The elemental grabs at its scrawny neck and pulls, making an agonized face. Then it points to the scout's empty seat. Pow is mystified. The elemental grabs at its neck again—no, it's not grabbing at its neck, it's pretending to pull on a pretend something that is not actually hanging around its neck. The elemental points at the scout's empty seat again, and then mimes chugging a bottle. Pow glances around. The scout has not returned; the spectators have thinned out, some ducking outside for the same reason the scout did, others for a smoke. Buck has also disappeared, but Lieutenant Brakespeare and Polecat are still whispering worriedly. No, Polecat is whispering worriedly. Lieutenant Brakespeare is also staring at the ice elemental, who seeing her gaze, opens his little blue beak. A few teeny tiny sparkles fly out: Gramatica, the language of magick.
Pow may be dead, and also alive, and therefore somewhat magickal, but he still can't understand Gramatica. But Lieutenant Brakespeare, who is not magickal in the slightest, cannot be magickal at all per The Articles of War, upon pain of death (except at remove, of course)—a tiny little flicker of comprehension flits across her face, a flicker that almost instantly is reabsorbed back into her normal mulish scowl. The elemental tugs on the imaginary thing again. Pow and Lieutenant Brakespeare make eye contact, and the lieutenant raises her eyebrow oh-so-very-slightly. Pow is still clueless but Lieutenant Brakespeare seems to have understood.
A bright blue light briefly electrifies the hog ranch interior, its whiplike crack provoking shrieks. The roar of thunder drowns out the shrieks. The storm is almost upon them.
The scout returns and takes his place across the table. Buck returns and she and Polecat resume their positions of support behind Pow. But Lieutenant Brakespeare has realigned herself until she stands directly behind the scout. Buck gives her a glare, which is ignored. The barkeep pours from a dirt-encrusted bottle.
"Ut!" The scout says, raising his glass.
"Ut!" says Pow. The brief hiatus has left him thirsty. He raises the glass and drinks; the liquid flows like oil down his throat.
The scout sputters and puts his glass down. "This is not whiskey!"
The barkeep holds the bottle up so that the label reading Madama Twanky's Amber Apple Schnapps is visible. "The whiskey bottles broke," she explains. "This is all I could salvage. Don't you like apple schnapps?"
The scout sniffs the glass again, suspiciously. "It don't smell like apples."
"If you ain't thirsty anymore, we can stop right now," Buck says "Call an end, and Pow the winner. Get home before the flood."
Pow swallows; death has ruined his palate pretty good, but even in death he knows the aftertaste of apple schnapps, his mamma's favorite digestif. He also now knows the aftertaste of gun oil. And he knows the difference between the two.
"Finish now and we can be out of here before the storm blows us away," Buck suggests. Her smile is very smug.
In response, the scout raises his glass and bolts its contents. Then he chokes. Coughs and wheezes. His eyes roll upward, and the snake tattoo on his forehead ripples. Tears spring to his eyes, snot dribbles from his nose. He swallows hard, and slumps forward.
The hog ranch is silent. The wind has stopped, but the roof brush rustles, and a few drops of rain slip through, an advance guard. Another bolt of electric blue scorches the night. This time the crack sets ears a-ringing, and the accompanying thunder has almost no delay. Lieutenant Brakespeare leans over and jiggles the scout's shoulders, but he doesn't respond.
"I hereby declare—" Buck starts to say, and then the scout lifts his head. His eyes glitter green and gold, and he says: "Set us up again."
The barkeep pours them each another round of gun oil and this time the scout doesn't hesitate. Smiling, he drains the glass and slams it so hard upon the tabletop that it shatters. He grins, a rill of amber fluid dribbling down his chin.
"Set me—" The scout's voice turns thick and then trails away. His head flings back and his eyeballs roll up and then roll down. A bubble of foam appears on his lips and as he gurgles this bubble forms a beard, dripping down his chin to cover his chest. The scout begins to vibrate, his arms and legs twitching like he's been hit by lightning. The foam turns reddish brown, as the scout paws at his neck, moaning creakily.
"Looking for this?" Lieutenant Brakespeare dangles a small buckskin bag for all to see. In her other hand, the knife she used to snip the buckskin cord while pretending to be solicitous gleams sharply. She smiles, and that smile, in combination with her jagged scars, one on each cheek, is extremely malevolent.
The scout croaks as she opens the bag, waving his hands weakly. Six wisps of light—the souls the scout has collected—fly up and out, floating through the brush roof to disappear into lightning-spattered darkness. Lieutenant Brakespeare shakes the bag over the table, and something small and glittery falls out: a scorpion.
"What is that?" Buck asks. The scorpion curls its tail up, stinger gleaming. Arivaipa scorpions are dull brown and white, bland. The carapace of this scorpion is milky green, like translucent jade, and its stinger is a small barb of bright fuchsia.
"Ha!" says Lieutenant Brakespeare. "That scorpion is a Potable Sigil. It makes any liquid drinkable. Pretty useful in the desert, no?"
"I told you he was cheating!" Buck crows.
"You cheated too," the scout says thickly. "That weren't no apple likker."
"Evening the odds," Buck retorts. "And anyway, your cheat cancelled out mine—so that makes your cheat bigger!"
The scout is gagging and retching; Candy thrusts a spittoon towards him just in time. The scout vomits up a copious amount of bad booze and gun oil and then keels over backwards. Lieutenant Brakespeare winches his head up via a fistful of greasy hair and says: "Where's the gold?"
The scout burbles and Lieutenant Brakespeare nods, satisfied. Candy and the drover carry him off, to recover (if he can) in the guardhouse. Lieutenant Brakespeare and Polecat follow, to plan the excavation of the payroll gold as soon as the storm blows through. Outside, the rain is starting to come down, which means inside it is starting to come down, as well. The spectacle over, the spectators scatter for cover from the storm.
"Can I have another drink?" Pow asks, but no one refills his glass—they've all disappeared. He's killed the bottle of gun oil (Buck had switched the liquids when everyone thought she was pissing), but, of course, he's still thirsty, and so he's rather sorry the contest is over.
The scorpion-sigil skitters, tail waving frantically, trying to find shelter from the raindrops. Pow's interior is starting to feel rather odd. There's a ticklish feeling in his tummy, a funny rustling that makes him want to giggle. Pow unbuttons his sack coat, and something hard butts his hand. He looks down, and sees a scaly nose poking out from a tear in his shirt.
Freddie. The Gila monster erupts from Pow's chest, and darts forward to snap up the insect sigil, then scuttles back to safety. A gust of wind has almost taken down one of the canvas walls; another gust blows off half the roof and Pow's hat. A falling viga narrowly misses Pow's head; it lands instead on the table, smashing it. Then something large drops into Pow's lap: the ice elemental's cage. Inside, the elemental has a death-grip on the bars, tiny sanguine-colored sparks flashing from its mouth. Pow doesn't need to speak Gramatica to understand the elemental's shrieks for help. As the rest of the roof blows away, Pow fumbles at the cage's door. The door springs open and the elemental springs out, disappearing into the howling electrified night.
Pow lets drop the cage, and raising his face, opens his mouth to the wet wet rain.
ELECTRIC RAINS
Kathleen Ann Goonan
Ella sat by Nana's body for two days before she pushed it out the window.
She had spent the first half-day realizing what death was, the next half-day grieving, the following morning waking and feeling reverent if somewhat nauseated, and trying to decide what to do.
It was three in the morning when she finally did it, and it was almost the season of electric rains.
There had be
en one already, fitful and slight, harbinger of spring and the season of avoidance. Once the weather warmed in Washington, D.C., thunderstorms boiled up almost every evening, preceded by the leaves in the park across the street turning up silver undersides. Ella was twelve, and had grown up knowing that she could not let the rains, or the rare snows, touch her.
But Ella had to take Nana home. Besides, she was beginning to smell bad. Night was a good time, the time least likely to rain.
In the end it was easy. There was no heat in the old lady's three-room apartment with the toweringly high ceilings and the hole in the plaster that looked like South America, so she'd not gotten very warm. The old lady had an electrical setup but used it only for cooking and powering a space heater in the most bitterly cold weather, hooking up big sparking clamps which scared Ella. There were people who kept the grid alive, down by Anacostia. Engineers, and those whom they taught, people who had escaped the first electric rains, like Ella and Nana.
By now, the body was very stiff. Ella was not surprised to find that the tiny old lady was not terribly heavy. She wrapped the body in the sheet upon which she had died, which made her easy to pull over the shiny wood floor, through the sitting room with its yellowed lace doilies and once-valuable international knickknacks—the ancient Chinese vase, the intricately carved Vietnamese table, the rug from ninteenth century Bagdad—and managed to lift her to chairs and then push her onto an oval table of shiny hardwood, a table she herself had polished only days before, one of the unending chores the old lady had her do so they could "live with dignity in this shit-eating world."
She shoved the table on its clawed wheels to the window. Grunting, she pushed up the reluctant sash. Paint chips flurried in the moonlit air, and the gust of wind took Ella by surprise: it was warm.
That was not good.
She leaned out the window; sniffed the air. It smelled too warm, like sudden spring. Perhaps it was. And the stars were obscured by cloud.
No matter. She had to do this, and soon.
She looked up and down the length of the street, waited until a lone car stopped at the light and then moved past, low, prowling beams of light ahead. She leaned out further, saw a few ragged shapes curled on the sidewalk. She swallowed. The rain people, those who didn't go down into the Metro but let the rain wash them countless times, could sometimes be normal, harmless. But sometimes . . .
She looked back at Nana's face, her delicately curved nose, her imp-like face overwhelmed by wrinkles, her high lacy collar always kept clean and white.
A middle-aged man used to visit, and talked to Nana blusteringly, with wide frantic gestures. He always frowned at the sight of Ella and she knew that the man did not like her being there and couldn't do a damned thing about it. She didn't like him much either. "Little bitch," he called her, the time he had squeezed her back in among Nana's spicy-musty clothes, but she had kicked him hard and he hadn't tried it again.
She sat down in one of the high-backed chairs and watched Nana for a moment.
Then, through the doubled wavy glass of the high windows, she saw a light streak through the heavens. A monitor plane, checking for contagion. Very rare. Nana laughed derisively whenever they saw one. "It won't be safe in our lifetimes, missy. At least," her voice gentled, "not in mine."
Ella knew, though, that the light was the spirit of Nana and that it was all right, that she did not have to tell anyone, that she could stay here as long as she wanted to. That was Nana's plan. Nana had talked about papers she had signed, and showed her the key to the safety deposit box at the bank. That nasty old man would do something about it, she was sure. He blabbered about the apartment being a "gold mine," and called Nana stupid all the time, even though he was her nephew.
But because of the newspaper room, she knew that both of them might well be insane. In the back of the townhouse was a huge room filled with stacks of old Washington Posts, yellowed, crumbling, musty-smelling. Nana had her cut out the crossword puzzles from each day, right by the funnies, and put them into a box from which she drew; she did one a day.
The newspapers were sorted roughly into years, but the year that Ella was most interested in was the year, the very day, that terrorists had run an Amtrak Silver Eagle from New York into Union Station in downtown Washington at full speed, crashing right into the lobby of the station.
They had hoped that in the resulting confusion they would be able to get into the Capitol Building, a block away, and set off their dirty bomb.
Their particular dirty bomb was not full of radioactive material. It was, instead, full of what became taken up by the atmosphere, rather than filling up the Capitol Building. That material was what had turned into electric rains.
The Post headline for that day said TERRORISTS DECIMATE DIRTY BOMB.
The terrorists had, apparently, been Ella's parents. She deduced this by reading several month's worth of Washington Posts, and hid them from Nana. That was not difficult in a room full of newspapers.
There was probably no bank anymore with the important papers in it; or, if there was, there was no one to pay attention to them, anyway.
Ella knew that Nana had lived here all her life and had seen her beloved city change and change and change and all the relatives and friends who really cared for her die until she was all alone, except for Ella, in the place she owned; the rest of the building she had divided into apartments when younger and rented them. Now, she kept the squatters out with fierce bars, preferring them to be empty rather than full of the "rain riffraff" which now inhabited Washington.
Ella climbed onto the table, knelt, and pushed the woman's shoulders. She leaned forward and grunted. It was harder than she thought it would be. Finally Nana's legs and her hips were outside and Ella, with a shriek, let go.
The window had a deep sill which overlooked 14th Street in Washington D.C., between R and S Streets. It was a place, Ella had been made to understand from listening to endless stories of hell and glory from Nana, burnished to mahogany smoothness by many tellings, which had felt the ebb and flow of time. When Nana's grandfather had bought the building, the street was genteel, alive with a shop for each need, even if that need was for fresh flowers, a need which Nana and now Ella felt keenly as stomach-hunger: brilliant purple zinnias mixed with broad creamy spider chrysanthemums, studded with red baby rosebuds, ah! Set on the grand dining room table, they made one feel royal.
But Nana, Ella often observed, had no problem feeling royal. She told Ella tales of the city lights being akin to blood for her, tales of being young and speeding about the city in a fine gray car, and then jolting on the farting busses when they still ran. Now, there were no busses, and the Metro entrances glowed. People had taken refuge underground when the electric rains had begun, but of course it had been too late: the rains, with their voices, had gotten them, had spread its contagion among them.
Now, if they went anywhere, they had to walk, even after Nana was attacked and raped. After that she walked her same route, head held high, Ella in tow and terrified, a heavy gun in her pocket that she practiced with once a week in the back alley on bottles and cans, laughing every time she blew one to bits. Once she dropped a young woman gangster just like that, when the gangster walked toward them holding a knife, and then she became known and feared, even by the people who danced up and down the street singing, "What a glorious feeling, I'm happy again!" The electric-rain people sometimes had ragged parades which marched beneath their window. They blew horns, and usually wore hats to hide their terrible deformities.
A warm breeze stirred the curtains. Ella was filled with terrified reverence as she gazed down on Nana, who had landed spread-eagle, face-up. The sheet had caught on a ledge and fluttered just below Ella, so Nana gazed at the stars.
Nana loved the stars, and had taught Ella their names; she had a formidable telescope she kept inside a little concrete room on the roof. On clear nights, cold or hot, they would go up, unlock the giant padlock, roll out the telescope onto the bumpy roof, and g
aze all night, drunk on pulsing lights arranged with the precision of numbers. "If you got close they'd change position so you wouldn't recognize them but of course you can't get that close," Nana told Ella. One night, as a great treat, she'd shot out the six remaining park lights so that the sky would be darker. "Ha!" she laughed. "Think the cops will show up? Not a chance."
Ella knew there was not a chance—she knew what cops were, but had never seen one. She only knew that now that park would be dark at night forever.
"I used to go to lectures with my dad every Friday night at the Naval Observatory," she told Ella in her deep, rough voice, sticking her gun back in her pocket. "Now that's dark. Gentle man, so kind, too good for this world. Nothing like me."
But Ella saw gentleness everywhere in her, in the way she took care of Ella, how she took care to keep her in fine silk pajamas, how she made sure the linens were always clean, lowering the laundry down to Ella waiting nervously on the street with a red wagon that said Radio Flyer on the side, then trundling down to the Deep-Clean Laundro-Mat. "Shitty machines," she always said, "and they cheat us on the drying time but what can you do?"—a litany Ella had grown quite used to. Once she asked if they could not just dry the clothes on a clothesline and had received a lecture about the possibility of electric rain polluting the clothes. The Deep-Clean was operated by an old man who wore very clean clothes, a fine and eccentric mix of clothes—thin wool suits in winter with vests and colorful silk ties and combat boots; beautiful, starched cotton dresses with aprons in the summer that he claimed he'd stolen from the Smithsonian Historic Collection. He ran his machines with a generator and spent most of his time gathering fuel.
Well, now Nana had returned to the streets.
Ella was very unhappy as she gazed down at her. She should have wrapped her more tightly, she thought now; she should have hidden her from the world; she should have cushioned the fall.
Eclipse One Page 20
