by Garon Whited
I held him by the hair, keeping him upright as I crouched next to him. He shivered all over, muscles twitching at random, uncontrollably. But he looked at me. He was in there. And he was afraid.
“You know, there are a lot of ways you could be useful to me,” I told him, shouting over the psychic thunder. “I could drain what’s left of your miserable soul and eat it. I could drink your blood. I could question you at great length about my ball, for example.”
“It’s gone,” he whimpered. “I’ll tell you anything! Anything!”
“I know you would,” I told him, patting him gently, comfortingly, pretending to calm him. “I know. I know. You just want to live. I know. I understand. But you know what?” I asked, and waited. He whimpered. I took it as an answer and leaned close, pressing my lips lightly to his ear. “I’m glad you want to live,” I whispered, “because I’m going to take that away from you.” He stopped breathing for a second.
“You used me to kill children,” I continued, whispering like a lover, “five of whom were especially important to me. I doubt they would want any part of this, because they were good, decent children. They were kind and generous and, being dead now, can probably forgive what you did.
“They were better than me. They always were. The only difference, today, is now we both know it.
“You went to a lot of trouble to summon a Guardian Demon.”
I extended my finger-talons and slowly, carefully, pushed two fingers into his eyes. He screamed and squirmed, but I pinned him down, held his head, and continued to push slowly, piercing both eyeballs, pushing onward to crack the thin bone at the back of the eyesocket. I slipped my fingers out quickly, to minimize the blood flowing into me. I didn’t want any of it.
With him blinded and crippled, I was only warmed up. I hurt him with extraordinary care to give back some measure of the suffering he doled out to me.
Normally, I have an aversion to torture. I still do. I find it distasteful, even disgusting. But I didn’t give a damn.
I didn’t want to persuade him to do something for me, to tell my anything. I wasn’t trying to force him to give me something he withheld. All I wanted was his death—a slow death, a painful death, a death his soul could remember as a lesson for its next incarnation.
And some personal satisfaction. All right, a lot of personal satisfaction.
When I was done, I ruptured his lungs and let him die by drowning in his own blood. After he quit breathing, or trying to, I waited seven minutes to make sure he was definitely dead—I couldn’t see what he used for a soul very well with all the magical pyrotechnics going on. I carefully did not try to eat it. Wherever he was going, he could damn well walk—and I hoped it was a long trip.
After the time was up, I stomped his head flat, crushed my way down his spine, and kicked the remains of his skeleton to gravel.
Still with great care, I shuffled through the ongoing storm to gather what there was of flammable materials from the ruins around us. It wasn’t much of one, but I built him a pyre, lit it with a perfectly normal lighter, and sat down in the storm of spells to watch him burn. Let the powers in the sky rain down pain like hail; I felt good about it. So good, in fact, I wasted half an hour simply enjoying the feeling of completion, of finality. I set out to kill him, to take revenge on him, and I did. There’s a lot of satisfaction in that, enough to make it worthwhile to sit there in the maelstrom of forces.
I left the smoldering heap billowing black smoke behind me.
Heading southwest at full throttle, I made for the next nexus. According to the onboard computer, I didn’t have the fuel for it, but I also didn’t see any gas stations. The skycycle would take me as far as it would take me and I’d see how fast I could run when it gave up.
What were they doing under these domes? Rearranging the world to suit themselves? There wasn’t a single structure standing from the modern era and now very few from the current administration. Most of the oddities were conjured out of thin air by spells, existed because of spells, and crumbled when those spells crumbled. With so much energy on tap, it was easier and more versatile than going to all the trouble of actually building anything.
There were some exceptions. A number of glassy spires lay in pieces. I presume they were supported by magic, but made of real glass. Some castles remained standing, minus the pieces of conjured architecture. I passed the ruins of at least one former floating castle.
From the looks of the living things, however, Johann—or his descendants—experimented along the same lines as Victor Frankenstein, only they didn’t limit themselves to human parts. Strange chimeras of mixed and mismatched creatures lay dead, while other, more viable creations still wandered. There were quite a lot of them, enough to form armies, and I wondered why he bothered.
As I crossed into the overlapping area between Johann’s personal dome and another, I observed a shift in emphasis. The fortifications were more solid, less fanciful, made for actual defense. Hordes of mismatched creatures lay sprawled all around them, while similar creatures still guarded the walls. Wargames, perhaps? A large-scale variation on strategy games? Or simply a game of toy soldiers with living things?
The fuel light blinked angrily at me and I slowed my headlong flight, landing before I was forced to crash. The rest of the trip would be on foot, unless I could promote a ride. What I might ride was a valid question. I hadn’t seen anything resembling a horse since I left Bronze. Even if I did find some magical mixture of many parts, whether or not it was in any shape to move, much less carry me, was doubtful.
So I ran. I’m not as fast as Bronze. I don’t corner nearly as well. I suspect she’s a superior jumper, too. But I still have the advantage over anything mortal. I don’t get tired. I get hungry, eventually, but blood isn’t too hard to find. I can see perfectly in total darkness and I had moonlight to supplement it. Broken terrain can be troublesome, as can ravines, gorges, and canyons, but my strength is such I can leap small buildings in a single bound—with a running start and favorable winds. Walls? Cliffs? Mountains? I go up and over those like a hyperactive spider. And if I land badly, I take it better than a mortal. Even injuring myself—say, by missing my footing, tumbling down a rocky hillside, and half-burying myself in a small avalanche, purely as an example, totally unrelated to any actual event—is easily dealt with in a matter of minutes, at most. The worst part is getting the grit out of my shirt and sand out of my boots. If I ever actually got buried in a small avalanche, that is. Which I did not.
My guess is I beat thirty miles an hour over rough terrain. I’d do better on a road, I’m sure, but you work with what you’ve got.
Darn these super-magical kingdoms. No infrastructure. If it were up to me—but then, at one point, things like this were up to me. Nuts.
I closed in on the southwestern nexus, a few miles west of Lancaster, Ohio, according to the map. It was inside an actual castle, one raised up out of the ground. It didn’t help the owner. I went over the wall almost without slowing. Nothing living inside the castle was in any shape to put up a fight and nothing magical was functioning.
Down in the basement, I found a young man in much the same position as Johann. He glared at me as he knelt in the center of the open nexus, gasping for breath and twitching at every anti-magical disruption bomb. He even gestured at me, but the ongoing disruption effects scattered his basic will-working like dust in the wind.
I replied by tearing off the room’s iron-bound door and playing Frisbee with it. I hurled it across the floor at him, the whole thing spinning madly as it flew, crunching into him. They both skidded across the floor, almost entirely out of the power flow. I circled around, grabbed junior, and dashed him against a wall much the same way peasant women slap laundry on rocks, but with a messier splatter.
The blood crawled over to me, I noticed, but it rippled and trembled and spattered under the magical pounding. Interesting and puzzling.
I left the castle without materially hurting it. Once, shortly after my hou
se burned down, I resolved to not burn people’s homes quite so cavalierly. I kept my promise. I merely burned his body in a pile of broken doors and timbers, out in the courtyard. The castle was damaged, but not set ablaze.
See? I can show restraint. And yes, that is showing restraint. It’s all about context.
Afterward, since I didn’t have time to make the next nearest nexus—one I’d noted before, in Toano, Virginia—I headed southwest again, with a slight lean toward the west. I wanted to be out of the area of bombardment before dawn. I’ve seen what the magical disruption attack does to living wizards; it looks like a whole lot of no fun. Even as an undead monster, I felt it as a constant spiritual pummeling. I had no desire to spend a day being pounded by my own artillery.
Tomorrow I might consult with Mary, if I could find a way to reach her. I tried calling her, but, strangely enough, there were no cell towers in range of my skinphone. It would have to wait until I got outside the dome zones. I wonder if she’s killed anyone?
I raced away from the zone of horrors.
Sunday, February 21st
The guy who ate a high-speed door was fond of having roads to go with the castles, or made use of the existing highways, at least. I ran across one going roughly my way and took it. This made my sprint for the border ever so much quicker.
With teleportation apparently cheap and easy, why bother with roads at all? Easier to move the troop-pieces along the would-be gameboard? Or just laziness in leaving the existing roads relatively intact under the layer of magical creations? Either way, I shifted gears from free-running to full-on sprinting. I covered ground at closer to sixty or seventy miles an hour and made some serious distance before dawn.
Vampires are scary creatures. Sometimes I scare myself.
When dawn started to bleed on the eastern horizon, I took shelter from the light. My hidey-hole was primitive, but it worked. I found a pile of rubble from a collapsed building. A handy wall provided a sunscreen to the east, some fallen branches provided large clusters of leaves, and a pile of carefully-placed rocks gave me a hole to hide in.
At least it didn’t smell like the zoo I once hid in. It smelled worse by the time I was done with dawn—or when dawn was done with me—and I couldn’t even cast a minor cleaning spell.
The constant pounding of the disruption spells was still present, but they were all coming from mostly the same direction. I wasn’t under one, or being hammered from all sides. I was still much closer than I liked, but I was far enough away to move around without bleeding from the nose and ears. It felt like a close thing, though. I shoved and climbed, getting out of my hidey-hole, and started staggering farther west, away from the pulsing, pounding pains.
All right, all right. I overdid it. I admit it. If I was well to one side and it still felt as though my brains were being slowly hammered out through my ears, it must have been unadulterated hell for anyone directly under the bombing. I could probably have used a little less brute force, but how was I to know that? I plead ignorance and fear.
At any rate, I paid for it. Going for a long walk with the mother of all pounding migraine headaches is not a good way to spend the day. I stayed on the road and tried to keep a steady pace, but the best I could do was plod, plod, stagger, plod, stagger, stagger, plod. Eventually I found—I think—Indianapolis. It used to be a major city, but it went through some revisions. Multiple fortresses stood scattered about, surrounded by battlefields. I smelled old blood. Skeletons littered the place, some intact, some broken, all armed. Necromancy? Or just animation? Either way, it was academic now.
Most of the fortresses were sealed up tight, their occupants in various states of pain and death. I poked around one which seemed abandoned, looking for a ride of some sort. I didn’t find anything even remotely vehicle-like, which convinced me not to waste time searching the rest. I went back to footslogging and occasionally groaning at the pain from my own bombardment.
This was a mess, no matter how one looked at it. It was my fault, too. If I’d never opened the first nexus. If I’d never opened the other nexuses. If I’d kept my head down and nose clean. If, if, if.
I couldn’t actually hear my would-be conscience shouting up through the hatchway, “I told you so!” I was certain it was there, though.
One blessing of the ongoing bombardment was the way it drowned out inner voices.
By nightfall I was well outside the former city and on down the road. The road led me through countryside, which suited me fine. The last fortification I saw was several miles behind me. If it hadn’t been occupied by fearful, angry creatures—organic gamepieces? Living toy soldiers? —I might have stayed in it until dark. The headache from the constant pounding was slightly diminished, but I had no desire to get into a fight with anyone over squatters’ rights. Besides, I still had a long way to go.
I started collecting armor and shields from dead things. I didn’t have a handy fallen tower to build a hidey-hole, but I could stack bodies as easily as stones. Wearing some mismatched armor and hiding under layers of shields with a veneer of corpses did the trick. It was more comfortable than the stones, but smelled even worse than I usually do. It also didn’t work perfectly. I sizzled a bit in some of the joints, but by then it was too late to do anything but tough it out.
Dark. The sizzling died away, taking the tingling feeling with it. The steady drumbeat of the magical artillery continued, but it was muted, now. Being dead, it bothered me not at all at this distance.
So. Now what? Turn and run for the next nexus, hoping I can get there before dawn and kill one more of Johann’s brood? No, probably not. On Bronze it would be no trouble, but Bronze couldn’t be here for this. What I needed was another technological piece of transportation. Something besides a cab. Something that could run on its own power and wouldn’t mind a bit of off-roading.
Which, of course, meant going outside the area of the domes and hunting for something. I wish the skycycle had a better range. I wish there were some gas stations left. I wish a lot of things.
I consoled myself with the thought that, as miserably inconvenient as this might be for me, it was an ongoing agony for my remaining targets. They were twenty-four hours into this punishing treatment and likely praying someone would just kill them already.
I’d get to it. Eventually.
The roads across the former border were blocked and heavily armed. Well, the domes of force vanished mysteriously, so I guess they were on alert. The army was camped out and watching everything. They seemed awfully tense, all things considered. Maybe they were having trouble sleeping, what with the silent, invisible explosions constantly going off. That would be my bet.
I considered the pros and cons of trying to sneak out. If I were up on the Great Lakes, I’d just walk into the water on one side and up out of the water on the other. On dry land, though, things were a bit more difficult. With no spells to use, there was no way to hide from night vision gear, surface radar, or any of a number of other technological wonders. I don’t know how well I show up on infrared cameras or radar. Does it matter whether they’re basic, advanced, or military-grade hardware? I wish I’d asked Diogenes if he can see me at night…
Might as well find out.
I found a breezy spot, stretched out on the ground, and let myself cool to ambient temperature. It would be harder to spot me on thermograph if I didn’t glow. That took a while, but so what? I had all night.
The road was the obvious way out of the area. I elected to avoid it. No doubt there were ways to monitor the whole perimeter, but I doubted it involved human eyeballs everywhere. If I don’t show up well on camera, like I don’t show up on mirrors, I might simply walk out through the woods.
I did exit the area through the woods. As for “simple” and “walk”… not so much.
My major obstacle was a firebreak. It was a canyon through the woods, ten or twelve meters of empty space, clear-cut, unobstructed ground. Simply crossing it was no problem, but there were strange fenceposts every fifty
meters or so, placed halfway between me and the far edge of the firebreak. About two meters high, they didn’t appear to be connected to each other, but I suspected they contained electric eyes or other sensory equipment. Breaking one of those beams would alert someone.
Preliminary test time.
I clawed through the base of a tree, ripping wood out of it until it creaked, then pushed it over, toppling it across the firebreak and between two of the fenceposts. It crashed down with a satisfactory crunch and thud. I faded back and to one side to wait for the response.
In moments, I heard the buzz of a drone aircraft overhead. It carried two small missiles, one under each wing, and a turret sported a camera lens. It circled the area at altitude, then made a single low pass along the fenceline. It didn’t fire on me. It didn’t seem to take any notice of me.
Ten minutes later, a squad of men arrived in a pair of six-wheeled, jeep-like things. They hit the lights, fired up chainsaws, and cleared the fallen tree in a matter of minutes.
I didn’t wait around to see the rest. If this is their typical response, I’m happy. I faded farther down the firebreak, out of sight of the men, and checked the sky. A drone was in sight, flying down the fenceline. Once it was past, I took a running start, leaped up and over a fencepost, landed well—much to my surprise—and kept running.
Nothing shot at me. Nothing chased me. I was even more surprised. Admittedly, they have thousands of miles of perimeter to monitor, so there’s only so much they can do, but shouldn’t they be a bit more vigilant? Then again, until recently, there were domes of force present. Raising their perimeter security along a five-thousand-mile border might take a while… and it is difficult to detect me with technology.
