by Landon Wark
Brendan Lamonte blinked, running one of the many checks he performed daily to make certain he wasn't dreaming. Positioned safely up the hill a ways he had had a perfect vantage point to capture the majority of the action that had occurred, both in the small hut and along the road winding down the hill. There had not been much happening in the former, though perhaps the rotund pudge of a woman throwing his partner across the room might count for something. It was proof that the power was spreading. But what had happened in the car was far more spectacular. Seeing two people there one minute and gone the next. There was real power that was gripping the world.
In contrast setting alight the house with the incredulous local police sitting impotently in their squad cars had been a humdrum event.
In the end he wasn't sure why the fire had been necessary, but these days it was best not to ask such questions. One of the marshals they had come with had tried to ask and... Well, that had not gone very well for anyone.
He lowered the phone to avoid capturing the vehicles of the local cops, a slick of blood that was black in the light from the fire oozing down one of the windshields. As the uploading symbol appeared along the phone's notifications bar Lamonte managed to pull his eyes away, focusing on what had once been his partner.
Furrows of rage crossed the burnt-in scars along his face as his massive fists continued to pound dents into the hood and door of the vehicle. Lamonte felt a twinge of fear as he watched, knowing that any attempt to stop him would be met with violence. Bright slicks of blood spewed over the rust of the car. Fenderman had never been the sharpest tool in the shed, but he was relentless. A sledgehammer of a cop rather than the scalpel Lamonte saw in himself. But, after that night in the station back North whatever little patience he had was gone. The scarring from whatever that McAllister kid had done to him ran deeper than his skin. Lamonte wasn't privy to his partner's medical records in any way, but there was something physically wrong with F-man's brain. There had to be. He rarely talked anymore and was prone to staring off into space interspersed with bouts of furious temper. Since they had both left home it had only gotten worse.
Lamonte conceded there was likely something wrong with himself as well. Though on a less physical level than what had happened to F-man, that night had changed him as well. It had... offended him, for want of a better word. He hadn't seen very much, but what had been captured by the hotel cameras and on F-man's face had been enough. It had gnawed on the inside of his mind until there was nothing that the two of them could think to do but try and hunt down that damned kid.
The others on the force had been no help. He had not dared to tell them the reason they were at the hotel after the McAllister kid, let alone what Fenderman had claimed had happened. They had been sympathetic enough at first, for a bunch of macho dumbasses, but after a while the rumours that the two of them had gotten beaten up by some string bean started. Half joking at first, though Lamonte had not seen them that way.
That fucking kid had goddamn opposed them. No, he had insulted them and basically raised his skinny fucking kid middle finger at the law.
The shattering of a headlight and a guttural snarl told him that, regardless of the danger to himself he had best stop the destruction. He thought twice about this upon catching sight of the local cop in his cruiser, head soundly bashed in. Another wheezed, face down, into a pool of his own blood. The two marshals sat in the other car, bullet wounds leaking all over the seats.
Lamonte sat down, flicked off the camera of his phone, pulled the clip out of his weapon and began reloading it. He quickly decided to wait for Fenderman's rage to run its course.
Part Three
Aegera Gets Lucky
It was one of those places.
One of those places that were designed to suppress thought. Any intelligent conversation that was possible in the alcohol soaked air would be instantly drowned out by the throbbing of the speakers and the din of the crowd. There was room for one thing here and one thing alone: Instinct. That part of a person that cares not for why the cover charge was so high, or why the drinks tasted more of water than of alcohol, only a brief aversion and then sudden surrender. Within, there churned dancers and drinkers and bartenders. The first shoved the second and the second screamed at the third and the third scooped money off the bar into gaping registers in the back of the bar.
And, of course there were a couple of the night club philosophers; sitting in booths along the wall, quietly passing judgment on it all, mocking that which they were never meant to be a part of.
One of them, Harold Klum, sat sinking into the leather of the booth, playing with one of the metal straws in the drink glasses that sat uncleared on the table. There was within him a kind of warm despair, the kind that comes only to those who managed to thread the needle of inebriation, the knowledge that his inhibitions were not only still intact, but still dominant and that no amount of alcohol would dislodge them. His eyes were squarely fixed on the blond woman dancing not three meters beyond the edge of the table and the warm despair swelled. They locked eyes for a moment and he turned away.
He was beginning to think it was time to give up his sojourn to the East and head back home to friendlier and more stable climes.
The serving girl walked over in her black denim pants and white shirt and cleared away the dozen or so glasses that sat on the table. A brief smile was exchanged and then Harold went back to playing with the straw that he had cleverly hidden under the table.
His sigh was swallowed up by the relentless assault of music.
There was a compression of the booth cushion to his right and the blond haired girl was sitting next to him.
After his shock died away he tried to move over to allow her some room, but her hand clasped over his and rooted him in place. She leaned over and said something he couldn’t make out in German almost unintelligibly layered with American accents. He would have been filled with revulsion at the sound of the accent if he weren’t already full of everything else. She tugged on his arm, pulling him from the booth. He shot a quick glance over to where Hilde and Roth were dancing. The latter lifted his thumb in approval. Harold stared at the back of the girl’s icy blond hair as she pulled him through the seamless crowd toward the exit.
He nearly forgot to pick up his jacket.
The wind was cool for early September. The heat wave of the previous week had faded and in its place was a chill that filled the air with the feel of approaching mortality.
Outside the disco was a line of people waiting to get in. The women looked with questions and the men with envy as they passed, the girl leading him onto the sidewalk. It was still early and the headlights on the street illuminated them from the waist down as they walked.
Harold’s heart beat madly in his chest. Nothing like this had ever happened before, at least not to him. The inhibitions brought his mind to a screeching stop as she let go of his hand and dropped back a step to walk beside him. They told him to think, to try to get out of this situation. They warned him of all the dangers associated with it.
His mouth opened of its own accord, against the wishes of his mind and he asked where exactly they were going.
“Come with me,” was all she said and in an instant he knew that she really knew very little German. An American tourist, backpacker or something. Again he felt a twinge of aversion, but it was instantly shoved aside.
“I know English,” he said. "Well, some."
“Good. That will make things easier.”
Before he knew what was going on her face was buried in his chest, her arms around him. He paused to wonder what was going on, the inhibitions allowing him to forget to return the gesture and, at the same time, allowing him to pick out the police car that sped past. The part of his brain that was still thinking began to wonder if it was pure coincidence that the embrace ended as soon as the car was gone. He frowned, but said nothing.
“Where are we going?” this time in English.
“Somewhere fun,” she repl
ied.
Harold’s heart skipped a beat and the inhibitions that plagued him seemed to skip out the door as she flagged down a taxi and practically pulled him inside.
As it turned out, her idea of somewhere fun was a back alley in a run down part of the city. The alarms in Harold’s head blared when she pulled him past several garbage bins and around a puddle of what looked like urine and motor oil and he resisted as she tugged him towards a corner that would put them out of view of any people on the street, of which there were few.
“Come on,” she said with annoyance. “We’re almost there.”
Still he resisted. Around the corner he could hear the sounds of people, sort of a tensed hush and a milling about that came at the beginning of the things people weren’t sure they were supposed to be at. At first he was certain they were a gang, waiting for a new initiate to bring in a victim, but then something tickled his brain. A thought about things that had been mentioned recently, in passing mostly.
“You’re one of those people,” Harold blurted.
“Sshhh!” she hissed.
There was a fair sized group crowded around what looked like a hastily constructed stage made out of a few two-by-fours and a top of layered particleboard, beside it stood a man; although man was a loose term. His eyebrows were plucked into thin arches and his hair likely reeked of spray and gel. It was dyed a shining black the way one might do with shoe polish, though this looked more like it was bought at the cosmetics counter. He was wearing make-up, black lipstick and eyeliner that matched the mostly leather clothing he was wearing.
Harold felt another twinge of revulsion mingled in with the sense of confusion over what was going on.
The girl gave a quick gesture and the man on the stage held up a hand for silence. There was little at first and then the air above him exploded into a blaze of light and sound. After that the entire alley was quiet.
“They call me Tom Nightshade,” he shouted in a voice that was recognizable neither as male or female, but was definitely British. “And before you start talking amongst yourselves, yes we are the ones you’ve heard about.”
There was a moment of murmurs among the people assembled. Harold turned to the girl, but she elbowed him in the side to keep him quiet.
“Some people call us liars, some frauds, some call us worse. They say we’re a cult, religious zealots, we spread lies and fear and undermine governments. We’re communists and the like,” Tom continued. “Depending on what your views are, these claims vary in truth. But one thing they aren’t telling you is true.”
With a flourish and a word there appeared in his hand a glowing fire. It expanded as he drew in breath until it was a fiery sphere the size of a basketball. He passed the orb from hand to hand, his voice never ceasing. The crowd stood, some in awe, some in suspicious silence as another appeared in the opposite hand. Harold’s attention was distracted as the girl beside him shoved her way through the crowd and up onto the stage. The man called Tom Nightshade lifted the orbs and tossed them both towards her. Harold started as she reached a hand out towards them and they fell into orbit around her with little more than a word. The girl reached a hand into the air and the two fireballs arced into the sky, building, shimmering, stretching and then… Erupting into a cascade of wondrous lights and colours, perpetuating itself into weaves of designs, birds and butterflies and streamers that floated down around the observers, some of whom stared with wonder, others with impressed satisfaction.
“Magic is real!” Nightshade shouted. “It’s waiting for you!”
Harold’s eyebrows arched.
Aegera slumped down in the nearest chair, exhausted. She leaned over to the nearby refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of water for her parched throat. Twice a night was getting to be too much.
All in all there were maybe twenty people out of fifty who had taken the books that Jonah had prepared for the new initiates. The Basics they were called, they made food and they could make money (Penny-come-quick as Tom had taken to calling it. The phrase had not caught on.) and a few other small wonders that Jonah had deemed worthy for the masses. Most, of course, had walked away with the only happiness of having seen a free (faked in their minds, but impressive none-the-less) light show and, she supposed, that was enough for them. It was enough for her, anyway. She would have been content if they could just keep the secret to themselves, but Jonah was not happy. She wondered if he was ever happy lately.
The burning of the house had rattled him more than he would ever admit to.
Absently she tallied up the twenty books on a ledger that floated to her out of the corner of the room. A possible twenty new Initiates at the next scheduled meeting. She was running that as well. More people to teach, to train. More people who would not look at her funny when she announced to the world that things like conjuring and teleportation were real.
Jonah would kill her if he heard her using those terms, but it was hard to accept them as anything else. To call them anything else was to question how they worked, and that was too mind-boggling to consider.
She sighed and grabbed a snack cake from her stash beside the sofa. The face that had used to belong to Sandy Jenkins greeted her from the warped metal of the fridge, the rippling filling in the fat that had once been packed around her jowls.
Jonah and she had appeared about two miles from where they had disappeared, without their clothes. At first, she had been concerned about that last part, but since they were alone… Jonah might have been embarrassed, but he was too busy shouting victory like a madman into the night’s sky. He seemed to have forgotten that they had almost just been killed.
He remembered a few hours later. They spent weeks trying to find out what had happened to the former inhabitants of the house, but there was no trace of them. It was as if they had just disappeared into thin air. Jonah became obsessed over the matter, spending days making phone calls and trying infinite combinations of words to track them down. When nothing turned up he had sat, catatonic in a hotel room for another week.
He blamed himself; that was for certain. It was evident in the way he now presented the words to the new recruits. After the food and the money and all the rest of the Basics, there were the words that would propel a man through a brick wall and others that would electrocute him where he stood. There were defensive techniques and offensive ones, designed to discourage anyone who might come after them again. It was becoming obvious to her that…
The door to the private room in the rear of the apartment block basement flew open and he emerged into the shadowy light of the room. He seemed comparatively well rested tonight, his eyes wide and bright. For a moment she felt a sharp pang of envy.
“You look like hell,” he said as he grabbed the pot of coffee from the machine. “You know, those things will make you fat.”
She put down the snack cake, only half finished and glared at him.
He took a long sip straight out of the pot. “How’s Tom working out?”
She sighed. “He’s okay. He has… unusual appetites. I worry about showing him too much.”
There were more than enough of those worries to go around.
“How many do you have so far?”
“About ten who are fully devoted. Maybe forty or more who are on the way up. A lot of them seem content with just the money thing. Not a ton of ambition.”
He was on his way back to his room with the pot of coffee.
“It’s a shame,” she called after him. “I could really use some help.”
“Promote someone,” he said.
There was a moment of tension in the air as Aegera made the decision. “Jonah.”
He turned towards her.
"I'm not sure I trust them."
Jonah's brow furrowed.
"I have to show you something."
Twilight of the Psychopaths
Raymond Polaski was a sociopath from a long line of sociopaths. His great grandfather had been a minor coal baron in the motherland who had fled when the c
ommies took over. (The Nazis had been fine, but fuck those pinko assholes). His grandfather, a lawyer and state senator, had been arrested for beating his grandmother when Raymond was two. His father had used some of his grandfather's political connections to force some intervention for his buddy Charles Keating in the late 80's.
There was nothing terribly glamorous about the sociopathy of Raymond however. No dinner parties, no opera. None of the trapping that came along with the various serial monsters that would be called upon when his ilk showed their faces in movies or series. There was especially no murder. The occasional trip to a strip club and a cocaine dealer at work, but other than that...
Truth be told the seediest thing that he had ever done was paying a few people to pick up jobs in a competitor's (Awe he thought the guy's name was. Something Frenchy/Africany anyway) district and then clamour about unionizing. Pushed the guy out of the running for a bonus and increased his own by eight thousand. It was not something he had made a habit of, but that year he had planned on buying a new car. Not too shabby. Dipshits like Awe didn't know how to use the gradient anyway.
As physics showed work was only done through gradients. Muppets slid down the gradient into the cold oblivion of mediocrity money was released for use by their betters.
Imagining it was one of Raymond's favourite daydreams when the old man was blathering on during meetings.
He tilted his pencil as the presentation screen went black and the old man went on, thinking that maybe he could get a few more interns to replace some of the guys who were angling for a raise in some of the Eastern offices.
The meeting ended without much pomp and Ray found himself sitting in the conference room with three other guys who had evidently zoned out as well.
"Do you believe that guy?" Phil, one of the others said. "He's running this place like it's forty years ago. Just... fuck, get the hell out of the way."
