by Don Allmon
He pulled the wireless adaptor Shaggy had given him free from his pocket and looked for a place to slot it—nowhere, nowhere, nowhere, fuck’s sake, was this car that goddamn old it didn’t have a jack?—and then there! And click.
Above, COWBOY blocked out the sky.
Network access was better than weed, better than any god damned thing on this earth.
—Get out of there, Buzz told him because she was his now. She hadn’t bothered to update the ancient cars’ outdated security, and now Buzz was gonna fuck her up.
Five seconds.
Everything lurched as Shaggy took control. The car behind the Buick rear-ended it with a bam, and the Buick veered another direction.
COWBOY hauled Comet from the Buick, held and punched and kicked him, leaving him bloody. Comet wrenched himself free of the drone, but too late and not enough. COWBOY filled him with bullets, all Valentine’s fury in a few hundred grams delivered at kinetic energies meant to kill cars. Bullets slammed into his chest. The carbon plastic of his vest pulverized. Capillaries burst and ribs cracked and the wind was blown out of him as his muscles spasmed tight and unmoving.
Around him, cars rear-ended one another and shot off different directions. Bumpers tangled. Plastic flew. Shaggy had fucked with every damn car in the fleet, turning wheels, braking, and speeding up others. He didn’t have land mines, but he had cars, and Buzz threw every goddamn one of them at the bridge. Some cars shot off the canyon edges like two-ton missiles and struck rusted supports, which gave. Some funneled onto the bridge harrying the Rolls. They smashed through barricades and broke through guardrails and fell and drew ancient pylons down. Shaggy’s vengeance: havoc.
Comet barely registered it at all. His world, already dim with dust and pain, strobed with thick shadows cast by the twisted ruined bracings passing above them. He couldn’t breathe. He felt weightless. He was falling. He barely felt the impact, that pain nothing compared to the rest. He clawed out because instinct demanded him to claw. His vision cleared. He hung from the finger-raked roof of a car, and there loomed a mantis-shaped robot over him, child-painted COWBOY. It had the detached hood of a car in its grip and it swung it down on Comet, bam!
Comet’s fingers, if not broken, numb, couldn’t hold.
Bam, one more time.
—Comet! Jump, goddamn it, jump, came Shaggy. But there was too much dust and too much blood in his eyes, and even if Comet could jump, he’d lost all sense of direction and didn’t know where. All around him cars were upended and wrecked and thrown into the abyss.
And now COWBOY aimed his gun, and what could Comet do?
—Don’t stop, he sent, —Don’t stop, and let go.
COWBOY’s endless bullets tore the asphalt decking. Comet was swept away.
Buzz saw Comet fall. Through the cameras of a dozen dead cars, he saw Comet roll and keep rolling and rolling and still rolling like all the laws of physics were broken now, and Comet’s body would die forever because Buzz had been too careless.
Comet’s life signs went erratic, stayed erratic for one long second, and then dropped to levels Buzz didn’t trust could be real.
—Your knight has fallen, Valentine sent because their networks were joined now.
My knight. My knight. She shouldn’t have said that. The only man he’d ever met who hadn’t betrayed him even when he should have. My paladin.
And finally, in the middle of the broken bridge, surrounded by smoking cars and rubble, girders falling, swinging wildly, all the bridge’s support blown out from under, Comet’s terrible roll came to an unnatural stop, and Buzz understood the anguish that had fed Duke’s rage when he’d seen Comet like this before.
Buzz passed off the bridge onto dirt, no highway this side of it. He slammed to a stop and spun a one-eighty with a rooster tail of dust.
Or that was the plan.
In real life, no great pilot, he swung out in a tepid left arc. His wheels slipped across sand and rock, and he nearly laid the whole damn bike on top of himself.
But Comet lay hurt in the middle of that bridge, and Buzz wasn’t going to leave him, not ever. There was no thought of anything else in his mind—not JT or Austin or Dante or the Blue Unicorn—there was nothing that mattered but Comet, downed.
Valentine’s beautiful car—a car like an angel would drive—followed him off the bridge, followed him in his long arc across the open ground, and not a fleck of dirt stuck to its mercury surface; even the bullet holes Comet had given it seemed to accent its perfection.
The bridge was clogged with cars and rubble Buzz could never hope to thread, so Buzz dropped the bike, laid it flat on the ground. Gravel dug up his pant leg when he fell, shredded him, and he didn’t notice. Behind him, the Rolls crept up on him, inexorable, nudging cars out of the way. Buzz couldn’t stop her, so didn’t even try. He ran back through burning cars and broken steel supports and leapt spans of buckled concrete, and the bridge quivered and shook.
Comet was a dust-covered ball, barely recognizable, hair matted, dirt-caked blood everywhere. Buzz tried to haul him standing. Comet kicked and fought, trying to help, making a mess of it all, and they both fell. The bridge wavered.
Around them whirled dust clouds high as Mount fucking Everest, and its thin gaps made everything all the more hellish. The morning sun, high and hot, blazed hazily like a demon hating down on some alien surface. The world smelled of carnage: choking dust, hot asphalt, and oil. Buzz begged him, “Comet. Please stand up. Comet, please.”
Comet’s hair was dull orange, breath shallow, heartbeat low, and temperature high. He pulled weakly at the shoulder-slung burlap bag until it came free.
The Rolls-Royce stopped amid the wreck of her fleet, not two car-lengths away. Its door opened. Valentine’s heel struck the span. COWBOY scrabbled up behind her, metal legs clacking. In her hand she held a small cooler, brain-sized, the kind of cooler black-market docs used to store organs. It steamed nitrogen cold. Buzz could feel it from here. The heels of her boots clicked across the crumbling concrete as she came nearer.
Comet clumsily freed the mine from the bag, and Buzz thought, Better that than what she’ll do to me.
But Comet threw the mine. It rolled to one side. Neither Valentine nor COWBOY bothered to stop it. It was nowhere near them.
“You missed,” she said.
The mine kept rolling and rolling until it bumped up against a steel pylon.
Comet held Buzz’s hand. —We’re going to be an airborne ranger. The mine exploded.
Maybe Shaggy’s massive car wreck hadn’t destroyed the bridge, but he’d damaged it so badly all it needed was that one final push.
Steel buckled. Concrete disintegrated into gravel. Spans of asphalt crumbled. The bridge fell into the Snake River, one huge, long, grinding, apocalyptic fucking Götterdämmerung crash. The whole thing plunged down like the Bifröst between worlds, and the universe rent in two.
Valentine didn’t cry out or shriek when she fell into the abyss, COWBOY falling too. She fired her pistol at them blind with hate until she ran out of bullets.
Comet flew. He flew like he hadn’t done since he’d gotten his eyes. He flew like he’d never done, ever before.
Noah Wu remembered the strike that had done it. They’d sat in the breezeway that wrapped the training yard, and the regiment banners lining the halls were still.
And he struck the bell.
Except it wasn’t a strike at all. It was barely a breath. It was only a breath. It was qì, nothing but steam over rice. And hearing that sound—that tin ring of a bell untouched but fantastically rung like the heroes of old could do—Grandmaster Natalia Jen had closed her eyes in joy. So few of her students had done it before him.
It was one of Comet’s finest memories of her: eyes closed in joy.
If she could have seen him now.
Comet took Shaggy by the hand, barely touching, fingertips to fingertips, Comet’s breath already entwined with his, they needed nothing more, and he flew. His toes barely touche
d the rubble that fell past him. His one free hand only gestured at steel girders falling past, and, as if he’d gripped them, he flung himself upward. He climbed, and he climbed, touching nothing but the man he loved. He climbed faster than gravity could pull the bridge down. He climbed faster than despair could drag them down. He climbed faster than hope could lift them. And if Comet had climbed any faster, he and Shaggy would have become paired stars in the sky.
Travel Advisory: The Boise Devastation
The Second Zombie Apocalypse had hit Boise hard. Pacifica, Christian Texas, and New Atlantic had jointly bombed the fuck out of the place. CTexas had used a low-yield nuke. (Try explaining that to the internationals. But everyone, even the Russians, knew CTexas was batshit.) News outlets had claimed “We got ’em!” but stories to the contrary resurrected every few years, and the crazy Geiger counts spun the rumor mill: Morse code from the dead. Every few years, someone published a translation of the ticks. Necromantic cults flourished in waves, complete with the inevitable Kool-Aid suicide pacts.
Great, more walking dead.
Then came the druids. Plants versus zombies. And they did pretty good. Radiation levels plummeted, so everyone turned a blind eye to what those druids sacrificed to convince the forest to forgive the bomb.
Welcome to Boise.
Flat on their backs, they lay there a moment and waited for the worst. The worst didn’t come. She didn’t rise over the ridge riding the back of COWBOY (which was a dream Comet would have from time to time). Valentine was gone and dead.
Comet wanted to fuck.
He felt like absolute hell. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d hurt as bad as this. And he couldn’t remember the last time he’d needed to fuck as badly as this. He wanted Shaggy now.
They were still holding hands. Just now, that was the best he could do. Shaggy’s hand was warm and surprisingly strong, and he wanted to never let go.
They lay there together at the broken edge. They both stared at the sky because they were too tired and too beaten up to turn their heads, not even to one another. The touch of their hands had to suffice, and the blue they saw in the sky was the kind of blue meant to write rainbows upon, not a single mote of dust to obscure it. They started to giggle. Comet had never giggled in his life. That was how messed up he was just now, that he would giggle.
“You saved my life,” Shaggy said.
“Yeah, that was cool. I was really cool. I wanna fuck you.” He suspected he’d pushed himself just a bit too far and wasn’t thinking quite right.
“I think that would kill you.”
“Yeah, I can barely move. I can’t fuck anything. You saved both of us.”
“No, this was all my fault,” Shaggy said, a whole lot less giggly. “I need a joint.”
Buzz pulled a spliff from his jacket (Comet’s jacket) one-handed and tucked it in his mouth. He dug in the pockets some more and flicked a lighter.
A druid extinguished his flame with the tap of a fingerlike branch and rumbled, “Only you can prevent forest fires.”
Modern-day druidism had less to do with historical druidism and more to do with spiritualized environmentalism. The world was filled with spirits. Two thousand years ago everyone had known that. A hundred years ago, science had winnowed that population to hardly anyone. Today no one knew what to think, except the druids.
The druid was nine feet tall and crowned in antlers—not worn, but grown. It was robed in bearskin and armored in wyvernhide, and its staff was a birch tree. It brought up old memories that Buzz couldn’t have, magically formed: green men, forest kings, and white stags. Behind it stood wicker-made creatures. They were tangles of twigs and fur with stripped bark as string to hold them together. There were bears and deer and horses and raccoons styled like they’d stepped off the walls of Lascaux or Chauvet. There were stick people, faceless. Woodwoses.
Comet struggled to his feet, fists balling, looking ready to fight. Even without the medical feed, Buzz could see just that bit of effort took everything out of him, and Comet nearly fell.
—Comet, stop, you need to rest.
—As soon as everything stops trying to kill us, I’ll be happy to lie down for a year.
The druid didn’t try to kill them. It looked over the wreckage, what remained of the bridge, and sighed. “You’re friends of Austin Shea.”
“Is it that obvious?” Buzz said.
“Darkness chases you everywhere.”
Buzz rolled his eyes. “Are you Grandfather Henry?” The druid wasn’t an elf, but neither was it an orc or a human. It looked like nothing Buzz had ever seen before.
“I am Urushiol. I lead this circle. Henry has gone.”
“Gone? I thought he was the leader here.”
“Not anymore. I will take you to Austin. You will finish your business here. Then you will leave.”
It gestured with its birch-tree staff and two trees separated themselves from the woods behind it and, cracking and groaning, crawled their way on writhing roots toward them. Their branches split and curled and formed into claws, and it was clear they were going to pick them up and carry them.
“We can walk,” Buzz said.
“You will not.” Urushiol said. “We have suffered enough trespassers on our land, and we will suffer no more.”
Fifteen minutes later, the trees lowered them to the ground. After the swaying of the tree, Buzz felt a bit off-balance. There was a break in the landscape, a sudden jagged cliff like the same earthquake that had jacked up the Snake River had also broken the land here. A tall, narrow cleft struck through it—a deep cave.
“JT and Austin are here?”
The druid pointed to the cleft, and then it and the band of creatures and trees returned into the forest. The sounds of their passing—the rattling of branches and whisper of leaves—melded with the rest, and they were gone.
Buzz and Comet ascended the last few dozen meters to the cleft and went in. Comet pulled his pistol and dialed his eyes brighter, and Buzz was gonna say, It’s just JT and Austin, but this hadn’t been at all what he was expecting, so a pistol might be a good idea after all. —Can I have one?
And Comet passed one to him.
Roots and vines hung from the roof of the entrance tunnel. It smelled like living things. Like when Buzz imagined farms, he imagined smells like this, like a really nice vegetable garden written large.
Comet led. Buzz let him.
The passage bent gradually right.
Something dropped from the ceiling, big and metallic, reflecting blue in Comet’s Jedi eye-shine. COWBOY! Buzz panicked. The cave flooded with white light, and Buzz, vision spotted, tried to fire into the glare, but the pistol wouldn’t do anything. Comet had shut it down.
“Buzz, it’s okay, it’s Jason!” at the same time JT said, “Buzz? Comet? What the fuck are you doing here?”
The cave was huge. The immense roots of the trees above shot through the whole thing like stalactites, some so long and powerful that they pierced the room ceiling to floor. Buzz couldn’t see the walls. The only reason he could see anything at all was the magical glow at the cave’s center. Oak leaves and motes of gold and green light swirled around two sleepers: Austin and Dante.
JT crouched just outside the whirlwind of magical leaves. He was forest green and wore jeans and a firetruck-red T-shirt. His tusks were stubby, and he worried one with his tongue. His eyes were bruised and sleepless, irises huge, no sclera visible, and flecked with orange, which meant he was worked up, nerves on high alert.
Beside him sat the utility drone that had dropped from the ceiling of the cave entrance and spooked Buzz. It was four-legged and unarmed. Unarmed maybe, but JT had brought down one of Valentine’s Ataris with a pack of them. The way it crouched there beside JT made it look like a vicious and protective dog.
Dante was someone Buzz had never met, only heard of. She was an orc girl. She wore fashionably torn-up jeans held together by safety pins and a pink T-shirt with a dead pony on it. Her hair was a long Mo
hawk, dyed purple, and one of her tusks was broken off short.
Austin was an elf on the heroic side of elves, beautiful as fuck, and the kind of vain prick you’d expect to cause a world war, some cross between Fëanor and Helen of Troy. He was dressed in the same thing he’d worn yesterday when Buzz had seen him last, which made him look like he was slumming, and not like the slob he actually was. God, Buzz hated glamour.
Austin and Dante lay side by side, his left hand in her right. Austin’s right hand lay over his chest, curled around a short ivory wand that sparkled like someone had dusted it with glitter.
Not a wand. A unicorn horn. The unicorn horn.
The horn didn’t look like what Buzz had imagined it would. He’d imagined something long and spiraled, tapering to a point, silvery-ivory white. He’d gotten the color right, but that was all. It was only twenty centimeters long. It wasn’t thick at all, barely a solid twig of a thing. And he realized the reason it didn’t look like he’d expected was because it had been filed down, shaved everywhere like a cheese block on a grater, and what Austin was holding was only the core of the horn, all that was left after Grandfather Henry had used it to heal his people so long ago.
The three stared at each other a long time. JT’s mouth twisted like he was confused by them being there; then he frowned like he was pissed off by them being there; then he grunted like it finally all made sense, and he bit his lower lip like now he was ashamed. “I was supposed to pick you up at the airport.”
Comet said, “It’s okay, I caught a cab. You’re exhausted.”
“I’d have been there, but something came up.”
“Yeah, we know. She chased us all across Nevada.”
“She’s here?” JT’s eyes went wide, and his drone scrambled back to the cave entrance.
