Soft Apocalypses (22 page)

A sudden dizziness washed over me; I realized my unconscious body’s face was turning blue. I pitched forward, back into my flesh, and awoke coughing and gagging, strained lungs burning, desperately grabbing at the pole to keep myself from tumbling off the wobbly crosspiece to the waiting teeth below. My arms were trembling, my hands barely able to grip the wood. The knife, meanwhile, had splooshed down into the swamp.

A bloody paintball whizzed past my right ear.

“I gotta say, I seen a whole bunch o’ witches, but I ain’t never seen ‘em pull a trick like that. I guess I need to have a talk with ol’ Boudreaux about the importance of the Lord’s work. You might be feelin’ right clever right now, but I got a flame-thrower back at the house. We’ll see how you pray when I set your pretty little face on fire.”

I felt exhausted and light-headed; I didn’t think I could spiritually project myself again for a while. I scooted around so the bulk of the post was between me and Brother Hiram. Hopefully it would block most of his shots. I didn’t think he could really hurt me unless he got blood in my mouth or eyes, but it was better not to take the risk. For all I knew, he had laced his paintballs with shards of glass or something else to cut skin.

I closed my eyes again and concentrated on reaching out to my familiar.
Pal, are you out there? Pal?

Jessie, I couldn’t get through to anyone on your phone.
His voice was distorted in my mind. I hoped that meant he’d been able to change his form.
But I have another idea. Where are you?

Down at the swamp
, I replied.
Hurry!

Rufus bellowed again and began to slam the post with the side of his enormous head, trying to shake me off my perch. Brother Hiram fired a couple more paintballs at me that went wide. Undead sometimes don’t have very good daytime vision, and that was a small mercy.

Suddenly, I heard an even louder, bearish roar from the trees above us. My heart jumped with surprise and hope. Pal must have found a battery with a really good charge and had managed to get himself into his form that blended all his past bodies: he was a gigantic shaggy spider with a four-eyed head that looked like a saber-toothed tiger’s by way of a mescaline hallucination. In his forelegs, he gripped a pair of rusty machetes.

“Yeah, Pal!” I hollered. “Kick their asses!”

Pal galloped down on Brother Hiram’s crew, swinging the blades right and left. I saw arms and heads fly along with sprays of black blood. But then the ghoulish preacher grabbed my shotgun and started blasting away at my familiar. Pal shrieked as buckshot bit into in his side, but he grabbed one of the zombies and threw him on top of Hiram, knocking him down. The weapon flew out of the preacher’s hands and landed in a thatch of swamp azalea partly overgrown with kudzu vines.

I swore. Adrenaline flooded my bloodstream, giving me energy I thought I’d lost for the day. I had to help Pal: I had to get to shore, somehow.

Rufus was leaping at me again, his claws scrabbling at the pole as if he hoped to be able to climb the wood. His mouth was open wide, gaping like a baby bird’s.

I climbed higher on the pole, held on for dear life, gritted my teeth, and used my legs to lift the wooden crosspiece off the hooks. And at that moment, Brother Hiram finally got his wish: I started praying.

“Please, God, let this work,” I said to the sky, my whole body shaking with fear and exertion. “Please, please, please.”

Then I dropped one knee, letting the wooden bar tumble down. Bullseye! Rufus gave a strangled roar as the wood rammed right down his gullet, and he fell backward, furiously shaking his head to try to dislodge the crosspiece.

It wouldn’t distract him long. I jumped down into the water and swam as hard as I could toward Pal, who was hacking up another zombie. Brother Hiram had almost pulled my shotgun free of the kudzu.

Cursing, I surged out of the water and kicked Hiram in the small of his back. He stumbled but didn’t fall, and swung the shotgun toward me. I was ready for him this time; I grabbed the barrel and slammed my knee into his groin. There was the sound of old bone cracking, and his grip loosened enough for me to wrestle the weapon away from him.

And then I did what I meant to do in the first place: I jammed the shotgun under his chin, closed my mouth, and pulled the trigger. His head came apart like a rotten watermelon and his body collapsed like a sack of garbage straight down to the mud.

The zombies fighting Pal abruptly dropped their fists and weapons, seeming confused and unfocused. Most of their cunning and motivation had apparently come from Brother Hiram. I looked out at the swamp; Rufus had stopped struggling against the wood stuck in his throat and once again resembled nothing more than a half-submerged log.

“Are you okay?” I called to Pal.

“For now.” Pal lopped off a couple more heads, then tossed me his second blade. “I’m sure my blood’s been tainted, but I should be able to keep my mind about me for a few more hours. And I know Madame Devereaux can cure what my own powers cannot. Let’s finish these fellows off before they get hungry and decide to wander into town.”

I helped Pal decapitate the rest of the gang, and then we went back up to the trail to the old house.

Brother Hiram had left a couple of sentries behind, but they were just as dumb and befuddled as the others now that he was dead. Once we’d put them out of their misery, Pal stuck his tongue in a handy electrical outlet and shocked himself back down to his ferret form. We searched the house, and found both Boudreaux Metier and Miz Deveraux’s healing crystal up in the attic.

Boudreax wasn’t undead, exactly, but he was agonizingly thin and sick-looking. Hiram had chained him to the floor and drugged him into a trance with whatever the old-fashioned glass IV was dripping into his arm. He was reciting the same spell over and over through his chapped, blistered lips: this was the source of the anti-magic field.

The carved healing crystal sat discarded on a nearby set of dresser drawers, surrounded by ceramic knickknacks and sundry other junk. The image of Hygeia looked enough like the Virgin Mary at first glance that Brother Hiram probably never realized what it was. I grabbed the crystal and spoke the magic word Madame Devereaux had given me to activate it. It glowed blue in my hand.

I knelt beside Boudreaux, gently pulled the needle from his arm, and pressed the statuette against the suppurating ulcer it had made. It glowed brighter, and his deathly pallor flushed to an almost-healthy pink. He stopped chanting, his jaw falling slack. A snore rattled in his throat.

“Hey Boudreaux.” I patted his cheek. “Wake up.”

His eyes popped open. After a moment of unfocused, chain-fighting panic, he seemed to see me, realize I wasn’t a zombie, and relaxed.

“Where’s Hiram?” he croaked.

“Dead,” I replied.

“Good.” He coughed. “That’s the
last
time I invite my damn in-laws over for Thanksgiving! You wouldn’t have a Dr. Pepper, would ya?”

“I saw some in the kitchen.” I began to undo his chains. “Let’s get you downstairs, and then we’ll all go over to Madame Devereaux’s.”

Boudreaux stared at the crystal in my hand. “Aw, crap, I was s’posed to get that back to her!”

“Don’t worry about it; I’m pretty sure she’ll understand that you’ve been a little tied up over here ....”

The Leviathan of Trincomalee

Thilini Rothschild saw the green fireball streaking across the sky above the coconut palms before her father did. “Look, Papa!”

“Why, that’s an extraordinary meteor! I’ve never seen one of such color.” He peered out at the night sky through his workshop window. “It’s fortunate that will crash far out in the Indian Ocean and not in a city!”

She gazed at the fireball’s sparkling emerald tail, entranced and yet feeling a bit crestfallen. “I hoped it was falling star so I could wish upon it.”

“Why, I’m sure a fine meteor such as that is just as wish-worthy!”

So she closed her eyes and thought,
I wish for an adventure!

Three years later, Thilini had forgotten all about the meteor. She woke before the first crows of her mother’s junglefowl, wound on her favorite green sari, and slipped out to the kitchen to gather some cold chickpea fritters and jackfruit in a basket. Her father would still be at his workshop by the harbor; no doubt he’d been working on his wireless telegraph machine all night. He’d probably forgotten to eat.

Excitement jittered in her stomach. Today was the day the
Southwind
would return, her hold creaking with goods. If the special gears and glass panels her father had commissioned from his partners in Switzerland arrived with it, that meant they might finally be able to assemble the submarine prototype she and her father had been working on for the past year. Thilini couldn’t wait to see the ocean from beneath the waves.

She hefted the reed basket over one shoulder, slipped into the sandals her mother made her leave by the front door, and ran down the wagon-rutted road to the harbor shops. To her surprise, a stout, balding man was standing in the shop, arms crossed. Her father frowned up at him from his workbench, his eyes shadowed in the flickering candlelight. Biting her lip, she pushed open the front door, quietly so the bells wouldn’t jingle.

“You’re wasting your talents here,” the stranger lectured in German. “You need to go back to Europe. Or at least come to our estate in Kandy.”

Her father pulled off his wire-framed round glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. His long curly brown hair had come loose from his queue. He looked exhausted. “I’m fine, Martin. The clean air here suits me more than the noise and stink of Frankfurt or London.”

He looked past Martin and his eyes focused on Thilini.

“Ah, you brought breakfast?” he asked her in Tamil.

“Yes, Papa. Who is this?”

“Your uncle Martin,” he continued, still speaking in her native language. “Pay him and his unpleasantness no mind.”

“Yes, Papa.”

“‘Attān’?” Martin said, repeating her endearment, staring at Thilini. Recognition seemed to dawn; he grimaced in disgust. He stared back down at her father, eyebrows raised. “Are you this little pickaninny’s sire?”

Her father turned red as a berry, his fists clenching in his lap. “I’ll not have you speak about my daughter in such a debased fashion.”

“Debased?” Martin exclaimed. “It is you who have debased our family! Rothschilds dance in the courts of every ruler in Europe, and yet here you are, tinkering in the sand, breeding like a mongrel with the first brown bitch who wiggles her tail at you.”

It was Thilini’s turn to feel the blood rise in her face. She could bear insults to herself with all the quiet grace her parents had taught her, but she would not stand by while this stranger spoke so badly of her mother. But her father responded before she could open her mouth.

“I have lived upon five continents.” Her father’s voice shook with rage. “And Thilini’s mother is the finest woman I have ever met. None of the simpering court ladies you and your brothers deemed so suitable as matches have half the beauty, intelligence, or courage of my dear Anula.”

“Indeed,” Thilini replied in her best German. “If my mother is such a poor match for my father, I should be a useless idiot, should I not? So, test me. Ask me any question you like, in any language you like.”

Martin was clearly surprised she knew German at all. “Who’s the tsar of Russia?”

“Alexander the Third.”

“And the President of the United States?”

“Grover Cleveland. Please, do ask me something difficult, dear Uncle.”

Martin frowned. “What’s the square root of eighty-one?” he asked in French.

“Nine,” she replied in English.

“What are the components of black powder?” he asked in German.

“Sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter,” she replied in French. “I can make you some if you like. The recipe is easier than my mother’s fish soup.”

“Why doesn’t your father’s wireless telegraphy machine work?”

She smiled at him. “And now you’re fishing for trade secrets, Uncle.”

Her uncle stared at her. “How old are you?”

“I shall be thirteen in two months.”

After Martin left, her father fussed at her a bit for speaking so boldly to her uncle, but clearly he was proud of her. They ate the breakfast she brought, and then he sent her down to the docks with their portable telegraph prototype. It was based on some of the correspondences he’d had with the American inventor Brooks. The device almost worked, but the power supplies they’d tried were insufficient for the components.

“I’m sure the new electrochemical cells will do the trick. It’s just a matter of fine-tuning the equipment,” he said as he loaded the sixty-pound rig onto her little palmwood wagon.

“Can we make it smaller?” she asked doubtfully.

He laughed. “Reliability first. Miniaturization second.”

Thilini hauled the wagon down to the docks and took up a vantage point where she could keep watch for the tall sails of the
Southwind
. Occasionally, part of a telegraph would come through; she’d transcribe the message and jot down the time in her notebook. The first time they’d gotten anything at all to transmit and be received through thin air, they’d both been overjoyed. But getting an entire message to go through over distances more than ten feet or so had proved a confoundingly difficult challenge.