“She’s the wife of a friend of mine.”
“Figures a girl like that would be taken. It’s not an open relationship, is it?”
Tim looked down at the table and tried to find a delicate way to say Akako’s husband was a woman named Agnes. “She’s, well, she’s not really into men. If you know what I mean.”
Tim was saved from having to attempt to explain any further when Akako returned to the table. Her breasts pressed tight against the American flag decal on the T-shirt; Tim tried not to notice that her nipples stood out on either side of Old Glory. The pink shorts exposed most of her legs, but at least they covered what mattered. Across the table, Old Coyote gaped at her. Tim could see the half-dozen other male truckers—and even a couple of female ones—stared the same way.
“Did you already order?” Akako asked, apparently oblivious to the stares and leers.
“Yeah,” Tim said. “I got what you wanted.”
“Great.” She slid next to him in the booth and then sighed. “Well, now I guess I’d better tell you what’s going on. I suppose the best place to start would be the beginning.”
***
In his classes at Rampart State, Tim had studied quantum mechanics a little bit. That had actually been his worst subject in terms of science, as he’d never really understood the complexities. Ideas like infinite parallel worlds struck him as being like time travel in that it made for better science fiction than science fact.
Next to him in the booth was a case study in quantum mechanics. From what Akako said, she was not from this world. She had been born in a parallel universe. Her world was largely the same as Tim’s, except Japan had colonized most of the United States and become the world’s premier superpower, so that Asians were the majority and whites in the minority.
When she was a teenager, Akako began to hear the voices. At first she thought she was going crazy from the stress of high school. Her parents had taken her for tests at the hospital, but there was nothing physically wrong with her. She’d gone to a psychologist, who suggested she might have schizophrenia.
She finally suffered a nervous breakdown and spent two weeks in a hospital for rest and observation. The doctors hadn’t helped her, but she’d learned to help herself. As she listened—really listened—to the voices, she began to understand they weren’t other personalities within her. The voices she heard were actually other versions of her in parallel universes. They came in both sexes and in all ages from a one-year-old boy to a ninety-year-old woman.
Akako discovered she could not only hear voices, but she could receive other sensory input from them as well. She could touch what they touched, smell what they smelled, and see what they saw. In turn, the others could do the same with her.
When it first began, she identified ten others. That number continued to multiply until she could finally contact two hundred twenty-six others. She—and the others—theorized there were many, many more out there, perhaps an infinite number.
They all had one thing in common: the name Red. Akako’s name meant ‘red’ in Japanese. There was a Rouge, Rojito, Rot, Rood, Rosso, and Vermelho among others. Those whose names didn’t literally translate as Red, usually had something that related to it as a nickname. So that was how they began to refer to themselves, as the Reds.
Once she got out of the hospital, Akako settled into a relatively normal life; she learned to control and hide her connection to the Reds. She went on to college to major in English Literature. When she was a graduate student, she met an assistant professor named Aggie Joubert. They fell madly in love and married two weeks later.
The marriage didn’t last long. A drunk driver killed Aggie on his way home three months later. To make things worse, Akako had been pregnant with their first child. She miscarried a week after Aggie’s funeral.
As she wallowed in despair, a miracle changed Akako’s life forever. The Red in Tim’s world, a teenage boy named Red, died. For the slightest of moments there was a tear in the fabric of reality. A voice guided Akako through this tear, into Tim’s world, where she woke up in Agnes Chiostro’s basement.
“And you know the rest,” Akako said to Tim. “Aggie and I fell in love again and we’ve been together since then.”
Tim glanced across the table at Old Coyote, who had been listening with rapt attention while he sipped at his coffee. “That is a hell of a story,” the old trucker said. “But it don’t explain how it was you came dropping out of the sky.”
“No, I guess it doesn’t,” Akako said. “That happened a few days ago in your time. But it’s been ten years for me.”
The way Akako explained it didn’t make any more sense than the rest of it. A group of assassins wanted to kidnap Akako’s daughter Renee, so Akako and Renee had gone to the Milton School for Girls, where a group of witches was supposed to protect them. Except that the leader of the assassins was herself a witch—Aggie’s thought-to-be-dead sister Sophie.
Sophie and some of her assassins had snuck into Akako and Renee’s room at the Milton School for Girls, where they stayed with a witch named Ms. Chiu. With a spell, Sophie transported Akako back to her rightful universe, along with Ms. Chiu. Except they didn’t emerge at the same point in time; Akako had gone back ten years, to when she was thirteen years old. As for Ms. Chiu, she had become Akako’s ten-year-old sister Aiko.
“I had to relive those years all over again,” Akako said with a sad shake of her head. Despite how much she wanted to change things, especially about her relationship with the Aggie of her world, she could do nothing. Everything played out exactly the same; she almost took a backseat within her own mind.
As for Ms. Chiu, she had disappeared a little at a time. At first she had been the same as Akako remembered, with all of her memories intact. Over the first few weeks she began to adopt Aiko’s mannerisms. The memories were the last to go; the process worked in reverse with her newest memories erased first.
Over a period of two weeks, Aiko acted immature for her age. She forgot how to ride a bike. She could no longer read. She threw tantrums in the store if she didn’t get something she wanted. She began to soil herself in public. For two days—much to her parents’s horror—she curled up on her bed; she wailed incoherently and sucked her thumb. “Then she was gone,” Akako said. The next morning Aiko had woke up back to normal, Ms. Chiu completely erased from her mind.
Akako might have met the same fate if not for her connection to the Reds. There was one in particular who was there even when Akako couldn’t hear the rest. She was a little girl of about eight years old with red hair.
Her name was Joanna.
***
When Akako said the girl’s name, Tim nearly slipped under the table as his body went numb. There could be no doubt in his mind it was the same Joanna who had come to him in his dream and told him to go to Rampart City. The same Joanna who had said she would send someone to help him once he got there.
“You’re the one she meant,” Tim said. “You’re the one who’s supposed to help me.”
“Yes. When the rift opened like it did the last time when I came here, Joanna brought me to her house.”
“To her sandbox?”
“Yes. That’s her portal between the other dimensions. Instead of going back to Aggie’s basement four years ago, I ended up here.”
“Falling like a shooting star,” Old Coyote said. That he hadn’t run away in terror or laughed at the absurdity of it all Tim took as a sign the old trucker was not as skeptical as Tim might have thought. “How come you didn’t break every bone in your pretty little body?”
“I don’t really know. I guess she protected me.”
“So do you know what’s happened to Rampart City? To Emma?”
“She’s made it her domain.”
“Who?”
“Isis.”
Tim stared at Akako for a moment. He had heard that name before, but only in ancient Egyptian mythology. Still, given all the other bizarre stuff going on, he wouldn’t be surprised if t
here was an Egyptian goddess around.
From what Akako said, he was about right. Isis was a goddess from Egypt. Long ago she had ruled a large portion of the world and used a demon spirit to collect the hearts of living people for her to devour as sustenance. In time, Merlin the wizard—the same one from Arthurian legend—challenged her in a magical battle royale that devastated the world. Isis was imprisoned in the desert for thousands of years while Merlin disappeared to another realm, to wait for the day when he might be needed again.
About five years ago, Isis returned. An Egyptologist named Dan Dreyfus inadvertently freed her spirit. She possessed a young woman and married Dan, who brought her to Rampart City. There she arranged for the murder of Steve Scherr, Becky Beech’s fiancé so Becky in her grief would find the armor of the evil Black Dragoon. She then began to harvest hearts for Isis so Isis could regain the power she had lost, in what the city dubbed the Heartbreaker Killings.
Isis might have succeeded if not for Emma Earl—the Scarlet Knight. She had confronted Isis and finally agreed to give her heart to Isis in exchange for Becky’s freedom. But Emma’s heart was too pure for Isis; it had seemed to destroy her. She didn’t die completely, though; her host body survived as a baby. Aggie gave the baby to her coven, who in turn gave the child—renamed Eileen—to a normal family.
Isis’s evil spirit remained within the baby. Even as a two-year-old she’d managed to create havoc by manipulating people. Tim’s blood began to boil as Akako said, “She gave Harry Ward the idea for TriTech. She told him to recruit you so in turn he could blackmail Sylvia to help him get rid of Emma and Agnes—and me.”
“Why Sylvia?”
“Because she knew Sylvia was more vulnerable than Agnes.”
“Because of me,” Tim said.
“Yes. Because Sylvia loved you. And she knew what you were capable of too.”
“I didn’t disappoint her.” Tim rubbed his face with one hand. “I did what Isis wanted like a good little puppet.”
It was Old Coyote who reached across the table to pat his shoulder. “I wouldn’t feel too bad, son. From the sound of it, this Isis is one tough broad. You said she did all this when she was just a wee little thing?”
“Her host was two years old, not her,” Akako said. She paused to slurp down the dregs of her chocolate shake. “Now that the host is fully grown, she’s regaining all of her old powers.”
“But Sylvia died just three years ago. That would only make her five or so, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes. That’s the other half of the story,” Akako said. She signaled the waitress over and ordered two slices of apple pie with ice cream. She waited until the pie came before she started into the second half of her story.
“It all began after Sylvia died, when Emma found out she was pregnant.” Akako went on to describe how an assassin named Cecelia had tried to take the armor from Emma while she was pregnant. “Emma went to the archives and Cecelia inadvertently broke open a spell that brought her twenty years into the future.”
In that future, Isis had returned to Rampart City and engineered new Black Dragoons to defeat Emma, who still wore the Scarlet Knight’s armor. Emma’s daughter Louise took up the mantle of the Scarlet Knight and with the help of Akako’s daughter Renee and a heroic sacrifice by Emma, they defeated Isis. “Once she became aware of this, Isis knew she had to accelerate her plans,” Akako said.
The perfect opportunity came thanks to a Russian gangster named Sergei Bykov, who already had designs on kidnapping Emma’s baby. He had blackmailed a nurse on the hospital staff to engineer a switch of Louise with another child. Louise was then taken back to Russia and raised by Bykov under the name Katya.
Two years later, Bykov’s personal assistant Katarina Markova escaped to America. Markova told Emma her daughter still lived, which prompted Emma to go over to Russia to recover the child. At the same time, Isis made a deal with the group of assassins run by Agnes’s sister Sophie that she would help them kidnap Akako’s daughter in exchange for Louise.
“That’s how Sophie got into Milton undetected. That’s how she knew about the spell that sent me home with Ms. Chiu so she could take Renee.” Akako paused for a moment to wipe at her eyes with a napkin. “Once they had Renee, they managed to get Louise back from Emma and take her to Isis. And Sophie made sure Emma found her way there.”
Tim didn’t need Akako to tell him the rest to have a good idea what happened then. It didn’t really surprise him when she said Isis had put Louise under her power, made her into a feral creature. Emma, like any good mother, had agreed to trade places with Louise to end her daughter’s suffering.
“It didn’t work the way Emma thought. Isis took Emma’s adult body and left Emma as a helpless baby. Now that she had a fully-grown host body, especially one as strong as Emma’s, Isis regained her full strength. That’s when she came back here, to Rampart City, and made it disappear.”
“So where is she?” Tim asked. “Where’s the city for that matter?”
“It’s still there. I think.”
“You think?”
“We can’t see into the city. None of us—not even Joanna.”
“So is this spell of hers why I can’t remember hearing about no Rampart City before?” Old Coyote asked.
“Yes. It’s part of her mental manipulation. As her power continues to grow, she’ll twist reality even more to suit her whims. Eventually she’ll enslave the entire world.”
“So how are we supposed to stop her?” Tim asked.
“We can’t. Emma is the only one who can defeat her. That’s where we come in. We have to find Emma and try to reverse whatever Isis has done to her.”
“How are we supposed to do that? We don’t have any magic powers.”
“I don’t know. We’ll figure that out once we know what we’re dealing with. The first thing we have to do is to get in there and find her.”
“So let’s go,” Old Coyote said. “We’ll just take my truck and drive straight on in through that fog or whatever it is.”
“We can’t,” Akako said. “The moment any normal person crosses that barrier, they’ll be under Isis’s control. She’ll change you into whatever amuses her at the moment.”
“Jesus,” the old trucker said. “Then what are you supposed to do?”
“I can go in there. I’m immune to magic. All of us Reds are because we’re out of phase with reality.”
“So how do I figure into this?” Tim asked.
“There’s a way you can help.” Akako reached beneath the table to produce a scroll. “This spell will take you into another dimension. Anything you bring back from there will be resistant to Isis’s magic. Go there and bring back weapons we can use to fight Isis with.”
“We? You mean you and me?”
“And me,” Old Coyote added.
“Right. You want me to bring weapons back for the three of us?”
“No. More like for two hundred.” Akako must have noted Tim’s skeptical look. “Joanna is going to bring more of us here. As many Reds as she can who are healthy enough to fight. But you saw what happens when we go through the dimensional rifts.”
“And this spell doesn’t work the same way?”
“No. You remember the vault Sylvia was trapped in, don’t you? It was made from metal taken from another dimension. That’s where you’re going to go.”
“Why me? Can’t you go?”
Akako shook her head. “The last time I nearly didn’t make it back. I almost lost myself the way Ms. Chiu did. If Agnes hadn’t been there, I would have. But you shouldn’t have that problem.”
“You don’t sound too sure about that.”
“There’s no way to know what will happen to you when you go through. You could remain the same or you could end up in a crib.”
“Great.”
“I’ll go if you won’t,” Old Coyote said. “Sounds like someone needs to teach this Isis bitch a lesson for fucking with our heads.”
“I think you’d bett
er let me handle it,” Tim said. “You can help Akako here.”
“Good,” Akako said. “When you get there, find a girl named Renee Kim. Tell her that I sent you. She’ll help you find whatever you need.”
“Is she some kind of gun dealer or something?”
“No, but she’s really smart, as smart as Emma is here. And she knows about this place. She’ll listen to you.”
“Wonderful,” Tim said. He wondered if maybe he shouldn’t let Old Coyote go after all. This had gotten much too weird for him. Then he looked out the window, in the direction of where Rampart City used to be. Emma was there along with his other friends. Who knew what Isis was doing to them? “How soon do we go?”
“As soon as I finish my banana split,” Akako said.
Akako instructed Old Coyote to take them back to where she had come in at. There she pressed the scroll into Tim’s hand. He wondered how Akako had managed to bring the scroll here from her world, but thought better than to ask at the moment.
“All you have to do is throw the scroll and it’ll open the gateway and pull you in,” Akako said. To Old Coyote she added, “We’d better get far away before that happens.” To Tim’s surprise, Akako kissed him on the cheek. “Good luck, Tim.”
“You too.”
He waited until she returned to the truck before he took a few steps and then threw the scroll as Akako had said. The scroll landed on the ground, but nothing happened at first. Then Tim had to throw a hand over his eyes to avoid being blinded by an explosion of purple light. That explosion formed a circular portal, the gateway Akako had mentioned.
As Tim looked back to the truck, a nervous shiver ran through his body. Akako had said she didn’t know what would happen to him on the other side. Maybe there was some other way they could get inside to help Emma—
He didn’t have any more time to consider this as hurricane winds began to blow across the barren plain. Tim tried to fight against the winds, but they were too strong. In the end he could only scream as he disappeared into the gateway.
Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis Page 143
