Martin huffed. The wind left his lungs. His captive pulled back and rammed an elbow, again, deep into his side. The man sneered and had the face of a venomous toad, a backstabber. His red mouth parted wide to make a call for help.
Teresa pitched a mantle. It stuffed into his mouth like a glassine gag. The sides of the man’s mouth folded from the force and made him look deformed.
Martin swung into his face—but struck the mantle instead. His arm halted with an unnerving crack. “Fuck!” he reeled.
The suffocating acolyte tried to bowl him over. Martin struck with his other fist. He hammered the soft disc of skin over the man’s temple. The Off button.
Eyes flickered back and the body dropped. Teresa let go of the mantle.
Martin bounced back, already kneading the pain in his hand. For a moment they surveyed the fallen, both breathing in the dusty air in heavy draughts. It seemed that someone else would show up then. None did.
Teresa dipped into her pack for the rolls of electric tape. Martin bound each of the church members, one ankle back to one wrist, and then a couple circuits around the head to gag them.
Teresa began taking the rifle pieces out of her pack, one at a time. When Martin finished, he sat by her, building his weapon too.
Teresa tucked into the grass in attack position,
goddamn ready
, just as she had been so many Octobers before. From their location the wood structure resembled the silhouette of a dark head with a sloping, brimmed hat. It leaned to the chalky foothill, clearly off its foundation, if ever there had been one. Tangles of weeds and farm equipment. Under the overhang were three limousines, dreary with new dust. Martin tried to smooth the blurry view through his rifle scope. He wrung out his hand a few times. Teresa watched.
He better not insinuate it’s my fault he’d punched that mantle
.
He glided the sight across the earth. “They’re all pretty calm inside. We haven’t made a scary enough name for ourselves, I guess.”
Teresa rotated her rifle in the snaps of sunlight. The smell of cinnamon and nutmeg came fist over fist.
The Hearts
. She pushed her sunglasses up her nose. Martin’s eyes began to flutter shut.
“You haven’t recovered yet from the motel. That took something out of you.”
He winced at the mention of it
“I need your aim.” She leveled her sight and inspected the barn within a cold, bobbing sphere. “Have to flush them out somehow. We’ll have to take the barn down.”
“The Hearts are in there,” he reminded.
“If we go slowly—”
“Wait,” he said, “How will we take the barn down
slowly
?”
“Cut the support beams.” She pointed.
“Mantles again. We don’t need to whip ourselves yet. The gateway hasn’t opened. What if the whole place collapses? You’re just out of the hospital—”
“Shut up with the whining. I’ll do it.” The locus in her mind, that special zip code, that vagueness never explained,
turned
. Her eyes told the mantle where to move—another distant mechanism described the width and height. She extended the structure. The fibers of old, mealy wood projected onto the screen in her mind. Every thread of wood could be examined, every contour, every exit, every entrance, every pocket, every cul-de-sac, and she worked the mantle through the compounds and sensed the weakened bonds.
Sawdust bloomed through the openings. The barn lurched. Shouts lifted.
“Wait it out,” Martin breathed. “Let them all come first.” His finger steadied on his rifle’s trigger. His aiming eye narrowed to a cut.
Misty forms emerged as the barn’s walls leaned. Then, through the pouring black suits, two came, babies squeezed under each arm.
Teresa inched her pointer finger around the trigger.
“Now.”
Four suits hit the earth. A woman careened sideways, taken in the chest. It was like watching a mannequin fall off its stand. Inhuman. Until pale fingers touched past her chest and fear flashed in her green eyes. That lustrous hair flopped through the dirt and the gaze clenched tight and immediate. Martin moved his sight to another.
“Find cover for fuck sake!” yelled one man who struggled to hold a baby under each arm. A brawny man kept nearby, handling two Hearts of his own. He stuck the babies out between them for a bullet buffer.
With three separate jerks of the rifle, Teresa took another group hurrying around the barn—
twinge!
—another limped twice toward a tree and collapsed.
To the east, random fire came from a mound of corrosion that used to be a tractor. Several shots went by and ruffled Teresa’s hair. A bullet ricocheted off a rock somewhere behind.
“Martin, we need cover.”
“I—”
“Hurry!”
No mantle came.
“What’s the matter with you?” she demanded.
The men holding the Hearts ran for the tractor; covering fire accompanied their clumsy strides. Up until now shots had been sloppy and adrenaline-dumb, so it wasn’t shocking to see one holder twist around, a whip of blood lash from his stubbly brown neck. His knees knocked the ground and the papoose slipped into the dirt. His comrade dipped down to hurry him but it was too late. The eyes turned up into the head.
“Cloth!” Shouts from behind the tractor. “
Chaplain Cloth!
”
A grain silo burned in the hillside. Martin and Teresa ignored the intimidating roar. Cloth could do nothing for his followers.
The Nomads waited for a head shot. The remaining holder reached for the discarded papoose.
“Give it up, buddy,” Martin whispered.
The man glanced to the tractor for assistance, but his answer came in a horrifying groan. The barn shuttered to the side, finally unable to endure the internal damage Teresa caused. Inner Circle scrambled from their hiding spots like plague rats—Martin brought one crashing down and Teresa had another in her sight when the barn finished the job. A mountainous dust cloud eclipsed any evidence of the fleeing group.
The lone man stumbled through the grit and pulled the four babies over his lap like a blanket. He had a strangely triangular face and blue-black hair, both on his head and jaw. Teresa spotted a train of vehicles coming up the dirt road to the north. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”
“Keep an eye out.”
Martin followed her, rifle leveled as they crossed the field to the last standing from this spent platoon. The man yanked out a .38 special and fired through the haze. Teresa instantly met the shots with two flash mantles. Both bullets plinked off the invisible resistance and exploded into whizzing red hot scrap. The man dropped his gun hand to his thigh. His fevered eyes went back and forth for any trace of support. There was none.
The scent of the Hearts warmed the Nomads from the inside out. “Hand over your gun,” ordered Teresa.
With a flavorless laugh the man put the .38 to a baby’s temple. She turned to the barrel for assurance with soaked eyes. “There are legions,” said the man. “They’ll be here any moment with Bishop
Szerszen
. You will not win.”
“Think you’ll live that long?” Martin fingered his trigger. His hands were slick with sweat.
Another bland laugh and the man pulled back the hammer. The smell of love clung to the dirt and rotting wood. He regarded Martin and Teresa, hardboiled sorrow in the eyes. His wide lips twisted into a smile, just before the gun stuck in his mouth.
The shot buckled Martin’s knees. Teresa called out a late warning. The man keeled over, face first, in a clump of bone white weeds. The shot rang in Teresa’s numb eardrums.
Tension pulled above and below. Teresa could feel Chaplain Cloth trying to escape, enraged for his absence and the failure of his miserable humans. Martin took a knee and began adjusting a papoose. The other Teresa picked up. She wanted to cry. The pink faces peered back in wide-eyed wonder. They looked really tired. It wasn’t the right moment but she’d always daydreamed about a little girl of her own. Fertility was not a power Nomads had been granted. Not for this life. This was more difficult than she could have ever imagined.
The hiss of acceleration on dirt grew louder. A few distant shots rang out.
Stupid to try firing at such a distance
. Teresa could feel Cloth’s anger as he withdrew back into his hellish pit.
It took little time to reach the Wrangler. The Nomads did their best to adjust the restraints to fit each child. While Martin rechecked the babies, Teresa went back to change out the rifles. She turned the corner into a sharp sounding
thwack
. Her body lurched. She heard her head strike the bumper with the ringing pitch of a tuning fork.
~ * ~
Martin retched. Putrescence billowed off the man in the suit. He had a vermillion tear from ear to throat. Some of the wound had clotted and gummed and some had split open as he turned his head. The black suit was a mélange of multi-colored stains and rancid fragments. Toilet paper hung from his mangy hair like ornaments. The man let the broken plank fall to the dirt and drew a knife from his pocket.
He must have been in the outhouse when the barn collapsed
, thought Martin. He wanted to go for his gun but it hadn’t been reloaded.
The man stepped forward and slashed. Martin parried and raised his palm to the bastard’s nose—but the guy caught him one-handed and flung him into the Wrangler. Martin couldn’t take a breath before he was pinned under a thick forearm that smelled of sulfides.
Martin touched the cold spot, still lukewarm from exhaustion—there was nothing to draw. A merlot pebble tumbled down his neck. He breathed faster, hoping his muscles would compensate. The knife sunk deeper. An inch more and a stream pumped from the wound. He became lightheaded. Darkness boiled in his peripheral vision and terror pulled through his guts with freezing claws; the sensation cooled his mind; the tiny drop of power he found drifting on adrenaline drew forth a sandstorm of ghost matter—
In one hot instant, a mantle jumped between Martin’s skin and the blade. White sparks zipped away as the knife tore from the man’s fingers. The mantle flew forward and wrapped around the man like quick-drying cement. The man’s body encountered the trunk of an elm with a suddenness that made Martin wince, then smile. The mantle closed in, a perfectly contoured cocoon and pressed into his body. Gripped like a god fist. Bones crackled like dry twigs. Martin let the mantle recede. The indistinguishable mass slipped straight down to the ground in a bony mush.
Martin went to Teresa. The sweet sound of her breathing filled his ears and he saw her eyes stirring behind the lids. It wasn’t like her to pass out so easily, but she’d had head trauma already this week. She wouldn’t be out another two days, thank goodness. The cut on her head, just below the one from the nightstand, was wreathed in splinters and dirt crumbles. Two concussions in the last two days, her headache was going to be large. But he hadn’t lost her.
Martin checked the babies. They were thrashing around and fussing, but otherwise looked unharmed. He gave them pacifiers and they took them into their wet little mouths almost with gratitude. Their faces blurred. Murkiness tumbled over anything Martin’s eyes took in. He slipped his arms under Teresa and stumbled left and right.
Oh shit, you’ve gone and overdone it again
.
He buckled Teresa into the passenger’s side, shut the door and bumped into the Wrangler on his way around. Building the mantle had not been a mistake;
it
had to be done
, he reminded himself. Just in case this
loopiness
really set in, he put in the train yard destination in the GPS before driving down the foothill and losing his bearings completely.
They hit a paved road that curved around the canyon in an S shape. He glanced in the rearview. Nobody was following. His eyelids scissored. He blinked to keep them from closing again. Teresa turned in her seat.
The road narrowed and the canyon’s wall jutted perilously close. He avoided a few clusters of fallen rock. A horn blared. He pulled off into another, denser copse of elms, and killed the engine.
This wouldn’t work.
He held his breath, waiting for a limo to drive past. Maybe the horn hadn’t even come from this road.
Rest felt nice.
His eyes popped open. They had closed on their own. They fell shut again.
Paul immediately convinced himself it was a dream. He put his hands on the Priestess again and she shook her head. “Where’d I go?”
The notes of his whimpers complemented the epic pipe organ music. The Priestess stretched out to touch him. A sheen of sweat glistened over her brow and dark circles had been hammered under her eyes. Her fingertips touched his lower lip and the contact sent his body into a sudden panic. Huddled in the passenger seat, he sought to roll into the tightest ball possible.
“What have you done?” she whispered.
Paul couldn’t answer. Her hair moved off her shoulder and it sounded like a flood of sugar notes trailing into a minor scale. Her skin fluxed between bass drumbeats. The question did process though, even if his lips were unable to shape an answer. But he heard his words: “The seeds. All of the seeds.”
Everything the Priestess did now seemed hyperactive. Reality sucked in all at once. Next she took the plastic bag he’d handed her and she smelled inside. Her eyes swelled into planets and the pipe organs transitioned to a different melody.