Unbroken os-4 Page 19

  I shrugged, killed the Victory’s engine, and dismounted as he climbed down from the truck. We were in the parking lot of a small restaurant that still flickered a red OPEN light in the window, although there was only one other vehicle parked there. The town had seemed deserted; there’d been almost no traffic on the roads, and we’d seen no one out on the streets on foot, either.

  But this little restaurant seemed to be carrying on despite all of the evidence around it that perhaps it was time to take a day off.

  A bell rang softly as we entered through the glass door, but that seemed to be the only sound, until I heard some metal clattering, and a woman rushed out from the back, wiping her hands on a towel. She was dressed in plain blue jeans and a checked shirt, and she had the look of a woman used to hard work and disappointment—but for all that, her smile was brave. “Welcome!” she said. “Things are a little strange out there today, but I’m still cooking. You folks grab yourselves a seat anywhere. I’d bring you menus, but really, it doesn’t matter. I’ll make you whatever you’d like.”

  Luis smiled at her and said, “How about a hamburger and a Coke?”

  “Bread’s a couple of days old, if you can stand that, but my produce comes out of the back garden, and it’s still fresh,” the cook said. “Best hamburgers in the Four Corners area, and that’s a promise. You want cheese on that? And fries?”

  “Sure. Cass?”

  I ordered the same, which seemed to unreasonably delight the woman. She hustled off, and came back to deliver us drinks, frosty in mugs and fizzing with energy and sweetness. I sipped mine and watched as she hurried back to the kitchen. “Why is she so eager to serve us?” I asked. “Surely she knows how bad things are. And will become.”

  “Oh, she knows,” Luis said. “Bet she doesn’t even charge us anything. Sometimes people just like to feel… normal. Like everything’s going to be okay. She likes to cook, and it makes her feel steadier. Gotta say, it makes me feel steadier, too. A little normal life in the middle of chaos—it’s not a bad thing.”

  I didn’t think so, either, but it alarmed me a little that in the midst of chaos humans clung so strongly to the lost normality of their lives. Her smile was bright and friendly, and she seemed so desperate to make us part of her circle of safety.

  The food, when it came, was excellent; she brought a plate of her own and put it on a separate table. “Sorry,” she said. “Proprietor’s gotta eat, too. I won’t bother you folks, and don’t be afraid to ask for anything if you need it.”

  Luis scooted out a chair next to him. “Join us,” he said. “I’m Luis. This is Cass.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” she said. She was beaming as she picked up her glass and plate and sat down at our table. “You folks just passing through?” She laughed a little. “Stupid question. This ain’t a time when people are settling down.”

  “Yeah, we’re on our way somewhere,” Luis said. “I guess this is your place?”

  “Well, it is now,” she said. “The man who owned it—he just ran away, left the place wide open. He told me I could have it if I wanted, so I figured I’d just keep it open for anybody who needed some food. Probably can’t get much more in the way of supplies, but I’ll use up what we got. No need for it to go to waste. I’m Betty, by the way.”

  “You from around here, Betty?”

  She took a bite of her hamburger and shook her head as she chewed and swallowed. “Nope. I was what you might call on my own. Lost my house a couple of years back, been traveling hard ever since. I ended up here when our bus broke down, and then the driver couldn’t get it fixed, so he went off to find help and never came back. Been here for about four days now, I guess. Seems like longer. Figured I might as well make the best of it.”

  “Well,” Luis said, “you make one hell of a good burger. Glad you decided to fire up the grill for us.”

  “Ain’t no big thing. I always wanted to open a restaurant someday,” she said, and munched a French fry contemplatively before she asked, “You two trying to fix things?”

  “Fix them, how exactly?” I asked.

  “Don’t know, but you two seem… different. You’re not running from something. You’re running to it. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody quite like the two of you before.”

  “Well,” Luis said, “Cass is extremely pale. It is kind of weird, even for a gringa.”

  Betty choked on her drink—iced tea, from the look of it. “Not what I meant,” she said. “I seen them people on the TV, the ones who can do things. Magic and such. Strikes me you could be like that. I mean, I’m a good Christian woman. I’ve always thought magic came from, you know, the devil, but—but maybe it don’t, after all.”

  “If it helps, think of it as miracles,” Luis said. “That’s what I do. My cousin’s a priest, one of my aunts is a nun, and my mom still drags me to mass every chance she gets. If I thought this power came out of a bad place, I wouldn’t dare be using it.”

  It puzzled me, this apparently quite serious discussion of the obvious, but then I thought of Pearl. She was what this woman feared—evil masquerading as good for as long as might be convenient.

  “I had a good feeling about you two right off,” Betty said. “Might be a little wild-looking, but you’ve got good hearts. That’s important.”

  The very unlikely Betty had something in her, too. Power, of a kind, though nothing that I recalled meeting before. It was a core of something I could only call a fierce, persistent hope. The kind that drove her, despite the hardships she’d endured, to make food for strangers and strive to provide a measure of comfort.

  She was, I realized, human. Deeply, helplessly human, with all the faults and foibles, shining courage and power of that heritage. Unlike the Djinn, she had little control over what was to come; she likely didn’t even expect to survive it. What she did, she did in the face of panic, terror, pain, and death.

  She was beautiful. I caught my breath, staring at her, because it was as if my Djinn eyes had opened again, seen all the depth of her past and complex, intricate, unpredictable future. I had spent so much time with Wardens, who were at least somewhat like the Djinn; I thought I’d known humanity in its purest form.

  But this woman—this one, hopeful woman—this was humanity, distilled and purified, and it humbled me.

  I ate in silence while Luis and Betty chattered on—discussing pasts, comparing relatives, talking of nothing in particular, and certainly not the lives being lost, the cities burning, the horrific cost of what was to come. It might be called denial by some, but in that moment I thought it was the very strength that made humanity so successful… the ability to transcend reality, to create reality around them, even for a moment.

  It was a gift the Djinn did not have, and until that moment, I had never imagined it to be so powerful.

  “So,” Betty said, when we had finished and there was nothing left on our plates but a few scraps and scrapes. “How do you folks feel about dessert? I’ve got some pies I made up fresh this morning, apple and chocolate. Even got some fresh whipped cream.”

  “Apple,” Luis said, just as I said, “Chocolate.” She looked from one of us to the other, and laughed.

  “I’ll have one of each,” she said. “Might as well. Can’t let it go to waste.”

  She stood up to go back to the kitchen, and stacked our empty plates; when Luis tried to help, she smacked the back of his hand in mock anger. I watched her go, and couldn’t help but smile.

  “I like that,” Luis said. He was staring right at me. “Your smile. You’re different when you do that.”

  “Am I?”

  “Usually when you smile, it’s to make a point, but that was just”—he shrugged—“human, I guess. And sweet. You’re not often sweet, and it’s nice.”

  I felt oddly uncomfortable with that, and shrugged, no longer smiling. “Perhaps it’s in anticipation of the pie,” I said.

  “C’mon, you’ve gotta admit. Nice lady, overcoming the odds, making pies… Who doesn�
��t love that?”

  “Perhaps she killed the former proprietor and stuck his dismembered body in his own freezer,” I shot back. “Not so heartwarming a story, then.”

  He threw a wadded-up napkin at me, and I was starting to smile again, perhaps with a wicked edge, when I heard plates crash, and Betty screamed.

  I don’t remember coming out of the chair, only the feel of the swinging door beneath my hand as I stiff-armed it open.

  There was a Djinn in the kitchen. Tall, slender, human, and male in form; he had a long fall of blond hair and eyes that glowed an unearthly, livid white.

  I didn’t know him, and it didn’t matter who he was, or had been; what he was now was rage and fury and pain given flesh.

  And he was killing Betty.

  His hand was locked around her throat. The broken fragments of the plates she had dropped were still bouncing and spinning across the floor, and time seemed to slow as I lunged forward.…

  And the Djinn released Betty, spun away, and caught me instead.

  She fell down, coughing and choking, but still breathing. He had never intended to kill her, I realized; she’d merely been a bell for him to ring to draw me to him. And that, I found, was all right. It was a choice I’d have gladly made.

  Odd, how much I had changed.

  Behind me, Luis shouted something that I failed to understand, but it didn’t matter; the floor beneath the Djinn suddenly rose upward in a geyser of tile, broken concrete, dirt, shattered pipes, and slammed him into the ceiling. He lost his grip on me, and I tumbled back down the instant mound of debris to crash breathlessly into the steel casing of the ovens.

  Luis headed toward me, but I pointed urgently at Betty. He changed course, grabbed her, and towed her backward, pushing her out the swinging door.

  “Wait!” she yelled. “What are you doing?”

  “Getting my damn pie,” he said. “Stay down.”

  The Djinn hadn’t been thrown off guard for long; he broke free of the pile of debris around him, but instantly met the flat side of a large skillet that Luis grabbed off the stove—still red-hot underneath, I realized. After he’d batted the Djinn across the face with it, Luis dropped the metal with a hiss of pain; the Djinn howled, evidently feeling the damage to its flesh as much as a human would have, but neither the crushed bones nor the badly burned skin bought us more than a few seconds.

  Time enough for me to yank a natural gas connection loose from the wall. “Fire!” I shouted to Luis, who snapped his fingers.

  The hissing gas line erupted in a blue-white jet of flame, engulfing the Djinn. It was a distraction, not a victory; we had little chance, it seemed, of destroying this one with the tools we had at hand. “Get Betty!” I yelled. “Get her out of here!” I was working hard to limit the natural tendency of the fire to eat its way back through the gas line, into a larger store; once that happened, the explosion would be spectacular, and there wouldn’t be anything left of the restaurant. I had to buy time for Luis and the woman to get clear before that happened.

  The Djinn was managing to extinguish itself, so I grabbed a bottle of cooking oil, ripped the cap off, and threw it in his direction. The plastic bottle was easy enough to melt in midflight, and the oil coated his skin and gave the fire fresh life all over him.

  He was no longer amused.

  I felt the coming blow, and the whole building rocked around me, as if it had suddenly been struck by a tornado, but the weather outside was calm and clear. The Djinn was breaking the restaurant apart—and in the kitchen area, sharp metal was everywhere, lying loose, or just lightly secured. A block on the counter holding a succession of cutting knives tipped over, and the knives slid free and rotated in the air, each finding and focusing in on me with their sharp points.

  Half of them flew directly at me in a rush, and I had just enough time to fling out my hand and create a strong magnetic field on the front of the stove. The knives, and most of the other metal pulling free in the room, veered course and clanged against the stove’s side in a near-unbreakable bond. The Djinn suddenly snuffed out all of the fire—even the flaming torch of the gas jet—and went very still. I felt the energy in the room change, as if something very large that had been casually swatting at me suddenly turned and focused its attention on me quite closely.

  Another Djinn misted into existence next to the one who still smoldered with sparks in its blackened skin. Then another, and another.

  I backed through the swinging doors, not daring to take my eyes off them. “Get in the truck,” I called over my shoulder. “Take her with you. Start driving.”

  “Cass—”

  “Do it!” I heard the front bell ring as they left, and the normality of that sound was made all the more wrenching by the three Djinn who simply misted right through the walls, walking toward me. I knew that I couldn’t take on three Djinn; even with Luis, there was no possibility of surviving the experience.

  Instead, I took in a deep breath and set myself on fire.

  The effect was, indeed, spectacular; the flames bloomed along my sleeve, and I screamed in panic and made a show of trying to slap them out. In fact, I was spreading them over my jacket, then down my pants, until my whole body was coated in a writhing fury of orange fire. I screamed again, ran into a table, and fell to the floor, still burning. The floor around me began to sizzle and melt. Flames climbed up the wooden legs of the chair against which I lay.

  I thrashed a bit, and then went still. The hiss of the burning floor and table was helpful in selling the illusion that my flesh was blackening and sizzling like meat on a grill, and after a few more seconds, the Djinn lost interest in me and misted away.

  I let the fire go on for a few more seconds. It was as well I did, because the last Djinn to leave—the one I’d burned, who did in fact still trail smoke behind him—came back to watch for a moment. Not mistrust, I thought, so much as satisfaction.

  When he was finally gone, I doused the flames, rolled up to my feet, and ran for my motorcycle. Luis’s truck was long gone; I had done my best to focus the Djinn on me, not on him, so I was hopeful that he wouldn’t be their target if he was fleeing. All I needed to do was fire up the Victory, and…

  The Victory was a steaming, melted pile of scrap metal.

  I stared at it, grim and quite disappointed, and with a muttered curse, moved down the street to another building, then another. It seemed that every vehicle in town had been destroyed, and I was still searching for something, anything, that could take me on the road when I heard, very distinctly, the blatting sounds of motorcycle engines, more than one, approaching down the deserted main street.

  I ducked outside. A biker gang, at least twenty strong, was cruising through, checking out the prospects for food, fuel, or looting; they had the hard, grubby look of men and women who’d been on the road for days, and the hunted expressions of those who’d seen too much.

  I stepped out into their way, and the first wave of bikes coasted to a stop just inches from my body.

  Even idling, the Harleys were loud beasts. The one I immediately pegged as the leader was looking me over, frowning, and he finally said, “So, are you stupid, or just crazy?”

  “Neither,” I said. “I need a motorcycle.”

  Under normal circumstances that would have gotten a derisive laugh, but not this time. They had no more humor left, it seemed. I saw guns being drawn, including a sawed-off shotgun, which would have worried me if I hadn’t already had considerable experience with firearms. I didn’t blink, or look away from the leader’s face.

  “You need to get out of here and keep moving,” I told him. “Stay away from towns. Try to live off the land, and conserve your fuel. Once it goes dry, there may not be more for a while. Things are going to get worse, not better.”

  “I’m still listening for a reason not to shoot you and get you out of our way,” he said. “Got anything, blondie?”

  In response, I deflated both tires on his bike. He yelped in surprise as the weight shifted, strugg
ling to hold it upright. “I could destroy some of your bikes,” I said quietly. “I could do that quite spectacularly, if I wished. They blow up so well. Or I could fuse the parts together. Or even fuse you into the metal, which I assure you would be very unpleasant, until you died of the experience. But I’m trying to be hospitable.” I called a fireball and balanced it in a blazing hand-sized bonfire on my palm. “I need a vehicle. I’m sorry I have nothing to give you for it, but let’s call it the spoils of war. If I’m still alive later, I’ll buy a new one for the leader of the”—I checked the logo on the back of his weathered denim jacket—“Devil’s Traitors.”

  To his credit, he didn’t immediately back off, though his eyes had narrowed at the sight of the flame held so casually in my hand. “We’re out of Albuquerque,” he said. “You’d better make it a fucking awesome bike, lady.” He looked toward the back of the pack, and pointed. “Take Pointer’s ride. Pointer, double up with Gar, and don’t bitch about it. We’ll steal you another one down the road.”

  The tough-looking one-eyed man he indicated didn’t seem pleased, but he did as instructed, leaving the Harley idling and leaning on its kickstand as he took his place on the other bike. I nodded thanks, and mounted up.

  “Blondie,” the biker said from the front of the pack. I released the kickstand. “If I see you again and you aren’t wheeling in a brand-new shiny ride for Pointer, this ain’t going to go well for you. Got me?”

  I nodded. “Seems fair,” I said. “I live in Albuquerque. I’ll find you.”

  “Not if I find you first,” he said, and let out the clutch. They picked up speed and left the streets in a swirl of dust and trash.

  I hit the throttle, and went in pursuit of Luis.

  He’d stopped on the side of the road twenty miles away, at another roadhouse; this one was deserted and locked, but he’d opened it up, and Betty was inspecting the establishment with enthusiasm. He eyed my new Harley with raised eyebrows. “Bike trouble?” he asked.

  “Don’t ask.” I was annoyed at the way the Harley rode; the bars were too far forward and low, and it would take time to customize it properly. I missed the Victory. “She’ll be all right here. We have to go. I’m not entirely sure the Djinn will leave us be, although I did a good imitation of gruesomely dying for their benefit.”