by John Helfers
“Course not. It’s not all about humanity, is it?” He looked at each of the men in turn. “It’s about white, male humanity. If you ever got rid of the metahumans, you’d just turn on each other again. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women, gays. Anyone who’s different from you in any way.
“Hell, if you got rid of them, you’d start in on the people with brown eyes. Or black hair. Or crooked noses.
“It’s not about preserving rights with people like you. It never is. It’s about preserving power. Yours.”
The men stared wordlessly at Lucky. After a moment, he continued.
“The Edmund Fitzgerald went down because the spear the sailor stole was cursed. Of course, the spear sank with the ship, and it sat at the bottom of Lake Superior for decades before someone finally figured it out and then went to find it.
“Ares Industries got its hands on the damned thing, and somebody there decided that it wasn’t enough to have a cursed spear around. After all, a spear can only affect one person—or ship, or building, or whatever—at a time. The Ares eggheads set their sights higher than that.
“So they ground it up, mixed it in with some nanites, and aerosolized the whole mess.”
Lucky let that sink in for a minute.
“You’re fucking nuts.” The hatchet-faced man folded his hand. The chips sat untouched in the middle of the table.
“Ever heard of anthrax?”
The men squirmed in their seats.
“People hear the word ‘anthrax,’ and they break into cold sweats and then reach for their ultra-antibiotics. Remember the attack in Sacramento last year? Killed three hundred orks before it was done.”
Lucky stared at the silent men. “Yeah, I expect you do.
“The funny thing about anthrax is that it’s usually harmless. Cattle everywhere carry it. You can pick it up by walking through any pasture. It’s more common than cow pies, and only about as annoying as stepping in one of them.
“But you refine it and then aerosolize it, and it’s deadly.
“Imagine doing that with a cursed spear.”
The men remained quiet. The white-haired man ran his tongue along the inside of his lips as if he had something to say, but he kept it to himself.
Lucky shrugged. “Wasn’t my idea. I just got mixed up in it.
“Someone else from inside Ares got wind of the plan and hired me and my team of runners to go in and put an end to it. They’d lost the argument in the boardroom, it seems, but they weren’t willing to just let it rest.
“Of course, they didn’t exactly tell us everything about what we were after. Just that we had to snatch it and then confirm its destruction.”
“Everything went smooth as silk at first. Our decker—that’s what we called them back in the days when they still had to jack into a system—he blew through their IC defenses like they were made of toilet paper. Our mage took out most of the security with a nappy-time spell, and I took care of the rest of them with less than a single magazine.”
Lucky’s hand pulled an imaginary trigger as he spoke.
“Then, when we got our hands on the package, it all went to hell. Matrix feedback fried Bones’s brain. Misha’s spells fizzled in his fingers at the exact worst time. My guns jammed.
“I grabbed the package and high-tailed it out of there. The others were already dead. Our rigger scooped me up, and we zoomed away, watching the Soo Locks vanish in the rear-view mirror.
“We would have made it, too, if it hadn’t been for the rain—and that damned moose.
“The damned thing went right through the windshield and crushed Jeremy dead. I sat there, stuck in the shotgun seat, and watched as we spun out of control and smashed into a stand of pine trees.
“The fucking airbags saved my life.”
Lucky closed his eyes and took a moment to collect himself. He pinched the bridge of his nose with his thick, stubby fingers until the screams in his head went away.
When Lucky opened his eyes again, the men were still staring at him, waiting for him to continue.
“The package shattered in the crash. All that dust. It got all over everything. Into everything.
“Everything.
“Me.”
Lucky coughed at the memory, and the men around the table all jumped.
“There’s a reason most people figured I died on that day. The paramedics that showed up to save my life were killed when the damn car exploded just after they pulled me out it. The kind man who stopped to give me a ride to the nearest hospital, he blew a tire on the way out of the parking lot and died in the resultant crash.
“The hospital itself suffered a gas leak shortly after I was admitted. The blast destroyed an entire wing of the place.”
“How?” the white-haired man said. “You—with luck like that, you should be dead a dozen times over.”
“Sure enough,” said Lucky, “and that was just the start of it. It took me a while to twig to just what was going on. I’d taken a number of head injuries, after all. Eventually, though, I figured it out.
“The scientists had gotten it right. They’d turned that single cursed spear into uncountable millions of tiny little curses, and all the ones that hadn’t gotten scattered all over the wreck had worked their way into me.
“I’d become—I am—a living curse. I’m kind of the anti-Midas. Everything I touch turns to shit.”
The men stared at the dwarf. The banker actually edged his chair away from the table.
“It’s all right,” the gunman said. “He hasn’t touched any of us.”
Lucky reached over and picked up a card, then grinned. “True enough,” he said. “But I didn’t have to.”
As he held the card up—the Queen of Hearts—the symbols on its face began to morph. Soon, he held the 2 of Spades.
“The nanites,” the white-haired man whispered.
Lucky tossed the card down on the table and rubbed the moving tattoo on his scalp. The inkiness under his skin leaped toward his touch like iron filings to a magnet.
“They get into anything I touch for more than a few seconds. And then they do the same to anything—or anyone—handling that.”
The gunman snatched up his gun again. “This—this game’s over. I’m through playing around with you, stunty.”
“Go ahead and fight it, kid,” the dwarf said. “Give it your best shot. I’ve been at it for years, and I can’t get it right. I’d love to see someone win.”
“No,” the white-haired man said to the gunman. “Don’t—“
The gunman pulled the trigger. The gun exploded in his hand. He fell to the ground, clutching the raw stump of his wrist for a moment before passing out from the shock.
The banker leaped to his feet, knocking over the tray of chips as he went. He took three steps away from the table before he slipped on one of those chips and went sliding into the plate-glass window that Lucky had been staring out through before. The glass gave way as if the sealants all around it had somehow rotted away, and it and the banker tipped out into the wide-open Chicago night.
The hatchet-faced man snarled like a caged animal. “I don’t believe you,” he said. “This is all just some more of the usual metahuman propaganda you freaks propagate.”
“I went into hiding right after I became cursed,” Lucky said. “The sorts of things that happen to the people I come into contact with, they’re not pretty. I can barely stand to watch.
“For assholes like you however, I’m happy to make an exception.”
Lucky stepped onto the green felt in front of him, then beckoned the man toward him, taunting him to try to knock the dwarf from his perch. The hatchet-faced man lost his temper and lunged straight for Lucky.
The dwarf swung a meaty fist out and smashed the hatchet-faced man’s nose flat. He felt the bones inside shatter and go straight back into the man’s brain. The man fell to the floor with a sickening thud.
“Wouldn’t your curse have taken care of him?” the white-haired man said.
&nb
sp; “Eventually,” said Lucky. “But who wants to wait for something like that when handling it yourself is so satisfying?”
“What about me?” the white-haired man said.
“You’re already history. You were dead the moment I came into the room. Just like all the security guards you’ve been waiting on to show up since then.”
The white-haired man clutched as his chest as he broke out into a sick sweat. “My heart.”
“Imagine that,” Lucky said. “What are the chances?”
“But.” The white-haired man gasped. “What about you? Why doesn’t the curse kill you too?”
“Because,” Lucky said as the man collapsed on the table, “that would be letting me off too easy.”
The dwarf got down from the table and strolled toward the door. As he reached it, he looked back over his shoulder at the four dead men. They’d engineered the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of metahumans. They’d have killed Lucky on the spot if they’d had an honest chance—not that he’d given them one.
They’d deserved to die, and he felt good about their deaths.
And more than a little jealous. He’d hoped one of them might have finally been able to release him from his curse. But no such luck.
He spat one last thing back at them as he left the place.
“Lucky bastards.”
Expectations
By Kevin Killiany
Kevin Killiany has been the husband of Valerie for three decades and the father of Alethea, Anson, and Daya for various shorter periods of time. He has written for Star Trek and Doctor Who in addition to several game universes, most notably BattleTech and Mechwarrior. When not writing Kevin has been an exceptional children’s teacher, drill rig operator, high-risk intervention counselor, warehouse grunt, ESL instructor, photographer, mental health case manager and paperboy. Currently Kevin is in family preservation services, is an associate pastor of the Soul Saving Station, and is managing to fit short stories in while working on his third novel. Kevin and Valerie live in Wilmington, North Carolina.
I rolled my left hand against the sidewalk, pushing off with the edge and heel before momentum broke my fingers. Hunching my shoulder, I tucked my chin to my chest and did my best to turn the headlong dive into a semi-controlled tumble. The plascrete pavement rolled up my elbow and across my shoulders as I pulled my Colt Manhunter free.
Ice seared my knee. I saw a flash shot image of slashed slacks and a mist of blood as it swung past my face. Flechette round. Dumb luck or my suit had kept the razor slivers from shredding anything more vital than dermis and capillaries.
I ended my roll flat on my stomach in two fingers of water. Dog kept to his feet, daintily avoiding puddles, as I wrapped both hands around my Manhunter and lined up on—
Nothing.
Or more precisely, a ten-meter-high wall of absolute blackness; flat and unreflecting in the orange glow of the sodium lights.
From the layout of the buildings, the black nothing was covering—or filling—an alley. But it could have been a straight shot to the bowels of the Deep Lacuna for all my eyes could tell me.
Then the scent of the spell reached me and everything became clear.
• • •
Sight is the easiest sense to fool. Folks notice smells, twitch their ears when the sound’s not right, scratch where it itches, and spit out what tastes suspicious, but when it comes to sight, they pretty much run on autopilot.
Which kinda makes you wonder why Fun City spent so much time and effort making their little piece of security look like it was stuck one hundred and twenty years in the past. Don’t get me wrong. I’m as fond of pink stucco as the next guy, and riding in the replica of an antique car with no roof and decorative fins was—in the argot of the illusionary period—neato.
But good as the augmented reality overlays were, they didn’t hide the fundamental wrongness of the picture. A picture made worse by the not-quite-right scent of orange blossoms they were using to not-quite-mask the stench of the Harbor wafting in over their western wall.
Technology’s not magic; this’s good enough for mundanes.
“It’s February. Real orange trees are full of fruit.”
“What?”
I looked at the woman sitting next to me—more like across from me, the back seat of the ground car was that wide—and realized I’d spoken aloud. That happens sometimes when I’m focused out; I forget what I’m doing.
“Talking to myself,” I answered. I patted Dog absently. Dog hated to be touched, but the sight of the gesture—man patting loyal twelve-kilo companion—had a universally calming effect.
The woman, who had introduced herself as Rachel, tilted her head to one side, weighing whether she was satisfied with that. The driver skewered me with a gimlet glance; no trust there. These folks had me on constant scan, they knew I wasn’t transmitting. But I reminded myself that this wasn’t Pasadena, and the local mundanes were suspicious of folks who weren’t so mundane talking to themselves.
“My father worked in the groves,” I lied by way of disarming explanation. “It’s the wrong time of year for orange blossoms.”
“Ah.” Rachel’s teeth flashed white against her dark skin as she smiled. She had an exotic Afro-Latina look—more striking than pretty—and all of her original equipment. Rare in LA. Athletic build beneath the expensive suit, and strong features that I bet looked damned formidable when she …
Focus, Bastion.
So focus I did. Ignoring the very real cloud of approving pheromones being produced right next to me, I spread my senses wide.
My eyes, least trusted of my senses, reported we were passing through a suburban merchants’ district, circa 1959. Neatly dressed people—most in period costumes marred by chrome—strolled beneath manicured trees, admired vintage shop displays, or noshed beneath bright awnings in sidewalk cafes. Surface readings were smiling faces, clean streets, cops who waved—even the squirrels looked happy. Everything so saccharine I felt my teeth rotting.
Speaking of teeth, I counted the teeth-grating “silent” buzz of no less than twenty-seven drones industriously surveilling our block of boulevard. A lot of beautiful people were sharing the fascinating minutia of their daily lives with the grateful world.
Pasadena has it’s P2.0, of course, the constant circulation of personal broadcasting and voyeurism that used up Dog knew how much bandwidth, but nothing on the scale of Fun City. In Pasadena the idea that P2.0 was more addictive than BTL was a wry-smile joke. In Fun City the addiction was pretty much a given; if not a religion. Everyone seemed to be trying to point their best profile in all directions at once.
For a moment one of the automated spy-eyes—doing a passable impression of a curious hummingbird—dipped out of the general swarm to pace the car. A cherry-red replica of a 1957 Cadillac convertible cruising majestically down the boulevard must have triggered its “this might be interesting” circuit. The car flashed the drone a signal I only imagined I heard and the roving eyeball turned away; no doubt scrubbing any images in the process.
My canine nose, as always, gave me more information than my ears. I closed my eyes and lifted my chin as I sampled the breeze. Beneath the Harbor stink and the ersatz orange blossom and the omnipresent electric ozone of the AR skins was the faint frisson of spell work. Basic security wards on the businesses for the most part, with more than one illusion—pretty much a staple in the land where image was all. Nothing—
A stench of fear. Bitter sweat and raw emotion flooded my senses for half a second and then dissolved.
“What?”
Rachel’s question tipped me to the fact that I’d shed my relaxed pose. Ol’ gimlet eyes was watching me, too, having evidently puzzled out a use for the mirror glued to the windshield.
“Nothing significant,” I said, glancing down at Dog’s relaxed form for confirmation. “We just passed close to something.”
“Magic?”
My ears pricked at the note of alarm beneath her casual tone, but I dis
missed it. Low-level paranoia over matters magic was par for a mundane who’d hired an occult investigator. Anybody who paid my opening highball price up front without hesitation had to be scareder than most.
Gimlet’s ever-watchful gaze regarded me from the mirror. I hoped the car was on autopilot.
“Someone having a very bad day.” I patted Dog again, pretending I didn’t notice his reproachful glare. “Nothing involving us.”
“Us?”
“Nothing involving me, anyone I care about, or anyone in the car.”
I braced for follow-up questions. A lot of folks who don’t use magic believe the trideo myths and expect mages to “read” spells in a glance, discerning everything from its purpose to the shoe size of the caster.
But Rachel just nodded and absently copied my gesture, stroking Dog’s back.
I shrugged apologetically, but Dog was having none of it.
Gimlet caught the wheel when it began turning, belatedly restoring the illusion he was driving as the Cadillac navigated a narrow opening framed by signs warning us not to enter. I had a fleeting impression of a 1950s garage and then we were through the back wall and climbing a steeply curving tunnel that made no effort to emulate the 1950s.
Regularly spaced along the featureless walls were motorized slug guns slaved to armored sensors that followed every curve of our stately spiral. Not terribly sophisticated, but whoever was sitting in the control center would have no trouble from anyone in the tunnel.
Our spiral ascent ended in a round room—high ceilinged and about thirty meters across—with one of their patented armored gun cams at each compass point. The car stopped in the middle of the room, facing floor-to-ceiling metal doors flanked by two human guards in light armor.
A tall specimen with dead white dreadlocks stood slightly to one side, somberly resplendent in an ostentatious costume of studded leather and flowing cape. From his elegance and arrogance I took the posing mage for an elf; but when his scent reached me I realized he was just a pretentious human. Noting the martial runes inlaid in ivory and silver along the length of the ebony quarterstaff in his grip, I took a chance and guessed horticulture was not his specialty.
