Scorched Earth

by Randall Pine

  Scorched Earth

  Book Two of the Dark Matter Series

  Randall Pine

  Prologue

  Leonard shuffled to his front door. His knees ached, his ankles cracked with every step, and his grip on the knob of his cane wasn’t as strong as it used to be. Walking wasn’t just a physical challenge these days; it was a mental one, too. Cataracts had blurred his vision, and he couldn’t trust his own view of the floor in front of him, which softened and swayed and seemed to be constantly shifting under his feet.

  His back was stooped from calcium deficiency. His knuckles were inflamed with rheumatism. His scalp was threaded with wispy white hairs. His teeth were made of resin and wires. His skin was covered with liver spots, and his fingernails were brittle and yellow. His chin bore a scar from when he had fallen two months ago and cracked it on the edge of the countertop.

  He grumbled under his breath as he eased himself across the foyer. Why couldn’t they let him watch TV in peace?

  The doorbell rang again, for the fourth time since Leonard had struggled out of his recliner. “Yeah, yeah, I hear you,” he yelled, and the effort of making his voice so loud dislodged a knob of phlegm from his throat, and he coughed and hacked and almost choked to death right there on the spot.

  By the time he opened the door, he was trembling with exhaustion.

  “What do you want?” he asked, squinting out into the overcast day.

  The woman standing on his porch was dressed in a long, purple cloak with a deep hood pulled up over her head. The fabric hung down and obscured her eyes. A small purple pendant hung around her neck on a thin gold chain, and she wore golden silk gloves that went all the way up past her wrists and disappeared into the sleeves of her cloak. In her hands, she held a purple envelope that bore a golden wax seal.

  She didn’t speak. She simply held the envelope out to Leonard.

  “What’s this, Halloween?” the old man muttered, glaring at the woman’s robe. He glanced suspiciously at the envelope, and when it became clear that she wouldn’t speak or leave the porch until he took it, he swiped the sealed message with a trembling hand. “Go back to Toon Town,” he grumped, turning back into his house and slamming the door behind him.

  He whispered angrily to himself in the foyer, curses, mostly, about being interrupted during his television show, and about the fashion choices of young people these days. But soon the annoyance drained away, and he was left with guilt. He sighed, and this caused another coughing fit. He doubled over and hacked away for a few seconds, then recovered and wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his sweater. He turned back and opened the door again.

  The woman on the porch was gone.

  He stepped outside and looked down the street to the left. He looked to the right. Even though he had clear views down to both ends of the block, there was no sign of the woman.

  “Hmpf,” he said, retreating back into the gloom of his house.

  He carried the envelope over to his recliner, and he moaned in pain as his hips worked hard to lower him down on shaky legs. He finally collapsed into the upholstery, wheezing hard, out of breath. He picked up his glasses from the tray table that was propped up next to the chair. Even with the glasses on, it took him a few hard blinks before the envelope came into focus. There was no writing on it—no name, no address, nothing. Just the golden seal on back.

  He couldn’t see well enough to make out the intricacies of the seal, but he doubted he would have recognized it even if he had a clear view. He didn’t know anyone fancy enough for all that hoity-toity rigmarole.

  He stuffed his thumb up under the paper and tore open the flap. There was a stiff piece of heavy-stock paper inside. He drew it out and held it up to the lamp so he could get a good look.

  Leonard’s eyes grew wide. He brought the piece of cardstock closer to his nose to get a better look. He verified the text on the paper.

  He looked up.

  He took off his glasses.

  He curled his lips into a nasty grin.

  Chapter 1

  “This place is great...we’ll take it!”

  Virgil stood next to Simon on the sidewalk, beaming at the structure in front of them. He wondered if he had ever seen anything so beautiful in his entire life.

  Simon, on the other hand, was absolutely positive he had never seen anything worse. “Virgil. This is a bounce house.”

  Virgil scoffed. “It’s an inflatable amusement and social structure.”

  “It’s a bounce house.”

  “So what?”

  “So we’re not making a bounce house the official office of Dark Matter Investigations!”

  “Why not?!” Virgil cried, throwing up his hands and stomping around in a circle, just to show his frustration. He had spent the last four days scouring all of Templar for the perfect office location, and he had decided definitively that the inflatable amusement and social structure was the perfect home for their new business.

  Simon rubbed fiercely at his temples. “Well, Virg, for starters, it doesn’t have a roof.”

  “It’s an open-air concept!”

  “For another, there are no doors.”

  “That’s a good thing! It shows our rock-solid trust in our fellow community members!” Virgil insisted.

  “We track down people from our community who call demons forth from hell so they can peel the flesh from every human being in the city; we don’t have rock-solid trust in our fellow community members!”

  Virgil crossed his arms. “Not with that attitude, we don’t.”

  “Virgil. It’s a bounce house. There are probably more than one thousand very good reasons why we can’t use it as our office.” Simon turned to face the bright yellow inflatable castle. It rocked lazily in the autumn breeze. “And also, why is there even a fully-inflated bounce house in a parking lot with a ‘for rent’ sign taped to the outside of it?!”

  “Because the bright young entrepreneurs at the Pounce Trounce Bounce House Emporium decided to set it up and rent it out as a workspace as a promotional gimmick,” Virgil explained. “Do you know what that means?”

  “That Pounce Trounce Bounce House Emporium is going to go out of business in about eight minutes?” Simon guessed.

  “That the rent on this place is a steal!”

  Simon shook his head. He turned without saying a word and headed back to the Pontiac 6000LE, parked at the edge of the bounce house’s lot.

  “Hey! Where are you going?” Virgil asked, trotting after him.

  Simon pulled open the door. “I’m going to see our office. Our actual office. And with any luck, it’ll come stocked with a brand new business partner.” He got into the car and closed the door.

  Virgil ran around to the passenger side and jumped in just as Simon was turning the key. “You got us a different office?”

  “Calling it a different office implies that this place is also an office, and I want to be very clear that it is not. But yes, I found us an office.” He pulled away from the bounce house and headed toward the Highlands neighborhood, just east of downtown Templar.

  “You’ve been looking for an office?” Virgil asked, confused.

  “Yep.”

  Virgil furrowed his brow. “Then why did you have me looking for an office?”

  “I didn’t have you looking for an office, Virgil. I had you running an errand that I knew you would be terrible at so I could get you out of my hair long enough for me to find us an actual office.”

  Virgil’s mouth hung open. He turned slowly and stared out at the road. He sat back in his seat. “Well,” he said, sounding affronted. Then he considered it
for a second. His face brightened. “You know, from a business perspective, I guess that was actually a really solid plan.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I should not be in charge of important things like picking out the office.”

  “I’m aware.”

  “I should be in charge of what sort of snacks we keep in the kitchen.”

  “There’s no kitchen,” Simon pointed out. “But yes, you can pick the snacks.”

  They drove on until they hit the Highlands. Virgil hadn’t spent much time in that part of town, and he looked with interest at the strip malls and fast food joints that flashed by them as they cruised down the mostly-empty street. “Not a lot of foot traffic,” he pointed out.

  “It’s Saturday. I’m sure it picks up during the work week. Besides, it doesn’t matter. We’re not a convenience store. We’re a highly-specialized investigation company. People will seek us out.”

  Virgil continued to gaze around the area. “There are no street signs anywhere,” he said.

  “Yeah, I noticed that too.”

  “We’re going to be hard to find.”

  “We’ll be fine.”

  “Simon—”

  “Virgil, we’ll be fine!” Simon cut him off, annoyed.

  “But Simon—”

  “Virgil! It’s fine!”

  “Okay,” Virgil shouted, “but there is a giant lizard creature about to eat that guy’s face off over there, and I think maybe we should go and stop him.”

  Simon peered out the window in the direction Virgil was pointing. “Oh,” he said, noticing the man who was struggling with a half-man, half-lizard mutant over in front of the Church’s Chicken. He veered into the parking lot and threw the Pontiac into park. “Well, you could have just said so.”

  Virgil rolled his eyes. “We’re going to be great at being business partners,” he said sarcastically.

  Then he pulled Gladys, the mystical curiocus Skee-Ball ball, out of his psychic vault and charged the mutant lizard.

  Chapter 2

  He wasn’t the first lizard-creature they had ever seen, but he was definitely the biggest.

  Every inch of his green, scaly body was covered with muscle. His huge, bulging arms connected to a pair of meaty shoulders that were about as wide as the Pontiac. He had big, powerful hands that looked like they belonged to a professional football player. His lizard head was long and serpentine, with black, intelligent eyes. He had a thick green tail that waved through the air and a forked red tongue that slithered out between his reptilian lips as he towered over the terrified, blubbering man, whom the lizard had knocked to the ground.

  The lizard-thing was wearing clothes, thank goodness—not all of them did—but his shirtsleeves were ripped along the seams, and his pant legs were completely shredded. That could only mean one thing.

  “Hey! Werelizard!” Virgil called, giving a loud whistle. “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?”

  The creature jerked his head to the side, noticing Simon and Virgil for the first time. He sized them up with a quick, jerky movement of his head. “The two of you put together are ssssmaller than he isss.”

  Virgil’s shoulders slumped dejectedly. “I told you we need to start going to the gym,” he said to Simon.

  “Not the time,” Simon reminded him.

  “Oh. Right.”

  Simon pushed up his left sleeve, revealing the dark gray manacle that he wore around his wrist. He gave it a shake, and it instantly lit up with a deep orange glow. “We don’t want to hurt you,” he said. “We want to help you.”

  The lizard laughed, a wet, hissing rattle that scraped up from the back of his throat. “Help me?” he said. He turned away from the fallen man completely and faced the two novice magicians. He raised his arms into the air and looked at them admiringly. “Help me with what? I’ve reached the top of the evolutionary ladder.”

  “We’re all going to evolve into lizards?” Virgil asked suspiciously. “So much for my social calendar.”

  “You don’t have a social calendar,” Simon said.

  “And if I become a lizard, I’ll never have one.”

  “Good point,” Simon said. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the creature for a second. He closed his right hand and whispered some words in Latin. A white light began to glow between the cracks in his fingers.

  “What’s that?” Virgil murmured out of the side of his mouth, trying not to take his eyes off the werelizard either, but intensely curious about Simon’s new trick.

  “Cacophony spell. Weren’t you paying attention last week?”

  “No, not really,” Virgil admitted.

  “We have to get him away from the victim.” The man who had been attacked by the lizard-creature was still cowering on the ground, shaking with fear beneath the swishing tail of the mutant.

  “I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” Virgil observed.

  The lizard-thing had focused his entire attention on the pair of them, seemingly forgetting about his victim altogether. The creature took another step toward them, his reptilian feet hitting the pavement with such power and force that each step cracked the blacktop. He seemed to increase in size even as they watched. “You thought you would be heroessss,” the lizard spat. “How upsssetting to learn that you’ll be just a sssnack insssstead.” He spat at Virgil, a huge, lime-green mucous blob that sailed through the air, heading toward his face. Virgil jumped out of the way, and the spitball missed his head, but it nicked the top of his left shoulder. He screamed in pain; the lizard’s mucous was highly acidic, and it had burned through the fabric of his shirt and seared a shallow channel in his skin.

  “Ow! Come on!” Virgil hollered, winding up his shoulder to try to shake off the pain. “That hurt, and it was super gross!”

  “Look,” Simon said, trying to gain some semblance of control on the situation, “we know this isn’t you. This isn’t who you are. The real you is in there somewhere, and probably scared.” He leapt to the side to avoid a flying spitball. It struck the tire of a pickup truck behind him, and the tire burst, melting into a liquid-rubber puddle.

  Simon struggled to maintain his focus. “We can help you. We know someone who can lift your curse.”

  “My cursssse is ssspending mossst of my life asssss a man,” the werelizard hissed. He took another two steps toward them, and Simon decided that was far enough away from the victim. He opened his right hand and hurled the ball of white light across the parking lot, just to the left of the werelizard. The light exploded in mid-air, and it burst out with the incredibly loud, discordant sounds of cymbals crashing, trumpets blaring, and saxophones wailing. The lizard-creature clapped his hands over his ears and darted away from the sound, moving himself into the middle of the parking lot, away from the victim, and away from the windows of the Church’s Chicken.

  “Now!” Simon cried. He fired his manacle, and the brilliant orange energy bullet tore through the air and ripped through the lizard’s right shoulder. The monster howled with pain. Virgil gripped Gladys, wound up, and let loose. The wooden ball zoomed toward the lizard, picking up speed as it went, and it struck the same shoulder that Simon had just blasted a hole through.

  But maybe Virgil had thrown Gladys a little too hard, because the ball exploded right through the werelizard’s shoulder, completely severing the arm.

  “Oh,” Virgil said, straightening up. The blood drained from his face, leaving him pale. He clamped a hand over his mouth. “I think I’m going to be sick,” he said.

  “Well that was surprising,” Simon agreed.

  The lizard’s snout frothed with rage. He glared down at his detached arm, lying useless on the ground. Then he reared back, lifted his head, and roared, like a wolf howling at the moon. As he screamed, the stump beneath his shoulder began to bubble up, as if it were growing boils. The boils pushed out and beca
me fingers…the fingers were followed by a hand, and then a wrist, and then an arm. Simon and Virgil watched in disgusted horror as the werelizard grew another arm to replace the one he’d lost. It was covered in thick, green mucous that dripped down onto the asphalt like viscous rain as the arm grew to full size.

  The lizard stopped roaring. He looked down at his new arm, flexing his fingers and his elbow, testing the arm. Satisfied, he reached down with his new hand and picked up his severed arm. Then he turned his attention to Simon and Virgil, and he began to approach.

  “Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope,” Virgil said, throwing up a kinesthetic shield in each hand and stumbling backward, away from the advancing monster. But Simon was frozen with fear and a certain amount of nauseated awe; his brain couldn’t convince his legs to move. He watched open-mouthed as the lizard approached. The monster drew himself up to his full height, then he lifted his detached arm and brought it down across Simon’s head, using it as a club to bash his temple.

  Simon stumbled a few steps, then fell to the ground.

  “Hey!” Virgil shouted. “Don’t hit my friend with your lopped-off arm, you—” But he didn’t get to finish his sentence, because the lizard hurled the arm at him next. He ducked behind his shields, and they deflected the lifeless arm easily. Virgil watched it bounce off the vibrant orange surface of the magic shield and roll onto the blacktop. “Heh,” he said, having proudly survived the same attack that Simon hadn’t been able to fend off. He lifted his eyes to gloat a little, and when he did, he saw the lizard-creature charging.

  “Whoa!” Virgil cried, taking cover behind his shields.

  The werelizard rammed into him with one huge fist, cracking both shields in half. The force of the impact knocked Virgil back, and he fell onto the ground. His shields had dissolved after cracking, and he held up his hands, willing them back into being. But they seemed a little gun-shy after the lizard’s attack; a small shower of sparks shot out of each hand, but nothing more. The shields wouldn’t form.

  “Aw, come on...not now,” Virgil whined, shaking his hands and trying to coax the magic out.