Mythbreaker

by Stephen Blackmoore

  “The Chronicler will be coming with us,” Medeina says.

  “No, I don’t think so,” the Man says. “But I am so glad you’re here. I couldn’t possibly do this next bit without you.” She shoves her spear at him and the blade disintegrates into dust before it reaches his face. Medeina recoils in surprise.

  “Fascinating thing, belief,” the Man says. “People believe in us and we become real. The more real we become, the more powerful we become. And when a powerful prophet believes in us? Well, we aren’t just real, we’re real. Right now, you and I are the most real gods Fitz knows.”

  Medeina smiles, her spear’s blade rematerializing. She steps forward. “Then we are matched, El Jefe,” she says. “I will enjoy gutting you and scattering your entrails across the countryside.”

  “Wow,” the Man says. “That’s a vivid picture. There’s one crucial difference between you and I, though.” He nods at Sam. “I have an ace in the hole.”

  As Sam is helping Fitz toward the exit she suddenly stiffens, eyes going glassy. Fitz stumbles out of her grasp, grabbing the stairwell door for support.

  “What the hell’s wrong?” Fitz says. He can see the Man’s red threads shoot out toward her, wrapping around her like a spider cocooning its prey. He tries to grab them with his mind, push them aside, but he’s too slow.

  Sam spins toward Medeina, yanking a key from inside her shirt and shoving it into the back of Medeina’s neck. There’s a loud popping noise as the key’s blade rips into her and Sam drags it hard around to her throat, tearing through the flesh like it’s butter.

  Fitz listens to Medeina screaming for a moment before he realizes it’s him. She doesn’t have a throat left to make a sound with. Medeina wheels around, the look of betrayal plain on her face. She mouths a word—Why?—but no sound comes out.

  A moment later flames erupt through the wound, her skin cracking and fissuring. She spins back to the Man, moves in to grapple him, her body wreathed in flames. She grabs hold of him, wraps her hands around his throat, but they crumble away to dust. She falls to the floor, every piece of her burning. Within seconds she is nothing but wisps of charcoal on the floor.

  The Man brushes ash from his suit coat and takes a puff of his cigar.

  Sam snaps back to herself. Looks at what she’s done, the key in her hand. Her face twists in horror, and just as quickly turns to cold anger. Fitz knows that face. When Sam hurts, she doesn’t scream or cry or anything like that. She gets angry. And when she gets angry, people get hurt.

  Fitz yells at her to stop, but it’s too late. She’s already mid-air, jumping at the Man. If it were anybody else, Fitz’s money would be on her. She’s a giant woman with muscles built from beating the hell out of people for cash. But against a god, she might as well be a gnat.

  The Man grabs her by the throat, interrupting what should have been a flying tackle. Her punches land on his face, but they don’t do anything. He pulls her in close enough that she gets a few solid kicks in too, a knee in his crotch. She even gets him in the eye with the key in her hand, but it scrapes along the surface as if his eyes were made of marble.

  He leans in to her and says, “No.”

  And just like that it’s over. She goes limp in his hand. A discarded marionette. He lets her go and she falls in a heap to the floor.

  Fitz stares at her motionless body, stunned. He can’t tell if she’s dead or unconscious. “You sonofabitch,” he says. “I am going to fucking murder you.”

  The Man laughs loud and hard. Doubles over and slaps his knee. Wipes tears from his eyes. “Oh, Fitz, you still don’t get it, do you?” he says, tapping ash from his cigar into the pile of Medeina at his feet. “You can’t win.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “WHAT THE HELL did you do to her?”

  “To Sam? I enrolled her in my vision,” the Man says. “Took some convincing. I had to get her to drink the Kool-Aid.” He reaches down to pick up the key Sam murdered Medeina with. “And this is the key to a 1972 Triumph Stag, a symbol of long dead forests, the head encased in bits of pine, birch and spruce wood from the Dainava Forest in Lithuania. Bits and pieces of all the things that made Medeina a goddess. It’s all about symbols.” He tosses the key aside.

  “I had Sam under my thumb before she met up with you and she didn’t even know it. I’ve had this planned out to exacting detail. Do you understand now, Fitz? Do you get that no matter what you do, what you try, I will always be ten steps ahead of you? You will always lose. No matter what. So why fight? Why struggle? What are you getting out of it? Dead friends? Destroyed allies? Just give up. It’ll be easier for you. Now, come on over here and let’s get started. You have a lot of work to do for me.”

  Fitz looks at the pile of ash on the floor, at Sam’s empty face. Is she still in there or has it been the Man looking through her eyes the whole time? A wave of hopelessness descends on him. He’s in agony from his shoulder and his rib. He’s tired. He’s been running for too long and everything’s gone to shit. The Man’s right. Fitz might as well just do whatever he says.

  Except. “Sam fought you,” Fitz says. “Until you cut her cord, she fought you.”

  “Because I let her fight,” the Man says, narrowing his eyes and speaking very slowly and carefully. He’s not used to being defied, Fitz realizes, and he doesn’t like it. “I let her fight so that I could show you what happens when I no longer allow it. So get your ass in line with the program.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Fitz says. He gets ready to spring, rage and adrenaline washing over him, blocking out the pain. Maybe he can’t win, but goddamn it he’s going to go down swinging.

  The stairwell door yanks open and Amanda, bloodied, missing an eye, her broken left femur jutting out through a gash in her pant leg, grabs Fitz by his wrist, pulling him into the stairwell. He screams in agony as she throws him down the stairs to the lower floor where the other Amanda, the right side of her face a shredded mass of hamburger, barely catches him. He bounces off the metal steps.

  She covers him with her body and says “Duck your head,” her voice thick and slurred where she’s missing most of her tongue.

  Fitz is about to ask why when he hears a high-pitched whistle and a blast that rocks the building, blowing the stairwell door in the floor above off its hinges and down the steps. A wave of searing heat washes over them, singeing their hair and sending the door to bounce off the steps. It narrowly misses flattening the two of them.

  “RPG,” Amanda says, or at least he thinks she says. All he can hear is a screeching whine. He thinks she’s just said, “That’ll buy us a few minutes,” but he’s not sure. The two of them limp down the steps.

  “We can’t leave,” Fitz yells. “We need to get Sam. He had her kill Medeina.”

  “She’s gone,” Amanda says.

  “No,” he says. “He just had some weird control over her.” He can’t believe he’d kill her. Why do that? Something tells him that the Man wouldn’t throw something away if he thought he could still use it. And much as it makes his stomach turn to think of it, he knows Sam would be useful.

  “Fitz, she’s gone.”

  It takes a second for Fitz to realize that Amanda’s not talking about Sam’s mind or her will or anything like that. She’s dead. The blast from the RPG surely killed her.

  “Goddammit, no.” He struggles against her to go back up the stairs into that flaming wreck of a conference room, even though he knows it’s just anger and grief and probably a concussion talking. Amanda tugs on his bad arm and the pain is intense enough to stop him in his tracks.

  “There is nothing up there to save,” she says. “She was already dead, even if her body wasn’t. And now she can’t be used against you. You want a shot at the Man? The only way you’re going to get it is if we get you out of here right now.” He wants to argue, but he knows she’s right. He nods and follows her down the stairs.

  They get about five floors down when the first Agents show up.

  Sunglasses and black
suits, wicked-looking guns. Black, white, Asian, their faces all generic and grim. They rush down from the top floor, moving like insects, scuttling down the steps, crawling on the walls and ceiling.

  “You got a plan for dealing with this?” Fitz says. “You’re the Internet. Throw—fuck, I don’t know—cat pictures or something at them.”

  She looks up at the Agents heading their way, doubt written across her face. She turns to Fitz. “Do you believe in me?” she says.

  “What?” He’s not sure he heard her right. Fitz thinks it’s a stupid question until he remembers what the Man told Medeina about belief, about his belief, right before he killed her.

  “Do you believe in me?”

  “Yes,” Fitz says with as much conviction as he can throw into it. It’s true. Despite what she may think of herself, Amanda has been the most godlike thing he’s seen so far. She says she’s just an idea. Something new and not as powerful as her father or the other gods. But to Fitz, she’s the most powerful thing he’s ever run into.

  There’s a shift, as if the world has just moved to make room for something that hadn’t been there before.

  “Then yes,” she says. “I’ve got a plan for dealing with this.”

  “Tell me it’s not pictures of cats.”

  “Better.”

  Scaly, green arms and hands shoot out from the walls and grab at the Agents, holding them in place. A thick tarry resin leaves them stained, gluing them to the walls, the floors, each other, while an unintelligible babble of noise fills the stairwell. It sounds like screaming words, but none of it makes any sense to Fitz.

  The hands tear at the Agents, ripping huge chunks out of them. The Agents fight back, firing their pistols, punching and ripping at the hands in an effort to get free. It reminds Fitz of a documentary on colonies of army ants trying to kill each other.

  Amanda pushes Fitz out of the way as one of the Agents get a shot off at them. The bullet punches through Amanda’s arm, but she ignores it. The Agent readjusts its aim, but before it can fire again its gun is grabbed from its grasp by one of the hands and turned back on itself.

  Soon all of the Agents are mired in the sea of grasping hands dragging them down, their attacks hitting each other as much as they’re hitting the hands. The metal stairs shake from the battle, the sound of gunfire echoing through the enclosed space.

  “The fuck are those?” Fitz says. He’s learning that everything with gods is symbolic. They manifest based on the thing they represent. The Man and his Agents, Bacchus and his wine, Big Money and, well, his money. But the grasping hands weighing the Agents down? The shrieking noise?

  “Comment trolls,” Amanda says and pushes him along down the stairs. “Go. There will be more Agents soon. Or worse.”

  Fitz hurries down the stairs as fast as he can. The pain is becoming unbearable. His vision swims in and out of focus. He’s starting to have trouble breathing. Floors go by in a blur and he has no idea how much further they have to go. Twenty floors? Two? He can’t tell anymore.

  The gunfire has stopped. Did that just happen or did the battle upstairs end a while ago and he just didn’t notice? He keeps going in and out of focus. He keeps wondering where Sam is and then remembering that she’s dead. He has to remind himself over and over again that the only way he’s going to avenge her is to get out of this himself. For a while there is nothing but the sound of his and Amanda’s feet on the metal stairs, her urging him to move faster.

  “How are you not dead?”

  Fitz looks up to see Jake holding the bottom stairwell door open. He blinks at the old man, not sure if he’s really seeing him or if he’s started to hallucinate.

  “I thought I told you to leave,” Fitz says, his voice slow and slurred. The room tilts and he finds himself being propped up by Amanda.

  “Help me get him out onto the street,” she says. “There’s a car coming for us.” Jake gets under Fitz’s other arm and helps drag him out into the building’s lobby.

  “I ran into Sam and that crazy goddess chick on the way down,” Jake says. “They told me to wait in the car. Then I saw the explosion and ran back inside. You look like shit. That from the blast?”

  “Some. Mostly from when I went down eight floors the hard way,” Amanda says.

  “Where are the rest of you?”

  “Dead,” Fitz says slowly. “He had Sam kill Medeina, then he killed her himself.” He’s thinking he might join them soon. The pain has turned into some distant sensation. Not lessened, just feeling like it’s happening to somebody else. That can’t be a good sign.

  “Fuck. So what’s the plan?”

  “Get him out of here,” Amanda says. “Regroup. Things are different now. My father’s a lot more powerful than I thought he was. We really have to keep him away from Fitz now.”

  “Can’t win,” Fitz says, dazed. “Should just go back and do what he tells me. Easier.”

  “Stop it,” Amanda says. “He’s not too powerful. Not without you. And you know what he’s going to do with you if you go back up there.”

  “Oh, fuck you,” he says. “How do I stop him? Huh? You saw what he did. How the fuck do I fight that?”

  “You say no,” she says. “It has to be a choice. He’s trying to make you feel hopeless. That’s what he does. But you can fight him; all it takes is saying no.”

  “Afraid it’s not that simple.” Zaphiel steps out from behind a column and they all freeze in their tracks. Zaphiel’s skin smokes a little and he smells of explosives. The wounds he received near the airport are still plainly obvious.

  “You can’t have him,” Amanda says.

  “I don’t want him. Not anymore. I’d rather kill him than let that monster upstairs take him.” The resonance of his voice echoes through the empty lobby.

  “That’s funny coming from an Old Testament angel,” Jake says.

  “I hear a ‘but’ in there,” Fitz says.

  “I’m His now. He’s the closest thing to God we have. All the others are gone. Yahweh, Odin. All the creators have left and He’s filled the void. I have no choice. I am ordered to bring you with me.”

  “I said you can’t have him,” Amanda says.

  “Why not? So you can have him?”

  “Fitz makes his own choices,” she says.

  “All right. Then let him make it.” Zaphiel looks hard at Fitz. “You’ve seen His power. You’ve seen that He has cowed gods, killed them with nothing but His will. Soon He will have all of the gods under His control. He has used your friends against you. How long until these ones die? How much will they suffer? The longer you deny Him, the more He’ll make them hurt. But come willingly and they will find a place in His new world.”

  Zaphiel unfurls his massive wings and a flaming broadsword easily six feet long appears in his hand. Though he’s a good ten feet away, the heat from the blade hits Fitz like he’s standing in front of a blast furnace.

  “Choose.”

  Fitz leans on Amanda, pulls himself straight, his rib screaming from the effort, his arm useless at his side. He’s still having a hard time concentrating through the pain, but he’s faced Zaphiel enough times already that he knows where his weak points are. He can see the threads shooting off of him, binding back into himself where they knot together.

  He reaches out with his mind, grabbing onto them and willing them to unravel.

  Zaphiel screams. Instead of bursting into flame like Big Money did, Zaphiel simply comes apart. Long splits rupture across his skin, like a paper doll being shredded by an angry toddler. Golden ichor flows through the cuts, pieces of him fall sizzling to the floor. The Cherub collapses to his knees as Fitz takes him apart piece by piece.

  “You may kill me,” Zaphiel screams. “But you will pay for it.”

  Just as his arms begin to split, spilling ichor to the floor like they’re a busted pipe, Zaphiel hurls the flaming sword.

  Fitz can’t tell if it’s a sacrifice or if Jake just has really bad survival instincts, but as Amanda pulls F
itz out of the way, Jake lets go of his arm and jumps straight into the path of the oncoming sword.

  The blade embeds itself in the old man’s chest, the fires setting him alight like a three-month-old Christmas tree. Fitz and Amanda back away from Jake’s flaming corpse. Fitz spies a fire extinguisher on the wall and pulls it out, but he can’t get it to go with only one working arm. Amanda grabs it from him, spraying Jake down with foam, but the flames are all-consuming, eating the old man up in seconds.

  “Make it stop,” Fitz screams at the disintegrating angel. “Make it stop, you sonofabitch.” But the angel keeps falling apart, liquefying until there’s nothing left but a thick, golden slurry running between the tiles on the floor. This is too much for Fitz. Too much killing. Too many horrible mistakes. Who else is the Man going to send after him?

  There’s a screech of tires from the street, and three Amandas run inside. “Help him,” Fitz yells at them, pointing to Jake’s charred body on the floor, but even he knows it’s a lost cause. The old man stopped moving before he hit the ground, and most of his body has already been consumed by the fires, exposing blackened bones.

  “There’s nothing to help,” one of them says as they grab Fitz and hurry him out to the waiting van.

  “Let up,” he says, pulling out of their grasp. “I can get into the goddamn car myself.” He limps toward the entrance and stops when he realizes that the Amanda who came down with him in the stairwell isn’t coming out. He pushes his way back inside to see a couple of Amandas handing her a large cardboard box.

  “Come on,” he says. “We have to get out of here.”

  “This body’s used up,” she says. “It can barely stand. If it were human it’d be dead already. I have twelve vans in the building’s parking garage filled with fertilizer bombs. I can’t solve this problem for you, Fitz.” She pulls out a spool of cable and bricks of plastic explosive, starts inserting detonators into the plastique. “But I can make damn sure my dad knows he can’t just do whatever the fuck he wants.”