Shaman

by Chloe Garner

  A noise behind him, like the snorting of a bull, scattered the crowd and a much larger demon walking, hunched over, on two feet walked through Sam’s perspective, throwing him into a fit of nausea that he fought off, and separated the two fighting goblins, throwing them into opposite walls so hard that one of them ashed. He roared and grunted a threat to the goblins still in earshot, then continued on along the cave. Sam followed, nausea rising and becoming nearly intolerable.

  He caught a scent. It was strange and new, this idea of smelling things in visions, and he was having to re-learn what smell was, when his nose wasn’t there to tell him, which he tried not to think about too much, because his head already hurt.

  It was like goblin breath. Or… Death. It was the smell of death. He hurried forward, feeling his grip on the vision slip, trying to follow the scent. The headache was no longer just a threat, and he wanted to put his hand to the back of his head, but he had no hand, nor a head. Samantha, somewhere far away, was worried about him and wanted him to quit. He turned one more corner then, gagging with a throat that wasn’t there, dropped out of the vision.

  He threw up. Samantha was only just fast enough to get out of the way. She tried to help him stay up as he staggered over to a tree, headache nearly blinding him and stomach still trying to invert itself. He threw up again, and she put her hand on his lower back, waiting. He threw up an empty stomach, then leaned his sweaty forehead against his arm. His ears throbbed, his vision swam, and he got cold chills up his legs as his body readjusted.

  “What did you see?” Samantha asked. He spat twice, then tried to stand. “Give it another minute. What did you see?”

  “Bodies,” he said. She pushed a bottle of water into his hand and he flushed his mouth with it, then drank the rest. Too quickly. He tried to throw that up, too, but he steeled himself and kept it down.

  “You okay, man?” Jason asked. Sam nodded.

  “You stayed too long,” Samantha said. “Pushed it too hard.”

  “Bodies,” he said again, still dumbstruck by what he had seen.

  “You saw them before,” Samantha said.

  “Human.”

  She was silent for a moment.

  “Where?”

  The cave. It’s swarming with goblins. Swarming. And they had a room with corpses. They were throwing a new one in when I found it.” He gagged again. “I’ve never seen torture like that.”

  Samantha’s hand left his back and he looked over. She was walking away.

  “Help him,” she said. “We’re going. Now.”

  Jason took his arm and he leaned against his brother for a few minutes as they walked, slowly catching up to Samantha. She was a solid flame of anger.

  “Did you see pit lords?” Samantha asked.

  “The big demon from the parking lot?” Sam asked. Deep fury answered. It was directed ahead of them. “Yes. I saw…” he counted, “three. Two throwing a body into the room with the rest of them.”

  The flame blazed hot.

  “Today, we do God’s work,” Samantha said darkly.

  “What’s going on, Sam?” Jason asked, checking to make sure that Sam was stable on his own feet again, then jogging to catch her. She was like a freight train.

  “They’re trying to build a factory here. Here. If I weren’t here with you…” Her resolve steeled and she kicked a dead limb out of her way, no longer picking her way through the light underbrush, but heading in a beeline for a destination only she could feel.

  “Talk to me,” Sam said.

  “A factory…” She swallowed. There was a spike of shame and guilt, which she pushed aside with a new wave of rage. “Souls. When they go to hell. They start loose, but demons pick them up and they become part of the economy. Demons feed on fear, blood, and pain. The factories are where they literally extract them. It’s not metaphorical, it’s not allegory. They’re physical substances in hell, and demons get drunk on them. Pit lords are the ones who run them. They enjoy it. And one of them has had the freaking bloody great idea to set one up on this side. They won’t want to kill people. They’ll be trying to keep them alive, but they won’t be very good at it. You can’t kill someone in hell. This side, we’re really fragile. But they’re demons. They’ll get the hang of it, and they’ll torture people… The fire demons are just cheap slaves. They’re terrified of pit lords. Should be.” Her focus drifted forward again and the clinical anger turned primal again. “They’re trying to build a factory. And we taught them to stay under the radar.”

  Sam thought of the body, only recognizable as human from the proportion of the limbs and the direction of the joints, and his stomach again threatened to turn itself. Samantha’s attention snapped back to him.

  “How much risk are you willing to accept to fix this?” she asked.

  “Whatever it takes,” Jason said. Sam nodded.

  “I could call Mitch. He could probably be here in a couple of days… I don’t know. He can’t do what I can do… I should call Carter. He’d take a week to get here…”

  “He’s always turned up, like, immediately,” Jason said.

  “Abby sent me ammo. She has to quit watching for a while after she directly intervenes. Circular logic tears her brain up. She won’t be watching, now. I’d have to call him, and he doesn’t hurry for stuff like this. No. I should be the one to do this. But I’m going to have to do stuff I’m the only one I know of that I can do. It draws attention to you. Especially you, Jason. I can cover Sam, but they can get to me through you.”

  “Whatever it takes.”

  She stopped short.

  “You need to sight in that rifle.”

  <><><>

  Jason lay on his stomach on a ridge that faced the cave Sam had, from where Jason presently lay, seen in his vision. Jason had his scope on the cave entrance, watching goblins crawling in and out of it. Samantha had said not to waste his ammo on them. He had filled a magazine with the marked bullets, and had a second mag laying on the ground next to him to swap when he ran out.

  “Only demons bigger than forty pounds… Ones who are taller than my shoulders,” Samantha had said. “Hit them center of mass, best you can. I want to re-use these bullets.”

  She had been in a scary, militaristic mode; more intense than usual. Jason wondered just how intimately familiar she was with what went on in a so-called factory. She and Sam were making their way down to the plain below the mountain face. She had been right - they were in a spot where a normal human probably wouldn’t have ever found them. Despite that, they had killed half a dozen scouts that she had sent Sam out to find on their way in. Sam was dog-tired, but wasn’t going to let her go down to fight the goblins hand-to-hand by herself. Jason couldn’t blame him. Even given her display in Oklahoma against dozens of them, there appeared to be hundreds here. Who even knew how many might be down in the caves Sam had seen.

  Jason found Sam and Samantha down at the edge of the wide plain, picking their way carefully. He knew Samantha wanted to make the first move. He had never backed down from something like this before, and he certainly wasn’t going to be the one to suggest they turn tail, now, but moving his scope back up to the cliff face, he wondered if they were actually good enough to pull this off. Samantha said she could lock them in. Goblins wouldn’t be able to blink out - they’d just fly away once they decided they were losing. Samantha seemed pretty confident that she could draw them in, though. The pit lords, though, she said could blink - he had to believe it, he’d seen the one do it in Texas - and she didn’t want to let them get away. She said all of them had to die. If that meant going into the caves after them, so be it, though Jason couldn’t see his way around how to make that happen. Samantha had brushed it off. Unlikely. They’d be after her.

  Sam had a handgun, an iron-studded baseball bat, and a hunting knife. Samantha had left her backpack sitting next to Jason - that frightened him more than anything; her leaving it behind invokved the sensation that this was a suicide run - and was only carrying her machete a
nd her hatchet. Ammunition was a joke, for these kind of numbers, but Jason would have felt naked going into that kind of a fight without a firearm. He re-checked the set of the rifle against his shoulder and looked at the busy entrance to the cave. Sam had said it looked like an anthill, from inside. From the outside, it looked like a beehive. Goblins were constantly coming and going, taking off from the mouth of the cave or landing around it. A pair got into a scuffle and fell off of the cliff wall, fighting to within feet of the ground, then pulling out of it and flying in different directions.

  Just sitting and watching them felt wrong.

  Samantha had made it to the edge of the clearing and Sam was helping her up onto a huge rock where she was clearly visible from all sides. The goblin activity picked up. She stood, feet planted well apart, one weapon in each hand, and arched her back, yelling something with her head tipped back at the sky. The entrance to the cave started to buzz as goblins came out to see what was going on, and those that had recently left landed again to be a part of the horde. Samantha’s yell, words, maybe, but Jason couldn’t pick out anything amidst the echoes, increased in volume and pitch, becoming a scream. The activity at the mouth of the cave, viewed through an open eye and through the scope, bubbled out, forming a swarm that reluctantly took off and landed once, then took off again, hundreds of individuals flying in an ad hoc formation toward Sam and Samantha. Jason felt a near-overwhelming urge to start picking them off, but Samantha had left no room for interpretation. No shooting goblins.

  He waited.

  Samantha vaulted off of the rock, meeting the swarm at a run. Which apparently took Sam by surprise for a half-step.

  The first three goblins tried to peel out of the way, but she caught a wing off of the first and the other two she impaled and decapitated, twisting to see Sam finish the first. She bowed low to get under the fourth and fifth as the swarm flanked around them and killed them on the wing as well before they got to Sam. Jason’s finger itched on the trigger for another moment, then a sense of awe set in, watching her fight. With a scope and a clear sun, he could see the majority of her movement as she stayed with her back to Sam, killing goblins with clean, brutal efficiency. She didn’t ash them all first hit. She lopped an arm here, a wing there, kicking them into the oncoming flood of goblins as decoys. Enraged goblins tore into their own as the wounded creatures came screaming by.

  He checked on Sam. Sam wasn’t holding his own quite as well, but he was actually decent as a bruiser. Without the careful room-by-room tactics they usually employed, and without things like furniture or walls getting in the way, he was creatively destructive in ways that made Jason proud of his brother. A goblin got a mouth on the end of the bat and Sam grabbed him by the throat and swung him through a line of goblins with enough force to ash two and disable three others badly enough that their compatriots turned on them. At the end of the swing, Sam let go of the goblin’s throat and neatly slid the knife in his off-hand through the gray flesh, ashing him as well. A goblin came at him from above on the other side, and Samantha’s hatchet caught it in the chest. Jason lost view of them, other than the puffs of ash, for a minute, then his open eye noticed a disturbance in the swarms of goblins yet beyond Sam and Samantha.

  Pit lords.

  He was up.

  He swiveled his sight up to the far end of the swarm where a trio of pit lords were kicking goblins out of the way. He grinned.

  Breathe in. Breathe out.

  The kick from the rifle was considerable - it was an elephant gun of a weapon - but he was braced for it and ready. He didn’t need another breath before he lined up on the second and ashed it, as well. The third stood stock still, scanning his own eye level for his enemy. He never considered looking up. Jason ashed him as a stationary target, then moved his mental focus back to his open eye.

  His brain wasn’t fast enough to count the pit lords that were now making their way through the goblins. He just relied on his instincts to aim and shoot, picking another target at breaths in and being ready to fire once he had dropped his heart rate down with his breath out.

  Quickly as he worked, he ran out of time. The pit lords made it to Samantha. One of them knocked Sam into a pile of goblins, who piled onto him with glee, but Jason couldn’t spare the thought for his brother as Samantha found herself in the middle of six pit lords.

  “I don’t have the weapons to kill them fast or easy,” Samantha had said. “You have to shoot them, I don’t care how close they are to me. I trust you.”

  She trusted him. He had never put his finger on the trigger of a rifle when he could see a human in the sight. It went against every rule he had, every moment of training he had done, every mistake he had ever tried to avoid, but he eased his finger onto the trigger and lined up on the one furthest from either Sam or Samantha and forced all of the air out of his lungs and willed his heart rate back down. It wouldn’t go.

  He could hear his heart in his ears and the muscles in his arms began to stiffen with the force he was using to hold them still. He could see Samantha struggling among the pit lords, slashing, kicking, dodging, keeping them at distance when she could and not being there any more when she couldn’t. Next to her, they looked lumbering and slow, but her weapons were ineffective against them, and it was only a matter of time before one of them laid hold of her.

  He let go of the rifle and let it fall on the stock, shaking out his arms and taking three short, quick breaths. One. Two. Three. Go.

  He lay back on his stomach again and picked up the rifle, finding the cluster of fighting demons and picking out the one that was least likely to go wrong. He hadn’t missed a single other shot, but the first shot went wide, burying itself into a goblin behind the pit lord he had picked. He mentally shook himself and lined up again, taking the breath in and then out. His heart rate dropped to where it was supposed to be, and he was calm. He pulled the trigger. The demon, arm over his head to slash at Samantha, ashed. He lined up again, and Samantha backed into the opening left by the ashed demon. He picked the one on the far side and shot again before he took his next breath. She spun into the rain of ash left by the second and knelt burying her hatchet into a pit lord’s knee and pulling it loose.

  He realized what she was doing. She was letting him know where she was going to be. He quickly took aim at the furthest pit lord again and shot. He was sure the bullet was left of center by three inches, but it was center-enough of mass, and the demon ashed. Samantha rolled through feet and stood, cutting arms away from her with the machete and hitting a pit lord solidly in the back with the hatchet. Jason barely noticed, taking aim at the one next to where she had been and ashing it. She twirled and stood in the next cloud of ash, still defending as three more pit lords made it to her. Jason took a quick check on Sam, who had gotten clear and was going godzilla on the goblins, simply stomping on them. Tight-pressed as they were, it seemed to be working. He snapped back to Samantha and took aim, squeezing the trigger on the next pit lord.

  Click.

  He cursed and pulled the gun back as he slid his hips over his knees, out of sight, and grabbed the spare magazine. He was only a few seconds at it, but being blind, it felt like forever. He lay back flat and picked up Samantha again. She had actually ashed a pit lord while he had been reloading, but she was up to eight of them again. He focused back over to his open eye. Five more. Maybe. It had been a quick count. He focused in again, pushing his heart rate down with two hard breaths, then settled back into the dance. He waited for her to make a big move one way or another, then led a pit lord who moved to chase her, ashing him. She started into the hole he had left her, but Sam took it instead. Jason pulled his finger off the trigger and watched as Sam hit an invisible wall and she pushed him into the mob of goblins waiting for the pit lords’ leftovers. He grinned. Heartless. He focused again, still grinning slightly, the well-oiled mechanics of the process taking over as he danced her through the remaining pit lords, buying himself enough time to pick off the last two - click one, click two
- before they got to her. She bent over her knees for a moment, then the press of goblins was on her again and she resumed the dance, rejoining Sam, who looked little worse for wear. Jason watched, wondering where Sam had gotten so good.

  With a sudden inspiration, he quickly packed up his rifle and grabbed Samantha’s backpack and started down the hillside, keeping the scope out so that he could keep track of Samantha and Sam’s progress. Sam was slowing, and he showed the signs of missteps in the fight. There was blood on his shirt and running down one arm, but he moved like he wasn’t injured. Samantha was light and quick and flawless, but also obviously tiring. She bent over her knees twice more when she had a moment.

  As he reached the last few feet of descent, the goblins raised off the ground as a flock, kicking up a cloud of ash that first obscured his view and then stung his eyes as they swirled it out and away from Sam and Samantha. He dropped the bags and knelt, his arm over his eyes, trying to keep his guard up as best he could in the blinding ash. Through the wingbeats and the screeching, he heard again the sound of Samantha’s yell, in clear, unknown words this time. The goblins screeched and screamed and hissed, but the flapping converged again and the ash fell, heavy, back to the ground. The remaining goblins formed a crowd around Sam and Samantha with renewed frenzy, and the two of them resumed their fight. Jason checked his pockets, then jumped down onto the plain, drawing his gun and opening fire.

  <><><>

  Samantha was kneeling on the ground, on the pile of ash, at any rate, forehead on her leading knee, weapons still in her hands, each edge-down in the ash. Her breath was controlled, but like exhaustion refusing to pant, rather than easy and even. Sam just collapsed on his back, staring up at the sky. Jason rubbed his shoulder as he approached them.

  “You two okay?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Sam said, then paused. “For both of us.”

  Jason kicked Sam’s shoe.