My name is Waldo Butters, and I am a Jedi Knight, like my father before me.
Okay, so that isn’t exactly, technically, in a completely legal sense true. I mean, my dad was actually a podiatrist. But I’m as close to the real deal as anyone is likely to ever see in this world. I’m an actual Knight, anyway. Or, at least, I was training to be one, when on a Thursday morning I first heard the Call.
Only I didn’t hear it, exactly, technically, in a completely legal sense. … Look, maybe I should just tell the story.
OF ALL THE training Michael Carpenter had me doing, the cardio part was what I liked best. Then again, my main Pandora station plays only polka music, so what the heck do I know?
I ran along through the early-dawn light in Bucktown while the city began to wake up. The training belt around my waist tugged at my balance constantly and unpredictably. It was hooked to a bungee cord attaching me to Michael’s bicycle, being pulled along behind me as I ran. Michael would swerve and brake randomly. Sometimes he’d hold the brake for several strides, and I’d have to shift to much more powerful strides to keep moving. It was demanding work. Constantly being forced to alter my balance meant that I could never fall into a nice, efficient rhythm and I had to pay attention to every single step.
The first several weeks, that had been a problem, but I was getting used to it now. Or, rather, I was getting used to it until I saw something impossible, forgot to pay attention, got pulled off-balance by my bungee cord, and crashed into a plastic recycling bin waiting by the side of the street.
Michael immediately came to a stop, swinging his stiff leg out like an improvised kickstand. He was action-hero-sized, moving toward his late fifties, and had his walking cane strapped to the backpack he wore. “Waldo?” he asked. “Are you all right?”
I stumbled upright again, panting. “I, uh.” I peered down the street. “I’m not really sure.”
Michael looked in the same direction I was, frowning. He pursed his lips thoughtfully.
“You don’t see that, do you?” I asked.
“See what?”
I squinted. Took off my glasses. Cleaned them on a corner of my shirt that wasn’t covered in sweat. Put them back on and checked again. It was still there. “If you could see it, you wouldn’t have to ask that.”
He nodded seriously. “Tell me what you see.”
“That homeless guy on the bench?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I took a breath and said, “There’s a big yellow exclamation point floating over his head.” After a brief pause, I added, “I’m not crazy. My mother had me tested.”
Michael sat back a little on the bike’s seat and rubbed at his beard pensively. He missed the reference. “Hmmm. Odd. Does that bring anything to mind for you, personally?”
I snorted. “Yeah, it’s what every NPC in every MMORPG ever looks like when they have a quest to give you.”
“There were a great many letters in that, and not much that I understood,” he said soberly.
“Video games,” I clarified. “When a game character has a quest for you, that’s how the game shows you where the quest begins. A big floaty exclamation point over their heads. You go talk to them and that’s how the quest starts.”
Michael barked out a laugh and gave the sky a small smile and a shake of his head. “Well, then, Sir Waldo. You’ve just had your first Call.”
“My what, now?”
“Your first Call to a quest, I suppose.”
I blinked. “Uriel talks to the Knights through video-game symbolism?”
“As far as I know, Uriel talks in person. The Call comes from higher up.”
“What?” I asked. “You mean, like … God? God speaks video game?”
“When the Almighty speaks to men, He always does it in voices they can understand,” Michael said. “When I felt the Call, it was always a still, small voice that would come to me when I was in prayer or otherwise quiet. Sometimes I’d have a very strong impression of a name or a face, and a direction that I needed to go.” He nodded toward the transient. “Apparently, you have been Called to help that man.”
“Put like that, it does seem to be fairly obvious.” I swallowed. “Um. I know we’ve been training pretty hard, but … am I really ready for this?”
He reached into the backpack, withdrew an old leather messenger bag from it, and offered it to me. “Let’s find out.”
I swallowed. Then I nodded and slung the bag over one shoulder. I reached into it and patted the old, worn wooden handle inside, and then walked over to the sleeping man. He wore an army-surplus field jacket and old Desert Storm–style khaki BDUs, and he had a beard that birds could have nested in. There wasn’t much grey in it, but his skin was weathered enough to make it difficult to guess his age. Forty?
By the time I got within five feet of him, I could see that something was wrong. There was a lot of vomit on the slatted bench by the man’s head and the ground beneath. One of his eyes was half open, dilated, and his breath rasped in and out.
“Hey,” I said. “Hey, buddy. Can you hear me?”
No response.
I knelt down and took his wrist, feeling for his pulse. It was hard, because it was thready and irregular. “Hey,” I said, gently. “Hey, man, can you hear me?”
He let out a little groan. I checked his other eye. The pupil was normal in that one.
I didn’t enjoy the work of being an actual physician, professionally. I liked examining corpses for the state of Illinois. Corpses never lie to you, never give you opaque answers, never ask stupid questions, or ignore what you tell them they need to do. Corpses are simple.
And this guy, who wasn’t nearly as old as I had thought when I walked up to him, was going to be one if he didn’t get attention fast.
“Call nine-one-one,” I said to Michael. “I think he’s had a stroke, maybe an overdose. Either way, he’s lucky he slept on his side or he’d have choked on his own vomit by now. He needs an ER.”
Michael nodded once, hobbled a few feet away, and produced a cell phone from a leather case on his belt. He called and began speaking quietly.
“Okay, buddy,” I said to the guy. “Hang in there. We’re calling the good guys and they’re going to help y—”
I don’t even know what happened. One second he was lying there, a wheezy vegetable, and the next he was coming at me hard, his ragged-nailed hands grasping for my throat while he gurgled, “No hospital!”
A few months ago, I’d have gotten strangled right there.
But a few months ago, I hadn’t been training in hand-to-hand with Michael’s wife, Charity.
It takes several thousand repetitions of a motion to develop motor-memory pathways in the brain to the point where you can consider the motion a reflex. To that end, Charity, who was into jujitsu, had made me practice several different defenses a hundred times each, every day, for the past two months. She didn’t practice by just going through a motion slowly and gradually speeding up, either. She just came at me like she meant to disassemble me, and if I didn’t defend successfully it freaking hurt.
You learn fast in those circumstances—and one of the basic defenses she’d drilled into me had been against a simple front choke.
Both of my forearms snapped up, knocking the grasping hands away, even as I ducked my head and rolled my body to one side. He kept coming through the space where I’d been. His arm hit my face and sent my glasses spinning off me.
I fought down a decades-old panic as the world shifted from its usual shapes into sudden streaks and blurs of color.
Look. I wear some big, thick glasses. I’m not quite legally blind without them. I know, because after I gave my optometrist a very expensive bottle of whiskey, he told me so. But without them …