Excalibur

by Tim Marquitz

  “Nitis!”

  I spun and nearly shot Mika as he clung to the door frame behind me. His eyes were wide,

  “The train—”

  “I know,” I answered, cutting him off. “We need to see if—”

  “No!” He cut me off in turn, pointing in the direction of the coal car. “We crash.”

  My eyes followed his finger, and though it was hard to see anything past the whipping clouds of black smoke and piled coal, I spotted the sudden rise of hills that signaled a sharp turn of the rails.

  “Oh…hell.”

  Mika nodded and stepped deeper into the car. The train bounced beneath us, ready to take flight. There was no time for us to jump free. It was too late.

  A thought hit me then.

  It was as ugly and stupid a thought as I’d ever had, and there had been a lot of stupid thoughts over the years, but it was our only chance. No time to think it through, or to even shit my pants, I grabbed Mika by the arm and ran to the sarcophagus. He started at me as though I was stupid, and I couldn’t argue.

  Three thick, heavy latches sealed the ornate coffin. I popped all three as the train danced under our feet and muscled the huge sarcophagus open.

  “What are you doing?” Mika screamed, but I wasn’t listening.

  I tossed him into the casket alongside the emaciated body already there and crawled in behind him, letting the weight of the lid slam down. I heard the latches snap shut like I’d hoped, but there was no time to celebrate the Pyrrhic victory.

  “Still no wampum rubbing,” Mika cautioned, which I thought was rather heartless given it was likely our last moment on Earth.

  I didn’t get the chance to complain, though. The train gave one last shake—the engine hitting the curve, I imagined—and chaos took a turn with my ass.

  We were tossed about inside the coffin, our corpse-buddy joining us in a way that I’m sure would have sent me to Hell if I hadn’t already been related to the Devil. Shrieks of tearing metal erupted around us, the sound so loud I couldn’t even hear my own screams inside my head. My heart palpitated so hard I was sure it would slip between my ribs.

  Over and over we toppled until I drowned in a blur of sensory overkill. There was nothing but me and the hazy memory of what was going on. And then there was the ground.

  The mean and way too solid ground.

  Oh how I hate that thing.

  The fugue of motion was instantly replaced by the jarring crash of reality. Stone and iron ruptured at the impact. There was a flash of light—dim night brilliant after the confines of the coffin—and we were flung free of the morbid embrace, two leaves and a corpse cast from the wreckage of the sarcophagus. And then there was the ground again…and again…and maybe a dozen times after that. I lost count after the second bounce.

  Darkness found me sometime after that.

  #

  “Nitis?” a soft voice pried at my ears, tugging on my consciousness.

  My eyes fluttered open to see the battered and bruised face of my guide, looking like his old raccoon self.

  “This clearly isn’t Heaven,” I muttered, scraping my tongue across chipped and broken teeth. “The women there are much better looking.”

  “He is fine.” Mika grunted and sat back, clearing my view. The rest of the freakish foursome filled my view. The guide helped me to sit up.

  “That was one hell of a show you put on there, boy,” Clay told me with a chuckle. “I figured we’d be scraping bits of you out of the hill for weeks just so we’d get paid.” May Lin and Unktowa hovered at his back. They were a little worse for wear than I recalled the last time I’d seen them, but they were in better shape than I was.

  “Nice to see you care,” I said, bloody strings of drool streaming down my chin. The red pattered the dirt between my legs. The mangled remains of the body I’d been hugging lay beneath me.

  “You get what you need?” Cletus asked, dollar signs emphasizing his question.

  I stared at the desiccated skull whose black pits stared back, feeling the gentle waft of magical energy that prickled my skin. A crack in its forehead glistened with ruby brilliance. The energy leaked from there in slow, steady waves. It hadn’t been the sarcophagus Uncle Lou was after, but the brain of the corpse inside it. I sighed.

  “Yeah, think so.”

  Clay, his hat missing, swiped a hand through his hair in a useless effort to tame it, and grinned. “Good, then I reckon we’re done.”

  “Wait. What?” I staggered to my feet, pulling the mummified body with me, every mile ridden and injury earned flaring up across my nerves at once.

  “Yeah,” Cletus answered for his brother. “Ciepher paid us to help you reclaim his property. We done did that.”

  I clutched to the body. “But…but…”

  “See you `round, boy.” Clay lifted his chin and snorted in some kind of redneck farewell I’d never understand. “Or as the Chinee here says, ‘Sayonara.’”

  May Lin bowed shallow as my gaze shifted to her. Unktowa smiled with his monstrous mouth and said something to Mika.

  “Unktowa say you very brave for having such tiny acorns.”

  I glanced down to see that I’d lost my pants somewhere along the way. I slid the corpse in front of my crotch as the group laughed and started off across the desert. Mika looked from the dead body to my face and back again.

  “You pale skins have strange ways.” He shook his head and started off after the others, leaving me behind.

  “Wait! A little help here.”

  About Tim

  Tim Marquitz is the author of the Demon Squad series, the Blood War Trilogy, co-author of the Dead West series, as well as several standalone books, and numerous anthology appearances. Tim also collaborated on Memoirs of a MACHINE, the story of MMA pioneer John Machine Lober.

  www.tmarquitz.com

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