Lincoln, Fox and the Bad Dog

by D Roland Hess

  “Hang up.”

  “Okay.”

  If Dan was in the Grand Staircase area, whether he had his phone on silent or not, he’d certainly check it if he got a call, and I’d be able to spot him.

  I waited.

  Twenty seconds.

  Thirty.

  “The call went to voicemail,” said Fox.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  So that hadn’t worked. No one had checked their phone, except a young teenaged boy who was checking his phone every five seconds anyway.

  I held Fox in a stable forward position and did my best attempt at a controlled not-completely-exposed walk down the stairs. Nothing bad happened.

  At the bottom, I took the long way around, hugging the wall until I made it to the first floor entrance of the Hall of Sculpture. My theory was that if I could prevent Dan from touching me, I was probably not going to be subject to his mental whammy. Most of the folks at the museum were keeping to the throughways, across the floor, ergo if I stuck to the walls I’d be safer. It would be hard to miss someone peeling off and heading my way, even if things got crowded.

  The limited amount of tactical training I’d had was making alarm bells go off in my head. I was stalking around a well-populated public space with a drawn gun. I had my finger off the trigger, like you do, but still. It was bizarre.

  Babd kept a step or two behind me.

  I rounded the corner and slid into the Hall of Sculpture. The entrance to the Hall of Architecture was about thirty feet away, across the floor, but I still planned to keep to the walls, making it a little further.

  A lot fewer people were in here. It’s one of those spaces that seems too quiet and has too little in it for its size. People go in but tend to move on quickly.

  For a second, I again wondered about the nature of the spell Dan had laid on the place, ignoring the fact that he was able to do it at all. How persistent was it? If something, say, tragic would happen to Dan, would the spell dissipate immediately, leaving everyone with a face full of Play-doh dicks and me in the middle of a crowd with a smoking gun?

  I hated to say that I’d worry about that later, but I thought I was going to have to worry about that later.

  Babd growled behind me, then made a little clipped peep sound.

  Then, nothing.

  Someone touched me behind the ear.

  I couldn’t move.

  “You’re Lincoln,” said a woman’s voice, a bit of an accent at play. I wanted to turn my head, but my neck wasn’t listening. No matter. She walked around to where I could see her.

  She was young, like mid-twenties, fairly short and dressed in tactical gear. She held a shiny stainless pistol that looked like a Beretta 92fs. I recognized her as the girl from the beach party picture Fox had shown me, one of the three social nexi of the Praecant communications graph.

  Two others came with her, people I hadn’t seen before. One was a narrow young man in a long black coat, with black hair and a stupid looking Van Dyke beard. The other was a middle-aged guy, black, tall and dressed in the same tactical gear as the girl. He didn’t look terribly fit, but the MP4 he had in his hands looked like it was up to any task that his pooched out gut wouldn’t be. They flanked her, so I figured she was in charge.

  “Funny thing,” she said, and I identified the accent as probably Australian, “but I got a call from someone not ten minutes ago that said you were here, coming after Mister Daniel.”

  I couldn’t blink. My eyes started to itch.

  “Now who would that have been?” she said.

  My eyes started to water.

  “Oh,” she said, her head angling slightly back toward Van Dyke. “Kirk, his eyes. Adjust it.” The young man raised his hands, and I watched as they were guided through a couple of sharp motions.

  Suddenly, I could move my eyes and blink.

  He must be the one who had touched me.

  “Your dog is interesting,” the girl said. She walked past me, out of my line of sight. “I know what you are,” I heard her say, and her voice came from behind me and lower to the ground like she was kneeling. “You’re not moving either, and you’re certainly not getting out of that body until we come back.”

  “Let’s go,” said the guy with the MP4.

  “Right,” said the girl from behind me. She came back into my field of view.

  “I’m doing you a favor,” she said, looking at me again. “This museum, a huge interior space with new construction, marble everywhere and a sealed climate? There’s no environmental iron. Not enough to matter, anyway. Magic works in here.”

  She turned and walked toward the entrance to the Hall of Architecture. As she did it, she lifted her free hand and spread her fingers. Red lightning crackled around her hand.

  “He’d have ripped you to shreds,” she said. “We’ll be back.”

  She made some hand motions–the tactical kind, not the magical kind–and the three of them dropped into a well-practiced walk, fanning out among the columns. She had the pistol up in her right hand, and my goggles showed the magic dripping from her left, leaving a trail on the floor. Kirk drew a sword that I hadn’t noticed, and it flared with magical energy.

  They disappeared through the doorway.

  They were going to handle Dan.

  And then handle me.

  Like before, I could feel some small amount of utility around the hand that gripped Fox. His magical properties and will were somehow able to very locally counter the effects of what they’d done to me.

  I tried to use that.

  I concentrated on what that felt like and tried to let it grow. Tried to coax it further into my hand and up my arm.

  Come on.

  Just relax and let it happen.

  Nothing.

  I wasn’t a Praecant, and although I had will, I couldn’t actually do magic.

  But I tried again anyway.

  Again, nothing.

  I was starting to panic, which is an amazingly horrible thing to do when you can’t move.

  Something else, then.

  Babd!

  I thought it as loudly as I could.

  She could pick up thoughts like that. Maybe there was something she could do. Could she reach into my brain and flip some kind of switch that would set me free?

  Babd!

  More nothing.

  I thought about my open comms with the Fox AI back at the hotel, but there was no way I could leverage that to my advantage. I couldn’t speak.

  The best I could do was to blink out SOS with my eyes.

  Now they were going to kill Dan, come back, grab me and either kill me on the spot or interrogate me first then kill me. Oh hey, maybe they might take me somewhere horrible and a crazy powerful Praecant could turn my brain into pudding. Literally.

  My mind glitched.

  … Gwen comes running in with her ball bat… she tells me that somehow all the contact with magic has awakened her latent abilities, and she frees Babd and I... the Praecant assault team subdues and arrests Dan... Gwen, Babd and I escape before they can come back for me...

  … Mom and dad walk out of the Hall of Architecture and tell me that there was some kind of misunderstanding, and everyone is really alive, and I just had a massive concussion that gave me a multi-year long delusion, and this is the last part of my therapy, and I’m better now...

  … I close my eyes, open them and realize that none of this is real... I’m running down the alley with May, laughing, and she’s looking over her shoulder at me, tongue hanging out and panting as she goes... even though the sun is hot out on the street because the township took out the trees two years ago, it’s nice and cool in the alley, so that’s where we play...

  … the other kids have dogs, but not a single one of them is close to being as good as May... they either have to be tied up or they eat their own turds, or they bark all the time or just aren’t that smart... sometimes I think May’s even smarter than the other kids I don’t care to play with...

  �
� here’s your frisbee, girl... Get it!

  I opened my eyes, and I was still in the museum despite a furious will to the contrary.

  Frozen.

  No May.

  No mom and dad.

  No Gwen.

  I felt cold, and although I couldn’t move, I could feel sweat collecting on the palms of my hands.

  I would sit tight. I had no choice. To quell the growing panic I told myself there would be a chance to get away later.

  If they didn’t kill me immediately.

  But they weren’t going to do that. They could have dropped me a minute ago, but they chose to freeze me. So clearly, they wanted me alive for just a little bit longer.

  That was… encouraging?

  Maybe Babd would come up with something.

  Gunshots.

  Five, rapid fire and some shouts from the Hall of Architecture. No mass panic though.

  There was another sound, kind of like a gunshot but different. I’d heard it before. It was a bone snapping.

  A scream, sort of like a woman’s, but when it’s that bad it’s kind of hard to tell. Then it stopped.

  One more gunshot.

  Then, just people talking.

  I counted my panicked breaths to twenty-three before something else unusual happened.

  There was a scream from the Hall, and suddenly, I was free.

  I took that to mean that Kirk Van Dyke was dead.

  My arms and legs immediately started shaking, and I collapsed down into a kneeling position, both for tactical reasons, and because I was afraid I was going to pass out. Babd ran up beside me.

  “I shall feast on their souls,” she said, and the last word faded into a growl.

  “I might let you,” I said.

  After I caught my breath, and things stopped tunneling, I willed myself to my feet.

  Two people came around the corner out of the Hall of Architecture, and in a panic I almost shot them in the face. But it wasn’t Dan or anyone who could sling magic around. It was just a hipster couple holding hands.

  There are other people here. There are other people here.

  I tried to hold that in my head like a mantra. The last thing I needed on my conscience was more unwitting death.

  Stoneface.

  Carol.

  Guster.

  I edged forward and poked my head around the doorway. If Dan saw and recognized me, things were going to get even worse, immediately. But I knew that at some point, I had to take the chance.

  The vast room contained maybe two dozen people walking about. Natural light came in through the ceiling, which was made entirely of glass. The enormous casting of the facade of St. Gilles du Gard dominated the room from the left while the rest was filled in with plaster and bronze castings of other ancient and historic architectural touchstones. Museum goers were just museum going, ignoring the fact that a formerly large man with a machine gun lay scattered across the floor in chunks.

  I spotted Kirk, dead and staring blankly, sitting at the feet of what looked like a statue of a Macedonian griffon. A part of me noted with some interest how I’d not reacted with any surprise to the gore in the room.

  Where was Dan? That was really the entire point of the exercise.

  There were some spaces within the room that were hidden from the main area. You had to walk behind the facade to get to them. Maybe he was there. That would be convenient if it were the case because it was a tighter area with almost certainly fewer people to get in the way and potentially get hurt.

  I exposed myself a little more in the doorway to get a better view, and that’s when I saw him. He was just too far to the right in the main area for me to see from my previous vantage point.

  He stood with his back to the doorway, maybe forty feet away from me, facing a miniature (but still large) re-creation of the Parthenon. The leader of the Praecant strike team seemed to be pinned to the Parthenon, her right arm bent backwards around the far corner of it at an unhealthy angle. I could tell that she was still alive because she was twitching in apparent agony but unable to make a sound.

  I’d seen this trick before, and I knew how it ended.

  I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d planned to do until this moment. Honestly. I’d lied to Gwen, thinking that it might come to this. I’d certainly prepared as though I’d have to do something drastic. But I was only doing that because some part of me was really smart. The rest of me held this fantasy that I’d come here, run into my friend, and we could work it out. Somehow.

  Stupid.

  So stupid.

  In tactical training, one of the things we worked on was a “mall shooter” type of situation. It comes down to this: if you have cover, there’s an active shooter, and you have a shot, you either stay in cover, or you take the shot. There’s no shooting to wound or disarm. There’s no warning or shouting, “Hold it!” If you decide to break cover and attack, there’s no reason giving the bad guy a chance. Compose your sight picture, then start firing.

  There was probably something more clever that I could do but right now with the smell of blood starting to hit my nose from the floor, nothing was coming to mind.

  This was it.

  “Safety rounds,” I said, just to be sure. No kinetic force. No museum goers were behind him if I should miss.

  This was not an easy shot.

  I wished I’d created some kind of auto-targeting system with Fox that could guide a bullet.

  Why hadn’t I done that?

  I guess when you’re sailing on new seas in something that looks enough like a boat, you don’t necessarily wonder whether or not you should add wings to it.

  But maybe there was one additional thing I could do.

  “Babd,” I said. “I’m going to shoot him. As soon as I do, rush him and take him down, in case I don’t.”

  It seemed reasonable. I could get off two shots with any hope of accuracy before she made it there. Decent odds. With any luck, she’d make it to him in time to bite into a dead body.

  But what if he had some kind of magical shielding?

  The strike team had guns, and he’d turned them to mush, so some kind of protection from ballistics was a possibility. Likely, even.

  Should I alter the method of attack?

  “Fox,” I said quietly. “Dispel with a narrow band on the next trigger pull, then switch to safety rounds.” The gun pulsed twice.

  If he had some kind of spell protecting him, the first shot from Fox should take it down. The second one would do the trick. But that follow on shot is always harder, so this reduced my chances of an effective hit dramatically.

  Damn it.

  I realized standing there that this was it. My last chance to run. I could still leave, get my stuff from the hotel, maybe even talk Gwen into coming along. I could. But who knew what that would hold? I tried to look at all the future paths in an instant, let my intuition describe them with neat lines, but it was all fuzzy. Maybe the Praecants would hunt me down with ease. Maybe I’d somehow be able to stay ahead of them for a long time. Maybe they weren’t nearly as powerful or adept as I’d supposed, and Gwen and I could live out the rest of our natural lives on a beach in Brazil.

  But like so many other things in this world, there just wasn’t enough information to make an informed guess. Even my normal faculties that let me be right when everyone else was floundering weren’t up to it.

  Running, it turned out, was a choice for a randomized outcome.

  On the “don’t run” side, things at least had a chance for more clarity.

  If I shot at him, I’d either get him, or I’d miss and he’d get me. And if I got him–scratch that, if I killed him–I may be able to have some kind of leverage with the Praecants. And if not, at least they’d be scared of me.

  I liked that set of options better.

  It meant there were a hundred questions that I’d never have answered. Answers I felt that I deserved. But those answers weren’t worth dying over.

  So I readied myself.<
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  I checked my body to try to flush the shaky tension out of my neck, shoulders and arms. I drew in and blew out two large breaths.

  Safety off.

  Finger inside the trigger guard, as I made a picture between the front and rear sights of Fox and the center of Dan’s back.

  I checked one more time that no one was behind him except the woman from the strike force, in case I missed. I didn’t want to accidentally hit her, obviously, but my real concern was the museum goers. And none of them were on a trajectory to come between Dan and I. We were clear.

  One more breath.

  I was stalling.

  I exhaled and kept my breath out for two heartbeats.

  I squeezed the trigger and half a second later, squeezed it again.

  Babd was already halfway across the floor.

  Dan jerked, and his hand went to his neck. The strike team leader fell to the ground, apparently no longer pinned to the Parthenon. The sight of her arm flopping at a place where a joint shouldn’t be made me instantly nauseous.

  Dan staggered forward a step. There was already blood on his hand.

  Shoot damn it!

  I should have kept firing.

  What was wrong with me?

  Do it, then!

  I took a measured step, keeping my sights on Dan, and fired again. I’d do it once with each step until I reached him.

  Babd hit him first.

  Shit.

  I wasn’t thinking correctly. I wasn’t used to this. Just an instant ago, I’d sent her at him, and here I was forgetting I’d even done that and shooting again. My vision was tunneled. I wondered how much control I actually had over my actions, and how much was just pure reactionary panic now.

  Babd grabbed Dan by the arm, and I forced myself to run toward him. She took him down.

  The woman from the strike team was screaming.

  Something.

  I willed myself to make sense of it because at the moment everything sounded like my heart.

  Focus.

  “Kill him!” she was screaming.

  But Babd was on him, so I was done firing. A stone cold action hero would have kept shooting and taken them both out, I suppose.

  As I ran toward him, my goggles showed magic starting to build around his body. Then, there was a sound like a freight train, and Babd went flying away from him. She was out of my line of vision in an instant, a fury flailing missile.