by Frank Hurt
Though the sun shone brightly, the temperature dipped low. No clouds passed above, but the sky darkened just the same. The barn swallows had been chirping noisily as they swept in and out of the old buildings—they were silent now, immobile. The tall thistle and grasses had been swaying in the wind, but now they were frozen. The air was calm all around them.
Ember and Nancy exchanged a look.
“Cunt!” A crow perched on the old International pickup where its hood ornament once was. “You bitch! What did you do to me?”
Ember stood slowly, watching the crow and trying to pretend not to notice the change in the environment. “Hello, Doug, nice to see you too. Douglas Demerrott.” She used his full name, pronouncing it with purpose. Spirits responded to their full name, and she had experience with this particular spirit needing all the reining in she could muster.
The crow squawked. He tilted his head, watching her approach. “I don’t…you took something from me, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t take anything from you, Douglas Demerrott,” Ember said. “I did take you from someplace, though.”
“I remember,” the ghost-crow squawked. He looked squarely at her. “You need to put me back.”
“I don’t think I can.”
The clouds darkened, and the crow squawked loudly, repeatedly, “Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!”
“Douglas Demerrott,” Ember said, raising her voice. “You will heed me. You will stop this…this misbehavior. You will obey me.”
The crow continued squawking. The sky continued darkening.
“Right. Fine. If you obey me, I will get you back to the Spirit World, Douglas Demerrott.”
The squawking stopped. The crow tilted his head. “You said you couldn’t put me back.”
“I was lying,” Ember lied. “I know exactly how to get you back to the plane of the dead. And I’ll send you back there—after you help me find the farmstead with your meth lab.”
The ghost-crow began laughing. It was a ghoulish laugh, though it didn’t lack humor. “Stupid cunt! You’ve already found it!”
Ember glanced back at Nancy, who was keeping her distance from the exchange. “The place with your meth lab? You said it was in a trailer house.”
“It is,” the ghost-crow continued laughing.
“There’s no trailer house out here, Douglas Demerrott.” Though she continued to use his full name, she felt it had barely any effect on him. It felt like she had a rabid animal on a leash.
“Cunt!” The ghost-crow squawked. “You probably walked right past it. Stupid cunt.”
Ember looked around, as though the trailer house would suddenly materialize. When it didn’t, she said, “show me.”
The ghost-crow laughed, but flew, wings flapping for visual effect even if they provided no needed lift. He led her to the junk heap, where he flew through a stack of tires before landing on a refrigerator with its doors missing.
The mage limped after, arriving at the heap of junk no less convinced than before. “Right. The trailer house—”
“Is right. Here.” If crows could grin, this crow was grinning.
Ember glowered at the ghost-crow. Then she saw it: a long, straight line beneath the pile of refuse. It was camouflaged so well, she literally had walked right past it, at least twice. Buried beneath the rubble, the abandoned appliances and rotting building waste, the trash bags and tractor tires rested a single-wide trailer house.
She took extra care with where she stepped with her stockinged foot. Near a mound of rotting tree branches and rusty barrels, a single car tire leaned against what she could now see was a door.
Ember rolled the radial tire aside, splashing filthy stagnant water from within, onto her feet. The ghost-crow laughed, but the added mess was hardly measurable against the coat of snot she was already wearing. The door had a heavy steel lever-style handle. She reached for it, pulling down as she did.
“Ember, wait!” Nancy shouted.
Within the door, a spring released. It didn’t feel like the normal release of a latch giving way. It sounded like a retaining pin sliding free from something more substantial. A faint hiss sounded from somewhere down below the trailer house.
The ghost-crow laughed as gregariously as he could.
Ember felt the hairs stand on the back of her neck. “What is it? What just happened?”
Nancy floated through the wall of the trailer house. She answered from within. “There’s a long spring attached to the door. The other end of it is attached to…to some wires. And a car battery. There are wires going from the battery to somewhere below. To some sort of valve and—”
“To an electronic ignitor and the propane tanks we daisy-chained beneath the lab,” Doug offered between laughs. “This whole place is about to become a big crater. Surprise, Cunt, you’ve just triggered a bomb!”
25
Silenced Static
Usually, a lull in the prevailing winds is welcomed on the Great Plains of North America. To those hardy folk who call the prairie their home, a stiff breeze becomes nothing more than background noise. So when the jet stream and the weather fronts agree to leave them alone, the resulting calm days are cause for delight.
What Ember was experiencing at that abandoned farmstead was not an example of such calm.
The unnaturally still air was shadowed—literally—by a slowly rotating swirl of unnaturally dark clouds, impenetrable by the sun’s rays. As much as she could observe, no living thing moved nor made noise within the monochromatic tableau. An uncomfortable chill settled in.
The chill paled in comparison to the malcontent tinting Douglas Demorrett’s voice.
The ghost-crow laughed cruelly, taunting the trapped mage. “When you release the door handle…ka-BOOM!”
“Nancy?” Ember called out to the other ghost. “Is he telling the truth?”
“I don’t know anything about bombs,” Nancy said. Her transparent azure head popped through the door of the trailer house. “I see wires, and springs, and the car battery. And yes, there are propane tanks beneath the floor. They’re connected together by a hose. I think it’s leaking.”
“Not leaking,” Doug corrected. “Venting into the crawl space. When you pulled down on the door handle, it dropped a pin. That released a spring, which flipped open the ball valve on a line connected to the propane tanks.”
The ghost-crow seemed pleased with himself. “That was the first stage. The gas is gonna empty into the enclosed space, until it finds a spark. That’s the second stage. I’ve got an ignitor from a barbecue grill wired up to a switch on the battery. The switch is flipped when you release the door handle. The ignitor will keep sparking, over and over until the gas finds it. There’s enough propane down there to turn this whole yard into a hole in the ground.”
“I hear hissing,” Ember said. She guessed the answer even before Doug volunteered it.
“There you go. It’s working. My design. Bet you don’t think this ‘birdbrain’ is so stupid now, do you?” The ghost-crow resumed laughing.
The mage felt green. The faint odor of rotten eggs increased exponentially until it stung her eyes. The ethyl mercaptan served as an odorant for propane, to alert people that a leak was present. “This doesn’t make any bloody sense, Doug. If you kill me, you’ll be trapped here, too. I can’t send you back to the spirit world if I’m dead.”
His laughter stopped. The ghost-crow scowled. “I already know you can’t send me back. You should never have taken me away from there. Now I’m stuck here! But I’m gonna make the most of it. There’s plenty of haunting I can do. But first, I get to watch you get vaporized, cunt.”
Nancy looked from Doug to Ember, her eye-less face a picture of alarm. “What should I do?”
“Nothing you can do,” Doug cawed gleefully. “You get a front-row seat to watching your friend die, too!”
“I could…I could run away, really fast.” Ember thought aloud. “Maybe I’d get far enough before—”
“You’re much too late for that
already,” Doug said. “Wouldn’t be much of a tripwire if it let you go for a jog before the fireworks began.”
Ember squeezed her eyes shut in an attempt to block out the cruel laughter. She imagined the explosion, how it would rip through her body and send pieces of her flying across the field. Nobody will ever know what happened to me. My parents. Cyn. The Schmitts. Rik will never know how I feel about him. I can’t die like this. I won’t die like this.
I didn’t come this far just to become a victim to this goon. I’m nobody’s victim.
Her eyes snapped open. The ghost-crow was cawing obscenities between laughs. The mage’s fear evolved into anger. “You don’t get to choose for me. It’s not my time.”
Doug flew toward her, laughing as he did.
She didn’t think, she just reacted. Keeping one hand firmly on the door handle, with the other she called on her mana, forming a sphere within her core. Just as she had done back at the Archive, Ember cast the energy from her hand toward the ghost-crow.
A whirlwind broke out around the mage, lifting empty tin cans and loose sand to form a visible vortex. The wind spread outward as a shock wave directed toward Doug.
He disappeared, mid-flight.
Wind braced her face, though this wind was not spell-cast. The sky brightened immediately, the temperature elevating back to normal. Swallows which had been suspended in mid-flight resumed their trajectories, chirping at one another as though nothing at all had ever interfered with their lives.
Nancy tenuously floated from the trailer house. “I can’t believe that worked.”
Ember swallowed, her eyes scanning the junk heap. “It felt…different. I don’t think he’s gone. Not permanently, at least.”
The terrycloth-clad ghost walked through a stack of tires. “I feel it too. He’s here yet…somehow. Invisible. It’s like he’s watching us, but he can’t talk and we can’t hear him.”
“Like a muted telly tuned between channels,” the mage said. “Just silenced static.”
“Why do I get the feeling we’re going to have to deal with him again someday?”
“One crisis at a time,” Ember said. “First, I’ve got to live through this one, yeah.”
She had Nancy confirm the schematics of the homemade bomb. As Ember kept her grip on the smooth, lever-style handle, her sidekick floated within the trailer house, describing the configuration of springs and wires, valves and switches. If that wasn’t confirmation enough, the headache-inducing fumes were added validation.
“Maybe you could just wait it out?” Nancy said. “Let the propane tanks run dry and drift away, into the air? Then there’d be no threat from the spark when you let go.”
“Right. But how long would that take,” Ember said. “If the gas is mostly contained beneath the trailer, it could take hours…days for enough gas to dissipate. That’s after the hissing stops.”
“I don’t see any vents at all,” Nancy admitted. “And there are about ten propane tanks under here.”
“I could try punching some holes into the skirting,” Ember said. “That is, if I can find something within arm’s reach. And if I don’t create a spark while I’m tearing at the tin sheeting. Or I could try to lean something against the door handle and hope it doesn’t slip off before I get away. Looking around, I don’t have much to work with though. Nothing I can reach anyway.”
“We need someone to break into here and disconnect the battery,” Nancy said as she floated through the trailer house wall. “Someone who can actually handle the wires. Someone who’s not a ghost.”
“I didn’t want to involve anyone else in this,” Ember said, resigning herself to the lack of options. Her hand instinctively touched the slight lump of the carved coyote pendant resting against her sternum beneath layers of clothes. “I guess I have no choice.”
She reached for her Tracfone, only then remembering she had donated it to the spirit world. Ember chewed her lip as she changed hands on the door handle, keeping weight on the lever. In a pocket on the other side of her black leather jacket—now sufficiently ruined by dried ectoplasm—she pulled out the Motorola provided by the embassy.
Though she knew there was a chance the phone was being monitored—if not in real-time, for sure within the call logs themselves—she flipped it open. The display flashed its battery icon.
“Bloody hell,” Ember grumbled. “I had this thing charged this morning. I guess the Snot Sea eats batteries, too.”
“Do you have enough juice to make a call?” Nancy asked.
“I sure hope so. It’ll have to be short. I’ll have to make it count.”
She gave herself a moment’s contemplation to recall a phone number from memory. She punched digits into the keypad and hoped she chose correctly.
26
You Look Far Worse
Despite the series of recent events to suggest otherwise, Ember felt pretty damn lucky.
She had abilities no other mage possessed, for a start. She also had a strong Investigator’s Instinct, which drew her obsessiveness toward clues that others would overlook. She, somehow, was able to enter a dimension of spirits and then escape the Snot Sea (as she couldn’t help but think of it) with its giant squid Sentry. Even now, trapped with a partially triggered tripwire, the mage knew she had been lucky. She had, after all, not fully triggered the bomb.
She was lucky, too, that her memory was good enough to recall an important phone number. She dialed that number it into a cell phone that luckily had just enough battery life and caught just enough signal strength to connect the call.
And, as luck would have it, the intended recipient answered the call.
“Anna, this is Ember,” she spit the words into the phone without hesitation, without offering an actual greeting. “I need your help.”
“Hello? Ember?” The changeling woman said. “Slow down. Tell me what’s wrong. Where are you?”
“No time. My mobile battery’s almost dead. Grab a pen, I’ll give you directions. I need you to come help me. With immediate effect.”
Ember didn’t wait for her would-be rescuer to find a writing instrument. She rattled off directions as best as she could remember and hoped they were accurate. “Look for my red Ranger when you come over the hill. I’ll be the one standing with my hand glued to a trailer house door, trying not to think about how badly I need to pee. Okay? Can you get here? Anna? Did you get all that? Anna?”
Silence followed.
“Anna? Are you there yet?” Ember pulled the phone away from her face to find the screen completely blank. The battery was drained. She said the name one more time, her voice despondent. “Anna?”
More silence followed.
Nancy stood nearby, her arms crossed. “Do you…do you think your message got through?” Though she spoke low, the faint whistle in the ghost’s voice broke the mage’s vacant expression.
Ember shook her head slowly. Her lip trembled. “I don’t think so.”
“What’s our backup plan? What do you want me to do?”
The mage snapped her Motorola shut, tucking it away in a jacket pocket. She stared absently for some time at the junk heap, then at the door, then at the one shoe she wore. “That was my backup plan.”
The hissing sound continued as propane vented within the enclosed trailer and its skirting. The rotten egg odor was pervasive, but it hardly registered anymore to Ember’s nose. She changed hands on the lever handle, flexing her stiff fingers once she had.
“At least we know we found the right place,” Nancy said. “They’ve got all kinds of lab equipment in there. Jugs of chemicals. Stoves. Respirators. We did find the right farmstead. I just don’t know why your witness would be such a…such a jerk for not telling you about his hillbilly security.”
Ember made a noise which might have been a laugh. “Jerk. Yeah. He wasn’t a witness, Nancy. He was a victim.”
“A victim?” The ghost tilted her head. “He seemed more like a villain to me.”
“He’s that, too.” Ember
attempted to run her fingers through her hair but found her ponytail yet one hopelessly encrusted mass. “I murdered Doug.”
“You…murdered him?”
She nodded. There was no point in keeping it a secret from a ghost. Ember thought it might feel good to confess, for whatever point there was in doing so. “He and his two friends—also changeling birds—were sent by someone much higher up the food chain to follow me. To spy on me. They did more than that. Attempted to do more than that. They attacked me. I fought back. With help from the Schmitts, Rik and Anna—Anna’s the one I called just now—we took out all three of them.”
“I’m no legal expert,” Nancy said, “but it sounds like self-defense to me. They attacked you, you said?”
Ember nodded.
“That’s not murder then.”
“We buried the truth,” Ember said. “Buried their bodies in shallow graves. Didn’t want to tip our hand to whomever their boss is. And now they’ve been reported missing. I planned on burning down this lab and making it look like they perished within the flames. Make it all look like an accident so their boss wouldn’t know that I’m onto him. Or them, since he’s probably not acting alone.”
“It sounds like your…your heart’s in the right place, anyway. There’s definitely enough combustible stuff here.” Nancy studied the heap of trash piled around and beyond the trailer house. “You can still do that, if you want.”
Ember managed a half-hearted laugh. “Brilliant. If I don’t die here, first.”
“Oh sweetie,” Nancy cooed. “You can’t die. Not like this.”
“It’s not how I imagined going, I’ll admit.”
“Well…that, sure. But I mean you can’t go…like this.” Nancy gestured vaguely at Ember. “You look terrible.”
The mage blinked at her ghost sidekick. “I feel like tosh. If I look half as bad as I feel—”
