The Dead Pools

by Michael Hesse

  We made our way around the spire having no need to climb it now. Mac and Nunez kept to the rear, while he sent me ahead. Despite Bender’s rescue Mac insisted I stay to the front and keep my eye on him. Regardless of his actions, I understood Mac’s motivations. Bender had shattered the illusion that he was merely gifted. Mac was grateful for his help, but he wasn’t about to trust something or someone he didn’t understand.

  The ground broke and rolled for several miles, first up and then down as we put the spire to our backs. It felt good to be moving again at a reasonable speed, though I wasn’t sure how long that would last. Occasionally we’d hear that warbling skin-crawling cry from the horns behind us. I glanced back each time, but couldn’t see anything moving on the plains.

  “You won’t see them until they’re nearly upon us,” Bender called over his shoulder. “The shadow riders could easily run us down, but they’re slowed by infantry. Specter troops aren’t fast, but they usually don’t need to be,” he added as an aside.

  “So why don’t they just let the riders loose to run us down?” I asked. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”

  “Politics,” as if that explained anything. Bender was the anti-Ramirez. It was hard to get him talking even when he had a lot to say. Ramirez on the other hand could overwhelm you with his stories and you were never sure afterwards just how much of what he said was true.

  “Want to try explaining that to someone whose pantheon doesn’t include Hell?”

  Bender didn’t answer and I just drifted into the run. This was something I understood, the need to keep running. If I didn’t concentrate upon the reason or the location, it could even be pleasant. There is something almost serene in a run, even with fifty pounds of gear strapped to your back.

  Several miles later my opinion was turning. The day was growing hotter. I say day although the lighting never changed, but it was definitely growing hotter. Sweat trickled down my face, rolled in sheets across my back, while the straps to my pack dug into my left shoulder squeezing blood through soaked bandages.

  The exertion was taking its toll on my unit as well. Stevens was huffing and Ramirez had developed a stumbling limp. Only Mac and Nunez appeared to be unaffected and only the gods knew what price he’d be paying afterwards. Thankfully we settled into a quick walk when we found the bones.

  It started with a few scattered on the dusty ground, but what bones they were. Most were vaguely human, but oversized. The smallest of the humanoid skeletons I spotted would have been at least eight feet tall when clothed in flesh, but there were others as well and I couldn’t begin to guess at what creatures they’d held together. Scimitar shaped tusks struck up from the ground where a millipede-like something that stretched for more than twenty yards had finally expired. And then there were jumbles and piles of bones that must have been combinations of more than one creature that had died fighting on the rusty sands. At least I hoped they were combinations; I couldn’t get my head around what a mixture of triangular saw blades and spiked spheres would have looked like if it were reassembled.

  I turned my eyes from the tangle as more horns ripped the sky. They sounded close. The hollow clattering of bones behind us could have been a natural fall if there’d been a breeze, instead my fears painted an entirely different picture. Saurian shadows slipped across the ground behind us, things flickered at the edges of perception. We were being hemmed in.

  Bender grabbed my good shoulder and pointed across the blood red ground toward a flickering light. “That’s him,” he hissed. “We move carefully in his direction, but when I say run, don’t hesitate. Run like the devil is behind you, because he is.”

  We set out again, but this time we didn’t bother to look behind. Whatever was stalking us was seemingly content to follow, but that would change the moment it knew it was found out. It’s tough to be the mouse when you know the cat’s about. The hairs on the back of your neck stand up shouting. Your heart pounds and every step feels like it’s your last.

  Bender led us on a zigzag path, from one pile of bones to another. We never stopped. We never rested, but I felt an almost orgasmic sense of relief every time we put something solid behind our backs.

  Time lay heavy on us. Each plodding footstep took an eternity as the pressure to turn and confront our stalkers grew. By the time I could make out Thomas’s silhouette my peripheral vision was crowded with slinking shadows. Get it over with already!

  We were maybe two hundred yards away when the storm broke. Shivering horns tore the air on our right, just out of sight. This was it, I knew. This was the moment the shadows would turn and converge, tearing into our little band and scatter our bones across the red-stained plain.

  Instead, silver trumpets split the air to our left. The shock of noise was so unexpected that I couldn’t help but turn. Above us the sky was filled with flitting figures that I first thought were birds until I realized how high they flew.

  There is a hush before battle when armies size each other up. It doesn’t last long, but it feels like eternity. It’s a singular moment, crystallized, as both sides take a collective breath before plunging headlong into the fray. A heartbeat later and it’s gone, blown away as if it never existed.

  “Run!” Bender’s cry broke the still.

  We ran. Heads down, full out, we ran while bedlam erupted around us. Stygian shadows swept across the ground snarling as they passed. Silver winged angels screamed down from a growling sky. Trumpets and horns tore at each other, dueling thunderheads failing to mask the agonized cries as the armies crashed and surged.

  Forgotten for the moment, we put as much distance between us as we could. We raced around a mound of bones, skidded to a halt as a flurry of lightning bolts pounded a company of rhino-men into smoldering jelly. Burning angels fell like shooting stars as a whirling cyclone threw fireballs into the sky. We dashed and slipped, stumbled and crawled, while horrors raged around us.

  Thomas stood in the eye of a steel hurricane, seemingly untouched by the battles raging all around. As soon as he spotted us, he turned and tore open the air behind him and waved us through. Ramirez and Stevens plunged in first, while Mac and Nunez followed on their heels. I tried to stop and say something, anything to convince him to join us, but Bender shoved me hard from behind and I tumbled through.

  Chapter 33

  Mexico, Friday Late

  Above the Dead Pools

  Dimensional traveler tip number one: walk, don’t run out of the Infernal Pathways. You don’t know what’s waiting on the other side. Luckily for me it wasn’t a tree or a boulder or even the crumbling lip of a cliff. It was worse. I landed on Mac.

  Blind and stumbling, Bender threw me from the pathways and onto two hundred and fifty pounds of mad Irishman. It could have been much worse than the elbow to the groin I received, but I was having difficulty finding the positive as I lay curled in a ball struggling not to barf.

  I was too busy heaving and clutching my bruised manhood to do more than watch as the ripped air sealed behind me. The last thing I saw was a silhouette of Thomas standing against a burning sky. I swear the asshole winked before flicking something through the shrinking hole. Blue fire flickered briefly along the ragged edges of the tear and then the dark swallowed us all.

  Jungle dark ain’t like city dark. A hundred thousand stars blazed overhead, but until we regained our night vision, we were all playing blind man’s bluff. Something slapped against my forehead and I spent the next several minutes desperately searching the ground with my fingertips before I located the culprit. By its size and shape it felt like one of Thomas’s tarot cards. I slipped it into a shirt pocket before I lost it again.

  At least we had a ticket home when this was over. If we survived. If Thomas survived. Those were two big ifs’ in a plan that could be briefly summarized as: kill the bad guys and go home. Right about now it didn’t feel like we’d thought things through.

  Gods, I hoped we’d take a different route home. The thought of stepping back onto that ba
ttlefield was enough to make the fifteen hundred mile walk look appealing. At least I’d get a good tan and maybe I could find a little senorita and settle down. At the moment I wasn’t convinced that I’d have much of a home left if I returned.

  Mac broke up my sun-dappled fantasy and ordered us into an outward facing circle. “I don’t want any of you trigger-happy dickheads blasting one another because you can’t see shit in the dark.”

  Mac moved slowly around us, stooping every once in a while to make sure he was staring us in the eyes. “I know you’re tired. I’m tired. We’ve just walked through Hell or as close as I’d ever like to come and now we’re here, thousands of miles from home without any backup or support and that’s just how I like it.”

  Grinning like a jack-o-lantern he continued, “Right now we’ve got free reign. There’s no oversight, no reports, no independent review board. If you’ve got something nasty that you’ve been playing with in private, now’s the time to let ‘er rip. Out there a madman is brewing a poison that rips souls to shreds and replaces them with monsters. I want him dead. I want his lieutenants dead. I want that poison destroyed and I want a message sent so that no one, not the OSS, nor the Thule, ever tries something like this again. Do we understand each other?”

  “Yes, Sergeant!” we all said as one.

  “Nunez, I need to know the lay of the land. If that Sinistra kid is right we should be on top of the pools. We need to know who’s down there, how many, and how do we get there unseen. Ramirez and Stevens, go through our inventories and put together a list of offensive actions we can take. Until Nunez gets back with his report, I won’t know what we need, but I need to know what’s possible. Thorn . . . you’ve got a whole jungle out there . . . hug a few trees, make friends with a platypus or whatever crazy-assed animals they grow out here. We need to move across this mountain and through that jungle without a flock of monkeys giving us away. Make it happen.”

  I shook my head as we broke the huddle. Make friends with a platypus? Had Mac truly boiled down the concept of convincing an entire ecosystem that we not only belonged, but weren’t a threat, to getting buddy-buddy with a platypus? It doesn’t work that way, not even close.

  Mac was right about one thing even if the only jungle animal he knew actually lived in Australia. We needed the jungle’s cooperation if we were going to remain unseen. Introducing myself was fairly simple. It’s not even a true spell, more like enhanced communication with magickal elements. Convincing that same environment that the four other blundering humans alongside me also belonged was considerably more difficult.

  While Ramirez and Stevens frantically tore through their packs sorting the contents by touch, I settled onto the ground. Crossing my legs, I leaned back and quickly drew a circle around me. Never enter a trance state without basic protection. You wouldn’t leave your doors and windows open when you sleep at night, so don’t open a doorway into your soul when you meditate.

  Once the circle was energized, I closed my eyes and let the internal chatter slip away. The goal wasn’t to impose my will on the environment, but to join with it. Urbanites make a mistake when they buy into the nobility of the environment crap. Nature isn’t peaceful and serene. If it appears that way, you’re too high above it. Like Tennyson said, nature is red in tooth and claw, and there is a beauty in that too, but you’re foolish if you overlook it. My goal wasn’t to convince the jungle that we weren’t dangerous. Bunnies are food. My objective was to assure the surrounding biosphere that we weren’t a threat. It’s an entirely different thing.

  I knew what I had to do. I’d done it many times before, but this jungle reacted wildly out of character. It withdrew as I reached toward it. I pursued, but carefully. A jungle, a forest, a lake, is more than a simple biosphere. It’s a spirit. The Greeks conceptualized this as dryads and nymphs, satyrs and naiads, and they were close to the truth, but the spirit of a place is much larger than a specific tree or rock.

  Nature spirits are hive-minds, entities constructed out of millions upon millions of living parts bound together symbiotically. The spirit itself is no more aware of the death or consumption of one of these parts, than you or I are aware of a particular cell dying within our bodies. It isn’t until the damage reaches a certain level that the mind reacts.

  The entity I pursued was wounded and there’s nothing more dangerous than a wounded animal. Consumed with pain, they’re likely to lash out at anything when cornered. With that in mind I moved slowly and carefully in pursuit. Spirits of this type are incredibly powerful; if it turned and attacked, I’d be overcome in moments.

  All around me the forest reacted to the spirit’s agitation. Owls screamed from hidden perches as thousands of sun bitterns, trogons, and swifts woke and stared uneasily from their nests. A jaguar roared and monkeys screeched from deep within the sheltering trees. This was quickly getting out of hand. Soon the entire forest would be awake and pinpointing our location.

  I threw myself wide in an effort to discover the source of the spirit’s unease. It wasn’t difficult to find. A patch of darkness grew along the forest’s edge. For ages the Dead Pools had slept within the spirits demesne, an unwelcome neighbor but death and nature aren’t strangers. The forest sent its weak and sick to the pools for release and a balance had been maintained, but recently something new stirred the waters. The influence of the pools spread like a cancer, stabbing deep into the spirit’s realm.

  Normally I introduce myself to a nature spirit as a Wiccan and receive a welcome response. Not this time. When I opened up with the friendly witch line I was immediately shut down. It growled and spat at me, knocking me back a few paces as I scrambled to discover what I’d done wrong.

  The realization was slow in coming, but it came on as steady as the darkest night. Miguel de Oras and his Aqua Negra cult weren’t sorcerers, they were witches. How fucking perverted is that? Thomas said that the Aqua Negra were originally charged with the protection of the Dead Pools. I should have realized it then. Sorcerers wouldn’t live in the wild; they’re urbanites, preening scholars, who imagine themselves elite. They don’t dirty their hands in the soil.

  The how or why de Oras twisted the Aqua Negra away from their original purpose didn’t matter. Here and now my only concern was to show the jungle’s spirit that we were here to clean up the mess. Pushing deep, I did the one thing you never do before a spirit. I tore myself open and let it examine my core.

  Rape isn’t the proper word. It was consensual, but a violation nonetheless. I exposed myself, held who and what I was open to a creature that was utterly alien. Would it understand my gesture or even care?

  I didn’t have a clue, but once I started, I couldn’t turn back. This was my one and only chance to prove that I wasn’t a threat and by extension, neither were the men that travelled with me. I turned over all my memories, my secret shames, the wrong things I’d done and the things I’d done to make amends.

  The spirit came in fast and hard, thinking that I’d made a mistake, exposing a weak flank. I felt it boiling from the jungle, eager to accept my sacrifice. Just before contact I felt it hesitate, sensing a trap it didn’t understand. Instead of rushing in and crushing me with its enormity, it sent a questing tendril out instead.

  Even that was nearly too much. I gasped as it worked its way into my core, sifting through the accreted layers that colored my soul. I was simultaneously drawn and repelled. Spirit was too small a name to encompass its totality. By opening myself in the manner I had I became submerged into the hive-mind, another speck in a gargantuan whole. Connections reached out, a great web that ran to every spark of life within its bounds. Every animal and plant, even the bacteria that thrived within its borders were bound together.

  I’d stood sky clad thousands of times before my coven and my gods, but never before had I felt so naked. I was unimaginably sad as it withdrew, as if I’d lost something special, even if it were only the illusion of my uniqueness. I was but another cell, another component of a greater mind that from
my limited perspective I labeled deity.

  Protector. The word tolled within my body, ringing with concepts I couldn’t grasp. Antibodies.

  All around me the jungle hushed. We had been acknowledged and accepted. The easy part was over, now all we had to do was eliminate the disease.

  Chapter 34

  Mexico, Friday near midnight

  Above the Dead Pools

  Antibodies. We slipped through the jungle like white blood cells rushing through veins. I’ve never before experienced anything like the cooperation the jungle gave us. Branches bent out of our way leaving gaping holes in the undergrowth, ferns withdrew revealing treacherous ground. The jungle calmed its migrant voices, soothed the chattering alarms that exploded whenever danger neared. We passed invisibly under a family of capuchin monkeys without a ripple of distress.

  We skirted the dead zone I’d felt during my communion, but even without that connection I would have known it was there. The jungle never truly sleeps, like a twenty-four-hour construction zone, one set of workers heads home as a new shift comes on duty. There’s always some noise; a rustle of leaves when a squirrel scampers from branch to branch overhead, a strangled cry as a jaguar catches his meal, something.

  The dead zone was different. Even city ears could sense it. There was no sound coming from the twisted foliage, no flickering movement out of the corner of your eye. It was sick and wrong, an abandoned building in the heart of a bustling town.

  We steered clear and worked our way around as best we could, but we’d have to cross it at some point. The zone wrapped around the Dead Pool’s canyon like a blanket tucked about a stillborn child. There was no avoiding it. Sooner or later, we had to go through.