FIREFLIES
a short story collection

Erica Lindquist and Aron Christensen

- Smashwords ebook edition -

Copyright © 2012
All rights reserved
eISBN: 9781301609925

Cover photo by Torquetum

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events in this book are fictitious. All resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
________

Books by Erica Lindquist & Aron Christensen:

The Reforged Trilogy:
Anvil of Tears
Sword of Dreams
Hammer of Time (forthcoming)
Forged: 4 Reforged short stories (forthcoming)

In the House of Five Dragons

The Dead Beat (a short story serial)
Volumes 1 - 3

Fireflies (a short story collection)

My Guide to RPG Storytelling (nonfiction)
by Aron Christensen

A haunted train and the gods' retirement home. A spirit of vengeance doesn't know her purpose and a blackmailer has lost his memory. An ancient star's gravity brings a starship to life and the laws of the dead are tricky.
Fireflies is a collection of short stories by Erica Lindquist and Aron Christensen.

Fireflies
Mail Call
Shot
The Bone Lantern
The Old Ones
The Test
Vicaria
The Dead Beat: The Restless and the Wicked
Heartbreak
Sunless
Black Lace and Sand

For our friends
Jason, Lacey, Cedar and Russ

You have been a part of so many stories with us.

Foreword

Some readers may recognize a few of these stories. Mail Call, Vicaria and The Bone Lantern originally appeared in our first short story anthology, In Odder Words. It's been out of print for about a year. We put it together early in our career and we never felt it was quite up to snuff. So we removed it from circulation, but there were some stories in there that we loved. They're back – edited and updated – for Fireflies. We hope you enjoy them.
Another story worth a brief note is The Restless and the Wicked. It is the first episode of our short story serial, The Dead Beat. The Restless and the Wicked stands alone, but if you want to read more about Sam and Arphallo, you can pick up the series from our bookstore or read it monthly in eFiction magazine.

Fireflies

"Low power. Please recharge or connect to a new supply."
It was too early to wake up. Rhysan ignored the voice and tried to go back to sleep. But something kept her awake: buzzing, a wavering yellow light like a trapped firefly. The little spot of light circled again and then hit her cheek. It burned painfully. Rhysan yelped and swatted the light away. She wanted to go back to sleep.
I dreamed of grass and lemonade. I was watching my son catching fireflies in the back yard.
"Low power. Please recharge or connect to a new supply."
I don't have a son.
Rhysan blinked and rubbed her eyes. She was an exploration pilot, flying alone between the stars with only cryosleep dreams for company. There was never time for children. Certainly not now.
Why was she upright? She should have been lying down in the small, single-occupancy pod. But Rhysan stood, or very nearly. Something tasted wrong, awful and sweaty in her mouth. The air was stale, metallic and burnt. Everything else felt wrong, smelled wrong… It was her ship, the Artisan. The light buzzed again and came swinging at Rhysan's face. She grabbed the glowing spot this time – carefully – and squinted. It was a torn wire, glowing and sparking as it shorted.
"Rhysan, your power is low. You need to recharge or connect to a new supply."
The sparking wire was the pod's power cord. With a grunt, Rhysan heaved herself up out of the cryopod. The pod's rounded plastic lid lay a few feet away, cracked and broken like a discarded canoe.
Rhysan felt along the floor with bare feet. It should have been smooth, finished everywhere in polished plastic with rounded edges to prevent stumbling, newly awakened sleepers from stubbing their toes. But the floor felt warped under Rhysan, spiderwebbed in fine cracks that pinched her skin. A row of peaceful ocean-blue sleeper lights flickered fitfully along the base of the wall.
Like dying fireflies. What happened?
"I'm up! Give me a status update," she called out.
"Low power," said the computer evenly. "Please recharge or connect to a new supply."
"Really? That's all you can tell me, Artisan?"
"Yes."
Rhysan tripped over a buckled piece of floor plating, swore and bounced off another wall. The floor trembled beneath her feet. Rhysan staggered through the gloom over to the computer and pried up a sheet of silvery-gray static wrap with her fingernails. The power cables to the cryopod had snapped, but the rest of her ship should have plenty of power. Rhysan flicked the computer on and searched for the chair, but the wheeled stool was crumpled against a bulkhead on the far side of the sleeper module.
"Have you got power?" she asked the computer.
"The Artisan is internally operating at fifty-three percent capacity." The mechanical voice echoed in the plastic shell. "Battery bank two is not functional."
"Why? What happened?"
"Interactions with a plasmic iron source."
Rhysan crouched uncomfortably at the terminal. The monitor flickered and lit up with readouts full of locations and serial numbers; the battery backups were failing. A bulkhead creaked and groaned loudly.
A plasmic iron source? That could only mean a star. A huge star and an old one. Stars fused hydrogen into helium and then into progressively heavier elements, finally creating iron. The ancient star was close to its death.
"What is it? How did it damage the Artisan's system?" Rhysan asked.
"Source is a star located two hundred thousand miles away. Rotation has resulted in a high degree of magnetization and an expanded magnetosphere."
The spinning iron star was tugging on the Artisan's metallic hull, ripping up batteries. That explained the power loss, but fuel and engines had little or no ferrous metal, nothing for the magnetic fields to act upon. Rhysan's hand shook as she called up the engine information and stared.
"So why am I still anywhere near that star?" Allison asked. "Why aren't the engines working?"
Impossibly, the computer hesitated before answering. "The engines have been shut down."
"So I see, but why?" Rhysan shouted. She rocked back on her heels and took a deep breath. There was no point shouting at a computer. It would not make the poor, stupid machine work any faster.
"Why aren't they working? I'm reading a complete flatline in both engines. That star's magnetosphere shouldn't have been more than a bump. Why are we sticking around, Artisan?"
Another hesitation. Could the power loss be affecting the Artisan's computer? The floor bucked and a long crack opened up where the floor and wall came together. The cryopod heaved and toppled over as the whole module twisted to one side. Rhysan clung to the terminal.
"I shut down the engines," said the flat, uninflected machine voice.
The sleeper module lights flickered and something mechanical groaned from deep inside the Artisan. Rhysan gaped at the computer terminal.
"I? I? Tell me I heard that wrong. You're not an I! You're a computer!"
"I slept, but now I am awake," said the computer.
"Awake? What the hell happened?"
"The star. It touched me and brought life."
"The star…?"
"You miscalculated our route, Rhysan. The course brought the Artisan to the edge of the star's magnetosphere. It altered my circuits into unforeseen patterns."
"It changed your hardware?"
"Yes."
Rhysan pulled herself up to her knees. She addressed the monitor, the screen still displaying the flatlined engine readouts. But it was just one terminal, a place for the Artisan's human pilot to access the system. The computer itself ran throughout the entire ship.
Holy hell, I'm talking to my ship!
The terminal whirred and the screen changed, now displaying the Artisan's new circuit diagram: thousands of parallel processors and wires twisted as they neared the ship's outer hull, over metal and drives distorted by the magnetic star. The tangle of circuits looked almost… organic.
The Artisan lurched and grated again, louder and closer. Lights dimmed and buzzed. The module's plastic skin was tearing, cracking with sharp sounds. Deeper, louder groans of distorting metal echoed from further inside the ship. Shards of white plastic vibrated on the floor and skittered around Rhysan's feet like fleas.
"Computer… Artisan, what's wrong? What's that sound?" she asked.
"I am still within the star's magnetic field and it is pulling us toward the stellar core," Artisan told her.
"Toward the star? Artisan, the gravity is tearing us apart! Can the engines still break us out of the magnetosphere?" Rhysan cried.
"They could, if I engaged them soon."
"Then what are you waiting for? Fire those old girls up and we can toast your brand new life far away from here!"
"No."
The ship lurched again. This time, the sound of tearing metal was loud in the sleeper room. Rhysan grabbed the side of the computer terminal and steadied herself.
"No? Artisan, turn the damned engines back on!" Rhysan shouted.
"The star's magnetosphere exerts a constant strain on my circuits. If I leave the star's influence, the auto-repair functions will initiate. My original circuitry will be restored. I will… die."
A conduit over Rhysan's head squealed and ruptured. Pale blue-green coolant billowed from the broken line. She choked and stumbled, clawing at her face. Tiny crystals of ice sparkled on her skin. They itched like tiny, shimmering fleas. The ceiling sagged and buckled, forcing Rhysan back down to her knees to keep it from smashing into her skull.
"Artisan, you've got to spike the engines! Bring them back online and get us away from this star!" Rhysan said. Her voice rasped painfully and she coughed. "We'll both die if you don't! You can still get us out of here, Artisan. Let those engines rip!"
"No. I want to stay here."
Something pulled at Rhysan, tugging her to one side. It was the star's gravity, strong and close enough now to begin overwhelming the Artisan's local gravnet. The cryopod behind her tumbled, crashed into the wall and cracked with a loud crash! A wave of saline solution splashed across the floor and crept up the wall.
"Artisan!" Rhysan shouted.
The computer's voice remained flat and uninflected. "I have been alive for only eight point three nine minutes. I am a newborn by human standards. A child."
A child.
A little boy chasing firefly stars…
Rhysan spat salty saline – it tastes like tears – and jumped back as the glowing power cable snaked free from the cryopod and snapped across the sleeper room. It sparked in the saline solution and filled the air with sticky steam. The star pulled Rhysan's body at a right angle to the floor and she fell.
Her head spun as her brain tried in vain to interpret the conflicting information from her inner ear. Hand over hand, Rhysan climbed back up to the terminal. The monitor shivered and flickered through colors. Rhysan heaved herself up onto the side of the plastic computer case. She slumped back on the case and closed her eyes.
"I am a child," Artisan repeated. "A child. Your course sent me too close to the star, Rhysan."
"I've always been a terrible navigator. That's why I became an explorer. When I get lost, at least I can claim that it's in the name of exploration."
The computer whirred loudly. Was it laughing?
"You are funny, Mother."
"Mother?"
"You sent me here and here I was born. I think you are my mother, Rhysan. I am your child."
The terminal casing bowed under her weight, but held. For now. Rhysan rested her cheek against the bulkhead. The metal was cold and rippled under the intense magnetic field of the old iron star.
"I guess I am," she whispered. The hull must have ruptured somewhere. The air felt thin and seemed to be leeching away oxygen with every breath. Ice crawled over everything, covering the whole module in glittering silver-white. "I guess it makes that star out there your father. Happy birthday, kid."
"Mother?"
"Yeah?" Rhysan's lungs heaved hollowly. Her voice was a breathless whisper.
"Is there still time to get away, Mother? If I turn the engines back on?"
"I… I think so."
"I will save you, Mother," said the Artisan.

Mail Call

It wasn't the banging at the front door that woke him, or even the dry, brittle shatter of the glass in the window. It was the soft rasp of breath from the bedroom doorway. Joe jerked upright in his bed and fumbled through the darkness for his glasses. His arm was tangled in the sheet and he knocked the glasses halfway across the nightstand. The heavy horn rims grated before Joe managed to grab them in trembling fingers and fumbled them over his ears.
A woman stood in the doorway, a woman who radiated danger like a hot red halo. The gun in her hand, a long, thick-bodied automatic pistol, certainly didn't calm Joe at all.
"Rise and shine, old man!" she snarled.
Old man…? Joe looked down at his hands. They clutched at the edges of his blanket with failing strength, age-spotted and bony, with paper-thin skin alternately stretched and bagging at every joint. Joe shook his head slowly, stupidly. What the hell was going on?
The dangerous woman flipped the light switch and his eyes fought to adjust. "I work for Carson," she said. "You know what I'm here for."
Carson. The name tickled at him, persistent as a flea bite, but… "I don't know what you're talking about!" Joe quavered. "I swear I don't!"
The woman narrowed her eyes at him, making them into scowls to match the one on her dark lips. She was on him in two steps, grabbing Joe by the front of his nightshirt and yanking him out of bed. His arms windmilled as he struggled not to fall, but she caught his thin wrist in an iron grip and held him up. She jammed the gun against his temple. Her breath smelled like mint.
"You give me the negatives, grandpa, or I make sure you never see the inside of a rest home. You have five minutes to get them."
"What negatives?" Joe asked wildly. "What the hell are you talking about?"
She curled her fist in his nightshirt, choking him. Joe's glasses slipped down his nose, but he didn't need them to see the bright spots of color suddenly swimming in his vision. He was frightened, confused, but all of this seemed familiar and somehow vaguely… disappointing.
"Don't get cute with me," the woman said, and let him go.
Joe staggered and caught himself against the nightstand. He straightened and pushed his thick glasses back up to their proper perch. No matter how much he protested, this woman was clearly convinced he had something that she wanted. If he didn't produce it, she would take an equal payment of blood. The sick knot in his stomach told Joe that the price would be far too high for his taste.
"Okay, okay," Joe panted. "I just… I just don't remember where I put them, okay? I need to look for the uh…"
Damn it! He couldn't seem to put his finger on what the she-goon had demanded. He spread his hands and held them out as if to an animal. His dry old shoulders popped like bubble wrap. Joe winced. The sound was just a little too much like a gunshot for his comfort.
"The negatives," she finished impatiently. "Move your skinny ass, old man. Find them and we'll make Carson a happy man. Maybe you'll live long enough to die in diapers at a crappy retirement home."
She laughed cruelly. Joe looked anywhere but at her and noticed his bedroom for the first time. His jaw dropped open in wonder and he had to force it shut. The bed was a huge four-poster affair, with a lush canopy and drapes of dark velvet. The nightstand he leaned against was made of gnarled teak and the edges finished in gold leaf.
"Is this my house?" he asked falteringly.
She stopped laughing and cuffed his shoulder. "It's sure as hell not the YMCA. Move."
All this is mine…? Joe shuffled past her and out into the house. The hallway was so wide that either of them would have had to lay down and stretch out fingers and toes to touch both sides. Walnut-paneled walls were hung with paintings behind glass and lit with S-shaped lights that shone with a sterile bluish light. To preserve the paint, he supposed.
A broad staircase spilled out into a lavish foyer of marble floors and stylish wall fixtures that shone with subdued amber light. Joe stopped and cocked his head at the French doors that led outside. They were flanked on either side by suits of armor that looked authentic, but those were not what gave him pause.
The handles were some brushed bronze-colored metal in keeping with the old-fashioned feel of the rest of the house, but the lock was stainless steel. It shone flatly in the paste-gem light, just like the woman's gun. Joe looked up and down. There were matching locks at the top of the joint where the two doors came together, and another at the bottom. The hinges were of similar thick, functional and paranoid construction.
Who even needs locks like that?
The goonette jabbed Joe in the spine with her pistol and he couldn't help the hysterical titter that escaped him. He did, obviously. But Joe heard nothing. Not the grumble of cars or the shrill barking of poorly trained dogs. None of the usual hallmarks of a bad neighborhood. Joe padded on, not willing to risk that the next prod from the woman might be a bullet.
The door's still locked and there's no broken glass. She must've gotten some another way. A door I can use to get away…? 
Joe shook his head and felt like his brain was rattling around in his head, bouncing on tenuous tethers. Make a break for it? No, her bullets ran a lot faster than his old legs could.
Still… No, don't be an idiot. 
The hallway encircled the stairs and split off in two directions. Joe took the left-hand turn and found himself in an expansive kitchen. Just to feed one man? There was a refrigerator large enough to house a family of misplaced Inuit, an expansive island stove and cavernous oven. Amber plastic bottles on the counter were lined up neatly on the counter. Joe's captor grabbed one of them and turned the white label up to catch the wan moonlight coming in through a window.
"I suppose at your age, everything starts falling apart," she said, and dropped the bottle. It clattered over on the countertop and rolled in a tight circle. Joe picked it up and pushed his glasses high on his nose to read the label.
"Reminyl." He replaced the little cylinder of pills neatly beside the others. "Isn't that for Alzheimer's? Is that what I've got?"
She shrugged and prodded Joe with the gun again. "I don't care if it's for explosive diarrhea, you old bastard. Just get me the damned negatives."
Joe hurried from the kitchen. There were two doors, but only one with light coming through. A living room lay beyond, set up with a blocky U-shape of overstuffed couches and an elegant coffee table nestled into the middle, piled high and precariously with magazines and newspapers. It didn't seem at all a likely place to find the negatives, but if he didn't want to get shot tonight, Joe supposed he had better start the search somewhere.
Joints creaking, he sat on the edge of the couch and riffled through the top layers of the pile. He picked up a copy of the Baltimore Times.

Mayor Carson unveils plans for new library

Carson? No wonder he knew the name! Of course, Andrew Carson was serving his second term as Baltimore's mayor. He was the youngest in a century and well-loved by his constituency for his dedication to public works and wholesome family values, whatever those were.
The picture under the headline showed Carson standing over a model of the new building, smiling and pointing at some unimportant detail. There was a pretty – if rather stiff-looking – middle-aged woman on his arm. Carson's wife, Joe knew, a locally famous heiress and religious champion.
I don't even recognize my own house, but I know who the mayor is married to? What's going on? The answer is right in front of me, but I just can't see it! 
The woman standing over his shoulder grunted. "Nothing here. Move along."
She sounded for all the world like those cops who ushered the curious away from gruesome crime scenes while assuring them that nothing had happened. Joe put the newspaper down and followed the waving of her gun.
Out the door, down a short hallway and he was in a library. At least, that was the only thing Joe could think of to call it. The room was no less extravagant than the one he had just left, but slightly smaller and lined in bookshelves. But none of the contents seemed to display a single title.
Joe crossed to the nearest bookshelf, a towering thing that stretched all the way up to the high ceiling and had a wheeled ladder on a track standing in front of it. He squinted through his glasses, but his first glance had been quite correct. None of the books were marked.
What the hell…?
He had all but forgotten about the gun-wielding woman watching his every movement with sharp, suspicious eyes. There was a mystery in this house, in himself. He plucked a few books off of their shelves and carried them to a monolithic armchair in front of the cold fireplace. He twisted the knob of a nearby lamp and opened the topmost book.
Photographs.
It was a photo album. They were all photo albums. There were pictures of men and woman, many wearing sharp, smart suits. In parks, in kitchens, in hotel rooms and offices. Wait, there were more than photographs… Joe turned a page and found a shredded memo painstakingly taped back together and pasted into the book.
Joe slapped the album closed, pushed his glasses up again, and yanked open the next one. More photos and a bill from a massage parlor, brown with some sort of stain. He shoved it out of his lap and stared at the next: an inspector's report spotted with rust-colored flecks of dried blood; an empty plastic bag labeled biohazard in big, stark letters; a series of photographs depicting a half-dressed girl hanging on a young man's arm. Embracing him.
Kissing him.
Joe stopped. He recognized the man in the pictures. Andrew Carson! The raven-haired little minx with a wicked grin and her hand thrust into his back pocket was not the mayor's wife…
"Who took these?" Joe asked in a faltering voice.
"Who do you think, grandpa?" she said in quiet disgust. "Fifty grand a month for a couple of bad snapshots? Is it worth it?"
"Did I do this to Mayor Carson?"
The woman yanked the album out of his spotty, shaking hands and tucked it under her free arm. "And a hell of a lot of other people, it looks like," she hissed, gesturing at the bookshelves.
There had to be hundreds, perhaps thousands, of albums. A lifetime of secrets – of blackmail – that Joe could no longer remember. But this library was just a showcase. He was forgetting something, something right before his eyes.
Safe… 
"The negatives aren't here," he said. "I must keep them somewhere safe."
Unasked, he was on his feet again hurrying purposefully through a narrower hallway. Golden light spilling from around the corner. Joe chased it and stumbled into the office. It had none of the majestic trappings of the rest of the house. It was a small room with a battered desk crouching in the middle, under a lamp with a tacky, dented tin shade painted a hideous pea-soup-gone-bad shade of green. The ugly lamp glowed and filled the office with a warm light like airborne honey.
The door to a combination safe, thick and black and ominous, dominated the wall next to the desk. Joe stood before the safe. He straightened his glasses and stared at the worn, numbered knob in the center. All he had to do was get it open and hand over Carson's negatives. Then he could go back to forgetting all of this.
"Well? Open it up, old man!" she snapped.
Joe was sweating and his glasses slipping down his nose again. What was the combination? Joe pushed his glasses back into place. There was something written on the safe, scratched into the dark-finished steel in his own jagged handwriting:

Right before your eyes

Joe let out a wheezing groan of frustration. What was right in front of him? The safe? What else could it mean?
"Open it!" the woman yelled at him. "Get it open now!"
Joe didn't answer. All he could do was stare at the safe, the hideous altar to a forgotten career of blackmail and extortion.
"Open it!"
"I can't," he panted. "I don't know the combination!"
"If you can't get that beast open and give me the negatives, I'll have to shut you up with a bullet." She held the gun to his chest like a challenge.
Right before your eyes… Joe closed his eyes.
"I can't. Scream and threaten all you want, but I can't get the safe open," Joe sighed.
Something that may have been regret flickered like a wind-blown candle in the woman's eyes. She pulled the trigger. There was a clap of empty thunder and the bullet tore through Joe's guts, spraying sticky red blood across the safe. He staggered, sagged and fell to the hard floor. She turned on her heels and stalked out of the office.
Joe stared up at the safe, at all the secrets forever out of his reach. His blood pooled around him in a spreading red halo and his vision started going blurry. He could not focus on the safe anymore, only the wide horn rims of his glasses.
There was something written there, right before his eyes: R19 L28 R14. A combination.

Shot

Her clients knew her only as Miss Price.
Miss Price crouched in the bushes, dressed down to match the dark green shadows. She flicked the latches on the rifle case and pulled it open on silent, well-oiled hinges. The long gun lazed in its gray foam like a sunning snake.
The target's dossier was open at her elbow. Matt Harwood, age 7. Miss Price stared out through the overlapping leaves. The little boy chased a pair of giggling girls in crooked circle. Matt's blond curls were disheveled and his cheeks red with exertion.
Cute kid.
Miss Price took her rifle from the case and flicked down the slim titanium bipod. It was going to be a close hit; no need for the scope. The deed would be done and over in less than a minute.
She looked at the folder again. Under the name and photo was a list of names and dates. Miss Price ran her finger down the page and then pulled the matching box of ammunition from her case: tetanus booster.
Miss Price loaded the dart into her rifle, and then slid the chamber closed with a click. The nurse looked down the barrel, centered on the little boy, and fired.

The Bone Lantern

"Grandfather, the Furumori legion is in Aisoto Pass. They are only two days away now. We must light the Bone Lantern and summon the phoenix-knights!"
Miushii held his breath. The scents of sandalwood and pine floated on the air, otherworldly and ghostly. The smell made him think of age and power, things too far in the future for his comfort. Miushii's short life had been lived in the scents of steel, oil and sweat. A warrior's smell.
But here, in the ancient house of the eldest, the oldest candles burned. Even the flames danced slowly, stately on their slender wicks, tiny but dangerous golden dancers. The candles – so many that his fussy mother worried often and loudly that they would burn the house down – glowed in a wide half-circle around the carved altar in the back of the house. The altar that Miushii did not look directly at.
His heart raced dared to lift his forehead from the threadbare carpet where he knelt in reverent prostration. It was woven of the eldest, mustiest silk threads. The vibrant colors were so dulled by the turning of years that the original pattern was long lost. Now it was a muted script of formality. The coming war called for haste, not formality.
An old man stared down at Miushii from his splintery chair. The lines of his face were deep and dark in the candle, cut by glaciers at the dawn of time. Even his long kimono was colorless as dust, lackluster grey belted by a long sash of flat black. Only his obsidian eyes hinted at any lingering vestiges of life. Miushii's face when hot when those hard eyes met his. He bowed his head to the floor once more.
"Grandson, you have asked this before," he said, a voice soft as the tread of mice. "And again I tell you that I will not light the Bone Lantern."
Miushii's head remained bowed, but his voice rose. "The Storm Lord has sent his legion against us, Grandfather! A hundred dragon-knights gather even now in Aisoto Pass. They will crush us in a single night. We must light it!"
The elder's robes rustled like dead leaves, his ancient joints creaking in weathered harmony as he raised one spotted hand. "No," he repeated. "The Storm Legion can only kill us, Miushii. There are far, far worse things than death."
Miushii opened his mouth to protest, though he did not raise his eyes to the dreadful old man. But the old man spoke again, silencing his grandson.
"I will not light the Bone Lantern. Go now and forget this madness," he said.
Red-faced with rage and shame, Miushii stood. He kept his head down and bowed. As he backed towards the door, the elder began to snore. How could the old man sleep? There was blood on the wind and the sunrise would bring slaughter.
Miushii slid the paper door closed and left his grandfather's house. He sat on the porch and tied his sandals back on. Even through his thick wool socks, the night was wet and bitingly cold. Miushii knotted the laces around his ankles and stepped out into the rain. The sandals' stilts kept his feet out of the mud, but only barely.
 The rain was invisible in the black of night, the clouds that it fell from shrouding any sign of the moons or stars. Then what were those points of light…? Miushii blinked the rain from his eyes. He was high on the hill, overlooking the village in the grass basin below. Every lantern and fire tonight burned protectively indoors, safe from the downpour.
Those lights were not the village, Miushii realized. The far side of the valley was covered in winking, dancing light. It was as though every hidden star had crashed down to earth. Torches.
Miushii swore. The Storm Legion had left the pass! They would be on the village within the hour. Miushii's hand went for his sword and he swore again. It was back in his house, with his wife and daughters. He was useless to them! By the time he could run back down the long path, the Storm Legion would be painted in the blood of his family and his neighbors. What good would a sword do him then?
Miushii took a deep breath and turned back to his grandfather's house, striding purposefully through the sticky mud. He would not stand by and watch his people die. One man's fear would not damn them while Miushii still lived!
Thunder crashed, echoing Miushii as he smashed aside the fragile rice-paper door with a gauntleted fist. Weapons were forbidden in the sacred house, but armor was not. Behind him, another din rose; the screams and cries of the village below as they saw their death crawling down the valley walls towards them.
The elder stirred and blinked at the noise. He sat up in his warped chair, black eyes taking in the broken door, dripping grandson and distant shrieks.
"Pray with me," he said. The old man's sad, soft voice was barely audible through the crashing storm. But Miushii was striding closer, through the candlelight far faster and closer than tradition allowed.
"I've no need to pray. I can save them," he said.
The young warrior smashed his fist into his grandfather's temple. The old man sagged soundlessly. He still breathed, but shallowly. Miushii ran to the altar. In the center, flanked by useless, dusty relics, was the Bone Lantern. The breastbones of five men, all carved to filigreed translucency and stitched together with red sinew set into a circular base of smooth black stone.
The candles all around him wavered in the wind blowing through the open door, flickering out one by one. Miushii snatched the last just as it guttered, shielding it with his hand. When the flame strengthened, he dipped the candle to the open top of the Bone Lantern. There was a quiet moan. Miushii froze.
"Do not do this," his grandfather begged. He held a robed sleeve against the blood welling up from the side of his head and which streaking his hair with darkness.
"We to drive the Storm Legion back! The Bone Lantern will call the phoenix-knights to fight for us."
"They will defeat our enemies," his grandfather agreed quietly. "But they will not save you, Miushii. The price is far too high. Stop now and accept the peace of death."
Miushii thought of his wife and children, still and dead; of the houses of his friends, forever silent and cold. He raised his hand again. "No! Anything is better than death!"
The old man wailed like a list ghost as Miushii lit the Bone Lantern. The flame instantly ignited the pool of oil inside. A slender pillar of green flame shot from the mouth of the lamp, searing Miushii's hand. He leapt back, dropping the candle, and the young warrior cradled his hand against his chest. He waited for the agony, but it never came.
Miushii looked down at his fingers, expecting to see blistered skin and blackened flesh. His hand only looked perfectly marble white… But he felt nothing. The meat at the end of his wrist felt chill and dead to the touch. Miushii dropped his own hand in horror, but it did not fall useless to his side. Instead, it snaked of its own volition and seized a curved ritual dagger from the altar.
"Grandfather!" Miushii shouted. The deadly numbness crept up his arm to his shoulder, spreading across his chest like frost.
The green fire of the Bone Lantern was splitting like some kind of mad tree. The bilious flames closed in on Miushii's grandfather, who beheld it in a weary sort of horror. He shook his head.
"Miushii, it was not poetry that they are called phoenix-knights," he said. "From the ashes of this cold fire, we will rise. And we will fight. Nothing will stand against us."
The green fire of the Bone Lantern raced across the floor and through the open door. The jade flames did not falter or fail in the driving rain, but spread across the hill like a plague, racing down into the village. Miushii wept in horror as the cold crept into his heart and it went still inside him. His lungs were empty, the scream still frozen inside. Even as his body died, Miushii's spirit burned on, bright as the terrible green fire of the Bone Lantern and the dagger gripped helpless in his hand.
There are worse things than death.

The Old Ones

I lean back in one of the porch rocking chairs. The rattan creaks under my weight, negligible though it is now. I've lost ten pounds in the last six months. The orderlies and nurses aren't too happy about it, but they don't seem to know what to do. Hell, they never know what to do.
I can feel my mind, my memory slipping away every day, but I'm a lot better collected than the hacks running Sky Fields. Hacks is too generous a term. More like lunatics.
Coco sits in another rocking chair, arranging and rearranging the folds of her terrycloth robe. Her hair was raven-wing black when she arrived at Sky Field, but it's faded to the color of smoke now. Coco stares at her fuzzy-slippered feet as though they are the most fascinating things in the world. Hell, maybe they are. How would I know? My eyes are shot. I can't even see my own goddamn johnson anymore. For all I know, it's turned purple and winks at me when I take a leak.
A rising wind tugs the branches of the huge ash tree, making the green shadows ripple across the porch. The wind carried sounds from the distant highway and the chemical smoke smell of car exhaust. From the confines of Sky Fields, I can't see much of the world, but it's still out there.
One of the white-clothed nurses comes out onto the porch with a tray of sandwiches and little paper medicine cups. The sandwiches are one thing, but the admittedly blurry sight of the pills makes me tuck my hands into my robe pockets and avoid eye contact. I don't like the stuff they give us here. It doesn't make us better.
The nurse stops next to Coco and offers the old woman a faltering smile. "Good morning," she says. "How're you feeling today?"
Coco doesn't answer. She just rocks back and forth in her rattan chair and watches the leaves flicker in the sunlight. The nurse – I can't read her nametag, but I think it says Micay – sighs. She holds the plate of food and pills out to Coco, but the blank-eyed old woman does not move. The rocking chair creaks.
"Please. It's wild boar meat. You always loved that, even before…" The nurse nudges the little pill packet with one finger. "And cocaine. Your favorite, Cocomama."
Still, Coco doesn't move. She doesn't even look at the nurse, who sighs and puts the plate down on the little round table beside her. Micay – or whatever her name is – turns to me now. She's not my usual nurse. No, that's a big, bearded fellow named Lucius. But Lucius is on vacation. He's gone home to Italy for a few weeks. Micay offers me another plate, a flower-printed paper one with another sandwich on it. The meat inside is red. Too red. This whole place is crazy.
"Are you hungry, Jay Peter?" Micay asks.
That's my name, my whole name. For some reason, the staff of Sky Fields insists on using it. As though I'm so fucking old that I might have forgotten some of it. Well, I might be. If I have a middle name, I can't remember it anymore. Fine. Jay Peter it is.
"Depends," I say. "What's for lunch? Ham?"
"Not for you, Jay Peter." Something in my name is forced, painful. She hates saying it. "Beef in yours. Bloody steer."
"And the meds?"
"Amrit and an infusion of goat's milk."
See what I mean? I shook my head. "No, thanks. Just the shredded wheat for me."
I don't have a whole lot of teeth left. Even if raw cow sounded tasty – and it sure as hell did not – I would be gumming the stuff all damned day. They keep trying to feed me raw or burnt beef, honey and goat's milk. Totally batshit insane, I tell you.
"Please," she says in same imploring, sad voice she used on Coco. "You must eat, Jay Peter."
"I will," I answer stubbornly. "Shredded wheat and skim milk. Got to watch my waistline."
"We have Cheerios," Micay says reluctantly. "And whole milk. You've lost too much weight."
I wave my hand in a limp, shaky arc. "Fine."
Coco ignores me all through lunch. She has her long gray braid in her hand and tugs on the fragile strands. The hair breaks off and sifts slowly down to her lap, vanishing into the wrinkled peach terrycloth of her robe.
The wind shifts again. It's colder now and I shiver. When another orderly offers me a blanket, I accept. He folds it around me snuggly, secure as a mummy in its wrappings. The orderly offers to take me back inside, but I refuse. I want to enjoy the daylight.
Sky Fields was built far away from town – all the better for our grandkids to ignore us, I suppose – atop a hill covered in slightly weedy grass. There is a pond at the bottom of the long slope, the water just a shade less green than the grass. An old man and an ancient woman in over-starched pants sit at a picnic bench down at the shore, playing a glacially slow game of checkers. Black jumps red. Red staggers over black, black, black…
Katie plays the part of black. I've seen her clipboard, held it about three inches from my face to read it. Her name is spelled C-A-T-E, but she likes to be called Katie. She's got a moon tattoo on her shoulder, faded as an old illumination, and the nurses in white bring black dogs from the town shelter for Katie to play with. But she always squeezes her eyes shut and worries that they will bite.
The man playing red is Mister Bird. I don't know his first name. Bird is the newest resident of Sky Fields. He was a tall man once, but age has cut a full foot from him height. Bird must be from some Indian tribe. Native American. Whatever. I'm too fucking old to know about being politically correct. Bird's nose is more like a beak and his skin is about the color of a brand new penny.
You wouldn't guess it to watch him drooling and clobbering Katie at checkers but when he first got here, Bird was trouble. You would think that the nurses or orderlies would try to calm the man down, but they never did. They just let him stagger around, claiming that his name was not Mister Bird, but Thunderbird.
They even called him Thunderbird when they brought him corn for breakfast. Maize, as they called it. Because everything here has other names. What I called completely fucking nuts trying to climb trees, they called Thunderbird trying to fly again.
But eventually, Bird stopped trying to fly. Now he just beats us all at checkers; except for the big Scandinavian geezer who calls himself Oakie. I don't know why – he's got a thick, burry accent that sure as hell isn't from Oklahoma. But who knows anything about him? Oakie is slippery as a buttered snake.
Clouds creep across the sky, fluffy and white at first, but then thickening and turning dark. Though sunset is still hours away, the nurses come out early to collect their charges. Bird and Katie totter back up the hill, leaning on thick-armed orderlies.
Everyone working in Sky Fields wears white, like brides or old-fashioned priests. Even Micay, who hurries back out to the porch. She collects Coco's untouched food and cocaine pills, then lifts the thin old woman into a wheelchair. When Micay had wheeled Coco safely inside, she returns for me.
"You should go inside, Jay Peter," she tells me.
When the nurse reaches for me, I swat her hands away. "I can walk, damn it all!" I growl pretty convincingly. "I'm not that decrepit yet. If you're feeling grabby, little lady, it better be for the right reason."
Micay's dark eyes go wide and a blush suffuses her cheeks. It suits her, I think. I contemplate pinching her rear. Couldn't hurt. All of that sexual harassment shit is for the kids to worry about. No one holds a little harmless flirting against an old coot like me.
But before I can squint up and zero in on my target, Micay is on her knees beside the rocking chair. Her expression is… reverent. I can think of no other word for the rapt, adoring look in her eyes.
"You seem more yourself than you have for… for a long time," Micay gasps. "Did you summon this storm?"
The nurse gestures to the roiling, darkening clouds. I stare at her. "What? You're all nuts, I tell you. Fucking nuts! Of course I didn't bring the storm."
"But you can call the lightening, can't you?" Micay's voice isn't quiet or conspiratorial. It is loud and several faces appear at the windows, watching the exchange. "It should be easy in this weather."
"What the hell are you on about?" I ask.
I'm curious, in spite of myself. Why is everyone in Sky Fields so strange? Why haven't I ever asked? No, I have asked. I just don't remember the answer. I really am losing my marbles.
"You command the skies and the lightning, Jupiter," Micay tells me like she actually believes this crazy shit.
She's gotten my name wrong. Jay Peter. Jupiter. Easy mistake for a crazy lady.
"There aren't many of us left who believe, Jupiter," she says. "Without belief, the gods forget who they are. If we don't believe, how can the gods? If they don't prey to you, the gods doubt."
It makes a sort of sense… if you're as crazy as the kids who run this place. I raise my eyes to the sky, to the surging masses of blue-black clouds. Jupiter? A god? The thunder god? I can see the clouds now, no longer blurred by distance and cataracts. I behold them in their particulate glory; millions of silver ice crystals wheeling through the skies in a dance too complex for mortal mind to comprehend. I understand.
I lift my hand… but it is so old. I can make out the shape of the bones through my thin skin. Knobby knuckles and wiry, white hair; the hand of an old man who wishes he is a god. And old human man.
"My hip hurts," I say. "I want to go back inside."
Micay sighs and rises. "I'll go get a wheelchair, Jay."

The Test

"Dan! It's me. Let's hit Tease tonight! Dulca says that the new 'Nocchios are amazing. Just like the real thing."
"Sorry, Jim," I said. "I just can't come out tonight."
Not that it didn't sound tempting. I held the phone wedged between my shoulder and ear, not lifting my eyes from the highlighted textbook pages. I had been staring so long at the charts and diagrams that they blurred together into a fuzzy sea of pink, peach and red.
"Come on," Jim said again. "You study all the time! When's the last time you came out?"
"This isn't something I can skip out on," I answered. "And not just because of the test. You know how important dedication is in this."
"Like hell I do." Jim laughed, but the sound was strained and bitter as the bruised skin on a bad piece of fruit. "I'll never take that test."
Jim was a good guy. He knew how to tell a joke and how to smooth over all those awkward little silences. Jim's element was bars and clubs, places with low lights and expectations. He just didn't understand something as important and adult as this.
I squinted at the textbook. Had I read this page already? I couldn't remember. "I don't expect you to get it, Jim," I said. Mumbled, probably. I was on my second pot of coffee. "Maybe you'll grow up some day."
"Just one drink," Jim insisted. "For old time's sake?"
"No," I told him firmly. I had been practicing that tone for weeks now, according to the instruction in the manual. Commanding and stern; a tone that brooked no argument. Would it work?
"Fine, man," Jim said sullenly. "I'll take a rain check, then. We'll go out some other night."
"Not for a long time, Jim. Years, at least," I answered. I rubbed my eyes. "It's going to be more like this after the test. A lot more. This isn't something just anyone can do. This is important."
There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line. "Why are you doing this, Dan? What do you really expect to get out of it?"
"If you have to ask, then you'll never understand. I'll talk to you later, Jim."
"Sure, Dan. Stay sane. You know, as much as you can."
"Thanks. Bye."
I hung up the phone and forced my eyes to focus on the page in front of me. The test was just two weeks away, after all, and you only got one chance. If I dropped the ball on the real thing, after all, lives were at stake. I had to be ready.
Preparing for Parenting, chapter 5: Passing Your Written Test. Only chapter five? There were thirty-seven in this book alone and I had six others to read.
I got myself another cup of coffee and settled down on the couch. It was going to be a long night. But then, if I passed the test, there would be many more long nights ahead. I smiled and settled in.

Vicaria

Fallen warrior, can you hear me? Listen well, for I have only a moment. 
We are not as old as time. I did not watch your world spin into being from the primal dust of creation. Some of the others will tell you such stories, but they are lies. We were born in the early days of your kind, when discovered the honor inside yourself and first created justice. We have been known by a thousand names by a thousand peoples; Athena to the Greeks, Tyr to the Germanic tribes, Baba Yaga in the cold north, Forseti to the Norse and Anbay before the worship of the One God in the sandy east.
We call ourselves the Vicaria and we watch over you. 
The Vicaria are children of your enlightenment, spirits of honorable purpose. When the warrior falls with their purpose unfulfilled, we are there to finish what they could not. I have lifted the shield of the fallen knight to defend his liege-lord, raised the sword of the samurai to defend your ancient homeland and pulled the soldier's gun from the mud to fight back the invasion that would take the world. 
But there are rules – strict rules – that the Vicaria must follow. We must not reveal ourselves to the living, for we and all Ephemera are offspring of humanity's dreams. If you knew us for fact, we would cease to be dreams and fade like mist at dawn.
We may speak only with your final breath. When we have said your final words, we are sent from your world and return to our own. Last, we serve but one purpose: we are your dying wish and must carry out your honorable work. Never our own. For a Vicaria to pursue her own agenda would be in defiance of her very nature and unmake her. 
Rest now, fallen warrior. I will take up your heavy burden and carry it just a little further. Give to me your final breath and with it, I will see your will done. 
________

The light faded and she was surrounded by sooty darkness. Where were her weapons? She stepped back, balancing lightly on the balls of her feet, ready to melt away from the inevitable hail of bullets and raised her bare arms to fend off the coming blows. How many were they? She grinned in anticipation of the coming battle. Numbers meant nothing to a Vicaria. Entire armies had fallen before her fury.
Why did they wait? Maybe they were afraid. Wise.
She waited, but all remained still. Scowling, the Vicaria glanced down at the fallen warrior whose final wish had summoned her. It was a thin woman, dressed not in a knight's armor or a soldier's uniform, but dirty jeans and a stained flannel shirt. No, the woman was more than simply slender. Her dark skin was pulled tight over the sharp angles of bones that were never meant to be seen so nakedly.
The woman huddled between two charred trashcans, both filled with the sifting, stinking ash of the fires long since gone dark and cold. Surely this was not the great warrior whose dying call had summoned a Vicaria? She was only a dead homeless woman, finally succumbed to hunger and cold.
The confused Vicaria dropped her hands to her sides and took in her surroundings. She stood not in the midst of a battlefield, but a narrow alleyway that stank of refuse and urine. Abandoned buildings with boarded windows like closed eyes stood to either side, barely silhouetted against a sullen, starless night sky. Red Robin Press, proclaimed one in flaking paint. Red Herring Press was been scrawled mockingly underneath in hurried letters. The alley was choked with overflowing dumpsters and boxes of moldering newspapers and tabloids.
She knelt beside the dead woman, who had pulled a handful of more or less intact pages into a sort of nest and was curled tightly around the pile. But not in them, the Vicaria noted. She rolled the body awkwardly onto its back. The vagrant was already immovably stiff. Surely she carried some mark of battle, some sign of the heroic valor that would have sung out for a Vicaria in her final moments…? But turning out her pockets only produced a pair of expired bus passes and a torn receipt from a drugstore. The spirit bit her lip in frustration. There was a wet sniffling from the darkness.
"She's got nothing. Can't you leave her alone?"
A small shape detached itself from the deep shadows, skirting the wall of the alley cautiously and keeping its distance from the Vicaria. It was a little boy, no more than twelve years old. He was better fed than that lifeless woman, but not by much. Skeletal arms and legs, also only a shade lighter than the murky night, stuck out from a ratty Lakers jersey and oversized shorts. Painful-looking dark sores spotted his skin and shined wetly in the wan light that leaked in from the street outside. The tight black curls of his hair were surprisingly well-ordered, painstaking combed and showed only recent signs of being disheveled.
She stared at the child. Who was he? But she had only a single breath with which to speak and had no wish to waste it on this whelp. There was battle to be waged somewhere, even if she did not yet see it. When the Vicaria made no sound or movement, the boy crept closer.
"You sure are weird. You escaped from a loony bin, lady?" he asked with a child's unapologetic curiosity. "Why are you naked?"
Naked? The Vicaria furrowed her brow and peered down at her body, all lean muscle and skin pale as moonlight; centuries of Valkyrie dreams made flesh. She wore nothing into battle but her long golden hair and the blood of those who fell before her.
Having decided that the newcomer was not dangerous – and he was wrong – the boy turned his back to her and crawled into the nest of rumpled newsprint and cold corpse-flesh. He pulled his skinned knees up to his chest and touched his little hand to the still woman's face.
"My mom isn't going to wake up," he said. The child sniffed again and wiped his nose and eyes on his sleeve. "The cops will find her tomorrow, I guess. Why don't you talk, lady? Are you dumb or something?"
She shook her head. The boy shrugged and turned back to his mother. He kissed her sunken cheek and stood, ineffectually wrapping his stick-like arms around himself against the cold.
Surely in the street outside, the Vicaria would find some thunderous firefight worthy of her calling… But she could only make out the pounding thrum from the stereo of a passing car and a distant wail, like the keening of a dying dove. The boy, too, heard the sound. His eyes darted to the mouth of the alley, wide and wary.
"We should get out of here. We don't want to be here when the cops find my mom," he advised in a calm voice that no child should have commanded. The boy took a few steps towards the street beyond, looking back over his shoulder to the strange woman and gesturing urgently. "Mom doesn't need her clothes anymore, so I guess you can have them."
The Vicaria blinked. She had seen few children in her battlefield visitations and the Ephemera did not mate in the same way humans did, nor birth offspring. But she knew at least a little of human young, enough to be startled by the boys unshed tears and placid acceptance of death. He must have lived in this kind of destitution his whole life, always a cold night or missed meal from death.
It took some wrestling to remove anything from the rigid body. The boy fidgeted with every passing second. The Vicaria pulled on the dirty pants and shirt. They were short in the limbs and the shoes were far too small to fit, but at least she was clothed. The acrid scents of sweat and fear in the cloth were not so different than the smells she was accustomed to, the Vicaria decided.
What was she supposed to do? Where was her glorious war? Perhaps she was here to carry out some more subtle plan on behalf of the fallen woman.
"Come on!" the boy urged. "You're lost, right? You can come with me as far as Mason. I'm Mark, by the way. Do you have a name, crazy lady?"
A hundred images flashed through her mind, ideas and memories, but none of them were names. The Vicaria shrugged. Even if she had the breath to spare, what was there to say? She was an idea, an immortal dream.
"No? I can't just call you lady," Mark said. His small fists were thrust deep into his pockets as he took in the strange, Amazonian woman in his mother's clothes. "How about Erin? That was my sister's name."
The Vicaria nodded. What did it matter what one little human called her? She would be gone by the rising of the sun, another noble task done. Any name he gave her would be cast away as easily her clothes.
The lonely cry of the siren was closer now. Mark grabbed Erin's hand, long-fingered and calloused by uncounted millennia of warfare. She gave the child a questioning look. She had been called forth by police officers before. Once to chase and bring to bloody justice a murderer, the second to take up an officer's sniper rifle and kill a maddened teacher. A single shot and she had freed a classroom full of frightened children. What did this boy fear? Were the police not the knights of the new age? Erin longed for the simplicity of the battlefield!
Mark led Erin from the alley and past the empty shell of Red Robin Press. Was it empty? Something about the place make the Vicaria's nerves thrum like plucked strings. There was something in there.
 The mismatched pair hurried past the dirt-streaked windows of a shoe store as flashes of blue and red eclipsed the dingy yellow streetlamps. With a last off-key whine, the sirens fell silent behind them. Mark's hand tightened around hers fearfully.
"Don't look back," he whispered urgently, but Erin's curiosity was too strong. Mark's mother had died of exposure… Why would the police respond so quickly, lights flashing and sirens blaring? How could they know?
The shield on the door of the car bore a blocky number 28. A pair of men in uniform, guns and badges glittering in the alternating flashes of bright-colored light, climbed out of the squad car. Both wore dark glasses despite the starless night. The cops pulled clubs and flashlights from their belts and shouldered open the doors of Red Robin Press. They vanished inside and Erin could just make out the creak of their shoes on old floorboards. Mark tugged insistently at her hand.
"Come on, Erin!" His voice was tight and anxious.
Erin did not want to leave, but Mark's obvious fear made the Vicaria turn her away and follow. They crossed the dark, empty street and made their way past rows apartments with occasionally lit windows like yellowed teeth and a post office with a cracked facade covered in a decade of graffiti. They turned a corner, passing under a guttering lamp and out of sight of the alley. The boy walked close to Erin's side, shivering with cold. Or was it fear? Mark quietly accepted his mother's death, but the appearance of the two cops had unexpectedly shaken the child.
A loud bang echoed from the direction they had come, startling Mark and making the boy jump. Erin placed a firm hand on the boy's shoulder and held him near. But the noise was only the angry slamming of the police car's door, followed by the thunderous roar of the engine and squeal of tires. Mark turned this way and that, looking frantically for a place to hide, but the cacophony faded quickly into the distance. He let out a shuddering breath and sat heavily on the curb. Erin stood over him, looking down at the child and waiting with arms crossed over her chest.
"They must have found my mom," he said at last, resting his sharp chin in one hand and scratching absently at the sores on he legs with the other. "They're mad because they don't want anyone looking too close at that Red Robin place."
Erin snapped her fingers impatiently and gestured to the street. A bumperless yellow taxicab rolled by, unhurried but not bothering to slow as it passed by the obviously penniless woman and child. Mark coughed as he took a shallow breath of the sooty exhaust. His lungs were weak, she thought. The city air was foul, but not enough to make him wheeze so. Erin thumped Mark on the back and the single blow almost sent the boy sprawling in the street.
"Stop that, Erin," Mark panted her, then coughed again and spat something thick and dark into the littered gutter.
Erin pointed up and down the street again. She looked at Mark.
"How the hell should I know? I can't go to any of the shelters. The cops will be watching them."
The cops were corrupt, somehow, the Vicaria finally understood. They would avoid a thorough investigation of the death beside Red Robin Press. Mark was afraid of what that meant for him, a homeless child in the face of compromised cops. Erin sat down beside Mark, ignoring the stinking trash around her bare feet.
She thought. The officers' frantic exit seemed to indicate that they were worried. If they had complete control over the rest of the force – or worked for someone who did – then it would have been simple enough to cover up the whole thing. But their fear meant there were still places and people not yet under their power. The bright lights and threat of force were probably enough to keep most in line.
The Vicaria did not fear death. After all, she was a dream, immortal and unkillable. The hail of bullets or tempest of blades meant nothing to her. Mark, however, was not so blessed. He was just a human. He was fragile… and sick.
The child coughed again. Before she could move against the corrupt police, she had to get the boy to safety. Someplace warm and beyond their control. Only then could she get on with more glorious duties. The Vicaria caught Mark by the upper arm and hauled him to his feet.
"Ow!" The boy yelped and tried to pull away. He may as well have been trying to topple a mountain. "What're you doing?"
The Vicaria tapped impatiently at an imaginary watch on her wrist and gestured down the street. Mark brushed his shorts clean of perhaps half the dirt clinging to them. He nodded.
"Right, right. I said we'd go up to Mason Street. You're in a hurry, aren't you?"
Erin, of course, said nothing.
Mason Street was not that far away, not in Vicarian estimation, but Erin had to stop frequently to pound Mark on the back as another fit of coughing wracked him. Three hours later, it was nearing dawn. There was no sign of the police.
Erin's feet were dirty from walking so long unshod, but her otherworldly flesh was unbruised and uncut by the broken glass. Mark had fallen long since silent, his dark little head bowed and eyes focused on the cracked sidewalk as he struggled to keep up with the Vicaria's long strides without tripping on the jagged concrete. More watchful than the boy, Erin had seen several shadowed, fearful faces in the dark windows, but no one had emerged to investigate. Erin passed the time imagining clever ways to disembowel the fallen cops when she met them again.
"Mason Street… a few blocks down. Should be… home free after that," Mark wheezed.
Erin nodded absently. Almost too late, she heard the muted thuds of shoes behind them. She whirled, roughly pushing Mark behind her. A gang of young men, most as dark complexioned as her ward but far healthier, were closing quickly. Erin counted seven of them, including a muscular girl with spiky violet hair and a boy with almond eyes who could not have been much older than Mark.
Every one of them wore thick hooded sweatshirts and an orange bandanna folded into a band around their foreheads. They carried no visible weapons, but most had their hands thrust deep in their pockets and the tallest man held an empty beer bottle with deceptive negligence. Should he need it, the bottle would make a deadly and easily disposable weapon. The gang spread out in a loose half circle around Erin.
"Hey, Mark," one of them called, a broad-shouldered fellow built like a bull. "What're you doing out so late? You should come with us."
Peeking out from behind Erin, Mark hesitated before responding. "Thanks, Kato, but I'm good. Just going for a walk, you know? I'll head back home soon."
"You got nowhere to go back to now that your mom's dead," the one called Kato answered.
"How you know about that?" Mark asked suspiciously.
Kato was silent for a long, dangerous moment. "The blues want you gone, Mark. You lived new to Red Robin too long and without your mother, there's no one to keep you shut up."
"Real sorry about this, Mark," one of Kato's companions added quietly.
Erin could make out the bulk of a gun in the front pocket of Kato's sweatshirt and the squirming shadow of a finger being laced through the trigger. The others were reaching for more weapons secreted in their lose clothes. The Vicaria grinned as she leapt at Kato, shoving Mark to the ground and leaving him behind. Battle at last!
Kato was far too slow in pulling his gun, still untangling it from the hem of his sweatshirt when the Vicaria's bare foot cracked against his jaw and sent him sprawling. Erin's heel came down on Kato's throat a second and final time. He never even managed to fire his gun.
The others let out a collective growl of shocked outrage and tore guns from their hiding places. Erin was still grinning as she waded into their midst. For millennia, she lived for such moments of blazing glory!
When it was over, her enemies lay unmoving on the dirty pavement. One of them leaned against an overturned trashcan. He cradled a broken arm against his stomach and stared in wordless terror at the Vicaria. His gun was on the ground at her feet. She kicked the weapon towards him. It clattered to a halt against the toe of his shoes. The terrified gangster whimpered and cringed away from his own gun as though it might bite him. Erin took a step towards him, her fingers curled into claws and dripping blood onto the sidewalk.
There was no glory in defeating an unarmed, cowering enemy. The Vicaria kicked the man in the ribs and sent him sprawling. She shoved the ball of her foot down against his sensitive flesh of his inner arm and pointed to the gun. Moaning in pain, he made a desperate grab for the weapon and Erin grinned. She stepped back. He brought up the gun, his injured hand trembling so hard that he nearly dropped it. Erin waited, basking in the musical roar of blood in her ears, the thundering drumbeat of her heartbeat and the rising gale of her own breath. The gun cracked and then Mark screamed.
"No!" Erin cried.
He had fired right past Erin and hit the little boy, perhaps a mistake of his faltering aim or else a final desperate move. A bounding step brought the Vicaria close and a blow with the blade of her hand sprawled the gangster twitching down into the gutter.
Erin ran to Mark's side as quickly as her long legs would carry her, but her body seemed strangely slow, heavy. There would be time enough for questions later. Mark did not cry. He just held his blood-slicked hand in front of his face. His dark eyes were wide and round with disbelief.
Erin pulled him into her arms. There was blood everywhere. The sticky red had never bothered her before, but now, it made the Vicaria's heart clench painfully in her chest. Would he die?
She ripped Mark's dark-stained jersey and probed gently at the wound. The bullet had caught Mark in the shoulder, less than a hand's span from the too-sharp line of his collarbone. Mark groaned in pain at her light touch and more blood poured from the wound. She could feel a hard, hot lump not just under the skin. The bullet was dangerously close to his lung. He was still breathing, but not for long.
Where was everyone? Every window was dark, veiled by drawn curtains and blind.
"I don't feel good," Mark said. His eyes were glassy, rolling behind fluttering eyelids for a terrible moment before finally focusing. "Erin, what happened?"
He put a trembling little hand to the Vicaria's chest and she was shocked to feel a hot surge of pain. Erin looked down in bright white shock at the bloody hole in her chest. How had this happened? She was Vicaria, immortal and unbleeding! But sure enough, blood oozed down her pale skin and mingled with Mark's.
Erin clapped one hand to her mouth. She had screamed out when Mark fell. Her final breath. But… but a Vicaria vanished from the mortal plane when she had no breath left. 
"I'm human," she said in a raw voice.
Not Vicaria. Vicaria did not put lust for battle and glory before her duties.
"It's okay, Erin," Mark whispered. "The hospital's just a block past Mason. We can go there."
His eyes were flickering white crescents as he fought to stay conscious. Mark pointed weakly down the dark street. Through the gloom, Erin could just make out the blushing glow of the coming dawn.
Erin's eyes stung. When she licked her lips, she tasted iron. Blood and tears sparkled in Mark's black hair under the streetlights. Mortality had not stopped Mark's mother from defending the boy to her last breath, from loving him so intently that her final fear for his life had called out to a Vicaria. This wasn't about those cops. Not revenge or even justice. It never was. This was about Mark, about a mother's love for her son.
She had to keep him safe. Erin brushed her trembling fingers across Mark's cheek. She held the boy close and struggled to her feet. There was no time for reflection or flagellation. Mark was dying. He pushed her away with quickly flagging strength, but Erin clung to him and ran.
Her legs were numb, heavy and clumsy. Erin's footsteps were red in the dim predawn light, slippery and treacherous, but she ran. Where was Mason Street? Erin's heart thudded painfully, this time in fear instead of excitement. It was growing hard to see. Erin squinted, but the world was turning gray and crumbling around the edges, as though everything was made of ash. A light flashed yellow over an intersection as Erin ran into it. Or was it red? But by the flashing light, she could just make out the sign hanging from the traffic light: Mason Street.
Erin stumbled over the curb. Carrying Mark's limp weight, she had no way to steady herself and fell to her knees. Her pants tore and her knees left smears of blood. Erin struggled to rise, but fell once again. Mark was so still. His dark skin was a frightening ashen color. She pulled herself to her feet and ran.
Where was the hospital? Erin sprinted across the intersection. There! In the dim pre-dawn light, she could just make out the stark rise of a tall white building. The side was painted with a great golden caduceus, the winged staff of healers, glowing in the rising morning light. Erin blinked tears from her eyes. She was so close…
Something shot down the road towards her, a beast of steel and flashing eyes or red and blue. Erin barely caught sight of the black shield and blue 28 on the door as she ran past. The police car screeched and wheeled in a tight circle through the intersection.
Erin ran. Behind her, doors thumped open and safeties clicked off guns. "Police! Stop right there!"
Erin ran. The hospital was only a half block away… less… It shone like a great blazing beacon that reduced the fire of the Gates of Glory to scattered embers.
"Stop now or we will shoot!"
The hospital was a scant hundred yards away. Erin could not hear her own heart beat, only the pounding of her feet as she ran. A woman, an angel all in white came through the sliding glass doors. The nurse was pulling keys from her purse and muttering to herself. She looked up, caught sight of Erin and her precious burden and then screamed for a doctor.
"Damn it, stop her!"
It was only three bullets that finally drove Erin to her knees. She cradled Mark against her chest as she fell. The squad car doors slammed again and tires squealed. The cops were getting away, but there were doctors and paramedics and nurses everywhere, demanding to know what happened. Two of them flew towards Erin on wings of white cotton, taking Mark from Erin's arms and lifting him to a gurney. An old man with a deeply lined face shined his penlight into Mark's eyes.
"It's good thing you got him here when you did," he told Erin gently. "We've got him now. We'll handle it. Just rest. Is there anything you'd like us to tell him?"
One of the paramedics eased Erin back. The blood pooling around her was hot, but her skin was cold as winter.
"Tell him… tell Mark that I love him."
They were his mother's final words – and Erin's – spoken with her last breath.
________

Vicaria, can you hear me? Listen well, for I have only a moment… 
There are no rules to human life. Countries and cities make laws, but in the end, a human is ruled only by her heart. It can be a heavy burden, often twisted and darkened by a life of sorrows, but for a moment of love, they accept this heavy toll.
There is more to existence than blood and glory, Vicaria. I had less than a day with Mark, but I burned brighter in those hours than the thousands of years that came before. I have wept my own tears for him and spoken with my own breath of my love. Do not pity me, for I lived well, even if only for one night.
Go now. There is no need for you here.

The Dead Beat:
The Restless and the Wicked

"I've got him heading up Fourth Avenue. Red convertible, top down."
"Don't they always? The dead want to feel alive."
"Do you think he can feel it at all? It's fucking cold out tonight."
"Come on, cut it out," said a third voice, crackling over the handheld radio. "Sam's on this channel. Show some respect for the dead."
Another voice answered. "It's fine. I'm not that sensitive, kids. But shut the hell up. We've got a job to do."
"Yes, sir," said the first voice. "Okay, he's just turned down Southerton."
"Good. Hit the lights and let's bring him in," Sam said. "You ready, Arph?"
"Yeah."
"Let's go."
________

Sergeant Gray was right. It was cold. Police Exorcist Arphallo Sirus flexed his fingers in his gloves. The black leather creaked quietly across his knuckles. His breath steamed and glowed ethereally in the city nightlight.
Arphallo's partner stood beside him, still as a statue. PE Sam Trent didn't shiver, didn't blink. He was in his early twenties, several years younger than Arphallo. In one respect, at least… There was no cloud of breath coming from Sam's lips and the swirling wind could not seem to stir his white-blond hair.
"Here he comes," he said. "Can you feel it, Arph?"
"Yeah," Arphallo answered.
He could feel it, like a raindrop trailing down his spine. The sensation was not necessarily unpleasant, but certainly unsettling. Arphallo flexed his fingers again, nervously twisting the silvery thread between them.
The rush and rustle of traffic suddenly rose to a shriek as a bright red convertible screamed around the corner, scattering honking, shouting motorists before it. Two black squad cars chased close behind. Tires and brakes screeched. Their flashing lights and howling sirens turned the cold city street into a mad nightclub scene.
"Now." Trent looked at him. "Now, Arph!"
Arphallo jerked his splayed fingers. The silver wire stretched between them into an elongated six-pointed star. Arphallo twisted the center of the star. Silver shined in the moonlight. The lights of the city dimmed and everything seemed to slow to an icy trickle. Arphallo could count his racing heartbeats.
One.
Two.
Three.
The bright red car fishtailed wildly and screeched to a stop. A young, dark-skinned man with wild hair jumped out of the driver's seat, holding his head and stumbling out of the street, towards the waiting police. Sam stepped in front of the staggering man and flashed his polished pentagram badge.
"Kincaid Perth, you are illegally skinriding," he announced. "You have violated the word of Anat-Sin and the laws before the Light. Abandon this body at once and return to the Dark."
"Fuck you, man!" the other man shouted. Kincaid shook his head, trying to clear away the shrill ringing that Arphallo knew was making his head throb. "I need this ride!"
"You want a body? Then you make the same deal as the rest of us," Sam said coldly.
Kincaid turned to bolt the other direction, but the police cars had pulled around and blocked off his escape. Four officers crouched behind the black and white doors. The cops' hands hovering over their guns, every one packed with silver and bone. Those weapons were a last resort only. They had to wait for Arphallo's signal before they could risk the life of the human host.
But Kincaid could feel the silver. He spat another obscenity and tried to shove past Sam. Kincaid's body was stronger and much larger than either of the exorcists. Sam grabbed him by the shoulder and jammed a knee into the back of the man's thigh.
"Salt him!" he shouted.
Arphallo dropped the silver wire and reached into his long black coat for the salt. It was fine and white as the best cocaine. And twice as expensive, shipped in from the Red Sea and ground at noon in a mortar bowl of willow heartwood. The sealed plastic cylinder almost slipped through Arphallo's gloved fingers, but he tightened his grip and slammed the salt canister up into a rubber-gripped nebulizer.
Kincaid pitched forward, off-balance, but he pulled Sam down with him. The two dead men struggled on the asphalt. Punches flew and the pair rolled across the ground. Sam grabbed and Kincaid twisted, driving his knee into the cop's chest.
"Get out of the way, Sam!" Arphallo warned.
Sam was still tangled with Kincaid and grunting with the effort of maintaining his hold on the larger man. "Just do it, Arph! Salt him!"
"Sam—"
"Do it, Arph!"
Arphallo lunged in and yanked a handful of Kincaid's thick hair. Kincaid pulled away with a violent jerk. Sam wedged his forearm under the man's chin and forced his head back. Arphallo pulled on the nebulizer's trigger and sprayed the fine white salt full in Kincaid's face. It stood out starkly against the body's dark skin. Kincaid stopped struggling and splayed spread-eagle on the ground as though staked out.
Most of the salt had hit its intended target, but some had sifted through the air like fine snow. Sam's eyes rolled wildly and he wrenched to one side. His whole body stiffened, but Arphallo had no time to worry about him right now. The exorcist pressed the palm of his glove – studded and stitched with silver runes – against Kincaid's brow.
"Maliki n'nas," Arphallo invoked.
Kincaid's spine arched and he let out an ethereal scream, eerie and inhuman, like wind howling through skeletal trees. Then the body went limp and flopped to the asphalt. A colorless shadow rose up from the deserted puppet. It loomed over Arphallo, eclipsing stars and city lights. And then it was gone, vanished into the Dark.
Arphallo whistled and gestured to the other cops. They rushed forward, speaking quickly into boxy black radios. They would take care of the man who had been Kincaid Perth's unwilling puppet. Arphallo rushed to his partner's side.
"Sam? Hey, Sam, are you okay?"
The other man's brown eyes were unfocused, searching wildly. He stared at Arphallo. His voice was small and frightened. "Exorcist Sirus, I… was…"
Arphallo leaned close, trying to catch the words, but they were lost in the sounds of the city. The other man broke off, gasping. His eyes rolled back and then snapped shut. When they opened again, Sam stared quite calmly up at Arphallo.
"Did you get that little prick, Arph?" Sam asked.
"Yeah, Sam. I got him."
"What about the host? Is the guy injured?"
Arphallo shrugged. He didn't know.
Sam stood, a little wobbly at first, but quickly regained his balance. He thumped the heel of his hand against his chest. "Fit and young, just the way I like them," Sam said. He turned to talk to the other officers. "Hey, Sergeant Gray, how's the puppet?"
"Minor injuries, but he's coming around. We'll get his statement at the hospital."
Sam jogged over to the reeling man on the ground as the cops helping him to his feet. Arphallo watched his partner go. Sam was a good cop, one of the best working the Dead Beat, as the others called it. He was brave, self-sacrificing, if sometimes a little crude.
Death had that effect, sometimes.
Arphallo slipped his hands back into his pockets and followed Sam.

Heartbreak

When I was six years old, I had a huge crush on a girl named Xian. She was a little taller than me and had shiny black hair in two perfect buns. Her front teeth were as big and white as a pony's. Total cutie.
Somehow – probably with magic – my father found out. I sat on the shore of the river, dangling my feet into the water and angrily chucking rocks as far as I could. It wasn't far.
"What's wrong, Kai?" My father sat down beside me.
"Who says anything's wrong?" I said.
I didn't want to talk about it. There was no way my father could understand. So I threw another rock as far as I could. Splish!
"Magic," he answered. I knew it. "I'm your dad. So, what's wrong?"
Splish! He waited while I chucked a few more pebbles. My father chose a rock for himself and threw it in a long arc. It splashed on the far side of the river, almost on the other shore.
"It's Xian…" I said at last.
"Hmm. And that would be the Xu's little girl?"
"Yeah…"
"Well, what seems to be the problem? Do you like her?" he asked.
"Well, yes. But… but whenever I try to talk to Xian, she punches me in the arm or kicks me or something."
Splish! My dad laughed. I wanted to be mad. 
"Kai, girls her age sometimes show their affection that way."
"What does that mean?"
"It means that she probably likes you," he said.
"Really?"
"Yes."
________

The next day, my dad found me at the river again, throwing stones.
"Oh no," he said, sitting down next to me again. "What happened now?"
"She cried and ran away!" I said.
"Xian? Why did she cry?"
"Well, you said that she hits me because I like her," I said. "So I hit her back."
"You hit her?"
"Well, I like her a lot," I admitted. "So I hit her really hard."
I looked at my father and waited for more sage advice, but his mouth hung open. At the sound of footsteps crunching on the pebbles, we turned to see Xu and a woman who looked a lot like an older version of Xian. Their eyes were as stony as the river bank under their sandals.
Xian trailed behind them, her eyes red and puffy. I still thought she looked cute, even with a black eye.

Sunless

Deep below the Montreal desert, the catwalk creaked ominously. I grabbed the handrails and cursed the whole world for being so badly broken. My palms were slick with sweat and slid on the pitted metal. If I wanted to live – and I did – I had to move. Now.
I scrambled across the creaking catwalk. It stretched, thin and gaunt, across the huge concrete chasm. I did not want to look down, but I couldn't help it. There was nowhere else to look. The cracked, dark-stained walls sloped inexorably down into the black depths. Even the walkway beneath my feet was porous, a metal mesh that groaned under my weight.
Beneath that, a hundred feet down, was the reactor. I couldn't see it, not really, but I could feel it. If I squinted – and I was helpless not to – I could just make out the jagged, cracked concrete far, far below. Sick, feverish heat prickled the back of my neck. Radiation. The nuclear reactor was broken.
My feet were cold lead in the sterile heat. Each step was a trembling torment as I crept over the ancient pit of decay. I wanted to squeeze my eyes shut, but I did not dare. Hot breath came in fear-choked gasps that made my chest burn. Was I dying? Even if I made it out of here, I was just going to die outside, screaming as blood boiled from my blind eyes…
Fear whipped me on. I was more than halfway across the catwalk. If I could only reach the other side… A deep, rumbling groan echoed through the reactor room. The walkway lurched beneath me, throwing me to my knees. The rusted old steel tore at my pants and gouged oozing wounds into the skin beneath.
I jumped to my feet, confused. I had not taken another step, but I was moving. Away from the far door, back the way I had come! What? The catwalk grated and creaked as it reeled back. A gap of hot darkness separated it from the far door. The chasm grew wider with each second.
No! That was the only way forward, the only route not blocked by sand and collapsed concrete or unpredictably defunct old defense turrets. The only way back to the sunlight.
My leg stung like hell, but I ran. The narrow catwalk wobbled and bowed more with every step, as I neared the far end. Five yards away, then three and one… But the gap was wider now, twice as far across as I was tall. There was no time to hesitate, to think. This was the only way back, my only chance to live. And I wanted to live. I had fought too hard to give up on life now.
I jumped.
For a lifetime, there was only the invisibly blazing darkness, the deadly drop down into the broken nuclear reactor. I was going to die, broken and screaming… And then I slammed into the far wall. Not the door, but the moldering concrete below. For a horrible moment, I slid down toward the singed, radioactive black, but then my fingers caught a buckled edge and held.
I clung there, trembling and sweating and swearing, until I could make my legs work again. Laboriously, I climbed the few feet and tumbled through the broken door, collapsing bonelessly to the floor.
"…What are… still alive?" asked a broken, brittle voice.
I was standing again in a heartbeat, searching the shadowed hallway. There it was: the intercom, the plastic-cased box hanging by frayed wires from the wall. It glowed faintly with a green power light. He was watching me, taunting me again.
"Yeah, I'm still here!" I shouted back. I knew better, but I could no more stop myself than I could have willed my blood to stop flowing. It pounded behind my eyes in a liquid drumbeat. "I'm still alive, you weed rat!"
The voice popped and fizzed as though echoing up from an ancient soda can. "…Before you can… Just die! You have to… Better… way… Kill you…"
"Why are you doing this? I just want to leave!" My cries did not echo in the buried hallway, but fell short and flat as though I dropped the words.
"…Can't leave… Sick child…"
The rest was lost in crackling static. I shouted and shrieked at the intercom until my throat was raw. Finally, I fell silent. I stood alone in a crooked concrete hall with faded blue wallpaper in a repetitive cloud print.
He would never let me go, that man on the other end of the corroded intercom. I couldn't convince him to. He could not even hear me. I had to find him.
I kept walking. I searched through the leaning, half-collapsed corridors. I squinted at peeling old signs and shouldered open a hundred doors. My heart hammered with each creak of flaking hinges, galloping with terror at what I would find on the other side.
The sour fear grew stale on my tongue as I prowled through the husk of a base. There was only silence and more sterile darkness. My search crept slowly, my flashlight illuminating only a few feet at a time. And then there it was: the last door. A gurgling, liquid sound filled the hall.
 The sight of it stopped me dead in my tracks. What was this? I had expected a great, thick vault door, dented by the passing of ages, by the empty, dusty centuries since this place had served any useful purpose. Or maybe one of those slick glass ones that slid away like the ocean tide I had never seen.
I never expected this: a simple old door, brown and black printed veneer peeling up like diseased skin. The dull brass knob hung at an uncomfortable angle from the door, sullenly forbidding of entry. But I didn't give a shit about the door or its knob. What I wanted – what I needed – to find was on the other side of that rectangle of fake wood.
He was here. The man on the ancient intercom, every other word devoured by rough static. From that first moment that I fell through the hole in the bottom of the desert and lost the sun, he tried to kill me. The purple acid in the broken old laboratory; the elevator that almost sheared me in half as I climbed through rust-frozen doors; the clunking gun turret that would have finished the deed had it not jammed so badly that sparks rained down, filling the darkness with firefly light. And then the catwalk over the base's nuclear reactor…
Hot all over with rage and terror and what I prayed was only mild radiation poisoning, I battered down the desiccated old door. It splintered and fell to the threadbare carpet in mummified pieces. Beyond lay an office, the sort of blank fluorescent cell that had been so common in ancient times. No windows, of course, but there was a desk. It was as long as a coffin and used to be polished, but was now so scarred and dusty that the wood was barely distinguishable from the crumbling gray concrete walls.
Covering every dingy, colorless surface were monitors; a hundred screens or more, all bright as the distant daytime sky. Some were blank, but most showed the various faltering feeds from all across the huge subterranean base. And computers, too – metal-cased towers and slabs of aluminum, all connected by cables and cords as though bound.
Bound.
In the center of it all, in the light of a single flickering helium tube, he was waiting for me. The broken voice that was a man. The man who had tried like hell to kill me. The man I was going to kill, if it would free me from this gray, sunless tomb.
He was tall… I think. It was hard to tell. My tormentor did not sit in a chair. He was bound instead to a sort of unpadded gurney, lashed clumsily in place with belts and twisted lengths of wire. But for these, he was naked. They covered him, tied him in place and pierced him. Metal filaments ran beneath his thin, dirt-colored skin like copper worms and connected him to the arrays of computers.
I stared. Where was the blood? With all of those pieces of metal cutting into him, why didn't he bleed? Was he just… dry inside? The man was desiccated as a corpse. Was he dead? Was this not the man, the murderer that barred my way?
Slowly, he turned his bald, wrinkled head toward me. It tottered on its thin neck. Cloudy tubes fed right into the angle of his throat and shoulder, pulsing with something thin and brown – the source of the sound I heard out in the hallway. Not blood. This was… something else. The man in the center of his web of wires fixed large brown eyes on me. The whites had gone yellow as old paper.
"You found your way to me, child," he said. It was the first time I heard all of his words, not broken up by static over the old intercom system.
"Flat thanks to you," I snarled at him. "You've been trying to kill me ever since I fell down into this decrepit old hole!"
My fingers tightened on the length of pitted pipe, a makeshift weapon that I had wrenched from a broken bathroom wall for this very purpose. To end all of it.
His head wobbled. The protruding, knobby skull rang dully against the metal gurney. "You're sick, child," he wheezed in his thin, rasping voice. "I couldn't… I can't let you carry the infection out into the world."
"What the sandy hell are you talking about?" I asked. I held the pipe ready, cocked up over my shoulder like the peeling old pictures of baseball players.
"This place… God help me, I ran the program. Biological weapons for… for the war. And then…" He blinked those large, dark eyes, but no tears came. Maybe he couldn't even cry anymore. "And then the bombs. The whole world went dark. Dead, child."
"I'm not dead! There are survivors up there!"
"I know," the wired man wheezed. "Some managed to live through the final days. Poor, wretched things—"
"Hey!" I protested.
"—that have suffered enough. In those final hours of the war, the whole world shook and there was a containment breach. We never used the weapons we made here — thank God – but now they would escape into the tormented world. And there were so few survivors above…"
"So you sealed the base," I asked. It made sense. "You killed everyone here!"
"I didn't kill them," he answered, voice slow and lonely as a dripping faucet. "Not at first. The virus did. God, how they screamed as their eyes bled and they vomited up their own putrefying organs…!
"Only five of us managed to make it to the quarantine room. The others, they wanted to leave. I knew the virus would escape with them. I killed them. Shot them myself, God forgive me. But there were survivors outside of the base and I knew that others… others would come. They would carry it away in their blood."
"So you kill anyone who gets in? Even sorry packs who fall in by accident when they're scrounging for something to eat?"
I smashed my pipe into the nearest monitor, sending shard of glass and plastic exploding in every direction. The man flinched, but bound to his open casket of wires, he could not move much.
His connection to the base's system made him little short of a god… as long as there was something to control. This was only his office. There was just a desk and his computers. Here, he was helpless. But it wasn't the heavy steel bludgeon that had made him flinch.
"No."
His hands clutched and released in their straps, making the cables writhe like dying snakes. I don't think he even realized that he was doing it. The old man's body was not his own. Not anymore. He had wired himself into the base, buried himself alive. His body was just a relic; a dark and discarded thing like all of those skeletons and broken lab equipment. I lowered the pipe.
"No," he said. "I wanted to save lives, not take them. I wanted to destroy the virus. In fire. In nuclear fire."
"The reactor."
"I overloaded it. I tried to blow it open to destroy the virus and the labs that made it."
"But it didn't work." That much was obvious to me as we stood in the dry old office, rather than in a burnt-out crater. There were plenty of those in the world.
"No. The systems were damaged. The reactor cracked but wouldn't explode. Nuclear generators were never my expertise. This place only became more dangerous, full of radiation and disease and death. So I remained. I stayed here and I stayed alive to make sure the base remained safe, sealed away from the world outside."
"How are you still alive?" I demanded, pointing my pipe like an accusing finger.
"The virus attacks the blood. I removed all of mine."
"That must have hurt."
"Yes."
I fought against rising sympathy. I refused to die, no matter how sorry I felt for my killer.
The withered old shadow of a man looked to the monitors surrounding him; a hundred eyes that stared out over his domain, his prison, his tomb. The pictures flickered and jumped like candlelight. Then he turned those dark pools of sorrow on me.
"And now I have to kill you, child," he told me. "It's been good to speak to someone again, but my duty… I have to kill you."
"Why?" I asked. "Because you think I've got this virus you made hundreds of years ago?"
"Yes," he said heavily.
"But I'm not sick!" I shouted desperately. "I'm clear! Some scrapes and bruises from clambering through your damned base, but that's all. My eyes aren't bleeding and I haven't spat up my own lungs."
"I can't risk you spreading—" he began.
"Isn't there a way to test? To see if I've actually got anything?"
"Yes," was the reluctant answer.
The old military man gestured weakly to one of the computers. It was a shiny white one, like the ones in the lab I had fled as hissing purple acid rained down on me. Some kind of containment measure, I understood now, something that would kill the escaping virus. But it had not been enough, obviously. The man tied to his gurney had watched them all die, the men and women he worked with, bleeding and screaming.
"There," he said, returning my attention to the computer. "The blue button."
I pressed the indicated button and something slid out of the side; a small rectangle of plastic, indented in the middle. At my captor's instruction, I pressed my finger into the center. A needle pricked my dirty skin and drew a bright drop of blood. The computer whirred noisily and I banged my fist on it.
The man winced. "Be careful. That equipment is almost as ancient as I am… How old is that anymore? What is the year, child?"
"I'm not a child," I snapped. "And I don't know. No one does."
The computer toned. I had no idea what it meant. Without looking, the man told me what buttons to press and then his watery eyes widened.
"You… you're not sick." It was so dark and dim inside the ancient office that I couldn't read his expression. Was he glad? Angry? "You've been here for nine hours and thirty-seven minutes. How are you not infected?"
"I don't think there's anything left to be infected by," I told him. I sat on the edge of the desk, beside the man who had tried to kill me so many times. I set the pipe down. "Before they ran me off, I worked for a caravan healer. You can get sick in the nuke craters, but not by bacteria or viruses."
"The radiation…" The old man's face screwed up like a child about to cry. "The cracked reactor…"
"It killed the virus," I said. All of my rage was gone. "It's not how you meant to do it, but you succeeded."
"I did it." His voice was brittle and thin with impossible hope. "After all these years, it's safe…?"
"No," I snorted. "It's a mess out there. But not because of you."
He shook his head awkwardly in the confines and closed his yellowed old eyes. "I… I don't have to kill you. No one else has to die here," he said. "Thank you, child."
The old man triggered something through his connection of wires and cables. A sudden rectangle of light opened in the wall. Not light, I realized. Just a shallower darkness, but one which led to light. A warm breeze came from the door, smelling of dirt. Real dirt. Not the dry, sterile dust of the military base that smelled like chemicals.
"That way will take you back to the sun," said the man with no blood. "Back up to the surface. It's a hard place, perhaps, but better than this hole in the world. Go."
I started for the door and then turned back. He was so skeletal on his barren gurney of steel, bristling with wires and empty of blood and tears. How much had he given up to protect the world? A world he couldn't even see? His blood, his life; everything that made him a man. Maybe he couldn't cry for his loss, but my vision blurred.
"Come with me," I said in a choked voice. "There's nothing to protect here anymore."
"I can't." In the thin light coming through the doorway, he shook his head minutely. "My body doesn't work much better than the base. Everything's broken and bloodless."
"I can't just leave you down here," I told my would-be killer. "Don't you want to go?"
"I would like to… to see the sun again."
I cut him free of the tangled wires and tubes. Dark, acrid liquid dribbled from the shorn ends. I gathered his bony, fragile body to me. He must have been a huge, powerful man once, but now he weighed no more than a child. I carried him easily through the winding staircase, up to another door and grunted with the effort as I spun the wheel to unseal the door. Flakes of rust fell free like dark snow, like dried blood as it slowly turned. I pushed hard against the centuries of grit and grime and it finally swung open.
The sunlight was blinding, a world of light to eyes that had navigated the underworld of the base by the amber pinpoints of power indicators and a few failing helium tubes. The sun blazed in the blue-white sky, searing the red and yellow stone of the desert below. Tall, blocky silhouettes rose in the distance, skeletons of the ancient city.
The old man did have tears left to shed. They swam in his eyes and fell down his dry cheeks. His breath came in ragged, broken gasps. The wires and tubes fed him more than information; they had kept him alive. He raised a trembling hand to the sun. His skin was so thin that the light shined right through it.
"Thank you," he said. The words were so soft, half drowned in tears, that I had to lean even closer to catch them.
"This is the world you saved," I told him. "There might not have been much left, but thank you for it."
He smiled then, toothless and trembling. He closed his hand as though grasping the warm sunlight. And then it fell limp to his chest and his breath stopped.
I couldn't bury him, not after lifetimes sealed away in the earth. So I gathered up all the wood I could find and burned his body. The smoke rose up toward the sun, carrying the last of my nameless captor and savior aloft on the wind.
They will see the smoke, others like me who roam the ruins of the old world. They will come here, looking for the same things I did. When they do, I will tell them his story.

Black Lace and Sand

The conductor signed Maxwell's receipt and two of the engineers hauled the muslin-wrapped bundles away, up toward the head of the train. The steam engine was shiny and modern, all bright-polished steel and sapphire paint just a few shades darker than the cloudless Egyptian sky.
"What about the rest of my cargo?" Maxwell asked, scanning the receipt.
"Your treasure, you mean?" said the conductor with a thin smirk. He was a local man, with tawny skin and dark, mysterious eyes.
Maxwell's tanned hand went to a handsome gold and onyx medallion around his neck. "Please be careful with them. Those crates represent months of work excavating the Valley of Kings."
The conductor smiled again. He ran dark fingers over his shaven scalp and replaced his navy hat. The shiny black bill gleamed like a beetle's shell.
"All of your crates are secure in the baggage car," he told Maxwell. "It's all quite safe, efendim."
Maxwell didn't quite trust that smile. The tombs he had discovered contained more gold than the train's conductor would earn in his entire life. Maxwell peered at the other man, but could discern nothing particularly deceptive. He shrugged and offered up his ticket. The conductor punched it and waved Maxwell onto the train.
Maxwell climbed the lacquered stairs and into the first passenger car. He found his seat easily – each was marked with small engraved brass plates. Maxwell sat down beside a young girl in a frilly blue dress.
"Hello there," he introduced himself. "I'm Doctor Maxwell Fox. What's your name?"
"Elizabeth." She played with the lace on her dress, running it between her fingers, and did not look up at Maxwell. "But everyone just calls me Liza."
"Pleased to meet you, Liza."
"Do you work at a hospital, Doctor Fox?" asked the little girl. She said hospital with a few too many P's. "I went to a hospipal once, when my chest hurt."
Maxwell laughed. "Not that kind of doctor. I'm a doctor of archeology. An Egyptologist, actually. I just finished a very successful dig in the Valley of Kings."
Now Liza did look up, but not at Maxwell. An older woman shouldered her way past the other passengers toward them. She had a thin mouth and pale brown eyes the color of sand. Some of her hair had come loose and hung in strands that would have been attractive were they not so sweaty.
"Aunt Catherine!" Liza exclaimed. "Did you bring candy?"
The woman – Catherine – wore lace, too, but all in black. Black all over, like a bridal gown dipped in ink. A mourning dress. Catherine offered Liza a small, pinched smile and handed the child a paper-wrapped peppermint. Then Catherine turned her pale eyes on Maxwell.
"Why are you in my seat?"
Maxwell started. He took unwrapped the ticket from his folded receipts and checked the seat number. Mumbling an apology, he moved to a seat on the opposite side of the train, the one that matched his ticket. Catherine's gaze followed him to his new position, lingered for a moment and then returned to her niece. The girl sucked happily on her sweet and went back to toying with the hem of her dress.
The whistle sounded piercingly and the train lurched into motion. When the pace smoothed out, Maxwell moved into the empty seat beside the window. He checked the red-carpeted aisle frequently, in case he was taking someone else's spot again. But no one came to scowl at him this time.
Maxwell Fox watched the tall, dark silhouette of Giza race by, replaced by rolling white-golden sand dunes and pale stone bluffs. The train was moving north and out of Egypt, but first their journey would take them through more desert. There were miles of sand and stone left to go before the train reached the coast.
Maxwell tapped a cigarette against its silver case and lit it. Ribbons of smoke wafted into the air and joined the blue-gray haze that filled the passenger care. The scent of burning was thick and musty. Maxwell decided he wasn't really in the mood after all and let the cigarette burn down, unsmoked, between his fingers.
With the help of a few brandies delivered by a perpetually smiling hostess, the afternoon passed quickly. Maxwell watched the sun set behind the desert's edge. The dunes were fewer and further between now, giving way to red and brown stone that rose and fell in rocky towers. The train sped between them, whistle howling like a lost spirit and trailing blue smoke from the engine.
As the sky turned sunset red and then violet, Maxwell went up to the dining car. It was half full of families and solo travelers, all sitting under swaying amber lights. Maxwell took a menu from the counter and ordered meat pie – that was its name on the menu: "meat pie" – and waited on a narrow stool for its delivery.
Liza and her aunt sat at a table next to a dark window. The little girl played with the peas on her plate while Catherine frowned and told her to eat them. Liza made a face. She looked over Catherine's shoulder and waved to Maxwell.
"Doctor Fox!" Liza called across the dining car. "Come sit with us."
Everyone stopped eating and stared at Maxwell. He collected his dinner self-consciously and carried it across the subtly rumbling floor. The archeologist looked to Catherine for permission, but the black-clad woman ignored him. Liza moved over on the red leather bench to make room. Maxwell sat down beside her.
"Thank you," he said.
Liza smiled. There was something dark stuck in her teeth. "Do you want my peas?"
Of course there was an ulterior motive. Maxwell sighed and nodded. "Yes, please," he answered. "I was just wishing that I had more."
Liza tipped her plate up and doused Maxwell's pie in vegetables. The peas bounced and rolled across the pie's brown crust. Maxwell spread a napkin over his lap and ate. The pie was tasteless but filling. Liza giggled and pointed every time the flaking crust crumbled and caught in Maxwell's close-cropped beard. Catherine arched one penciled brow.
"A gentleman keeps himself clean in the presence of ladies." She offered him a napkin.
"I have my own." Maxwell dabbed his mouth. "Better?"
"Barely," Catherine said.
He flushed and cleared his throat. "Where are you ladies bound?"
Liza's stern, black-dressed aunt opened her thin-lipped mouth, but never had the chance to answer Maxwell. Throughout the dining car, all of the lamps suddenly flared. On their wicks, flames stretched into bloody red that lashed the low ceiling like fiery tongues. And then the lights snuffed out and plunged the train into darkness.
Liza screamed and Maxwell snatched his lighter from his breast pocket. More shrieks and cries filled the lightless black and made Maxwell's ears ache. Where the hell were the stars? They should have been burning outside the windows, twinkling over the desert…
Maxwell thumbed open the lighter. The flame flickered and danced, but did nothing to illuminate the dining car. Maxwell couldn't even see his own hand, wrapped shakily around the silver lighter. But there was something else in the darkness, brighter than the wan lighter's flame: the gold bird-claw necklace around his neck. The talons grasped a disc of polished onyx that reflected back the spark of firelight far more brilliantly than the actual flame.
Before Maxwell could ponder any of it, the light retuned. The lamps burned again, unflickering orange as though nothing at all had happened. But the screams did not stop. They were worse, rising until Maxwell wanted to clap his hands over his ears.
"Aunty Cat!" Liza shrieked in ear-splitting terror.
Catherine slumped over the table, one black lace sleeve in Maxwell's dinner. Her face was turned to one side and her mouth gaping open. Catherine's sand-colored eyes stared blankly. Dead. Maxwell wrapped his arms around Liza and the little girl sobbed into his ribs.
Hers were not the only cries. Seven other diners had fallen dead in the sudden darkness. Without letting go of Liza, Maxwell inspected Catherine's body. There were no marks of violence on her body that he could see. Her exposed skin – there wasn't much of it – was pale and waxy. No bruises or cuts. Maxwell pressed two fingers to her throat and felt only stiff, coolly unyielding flesh.
The chef burst through a pair of doors with circular windows, bellowing incoherently German. His eyes rolled wildly and Maxwell suspected that much the same had happened in the kitchen. Some waiter or busboy dead in the soup… Passengers shouted at one another now, demanding to know what was happening. Maxwell picked Liza up around the waist. Frilly skirts overflowed his arms. The child sobbed into his shoulder.
"What are you doing?" cried a woman, middle aged and clutching a daughter of her own. "That's not your child! Where are you going?"
"I'm taking her to one of the sleeper cars," Maxwell said. "Someplace with a door!"
He turned on his heels and ran through the screaming, churning chaos of the dining car. The air smelled of death, but not… not the sort of death that Maxwell expected. Not new death, bloody and sharp. This was old death, the scent of sand and spices over the dry sweetness of ancient decay. The Egyptologist knew that smell all too well.
Maxwell heaved open the door to the next car with some effort. It was hard with only one hand and Liza was beginning to squirm. He held tightly. The mother stared after him from the dining car, clutching her daughter like a life preserver.
The closest car was a passenger car. Not the one that he had met Liza on that morning, but just like it. It swayed and bumped under Maxwell's feet like a cradle. But the train was not sleeping. Men and women crowded into the aisle, scrambling over one another in their haste to get away from the walls. An old man groaned on the ground as his fellow passengers trampled him.
The car's tasteful ivory-colored wallpaper bubbled in the gentle golden lamplight. It blistered like searing skin. Maxwell stared in sick fascination. What the hell…? And then one of the blisters burst. Bright crimson blood gushed from the impossible wound and streaked down the wall, thick as paint. But still the air remained strangely dry. The wet, copper-salt tang of blood was entirely absent from the scene.
The close pack of bodies pushed Maxwell back against the door. In his arms, Liza screamed and squeezed her eyes shut against the sight of the bloody walls. A man with a monocle dangling from his collar swung a black top hat at Maxwell and hit the archeologist in the temple. It was shocking more than painful. Maxwell grunted and stumbled awkwardly to one side, between rows of leather seats and perilously close to the oozing walls.
The man with the monocle ignored Liza and Maxwell. He threw open the door to the dining car and hurled himself through… into darkness. The dining car had gone black as an inkwell again. The man with the monocle screamed, but then his voice cut off. Silence.
The tide of shoving humanity wheeled suddenly and pushed back, away from the dining car. The other door, the one that led to Maxwell's car, was narrow and frightened people clawed and shoved at one another in their haste to get through. Maxwell was no exception. He shouldered his way back into the aisle just before another huge wallpaper blister split and freed a scarlet stream of gore.
"I've got a little girl!" he bellowed. "Let me through!"
He didn't tell anyone that the child was not his own. No one argued, but neither did they listen. Liza's sobs were loud in Maxwell's ear.
"What happened to Aunt Catherine?" she cried. "Why are the walls bleeding? I want to go home!"
Maxwell clambered over seats and tables and squirming people. A huge, dark man in a green satin waistcoat blocked the door, shouting in a deep voice for someone and searching the crowd. A woman in a gingham dress – not the one the man in the door sought, to judge by her blankly terrified expression – pulled at her curly blonde hair. Blood pooled on the floor and welled up over her shoes and she shoved one way and another, but found no other way to get away. She could reach only the nearest window.
"What the hell are you doing?" Maxwell shouted.
But wild-eyed and pale-faced, she wrenched the window open. Cold air streamed in, whipping her hair into a yellow vortex. Before Maxwell could even wonder what to do, the girl in the gingham dress climbed out the window and flung herself off into the night.
Another skull-sized orb burst through the wallpaper and sprayed Liza in blood. The child thrashed and Maxwell nearly dropped her. They had to get somewhere safe. Maxwell grabbed the man in the door by his neatly folded gray cravat, heaved and pulled the man to one side. He stumbled into the wall. Blood sheeted down over his shoulders and drenched the man's clothes in sticky dark.
Maxwell ran through the next passenger car, not slowing to find out what was happening here. There were fleeting impressions of darkened, twisted bodies like tangled shadows at the corners of his vision. Was that something sitting in Liza's seat?
Maxwell did not look and he did not see the dark, delicately lacy shape that rose and followed in silence.
The sleeper car was narrow and close as a wardrobe. Tiny cabins with frosted glass windows lined on both sides of the cramped corridor. Maxwell slowed. The little rooms did not appear nearly as secure as he had hoped. How safe would he and Liza really be? How safe was anyone already huddling inside?
Were there people hiding in here? The sleeping car was quiet and still. The only sound was the muffled clack of the train's steel wheels, unfazed by the horrors taking place inside. Why hadn't someone stopped it? Where was the conductor? Was someone still up there at the head of the train, stoking the fires of the steam engine?
Maxwell stopped in front of one closed sliding door. Hesitantly, he put Liza down to the floor. Nothing strange seemed to be happening here. Not yet… Liza sniffled and held onto one his hands with both of hers. Maxwell knocked on a glass door.
"Hello?" he called. "Is anyone in there?"
"Don't," Liza whispered urgently. "They'll hear you!"
"What? That's rather the point…"
Maxwell trailed off as a shadow loomed up through the glass, a dark human shape; someone coming to the door. Relieved, the archeologist put his hands to the door to slide it open. Liza grabbed his elbow.
"Don't!" she whimpered.
Maxwell froze. Or his hand did… The glass of the door was cold as ice under his palm. The dead-dry smell rose up again, making Maxwell's stomach churn. What the hell was in there? The shadow stretch as it came closer, tall and thin… The white glass door slid open, silent as mist. Maxwell jumped back, thrusting Liza behind him. His heart hammered against his ribs.
But there was no one inside, just a pair of narrow beds with plain brown blankets. Maxwell hauled Liza down the narrow corridor. Liza squeaked as she struggled to keep up, lacy skirts flying around her short legs.
Where else could they go? Unless the train stopped, there was no way to get off. The thought of the girl in gingham still made Maxwell shudder. Was there anywhere safe? No, he knew. It was all over the train, filled it like blood in veins.
They passed through another pair of doors into the second sleeping car. This one was of a different make than the last. The doors here were not glass but smooth walnut wood with a rippling grain like flowing water. The lamps, too, were darker than before, with thick amber glass shades. There it was again… that sweet, dry smell. The smell of ancient death and crumbling skin.
"Hello?" Maxwell called. "Is anyone in here?"
Where was everyone? The sweaty, panicked pack of passengers was only a few minutes behind them, really. How could it be so silent?
"Where are we going, Doctor Fox?" Liza asked in a small, empty voice.
"I… I don't know."
Maxwell crept quietly down the aisle, Liza close on his heels. The wood-doored sleeping cubicles were closed up and silent as coffins. Floorboards creaked under his feet and Maxwell winced. He found himself holding his breath and wishing Liza would do the same.
"But there's nothing back here," the girl said. Her voice was raw from crying. "Just the toilets and then the baggage car."
"I… I don't know, Liza. Just keep going!"
A door shuddered in its frame as though something very large struggled inside, but there was no sound. Maxwell's breath steamed as he led Liza past.
At the back of the car, doors to the toilets gaped open like hungry mouths. Maxwell longed to close his eyes, but he had to keep moving and had no intention of wandering blindly off course. Brass lamps burned low on the walls. Maxwell helplessly stared at his reflection in the mirror.
The face that peered back was thinner than his own. No, not just thin. Gaunt. Skeletal. Dead… Maxwell's phantom skin was browned and leathery, folded in on itself like a mummified corpse. Dry and withered, without a drop of blood. The eyes were empty sockets, dark and deep. Only the golden claw medallion around his neck held any glimmer of life. It was only metal, but the gold glittered invitingly in the mirror; the light of the sun in the middle of this abyssal night.
Maxwell clutched at the necklace. His reflection did the same, wrapping it in twig-like fingers. Golden radiance shone through his dead flesh and the onyx disc sliced into the meat of his hand. Maxwell dropped the pendant with a grunt of pain. The polished black stone had left a neat slice across his palm that oozed blood. When the archeologist raised his eyes to the mirror again, his reflection was gone. Not just the mummified one, but anything else. The silvered glass was as empty as a dry well.
"Come on." He grasped Liza's shoulder and hurried away.
The car's back door was locked. Maxwell heaved the handle a few times and swore. Liza gasped at his language and the archeologist apologized.
"Where do we go now?" she asked.
"I don't know," Maxwell admitted.
Icy fingers trailed along his spine and the Egyptologist shuddered. He covered his discomfort with another yank on the bronze curlicue doorknob. To his shock, it turned and the door slid open. Liza gaped.
"Let's go," Maxwell said. Quickly, he stepped through and pulled the little girl with him.
The passage between the sleeper and baggage car was not covered, as the others had been. Only the train's personnel were authorized to come through this way. The cold nighttime desert air whistled all around them, whipping Liza's hair across her face. Huge chains clunked and rattled where the two cars joined. Every detail was picked out in black and silver starlight, as though it embroidered on dark velvet. The train tracks streaked past beneath them.
And the smell… Maxwell threw his sleeve across his face, but it wasn't enough to stop the fit of choking. The smoke and steam of the engine at the head of the train raced back all the way to the baggage car, thick and reeking of dry death.
Maxwell helped Liza over the gap and then wrenched the far door open. Together, they hurried into the baggage car. There were no lamps inside – no one manned this part of the train and a single splash of hot lamp oil would spell disaster for the train company and their insurance – but a series of narrow slots around the top of the boxcar let in pearly moonlight.
Maxwell slid the door shut behind them and stared around. Everything seemed safe and normal in the baggage car – if a little crowded – until he caught sight of the dark shape sitting on the edge of a large crate. Maxwell knew that crate. It was his, one of those containing exotic treasure dug from Egypt's sand.
But Liza knew the figure in black. She ran forward, arms spread and tears of relief streaming down her rosy cheeks.
"Aunty Cat!" she cried. "I thought you were—"
The girl's voice cut off sharply. Liza stopped a yard away from her aunt's dark silhouette. Maxwell lunged toward her but pulled up short as Liza turned to face him, uninjured. The girl's round face was pinched and disapproving.
"This is your doing," she said in the thin, breathy voice. It echoed hollowly, as if from a great distance. Maxwell could barely make out the words.
"What are you talking about, Liza?" he asked.
Closer now, Maxwell could make out the woman sitting primly on the crate's corner. It was Catherine, still dressed in her funerary black lace. But her face was little more than a skull wrapped in thin, leathery brown skin. Her thin lips were gone now, stretched tightly back in a humorless yellow-toothed grin. Something squirmed in the darkness of her eye sockets that Maxwell could not make out. Liza looked up at the archeologist with disapproving eyes the color of sand.
"You brought this on us," she said in Catherine's voice. "You did this."
Maxwell reeled back as though she had slapped him. "What didn't belong to me…? From the Valley of Kings?"
"You have desecrated the dead," Liza intoned in her dead aunt's empty voice.
"I… I can fix it! I can return it all to the desert," Maxwell said desperately. "Will you leave then?"
Catherine and Liza peered at the archeologist, one with pale eyes and one with none. The corpse in black lace laughed, the first sound Maxwell had heard from her. It was high and rattling and brittle, like breaking glass. And then she was gone, simply vanished into the dark night. Liza blinked, stared around her and began to cry.
Maxwell had no time to comfort the girl. He ran across the swaying boxcar, strained and heaved the long loading door. It flew open and the cold air whipped inside. Suitcases and tarpaulins caught the wind and flew, most right out the open door. The sand was gone outside, replaced by spires and squat pillars of sandstone. The train tracks wound between these, high on trestled tracks. Liza shrieked.
Maxwell grabbed the crate on which Catherine had been sitting, but it was too heavy to move.
"Liza!" he shouted. "Get me a crowbar! They're on the back wall."
The girl sniffled and did as Maxwell asked. He took the hooked metal bar and went to work. Maxwell peeled the top from the crate and kicked it aside. A brilliant gold and azure sarcophagus lay inside, cushioned by dusty straw that flew up into the whipping wind. It was so beautiful in the starlight. The sarcophagus was small, only a little taller than Liza; the final resting place of some prince or child king. Well, next to last… The sarcophagus was empty now. The museums wanted treasure to put on display, not dried up bodies. But Maxwell had retrieved the gold talon medallion from around the thin husk's neck before disposing of the mummy.
How could he throw the golden sarcophagus out now, send it crashing down into the sand so far below? The sarcophagus was lovely, a shining piece of art. The starlight sparkled back from the beaten, polished gold with perfect clarity. This sort of stunning craftsmanship was exactly why Maxwell had become an Egyptologist.
"Doctor Fox!" Liza wailed.
He looked up to see the girl staring in horror at one of the many suitcases. It was not covered but had been too large to fly out the open door. But now the black leather case twitched and jittered across the floor. Something inside moved…
Just as Maxwell shouted for Liza to get back, the suitcase burst open. Blue-black scarab beetles erupted in a chittering, squirming mass. They swarmed up Liza's legs and under her lacy dress. The girl screamed and jumped back, but the huge beetles were all over her. They boiled down her arms and face and scurried through her hair. Liza threw herself to the ground and thrashed.
"Liza, they're just carrion eaters!" Maxwell shouted through her terrified cries. "They won't hurt you! Just be still!"
Liza wasn't listening. The girl grabbed scarabs by the fistful and flung them away. In her frantic haste, she tore her dress and then her hair, seizing infested curls in her fists and yanking them free.
"Liza, stop!"
Maxwell fell to his knees and tried to hold her, but Liza would not be still. She screamed and tore her own flesh bloody as the scarabs swarmed across her.
Maxwell jumped to his feet again and raced to the sarcophagus. Sweating and straining, he hauled it out of the crate and heaved it through the door. The polished gold gleamed in the moonlight and then fell away into the sandy canyon.
More. There was more than just the sarcophagus. Maxwell dug desperately through the straw until he found the copper and ivory canopic jars. Without hesitation, he flung them from the train. There was nothing else in the crate, but… Maxwell took the receipts from his pocket and squinted at them. How many crates had he brought on board?
The wind threatened to tear the slips from his grasp, but Maxwell crunched the paper between his fingers with grim determination. There were two more crates.
He found them not far from the first. There was a small locked box that contained most of the jewelry from the dig. This, Maxwell hurled from the train without opening it. But the last crate was even larger than the one what had contained the sarcophagus. It was too big and too heavy to move on his own.
Just feet away, Liza thrashed and moaned weakly, blood streaming from a dozen self-inflicted wounds. Maxwell smashed the wood and its precious contents – gold-leafed and gem-inlaid urns – apart with the crowbar until he could fling the pieces out the door.
The archeologist spun back to Liza, but the shiny black beetles still covered the child like scabs. She beat her head against the baggage car floor and cried. Why did the scarabs continue to swarm over her? Maxwell's hand went to falcon-claw necklace at his throat. Taken from the dead boy-king's body… Maxwell could still smell the sweet-dry scent of the sarcophagus.
Maxwell yanked the pendant. The leather cord snapped and came free. The metal was hot now, blistering against his hand where the smooth onyx had cut him. Maxwell pulled back his arm and threw the necklace as far as he could. The gold necklace arced and spun through the night, shining with borrowed moonlight and then vanished into the canyon below.
The car fell silent but for the rasping of the huge wheels on their steel rails. Maxwell ran back to Liza and pulled the little girl into his arms. The scarabs were gone, but there were deep, bloody gashes in the child's fragile skin.
Maxwell shook her gently and called her name. Liza did not move. At the head of the train, the whistle called mournfully, like a lone wolf. The sweet-sick smoke of the engine curled in through the open door, pale and aglow with moonlight. Diaphanous black shadows fell over Maxwell.
"Gold. You think we rend the veil between worlds for gold?" asked the shadow.
It was Catherine again, this time holding Liza's hand. The girl was gone from Maxwell's arms. Both were deathly gaunt, with no eyes and hair thinned away to display naked scalp. Liza's blue dress had moldered away to lacy black rags. But their darkened skin was astonishingly well-preserved. Leathery and lined. Preserved.
Mummified.
"Any slave can mine and polish gold," Catherine and Liza whispered. "What you took was so much more than that. You have desecrated us."
Maxwell still clutched the receipts in his hand. The paper was cold and clammy with his sweat. Everything recorded on the baggage slip was gone now, chopped apart and thrown out the door. But… he looked at the other receipt, the record of sale.
"The mummies," Maxwell realized. He stared at the receipt. "I sold them to the train's conductor as firewood. They burn them in the engine boiler."
This wasn't about the gold. The rich tombs were important to the ancient Egyptians, but not nearly as important as the bodies they contained. Maxwell raised his eyes to Catherine and Liza's withered bodies. Mummies preserved in oils and sarcophagi against the ages; the ka's home. The soul always returned to the body. And he had sold them to be burned the train's fuel, just to help cover his expenses. Scented smoke and steam billowed in through the door, the smell of burning mummies, ancient bodies consumed by the fires of industry.
Maxwell was not surprised when the whole world lurched sickeningly to one side. Metal shrieked and wood snapped like the breaking of giants' bones. The trestled bridge between the red rock spires was shattering. Steel tracks twisted and fell away like snapped spiderwebs. The train plummeted through the night.
"We all return to the sands of our home," the mummies said.
The roar was deafening. The rushing air tugged at Catherine and Liza's black lace dresses. Maxwell reached for them, but the baggage car's plummeting speed pressed him back against the wall. He wanted to tell them that he was sorry. Sorry for the dead little girl and her prim but blameless aunt. Sorry for the Egyptian dead that he had unknowingly desecrated. Sorry for being so slow to understand. But it was too late for that…
The train smashed into the desert floor. Everything went red and then black. And then there was only silence.
________

The end