Contractor (52 page)

the streets. The place was devoid of people.

They evacuated in the days after the

president’s speech. With magic picking at his

senses and his ears, he kept jumping at

nothing.

His stomach grumbled louder and

louder. He tried several restaurants, but the

little food he found was uncooked.

Eventually he came across a large

supermarket. He walked through the parking

lot and up to the entrance.

The automatic doors were open. Daniel

stared at them for a long time.

No one was around. The dome should

have frozen the doors shut. Someone who

wasn’t affected by the spell had been

through.

Daniel almost thought better of going in,

but he really needed to eat. He crept past the

stacks of shopping carts and onto the tile.

Signs advertising sales were crowded

around the entrance. There wasn’t any light

besides what was coming in through the

windows. The shelves stretched into a dim

darkness.

He should probably check the whole

place before he let his guard down. He

scryed it out; it appeared empty, but the

paranoia was settling in. He sidled up to the

first aisle. No body home.

He heard a sound. Metal clinked on

metal. He stopped and cocked his head. It

came again.

He inched closer to the source of the

noise, aisle by aisle. The sound clinked and

clunked intermittently. He poked his head

around a corner.

Standing near shelves holding canned

goods was a woman with her back turned to

him. She picked up a can, examined it for a

moment, then chucked it in a bag she was

holding. It settled onto other cans already

there.

Daniel tried to scry her, but to his

magical sense, it was as if she wasn’t even

there. He only knew one thing that could hide

itself like that. She was a contractor.

Daniel ducked back. His first thought

was to find a different store. If she was

anything like Jack at all, he couldn’t trust her

as far as he could throw her.

But what were the chances of that?

Something had happened to Jack, Daniel was

sure, that had deeply affected him. He was an

exception. The woman might be like Daniel,

normal, trying to deal with the situation that

had landed in her lap. Having someone to

watch his back would drastically increase

his lifespan. Worst case scenario, he could

run away. He was confident his sprinting

speed was second only to the jets and the

extractor-birds.

He decided to move back to the

registers and yell at her from there. The extra

space would give him more time to react,

and hopefully she wouldn’t feel as

threatened. He edged behind one of the

grocery conveyor belts. "Excuse me!"

The woman snapped her head up. Purple

lightning arced from her hands and cracked

towards him. He ducked. The lightning

exploded into the customer service desk. The

sharp scent of melted plastic and burning

wood filled the air.

"Wait, wait!" Daniel shouted. "I’m on

your side! I’m a contractor too!"

The sparks dripped in volume, but they

kept snapping. "…we don’t have a side."

Daniel peered over the edge of the

register. She stared back at him. Purple lights

arced and flashed around her. Thin strands of

her brown hair floated in the air,

overcharged with static. He left his baseball

bat on the ground and slowly stood, keeping

his hands where she could see them. "Take it

easy," Daniel said. "I moved back here

because I didn’t want to startle you. If I was

going to try something, I would have snuck

up on you, not announced myself. Right?"

His appeal to reason worked. The

purple lightning twisting at her fingertips

vanished. Her hair fell back onto her thin

frame. She threw the heavy-looking bag over

her shoulder without much trouble; she must

have been stronger than she looked. "What

do you want?"

"You’re right. We don’t have a side."

Daniel licked his lips. "So I was thinking we

should make our own side. They’re not

holding anything back. If we work together,

we could get a lot more accomplished with

half the risk."

"No thanks."

"What about when you sleep?" Daniel

pressed. "Maybe you only need a half-hour

nap like me. But that’s a long time to be out,

if this goes on for a while."

"More reason not to be around someone

that has a vested interest in killing me." She

slowly walked up the aisle, then, keeping her

eyes on him, went for the entrance. "You go

your way, I go mine, and we don’t have any

problems." She ran out the entrance and

behind the building. Daniel heaved a mixed

sigh of relief and disappointment.

He checked to make sure the desk

wasn’t going to set anything on fire, but it

had already been frozen. Even the smell was

gone.

He started around the store. The

refrigerated food, along with the rest of the

perishables, had already been cleaned out.

Everything else had been left to sit. It was

odd seeing a supermarket with whole rows

of meat and dairy empty.

All the bread was gone, but there were

plenty of snacks. He grabbed a box of

crackers off the shelf and started munching.

He stole a can opener from the household

goods aisle, then, taking a leaf from lightning

woman’s book, loaded his backpack with

canned food. There wasn’t much left, but in

the hurry to pack it all away, cans had rolled

to the back of the shelves here and there.

He considered the long-range attacks

he’d seen so far. Daniel had an advantage if

he could get up close, but, like that overseer

on the bridge, he might be gunned down by

oppressive fire. His magic and his armor lent

him some protection, but he needed

something more specialized.

He made his way to cooking wares.

There were plenty of metal items—knives,

spatulas, ladles. He set his bat on the ground

and picked up a paring knife.

Daniel found the biggest, widest soup

pot he could. It was about two feet across the

bottom. He charged the knife with his

powers and sawed through the base of the

pot. He bent several layers of disposable

baking trays around that circular frame,

forming a wide shield.

He grabbed several ladles, cut their long

handles free, and bent them into tight ringlets.

He punched them through the aluminum and

bent them like twist ties to hold it all

together. He dug four wide holes in the pot-

backing, then bent two more ladles through to

form a pair of handles.

He tested it up and down the aisle,

blocking an imagined attack, then stepping

forward into a strike with his bat. The armor

plates on his arm stopped any chafing, and

the improvised ladle-grip gave him plenty of

control over the shield.

By itself, the stability of pre-fabricated

kitchenware might be questionable, but

charged with his magic, it was harder than

steel. God bless America.

Satisfied with his latest purchase, he

slung his backpack over his shoulder and

headed for the doors. An easy leap set him

on top of the supermarket. He looked to

Manhattan. The black fortress was alive over

the skyscrapers, buzzing with Vorid ships.

Daniel set his weapons down and pulled

out his cell phone. He turned the camera

function on, took a brief recording, then

played it back. It was working.

He turned the camera back on. "Hello,"

he narrated. "Welcome to New York."

Daniel panned over the skyline. "I had a

history teacher that hounded us for primary

sources. I’m pretty sure there aren’t any other

reporters taking footage of this, so I thought

I’d do that, just in case. If this isn’t the end of

the world, a generation of high school

students will owe me their sincere

gratitude." Daniel panned to Manhattan and

zoomed in on the black fortress. "It’s been a

little over an hour since the dome dropped. It

looks like the Vorid have set up shop

downtown. The army and the navy are

attacking from the east, the north, and the

south. I’m deep in enemy territory."

Daniel withdrew a can from his pack.

"As you can see, the spell over New York is

really strange. That’s the dome I mentioned.

You can’t see its borders if you’re not a

magician, but it’s pretty clear the color is

sucked out from everything—just blacks and

whites. I’m not sure what causes that, or

why, but it’s not the weirdest part." Daniel

tossed the can in the air and followed it with

the camera. The can went up, reached the top

of its arc, then began to slow. It stopped

halfway down, paused in midair. The colors

of its label faded to shades of grey.

Daniel grabbed the can. It lit back up as

if someone had flicked a switch. He loaded

in his pack. "Basically, everything not under

the influence of a spell gets frozen. I’m a

contractor, so I have a natural resistance to

it, and that transfers to things I touch. It

doesn’t seem to influence air, because I can

breathe fine, and I’ve seen smoke moving for

a while, so it might depend on what it is, too.

Magic’s pretty strange like that."

There was a roar of an engine. A jet

cruised overhead. Daniel followed it with

his camera. "Good timing. Magicians have

been helping the bombing runs all afternoon."

The jet flew over the island and released a

missile. The weapon fell apart, opening up

into a cloud of projectiles. An explosive

storm plowed into the fortress and the

overseer ships in a series of fiery blasts. A

few seconds later, the booms crashed over

Daniel’s ears. "That had to sting."

The jet turned to fly back. It was

pursued by a veritable cloud of the steel

birds. They were moving almost as fast as it

was. The jet’s afterburners flared; it boomed

into supersonic speeds, outstripping them in

moments.

The birds kept on it. They gathered

together. Their wings seemed to link up,

creating a sort of half-moon dish of metal.

They fired a single bright blue laser.

The jet dropped to just above the water

to avoid the attack. In another moment, it

vanished out the edge of the dome. The birds

separated and circled back to roost in the

skyscrapers.

Daniel had never seen anything leave the

dome before. They must have figured

something out. Of course—otherwise every

attack would be a suicide run.

"You’d figure there would be a

conveyor belt of planes bombing, but that’s

not happening," Daniel said. "I don’t think there’s enough magicians. They’ve probably

got every man they have on the ground right

now." He cleared his throat. "Well -"

There was another blast nearby. Purple

light flickered up from an alley. The corner

of a building was blasted up. Red bricks

scattered in the air like the sparks of a

firework. Daniel jammed his cell phone in

his pocket and grabbed his bat and shield.

He skipped across the rooftops. The

woman from before was cornered in a dead

end. Birds were everywhere, circling,

occasionally diving down to distract her.

A small army of the extractors was

marching in from the intersection. She was

punching through them with her purple

electricity, one after another, but she was

losing ground fast.

Daniel leapt down to the street just as a

few of the birds shot off their blue lasers. He

dashed to her side and braced himself

against his shield. The iron glowed white

with power. He felt the impact where the

lasers struck, but he held without problems.

They started circling again. Daniel

pointed at the flock. "Can you hit those

accurately?!" he shouted. The woman stared

at him. "Yes or no?!"

"Yes. But the extractors -"

"I’ll hold the robots off, you get the

birds. Got it?"

"Alright!"

Daniel dashed forward. Purple lightning

was already flickering above him; birds

dropped like flies. He slowed in front of the

extractors and put all of his power into his

bat.

The first extractor noticed his weapon

glowing and raised its arms in a cross to

block. Daniel slammed it with bludgeon

powered by thousands of Vorid spawn,

hundreds of extractors, and a handful of

overseer souls.

The sound his bat made was something

between an explosion and an angry car

crusher. Daniel watched as the extractor was

ripped apart by the sheer magical force. He

didn’t even make contact with the thing—the

steel parted and ripped away from his

oncoming weapon, as if repelled by the