by Jeff Somers
I stood there, hanging from Mags, staring.
When we got back to the driveway, Claire was gone. Mags started calling her name, wandering around, concerned, but I just stood there, smoking. I was used to people leaving. The only people who hadn’t left were Hiram and Mags, and Hiram had gotten killed for his trouble, and I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t end up killing Mags at some point, too. If it were possible, even, to kill Mageshkumar.
I remembered Claire on the bus ride to Texas. Soft and dreamy, a normal girl who smelled like soap and cigarettes, who tucked her legs under herself, who stroked Mags’s hair gently as we whispered our life stories to each other. I felt a stab of pain that she’d left without saying anything, without a note. I understood, I thought, why she’d left. I was grateful, I thought, that she’d stuck around long enough to bleed for Mags and save my life. I knew, on some level, that this should have been enough.
I stared out at the charred trees around us. It wasn’t, wouldn’t ever be.
I’D NEVER BEEN SO hungry in all my life. Or so happy to let Mags run the full con for us. He Charmed the hostess with a smile and flick of gas. He Charmed our waitress. He Charmed the round family seated next to us. He made some napkins stuffed in his pocket look like twenty-dollar bills. He played every trick he knew and ordered us two heaping breakfasts: pancakes, eggs over easy, sausage, bacon, toast, and glorious, hot black coffee.
I sat shivering as I ate. I was living on gas. I was living on the energy Mags had given me. I ate my breakfast and Mags silently slid his over to me. I didn’t pause for breath.
The news was leaking in. Small town, and the diner had no televisions, so it crept in the old-fashioned way, via people arriving, text message, and the Internet. Disasters everywhere. Bizarre things. Mass murders. Someone had set off a bomb at a military base, killing dozens. Hundreds of people visiting the Grand Canyon had suddenly gone mad and hurled themselves over the edge. People had jumped by the score from landmarks around the world, raining down from the Eiffel Tower, the Space Needle, the Golden Gate Bridge. The stories trickled in, and the diner got quiet. People hurriedly paid up and left.
Someone finally set up a radio and we listened to report after report: dozens dead here, thousands killed there. All isolated incidents. All inexplicable. A Day of Madness.
Someone read aloud an incoherent post on the Internet about marines storming a base out in Colorado where the people with their thumbs on the launch buttons had lost it, but no one could find a confirming story, and then the website disappeared.
I sat back and smoked another of Mags’s cigarettes. Didn’t say a word. No one would have believed me.
The disasters came in spurts. People left, new people came in. I considered ordering a third breakfast. The radio spilled out more news. Mass drownings off the Florida coast. An entire old-age home committing suicide via sleeping pills doled out to residents in a carefully managed plan. A college fraternity leaping from the roof of their house en masse. A man with a semiautomatic hunting rifle killing thirty-four people at a mall in New Jersey.
I’d heard these stories before, from Hiram, in books. All the markings of ustari fueling spells. But those incidents had all been separated by years, decades, centuries. This was every five minutes.
The lunch crowd. A new group of people came in, fewer than had been at breakfast. They ate hurriedly, left, throwing money on the counter. The radio sighed out its next list of mass deaths. It never ended. I was bloated and charged, the curious manic energy of the recently dead. More new people sat down, ordered. The radio voice grew ragged. Started off as a smooth professional voice, bored by the news. Slowly frayed. After an hour, he was gasping it out. Barely hanging on. Mags and I just sat there, listening. I kept reminding myself, over the ragged and off-rhythm beat of my heart, that it would have been worse. It would have been the entire world.
Ev Fallon walked in after I’d ordered my fourth meal of the last few hours. He simply walked over to our table and sat down, pulling out a curious pack of European cigarettes and tossing them on the table to share. His hands sported two fresh bandages, rusty blood soaking through. He looked old. He’d been old before, but now he looked ancient. A hundred years old, and a hard hundred. He stared down at the table.
Mags stood up, fists clenched, but I reached up lazily and tugged at his sleeve. I didn’t have the energy for anger or revenge.
“I have not been particularly smart or heroic today,” Fallon said slowly, without looking at us. “I thought perhaps I could at least still be useful.”
It was not an apology, or an admission of guilt. I wondered, if Claire had not been there, would I have gone down into the machine myself? I might have fled, too. Might have tried to come up with a way to ensure I was that one percent left alive.
One thing I knew: I was not a good person.
I shrugged.
“The death toll will be hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions,” he said quietly. “There is chaos in the larger cities. The population centers. Farther away, everything seems normal. In the cities, many are dead. There will be no explanation.”
I picked one of his cigarettes up and put it between my lips. My eyes felt like they’d been filled with sand and lit on fire. “You have a car?”
Fallon nodded.
“Take us home.”
FALLON HAD ACQUIRED A brand-new luxury sedan, sleek and black. The leather on the seats was the softest thing I’d ever felt. It still had the dealer sticker on it. It was fun to think of the Fabricator bleeding himself in order to steal a car.
As we drove, things got worse. At first the roads were relatively empty. After a half hour, the traffic on the other side of the divider, heading away from the city, started to get heavy. Another ten minutes, it was wall-to-wall cars. Another five and people had gotten out of their cars to walk. Fallon drove calmly, expertly. A man who was completely at home with any kind of machine. He steered up onto dividers, embankments, gently easing the car over all manner of obstacles, weaving in and out of abandoned cars, rubble, the burning remnants of a school bus.
Another ten minutes after that, we started to see the smoke.
Getting into the city was easy. Normal. The streets were oddly deserted. No one on the sidewalks, no cars moving at all. The smoke was always on the horizon. We never got any closer to it, twin pillars of black air swirling upwards and out. I dozed. At one point there were three or four people around the car, screaming and pounding on the glass. I dozed again. Then we were picking our way slowly through the remnants of a blown-out building, like a bomb had gone off.
All over the world, Renar’s Rite had reached out and started chain reactions. Designed to spill blood that the Rite would then absorb until it had enough. Since we’d broken it, all it had done was kill a bunch of people to no fucking purpose.
We turned a corner and the car stopped with a jerk. I sat forward. The three of us stared at a dozen dead bodies in the middle of the street, the blood cold and useless and everywhere. Fallon idled there and then silently backed up.
By the time he’d wormed his way to the burned-out husk of Hiram’s apartment, we’d begun to see some people. Dazed. Coming out of their homes for the first time in hours. Most of the city seemed untouched, but you saw it in everyone’s faces. For a few hours, the whole population had gone crazy. And might again at any moment.
Mags helped me from the car. Fallon rolled down the passenger-side front window.
“I will be in touch, yes?”
I turned my head limply and looked at him. “Why?”
He shrugged, putting the car into gear. “To make amends.”
We watched the car drive off. Stood listening to the endless wail of sirens, distant, dopplered.
“You Vonnegan?”
Mags spun, crouching into a defensive, snarling posture. I turned like a balloon in the wind, helped along by the stiff breeze Mags caused.
Sitting on the front steps of Hiram Bosch’s former home was a tall woman, skin a deep tan,
hair a bright, unnatural red I could see with a glance was magically maintained. She was wearing what looked like a man’s suit, blue and pin-striped. Her hair was pulled back in a fiery tail that reached down to her ass. She was sitting there like the steps were perfectly comfortable, legs stretched out, one arm draped along the cracking stone.
Her hands were covered in familiar scars, most of them white and old, long healed.
“Who are you?” I asked.
She smiled. She was quite pretty, somewhat older than me. She unfolded her long frame and stood up, leaning forward in a stiff, formal bow and extending a hand. Mags looked at it like it might be made of death.
“Melanie Billington. Call me Mel.”
I reached out and took her hand. I wanted nothing more than a bed and several days of silence. “Good to meet you, Mel. But listen, just a few hours ago I was dead, and this is where my gasam died a few days ago, so can we do whatever this is another time?”
I realized as I spoke that this wasn’t home anymore. I’d made Fallon take me to the wrong place. Hiram’s had been home for years when I hadn’t been allowed to stay there. Now I could go in if I wanted, but it was a wreck. There was nothing in it for me.
I had to go make my own place.
She smiled, straightening up. “I know, boyo. It’s in the air. On the grapevine. Your name, what you’ve done. And that dried-up old bitch is still alive, and plenty of the other ustari are willing to work with her, to try again.” She shrugged. “Live forever, kill the rest of us. I am here, like a lot of other idimustari soon will be,” she said, spreading her arms, “to help.”
I blinked. “To help with what?”
Her face shifted to quizzical. “The War, Mr. Vonnegan. To help you with the War.”
II.
NEGOTIATOR
30. WHEN THE SUICIDE STEPPED ONTO the train, I thought, Shit, things are about to get interesting.
It had been a long six months.
The subway had stopped four times already today between stations, just grinding to a shuddering halt, lights flickering, air-conditioning clicking on, off, on, off. The walls and seats and floors and ceiling of the car were covered in bright red graffiti that made no immediate sense. All of the metal handholds and trim felt greasy, damp.
“Fuck,” Mags whispered, shifting his weight in the seat and crossing his arms. I could hear the seams of his jacket straining.
“We’ll make it,” I said.
“The fuck we will.”
I shrugged. “We couldn’t take the streets. What else were we going to do?”
He snorted. The snort translated to a stream of vulgarity and Mags’s usual declaration that a man in my position should get a few dozen Bleeders together and fly wherever he wanted. Mags was a proud mama when it came to me. For myself, I’d gotten comfortable with bleeding others when it felt necessary. Flying around the city didn’t exactly feel necessary.
We were drifting along the track, not going any faster than a healthy man could stroll, hands laced behind his back, thoughts on his mind; still, we were moving. The way the trains were—the way everything was now—this was better than nothing. We’d speed up a bit after Ninety-Sixth street, I thought. We were in the first car, where the conductor sat in his tiny booth, and could watch the dark tunnel scrolling towards us a frame at a time.
I ran my gaze over the other passengers. An unshaved old pensioner across the aisle from me was reading a print newspaper. The headline read FORTY DEAD IN FERRY MASSACRE.
I’d heard that one. Two uniformed police officers had boarded the ferry to New Jersey, waited until the boat was in the middle of the river, and started shooting. First the captain and crew, then the passengers. One of them had put the throttle all the way up, and the boat had eventually crashed into the Hoboken piers and caught fire.
Good times. They were all good times, these days.
At that same moment, four hundred and thirteen residents of Gdańsk poisoned themselves, leaving behind a single note that read, in full, Reka reke myje, with no other comment. In Ulan Bator, two dozen pregnant women leaped into the Tuul and drowned themselves. In Kira Town, a renegade army unit cut off the heads of two thousand men and women, then motored off, having taken nothing, left no message, and gained no military advantage.
In London the day before, sixty-four percent of the police force called in sick. There were no demands, no labor negotiation. People took the opportunity to riot and set fire to all those cars they’d been meaning to see burn. The next day, all those cops showed up for work like nothing had happened.
In Florence, two hundred homicides in the past two weeks.
In DC, thirteen suspicious fires. Yesterday. In New York, in spite of, or because of, the chaos, people kept coming. The city was bursting, and the people left their mark on everything they touched. Graffiti was everywhere, most of it painted, some of it scratched into the glass. I didn’t understand most of it: symbols and exaggerated lettering. It was growing over everything in the city, some of it interesting, even artistic. The subway car we were riding in was like being inside one of those caves in France where they found the paintings: A dozen assholes had already made their mark and retired, confident these tags would see them remembered by history.
We rumbled into the Ninety-Sixth Street station in slow motion, gliding in as if the air had gotten thick, blunting momentum. A handful of people stood up to exit, a handful slouched on the platform waiting to get in. The doors opened, and there was the usual confusion as people tried to push in and people tried to push out. There was a weariness to the whole enterprise. No one got upset, no fights were sparked. There was just desultory shoving and mild chaos.
And then, just as the doors cleared and were about to shut, the Suicide stepped onto the car, the doors sliding closed right behind him. I knew what he was because he was wearing the uniform: all black, unlaundered. A sweatshirt with a hood, denim pants, a T-shirt. Head shaved, apparently by his own hand, in the dark, with a dull blade. His skull was scabbed and clumps of hair sprouted here and there like mold. Bags under his eyes, skinny and nervous. Hands pushed into the pockets of the sweatshirt over his belly.
“Fuuuuck,” Mags groaned in recognition.
The Suicides were the echoes of Mad Day, the ripples lapping against the far shore of time. The world had gone insane for forty-eight hours. Millions had died. There were cults, or loose groups of them, though they weren’t really organized. They just all shared a deep belief that the only thing that had gone wrong on Mad Day was not enough people had died. That it was everyone’s duty to try and rectify this failing of the human race. One at a time, if necessary.
I thought, Fucking hell, that bitch Renar did her damage, didn’t she?
“We’re not gonna make it,” Mags complained.
“Sure we will.”
“She’s waiting.”
I sighed. I wasn’t sure why we going in the first place. Mel Billington took herself so fucking seriously, and she was always talking about the War. There wasn’t any war that I could see, at least not between mages. She was fucking exhausting. “One fucking asshole isn’t going to stop us, okay?”
The train shuddered back into motion. The Suicide stayed near the door, swaying uncertainly.
These guys really had a thing for trains. Jumping in front of them, mostly, which made this one’s decision to climb on board and share our ride kind of suspicious. Like maybe he wasn’t fully committed. Since he and his friends were almost single-handedly fucking up the public transportation in Manhattan, everyone riding with us knew what he was on sight, and all were doing the grim calculus on what effect he might have on their commute.
“That fucker makes a move,” Mags whispered fiercely, rolling up his sleeve, “I’m going to shut him up.”
I thought about pointing out to Mags that bleeding and casting on that idiot would more than likely slow us down even more—suicide they were used to, giant Indians casting spells, not so much—but the ensuing argument exhausted
me before it began. And Mags had improved. After years of learning at a snail’s pace, something had changed in him. He was actually remembering things these days. He wasn’t exactly spinning his own rituals, but he was a better mage than he’d ever been before, in my experience.
The Suicide was leaning back against the sliding door with his hands pushed into his black pants, his head down. He looked defeated. Ruined. It was surprising how easily you could be pushed down the stairs, wake up one day and have nothing. Mags was staring at the kid from under his amazing unibrow, like he was summoning the mental energy to shoot a heat ray out of his eyes.
When the subway ground to a halt for the fourth time midtunnel, the lights flickering off, the whole car groaned in unison.
Then, silence.
Then, like steam escaping from a volcano named Mageshkumar: “Fuuuuck.”
He’d dressed up for the occasion, his suit a bit too tight, as they always were, the seams straining to contain his bearlike frame. He always forgot to unbutton his jacket when he sat down, so it bunched up in front of him.
Me, I was in my usual black suit, shiny from wear, too loose and wrinkled.
I heard the Suicide say, “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention for a moment?” and Mags was up out of his seat.
The Suicides all had a patter, a short speech. The exact words differed depending on what kind of Suicide you were dealing with. Some of them were on target and specifically mentioned Mad Day, how it was “the beginning of the end of the world.” Some had other specifics, personal tragedies or peculiar maths they’d worked out. Most of them were parroting what someone else had said or written. Some of the Suicide Cults had gotten big, with gangs of people in their black hoodies wandering the big cities of the world, urging everyone to follow them into the grave. Urging everyone to read the signs (from God, from the cosmos, from whateverthefuck) and get in line.
