Paradise Lost Boxed Set

by R. E. Vance

  My first instinct was to charge him. I still had my sword. My head no longer throbbed, and even though my ankle was still busted, I had CaCa’s cast of shit holding it in place. My head was clear and I could think well enough to know that a head-on confrontation would only mean my death and much, much worse for Paradise Lot and the GoneGod World.

  No—get away. Regroup. Plan. Lay a trap. Get a gun—a really, really big gun. Do whatever it takes to even the odds. CaCa’s name would have to be added to what I owed the Avatar of Gravity, to settle at a later time of my choosing.

  If there was a later. I ran down the pipe, but with every few yards of ground gained, he lifted more asphalt as he calmly walked on the street above. It must have been quite a scene, watching the asphalt peel back like that.

  “Stop,” he hissed.

  “No,” I said, turning around to give him my middle finger. Then I resumed my “Mortal, Mortal, Mortal” song, this time to the tune of the Gummi Bears theme. I wondered why he didn’t simply stop me—push me down or take away gravity altogether. But he just kept peeling back the road as he followed me down the pipes.

  I took a turn to the right, away from the chasm he was creating, and down a pipe. I was trying to increase the distance between Grinner and me. It was working because it took him some time to get around the hole he had made and reach the other side. But still—he was on asphalt and I was literally sloshing through shit.

  Then, as if my prayers molded reality, I saw hope. I saw salvation.

  A city utility entrance stood before me, its door wide open.

  Revenge Is a Dish Best Served as a Banquet

  I ran into the utility entrance, closing the door behind me. From the door’s porthole-sized window I saw the road above tear open. Judging from the angle at which the asphalt ripped away, I suspected that Grinner didn’t know where I was. Still, he wasn’t stupid, and even though I had managed to escape, it was only a matter of time until he found me.

  I turned to survey the room. There were a few pressure gauges and a couple of turned-off computers, their black screens reflecting me in their emptiness. I looked like hell. Well, at least how I looked and felt were consistent. The room had a little metallic bridge under which the river of shit streamed by. There were several pipes with various labels on them, including one that read City Water. There were also a few small turbines and a bunch of lab equipment, as well as a table with discarded beakers and vials.

  I was in the city’s access point, where officials measured the chemical levels of the sewer and water systems. That is, until Paradise Lot became overrun by Others, and city officials decided their tax dollars were best spent somewhere with a voting population. Now it was an abandoned building, used by really poor Others who resided rent (and utilities) free.

  Above me were some of the roughest, ugliest residents of Paradise Lot, the kind that hated strangers almost as much as they hated humans they knew. Being both, I rated a special sort of ire. But they were all that stood between me and the outside, where, if I did make it out in one piece, the Avatar of Gravity was waiting to capture, torture and eventually kill me.

  Fire, meet frying pan.

  Frying pan, meet fire.

  Hellelujah!

  ↔

  I opened the door leading upstairs. Whoever lived below was watching the carnage above, but there were plenty of Others that hung out in the darkened halls of Paradise Lot Municipality. The One Spire Hotel was smack-dab in the middle of a slum—I have no illusions to the contrary—but there had always been a spark to it, a bit of life. The wino angels sang, the pan-handling gargoyles thanked you as you passed by. The poor and downtrodden may not have made eye contact, but there was always a shift in their body language that acknowledged your presence. But these Others were something else altogether. They watched as I passed by, their eyes filled with abandoned hate.

  These were the Others who truly had nothing, the real have-nots of the GoneGod World. They seemed to just sit around, counting the minutes as they waited for sweet oblivion. I looked down the hall and wondered how many lived here. A hundred? A thousand? How many of them had lived full, happy lives before the GrandExodus? I’d seen poor, and I’d seen desperate. But this was a whole new level of destitute. And here I was, naive and idealistic, believing I was living the worst of it, when there were many so much worse off than me.

  If I lived through this, I’d come back here and do something to help. I didn’t know what—but something.

  Two valkyrie loitered by an open doorway. When they saw me, their eyes lit up in surprise and one of them ducked into the room. I knew if I walked down that hall, I’d be in for trouble.

  Best to find another exit, I thought, but before I could go back to where I had come from, the valkyrie emerged, followed quickly by an uppity harpy.

  “You!” the harpy shrilled. “What in Tartarus are you doing here?”

  ↔

  I considered putting up a fight. Probably would have won, too. But, given what was waiting for me outside, I thought I’d let this play out in here first.

  The two valkyrie escorted me to a dim room that once upon a time had belonged to a middle-management employee and forced me to sit in a plush chair opposite an old office desk.

  The harpy hopped onto the bureau and announced, “Hear ye, hear ye! Bow before the great Yara-Uno, Master of the Concrete River, Guardian of the Hallowed Halls of City Municipality.”

  Two candles were lit, illuminating a bulbous red creature whom I hadn’t noticed in the chair opposite me. He was about three feet high, fire-engine red, bald, with two pencil-thin appendages that stuck out from where his ears should have been.

  “Holy crap, you’re a friggin’ Yara-Ma-Yha-Who,” I muttered as I stared at the Australian red vampire in awe. Unlike your typical vampire, this guy had no teeth—instead, octopus-like suckers protruded from the palms of his hands. Legend had it the Yara-Ma-Yha-Who gobbled up his victims, sucking on them like hard candy for a day or two before spitting them out whole and healthy, if not wet and somewhat traumatized. I’d seen all sorts of demons and monsters, but I’d never seen one of these before; I had been sure that, among the thousands of pages we were forced to study about all the different kinds of Others, the Yara-Ma-Yha-Who wasn’t real. I mean, come on, he looked like a giant red thumb with limbs. “I thought you were just a legend,” I said.

  The Yara-Ma-Yha-Who smiled. “I am a legend,” he said in an Australian accent. “You the reason why the First Law is tearing up the streets above?”

  I nodded.

  “And he is here, why?”

  “He thinks he can reopen Heaven.” Why lie? They’d eventually find out. Hell, the way Grinner flapped his mouth, I was kind of surprised word hadn’t gotten around yet.

  The red devil shifted in his seat. “Which one?”

  “Not sure,” I answered. “He listed like five of them. And something about how he was the new ‘god of gods’ …”

  The Yara-Ma-Yha-Who nodded. “Doesn’t matter,” he grunted, opening a drawer, pulling out a piece of paper, and tossing it over to me. “You him?”

  I picked up the page and saw a sketch of Joseph at the “Coping with Mortality” seminar. Miral stood behind him and to his left was little old me, another pair of eyes watching Joseph as he spoke. From the overly optimistic smile I wore (not to mention the distinct smell of shit), this drawing had to be CaCa’s work.

  I pointed at myself in the sketch.

  “And you were there when he died?” the Yara-Ma-Yha-Who said, pulling out a metal knitting needle and brandishing it like a fencing sword.

  I gulped, looking at the needle and imagining a death by a thousand pokes. I shook my head.

  “Then you are a friend of the One Made from Refuse and Archiver of the Lot. A friend of his is a friend of ours! I am Yara-Uno, the first of my kind and the last of my race.”

  May the GoneGod bless your soul, dear sweet CaCa, I silently prayed. That’s twice today that you’ve saved me!

&
nbsp; The little red thumb stood on his chair, extending his wafer-thin arm at me in an awkward handshake, a wide smile on his face revealing thousands of suckers in his gums. Then his expression went very grave and he said, “Tell me, the Unicorn killer—that him outside?”

  I nodded, a gesture he imitated. Yara-Uno’s nod turned into a sway as he put the weight of his little body on each leg. The change in his demeanor seemed to act as a signal because, without a word, the harpy leapt off the desk and left the room. Yara-Uno continued his odd oscillation for a few more seconds before fixing his eyes on mine and saying, “Thanks be to you, human, for you have brought our enemy to our home. This is a truly appreciated gift.”

  ↔

  Then things happened much faster than I thought possible. I mean, I’d been in the Army, I’d been in Special Forces, I was used to getting prepared for battle at a moment’s notice—still, I’d never seen troops prepare as fast as they did. There must have been a hundred Others, all armed to the teeth: helmets made out of paint cans and buckets, body armor fashioned from sheet metal and chicken wire, and weapons that were bats with nails, kitchen knives with door handles as hilts and a whole hodgepodge of common items taken to their deadly extreme. Hell, one gargoyle had an old Christmas-tree stand as a shield and a candlestick with fashioned razor blades as a mace. A valkyrie wielded a short sword, a minotaur a war hammer. There were Others who, given how deadly their equipment looked, I figured were once-upon-a-time warriors of Other worlds.

  And within seconds a makeshift army of mythical creatures stood at the ready, Yara-Uno their commander.

  By the GoneGods above and below—all this time I had arrogantly thought we had won the war against the Others because they were too weak and incapable to stand up to human brutality. But seeing this makeshift army standing shoulder to shoulder, I suddenly understood that the only reason we “won” was because most of them did not want to fight.

  But give them a cause—a true cause like avenging the death of the One and Only Unicorn—and you’d see a whole new kind of enemy. I only prayed that humans would never do anything to unify them against us, because if we did, we’d surely lose.

  “Now,” Yara-Uno said, “tell us about our enemy.”

  There was a chance to take down Grinner. So here I stood with my brothers- and sisters-in-arms—more like my brothers- and sisters-in-wings and horns and other appendages.

  “OK, people,” I said, looking into the crowd. “Ahh, not people, but creatures.” Not a good start to a pep talk. I cleared my throat and began again. “The thing outside killed the Unicorn.” This drew a reaction from the crowd—dwarves punched the floor, valkyrie threw their heads back and shrieked, minotaurs snorted. Every Other in the room jeered in their own special way. “That freak killed Joseph because he wants to be the new head honcho. Something Joseph died trying to stop. Something we’re going to finish.”

  I told them about the gravity and air attacks I’d seen, Grinner’s desire to rule Heaven and everything else I knew about him. Once I was done, I waited with dramatic pause before throwing my hands up in the air and crying out, “For Joseph! For the Unicorn!”

  The crowd erupted in snorts and cheers and cries. “Good speech,” Yara-Uno said. “Not as good as mine … but good enough.” He gestured to the troops of Others that were working themselves up into a battle frenzy.

  A distraught pixie fluttered in and whispered something in Yara-Uno’s ear. The red vampire listened, then lifted his scrawny arms in the air to silence the crowd. “He’s outside and he suspects we hide the human.”

  “Took him long enough,” I said, drawing my own sword.

  Yara-Uno shook his head. “No. You stay here.”

  “What? This is as much my fight as yours,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “With that?” he said, gesturing toward my leg. He had a point. “Besides, your smell will distract me.”

  “Fine,” I said, “but if you start to lose—”

  “Lose?” he said, pulling out his knitting needle. “Yara-Uno never loses.”

  ↔

  “You killed the Unicorn,” Yara-Uno said with an eerie calm as he walked out the front door.

  I watched from the third floor, where I could fling rocks at Grinner from my balcony seat. From above, I could see the top of Grinner’s head. He wore that wide-rimmed fedora of his, and from this vantage I could see that the top of his hat was unnaturally sucked in, tightly hugging his skull.

  “You spilled his blood and now he is no more,” Yara-Uno announced in an even tone as he circled Grinner, forcing him to turn his back to the building. A solid tactic. Pretty good for a thumb.

  Grinner didn’t seem to notice or care about the Others watching. “I am here for the human.” His gaze never left the Yara-Ma-Yha-Who.

  “You … killed … the … Unicorn,” Yara-Uno repeated slowly, each word carrying with it his full ire. “You spilled his blood and now he is no more.”

  “It was painful for me to kill one such as the Unicorn,” Grinner said. “He was a good creature that would have served me well in my new kingdom. But he refused and therefore had to be crushed.”

  “Sure, sure,” the red devil said. “He stood in your way, Yara-Uno understands. But myth says you crushed his innards. Fable says you tortured him. Legend says he died on his back!” This last point drew some protest from the crowd. To most Others, dying on your feet was a noble death. One allowed a defeated foe to die standing up, or on the back of their horse. But a prone death—that was a coward’s death, and to force one such as Joseph to lie there being tortured … that was an unacceptable insult.

  Grinner shrugged. “Feet, back or knees. All will bow to me.”

  From the corner of my eye, I could see a ghoul and valkyrie flanking the Avatar of Gravity. Fairies fluttered about with staffs in hand. The crowd was near explosion. The minotaur snorted, and with it the crowd erupted in jeers and taunts. For the first time Grinner seemed to notice the crowd. Turning around, he addressed them: “Servants of the OnceGods, serve me now and I shall return you all to the realms you once belonged to. I shall give you life anew. And all for the price of obedience. A fair exchange, think you not?”

  “I serve no one,” Yara-Uno said. “Not anymore.”

  “You will bow to me,” Grinner said, turning to the red devil, his hand lifting above his head. But before he could employ his gravity trick, Yara-Uno let out his war cry.

  Dragons roar, centaurs stomp, banshees shriek—and each one of their battle cries strikes terror into the hearts of their enemies. But a Yara-Ma-Yha-Who’s battle cry? It came out as a short “WAAN, WAAN, WAAN!” If I wasn’t on Yara-Uno’s side, I would have laughed. This was the creature that faced off against Grinner? Why couldn’t it have been a wakwak or a hill giant? At least they had war cries I could respect.

  Seems that my lack of fear was out of ignorance, because the crowd all backed away in terror. It was as if the Yara-Ma-Yha-Who’s battle cry was akin to the kraken rising from the deep or an archangel’s trumpet sounding the End of Days. Even Grinner’s smile wavered.

  With the WAAN, WAAN, WAAN!, the valkyrie lobbed his homemade arrows and the pixies shot their pool balls from their bra and tensor-bandage slings. Grinner took the hits with a whoop, dropping down to his knees.

  “Hell, yeah!” I shouted, throwing a cue ball at his head. “You’re going down!”

  “Ahh, Human Jean, how kind of you to join us,” Grinner said as he turned off gravity. The pool balls and homemade arrows floated up in the air before they started to circle him. After that, nothing else got through, each new volley adding to the meteor belt that orbited around Grinner. Then the Avatar of Gravity fanned his fingers in the direction of the crowd, each gesture sending a torrent of shrapnel shooting back up at us like bullets fired from a cannon.

  I gotta watch my mouth, I thought. I ducked into the building and away from Grinner’s counterattack.

  “You! Spilled! His! Blood!” I heard, and chancing a look outside,
I saw the Yara-Ma-Yha-Who’s gaping orifice of a mouth stretch open, as his tiny hair-thin legs propelled him forward at a supernatural speed. He dived into Grinner’s zero gravity, his arms outstretched like Superman’s big red thumb. Yara-Uno’s left hand held the needle, and I thought he was trying to stab Grinner. Apparently Grinner thought the same thing, but only had time to put up a small gravity shield to block the attack. Like I said, the little bugger was fast. But Yara-Uno wasn’t trying to stab him.

  He wanted to slap him.

  Yara-Uno’s right hand flashed up and slapped Grinner’s cheek. With a sharp smacking sound, his palm connected as he cried out, “You spilled his blood! And now I spill yours!”

  Way to go, little guy!

  In zero gravity everything floats, even little red Australian vampires. As Yara-Uno floated up, his octopus-like suckers latched on to Grinner’s cheek, making Grinner look like he was holding a big, red balloon in his teeth. Grinner shuddered as Yara-Uno’s eyes brightened and his mouth widened. Don’t get me wrong, Yara-Uno already had a big mouth, but it somehow fit his little red face. The smile that spread on his face was unnatural. He looked like … Grinner. Apparently, when the Yara-Ma-Yha-Who sucked your blood, he got a little bit more of you than red and white cells.

  He got Grinner’s powers.

  “You spilled his blood,” Yara-Uno repeated.

  “How can this be?” Grinner said as he, too, started floating.

  The two of them rose up into the sky. They must have gotten a hundred feet up when Yara-Uno’s face returned to normal. He was shutting off his new powers.

  “And now I spill yours!” Yara-Uno shouted one last time as they fell.

  A valkyrie dove out the window and caught Yara-Uno as Grinner fell to the Earth with a shattering BOOM!, and I could see from Yara-Uno’s approving look that he’d left the last bit of juice to increase gravity and give Grinner a big, crater-causing taste of his own medicine.