Blood and Fire

The Turtle must’ve been watching out for us because everything was going smoothly. I won’t stoop to the cliché, but let’s say that I would’ve been a little more comfortable if we’d had more trouble. No one questioned the presence of a nine year old girl traveling with us, no one hassled Carrie or Eden, even though women were scarce, and we were generally just left alone. It made me feel like something worse was coming.

We’d done well so far, making our way along with the Grissom’s men, and we made it through the Thinny, though it was a stomach-churning sight. It devoured hundreds… I don’t think any of slept very well that night.

Even if it weren’t for the Thinny, I had a lot on my mind that evening. Carrie and Penny walked off to talk. Maybe I could have picked up on what they were saying, especially from Penny…but I didn’t want to pry. Whatever it was, it upset Penny. Ashleigh went and talked to her, which is good. He makes her laugh, and when she came back she was smiling even if her eyes were a little red.

Carrie and Eden had both already talked to me about blood and Penny was urging me to just bite someone just about every day. I know she was just worried about me, but how do I explain to her that it makes me hate myself?

That night I invited her into my tent. I asked her to get out my blood and hand it to me. I thought that maybe if I let her help me…feed… that it would help her. Make her feel like she was taking care of me, you know? I drank the cold blood more slowly than I usually do, not wanting to spill any. It was hard enough letting the person I love more than anything watch me drink human blood…I didn’t want it running down my face like a monster.

I guess it was what upset Penny before. Carrie told her not to get on my case about drinking, tried to explain how it makes me feel. It made me think back to my conversation with Eden.

“I want to watch her grow up,” I told Eden. “I want to see her graduate high school. I want to see her get married, be there to give her away…” I could even see her all grown up, taller than Carrie, but still short. I could see her face, the childish lines smoothed by age into startling beauty. “…But I don’t think I’m going to.”

I wish I could’ve promised Penny, but I knew that I wasn’t going to get to do those things. I didn’t need Carrie’s visions to tell me that, either. It was my own nature and there was only one escape from it.

Holding Penny as she cried on me I let myself hope for a second. How many times had I put a gun to my head and not pulled the trigger? Penny had already saved my life a hundred times over. Maybe…

Well…Ka….

It was enough that Penny loved me, that she’d seen me drink blood and not turned her face away from me. After all, there was more to my life now than blood. Penny probably thought she was being coy. Sometimes she can be amazingly cunning and full of guile, but there are times when that mischievous glint in her eyes shines through. And she giggles.

She asked me about Carrie of course. I’d been a bit worried about that actually. Penny’s always giggled and teased me about the women who stare at me, or who approach me while I’m out with Penny. I’m not sure if she thinks it’s cute, or if maybe she’s sorta looking for a mother-figure as well. But what she expects and the realities of a relationship are two different things. I wasn’t sure how she’d react to sharing me with someone else. I had to admit, it’d been part of what was keeping me and Carrie apart.

I asked her if she would be okay if me and Carrie got together and I put as much of the reality of that into my words and thoughts as I could. I wanted her to really understand what it might mean…if it happened.

When she gave us her blessing, I was more frightened than relived. Since Penny approved, there was nothing really standing in our way… And I might not have much time with her. Of course… that was the rest of why we hadn’t at least given it a chance yet. We both knew that I was going to die and that it was going to be sooner rather than later. Did I want to get involved with her only to leave her on her own again? Did she?

We’d set up our tents as far from the rest of Grissom’s men as we could. Maybe we were risking discovery in staying a little ways away, but no one tried to bring us in for security reasons or anything. I think that the Thinny robbed the band of a lot of their professionalism. But we were keeping watch just the same, we didn’t trust these soldiers. And Penny was looking for an excuse to get me together with Carrie.

I didn’t think it was worth it to try to tell Penny that you can’t push love any more than you can push Ka, but I’m not sure she would’ve understood. Besides, it made her happy…and it made me happy. When Ashleigh woke us up and he and Alistair and Eden were crawling into their tents, we stayed up and talked and played cards and I showed Penny magic tricks. I tried not to think about it, but the idea was seductive. Me and Carrie and Penny… like a family. Not a ka-tet, but just a family. Would this be what it was like?

The night wore on and we settled down into more silent watchfulness than conversation. Penny said she was going to go to bed. I know it’s harder to stay awake when you’re bored and the poor kid hadn’t had anything to do but talk to grownups while riding along with the army for almost two weeks. She couldn’t even really let herself teleport and that was something she was as used to doing as walking. She gave me a hug goodnight and what might’ve been a wink.

I sat down next to Carrie by the fire and after a while I asked if she wanted to learn my coin trick. It was a good way to build manual dexterity and all my little magic tricks had come from this one little parlor trick. It was something that Lex first showed me to get my fingers faster to help with my reloading speed.

She moved closer next to me so she could watch as I took out the silver coin that came from Gilead. I held it between my thumb and first finger and rolled it to the second slowly. Then the third, explaining how to raise and lower the knuckles and catch the edge of the coin to make it dance.

I was enjoying her nearness, her arm pressed against mine on my left, touching the rose inked into my bicep. When I finally noticed her head beginning to droop I stopped the coin and chuckled. I nudged her with my shoulder.

“Carrie, wake up.” She looked at me and blinked. “You were about to go under.” I smiled. I couldn’t help it. “I didn’t even think of that. I guess I forgot. Tell you what, let’s practice with cards.”

I fished my deck out of my pocket and slipped the cards out of the worn box. I leaned in close to her and held the deck in one hand. My fingers moved surely, twisting the top half of the deck and slipping it under the other half. Again, twisting the cards and slipping them under. Again and again, slowly, explaining what my fingers were doing.

“Okay, now you try it,” I said. The cards settled in my palm and I held the deck out to her. She reached up and closed her hand over the cards, her fingers brushing mine… I turned to look at her and our faces were only an inch apart… or was it half an inch… a quarter inch…?

And then our lips touched and we kissed. She tasted like roses.

My head felt light and the stiffness between my legs was sudden. I think we would have ended up in my tent except for the sudden flames. The fire roared up, doubling in size with a quiet whoosh of heat. We pulled back, startled, and the cards in our hands were smoking. They crackled, then burst into flames. We flung them away from us and they were lifted on the hot air from our fire, whirling above us like fireflies until they burned down to drifting ashes.

The fire burned in a six foot pillar of bright light for another second, and then the flames collapsed in on themselves, just tiny tongues licking up from the embers.

Red and Blue

Memories and reality were mixing like oil and water. The Dixie Pig had been taken down to make way for new Sombra headquarters or something, but the kitchen was just like I remembered it.

I remembered the way that the smell of cooking meat made me sick and how it made my mouth water, and how my watering mouth made feel even more sick. Always after I had to make a trip through the Pig I’d go out hunting, like it stirred up the vampire part of me. But now the kitchen was empty and cold, and I moved through it with my hands near my guns.

I remember the hallways, doubling back on themselves, laid out in some Escher labyrinth studded with posters out of a twisted version of the Roman Coliseum. Bloosports for the Great Old Ones, going mad from ennui.

I was a hunter, but this time my prey wasn’t children and psychics, but the ones who collected them. Lead flew, bursting the tick-like bodies of the Grandfather Fleas. It felt good so blow them away and see the blood spray the walls. They hadn’t earned their meal anyways.

And then we found the door, the way back to Mid-World. I knelt and let Penny paint my face, but it took all of my self control to hold still and let her. I told myself that this is a thing that Roland might’ve done: taken the face of an enemy to survive, to do what he had to do…

…but isn’t that why Roland almost failed his quest? Isn’t that what Eddie and Jake and Susannah saved him from? Roland also gunned down all of Tull.

So there we were, surrounded by low men and vampires and humes all set for a bloody holiday in Mid-World. Like that restaurant at the end of the universe in that brittish book. All set to get off watching good men die. I wanted to kill them all. And then I felt my impulse returned, felt it touch my ka-mates and reflect back to me. Yes, kill them all.

I pulled iron and the sandalwood grips never felt so good in my hands, never felt so right. Bullets and blood flew. I saw a taheen wearing a human skin impale Eden on a spear. But even as her pain echoed through our khef, so did her determination. She might die here, but if that was so, then she was okay with that. Maybe it was a good death.

When the bloodbath was over, Alistair had saved Eden, and the tet of the Turtle was left standing. We found gear and horses outside, all that we’d need to get to Jericho Hill and see the Horn of Eld safely to its fate. But the outriders called me Hendrick, the name of the man I’d gunned down in contempt. We still had to wear the paint and we couldn’t just mow down all of Grissom’s army…

…But even though I knew that… I wasn’t sure if I could stand by and let the barbarians do what they intended to do. The face paint was blue, but I felt Red.

Ew Ork, Ew Ork!

Arthur followed Al all through the great wide woods towards the setting sun. He had a dim idea that the world was a much larger place than he ever suspected. Already he had traveled more than any throcken of the great woods had before, even his mighty dinh. Thoughts of his dinh and his old ka-tet were painful, but with a child’s – or an animal’s – acceptance, the pain was fading quickly, replaced by sincere love for Al and his new ka-tet.

The bumbler stayed close to his new family. There were wolf-smells here too, and they made Arthur’s fur bristle. He looked around fearfully, but the smells were very old. But this larger world was full of other dangers and smells that Arthur had only vague knowledge of. There was a cave full of old death-smells. There was a odor of people, and a sickly musk like what clung to the wolf. He hadn’t know that people could get body-sick and mind-sick like that so that too many legs or eyes grew or so that the ones that did did not grow right. But none of the sick-people were left in the cave, only bodies. Arthur barked a warning shout at the corpses, but scurried on quickly. Even a bumbler knows that sometimes the dead rise.

The little throcken sifted all of this out from the smell-marks of the blue-faced people, more individual scents than he could believe. He remembered the long ant-line of people as they marched towards the hill where he met Al. He could tell they came this way because of how the smells grew slowly more dim. Maybe Al and his friends were trying to go back to their nest to kill the rest?

The nest was one of the on top of the ground burrows that people lived in, but the sides were rounded all the way to the ground and it smelled very strange. Arthur didn’t want to go inside, but he supposed that if Al went in, that he would too. But as it turned out they didn’t have to. Something appeared there in the clearing outside the strange burrow. Arthur sensed it’s presence in a collage of scents; the warm fur-scent of his mother, the familiar scents of his tet, spring clover, fresh muffin balls… His curling tail bobbed like a spring in joy.

Then the world changed. Light came and took all the trees away and Arthur found himself on smooth, hard ground. There were people all around and so much noise that he laid his ears flat and ducked his head down. But when he looked down, the ground was shiny like the surface of a stream and he saw a throcken-face looking back up at him, gold-ringed eyes wide in fear. He scuttled closer to Al, almost getting his small feet stepped on, and stepping right on top of Al’s large feet himself.

The smells were overwhelming, but Arthur couldn’t place any of them. They were none of the smells of forest or stream or glade or field. But Al’s smell was happy and there was no fear in the air. In fact, he sensed some burden easing in Al, like he had been pulling a very heavy weight in his mouth and at last he could set it down. Except this weight was in his head and he had to pull it with his head. Arthur realized that Al was hurt. He hadn’t known before, because the hurt-sense had been a part of him when Arthur first found him. But now he could sense the hurt going away. Not all away, but getting better. Arthur gave a happy little bark that was lost in all the noise of the strange new place.

Arthur left the arrival place and the throcken realized that he was inside of a people-burrow. It was so large! Many bumblers could live here and have all the room they could ever need. Delah. Except there was no food smells here. He worried, but there was another scent, one tht he had never smelled before, but which he felt as being familiar. The scent came from a green place, the only plants he could see or smell, and in the middle there was a red flower…

Arthur wanted to go to it and maybe lie in the little patch of grass. But Arthur was leaving. It was okay, somehow the scent of the flower was on Al, too. More sensed than smelled. Arthur couldn’t explain it, but bumblers feel little need to explain things. The smell was in Al’s head, and it made him better. Arthur loved that smell.

And of course, there was food! Arthur knew that Al would never let him be hungry. The smell was new and delightful and smelled strangely hot. The food inside was gooey and warm with bits of greasy meat…oh!

Al’s burrow was incredibly large and strange. It had holes in the sides, except there was something over them so you couldn’t go through them, which was good because the holes we high up. Higher than the tallest tree. But Al was happy here and he never let Arthur fall and he always brought strange, wonderful new food.

The throcken didn’t like going outside in this new world – he could sense that it was not the same one he left. Outside he was surrounded by a forest of towering people-burrows. There were trees, but only a few here and there and underneath the choking smoke-smell of the air, they smelled weak and sick. But he was brave enough to follow Al back to his own little burrow where the walls were closer and it wasn’t so high off the ground.

But Arthur knew a little of ka. Not a human’s understanding of course, but an instinct for it that so few people did. Al’s life was not one of only food and hours of playing with shiny twigs and flat white leaves in his burrow. His ka was greater, and Arthur had given himself over to Al’s ka so he could be with him.

The night that Al and his friends had a very big food gathering and they let Arthur play with the brightly colored leaves that had surprises inside that made them happy…that night they went out into the cold and the snow. And there in a field of wet stone and old metal the little throcken’s fur bristled. He hunched his back and stretched out his neck, smelling hard for danger. The evil moved and it made the junk leap up and strike.

The bumbler, just the runt of his tet wanted to turn and run away, to follow his own smell back to someplace safe. But Al wasn’t running. He stood his ground, feet planted in the snow, his hands making something out of bits of branch. He pointed it at the metal thing and it threw a stick at it with a quivering twang! Arthur barked excitedly, leaping around his feet. He was fighting it!

Arthur was afraid and excited all at once. His round body bounced in the snow, hardly feeling the cold through his thick pelt. Al’s smell was the same, scared, but also focused, intent. He used his special branch to throw stick after stick at it. Arthur knew that if he had been at the den with when sick-wolf had attacked, that he would have killed it with his sticks. The metal monster threw big metal sticks high into the air, but Al didn’t run. Arthur wanted to…the metal stick was as big as a whole tree, stripped bare of branches. It tumbled end over end in the air, its shadow falling over them.

Al looked up at it, his fuzzy face grimly determined and he stood his ground. Arthur trembled, looking up at the metal tree falling on them. Then he darted between Al’s feet and planted his rump in the snow. Either Al would save them both, or they would die together.

The air whistled over the tumbling metal, and Arthur’s bravery gave out. He pushed his head against Al’s leg and closed his large gold-black eyes. In the darkness he could hear the rattling pops and the grunts and cries of fighting and the creaks and crunch of angry metal. The sounds ended with a final ground-shaking boom and a hot wind. When Arthur looked the field of snow and wet stone was as bright as day, a burning fire lighting the battlefield. He smelled blood and pain, but also satisfaction. Arthur looked up at Al, who was still alive and rolled over in happiness.