Fire in the Wall

by S G Dunster

  We had all made new clothes—tight, flexible suits that were fire-resistant, bullet (and hopefully, fang)-proof, with crossed tool belts over our shoulders and cinched at our waists. I reached for a pocket at my waist and took the glass-knife I’d made, forming it in a little sheath at my hip. I dug my fingers into the jelly-like plastic grip I’d given it.

  Hard. Harder than glass, as I set the blade against the curve of the dome and pressed the trigger in the handle. The tip heated instantly, glowing fiery red.

  The glass bubbled. Melted. As I drew my blade through, it cut neatly, melting through three inches of glass. It took a while, a few seconds per each. A breeze passed over us, tousling the mass of vines and spindly trunks that sprayed up all around us, emerging from the dark joint between dome and walkway.

  Finally, there was an irregular rectangle big enough for Arapahoe, who was largest, to climb down through. He helped me lift the piece out when I’d gotten all the sides cut.

  We discovered a second glass layer, again three inches thick. I groaned. “Can you guys . . .” I gestured to Lil and Eap, and cutters formed in both their hands. They knelt through the hole with me.

  I looked back at Selah and Arapahoe, wondering what they thought of magical tools appearing out of nothing. They hadn’t complained when I presented them with the strange suits, but they hadn’t seen me make them.

  Arapahoe just regarded me steadily, and at my look Selah came forward to move aside some vines and branches that were making the job more difficult for Eap.

  Beyond the second layer was a third, this time six inches thick. At this point, Selah and Arapahoe took their own glass knives from their belts and knelt to help.

  This threw me again. Selah and Arapahoe . . . telling things? How? And why weren’t they upset? Why weren’t they asking me a million questions? Why were they taking all this in stride? My Whippoorwill was a pretty down-to-earth story. Magic wasn’t an element, unless you counted the fact that it was a giant hunk of metal supported by gas and whirring fans.

  But there they were, kneeling calmly next to me, as if it were all normal. As if nothing had happened.

  Relief tickled every extremity, tethers of tension loosening. I let out a long breath. Apparently, this Selah and this Arapahoe could tell and didn’t mind strange things happening. But also, clearly, they didn’t know what I had done, what had happened between me and Selah. They weren’t angry and upset as they’d been when I last saw them. When I’d made them disappear. Their ability to tell and their modified memories made this situation much simpler. Eap’s doing? I’d need to ask him how he managed it.

  We were through. The last piece of glass, this one quite heavy, was levered out of the hole and laid aside.

  I leaned down into it—a slanted, irregular rectangle, cut through two feet of glass layers between thin sheaths of air.

  It was pitch dark. From the outside looking in, it was just a square of black. A maw.

  I moved away, and Eap immediately put a foot on the curved, bubbled edge we’d cut. “In for a pence.” He took a coiled rope from his shoulder, fixing it to a thick branch of vine, and let it fall into the tangled mat of plants inside the skywalk. He leapt onto it and slid down.

  We all waited for a moment, looking down into the vine-choked hole.

  “Come along,” Eap’s muffled voice called.

  Arapahoe stepped around me, shimmied into the hole, and slid down as well.

  Selah followed him. When she reached the bottom, she yelled something, but I couldn’t make out what. I grabbed the rope, took a deep breath and slid down, imagining gloves for myself mid-slide because the rope was burning my palms.

  I fell into a mat of something dry and musty; what felt like a tangle of dry sticks and twigs. I stood up, brushed myself off, and reached for my handheld floodlight.

  As I flicked mine on, two others blinked on as well—Lil’s and Arapahoe’s.

  The beams glanced off the surroundings, diffusing light into the darkness, spotlighting details. We were in a thicket, for sure. Twisted trunks, some as thick as my waist, with wavy branches bare of leaves, reached up toward where light might come through. Tangled through them were hoary sticks; the stems of vines. They fed into what was under us—layers and layers of decomposed leaves and wood.

  We were standing under the arch that lead into the dome proper—a great metal beam weathered with dark red rust.

  The only light down there was indirect, filtered through a thousand branches, trunks, millions of leaves. It was dappled, dark, cool, full of mysterious shifting shadows—fertile ground for my imagination. It was what I’d always imagined being in the middle of a dense forest would be like, except for the smell. The air was stale, cloying . . . moldy. I didn’t want to breathe in because it tasted of disease. As we stepped into the strew of debris, I couldn’t really see much of what I was walking on unless I aimed my light directly at it. And I did not want to.

  As we walked in further, another, unpleasantly suggestive smell hit us. Arapahoe grunted. Selah breathed in sharply and pressed her hand to her nose. “Death,” she said.

  To me, it smelled like the five pounds of rotten hamburger Mom had mistakenly left in the trunk of our red Pontiac for a week, only maybe a hundred times as strong, and present wherever we walked.

  Slowly, unwillingly, I aimed my light at the ground.

  Bones. So many of them. A tangle of them, gleaming pale where they stuck up through the dark muck of rot they rested in. Leaves, but also, I knew, flesh.

  I couldn’t think of numbers the way Lil did. Thousands. Maybe millions. A whole globe-city, dead under our feet.

  We were walking on a soup of woven bones and dead flesh, seasoned with leaves and rotting wood and dirt. I stepped, and the ground squelched unpleasantly under me, setting a wave of buzzing insects flying up around us.

  “We shouldn’t.” Selah grabbed my shoulder.

  “We’ve no choice,” Eap said, an oddly satisfied note in his voice.

  We picked our way through, gingerly, unwillingly. I blanked my mind, trying not to think. Trying not to smell. The buzz of flies grew deafening. Circling us hopefully, the little creatures landed all over, testing us for death.

  We were walking on a mass grave.

  We walked past piles of pale round objects with three-paired shadows of nose and eye sockets. Here and there rib sickles jutted up through the grit and dirt. Jumbles of arm and leg bones fed the bushes, trees, vines, and as we went in further, tender waves of green grass and ferns. Things that liked shade, and mulch.

  Eap, walking at the head of our line, stopped suddenly, gesturing.

  I heard it, too. A soft, scuttling noise, like crabs on a tide rock. Like sharp talons on stone.

  Eap began walking again. I stayed there, frozen.

  “Move,” Lil snapped, bumping my shoulder hard as she passed me. I followed them, giving Selah a glance as I passed her.

  She shrugged and smiled a little. “Poison darts at the ready.” She drew a wicked-looking weapon from her belt.

  “You make that?” I asked, a fresh trickle of wonder dispelling the cold freeze of fear.

  Her smile grew grim, tight. She kept close to me, almost treading on my heels. I could feel her warmth. Breath, body . . . all those curves and soft places I’d imagined . . . and had actually touched

  No, I told myself furiously. You made that mistake. Leave it behind now. I took my own poison-dart gun from my holster—quickly formed, and matching hers—and held it tightly, bending as we moved through the dense growth. I sped up so I was a couple of steps ahead of her and Arapahoe. He was bringing up the rear of our party, just behind Selah.

  If it weren’t for our floodlights, we would be walking in completely blind. As it was, there were just so many shadows . . . so many tangled and overgrown areas where anything could be hiding.

  My shoulder broke through a spider web. Hand shaking, I brushed it off, looking around carefully. I didn’t see any spiders. I didn’t want to see any s
piders.

  I knew I was going to see spiders. Eap had scoffed, but all the dark things in my head were here. I’d put them here.

  We moved deeper in, Eap leading us, pausing every once in a while and cocking his ear to listen.

  The underbrush thinned. We stepped into a soaring, open space. The light was brighter here, filtering down through the dome and trees, but still not enough to see well by.

  “We must have made it past the smoke-damaged panes,” I said.

  Lil’s floodlight illuminated thick, hoary trunks hung with vines the size of muscled pythons . . . no.

  No.

  I took a step back. My pulse thumped in the roof of my mouth. Its malevolent black eye fixed on Eap, and then it quickly slithered up the trunk and out of sight.

  I took another step back and suddenly there was an arm pressed tight against my throat. An unfamiliar, muscled, putrid-smelling arm, and I was pressed into somebody’s chest, a sharp slice of a knife edge at my collarbone.

  I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t talk. I tried to cry out, to fight, but whatever . . . whoever it was, was stronger than me. So much stronger, they could keep me completely immobilized and silent. Several more of them—dark, lean shadows—crept up on Eap, Lil, Arapahoe, and Selah.

  Arapahoe fought and threw one of his attackers to the ground. Two more piled on him, tied him down, silencing him with a wooden branch shoved between his jaws.

  Selah managed to let out a noise of distress when she was taken. When Lil, ahead of us, whipped around to look, another of the wild men ran at her from behind and struck her in the head with a stick, before I could manage to shout and warn her.

  Eap, just ahead of her, stopped and turned just as another came at him, grabbing him by the neck and lifting him. Eap struggled and went suddenly limp.

  I tried to make a noise. My throat wanted to.

  A dozen wild people. They were filthy, all of them, smeared with some dark, scabby substance, their hair in long masses of tangles. All held weapons.

  They stank like dead bodies. Worse than dead bodies—like people who ate dead bodies as if they were ripe fruit and then smeared rotting entrails all over themselves for fun.

  The room was furring around the edges. The smell and the surprise. The fear. I was going to pass out. She was gripping me so hard I couldn’t quite breathe.

  A band—a metal sleeve around my throat, so hard and tough it couldn’t be dented. It didn’t help. The arm was already pressed there. Frantically, I tried to grasp for some idea. Some thought. A weapon.

  I scrambled to bring it up, to stab it at the arm gripping my neck. I couldn’t feel, couldn’t think. Blackness took over.

  Chapter 22

  I woke up in a pile of filthy rags. In a cage. The air stank like skunk. Rotting meat. Old urine. My neck throbbed, and my throat felt like a chewed plastic straw. I sat up slowly, gingerly. My ribs ached, too.

  “He lives,” Arapahoe said quietly. Selah laughed, the noise deep in her throat, almost a grunt.

  They were all here. Lil, Eap, Arapahoe, and Selah, huddled in the center of our cage.

  A cage. Poles lashed together with strips of dried hide.

  I tried not to think what sort of hide. But I knew. We all knew.

  Pressed up against the cage were vines bursting with sawtooth leaves and voluptuous flowers. There was a wall of tree trunks growing together and snaking up for hundreds of feet, weaving their branches in a through the poles.

  I looked beyond the bars, the trees, where they opened into a dim meadow. Lying along the edges of a large fire ring, there, in the center, were men and women piled together. Filthy, wearing leaves and leather, hair bound up off the backs of their heads in matted masses.

  Hair held up off their scalps with the shriveled tendons taken from their quarry while it still breathed; foul pompadours, filthy clouds shadowing their heads like a plume of unholy smoke. My mind was telling the story even as I took in the scene.

  “Quiet,” Lil hissed. “We don’t want them to wake up yet.” She had Satie on her chest and was stroking her smooth apricot skin with one index finger.

  “Eap,” I said, “What’s the plan?”

  He turned to me and placed a stubby, thick finger into the center of the dark blotch of moustache. “Tell, of course. We’ve got to tell our way out of this, boy.” Monty slunk around his leg and settled in his lap, glaring at me with uranium-yellow eyes.

  The wind shifted, and the smell hit me again—more pungent, far worse than the odors we were dining on inside the cage.

  I still can’t quite describe it. It was like feet in wet athletic shoes and no socks, worn day after day without respite. Sweat, slime, muck, decomposing things. Only multiplied, more intense. It was bodies uncared for, sanitation ignored, and rotten meat. A breath of filth washed over everything, punctuated by the buzz of flies coming from a mess of blood and bones just a little ways from our cage.

  I sucked in a breath when I made out a familiar shape, tossed on top of the pile of carnage—part of a foot. The last three toes intact, but rotting . . . black, like bad grapes, and the fan of phalanges and foot bones, the first two toe bones exposed.

  “They eat people,” I muttered. I glared at Eap.

  He gave me a grim smile. “What else is there in here to eat?”

  “I saw a snake,” I muttered.

  “Wasn’t a snake,” Arapahoe stated. “They can slither through these trees like snakes, though.” He glanced up, his dark eyes rolling to scan the branches that hung over us. Nothing visible.

  But that didn’t mean nobody was there.

  My heart was beating so loud, I could hear the thrum of blood in my ears. “So, what shall we tell? I don’t really want to stay here.” I touched my belt, looking for my gun, my knife, anything.

  “They took them.” Selah shifted and slid away from Arapahoe, who grunted, started, and rubbed his eyes with his large brown hand. “We don’t have any weapons. Except for this.” She reached into her boot, and, giving me a sly look, took a gleaming silver gun from it. It was elegant, with a filigreed handle. “I’ve got three bullets. They’re steam shells.”

  “Let’s make some.”

  “No,” Eap said. “Outside the dome, we made our weapons. Now that we are in the fray, we must use the tools we’ve given ourselves and no more. This is the predicament we’re in. No magicking our way out of it, Logan, or we won’t be firming up anything.”

  Lil stood and touched the canes of wood. Tried to bend them. They were well-lashed; they didn’t even shift. The canes were too stout to break, gridded like they were.

  I looked again at the mass of men and women sleeping on the ground around the fire. Dozens. Too many for us to imagine a way past if they were awake.

  “You said you had . . . steam shells?” I said to Selah.

  “Steam shells,” Selah confirmed. “Superheated. Will set anything they touch instantly ablaze. But they look like stones. That’s probably why nobody bothered.”

  “Good thinking,” I said.

  “I am your weapons master.” She gave me a small quirk of the lips and strutted to the side of the cage that divided us from the fire. “Won’t shoot them yet, of course. They’ll be a distraction while we run for it. But we’ve got to figure a way to break out.”

  “You woke up fast. I’m glad,” Lil said. “Or who knows how many of us would have been eaten before we could escape.” There was almost a glee to the way she said it. Eaten.

  “At least two, probably,” Eap murmured, giving me what was almost a wink. Monty leapt from his lap and stalked the cage’s perimeter.

  I stared at them, appalled. “You two are enjoying this.”

  Arapahoe hissed, hushing me.

  “All right,” I said, obediently lowering my voice. “I am not enjoying this. How do we break out?”

  “What do we have,” Eap said, “that will cut through leather?”

  I rummaged through my belt. The others didn’t bother; apparently they’d already
completed their inventory, and came up with exactly what I did: nothing.

  Not even the lights. Those were gone.

  I patted myself down—rubber suit. Leather belt. No bits of metal anywhere, except for brads to join things, to make holsters fast. I looked at my fingernails.

  Short, ragged. Filthy.

  “Teeth,” Lil said.

  I stared at her again. She shrugged, bent, and began to gnaw at one of the lashes, Satie scrambling from her chest to her head. She’d chosen one near the bottom of the cage. She had to lie down to chew properly. Satie perched on top of her blond crown, her knoblike eyes only inches from mine.

  “Gross.” I shuddered. “The leather, it’s probably made of—“

  “Shut up, Logan,” Lil interrupted, her voice muffled. She sat up, and we all gathered to look at her work.

  The lashes were old and gluey. Tough. She’d barely gotten the thing wet, much less cut into it.

  “It will take a while,” Selah said. “And we will have to—” Her gaze shifted, suddenly, to the fire ring.

  People were stirring.

  Sitting up, stretching. Beginning to chatter in low tones.

  “Sit,” Arapahoe said quietly as one rose and started loping toward us. “Sit here, backs against the lash. Logan, lie there as if you’re still sick.”

  Monty hissed and slipped through one of the squares in our jail, stalking around the perimeter, tail raised like a war banner.

  I obeyed, moving toward the gnawed lash, lying down. The others gathered around me as if keeping me safe, warm. I could feel the side of Lil’s leg, up against my head, muscles tensed, steel-strong.

  Shuffling, a creak, as something leaned against our cage. The soft thrum of Monty’s low growl made me feel a little better.

  “Curre,” A hoarse voice breathed down on us, bringing with it a scent like dog’s breath—hot, meaty, and foul. “EGO,” he suddenly shouted, almost directly into my ear. I worked hard not to flinch.”Amo currere cenam meam.” A laugh like a hyena, high and wailing, and he shook the cage, hard, barely budging it. Something sharp poked into my shoulder.