by Forbes West
Ephor Storma walks towards your office. “The men will stay here to protect the Mission, but I am no longer in charge of them. I lost that right when I lost the duel to Mathias. There is a security forces lieutenant.” He points out a single Ni-Perchta, skinny, very young and very weak-looking in an Army surplus uniform dyed blue. “He is in charge of our fellows here.” To your astonishment, Storma takes off his body armor and leaves it in a clump on the floor.
More and more Ni-Perchta security forces show up during the next day and fortify the Mission as well as they can, dragging sandbags into the lobby.
Storma walks out in his tunic, pausing in the doorway to stare at the sky for a long moment.
“And so Moses walked the desert for forty days and forty nights, exiled by Pharaoh... Banished from his people...” you say in an oddly deep voice. Saki looks at you in wonder.
“Sorry. I did a couple rails of Adderall while this was all blowing over...”
Botha arrives back in the lobby in full body armor and loading an M-16. He orders Ernesto and the maintenance crew to bring in fans to blow out some of the lingering tear gas. Ernesto asks if you are okay. You tell him, yes, yes you are, and ask if he is going to stay.
“Wherever you go, it’s something nowadays,” Ernesto says. “Always, you know, something. You can go to the World Trade Center in New York back in 2001 and that was the safest place in the world—until September 11th. You can go to this place I used to go to—this shopping center in Seal Beach, California.”
“I didn't know you lived around the Long Beach area.” You wonder why so many people like you are all from the same part of California. The odds have to be ridiculous.
“Sí. You remember Seal Beach, right? The hair salon that got shot up?” You do.
“Crazy guy just bam, bam, bam, shot it up, killed a bunch of women. No place is safe. Life ain’t safe,” Ernesto says. “People are crazy everywhere...”
* * *
You and Saki don’t show up for work the next day and Jake and Botha don’t even bother to call you on it. You spend the day at the Benbow, talking things over with Guy and Treena.
“Are we leaving?” Saki asks Guy.
He walks over to his small humidor case made out of cherry wood. After taking out a cigar and lighting it with his ori-baton, he shakes his head. “Less people, more opportunity. More opportunity for all of us. Sargasso-3 is going to be wide open at night now. People are afraid just to go out during the daytime.”
The Inn, surprisingly, is doing well—those who have decided to stick out it despite Mathias’s attack are now drinking their anxieties away.
“Best thing to happen to the Benbow,” Treena says. “So much money it’s not even funny.” She holds up the extra Dii-Yaa. “Too bad about Winniefreddie not being around for this.” She bites her lip.
The new normal continues right up until the portal’s official closing date. The toughest who have stayed living at the Mission seem simply resigned to the closure of the only way back to Earth. They still follow their daily routines, heading to their independent mines and the few salvaging jobs left, albeit under the armed guard of the security forces. Mission Security long-range patrols go out as well, their old, European-style police car sirens echoing in the night. Mathias’s and Petty’s gang disappear back into rumor and innuendo, though no one feels truly safe.
You give your official two weeks resignation to Botha, who is the last true Network representative on-site, besides Ernesto and Saki. As the Benbow has picked up business enough to warrant your presence, you leave the Network.
You move into Saki’s apartment as a roommate, crashing on the couch as Guy stays over many nights. You hear them through the wall at night and cover your ears with your pillow.
The Mission starts to suffer. There is no food court operating anymore; Subway and McDonald’s have been boarded up. The security forces make the lobby seem more like a military barracks. The pool has turned a disturbing green color, though the hot tub is still functioning. The gym has been turned into a room for the security forces to sleep in.
Ernesto and the other maintenance crew members barely show up to do their jobs anymore and respond with open contempt to those around them, especially the more mouthy residents of the Mission tower. Payment from the Network comes erratically, if at all. You and Saki used to be paid every day, now for Saki it’s every other day, or once a week. Oddly, you get paid daily until your last day.
You tend the bar at the Benbow. You still wear your old Network flight suit but you’ve ripped off the Network logo and replaced it with a logo you made yourself. It states S.B. Crue and has that seal skull design of the downed airship.
At night you smoke cigars on the patio of the Benbow Inn with Guy and Saki and discuss all sorts of things. Guy tends to become the philosopher after the third beer of the night. You discuss matters such as communism, Las Vegas, gay rights, and whether or not advanced aliens would invade à la Independence Day by bombing the shit out of everything or like V: the Mini Series where they would slowly take over.
One night, as it gets cooler out, Guy, you, and Saki watch as a flight of Spitfires— maybe sixteen of those old World War Two planes—pass through the night. Their engines boom across the fields, and their silhouettes are obvious in the moonlit sky.
“Spitfires,” Guy says. “Hunting illegal airships. They’ll blow up illegal salvagers at night-time but they won’t fly out to protect regular people in the daytime. Funny world, huh? Shows the Network’s priorities. They could just…I don’t know.”
He nods over at the yellow Karmann Ghia. A week ago, with one last and very dangerous run of the S.B. Crue, you picked the car up and have since worked with Guy to repair it. It’s the first time you’ve ever worked on a car before, and Guy is very patient with you, despite you almost dropping the car on his head once when you were not paying attention.
“The Old Man at Midnight ever mention his car?” Saki smokes a joint and blows out rings of smoke.
You shrug as Treena comes out with her own beer. “Wrote a letter about it. I guess it’s mine for the moment,” you say. You received a letter from a Ni-Perchta messenger a few days ago from Hamilton. He said you can keep the car until he needed it again.
A bug zaps itself on a green electrical bug zapper next to Guy’s head. “Hmmmm...” Guy says.
“Hmmm what?”
He shrugs. “Just saying hmmmm. Wanna go nighthawking again, girls? It’d be fun and interesting.”
Before you get a chance to even answer, Treena shakes her head over and over. “I’m not leaving here for all the tea in Asia, Guy. I am not. The chances of dying out there I figure to be exponentially high.”
He blows out a smoke ring from a cigar he’s just lit. “Exponentially high? How do you figure that? It’s not like you can just google something like that, you know. Not here, not ever. Puh-leaze, Treena.”
She blinks a few times. “I’d rather not. I have a general feeling of dying horrifically out there. Like a dog. Toe cutters, wild animals, Gugs, unknown traps—why we ever did it in the first place is ridiculous in retrospect. Short-sighted.”
You sort of nod. “I agree.”
Guy raises his hands. “So no one is going. We have a golden opportunity to grab some low hanging fruit here and you guys...I mean, most of the legitimate people took off. No one’s heard from Mathias and Petty since the lobby thing. We won’t be able to drag a lot away, though. With the S.B. Crue’s rudder being screwed up we burn through a thousand dollars’ worth of fuel every flying hour. But by car we can grab that, you know, low hanging-”
“No, no, I said I agree with Treena. I do, about dying like a dog. But I’ll go out
there, Guy.”
He puts out a hand for a high five. “Okay, then! I don’t like your suicidal impulse at all, but that’s better than…Who else can we rope in? Saki?”
“We can’t do any major runs. The S.B. Crue is too expensive to operate, with the fuel and the repairs, so i
t’s going to be so boring.” Saki wrinkles her nose. “I am not down.”
“Can you just go out with us a little so I can train newbie here?” Guy nods at you. “Please?” He turns to you. “We never really got you up and running.”
Treena rolls her eyes. “Have fun with a gruesome death. I have no plans to go out there to that desolation ever again.”
* * *
With your Tokyo Sex Whale jumpsuit, elbow and knee pads on and your ori-baton outfitted with several different types of ori, you take a little trip out to Sargasso-3. Your group has taken the yellow Karmann Ghia out for a spin, filling it up at a late night Ni-Perchta-run petrol station. It’s the best car for gas mileage, and considering that, off- world, gas is basically twelve dollars a liter, this is a good deal. Guy smokes a cigar the whole way, making you a little ill. You are stuck in the back, and Saki is driving.
“You don’t know anything about orichalcum, do you? Just a guess,” Guy says, as you head down the yellow X highway at a very high speed. “That’s a dangerous thing not to know out here in the wastes. Very dangerous. I’ll teach you what I know, as if you are a child.”
You nod, a little annoyed. “I just try to think of what I know from TV and movies.”
“Saki, stop the car,” Guy tells her. He turns around in his seat. “Get out.” You both climb out. Saki puts her seat back and throws the radio on. She brings a book—Stephen King’s The Stand in Japanese—out from the glove compartment and flips to a random page. She straps a miner’s flashlight to her head so she can read easily.
“What’s she doing?” you ask, looking back as you put on a helmet.
“Just in case we have to get out fast for any reason,” Guy says. “Come on, we got a little bit of a walk to do. Saki?” He turns back to her. “Three honks for trouble, okay, honey?”
Saki gets angry. “I am reading now! Yes, thank you! I haven’t had a chance to read outside in a long time...”
“Read outside?” you ask.
Guy shrugs. “Saki’s a little strange.” He and Saki kiss, making you feel odd and queasy.
Saki slaps Guy hard on the cheek and revs the engine. “One hit of the gas and I leave your ass!”
Two minutes into your walk, Guy speaks again in low tones. “You know, I thought of it, visualized, pondered it, and here you are—the product of the universe and my thoughts. I always wanted to be around a smart, tough girl with a sort of minor superpower.”
You are unsure of what to say to that. “Oh well, that’s cool,” you finally say, and jump over a pothole the size of a dinner table. Neon lights on an ancient building across the street flash and fizzle with sparks.
It is quiet again, your shoes crunching along the broken street. You pass by six decaying bodies laid out by a rusting old pickup truck and an old Volkswagen Bug. The Bug has been spray painted with an M and a P. Nailed to the side of the pickup, you count thirteen of those tarot cards with the man and the Ni-Perchta woman chained to the Devil. “Lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same spot,” Guy says.
“This wasn’t lightning.”
Guy points to what used to be an open-air bathing place. Broken benches and an overflowing pool easily the size of a lake are all that is of left of the grand complex. A broken holographic display plays advertisements, including images of nearly nude men and women frolicking under the sun, being served by others with gray skin who wear odd, Greek chorus-like masks. There are also black robotic things scurrying back and forth, serving the people.
“See that?” Guy asks. “Depraved and decadent and overall messed up reminder of the past. Men and women together like that. A sick civilization used to live in these cities—at first human but then vampire. The Antediluvian people lived here in Sargasso-3—just as evil as the people before the flood were. They were wiped out by a metaphorical flood before the time of Christ; some think nuclear or biological or both. There’s an awful lot of radioactive bullshit around.
“According to this professor I once heard talk, they gave up the worship of the original High Three Gods—Ak, Kern, and Bo—for what you saw earlier, that bearded face creature—the Storm King—and became, well, evil, making themselves semi-immortal, enslaving the Ni-Perchta, manipulating their bodies and drinking Ni-Perchta and human blood to keep their lives going and going. You ever hear of Bevan’s disease?”
You know what it is but ask for an additional explanation anyway. “There are three types. Type three Bevan’s—this disease is actually what the ancients did to themselves on purpose in order to extend their lives. It’s human-made. You can live forever if you are lucky enough to grab it. But the poor type ones or twos die quickly or become insane. No one knows why so few are lucky. They don’t talk about that on Earth, do they?” Guy’s face turns hard.
“No, no, they don’t.”
“All the type threes have to do is just drink a blood pack once a week. No big deal. Just guzzle three quarts—it’s so gross when you think about it now. But if you get type three, you can live forever and stay young just by drinking blood packs.”
He keeps going. “Type twos die feral and insane in three weeks, usually chewing their fingers off before they die. Type ones just drop dead—splat. So don’t take the mummy lottery—if you get bit, you’ll more than likely die horribly.”
“Are we sure Saki is okay?” you ask, looking back at the Karmann Ghia.
“I asked her three times if she was cool with this. She’s just Saki. That’s all. She zigs when you think she is going to zag,” Guy says. “I know, right? Her staying in the car? But she likes to be out here sometimes, even at night.”
“You see something else there, poolside?” Guy points out another thing, changing the subject. It’s a giant U shape that has been spray painted in white on the side of a broken marble wall. Under it is a glowing and vibrating machine—perhaps a vending machine at one time. A picture of the Milky Way plays across the side of it. There is another painted symbol under the giant U shape—two straight lines separated by a squiggly line. “A nighthawk sign. Says it’s safe to camp here but don’t drink the water. We can set up camp, based on a stranger’s spray paint. Isn’t that interesting?”
You study the marks, remembering that you’ve seen one like that before on the bridge your first night at the Mission.
Guy walks forward through the pool complex and stands next to a modern plastic lawn chair. There’s a makeshift fire pit full of dead black coals.
“Our little camp.” Guy takes off his visored helmet and tosses it onto the lawn chair. He snaps out his ori-baton, smiles and lifts you up off the ground telekinetically with the baton. You float in the air like a mote of dust, your heart beating quickly. You keep going higher and higher and higher to the point that you are nearly three hundred feet up until he finally lowers you. You’re feeling queasy and ready to throw up. “Sorry, the look on your face...”
You kick him straight in the balls; he drops to his knees.
“Oh, come on. Some, some goddamn levity. Shit.” He tosses you his baton. “Heal my balls.” He holds himself, bending at the waist and trying to suck in air. You shake your head as you use your baton to heal Guy’s you-know-what’s.
“Look, I also did that for a point. This isn’t a game out here, Missy! You need to know how to use it at least to a point of some proficiency. Or else someone’s going to just pick you up like that and drop you off the side of one of these very tall buildings.”
He straightens up. “I should have trained you properly from the get go. I don’t know if it would have helped you by the temple. But it may have made you a little more comfortable. Sorry, schoolgirl. That was my mistake.”
He shows you his baton. “See this? Typical orichalcum baton, usually made in Singapore. Usually covered in metal. It’s got a little battery inside like a wristwatch. That’s all the charge you need.”
You nod, biting your tongue. You already knew this.
“I have a good amount on mine. Here, look, the Network cut up the sto
nes like zodiac signs. See, Leo, for telekinesis.” He points to the stone shaped like a snake. “Sagittarius, for fire control.” One long finger points to an arrow-shaped stone. “Libra, electrical control. Aquarius for healing, and Cancer—which I don't have here—for random transformation of the body and for shapeshifting. That type of stone, the shapeshifting, is expensive and very hard to use. The only one who could do that day in and day out was Winniefreddie. You have to have a weird focus for this stuff.”
You nod.
“You have two—the Leo and the Sagittarius—those are good standard orichalcum to start with, the most basic and most useful, most common outside the mines. Now to me they all look like blue stones.” He grabs your baton and looks at the stones embedded into it. “But they don’t to you, do they?”
You shake your head. “Leo is actually blue and whitish, the other is a bluish-yellow. To me.”
He nods and steps to the side. “I want you to spray out a jet of flame, a gust of it, straight ahead. Feel the power inside that baton and think of heat.”
You put out the ori-baton strapped to your belt and think of a great flame. A little spark comes out of your hand, just a little ball of flame that shoots into the water of the overflowing pool.
Guy shakes his head. “No, not like that. Here, let me show you.”
Part of you suddenly becomes enraged. Perhaps it is frustration; perhaps it is just the journey so far. For a moment you think of torching Mathias, that laughing murderer who tortured you by the Ghia.
A jet of flame as powerful as something from a flamethrower comes out of your hand and goes spraying across the water in a sixty-foot arc. The flames reflect off the stillness of the green water. Guy jumps back.
“Like that?” you say. “I said I could be good with this stuff.” A little bit of flame still dances at the end of your fingers, but not hurting you in any way, and you blow it out. Part of your mind whispers, “Beginner’s luck,” making you feel small once again.
