Black Box Inc.

by Jake Bible

  He stood and held out a hand, palm up.

  “You got what I asked for?” he said to Steve.

  “Yes,” Steve said and placed a plain white envelope in Vic’s hand.

  Vic took a look inside and nodded. I have no idea what was in there.

  “All right. Everyone give me some space while I work, will ya?” he said.

  We took a couple of steps back. Lassa hesitated, but I shot him a look, and he moved back as well. Vic knelt next to Travis and tilted his head back. He opened Travis’s mouth, then hawked up a huge loogie. Before we could do anything, he spit the glob of snot into Travis’s mouth. I think we all retched a little, even Steve.

  “There we go,” Vic said as he stood up and wiped his hands on his cutoffs. He pointed his chin at me. “You want me to take care of that little problem on your back?”

  “What problem on my back?” I asked. He couldn’t have meant Back Chase because Daphne had made that go away.

  Vic shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  He held out a hand to Steve, but Steve didn’t take the hand. Vic laughed at the slight like it was nothing.

  “Good meeting you folks,” he said, taking a bow while doffing his hat like he was some redneck English gentleman. “And I bid you adieu.”

  He straightened up, burped, then turned and walked off the way he’d come. He pulled the envelope out of his pocket and started laughing his head off as he turned a corner and was lost from sight. We could hear him laughing for a long while.

  “What’d you give him?” I asked.

  “Something I expect to be reimbursed for,” Steve said.

  “Not with cash, I assume.”

  “No, not with cash. I’ll get in touch when I need reimbursement.”

  “Okay.” Not sure what else I could say. The situation was what it was.

  I looked over at Harper.

  The talk had turned violent. She had one of the truck guys in a headlock and was squeezing him hard enough that his red face was turning a deep purple. The other guy was holding a tire iron and going in for the attack.

  “I wouldn’t,” I warned.

  The guy didn’t listen and raised the tire iron. He got a kick to the nuts and went down hard.

  “Hey!” Steve shouted and stomped over to the scuffle. “Knock it off!”

  “Tell them to behave,” Harper said.

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” Steve said. “I was talking to these muscae mooks. You hear me? Knock. It. Off.”

  “Sure, Mr. Steve,” the guy in the headlock said.

  The one on the ground holding his crotch mouthed something, but his words were either too low to hear or at a frequency my ears couldn’t pick up.

  What my ears could pick up was the loud sound of my stomach growling. Apparently, everyone else could hear it too, as they all turned and stared at me. I shrugged and turned to look back at Travis. Lassa was stroking the guy’s forehead.

  “He’s not getting better,” Lassa said.

  “Steve!” I called.

  “Vic says it’ll take a while,” Steve said. “But he won’t get any worse between now and then.”

  “Pick him up,” I said to Lassa. “Let’s get to the limo. Harper!”

  I glanced over my shoulder and saw her let the guy go from the headlock and kick him in the ass with her boot. He flipped her off, but didn’t argue anymore about who was unloading the food and carting supplies across the border to the limo.

  Which was still waiting for us when we got through the cloud. Steve came with us, since he had Lord Beelzebub’s soul, and I asked him if the cloud was going to affect Travis any. He said the protections didn’t work that way leaving Ekron. I hoped he was right; otherwise, there would be one pissed-off yeti in bad need of a shave rampaging through Lord Beelzebub’s dimension if Travis died.

  “I had to leave some of the weapons to make room for the food,” Harper said as she got into the passenger’s seat of the limo. “I kept all the ammo for the guns, but none of the extra rockets. The only RPGs we have are loaded into the launchers.” She held up her shotgun. “And this with plenty of shells. We better not need more getting back to the faerie dimension.”

  Travis was resting on the bench seat closest to the front seats so Lassa, who was back in the driver’s seat, could reach back over the divider and grab his hand if he needed. Travis’s color was already considerably better.

  “It looks like that man Vic did the job,” Teresa said. She tapped her ear. “I can hear his breathing improving. That’s good since we’ll need him awake and aware before we get to Daphne.”

  Lassa and Harper turned to stare at her, but I understood what she was saying. Before they could get on her about being callous and unfeeling, I spoke up.

  “He has to become Aspen again,” I said.

  “Daphne’s already on to him,” Harper said.

  “Yeah, dude, the jig is up,” Lassa said. “What does it matter if he changes back into Aspen?”

  “Only way is through, right?” I said. “If he still looks like Aspen, then Daphne may think we’re still snowed.”

  “Except for me,” Harper said.

  “Except for Harper, but you two ladies have your own issues between you,” I said. “Which could help, too. Any distraction that might buy us a few minutes is worth it. Shit, if it buys us a few seconds that’s better than nothing. All we have to do is head off any attack from her despite what deal she made not to harm us. Am I wrong here, Teresa?”

  “No, you are correct,” Teresa said. “We need all the advantages we can get.”

  “Well, shit fuck,” Harper said. “So I have to keep on pretending too. This is going to suck balls.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “No choice.”

  “No choice.” Lassa sighed.

  “You all on the same page now?” Steve asked from the rear passenger’s side door. He had an arm leaning on the frame and was smiling in at us. “Because you all have jobs to do. Speaking of.”

  He looked at me as I was about to open a box of powdered donuts.

  “Yeah, I’m coming,” I said. “Carb loading first.”

  I jammed three donuts in my mouth at once. They weren’t mini donuts, but full size. I started to choke right away, but it wasn’t my first encounter with the threat of death by powdered sugar. I chewed, coughed, chewed, coughed, then swallowed.

  “You could have covered your mouth,” Teresa said, looking disgustedly at a spray of white sugar and yellow donut on the seat next to her.

  “Ma bah,” I said.

  I followed Steve back over the border and stared at the road. I needed to create something out of Dim that could easily be closed when the Fae army came through. Except I wasn’t going to be there to close the box, of course, so I’d need to rely on my new hinge idea I’d been playing with. The problem was I hadn’t been playing with anything on the scale that Lord Beelzebub wanted.

  “I can’t build up,” I said. “No space for the box to close.”

  “You can do more than boxes,” Steve said and patted his jacket pocket where he obviously had a pistol. “You wrapped up those bullets.”

  “Yeah, but that won’t work here,” I said. “In order to wrap up an army, I’d have to set the Dim a quarter mile back. The first wave would get through the cloud and see the trap. They’d warn the others too soon. No, what I need to do is build down.”

  I stared at the length of the cloud, which was more than a few blocks wide since the entire dimension was a massive version of Detroit, all concrete and steel-beam buildings for as far as the eye could see. But the density looked different as it got away from where we’d entered. Probably couldn’t walk through that part.

  Steve was watching me and patted my shoulder, then pointed at the road. “One way in, one way out.
Cover the road only.”

  “Oh, thank fucking God.”

  I took some deep breaths to psyche myself up.

  “This will work,” I said and moved about ten yards back from the cloud.

  I took quite a few more deep breaths, more psyching up, but really I was stalling. Steve knew I was stalling and began tapping his foot on the pavement in irritation.

  I got to work.

  It took me close to an hour to work the amount of Dim I needed to work. The box wasn’t perfect, and had its flaws, but the trap would do the job. The main issue was no hiding the black smoke covering the street. I only hoped the Fae coming through first would chalk it up to a natural occurrence in Ekron.

  “That’ll close on them?” Steve asked as we stood on the very edge of the Dim trap.

  “Should,” I said.

  “Should ain’t good enough, buddy,” he replied.

  “Should is the best I can give you, pal,” I said.

  He studied the Dim for a few more seconds, then nodded. He reached into his jacket, and for a moment I thought he was going to shoot me. He did pull out a gun, but it was my little .38. He handed that to me, then pulled out a small mahogany box of questionable design. The design was further marred by several old stickers of glitter stars and unicorns. The stickers were peeling off and looked sad.

  “That?” I asked, taking both the pistol and the box. “His soul fits in here?”

  “His soul fits in there,” Steve said.

  “I was expecting something bigger,” I said, wondering what size my soul was.

  “He’s the Lord of Flies and Lies,” Steve said. “You don’t get to be that with a large soul. That would get in the way of what needs to be done when it needs doing.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “Good luck. See you soon.”

  “You better,” Steve said. “For everyone that you love’s sake.”

  “You need to work on your send-offs, pal,” I said and started across the Dim. The trap wasn’t going to close on me.

  “I’ll take that into consideration, buddy,” Steve said.

  I was across the Dim and through the cloud as fast as possible. When I hopped into the back of the limo, Travis was wide awake and eating his way through a box of macaroons.

  “There better be some left for me,” I said as I sat down and handed the soul box to Teresa. “I thought it’d be bigger.”

  “I didn’t,” Teresa said, tucking the box away into the folds of her gown. “I expected it to be smaller.”

  Lassa got us turned around and headed back along the Gory Gauntlet toward the faerie dimension.

  “Does the faerie dimension have a name?” I asked. “We were in Ekron, and we live in Earth, but what do the faeries call their dimension?”

  “You couldn’t comprehend the pronunciation,” Travis said as he polished off the macaroons and tore open a family-size bag of barbecue-flavored chips. “I could tell you the name and all you’d hear is static and a slight rustling noise.”

  “He’s correct,” Teresa said.

  “I could never get the name right,” Harper said. “So I gave up.”

  “We should call it Candy Land,” I said. “Since faeries freak out over sugar.”

  Speaking of, I snagged a jumbo tub of Red Vines and ripped the seal off, stuffing four strands into my mouth at one time. Chewing that much hurt my jaw, but damn if it didn’t taste good.

  “There already is a Candy Land,” Travis said. “Nasty dimension. Never go there. Constant war and strife.”

  “Good to know,” I said. My mouth was so full of Red Vines that I knew no one could understand me. They also didn’t ask for clarification.

  We drove on in silence, our minds occupied with what was to come next.

  24

  WHAT CAME NEXT was a flat tire. In the middle of a hell road. Right when six marauders decided to appear by the side of the road with heavy machine guns. We were pinned down inside the armored limo with no way to get to the tire that needed changing.

  “Harper!” I shouted over the roar of the machine guns and the barrage of slugs pinging off the limo’s armor. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking we should let them run out of ammo, then I jump out and blow their heads off!” Harper shouted back at me. “But we don’t have time to wait! They’ve figured out the belt guns and they shift positions anytime the guns move! They’re too close for the RPGs!”

  “So what is the plan, then?” I yelled.

  “Luck,” she said, then shoved the sunroof open and jumped up out of the limo.

  “Harp!” Lassa yelled, grabbing for her, but she was already gone.

  We all looked out the windows, but couldn’t see her. The machine guns were still blasting away at us, and the marauders had huge grins on their faces.

  Then, one by one, they lost those faces to a good amount of double-aught buckshot. Just gone. Rag covered, ugly as sin faces, then nothing but open skulls dripping blood. The machine gun fire stopped, and Harper climbed back into the limo.

  She was bleeding badly from her left shoulder.

  “Not my shooting arm,” she said, as if that were our first worry.

  “Shit, Harp, hold still,” Lassa said. “I’ll get the first aid kit.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m good,” Harper said. “Get out and change the tire before more show up.”

  He started to argue.

  “Lassa,” I said, cutting him off. “We each have a job. Yours is transportation. Change the tire.”

  He growled low, but opened his door and hopped out quickly as I began to hunt for the first aid kit. I found two tucked into a drawer under the bench seat I was on. One was good old red like a first aid kit should be, the other was bright blue.

  “Which one?”

  “The blue box,” Harper said.

  I grabbed the blue box, opened the lid, and stared inside.

  “What the hell is this shit?” I said as I stared at a bunch of small bottles filled with different colored liquids. “Where are the bandages and antiseptic and all that?”

  “Faerie first aid,” Harper said. “Doesn’t work on any of you, but my body adapted during my years in that dimension. Hand me the chartreuse bottle.”

  “The what?” I said. “What goddamn color is chartreuse?”

  “This one,” Teresa said, plucking a bright green bottle out and tossing it to Harper.

  The limo began to rise on one side as Lassa worked the jack. Harper stripped off her shirt and poured the contents of the bottle directly into the bullet wound. The liquid sizzled and sparked, and she cried out as the wound began to heal. There was a good amount of cursing outside from Lassa as he changed the tire and a good amount of cursing inside as Harper punched the dashboard over and over while her wound bubbled and smoked. I busied myself by stuffing my face full of whatever I could get my hands on.

  Felt like home.

  “Damn,” Travis said as he rested on the bench seat. “I feel like crap.”

  “Have a cracker,” I said and offered him a box of saltines and a bottle of spray cheese. “They hit the spot.”

  “No, I’m full,” he said. “I can’t eat like you.”

  “No one can,” Teresa said.

  “Harp? You good?” I asked as she stopped punching things and quieted down.

  “Better,” she said, then jammed her finger and thumb into her wound and plucked out a slug. She opened her door and tossed the warped bullet onto the scorched roadside. “Much better.”

  I’d say the sight of her pulling a bloody slug from her shoulder, not to mention the stink of the faerie medicine smoke wafting from the wound, would have put off my appetite, but I’d be lying through my goddamn cracker-and-spray-cheese-coated teeth.

  “Done,�
� Lassa announced as he got back in the car, started up the engine, and sped back onto the road. “The faeries that put the armor on this limo did not think ahead with their hexes. Total rush job like the windshield. I had to strip off half a ton of metal to get to the flat tire.”

  “You put that plating back on, right?” Harper asked.