Scorched Earth

by Randall Pine

  Virgil sipped his hot chocolate. The Dixie Diner had the best hot chocolate in town. “So what happened?” he asked.

  Simon lowered his head. He was still pretty shaken up by the evening’s events.

  “The police came,” Abby said, taking control of the story and staring into the swirling depths of her coffee. “They forced all the doors open; that’s how we saw them. They were still alive, like the ones on the football field, but…skeletal. Just…dried up.”

  “The police questioned us for a while, and we told them everything we’d seen,” Simon said, putting down his fork and rubbing his hands along either side of his head. “But we hadn’t seen anything, really. The mark from the energy column, and then the girl in the truck. The woman in the cloak was long gone by the time we showed up.”

  Virgil thought about that and tried to picture the situation in his mind. “This is why I don’t go on dates,” he mused.

  Simon shot him a harsh look. “It’s not funny, Virgil.”

  Virgil shrank back, his cheeks flushing red. “I know. Sorry. That was…sorry.”

  Abby blew across the top of her mug, absent-mindedly working to cool the coffee that had already gone cold about twenty minutes ago. “What’s the connection?” she asked, staring off into space. “First the football players at practice…then you two down in the tunnel…”

  “That just felt like a booby trap,” Simon pointed out. “It might not have anything to do with us at all.”

  “Then the couples at Lookout Point,” Abby finished, seemingly ignoring Simon’s words. “One in the city, one under the city, one outside of the city.” She frowned. “It doesn’t seem geographically-based.”

  “I think Simon’s right,” Virgil said, setting down his half-empty mug of hot chocolate. “I don’t know why, but it felt like that. Like the attack in the tunnel was a trap. Almost like a tripwire, some magical ambush that she had set up in order to cover her tracks. Like she was setting a mousetrap or something.”

  Abby sighed and set her coffee down on the Formica table. “Even if that’s true, what’s the connection? The football players, and the people at the lookout?”

  “Maybe that they’re all engaged in some sort of physical activity?” Simon suggested quietly.

  Virgil exhaled loudly. “Okay,” he admitted, “not untrue. But what else?”

  Abby suddenly straightened up in the booth. “That girl we found. She was wearing a letterman jacket, right?”

  Simon nodded. “Yeah. From St. Gerard’s.”

  “So she was in high school,” Abby continued.

  Virgil tilted his head and gave her a look from across the table. “Wait…do you think all the people at Lookout Point were in high school?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Abby replied. “I didn’t see any of the other ones wearing the jackets, but that’s a high school thing to do, right? Drive up to the lookout, turn off the car, lock the doors, make out for a while?”

  Simon blushed. “I don’t think just high schoolers do it…”

  “No, she’s right,” Virgil said, snapping his fingers and leaning forward in his seat. “This might be something. The football players were all in high school…if everyone at the lookout was in high school too…”

  Simon furrowed his brow. “Someone’s targeting teenagers?” he asked.

  “It makes sense, right?” Abby asked, leaning forward in her seat, too, and sounding suddenly excited. “If you wanted to zap a bunch of teenagers, where would you look to do it? A high school, definitely. A popular make-out spot? Obviously.”

  “Wait,” Simon said, waving his hands through the air and trying to clear his head. “Why would someone—why would anyone—want to kill a bunch of teenagers?”

  “But she’s not killing them,” Virgil said, his eyes growing huge. “No one’s actually died yet. Right?”

  “Right,” Abby confirmed.

  “But that doesn’t make it any clearer,” Simon pointed out. He mopped his hands down his face and tried to clear his head. “So far, she’s just made them seriously messed-up. Why would you go to all that trouble, and dry-shrivel someone up, and not kill them? I’m not saying I’m not glad they’re alive, but man, think about what their lives will be like now. Withered and wasted like that. Their organs probably charred. It’s awful. It’s unbelievable! It’s a fate that I think might honestly be worse than death. Who would do that to someone?”

  “Who would do that to kids?” Abby added quietly, looking down at her hands.

  Simon and Virgil exchanged a look. They knew Abby was a little bit older than they were, though they didn’t know how much older…but they, themselves, weren’t too many years removed from being teenagers.

  “Four or five years ago, that could have been us,” Virgil said quietly, putting shape to Simon’s thoughts.

  “Yeah,” Simon said, setting his jaw and staring into the empty space beyond the diner booth. “I know.”

  They sat in silence for several long minutes. The waitress came by and refilled their drinks; they hardly even noticed her. Finally, Abby spoke. “We have to figure out why someone would want to attack them.”

  “And how she’s doing it when she doesn’t even register on Llewyn’s magic globe,” Virgil added.

  Simon made a decision. “I’m too tired to think about this tonight. Too tired, and I still just…it was bad. Seeing all those people like that today, first this morning, then again tonight. It was bad.” He swallowed hard, trying to push the memories of the withered teenagers from his mind. They didn’t seem to want to leave. “Tomorrow’s Sunday. We have the day off from training with Llewyn. Let’s say we meet at the Dark Matter office at noon and brainstorm then. See if we can figure out why she might be doing this.”

  Virgil and Abby both nodded.

  “Those couples at Lookout Point were attacked because we haven’t been fast enough to find her. We have to stop this, and before more people get hurt.”

  They all agreed on that point…though none of them felt confident they would find the woman before she struck again.

  Chapter 12

  Llewyn frowned down at the dusty, yellowed pages of the book. He wasn’t finding answers to any of his questions.

  If anything, his research was just leading to more questions.

  He slammed the book closed and stood up from the table. He rubbed his eye, trying to will away the tiredness that was seeping into his bones.

  He lifted up the heavy book, groaning under the weight of it. The spine of the ancient tome was eight inches wide, and it was bound with iron. He heaved the book back up onto the shelf and sighed. Then he moved on to the next book, pulled it down from the shelf, slammed it on the table, opened it up, and began to read.

  He had been at it all night. The sun would be up in less than two hours, and he wasn’t any closer to understanding the new threat of the cloaked woman than he had been when he started almost twelve hours before.

  He had never experienced a magical being who didn’t register on his globe. That meant one of two things for the woman in the cloak; either the power she had wielded wasn’t magic, or she was so extraordinarily powerful that she had the ability to hide herself from his sight. If she wasn’t a magical creature, then the power she wielded was science. That scared him, because Llewyn had seen an extraordinary evolution of scientific progression in his long, long life, but he had never seen any man-made tool that could create anything close to the sustained lightning column that the woman had used to attack the football players. And if she was a magical being…well, that scared him, too; even with the full strength of his power, he wouldn’t know where to begin combatting someone as strong as she must have been.

  Neither option seemed likely, but he knew that one of them must be true.

  His chest itched around the edges of the black dagger that was lodged there. He scratched the ski
n through his shirt, and then, just as a test, he gripped the front edge of the obsidian sliver through the cotton and tried to pull it out.

  It didn’t budge.

  It never budged.

  But it was always worth a try.

  The book before him now was a text on metaphysical potions, lab-made elixirs that were imbued with quantum elements that fueled them and gave them various otherworldly attributes. Because they were powered by the quantum field, they were science-based, and not magical in nature. Theoretically, then, someone could wield the powers of these metaphysical potions without registering so much as a blip on the magical scale. Metaphysical potions were extremely difficult to manufacture, and therefore were exceedingly rare.

  Rare, but not altogether impossible.

  Llewyn ran his thumb absently over the lump of the black blade in his chest as he read about metaphysical positions with elemental properties. He scrutinized the formula for the Whippoor-Wind potion. It had nothing to do with energy columns or lightning branches, but it was an interesting potion, nonetheless. It consisted of two main liquid components, each one a mixture of acids and bases and oxidizers and sulfides that, when mixed to the proper proportions, caused a string of chemical reactions that fired the particles to a quantum level, opening up holes in the quantum field and harnessing the elements of two distinct planes of existence. The first liquid component tapped into the Fields of Air, a super-quantum dimension that consisted wholly of hyper-concentrated, oxygenized air. The second liquid component, if mixed properly, opened a subatomic gateway into a realm of pure pressure. If the two liquids were mixed together, the pressure from the second component would funnel through the quantum openings between the particles and force the air seeping through the particles of the first liquid component, turning the combined liquids into an elemental potion that caused extremely powerful and highly uncontrollable winds.

  The Whippoor-Wind potion had to be mixed in a vacuum; otherwise, the uncontrolled and explosive winds would destroy the creator. But if they could be successfully combined, and then injected into a capsule and sealed, the potion could be used for high-intensity wind bombs.

  Llewyn placed a bookmark on that page. He would come back to it when the boys were ready.

  He continued to skim through the metaphysical potions; Fire-Grease, Earthen Split, Watery Grave, Mists of Sand…and there were a handful potions that channeled lightning, like Strike Gel and Electro-Water, but there was no mention of any sort of concoction that could channel the raw power that he had seen play out on the YouTube video on Virgil’s phone.

  He closed the book, and closed his eyes. He felt very, very tired.

  His chest hadn’t stopped itching. He scratched at the ever-present wound as he lifted the book with his other hand and slid it back into its place on the shelf.

  It was difficult not to feel the familiar anger growing in his chest when Morilan’s dark blade made itself felt this way. It didn’t itch often, but when it did, he was filled with rage and regret over the Carpathian battle against the evil mage. He had been so stupid, letting his shields down, and he paid for it every day now. The blade was always a source of pain and discomfort; he’d existed with it so long that the dull, ever-present pain was a part of him now. It bothered him, but he could live with it. But on the nights when the edges of his skin began to itch from the slight tremoring of the black dagger…it was the itching that drove him mad. It was too much insult added to too much injury, and it threatened to derail his concentration now.

  Llewyn pulled the next book down from the shelf. He laid it on the table. He was so very, very tired.

  He opened the book. He began to read.

  His study was the size of a gymnasium, lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves that were filled with books of all shapes, sizes, weights, and topics. Most of them, he had never even touched, much less read. The books contained a seemingly infinite universe of knowledge, and searching for something as unknown and obscured as the power of the woman in the cloak was like looking for a needle in an entire field of hay stacks.

  Yet there was no other option.

  So Llewyn turned the pages, and he forced his eyes to read.

  He was about a third of the way through the book when the blue light in his right eye began to throb.

  The wizard sat up straight in his chair. It had been several months since the eye had shown him anything of great importance, and he was relieved to be on the verge of receiving something now. He placed his hands flat on the table, palms down on the warm wood, and he closed his left eye, letting the light from his right eye socket fill his vision. The world flashed blue with static and light, and then the light faded, wiping away the curtain of the future and showing Llewyn a vision of How Things May Be.

  In the vision of the possible future, Llewyn saw a vast field of wild grass, devoid of trees and hills beneath a purple twilight sky. Hundreds of human silhouettes were suspended in the air above the field, held in place by lightning bolts that speared their chests and continued on to the horizon in every direction. The bodies of the injured shook and convulsed silently; their mouths were open, as if to scream, but they made no sound other than the rustle of their clothing and the rubbing of their skin as their fingers twitched against each other. Bright light shot through their eyes and their open mouths, and from their fingertips, so that the entire field was filled with spotlights that swayed against the sky and against the grass.

  In the center of the field stood a broad and powerful column of energy, similar to the one Llewyn had seen on the football field in the video, but with a larger circumference, and surging with even more power. It served as the base for the scores of lightning bolts that ripped through the bodies; they extended from the column like nerve endings.

  But there was one figure that stood out against the others…a figure whose feet actually touched the ground, and who was not run through by a bolt of light. The figure had her back to Llewyn, and she stood well away, on the far side of the great column, but there was no mistaking her identity.

  It was the woman in the purple cloak.

  She was turned toward the far horizon, with her head tilted upward. In his vision, Llewyn followed the trajectory of her gaze, and he inhaled sharply when he saw what she was looking at: a trail of light that permeated the sky above, cutting through the swirling purple clouds like an illuminated sidewalk in the sky. The lit path extended far beyond the open field, and Llewyn followed it with his eye to the slight rise of a mountain range far, far in the distance.

  The trail seemed to end directly above the central mountain peak. A thin shaft of light shot down from the end of the cloud path, beaming onto the top of the mountain.

  Movement caught his eye, and Llewyn brought his attention back to the field before him. The woman in the cloak had turned around. She faced Llewyn now, and her hood had pulled back slightly, so that he could see her lips beneath the purple cowl.

  They curled up into a cold, cruel grin.

  Llewyn pulled himself back from the vision, opening his left eye and finding himself once again in his study. It was always jarring, coming out of a potential future, and he took a few seconds to collect himself, to bring himself back fully into the present. He tried to push away the mental image of the woman’s vicious smile, though it was no easy task. She had seemed almost to actually see Llewyn, which was impossible; she was in the future, and he was in the present. Still, the smile felt calculated and directed, and that chilled him.

  But he forced himself to push the image away, and to focus on the more troubling aspects of the vision.

  The first was the sheer number of people who were being fried by the energy column. It had been horrific enough to see an entire football team suspended by the lightning bolts. But in the field, the hundreds of silhouettes had filled the air so thickly, they seemed almost like one solid mass.

  Whatever the woman was doing
to the people of Templar, she wasn’t going to stop.

  She was just getting warmed up.

  The second thing that troubled him about the vision was the path through the clouds that led from the energy column and terminated in a beam of light in the mountains. That energy trail told him everything he needed to know about the woman, or at least about how she was carrying out her attacks.

  The only question now was how to stop her.

  He looked down at the table before him. The book that he had been reading before the vision took hold had been replaced with a different volume, an especially old book of animal-skin paper with crude runes drawn on the pages in blood. The book was opened to the page that Llewyn needed. He ran his finger along the ancient paper and began to translate the symbols that were written there.

  He had gotten almost through the first line of text when a sharp pain shot through his chest. He closed his eyes and grunted, clutching the space below his breastbone. The itching at the edges of his wound had become a burning sensation, and he felt heat rising up from the skin across his chest. The pain still flaring through his torso, he pulled open his shirt and looked down at Morilan’s blade.

  His flesh was chalky and white. The edges of his eternal wound had become pink and irritated, as if newly infected. Tiny black tendrils had sprouted beneath his skin, starting at the obsidian form of the blade, spreading across his chest and up to his neck. Morilan’s curse had finally burrowed deeply enough to nick the wall of his heart.

  Llewyn’s blood was being poisoned by the dark wizard’s magic.

  He stood up from the chair, but too quickly…the chair felt over backward, and Llewyn tripped over the upended legs. He fell onto the floor, knocking the wind out of his lungs. He turned over onto his side and worked to push himself to his knees. It was a great struggle; Llewyn was suddenly weak, and washed over with the sweat of fever.

  Morilan’s curse was working quickly now.