Owl and the Electric Samurai

by Kristi Charish

  Texas just shook his head and turned the shotgun on Rynn next. I noticed Michigan was standing a little ways back, also armed and aiming at us. I frowned, was it my imagination or was he pointing a musket at us? I also noticed the tents and boxes, not to mention the packs, surrounding the courtyard, as if Michigan and Texas were planning a trip.

  “Carpe?” Texas asked, as he gestured at Rynn with the barrel, sounding not quite as certain this time. For Rynn’s part, he just lifted his head and glared.

  I jerked my head toward the real Carpe, who was clutching his laptop bag on the other side of Rynn, still looking green. “Try again,” I said.

  Texas eyed us over while Michigan stayed where he was, though I noted he was still aiming the gun less confidently than Texas. The last thing we needed was bullets flying around.

  “I don’t even want to know who the middle one is, to be honest,” Texas said. “Son of a bitch, can you two ever take a fucking order? Like ever? Seriously. What about ‘meet us’ did you not understand?”

  “Technically we were supposed to meet you—about now,” Carpe said, pushing himself up to his forearms with some success.

  Texas turned an incredulous stare on him. “After we opened the portal,” he said.

  I grimaced and looked around. “Yeah—actually, again—same difference.”

  Texas turned his attention and the double-barreled shotgun back on me. “Just shut up, Hiboux, will you?”

  Yeah, under any other circumstance. “Look, as much as I get you want to be pissed at me, we just beat the mercenaries here. You’re welcome.”

  Texas turned to Michigan. “What the hell did I say about leading the fucking pack? Didn’t I say that’s exactly what she’d do?”

  Texas—or Frank—snorted and stormed off to the canvas lean-to, leaving Michigan with his musket on us.

  Michigan didn’t join Texas in his rant. “How many, and how far behind?” he asked me.

  “Right behind us. Research equipment, armed teams ready to enter. If we hadn’t hijacked things from right under their noses, they’d either be here or you’d be walking right into their midst. I did you a favor.”

  “A favor? That’s rich.” Texas shook his head at us from the lean-to. “You know, you try to help someone stay out of trouble . . . what about stay the fuck away did you not understand?” Texas yelled, the last part directed all at me.

  Even though it wasn’t directed at Captain, he took offense. He sat down between me and Texas and let out a loud hiss.

  Texas shook his head. “Even the damn cat is crazy,” he muttered.

  “Okay, just everyone settle down,” Michigan said. He turned to Texas. “She might actually have done us a favor,” he said. “We still have time. All my research says that they’ll need a couple hours before they can open it again.”

  “We’ll have to move up the entire time line.”

  “And we would have had to move the entire time line up anyways! At least this way we know they’re coming.”

  Texas swore and hit the wooden table under the lean-to with his hand. Though he still looked like he wanted to shoot us, there must have been some truth in what Michigan said, because he lowered his gun and ran his hand through his hair. “All right, Neil. Step up prep and get the barriers up with guns ready to shoot. Make sure we’ve got extra rounds in the packs,” Texas said. With a furtive glance at us, Michigan set off at a jog for the rest of the canvas tents just outside the abandoned city square.

  Extra rounds in the backpacks? Better to keep them behind the barriers . . .

  “And make sure we’ve got the slates ready to shoot through!” Texas shouted after him. Then he turned back to us.

  Okay, this was getting stupid. I clenched my fists. “Look, what were you planning exactly when the mercenaries got here? Just let them walk right through the door?”

  He turned a murderous look on me. “As a matter of fact, we were planning on letting you walk right in while we walked out!”

  I stared at him. “What did you plan to do? Meet us in the gate? I don’t know about you, but there’s no way I could hold a conversation in there—”

  “There was no meeting, there was never any meeting!”

  “Are you out of your minds?” I yelled before my filter could kick in.

  Texas crouched down in front of me. “You wouldn’t let the fuck up about helping us, so we figured we’d let you help us. We open the gate, you idiots walk in, we walk out. That was the plan.” He shook his head at me again as he stood up, leveling his shotgun at me once again. “You just had to show up early, didn’t you, Hiboux? Mess up all our plans.”

  The double-barreled shotgun Texas was holding was much older than I’d thought—an 1890s antique Browning . . .

  “What the hell are you doing with an antique?”

  Texas just laughed.

  I spotted the muskets propped up against the side of the lean-to. In fact, everything here was antique, down to the crates. Even the lean-tos and tents set around the square had their canvas patched together more than once with mismatched scraps of cloth.

  Those had to be eighteenth-century muskets lined up by one of the town walls, and the cannon looked like it had been taken off a nineteenth-­century frigate. It was a hodgepodge collection of explorer’s goods from the last three hundred years—maybe more. But if this many people had found Shangri-La?

  Oh shit.

  “You haven’t been hiding out here at all,” I said to Texas. “All this time, you’ve been trapped.”

  Texas laughed. “And now she gets it, the great Owl gets that the fabled city of Shangri-La is one big fabled sinkhole.” He bared his teeth at me, eliciting another hiss from Captain. “Four years we’ve been trapped here. We can’t leave—no one’s left in over three hundred.”

  “Or at least enough people haven’t come through one of those portals for it to work the other way around,” Michigan said, coming back up behind Texas and carrying a large leather book under his arm. “Here,” he said, handing me the book. With a wary glance at Texas and his shotgun, I started to flip through the pages. It was the journal of a climber and explorer, one George Steinback, dated from September 8, 1965, with the last entry entered on December 31, 1976.

  I didn’t recognize the name, but he was a self-professed archaeology hobbyist with a couple undergrad courses under his belt and an inclination to finding a lost city—or that had been the idea when he’d set out in Nepal in 1965.

  “Shit, this guy was IAA,” I said. Not high up but versed enough to know about the supernatural. Unfortunately, George was one for puzzles, and he’d managed to figure out how to open the portal with the help of a diary he’d found in an old box of discarded books at a university claiming to know the location of Shangri-La. His elation had turned to depression pretty fast when he’d realized he couldn’t get out and no one knew where he’d gone or where to start looking.

  “He was here for almost forty years before we stumbled along,” Michigan said.

  “And went nuts at least ten before that, if that journal he left is any indication—the pages he didn’t destroy. And when George got here, he found those guys,” Texas said, pointing to a collection of graves as he gestured for me to get up. I made my way to the nearest and largest of the gravestones built with stone salvaged from the temples. The stone read Col. Percy Fawcett. Him I did remember from history class. He and his entire expedition of fifteen men disappeared in the Amazon searching for a lost city as well.

  I suppose if you were going to have a pocket universe, distance was the least of your concerns. Col. Percy had been well entrenched in the IAA as well. Michigan handed me a second journal, this one older and more worn.

  I skimmed through the pages, but Percy’s diary read just like George’s—elation, concern at not finding an obvious way out, optimism, then despair. It was like the Four Stages of Learning You We
re Trapped.

  “They lasted about a decade trying to reactivate the gate. Then one of the team stumbled on the accounts of a British military expedition that got lost here during the India wars, who had a theory that to get out you needed to shoot enough people.” I looked up at Texas from the journal. “You can imagine how things went from there,” he added. “If you don’t believe me, see the bullet holes for yourself.” He nodded toward the pile of crates, every last one riddled with bullet holes.

  The sickened feeling hit me full force . . . ten years trapped here, then someone decided to try their luck with mass murder. Fantastic.

  “Not that they couldn’t have survived comfortably for decades,” Neil said. “Doesn’t get cold here, consistent rainfall, no snow except in the mountains, and someone at some point planted crops. There’s a small spattering of wildlife—bugs, yaks, rabbits. A lake.”

  “Haven’t wanted to screw with the ecology, since we have no fucking clue how small or contained it is,” Texas said.

  Eat a couple yaks and the next thing you know you’re overrun with plague-carrying rodents . . .

  “A veritable damnable, fucking paradise,” Texas said, kicking a metal can that, along with the tent canvas, had also been patched up.

  I caught sight of the computer equipment. So had Carpe, who walked over to look at it. “This is years out of date,” he said to Texas and Michigan as he perused it. “And it looks like you patched it all together.”

  “’Bout the only thing we’ve been able to figure out how to fix and patch into the magic of this place.”

  “That’s how you run World Quest,” I said.

  “That is World Quest. This place,” Michigan said, holding out his hands at Shangri-La, “acts as the server, not the computer. Who would have thought it, human-made magic plays nice with human-made programming.”

  “And don’t ask us how it works,” Texas said, and nodded at Michigan.

  “Think a living, almost breathing, jerry-rig,” Michigan said. When we all stared at him, he added, “The city decided it likes the game, so it keeps it running. And before you even ask, no, it won’t work with phones—or at least I haven’t figured out a way to make it work with phones or any other electronics.” He held up a walkie-talkie and pointed to a pile of discarded dig equipment. “This? Those? Completely useless. The only way Shangri-La lets us communicate with the outside world is through that game.”

  “If the magic of this place is sentient, it has one hell of a sense of humor,” Texas added.

  “Why didn’t you contact someone through the game? Or, I don’t know, tell someone you were here . . .” I trailed off as Texas shook his head.

  “Because it won’t let us,” Texas said.

  Michigan shrugged. “Game crashes, program glitches. You name it, every time we’ve tried, Shangri-La stops us.”

  The desperate way they’d rigged the game to work with the outside world, the maps, the warnings . . . shit, they weren’t kidding. They really were trapped. I glanced around at the . . . if not living, then sentient, city.

  I was having a real problem lately with sentient magic things.

  I didn’t have a chance to ponder that one too much longer as I looked back up from the journal into the business end of Texas’s shotgun.

  I remembered the expedition that had gone homicidal. “Oh hell—not you two as well.”

  “That would only make things worse,” Neil said. “Just like it did for them and the next three expeditions who stumbled into the place. People need to be alive in here for others to leave.”

  Texas lifted the safety. “And guess what? You’re the first ones to have found your way through since we did.”

  “You were planning on tricking us into switching places with you.”

  “And the world-renowned antiquities thief catches on. Only took you . . . oh, ten minutes.”

  I raised my hands and took a step back as I did my best to try and think a way out of this. “There has got to be another way—” I started, but Texas interrupted me with a shake of his head.

  “I did my best, Hiboux. We didn’t want it to be you, we even tried to warn you, but what happened? You just had to come after us and bring your idiot friends. It’s like the delinquents of World Quest just had to crash our front door.”

  “You just said you can’t kill us—shit!” I dropped to the ground along with Rynn and Carpe as Texas fired a round into the lean-to behind us, adding to the collection of bullet holes. “Look, you two are making a huge mistake. Right now there is an entire company of mercenaries on their way to find you. Damn it!” I swore as another shot struck the table near my head. “I thought you said you weren’t going to try and kill us!” I yelled.

  “Had an awful lot of time to target practice in here. And I am not sticking around for the shit show you call archaeology.”

  “Where do the bullets even come from?” I shouted.

  “Re-melt,” Texas shouted back and lined up another round. “I can always make it a leg shot. See how well you bounce back from that. I’ll give you a hint, it ain’t like World Quest.”

  Four years locked in Shangri-La; we were not going to negotiate with these two. I cast a quick, furtive glance around for anything we could hide behind or, failing that, throw. There was the metal can Texas had kicked over and the rows of muskets . . . but Texas saw where I was looking and made a tsking noise before I could even attempt to inch in that direction.

  I lifted my hands above my head. When Texas gestured for me to back away from the portal, I did—on my knees.

  Texas shook his head once more. “Had to be you two assholes, didn’t it?” He leveled the gun at my leg. “Medical supplies are over in the tent—a little old, but there’s still some penicillin in there.”

  I noted Michigan was looking around, searching, about the same time I noticed that only Carpe and I were on our knees. Captain had hightailed it for the crates when the shooting had started.

  “Where did the blonde go?” Michigan asked.

  Texas took his eyes off me to search the camp. For a moment, I thought he might lower the gun or waver in the direction it was pointed, but no, he did his namesake proud.

  It didn’t do him any good. A dart with a bright red-and-orange tail, not unlike a highly poisonous ornamental insect, smacked into Texas’s neck. He grabbed it and managed to pull it out and look at it, then us. “It had to be you two World Quest screwups,” he said before his eyes rolled back and he slumped to the ground, smacking his head on one of the lean-to poles.

  I imagine Michigan would have had something more to say about it, but he also got a neck full of one of the red darts. He didn’t manage to pull his out before toppling over—this time onto the soft grass.

  Rynn stepped out from behind the farthest patchwork tent. For a moment I wondered how he’d managed to keep some of his weapons from our run-in with the mercenaries, but I decided that unlike Carpe’s endless supply of electronics, Rynn had probably relieved one of the Zebras of them on the way here.

  Rynn checked Texas over, briefly examining the spot where he’d hit his head on the way down. “He’ll be fine except for a bruise—and a mild hangover.” Rynn stood. “He should wake in a couple hours.”

  The fact that Texas would wake up with a nasty headache should probably not have made me feel as happy as it did.

  It was Carpe who spoke first. “What do we . . . ah, do with them?”

  For a moment it occurred to me that if they’d been planning to leave us here . . .

  I shook the thought off. I wasn’t stooping to their level.

  Carpe cleared his throat. “Um, not to be the bearer of bad news, but you both heard what they said.”

  I shook my head at him. Was I pissed? Sure, but I wasn’t unsympathetic. If I’d been stuck here for four years with a finicky video game that had taken on its own personality traits,
chances are I’d have been getting pretty desperate too. No, I wasn’t going to condemn them to being trapped in here over that. “Tie them up for now,” I said over my shoulder. Rynn obliged, using heavy rope he found mixed in with the supplies and fastening them to one of the tent poles, one on either side. I headed for the table where all the old books and journals that had accumulated over the years were laid out, then I started perusing the old books once more, doing my best not to pay attention to the unconscious developers.

  “Alix, I hate to consider it too, but we might not have any other option.”

  I ignored Carpe as I went through the materials. Diaries, journals, reference books, accounts of men and supplies, some dating as far back as the 1700s. At least Neil and Frank had organized them and made their own notes. I made a point of setting them aside; I don’t know if it was superstition or instincts, but I stayed as far away as possible from the jerry-rigged servers. I’d leave Carpe to deal with those, meanwhile . . .

  “You forget the most important part about finding your way out of a dungeon, Carpe,” I said as I picked up a journal from a pile that had 1925 written across its cover. The materials had all been organized into neat piles, with various collections of notes tucked inside—Michigan’s work, if I guessed the handwriting right. It’d take me a while to go through them, but I would, provided I could fight off the armor. I could already feel it creeping at the edge of my thoughts. “There’s always another way,” I said, holding up the journal. “You just have to find it. Take the books on the left half of the table and start going through them,” I said to Carpe. “Rynn, you start with the ones on the table over on the right. Looks mostly to be maps, but there might be notes and journals in there too. Look for anything and everything that deals with trying or failing to find a way out.”

  Carpe looked perplexed. “What about the armor?”