by R. L. King
“Get out!” Verity yelled, glaring hard at the man. He stopped as if he’d run into a wall. He stared at her, eyes so wide that they almost popped from his head, and his hands went to his temples. “He’s fighting me, Jason!”
Jason didn’t think. He swung the rifle around and smacked the man across the back, pitching him forward in an awkward stutter-step toward the portal. Verity focused on him again. “I said out!” she yelled again, grabbing his shoulder.
The man screamed as something popped out of his head, still clutching his temples as if trying to hold it in. The thing wasn’t gray and formless, but neither was it the red-purple ball that Verity had driven from Gordon Lucas and Stone had captured in his magical cage. Instead, it appeared somewhere halfway in between—vaguely round, colored in muted shades of the red and purple of its more powerful counterpart. The man’s body collapsed to the ground, leaving the energy ball to dart upward—but then it appeared to change its mind and altered its direction, streaking toward Verity. She raised her hands and fended it off, careful to take her finger off the pistol’s trigger so she didn’t shoot Jason.
Then the ball, flaring with desperation, changed direction again and flew toward Jason. He held up his hands like Verity had, fully expecting it to stop and change its mind—but instead, it settled over his head.
Verity screamed, but Jason barely heard it. Suddenly his brain felt strange, wrong, dissociated. His own thoughts were still there, but now they were mixed with other, alien thoughts—the strongest of which was that he needed to shoot Verity.
No! his own mind told it. I don’t want to shoot her! She’s my sister!
She is the enemy. She is our enemy. Shoot her now!
And then he was swinging the gun around to level it at the wide-eyed Verity. “Jason, NO!” she screamed. She stretched her hands toward him, her face screwed up in concentration, but her arms trembled.
You want me to shoot my sister!
Shoot her. NOW! She is the ENEMY! She will DESTROY us! SHOOT HER NOW! The voice rose to a crescendo in his head; his finger almost twitched on the trigger.
“Jason! Jason, I can’t get it out!” Her voice was nearly hysterical with panic. “I can’t make it leave!”
You want me to shoot my sister, you motherfucker! Jason’s anger, red and uncontrolled, the kind of rage that too often used to get him in trouble in his younger days, surged, and he made no effort to stop it. That is not gonna happen!
And then Jason’s mind was his own again. His vision filled with something red-purple and sickening, and then it was gone, and he stared at horror at his own hands holding the gun, its barrel still pointed at Verity. He jerked it upward and very nearly threw it aside. “V! Are you okay?”
She was shaking, but she nodded. “Is it—gone? Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” He wasn’t, not really, but there was no time to dwell on it now. The sounds of the rest of the conflict grew closer, the shadows still bouncing and flickering in the passageway. He spun back toward the portal. The gray shapes popped out with increasing frequency now, almost as if they knew that their entranceway into the world wouldn’t be around much longer. “Al!” he yelled again.
“It’s been too long, Jason! He—”
And then, without warning, beams of white-hot light lanced out from the interior of the portal, joining the candles and crystals around the chalk circle that Stone had drawn, forming an odd and asymmetrical latticework of beams and anchor points. The center of the portal flared a horrific pink as a figure popped out, staggered to the side away from the circle, and dropped to its knees.
“Al!” Jason yelled. “V, check on him! I gotta watch the door!”
Verity ran over and flung herself down next to Stone. He was drenched in sweat, bloody, his head bowed so she couldn’t see his face. His back heaved up and down with his harsh breaths. She touched his shoulder. “Dr. Stone? Are you—”
With great effort, he pulled his head up to look at her. “Verity—” he gasped. His eyes were strange—he looked like he had just seen something no human was ever meant to see. “Must—go—portal—going up—” His shaking arms gave out and he collapsed.
“Jason!” Verity screamed. “Help me!”
Jason took a quick glance back at the chamber entrance, then raced across to her. “What—”
“He says we have to go!” she got out between shaky breaths. “He says the portal’s gonna blow up!”
“Holy shit! V, there could be a small army out there!”
Verity struggled with Stone, trying and failing to lift him up by muscle power alone. Jason brushed her aside and grabbed the mage himself, flinging him over his shoulder. “Give me the pistol. You take the rifle.”
She did as she was told, moving on nothing but momentum now. “The hallway—”
Before she could get anything else out, another figure burst into the chamber. Jason almost shot him before he realized it was Sykes. The Harmony man skidded to a stop, staring at the glowing magical circle in the center. He held a rifle in his right hand, his left arm dangling at his side and covered in blood. “Thank God!” he breathed.
“Sykes! What’s going on out there?” Jason demanded.
“We’ve got ’em on the run,” Sykes puffed. “But it won’t last long. We’ve gotta get out of here before they regroup!”
“You’re tellin’ me!” Jason shifted Stone on his shoulder. “That portal’s gonna blow, and we don’t know when. Did you get any vehicles up here?”
Sykes shook his head. Behind him, Zoe ran in with pistol and flashlight and did the same thing Sykes had, stopping still to stare at the portal and the circle, mesmerized. Around them, gray fog balls spun and flew, zipping away as if they knew what was going on, flying to pieces as if something in the failing portal or Stone’s actions inside it had stripped them of their protective coatings. “Couldn’t get past the roadblocks. Once we realized they’d grabbed you three, we headed back down to the complex and picked up reinforcements. Sorry it took us so long—”
“No time,” Verity wailed, already moving toward the exit. “Come on, come on! Let’s go!” She’d almost reached it when she suddenly stopped, spun, and ran back in.
“V!” Jason yelled, lunging toward her.
She didn’t stop. Running full-tilt, she snatched up the two notebooks Stone had been using and stuffed them into her jacket, then rejoined the others.
They ran. They left the cave, leaping over prone bodies, unable to identify friend or foe, living or dead in the dimness. Jason’s knee, still not entirely healed and stressed beyond the limited recovery time he’d allowed it, screamed in protest, but he forced himself to ignore it. There was nothing more to do but run until he couldn’t run anymore—and then keep going anyway.
Along the way, others from Harmony joined them, questions in their eyes, but they didn’t stop and the others, picking up on their urgency, fell in with the exodus. They got down the path to the church and ran past it, out toward the woods. They saw none of the Evil, save for a few prone and bloody bodies in the snow.
“How far?” Sykes got out between breaths.
“I—don’t know—” Jason puffed. “Just—keep running!” His breath screamed in his lungs, his knee a white-hot ball of agony. His arms shook as he struggled with Stone’s weight over his shoulder. He wasn’t going to make it. None of them were going to make it. They—
The sky lit up with the brilliant light of a silent explosion, for a few seconds turning the gray sky to the brightest of whites. Jason felt himself pitched forward; out of the corner of his eye he saw Stone’s body flying off in one direction and Verity’s in another.
His last conscious thought was to wonder if this is what it would look like to be caught in a nuclear explosion.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Jason?” The voice came from far away.
He struggled reluctantly to wakefulness through a gauzy curtain of fog. He would have preferred to continue floating, pain-free, awareness-free—but the voi
ce seemed important. He felt like he shouldn’t ignore it. He opened his eyes.
He lay in a hospital bed. Verity sat in a chair next to it, her eyes big and frightened. She had a bandage on her forehead and another one wrapped around her left wrist and she was covered with bruises and small cuts, but otherwise she looked physically unscathed. For a moment he just stared at her.
Her eyes closed briefly as she let out a long sigh of relief. “Oh, man,” she breathed. “Thank God. How do you feel?”
He thought about that. Nothing hurt at the moment, but he suspected that had something to do with the IV tube snaking up from his arm and out of his line of sight. He struggled to remember what had happened, and too easily it all came flooding back to him. “V—”
She patted his hand, still looking worried. “You’re okay, Jason. They said your knee will take a while to heal, and you got banged up pretty good—you might have a concussion, which is mostly why they’re keeping you here. They want to keep an eye on you overnight. But they said you’d be fine.”
He raised his hand to his head and found a bandage swathed around it. “What—what about the others? Al? The Harmony people?” His eyes widened. “Oh, God, Verity, what do they think happened? If we’re in the hospital, that means the authorities—”
“Shh...” she whispered with a glance toward the door to make sure nobody was coming in. “They think there was some sort of natural-gas explosion up in the mountains from one of the old mines up there.”
Jason stared at her. “That’s crazy.”
She shrugged. “I dunno—but that’s what they’re saying now. I mean, they can’t exactly know what really caused it, right? They mentioned something about survivalists stockpiling explosives, but they can’t find any evidence of it. The town’s almost all destroyed, but there wasn’t a fire. That’s what’s really confusing them.” She motioned toward the small TV set mounted up high in the corner of the room. “I’ve been watching the news, and that’s what they’ve been spinning it as.”
“What about the others? Where’s Al? Sykes? The rest?”
Verity’s expression clouded. “Dr. Stone’s alive. He was still unconscious, last I checked. Most of his physical injuries weren’t a big deal, surprisingly. Lots of blood, but nothing life-threatening. But he hasn’t woken up yet, and nobody’s sure why.” She sighed. “Mr. Sykes is okay, too. He got shot in the arm, but it just grazed him—he told the authorities it was shrapnel. They patched him up. A lot of the Harmony people are out front, waiting for news. So far, we know a few are dead: Zoe didn’t make it. Neither did Spike and Gerard, and a couple of others I don’t know. And Jason—Joshua’s dead, too.”
Jason’s eyes widened. “How—”
“Prudence told me. It turns out that right about the same time the portal exploded, he had some kind of massive seizure and died instantly. The doctors are calling it an aneurysm, but they won’t know for sure till they do an autopsy.”
“Holy shit...” Jason sighed. So many dead or hurt, and he couldn’t shake the irrational feeling that it was their fault—his and Verity’s and Stone’s. But that was insane—they had averted a lot more deaths in the long run by closing that portal. This was a war, when you got down to it. People died in wars. And it wasn’t like the Forgotten didn’t know what they were getting themselves into.
“The police already talked to me,” Verity continued. She dropped her voice. “Fortunately I got a chance to talk to some of the Forgotten first—the official story for why we were up there was that we were having a Christmas/winter solstice ceremony thing up there in the mountains. There’s no reason for the police not to buy it, since there’s no way we could have been responsible for an explosion that big. I think a couple of them are suspicious but—” She spread her arms. “—like I said, they really have no way of figuring out what happened unless we tell them. And even then they’ll probably just think we’re all having mass hippie hallucinations or something.”
Jason, suddenly feeling overwhelmed by the whole situation, scrubbed at his face with his hands. “And we’re gonna have to do this all over again in Vegas...”
“Not for a while, we’re not,” Verity said, her expression sober. “If the Harmony people’s healer doesn’t come back soon, it’s gonna be weeks before you can do anything but hobble around on that knee—and we don’t even know if Dr. Stone’s okay yet.”
“Why wouldn’t he be? You said his injuries weren’t—”
“You didn’t see him, Jason.” She looked down at her lap. “You didn’t see his face. His eyes... He looked like—” she waved her hands, trying to find the right words. “—he looked like somebody who’d just gotten a good look at the place where insanity comes from.”
Two days passed. Jason’s doctor determined that he had only a mild concussion, and gave in to his demands to be allowed to check out of the hospital if he promised to take it easy for the next few days. He was able to get around with the aid of a knee brace and a pair of crutches; it was slow and frustrating, but at least he was mobile.
Stone had not yet awakened. Jason and Verity were allowed in to see him; aside from the IV and the bandages visible on his face and arms, he didn’t look seriously injured. The doctor was baffled as to why he hadn’t regained consciousness yet. “The nurses report that sometimes he seems almost like he’s fighting to wake up,” he told them. “He moves around, and mutters things they can’t understand—but nothing we’ve done to try to bring him out of it has worked.”
Reluctantly the two of them decided to head back to the Harmony Farms complex and accept an invitation to stay; they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—go anywhere without Stone, and the complex had the added attraction of keeping them away from the small group of persistent reporters hovering around the hospital, trying to get interviews with anyone involved. The incident was all over the papers and the television channels; Jason and Verity read some of the articles, and weren’t surprised that a lot of questions were being raised about the source of the blast, but equally unsurprised to find that no other credible theories had surfaced as yet to explain it. Sykes told Jason he’d heard from a friend on the local rescue squad that the cave had been completely demolished, along with most of the nearby town.
On the fourth day after the explosion, the Harmony group’s healer and his friends returned in their wildly-painted van; they’d heard the reports on the news and immediately cut their pilgrimage following the Electric Platypi’s tour short and hurried back to find out if they could help. Jason patiently waited his turn with Zachary, the healer, as he patched up the remaining members of the Harmony group who’d been injured in the fight or the explosion. When he finally got to the cabin Jason and Verity shared, he looked the two of them up and down.
“So you guys are the ones that started this whole thing,” he said by way of greeting. He was a potbellied, thirtyish man with an unkempt beard, long hair pulled back in a ponytail, and a tie-dyed Electric Platypi T-shirt that couldn’t have been more of a hippie cliché if he’d done it on purpose.
“We—” Jason started to protest from the couch and Verity drew breath to join in, but the man held up his hands to stave them off.
“No, no, don’t,” he said, waving Verity back inside. His expression grew serious. “You guys did a good thing up there. A damn good thing. It sucks that it cost what it did, but Prudence and Sykes told me about what went down. I didn’t even think it was possible to get rid of the Darkness. And you guys are doing it. I’m just sorry I wasn’t here to help out. Maybe we could have saved some people.”
The process of fixing Jason’s leg was quick and mostly effective. Jason had never been awake when being healed by Forgotten abilities before, so he didn’t know what to expect. Zachary simply sat on the edge of the couch next to Jason, placed one large hand on his knee, and closed his eyes. Jason felt nothing but a pleasant warmth and a bit of an itch working its way down into the core of his leg. Verity hung back and watched silently.
Altogether it took only a
minute or two, and then Zachary sat back. “Give that a try. I might not have got it all, since it works better if I catch injuries before they have time to set, but it should be a lot better.”
Jason tentatively removed the brace with Verity’s help, then swung around and put an experimental bit of weight on his leg. When that didn’t hurt, he stood with care.
“How is it?” Zachary asked.
Jason took a few steps. “This is fucking amazing,” he said, eyes wide. “It doesn’t hurt. It’s stiff—I think I’m still gonna be limping for a while—but it doesn’t hurt anymore, and I can move around mostly like normal. Thanks, man. I owe you big.”
Zachary shook his head. “You’ve already paid us back more than we could ask for, friend. I’m just glad I could do a little something to help out.”
Verity stared at the healer. “Do you think you could go take a look at Dr. Stone?” she asked.
“The mage?”
“Yeah...he’s at the hospital. They can’t figure out what’s wrong with him. They can’t find anything physical, but he isn’t waking up.”
Zachary sighed. “I’m not really that kind of healer,” he said. “I do physical stuff—fix broken bones, stop bleeding, that kind of thing. Mental stuff’s not really my bag. But I’ll give it a try. Let’s go.”
They arrived at the hospital and inquired as they usually did at the nurse’s desk as to whether they could visit Stone. She looked apologetic. “He’s not here. He checked himself out last night, Mr. Thayer.”
Jason stared. “What?”
“He woke up?” Verity demanded.
“Where is he?” Jason leaned over the desk as if getting physically closer to the nurse would help him get answers.
She picked up the phone. “Let me call his doctor. You can talk to him.”
The two of them—Zachary decided to wait for them in the waiting room—were ushered into the doctor’s small office. Jason didn’t sit down; he had donned the knee brace and was using the crutches so as not to arouse suspicion at the hospital, and he chose to stump back and forth across the small room like a gimpy cat in a cage. Stone had checked himself out of the hospital? It had only been less than a day since they’d seen him last, and there had been no change—he’d still been unconscious and unresponsive. When the doctor entered the room, Jason’s frustration and confusion came out in an explosive exclamation: “You let him go?”
