Scorched Earth

by Randall Pine

  They didn’t need much urging; they stumbled out the door and into the parking lot, where they scattered to the edges, some of them hiding behind parked cars, others diving into the protection of the alleys on either side of the building.

  “Clear!” Virgil hollered over his shoulder. Simon’s arms were shaking hard now, and his muscles were screaming with the strain of holding back the energy. He eased himself back toward the door, maintaining the strength of the shield. One of the bolts began to sizzle through the surface, and the back of the shield began to glow yellow with the light of the electric power that was about to protrude through the barrier. With one final, exasperated scream, Simon dove backward, evaporating the shield as he fell through the doorway, which Virgil held open. Simon hit the pavement hard, and Virgil shoved him with his shoulder, pushing him out of the way of the open door as the energy bolts flailed around, searching for the purchase of human flesh. They dove out of the way just in time; the energy bolts hit nothing but open air and then retreated into the fury of the lightning column.

  Simon lay on the ground, his chest heaving, his skin clammy with cold sweat. “We did it,” he exhaled, his voice exhausted but tinged with pride. “We saved them.”

  But something inside the restaurant had caught Virgil’s attention. His jaw was tight, and Simon could hear the squeak of his teeth as he ground them together in frustration. “No,” he muttered. “We didn’t.”

  They looked back inside the restaurant and saw the jock with the letterman jacket cowering behind the table. In all the chaos, Virgil hadn’t noticed that the boy had fallen behind, too scared to move. He was gaping at them from across the Squeezy Cheez with wide, pleading eyes. Even from the distance, they could tell he was shaking.

  The lightning column seemed to sense the boy’s presence. It began to move, shifting through the restaurant like a massive, destructive spotlight, blasting the roof to pieces as it sliced through the building, getting closer and closer to the boy.

  “We have to get him!” Virgil cried.

  Simon was slumped against the wall, breathing heavily. He raised his hands and tried to form a shield, but nothing came out through his palms but a few orange sparks. “I’m out,” he panted helplessly.

  Virgil nodded. “Stay here, I’ll go.” He raised his hand and formed a shield…but it was a smaller, circular thing with only very softly-glowing runes. He frowned down at it. It was strong, but he didn’t know if it would be strong enough to keep the energy at bay.

  He didn’t give himself time to think it over. He plunged back into the restaurant and ran head-long into the fray.

  The lightning column was still moving, slowly creeping closer and closer to the cowering jock. Virgil leapt over a fallen table, clearing it easily, but the column threw a bolt of energy his way, and he caught it just on the end of his shield. The impact was enough to throw him off his balance, and he crashed to the floor on his knee. He sucked in his breath through his teeth, wincing at the pain. “That smarts,” he muttered.

  He struggled back to his feet, still holding the shield out before him. He hobbled forward, trying to shake the pain out of his leg. The jock looked up at him from the other room with tears in his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak…but the lightning column shot out with ten separate, jagged energy bolts, plunging them into the high schooler’s body, skewering him from top to bottom.

  The boy’s scream was deafening.

  Brilliant white light flooded out from his eyes and mouth, and even filtered out through the very pores of his skin. The fingers of energy that pierced his body hoisted him up, raising him to the ceiling. Virgil screamed and ran forward, aiming to throw himself between the bolts and the boy, but the lightning column had one last trick up its sleeve. Another line of energy crackled out from the column, striking the roof above Virgil’s head. The powerful lightning hit one of the support beams, severing it neatly in half. The beam fell down, and a section of the roof followed it, collapsing in front of Virgil, blocking his way into the next room.

  The last thing Virgil saw before the rubble and debris choked off his view entirely was the electrified body of the boy, hanging limp and withered near the ceiling, with lightning bolts surging through his body as the frozen animatronic robots watched silently from the stage.

  Chapter 23

  They watched the flashing blue and red lights from across the street, and when the paramedics wheeled out a gurney with a white sheet draped over the boy’s lifeless body, Virgil thought he might throw up.

  “Don’t throw up,” Simon said, reading his thoughts. “That’s the only way this gets any worse, if you puke in my car.”

  They were sitting in the Pontiac in a daze, watching the emergency responders try to sort out the Squeezy Cheez mess. “This doesn’t get any worse,” Virgil shot back. “This is the worst.” He couldn’t take his eyes away from the gurney as the paramedics lifted it up and slid it into the back of the ambulance. “This is as bad as it gets.”

  “I know,” Simon said hollowly. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. I’m sorry.”

  “I know,” Virgil replied.

  They sat quietly in the car for several long minutes, watching police officers seal off the area around the Squeezy Cheez with yellow tape.

  “It’s not supposed to be like this,” Simon said, finally breaking the silence. “People aren’t supposed to die.”

  “People die all the time,” Virgil pointed out numbly.

  “I mean now. I mean from this!” Simon grabbed the steering wheel, squeezing it so hard that the material squeaked. “The electricity doesn’t kill people. It fries them, saps their hydration, shrivels them up, but it leaves them alive. Doctors can maybe fix it, or reverse it, or something, if they’re alive, but it’s not supposed to kill anyone!”

  Virgil shook his head. “I don’t think the woman in the cape knows the rules.”

  “Asag didn’t kill anyone!” Simon continued, barely even hearing Virgil. “Neil didn’t kill anyone!”

  “Not that we know of,” Virgil pointed out.

  “People aren’t supposed to die!”

  “Did you think no one would ever die?” Virgil demanded. His voice sounded sharper than he’d meant it to, but he couldn’t help it. He could still see the fear in the boy’s eyes before the lightning pierced his body. “We’re dealing with evil, supernatural forces, Simon! Forces strong enough to suck the life out of people. Strong enough to summon mud-monsters from beneath the ground! Strong enough to bring a powerful demon into the world, strong enough to force a kinesthetic mage of the Seventh Order to lock himself in an ice vault. Did you not think that eventually, someone would die?”

  Simon lowered his eyes. When he spoke again, the words were soft, almost pleading. “I didn’t think we’d be responsible.”

  Virgil turned to look at his friend. “Listen to me,” he said, gripping Simon by the shoulder. “Don’t you say that. We saved six people’s lives tonight. I got careless, and I missed one, and if anything, his death is on me, but we saved six lives tonight, and don’t you dare forget that.”

  Simon raised his eyes once more. They were coated over with a firm resolve. “I won’t forget,” he agreed. “I won’t forget that we saved some lives, but I won’t forget that we lost one, either.” He turned the key in the ignition and started up the car.

  “What’re you doing?” Virgil asked. “Don’t you think we should go over there and talk to the cops?”

  “Later,” Simon said, his voice firm. He clicked his seat belt, and Virgil did the same. “You know what the worst part of losing Laura was, besides actually losing Laura?”

  Virgil sighed. “I was just thinking about her, too…” he said.

  “The worst part besides losing her was not even knowing where to look for justice…not knowing who had killed her in the woods.” He threw the Pontiac into drive and tore out of the parking l
ot. “I’m not going to forget that we lost someone tonight. And this time, I know how to avenge the dead.”

  Virgil raised an eyebrow at his friend. “What’re you saying?” he asked.

  Simon gripped the wheel and pushed his foot down on the gas. “I’m saying that enough is enough. This ends tonight.”

  Chapter 24

  Abby felt like she’d died of flu and been cruelly dredged back to just this side of life. Her head burned with fever; she shivered with ice-cold chills, and her entire body was covered in a sheen of clammy sweat. Her muscles ached, her bones hurt, her throat felt dry and raw, as if she’d been swallowing sand.

  “I’m never saving Llewyn again,” she muttered.

  By keeping both hands planted solidly against the wall, she found she could manage to walk a mostly-straight line. A quick peek inside the library confirmed what Virgil had said, that every single book in the room was frozen solid. And if the library was frozen, all of the other rooms would be frozen too, no doubt. She had no idea how she was going to get to the bottom of the “Summon Morgaine” mystery.

  But she had a hunch that she would have a little easier time of it if she wasn’t so deathly ill.

  She inched her way back down the hall, passing one hand over the other and stopping every few steps to catch her breath. She passed by the frozen wizard and eased herself across the hall, falling down against the open doorway into the potions room. The space was a mess; broken bottles littered the floor, and a few dozen potions and salves of varying colors and consistencies were all frozen into hard puddles.

  If she’d had the time and the mental acuity to consider it, she would have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of potions that were stored in the room. She gripped the door jamb and squinted at the labels she could read. She was nervous that, if she went any further into the room without the support of the door, she would collapse against the floor-to-ceiling shelves and make an even bigger mess than there already was.

  She didn’t know what she was looking for, exactly…any liquid potion was bound to be frozen inside its glass vial and ultimately useless to her. There were plenty of warming potions and melting potions and counter-curse potions within view, but they were no good to her in stasis. She was about to stumble back out of the potions room to explore the rest of the mansion when something in the near corner of the room caught her eye.

  “Oh,” she said, brightening a bit as she read the label. “Why, yes, I think that will do nicely.”

  She smiled with mischief and stumbled toward the jar.

  Chapter 25

  “The good news is, I found some information on the Refracticore,” Virgil said as they sped along the highway.

  Simon scoffed. “Let me guess what the bad news is. You found the information on Reddit.”

  Virgil looked down and cleared his throat. “Well, I wasn’t going to tell you that part, but…”

  They were careening toward the Bypass Mountains once again. Simon’s plan was simple, if not exactly elegant: They would return to the Stocks, hide in the trees just off of the clearing, and sit and wait until the woman in the cloak returned.

  “We don’t even know that she goes there,” Virgil pointed out. “We didn’t see her there, and in fact, the only times we have seen her, she was somewhere else when the lightning thing was happening.”

  “Then we’ll wait for the van from Furtive Hills,” Simon replied.

  “We don’t know that that’s there every time, either…”

  “Well, we’ll wait until someone shows up!” Simon snapped.

  That had pretty much ended the conversation.

  Now Virgil was poring over the information on his phone screen, quickly running his eyes over the lines of text. “Do you want to know what it says or not?”

  “Sure,” Simon grumbled. “Tell me what the nerds of Reddit think about the Refracticore.”

  “Hey, the fact that the nerds of Reddit are aware of the term ‘Refracticore’ and had a conversation about it that started way back in 2016 means they’re way ahead of us on this thing. Now stop being a judge-box and let the collective wisdom of an entire subculture illuminate the darker corners of your supposedly superior mind.”

  Simon didn’t reply, but he made an annoyed, impatient twirling motion with his hand.

  Virgil cleared his throat and began sharing the bits of information he thought were most important. “It’s a stone,” he said, scrolling back up to the top of the screen. “Unearthed in a deep cave near the Euphrates River in the 16th Century by a cult of monks, according to one user. Dug up by witches, according to another. One guy said it was Warren Harding.”

  “Warren Harding?” Simon said. “President Warren Harding? In the 16th Century?”

  Virgil shrugged. “In this scenario, I guess he had time-traveling abilities. There’s a whole sub-Reddit about it. Do you want to hear the specifics of that?”

  “I hate Reddit,” Simon mumbled.

  Virgil nodded. “Got it. We’ll skip time travel for now, whatever...they all agree it was the Euphrates in the 1500s. No one seems to know its true origin, though theories range from Mesopotamian shaman to intergalactic pranksters. Should I go deeper with the origin theories, or…?”

  “Virgil…” Simon said, rubbing his forehead with frustration.

  “Okay, just checking. Anyway. It’s a stone. A big stone. A big, precious stone, carved with lots of facets. This one user says the stone was actually set into the end of a long staff made of solid gold. He posted a drawing…look at this.” Virgil held the screen up to Simon.

  “I’m driving,” he complained, but he glanced at the image anyway. As soon as he saw the image, his eyes grew wide with interest. “Whoa,” he said.

  “Yep,” Virgil nodded. “The bottom of the staff has four prongs...that plus the staff itself would account for the indentations we saw in the dirt up on the Stocks.”

  “They’re jamming the staff into the ground and setting up the stone like a scepter,” Simon said, thinking out loud. “Interesting…”

  “I guess Reddit knows a thing or two after all,” Virgil said indignantly. He returned to the screen. “The Refracticore is used in groups, usually in conclaves. Which I just Googled, and it means ‘secret meetings.’ In case you were wondering.”

  “I know what ‘conclaves’ means,” Simon pointed out.

  “Cool, genius,” Virgil said, rolling his eyes. “Anyway, it’s used in groups because of its specific power.”

  “Which is?” Simon asked.

  Virgil smiled smugly. “I thought you’d never ask. The Refracticore has the power to absorb, concentrate, and redistribute energy. With the right spell, the stone draws energy into the top of itself, which is shaped like a cone…and then it can shoot the energy back out, and I’m quoting here, ‘in absorbable form’ to the people standing around it. Because of its facets, the stone has 37 surfaces, not counting the cone on top or the flat bottom, so it can redistribute energy to up to 37 people at once.” Virgil put down the phone. “If I’m being honest, I don’t know exactly what any of this means, but it sounds pretty impressive.”

  “What kind of energy does it absorb and redistribute?” Simon asked.

  “It says it depends on the spell that’s cast,” Virgil replied.

  Simon bit his lip thoughtfully. “So it’s not magical in itself…it needs a magic spell to work.”

  Virgil shrugged. “Sounds like it.”

  “But the woman in the purple cloak doesn’t have any magic.”

  “According to Llewyn’s weird X-Men map room, no,” Virgil frowned.

  “Hm,” Simon said.

  Virgil waited for him to say more, but he fell silent after that, lost deeply in thought. So Virgil continued. “There’s some bad news,” he said, looking down at the screen. “According to this, the Refracticore is indestructible. It’s cursed
or immortal or magically resilient or something, no one’s really sure, but apparently there have been lots of attempts to smash the thing to pieces, and none of them worked.”

  “It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try,” Simon said quietly.

  “I agree. We should always try to smash things up. Definitely. I’m just saying, we may need a back-up plan.”

  “Yeah. We probably do,” Simon agreed.

  They sat quietly for a few moments. Virgil was hoping that Simon would throw a back-up plan out there, but he didn’t. Virgil’s heart sank as he realized that Simon didn’t actually have a plan beyond trying to destroy an indestructible magical stone.

  “Well,” he said, putting his phone back into his pocket and sighing at the road ahead. “Maybe something will come to us.”

  Simon didn’t respond to that, either.

  Chapter 26

  “Look, you know I’m not one to complain,” Virgil said.

  Simon laughed out loud, a hard, barking sound. “Oh, you’re not?” he said.

  “Not when it counts,” Virgil insisted. “Never when it counts!”

  “Uh-huh,” Simon said, rolling his eyes.

  Virgil hesitated. “Having said that, I’d like to take a second to complain.”

  “Go on.”

  Virgil looked around at the trees, and at the way they blocked out the moonlight. The leaves looked silvery in the darkness, and the trunks appeared to be pure black. The Stocks were a creepy place at any time of day, but especially so at night. “It’s dark, and I don’t like it,” Virgil finally spat out. “There, I said it.”

  “You’re afraid of the dark now, too?” Simon asked.

  “I’m not afraid of the dark,” Virgil insisted. “I’m afraid of things that can hide in the dark. It’s different.”