Source

by King, R. L.

  “That sucks,” she said sympathetically. “At least you’re getting the ‘full Burning Man experience.’” Her tone and finger quotes suggested that she didn’t think any more of such a thing than he did. “I’ve heard that especially for your first time, you’re cheating if you don’t sleep in a tent and try to live as simply as you can.” She snorted. “No, thanks. I like my creature comforts. And speaking of creature comforts—” She motioned for him to sit down on the sofa, opened the small refrigerator, and pulled out a couple of frosted brown bottles. She popped the tops off both, handed him one and sat down next to him, holding hers up. “To—being dust-free.”

  He chuckled. “And proper showers,” he added, clinking his bottle into hers. He took a long drink—it was cold and tasted wonderful. “So,” he said, “You work in an office, do you?”

  She nodded. “Insurance. I’m kind of an office manager. I make sure everybody’s doing what they’re supposed to be doing and that we don’t run out of staples and copier paper. All very exciting. What about you?”

  “I’m a teacher,” he said.

  “Really? What do you teach?”

  “Sort of—anthropology,” he said. He wasn’t sure how ‘Occult Studies’ would go over; even if he wasn’t in disguise, women tended to look at him funny and find reasons to vacate the premises when he admitted his real area of expertise. He usually tried to keep it vague until he and the woman in question had a chance to determine if they were compatible.

  “Interesting,” she said, leaning back and looking out the RV’s front window. She took a drink of her beer and reached up to flip off the overhead light. “That’s better,” she said. “The lights in this thing are a little harsh. Plus everybody can see in unless you put the curtains up around the windows.”

  Stone didn’t mind at all. He leaned back and smiled. This was the first chance he’d had to relax since Wendy and Rosie had happened by his tent. He wasn’t fooling himself: that whole thing had been nothing more than a nice, mutually pleasurable diversion, and he wouldn’t have let it go much further even if Verity and the others hadn’t blundered in on it. Rosie and Wendy had been far too young and—well, uninhibited—for him. But with Tanya he felt more comfortable: she was closer to his age, definitely attractive, and seemed intelligent. He just wished he could shake the feeling that he’d met her somewhere before.

  He turned to her, studying her as best he could in the dimness without being obvious about it. She had short blonde hair, a strong face, and wore a long-sleeved, scoop-neck knit shirt and tight jeans. He decided he might be getting her confused with Sharra, as the two of them did share a general resemblance. That had to be it.

  She leaned in closer, snuggling against his shoulder. “This is nice,” she said. She reached out and tentatively ran her hand over his chest, on top of his shirt. When he didn’t object, she increased the intensity. “Are you sure you can’t stay for a while? I’d like to have something fun to remember the trip by when I go back home.”

  “For a little while,” he murmured, setting his bottle down and leaning in to kiss her. She met him halfway, her arms going around him as she pulled him into an embrace.

  “Hold on,” she said, her voice soft and husky. “Let me put some music on.” She got up and went to the RV’s console, where she fiddled with something with her back to him. After a moment, the soft sounds of a mellow band he’d never heard flowed into the small space. “There,” she said. She resumed her place, arranged herself on the seat, and slipped her arms around him again. “Better?”

  “Mmmm,” he agreed, leaning in to resume the kiss.

  She slid her hands under his shirt and began rubbing his back, and after a moment he did the same for her. “Ooh, that feels good,” she whispered. Deftly, she slipped his shirt over his head, then leaned back in so he could resume work on her back.

  Something thumped.

  Stone tightened, stopping in mid-kiss. “What was that?”

  “Nothing,” she murmured, and pulled him toward her. “Noisy neighbors, probably.” She caressed his back, moving her hands up to knead at his shoulder muscles. “Relax…”

  The thumping repeated. Again, Stone stopped. He could swear the sound had come, not from outside the RV, but from beneath it. He thought he even felt a faint movement that time, like someone had kicked the undercarriage. “I definitely felt something,” he said, sitting up straighter and twisting around to face the front windows. “I—”

  He went stiff as something sharp jabbed into him high up on his back. He whipped around, confused. “What was—”

  Tanya was still smiling, but it wasn’t a pleasant smile anymore. Her eyes glittered in the dim light, her expression coldly amused. “Damn,” she said. “I was hoping to wait ’til I was fucking your brains out—it would have been more fun that way. But this will have to do.”

  He glanced down, noticed the hypo in her hand. He blinked, then again. Already he felt his brain growing oddly fuzzy, dissociated, and warm. “I don’t—”

  “You don’t know what’s going on,” she said, nodding as if in understanding. “That’s okay, Alastair.” She emphasized the name with a snide drawl. “Because I do, and that’s all that matters.”

  Her hand shot out and snatched the pendant around his neck, ripping it free and flinging it aside. His illusionary disguise dropped instantly.

  “You—know—” He swayed a little, catching himself on the edge of the sofa.

  “Who you are? I do. And I’ll bet you have no idea who I am. But you should, before I kill you.” She slid her sleeves back to reveal the burn scars and the intricate magical tattoos on her forearms. “You might remember me from that old bitch’s house in Los Gatos. It’s been a while, but you killed my friends, remember? And I killed your pathetic boy apprentice. I seduced him, too. I fucked that kid blind, and he loved it. Men are so easy to manipulate. You all think with your cocks.”

  Stone blinked again. His brain was going from merely warm to hot. Sweat trickled down his forehead. And—things were oozing from the RV’s walls. “You—”

  “Me,” she said, nodding. “Trin, if you never got the name.” She took a step back, grinning. “Oh, Stone, it’s going to feel so good to kill you. But not yet. Not until the drug takes effect. Don’t want to waste any of that lovely fear…”

  His breath came faster. When she grinned, her jaw unhinged and dropped halfway down her chest, revealing multiple rows of pointed teeth and a questing, green, bifurcated tongue that swept back and forth like the head of a snake. The tattoos on her forearms began to crawl up toward her chest, and the things leaking from the walls converged on her, pooling at her feet.

  He screamed. He couldn’t help it. Heart pounding, brain on fire, he whipped his head around to locate an exit, but the only door was blocked by what looked like a mound of ambulatory intestines, dripping with gleaming clots of bright red gore.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, her voice sounding silky and far away. “Things getting a little hot for you?” Her words came out as visible clumps of writhing gore, spilling down the front of her shirt and dropping with wet little plops to the ground, splashing up bits of goo from the things.

  Stone took a step back and nearly tripped, panting so hard now that his chest hurt. Sweat poured from his forehead, from his chest, from his arms—or he thought it was sweat. When he glanced down, though, he gasped: his chest was covered in blood, and more ran down every second. He screamed again.

  His thoughts were barely coherent—he struggled to organize them, to understand what he was seeing, to deal with the situation before it was too late. But the pain increased, burning at the inside of his body like poison flames. The freakish thing in front of him with the unhinged jaw and the snakelike tongue laughed, moving closer to him, raising clawed hands toward his neck—

  What he did next, he didn’t do by conscious thought. There wasn’t any conscious thou
ght left in him any longer as the drug coursed through his veins and claimed any reason or rationality he might have left. All there was now was the pain, and the creature, and the things.

  He lashed out, pointing both hands at the creature and shrieking out some string of what sounded like gibberish. Energy coursed from him, augmented by the power of ten converging ley lines. For the space of less than a second the real world returned: just long enough for him to see the look of shock on the creature’s—

  (the woman’s)

  (Trin’s)

  —face before the power hit her and threw her into the back of the tiny space with enough force to dent the wall.

  He didn’t wait to see what happened next. Flailing his arms to clear out the mound of intestines blocking the exit, he threw himself through it, flung open the door, and ran into the night.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Friday - Saturday

  Verity arrived back at the campsite an hour or so before dawn to find Jason already there.

  “Find anything?” he asked. He sat in a chair next to the dying fire, drinking a beer and looking dejected. Sharra had put her book away and dozed in her lounge chair.

  Verity sighed. “Not a damn thing. I checked out all the places where I saw signs of magic, but unless I’m really mistaken, I don’t think any of them are Evil. Couple of old people, some kids getting drunk and partying—I just don’t think they’re anything but what they look like.” She held up the map. “I marked where they are if you guys want to take a look too, but—” She spread her hands helplessly. “I got nothin.’”

  “Me neither,” Jason said. “Not surprised in my case, though, since I don’t have a fucking idea what I’m looking for.”

  “Where’s Dr. Stone?” Verity glanced around the camp. “He already gone to sleep?” That seemed odd to her, since today was the last day they had to find the Evil before the Burn.

  “He’s not back yet,” Sharra said, awakened by their conversation. “I’ve been here all night, and I haven’t seen him since he stopped in a couple hours ago.”

  Verity exchanged glances with Jason. “I wouldn’t worry too much yet,” Jason said. “Maybe he’s on to something, or he met somebody and he’s having a sleepover. If he’s not back in a couple hours, we should probably go see if we can find him.”

  Verity nodded, but she didn’t have a good feeling about this. “Guess I’ll try to get a little sleep, then, and wait making breakfast till he gets back,” she said. “What if we don’t find anything?”

  Sharra shrugged. “If they’re here and we don’t find ’em, then I guess we’ll just have to spread out and keep our eyes open during the Burn. Maybe we can borrow walkie-talkies from somebody and keep in touch. And we can watch for magic, too. If Alastair’s right about them doing some kind of enormous ritual, it’ll light up on magical sight once they get it going. We can track it that way.”

  “Yeah, that’s true,” Verity admitted, brightening a bit. “I don’t like having to react instead of knowing ahead of time, but at least it’s better than nothing.”

  “And there’s always the chance they’re not here at all,” Jason reminded them.

  “That’s not a good thing, though,” Verity said. “If they’re not here, they’re somewhere else, and we don’t know where.”

  Jason didn’t answer that.

  Stone ran.

  He didn’t know which way he was running, and he didn’t care. His head was on fire, with horrific images closing in on him from all sides. He dodged monsters, hideous shadowy things that loomed into his field of view and then slid away to this side or that. Some of them he couldn’t dodge; he slammed into them and then scrambled back to his feet, ignoring—or in some cases not even hearing—the angry protests. Once, he couldn’t stop in time and caromed off the side of some large lumbering beast with skin as tough as metal. He fell backward and would have smashed his head on the hard-packed ground if writhing tentacles hadn’t reached out and seized him, hauling him back upright. Voices—muddy, indistinct, as if speaking to him from deep underwater—rumbled in his ears, but he couldn’t understand what they were saying. Shrieking, he tore himself free of the tentacles’ grasp again and threw himself headlong forward, his gaze jerking around in increasing desperation as he sought a clear path that would take him away from the crowd.

  The sun was just beginning to poke over the horizon. In the center of a sprawling camp composed of two small campers, one threadbare RV sporting a hand-painted Grateful Dead logo on the back, a VW van held together with primer and Bondo, and three heavily patched, embroidered, and painted tents, a small group of people circled a flickering campfire, their hands joined, their faces turned upward toward the sky. They had done this every morning since they’d arrived: it was a shared ritual to greet the dawn, connect with each other, and enjoy a communal meal before heading off to do whatever they had planned for the day.

  They had just completed their prayer of greeting and were breaking their circle to begin preparing breakfast when a loud cry sounded from somewhere nearby. Before they could get their bearings on where it was coming from, a ragged figure hurtled into the middle of their camp, arms flailing. It stopped, revealing itself to be a tall, dark-haired man clad only in shorts and combat boots. Eyes wide in terror, expression crazed, he took them all in with a swift glance, tried to change direction, tripped over his own feet, and collapsed in a heap, still shrieking and flailing as if something pursued him from out of the depths of hell.

  The group’s leader, a heavyset mid-forties woman named Raina, was the first to react. She hurried over next to the man, her eyes darkening with concern. “Bring a light,” she said, and in a moment someone crouched down next to her with a lantern.

  The man’s pale skin was slicked with sweat and streaked with dust. His hands and knees were scraped and bleeding, and his chest rose and fell so fast with his harsh breathing that Raina feared he would pass out. His eyes, wide open, bloodshot, and staring, fixed on her face and he screamed again, trying to crab-scrabble backwards and out of the ring of observers.

  “He’s trippin’ hard,” said one of the others. “Bad scene.”

  Raina nodded. She’d seen this kind of thing before—far too many times in her lifetime. She was no stranger to recreational drugs—in fact, her entire group had enjoyed pleasant evenings featuring marijuana and mushrooms over the past few days, and considered such indulgences to be an integral part of their efforts to commune with the Universe—but she also knew the value of moderation, and of being aware of exactly what you were putting in your body and where it came from. This man, whoever he was, was no youngster: it was hard to tell since his face was so contorted with pain, but he looked like he was in his thirties—plenty old enough to know what he was doing if he was a habitual user. There was no time to worry about that now, though, she decided.

  “Take him inside, would you please?” she asked two burly, bearded men about her age. “See if you can find any ID on him, so we can try to figure out where he came from.”

  The two nodded and bent down, but when they got near the man he shrieked again and increased his effort to try to get away from them. He threw himself down and waved his hands in their direction, yelling something unintelligible, maybe in a foreign language. The two men each grabbed one of his arms and pulled him up, gently but firmly; he fought hard, but wasn’t strong enough to overcome them. They dragged him, still shrieking, inside one of the tents.

  Raina watched them go, sighing. Another woman, younger, in a floaty floral sundress, stood next to her. “Should I go try to find a doc?”

  “Not yet,” Raina said. “Let me take a look at him. We’ve all dealt with bad trips. Maybe if we can get him calmed down, he can tell us what he took and we can deal with it without having to involve anybody else. No need to get him in trouble.”

  She looked across the playa at the sky. Despite the light from the
sunrise, a large darkening patch was visible off in the distance. “Besides,” she said, pointing, “looks like a dust storm is brewing. Big one, from the look of it. Don’t want to get caught out in that.”

  The other woman nodded and hurried off to gather and secure their gear.

  Trin awoke, her body wrapped in an awkward fold around the foot of the bed in her RV. For a moment she couldn’t remember where she was or how she got there, and every muscle and most of her bones throbbed.

  The memory came back quickly, though, and her eyes narrowed. Moving with care in case anything was broken, she raised herself to a sitting position.

  Stone.

  Fucking Stone.

  Even after she’d stuck him with the hypo full of Sam’s wonder-drug, he’d still managed to hold it together long enough to tag her with something that hit like a semi truck. If she hadn’t gotten her shield up in time—if they hadn’t been sitting on a metric assload of ley lines to augment her power—she’d be dead now. She was surprised he hadn’t knocked her clear through the wall of the RV. She’d gotten a lot more powerful since she’d last gone up against him—but apparently so had he. She’d underestimated him.

  And where the hell was he, anyway? The drug had definitely affected him—she could tell before he hit her that he was freaked out of his mind with pain and terror. That was probably lucky for her: he’d hit her hard, but his attack hadn’t been focused as well as it could have been. But if he was under the drug’s effects, he should still be here somewhere, maybe passed out at the front of the RV or somewhere inside the camp. She didn’t think he could have gotten far.

  She still might have her chance to kill him.

  The thought gave her energy. She heaved herself to her feet, swearing as her back, arms, and head shrieked with warning pain and nausea rocked her. She didn’t think anything was broken, but she was going to hurt for days. One more thing Stone would have to pay for. If she found him now, his death wouldn’t be quick. Or painless.