Mercury Retrograde (3 page)

The road. Almost there. His boots crunched in gravel, and he nearly fell when he arrived at the shoulder. Bracing his hands on his knees he looked north and south at the empty, wavering asphalt. The sun had set, and stars prickled out above the mountains, swimming in his vision. He couldn't make out which one pointed north; they all spun overhead like a bad acid trip.

Somebody had to come. They just
had
to.

He waited for what seemed like forever until he saw headlights in the distance. He straightened, brushed futilely at the filth on his jacket, and stuck out his thumb like he knew what the hell he was doing.

The headlights came closer, washing over him. He closed his eyes.

Pleasestoppleasestopplease. . .

An engine ground to a halt, and he opened his eyes. A tractor trailer slowed beside him, the passenger's side window rolled down. By the dim green light of the instrument panel, Cal could make out a flannel-­encrusted dude with a goatee.

“This is a long way from anywhere, kid,” the trucker said. “Where you headed?”

“I'm trying to get to Temperance. My motorbike ran out of gas, and I got no way to get there.”

The trucker paused to light a cigarette. The ember danced like a firefly. “I'm going that way. Get in.”

“Thanks, man.”

Please don't let this guy be a perv.
Cal cringed inwardly. But he opened the door and scrambled up the running board to get inside. The cab smelled like cheeseburgers and corn chips. A glow-­in-­the-­dark figurine of a plastic alien danced from the rearview mirror.

Cal slammed the door, scooted as close to the window as he could, and wrapped his hands around his stomach to stifle the gurgling. He didn't want the guy to think he was gonna shit in his truck. That would be epically bad.

The driver put the truck in gear, and the semi growled down the road. The cigarette bobbed in the dark, but the driver didn't say a word. His right hand reached toward Cal.

Cal squealed and clawed at the door handle. The truck had to be going at least forty, if he jumped . . .

“Relax, kid.” The trucker reached down to the littered floorboards and lifted a bag of potato chips. “Have some.”

Cal gingerly accepted the crinkling yellow bag, and the trucker's hand returned to the steering wheel. Cal's shaking fingers wormed inside, and he lifted a chip to his mouth. It tasted stale, but the salt soothed his swollen tongue. “Thanks.”

The truck driver looked at him sidelong. “Temperance. Small town. Is your dealer in Temperance?”

Ah, shit. Well, maybe it was best if the guy thought Cal was going through some hellish withdrawal. That would be the most benign explanation, anyway. “Something like that.”

“Mmm-­hmm.” The driver didn't sound especially inclined to make it any of his business.

Cal glanced out the window, at the miles flashing by. His pale face was reflected back at him in the glass, superimposed over the dark landscape . . .

. . . and mercury leaked out his nose.

He rubbed at his nose with his sleeve, smearing it away. He glanced back at the trucker.

The dude was watching him.

Shit.

Sweating, Cal turned back to the window. Silver beads of liquid began to spring out on his forehead. He wiped them away with his shaking hand, but he could feel the metal squirming under his skin. The mercury licked up over his eyes, covering the whites and the irises. He could see through it, as if he were looking through tinted sunglasses, and he gasped.

“Hey, what's wrong with you?”

The truck swerved. Cal twisted around to see the trucker pulling a gun out from under the driver's seat. The driver shoved a pistol against Cal's nose, and Cal shrank back up against the door of the truck, holding his hands up.

“Be cool, man, be cool!” he squeaked.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” the trucker shouted at him, while the cold metal slipped from Cal's nose to his upper lip.

The rig swerved into the left lane. Headlights shone in the bug-­smeared windshield before them. A tinny horn sounded. The car in the left lane ran off into the ditch without making contact.

“Don't do that, man!” Cal rasped. A tear leaked out from his eye. In fascination, he watched as the mercury reached out, spiraling around the barrel of the gun.

“You're one of
them
, aren't you?”

“One of who? What?”

“Them! One of the Greys!”

Cal's eyes flickered to the alien figurine bouncing against the windshield. Oh, fuck . . . this guy was a true believer. “Oh, shit. No, man I'm from Earth, I swear. I come in peace!”

The trucker pulled the trigger.

Cal shrieked, expecting his brains to blow out all over the seat. But the mercury had wrapped itself around the gun, absorbing the concussive impact with a belch-­like bubble and a sound like a blown tire.

The driver sawed the wheel back. The tires screamed, and the cab of the truck tipped up on two wheels. He dropped the gun to struggle with the wheel, but it was too late. The back end of the trailer came around, and they were sideways in the road, sparks showering against the pavement and metal shrieking.

Cal pitched forward against the windshield, then lashed back like a rag doll as the truck jackknifed and skidded across the road. The cab landed in the ditch with a force so great that the roof wrinkled like aluminum foil. Steel and glass howled.

Cal whimpered against the floorboards. He clawed his way up through the debris of old newspapers and spilled potato chips, peering at the driver's side. The trucker slumped over the wheel. His hands dangled motionless, but Cal couldn't see his face.

Cal clambered up to the seat. A huge spider-­shaped crack spread across the windshield right across from him, roughly where Cal's head had hit. Cal touched his forehead. His fingertips brushed what felt like the cold chrome of a car bumper, not warm flesh.

“Damn it,” he cried. He reached to open the passenger door, but it was wedged against the side of the drainage ditch, wouldn't open more than a ­couple of inches. Cal worked the crank of the window, succeeding in getting it partway down. He wriggled his lanky frame through and out onto the bank.

He lurched forward into the safety of the weeds before he turned back. The truck had folded in on itself on the road, and he smelled gasoline.

Pain lanced through his stomach, and he doubled over, spitting a string of mercury out on the ground.

He squinted ahead, seeing light. The truck's headlights illuminated an arrow-­shaped road sign:
TEMPE
RANCE 3 MILES
.

Maybe the crazy guy had gotten him close enough.

He limped off into the darkness.

D
arkness was split by a low growling.

Petra bolted upright in a tangle of blankets. Moonlight filtered through the blinds of the Airstream trailer she called home, striping her futon bed and the linoleum floor in streaks of black and white.

A shadow crossed the floor. Sig. He'd climbed off the futon and stood before the door. The dim light outlined the fur raised on his back. His lips were drawn back in a snarl, exposing white teeth.

“Sig . . . what is it?”

Sig continued to growl, eyes fixed on the door. Petra heard nothing, but that didn't mean that nothing was out there.

She didn't have much worth stealing. Her 1978 Bronco was parked out in the gravel in front of the trailer, all buttoned up for the night. Somebody would have to be out of their mind to try to boost that ride. Her geology picks, GPS, and other tools were in a duffel bag inside the trailer. Aside from the gold pendant her father had given her, and the Venificus Locus, they were the most valuable things she owned. She kept some cash stuffed behind the paneling of the walls, but that would be hard to find.

Under a blue tarp near the door was her latest project—­the one thing she couldn't hide well or lock up. At one of the reservation swap meets she'd gone to with Maria, she'd picked up a motorcycle frame and an accompanying heap of parts on a whim. She'd cleaned the rust off of the WWII-­era BMW R75 frame and had just begun tinkering with the ignition plate and draining rainwater out of the odometer to see if it could be salvaged. The sidecar was a rust-­eaten disaster and would likely need to be reconstructed entirely from scratch, but she liked the idea of seeing if Sig would take to a sidecar. The restoration would likely take her years of cobbling together bits and pieces. She hadn't ridden since college, but it felt like she needed something to do at home to take her mind off things. The pile of rusted junk was probably also a prime target for thieves looking to make a quick buck.

She reached under the futon for her gun belt and drew one of the antique pistols from the beat-­up leather. She climbed out of bed, padding across the floor in bare feet. Her toes curled, feeling unprotected against the floor, but she felt secure enough to answer a threat at the door in the sweatpants and T-­shirt she slept in.

His head low to the ground, Sig crept closer to the door, stalking in slow motion.

A shadow crossed the window of the screen door. Someone
was
there.

The shadow knocked. In the silence of night, the sudden sound made her jump.

Her grip slick on the pearl grips of the gun, Petra crept to the door.

The knock sounded again, harder and faster. Sig barked, snarling like a dog ten times his size.

“What do you want?” she shouted, loud enough to be heard beyond the door.

A thin voice seeped around the cracked weather stripping: “Petra. It's me, Cal.”

Cautiously, she sidled up to the door. She pushed the blinds apart with the gun barrel. The silhouette of a gawky teenage boy dressed in black stood on her step, hands stuffed in his pockets.

Petra swallowed a lump in her throat. “Are you alone?”

That was the key question. She felt somewhere in her gut that Cal could be a decent kid, but shit had gone pear-­shaped when he got in with the wrong crowd. Last time she'd seen him, he'd been deceived into luring her to Stroud's Garden for a bloodletting. She trusted him about as far as she could throw him.

“I'm alone. Unarmed, too. Please . . . I need your help.”

At her feet, Sig gave a feral yip.

“You wanna tell me why I shouldn't call the cops? They're still looking for you.”

“Please. I got nobody else.” He sounded plaintive, like a lost emo puppy.

Against her better judgment, she unlatched the door. She stood back, aiming the gun before her.

“Come in. Hands up.”

Cal nudged the door open and stepped inside. In a flash, Sig had backed him against a wall in a flurry of fangs and fur.

“What do you want?” She fumbled behind her for the light switch, keeping her gun trained on Cal.

The light clicked on, and she gasped.

Beneath a shock of black hair, Cal's eyes were silver, silver like coins on a dead man's eyes. Liquid metal tears oozed from them, dribbling down his chin.

“Oh, shit,” she breathed.

 

“W
hat happened to you?”

Petra held the gun before her in a quavering grip. She hadn't seen anything like this . . . not since Stroud's Alchemical Garden, when Stroud had been holding himself together with duct tape, chewing gum, and a whole lot of sorcery.

“I'm not sure.” Cal shifted unsteadily from foot to foot. He took a step toward Petra, and Sig snapped at him. He backed up against the wall.

“Where's Stroud?” she demanded. It was impossible to believe that he didn't have something to do with this. She believed him dead when his house blew up, but . . .

“I don't know. I swear. I was digging around in the ruins after the Garden burned down, and saw this . . .” He turned over his hand and opened it. The skin of his palm rippled with grey shadows underneath. “It grabbed me. It wouldn't let me go.”

“The mercury,” she breathed.

“Yeah. Yeah . . . and it hurts.” Silver tears spilled from his eyes. “You gotta help me.”

“Jesus, Cal.” She holstered the gun.

Cal slumped against the wall, his eyes flickering closed. Petra caught him before he fell.

“We gotta get you to a hospital.”

His eyes opened. “No! No hospital.”

“You're sick, Cal. You've got heavy metal poisoning and God only knows what else.” She grabbed his wrist for a pulse, and it thundered under her fingers. “Your heart can't take this.”

“No.” He shook his head as Petra lowered him to a chair. “Stroud could handle it. It didn't kill him. You gotta find a way . . .”

Petra retreated to the back of a trailer for a bra, a beat-­up military jacket, and a pair of boots. She snatched her keys, wallet, and cell phone from the kitchen counter.

“No. Stroud was magic.
He
might have known what he was doing, but he clearly didn't share that with you. I'm driving you to the ER.”

Cal tried to climb to his feet. “I'm not going.”

And he fell to the linoleum like a ton of bricks.

“Cal!”

Petra hovered over him. His pulse still thudded strongly. She pried his eyelid up, and the mercury cataract had retracted. Maybe that was good. Maybe bad. But figuring out which was beyond her pay grade.

She ran outside to unlock her rust-­colored Ford Bronco. She popped the passenger's side door and had to fight Sig out of the passenger's seat.

“You can't come,” she insisted. She reached forward for his collar and dragged him out.

She went back for Cal. She saw no sign of the leaking mercury. It was as if it had trickled back beneath his skin. Grasping him under his arms, she managed to drag him through the trailer door. His legs bounced on the steps, and his heels dragged in the dust as she hauled him to the truck and shoveled him in. Throwing his torso across the bench seat, she flung his stringy legs in after him. A seat belt was a waste of time on that pile of goth spaghetti.

Sig paced outside the truck, growling. As she opened the driver's side, he lunged inside, heading for the darkness of the backseat of the Bronco.

“Sig . . . I don't have time for this.”

His eyes glowed in the back. He was resolved.

She jammed the key in the ignition and cranked the engine. She flipped on the lights and peeled away down the gravel road, conscious of the gold coyote eyes boring a hole in her back. She was certain that Sig thought she was the stupidest human who had ever lived.

“What do you want me to do? Turn a sick kid away?”

Sig huffed.

“This isn't going to end well, is it?” She knew that shit was going bad, could feel it creeping up on them.

Sig didn't comment, just let her stew in her frustration.

Miles whipped by in the dark, marked by faded stripes on the pavement and the gathering of clouds on the western horizon that scrubbed out the stars. She pushed the old Bronco to its limit, the engine roaring underneath the hood like a dinosaur with a head cold.

Petra chewed her lip as she glanced down at Cal. He'd picked up something from Stroud, something awful. She rubbed her hand on the side of her jacket. Some of Stroud's magic had sneaked up on him. She had no idea how contagious it was, but she sure as hell didn't want to find out.

Stroud had a freakish relationship with mercury. As an alchemist, he'd had the ability to work the element as an extension of himself. She'd seen him wear it as liquid armor, seen it deflect bullets. She'd even heard it rumored that he'd used it to choke a cop nearly to death. It was powerful magic, but Stroud had had many years to harness it. Maybe he invented it himself; maybe it was something he'd cooked up following a recipe from Lascaris. Maybe he inherited it; she'd heard that Stroud could trace his lineage back to the founder of Temperance and the local madam. However Stroud had come by it, it was bad news for Cal.

The nearest hospital lay twenty miles away, at the county seat. This time of night, and this far out in the middle of nowhere, Petra had expected that the tiny ER would be empty, perhaps occupied by a solitary drunk or a pregnant woman in labor.

But the emergency room was packed. The two-­story cement building was surrounded by a nearly-­full asphalt parking lot. As Petra parked and hopped out of the Bronco, an ambulance with flashing lights screamed by. A knot of cops and civilians swarmed by the front door. Slamming the Bronco's door on Sig, Petra threw Cal's arm over her shoulders and dragged him toward the yellow-­painted berm.

“Hey!” she shouted. “I need some help over here!”

A cop and a man in scrubs rushed toward her.

“Is this another victim?” the cop asked.

“Victim of what?” Petra echoed, then shook her head. Clearly, these folks were having a bad night, too. “This guy's got heavy metal poisoning. Mercury.”

The man in green scrubs shouted through the glass doors of the ER for a stretcher.

“How long has he been like this?” the man in scrubs asked, checking Cal's respiration with gloved hands.

“I don't know. He just showed up at my doorstep. He was covered in mercury, and he passed out.” That much was true. Petra struggled with how much to explain. She opened her mouth to say more, but a gurney arrived. More ­people in scrubs flopped Cal onto it like a sack of potatoes and whisked him into the fluorescent glare of the hospital lobby.

Petra made to follow. She glanced at the ambulance. Another stretcher was being pulled out of the back, with a blood-­smeared burly man in flannel strapped to it.

“Incoming!” one of the paramedics yelled, pushing inside with the stretcher.

“Busy night?” Petra mumbled to the cop beside her.

“You have no idea.” The cop shook his head. “Crackpots, brawls, auto accidents and . . . ah, shit.”

A news van bristling with flying saucer antennae on the roof pulled up to the curb. A man with a camera and a blond woman in a red coat holding a microphone hopped out. The woman was clearly ready for television: Her teased hair had been parted in the back and sprayed on the sides to resemble a cobra's hood.

The cop retreated, and Petra slipped in the doors to the lobby. Whatever they were here for, she sure as hell hoped they wouldn't find Cal. He'd make one hell of a story: “Local Teen Cursed with Living Mercury, Clings to Life.”

She made her way to the admitting desk, through a lobby that looked like a box of human misery had been upended on the green tile floor. A family huddled together, weeping, while an angry man shouted into a cell phone. An old man sat in the corner with his hands covering his face, while a little girl knelt on the floor, trying to reach up inside the Coke machine. A look of utter concentration had spread across her face, her tongue protruding from her lips.

Petra spoke to the nurse behind the Plexiglass-­shrouded desk. “I brought the emo kid in. He's got heavy metal poisoning.”

The nurse nodded. “Please come with me. I need to get some information.” He led Petra through a pair of double doors back to the bowels of the hospital.

“The doctor wants to speak to you,” he said, pulling aside a pink-­patterned curtain.

Cal lay in a hospital bed, looking like an overcooked vegetable. They'd cut his shirt off, and his skin held a greyish cast as it stretched over his ribs. A nurse was starting an IV, muttering about the needle tracks in his arm, while another stuck heart rate monitor leads on his chest. His eyes remained closed, and an oxygen mask covered his face.

“I'm Dr. Burnard,” a woman in scrubs with a stethoscope slung around her neck said, nodding at Petra. “Are you a relative?”

“No . . . I don't know him very well, at all,” Petra admitted. “He just showed up at my trailer, in a bad way.”

“What did he say?”

“That he'd been poisoned with mercury. I saw it—­it covered the sclera of his eyes and was moving . . . under his skin.”

The doctor squinted at her. “How do you know it was mercury?”

“I'm a geologist. I know mercury.”

“How much of it did you see?”

“Visible on him at the time? I'd guess about twenty fluid ounces.”

The doctor turned and told the nurse: “Let's get some blood to confirm. See if we have some Demercaprol on hand, or if we need to get it from the university.”

“Did you touch him? Skin on skin?”

“Yeah, I brought him here.”

The doctor hooked a thumb at her and nodded at a nurse. “Check her and scrub her down.”

“Hey, wait a minute . . .” Petra protested. A nurse grabbed her arm with a latex-­covered hand and led her away to the second floor, while an aide trailed with a clipboard.

“Is he gonna be okay?” Petra asked, though she knew that there was likely no good answer to that question.

The nurse beside her said: “We'll do everything we can do for him. And for you, if you got contaminated.” She pushed Petra into a tiny exam room and yanked out a red bag with a biohazard symbol on it. “You'll need to put your clothes in here.”

The aide with a clipboard clicked a ballpoint pen. “The young man you brought in. What's his name?”

“Cal. His name is Cal.”

“Last name?”

“I don't know.”

“Age?”

“Sixteen, maybe?”

“Address?”

“I don't think he has one.”

“What's your relationship with him?” she glanced over the clipboard.

“He's a . . . friend.”

“Any family or legal guardian?”

“I think he's on his own.”

“Do you know if he has insurance?”

“Probably not.”

“Any known medical conditions? Allergies?”

“None that I know of, but . . . I don't really know.”

“Is he taking any medicines? Legal or illegal drugs?”

“I don't know about medicines, but he used to occasionally smoke meth. And that drug that killed a ­couple of ­people last month. Elixir.”

The aide frowned and scribbled.

Petra sighed. She didn't know enough about Cal. Not enough to help him. Maybe not even enough to keep him alive.

­People in scrubs poked and prodded and quizzed her about her own identity and medical history, which she was able to answer adequately enough. Another nurse herded her into a room with a shower and brought her a hospital gown and socks to change into.

Petra scrubbed her skin until it was raw. She wasn't worried so much about mercury itself—­she could watch herself closely for symptoms, and would likely have refused to be clucked over if it had been an ordinary chemical spill. She told herself that it
was
reasonable to worry about the magic underneath it. While the hospital staff were scrupulous about gloves, she had not been. A phlebotomist came by to take her blood, saying that they'd test for heavy metal poisoning and get back with her.

They let Petra keep her keys, wallet, and cell phone in a zipper plastic bag. She sat in the smaller waiting room for the second floor with the bag in her lap, waiting for news of Cal and her own blood work. The television overhead was tuned to a local station, and she glanced up to the screen to see the same blond newscaster she'd seen at the ER entrance. The reporter stood outside, with the parking lot behind her. Petra could make out the Bronco in the background and Sig's face in the back window. Drawn by the lights of the camera, he seemed intent on photobombing the shot, licking the back glass. Petra rested her head in her hands, rubbing her temples.

“ . . . report that they saw a giant snake after the rest of their party went missing. Steven Moore was at the scene.” The woman shoved the microphone at a young man standing uncertainly beside her. He sported an expensive-­looking down jacket and an impressive amount of facial hair that he couldn't seem to stop playing with.

“We were, uh, partying by the creek when Tamara heard a noise. At first, we thought it was maybe a beaver or something. I heard hissing, but . . . yeah. Beavers don't hiss. I don't think. Anyway. Ed shined a light down on it, and it wasn't no beaver. It was big . . . like the Loch Ness Monster. Had to be at least thirty feet long and as big around as a barrel. Yellow eyes, it had yellow eyes. It disappeared into the water. Tamara got some video on her phone.”

The television image changed to dark, blurry footage of . . . something. Petra leaned forward and squinted at it. Something writhed sinuously in the water while a woman shrieked in the background.

It could be a log twisting in a fast current. Maybe. But it had some curve to it. And she could make out two yellow points that could be eyes, under the right conditions. The eyelike lights vanished as the camera was dropped.

The reporter returned to the front and center of the screen. “Two members of Steven's group were found ill beside the bank of the creek, suffering respiratory distress, and one is still missing. They were taken to Park Community Hospital. No news is available yet on their conditions.” The reporter looked a bit irritated at that, her crimson mouth turning downward. Petra guessed that since she was reporting from the parking lot, she'd gotten her ass booted out of the hospital. “The missing person is Amber Taylor. She's nineteen years old, blond hair with blue eyes, five feet five inches, and 130 pounds. She was last seen at the west side of Pelican Creek, east of Sulphur Hills. Amber is wearing jeans and a white hooded sweatshirt.”