Attack the Geek (6 page)

Chandra clicked her tongue ring against her teeth, pondering.

Uncle Joe calmed his shaking for a moment, saying, “We can’t let that thing in here. No way.” Joe looked like the movie version of shell-shocked. Ree didn’t know if she’d ever seen PTSD firsthand in an identifiable way; it’s not like people wore hats advertising their mental health challenges. But one way or another, she wasn’t betting on him making it through another skirmish.

Wickham had adjourned to the bar. Beside her sat a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue, two hundred-dollar bills out next to it. Whatever else Ree could say about Wickham, the woman wasn’t a thief.

“We have to split it up,” Grognard said. Ree looked back to the group, leaving Wickham to her top-shelf moping.

The barkeep continued, “There are too many possibilities. We can’t guarantee we’ll be ready with the solution. I’ll open the door, and I want Talon and Eastwood with me to hold it off. Ree, you use the comic and get the intel. When you’ve got it, tell us and we close the door. Then we make the rest of the plan. All right?”

The group nodded. Talon swapped her longsword out for a
naginata
, and Eastwood added a blue lantern ring next to his green.

“I don’t know whether to hate Geoff Johns or call him a genius,” Ree said, gesturing to the rings.

Eastwood shrugged. “It works.
Darkest Night
’s the best thing DC’s done in years.”

“I was always more of a Jack Kirby cosmic girl,” Ree said.

The other geeks gathered themselves up, each preparing in their own eccentric ways. Uncle Joe wobbled to his feet, muttering under his breath as he rearranged several cards into the first page of sleeves. Chandra hauled a shield approximately the size of Grognard across the room. Ree met the punk halfway, and they walked the
scutum
together, leaving it against the interior wall next to the door. Shade was still out for the count. Grognard had produced a blanket from somewhere and had it draped over the unconscious techie. Drake attached a bayonet to the end of his rifle, and had a black crystal loaded in the chamber.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen that one. Do I want to know what it does?” she asked as the group made themselves ready by the door.

“No,” said Drake and Grognard, in chorus.

“Roger that,” Ree said. She had her lightsaber strapped to her belt, phaser tucked into her apron, and had retrieved the issue of
Fantastic Four
#45, removing it from its case. It’d been a while since she handled a comic this old with her bare hands. As an undergrad she’d held an
Amazing Fantasy
#1 at the Rollins Rare Books Library, but that was with gloves. Now even touching the issue gave her a charge.

Ree flashed back to something Eastwood had told her, about a friend of his tearing up an
Action Comics
#1 to fight off a tornado, and lost herself for a moment in the fantasy of how insanely cool that would be.

The sound of splintering brought her back to reality. The
zot!
of Grognard’s wards had vanished completely.

“That’s our cue,” Grognard said, releasing the locks in record time.

“Have fun!” Wickham said from the bar, waving with her middle finger. Ree’s ears burned, but she didn’t have time to be snippy back.

The brewmaster counted in a hurried voice, “One.”

Ree held the comic over her head, in both hands.
I didn’t even get to read it,
she realized. She’d probably read the issue some time in the past, but never the original glossy, with its faded colors and smell of history.

“Two.” Drake exhaled, his rifle held vertically beside Grognard, Eastwood at his side.

“Three.”

Chapter Five

Karnak Knows Best

All at once, Grognard threw open the door, Eastwood tossed a fresh flare into the darkness, Talon and Chandra set the road-block-pike formation, and Ree tore the comic.

A flash of magic washed up her hands, arms, and then to her eyes.

The Minotaur loomed large in her vision, its fur burnt and horns partially melted by Grognard’s wards. But it kept coming, rushing forward at the opened door.

And as it moved, Ree saw the Minotaur in a combination of a first-person shooter HUD and a Terminator’s threat assessment screen. Circles popped up over the Minotaur’s horns, hide, axe, and the ring through its nose.

Minotaur
—Huge Size

Axe
—Huge

Hide
—Hardened against magic, piercing, slashing, and bludgeoning

Horns
—Deals damage to magical wards

Nose ring
—Vulnerable only to grappling. If removed, will remove magical protection on hide.

“Got it!” Ree shouted.

The Minotaur dove forward, leading with its horns, trying to force its way inside the door while Grognard and the others pulled on the heavy iron ring to close the door again.

“Watch out!” Ree shouted as the horn broke the threshold of the door, catching Eastwood across the right shoulder. The older geek snarled in pain, but held on with his left arm. The Minotaur got its head inside the door. From there, Ree knew it could pull the door open and then they’d all be hosed. She reached down and grabbed at the nose ring.

“Grab the ring!” she shouted, hauling on the metallic ring with all her might. Sadly, that wasn’t much. The ring didn’t budge, didn’t even seem to get the creature’s attention.

The world moved in slow-mo around her as Drake fired into the creature’s face, Talon and Grognard hacked at its nose, and the door started to wrench open.

“Help!” Ree shouted as the Minotaur shook its head, worming its way inside. She ducked under the mangled horns, trying to keep her grip.

She kept hauling on the ring, pushing against the creature’s snout with one foot.
Nothing doing.

Another pair of hands joined hers on the ring—large, gnarled, bloodied: Grognard’s. The pair of them pulled, but still it didn’t budge.

“Get this thing out of my bar!” Grognard shouted. The Minotaur had the door half-open, and Ree saw the axe glimmering in the light of the flares. As she felt rank-smelling Huge-Axe-Decapitation-Doom growing undeniably closer, she composed a letter in her brain.

Dear Dad,

If you’re reading this, then somehow my telepathic last message has been imprinted on something and reached you in Indianapolis.

Turns out that when I said, “It’s a bartending job, it’s not going to kill me,” I was a dirty liar. I’ve been hacked, dismembered, or otherwise murderated by a huge Minotaur alongside several of my closest secret-life friends and a snotty brat of a model (don’t mind her).

Tell the Rhyming Ladies I love them, and I’m sorry.

And mostly, I have to say I’m sorry to you, because I’ve been holding out.

Love,

Your Departed Daughter

P.S. Morbid much?

Ree shook off the fatalism and snapped back to reality, where Eastwood was blasting away at the Minotaur with both power rings, blue and green beams hitting side by side.

And doing not a bloody thing.

“I’ve got it!” Uncle Joe said, and Ree heard the sound of tearing mixed with the release of magic.

A spectral hand popped into existence in front of the Minotaur. It swept Ree and Grognard off of the creature’s snout, pushing them back into the bar.

“The fuck!” Ree said. But then, the hand pushed at the Minotaur, the hand larger than the creature’s head. The Minotaur strained against the hand, snorting. Its eyes were red, and it had dropped the axe, pulling at the sides of the doorway. But inch by inch, the hand pushed the creature out of the door. Grognard leapt up and pulled the door shut, re-sealing the wards. “That door isn’t going to keep it out for long,” Ree said, looking back at Uncle Joe, who she suspected had pulled out the save.

“Was that a Bigby’s Hand spell?” she asked.

Joe had crumpled to the floor, binder at his feet. “Mint Limited edition, from the canceled
Dungeons & Dragons
trading card spell expansion in 1992. They only made four test sheets. That was all of them.”

Uncle Joe looked lost, hollowed out. Ree couldn’t imagine how hard that must have been for him—giving up singular artifacts like that. That’d be like Ree burning the only remaining
Star Wars
laserdiscs, or the original scripts for
X-Men
#1. There were times when Geekomancy totally blew. In fifty years, would any of their material culture be left?
Or will people like me use it all up?

She looked to the floor at the torn comic. Digital editions were replacing every medium in narrative—she’d heard some chatter about digital transition for Geekomancy, but every answer she heard raised more questions. Not to mention how it’d change the experience for readers and viewers.

Ree felt a hand on her shoulder, and she pulled herself out of the maudlin of self-reflection. It was Drake.

“Are you quite all right, Ree?”

Ree exhaled. “Yeah. I just wish we didn’t have to destroy things for this magic.”

“You don’t have to,” Drake said. “The more prepared you are, the more you can use the renewable sources. But these are pressing times, and your life is worth more than an individual incarnation of a text or a trading card.”

Ree squeezed Drake’s hand.
Why do you have to be dating Priya?
Ree whined to herself, then sighed and looked around the room, jumping back into the moment.

Across the bar, Wickham’s movements were a shade sloppier, her bottle an inch emptier. The woman was actively ignoring the group.
Better than heckling,
Ree thought. Grognard stood by the door, rolling red-on-black dice while holding his back to the door. Eastwood was beside him, lending his middling weight.

“What’s the word on the wards?” Ree asked.

Grognard cursed under his breath. “Shitty, that’s the word. I can’t reset anything while Toro out there is ripping my door to shreds.”

“What can we do to help?” Chandra asked.

The brewmaster chuffed with his half-laugh. “Hold the door and pray to whoever you can get to listen.”

The gang piled on to the door, which led to a reverse game of whack-a-mole, where they tried to keep away from the parts of the door being torn up by the Minotaur’s horns. The door was quickly approaching the consistency of Swiss cheese, and shortly after that, it’d just shatter entirely.

“Wait. I can help.” Uncle Joe flipped through his binder, and pulled out several square-edged cards. They looked hand-cut rather than machined like most CCG cards.

He joined the group, then tore up a card and put his hand to the door. Several of the gaps closed up.

“But first . . .” Uncle Joe tore up another card, then reached through one of the holes and slapped the cards on the opposite side.

A moment later, there was a
KABOOM!
from the sewer.

Uncle Joe grinned. “Explosive Runes.”

“That thing can read?” Ree asked.

The cardmaster shrugged. Uncle Joe tore up another card, which closed the remaining gaps in the door.

“That should give you some time,” Joe said.

Well, hot damn,
Ree thought. “What’s gotten into you?” she asked.

A mad smile hit Uncle Joe’s face: the smile of a berserker or a mad bomber who bombed at midnight. It was the face of “I no longer give a fuck.”

“I’ve already dropped a grand tonight. What’s another few hundred dollars?” he said.

Grognard rolled the dice once more, then whooped. There was another
thud
,
but this time, it was met by an equally loud
zot
.

The brewmaster stood and slid the dice back into his apron. “That will hold it for a while. Now, how exactly do we kill that thing? The nose ring?”

Ree nodded. “If you pull the ring out of its nose, the immunity goes away. But it has to be done by hand. And it isn’t exactly easy.”

“So we need some superstrength,” Eastwood said, stomping his way over to the store section.

“I got it,” Ree said, producing her phone. She had clips to spare for this one. Namely, the entirety of “Chosen,” since she found herself defaulting to Buffy powers so often.

“No good. We want superstrength multiplied by normal strength. It should be me,” Grognard said. “Bring me those Hulk gloves.”

Ree stepped up to the store section, then heard movement off to her right. She looked back to the group, then to a clearly inebriated Wickham at the bar.

“What was that?” she asked.
Mice? Cockroaches?
But it hadn’t sounded like skittering. It was more like shuffling.

She stepped over an aisle and caught another flash of movement at the end of the row. “Ha!” she said, rushing down the aisle. Minotaur or no, she was not going to let some vermin run around and trash her (well, Grognard’s) store.

“What the hell are you doing?” Grognard asked from across the room.

“There’s something here, boss.” Ree peeked around the corner of an aisle, and saw it.

The fuck?
It was a
Warhammer 40K
Ork bike, painted red (naturally), from one of the pre-painted sets Grognard sold on commission.

And then, from behind her, she heard blaster fire. She hit the deck, turned, and saw that an Amidala’s blaster pistol prop was firing at random, twitching on its rack.