by Jeff Somers
Fallon sighed, looking around the dark for any sign of Pitr. “I will admit, Mr. Vonnegan, that after so many years, this did start to seem easier. Especially since someone else had done most of the work. But as I said, stopping Mika and her confederates would not have been easy, and carried with it the risk of defeat. I examined the odds, and I made my choice.” He nodded, once, firmly. “Mr. Mageshkumar! Last opportunity!”
Silence greeted us. Good for you, Pitr, I thought. I’d been worried he was going to try something ridiculous and Mags-like by trying to attack the man who was, after all, the most powerful enustari in the world now.
Fallon sighed. “Very well, then.” He looked down at me, his face almost kindly. “Mr. Vonnegan, it has been a pleasure.”
I smirked. “Fuck you.”
He nodded. “Do not move; do not speak.” And though I didn’t feel anything, I knew, with the silver leash around my neck, that I would not be able to.
The blade was sharp and well cared for, and cut me with a gentle nudge from Fallon. He didn’t slit my throat entirely, just precisely opened the carotid artery so that a warm cascade of my blood swarmed out in gentle waves. The shock burned through me, and my nervous system went into instinctive overdrive. But I couldn’t move. I just knelt there, bleeding. I could already feel a tingling drain in the center of my body, that shivery, exhausted feeling I’d once known so well. The feeling of bleeding to death in slow motion. Except this wouldn’t be over the course of weeks or months but minutes.
I knew bleeds. I gave myself two minutes before I lost consciousness. Maybe two more before I was dead. Maybe one more. I was already in pretty sad shape.
Unexpected, horrifyingly, tears welled up. I watched them drop to the concrete floor, where they beaded like the floor had been treated with something, rolling this way and that and mixing with the blood that had begun to drip from me. Nothing had gone according to plan, as usual, but I’d always assumed that when my time came, Pitr would be there. I guessed he was somewhere nearby, but I felt all alone.
I closed my eyes and concentrated and could feel his heartbeat. I’d never had a chance to figure out why I was able to feel him like this. We were linked. Had been since the first time the kurre-nikas had brought him back. Twice that bastard had come back from the dead.
My thoughts were getting slow and heavy. I kept losing track. Breathing was suddenly a lot of fucking trouble.
I slumped on the dirty concrete, bleeding out. I thought that if he could at least keep himself hidden, if he could be smart for one time in his life, Mags would slip away. Fallon was enustari and might be able to track him down. But Fallon didn’t want to use the gas. He had a finite supply in this dead world he’d helped create, and he might decide Pitr was too stupid to worry over and just let him go.
Fallon made a tsk-ing noise with his mouth. “Mr. Mageshkumar!”
Another two heartbeats, echoed with Pitr’s somewhere nearby. I knew I would have fallen over by now if the leash had allowed it.
“Very well,” Fallon said. “Let us see where you are hiding, then.” He closed his eyes and began to recite.
Fallon finished and the spell drew energy from me, and I was so fucking cold all of a sudden, shivering. Shivering so hard my teeth rattled in my head. I opened my eyes slowly, each one heavy as a boulder, their natural state closed. And there was Pitr, standing right next to Fallon. He looked terrified. In one hand he held the Token, clutching it like I had, white-knuckled and shaking. He could have reached out and hit Fallon with it.
In his other hand, he held the gun I’d taken from Detective Stanley in another life, still smeared with the Negotiator’s blood, dead and tasteless.
Fallon remained standing with his eyes shut. When he opened them, he jerked back and barked a single Word—my new favorite Word, I thought dreamily—just as Pitr squeezed the trigger.
And for the third time that I knew of, Pitr Mags died.
I CAME TO LIKE I was buried in snow, light trickling down in photons so big and fat I felt like I could reach up and grab them like globes. For some time I didn’t know if I was awake or alive. I just was. I marveled at the light and the cold and the awful, searing dry pain in my neck and just lay there and marveled and lay there and marveled and there was no time.
The pain in my neck grew worse and worse. It was a rusty, jagged pain, and every time I sipped some air, my breathing shallow and rapid, it swelled up and hurt like hell. And that led to a thought: Fallon had cast off my wound. He’d used the gas I’d been pouring into the air to reveal Pitr’s Glamour, and my wound had scarred up.
The one gift the universe gave back to the Bleeder: It healed the cuts.
The concrete I was lying on was ice-cold and stained black with my blood. Fallon had let me just bleed, wasting it. I assumed he’d intended to take me to the edge of death and then pull me back so he could nurse me back to health to be bled again. Instantly that seemed pretty obvious what he had planned to do. Bleed Pitr and me repeatedly, storing the gas in his fancy Fabrication, so that one day when we finally died he’d have gotten his money’s worth.
I couldn’t stop shivering. I reached up and pulled the silver leash from my neck. It squirmed and hummed against my skin, then seemed to rush away when I dropped it.
A few feet away from me, two upright sets of shoes. Fallon’s were the super-shiny dress shoes, black leather, sturdy black laces, soles like new, without a scratch. Pitr’s were tennis shoes. Duct tape wrapped around them, holding the crumbling rubber soles on. They were muddy and torn. I should have paid more attention to his feet. I should have gotten him new shoes. I could have gotten him a new pair of shoes at any time.
Shaking, I rubbed my dry tongue against my scratchy teeth and began to drag myself towards him. My right arm was still numb and useless, so I had to rely on my left to do all the work, and it seemed to resent this.
My fingernails peeled up. I didn’t have enough blood left to bleed. I weighed a thousand pounds, and progress was slow. My breathing came in short, rapid bursts of hot, dry air. It was all carbon dioxide, in and out. When I was close enough, I grabbed on to Pitr’s feet and used his weight as an anchor, pulling myself towards him, on top of him, until I lay panting on top of him.
I CAME TO LIKE I’d been dipped in glue. My eyes didn’t want to open. My nose was clogged with dried blood, and my mouth had hung open so I could breathe and was so dry my tongue was literally glued to the top of my mouth. I gagged and twitched. It took me a moment to realize I was trying to cough.
When it had passed, I looked down at Pitr.
His eyes were open, and I hated that. Still shaking, I dragged my left hand up and slapped with ragged, bloody fingers at his eyes until I’d managed to drag his lids down. They fluttered back up, making him look half asleep. I decided that was better.
The world was broken. I had broken it.
I rolled off him and found the Token, thrown from him and bounced off the wall, lying in a cold, jelly-like puddle of blood mixed from Fallon and Pitr. As my hand closed around it, the roar of gas filled me. I closed my eyes and remembered the spell I’d tried once to bring him back.
Pulling as hard as I could, I spoke the spell. Felt the power pass through me, making me shiver even harder. Croaking, I spoke the spell again, but my lips and tongue betrayed me, scratchy and dry, and I flubbed the fifth Word. A tiny explosion of the universe’s displeasure tore around the garage. I closed my eyes and barked an incoherent scream.
Then I struggled for a deep breath, my chest feeling tight and compressed, like something heavy was on it, or like a lung had collapsed, and spoke the spell again.
I watched Pitr’s feet, all I could see. I spoke the spell again, and in the middle of it, I dissolved into a paroxysm of coughs, and this time the explosion was more violent, lifting me and the corpses briefly from the floor and smacking us down.
I spoke the spell again. Felt the rush of power directed at Pitr’s body. But there was no twitch, there was no sign of anything
.
I spoke the spell again. I watched his feet for any kind of movement, but there was none.
I started to speak the spell—
I CAME TO IN slow motion, the roar of gas still coursing through me, a chorus of demons screaming from somewhere distant inside of me. I thought I would cry, but I was dry as a desert, and Pitr had died twice before, and recently.
I fell asleep.
58. I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT DAY it was supposed to be, so I’d just randomly started assigning names to the days. I’d started with Monday. Then I’d decided the next day should be called Muddle. I went along that way for a while, then lost track. I’d started over at zero and counted up. I’d lost track a few more times, but I was pretty sure it was somewhere between three hundred and three hundred twenty-five.
I’d taken to walking around everywhere with a scratchy brown blanket wrapped around me like a cloak. I’d found it in Elsa’s apartment and liked it because it didn’t match. Everything else was new and expensive—or had been three years before, when the world had ended—and soulless and designed. The brown blanket was old and dirty, a blanket from the time before blankets were meant to be comfortable. From a time when a blanket would be listed as a prized possession, something you’d fight and cut and scream to hang on to, not something you gave to Goodwill and bought new. Plus, it had ancient old bloodstains on it. It was perfect. It had meant something to that daffy old bitch, and now it meant something to me.
My arm never came all the way back. I started to get feeling a day or so after the end, and could move it, but I’d lost some of the fine motor control, somehow, and dropped things all the time.
I’d buried Pitr on the roof. Buried was the wrong word. I’d built, with the help of the Token, a mausoleum out of stone, fused to the structure and open to the elements on the top. Because Pitr had always liked the sun and the rain, and he’d hated being inside small spaces.
I’d ransacked Elsa’s apartment in slow motion. I tried not to use the Token for everything, reminding myself that I had no way of knowing how much there was, how deep that vein went. You had to imagine I could cast anything I wanted for decades and not exhaust it, but if I had a brilliant idea and found I had wasted too much gas to get it done, I wouldn’t get another shot.
I had the Token. I had the kurre-nikas. I had everything I needed. Except the fucking knowledge.
I’d searched every corner of the apartment. Elsa had been someone, she’d been enustari, she’d built the fucking kurre-nikas in a parking garage. Assuming the fucking thing actually worked and had been built according to the fucking directions in Norwegian or whatever, because what the fuck did I know? I had no fucking education. There had to be something. A cache of Artifacts. A journal with her meticulous notes about building something huge like the kurre-nikas. Something. Anything.
There was nothing but the barna, the jeweled boxes, each, I assumed, containing the insane imprisoned soul of someone Elsa had stolen a body from. And pill bottles, and liquor bottles, and cigarettes. A whole closet filled with cartons of cigarettes, all brands, all varieties. She had created the kurre-nikas, the most complex Fabrication I’d ever seen, from scratch.
Three times a day I ate a can of SPAM and a can of green beans because if I didn’t I would die. Every day I drank a bottle of bourbon or sometimes two because if I didn’t I would die. Every day I spent an hour or four staring out the cracked, starred windows, covered in the dried, flaking guts of gidim, and thought of nothing.
At night, when I invariably couldn’t sleep, listening to the immense emptiness of the world outside the windows, I walked down to the garage level, passing the skeletons I’d named Bob and Boy, and sat in the soft glow of the Fabrication, willing it to tell me how to use it. I’d left Fallon where he was. It no longer smelled.
I wrote spells. I used a phonetic alphabet I’d invented as shorthand. No one but me would be able to understand any of it. I only tested them sometimes, bleeding myself, and the endless scars on my body that had faded during my time as General of the Asshole Army began reassembling, resurfacing, red and angry. I would lose myself in the work, drinking steadily and piecing them together, then scratching out the bullshit and shading them down to a tighter group of sounds. I tried to think big, to come up with huge ideas and make spells for them. I’d spent a few days attempting to come up with something like the kurre-nikas, something that would adjust the whole fucking pattern, but I got lost in the weeds. Where did you even start?
I started talking to myself. Talking to Pitr, really, but I reminded myself that Pitr was gone and I was the only one left. I wandered back and forth in my blanket, having entire conversations with myself. I worked out complex grammars and nested reaction loops. I invented new approaches to old problems. From memory, I recorded every line of the Biludha-tah-namus that I could remember from my time in the murder machine at Renar’s mansion, trying to puzzle out the mechanics of that Ritual. I figured since the tah-namus played with the very bones of reality, making the impossible possible, I might learn something I could apply to understanding the kurre-nikas. Somewhere deep inside both things was a fundamental concept, a technique, a trick that Fallon and Elsa and Renar had learned. Something I’d never heard of, because I’d had the equivalent of a third-grade education in magic.
I let my beard grow. It was a mistake, but every day I took pleasure in not correcting it.
Fallon had been carrying a collection of Fabrications and Artifacts in his pockets. I didn’t recognize any of them or have any idea what they did. I organized them on the kitchen counter and thought that eventually I’d make a try at them, see what they did. But seeing as I was one of a handful—maybe—of people left in the world, or maybe the only person left, who knew, I didn’t feel a strong need for weaponized Fabrications. And I doubted Fallon had a Reset the Universe button mixed in there.
Sometimes I went out and wandered. I took the stairs. I saw no need to waste blood, my own or the phantom sufferings of a million people in some other dimension. And I needed the exercise. So I walked down, saying hello to Bob and Boy, and wandered the streets. The skeletons didn’t bother me anymore. And it didn’t matter if I got lost. I had the Token for emergencies, and there were a million places to sleep.
I found interesting things. Signs that the tah-namus had taken long enough for some people to see what was happening. People banded together in unusual places: public buildings, temples. Skeletons clasping each other, holding on to each other. Not many examples. I assumed it had been fast but not instantaneous. Some people had seen their neighbors burning up in an eldritch flame, being sucked dry in nanoseconds by a force they had never been taught existed, and they’d clawed their way to each other and huddled.
Several miles away, on an elevated road crammed with cars that were, in turn, crammed with skeletons, a single man in an expensive suit lay on the pavement, his bony fingers still curled around the handle of a black suitcase filled with yuan.
Here and there, suicides. People fast enough to get a belt around their neck, or a gun out of a cabinet. People who had beaten Renar, too fast for her ritual. I wondered if they had attained a better fate. If they were more at peace. If it mattered, how you died.
The people didn’t bother me too much. I’d bled enough now, and seen enough people die on my account or for my mistakes. The pets, though, the animals. They bothered me. Pitr rubbing off on me. The cats and the dogs. I could imagine how confused the people had been, how terrified. I couldn’t imagine the animals, how it had seemed to them. When I came across a pet, I got all choked up and wondered if I’d finally just completely lost it, when billions of skeletons didn’t bother me but the dead dogs and cats did.
On what was either day three hundred fifty or three hundred seventy-something, I stood with my blanket clutched around my neck, looking out and counting the windows, when movement, tiny and distant, caught my eye. I stared down at the figure walking along the street for a while, unable to process it. A person. A person, walking
the streets of Shanghai. Another person, alive.
Or at least it looked like a person. It appeared to have two heads.
There was no time to race down the stairs. By the time I made it they might have taken a turn, disappeared into the city. Lost. I didn’t even pause to bleed. I ran to the bedroom and retrieved the gun. I had no idea how many bullets remained or if I was supposed to have kept up some sort of maintenance during all this time. I stuffed the gun into my pocket and raced back to the main part of the apartment, grabbing the Token from its place on the countertop. I whispered the Teleportation spell that was my only gift of enduring value from the Negotiator, and a moment later I stumbled and staggered on the street, having, as usual, appeared about three or four inches above the ground.
The figure was a few blocks away, walking with confident strides, a staff or walking stick in one hand, a large pack strapped to their back. Still holding the Token, the rush of eager, awful energy pushing against my thoughts, I began to walk towards them, waving my arms.
It was a man, average height, older. A man with a monkey on his shoulder, a small humanoid with big eyes and tiny hands who peered at me with a disturbing intelligence that felt somehow malevolent. As the man drew closer, I slowed down, recognition dawning. He wore a heavy military-style coat, but underneath were trousers, a white dress shirt, and red suspenders. When we were close enough to make out each other’s faces, I stopped suddenly. He took the last few feet with imperious, impatient strides.
“Mr. Vonnegan,” Hiram Bosch said through a bushy yellowing beard, his voice a gravelly, rusty instrument as he looked me up and down. “You look . . . precisely as bad as I would have imagined.”
59. “IT IS ASAG, A SUMMONING,” Hiram said, Lighting a cigar and sending a cloud of smoke into the air. “The animal. A demon, of course. Bound to me, paid for in blood.” He closed his eyes. “It offers advice. It has been my sole companion for years now.”
