Old Broken Road

by Alexander, K. M.

  TWENTY-TWO

  IT ALL HAPPENED SO FAST.

  The meager light from my lamp penetrated the gloom inside the old church revealing Hannah lying unconscious and naked on a table made of rough hewn timber. Her chest rose and fell with small breaths.

  Alive, I thought. My heart sang. She’s alive. Hannah is alive!

  Cuts and bruises covered her body, red and raw against her bronze skin. She was apparently being prepped for crucifixion. She was bound to a T-shaped cross. Ropes held her arms tightly to the horizontal beam and legs to the vertical stipe. No spikes had been used. At least not yet.

  I wanted to rush to her, cut the ropes, and carry her out of the church. I held back, wary.

  It was hard to wrap my head around the interior. The windows opposite me were blocked by the remains of the landslide. Tables lined most walls, covered in strange instruments. Contraptions with sharp edges, pointy bits, and jagged glass. The old wooden floor was stained dark. Sharpened stakes waited in a nearby corner, their tips white and brilliant in the lantern's light. Pictograms, written in something dark, covered the walls. The scrawls reminded me of the graffiti that covered the sublevels of Lovat.

  On the opposite side of the room, where an altar would have been, was Councilman Enoch Boden. The heavy hood that he always wore was drawn back revealing a bald pate. His back was bent and he was heaving a body up onto another table. He started and turned as I lifted the lantern, dropping Range onto the wooden table with a heavy thump. His jaundiced eyes blinked rapidly against the bright light.

  Only a second passed.

  A heartbeat.

  Boden’s eyes met mine.

  “NOOOOO!” he screamed, his mouth a gaping hole, his eyes enormous. The old man rushed towards me with alarming speed and struck the lantern from my hand before backpedaling away and crashing into a table. The lantern tumbled, striking the windowsill at my feet before falling outside. Surprised, I slipped, barely catching myself on the window frame with both hands and twisting my knee violently as I struggled to regain purchase. Boden was yelling. He seemed to be… burning. His skin bubbled. Peeled.

  The small bits of glass that remained in the edges of the window dug into my palm.

  The lantern was gone, the room once again swallowed by darkness. I heard it shatter somewhere outside and below me. A mumbled “Oh shi—” drifted up from Taft.

  “NO!” Boden screamed again, recoiling almost as quickly as he lurched forward.

  A rushing woosh sounded from behind me and my jacket billowed with a flutter of air. An orange flickering light rose up, re-lighting the interior of the church. I could feel the warmth on my back and hear the crackle of the flames. I glanced over my shoulder. The lantern had set fire to the dry pine needles that covered the open area around the church!

  Boden wasn’t pleased. His face was turned down in disgust. He spat and slid down to the floor, backing beneath a table. He sank into the shadows. He shook his head and wiggled his fingers before him, his movements jerky and unnatural.

  Outside, the noise exploded in the sky, returning like a thunderclap. The ripping metal warble filled my ears. Boden glared at me and gritted his teeth. His eyes bored holes into me. The noise grew louder.

  Pulling myself inside, I drew the Judge and fired at the old man, striking him in the chest. He coughed. Spat black blood and grinned. As I stepped down to the church’s floor I made sure to place myself between him and Hannah. He would not take her.

  BAM. The grip of the Judge punched my hand. A second shot.

  Boden twitched and grinned as the slugs impacted. They didn’t seem to slow him. A thick viscous liquid dripped from the entry wounds. He scrambled across the floor, running beneath the tables towards Range, still unconscious, leaving a trail of goop in his wake.

  Flaring my nostrils, I fired into the floor in front of him, sending an explosion of wood splinters into his face.

  That got his attention.

  He started and spun to face me, peering from under a table.

  “You ruined it!” he growled, his voice somehow discernible over the noise in the sky, the hammering rain, and the crackle and pop from the fire.

  I squeezed the trigger a third time. The Judge boomed again, belching white smoke from its barrel. Boden jerked and then rolled into a sitting position beneath two tables. He began to shake his head in long pendulous motions, craning his neck to one side and then to the other.

  “It’s over, Boden,” I said, feeling more confident.

  Taft stepped through the front doors of the church, her sawed-off shotgun held in front of her. She leveled it at the councilman.

  Boden glared at her and then at me.

  His head began to shake again. He waved around violently.

  Then he began to change.

  Taft and I glanced at each other. What was this?

  His movements became less jerky and more supple and smooth. He rose, transforming as he did so, lifting the tables and sending the tools that covered them clattering to the floor.

  His clothes seemed to lengthen and shift in hue. It was only when he stood that I realized what I was seeing. The man from our dreams.

  He was tall and slender with a straight back and a handsome swarthy face with sharp features. He was draped in billowing red robes that moved slightly in the heat from the fire. A prince standing in his ravaged kingdom.

  Suddenly, there seemed to be a shift. We were in the church, and yet... we were somewhere else.

  I looked around, confused. I could still feel the heat from the fire, hear the small sound of the flames, but gone was the macabre interior of the abandoned chapel. Taft was nowhere to be seen. It was just me and the Red Man, standing amidst ruins. These familiar ruins. A scorched flat plain stretched off in every direction uninterrupted. No hills, no mountains, just endless wastes. In the distance a broken sun was setting, and it lengthened our shadows across the flat expanse.

  Boden smiled at me, a wicked grin that seemed to waver in the heat. A pair of coyotes circled him, licking at his hands.

  I shuddered. My head ached as I tried to comprehend what I was seeing. How could I be in two places at once? I must be somewhere in the Territories… The mountains and rolling hills I was used to had been flattened. Replaced, reshaped into a flat expanse. This was no world I knew.

  In the distance were the smoldering ruins of an enormous city. Lovat—it had to be. Though how I could recognize it, I wasn’t sure. The great city was broken, its towers shattered, its levels pancaked atop one another. I could smell death on the wind. Beyond its silhouette something immense and unknowable moved along the horizon.

  I took a step forward. I heard my foot fall on the wooden floor of the chapel but felt it slap against the scorched hardpan of the wastes.

  “Stop this!” I said.

  Boden just smiled.

  So I shot him.

  The Judge roared and Boden jerked, then blinked.

  A gust of wind rose, bringing with it dust and sand. I closed my eyes and moved to shield them. When I opened them again, the scene had faded and we were standing in the burning chapel yet again. Boden looked less like the robed prince of a shattered land and more like a small elderly councilman again.

  I heard Taft mumble a curse, and glanced at her as she took a step back. Her face was locked with an expression of terrified panic.

  Boden chuckled, grinning maniacally. A glop of black slopped from one of the bullet holes in his chest. He quaked and his skin darkened, turning a deeper tan and then fading into a midnight, oily, black.

  His arms and legs seemed to simultaneously thicken and melt into his body. A massive black tentacle burst from his chest and then uncoiled before him. I stepped backward in horror. He stopped shaking his head, and looked up at me. A horrific grin split his face, long globs of black falling across it. He seemed to occupy a dual space, looking both like the old man from Methow and like something else. Something older. A creature beyond.

  His yellow eyes glowed as his
face split , becoming wider and wider. Two new eyes appeared below his mouth, then a nose. With a slurping sound, it broke and became a pair of faces. I shuddered, staring.

  The twin faces elongated, stretched, and broke apart. Now there were four. Eight eyes blinked at me. Four wide smiles grinned, wet laughs burbling from somewhere within, trickling out over drool-covered lips.

  “You never should have come,” it said. The mouths kept laughing. The words seemed to come from within my head.

  “I had plans,” it said.

  The thing rose, pulling itself up with arms that disappeared inside its mass until it hung against the window frame behind it. There it paused, sagging like a wasp’s nest.

  Just then, Taft’s shotgun belched a throaty boom as both barrels fired. The shot spluttered against the wet mass causing small ripples to cascade across its oily form. If the blast had any effect the creature didn’t show it.

  An arm elongated from the mass, lashing out across the room and striking Taft, sending her crashing backwards.

  “You can’t kill me, Guardian. You won’t.” The voice was in my head.

  I stepped forward and fired the remaining shots from the Judge, flipping open the cylinder and reloading as I braced for a lashing of my own.

  None came.

  The Boden-monster began to seep backwards out the windows like rainwater being sucked up by parched ground. It disappeared in between cracks in the rocks and dirt, the four faces staring at me, mouths lolling open. Bemused.

  I blew them apart, but the face reformed, cackling as it disappeared into the cracks.

  Boden was gone.

  “Taft!” I rushed to her side but the big woman was already rising. She pushed herself up off the floor.

  “Bastard,” she said, spitting blood and wiping her mouth. She raised an arm and looked down at a gash that opened beneath her left breast through her jacket and her coveralls.

  “You okay?”

  She grunted. “I’m fine. It just looks nasty.

  The fire had latched on to the old church and was hungrily consuming the wall through which I had come. It was working its way to the roof. Black smoke belched upward and the sound of raindrops sizzling could be heard.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get the others and get out of here. This place is going.”

  I quickly moved over to Hannah. She was still unconscious despite the gunfire. Her lips were cut and bruised and a swollen purple mark crawled along the right side of her face holding one of her bright green eyes shut. She was filthy, and smelled like a musty cellar. Shallow cuts crossed her stomach and chest, and I could see more angry bruising along the insides of her arms and legs. I pulled my knife to free her from the ropes that held her tightly to the wooden cross.

  It was then that I realized.

  Her left hand was missing at the wrist. A rag was tied over it, stained red with blood.

  The bastard had taken her hand!

  I stepped back, blinking. Staring.

  “What is it?” asked Taft, rushing over. Her words caught in her throat. “By the Firsts—”

  I shuddered violently, my hands tightening into balls. I looked to the windows through which Boden had escaped. There was no sign of him.

  “I will kill you, Boden,” I promised.

  The noise in the sky went silent.

  TWENTY-THREE

  SAMANTHA SHIFTED TO HER OTHER KNEE as she examined the pictograms on the side of Boden’s heavy trunk. Shortly after our return we went through his small room, searching it high and low looking for anything that might give us more insight. His room was much like the others. The same four-post bed. The same dusty mattress. The same dresser. The only thing that stood out as any different was the trunk.

  It was large, about four feet across and three feet deep, and about waist high. It was made of a black wood, lacquered to a finish that rivaled granite. The man—if you could call him a man—liked his gold. Gold metal slats squeezed it together and ran its length, fastened with heavy, gilded clamps and thick gold bolts.

  Between the slats queer little pictograms were painted in neat rows in flaking gold paint.

  The windows had been blackened with tar so we brought in several lamps to illuminate our work. The pictograms caught the light oddly. In the flicker from the lamps they gave off a sickening yellow sheen, not the brightness you’d associate with gold.

  “This is a language,” Samantha finally said, breaking the silence that had settled for the last twenty minutes.

  “Aklo?” I asked. I didn’t know of many languages. I knew Strutten, obviously, and Cephan was spoken by some species along the coast. Aklo was the only other language I knew of. I learned about it last year when Samantha used it to translate some ancient tomes that led us to Peter Black. It was older than Strutten, older even than Cephan. It was said to be the language of the Firsts.

  Samantha shook her head. “No, but it’s nearly as old.”

  “It have a name?”

  “Not in Strutten, no,” Samantha said, her voice lacking its usual warmth. She looked tired. She ran her hand over the markings that were etched into the golden slats. “It was once on here too, though it’s not as noticeable. Age has worn the characters soft. Gold doesn’t hold carving well, especially with a lot of handling.”

  “Can you read any of it?” I squatted down next to her and squinted at the little symbols. A bird. A couple of wavy lines. Next to those was what looked like scales, and below that a cross with an oblong shape near its top. Nothing I could decipher.

  My stomach rumbled, loud enough I feared Samantha could hear it.

  If she did she didn’t react. “Maybe…” she said, her voice drifting off as she squinted at the shapes.

  Footsteps could be heard coming from the hallway and soon enough Wensem entered the small bedroom. He leaned silently against the doorframe and watched Samantha work, his arms folded across his narrow chest.

  I looked over my shoulder. “How’s Hannah?”

  He grimaced and shook his head. “Rough. Real rough. She won’t talk, just stares at that stump. Taft washed her up good and bandaged her with some fresh linens, still nothing. She’s trying to put food in her belly right now.”

  “She taking it?”

  “Not much, but Taft is persistent. She’s getting something down, though it’s not more than a watery gruel. What did that son-of-a-bitch do to her hand? Did you see it anywhere?”

  I shook my head. “No, but I wasn’t looking, either. Between Boden’s transformation and the fire, we didn’t linger. Taft slung Range over her shoulder and I carried Hannah. We high-tailed it back here.”

  Wensem rubbed his chin with a finger. “A lot of the bodies outside are missing parts as well. Parts of legs. A foot. An arm. Even a few heads.”

  Parts. I cringed. Peter Black had collected body parts, too. Specific ones: lips, eyes, ears, and so on. Each had a sacred significance in the ritual to awaken Cybill. Was this something similar?

  “And it was then,” Samantha said suddenly, reading the pictograms, “that… hum, I can’t read this word. It’s special, though.”

  “Then what?” I asked, turning my attention back to Samantha and trying not to dwell on the missing body parts.

  “Then… whoever this is,” she tapped a symbol that looked like squiggly helixes drawn atop one another surrounded by a wavy starburst. “…came out of Kemet.”

  “What’s a Kemet?” asked Wensem.

  Samantha waved a hand. “An ancient civilization. Very ancient. Existed well before the Aligning. Before the Territories. Before Lovat. They still teach about it during Reunified services. It’s a part of our scriptures. Haven’t either of you attended?” she chided, not looking up.

  I wondered if this Kemet really existed or if it was just a myth like the fictional nations of Columbia or Le Vieux.

  Samantha continued to run her hands over the pictograms, mumbling as she did. I leaned forward, squinting for a better look. It placed me awfully close to her.
I could smell her, feel the heat radiating from her. My mother always said, “Dimanians run hot.”

  Hot indeed. Samantha had been livid when Taft and I returned.

  We arrived late the following morning to a chaotic scene. Townsfolk were running everywhere, guards from the barricades were shouting at one another and Wensem was in the thick of it, trying to regain some semblance of control. When Methow woke, and a bunch of us were missing, the town panicked.

  We were initially greeted with shouts of relief. Samantha rushed up to me and wrapped me in a big hug and kissed my cheek. After things settled down and Taft and I explained ourselves her mood changed.

  “What was that? Why didn’t you tell anyone?” she said, her dark eyes flashing.

  “I’m sorry. Taft had the idea and we figured it’d be better to move on our own,” I explained.

  “Why? You didn’t think you could trust Wensem? You didn’t think you could trust me?”

  “Look, it’s not like there were a lot of options! We had the chance and we took it.” I had shrugged, trying to play off our decision like it was not a big deal.

  “You know, when Hagen first brought you to Saint Mark’s I didn’t like it. We argued. Then, after you returned from confronting Black something changed. I could see how much you cared. How much you wanted to stop the killers. Something inside of me changed. I somehow overlooked how reckless the whole thing had been.”

  I had looked away, not wanting to meet the fire I knew was in her eyes.

  “Just like this was. Reckless. Reckless and selfish and stupid. What if you were taken? What if it was you who'd lost a limb? What if you had been set up, ambushed by those gargoyles?”

  “Look…” I said, reaching out to place my hand on her shoulder. She pulled away roughly.

  “Don’t touch me. ”

  “Sam…” I said softly.

  Her dark hair shifted as she shook her head no. “No, Wal. No. Not again. The last time you just reacted you ended up nearly getting yourself killed. Remember? This isn’t Wal versus the world! You have a company here, a company that relies on their caravan master. A company that needs communication between one another, that needs leadership. Between this, between you almost blowing the damn doors off the town… I don’t know, Wal…”