Scorched Earth

by Randall Pine

  Llewyn forced himself to his feet, and he stumbled forward, one hand pressed down over his chest, the other groping blindly for the doorknob. He needed to get to his potions room, and fast. He could slow the spread of the disease and buy himself some time.

  His vision blurred, and the room swam. His hand closed blindly on the doorknob, and he pulled open the door. It felt as if it weighed five hundred pounds. He stumbled out into the hall, staggering against the wall as the poison in his veins spread beneath his skin. Now his entire torso was covered in the black webbing; it had spread up into his cheeks and across his broad shoulders. He rocked and swayed on his feet, falling hard to the side, slamming into the far wall. He righted himself and grunted as he made his way forward, pulling against the stones of the wall for support. The fever raged through his entire body, and he felt his heart begin to burn like it was on fire.

  He was two feet from the potions room when his strength gave out, and he collapsed. The floor tilted up to meet him, and he lost consciousness as the black blood crept into the vessels of his brain.

  Chapter 13

  “Hey, how was your date last night?”

  Simon looked up at Virgil and blinked. “What?”

  “I said, how was the date?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah,” Virgil said. “Why?”

  “We found twelve mostly-dead teenagers who had been totally shriveled up from taking magical lightning bolts through their chests...how do you think it was, Virgil?”

  Virgil shrugged. “I’m just trying to find the bright spot in a bad situation,” he said.

  Simon paused. He considered that for a second. “It was actually really great, up until the bad part,” he decided.

  “Nice,” Virgil smiled.

  They were sitting inside the new office. They had brought over a few chairs from their apartment, and Simon had set one up behind a folding table that served as a makeshift desk. Virgil was perched on the edge of a clothes dryer, sitting with his legs crossed like a man in search of enlightenment. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small handful of Skittles. He popped them into his mouth.

  “Where’d you get those?” Simon asked.

  Virgil nodded toward the stockroom in the back. “Old vending machine I found in storage.”

  Simon blenched. “Virg, those are probably, like, ten years old.”

  “Yeah, but they were free,” Virgil said with a shrug. He chewed on the Skittles. They were tough as leather. But he swallowed them anyway, lest he give Simon the upper hand. “Is Abby still meeting us?” he asked. The wall on the clock said it was ten past noon.

  “She should be here any minute,” Simon replied. “I’m sure she—” But before he could finish the sentence, his phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket, then showed Virgil the screen. The caller ID said Abby.

  “Speak of the devil,” Virgil said with a wink.

  Simon answered the phone, his cheeks already twinging pink with the idea of talking to Abby. “Hello?” He listened carefully, and his face fell. “Get outside where?” he asked. He listened to her instructions, then he got up from his chair and headed toward the front door, motioning for Virgil to follow him. They pushed their way out into the strip mall parking lot. “Okay, what’re we looking for?”

  Virgil tapped him on the shoulder, and when Simon looked over, he was pointing up into the sky. “I think we’re looking for that,” he said.

  The sky was overcast, even though there had been no rain in the forecast. The clouds were tinted purple, just like the clouds that had been over the energy column at the football field, but not quite as thick and threatening. And there was a wide trail of blueish-golden light running along the length of the clouds, as if someone had unrolled a light-up LED carpet over the top of the cloud layer, and its light was shining through the dark, swirling mist.

  “What is that?” Simon asked, his voice quiet with awe.

  “I have no idea,” Virgil replied. “It looks like—”

  But Simon shushed him. “I’m asking Abby,” he hissed, and then he turned back to the phone. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Huh.”

  Virgil rolled his eyes and returned his attention to the sky. The clouds were swirling, and pretty quickly, too, almost like foam that had collected on the top of a boiling pot of noodles. And the light was shifting with it. So maybe it wasn’t like an LED carpet unrolled over the clouds, and maybe it was more like a long raft of light that was riding the current of the roiling clouds, heading east.

  “Got it,” Simon said, and he hung up the phone. He pulled the car keys from his pocket and headed toward the Pontiac. “Come on.”

  “Where are we going?” Virgil shouted, running after him to keep up. “What’s with the cloud-light? Did she say?”

  “Yeah. She said.” Simon jumped into the car, and Virgil wasn’t far behind. They pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward the eastern side of town. “There’s another energy column, this one at the skating rink over on Newstead.”

  “The skating rink?” Virgil said, screwing up his face. “That place is still open?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Gross.”

  Simon ignored the color commentary and continued on with his explanation. “She said the column is running right through the roof, and all the windows are flashing from the lightning strikes inside. It’s happening again.” He turned the car onto the Interstate 85 on-ramp and pressed down on the gas. “The light in the sky,” he said, nodding upward and indicating the beam of blueish-gold light above the clouds, “is connected to it.”

  Virgil frowned. “It’s connected to it?” he asked.

  “Yes. The path of light is connected to the energy column.”

  “Is that…normal?” Virgil asked.

  “Is any of it normal?” Simon shot back.

  “Well, you know what I mean.”

  Simon sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t remember seeing something like it at the high school. Do you?”

  “No,” Virgil said, shaking his head, “and it’s not in the video, either. I’ve watched that thing a million times.” He looked out the window and up at the cloudy sky. “But the clouds were a lot darker then…a lot thicker. It’s kind of hard to see the light right now as it is. If the clouds are thick enough, they probably hide the trail.”

  “Okay, then. Great. It may or may not be normal,” Simon said. He pulled the Pontiac over into the far right lane and took the interchange, arcing the direction of the car from northeast to east. Now they were more or less following the light path away from the skating rink.

  “So I hate to ask this,” Virgil said glumly, “because I’m positive I’m not going to like the answer…but where are we going right now?”

  Simon gritted his teeth. He peered up at the light path through the windshield. “We’re following the trail,” he said. “See if we can find where it leads.”

  Virgil nodded mournfully. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

  They drove on, trading the 85 for the 76, the highway that ran through the Bypass Mountains and bisected the Appalachians, connecting Templar to Harrisburg some three hours away. The foothills of the Bypass front range rose up before them, and as they snaked through the hills, the light beam overhead dodged in and out of view, hidden now and then by the trees and the sharply-angled mountains. Every time they lost sight of it, Simon worried that the light had disappeared, but it always came back when they went around a curve or came into a wide valley.

  “It looks like it runs over the Stocks,” Virgil observed. The Stocks were a pair of mountain peaks that stood side-by-side with their tops leveled mostly flat by time and wind. The valley between them was almost a perfect semi-circle, so that when taken as a whole from a distance, the two peaks and the valley between them looked like the bottom half of the Medieval torture device. Despite its macabre name—or
maybe because of it, Templar being what it was—the Stocks was a popular camping destination for the people in the city and the surrounding suburbs. Simon and Virgil had camped there dozens of times themselves, and they knew that part of the mountain range pretty well.

  “It doesn’t just run over the Stocks,” Simon surmised, glancing ahead, toward the horizon. “It looks like it ends over the Stocks. Look.” He pointed toward the northern side of the valley slope. Far in the distance, far enough that they could barely distinguish it, there was a thin beam of light that came down from the cloud trail and shot toward the earth.

  “The end of the rainbow,” Virgil muttered, his pulse quickening. “Except in this case, the rainbow is a lightway of evil magic, and the leprechaun is a woman in a purple cloak, and the pot of gold is—I’m just guessing here—our doom?”

  “You know you don’t always have to say all the words that come into your head, right? You can just say some of them sometimes and let the rest just stay in your brain.”

  “And deprive the world of my wit? Never.”

  Simon exited the interstate and pulled onto the winding state road that ran alongside the northern end of the Stocks. The weather had taken a turn toward winter in the last couple of weeks, and the mountain was littered with the vehicles of Templarians who had made the drive out to see the autumn colors of the leaves one last time. But even though the light trail ran directly over their heads on this part of the Stocks, none of the sightseers seemed to notice it; their eyes were glued to the branches, and didn’t seem to go any higher.

  “How can everyone be so calm and cool about this?” Virgil demanded. “That light is frying the life out of a bunch of dorks at the skating rink as we speak, and they’re just carrying on with their holly jolly weekend!”

  Simon had been thinking that too. It filled him with sadness, and with a feeling of hopelessness, every time the people of Templar closed their eyes and turned their heads from the supernatural horrors that sometimes plagued the town. He wondered—not for the first time, and not even for the hundredth time—if Laura would still be alive had the people of Templar committed to opening their eyes and fighting back against the darkness. “It’s too hard to accept it,” he said quietly, watching a family of three laughing and pointing up at the bright orange leaves of a maple tree as the Pontiac rumbled past. “If you can ignore it, it doesn’t exist.”

  Virgil snorted. “Tell that to the West Templar football team.”

  They drove on, and the higher they climbed along the mountain, the more the cars thinned out. Most of the good deciduous trees were on the lower half of the mountain; the higher they went, the more the scenery gave itself over to evergreens, so the leaf-watchers stayed toward the bottom. Soon, they were the only car on the road.

  Their phones vibrated, and Virgil pulled his out of his pocket. “It’s Abby,” he said, reading the group text. “She’s going to swing by Llewyn’s to grab the manacles, then she’ll meet us out here.”

  “Good,” Simon said, pulling the car over to the shoulder and turning off the engine. “Give her our coordinates; we have to go on foot from here.”

  They had gotten as close as they could by car, pulled up more or less even with the vertical beam of light, which was thinner and brighter than the wide energy column they had seen at the football field. It shot down into the forest to the south of the road, about halfway down the high valley slope of the Stocks.

  “Give her our coordinates?” Virgil asked, giving Simon a look. “What are we, the Green Berets? I don’t know our coordinates.”

  “Well, turn on Find My Friends so she can find us,” Simon replied, annoyed. “You know what I meant.”

  “I’m not turning on Find My Friends, are you crazy?”

  “Just turn on Find My Friends—who cares?”

  “Then the government will be able to track my GPS!” Virgil cried.

  “It’s not the government, it’s Abby!”

  “And anyone else who can hack into a phone’s GPS!”

  “Your phone is already using GPS, anyone can hack in and get it anyway!” Simon shouted.

  But Virgil crossed his arms. He was adamant. “I’m sorry, Simon, but I value my privacy too much to share it with Abby.”

  Simon shook his head, incredulous. “She is a friend who is bringing us magical weapons so we can face whatever evil magic is frying the life out of kids!”

  Virgil just hugged his arms to his chest even more tightly. “I value my privacy,” he said again.

  “Then you’re living in the wrong millennium,” Simon snapped. He pulled out his own phone and shared his location with Abby.

  “Can I ask a totally unrelated question?” Virgil said as Simon stuffed his phone back into his pocket.

  Simon sighed. “What?”

  “Should we just wait here until she brings the magical weapons to us so we don’t go stumbling across some super-powerful life-force killing sorceress with just our bare hands, a Skee-Ball, and a mystical key?”

  Simon frowned. He was grateful for the way his curio key had helped them back at Mrs. Grunberg’s house when they were fighting Neil and his demon, but he often wished he had been given something more broadly useful. “Yeah, maybe that’s not such a bad idea,” he mused.

  But just a few seconds after he said it, the light-path in the sky turned off. It disappeared quickly, the tail end of it zooming across the sky like a film reel that had reached its end. The back edge of the light trail caught up to the vertical beam, which flickered three times, and then disappeared.

  The clouds dissolved, and the sky returned to normal.

  “We have go to,” Simon said, changing his mind and opening the door.

  “Simon!” Virgil cried, pulling off his seatbelt and joining his friend outside the car. “We don’t know what’s waiting for us down there!”

  “No, but there’s a good chance nothing will be waiting for us down there if we wait for Abby! The spell—or whatever it is—is done. I don’t think we can really count on whoever’s behind this living down in the forest full-time.” He hopped over the guardrail and began easing himself down the mountain slope. His shoes slid on the loose earth, and he had to reach out and grab the tree branches to keep himself from sliding. “Come on!”

  Virgil sighed and grumbled under his breath. He threw his legs over the guardrail, too, and followed Simon down the hill. “This is a bad idea,” he called out, taking his time with the descent.

  But Simon didn’t reply. He was too deep into the hillside.

  The mountain and the forest had already swallowed him whole.

  Chapter 14

  Abby hopped out of her truck and jogged across River Road. “Llewyn!” she called out, before she even reached the tent that was strung up beneath the Mallard Street Bridge.

  She stepped carefully but quickly down the side of the drainage ditch and approached the wizard’s tent. She frowned when she got to the entrance; half of the canvas had collapsed. The far corner of the tent flapped lazily in the early autumn breeze.

  “Llewyn?” she said again, stepping forward and peering into the tent. Usually, when she came by unannounced, the front gate was up, shielding the interior of the tent from any curious passersby…but today, the gate was down. She could see clearly into Llewyn’s home.

  She peered inside, and when her eyes adjusted to the dimness of the space, she gasped.

  “Llewyn!”

  Abby ran into the tent, startled by the rubble and ruin that had once been the entryway. Every time she had seen it before, it had been a grand, arching foyer, with stone walls reaching up to rich mahogany ceiling beams. But the beams had rotted away and had half-collapsed over the entrance; the stones were crumbling and soft, and the floor of the foyer was covered with a thick blanket of pulverized stone and tiny pebbles.

  Abby stepped carefully through the dark entryway, s
tepping over the larger stones on the floor and crossing into the sitting room beyond. That space, which had so recently been a grand reception area, now lay in ruins; the double staircase that curved up to the second story had withered and cracked, and collapsed onto the floor, leaving only the bases of the stairwells, two broken, ragged things that reached up toward the roof with jagged, severed arms of wood.

  Abby stepped carefully across the ruined floor, side-stepping the unraveling couch, and entered the hallway. The walls there were askew, slanting at a twenty-degree angle like a funhouse corridor. Half of the doors had vanished, and the handful that remained were hanging off their hinges. Abby poked her head into each door, calling down the dilapidated hallways for the wizard. Her voice grew more and more frantic as she pushed her way down the hall, coming up empty.

  She burst through the last remaining door, holding her breath.

  There was the wizard, lying face-down on the floor, a black puddle forming around his lips.

  “Llewyn!”

  She sprinted down the hall, sliding on the uneven stones, and came skidding to a stop near the fallen wizard. She reached under his shoulder and, grunting with the effort, managed to roll him over onto his back.

  When she saw his face, she gasped and pulled away. His skin was purple and crisscrossed with a spider web of black veins. His neck and cheeks were swollen, as if he had been choked to death. His green eye was open and staring blankly at the ceiling; the blue light in his right eye had been completely extinguished, and now it was nothing but a dark, empty socket.

  Tears welled up in Abby’s eyes as she whispered the sorcerer’s name, gingerly touching his face through her glove, feeling for warmth, but finding nothing but ice.

  Then Llewyn gasped.

  It was just one burst from his lungs, one heave of his chest, and then he fell silent again…but Llewyn was alive.

  “Wake up. Wake up!” Abby demanded, patting his cheeks, trying not to slap him too hard, but desperate to get a reaction. “Come on, Llewyn, come on…” She knew CPR, but she didn’t want to press down on his chest, fearing she might drive the dark blade that was lodged there deeper into his sternum. She pushed open his blue coat and gasped at what she saw; his white shirt was soaked through with a thick, black wetness.