Black & Orange

by Benjamin Kane Ethridge

  Sawdust bloomed through the openings. The barn lurched. Shouts lifted.

  “Wait it out,” Martin breathed. “Let them all come first.” His finger steadied on his rifle’s trigger. His aiming eye narrowed to a cut.

  Misty forms emerged as the barn’s walls leaned. Then, through the pouring black suits, two came, babies squeezed under each arm.

  Teresa inched her pointer finger around the trigger.

  “Now.”

  Four suits hit the earth. A woman careened sideways, taken in the chest. It was like watching a mannequin fall off its stand. Inhuman. Until pale fingers touched past her chest and fear flashed in her green eyes. That lustrous hair flopped through the dirt and the gaze clenched tight and immediate. Martin moved his sight to another.

  “Find cover for fuck sake!” yelled one man who struggled to hold a baby under each arm. A brawny man kept nearby, handling two Hearts of his own. He stuck the babies out between them for a bullet buffer.

  With three separate jerks of the rifle, Teresa took another group hurrying around the barn—twinge!—another limped twice toward a tree and collapsed.

  To the east, random fire came from a mound of corrosion that used to be a tractor. Several shots went by and ruffled Teresa’s hair. A bullet ricocheted off a rock somewhere behind.

  “Martin, we need cover.”

  “I—”

  “Hurry!”

  No mantle came.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she demanded.

  The men holding the Hearts ran for the tractor; covering fire accompanied their clumsy strides. Up until now shots had been sloppy and adrenaline-dumb, so it wasn’t shocking to see one holder twist around, a whip of blood lash from his stubbly brown neck. His knees knocked the ground and the papoose slipped into the dirt. His comrade dipped down to hurry him but it was too late. The eyes turned up into the head.

  “Cloth!” Shouts from behind the tractor. “Chaplain Cloth!”

  A grain silo burned in the hillside. Martin and Teresa ignored the intimidating roar. Cloth could do nothing for his followers.

  The Nomads waited for a head shot. The remaining holder reached for the discarded papoose.

  “Give it up, buddy,” Martin whispered.

  The man glanced to the tractor for assistance, but his answer came in a horrifying groan. The barn shuttered to the side, finally unable to endure the internal damage Teresa caused. Inner Circle scrambled from their hiding spots like plague rats—Martin brought one crashing down and Teresa had another in her sight when the barn finished the job. A mountainous dust cloud eclipsed any evidence of the fleeing group.

  The lone man stumbled through the grit and pulled the four babies over his lap like a blanket. He had a strangely triangular face and blue-black hair, both on his head and jaw. Teresa spotted a train of vehicles coming up the dirt road to the north. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”

  “Keep an eye out.”

  Martin followed her, rifle leveled as they crossed the field to the last standing from this spent platoon. The man yanked out a .38 special and fired through the haze. Teresa instantly met the shots with two flash mantles. Both bullets plinked off the invisible resistance and exploded into whizzing red hot scrap. The man dropped his gun hand to his thigh. His fevered eyes went back and forth for any trace of support. There was none.

  The scent of the Hearts warmed the Nomads from the inside out. “Hand over your gun,” ordered Teresa.

  With a flavorless laugh the man put the .38 to a baby’s temple. She turned to the barrel for assurance with soaked eyes. “There are legions,” said the man. “They’ll be here any moment with Bishop Szerszen. You will not win.”

  “Think you’ll live that long?” Martin fingered his trigger. His hands were slick with sweat.

  Another bland laugh and the man pulled back the hammer. The smell of love clung to the dirt and rotting wood. He regarded Martin and Teresa, hardboiled sorrow in the eyes. His wide lips twisted into a smile, just before the gun stuck in his mouth.

  The shot buckled Martin’s knees. Teresa called out a late warning. The man keeled over, face first, in a clump of bone white weeds. The shot rang in Teresa’s numb eardrums.

  Tension pulled above and below. Teresa could feel Chaplain Cloth trying to escape, enraged for his absence and the failure of his miserable humans. Martin took a knee and began adjusting a papoose. The other Teresa picked up. She wanted to cry. The pink faces peered back in wide-eyed wonder. They looked really tired. It wasn’t the right moment but she’d always daydreamed about a little girl of her own. Fertility was not a power Nomads had been granted. Not for this life. This was more difficult than she could have ever imagined.

  The hiss of acceleration on dirt grew louder. A few distant shots rang out. Stupid to try firing at such a distance. Teresa could feel Cloth’s anger as he withdrew back into his hellish pit.

  It took little time to reach the Wrangler. The Nomads did their best to adjust the restraints to fit each child. While Martin rechecked the babies, Teresa went back to change out the rifles. She turned the corner into a sharp sounding thwack. Her body lurched. She heard her head strike the bumper with the ringing pitch of a tuning fork.

  ~ * ~

  Martin retched. Putrescence billowed off the man in the suit. He had a vermillion tear from ear to throat. Some of the wound had clotted and gummed and some had split open as he turned his head. The black suit was a mélange of multi-colored stains and rancid fragments. Toilet paper hung from his mangy hair like ornaments. The man let the broken plank fall to the dirt and drew a knife from his pocket. He must have been in the outhouse when the barn collapsed, thought Martin. He wanted to go for his gun but it hadn’t been reloaded.

  The man stepped forward and slashed. Martin parried and raised his palm to the bastard’s nose—but the guy caught him one-handed and flung him into the Wrangler. Martin couldn’t take a breath before he was pinned under a thick forearm that smelled of sulfides.

  Martin touched the cold spot, still lukewarm from exhaustion—there was nothing to draw. A merlot pebble tumbled down his neck. He breathed faster, hoping his muscles would compensate. The knife sunk deeper. An inch more and a stream pumped from the wound. He became lightheaded. Darkness boiled in his peripheral vision and terror pulled through his guts with freezing claws; the sensation cooled his mind; the tiny drop of power he found drifting on adrenaline drew forth a sandstorm of ghost matter—

  In one hot instant, a mantle jumped between Martin’s skin and the blade. White sparks zipped away as the knife tore from the man’s fingers. The mantle flew forward and wrapped around the man like quick-drying cement. The man’s body encountered the trunk of an elm with a suddenness that made Martin wince, then smile. The mantle closed in, a perfectly contoured cocoon and pressed into his body. Gripped like a god fist. Bones crackled like dry twigs. Martin let the mantle recede. The indistinguishable mass slipped straight down to the ground in a bony mush.

  Martin went to Teresa. The sweet sound of her breathing filled his ears and he saw her eyes stirring behind the lids. It wasn’t like her to pass out so easily, but she’d had head trauma already this week. She wouldn’t be out another two days, thank goodness. The cut on her head, just below the one from the nightstand, was wreathed in splinters and dirt crumbles. Two concussions in the last two days, her headache was going to be large. But he hadn’t lost her.

  Martin checked the babies. They were thrashing around and fussing, but otherwise looked unharmed. He gave them pacifiers and they took them into their wet little mouths almost with gratitude. Their faces blurred. Murkiness tumbled over anything Martin’s eyes took in. He slipped his arms under Teresa and stumbled left and right. Oh shit, you’ve gone and overdone it again.

  He buckled Teresa into the passenger’s side, shut the door and bumped into the Wrangler on his way around. Building the mantle had not been a mistake; it had to be done, he reminded himself. Just in case this loopiness really set in, he put in the train yar
d destination in the GPS before driving down the foothill and losing his bearings completely.

  They hit a paved road that curved around the canyon in an S shape. He glanced in the rearview. Nobody was following. His eyelids scissored. He blinked to keep them from closing again. Teresa turned in her seat.

  The road narrowed and the canyon’s wall jutted perilously close. He avoided a few clusters of fallen rock. A horn blared. He pulled off into another, denser copse of elms, and killed the engine. This wouldn’t work. He held his breath, waiting for a limo to drive past. Maybe the horn hadn’t even come from this road.

  Rest felt nice.

  His eyes popped open. They had closed on their own. They fell shut again.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Paul immediately convinced himself it was a dream. He put his hands on the Priestess again and she shook her head. “Where’d I go?”

  The notes of his whimpers complemented the epic pipe organ music. The Priestess stretched out to touch him. A sheen of sweat glistened over her brow and dark circles had been hammered under her eyes. Her fingertips touched his lower lip and the contact sent his body into a sudden panic. Huddled in the passenger seat, he sought to roll into the tightest ball possible.

  “What have you done?” she whispered.

  Paul couldn’t answer. Her hair moved off her shoulder and it sounded like a flood of sugar notes trailing into a minor scale. Her skin fluxed between bass drumbeats. The question did process though, even if his lips were unable to shape an answer. But he heard his words: “The seeds. All of the seeds.”

  Everything the Priestess did now seemed hyperactive. Reality sucked in all at once. Next she took the plastic bag he’d handed her and she smelled inside. Her eyes swelled into planets and the pipe organs transitioned to a different melody.

  “All of them?”

  He could only quiver as an answer. The harmonies chilled him.

  “Paul, you’ve got to slow down. You’ve got to balance your garden, somehow.”

  He didn’t want to understand what she meant. The atmosphere itched and he felt the world spin faster with each new blossom popping open inside his body. The strength of the universe flexed inside the feebleness of an atom. Paul drank in the seconds like golden wine.

  “Slow yourself,” she repeated. “Then we can find more seeds.”

  More?

  She read his eyes. “You must obtain another source to cull the dark blossoms, that which controls the strides of the universe—but first you must recover command of them. You must prevent more dark blossoms from opening.”

  His teeth grinded at the impossible prospect.

  “Hurry,” she said. “Try Paul! Try!”

  He did. He tried. He was always trying. But there was something else bubbling to the surface. Through all of the madness since the Heralding, Paul had forgotten the children. They’d been the farthest thing in his thoughts. They sang angrily along with the cacophony. The choir announced premature arrival into the world—he had to slow things down or they wouldn’t have time to thrive!

  Pumpkin flesh flew into the air: birth! The children escaped from the broken pumpkins with slavering jaws. Verdant claws raked the dirt as they turned inky eyes up to the slipstream of clouds: life! Paul’s connection with them sent his mind into a backspin and he fell a thousand leagues into the deepest of all possible darknesses.

  ~ * ~

  Thanksgiving to the bleeding black feast!

  ~ * ~

  The babies’ screams ripped Martin into consciousness. There had been moments when he heard their needy calls, but he’d been too out of it to wake up. His body shot straight and he clutched the steering wheel with clammy fingers. He accidentally set off one blast of the horn and let go. Another baby waahed, and three hollered, squirming in their seats.

  Teresa’s hands went to her forehead and she looked around dizzily.

  “Hi,” said Martin. “You really need to cut that out. I have enough brain damage for the both of us.”

  He squeezed his watch in the quickly dying light. An indigo window floated on his wrist. “I can’t believe we weren’t found. We were out here for a while—”

  “Déjà vu all over again,” Teresa muttered. The babies’ shrieks jerked her alert. “They’re hungry, I think.”

  Martin shrugged. He wasn’t really listening. They had to think of somewhere to go. Quickly. He started. The minutes on the display clock flipped away. Shadows began spearing through the car.

  ~ * ~

  The Priestess gripped Paul’s hair and her eyes opened wider with every word. “Paul, please. Do this for me... control it, Paul. Control it.”

  Paul wanted to die. Everything he ever wanted to do had already been done. The Priestess was safe. Living like this was not living. All of the dark blossoms killed the other golden flowers inside of him—a black colony that had consumed all. Time wailed from the disparity.

  “Please!” she yelled.

  He lingered above his field of fresh, radiant power and threw a shadow over them for a moment. The action made Paul’s bowels run. Veins engorged in his face. Something hateful traveled up his spine and caught at the base of his neck. The Priestess yelled again, miles above him, and Cloth’s children continued to sing, miles below.

  Paul Quintana knew then. Controlling this was not going to happen. If anything, time would start to go even faster.

  ~ * ~

  “Do you feel that?” Teresa asked.

  Martin swallowed. “It’s like standing still with the world—”

  “—racing past?”

  “Yeah,” he agreed.

  “Can you hand me my watch? It’s in the cup holder.”

  Martin fished the cold, snaky titanium out and—

  —handed it to Teresa. The face flashed indigo. 8:04 PM.

  “What’s happening?” she asked.

  “I—We’re getting closer to the Opening.”

  Teresa jerked the key for him. He stomped the pedal and they cut out on the road without headlights. Nothing moved in the night; everything had a vacant, frozen look, from the hanging branches to the feathers of light through the trees from nearby track homes.

  “You think the Messenger is doing this?”

  Teresa shook her head.

  9:43 PM.

  ~ * ~

  “I’ve got the train yard in the GPS,” said Martin. The bright glowing map showed them as a green arrow traveling over an uncharted road. “As soon as we’re on a real road I’ll—”

  The Wrangler stopped. The blue and red lights of a police cruiser rose up from the canyon. The jeep was obscured behind a ranch home, but had only one way to go.

  Martin slapped the steering wheel. “Should I just go?” A dozen more minutes had passed and now his heart thumped in time.

  “I think he’s going. Then we’ll gun it.”

  Blue and red blades swept through the trees and out of sight. Martin edged the Wrangler down the road. The tail end of the patrol car could be seen just down the two lane road. A flashlight aimed from the driver’s window into the trees.

  11:54 PM.

  ~ * ~

  The flowers petrified to stone inside Paul and the garden calmed to a deadly silence. The Priestess kissed him so hard their teeth gnashed.

  Something still wasn’t right. Time had gone from silk to marble. A numb feeling prickled Paul’s stomach. He spoke his first words in what felt like centuries. “Time’s stuck, Priestess. The flow has stopped! I can’t move it—it weighs too much!”

  ~ * ~

  With trembling fingers Teresa reached for a clove. The box had been crushed when she fell. And hello, the babies? They matter, only them. Her headache rolled to the front of her head and her pulse fed the pain.

  The patrol car finally vanished into blue midnight. No running around now, she thought. They had to get to that train yard fast. The front tires bumped onto the road and Martin turned on the headlights to see better in the falling night.

  In the next moment, she wished h
e hadn’t turned them on.

  October 31st

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  A man in a suit, a man with two colored eyes. Black and Orange. A man and not a man. “Happy holiday!” Chaplain Cloth greeted.

  In the burning white beams, Cloth stood just off the road between a pair of flinching Eucalyptuses. In the night his kerchief flared like the head of a raw flame. Directly behind, clumps of earth slipped away and the gateway opened. Bat songs and screeching winds lifted from below, an Armageddon sigh. The ravenous grave edged closer to Cloth as he took a few surefooted steps closer. “Will you make this one last?” he asked simply. The headlights glinted off the black eye and heated the orange. “I daresay it hasn’t started well for you.”

  Martin revved the engine. The jeep was so quiet he could hear the babies’ milk gurgles.

  “Make this hunt count, Nomads. It’ll be the last this world ever sees.”

  Liquid eyes filled the night around Cloth and the gateway. The children’s rolling snarls came from all around, but especially behind the Wrangler. Teresa glanced back and tried to see through the red brake light glow. Hundreds of bulbous forms crawled forward, waiting to spring.

  Martin stomped the gas.

  The Wrangler fishtailed as Cloth slapped them with a mantle. The back tires squealed. Martin cranked the wheel. Children exploded from the night, a hybrid species of gourds and two-legged terrors. Martin watched as they caved the hood in. Thorny arms made of pumpkin stalk thrashed for purchase through the steel. The children were more vibrant in color, supercharged. One stem-headed child gained distance toward the windshield in two metallic slaps. Headlights from a passing pickup caused Martin to jerk. More children flooded down from the right side of the canyon and swarmed them. The orange mass rolled into a ravine. An explosion flew into the air just behind. Chaplain Cloth’s silhouette slanted over the hills in a long black dagger.