The Devil in Miss Shimmer
chapter
twelve
A Bale of Trouble
Pal was still performing his musical spell as we plummeted toward the ground. I tried to shout an old word for “slow” but felt my magic blocked as solidly as if someone had put me in a stranglehold. Cooper was shouting an incantation, too, with no better result. More bizarrely, I realized my flame hand had been extinguished, leaving nothing but a couple of inches of coal-black stump below my elbow.
“Haystack below! Go left so I don’t crush you!” Pal released me, and I twisted midair and pushed off his hairy body with my legs.
I landed on my backpack on a steep hill of scratchy hay, rolling sideways until I tumbled to a stop against some straw bales at the bottom. The pack had miraculously stayed on my back. A piece of baling wire jabbed me painfully in the side, and I gasped. Instantly, my mouth and nose were filled with a foul roadkill stench.
I rolled away from the protruding wire and came face-to-face with an eyeless, desiccated corpse, the leathery lips vermin-eaten and pulled back from the tobacco-stained teeth in a rictus.
“Augh, there’s a dead guy!” I hollered, scrambling to my feet and leaping over the bales to the sandy ground beyond. “Ew, ew, nasty, ew!”
I dropped the opera gloves that were still clenched in my right hand and slapped at imagined maggots on my naked body and legs.
Pal was a dozen yards away, heaving himself over onto his stilting legs in the straw.
“Oh dear, there’s a corpse over here as well.” He bent to examine what I’d initially thought was just a bundle of rags. “She appears to have missed the haystack entirely when she fell.”
I took deep breaths, trying to still the creepy shivers jittering up my spine. The air was as hot and thick as the blood of a man dying of fever. Every inhalation brought the bitter-sharp smell of a thousand spiny weeds and the pungent stink of rotting flesh and something I took to be gasoline or kerosene.
The pile of hay we’d fallen into was positively mountainous; the top had to be over a hundred feet high, and the base was easily the size of a football field. Cooper and the Warlock had gotten stuck in the hay much closer to the top and were struggling down the hill, sinking knee-deep in the fodder with every step; they both seemed to be uninjured. The cloudless sky was the blue of a natural gas flame, and the sun stung my bare breasts and shoulders; I’d be burned to blisters in a half hour. The makeup Mother Karen had put on me smelled as if it had some kind of sunscreen in it, so at least my face would be okay for a while. The tops of my ears and my nipples, maybe not so much.
Where were we? I turned to survey the landscape. At first glance, I thought we were in a junkyard planted randomly in the middle of a vast expanse of flat scrub, but then I realized the twisted metal frames were the wreckage of various types of smaller aircraft, from gliders to crop dusters to small commercial jets. I even saw the stripped, sun-bleached bones of a dragon. Farther in the distance I could see abandoned, intact aircraft; apparently their pilots had coasted to safe landings.
Or mostly safe: some had broken wings and fuselages, and I could see dark, muddy fuel spills beneath them. Why hadn’t they exploded or even burned? And what had made them crash? Clearly we were in a magical dead zone, but planes didn’t need magic to stay in the air. Or if they did, the airlines sure weren’t advertising it.
Cicadas were a steady, feverish buzz in the scrubby mesquites scattered among the wrecks. The earth was a mix of exposed crumbling limestone and dry caliche dotted with tufts of brown arrowgrass, purple-blossomed nightshades, ragweeds, and horse crippler cacti.
“Hey, guys, I think we’re in Texas.” I shrugged off my backpack and dug out a disposable lighter.
“Texas?” The Warlock was running his purple healing crystal over a nasty scratch on his face as he limped through the straw toward me. The wound was sealing, so the crystal was still working. His gaze rested on my bared breasts for two heartbeats, then slid away to the airplane wreckage. “What makes you think this is Texas?”
“The weeds, mostly. And the general landscape.” I flicked the lighter several times and didn’t get so much as a spark off the steel. Huh. Planes probably didn’t need charms, but they definitely needed internal combustion. Apparently someone—or something—had nixed fire as well as spoken magic. I blinked through all the gemviews; my ocularis seemed to be working properly. Whatever was squelching our spells didn’t seem to affect enchanted items.
The Warlock ran his fingers through his sweaty curls and scratched his scalp. “But it’s so … flat. Where are the mountains?”
I laughed and started digging my street clothes out of the backpack. “You’ve seen too many Westerns; you’re thinking of Montana. Hollywood thinks it looks more like cowboy country than the Lone Star State. Or maybe it’s just cheaper to film up there.”
Cooper joined us. “Not that I don’t love talking about movies, but maybe we should be talking about this spectacular trap we just randomly fell into?”
I wiggled into my sports bra. “Trap, yes. Random, no.”
The Warlock frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Well, the trap part is obvious.” I slipped on my Hello Kitty T-shirt and gestured at the hay mountain. “That or this is the shittiest theme park attraction I’ve ever seen.”
“Did you know this was probably a trap when you had Pal go through?” Cooper asked.
“Yeah, I had an idea.” I started taking my boots off so I could slip on my dragonskin pants. It was way too hot for them, but at least they’d provide a bit of protection if we got attacked. I couldn’t bear the thought of putting on the dragonskin jacket, even though my arms were getting pink from the sun. For all the stuff I’d packed, I’d forgotten sunscreen.
“You knew this was a trap?” The Warlock looked like he was ready to pay me back for the broken nose I’d given him. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“I was thinking we were facing certain fiery death if we didn’t go through the portal.” I stepped into the pants and pulled them up with my flesh hand; immediately my legs started sweating uncomfortably under the leather. “And since the portal didn’t seem to lead into outer space or a live volcano or Rush Limbaugh’s underwear, it seemed like the better of two lousy choices.”
I was getting faint flashes of the dragon’s death as the leather clung to my damp skin. If I closed my eyes, I could feel Moorish steel slashing my long neck and belly as I belched fire at the impudent raiders. But the death-imprint was old, faded, hovering just at the edge of my perception. I could get used to it, probably tune it out entirely after a while like a mild case of post-nightclub tinnitus.
“But maybe they just wanted to take us into custody,” Cooper said.
“Look, guys, contrary to popular belief, I’m not an idiot.” I pulled the hem of my shirt out over the top of my pants and started to put my boots back on. “I got a peek inside the mind of the Virtus I killed. They want me dead, period, end of sentence. And to be on the safe side, they want you guys dead, too. They are probably the least random beings in the universe; everything they do is carefully planned and measured against a thousand possible outcomes. The Virtus probably didn’t have to miss when it took a swing at us, so they wanted us to go through this particular portal. So it was a setup from the beginning. And we just have to deal.”
“But why here?” the Warlock asked. “I mean, if they want you dead … well, this hay pile doesn’t fit in with that, you know? Whoever is running the show here wants people to survive the fall. So are we looking at some kind of fate worse than death out here, like prolonged torture or something?”
“They’re not sadists.” I shook the dust off the opera gloves and stowed them in the pack. Trying to explain to the others what I’d seen and felt when I’d touched the Virtus’ mind was pretty difficult. I just didn’t have the words for all of it.
“I killed one of them,” I continued. “That means I’m dangerous to them in a physical se
nse, sure. But I’m also dangerous to them on a prophecy level, and to them, that’s even worse. Clearly the Virtus I took out the other day hadn’t planned on dying, right? I upset their carefully-laid plans, and they just can’t stand that. Their wanting me dead isn’t vengeance or something—it’s simply to fix a bug in their program, I guess is the best way to put it.”
I tucked my pants cuffs into my boots. “And that probably means they expect I’ll die here without their having to risk any more of their own people to do it. Obviously, that’s not good. But there’s also the possibility that they herded us out here because their calculations say I’m likely to end up fixing some other problem they don’t want to deal with directly.”
I stood up and faced them. “And that means we might get out of this alive.”
chapter
thirteen
Texas Hold ’Em
“What kind of problem could you solve for them?” the Warlock asked.
“Jeez, I don’t know,” I replied. “It’s not like they e-mailed a memo. If certain people had bothered to share basic information with me, none of this would have happened in the first place.”
I frowned, getting angry at Benedict Jordan and my father all over again.
The Warlock tugged at the crotch of his tuxedo pants, looking unhappy. “So what now?”
“Well.” I picked up my backpack and shrugged into it. “We could get some shade under one of those planes, but I think we should look for civilization. I’ve got only one bottle of water, and out here that won’t last the four of us even until sundown. It also won’t last us much of a hike in this sun, so does anyone see anything nearby?”
Cooper squinted off into the horizon. “I think there’s a gas station or something over that way.”
I followed the direction of his gaze, and saw the sun glinting off a red-and-white sign a mile or two away, the logo and lettering unreadable at our distance. Near it was what looked like a low building, and beyond it, a gray water tower that was barely visible against the sky.
Cooper loosened his tie and slipped off his tux jacket; his dress shirt was already drenched in sweat, clinging to his tight ab muscles. The Warlock followed suit, and I stowed their jackets in my backpack.
“I think before we wander off toward the Great Unknown, we should check the planes for supplies,” Cooper said, rolling up his sleeves. “Just in case the survivors left behind some water or food or something. And I don’t know about you guys, but I could use a hat.”
We checked out the nearest, mostly-wrecked planes first, and found more corpses that none of us felt like moving in order to search the aircraft. As we moved farther through the airplane graveyard, we spotted an American Airlines regional jet that had plowed deep furrows in the rocky earth during its touchdown, snapping off at least one of the wheels. The crew and passengers had gotten all the doors open, and from them hung the deflated remains of the emergency slides.
“I bet there’s something still in that one,” Cooper said. “If the crew was sticking to protocol, they wouldn’t have let people take any luggage off.”
“Should we try to break into the luggage hold?” the Warlock asked.
Cooper shook his head. “Probably any bottled water would be in the passenger compartment.” He looked at me and then at the limp yellow slide. “That thing looks hard to climb. If we boosted you up high enough to grab the edge of the door, do you think you could pull yourself in there one-handed?”
I nodded. My stump didn’t hurt and was actually feeling a bit numb for a change, so I thought I could use my elbow for leverage if necessary.
Cooper looked at Pal. “Do you mind if we stood on you to get some extra height?”
Pal blew a chord that I took as a sigh. “I suppose there’s not another way for you to get up there. Please don’t stand directly on my vertebral crests, because that hurts.”
“He says it’s okay,” I told Cooper. “Stay off his spine bones if you can.”
My familiar knelt and Cooper and I got on his back. Pal stood and moved directly beneath the airplane’s main door. After some awkward false starts, Cooper was able to balance on Pal’s thorax and I was able to climb up on Cooper’s shoulders and sit on him like we were preparing for a chicken fight.
“Okay, steady,” Cooper said. “Step onto my hands and I’ll push you up.”
Clutching his head for balance, I gathered my feet under me and stepped out onto his outstretched palms. He grunted as he pressed me upward; Cooper’s wiry but he’s plenty strong. I grabbed at the lip of the open hatch with my flesh hand and swung my other elbow up onto the edge and pulled myself inside.
The short blue carpet covering the aluminum floor smelled like dirt, cleaning chemicals, and stale coffee. I quickly got to my feet and surveyed the passenger compartment. No corpses here, which I was very glad to see; the overhead luggage compartments were mostly open, and I could see bags and other items still inside.
“Looks like we’re in business, guys!” I called down to the others.
I rummaged through the galley compartments first. They had been ransacked pretty thoroughly already, but I found four unopened water bottles in an overlooked bottom bin along with some packets of shortbread cookies and pretzels. Someone had left a tote bag filled with beach towels on her seat; I emptied it out, keeping the SPF 45 lotion at the bottom, and loaded it with the water and snacks. Upon checking the rest of the luggage compartments, I found a bone-colored straw cowboy hat I snagged for myself, a gray felt cowboy hat I thought might fit the Warlock, and an olive-drab boonie hat for Cooper.
I went back to the hatch and dropped the bag of loot down to Cooper. “I think I can get myself down on the remains of the slide.”
I sat down, swung my legs over, and awkwardly lowered myself so I could grab the slide. I nearly lost my grip, and half slid, half fell the fifteen feet or so to the sandy earth, landing on my back.
“Are you okay?” Cooper stepped toward me, looking concerned.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” If I’d learned one thing in the year I’d gone to hapkido with Mother Karen, it was how to make nice with the ground during sudden encounters.
We traded the bottle of sunscreen around and slathered it on. Cooper and the Warlock briefly argued over who got to wear the gray cowboy hat but rebuffed my offer to go back into the plane to find another one.
“Well, let’s get moving; maybe we can find some help over there,” Cooper said, his cheer sounding only slightly forced. He tried a couple of other old words for random simple charms, with no effect. “But I have to say, this magic block worries me. Someone went to a lot of trouble to set it up. It’s taking a whole lot of power, but I can’t tell where it’s coming from.”
“There’s nothing we can do about it except try to figure out what’s happened here,” the Warlock replied.
We walked out across the scrubby field toward the red-and-white sign.
“We need to find a phone to let Mother Karen know what happened,” I said.
“If someone’s gone to the trouble to suppress magic, what are the odds that the phones are still working?” the Warlock asked.
We continued in silence. The sign soon became legible: it bore a cartoon cowboy in a red-checkered shirt tipping a red ten-gallon hat alongside the words “Howdy Y’all! Welcome to Rudy Ray’s Roadstop.” There were a couple of gasoline and diesel pumps out front under a corrugated steel awning tall enough to shelter a semi and what looked to be a kerosene pump and air pump off to the side. Something low and flat out back was reflecting a lot of sunlight; I wondered if it was some kind of greenhouse. The Roadstop was a single-story brick building with a flat gravel roof. It was a fairly standard convenience store construction with a few folksy flourishes like the hand-painted cartoon cowboy signs advertising ice, beer, wine, and homemade pecan pies in the windows. The parking lot was empty of cars except for a burnt-orange Toyota Prius with a Texas Longhorns bumper sticker. The lonely car was covered in a thick layer of caliche dust and looked a
s if it hadn’t been driven all summer.
There was a “Y’all Come on In, We’re Open!” sign on the glass front door. Once we got fairly close, I was able to see past the glare reflecting off the windows into the store. “Hey, check it out, the lights are on. Somebody’s really here.”
“It looks as though I’m rather too large to fit through the door,” Pal told me. “I shall wait for you in the shade by the fuel pumps.”
I went to the door first, cautiously pushed it open a crack, and stuck my head inside. The air was cool, a little stale, but clearly the place had working air-conditioning. I heard something I first thought was ice rattling around in a blender. The front part of the Roadstop was a little café area set up with a half-dozen small round white tables and chairs to the right and a glass-fronted food service counter along the wall to the left. The food service area had a refrigerated section for ice cream (all the tubs were empty and clean) closest to the door, I supposed to attract the attention of hot, tired travelers. Past that was a section that advertised various pies and pastries—nothing was left but a few dry-looking brownies—and to the right of it, what looked to have been a hot food area that once served chili dogs and tamales and such. Beyond the café tables was a small grocery store area, mainly rows of wine coolers and beer. Most of the shelves of dry goods were empty, as were the refrigerated drink coolers along the back wall. To the far left was a glass door that led into a dark room; a sign on the door read “The Liquor Locker—Over 21 Only.”
Directly across from the door past the café tables was a separate counter of Texas-themed Tshirts, caps, postcards, and other souvenirs. Between the postcard display and an old-fashioned manual cash register I could see a booted pair of feet propped up on the glass countertop.
“Hello, anyone here?” I called.
The ice-chopping noise stopped abruptly, and as a chair squeaked and the boots slipped off the counter I realized the sound had been snoring. A thin man with a thick gray handlebar mustache popped up behind the cash register, running his fingers through his sparse white hair nervously.
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