Authors: Scott V. Duff
“It’s also what a great many people on this side that I don’t know call me. I’d rather they not have the other name just yet. Don’t worry about it. There won’t be that many people around us most of the time. Just make sure you say ‘Mr. McClure’ if we’re ever in front of the
Saun
together.”
“By your command, Lord Seth,” Zero answered as I signaled for the turn into the gas station. “These people have chosen to live here, in the desert?”
“Yeah, it’s not as hard as it looks, seeing the range out there, though,” I told him, spotting an ethanol-free pump at the far end. The station was empty at the moment so I didn’t have to worry about other people. Zero had a little trouble operating the latch on the seat belt, but that only kept him in the car long enough for me to get around to his side and the pumps. He watched my every move as I filled the tank.
“This is ‘gasoline’?” he asked sniffing the air near the tank as I returned the handle to the pump, making a face at the odor.
“Yep, and it’s very volatile so be careful about sparks, especially around the fumes,” I said, reaching around him to put the gas cap back and close the lid. “C’mon, let’s get something to drink.” Zero was all eyes from the door to the coolers at the back of the store. Everything was new to him and he tried to see it all as fast as he could. His head was almost spinning all the way around. Taking two bottles of over-priced artesian water from the cooler, I handed them off to him. “Calm down. You look like a meth-head, seriously. Relax. Go pick out something off the candy aisle while I visit the restroom.”
“What’s a ‘meth-head’?” he asked, still bright eyed and full of innocence.
“It’s a kind of drug addict,” I explained, getting a little dramatic. “They’re very twitchy and excitable, especially before they go over the edge into lunacy and madness. They become like hulking monsters that sometimes take multiple gunshots to the legs and chest before they’ll die.” Zero looked more aghast as I got more melodramatic. Until the end, when he giggled uncontrollably.
“I knew a minnow salesman in my youth once who told stories like that,” Zero said cheerfully.
“You haven’t learned yet that monsters are real?” I asked quietly as I stepped to the restroom to take care of business. I heard someone else come in as the door closed, but I didn’t give it much thought. Usually didn’t give much thought to anything in this situation except “don’t touch anything” and “don’t splash.” My preference would have been to step over to my bathroom, but I didn’t want to leave Zero alone.
“Hey, kid, that your car?” I heard a high baritone voice ask outside in the store. Switching my awareness, Zero was still looking down the candy aisle while two large men loomed at the front counter. Both looked freshly showered but were still sweating. They wore athletic shorts and shirts emblazoned with mixed martial arts companies of various associations. The one hollering at Zero had full-sleeve inked on his left and, really, not well. The artistry on Ryan made everything look so crude. “Kid! Answer me!”
Zero looked up at him innocently, I swear, and said, “Are you talking to me? I’m not a goat, so I didn’t think you were.” Snickering, I flushed the urinal and put everything in its proper place. I was paying more attention to Zero than myself, but when I came out of the bathroom, I was drying my hands with one of my hand towels and I rather liked that I could pull doors open without touching them when I didn’t want to. Casting a quick camouflage, I walked quietly down the opposite aisle, wanting to see how he handled this.
“Don’t be a smartass, runt,” the man growled, scowling at Zero. “Move your car. We need gas.”
“I don’t know how,” Zero answered without looking at him. He reached up on the top shelf, took a packet of nuts down, then turned to the man. “The owner will return shortly, I’m sure. Relax.”
The man moved up the aisle toward Zero, blocking the aisle but not quite threatening him. I moved up and around the aisle I was on and threw a mild fascination on the clerk, having him remove his hand from the shotgun under the counter and sit at the same time. Matters weren’t that tense, but the poor man had been robbed twice in the last three years and that leaves you a little paranoid.
“Why’d you dye your hair such a faggy color, boy?” the man growled down his nose at Zero. The other man stayed by the door, annoyed with the first man but unwilling to interfere.
“My hair is its nature color,” Zero said, backing a step. “Why are you intentionally badgering me? Are you a meth-head?” The door-man burst out laughing, causing the first to turn and glare at him. I used that to slip past him, dropping the spell while still in his peripheral vision. Zero grinned when he saw me and held up the small bag of cashews. “Is this okay, Seth? Everything else has stuff that I don’t know what it is, guar gum and polysorbate-80.”
“Do you like cashews?” I asked, patting his back then leaving my hand on his shoulder.
“More than peanuts,” he answered, gesturing at the top of the rack.
“Hey, dude,” the man interrupted.
I ignored him, taking the packet of legumes from Zero, I pointed behind us and said, “Not something you could know, but second shelf up in the blue can, it’s a much better quality cashew than this. You shouldn’t eat all of them at once, though.” I turned to the man while Zero went after the can.
“Now,” I asked politely of the jerk, “what can ‘dude’ do for you?”
“You can move your car now. We need to get gas,” he said again, trying to affect a bull-like attitude by forcing his head down to stare at me with dark eyes. When I snickered at him, he lost the glare and shifted to a fighter’s stance. My grin widened and I slipped my left arm over Zero’s shoulders as he came up beside me again.
“No, Zero, he’s not a meth-head. He’s just a jerk who likes to pick on people smaller than he is. They do share characteristics, so it was a very good guess.” Turning back to the jerk, I drew on my aspect slightly and returned his menace in spades. “You owe my man an apology. You called his hair ‘faggy’ in color, an insult. Further, if you’d bothered to look at it, you’d see six different shades of blue—they’re called highlights—blended in throughout. There isn’t a dye in the world that good. Now apologize.”
“S-s-sorr-r-ry, k-k-kid,” he stammered badly, backing away quickly. He kept an eye on us as he nearly ran to the door. We followed at a more sedate pace, watching the Door-man question the jerk on the way out and across the lot to the pumps. The jerk was freaked out and didn’t know why. The fascination on the clerk broke when Zero unloaded his stuff. He jumped off the stool apologizing and muttering about dozing. I just smiled and told him not to worry while I paid the bill. Zero grabbed the bag and we headed for the door.
We saw the other two men as we pushed out the door. “Zero, we have struck the jackpot,” I murmured. “See the logo on the red bag in the back of the SUV behind us?”
“Yes, sir. Isn’t that the name of the place we’re going now?”
“Yes, it is,” I answered, smiling wider. Casting my mind open a little wider, I listened to their thoughts and dug lightly into their recent memories. They didn’t have enough of a fix on the main encampment for me to build a portal, but they just came from their gym, and that experience was fresh on their minds. That portal would chop twenty minutes off the drive. “And they’re making the trip a lot shorter for us.”
“Are you going to kill them, Seth?” he asked.
“No, not unless I have to,” I said plainly. “We’re just going to strongly discourage them from their current path. Too many people have died in this war and it has got to stop. Start by destroying the infantry.” We spoke so quietly and so quickly together that there was little chance they heard us. I popped the locks just as Zero reached his door.
“Hey, kid, can I ask you a question?” the Door-man called from the SUV. He hung over the open door, standing on the footrunner. Zero looked at me as I made my way ‘round. I just shrugged and grinned at him. He nodded to the Door-man, dropping the bag to the seat. “Where do you come from that blue hair is natural?” the Door-man asked calmly with a heavy Swedish accent to his clear American English.
Zero smiled broadly and stepped closer, one step free of the door. “I am from Gilán, where roughly three hundred and eighty of a thousand have such a glorious color. That’s a personal count so it easily could be wrong.” He turned for the car, seeing me grinning at them over the roof.
“And where on Earth is Gilán? I’ve never seen it on a map?” Door-man asked, standing straighter on the railing. We really had his interest now. Apparently, Zero was willing to walk away from the table, though, after answering his one question. He climbed in the car, buckled his seatbelt, then reached over and closed his door. I ducked my head down and watched him do it, positively enthralled with his process.
Looking back at the Door-man, I said with a shocked grin, “Looks like you lost his interest, dude. Thanks for the directions, though. Took a good twenty, twenty-five minutes drive off our trip. You’ll be hearing ‘bout us.” I got in the car calmly and started her up, pulling away perfectly normally while letting him untie the knot of that threat. The jerk was rude and hot-tempered, but the Door-man was cooler and more intelligent. And it didn’t take a genius to figure out all the connections from his side. Otherwise he’d hear about our attack of the dojo later. I really didn’t care.
“Zero, watch behind us for a moment while I do this,” I said, stopping just before the highway. He turned in his seat and looked through the back window. I pushed out a thread of my awareness and entered the natural flow of the fabric of the local reality. Concentrating a little harder on the flows of energy, I found the Old World leys, the simple paths followed by people during their daily lives. The energy of it was scattered to the sides of the roads by cars and trucks. From there I pushed that awareness into the next level of wild magic and into the weird space between the energy flows and reality: I was in the Weirdways. Folding their memories into the shape of the space there, I found the end point farther along and opened that point in this strange faery space, letting my awareness slip through. And there was Kojo’s Dojo, a huge steel warehouse sitting between two hillocks behind a huge parking lot about two-thirds filled.
“All right, Zero, we’re almost there now,” I said, pulling out onto the highway. “Just remember, eyes open and head down. Don’t get hurt. You’re a lot faster than they are so it shouldn’t be a problem.” Then I skipped us ahead the eighteen miles, slowing for the turn into our unsuspecting target.
It was an unassuming building, a plain corrugated steel-framed monstrosity that held nothing in the way of style. It was a box in the dessert with air conditioners on top and nothing else, merely walls to hide behind from prying eyes. I pulled up to the door and parked in a handicapped parking spot, wondering why they bothered. Must be legal reasons, ‘cuz they sure as hell weren’t doing any rehab there. It was a noisy place, even from outside the building.
Zero was excited from the parking lot alone. “There certainly are a vast array of vehicles, Lo—Seth,” he said grinning over the roof, staring over at the rest of the lot. “Are they all called ‘cars’?”
“No, some are trucks or SUVs,” I told him, making our way to the door. There was no one watching the lot, which I thought odd until I spotted the cameras around the eaves of the building. Zero needed protection from them, so I cast that tiny little spell that fuzzed him to electronics. His
huri
nature would take care of any photography that used silver to process. We stepped into the noisier vestibule and were greeted by a man yelling into a phone to be overheard by the yelling and thudding from the gym.
“Natural blue hair? You’re nuts, Thorrstadt!” he yelled. “’Sides, ain’t no wizard in his right mind gonna attack us! There’s over a hundred men here now and four battle wizards of our own.” He paused to listen, staring at the floor and plugging one ear. We stopped in the center of the room to listen; I was curious and he was giving me information. “Whatever, Thor. I’ll tell Marren when he comes out and not before.” He slammed the phone down, cursing under the noise and started to move out from behind the counter. That’s when he noticed us, noticed Zero with his blue hair.
“Maybe you should go tell Marren now, instead of later,” I said to the man with eyes as big as saucers. He ran, yelling Marren’s name down the hall as he went. Zero giggled. Meeting his grin, I cast out a small net around the building to catch radio signals, effectively cutting them off from the outside world. It even cut the satellite signal to their television feeds as the two in the lobby flashed to “Searching for Satellite” messages. “This should be fun.” We followed after him.
The building was sectioned off, mostly to provide legitimacy to the cover story, into four main parts. The offices and lobby, at the front, handled the business end. From there, we entered the smaller exercise and training area where posters on the wall claimed they trained smaller groups in Aikido, Tae Kwon Do, and other self-defense methods. The next doorway, a double-wide set of swinging doors, led into a three-way entrance to the showers on the left and right, then straight back to the last and largest section. This was where the action happened, the main floor. There were a hundred seventeen people here, only six of whom were women. The near end was weight training and exercise equipment, lightly manned tonight with only twelve men and one woman. Two sparring rings prominently occupied the center of the room. Everywhere else was matted with thick wrestling mats occupied by men practicing martial arts moves with dangerous proficiency. This was not a learners’ class.