by David Moody
“Fuck.” Maddie was staring where the floor had returned to normal. She avoided the spot in the off chance there was some residual magic there; she didn’t relish the thought of her foot being stuck and dangling in the underworld.
24
THE MOON
Sam and Thistle had been morose and exhausted. There was no sign of Maddie and Kalandar and the bogalites continued to have their way with the people below. In some rare instances, groups of fighters had struck back and killed a few of the aggressors, but it was not enough to stop them. It was only after the large animal had been wholly sated that any success could be waged against them. The creatures were so fat from their kills, they went into what could only be described as a food coma or hibernation. They were easy enough to kill in this state, but it would come down to how many could they eliminate before the rest awoke hungry and ready for another meal.
Sandra had ventured out of the ring room. She wasn’t sure what exactly she was looking for, but something that would help ensure her survivability. Even her daughter had started to become hostile toward her—her ungrateful daughter! She went down to the lobby, took a cursory look at the devastation outside.
“Better you than me,” she said aloud. She then took a look around, making sure she was alone. She went behind the counter and opened up a few drawers until she found what she was looking for. The grey, credit-card-sized key was labeled with the word master in all caps.
“This is a big hotel, Sandra! Can’t be expected to check every room.” Then it dawned on her that she didn’t need to check on any of them. A hotel this big and swanky was sure to have security, and security meant weapons. “It must be on the first floor.” She made three loops around: she found the gym, the pool, and the hotel convenience store, but no security. “Basement it is.” She decided against the elevators and instead opted for the stairs. She was halfway down the flight when something felt off. The lighting had subtly changed; it no longer had the artificial harshness of the bright white LED bulbs but rather the soft glow of a sunrise on an early autumn morning. It wasn’t unpleasant—the opposite, in fact—she just found the transition strange. When she opened up the basement fire door, she was not greeted by the white walls and blue patterned rug she was expecting, but, instead, what looked like an entirely new world.
“I’m sleeping…I must be.” She blinked her eyes rapidly and shook her head, even pinched herself. “Not dreaming…that fucking demon did something to me.” She could see a city off in the distance. Before her was a field of swaying growth; she was hesitant to call it grass, as she’d never seen red grass. “I…I think I need to go lie down.”
“Sandra,” her name was whispered along the slightest of breezes.
“Who’s there?” She wasn’t scared, not yet, but concern was climbing high on her internal charts.
“Sandra, you have been chosen.” This was a little louder than before, but she still had to cup her hand around her ear to hear it clearly.
“Chosen for what?” She didn’t think it could hurt to find out what it was talking about, though she knew that no good could come from a disembodied voice whispering to her on an alien world.
“You are the key.”
She thought the choice of wording entirely too foreboding. “Definitely a dream. I’m leaving before I get to the part where I’m being chased by something and I can’t run. Annnd here we go.” Her heart began to race as she saw a figure across the field begin to make its way toward her. It was moving at a normal pace and so far had not made any threatening noises or gestures. Curiosity won out as she figured she could always just go back into the stairwell and close the door behind her. As he got closer, yeah, she thought, definitely a he, her heart began to race—but in a different way. He was somehow familiar, but it couldn’t be, right?
“Dean?” She couldn’t help but rub her eyes, even as she berated herself for being so naive. “You’re…so young.”
He was smiling at her.
“And alive.” Her emotions warred between whether she should be panicked or thrilled. She’d loved her husband, in the beginning, and seeing him like this was nearly too much. “This isn’t possible.”
“Anything is possible here.”
“You died in a nuclear fireball.”
“Yes, I suppose a version of me did.”
“You look like you did when we were in college.”
“And you can too.”
“What? How is that possible?”
“As I said, anything is possible here. We can be together and happy like we were when we first met. You just need to step completely out of the hotel and surrender yourself to me.”
Sandra smirked. She knew you didn’t need to be as brilliant as she to see the trap that was unfolding before her. “Surrender myself?”
“It is merely a word.”
“Yeah. Lots things have gone wrong in history after ‘merely a word.’”
“Sandra, your dreams, desires…they can all be yours if you join with me.” His hand was outstretched and there was longing on his face, one she remembered fondly when he was looking to skip classes to spend the day in bed with her. But there was also something more. Hidden underneath the facade, a desperation; she wasn’t sure if this wraith of the man she knew as her husband was being forced into this, or if the being mimicking him could taste how close it was to succeeding. “Do you not want to be young again? To have that feeling that the entire world is at your feet?”
“You’re trying too hard, Dean. Sometimes less is more.”
“We need a way in.”
“We, is it? It looks like you’re alone.”
“We are never alone.” His voice now sounded like three blended ones; it struck a discordant tone within her.
“I’m going to go now.” She was closing the door.
Dean, or whatever it was, began to sprint toward her. “Unwise decision, Sandra.” He returned to his normal speech pattern, but the blackness in his eyes could not hide his true intentions. Sandra slammed the steel door shut then screamed as a fist punched through the heavy door and grabbed her arm.
Sam awoke from a nap; she couldn’t say “refreshed,” but she felt better for it. She noticed a yawning Thistle looking over the control panel. “Did you sleep?”
“Some. Your snoring kept me awake.”
“What’s happening outside?” Sam stood and went to the monitors. “Where is everyone?”
“Dead or hiding, I guess. I had to stop watching.”
A wriggling worm feeling stirred in Sam’s stomach. “Where’s my mother?”
“I thought it was pretty quiet. She must have left while we were sleeping.”
“Did she go outside?”
Thistle nearly replied with I hope so; instead, she shrugged.
“This can’t be good.”
“What could she do?”
“It’s my mother; what couldn’t she do?”
Thistle wasn’t overly concerned. The demon hadn’t awakened anything within Sandra, so she didn’t have any magic to speak of, and even with the god-weapon, there was only so much she could do with it, considering it was empty.
“I need to find her.”
“Sam, we have more important things to do, like help those people if we can, and maybe try and discover what’s happened to Maddie.”
“Maddie’s dead,” Sam said with resignation in her voice.
“We don’t know that, not for certain, and we sure could use her. I have a basic understanding of the controls, but nothing like she does.”
“It’s all lost. What’s the point? My father and Maddie are dead, my brother and boyfriend are missing, and my mother will be plotting something to destroy the rest.”
“My father is dead and my mother and brother are missing, as well, but we can’t let ourselves stop trying; that might be all we have left. We have powers, and we owe it to those people out there to do our best to help them is we can.”
Sam thought otherwise. It seemed to her like no mat
ter what they did, those people were doomed. Then again, doing something, anything, was better than sitting around feeling sorry for herself.
The rings began to glow; it started as a light brown and quickly moved to bright red. “You doing that?” she asked.
“Haven’t touched anything, yet.” Thistle had pulled her arms in, her palms facing the console.
“The monitor!” Sam pointed excitedly. They were both looking at Maddie, who, for some reason, was staring intently at the floor. “She’s alive!”
“Where’s the giant red demon?” Thistle asked.
Sam wondered if the glowing color of the rings had anything to do with Kalandar. “Is this just a picture?” Maddie didn’t appear to be moving.
Thistle studied the image intently. “No, she’s moving…just really slow.”
“Weird.” Out of the corner of her eye, Sam noticed that the brightness of the rings was beginning to fade. “Thistle, I think we need to get her out of there.” An edge of panic beginning to well within her.
“I…I don’t know what to do.”
“The opposite of what we did to send them away!”
“Do you know what we did?” Thistle asked.
“I mean, sort of.” The rings were turning pink and the image on the monitor was getting blurry. “I feel like if we don’t get her now, she’ll be trapped there forever, wherever there is.”
“Right, right, retracing our steps…how hard can it be?” They shared a glance knowing full well just how difficult it was. Thistle tentatively reached out and worked the controls, the ring still losing luster.
Sam was concentrating. She had her head back, her eyes closed, her arms outstretched, palms facing upward, and her hair was blowing from a non-existent breeze. A deep blue color began to mix in with the red, creating a vibrant purple. “I feel her!” she shouted. The image on the screen began to gain clarity. “I’m trying to connect us….” Sam was straining as she exerted power.
Thistle watched as a purple sphere, no bigger than a child’s marble, began to form in front of Maddie. It was many long seconds later when she reacted to it, first stepping away then closer, then tentatively reaching a finger toward it.
“Thistle, gonna…need some help.” Sweat was running down Sam’s back, her body was thrumming from the current coursing through it.
Thistle added her flow to Sam’s. The sphere grew larger, but not big enough.
“Sam, I don’t know how much longer I can do this!” Thistle was out of breath, as if she’d run for miles.
Sam’s legs were growing weak, to the point she was fearful she was going to collapse. “Maddie, fucking help us!” Sam shouted.
An elongated echo of Sam’s words played back on the monitor like distorted feedback. To Sam and Thistle, Maddie was moving excruciatingly slowly as she began to manipulate the portal on her side. Sam cried out when her left leg locked up, if she bent it, she knew the muscles in her thigh would create a charley horse that might rip it free from its moorings.
“Don’t stop!” she begged when Thistle looked as if she were going to come over and help. Intrinsically she knew this was their one shot to pull Maddie back from the purgatory they’d sent her to. Somehow they’d been given a lifeline to her, but if they didn’t use it now, she would be adrift forever.
Maddie manipulated the magic on her end, making it more stable, pulling on the edges to enlarge it. She could feel the wavering power as the two women on the other end were beginning to flag. Her heart was beating so quickly it was almost one continuous strum. It wasn’t as big as she would have preferred, but time was of the essence. Maddie backed up to get a running start. She ran toward the opening and leaped with her arms extended out before her. There was an interminable amount of time where she had no sense of what was going on. She could not see, hear or feel anything. She might as well have been inside a suspension tank, as she didn’t even believe she was moving. If this was her life now, she would have preferred to have been back on the dead world. Then came the most minute hint of light.
“I’m dead. Just fucking great. Heading like a snail with a broken foot toward the light to a being I gave a royal bitch slap to and whom I don’t even believe in anyway. This ought to go well.” As she thought upon what she would say in her defense, the blackness immediately turned to an all-encompassing white and she found herself sliding along a slick tile floor before she crashed sideways into a wall.
“Maddie!” Sam cried out in relief.
“Sandra,” Thistle said warily.
Maddie wanted to tell them she thought she had found help, but something was wrong with Sandra, even more so than usual. What she had to say would have to wait.
25
LONDON
Arridon came to on the cold, hard floor of a cathedralesque room. Columns of stone soared to a ceiling multiple stories above with windows that pierced the cloudy sky. The quiet hum of magic and machinery enveloped him. There was no water, no cave, and no Thistle.
He sat up, his heart beating rapidly from fear and worry.
“Thistle? Thistle?!” he hollered. His voice echoed back to him, hollow, and as fearful sounding as he felt. Arridon got to his feet and searched the room; he found no signs of his sister.
“How do you just vanish?” he mumbled.
On one wall of the room a solid steel rectangle sat recessed. A line split the polished metal in half, and on the wall nearby, Arridon saw a small panel with a single round button.
“An elevator. If she left here, she went in that.”
Arridon strode with purpose to the button and pressed it. The door responded as if it had spent its entire existence waiting for him to just that. It slid open with no delay, and he stepped inside. After examining the panel filled with a hundred numbered buttons, Arridon pushed the one marked L, for Lobby. The door hissed shut, and he felt an abrupt wave of queasiness come over him as his descent began. The feeling passed as the numbers on the flat, god-tech screen changed with rapidity. The moment his breath had simmered down to normal, the sensation returned, and the numbers stopped moving. The door slid open, revealing a strange scene.
Ten feet of worn stone floor terminated in a railing that overlooked a massive open space, the floor far below teaming with people wearing strange clothing, speaking strange languages and moving left to right. In just the few seconds Arridon stood there, several had pushed their way into the elevator he’d arrived in, tapping on buttons to take them skyward. As the door started to close, he slid sideways out onto the platform, pushing strangers aside. They paid him no heed in their haste to get somewhere.
Arridon walked to the transparent railing and looked down into the foyer of the huge structure. Glass walls—some broken, and all dirty—surrounded the whole space, and an entirely new crowd of people buzzed about. She wasn’t here. She’d never go into that crowd on her own.
Arridon picked his way through the throng, minding the weight of his mother’s pistol in his waistband and any prying hands that might try to take it from him. He got the moving stairway heading down and allowed it to transport him to the lower level. He held onto the handrail with a firm grip to steady himself. He stepped out into the ground floor room and walked through a round, rotating glass door, into a city not unlike the Endless City back home.
Steel and stone spires, many covered in dingy glass, reached towards the sky, scratching at the dark, low-hanging cloud cover. At the ground level, metallic, wheeled machines sped past, humming with a power he didn’t understand, but he could see they were transportation devices. Their occupants all seemed irritated or frightened by something. Men and women, all wearing foreign and strange clothing, some in armor with obvious weapons, walked around, some irritated at having to avoid bumping into him, all hurried and wary. He was reminded of the Channel, and the moments before the chaos came. Arridon turned and saw posters matted against the wood covering the broken glass of the massive skyscraper he’d just exited. On each poster was the picture of a pretty, but hostile looking w
oman carrying some kind of god-tech weapon. He stood, sweating, almost paralyzed by the sensory overload.
“That’s my daughter, Jenny,” a voice called out from nearby. “She’s caused more than a little trouble, but I reckon you’ve done your fair share as well, otherwise you wouldn’t be here, correct?”
“Who are you?” Arridon almost barked at the man. He realized he was clutching at his waist where his mom’s gun was, and tried to play coy about it. The old man smiled.
“My name is Phil. I work in insurance. You just came through a gate at the top of that building there, right? Not from around here, I suspect.”
“Where is my sister?” Arridon asked the old man with the gray, receding hair who called himself Phil. Phil wore a strange set of trousers and an oddly checkered shirt that buttoned down the center of the chest. He looked cleaner than most others walking past, and he certainly didn’t seem to care about the city’s grime, the hustle, or the bustle. He smiled. He worked in “insurance,” so he claimed. Before the man could answer, Arridon turned his chin up to the sky again, and soaked in the massive vertical sprawl of the loud city.
Garish colors erupted out of flat walls as big as castles, illuminating scenes of smiling strangers. The images had to be magic. Haze and noise filled the sky as shining objects coasted through the air above. They looked like birds, but didn’t flap, nor alter course with the grace of a living creature meant to soar. More machines.
God-tech.
