Yael turned at the next corner and went to work crouched behind the rubble, freeing a chunk from the crumbling remains of the wall. She managed to break off two pieces roughly the size of her fist before the first man came around the corner, hair standing up from a lesion-covered head, face flushed with anger and exertion. Yael’s aim was good, honed by years of driving off the graveling-sparrows that roosted on the walls of her parent’s estate. The chunk of concrete bounced off his forehead. Yael saw the first blossom of red on his skin, eyes rolling back in his head before he fell. The man behind him caught the second rock with his nose and fell to his knees, howling with rage while Yael backed further into the ruins, praying that she hadn’t picked a dead-end.
She had. The wall that rose up in front of her was fairly intact, two stories high and far too smooth for her to attempt climbing it. Yael turned around, her back pressed to the wall and fumbled in her waist pouch.
Four men advanced on her, three new ones plus the one who had blood streaming from his nose. They had seen enough to be cautious in their advance, but they clearly had not been dissuaded. Yael found what she was looking for and pulled it from her waist pouch, clutching another titanium spike in her right hand. Her pursuers slowed their approach and wrapped bandanas and rags across their mouths, but they didn’t back off. Yael’s mind raced, looking for a solution, a way out, a way through. Realistically, Yael knew she could stop only one of the men if they rushed her, which they almost certainly would.
Yael was so frightened that she didn’t notice that the men had come to a halt midway down the dead-end, ugly laughter dying on their lips. She only became aware of their trepidation when they turned around one by one to face a figure in a red-hooded sweatshirt and cut-off camouflage pants, flanked by a dog that looked more like a wolf than anything else.
“Huh. What do we have here?”
It was a thin woman, her features hidden by her hood, her voice amused and her hands in the front pocket of her sweatshirt. The dog kept pace beside her as she walked down the shattered alley, the men backing nervously toward Yael.
“This many of you boys in the same place, I guess you found something you want real bad, huh?
The men vacillated between Yael’s spike and the woman in red’s cheerfully relentless advance. They muttered amongst themselves briefly, then one of them, a golden-skinned man with numerous ear piercings, finally spoke up.
“This ain’t your concern. Our business is finished. We gave you free passage through our territory. You ought to take it.”
“Gave me free passage? Did I hear that right asshole? ’Cause the way I remember it, you bastards wanted to rape me and eat my dog.”
“We came to an understanding,” the golden man insisted.
“I killed everyone who got close enough,” the woman said, shrugging with disdain. “Then you hid and yelled shit from behind the rocks and I got bored. I was on my way out of here when I saw that girl in the mask give you a hard time. That was interesting.”
“What do you want?”
“I wanna talk to her. Without company.”
The men looked at each other uneasily and Yael wondered what the woman could have done to make them so afraid. They seemed to want to leave, but with the woman blocking the only exit, they didn’t know what to do.
“If we let her go, will you let us leave?” The short, dark man who asked the question looked very concerned underneath layers of face paint. “Without a fight?”
“Well, I might,” the woman offered happily, standing as if she had the whole day allotted for that task. “Fenrir doesn’t take talk of eating him very well, though. He’s pretty hungry, too. I can’t promise you anything.”
The golden-skinned man spun on his heel, stabbing one blunt finger in the direction of Yael so violently that she almost mistook it for an attack and grabbed for her backup spray can. Smaller than the first, and lacking the remote detonator, it would still probably stop him before he could get to her.
“We will leave. For now. But you are lucky that your friend showed up when she did...”
Yael never heard the rest of the sentence because that was when she sprayed him, the vapor surrounding him like a cloud. He cried out, a sound that died down as his throat closed, and clawed at his useless eyes. On either side of him, men stared at each other in uncertain horror while the woman behind them cackled.
Yael wondered if she had done the wrong thing, if she should have let the men leave after making their threats, because she thought they might rush her en masse, trampling their fallen spokesman. Then they seemed to realize there was no outlet in her direction, and turned and ran, one after the other, for the mouth of the alley.
The woman in red stood and waited, standing between them and the exit. Just behind her, her dog whined with eagerness.
The first had a length of pipe that he swung with tattooed, heavily-muscled arms, while the short man behind him held kitchen knives of different lengths in either hand, the blades chipped and jagged. The woman ducked the pipe swinging for her head without even taking her hands out of her pockets, though it came close enough to knock her hood from her head. This revealed a blond ponytail and a much younger girl than Yael had been expecting, with a grin like a broken glass bottle. Stepping sideways, she watched the pipe ricochet off the ground with amusement, hardly seeming to put any force behind it at all when she stepped on top of the pipe. Her weight tore it from his hands, then she kicked him in the side of the knee so that it snapped and buckled beneath him. The tattooed man’s screams were muffled by the bulk of Fenrir, who leapt on him with a particularly ferocious growl and started tearing the shrieking man to pieces.
The dark-skinned man attempted to stab the woman in red with both knives simultaneously, in an act of desperation or madness. The woman jumped backwards at the last moment and the man slashed at nothing but air, yelling incoherently in frustration. The woman finally took her hands from her pockets, jabbing the man in the neck with something Yael couldn’t quite see. His whole body went rigid for an agonizing moment, then he fell over, crashing to the ground in a twitching mass.
It was obvious to Yael that the final man had no intention of fighting. He ran for the mouth of the alley, sprinting with the form and single-minded drive of an athlete, ignoring his comrades scattered across the ground. The woman in red seemed disappointed as she let him pass. Instead, she collected one of the dark-skinned man’s knives and sat on his broad chest, holding the point so it hovered directly above his left eye.
“Granted, it’s hard to find a place to take a bath around here, but I swear that you bastards go out of your way to stink. Let’s make this quick. Tell me what I want to know, or I’ll shove this knife straight through your eyeball and leave it there. Then my dog will eat you. Understand?”
The man twitched and shuddered, pinned to the ground as if the chipped point of the knife exerted its own terrible gravity. He was actually moving slightly from side to side, as if he intended to worm his way into the ground to avoid the knife.
“Good. Where do you guys keep your stuff?”
“What?”
“You rob people, right, asshole?”
For some reason, the man had to open his mouth several times for each word that he managed to spit out. Yael crept closer, making sure to stay out of reach of the man she had sprayed, who was still writhing blindly, whining and rubbing dirt in his face.
“Yeah, well, it’s hard to find...”
“You know what else is hard? Seeing things with only one eye. You gettin’ the general idea, son?”
Apparently he got the idea. The directions he babbled made no sense at all to Yael, who had no clue where she was, but the woman seemed satisfied enough with them, because she buried the knife in the man’s head with such abrupt and casual violence that Yael let out a little shriek. The man’s body performed one tremendous spasm, then went limp, the hilt of the kitchen knife protruding forlornly from his eye socket. The woman looked over at her with a jagged grin
and her dog paused his meal to do the same. Saliva and blood dripped from Fenrir’s stained muzzle, his black eyes sparkling with malice and curiosity.
“Well, hello,” the woman said brightly, standing up and wiping the blood thoughtlessly from her hands onto her tattered sweatshirt. “What in the hell are you doing out here?”
4. The Young Lady’s Guide to Wasteland Etiquette
Nostalgia creeping across a humid expanse of skin, languid as any seduction. Echoes of footsteps and urgent breathing, found objects of a sidewalk vendor arranged in a subtle and vaguely disturbing pattern across a plaid blanket. The topography of a subjective and unknown territory, the metallic taste of fear.
Yael had to hurry to keep up, though the blonde girl was hardly taller than she was. The manic pace she set was matched by the questions she rattled off at Yael, rapid-fire, often without listening to the answers.
“What’s your name?”
“Yael Kaufman. May I ask your name, Miss?”
The woman cackled, adding another piece of gum to the wad she chewed incessantly.
“Aren’t you a polite little brat? And it’s Jenny. You might wanna drop the honorifics, by the way. This isn’t a place for nice people.”
“Polite isn’t the same as nice,” Yael pointed out, practically jogging to keep up with Jenny on the narrow trail that wandered between blackened tree trunks and alkaline banks of soil. “It never hurts to be polite, Miss Frost.”
“Suit yourself. What the hell are you doing out here?”
“I’m going to the Night Market in the Nameless City – which is really a name in and of itself, if you ask me,” Yael said directly, seeing no point in making a secret of her destination. That earned her a backwards glance from Jenny. Fenrir, trotting behind her, looked as if he was laughing with his tongue lolling out. “I have business there.”
“Where did you hear about the Night Market?”
“A cat named Tobi told me.”
“Oh. Okay. That makes sense, at least.”
“I am glad that you think so. In my experience, cats haven’t generally been talkative. I thought it a bit odd.”
“Not really,” Jenny said, shrugging. “Cats talk. People usually just don’t listen.”
“I – I am not certain what you mean.”
“You do seem pretty new at this. Why are you wearing a mask?”
“The air isn’t safe. I have a read-out,” Yael said, tapping one of the lenses inset in the mask. “Not all of the bio-war compounds here are inert. You are at risk, Miss Frost...”
“I don’t care about that shit.”
“You don’t – you aren’t worried about lung cancer? Or blister gas and neurotoxins?”
“Not particularly.” Jenny climbed the ridge in front of them with the same relentless pace she used on the flat, paved road, leaving Yael to pant along behind her. “What do you care? Why would you give a fu – ”
“Please don’t swear,” Yael said sternly. “I don’t care for that sort of language.”
Jenny paused in climbing the ridge, glancing back over her shoulder at Yael, who glared stubbornly in return, hiding her trembling hands behind her back so Jenny wouldn’t see them. Yael was worried about Jenny Frost’s potential reaction, but at the same time, principles were important, and she didn’t back down once she took a stand.
Even if she sort of wanted to, this one time.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. You are kidding, right?”
Jenny turned around slowly, her hands buried in her pockets, her expression bemused but alarmingly fluid. Yael noticed for the first time the wanton cruelty that lurked in her eyes, the utter lack of empathy and naked disregard. Yael noticed Fenrir moving behind her, cutting off any chance of retreat down the path.
“Decent people don’t talk that way.”
Jenny laughed bitterly.
“Oh. Well, we’re fine, then. Because I am not at all decent.”
Yael peeled her mask off, so fast that the plastic stuck to her cheeks and stung as she pulled it away.
“I don’t care. I won’t listen to that sort of language. And my name is Yael. You need to work through all of this.” Yael marched defiantly to Jenny, pushing her damp bangs from her forehead. Fenrir followed uncertainly. “Our trip will be even longer if we argue for the whole of it.”
Jenny Frost’s jaw dropped, then stayed that way, staring at Yael as if she had never seen anything vaguely like her before.
“Are we having the same conversation? Because I could swear you just told me what to do again. Since when are we traveling together?”
Turning her back to Jenny’s open annoyance, Yael forced her hands to be steady as she set her duffel bag on the ground and then opened it.
“You are going to the Nameless City, yes? Well, so am I. To the Night Market.”
Yael continued digging through her bag while Jenny stared in bemusement, bending to look at Yael from various angles. She ignored Jenny’s odd behavior.
“You said that already. Why should I care?”
“Because you are going to the city beyond dreams, the city beside the ocean where the worst monsters sleep,” Yael said, steeling herself when her fingers closed around the narrow wooden box that her brother had left in her charge, in those last frantic days, before he disappeared. “And you can’t get to the Nameless City without one of these.”
The wooden box was enameled with panels of exotic rosewood and an ebony inlay depicting the sign by which dreams are remembered and hearts exposed to the corruption of the King in Yellow. It opened with a stroke of her hand, pivoting on a hidden mechanism. Like much of what Yael carried with her, it had belonged to her brother.
Yael could still remember the morning he had announced its discovery. He charged through the kitchen barefoot and half-dressed, scandalizing their stepmother and assorted servants. But he didn’t care. He went straight to Yael to show her his treasure, the product of a lifetime laboring over dreams. She straightened his knitted skull-cap and held him tightly while he babbled, cooing over the gleaming silver as if it were a child.
Yael wished she could remember his name, but the Visitors had taken it.
“Holy fu-”
“Please don’t swear.”
Jenny managed to tear her greedy eyes from the key to Yael’s face.
“What the fu-”
“I am serious,” Yael said, snapping the box closed, hiding the tarnished silver key, carved as intricately as scrimshaw, from the corrosive air of the Waste. “I don’t care for that sort of language.”
“Give me a f... okay, okay. Are you insane? Why do I need some key?”
“Because you can’t travel to the Nameless City without one,” Yael said, reciting from memory one of the rambling annotations scribbled in the books her brother had left behind. “A Silver Key can only be found in a dream. And that isn’t possible for you, is it, Miss Frost?”
Yael’s confidence seemed to unnerve Jenny. She licked her lips and shook her head uncertainly.
“I can’t... I don’t sleep. How in the... how do you know this stuff?” Jenny rubbed her temples as if she felt a headache coming on. “Have we met before?”
“No. My brother, however, was a very experienced dreamer, and I was his student,” Yael explained modestly, carefully repacking her bag. “My dreams warned me of our meeting in a general way, though they didn’t mention what a foul mouth you would have.”
“Isn’t that fascinating,” Jenny said, rocking urgently from the balls of her feet to her heels. “There are all sorts of things I want to know...”
“I only know three things that are meant for you,” Yael said mildly, zipping up her bag and pulling her mask back over her head. “The first; you need a Silver Key to find what you are looking for, Miss Frost. The second; you can’t take mine, because that key is my brother’s dream, and my brother is gone and no one remembers him besides me. Without me, there is no key.”
Jenny’s face twitched, her eyes narrowed to slits.
“What’s the third?”
“When I was a child, my brother did something while I slept.”
Jenny smirked.
“I know how that goes.”
“Don’t be vile,” Yael snapped. “He never touched me. He did something to my dreams. They started to show me things – messages, warnings... and a map that I have seen every time I closed my eyes since I was eight.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about. You dream about maps?”
“A dream of a map of a country that never was,” Yael said, suddenly feeling very tired. “You want to cross the Waste, Miss Frost? I know the way. You want to go to the Nameless City? I can take you there.”
Jenny crossed her arms and lowered her head in thought, brow furrowed. Yael couldn’t help but notice Jenny’s ears almost came to points that poked out of her straw-blonde hair; the spray of multi-colored stars tattooed along her collarbone peaking from under her tattered red sweatshirt; her right hand, scratched and battered, fingernails painted black and then nibbled away to ragged nubs. She wasn’t from the Waste, Yael decided. Jenny Frost came from somewhere much worse.
The sun crept across a furious sky hardly visible through writhing clouds, and the Waste blossomed around them. Everything was coated with a uniform layer of pulverized stone, glass, and paint that created glimmerings of reflective color amongst concrete and dead grass. Jenny studied the cracked earth between her dusty sneakers and Yael watched her, wondering if she had done everything right, exactly the way she had been taught to do. She had no anxiety that her brother was wrong, because he had been right about everything. He had even kissed Yael goodbye the night he disappeared, the first time he had done something like that since she was a child.
Yael wished she could remember his name.
“Alright, Princess. I give up,” Jenny said, grinning and shaking her head ruefully. Up close, Yael could see that Jenny’s teeth were unusually sharp and pointed, and she wondered what lurked in the murky depths of her gene pool. “You guide and I make sure you get there in one piece. Deal?”
The Night Market Page 5
