Out of the Black (48 page)

Ashok was punching the creature dead in the face as hard as he could and as fast as he could with his right hand. He was using his left forearm against the thing's neck to keep its teeth away. He'd used his left hand to shove the thing back as it tried to bite his right index finger off, and had lost a tablespoon-sized chunk of flesh from his left hand for his efforts.

The air around him was full of screams: anger, pain, terror- but the scream Ashok could hear the best was his own. He'd never wanted to be eaten alive, and his first taste of the experience had confirmed all the earlier aversion. The creature on top of him was laughing, almost casually, like the world's grimiest cowboy might laugh in his first hot bath- it was enjoying every second of this.

They both knew that Ashok had already lost this fight, but Ashok kept pounding away on the thing's face anyway... his big goal right now was making sure the bite marks that would eventually cover his corpse had as many gaps as possible.

Then there was a pulse of some kind- maybe a sound, but he would never be sure- and the grinning, laughing thing convulsed once, like it had been hit by a defibrillator and went limp on top of him.

Alex's eyes were still on Rae when the world seemed to turn inside out.

Alex managed to keep his head enough to follow Kaspari's advice. He managed to check his reflexes and didn't leap into the Loom. As bad as this explosion was here, it was probably a couple orders of magnitude worse in the currents of the Underworld.

The explosion seemed to twist them, and everything else, inside out and backwards. Alex never lost consciousness, but the brownout ended with him on his face perhaps a meter ahead of where he'd been, bleeding from mouth and nose. Groggy but resolute, he struggled to his feet.

He and Rae had been blown forward, landing among the first wave of demons. Rae was pressing to her hands and knees, but none of the demons moved more than random twitching.

While he and Rae had been blown away from Kaspari, the demons seemed to have been sucked in closer. All of the demons were laid out like a fallen forest after a volcanic eruption. They were all aligned, bodies radiating away with heads pointing toward Kaspari. Whatever he'd done, it looked like it had worked.

In the middle distance, Anne stood holding her sword like a samurai after a great battle. Spattered with a new coat of wet blood, she looked like she was very ready to hit the showers. She surveyed the sea of bodies, searching. Ping was nowhere in sight.

Then she moved. Alex doubted he would ever get used to just how suddenly or how fast she could move. There was no perceptible acceleration or deceleration. One second she was standing still, the next she was standing still somewhere else, and his eye was left w tracer-like impression of motion between the two points.

About five meters from her initial position, she threw aside two fallen bodies. The first landed about three meters to the right. The second hit the ceiling above her, then fell back, forcing her to dodge away, covering her head with her arms.

She reached down and helped Ping to his feet. He was shaky and bloody, though there was no way to tell how much of the blood was his own. His face was puffy, his nose clearly broken. He smiled somewhat self-consciously as Anne supported him on unsteady feet. He stowed his sword and focused on standing.

Then Ping seemed to notice Alex and the others and he began to struggle toward them. Anne compensated and began to help him over the bodies.

"Babe..." Rae said, "Look."

Alex turned to see what she meant. She was staring at Kaspari. He was unmoved, still sitting cross-legged. Now though, he looked as if he were about to explode from internal pressure. His face was hard with struggle. His teeth bared, his muscles taut, he shook with the strain of his labor. Veins stood out on arms and his forehead, sweat dampened his face and head. Though he was still avoiding the Loom, Alex could feel the immense powers at play down in the plumbing for this part of the real world. The roiling power tugged at him from the center, an itch-tingle through both flesh and mind.

Though Issak had cautioned him not to, Alex needed to at least try to help. In the new silence that covered the garage he sank to the ground, crossed his legs and closed his eyes.

"What'cha doin?" Rae asked in her 'you're doing something stupid and need to stop Right Now' voice.

Alex smiled without opening his eyes. "I need to help. This really matters... end-of-the-world-or-not time here."

"I've still got a tire iron..." she threatened.

"I've still got a head for you to whack." His smile didn't waver.

"Be careful."

After a few seconds to calm his mind, he put a toe in the water of the Underworld. The flames exploded around him, nuclear hot, nuclear bright.

As Ping and Anne hobbled up, Alex screamed and jerked out of his sitting position, landing on his back. Both he and Kaspari shared the look of desperate struggle.

"That's not careful!" Rae shouted, dropping the tire iron and falling to her knees beside Alex. She lifted his head onto her lap and stroked his face, whispering encouragement and threats.

In a sea of fire and lightning, Alex saw Kaspari's struggle. At the base of a huge funnel of energy, channeled by the ground surrounding the underground garage, he fought in the doorway to somewhere else. He fought with a formless black squid with uncountable tentacles. The thing had him, its tendrils wrapped through his essence. He seemed to have given up the struggle to sever the thing's connection to him and was focusing his efforts on forcing the thing back through the door into darkness.

The thing's tentacles flailed at Kaspari, trying to find purchase on something to halt its backward slide. At times, the thing mounted enough resistance to halt Kaspari's advance, but it seemed to be able to hold onto little besides Kaspari and whatever was hidden in the black on the other side of the doorway.p>

Then the creature passed the dark threshold and everything changed. The creature lost its hold and it and Kaspari fell downward. Kaspari sent out anchoring tendrils of force, trying to remain on this side of the darkness, but it seemed hopeless. He was caught in the vortex of his Cast, buffeted by currents of power too hot and strong to be resisted for long.

Alex realized he had to act quickly. He anchored himself as best he could and then plunged into the vortex. As he approached Kaspari's position, moving slower now, reinforcing his hold on this world with every move forward, Alex noticed the real problem. The Outsider had not released its hold on Kaspari. His flagging strength seemed entirely focused on holding on, so he had none left to try to disengage the creature.

Close enough now, Alex began to work on the tendrils that seemed to wind though Kaspari's essence. He tried to cut, pry, dissolve, warp... nothing worked. About this time, Kaspari noticed him. The fountain of fire that was Kaspari's form here turned partially on him. Alex got the impression of tired acceptance as Issak swatted him aside, forcing him out of the downward current. Then Kaspari let go.

As Issak fell into the darkness, Alex streaked forward. He caught Kaspari, and was immediately pulled forward himself. There was a jarring as Alex's tethers stopped their fall for the moment. The shock was almost enough to make him let go of Issak- almost. As he solidified his grip on Issak, he got a clear impression from him. Something like 'What are you, stupid?' This was the point when the first of his tethers ruptured. Stupid indeed. He really didn't have much of a plan other than "hold on and hope for the best". Only one thing was clear to him. He wasn't letting go.

Below, the darkness began to take on texture. It shifted like ebony sand in slow wind. He could see a distributed intelligence at work in the ebb and flow of the black particles. As he focused, or perhaps came closer, the shifting darkness became clearer, more detailed. They were creatures, numberless as the sands of all seas. His first thought was the black shimmering carapace of roaches- wet, hairy spider legs- black desiccated jellyfish.

The Outsider was not a single organism, but a slow trickle of these linked creatures that had been leaking into the world. Below him, Kaspari fought against the chains that bound them to him. Desperate yet hopeless, he alternately clung to Alex, and tried to push him away. But Alex would not let go. Together they sank toward the sea of insect sewage.

This was it. Alex spared a fraction of his energy and focus to push a tendril of Vision up into the Overworld. He wanted to see her just one last time. Maybe he even had enough juice left to tell her goodbye.

After microseconds that felt like minutes here in the fringes of the Underworld, he could just make out the blurry outlines of the four people around his body. His vision was dim and dominated by the milky static of Kaspari's Cast. He didn't have enough energy to punch his Vision completely into the Overworld, so he saw mostly the constructs of the Loom, with only phantoms and ghosts to show him those in the "real" world.

Kaspari's body was at the nexus of dizzying patterns of energy. Anne was there, too; he could see her clearly because of the Forging of her flesh. In his vision, she shone like an angel, vibrant with heavenly power. So that's what she looked like without all the blood- beautiful.

A dim shadow leaned on Anne for support. Alex could only tell it was Ping because of the brightly urning sword in his jacket pocket and the fire-traced ring that unlocked it. On closer inspection, he could also see the vestiges of the Casts Alex had worked on him earlier. The signature of the Obscuring he'd worked to fix his mind on the antique keys was gone, but the remnants of his last Healing still smoldered with the consistency of slowly dissipating smoke.

Near the shimmering power surrounding his own body was the only person he really wanted to see. She was kneeling, his head in her lap. Thankfully, he could see her clearly. He toyed with the idea that it was because he loved her so much that he'd made it happen somehow, but he knew the real culprit was the cameo hanging from her neck as she bent over him, alternately sobbing and breathing out threats.

He didn't have time to relish his last look at her. Even now, she was darkening, fading, like the rest of his Vision. Below, where the lion's share of his effort was focused on clinging to Kaspari and holding on to this world, things continued to get worse. They were now past the event horizon and the blackness was closing about them. The tendril of his presence in the Overworld was faltering, fraying under the strain.

Maybe he had enough time for one last message. He'd just completed the preparations, when inspiration struck him. With a new sense of hope, he sent his message. But before he could be sure the message had been received, his eyes to the Overworld were closed.

Time passed. Light faded. Their desperate struggle continued.

Then, below him, in the midst of his struggle, Kaspari seemed to explode.

Rae screamed as the blade thrust into Kaspari's chest. The entry wound was clean, there was no spattering blood, but her ears popped as a familiar pressure wave seemed to rock the forge of creation.

Alex was not letting go. The supernova that had engulfed Kaspari blew over and through him, tore him apart, tore the pieces apart. Not letting go. He couldn't really tell anymore if he was holding Kaspari, but he was holding on to something.

The fire burnt him black, scattered the ashes. Not... letting... go!

"Don't you ever get tired of doing that?!" Rae screamed in disbelief, but Ping didn't move the blade. Anne was insensate from the tornado of power erupting from Kaspari. She fell sideways, not seeming to notice when her head cracked the cement. Her arms covered her face, her knees pulled up to her stomach.

Hawthorne emerged from shadows into a blurred and swimming reality. Her first thought was that the microvan had gone off a bridge and they were drowning in a fast moving river. After a few panicked seconds, she cleared the deflating airbag from her face. Her awareness increased and the wet electricity that seemed to rush over her subsided somewhat.

Still alive. After a few seconds, she managed to wrestle the driver's door open. She tried to step out, but was stopped by her seatbelt. It took her a few ticks of the clock to figure out the problem, longer to fumble the seatbelt's catch open. Somewhere not too far off, Rae screamed in exasperation. Hawthorne turned to see, but only saw the ceiling, with its bank of oddly flickering lights.

Operating at peak efficiency, she thought, lying on her backn the too-hard ground. The river of energy again filled her senses as she dimmed toward unconsciousness.

The flames were so bright now that they were no longer flames; no longer hot. Alex was in a white room with no perceptible boundaries. Though he supposed that made it a 'place' and not a 'room', he couldn't shake that roomy feeling.

Then it hit him, as he saw Kaspari sprawled out before him. "Aw crap!" he said without lips or mouth, "I'm dead!"

Kaspari was slowly getting to his feet. "I told you not to help, didn't I?"

"Sure, that's helpful now!" Alex said, frustrated. "Besides, without my help, you'd be getting the all-roach enema right about now."

Kaspari looked very tired, but he managed a wry grin. "Thanks... and thanks for that image, too."

"What happened?" Alex looked around- white.

"My guess is something very white." Issak said.

"You always were an observant man." Ivo said.

At the center of the silence that followed his conversational mushroom cloud, Ivo Lutine stood smiling. His clothes were simple; they seemed to be made of the same elemental white that was the substance of this place. As they watched, another form began to resolve from the brightness. "You need to know that we're all right Issak." Roy said with great feeling. Then he glanced sideways, "Oh. Hi, Alex."

"Hi Roy." Alex said, rather enjoying his dream.

"Dad." Dek said from behind Issak, "Remember that I love you... and sorry 'bout the hand- I missed the wink."