The bullet punched through the wall into the office and glanced across the back of a four-year-old girl’s skull.. Mama saw her collapse on top of her dolls and ran into the office, shrieking a garbled mix of English and Spanish. Two women in their twenties came out of the kitchen, running to see what had happened. One saw the blood-covered child and fell to her knees. She wrapped her arms around her head, her moans escalating into agonized keening. The other pulled her phone out and started dialing 911.
Even after months at Stonewall, I froze, too. The utter hopelessness in their voices mirrored everything I’d felt when Mom died. I was back in the hospital, next to her bed, and I couldn’t see anything but her.
Rose elbowed me in the ribs and yelled, “David! Wake up!” She vaulted over the counter and shoved her way into the office. “Pray quietly,” she snapped.
The girl on the phone finally managed to connect, but she was praying in Spanish rather than talking to the operator. I shook my head to clear it and took the phone from her.
“We need an ambulance for a gunshot injury, suspects are down and disarmed.” I gave the address and handed the phone back to the girl. I looked out at the street to see if I could see any emergency lights, and looked right at the third member of the gang. She was behind the wheel of a mid-seventies sedan, wearing white face paint, neon-green lipstick, and a blue gingham dress. She looked back at me and floored it.
Lucky for me, the car was in neutral. She missed reverse, popped the clutch, and the car died. Before I got off the porch, she was out of the car and running.
Thirteen ran out of the shadows, right across Clown Girl’s path. She tried to step around him and wound up kissing pavement. Thirteen slashed the back of her leg, severing her Achilles tendon. She started crawling, dragging her leg behind her. Thirteen hissed, pressing his bared claws against her eyelid. She wrapped her arms around her head and stopped moving.
Two cruisers and an ambulance pulled in. I kept my hands visible and stayed out of the way during the clown roundup. A few minutes later, the EMTs rolled out with the little girl. She was pale, but breathing.
I told the police the robbers had given up when Rose confronted them, and that the shooting appeared to be accidental. I didn’t know what else to say, and hopefully that would satisfy them.
Rose came out of the bathroom, rubbing her hands together to finish drying them. She looked worn out and a little pale. “I really need something to eat,” she muttered. “Took too much energy.”
“What happened?”
She managed a smile. “Bad scalp wound, lots of blood. The bullet forced shards of her skull against her brain, but that’s all. I pulled her skull back together and did what I could to seal the wound. She’ll be fine.”
Mama came out of the back and reached for Rose’s arm. She pulled her hand back and asked, “How did you do that?”
Rose smiled and half-shrugged. “With great difficulty. Could we get some fajitas, to go?”
Mama wasn’t distracted. “Only God can heal like that. Are you an angel? A saint? Please, you have to tell me.”
“I’m a chupacabra.
Rawr
.” Rose made biting motions, clicking her teeth together. “How about those fajitas?”
I said, “Mama, Rose is my girlfriend. If word of what happened here gets around, she won’t be my girlfriend any more. She’ll be an exhibit in a zoo, and no one will ever see her again. What happened was a miracle. It just happened. Give God the glory and leave Rose out of it. Can you do that?”
Mama nodded. “It was God’s hand. I’ll say that, but I will thank God for you being here.”
Rose smiled. “Thank you. Fajitas?”
“We don’t have any ready, but I have a serving pan of beef and cheese enchiladas. I’ll pack them for you.” A few minutes later, we had two large sacks full of dinner and Mama was locking up to go to the hospital. She slowed to wave again before speeding off into the night. Thankfully, the walk to our house was uneventful.
When I unpacked the food, I found a box of grilled fish and bacon-wrapped shrimp addressed to “El Gato”. While I fixed his plate, Thirteen pulled a bottle of imported British stout out of the refrigerator and handed me the bottle opener. I popped the cap and poured the stout into a coffee cup for him.
Ten pounds of enchiladas later, Rose was relaxed and ready for bed. I was feeling wrung out, overwhelmed by the emotional and physical rollercoaster of the day’s events. Thirteen belched and yawned, licking stout off his whiskers. He seemed content to sack out on the table, so I left him be and got the remaining food put away.
Rose was asleep by the time I got to bed. I thought I was too tired to go to sleep myself, but I did.
Black dust covered my feet. I shook it off my shoes and tried walking, but I kept sinking into it. The dust was as fine as ash, and just as ephemeral. Walking was a pain, so I floated up a foot or so and had a look around.
It looked like Boulder, but I couldn’t see the mountains through the haze of ash in the air. The buildings looked the same, but somehow diminished. Less substantial, as though they were made of eggshell and cardboard instead of brick. The only color I could see turned out to be right behind me—the Dushanbe Teahouse.
Mom was sitting at a table next to the fountain, sipping a cup of glowing golden-red tea. I sat down at the table and tried to talk to her, but nothing came out. She took a drink and started glowing herself. The steam from the tea rotated as it rose into the air, forming a DNA double helix.
Mom said, “It carries more than they realize. They need to live in fear. Fear keeps insanity away.” She started to fade away, taking all the light with her. She reached out toward me and said…something. Something important. I reached out for her, and woke up just as I fell out of bed.
It was three forty-five in the morning. I rambled into my office and wrote everything down before I forgot. Almost everything, anyway. I tried to do a search on the line “fear keeps insanity away”, but got no meaningful results. I rubbed my eyes, and when I opened them again, Thirteen was sitting on my desk.
He pointed to a blank whiteboard behind me and, in a deep, resonant voice, said, “The math is wrong.”
I woke up with half of the keyboard pressing into my face and a terrible crick in my neck. I staggered back to bed and fell asleep hoping anyone else with a message for me would just send a damn email.
Call to Arms
Morning sucks.
I rolled over and grabbed a notepad out of the side table. By the time I got the details down, Mother Nature was calling and I’d found an
R
key next to my pillow. Rose was still asleep. I freshened up and went downstairs. Thirteen was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs, ears back, hat missing, holding something in his paws. It was still twitching.
Great. Under the layers of genetic code, there’s obviously still a cat in there somewhere. I sat down and said, “Please tell me that’s not a baby bird or something.”
The cat snorted. He pushed the fluttering thing toward me, keeping a good grip on it the whole time. It had patches of fur and smelled of decomposition. I picked it up with a paper towel. Once I had it, Thirteen took off. I carried the squirming bundle into the kitchen for a better look.
In the morning sunlight, it was clearly most of a squirrel. About a third of it had been stripped away and replaced with bronze gears and copper tubing. The brain was enclosed in glass, with a bundle of wires feeding into it, and an inch-long crystal point running lengthwise through the middle.
The tubes connected to pistons on all four legs. Maybe they provided extra force for running and jumping. The internal organs and intestines had been removed, and the eyes replaced with polished lenses the size of a BB. The ribcage held a hydraulic pump connected to a spinning metal cylinder. I pulled the cylinder’s mounting bracket loose and the critter went limp.
Thirteen returned with his hat back in place. He jumped up next to the sink, turned the water on, and washed his paws with soap.
“Well, crap…” I looked the mess over and sighed. “Hopefully we don’t have to whip up a vat full of thermite to get rid of this thing.”
“Get rid of what? And what is that smell?” Rose got the orange blossom water out of the fridge and splashed some under her nose.
“Cat caught a spy. Have a look.”
“Hmm.” She poked and prodded a bit before shaping her fingers into talons and popping the glass cover off the skull. She slid the crystal point out of the brain and set it aside. “Get me that big iron skillet.”
The squirrel went in the skillet and the skillet went on the grate of my charcoal smoker. Rose made sure the cat and I were well back as she focused on a spell. Antifreeze-green liquid dripped from her hand into the skillet. She yanked her hand away as the liquid touched the squirrel and ignited.
“The Rain of Flesh Rending,” she said. “Only used in times of war. It’ll burn anything organic, and keep burning as long as it has fuel.”
Ick. “You’re buying me a new skillet.”
The fire burned the squirrel to ash and the ash into nothingness. The seasoning on the inside of the skillet burned away, leaving the iron surface factory-fresh. The hardware from the squirrel was shiny and clean as well. I reached for it, but couldn’t bring myself to pick it up.
Rose pushed me toward the house. “Go warm up the leftovers. I have a few things to try with this hardware.” She proceeded to disassemble the squirrel’s cybernetics, examining each part in detail. She got to the crystal eyes and said something in Draconic. It didn’t sound like good news, but nothing does in Draconic.
“Problem?” I set a pile of enchiladas down in front of her.
“All the metal parts are from Earth. So was the squirrel.” She poked the crystals and said, “These are not.”
“So we could use them to find his world? Could we warn the powers that be about him and let his own people deal with him?”
Rose frowned. “Giving us the key to his homeworld is a rookie mistake. If I were in his position, I’d use something from a world capable of destroying my enemies and hope it lures them to their doom.”
“Dragons are so suspicious.” The pile of parts looked harmless, but they were inspiring me to suspicions of my own. “But baiting us into attacking where he wants us to attack sounds like a good plan.”
“Yes.” Rose looked into the crystal point, rolling it around and watching the play of light in the facets. “What do you call it in a game when you can’t see the entire map until you go everywhere?”
“Fog of war.”
“That’s it. We’re both operating without seeing the whole playing field. The thing is, neither your world nor mine has ever produced anything like this squirrel. I’d say a Gnome fabricated the metalwork, except that it’s both practical and functional. Gnomish design, but Dwarven execution. The necromantic spells animating the squirrel followed the lines of Human magery.” She held up the crystal point. “The crystal itself could only have been created by another Dragon, but the magic activating it is also Human.”
“Thain’s been dead for a while. Maybe he went to night school, had a few hobbies.”
Rose scowled tapped on the table in front of me. “Or he knows a spell to absorb knowledge and skills from his victims. He did manage to learn a great deal about medicine and whatever else to be able to work on the Loseitall trial.”
Oh, shit
. “I think it’s time we stopped trying to fight him on our own. We have friends with resources. Let’s bring them in.” I looked at the calendar and tried to remember what day of the week it was. “We have archery tomorrow night. Let’s take what we have, and go out to dinner afterward to discuss it.”
“You should call your friend Ishmael, too.” Rose swept all the squirrel hardware into a plastic bag and dropped it in her purse. “I doubt the Visitor Services Division will be of any use, but you never know.”
I should have known
. “Is that what his group is called?”
“It was when we set it up.” Rose gave me an apologetic shrug. “There have always been Humans who didn’t cope with the loss of the acceptance. They needed something to do. Visitor Services has been useful from time to time. Just… Please let them keep thinking it was their idea?”
I sighed. “No problem. I’ll call him after I talk to Miranda and Ember.”
Miranda said she and Jake were down for a war council after archery, except for one thing. “You guys have been busy, so we didn’t want to add another issue to your plate. The range lost its lease and the land is being turned into a giant soulless corporate sweat box. Resistance is futile.”
“Well, that sucks. Anyplace else we could use?”
“Yep. We found a nice place on Highway Seven just east of Lafayette. I’ll email you the directions. You two have to be there, anyway. Jake and I have been working on something and we’re going to be bringing some show and tell to play with.”
“This isn’t that naked-women-with-guns tarot deck Jake came up with, is it?”
Miranda coughed. “No, he’s still working on that in his spare time. He wanted me to pose for the Queen of Shotguns so he could create some sample cards. Not gonna happen. But, no, this is a real project. It’s really cool.”
“Sounds good. We’ll see you tomorrow.” I hung up, shaking my head. The last
next big thing
Jake had dreamed up was a line of navy-colored condoms wrapped in badge-shaped gold foil envelopes. He was going to call them “The Thin Blue Lining”, but Miranda exiled him to the couch until he changed it to “Body Armor”. Last I heard he was trying to trademark
Serve and Protect
as a marketing slogan.
Thirteen decided to hop into the Land Rover while I was loading our bow cases in the back. I thought about trying to shoo him out, but trying to keep a shamelessly teleporting cat out of anywhere is a pointless exercise. Instead, I tickled him under the chin and asked, “What have you got planned? Cruising for loose country girls?”
He shook his head and stood up on his hind legs to look over the seat, making a harsh, querulous growl as he surveyed the street and the park. After a few seconds, he pointed across the street with a single extended claw. I looked where he was pointing. At the edge of the park, the evening sunlight was glinting off something moving through the branches of a big oak.