Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus)

by Robert McCarroll

  It bore the Paragon Logistics markings, but was in no shape to drive. All of the wheels on the driver’s side had been cut off and lay a short distance away. Part of the axles and suspension still clung to the wheels. The sharp line at which they’d been severed raised the smaller hairs along my arms and the back of my neck. The main cargo section had been sliced open like a giant tin can. Boxes and crates had spilled out where a huge gash had been ripped out of the lower side. Dad pulled up as close as he dared and parked. We climbed out and approached the stricken vehicle.

  The cab had not been spared the same fate. Whatever had sliced up the rest of the rest of the truck had carved it and the engine block up, at least on the driver’s side. The passenger side looked untouched. Not that it made a whole lot of difference to the drivability of the truck. Flies buzzed about the area, and the unmistakable smell of blood was in the air. Dad opened the wreck of a door and jumped back as part of a leg fell out. It had been severed from the owner just above the knee, and still wore part of a green and white hero suit.

  Dad moved over the stagnant blood stain in the driver’s seat to check on the owner of the leg. He lay mostly in the passenger seat of the truck, though absent the piece that had fallen out. The man’s stump, however, was capped in a thin membrane of ragged pink flesh. As Dad checked his pulse, the man’s eyes fluttered open.

  “How long was I out?” the man asked.

  “Depends on when you passed out,” Dad said. “You lost a lot of blood.”

  “I lost more than that,” he said, glancing at the stump of his leg.

  Dad gently eased him into a sitting position against the passenger door. Now that I had a better view, I saw that he had a wraparound mask that showed the top of his head and his mouth, chin, and jaw. He had a bandoleer of pouches strung from his left shoulder to his opposite hip. He looked on the verge of passing out again. “What happened?” Dad asked.

  “I got chased by death into a dead end,” he said.

  “I need more to go on than that,” Dad said.

  “It was a semi-corporeal manifestation in the shape of the grim reaper. Its scythe carved this truck up. I don’t know who’s behind it. It doesn’t fit the signature of a known threat.” His head lolled, and his breathing grew shallow for a few moments. “It was either an illusory visage to mask the actual attack, or a chained spirit. Whatever it was, it reeked of magic.”

  “There were reports of chanting?”

  “Yeah, that thing was accompanied by its very own God choir - chanting right out of thin air. The Litany of Despair, how appropriate.”

  “Do you know how to defend against this litany?”

  “Deafness? Strength of will? Break the chanter’s windpipe?”

  “This last one is very important,” Dad said. “Which box contained the hazardous cargo?”

  “Look for a wooden crate marked ‘Flasks, Iron’. They were in there.”

  “Now stay with us. I’m going to go check on the cargo.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Dad climbed out, and we went to the spillage that had tumbled from the side of the vehicle. The crate he had indicated wasn’t hard to find, it was right on top, with the side sheared away as cleanly as any of the other strokes that had opened up the truck. Torn from the packing foam and tossed to the ground were three iron jugs, each maybe as tall as my forearm. All looked old, with a dark patina of age, but no sign of rust. Glyphs and sigils had been carved into the faces of the jugs and highlighted in enamel. Wax around the lip of the jugs showed where the stoppers had been removed. All three were empty, though one had a crack down the side, and another’s glyphs were faded to almost illegible.

  “That is not a good sign, is it?” I asked.

  Dad pulled out his phone and made a call. “Identify Razordemon,” he said. A moment later, he lowered the phone and pressed a button. “Shiva, you’re on speakerphone.”

  “Understood,” the synthetic voice of the computer said.

  “Query, what was the nature of the hazardous cargo Tekton was transporting?”

  “Cargo is three spirit jars forged by Gottfried Witchbane marked as containing Bluebottle, Adamantaphrax, and unknown. The third label is noted as being too worn to be positively translated. The jar marked Adamantaphrax is cracked, having been damaged during the First World War.”

  “What was in these jars?” Dad asked.

  “Testimony states that they contain malicious or tutelary spirits captured by Gottfried Witchbane during his work for the Inquisition.”

  “You sound skeptical.”

  “I am a creation of science, my conception of the arcane is limited,” Shiva said.

  “Do we know for certain what they contained?”

  “Negative. There is no record of the jars ever having been opened. However, similar containers constructed by Witchbane and others have been opened and found to contain non-human entities of varying power,” Shiva said. “The risk level was deemed too high even for controlled conditions to investigate.”

  “These non-human entities...”

  “Have been referred to as ‘spirits’ by the magically gifted members of the community.”

  “In that testimony about these particular jars, what was said regarding the spirits contained within them?” Dad asked.

  “Question,” Shiva said. “Have the jars been opened?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mission parameters state that is a priority alarm event,” Shiva said. “Subject ‘Bluebottle’ is described as pestilential in nature, and is to be treated as a Category A biohazard. Containment of this entity must be prioritized before there is risk of exposure to the general population.”

  “I need you to send me all of the parameters for Tekton’s mission. Tekton himself needs a medical evacuation from the Pigeonpot Depot of the Corps of Engineers. And I need backup. Preferably someone magical.”

  “Understood,” Shiva said. “However, your current location is not close to any significant concentration of Community assets. It may be several hours before anyone can arrive.”

  “Just get on it. We’ll try and track these things down.”

  “Understood. Anything else?” Shiva asked.

  “Not at this time. Out.” Dad hung up his phone. “You two heard him. Don’t touch anything. Especially if it looks suspicious. But we need to find some sign of where these things went. Start looking.” He stopped Donny as we took a few steps back towards the spilled cargo. “First, can you get a bottle of water for Tekton? That cab is roasting, and he’s already down a lot of fluids.”

  Donny nodded and ran back to the SUV. I closed my left eye and zoomed in on the details so I didn’t have to get too close. Now that I was looking, I spotted one set of tracks right away - muddy bootprints. They originated by the truck and headed off. They had been mostly baked by the sun into splotches of dirt, only there was no source of mud to have dirtied the boots to begin with. Scattered along the pavement in a different direction were empty seed hulls, possibly wheat chaff, but I wasn’t sure. I pointed these out to Dad.

  “Intuition says neither,” Dad said. “But I don’t have a rational explanation for why.”

  “Neither implies pestilence?” I asked.

  Donny handed off the bottle of water to Tekton as his pocket beeped. Or rather, his phone did. Almost absentmindedly, he pulled it out and read what had popped up.

  “Is now really the time for that?” I asked. Technically, I was his team lead, even if Dad outranked us both by miles.

  “Normally, I’d agree with you, and apologize,” Donny said. “But, this time I don’t think I will.”

  “Why not?” Dad asked.

  “Because it might have given us another witness,” Donny said. He hurried over and showed us the last few updates on his screen.

 
; The oldest read, “Pigeonpot has never seen so many heroes. After that weird noise, we have a confirmed trifecta, Tags: BaronMortis8, Razordemon, Shadowdemon.” There was a picture attached of us talking to Pran Kulkarni. It wasn’t a very good picture, taken with a cell phone from a distance, but it was clear enough to identify us by costume. Below it was a response, “No way that’s Baron Mortis, look at the coat, it’s a cosplayer who screwed up the costume.” The third post read, “Would cosplayers be chasing this?” The attached picture was of a humanoid figure in blue and green plates with a diaphanous blur behind it. The head was cut off in the image by the ‘Smiley and Sons’ sign. The last update read, “It reeks, I had to close the windows to keep out the garbage stench. Flies are all over it.”

  “They look like they were taken from the building across the street from the gas station,” Dad said.

  “And I’d say a reeking fly-magnet might count as ‘pestilential’,” Donny said.

  “What are you getting alerts on?”

  “Conversations tagged Baron Mortis,” Donny said.

  “We gotta work on your vanity problem,” I said. “Or you’ll end up worse than Miss Pain.”

  “That’s just an unfair comparison.”

  “Says the guy who bought every piece of merchandise with his new face on it.”

  “Enough,” Dad said. “Tekton, status?”

  “I’m not going to be going anywhere, but I’m not going to die on you either,” he said. “Thanks for the water, by the way.”

  “You’re welcome. We’re going to be moving out in pursuit of the first objective. I want you on our comm frequency just in case.” Dad rattled off a number, and Tekton adjusted his fund-issue earpiece. I made sure mine was on the same frequency. “Back in the car, we’re moving out.”

  Part 3

  Across the street from Smiley and Sons was a laundromat whose windows didn’t open. Atop it sat an apartment whose windows did. The building was either partially brick, or had a brick facade on the side facing the gas station. The rest had a compressed fiberboard siding that was starting to fray and separate, the color having long since faded. The town was still as eerily silent as before, with its residents still in hiding. Dad pointed to a narrow, powder blue door to the left of the laundromat. We approached it and Donny pushed the doorbell. The smell the posts had complained of still lingered on the air. It was the aroma you got from rotting meat or general putrefaction. It was not dissimilar to the odor of old garbage left in the sun.

  A sound a few steps shy of that made by someone falling down a flight of stairs emerged from behind the door. Before we could ask each other what we thought it was, the door popped open and we were greeted by a camera flash. Dad’s expression was hidden behind his mask, and since his eye lenses could suppress the effect from a flash grenade, he had no visible reaction. A blob of green was floating in front of my left eye, but my artificial eye recovered immediately. Donny was muttering to himself and trying not to show that he’d been looking right at the bright light.

  The girl behind the camera was maybe fourteen or fifteen, with dark brown hair and green eyes. She had on a t-shirt with a pig standing before a charcoal grill, cooking up burgers. Her shorts were styled like capris, but didn’t reach past her knees. She had immediately gone from taking our picture to texting. She stopped when Dad clamped his hand over the phone. He held up his own, the screen showing only the image of the figure walking past the Smiley and Sons sign.

  “Were you the one who took this picture?” Dad asked.

  “Uhh...” she nodded, words failing her for a moment.

  “Which direction did it go?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “What he means is,” Donny said, trying to pretend he wasn’t still blinking away the effects of the camera flash, “We’re trying to find it. This thing is a disease vector, and we want to keep it from infecting anybody.” He put on his broad, dopey grin in an attempt to be reassuring.

  “Away from the highway,” she said.

  “Thank you,” Dad said, releasing his grip on her phone.

  She turned towards Donny, giving a creepy grin. “You know, I stood up for you when those Internet crusaders tried to ruin your rating for not being black.”

  “Uh, thanks,” Donny said. He had started to pick up the same not-quite on-kilter vibe I was getting from her.

  As we turned to leave, the girl lunged at Donny. Dad and I both grabbed her. When we pulled her away from him, she had a death grip on his plastic skull mask. Fortunately for him, Donny was wearing his white domino mask under it. The only thing she exposed was the strip of pale brown fuzz Donny called a mustache to avoid having to shave. Her fingernail, however, had gouged a thin line along his cheek that was already starting to bleed. I prised the skull mask from her fingers, and Dad deposited her back across the threshold of her home.

  “That was uncalled for,” Dad said, closing her door.

  “You all right?” I asked, handing Donny his skull mask.

  “Yeah, I guess.” He flicked the broken strap on the mask. “Good thing I kept wearing the backup,” he said.

  “Let’s get moving,” Dad said, leading the way back to the SUV. Donny voluntarily climbed in the back to hunt for the first aid kit. There was a fair amount of blood on his cheek from what looked like a relatively tiny scratch. He started swabbing it down with alcohol as we pulled off down the road.

  “I hope I don’t need stitches from some girl’s fingernails,” Donny said, applying a bandage to the side of his face. “That’s also a terrible place for a scar. It’d be visible both in and out of costume.”

  “It’s a scratch,” Dad said. “Your face just has more blood vessels near the surface.”

  A few residents of Pigeonpot peered out of their homes and businesses, starting to shake off the effect that had gripped the town.

  “What’s East?” I asked. “Why would it head that way?”

  Dad tapped his earpiece. “Tekton, what do you know about Pigeonpot?”

  “Between jack and shit,” Tekton said.

  “Do you know more about the creatures kept in those jars?”

  “Just what’s in Witchbane’s journals.”

  “Anything from that suggest what they would head for?”

  “If they’re like other forms of free-roaming entities, they’d be drawn to sites in line with their base nature. Especially when recently roused.”

  “So a pestilential entity?”

  “Would look for some place rife with disease, or at least microbe-rich,” Tekton said.

  “In a town like this?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Stop,” Donny called. Dad hit the brakes, hard. “Pigeonpot Waterworks.” Donny pointed out the window.

  “What about it?” I asked.

  “How clean do you think a sewage plant is?”

  I looked at the brick building, isolated on a plot of empty grass at the edge of town. “It’s not very big,” I said. As far as water works I’d seen, it was tiny, only the size of a modest house. Sadly, I’d seen more sewage plants than is normal for someone who isn’t in the sanitation business.

  “We can check it out,” Dad said, turning onto the lot and parking. There was a concrete spillway that wrapped around two sides of the building, probably an overflow basin. The small parking lot would hold six cars, or three and a pump truck. Currently, ours was the only vehicle in it. Opening the door, I was hit with a wall of odor. The sharp scent of stale sewage mingled with the lingering reek of rot. Both bordered on the overwhelming.

  “Brings back bad memories,” Donny said.

  “You’re not alone,” I said.

  “If the bad guys stopped making use of sewers, we’d be able to stop going into them,” Dad said.

  T
wo parallel claw marks had been torn into the gray steel door, and the lock had been ripped free from its mooring. The ragged edges of the damage looked nothing like the clean strokes that had opened up the Paragon Logistics truck. These were shorter, fatter, and not nearly as fluid. Dad moved to point and pushed the door open. As the sunlight spilled in, pus-white maggots wriggled along the concrete floor towards the shadows. My eye adjusted to the gloom, and I took in the layout of the facility. The concrete balcony we were on sat at ground level. A walkway atop the wall separating two effluent pools reached out in front of us. The right pool was marked as a separation tank and had no visible hardware in it. The left had a massive piece of hardware that rumbled, drawing out debris from the incoming flow. The pool around it swirled with a constant influx. It’s gray-brown surface looked almost as bad as it smelled.

  On the far left, sitting on an apron of concrete level with us, was a brand-new-looking generator. It was still shiny and unblemished. It stood in stark contrast to the worn and battered look of everything else in the place. The row of high pressure tanks behind it bore ominous looking warning labels. It slowly dawned on me what it was.

  “Why would you have a hydrogen-powered backup generator?” I asked.

  “Probably bought it with some sort of green power initiative grant,” Dad said. “Don’t expect government policy to make sense.”

  “Whatever we do, we have to not break that thing,” I said.

  “It would be preferable to avoid any collateral damage,” Dad rebutted.