Pacific Fire

by Greg Van Eekhout

  Em’s face was red, the muscles in her neck taut, and just then, Sam noticed that despite the pitiful sounds of her weeping, no tears fell. In fact, she was smiling. She twisted. Her foot went into the guard’s knee. She had one of his hands, and then his arm, and she did something to his elbow that made his arm bend the wrong way, and then she had his bayonet. She drove the blade in and out of his eye. The technician who’d opened her cage reached for another switch, this one big and red, and Em shot him through the hand. The crack of the rifle sounded like a breaking bone. The leech at the gangway fired a shot in her general direction. It went far wide and he turned to race up the gangway. Em shot him in the head. She shot two more.

  “Everybody sit down.” She spoke just loud enough for her voice to be clearly heard through the deckhouse.

  The technicians did as they were told.

  A leech came down the gangway from the upper deck, firing. Em pulled the trigger and he fell.

  She went to the switches.

  Another leech came down the gangway. Em shot him twice, once in the knee, and then in the chest. She waited a few seconds to see if anyone else was coming down, then began throwing switches to open the cages. A few of the captives came out. Others stayed back.

  “I’ve killed six guards,” Em said. “You have their guns and a whole lot of knives. Stay below deck until you get an all-clear. Don’t let the techs overwhelm you. Kill them if you have to. And keep your heads down. There’s going to be gunfire above.”

  Some of the captives still wouldn’t leave their cages. Some cowered. But a few stepped forward and gathered the guns of the fallen guards.

  Blood streamed down Em’s bayonet. She pushed away a lock of hair and smeared red across her forehead. Her eyes looked like stone.

  So this was Em, being an Emma.

  “How many above?” Sam asked her.

  “I counted seven more, plus the hound.”

  “Any idea how we’re getting off this boat?”

  “Yeah,” she said. She took a cleaver from one of the technician’s racks. “You’re not going to like it.”

  * * *

  Em held the cleaver to Sam’s throat. He felt a thin, cold line against his jugular. In her other hand she held the bayonet. Sam offered no resistance and let her walk him up the gangway to the deck.

  The first obstacle they encountered was the pink-faced man who’d first captured them in the San Andreas Abyss. He was waiting at the top of the gangway, his gun inches away from Sam’s face.

  “No bullshit,” said Em. “I know you want him alive, and you want his lovely osteomantic tissues unspoiled by dirty metal. Throw your guns overboard or I shoot him.”

  Sam was wider and taller than Em, and there was no way for Pinky to shoot her without going through Sam. He flung his weapon over the side. It hit the canal with a satisfying splash.

  “Good,” Em said. “Now go jump after it.”

  Pinky snarled out the word “fuck” before Em thrust the bayonet forward between Sam’s arm and side and punctured Pinky’s belly. Pinky let out one long “Owwwww” and doubled over.

  “What are they paying you guys?” Em called out.

  Sam heard a noise behind him. He didn’t get a chance to warn Em, because she pivoted around and tilted the gun up. There was another bone-crack from the rifle and someone fell, facedown, from the top of the deck. A pool of blood spread from his head. He didn’t move.

  “How much are they paying you?” she repeated.

  “Two percent of the job,” answered a voice. Sam didn’t see its source. The rest of the leeches had hunkered down under cover.

  “Your job’s busted,” Em said. “So, math problem: What’s two percent of nothing?”

  There were no answers. Sam supposed it was a rhetorical question.

  “I make four of you left,” Em said. “So I better see four people jumping overboard, or I’m going to kill my expensive hostage and then hunt you down and shoot your knees out just to hear your voices.”

  “Overboard, fellas,” blared a voice from a speaker horn: the hound. She was probably in the wheelhouse.

  One guy took a life jacket with him, but the rest just clambered over the rail and dropped into the canal.

  The ability to impel someone to do what you told them, just with words, was a power as useful as magic. Sam liked how Em wielded it.

  But she still had the cleaver to his throat.

  “You can let me go now.”

  “Not yet. I don’t want to lose my leverage,” Em said, and Sam was seized by a queasy moment of doubt. Had he misjudged this situation? Had he misjudged Em?

  “Shall we negotiate?” the hound said over the loudspeaker. “You must know what he’s worth.”

  “I have your treasure, and you have no more thugs,” Em shouted. “I don’t need to share.”

  Drive head back into Em’s face. Drive foot into her knee. Maybe she’d slice his jugular. Maybe bayonet him. Maybe shoot him. He’d need luck. He’d need chaos to work in sympathy with his intent.

  That was Daniel thinking.

  Sam let her hold him there, with her cleaver on his skin.

  He chose this moment to trust Em more than he’d ever trusted anyone or anything. He was going to ridiculous lengths to prevent Otis and his Pacific firedrake from killing people beyond his ability to count, and he decided that if he couldn’t trust Em, the world wasn’t worth saving.

  “You’re still on my boat,” the hound said. “And you’re not going to take the wheelhouse while I’m in it.”

  “That’s why I’m taking your dinghy,” Em said.

  “My boat’s a lot faster than the dinghy. I’ll just follow you.”

  “I think you’re going to find yourself delayed.

  “All clear,” Em called down the gangway. The captives came up cautiously, led by a few who’d claimed the guards’ guns and others who took up knives and cleavers. The owl-eyed man blinked in the harsh sunlight.

  “It’s a nice day to go boating,” he said.

  “The boat’s not yours yet,” she told him and the others. “The hound is in the wheelhouse, and she’s more dangerous than the others. But there’s only one of her, and there’re a lot of you.”

  “Even odds?” said the girl with the stunted condor wings. She’d claimed a handgun.

  “Maybe a little less than even,” Em said. “But better than the steel tables.”

  The captives began moving toward the wheelhouse, and Em finally took the cleaver from Sam’s throat. He felt something larger than relief.

  “Thanks,” he said, rubbing his Adam’s apple.

  They made for the stern and hurried down a ladder to the dinghy. Em took position at the outboard motor and Sam untied the tow rope. Gunshots rang out as they zipped away from the factory boat and raced through canal traffic at full throttle. Em stared straight ahead, her jaw set like granite. Tears glimmered in her eyes.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I hate shooting people,” she said. “I just fucking hate it.”

  Sam watched out for police and for the factory boat and for more leeches as Em sped on, steering the dinghy and weeping.

  TEN

  Sam and Em arrived in Los Angeles on a vivid afternoon. The snowcapped San Gabriel Mountains loomed behind the jade and azure towers of downtown. Palatial clouds sailed overhead. Daniel always described LA as big and messy and sprawling. But never beautiful.

  “Quit gawking,” Em said, guiding the dinghy through midday traffic. “You look like a rube.”

  “I am a rube. I didn’t think the buildings would be this tall.” He craned his neck to watch an airship approach the mooring tower of an emerald-green skyscraper at least eighty stories high.

  Em steered around a cement-mixing scow, its drum rotating on its way to a construction site.

  “How many times have you been in LA?” he asked Em.

  “Three times, on rescue missions. My first time, we broke golems out of the Playboy Mansion. That was weird.”
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br />   She’d been acting like herself since the leeches, but there was a strain in her manner, in her posture, in her voice. She’d killed people on the glue factory boat. It weighed heavy on her. But she was still with him.

  After a brief stop at a hardware store to shoplift some tools, she drove them to a range of foothills off the La Cienega locks, where they left the dinghy in a dead-end canal. With shovel and crowbar over their shoulders, they hiked up a trail of green and yellow grasses. A sign said NO TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS SUBJECT TO MINISTRY OF JUSTICE DISPENSATION PENALTIES. Sam wanted nothing to do with having justice dispensed at him, but Em ignored the sign and cut a hole in a rusted chain-link fence.

  They crept through oil fields. Pump jacks cranked up and down, pulling dwindling amounts of crude petroleum and magic from deep underground. Climbing among the mechanical squeaks and hisses, Sam and Em reached summit, where they paused to catch their breath. From here, the Hierarch used to launch dragon flames at enemy aircraft from beyond his borders, or at rebellious osteomancers inside his borders. Now, the place was occupied by a few radio transmission towers and the cracked remains of wartime catapult bunkers.

  The view of LA was spectacular. The Pacific Ocean glimmered blue in the west, with a gray bank of clouds sitting on the horizon like a wall. Sam could make out the purple-gray silhouette of the Catalina Island ridgeline. It seemed enticingly close, as if they could just wade out to it. The rest of the LA basin was filled with houses and offices and strip malls and dark green tufts of treetops. The Hollywood sign stood out against an arrogant blue sky, and just right of it, the green copper domes of Griffith Observatory. If Daniel had claimed the Hierarchy, that would have been one of his palaces.

  He looked for the site of the Magic Castle, where he’d been born, and where Daniel rescued him. He saw no sign of it. Daniel had set it aflame, and rains and mudslides took care of the wreckage.

  For all the times Daniel told him spooky-boo stories of Los Angeles, Sam felt oddly as though he’d come home. He spread his arms and encompassed the city, just as the Hierarch might have done when standing on this very spot with his war machines.

  “What are you doing?”

  Startled, Sam turned to Em. “Just looking,” he said guiltily.

  “Well, golden god, you can help me look for the cache.”

  The Emmas had laid in a cache of bone near here, and if he and Em hoped to survive Los Angeles and do damage on Catalina, they’d need to arm themselves. But the cache had been here for going on a dozen years, and the chances of it going undisturbed this long weren’t great.

  Em took them into a field of asphalt broken by tufts of weeds. She stepped gingerly, as if walking through a garden and trying not to step on the flowers.

  “What are we looking for?” Sam asked. “Some marking stone or sigil or something?”

  She didn’t answer, just kept picking through weeds and busted slabs of concrete.

  “A big X, like on a pirate treasure map?” Sam ventured. “An informative frog?”

  “I’ll know it when I see it.… Oh! Here we are.”

  At Em’s feet, a spray-painted face on the concrete looked up at him. It was just an outline done in red, but he recognized the nose.

  “You drew your own face to mark where you left your stuff? That’s ingenious.”

  “It’s not my face. It’s the Emma who buried the cache. To anyone else it just looks like graffiti, but to an Emma, it couldn’t be more obvious.”

  “Okay,” Sam said. “I’m sorry I made fun of you.”

  “When did you make fun of me?”

  “When I said ‘ingenious’ I really meant ‘incomprehensibly stupid,’ but now that you explained it, I guess it’s not a bad system.”

  They pried the slab away and started digging through dry, loose dirt and plant roots. Two feet down, Sam’s shovel struck metal. Another minute of digging revealed a bread-loaf-sized ammo box.

  Em brushed dirt away and unclipped the lid, and Sam joined her in staring into an empty box. He smelled only dirt and a tinge of rust.

  “This is either the best sint holo invisibility essence I’ve ever not seen, or else it’s an empty box,” he said.

  Em slammed the box shut and kicked it into the hole. Sam backed away from her, because she looked like she was searching for other things to kick. He grasped for an encouraging word, or at least something mollifying.

  “Maybe we can find the person who stole your magic and make them suffer,” he offered.

  The crack-pop of gunfire rang out, and bits of concrete peppered their knees and shins. They dove into the dirt for cover, but instead of more gunshots, there was a shout.

  “You leave my chickens alone!”

  Sam lifted his head above the weeds. In the doorway of one of the bunkers, an ancient scarecrow of a man carried a rifle.

  “We mean your chickens no harm,” Sam called out.

  “What chickens?” Em whispered.

  “Whatever chickens he’s upset about,” Sam whispered back.

  “Stand up so I can see you,” the man said in a timorous voice.

  Em clamped her hand around Sam’s arm. She had an extraordinarily strong grip. “I think he means stand up so he can shoot us.”

  Another shot blast, and the sound of a bullet’s ricochet.

  “I can shoot you standing or I can shoot you snake-crawling. Your choice.”

  Sam wrenched free from Em’s clutch. “I choose standing.”

  He cautiously lifted himself to his feet, hands in the air. Cursing, Em did the same.

  The man’s eyes were red rimmed and wild, and his hands shook so much it was hard to tell if he was aiming at Em and Sam or aiming at a cloud. Dangerous in any case.

  From somewhere in the bunkers, a rooster crowed, and the man’s legs began to tremble. He shifted from one foot to the other in a little dance of agitation.

  “Seriously,” Sam said. “We’re not after your chickens.”

  The man squinted and leaned forward, and then his eyes popped wide and he fell to his knees. “Forgive me,” he wailed. “I am a plunderer and a glutton.” The more he shook, the more the bore of his rifle bobbed and jittered.

  “Hey,” Sam said, “could you maybe put the gun away?”

  The man gawked at his rifle as if he’d suddenly discovered a python in his hands. He tossed it before him. Sam and Em both flinched. Luckily, there was no accidental discharge.

  Sobbing, the man buried his face in his hands. “I dreamed of this day. I prayed for it.”

  Helplessly confused, Sam turned to Em. “Is this like an LA thing, or…?”

  “I don’t know. Every other time I’ve been here it’s just been a lot of running around and shooting and explosions.”

  The man wiped an arm across his sloppy nose. “The chickens are yours,” he blubbered. “It’s all yours.” He spread his arms in an all-encompassing gesture, uncomfortably like the one Em caught Sam giving the vista of Los Angeles.

  His eyes shot skyward, and then he hastily rose to his feet. “Come on,” he said with a manic grin. “I’ll hide you.” He disappeared into the shadows of his bunker.

  “Hide us from what?”

  “That,” Em said.

  He followed her gaze. A helicopter, small in the distance, approached from the office towers of Century City. Maybe just a news chopper, or a rich person’s transport. Or maybe it belonged to an osteomancer on the hunt.

  The bunker started to look like a good idea. They followed the man inside.

  Inside, a gas camping lantern cast a yellow glow over a shopping cart stuffed with what looked like random garbage, but were probably the man’s life’s possessions. Among newspaper pages and crumpled plastic bags were books and a trombone missing its slide and plastic water jugs. A radio was plugged into an extension cord that snaked off into the dark unknown. Chickens clucked in the shadows, and the stench of chicken shit hung everywhere.

  The man held a finger to his lips as the hum of the helicopter resolved in
to the rhythmic chop of rotor blades. They huddled in the cramped space until the sounds passed overhead and faded.

  “You’re safe now,” the man said, smiling shyly at Sam.

  “Who was that in the chopper?”

  “Looters and lessers, sire, the whole lot of them. They buzz the sky like vultures, picking on the remains of your kingdom.”

  Em gave Sam an uh-oh look, which matched the feeling in his belly.

  “What do you mean, my kingdom?” he asked, though he knew damn well what the man meant.

  The man giggled, like they were all in on a delightful secret.

  “You don’t have to hide from me, majesty. I’m your most loyal subject, always have been, and my daddy before me, and his daddy before him.”

  Sam didn’t quite know what to say, and Em was no help.

  “Come on, I’ll show you my chickens.”

  He cantered into a deeper part of the bunker. Em began following, but Sam blocked her way.

  “What are you doing? He thinks I’m the Hierarch.”

  “Apparently. So?”

  “So,” Sam sputtered, “I’ve spent my life trying to avoid situations just like this.”

  “No, you’ve spent your life trying to avoid people who want to vivisect you. This guy is your number one fan. And we need the magic my sisters cached. If nothing else, I want to see these chickens.”

  Exasperated, Sam went along with her. In a larger chamber, rails in the floor led to a pair of steel doors, probably for the deployment of a war engine. The device was nowhere in sight, and a carpet of weeds and dry plant bits indicated the doors hadn’t been opened in a long time. The smell of chicken shit was stronger here, and clucks and shuffling sounds came from cages set up on sawhorses, partially covered by a plastic tarp. But when Sam’s eyes adjusted to the dark, what drew his attention was a wall plastered with newspaper and magazine pages, and drawings and photos and postage stamps, and a small fortune in currency, all depicting the Hierarch’s face: strong, grim, with eyes like two pinpoints of light in a coal shaft, ageless, but a chin and nose that unmistakably also belonged to Sam.

  The man could barely contain his glee. “The pretenders said you were dead. They said Blackland ate your heart, and the rest of the osteomancers divided up your kingdom and squatted in your sacred places and ate your magic. But I never believed them. I don’t know how anyone who ever saw you could believe them. But me, I did see you. You wouldn’t remember me, I was just a boy, at your Blessing of the Animals ceremony. I gave you a chicken and you ate it live on the spot, right in front of me. You honored me, sire. You honored me.” He got blubbery again. “Oh, sire. The Hierarchy without you … We are excrement and gas. Where have you been, my liege?”