky legs. Both of the minds residing within her body agreed and voiced a whisper, “I think we’re in trouble.”
Chapter 20
In the blink of an eye Rob transformed. Leaping to his feet, the werewolf snarled ferociously, causing most in the congregation to take a cautious step backwards. He warned them off with bellow of animal fury.
The man standing closest to them, the priest, dove for a nearby, knee-height table and reached under it. He yanked a shotgun free from the hidden restraints.
“Run, Claire! Run!” Rob insisted in his gravelly, lupine voice.
Claire took a step back. Her mind still reeled from the confusion addling her thoughts; it grappled with the foreign consciousness. The two minds stitched themselves together even as they fought.
The first gunshot rang out. A loud kra-boom echoed through her head and the concussive force of the nearby shotgun blast put her hair on end and snapped her to action.
“Run! And don’t look back,” Rob howled; he only bled slightly from the priest’s scatter-shot. The chest-plate from his royal armor absorbed the brunt of it.
Claire turned on her heels and ran. She slipped behind some machinery at the rear of the church and hid as a mob tried to give chase.
Rob wouldn’t stand for any pursuit. He pounced into their midst and clawed at the maniac cultists. Blood and screams spilled from the mob as they piled on top of him with a gang tackle violent enough to make Claire’s Vikings jealous.
“Kill the beast,” the priest howled. “This is the monster that has been stalking your children in the parks—the monster that The Seven warned us about! And somebody find that girl. She is the chosen one!”
The pile of cultists flipped in every direction as Rob burst upwards, casting them off with superhuman fury. He dashed ahead on all fours as the startled priest pumped two more loads of buckshot into the werewolf. Rob caught him in his claws with a vicious, whirling uppercut. He kicked the shotgun far away as the cleric collapsed in a gory h
eap.
He turned again to the pulsing congregation and cringed against their small arms fire. The armor turned back some bullets; many lodged in his flesh. Rob howled in pain and rage. He charged into the mob so that they risked hitting each other if they shot, but they did not stop firing. Bullets that missed their mark hit other cultists.
The horde pressed in on Rob again just as a shimmering window between the worlds opened. Caivev—Vivian stepped through from the Prime. She shook her head in bewilderment at the scene. Noticing the familiar werewolf, she unholstered her blaster and yanked the tracking device from her belt and activated it.
Glancing at the handheld screen she pointed to the lycan and shouted, “I’ve got this!” Vivian tossed the tracker to a nearby cultist, the nearby blip on the screen glowed only faintly as the tracking poison had mostly ebbed from her system. “Follow that! Capture the girl!”
Vivian turned and pumped a scorching bolt of energy into Rob’s back. He howled in agony and grabbed a nearby cultist to use as a human shield. Rob stared over his prisoner’s shoulder and growled at Vivian. This was not the first time they had played this game.
Vivian poured fire into him anyway, shredding the cultist, trying to burn through and into her prey. This time, the stakes were higher than ever!
The hunter with the tracking device grabbed a small crew of accomplices and stalked Claire. They moved directly towards her hiding place. Claire watched Rob, praying that he could somehow escape.
“Get out of here!” Rob yelled again. “They must not catch you!”
Claire stayed, watched, riveted by fear and hope. “But our answer was yes,” she whispered. “I do!” she wiped a tear. “Bithia would have married you.” She prayed that he already knew the answer to that fated question, even if it had never been voiced.
The Heptobscurantum continued to press the attack, mobbing Rob, overwhelming him. Claire’s pursuit had almost discovered her; they needed only a few steps more until they’d be on top of her.
She watched Vivian level her blaster on Rob and take careful aim. Just before her traitorous friend could pull the trigger, Claire pushed a huge stack of retired hymnals down on top of her hunters before they could discover her.
Fleeing, hot tears burned her face. Claire could clearly hear the final, echoing report of Vivian’s blaster as she burst through the rear exit into the parking lot. Claire didn’t stop running, couldn’t stop running. The fate of the universe relied on her never slowing.
. . .
Jacob Sisyphus strapped his victim down upon the table. He had thought through this process quite heavily and consulted many texts, both old and new, about the procedure.
His Prime version continued to beg. Sisyphus did not pity him; he hated Jarfig for his perceived weakness, for those attributes that he deemed pathetic. He refused to speak to it, even acknowledge it or dignify it with a name—not even with a pronoun. Jarfig was an it, not a him.
“Please,” it begged. “Just kill me!”
Sisyphus had already blindfolded it. Sick of the begging, he strapped a gag in its mouth.
He had no intention of letting it die. Sisyphus did not want that thing’s soul to transfer into his body and contaminate him with weakness; he wanted nothing to do with it but tap it for its Primal energies.
Smiling with a twisted grin he brandished his sharpened incisors. He believed in his ability to siphon the powerful, life energy from his Prime without extinguishing its life. It was a mere fountain for continued, enhanced power.
Bending down near its shoulder Sisyphus bit his victim and drank deep. It cried out; the gag muffled the horrific screams while the insane occultist slaked his thirst and felt the primal power course through him.
…One Month Later…
Claire walked briskly past the bulletin board, peeking at the flyer over her dark sunglasses. Her face was stapled in large, Xeroxed glory with the giant word “Reward” followed by a phone number. She felt she could breathe a little easier than she had in the past four weeks since she’d first fled the counterfeit church that the Heptobscurantum had defiled. Finally, other, newer posters had begun to take over wherever her face had been hung these last thirty days.
She’d come to terms, somewhat, with sharing her head with the Princess. It was less of a battle for the driver’s wheel, now. It had become more of a road trip with a close friend; every day they merged a little more. No longer Claire, and not Bithia… Clairithia? She scrunched up her nose at the thought. Both of her minds laughed at the absurdity. Clairithia sounds like the name of a disease.
Glancing into the decorative mirror in the tiny café she’d entered, Claire saw her brightly colored hair and punk makeup; she looked radically different from the girl on the poster.
She’d picked up many keen insights from Bithia, like hiding in plain sight, and the idea to keep to the smaller towns. As she sat, she caught the eye of a lecherous old man who raised his eyebrows at her pink-ombred hair and heavy eyeliner; his wife, seated across from him, noticed it and smacked him with her purse, chastising the elderly man.
That’s how it worked. Dressing for attention meant most people wouldn’t, or couldn’t, give her a look. At least, not in the rural areas she had kept to.
Claire slid into a booth at the mom and pop style restaurant in the tiny south-Iowa town. She ordered a coffee and leaned back to rest. She thanked the waitress for the cup. A new appreciation formed in her for the small, out of the way places. The culture radically differed from her norm.
She sipped her coffee and reflected. A week ago, one of Vivian’s agents nearly caught her, but a trio of skater kids hid her and sent the Heptobscurantum officer off in the wrong direction. Every sub culture she encountered hid its own diamonds in the rough.
Sighing away her tension, Claire conversed with her inner thoughts, no longer frightened when they answered back of their own accord. Last night she’d been foolish and attended a recruitment meeting for the cult. The Heptobscurantum continued growing wide and fast.
It had been a dangerous gambit, but she needed to know exactly who still chased her. They were all dangerous, but the early initiates had no real idea what they had bought into. Some of their methodology was thought control; some of their tactics focused on intentionally seeking out the depraved and unstable. But none of the early members truly knew the true nature of Sh’logath. Sh’logath was a mere concept, an ideology, like the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
The cult presented Sh’logath as the remaker of all things. He was pitched as sympathetic; a moral force that appealed to the disenfranchised, the philosophical, the holistic. She suspected that the later levels learned of the necessity of destroying all existence and killing all living things in order to do this. Agod, nega-god, and Devourer of Reality weren’t terms she heard at that meeting. But they did have a free lunch, although Claire avoided drinking the Kool-Aid.
Oh, Bithia, how am I going to get out of here? I’ve got to get out of the country!
They control the entire planet, Bithia replied. They could find you anywhere.
Claire nodded. But I might have a better chance further out of the way, maybe Peru? She’d always fondly remembered working with her father at the Huamparán dig on the Inka Road and hoped to return someday.
Or you might be more noticeable, there’s only a tiny population of white females in that area.
Sighing and muttering, Claire sipped her coffee. She didn’t know what to do, except keep moving.
“Are you okay, honey?” the middle aged waitress asked her.
“Oh, thanks. I’m fine,” Claire lied. She realized her inner voice had been spilling out slightly as a quiet murmur. It probably sounded like she was talking to herself. Claire and Bithia both chuckled.
Huamparán was out, then. Claire thought of her father. She missed him greatly; she thought of Bithia’s father and missed him, too—equally in fact. So many had made the ultimate sacrifice: fathers, the Guardian Corps, Rob,
Zahaben, Shardai, and so many more. A melancholy mood embraced her like a cold hug as she ticked off all the names, eventually losing count, repeating Rob’s name a number of times.
She smiled, recalling a memory from when Bithia was a teenager. Zabe had saved her from an attempted kidnapping by a band of Nitthogr’s forces. It was the first time Zabe had done so—it had always been Zahaben before that. How he’d smiled that day; his father congratulated him and folded him into the ranks of the Guardian Corps that same day… Bithia’s father had been alive then, too. So was Claire’s.
Claire sighed and drained her mug. She paid in loose coins, of which she had fewer and fewer, and walked out the door. She thought to the duffel bag they’d had at the Desolation and lamented leaving it behind at the Prime; a handful of gold coins remained inside the sack, far out of reach and on the other side of reality.
She’d no sooner set foot outside than she saw a remotely piloted drone car pass her by as it snapped images for an online mapping software. Claire cursed. How could I be so foolish! I’ve been so careful up until now!
Turning, she sprinted down the street, not caring how much attention she drew to herself at this point. The photos would likely pass through facial recognition protocols and alert the Heptobscurantum within seconds. Claire had to flee as far as she could as fast as she could; she had minutes at the most.
Reaching the end of the block near the two-lane highway, she darted across the street and into the parking lot of the large truck stop. Claire ran up to the bank of semi-trucks parked near the filling station and banged on doors, hoping she could convince one to give her a lift.
At the third vehicle, a door finally unlocked. Claire nearly fell off the step when the passenger door opened to her.
“Rob!” she exclaimed.
The OTR driver stared back at her quizzically. “Yeah,” he said… but the accent was wrong. “Robert. Robert Schaeffer,” he extended a hand. “Do I know you?”
Wolves of the Tesseract Collection Page 21