Shotgun Sorceress (21 page)

I found an old bandanna on the floorboards that had been recently employed as a dipstick rag and used it to wipe my hand off. Hopefully the motor oil and diesel would mask my funk. And also kill off any hepatitis I just managed to get on the rag. Crap.

There wasn’t a trash receptacle in sight. I pulled up my pants and buckled on my pistol, then stood on the seat so I could lean out of the sunroof and wedge the rag under the .50 gun; I figured in lieu of fire the heat of the sun would be the best I could do to sanitize the thing. And at least it wouldn’t be floating around on the floor of the van looking like something someone could use for emergency nose blowing.

“Jessie!” It was Pal’s voice inside my head.

Thank God
, I thought back.
What happened to you and Cooper?

“We’ve run into a spot of trouble, I’m afraid … we’re coming your way. Please have a machine gun ready. All of them if possible. I don’t think we can have too many guns right now.”

What? Crap
.

I stuck my shotgun up on the van’s roof and boosted myself up to sit behind the .50 gun mount. And promptly realized that although I thought I could figure out the firing mechanism, I had no way to shoot the weapon without Charlie’s cat nearby.

“Charlie! Warlock!” I hopped up and down, waving my arms at the Western store. The van rocked ominously beneath me. “Get out here; I need the kitty!”

I stood on the roof of the van and scanned the highway as the Warlock and Charlie came running up.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“I’m not sure yet. Pal contacted me. He and Cooper are coming and it sounds like they might have some company.”

“Some company” turned out to be one of the biggest understatements I’d made all year, followed closely by “I think the habañero diablo might be a little spicy.” Pal came galloping down the highway with Cooper clinging to his neck for dear life. Six heavy-duty pickups were speeding close behind; the truck beds were packed with meat puppets armed with bats and axes. Some were wearing what used to be nice suits and dresses, and others were wearing sweats and pajamas. There were close to forty puppets in all as best as I could tell.

Pal ran straight toward us, playing his flying spell, unable to get airborne because he wasn’t close enough to Charlie’s cat. We didn’t have much time. I went to a crouch on the roof of the van, trying to decide whether to go with option A, start blasting with the shotgun, or option B, try to figure out how to operate the .50 machine gun. Smoke rose from the cuff of my glove as my anxiety built, and I suddenly decided to go with option C, yanking off the deerskin and holding my flaming claw high.

Pal’s spell finally took hold, and he rose fast in the air. The lead truck sped up, apparently intent on ramming the van and dashing me to the pavement.

“Get clear!” I hollered.

As soon as Pal and Cooper had flown over my head, I let loose on the trucks. The burning purple ectoplasm came out of me in a firehose jet, and for a moment all I could see was the stuff flaring into an unnatural fireball in the air before me. I hit the lead truck, and the vehicle went up in a hot burst of flames, swerving and rolling clear of us as the melting tires blew out. It was absolutely horrible what happened to the meat puppets in the bed. They were eerily silent as they burned.

But I didn’t have too much time to think about what I’d just done; the other trucks were still coming. I lit them up, too, with equally gruesome but effective results. The air was filled with the stink of brimstone, molten metal, burning tires, and charred flesh.

As I torched the third truck, I realized that my ectoplasmic jet was thinning, growing weaker. Was I running out of energy? Dammit. A few trucks of puppets would be a hell of a thing to blow my remaining power on considering we hadn’t dealt with Miko yet. And surely there would be a few Virtii waiting in the wings for the final act.

I used my fire more carefully after that. Soon it was all over but for a few puppets that had been tossed out of their trucks before they had a chance to be napalmed. They lay twitching in pools of blood, still trying to reach their weapons and get up even though their limbs and bodies were mangled. I felt intensely sick and looked away, looked down.

Charlie was standing there beside the van, staring at the carnage, muttering a prayer over and over under her breath, clutching her AK-47 in shaking hands.

I pulled on my glove, picked up my shotgun, and cleared my throat. “Charlie, do you think you could … you know. Help me put those last few down? Please?”

“Um. Yeah.” She flicked the safety off her weapon and stumbled out into the parking lot.

“You take that bunch on the right, I’ll take the ones on the left.” I slid down onto one of the tires armoring the side of the van, then hopped onto the pavement.

I figured her orange cat would leap out of the sling and run away the moment she pulled the trigger, but it continued to lounge against her chest, purring loudly. Charlie stepped through the bodies, firing single rounds into the skulls of anyone who still appeared to be moving. Her shaking aside, there was almost no hesitation in the girl’s movements; I got the feeling that she’d had to do this before.

I lifted my shotgun and set about the unpleasant task of blowing the heads off any puppets that were still moving. It was one of the most depressing, disgusting things I’d ever had to do. But at least it didn’t take very long, and afterward I walked back to join the guys.

The Warlock was tending to Cooper with his healing crystal. Based on the huge purpling knots on my boyfriend’s face and body, he had taken another club to the eye and a couple to the shoulders and forearms before Pal spirited him away to safety. Pal stood close by, giving me a look I couldn’t quite read.

“Nice job,” Cooper said, apparently without irony or sarcasm.

My cheeks flushed. “ ‘Nice job’? No. There was nothing ‘nice’ about what I just did. That was really fucking horrible. I am going to see those bodies burning in nightmares the rest of my life, and no, I don’t care that they didn’t have souls and I was doing them a favor or whatever. I do
not
want to have to do that again, okay? So if you go off looking for a fight, don’t bring it back to me to deal with, dammit!”

Cooper stared back at me. “Okay. I’m
sorry.
”

He still had a look and tone of anger I didn’t like, but I bit my tongue on another heated reply. Now was not a good time to get into an argument with him.

I turned away to retrieve my backpack and the shotgun and Pal’s tack from the van. “We’re leaving.”

chapter
eighteen

Crazed State Unhinged

T
he sun was sinking low on the horizon as Pal and I followed Charlie’s van down the highway to the Cuchillo State University campus. The survivors had set up a tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire around a cluster of tan brick buildings in the middle of campus, walling off the Student Union, the health center, and two high-rise dormitories. The inside of the fence was buttressed with four-foot-tall sandbag walls with a rifleman keeping watch behind them every fifty yards or so.

A squad of skinny college-age boys dressed in a mix of coffee-stain desert combat fatigues, tiger-stripe airman battle uniforms, Air Force ROTC T-shirts, and grubby jeans were stationed at the sliding gate. They raised their rifles toward me and Pal, but Charlie waved at them from the driver’s window and told them to stand down. The young militiamen opened the gate for the van, and Pal flew us over the fence and landed us in the courtyard. People stared at Pal, but as with Rudy, they seemed only moderately surprised to find a giant ferrety spider monster landing in their compound. The crowd was mostly more young college- and military-age men and a few girls my age and a little younger.

And the courtyard was filled with cats: they rode in backpacks and slings and lounged on the concrete picnic tables. More cats napped on the sandbag wall or in the branches of the oak trees shading the courtyard. Something seemed oddly familiar about the cats, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I supposed that there are only so many different kinds of cats, and sooner or later one was bound to remind me of another. But all of them? It made me uneasy.

A swarthy thirty-something man in a short-sleeved Air Force uniform approached us. I saw gold oak leaves on his epaulets.

“Air support at last … fantastic.” He stuck his hand out to me as he looked Pal up and down. “I’m Major Woodrow Rodriguez, USAF, out of Fineman AFB, acting commander of military defense operations here. Got any more of these?”

He looked me square in the eye as I shook his hand, and in his gaze I saw a certain profound lack of interest in me as a woman. Guys usually either check you out a bit at first or dodge serious eye contact entirely to avoid seeming like they’re attracted to you. But as far as the major was concerned, I got the feeling I could have been a piece of talking furniture. When he saw the Warlock and my shirtless boyfriend get out of the van, though, there was a faint spark of interest in his face. Faint, but definitely there.

“More like Pal?” I replied. “No, sorry, he’s unique … but if you’re with the Air Force, why don’t you have planes and helicopters? And why is everybody here and not at the air base?”

I looked around at the whip-lean cadets and young militiamen standing guard and repairing weapons and attending to other duties in the courtyard, and I realized that if I were single, I’d be hard-pressed to find a date around here. Well, it made sense: I of all people knew the fierce tweak Miko could put on your hormones, and these boys had all survived at least a year of her tampering with their minds and bodies. Any gay kid growing up in a military-minded family in a small West Texas town would learn a monk’s restraint, or he’d probably end up broken, bloody, and crucified on a barbed wire fence before he turned twenty-one. Don’t ask, don’t tell, and most important, don’t die.

The major gave a harsh, barking laugh. “Fineman AFB is little more than a smoking crater now. Miko infiltrated the minds of some of our key personnel and brainwashed them into committing coordinated acts of domestic terrorism and treason against the base and their fellow airmen. Only a few dozen of us survived the assault on the base; we scavenged some small and medium arms, but most of the vehicles and all the aircraft were destroyed. Once Miko revealed herself and her intentions, we chose to activate the ROTC cadets here at CSU and reestablish our base of operations in these core campus buildings.”

Despite his scowling demeanor, the major had truckloads of square-jawed, take-charge charisma. A man’s man, through and through. My body was reacting to the smell of his testosterone-laden sweat; it didn’t care that he was gay. It didn’t care that I was in a committed relationship. It wanted what it wanted. And what it apparently wanted was to drive me to hang myself in frustration.

Oblivious to what was happening in my pants, the major gestured toward the high-rise dorms. “This isn’t your everyday college campus. In addition to generating its own power at the physical plant, it has its own sewage treatment and water reclamation facilities. Part of Miko’s attack on Fineman involved dumping psychoactive drugs in our water tower, so from the outset we knew we needed to keep tight security on our food and drink supplies. However, since her initial attack, she seems content to wage a war of attrition through demoralization.”

“So what did she say she wants?” I unbuckled the chin strap on my riding helmet and took the stifling headgear off.

The major gave me another coldly direct gaze. “She says she wants our souls. I was never religious before all this happened—and I certainly never believed in magic and flying spiders—but whatever she takes from a man, it’s the very essence of what makes him human. Nobody’s the same after she touches them. We’ve lost a lot of good men to her.”

“And women, too, I expect.”

The major looked away toward Cooper and the Warlock, who were unloading some boxes of ammunition from the back of the van into the waiting arms of the cadets. Gave a slight shrug. “Women, too. We did manage to evacuate as many mothers with children as possible before the city got locked down. It was only the right thing to do.”

Charlie came over to us, adjusting the cat’s sling nervously as she looked at the major. “Um, I need to take her to see Sara.”

“Of course.” The major straightened up and glanced down at his wristwatch. “And I need to attend evening security inspections.”

He gave me a curt, formal head bob, turned on his boot heel, and strode away.

“I think she’s in the North Tower,” Charlie told me. “But, um, your spider won’t fit so good in the lobby.”

I turned to Pal and pulled off the riding pad and saddlebags. “Do you think that just this once you could shrink yourself down? I’d hate for us to get separated given that things are mind-bogglingly screwed up around here.”

He blew a chord that sounded like a sigh. “Fair enough.” He began playing a different tune, and his body shrank until he stood about as tall as a mastiff. “Better?”

“Yeah, that should get you through a regular door,” I told him.

We collected Cooper and the Warlock and headed into the dormitory lobby. The building was only weakly air-conditioned, but it did provide some respite from the oppressive heat outside. A couple of young men were playing Team Fortress on an Xbox hooked up to the TV in the corner, and some others were reading books and playing cards at the tables. Sleeping boys were stretched out on all the sofas. It could have passed for a men’s dorm in most any college if not for the uniforms, general dinginess, and looming feeling of despair.

And the cats. There were cats
everywhere:
lounging on the TV, lurking in the bookshelves, curled up on the sleeping students. I felt a shiver when, as a group, they opened their yellow and green eyes and stared at me.

Charlie passed her AK-47 to the tired-looking blond girl stationed behind the front desk. “No guns allowed past the lobby unless you’re a resident advisor or an officer.”