Mythbreaker

by Stephen Blackmoore

  He stops, straining to hear it. It’s like looking for a cricket trapped somewhere inside a house. He can hear it, but can’t figure out where it’s coming from.

  He ducks behind a machine in search of the noise, roots around under a drill press, his hand snagging something small. He pulls it out.

  A smartphone. Ringing.

  He hits the button, and the screen lights up with a text message from a blocked number.

  ARE YOU ALONE?

  He tries to exit the messaging app, get to the phone so he can call the police. But it won’t let him. The phone buzzes again.

  ARE YOU ALONE. Same words, but somehow they feel more insistent.

  Yes, he types. Who R U? I need help. Angel has me trapped. He’d like to think this was the strangest text he’s sent, but there was a time when he’d just smoked a bunch of hash and sent pictures of his dick to some guy he’d met in a bar the week before, with all the lyrics to “I Feel Pretty” written backwards.

  The response reads, I WILL GET YOU OUT OF THERE GO TO THE NORTH WALL TWELFTH WINDOW FROM THE RIGHT NO CLOSER THAN FIVE FEET. And then a moment later, as if tacked on as an afterthought, PLEASE.

  Fitz doesn’t know what’s going on or who’s on the other end of the phone, but so far that’s the first polite thing anyone’s said to him since this nightmare started. He orients himself as best he can to what he thinks is the north wall, counts twelve windows and heads toward it.

  He guesses at what’s five feet—he’s always sucked at distances—and stops in front of the window. I’m here, he types.

  DUCK, comes the reply.

  Fitz hears a rumble outside the building, decides that following instructions is in his best interest and gets down to the floor. The rumble grows to a roar and a second later the window explodes inward with a shower of glass and metal as the crane from a utility bucket truck crashes through it.

  Shards of glass shower over him, as the phone buzzes in Fitz’s hand.

  GET IN THE BUCKET

  The bucket is dented and twisted, one side torn from going through the wall, and it’s angled so high up that there’s maybe a foot of clearance between the top of the bucket and the ceiling. He’s not sure if it will hold him. Or even how to get into it.

  And then there’s the problem of Zaphiel.

  The door at the far end of the room is torn down, the ruined hinges glowing red with the sheer speed of the impact. The Cherub is there howling with all four of his nightmare faces, charging into the room.

  Fitz shoves the phone into his pocket and instead of trying to get into the bucket, jumps onto its side, hugging it like a life preserver in a storm.

  “I’m in the bucket,” he screams, hoping whoever is in the truck outside can hear him.

  The driver hits the gas, tearing the bucket back through the hole it made in the wall, as Zaphiel jumps at Fitz. He mostly misses, but one hand punches into the metal.

  Fitz scrambles to get up and over the bucket’s lip, Zaphiel thrashing and screaming next to him. Fitz uses his face as a step stool, boosting himself inside. The angel snarls and swipes at him with his free hand, tearing a gash in his shirt and raking claws across his chest. The pain is intense; Fitz can feel hot blood soak through his shirt. Once he’s inside, the angel’s hand, lodged in its hole, grasps for any part of Fitz it can get hold of.

  Fitz finds a tool belt with a pair of pliers, a wrench and some screwdrivers in the bottom of the bucket. He pulls the wrench, and hammers at Zaphiel’s hand. He can hear him on the other side, scrambling for more purchase, trying to get into the bucket with him.

  Zaphiel stops thrashing, goes very still. And then the angel lights up like a supernova. The light is blinding; Fitz can feel its heat blistering his skin. The metal around Zaphiel’s hand glows and warps and the angel wrenches it out.

  Fitz expects the angel to fall, but instead he hovers, glowing behind the truck as it tears through the building’s parking lot and onto a street, running parallel to a set of train tracks, heading east. In the distance, across the river, Fitz can see the skyline of Downtown L.A.

  A cacophony of noise hits him and he looks back to see Zaphiel, his body twisting and shifting into something immense. His clothes rip to shreds as four huge wings erupt out of his back and his body grows to three times its size.

  The phone buzzes in Fitz’s pocket and he screams until he figures out what the vibration is and fishes the phone out, almost dropping it in the shaking, rattling bucket. The crane isn’t designed to be deployed while the truck is pushing fifty miles an hour.

  DRAW THIS ON THE BUCKET, it says, followed by a picture of a strange pattern that looks like something between Sanskrit and what some fifteen-year-old metalhead would draw on his Pee Chee folder in chem class. QUICKLY

  “With what?” Fitz yells. “It’s not like I’ve got a marker up here.”

  USE YOUR BLOOD

  Fitz stares at the screen. “I am not using my blood to draw anything,” he says before realizing that he’s yelling at a text message. He starts to type No, but his phone buzzes before he can hit send.

  DO IT NOW HE IS GETTING CLOSER

  Sure enough, Zaphiel is heading his way. He doesn’t look like he’s straining—though it occurs to Fitz that he has no idea what a straining Cherub with four monster faces would look like—and he’s covering ground faster than the truck is. The horizon fills up behind him with thick, dark clouds like a Spielberg movie and Fitz’s ears pop from the pressure. The clouds boil over the L.A. skyline like a witch’s cauldron, dark and thick. Flashes of lightning thread through them in a lattice of electricity.

  He has seconds at most.

  “Fuck. Fine.” He reaches into the tear in his shirt. The wound isn’t deep, but it’s wide and long and his fingers come away wet with blood. He’s not sure if it will need stitches or not. He draws the glyph on the inside of the bucket.

  The truck makes a high-speed turn into a parking lot full of similar utility trucks just as he gets the final squiggle on the design.

  The angel, only a few feet away from the truck, suddenly explodes into flames, dropping from the sky like a stone. He hits the pavement hard, skidding along for several feet before coming to a stop, a flaming, broken wreck.

  With that the pressure in Fitz’s ears suddenly lessens, the clouds break up and a few seconds later the sky is clear again.

  The truck drives on until Fitz can’t see the fallen angel anymore and then screeches to a halt, almost throwing him over the side. The bucket crane lowers to the ground, and once it’s down, the driver, a black woman with her hair in dreads and wearing a heavy leather bomber jacket, jumps out of the car and runs back to help Fitz out of the bucket.

  “Come on. There’s a car over here.”

  “Who are you?” he says, following her as quickly as he can to a Chevy Impala parked nearby.

  “Amanda. And you’re Fitz. I’m supposed to take you to a safe house nearby.”

  “Safe house? What the hell is going on?” He freezes. “Are you with her?”

  “Who?”

  “Medeina.”

  “I have no idea who that is.” A crack of thunder sounds in the distance. “But I know what that is, and neither one of us wants to be around when it gets here.”

  Fitz doesn’t know what to do. Thinking about it, he doesn’t think she’s working with Medeina. The goddess doesn’t strike him as the type to use someone else to do her dirty work. And she wouldn’t go to the trouble to break him out of that warehouse. She’d just waltz in and slaughter anybody she found. Including Fitz.

  Jesus. Listen to him. He’s actually believing in this shit.

  He shakes himself. “No. Not until I get some answers. Why did you get me out of there?” He holds up the smartphone. “Why were you texting me?”

  “First, because I’m being paid to. Second, I wasn’t texting you.”

  “Then who was?”

  She shrugs. “Fuck if I know. Somebody working for the same guy I am, I suppose. Look, I
’m happy to answer whatever I can, but not here and not now. I need to get you to the safe house or I don’t get paid. Now are you gonna get in the car or do I have to beat you over the head with a tire iron and stuff you in the trunk?”

  He weighs his options. It’s a little late for ‘Don’t get into bucket trucks driven by strange women.’ And at least he’s being promised some answers. Right now all he has are questions.

  “What’ll it be, sparky?” Amanda says. “Ride up front like a big boy or in the trunk like a bitch?”

  Another crack of thunder decides it for him. He can feel Zaphiel’s anger. Whatever it was that Fitz drew on the side of the bucket, it isn’t going to slow him down for long. He goes to the Impala, slides into the passenger side.

  “Good call,” she says.

  MEDEINA DRAGS THE corpse into the corner of a storage room she has found in the hospital basement, leaving a thick smear of black across the floor.

  At first glance she had thought this thing was a mortal. But then she got a better look at it in the hallway before it came for her and she knew that it was something... other.

  Above her, mortals are combing through the ravaged hospital, rounding up survivors, counting their dead. She pauses, a tiny pang at the edge of her consciousness. She wasn’t always this way, was she? She remembers a time when she was a defender of the forest, not a slaughterer of the innocent.

  When did she learn to hate humanity so much? Was it when she was ejected from the heavens? Did it mark her so badly, make her so desperate to regain her old home?

  Or was it when she became Zaphiel’s lackey? When she agreed to hunt for him in the hopes that he might place her back where she belonged. Not here in this wasteland of mortals, land covered with thick layers of metal and concrete.

  She shakes her head, as if to dislodge the thought from her mind. The past is the past. What matters is what she does now. Even gods, it seems, need to keep up with the times.

  The mortals won’t find her here in the basement. They will walk by without even noticing the door. She worries for a moment that she is hiding from them out of cowardice, but then decides that, no, she’s doing it so as not to be interrupted.

  Another new thing there. Doubt.

  She props the corpse up against the wall, the arms and legs flopping lifelessly, one severed wrist still leaking the black substance that flowed through its veins.

  It isn’t ichor, that golden fluid that flows in the veins of the gods. This stuff has the consistency of black tar, thick and sticky. Not ichor, not blood. So this thing is not a god. It is not a hero or a demon.

  So what is it?

  It was a surprising opponent, though not a terribly worthy one. The bullets tore into her, gouging her flesh like razors. Pain isn’t something that has happened to her in over a thousand years, since she picked a fight with her brother Perkūnas.

  The battle with her brother was fierce. She tore into him with her spear, and he rained down upon her hail the size of houses. She countered as a great she-wolf, and he uprooted the trees of her forest to crush her. Finally, after he hammered at her with thunder, she was forced to concede and retreat in the form of a hare, dodging into burrows and digging through the attack.

  This battle, though hardly as epic, was a reminder that though she is immortal, she can still be harmed. Though this thing, neither mortal nor immortal, wounded her, if only a little, her spear made short work of it. At first she merely knocked the guns from its hands, but it grew new ones to continue to fight. So she resorted to lopping off its hands and slicing deep through the boneless neck until the head hung limp from a thick flap of skin. And even then it continued to attack.

  It wasn’t until she carved out its chest—expecting to find a heart and instead merely releasing a torrent of the black sludge that pumped through its body—that it dropped lifeless to the floor.

  She pulls its loose head up and places it back atop the stump of its neck. She has tried to remove its mirrored sunglasses from its face, but they might as well have been welded there. She can see no seam, but they’re stuck fast. She suspects that there are no eyes behind the mirrored lenses. That those are, in fact, the thing’s eyes.

  She holds the spear at the ready in case it comes back to life. Some Slogutis, nightmare beings she has fought on more than one occasion, will do that. They can only be killed by slicing them apart and keeping each piece sealed in a pine box banded with iron.

  When nothing happens, she’s a little disappointed. She came looking for a fight and truth be told this one didn’t go on as long as she’d hoped. She wishes it was the Cherub’s body lying here. She could slice it apart over and over again.

  She stares at the blank face looking for clues, but all she sees is herself, and the reflection is not kind. She is covered in its black sludge, in golden ichor from wounds that should have sealed up already, but are taking far longer than they ever have.

  What is it? Who sent it? Why?

  “I will find your keeper,” she says. “And I will get my answers.”

  “You could just ask,” the thing says, its mouth moving, but its face dead.

  Medeina leaps back, swinging her spear until the point dimples the thing’s forehead. She feels certain that it is dead. It makes no move, and yet it speaks.

  “You’re awfully nervous,” the voice says, a thick, deep voice, one that oozes power and confidence, distinctly male, “for a god with a spear and magic helmet.”

  “I am not wearing a helmet, beast,” she snaps back. The voice, she realizes, is not coming from the creature so much as through it. Whoever is speaking to her is not here in the room with her.

  “Yes, well. Not a fan of the Merrie Melodies, I see. My point is that the ‘beast’ before you is well and truly dead. Not that it was ever really alive to begin with. But that’s okay. I have more. So if you have questions, why not ask them?”

  “Will you tell me the truth?” she says. Anyone who will resort to such deception cannot be trusted, and she has been caught in such traps before. Once she was imprisoned by the trickster Velnias, the dweller of the swamps, when she trusted too freely.

  She will not let that happen again.

  “Oh, probably not,” the voice says. “But you can ask, anyway. Here, let me start with a freebie. You and I have a similar goal. We both want to get our hands on Louie Fitzsimmons.”

  “I wish to kill him. You?”

  “Nothing so shortsighted. He can be appropriated. And if not, well, then he can be discarded.”

  “Killed, you mean.”

  “Well, yes, though personally I’m a fan of euphemisms. My point is that before he’s discarded he can be useful. To both of us.”

  “Who are you?” she says.

  “There are those who call me El Jefe,” the voice says. “Though, like you, I have many names. Do you know why Mister Fitzsimmons is so highly sought after?”

  She spits. “No. Zaphiel refuses to tell me.”

  “Oh, yes. The Cherub. I’ve heard of him. Not very nice, keeping you in the dark like that. It’s like he’s trying to edge you out of the biggest score the gods have seen in a thousand years or something. I’d be furious if I were you.”

  “He what?”

  “I know, right? You don’t keep your associates in the dark like that. Never mind rude, it’s downright unprofessional. But I could tell you. If you’re interested.”

  “This is a trick,” Medeina says.

  “It’s all above board, I assure you. Once you hear it I’m sure you’ll agree with me.”

  “There is a condition. There is always a condition.”

  “Well, yes. I’d like you to join me. Fight for my side, as it were. The benefits are excellent. Industry standard. And let’s be honest, there is no way gods can be bound by agreements the way mortals can, anyway, right? If you agree to work with me and decide to leave, well, then you decide to leave. You found Mister Fitzsimmons once before, you can find him again. But I have access to resources that could aid y
ou in that. My team’s growing every day. In fact, I’m about to go enlist the aid of a couple of his friends. It’s a win/win.”

  It doesn’t take long for Medeina to decide. She really has nothing to lose. As he says, if she decides to leave, she will leave. “Agreed.”

  “Excellent. So let’s get down to brass tacks. Have you heard of the Chroniclers?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  AMANDA PULLS THE Impala up to a boxy, stuccoed single-story house off of Caesar Chavez Avenue across the street from a cemetery. Bars on the windows, a heavy security screen door in the front, with a weed-infested front yard surrounded by cheap chain-link fence. Graffiti covers two walls. Older tags are spray-painted out, newer ones are larger than the ones they’ve replaced. It’s like watching gang warfare carried out through paint.

  “This is it.”

  “This is a safe house?” Fitz says. “It’s not even a safe neighborhood.”

  Amanda rolls her eyes. “The walls are reinforced concrete with metal plates behind drywall. The windows are half-inch-thick Plexiglas. That barred front security door is just decoration; the real security door is behind it and has internal ballistic panels, top, bottom, hinge and striker-side locking bolts. The gangs around here have been bought and paid for to make sure nobody fucks with it when I’m not here.”

  “But the graffiti—”

  “Is there because I paid for it to be there. Trust me, anybody tries to mess with this place, they’re not getting real far. Happy now?”

  He’s not. Not by a long shot. And he doesn’t feel very safe, either. He doesn’t think that a heavy duty door is going to keep Medeina or Zaphiel out if they decide to come calling. Maybe if some of the graffiti was that weird symbol his mysterious benefactor had him paint on the side of the bucket? How the hell had it stopped Zaphiel?

  He limps along behind Amanda to the front door, nervously looking over his shoulder. “You got a first-aid kit in there?”

  “I got a whole lot more than that in there,” she says, opening the security screen and unlocking the front door with a key shaped like a long hex-wrench. A series of heavy bolts shift inside the door with loud thunks. The door swings open like a bank vault and he follows her in.