The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

  “Everyone, please be calm!” the mayor squawks. “I assure you Chief Propst and his—”

  With a sharp static squeal, the microphone cuts out.

  * * *

  “SOMEBODY HELP HIM!” someone cries. Police officers scramble. The chief barks orders.

  Lilly is giddy with fear and cold. Excited, even. Almost. Euphoric at the violence she can smell in the air. For days now she’s been worried about a sudden explosion of violence. When you’ve been so twisted up with waiting for something horrible, there’s a delirious pleasure when it finally comes.

  “Put the music back on!” she hears the mayor shout, unamplified. But something is wrong with the speakers, and she can hear the music but only very faintly.

  “Kill that goddamn spotlight,” a cop shouts, running toward it.

  Everyone else is staring at the center of the wheel, where her boss is bound by ropes. And also maybe dead. Hopefully dead. Hopefully there’s no further awfulness in store for him. Either way, Lilly can’t bear to look at him.

  Which is why she’s the only one to see a figure climbing down from the Ferris wheel. A woman, slim and nimble, swinging hand over hand around the spaces between pods.

  “Hey, Heather,” Lilly whispers, knowing she can’t hear her.

  She waves, when Heather gets to the ground, knowing Heather won’t see it.

  All of which is why Lilly misses it.

  Someone next to her shrieks. The general sounds of a low-level panic are suddenly escalated. Screams crowd the air. Wails. Everyone is wailing, it seems.

  Lilly turns around. The mayor is still standing on the platform. One hand on a mic that no longer works. Looking down with deep confusion at the harpoon through his stomach.

  * * *

  SOMEHOW DOM IS NOT SURPRISED when he sees who’s standing there at the center of the pedestrian walkway. He knew something was off when Rebecca called to dispatch him. He could hear it in her voice. That there was more to the call, something she wasn’t telling him. Like maybe, your wife is the potential jumper. He walks faster, slipping slightly on the snow that’s accumulating on the sidewalk.

  “Attalah!” he calls, thinking: She can’t jump. I’ll die if she jumps.

  But then he gets closer and sees the figure at her feet. Kneeling. Handcuffed.

  “You came,” she says, smiling. He can’t read her smile. He has no idea who she is right now.

  He remembers Rudy in the hospital bed, baffled by what he’d become.

  “What the hell are you doing, Attalah?”

  “I had to,” she says.

  “Why is Ronan handcuffed?”

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “She keeps saying that,” Ronan says, and Dom is now close enough to see the blood on the side of his face.

  “What did you do to him?”

  “He fell,” she says. “I chloroformed him, and he struggled, and he fell and hit his head. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

  “I’m fine,” Ronan says. “For now. Who knows what the hell she’s got up her sleeve.”

  “I just saved your lives, assholes,” Attalah says.

  “Saved us from what?” Dom asks. The wind is so strong and so cold out there that he has trouble standing up straight.

  “Wait,” she says. “Any second now.”

  “This is crazy,” Dom says, unholstering his radio, ready to phone in—what? My wife kidnapped my best friend and gay lover and is going to make him walk the plank? My wife is part of some horrific plan that almost certainly involves mass murder and destruction?

  “There,” she says, pointing north, toward Hudson, and Dom turns to see a massive ring of fire kindle in the darkness. The Ferris wheel, blossoming into flames. He hears what might be human screams, carried south on the wind, or might just be the wind shrieking through the metal girders of the bridge.

  “They snapped,” Ronan says. “A whole lot of people . . . they broke.”

  * * *

  “PEOPLE OF HUDSON!” a woman cries, whale-headed, microphone in hand. The speakers are working again. Even from here, across the parking lot, she can feel the heat from the burning Ferris wheel.

  Some people are fleeing. Some are putting on whale masks.

  Wallace Warsaw steps forward, says, “Now you listen to me, missy,” and then there is a harsh shout from nearby and suddenly he has a harpoon through him, too. This guy’s aim is a lot cleaner than that of whoever speared the mayor. The mayor is gurgling on the ground, gut split open, very much alive and wishing he wasn’t. Wallace Warsaw got his through the neck and is dead a matter of seconds after he hits the snowy ground.

  “People of Hudson,” the woman says, and almost gasps with joy, with power and energy. “Tonight is the night when we take back our town!”

  Cheers. Well over half the crowd is wearing whale masks by now.

  “They tried to take what is ours, but we will not let them.”

  Baleful, bloodthirsty shouts.

  “They tried to build something new on our ashes,” she cries, wondering where it came from, this sudden eloquence, this long-sought clarity. From the blade between your ribs, sailor, says a voice from somewhere inside her, and she sees that this is true, that the jagged shape beneath her skin is one point in a web that ties her together with everyone else in Hudson. “But it’s they who will burn. Like good vultures, they saw us as a beautiful carcass they could feast on. They came for our old buildings, our antiques. Let’s see how much they like this town when we’ve destroyed all of that.”

  Distant explosions.

  Jark Trowse is awake, alive, burning at the center of a circle of fire. His screams echo across the parking lot.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  RONAN

  He came, I thought, heart swooning, when I watched Dom cross the bridge to where we were. Low clouds swept across the bridge, moving south with the wind, swallowing up and spitting out the welcome sight of him.

  “Attalah, what are you talking about?”

  “They were going to kidnap Ronan, same way they kidnapped Jark Trowse,” she said. “They had something planned for both of them, and Wallace and the mayor. They said they wouldn’t hurt them—just humiliate the hell out of them—but I don’t believe that at all.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “The motherfuckers in whale masks,” I whispered, and Attalah nodded.

  “I went along with them, but only to find out what I needed to know. I had to say some pretty fucked-up shit to convince them, honestly.” If there was more to it, if she’d been on board for a while and then had a change of heart, I respected her too much to press for more information.

  “Who are they?” Dom asked.

  “There’s a lot of them,” she said. “But Zelda was the main one pulling the strings.”

  “Zelda?” Dom asked. “Mousy little Zelda who needed to take a ton of speed before she could even look somebody in the eye without having an anxiety attack?”

  “No,” Attalah said. “It’s another Zelda now. She’s . . . different.”

  She hasn’t been herself lately, I thought, echoing Norman Bates. She’s fallen in with a bad crowd. Under the influence. Ghosts, monsters, whale god spirits. That sort of thing.

  I wasn’t scared of the dark beneath us anymore. We were together. What on earth could I possibly need beyond the three of us? And what could hurt me as long as they loved me?

  “Attalah,” Dom said, his voice low, anxious—clearly not sharing my sudden sense of utter peace. “What do they have planned?”

  “There’s nothing you can do about it,” she said, stooping to uncuff me. This time she wasn’t the only one to struggle, standing up straight. My knees ached; my thighs burned.

  “What. Do. They. Have. Planned?”

  “They’re going to destroy a whole lot of shit, that’s what,” she said. “They’ve got bombs and bulldozers and fucking harpoons, and depending on how crazy they are they’ll either bulldoze a building or two, or they’ll burn Warren Str
eet to the ground. Me, I think they’re way closer to crazy than not. And there’s not a goddamn thing you can do to stop them. But I know you, Dom. I know you’d try, anyway, and you’d get yourself killed in the process. That’s why I had Rebecca help me get you out here. Where you’re safe from them and safe from yourself.”

  He turned and looked south. The city lights, the burning wheel—clouds came so thick and low and fast now that we could only see them in tiny glimmers. But the pain on his face, I could see that clear as day. He loved Hudson too much to let it die. He cursed, under his breath, and turned to go.

  “Dom,” Attalah and I said at the exact same time. He didn’t stop.

  A cloud came, then, so thick I couldn’t see the people standing at arm’s reach. And when it dispersed, I wasn’t on the bridge anymore.

  Warren Street, burning. Antique stores engulfed; millions of dollars of irreplaceable artifacts reduced to ash.

  Warren Street, bare, burned. A month or a year or a century from now. Dead terrain, covered in snow.

  Warren Street, bare, before it was a street at all. Five centuries ago, or possibly a thousand. Dead land under snow, sloping down to a river.

  Between the two of them, you couldn’t tell the difference.

  “Scary stuff, isn’t it?” Katch sat on the railing beside me.

  “Can’t we do something?” I asked.

  “No,” Katch said. Sounding sad; sounding scared. “We pushed too many people too far. Tom did, mostly. But me, too, a little. What happens now is out of our control.”

  Wick stood in the middle of the bridge as well. So did my father. In the distance, on the pedestrian walkway, was a woman. Too far away for me to see who she was, but didn’t I know? Couldn’t I guess? Hadn’t she always been here, waiting for me?

  They twitched. They jerked. As Hudson suffered, so did they. When it died, so would they.

  Tom wasn’t trying to save Hudson. He was going to burn it down.

  We were between gusts of snow. No cars crossed the bridge. Even the clouds around us were frozen in place. Dom stayed still, mid-step. Attalah’s mouth was open, another word stopped on its way out.

  Oh good, I thought. Time has stopped. How nice.

  “What can we do?” I asked Katch.

  “Nothing,” Tom said, standing on the railing beside where Katch sat. Grinning. Hungry.

  “That can’t be true,” Dom said, turning back toward me. Toward Tom.

  “You can see him?” I asked, startled. “Hear him?”

  Dom nodded.

  He believes. Attalah doesn’t.

  Again the scene shifted. The Hudson boat launch. Ferris wheel flames frozen in place but still giving off heat. Bloodshot eyes; raised weapons.

  “They let me in,” Tom said, “they opened their hearts to me. Their hate fed me. Now I feed them. I can show them anything now. Instead of their mother they’ll see the bully who beat them up in high school, maybe, and instead of open arms they’ll see raised weapons. Or they’ll see nothing at all.”

  Cops stood at ease, blind to what was unfolding around them. One looked out at the water, a mouthful of cigarette smoke standing still in the air in front of him, while a screaming woman stabbed a harpoon into a man’s open mouth beside him.

  I called out into the cloud mist. “Can you see this, Dom?”

  “I see it,” he said, his voice inches from my ear but also echoing from endless miles away.

  “We’re dying,” Wick said, and then it was just me and Dom and Wick and Attalah at the bowling alley. Dom tried to give the boy a hug, and he pushed him away. “Do something, Dom,” he begged, his voice weak as wind. Dying with the town.

  You humans are so shortsighted, Katch had said. Wick is better off, trust me.

  The whales had built a safe place for souls to stay, here in Hudson. Where they’d be protected—and punished—and together, forever. But if they ceased to be, so would Wick. So would Katch and (my mother) (my father) (Dom’s father) everyone else we had ever lost.

  “You have to help us,” said my father.

  How could I stop him? Where did his strength come from? But I was worried I already knew the answer.

  Your hate helped immensely, Katch had said. You’ve helped so much more anger blossom.

  All that hate, spreading through the city, it comes from you.

  You’re far too important for us to risk snapping you.

  This place—it’s feeding on you, my father had said. It needs you.

  Attalah helped Katch crystallize, but she hadn’t been able to feed him what he needed. She wasn’t toxic enough. Her heart wasn’t overflowing with hate and rage and sadness.

  For that, they needed me. My pain. My weakness. I’d fed them, and I’d let Tom in.

  My father said, “You have to go, Ronan.”

  I touched my chest. The blade between my ribs was bigger now, a knotted vein of metal with new sharp metastases—extending through me, into the hearts of others. A toxic tree that had sprouted from the soil of my shattered heart. The roots had burrowed deep into the dirt, branched off into a hundred new directions, piercing the hearts of hundreds of others, but the taproot, the one all the others broke off of—that was me.

  “I know what to do,” I said to Dom, even if I didn’t know, not really. I had hope, not knowledge, but hope would have to be enough. “How to stop all this.”

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  “What are you talking about?” Dom asks.

  “I love you,” Ronan says, stepping closer, like he’s going in for a kiss, but then he hugs him hard instead.

  “You’re scaring me,” Dom says, hugging back. Not intending to ever let go.

  “I love you both,” Ronan says. “If there was a way that we could all three survive, and save the town, and the people we love, I’d take it. But I don’t think there is.”

  “Fuck the town,” Dom said. “It’s just buildings, streets. It’s home, and I love it, but it’s just . . .”

  “It’s not,” I said. “I can’t explain it, but there’s so much more to this place. Someday you’ll see it for yourself. They’ve created something, a safe place beyond the reach of time and death, but that’s been under attack for so long it’s about to get washed away. The thing that’s threatening us—ultimately, its power comes from me, Dom. I let it in. I gave it life. It’s grown out of control, but it’s all rooted in me.”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  “You know I am,” Ronan says. “We can’t kill them, but without me—they’ll be crippled. All these people under its control, they’ll be freed.”

  “Shut up with that without me shit. You’re not going anywhere.”

  “Let go of me, Dom. Don’t make it any harder for me to . . .”

  “I love you, too, Ronan. We both do. We love you and we need you and this town needs you.”

  Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the snowflakes around them have begun to fall again.

  “We’ve been stuck here, inside a single moment,” Ronan says. “Katch” (the whales) “did that, I think. To buy us time. But pretty soon that moment will come to an end, and the killing will resume. The destruction. Hudson will burn to the ground.”

  “This can’t be real,” Dom whispers, his head lodged in the crook of Ronan’s neck. Suddenly he is the one being held up, not the one doing the holding.

  Wind picks up. Its wail grows louder.

  “I always thought I was the strong one,” Dom says.

  “You are,” says Ronan, inhaling the sweet spice smell of Dom for the last time. “You always were. It took a hell of a long time, but a little of your strength finally rubbed off on me.”

  “There’s got to be another way.”

  “You’ve seen what I’ve seen. You know there’s not.”

  Dom lets go. Ronan steps back. Climbs up onto the railing of the pedestrian walkway.

  “No,” Katch says, eyes widening in fear.

  “Stop,” Tom says, standing there beside him, and unleashes a
torrent of high-volume profanity. Most of it isn’t even human words. He reaches out for Ronan and then pulls his hand back. Afraid to even try.

  Wick smiles. So does Jim Szepessy.

  “You’ll tell Attalah?” Ronan asks. “That I love her?”

  Tom goes rigid, frozen in fear. In the knowledge that he can’t stop this. Wolf howls and angry bellows echo in the wind.

  “She already knows,” Dom says, one hand still extended to grab hold of Ronan and hold him there forever. “But I’ll tell her anyway.”

  Ronan takes one small step into the darkness.

  Dom lunges forward. His fingers close on empty air. A wailing fills it up—his own, astonishing in its volume, its violence.

  A squall of snow sweeps up, like Dom’s pained cry given physical form. It washes over the bridge, a tsunami of fog and cold. When it’s gone, time has slipped back into its old familiar groove. Cars crossing the bridge. The red lights of radio towers flashing in the distance.

  Dom and Attalah are alone.

  “Oh my God,” Attalah says, and her hands fly to her face. To grab hold of the scream that wants to come. To stop it in its place.

  “What did you see?” Dom asks.

  Wick squats on the railing, watching. And a woman Dom hasn’t seen in twenty years.

  “I saw him jump. I saw—” Attalah pauses, turns to look around. Shakes her head. “I must have . . . I don’t know what I saw.”

  Dom hugs her. He’s crying. “You and me both,” he says.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  RONAN

  “Love is harder than hate,” Pastor Thirza said, looking past the packed house. Every pew occupied; a bigger turnout than Grace Abounding had seen in years, if ever. “When I decided that would be the subject for my next sermon—when I put it up on the sign outside—I don’t think I’d really thought it through. Those were dark days for me, I don’t mind telling you now. I had a lot of crazy thoughts running around in my head. Love is harder than hate, that was one of them.”

  Behind her, a line of easels holding framed photographs five feet tall. Everybody who died in the final days of the Late Unpleasantness. Mayor Coffin; Wallace Warsaw. Jark. A man I didn’t know, part of the crew that tried to threaten Treenie Lazzarra and got shot for it. Five more unfamiliar faces, harpooned or shot down at the boat launch. One of Tom’s conquests, some schmendrick whose screen name was Bergen_Street. I don’t even know how or when that happened.