Twig

by wildbow

  Any second now, Iron Maiden would change targets to me.

  “Jamie,” I said.

  “I know, Sy,” he said. And from the tension in his voice, I knew that he knew I was being flanked.

  I held up my hand, gesturing.

  Ready.

  I took my time rolling up my sleeves, then used my skin between index finger and thumb to scrape the worst of the muck and blood off my forearms and hand, before doing the same with the other hand.

  I made eye contact with tentacles, not the milky white eyes of his actual face, but the eyes of his body.

  His body language was something alien. I couldn’t even see all of him, so I had to work with limited information. I wasn’t even sure he had expressions like a normal person.

  Iron Maiden moved up a step, holding her axe with both hands as she forced Jamie to retreat further.

  That step was just a little bit shorter than the last. She wasn’t chasing Jamie anymore. She was preparing to flank me.

  The poster had asked for me to be delivered dead or alive. Dead was a possibility. Dead was probably something she did very well.

  I made my move, scrambling backward, and I saw Tentacles move, setting his weight.

  In the moment he moved, I shifted my weight forward. The toes of my shoes scraped against the puddle-covered road and found traction, and I lunged forward.

  He would hit me, probably hard, but it wouldn’t be the same calculated strike he’d plotted. Even as I shifted my weight and changed my plan of attack, he did the same.

  I closed the distance between us with a reckless run, one foot going too deep into a puddle, slowing me down.

  I hurled the clump of mud and blood that I’d collected from my arms. It hit him across the chest and stomach, some of it finding its way into the eyes of that tentacled body.

  He attacked blind. I anticipated an attack down toward my feet and legs and leaped, but my timing was off, I couldn’t even see the attack, and he hadn’t attacked low. The whip-like tentacle caught me along the length of my body, heavy but not the sort of thing that would tear me to pieces.

  I hit the ground hard enough that the air in my lungs was shaken free. For two terrifying seconds, I tried to breathe and couldn’t.

  In the third, I put the fear away, gripped the second clump of blood and mud, and hurled it. He drew his tentacles in to form a kind of shield. Some of it still struck home.

  “Sy!” Jamie cried out.

  Iron Maiden. She was stalking toward me in that weird gait of hers, lifting the axe in that same strange way.

  Before she was halfway to me, a second grenade went off. Jamie’s throw, capitalizing on her distraction and Tentacles’ blindness.

  She flew, almost literally, in my general direction, before landing in a heap. I flew, in a metaphorical sense, in the opposite direction, toward the site of the explosion and toward Jamie.

  “Arachne!” Tentacles cried out.

  She had a name, it seemed.

  He attacked, partially blind, and as disappointing as it was, many of those attacks managed to hit me, knocking me off balance, or catch at parts of me, forcing me to pull away, losing momentum.

  But Tentacles seemed more interested in his companion than in us.

  Jamie and I left the pair behind us. We hurried toward Horace, who was slumping over more and more, and between Jamie and my bruised self we managed to bring the fellow along with.

  Not that we got very far.

  A short distance down a block and around a corner, and we’d reached the next bridge. The impact of the Academy’s rain was clear, now. As the rain came down, something in it was activating with something in the river. Either the rain held seeds, or the river did. A material Jamie and I had seen used a thousand thousand times before. Virtually every building in the Crown Empire was touched by the stuff, and here it had been put to use in quarantine.

  Where canals had once separated and subdivided the city, there were now walls of wood, knitting together, weaving into a barrier, with the sole purpose of generating raw height, the horizontal growths rare and quick to break away and fall on either side of the waters.

  Here and there, the aquatic warbeasts reached up and through, swatting at the barriers, bringing down loose horizontally-growing branches. They would stay for as long as was necessary to remove any climbers or stall other threats, then likely retreat to somewhere or get choked out by the growths of wood.

  They were sectioning off the city for quarantine purposes. Our escape routes were getting further and further overhead by the minute.

  Previous Next

  Cut to the Quick—11.11

  I helped a one-armed Harvey hobble along, while Jamie walked ahead of us. We had a row of houses to our right and a still-rising wall to our left. The street we ran down was more for walking than for houses, rendered dark by the lack of trees growing around the houses, the fact that the lamps were off, and the combination of both stormclouds and pouring rain.

  Jamie tried every doorknob we passed, while I did what I could to bear Harvey’s weight.

  He found an unlocked door, opening it, and held it for Harvey and I.

  “No use trying to break through or get around before the walls are fully done growing,” Jamie said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “It’ll be a narrow window, Sy. When they’ve reached maximum height, they’ll get thicker and denser. Most architects that use builder’s wood will set up partitions to constrain the growth, but those aren’t available here. It’ll just be raw mass. The thing to look out for is if the growth visibly slows, but you can hear the creaking of wood moving against wood.”

  “Good to know,” I said.

  “What’s my next step?” Jamie asked.

  “Find the house medical kit, bucket,” I said, as I helped my charge limp through the door. “Mop too.”

  Jamie hurried off to find things and supplies, still moving slower than he should have. Looking at the interior of the house, the occupants had left in a hurry, creating mess wherever they went. I wasn’t sure if that would help Jamie find the things he needed or hamper him.

  I led Harv over to an armchair that had been set near the now-dark fireplace. He fell down into the seat, in something that approximated a sitting position, with only enough sense to favor his butchered left side and keep it from colliding with the chair.

  He was as white as a sheet, with a very red nose and eyelids. Nothing in his face, eye contact or body language suggested he was present. The shock to his system, blood loss, trauma, or a combination therein had left him disconnected from reality.

  That might have been a mercy, all told.

  “Don’t pass out on me now, Harv,” I said.

  He moved his head very slowly. His eyes actively searched for me, even when I was in his field of view, as if his vision was blurry or his thoughts weren’t all there. He managed to look at me, then gave me a puzzled look.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Just stay with me. You managing?”

  “Pain,” he said, sounding about as strong as he looked, which was easily summed up as ‘pathetic’.

  “I took your arm, that tends to hurt. Unless you mean you can feel the stuff crawling through you?”

  He shook his head, then looked like he might pass out from the way that little motion made his head swim. I put a hand out to his shoulder to steady him.

  “Pain,” he said, again. “Like it’s still there, running from shoulder to fingertip.”

  “Phantom pains,” I said. “That’s going to happen, with something like this.”

  “I want to die,” Harv said. “I can’t live like this.”

  I peeled away at a portion of his shirt and jacket. It was plastered to his skin by some combination of cloying blood and sweat. He winced visibly as I pulled the material away near the top of his shoulder.

  “There are drugs they can give you that will let the mind figure out how to handle the phantom pains,” I said. “There are surgeries where they
will give you a new, working arm.”

  I saw him shake his head.

  Harv was a shadow of Jamie, like this. Like Jamie, he was sick, if farther along. If Harv could make it, so could Jamie. If he died on me, I might lose hope for my friend.

  “Trust me,” I said, firmly. “The rest of your long life is waiting for you.”

  “My parents didn’t even answer the door,” Harvey said, his voice a hush. “They were home.”

  He’d lost his family, in a way. Even if everything returned to normal and the plague was cured, he’d lost that.

  I couldn’t sum up an encouraging response to that. It hit too close to home.

  “That’s the wrong thing to be focusing on. You need to keep your eyes forward and work on staying alive. I might even be able to get you funding to help you get that surgery and get back to life as normal.”

  Jamie approached, coming down the stairs, his hands holding a bucket with a bowl perched on top. He held it like it was full. “Just like you to find another pet project, Sy. We wrap up our financial obligations to the other four with a decent cash donation to set them up and help get them settled, and you go and you find a new woebegone bystander to help.”

  “It’s only fair,” I said. “I borrow them and use them for a while, then I usually subject them to something horrifying, if not multiple horrible somethings. I gotta make it up to them on some level, leave them at least as well off as when I find them.”

  Very carefully, I took the bowl from him. It held water, warm if I judged by the feel of the bowl, and a washcloth. The bucket, in turn, held the same medical supply kit that just about every family of means kept in their house. I plucked that from the bucket.

  “But why did you find him in the first place, Sy? You just felt like carving him up? Felt suddenly altruistic? Disinfectant in the water.”

  “I like how you’ve managed to suggest two very different reasons, befitting two very different moralities, and made them each sound as natural as sun in the morning.” I tore open a package of disinfectant and dumped it into the bowl. I washed off my hands in it, and felt my hands and arms tingle on contact with the stuff. Strong.

  “Seriously,” Jamie said. “Don’t deflect. Why did you pick him to rescue?”

  Hands clean, I started mopping at the area of crusted blood, wiping the skin around Harvey’s wound clean. I focused the entirety of my gaze, hands, and attention on the task at hand as I let the words pass through my lips, “Roll up your pants legs.”

  I didn’t look as Jamie set to work. I used the washcloth and warm water to wash away and break up some of the congealing blood that bound shirt and jacket to Harv’s upper body, then got the kit.

  “Still with me?” I asked Harv.

  “Mm,” Harv said.

  Jamie had gone silent. I glanced at him, and saw that he’d stumbled back a few steps before collapsing into a sitting position on the arm of the nearest armchair.

  Red spots, across his calves and shins.

  I blinked hard and looked away, suppressing the welling emotions. Jamie, meanwhile, looked quietly devastated.

  There were steps to be followed. I’d expected this, braced myself for it.

  In front of me, Harry turned his head, looking at me, then at Jamie, then back to me. The shaking of my hands as I tended to him had gotten his attention.

  Calm, I told myself. Be calm.

  “Damn,” Jamie said. “No.”

  “You’ll be fine,” I said. I forced my voice to be neutral and calm. “So far, the infection doesn’t seem to be spreading any further for Harry here. I’m not seeing any more tendrils. A prompt and thorough amputation seems to slow or stop the progression. Whoever created this thing either didn’t plan for this, or they liked the idea of us hacking each other to pieces in efforts to stem the tide of this disease.”

  His hands went to his head, fingers running through his long hair. “That’s what you were doing. A trial run, before you treated me.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I found the opaque bag of aqua nucifera and pinned it to the side of the armchair with my knife. I unreeled the attached tube.

  “Thank you for not telling me. I’m bothered that you noticed before I did.”

  I nodded. “You were focused on other things.”

  “Still bothered,” he said. He stared down at his knees and his exposed calves. “Really bothered.”

  “We’ll fix you up,” I said. “Well, we’ll fix up Harry first, and make sure that he’s going to make it through this. Once he’s stable, I’ll feel a lot better about your outcome.”

  “Sy,” Jamie said. “Even if this goes perfectly, it’s my legs.”

  “I know.”

  “We’re running from Dog, Catcher, two Brunos, the Ghost, Sanguine, the tentacled man, and very possibly Iron Maiden.”

  “She lived?”

  “I’m suspicious she did, Sy. I had one last glimpse of her, and she looked awfully whole for someone who was standing at the periphery of a grenade’s detonation.”

  “Damn it,” I said.

  “Not to mention,” Jamie said. “We’re outrunning the plague, and working to get out of the city before the quarantine is fully established and the walls require something closer to a siege engine to break through.”

  “I know,” I said. “Yeah.”

  “You want to, what, amputate my legs? While we’re on the run? You don’t see the problem with that?”

  “Not amputate. I hope. But running might be hard afterward.”

  Jamie nodded, eyes still on his legs.

  “For now, we need to focus on the people who are chasing us,” I said. “Assuming they didn’t give up, I’ll feel a lot happier if I go back and cover our tracks. I want to get the lay of the land, and figure out where we’re going next.”

  “Do you know how miserable it’s going to be, waiting here and waiting for you to come back? Assuming you do? Half the bounty hunters in the western Crown States are lined up against us, Sy.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I’ll make it back.”

  “Soon?” he asked.

  “Soon enough,” I said. “I promise.”

  I saw him draw in a deep breath, then exhale.

  It wasn’t usual, to see him this insecure. Jamie was so stable, most of the time, even when he was arguing with me, he tended to do it in a way that seemed unshakable, and frustratingly, like he wouldn’t ever change his position.

  “Stay busy in the meantime. There are gloves in the kit,” I said. “Wear them. Stitch him together with your Academy know-how, best you can. When I get back, we’ll get you looked after.”

  Jamie looked antsy. I ventured, “Need a minute before you start?”

  He nodded.

  Before standing, I was careful to re-wrap the wound. I dug for and found another bag of aqua nucifera. If Harry needed it, we could give it to him, but I was thinking Jamie would need some too. The bags could be refilled once each with some sterilized water, and they would still approximate a blood transfusion, while having a longer shelf life and not needing refrigeration.

  “You wanted the mop?” Jamie asked. He lurched to his feet. I could see from his expression and the way he tested moving his legs that he was now acutely aware of how much slower and heavier they seemed to be.

  “Yeah,” I said. And I assume you want to talk.

  Jamie walked with me to the kitchen. I broke away to check the hall closet, and found a jacket that was only slightly too big for me. No hood, but I would manage. It had to be warmer than the alternative.

  Jamie had found the broom closet, and collected the mop. He held it out for me, but as I took hold of it, he didn’t let go.

  “Sy,” Jamie said, voice lowered. He didn’t want Harry to hear.

  “Mm?”

  “The way this thing has been progressing. What the guard at the prison said. It’s unpredictable.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think… and I’m not sure, but it seems to make sense based on what we’ve seen, b
ut this thing chooses how long to incubate. Sometimes it appears within the hour. Sometimes it takes longer.”

  “Looks like,” I said. “It’s a shame you got the fast growing strain. I’m hoping there’s a downside for the plague as it accelerates like it is. Maybe it burns out on raw materials?”

  “I think it gets raw materials from blood,” Jamie said. “It won’t run out soon.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, maybe.”

  “But Sy. Just because Harold doesn’t have any signs around his stump now doesn’t mean he’s healthy. If there’s even a thirty minute incubation time, the disease wouldn’t necessarily have shown up again.”

  “Possible.”

  “I get lying to him, to help lift his spirits. But you’re not going to fool me.”

  “Can’t seem to fool you or lie to you ever,” I said. “Not reliably. It’s really unfortunate.”

  “There are no guarantees, Sy. Even if you try to carve out the infection, it might not be the way to deal with this.”

  “There are never any guarantees,” I said. “I’ll be back soon.”

  “Please,” Jamie said.

  The word seemed out of place and eerie, passing through his lips.

  I passed through the one end of the main room of the house to head to the windows. I peered through each before deeming the coast clear enough.

  Jamie was pulling on the gloves. With his assistance, I peeled the bloody shirt and jacket free of Harry’s shoulder. Both went into the bucket. I repositioned the bag of aqua nucifera and reclaimed my knife.

  Jamie’s demeanor shifted as he watched me slide the knife into my boot. As if he recognized the danger I was throwing myself into.

  Stepping out onto the porch, I quickly spotted the droplets and spatters of blood that marked the deck and stairs. I swabbed them with the mop, dipping it into a puddle first.

  Once the deck was cleaned of the blood, I moved down to the street, collecting some twigs and light detritus. I dusted the steps and deck so they wouldn’t look so tidy.

  A glance down both ends of the street suggested we hadn’t been followed.