Death Blows

by D. D. Barant

  Up, I think, and the shield rises. Think I’m starting to get the hang of this. I’m going to have to circle around to the other side to pull the baby out—can’t risk knocking the scythe free—but I can do this.

  Cassius and Charlie are out of my line of sight. I make a long arm, reach inside the nose cone and snag the kid. We should be all right now—

  That’s when something slams into the bottom of the shield, hard, and when I discover an interesting fact: While the shield will protect whoever’s riding it from harm, its magical mojo doesn’t do squat for falling off the damn thing.

  I do my best to shelter the baby when we hit. Only from around a dozen or so feet up, but it’s a concrete floor and I land on my back. All the air goes out of me with a grunt, and pain rushes in to fill the void.

  Got to get up, I think groggily. I took a pretty good whack to the skull, too. Got to—

  “You’re not going to ruin this,” Stone says calmly. He grabs the baby away from me with a hand like flows like molten metal, wrapping her in a shiny silver cocoon. “You can’t.”

  I’m on the other side of the gantry now, and so is Stone. No sign of Charlie or Cassius. Very bad. I consider drawing my gun and realize it’s probably pointless; I doubt it could do enough damage to stop him.

  “I don’t understand,” I say, very clearly and calmly. You’d be amazed how often that gets them to talk; sometimes the most important thing in a fractured world is finding someone who does understand. The real question is, is he desperate enough to try to explain?

  “I became a monk for the stillness,” he says. Ripples of color and texture are moving in slow sine waves across his face, his body; copper and granite and iron and jade, like some kind of humanoid ultimate lava lamp. “For the quiet contemplation of the universe. But when he approached me, asked me to work for him, I couldn’t say no—there was too much at stake. It was too important. And terrible things happened…”

  “I know. I’ve seen your shrine.”

  “I just wanted the voices in my head to stop. I couldn’t talk to anyone, not without revealing what I was. So I thought—maybe I could just leave. Go somewhere where this hasn’t happened yet.”

  “Another reality?”

  “Yes. And I knew someone, someone who might be able to get me there… but he had a price. I had to do things for him. Get things for him. He told me that when he had enough power, he could help me… cross over. But that doesn’t matter anymore.”

  Uh-oh. “Why not?”

  “Because he showed me that I can never have stillness. I can never have peace. He showed me his world, showed me it with his mind, and the scales fell from my eyes. Clones of men bitten by radioactive spiders who make deals with the devil. Mutant rock stars who can teleport to Dyson spheres in other galaxies. Asgardian thunder god frogs. Transsexual shamans who travel in time, green shapeshifting child actors battling blood cults and the Wrath of God creating a giant duck that gobbles a mobster alive… and all of it, always changing, past and present and future, shifting and contradicting itself and never, ever staying the same. It was absurd. It was horrifying. It was beautiful.”

  Tears run down his face, little mirrored blobs of mercury that explode into a thousand shiny beads when they hit the floor. I wonder if that’s why we found traces of quicksilver at one of the murder sites.

  “It changed everything, because I saw that everything is change. I couldn’t go somewhere else, somewhere perfect, because there is no such place. What I had to do was make changes here. Make the right changes, and everything will shift. That’s what magic is.”

  The gantry stops, locking into place with a loud mechanical chunk. It’s fully raised now, the nose pointing out the hole in the roof.

  “I get it,” I say. “You just want to fix things. But you’ve made a mistake.”

  “No. I haven’t.” His body shifts, extending upward into a growing pillar. It’s a solid gray color now—granite, I’m guessing. He puts the baby back in the nose cone, then pulls my scythe out. The clamshell whirs the rest of the way shut.

  I risk a glance around the gantry. Both Charlie and Cassius are down, a black spill of volcanic sand seeping from a wound in Charlie’s chest. I have no idea what that means, how hurt he actually is. Cassius seems to just be out cold.

  I draw my gun, then think better of it. Rocket fuel and bullets are not a good combination. I wish I could just T2 his shapeshifting ass with some liquid oxygen, but this isn’t a movie—I’d just wind up blowing all of us sky-high.

  I’m running out of options here. I can’t shoot him, my backup is down, and Captain Rushmore is about to launch Gretchen’s firstborn into orbit for reasons so crazy I don’t know how to argue with them.

  But I’ve got to try.

  “You can’t launch this thing without listening to me. This is the beginning of the story, right? The part where you need to explain the… the premise. You need to set everything up properly, don’t you?”

  He’s shrunk back down to his normal height, his skin looking more like marble now. “Of course. The premise… that’s where you set up the rules. We’ll have new rules now. Rules that make sense, rules you can live by and that never, ever change…”

  I’m just stalling now. “Tell me. Tell me all the rules.”

  And now he looks confused, for the first time. “What? I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” he says, “I’m not the one making them.”

  A loud beep from the gantry console gets my attention. I glance over—and see that a single, very long, ductile filament of gray is swaying over the console like an anorexic cobra. A filament that Brother Stone extended from his foot, along the floor, and past me without my ever noticing.

  “Launch in one minute and ten seconds,” a prerecorded voice announces calmly. “Countdown commencing at mark.”

  Sneaky bastard. And here I thought he would just go through me.

  Okay, down to a very few options. Shoot the console? Try to drag Cassius clear, or Charlie? I don’t have time for both and Charlie’s probably too damn heavy anyway, but Cassius at least has a chance at surviving ground zero of a rocket launch. I take a step backward, thinking hard, and—

  Cassius and Charlie are gone.

  Not on their feet, not hiding in the shadows and planning a last-minute attack, just gone. I’ve got a good view of where they lay, and they aren’t there anymore.

  “You should leave,” Brother Stone says. He hands me my scythe, the gesture formal and almost ritualistic. “The beginning is about to end.”

  “We’ll leave together.”

  “No. I’m staying here. Fire and thunder have haunted my dreams for fifty years; tonight, I will hear them for the last time.” He smiles. “And I will be at peace.”

  “Thirty seconds to launch,” the calm voice reminds me. No more time to argue; I sprint for the blast doors.

  TWENTY

  I don’t know how far away I have to get or how much damage the launch will do; this facility was only designed to build and test rockets, not launch them. Plus, I’ve noticed that the relative invulnerability of thropes and pires sometimes leads to a shocking lack of industrial safety measures.

  The doors are heavy and thick and it takes me long, precious seconds to wrench one open. Through an antechamber, another steel door, a stairwell of reinforced concrete heading down. One flight of steps, two, three. I’m at the entrance to some kind of bunker, and I’m just yanking that door open when I hear the hissing, roaring rumble of the engines igniting. I get inside, slam the door behind me, and clap my hands over my ears.

  It gets louder. The temperature starts to climb. The room shakes like an oversize die in a giant’s fist. I think I’m screaming but I can’t hear my own voice.

  It goes on and on, and I wonder if the rocket’s actually managed to launch or just hit the roof and exploded—and then the noise dwindles and dies. I take my hands away from my ears cautiously. It must be a hundred degrees in here
, and I’m sure it’s worse outside.

  But I have to get out there. I saw something in the second before I ran, something that gave me hope for the survival of Gretchen’s child.

  Charlie and Cassius weren’t the only ones who disappeared. The shield was gone, too.

  I search the room, which is some kind of safety bunker, and find a gas mask clearly intended for thropes but still able to function on a human-shaped head. I put it on, test the doorknob to make sure it isn’t red-hot, and pull the door open.

  The corridor outside is filled with hot, thick white smoke. I make my way back up the stairwell, feeling like an entrée taking a tour of an oven.

  The blast doors are too hot to touch. I don’t even try to open them. Instead, I head the other way down the hall, looking for an exit.

  I find Cassius and Charlie sprawled on the floor of the foyer, the shapes of their bodies dim in the smoke. Cassius has an ugly gash on his forehead—caused by a silver fist, no doubt—but the fact that he hasn’t imploded into a pile of dust means he’ll be fine. I’m more worried about Charlie, so I kneel and check him out. His chest has been punctured in several places, but placing him on his back has stopped any more from leaking. His face seems a little flatter than normal, like a partially deflated balloon. He told me once that his life essence was mixed with the sand he was filled with, and if he lost too much the spell that animates him would pop like a soap bubble. I have no way of knowing if that’s already happened.

  The entrance door to the building has been torn off its hinges, and the smoke swirls past me and outside, slowly clearing. I can see the night sky, and the climbing star that’s the rocket. How long has it been since it’s launched? A minute? Two? How long before—

  The star flares into sudden brilliance, a new sun. The fireball hangs in the air for a second before shrinking and beginning its relentless, final descent.

  “No,” I breathe. “No, come on, come on …”

  I stare at that speck of falling brightness, growing fainter and fainter, willing there to be something else, something small and dark and moving fast, so fast I probably can’t make it out but I know it’s there, it’s got to be there… I find myself outside, the gas mask torn off and thrown aside, searching the sky wildly and shouting, “Where are you? Where are you, goddamn it?”

  “You’re looking the wrong way,” a voice says mildly.

  I whirl around. Catharine Great Shaka stands on her sky-shield, hovering a foot above the ground. She’s got Gretchen’s baby nestled in the crook of one arm—a strangely silent baby. “Oh, no,” I say. “No, no…”

  “She’s fine,” Shaka says. “Just exhausted. She’s asleep.”

  “I can’t believe you pulled that off.”

  “What, retrieving an infant from a rocket in midair?” She gives me an exaggerated shrug. “The shield did most of the work. Had a little trouble ripping the nose cone open, but I always carry a good knife.” She pats a sheath at her side.

  “That’s not a knife, that’s a machete with a gland problem.”

  “Here.” She hands me the infant gently. I can hear sirens in the distance, getting closer. “I should really be gone by the time they get here. Too many questions for somone in my position to answer—and I’ve got what I came for, anyway.” I nod, too weary to argue. It’s not like I could make her stay, even if I wanted to. She crouches—making herself more aerodynamic, I guess—and the shield soars away into the night. In a second she’s no more than a dark speck in the sky. I look down at the sleeping child in my arms. “When you get older,” I tell her, “you better believe your aunt Jace is never, ever gonna let you forget this…”

  “Rrrrrrr,” Charlie says.

  “Are you clearing your throat?” I ask. “You sound like a motor trying to turn over. Which, I guess, you kind of are.”

  “What—hey. I ain’t dead.”

  “Nah. Leaky, sure. But I did my best to, uh, remedy the situation.” He tries to sit up, and I put a warning hand on his chest. “Stay where you are, sandman. You’ve still got a lot of holes in you, and if you start moving around you’ll undo all my hard work. The paramedics will be here in a minute.”

  “Stone? The kid?”

  “Kid’s fine. Stone’s a puddle of molten slag—he decided to watch the launch from underneath the rocket’s exhaust.”

  “I should be dead. Why ain’t I dead?”

  “Stop sounding so irritated.” I told him about the African Queen and her last-minute save. “She’d been stalking him for a while, obviously. She hung back and waited for the right moment, then hauled you and Cassius out of there. Once she had the shield, she used it to rescue the baby.”

  “Good for her. But I took some serious damage, partner; and I lose enough silica, it’s just like a human bleeding out. So how am I—”

  “—still here and as annoying as ever? That would be thanks to me.”

  “How?” I tried not to sound embarrassed. “Well… you lost a lot of beachfront, Charlie. I followed the trail all the way back to the blast doors. And then I found the room.”

  “What room?”

  “More of a closet, really.”

  “What kind of closet?”

  “A… broom closet.” There’s a pause. “So you—”

  “Swept you up.”

  “And then?”

  “Found that plug you don’t like to talk about.”

  “And… refilled me.”

  “More or less. Had to stuff some of your holes with paper towels—it was all I could find.”

  “Wait. That shouldn’t have worked. I mean, yeah, good thought, I applaud your intent, it’s just that I’d already lost enough mass to make me pass out inside—and you couldn’t have recovered anything on the other side of the blast doors. So how am I able to—”

  “Argue like the obstinate walking boulder you are?” I hear the screech of tires as emergency vehicles pull up outside. About time. “Let’s just say I gave you an improvised transfusion, okay? Now shut up and save your strength.”

  And then the room is full of agents and paramedics and red-and-blue flashing lights. I make sure Charlie’s in an ambulance and being taken care of before I let anyone look at me. Cassius is still out cold, but I refuse to be worried; like I said, in his case any injury that doesn’t turn him into a pile of dust is one he’ll recover from.

  When the baby, my partner, and my boss are all in the hands of medical personnel, I finally let a paramedic examine me. “Those are nasty burns,” he says, studying the palms of my hands. “Forget to use your oven mitts?”

  “Something like that.” He wants me to come with him, but I have things to do. I let him bandage me up, accept the offer of a handful of painkillers, and then get moving.

  I’ve got a killer to catch.

  I shouldn’t go in alone. Going in alone is dangerously stupid; I should have thropes in body armor and compound bows, some heavyweight enforcement golems, and maybe a combat magician or two. I bring Eisfanger. “Why are we doing this, again?” he asks nervously for like the seventh time. We’re parked in my car on the street, half a block away from our target. “Because you’re the only person I trust who isn’t in the hospital.”

  “But I’m really not a field agent—”

  “Look, Damon. If I’m right about this—and I am—the person behind this has connections that run deeper than some countries. I can’t risk somebody in the Agency tipping them off or, worse, laying a trap. We have to act quickly, before they move on to the next phase of their plan.”

  “Which is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But—I’m really confused here. I thought you said Stone was dead.”

  “He is. Puddle of slag in the middle of a blast crater. But I got him to talk before he went to that great quarry in the sky, and he told me he was working for someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “He didn’t specify. I thought it had to be someone human at first, someone who got him to infiltrate the Hexagon, but w
hat he said made me realize it was somebody else—somebody who was already a member.”

  “And now we’re going to—what? Go in and arrest them?”

  “Something like that. You ready?”

  He swallows, then pats the aluminum case he holds on his knees. “Yeah. Just give me a second.”

  He shapeshifts into were form, snow-white fur sprouting all over his stocky body. When he’s done, we leave the car.

  The grounds have a high stone wall around them, and the front gate is locked. I solve this by shooting the lock.

  I thought we were sneaking in, Eisfanger signs.

  “Plans change,” I say. “Maybe he’ll think it was a backfire.”

  We march straight up to the house. It’s as large as I remember, and there don’t seem to be any lights on at all.

  Nobody home? Eisfanger suggests.

  “Lucky I brought my spare key,” I say, and shoot this lock, too. The door swings open and I stride on in. Eisfanger darts past me, then pads silently down the hall and out of sight. Hopefully his nose will tell him where to go.

  No lights have come on, and if there’s an alarm going off it’s a silent one. “Vincent!” I shout. “I know you’re here! Show yourself!”

  Okay, so breaking into an empty house and yelling at the walls might not seem like a brilliant plan, but I know he’s here. In fact, I’m pretty sure he’s got some kind of secret lair in the basement, and that’s probably where he is right now. He’s collected all his toys—except for the shield, of course—and now he’ll want to play with them.

  A light comes on upstairs. A warm, buttery light that gets brighter as it gets closer.

  He steps into view at the top of the stairs. He’s wearing the Solar Centurion armor, but it’s not turned up as bright as it was when Cassius wore it. He’s got the Midnight Sword in a scabbard on his belt, and the Quicksilver Kid’s throwing knives on a bandolier across his chest. He’s holding something in his right fist that I can’t see clearly.

  “Hello, Agent Valchek,” Sheldon Vincent says. “I’m surprised you’re here. The climax was the big fight at the rocket facility—epilogues are for books, not comics. They’re a more conservative medium when it comes to length.”