Authors: S. Andrew Swann
Dragons & Dwarves (66 page)
In addition, the driveway up to the three-car garage was covered by an unbroken layer of snow. I began to worry that the doctor wasn’t home.
I got out of the car and trudged through the snow up to the front door. I didn’t see any sign of life. I rang the doorbell, and got no answer. I leaned on the button, listening to the electronic chimes inside the house.
Nothing.
I pounded on the door with little hope. “Dr. Pretorious? Dr. Pretorious?” My words came out in puffs of fog, and I began doubting that I had the correct house. I was going off of memory for the address. All my notes were in the hands of the FBI at the moment.
For a few seconds I wondered if Blackstone had beat me here . . .
“Dr. Pretorious!”
I tried the door itself.
Unlocked.
I let myself in, not knowing what to expect.
The smell hit me first, before my eyes adjusted. Food rotting, feces, ammonia . . . The heat was jacked so high that breathing the fetid air was like trying to suck air through a wet towel—a towel that’d been used to clean up the bathroom at a strip club. A cheap strip club.
As my eyes adjusted, I began to see eyes, dozens of eyes. Pupils reflecting light back at me. I froze when I heard something growl. I hyperventilated, thinking of all the nasty goblins, gremlins, and little beasties that crawled around dark places. I had to tell myself that I was too far from the Portal for that sort of thing, but I still held my breath until I could make out the feline outlines that went with the demonic eyes.
Cats. Just a shitload of cats.
“Fuck,”
I said, half relieved, half angry at myself. The word was enough to send about half the eyes scurrying deeper into the darkness.
I said, half relieved, half angry at myself. The word was enough to send about half the eyes scurrying deeper into the darkness.
I closed the door behind me, and stepped carefully around debris on the floor as I felt around for a light switch. I found a panel of three on the wall, only one of which worked. A light came on over the master staircase.
“Holy shit . . .”
The house was only ten or fifteen years old, cost a few million . . . In three years, Dr. Pretorious had managed to completely destroy it. Cat shit was everywhere. Wallpaper was stained and peeled off of yellowing walls. The carpeting had been shredded, the fibers pulled up into random piles all over the floor and the stairs.
The cats orbited me, staring, none closer than about fifteen feet. None of them seemed to be hurting for food, and the floor was scattered with empty cans and empty twenty-pound bags of cat food.
Deeper in the house I heard a television turned to Fox News or CNN. I could hear some talking head discussing trade relations with China.
I stepped carefully around the crap on the floor and headed toward the sound of the television. “Dr. Pretorious?”
The cats followed me, mewing and occasionally hissing if I passed too close. One that had been concealed under an empty pizza box lying in my path suddenly appeared in front of me, back arched, spitting, then jumped me. I had to bring my foot up to deflect it back toward the ground.
It shot away, and I escaped with a slightly unraveled sock.
I flexed my bandaged hand. Just being in this atmosphere was probably going to give me an infection. It was bad enough here having exposed skin. An open wound . . .
The den was actually worse. Lit only by the television, I saw a massive leather couch that looked as if it had had a losing argument with a rototiller. There had been built-in bookshelves, but most of the shelves had collapsed, spilling their contents on the floor, allowing the books to be shredded in a giant improv litter box.
There was someone watching the television, seated in a wheelchair. He looked about two or three times as old as his portrait. Hair uncut, beard unshaven, skin pale, spotted, and deeply lined.
“Dr. Pretorious?”
The old man continued to stare at the news.
“Dr. Pretorious?”
“Is it time already?” he whispered. His voice was cracked and brittle, as if he hadn’t spoken in a long time.
“My name is Kline Maxwell, I’m from the
Cleveland Press
. . .”
Cleveland Press
. . .”
“Is the seal broken? Have you seen a pale horse?”
Shit, the guy’s lost it. He’s nuts.
“I wanted to talk about Magetech.”
He turned toward me, and his pupils were wide and cloudy with cataracts. I doubted he could see anything. “I don’t talk about that.”
“You were a scientist, you helped found the company.”
He shook his head violently. “I don’t talk about that.” He stared at the television again. He switched to another news channel where a Republican Senator from North Carolina was talking about an upcoming Supreme Court nomination.
I looked at him, and the television, and asked, “What are you looking for?”
“A sign. A sign he is coming.”
“Is he part of Magetech?”
He was quiet for a long time, before he said, “I didn’t know.” He turned toward me. “Tell them I didn’t know.”
Filthy as the floor was, I knelt down so I could be on the same level as he was. “If I’m to tell them, I need to know your side of the story.”
“I don’t talk about that.”
“Because you’re afraid of him.”
“He will come, for all of us.”
“Let me know what you did.” I reached out and touched his shoulder. “You’ve been beyond his reach for three years.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“Then tell me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I
N fits and starts, it came out.
N fits and starts, it came out.
Early on, Mazurich understood that someone needed to reconstruct the physical infrastructure of the city, or any political gains made by Mayor Rayburn and the statehouse would be hollow. Roads, buildings, sewers, those were all immediate, and led to the alliance between Mazurich and the dwarven immigrants.
Beyond those first steps was the creation of Magetech.
Shortly after the first city contracts were signed with the dwarven clans, and before they had found a homeland in the mines under Erie, Mazurich was approached by another immigrant from the Portal. Simon Lucas had been one of the growing numbers of human immigrants to come from Ragnan.
While Mr. Lucas was new to our world, he had an excellent command of English and some compelling arguments. Cleveland was in danger of becoming simply an extension of Ragnan. Science and technology couldn’t be allowed to retreat in the face of the Portal. On the contrary, the disciplines developed in this world, in the absence of mana, could be used to create an understanding and manipulation of mana beyond anything imagined in Ragnan.
Mr. Lucas persuaded Mazurich, especially as it became clear that, like the dwarven contracts to maintain the roads, it had been left to local companies to solve the problems in the technical infrastructure, the interference of magic in everything from the communications signal from cellular phones to digital cameras.
Mr. Lucas helped arrange the settling of the dwarven clans under Whiskey Island, and in turn the dwarven clans, rich with funds from city construction contracts, invested their funds with Mazurich and the new Magetech start-up.
Mazurich bought several technology companies that had been collapsing under the stress of the Portal. And he brought in Dr. Pretorious.
“The engineers and programmers studied our technologies, how to make them work. I studied mana . . .”
A lot of mana.
Dr. Pretorious was probably exposed to more mana than any human in history. He had free access to the product of the dwarven mines for his experiments, and over a period of seven years studied how to use it in an industrial setting.
“Infused into alloys and crystals, wires and circuits—the basis for self-perpetuating machines, enchantments that replicate with no human intervention. Mana concentrated to the point it sustains its own creation.” He stared at the television. “We conceived of things that could make the heavens tremble and the stars fall from the sky. We manufactured means to open the gates of hell itself . . .”
“Simon Lucas.”
“The Devil himself,” Dr. Pretorious said. “I don’t talk about that.”
“You need to tell me, what is he trying to do? What does he want?”
He continued to stare at the TV, as if he could actually see it. I looked at it and saw coverage of a winter storm in Chicago, headed toward us. The color seemed off . . .
On the bottom, the scroll blurred and started repeating “I don’t talk about that . . . I don’t talk about that . . . I don’t talk about that . . .”
All around us, cats began crying. The feline wail became louder and louder, as if we were suddenly in the midst of hell’s own choir.
“The sign,” whispered Dr. Pretorious.
The picture on the television blurred into a mass of swirling color, splattered blood, and laughing half-fleshed skulls.
I shook my head. “No, we’re not close enough to the Portal.”
I heard shattering glass from behind me. I turned to see a pair of shadows walk into the den. In the ruddy glow of the television I saw raw flesh, stitched over bone with steel wire.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” said Dr. Pretorious as he turned his wheelchair around.
“What are they?”
“Our children,” he said, facing the two zombies. One reached for the old man, and I did what was probably one of the top ten dumbest things I have ever done.
I grabbed for the zombie.
Not only that, since I’m right-handed and obviously wasn’t thinking, I grabbed its wrist with my injured hand. The words “bad move” are an immeasurable understatement.
My grip sank into rotten flesh, and I could feel bone and wire—and touching the wire was like touching a high-tension line. The creature didn’t even need to shake me off. When the metal cut through the dressing on my hand, and touched skin, I felt a resonating blow of energy rip through my body. It tore through me with such force that, for a moment, it was as if my perceptions had been blown free of my flesh. I could see my own body fly backward though the air and slam into the remains of one of the bookcases.
I blinked away phantom images of shattering Magetech and Death from the tarot . . .
Zombie One grabbed Dr. Pretorious by the neck and lifted him out of his wheelchair.
The other one headed toward me.
I tried to push myself upright, but my hands slid on books and cat feces and I couldn’t do much more than push myself a little backward. I heard a strangled gasp from Dr. Pretorious. Then the other one grabbed me by the shoulders.
Again, terrible forces flew through me, twisting my vision outside of myself.
Then the impact of a window snapped me back to the here and now. The window gave way around me, the heavy drapes entangling me were the only thing keeping me from being flayed alive by flying glass.
I landed, stunned, in a snowdrift, in front of the house.
Every move I made sent daggers of pain through my arm and my back, but I scrambled to get free of the drapes wrapping me. As I did, I heard the sound of sirens coming closer.
I pulled the drapes free of my face and my upper body, and saw my zombie, framed by the window. Steam rose from its raw flesh as it climbed out of the window, toward me. The sunlight reflected off the metal wrong, as if the metallic stitching holding this thing together was reflecting back a completely different light.
The air around it was blurry and out of focus, as if I was looking at a heat haze around it. However, I suspected it was more from the concentration of mana powering this thing, than from any mundane energy.
I half crawled and half rolled out of the drapes, and managed to push myself to my feet. In that time, the zombie was already halfway toward me, and the other one was climbing out of the window.
This cannot be happening in Columbus . . .
But it was clear. Magetech had managed to encapsulate the forces flowing from the Portal, and create a self-powering magical effect. Those things were radiating mana, almost as if they were Portals themselves, spewing magical radiation enough to interfere with the doctor’s TV.
I made a limping dash toward the Lincoln, barely ahead of the zombies. I reached the door just in time for the first police car to skid to a stop at Pretorious’ cul-de-sac.
“Freeze!”
I stopped moving, even though I knew that the cops weren’t shouting at me. I heard one of them say, “Holy shit.” And the undead twins shifted their attention to the police. Two uniformed cops took position on the other side of their patrol car, and started firing.
Bullets tore away chunks of flesh and clothing, but otherwise didn’t impress the two zombies. One of the cops tried to call something in on the radio, but I could hear the mana interference from where I was.
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