TWO HUNDRED ELEVEN: The Strange Thing Is…

211

******

“We can’t kee—keep going so fast-t. Ow. We’ll flip over, Alden!”

Kibby was bouncing and swaying as the car plowed through the terrain. Alden had strapped her into one of the front seats as soon as he realized they’d run into a problem that couldn’t be dealt with while he held her preserved. Her harness and the grip of her hands on it weren’t enough to steady her when the car was crashing through grass and over potholes.

“We won’t flip. We’ll be fine.”

He swiped blood off his forehead before it could run into his eye. He wasn’t buckled in, and he’d smacked his head on the sharp corner of one of the crates that held their food. It was only a cut, but it was dripping all over the place. He left red smears on the supplies as he dug through them in search of the largest tarp they’d brought. “Found it! And I’ve got your things, too. Tell me what else you need.”

He fell back into his seat, clutching the silver tarp and the jar of green stuff he wasn’t allowed to drink, and a doughnut shaped thing Kibby said was a detonator. She was fighting to get her hands in her pockets. When she did, she pulled out tape and a couple of metal containers shaped like test tubes. She’d taken them from cabinets in the main work labs yesterday.

“I need…” Her eyes flicked to the screen on the dash that showed the car’s surroundings.

“Don’t look at that,” said Alden. “Look at me. We can do this.”

Kibby met his eyes. “I need a while. A little while. Not long.”

“Good. I need a little while to get ready, too.” He was managing well with the false confidence, he thought. And if the stress inside him was bubbling out in his voice, then it would be hard to notice over the rattling and crashing sounds, the spatter of dirt against the exterior of the armored vehicle as its metal wheels fought their way through the landscape, and the obnoxious warning alarms pinging.

One alarm for damage to the front of the car, one for excess speed, one that he was sure must mean, “Oh my God! Why are we crashing into a hundred demon grasshoppers a minute, you fool?!”

They’d run into trouble in the worst possible area. He thought they were less than an hour from the edge of the corrupted zone, assuming they kept driving at the cautious speed he’d maintained ever since they left the lab. But the demons were thick here. The black specks looked like flakes in a dark version of a snowglobe, freshly shaken and making the car scream.

Alden had taken a few hits while he held Kibby. He swore at least one of the little horrors had just appeared inside the car instead of crashing through a weakened point. I knew leaving during the swarming would be bad. I prepared for that.

What he hadn’t prepared for was the animal graveyard. One second, they’d been rolling through the increasingly patchy and weirdening grass. The next, they were in an area that must have been stamped short by the feet of the bokabv herd that had fallen there. Around fifteen corpses, most big, a few small. Alden was sorry for the poor things.

As he’d directed the car to go around the area where they’d died, he’d felt the chaos rising. And the car seemed to agree with him. It had given him a warning of some kind, written in logograms he couldn’t read well, right before the biggest demon Alden had ever seen stood up from where it had been lying hidden in the grass. The creature had charged toward them with a bleating cry that continued even after its mouth was closed.

Alden barely had time to register that it was a bokabv, or had once been, before it rammed the front of the car with a forehead grown misshapen. Bony knobs massed there, bursting through skin that oozed with blood that shouldn’t have had the same bioluminescent quality as the undemonified animal’s saliva but somehow did.

Alden could still see a gleam of it in the dent on the hood where it had struck them. In the rear camera, he could see the demon itself, chasing them relentlessly. It seemed farther behind than the last time he’d checked, but that was only because they were driving ahead at destructive speed. As soon as the car hit a ditch too deep, it would be on them.

Alden wondered if the part of the demon that should have felt exhaustion had broken. Maybe the part of it that understood they were now far away from the herd it was trying to defend had shut down, too. If it chased them because it was crazed, hurt, and changed…that was sad. But there was no avoiding the truth that when it caught up to them it was, in the best case scenario, going to kill itself in the process of destroying their car.

Alden was sure that sitting tight and hoping the vehicle beat the demon before the demon beat him was the wrong call.

Should we have stayed at the lab after all?

The thought intruded on him as he tried to make his plan for getting on top of the moving car. He pushed it aside.

Slow down a lot, but don’t stop. Accept that you’re going to get peppered with the little ones. It will hurt. Don’t let it distract you. We’re almost to the edge of the corruption. You have to get the car and Kibby out of here.

Just one big, terrifying demon in the way before things got significantly safer for them. That was all.

“I finished!” Kibby was holding out a contraption that had way too many parts. A tiny question about how this shoebox-sized mess of wires and tubes had appeared so quickly from so few components flitted across Alden’s thoughts and then dissolved in the sea of more pressing concerns.

“Okay,” he said, taking it from her. “Okay. You’re in charge of keeping the car going. Stay in here. Don’t come outside no matter what.”

“What if you need help?”

“You already helped. I won’t need more.”

He thought about telling her to keep going even if he fell off or died. Putting that out there right now might do more harm than good, though.

“I’m going to shield us from the explosion and whatever happens next.”

Do you think I can do it? he wondered.

“You can,” said Kibby.

“Of course I can.”

******

Of course I can. What a thing to promise.

Alden was moving.

He was pulling himself up onto the top of the car. The walls of the charging shed provided some help since the tie-downs for them gave him handholds. He was unfurling the tarp.

Shouting for Kibby to slow them down a little more.

Getting hit by chaos. More chaos than he was used to even from before.

Asserting himself. Asserting his skill.

Hearing the buzzing.

Feeling cool air on his back as his shirt collected another hole.

A man tried to stab me in that spot once. He’s dead now, and I’m still here.

That was something he could think about later. The car was slowing, making it easier to get the tarp right without so much flapping.

It was soft and light. His hands acted like they knew what to do with it better than they would have if he’d tried something like this the last time they were here on Thegund. Not that getting coverage for the back and, to some extent, the sides of a large car with an even larger cloth was as complicated as an origami turkey.

He was glad he couldn’t see in two directions at once like an Artonan. Looking away from the approaching demon would have been impossible if he’d thought he could get away with splitting his attention. He kept his center of gravity low, kept his feet shoved under a strap so tight it threatened his circulation. It was a somewhat pitiful effort to give himself one more layer of security in the event that the ground gave way beneath the weight of the car.

The strange thing is…

He let the edge of the tarp drape over his own head, down his back a little, making sure he’d have some coverage too. He preserved it.

“Are you sure I can just drop this thing?” he shouted. The bomb and its detonator were tied to his waist by a couple of loops of thin rope so that his hands could work. Worst fanny pack ever.

Kibby’s shout from the car was muffled but affirmative. As if it had heard her, the bokabv demon issued its battlecry again. Now it was so loud that Alden had to look. The beast was gaining on them. Rapidly.

And Alden was already feeling the strain of holding a large shield in a place where thousands of smaller demons surrounded him.

He inhaled deeply, the smell of rotting grass and something like boiled egg coating his nostrils.

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The strange thing is, I think I can do this.

Not for long. Not perfectly. But if Kibby’s bomb worked and if the bokabv was already weakened by attacking the car…

He tossed the bomb into the crushed trail of grass in their wake. He held their shield in one hand, the detonator donut in the other.

She’d told him he should sink his fingers into the depression on the inside of the ring and say, “Pierce.” Like it was a potion injector.

Alden stood, eyes glued to the bokabv as it approached the bomb in the grass. What if it sees it? Will it turn? What do I do if it comes around and attacks from the side?

Meet it with the shield. As many times as it took. Survive.

Strange, he thought again.

He could see the bokabv very clearly. The bony mass of its head, so unlike the sweeter, softer face of a normal one. The almost blinding glow of its matted fur. The things happening around it that were a little more wrong than all the rest of the wrong here. Behind it in a narrow strip, the ground looked like it had been trampled by hundreds of creatures instead of one, the grass all vanishing in an instant like the touch of its feet were fire, scorching down to bare dark soil. Off to the sides, Alden saw the subtle motion of stems curling in death or thickening and lengthening with altered life.

Strange that I think I can do this.

His mouth was dry.

Almost time.

His brain was working to connect this moment to so many others. He remembered another bokabv he’d met at some point, nudging his face with a velvety snout. And Instructor Klein barreling toward him with an oversized dog crate that had flattened into a pancake.

This is so much more serious than that.

He remembered being told by the Earth System that he’d leveled. Puking in the toilet afterward. Lexi telling him Anesidora was the only place on Earth that really wanted Avowed. He remembered an injector for soothing a stomach that had been overwhelmed by fear that would be with him for longer than any virus.

“You don’t know how to use it,” Lexi had said.

I do now. Alden ducked behind the shield.

“Pierce.”