They Promised Me the Gun Wasn't Loaded

by James Alan Gardner

  I open my fists. The crushed wasps drop. The skin of my palms is turning black.

  Then I’m falling and—

  9

  Selective Pressures

  OOF, I’M AWAKE AGAIN. So, yay?

  I’m still in the furnace room, lying on the rough concrete floor. My hands hurt like hell; they feel as if someone pounded nails through them. But when I stare through watery eyes at my palms, they’re undamaged. My power of miraculous recovery saved me from a death worse than Fate.

  As I try to stand, I twist an ankle. Stilettos are damned unforgiving when you’re wobbly on your feet. I take off my shoes and try again. Now my ankle hurts like hell, but if I can heal from a lethal wasp sting, a sprain is de nada. Just give me a minute.

  Meanwhile, I look around. I don’t know how much time has passed since I got stung, but when I examine the room, I see a buzzing mass of wasps where Shar should be. There must be thousands of insects, clumped so thickly I can’t see what lies beneath.

  « Shar! » I yell mentally. « Are you all right? »

  « I am furious,» she replies, «but not hurt. I changed to Dakini and enclosed myself in a telekinetic envelope without getting stung. And you’re well? »

  « Well enough,» I say.

  I stare at the buzzing swarm. The general shape tells me Shar is standing upright, but I can’t see her for all the wasps crawling over her body. Every now and then, I catch a glint of violet beneath the insects’ yellow bodies. That must be the shield that keeps my friend from getting stung. I don’t know how she can breathe in there, but I’d better not ask. Never question the mechanics of superpowers, or else you might bugger things up. If I ask, “How can you breathe?” Shar may start suffocating.

  There’s also no point asking, “How can I help?” Even if I had a flamethrower, I couldn’t kill wasps fast enough to get them all—not before they stung me to shit. I’d pass out again for sure … and considering that two small stings put me down for an unknown length of time, who knows what a hundred stings would do? I don’t want to test the limits of my recuperation.

  But at least, no wasps are attacking me now. Shar (or rather Dakini) is a human-sized sugar cube drawing the wasps’ attention. Let’s not disturb them. The wasps focused on Dakini aren’t killing anyone else. In a way, she’s doing her part to keep people safe.

  But I don’t have a comparable option. I can’t produce force fields, so if I get costumed up, I’ll get stung and stung and stung. I have to stay Jools until I figure out some clever way to kill a million insects.

  « I’ll get help,» I tell Dakini. I hurry away before I’m noticed by the wasps.

  * * *

  I SPRINT FOR THE utility room’s door. With my shoes off, my feet are only covered by stockings; the concrete floor shreds the nylon to ribbons in 2.73 seconds. This leaves me in bare feet—my cute uncallused feet, as soft as a baby’s soft spot. I stop and mutter, “Let’s get something straight. My feet may look demure, but they’re as tough as the toughest human’s toesies. As tough as an African long-distance runner who marathons daily without shoes.”

  My feet don’t visibly change—from the ankles down, I could still model sandals. But my pampered-looking skin pulls taut around my bones. It hurts for a moment like a foot cramp; then abracadabra! My Vogue-model feet fast-forward through a lifetime of shoelessness, leaving them ready to race over cobbles without getting cut.

  I crack open the furnace-room door. The basement outside is a shambles—an appropriate word, since “shambles” originally meant “slaughterhouse.” I don’t bother counting the bodies sprawled motionless across the floor, nor do I check whether they’re all dead. Even if some are alive, I don’t know how to keep them that way. What would be able to counteract the poison injected by a Mad Genius’s wasps? Maybe there’s something that’ll work as an antivenom, but I don’t know what it is and I sure as hell don’t have any with me.

  No wasps within sight. I throw open the door and hurry past the corpses. I breathe through my mouth to avoid inhaling. The club’s aged-in scent of wood polish and beer has been replaced by the stench of body fluids: everything that spills out when dead muscles go slack. The reek is appalling. But if there’s such a thing as a bright side, the smell seems to have driven away the wasps. Whatever species they belong to, the wasps have no interest in carrion.

  Tables and chairs lie scattered in all directions. From the pattern of dispersal, I can tell that people stampeded toward the stairway. They cleared the route by tossing furniture out of their way. Vampires and were-beasts can throw really hard—the club’s wooden chairs were sturdy, but some were reduced to flinders when they smashed against the wall. Let’s try not to imagine what might have happened if ordinary humans got hit in the process.

  Here and there, I see human-shaped lumps covered by wasps. They look a lot like Dakini did, except they’re lying on the ground.

  Darklings? Sparks? Innocent bystanders? I can’t tell. But the insects targeted people with powers, whether Dark or Light. I wonder what happened to Grandfather and Invie, or the Australian All-Stars. I wonder if I’m all on my own.

  No. My friends will be all right. They have to be.

  I tiptoe past the wasp-covered forms, then race up the stairs two at a time. I stop when I reach the ground floor. The doors to the outside world have been torn off their hinges. Furniture has been scattered like I saw in the basement, and dozens of dead bodies lie sprawled. But I also see human-sized cocoons of black chitin scattered haphazardly around.

  I’ve heard of such cocoons. Since vampires are vulnerable to sunlight, some clever vamp wizard developed a spell to surround himself with a lightproof black chrysalis. The wizard then taught the spell to other Darklings (for a suitable price, of course). I don’t know how much the dude charged, but clearly, a lot of Darklings paid up.

  The cocoon spell locks in its occupant till sunset—in this case, sunset tomorrow. The chitin of the cocoon is so hard it repels bullets. Maybe it also repels superpowered wasps. Guess we’ll see at tomorrow’s sunset whether the wasps could get inside.

  In the meantime, I hear buzzing in the barroom. I tiptoe to the door and take a peek. A gigantic sphere stretches from floor to ceiling, covered with angry insects trying to plunge their stingers through the outer shell. Underneath the wasps shines a familiar golden light: the beaming goodness of a force globe produced by Aria.

  « Aria! » I say with my comm ring. « Is that you in there? »

  « Me and a lot of people,» she replies. « As many as I could manage. » She pauses. « How are you doing? Dakini told us you got stung. »

  « You know me,» I tell her. « There’s dead and then there’s mostly dead. » I look at the huge buzzing sphere. « How long can you keep that up? »

  « I’ve achieved equilibrium,» says Aria, ever the physics student. « I’ve adjusted the size and thickness of the sphere to levels I can maintain indefinitely—like walking at an easy pace. But if I try to do anything else, I’ll burn out fast. »

  « Dakini is in the same boat,» I say. « But don’t worry, I’ll figure out something before you get tired. »

  I feel a sudden chill, as if someone dropped an ice cube down my dress. I whirl and see a ghost; it was running its hands down my spine. The ghost is so dried up and shriveled, I can’t tell if it’s male or female—just a mass of burned skin and bones. Its lips move, but I can’t hear anything over the buzz of Aria’s wasps. The ghost reaches out again and I shy away, feeling a brush of the phantom’s icy cold.

  I back away farther, thinking, Damn, I’ve lost my invitation card. The card was in my purse, which I dropped in the furnace room. Will I have to face dozens of spirits like the one in front of me? It reaches for me, but I don’t think it means any harm; it just senses my body heat and longs to make itself warm.

  I retreat, keeping an eye out for other phantoms who might want to paw me. None in sight. That worries me. Before we got the “good” invitations, this part of the fest hall was full of lo
st spirits. Where did they go?

  I doubt they ran from the wasps. A wasp can’t sting a ghost. And even if Diamond’s wasps are so damned special they affect the spirit world, the poor bozo spooks we saw probably didn’t have enough intelligence to run away. If they got stung, they’d just huddle in misery, wondering why they hurt.

  So where did the ghosts go? Did something lure them elsewhere?

  I run for the stairs and head upward.

  * * *

  A COLD WIND SLAPS me as I approach the second floor. It’s blowing through broken windows. Looks like some people made their own exits when they saw how bad the wasps were.

  Hey, the chill has affected the wasps. Hah! Diamond may be a Mad Genius, but he’s Australian. When he engineered his killer wasps, he didn’t make them tough enough to withstand Canadian winter. And it doesn’t help that his wasp nest messed up the frickin’ furnace.

  So wherever the wind can reach, the temperature has fallen below freezing. None of the wasps are moving. Waterloo’s local wasps go dormant and hibernate through the winter. Diamond’s wasps are doing the same … or else they just die and good riddance. Candy-assed poikilotherms.

  Even better, the cold guarantees the wasps won’t spread beyond the Transylvania Club. If this were summer, the broken windows would let wasps swarm the city. But tonight, the windchill is a slow but certain solution to our problems.

  « Aria! Dakini! » I call through my comm ring. « The wasps can’t stand cold. Break some windows, or get outside. »

  « Damn,» says Aria. « I should have thought of that. But I’m trapped in this big fucking bubble. No way I can squeeze through a door. »

  I say, « Want me to smash the windows near you? »

  « No, my cou … uhh … there’s a guy named Todd here with me in the bubble. He’s called 911. He can tell the fire and police to break the windows. »

  « That works,» I say. « Just make sure the window-breakers back off fast. It’ll take a few minutes for the wasps to freeze. In the meantime, a single sting is lethal. »

  As I continue up the stairs, the temperature keeps dropping. Ice has caked on the metal pipe that serves as the stairway’s banister. There’s even a sheen of ice on the wooden steps. My bare feet hate it to pieces. But I pick my way through the ice till I reach the blinder wall at the top of the stairs.

  Deep breath. Then I crouch, so I won’t be too noticeable as I come out the other side of the jet-black curtain.

  Good decision, Jools! Just as I’m ready to sneak through the blinder, Wrecking Ball flies out over my head like she’s been shot from a cannon.

  Flight isn’t one of Wrecking Ball’s powers. Something must have hit her hard enough to send her sailing. She clatters through the guardrail at the side of the stairs and disappears toward the floor below. I can hear her crashing through furniture, plowing into tables and chairs. When she finally comes to a stop, silence reigns for a moment before she yells in outrage.

  More sounds of breakage ensue. Wrecking Ball is not a happy camper.

  Something drops onto the step beside me. It’s a device the size of my pinkie and it’s obviously Cape Tech—mostly black, but covered with strands of dark green. The strands glow, and move in a random-seeming pattern all over the surface. Specks of light circulate through the strands like little creatures racing through a maze. The device reeks of pine, like the D-grade air freshener that gets sprayed inside used cars.

  This thingie must have fallen off Wrecking Ball when she crashed through the guardrail. I gingerly touch it with my fingertip. My hand changes: it becomes semi-see-through and puckered like a raisin. I don’t feel different, but now my hand looks like it belongs to a withered ghost. My other hand does, too, and when I press my fingers against a stair step, they sink a short distance into the wood. It feels like pushing a taut tarpaulin as it gradually yields to the pressure.

  “Fuck,” I say. My voice sounds hollow. Sepulchral.

  “Fuck,” I say again. Robin Hood and his posse snuck in disguised as ghosts.

  * * *

  I THINK ABOUT THE invitation cards. Did their enchantment literally blind us to the presence of Robin’s gang? Or maybe the ghosts Miranda saw were Robin and his homies: visible to invitation-holders, but dismissed as surplus specters. They arrived on the ground floor and made their way toward the bazooka. Then Diamond unleashed his wasps, and in the confusion, Robin’s gang made their move.

  Wrecking Ball roars. Her thunderous footsteps pound the floor as she starts to run. The building shakes in response.

  The density of cast iron depends on how it’s made, but WikiJools says it averages seventy-two hundred kilograms per cubic meter. I take a guess at Wrecking Ball’s volume, mentally scribble numbers on the back of a fictional envelope, and end up with an estimate that the woman weighs close to a metric ton. That’s a lot of stress on the wooden floor … especially since Wrecking Ball’s weight gets concentrated on a small area each time one of her feet smacks down. The Transylvania Club was constructed to hold a crowd of beer-belly drunks dancing the polka, but Wrecking Ball may exceed the building’s tolerance.

  And she’s only one of Robin’s Merry “Men.” The gang has several other Sparks. No one else matches Wrecking Ball’s weight, but they all wield serious firepower. A shooting match could blow the club to bits.

  Staying low, I finally shove myself through the blinder to see what’s happening. Much gratuitous sound and fury: it’s more than a brawl with a dozen combatants, it’s a fucque du cluster à la mode.

  Let’s deal with the least important people first: Stevens & Stephens. They’re crouched behind a flipped-up table and shooting at God knows what. They seem to be popping off their Glocks at random. Maybe this is the gunfire version of typing madly when you hear your boss coming down the hall. You don’t want to look like a slacker by having leftover ammunition at the end of a firefight.

  Next there’s Reaper himself. He’s battling blade to blade with Ninja Jane from Robin Hood’s gang. Reaper’s scythe versus Jane with a pair of daggers. They’re off in their own little world, far from the bar and the bazooka. They’re on the opposite side of the building, going full Princess Bride as they leap over tables, throw chairs at each other, and swing from the building’s rafters.

  It’s hard to tell who’s winning. It’s hard to see much at all. Reaper is in his dirty gray robe, while Jane wears head-to-toe black: loose-fitting silk that covers her completely, except for a narrow eye slit. Since the candles have all blown out, the fight looks like shadow puppets flitting through the darkness. I catch flashes from Jane’s knives, and the black glow of Reaper’s scythe, but apart from that, my eyes don’t see much.

  On the other hand, their fight gives my ears a lot to hear. First, the weird crinkling of the air as it recoils from the scythe. Next, a series of thuds as Reaper hops over and onto furniture. Jane herself makes no sound, despite numerous superhuman jumps. WikiJools tells me she’s never been heard to speak, but she’s surrounded by apophenic whispers, a chorus of white-noise voices, mostly unintelligible but occasionally saying things you think you understand. “I saw you do it.” “No escape.” “Blood on your hands.” Whatever language you speak, you can hear sinister phrases. Different people hear different things, and all at the same time.

  I’ve heard about this before, and said to myself, “What a cheap gimmick.” But hearing the voices for real is a whole other thing. They get under my skin like maggots; if not for the noise from the rest of the fight, I’d be totally creeped out.

  But the rest of the fight is loud. You might expect the fighters would be mostly Darklings; after all, the building was full of them. But the great Dark majority are locked in cocoons or have bailed out of the building completely. The only Darklings left are Vandermeers: Nicholas, Elaine, and Momma Lee.

  Elaine and Nicholas flank the bazooka case. They’re fighting off Robin Hoodlums who want the gun. To me, this proves what K suspected: both Vandermeer kids belong to the Dark Guard. Otherwise, th
ey’d have buggered off like all the other Darklings—the ones who didn’t give a flying fuck about the gun. I sympathize with the Darklings who fled; why risk your life over a stupid MacGuffin? But if Nicholas and Elaine are Dark Guardians, they have to oppose rogue Sparks like Robin Hood.

  I have no idea where Lee fits in. Maybe she’s Dark Guard, too. Maybe she’s protecting her children. Or maybe she’s a pissed-off Elder of the Dark who has totally run out of fucks.

  The why can wait. At the moment, let’s concentrate on the how. And the what-can-Jools-do-to-stay-alive.

  Crouched beside the bazooka, Nicholas plays the ghost card on both offense and defense. The offense part is against a pair of robots I assume were built by Maid Marian. They’re big metal golems abristle with weapons: cannons in their bellies, fire and lightning in their hands. As I watch, Nicholas surrounds them with mist. Their fire goes out, their lightning gets grounded, and corrosion laces through the robots’ metal.

  The robots try to fire their cannons; the barrels rupture, spewing fragments in all directions. Several shrapnel-like pieces fly straight at Nicholas … but he’s a ghost, and the shards pass harmlessly through him. They don’t stop until they hit the glass case that holds the bazooka. Flares of magic erupt where the shards hit the case. The metal fragments melt in the blink of an eye, becoming molten blobs that dribble down the glass.

  So as expected, the case is awash with defensive spells. It’s not gonna be breached by mere ricochets.

  On the other side of the case, Elaine is going full Dungeons & Dragons, casting spells like a tenth-level wizard who’s prepped for combat. Unlike her ghostly brother, she seems quite solid. For defense, she’s surrounded herself with enchanted barriers. They glow like bloodred ramparts that Elaine crouches behind as she tosses sorcerous nastiness over the top. But the barrage of attacks from Robin’s gang are whittling down her defenses. Elaine’s cheeks have been gashed and her horn-rimmed glasses have literally melted onto her face. Her glittery black dress is in tatters; if she were human, she’d be bleeding to death.