Dead Man’s Hand (11 page)

“What was that about?” he asked.

“Funny; I could be asking you the same question,” she shot back. “I thought we were
here hunting giant death bugs, not so you could make eyes at some black-haired lady
who ain’t never seen the sunlight. Or is this what you do every time you go out to
the desert?”

“What?” Jonathan looked at her blankly. “What in the world are you talking about?”

“I suppose I should expect it. Last time you came to the desert, you brought me home
with you. It’s past time you went out and got yourself a new pet project. Can’t say
as I think she’ll be half as good with a gun as I am, but hell, maybe you don’t like
girls who can outshoot you. I swear, Jonathan Healy, you are the most arrogant, idiotic—”

He clapped his hand over her mouth, cutting her off in mid-sentence. Fran’s eyes widened,
filling first with confusion, and then with the sort of fury he really preferred to
see directed as far away from himself as possible.

“Shh,” he whispered, before she could pull away or, worse, bite him. “You can be furious
later. Right now,
listen
.”

Fran glared at him, but relaxed against his hand, doing as he asked. Then her eyes
widened. He pulled his hand away, nodding. Fran nodded back, and the two of them started
down the street, moving toward the sound of buzzing wings.

* * *

Jonathan’s chest tightened as the source of the buzzing came into view ahead of them:
the train station. It made sense. The station was the largest standing building in
town and, if something was truly upsetting the swarm, it also afforded the most opportunities
for a rapid escape. He’d never heard of Apraxis migrating by train before, but he’d
never heard of them moving during their settled season, either. If the one could happen,
the other also became plausible.

He led Fran up the station steps in silence, wishing he could make her fully understand
the scope of the threat. Apraxis wasps were smart. If they’d just been killers, they
would have been a horror and a threat, but they wouldn’t have been half so dangerous.
As it was, he was leading Fran into a building containing an unknown number of flying
opponents with human-level intelligence and inborn weaponry.

It was almost enough to make a man rethink his choice of profession.

“Fran, if you don’t want to go inside, I would quite understand. You’re still an apprentice,
and it would be unfair of me to ask you to endanger yourself in this fashion.”

“Are you joshing me, city boy?” Knives appeared in Fran’s hands, no doubt pulled from
somewhere in the lining of her coat. He had long since given up all pretense of knowing
how many weapons she carried at any given time. It seemed safer to admit ignorance
until she started calling for backup. “You drag me halfway across the country and
make me share a house with the Wicked Bitch of the West, and then you try to keep
me out of the
interesting
part? You know me well enough to know
that’s
not going to work.”

“And you know
me
well enough to know that I have to offer,” said Jonathan, pulling his own pistol
from his belt. “Very well, then. If we’re both set on risking our lives before midnight,
we’d best get on with it. The clock isn’t going to stop while we argue. There are,
however, a few rules.”

“When aren’t there?” Fran asked.

The look he gave her then was so uncharacteristically serious that she quieted, a
small frown forming on her lips. “Will you listen?”

“Yes, sir,” she replied, all levity gone.

“Thank you. First, you stay behind me. It’s not simply a matter of my trying to cover
for you—Apraxis often attack from the rear, and we’re going to need the cover if we’re
going inside. So stay behind me, and watch my back. In exchange, I’ll watch yours.
Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“Second, if I say run, you run. Don’t take one more shot. Don’t decide that I’m being
overly cautious.
Run
. I’ve seen what the Apraxis do to their victims. You haven’t.” With any luck, she
never would. With even more luck, he never would again.

“Anything else?”

Jonathan sighed. “Please try not to die. There aren’t any convenient circuses to steal
a replacement trick rider from.”

“I’ll keep breathing if you’ll do the same, city boy,” said Fran.

“It’s a deal,” said Jonathan, with a brief-lived smile. Then he began advancing on
the train station, his pistol held ready. This time, Fran followed him, not into the
streets of Boggsville, but into Hell itself.

* * *

Night and darkness had transformed the station from a bright, airy building into a
cavern filled with suspicious shadows and sounds that had no obvious source. The buzzing
was constant, so loud it seemed impossible that the entire town wasn’t coming to investigate.
Fran crept along at Jonathan’s heels, and decided that anyone who was still alive
and living in Boggsville must have learned to ignore the buzzing, because to do anything
else was to deal with the question of its source.

Jonathan continued forward until they reached the middle of the station’s main waiting
room, where the sound was at its loudest. He stopped there, gesturing for Fran to
do the same. She nodded and turned, locking her shoulders against his back. Then,
and only then, did the pair look up toward the rafters, and the sound of thousands
of wings beating in unison.

It took a moment for their eyes to process what was in front of them. The ceiling
seemed to be pulsing, like it was breathing in time with the humming of the wings.
Jonathan’s mouth went dry. It was a living curtain of bodies—some small, proving that
the Apraxis were continuing to breed, while others were almost a foot in length, wasps
grown far past the point which Nature intended. The only mercy of the scene was that
the darkness sapped the brilliance from their colors, turning them into gray-banded
shadows. Seeing them in the light would just have made it clearer that they were never
intended to exist.

He felt, rather than heard, Fran’s indrawn breath. There was no need to motion her
to be quiet; she knew as well as he did what would happen if they baited the apparently
sleeping beasts above them. The wasps must have taken shelter in the train station
for the night. They would remain there until morning, unless startled. Slowly, Jonathan
reached back with his free hand and gestured toward the door. He and Fran needed to
exit. Reconnaissance was complete: the hive existed, and could be tracked. Now it
was time to decide what to do about it.

A normal Apraxis hive would contain ten to thirty individuals. When he’d heard the
sound of wings, he’d believed that was what they were moving toward: a single hive,
ready to be examined and exterminated. He hadn’t been expecting to discover all the
missing hives from the area clustered together in a single place, apparently united
against whatever had caused them to move.

Fran nodded, once, before starting to walk back toward the door. Jonathan matched
her steps, trusting her to guide him out. He didn’t want to turn around; he didn’t
want to do anything that might risk his losing sight of the pulsing mass that was
the hive for even an instant.

They were almost out when a rock hit the station window. The sound echoed through
the room like a crude imitation of a gunshot. The buzzing stopped a split-second later,
like the monstrous wasps were holding their breath in anticipation.

“Run,” whispered Jonathan.

Frances ran.

Jonathan ran after her, and behind him came the roar of wings as hundreds of Apraxis
wasps launched themselves from the ceiling and swept down upon the perceived threat
to their hive. Fran reached the door first, grabbing for the knob. It refused to turn.

“The door’s locked!” she shouted, all pretense of stealth abandoned.

“Find a way to unlock it,” Jonathan snapped back, before turning, pulling the second
pistol from his belt, and opening fire on the descending swarm.

The first several Apraxis to dive toward him were greeted with bullets which shattered
their fragile exoskeletons and sent them careening to the floor. The next wave veered
off, choosing to attack from the sides instead. He shot three of them down. The fourth
encountered a hastily-flicked knife as Fran caught the motion out of the corner of
her eye. All the wasps they hit went down. But there were more—so many more—and their
weapons were limited.

The third wave paused in their attack, hovering overhead and moving in a complicated
interweaving pattern, like a deck of cards being shuffled by a pair of skillful hands.
Jonathan tried tracking them with his pistols, and found that he couldn’t keep a single
wasp in his sights; they were moving too fast. He might hit one or more if he fired
into the body of the swarm—they were tightly packed enough to make that possible—but
he might also miss entirely, and bring the full weight of their wrath down on his
head.

“Frances, if you’re taking your time out of a misguided respect for the property of
others, this is the time when you stop being considerate and start smashing things,”
he said, out of the corner of his mouth.

“I’m trying,” she hissed back.

The swarm overhead was beginning to dip lower, still moving in that complicated, coordinated
pattern. It was almost hypnotic in its way, like watching fire consume a log. Jonathan
blinked, trying not to let himself be mesmerized by the swirling sea of wings and
bodies. He didn’t dare look away. Looking away would be an invitation to the end.

“Fran—”

“Almost…” There was a loud splintering sound. “Got it!” Then the door was shoved open,
and she was dragging him out into the night, away from the swarm. Fearing the escape
of their prey, the Apraxis dove. Too late; Jonathan and Fran were already outside.
The wasps pulled up short at the threshold of the station. Then they vanished back
up into the rafters, leaving only the steady drone of wings to mark their presence.

Jonathan, who had half-fallen against Fran, got back to his feet. “Well,” he said,
re-holstering his pistols before removing his glasses and wiping them against the
front of his shirt. “That was bracing.”

“Is that normal for giant demon wasp things?” asked Fran. She moved to stand beside
him. Her knives were already gone, vanished back into her clothing.

“Not in the slightest. We should be dead now.” Jonathan replaced his glasses. “They
won’t leave the building. Enough Apraxis to kill everyone in this town, and they’re
hiding in a single defensible location.”

“Meaning what?” asked Fran.

The look Jonathan gave her then was enough to make her blood run cold. “Meaning there’s
something out here that the Apraxis are afraid of.”

“See, I was really worried that you were going to say that.” Fran looked back to the
doorway. “Now what?”

Jonathan didn’t have an immediate answer.

* * *

“Things don’t add up,” said Jonathan an hour later, as he sat on the edge of their
shared bed, flipping one more time through his father’s notes. “Apraxis wasps depend
on swarm intelligence. Collectively, they know everything that any of their victims
knew. Depending on the size and complexity of the swarm, they can have the intelligence
and memories of hundreds of humans. Swarms have even been known to exchange members
when they were missing information that they thought might be beneficial.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Fran continued oiling her knives, testing
their edges one by one before sliding them back into their sheaths.

“A healthy Apraxis swarm isn’t afraid of
anything
, because the lives of individuals matter only when the swarm is reduced to the point
where they risk losing vital information. This swarm is a… a collective. They’re not
at risk of losing anything. So why would they refuse to leave the station?” He threw
the notes down in disgust. “They have no natural predators. They have no known illnesses.
Their behavior makes no
sense
.”

“Now hold on there, Johnny. I think you’re missing something.”

Jonathan looked toward her. “How so?”

“When we met, you didn’t know that there were Questing Beasts in Arizona, and I didn’t
know that there were talking mice in Michigan,” said Fran. “An’ neither one of us
knew that there were little green snakes with wings living in Indiana.”

“They’re a sub-species of coatl,” said Jonathan. His interjection lacked heat; he
was already getting the distant look that meant he was considering the implications
of her words.

“Whatever they are, they’re little green snakes with wings that no one knew existed.
So how about you stop saying the giant wasps have no natural predators, and tack on
a weasely little ‘that we know of’? Then all we have to do is look around until we
know what we have to shoot. Besides the several hundred giant death wasps.”

“Frances Brown, you’re a genius.” Jonathan was suddenly on his feet and heading for
the door, leaving Fran to blink bemusedly after him.

“Was it something that I said?” she asked, of no one in particular.

* * *

Jonathan’s pounding brought Eleanor Smith to her bedroom door, the high collar of
her dressing gown clutched tight around her neck. Her eyes widened when she saw him,
and she stepped out into the hall, closing her door—but not before he could see the
mound of gold chains and ore covering her mattress.

“I don’t have time for pretty pretense or lying to you,” he said, cutting off her
protests before they could begin. “I am here to find out what is upsetting the Apraxis
hives and endangering lives in this town, including yours and your daughter’s. As
I have no idea how to contact the local bogeyman community, any information I acquire
will have to come from you. Now: when did this start?”

Eleanor stared at him, open-mouthed, for several seconds. Then she lifted her head,
took a breath, and said, “I’m sure I don’t have any idea what you’re—”

“You’re a dragon princess,” he said. “Your species used to live symbiotically with
the great dragons, until they became extinct. You’ve been hiding amongst the humans
ever since. I’m not here to endanger you, but I’m not going to allow you to lie to
me, either. There’s too much at stake.”