Dies the Fire (8 page)

He spoke a little louder: “That goes for everyone here. Take what you can carry.”

The stocky Mexican gave him an odd look, then handed the three of them a platter of sandwiches and went, grunting a little at the weight of the cardboard box of food in his arms and the sack of dried beans on top of it. The rest of the staff trailed out in his wake, similarly burdened.

Juniper looked at the pastrami sandwich he'd made.

Her stomach contracted like a ball of crumpled lead sheet; she made herself eat anyway, and wash it down with a Dr Pepper.

Juniper kept her mind carefully blank as she and Dennis worked. She changed back into jeans and flannel shirt and denim jacket, then helped the manager—
ex-manager
—load their bicycles with sacks of flour and soy and dried fruit, blocks of dark chocolate and dates, blessing the Toad's organic-local cuisine all the while.

“No canned goods?” Dennis said, as she chose and sorted.

Juniper shook her head. “We'd be lugging stuff that's mostly water and container. This dried food gives you a lot more calories for the weight, when it's cooked. And throw in those spice packets, all of them. They don't weigh much, and I think they're going to be worth a lot more than gold in a while.”

The garage out back held a little two-wheeled load carrier of the type that could be towed behind a bicycle; Dennis used that for some of his tools before piling more food on top, and she didn't object. They stowed as much as they could in the storage area of the basement; that had a stout steel door and a padlock. When that was full, they stacked boxes of cleaning supplies and old files in front of it, hiding it from a casual search at least.

“Wait here a second,” Dennis said.

When he returned he had the shotgun from under the bar. He turned it on a stack of cardboard boxes and pulled the trigger.

It was his hopefully nonlethal backup for an emergency that had never happened—the Hopping Toad wasn't the sort of place where a barkeep needed to flourish a piece every other week.

He worked the slide twice and the second time he caught the ejected shell; then he cut off the portion that held the shot and set the base down on the concrete floor.

“Stand back,” he said, and dropped a lit match into it.

There
should
have been a miniature Vesuvius, a spear of fire reaching up from the floor to waist height into the dimness of the cellar, blinding-bright for an instant. Instead there was a slow hissing, and what looked like a very anemic Roman candle, the sort that disappointed you on a damp Fourth of July.

“What's
happening
?” Juniper cried after they'd stamped out the sparks and poured water to be sure.

“Juney . . . Juney, if I didn't know better, I'd say someone, or some One, just changed the laws of nature on us. As far as I can tell, explosives don't explode anymore. They just burn, sorta slow.” He ran a hand over his head. “Shit, you're the one who believes in magic! But this . . . it's like some sort of spell.”

Juniper raised her brows. She'd always thought Dennis was a stolid sort, a dyed-in-the-wool rationalist. She started to cross herself in a deep-buried reflex from a Catholic childhood, and changed it to the sign of the Horns. The idea was preposterous . . . but it had a horrible plausibility, after this day of damnation.

“Well, the sun didn't go out,” Dennis said, scrubbing a palm across his face. “And humans are powered by oxidizing food, and our nerves are electrical impulses . . . Maybe some quantum effect that only hits current in metallic wires, and
fast
combustion?”

Juniper snorted. “Does that mean that the dilithium crystals are fucked, Scotty?”

Dennis was startled into a brief choked-off grunt of laughter. “Yeah, that's bafflegabic bullshit, I'm no scientist—I just read
Popular Mechanics
sometimes, and
Analog
. We don't know what happened; all we know is that it
did
happen, at least locally . . . but who can say
how
local? Like you said, Juney, we gotta act like it's the whole world.”

He went over to another corner of the basement and dragged out a heavy metal footlocker. “I was keeping this stuff for John, he had it left over from what he sold at the last RenFaire and Westercon, and it was less trouble than taking it back home or all the way out east.”

“East?” she said.

She'd met John Martins now and then and liked him, although Dennis's elder brother was also a stoner whose musical world had stopped moving about the time Janis Joplin OD'd; besides that he was a back-to-the-lander and a blacksmith. Mostly he lived in a woodsy cabin in northern California, and made the circuit of West Coast dos and conventions and collectors' gettogethers. Of course, he and Dennis worked together a fair bit, with Dennis doing the leatherwork.

“Yeah, John's in Nantucket, of all places. He's got a girlfriend there, and there are a lot of the summer home crowd who can afford his ironwork and replicas. I hope to God everything's all right in Santa Fe East. John's a gentle sort.”

He unfastened the locker and threw back the lid. Reaching inside, he took out a belt wrapped around a pair of scabbards and tossed it to her.

“Put it on,” he said. “Jesus, I wish John
were
here. He's a good man to have around, under all that hippy-dippy crap.”

What she was holding was a palm-wide leather belt with brass studs and a heavy buckle in the form of an eagle. It carried a long Scottish dirk with a hilt of black bone carved in swirling Celtic knotwork and a broad-bladed shortsword about two feet long. She put her hand on the rawhide-wrapped hilt and drew it; the damascene patterns in the steel rippled like frozen waves in the lamplight. It was a
gladius,
the weapon the soldiers of Rome had carried from Scotland to Persia; the twenty-inch blade was leaf-shaped, tapering to a long vicious stabbing point.

Juniper took an awkward swing; the sword was knife sharp, not as heavy as she'd expected, and beautifully balanced. It was beautiful in itself, for the same reason a cat was—perfectly designed to do exactly one thing.

Except that a cat makes little cats, as well as killing,
she thought. And went on aloud: “I can't wear this!”

“Why not?” Dennis said.

He reached into the locker and drew out an ax—nothing like the firefighting tool he'd used in the brief street fight. It was a replica of a Viking-era Danish bearded war ax, and made with the same care that the sword had been; the haft was four feet of polished hickory.

“Why not?” he repeated. “ 'Cause it'll look
silly?
I'm going to be carrying
this,
you bet. Same reason I'd have taken the shotgun, if it worked. Lot of desperate people out there right now, more tomorrow—and a lot of plain bad ones, too. We already got some confirmation of that, didn't we?”

She swallowed and unwrapped the belt, settling the broad weight of it around her waist and cinching it tight—they had to cut an extra hole through the leather for that, but Dennis had the tools and skill to do a good quick job. The down vest she pulled on over it hid the hilts and most of the blades, at least, if she wore it open.

“I don't have the faintest idea how to use swords,” she complained as the three of them spent a grunting ten minutes moving a heavy metal-topped counter-table over the trapdoor to the basement.

“I just
sing
about them. And I don't know if I could actually hit someone with this.”

Dennis picked up the ax and hung it over one shoulder with the blade facing backward and the beard and helve holding it in place. Eilir was frightened but excited; she took a light hatchet and long knife to hang from her own belt.

Her mother felt only a heavy dread.

“It'll still
look
intimidating as hell, if we get into any more . . . trouble. God forbid! Anyway, I used to do some of this stuff,” Dennis said. “And I've got friends who do it steady—you do too, don't you?”

“Chuck Barstow,” Juniper said. “You met him last Samhain, remember? His wife Judy's the Maiden of my coven.”

Dennis nodded. “Hope to hell he turns up. I may remember enough to give you a few pointers. And damn, but we're better off than those poor bastards on the 747!”

“Amen,” Juniper said.

She winced for a second; if this whatever-it-was
had
happened all over the world, there would be tens of thousands in the air, or down in submarines, or . . . Her mind shied away from the thought; it was simply too
big.

“Focus on the moment,” she muttered to herself as they went out into the front room of the tavern, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. “Ground and center, ground and center.”

Then: “Dennie, what the hell are you doing? I thought money wouldn't be worth anything?”

The heavyset man had opened the till, scooping the bills into the pockets of his quilted jacket; then he ducked into the manager's office and returned with the cash box. He grinned at her.

“Yeah, Juney—it won't be worth anything
soon.
I want to look up an old friend on our way out of town.”

“Friend?”

“More of a business acquaintance. He runs a sporting-goods store, and sells grass on the side. Actually, he sells pretty much anything that comes his way and isn't too risky, which is why I'm betting he'll open up special when I wave some bills at him. If he were really a friend, I'd feel guilty about this, but as it is . . .”

 

 

 

Chuck Barstow stopped his bicycle by the side of the road and touched his face lightly as he panted. The glass cuts weren't too bad, and the bleeding seemed to have stopped—he'd been able to dive behind the desk when the 727 plowed into the runway about a thousand yards away. Despite the chilly March night he was sweating, and it stung when it hit the cuts.

He looked over his shoulder. Highway 99 ran arrow-straight southeast from Eugene Airport. It was nearly eight o'clock, and the fires behind him had gotten worse, if anything. The streetlights were all out, but the giant pyres where the jets had dropped towered into the sky, and were dwarfed in turn where one had plowed into the tank farm where the fuel was stored. He could see the thin pencil of the control tower silhouetted against the fire, and then it seemed to waver and fall.

I was there. Right there in that tower. Twenty minutes ago,
he thought, coughing at the heavy stink of burnt kerosene.

The highway was full of cars and trucks, both ways. Many of them had crashed, still moving at speed when engines and lights and power steering died together, and a few were burning. There were bodies laid out on the pavement, and people trying to give first aid to the hurt. More were trudging towards Eugene, but there was nothing except fire-lit darkness towards the city, either.

He could hear curses, screams, there two men slugging at each other, here two more helping an injured third along with his arms over their shoulders. A state trooper with blood running down his face from a cut on his forehead stood by his car with the microphone in his hand, doggedly pressing the send button and giving his call sign and asking for a response that never came.

“Chuck,” Andy Trethar said from behind him. “Chuck, we've got to keep going. They'll all be waiting for us at the store.”

Before he could reply, a stranger spoke: a tall dark heavyset man in an expensive business suit, looking to be two decades older than Chuck's twenty-seven.

“How much for the bicycle?” he said, looking between them. “I have to get to the airport
immediately.
”

“Mister, it's not for sale,” Chuck said shortly. “I need it to get back to my wife and daughter. And the airport's a giant barbeque, anyway.”

“I'm prepared to give you a check for a thousand, right now,” the man said.

“I said,
not for sale,
” Chuck said, preparing to get going again. “Not at any price.”

“
Two
thousand.”

Chuck shook his head wordlessly and got ready to step on the pedal. Judy would be worried, and Tamsin could sense moods like a cat—the girl was psychic, even at three years old.

The fist came from nowhere, and he toppled backward and hit the pavement with an
ooff!
Pain shot through him as the bicycle collapsed on top of him.

Someone tried to pull it away from him, and he clung to it in reflex. He also blinked his eyes open, forcing himself to see. Andy was pulling the heavyset man back by the neck of his jacket; the man turned and punched again, knocking Chuck's slightly built friend backward.

Some of Chuck Barstow's coreligionists were pacifists. He wasn't; in fact, he'd been a bouncer for a while, a couple of years ago when he was working his way through school. He was also a knight in the SCA, an organization that staged mock medieval combats as realistic as you could get without killing people. His daytime job as a gardener for Eugene Parks and Recreation demanded a lot of muscle too.

His hand snaked out and got a grip on the ankle of the man in the suit. One sharp yank brought him down yelling, and Chuck lashed out with a foot. That connected with the back of the man's head, and his yells died away to a mumble.

Sweating, aching, Chuck hauled himself to his feet; they pushed their bicycles back into motion and hopped on, feet pumping. The brief violence seemed to have cleared his head, though: He could watch the ghastly scenes that passed by without either blocking them out or going into a fugue.