Shotgun Sorceress

Chapter eighteen

Crazed State Unhinged

The sun was sinking low on the horizon as Pal and I followed Charlie’s van down the highway to the Cuchillo State University campus. The survivors had set up a tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire around a cluster of tan brick buildings in the middle of campus, walling off the Student Union, the health center, and two high-rise dormitories. The inside of the fence was buttressed with four-foot-tall sandbag walls with a rifleman keeping watch behind them every fifty yards or so.

A squad of skinny college-age boys dressed in a mix of coffee-stain desert combat fatigues, tiger-stripe airman battle uniforms, Air Force ROTC T-shirts, and grubby jeans were stationed at the sliding gate. They raised their rifles toward me and Pal, but Charlie waved at them from the driver’s window and told them to stand down. The young militiamen opened the gate for the van, and Pal flew us over the fence and landed us in the courtyard. People stared at Pal, but as with Rudy, they seemed only moderately surprised to find a giant ferrety spider monster landing in their compound. The crowd was mostly more young college- and military-age men and a few girls my age and a little younger.

And the courtyard was filled with cats: they rode in backpacks and slings and lounged on the concrete picnic tables. More cats napped on the sandbag wall or in the branches of the oak trees shading the courtyard. Something seemed oddly familiar about the cats, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I supposed that there are only so many different kinds of cats, and sooner or later one was bound to remind me of another. But all of them? It made me uneasy.

A swarthy thirty-something man in a short-sleeved Air Force uniform approached us. I saw gold oak leaves on his epaulets.

“Air support at last … fantastic.” He stuck his hand out to me as he looked Pal up and down. “I’m Major Woodrow Rodriguez, USAF, out of Fineman AFB, acting commander of military defense operations here. Got any more of these?”

He looked me square in the eye as I shook his hand, and in his gaze I saw a certain profound lack of interest in me as a woman. Guys usually either check you out a bit at first or dodge serious eye contact entirely to avoid seeming like they’re attracted to you. But as far as the major was concerned, I got the feeling I could have been a piece of talking furniture. When he saw the Warlock and my shirtless boyfriend get out of the van, though, there was a faint spark of interest in his face. Faint, but definitely there.

“More like Pal?” I replied. “No, sorry, he’s unique … but if you’re with the Air Force, why don’t you have planes and helicopters? And why is everybody here and not at the air base?”

I looked around at the whip-lean cadets and young militiamen standing guard and repairing weapons and attending to other duties in the courtyard, and I realized that if I were single, I’d be hard-pressed to find a date around here. Well, it made sense: I of all people knew the fierce tweak Miko could put on your hormones, and these boys had all survived at least a year of her tampering with their minds and bodies. Any gay kid growing up in a military-minded family in a small West Texas town would learn a monk’s restraint, or he’d probably end up broken, bloody, and crucified on a barbed wire fence before he turned twenty-one. Don’t ask, don’t tell, and most important, don’t die.

The major gave a harsh, barking laugh. “Fineman AFB is little more than a smoking crater now. Miko infiltrated the minds of some of our key personnel and brainwashed them into committing coordinated acts of domestic terrorism and treason against the base and their fellow airmen. Only a few dozen of us survived the assault on the base; we scavenged some small and medium arms, but most of the vehicles and all the aircraft were destroyed. Once Miko revealed herself and her intentions, we chose to activate the ROTC cadets here at CSU and reestablish our base of operations in these core campus buildings.”

Despite his scowling demeanor, the major had truckloads of square-jawed, take-charge charisma. A man’s man, through and through. My body was reacting to the smell of his testosterone-laden sweat; it didn’t care that he was gay. It didn’t care that I was in a committed relationship. It wanted what it wanted. And what it apparently wanted was to drive me to hang myself in frustration.

Oblivious to what was happening in my pants, the major gestured toward the high-rise dorms. “This isn’t your everyday college campus. In addition to generating its own power at the physical plant, it has its own sewage treatment and water reclamation facilities. Part of Miko’s attack on Fineman involved dumping psychoactive drugs in our water tower, so from the outset we knew we needed to keep tight security on our food and drink supplies. However, since her initial attack, she seems content to wage a war of attrition through demoralization.”

“So what did she say she wants?” I unbuckled the chin strap on my riding helmet and took the stifling headgear off.

The major gave me another coldly direct gaze. “She says she wants our souls. I was never religious before all this happened—and I certainly never believed in magic and flying spiders—but whatever she takes from a man, it’s the very essence of what makes him human. Nobody’s the same after she touches them. We’ve lost a lot of good men to her.”

“And women, too, I expect.”

The major looked away toward Cooper and the Warlock, who were unloading some boxes of ammunition from the back of the van into the waiting arms of the cadets. Gave a slight shrug. “Women, too. We did manage to evacuate as many mothers with children as possible before the city got locked down. It was only the right thing to do.”

Charlie came over to us, adjusting the cat’s sling nervously as she looked at the major. “Um, I need to take her to see Sara.”

“Of course.” The major straightened up and glanced down at his wristwatch. “And I need to attend evening security inspections.”

He gave me a curt, formal head bob, turned on his boot heel, and strode away.

“I think she’s in the North Tower,” Charlie told me. “But, um, your spider won’t fit so good in the lobby.”

I turned to Pal and pulled off the riding pad and saddlebags. “Do you think that just this once you could shrink yourself down? I’d hate for us to get separated given that things are mind-bogglingly screwed up around here.”

He blew a chord that sounded like a sigh. “Fair enough.” He began playing a different tune, and his body shrank until he stood about as tall as a mastiff. “Better?”

“Yeah, that should get you through a regular door,” I told him.

We collected Cooper and the Warlock and headed into the dormitory lobby. The building was only weakly air-conditioned, but it did provide some respite from the oppressive heat outside. A couple of young men were playing Team Fortress on an Xbox hooked up to the TV in the corner, and some others were reading books and playing cards at the tables. Sleeping boys were stretched out on all the sofas. It could have passed for a men’s dorm in most any college if not for the uniforms, general dinginess, and looming feeling of despair.

And the cats. There were cats everywhere: lounging on the TV, lurking in the bookshelves, curled up on the sleeping students. I felt a shiver when, as a group, they opened their yellow and green eyes and stared at me.

Charlie passed her AK-47 to the tired-looking blond girl stationed behind the front desk. “No guns allowed past the lobby unless you’re a resident advisor or an officer.”

We dutifully handed in our weapons. The blonde tagged the guns and gave us pink paper claim stubs. “Now, don’t lose these,” she admonished.

“We won’t,” the Warlock replied.

“I think Sara’s probably going over the scout reports in the RA lounge—” Charlie began.

She was interrupted by a scream in the hallway to our left. A large black cat came rocketing out of the corridor with a balding, middle-aged man in a Catholic priest’s black cassock close behind. The priest was carrying a large sledgehammer and mumbling something in Latin between panting breaths.

The cat slid to a stop in front of Pal and fluffed up its fur, hissing at my familiar. The priest stormed up on the stymied feline and brought the sledgehammer down on the cat with enough force to break its body wetly in two.

Shouting his Latin prayer now—I was starting to recognize it as one of the old demon banishments that really didn’t work too well—the priest brought the sledgehammer down on the cat’s skull.

A woman in her midthirties came rushing out of a back office. She was wearing a light blue T-shirt on which someone had Sharpie-markered “Mayor Pro Tem,” baggy mom jeans, and a child’s red plastic cowboy hat over her prematurely white hair. She was also wearing a big-ass .480 Ruger Super Redhawk revolver strapped to her hip.

As the priest raised his sledgehammer for another blow to the cat’s corpse, the woman drew the Redhawk with both hands, put the nine-inch barrel to the back of his head, and pulled the trigger. His skull came apart like a watermelon, and suddenly all of us within ten feet were wearing him.

The woman wiped a bit of skull and blood off her cheek with her thumb and frowned at the priest’s headless corpse. “Now, Padre, I’ve warned you three times, you don’t hurt the kitties. I can’t have you acting like this. I just can’t. I think I’ve been more than reasonable about this.”

The woman finally seemed to notice all of us standing there gaping at her and smiled at me. “Oh, hello, you must be Jessie! I’m Sara Bailey-Jones, acting mayor of Cuchillo. The kitties told me you’d be coming. I’m so sorry about your clothes—ask Brittney at the front desk for a fresh tee. I think they have some leftovers from World Peace Day. You’d take a large or an extra-large?”

As I looked into Sara’s Adderall-blue eyes, it occurred to me that she was utterly, completely, break-out-the-straitjacket batshit crazy. And also she appeared to be in charge. And based on the general lack of reaction to her blowing the priest out of his socks, this wasn’t the first time this had happened in the dorm.

“Extra-large, please.” My voice was a hoarse squeak.

“Ooh, look, kittens!” Sara squealed like a teenage girl.

I looked down at the floor. The pieces of the smashed cat were healing themselves, sprouting legs and heads and tails and turning into fluffy little black balls of cuteness.

“Okay, I’m officially freaked out now,” the Warlock whispered.

Sara didn’t seem to hear him. She reached down and scooped up the kitten that had formed from the cat’s back legs and held it out to me. “It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this.”

“But—but I’m not alone.” I wished I could keep my voice steady. “I have Pal here, and Cooper. And the Warlock.”

“You need a kitten. They’re crucial.”

“But … what do I feed it? And where are the litter boxes?” It finally occurred to me that one of the things that was disturbing me on a subconscious level was that, despite there being twenty-odd cats in the immediate vicinity, it didn’t smell the least bit litter-boxy. All I could smell was blood and gunpowder. And sweaty guy funk. But no cat poop.

Sara waved her free hand dismissively, as if I’d asked her how often the city plowed the streets during snowstorms. “Oh, we don’t worry about that here! Please, take the kitten.”

Her voice hardened a little on the word “please,” and there was a gleam in her eye that worried me, so I reached out and took the little creature from her. The kitten settled into the crook of my arm, purring. It smelled like hot electrical wiring.

“That’s better.” Sara beamed at me. “You can keep him in that saddlebag of yours; they like riding around in sacks and slings. I think they’re sort of like cockroaches that way; they like darkness and a little pressure on their bodies. Only they’re cute, of course. And cockroaches don’t like ear scratchies and belly rubbies.”

“Yeah, um, I’m pretty sure Jessie and her friends are tired.” Charlie looked a bit embarrassed and worried, as if she didn’t know what Super Nutty Nutbar thing Sara was going to say or do next. “So could we maybe get Britt to give them the key to their room?”

“Certainly,” Sara replied. “Be a dear and get that for them, would you? We’re giving them the corner quad on the eighth floor.”

I held the kitten out in front of my stone eye and blinked through a couple of gemviews, trying to figure out what I was looking at. “So … where did these cats come from?”

“My television set.” Sara picked up another kitten and handed it to the Warlock. He took it from her gingerly, squinting at the purring fluff ball as if it were a ticking bomb.

“Your television set.” Cooper stared at her.

“Oh, yes!” Sara scooped up the last kitten and cuddled it under her chin. “So soft! I heard the president say on TV that we Americans make our own reality, and I thought, you know, he was right about something for a change! That man screwed up everything … I wanted to give him a real piece of my mind, and then one night my mom and I were watching a Ronald Reagan Western, and a kitty came out of the screen! I named him Ringu. He brought more of his friends from commercials and old sitcoms and cable movies.”

Sara stopped cuddling her kitten and squinted at it. “I think this one came out of The Matrix. But it doesn’t matter where they came from, what matters is that they want to help me put things right. And they gave me the idea that we should go visit the president during one of his live speeches.”

Sara stared at me earnestly, and I felt supremely creeped out by the look on her face.

“Did you know,” she asked, “that pound for pound, cats are the deadliest predators on the planet? Yes. It’s true! And so we got ready to go see the president, and his speech was about to start … and the power went out! Miko did it. I hate her. She screwed up everything.”

What the heck is going on here? I thought to Pal.

“My educated guess,” he replied, “is that this woman is a latent, untrained Talent whose powers were triggered by an emotional trauma that also set her on the road to madness. Very dangerous. I would avoid upsetting her if possible.”

What about these cats?

“I’m not sure what they are quite yet.” Pal’s claws scratched on the floor as he shifted his weight nervously. “Electrical spirits, perhaps? Figments of her mind that her powers have made tangible? Some type of devils? We’ll have to watch how they behave. But clearly they’re able to counteract Miko’s antimagic field, so it would seem prudent to keep one nearby.”

“Mein Gott, what a mess you’ve made!” An old woman in a short-sleeved purple dress tottered out from the hallway to our right. At first glance I thought she was a meat puppet—her body was positively cadaverous, and she certainly smelled like she was close to death—but there was a sharp intelligence behind her yellowed eyes.

“Must you do this?” The old woman waved her cane at the dead priest. I saw an old, faded concentration camp tattoo on her nearly fleshless left forearm. “Would you do this to a rabbi, too? You’re acting like you belong in the SS-Totenkopfverbände!”

“Mom!” Sara turned on the old woman, her face flushing red. “Don’t say that. That’s mean. I have to keep order here!”

At that, the young men in the lobby started quietly closing their books, setting down their cards, pausing their video game, and slipping out of the room. Behind the counter, Britt looked as if she wished she could do the same.

“This is not order, this is fascism!” The old woman pounded her cane on the floor, punctuating every word.

The kitten in my arms was starting to vibrate, and I could see tiny electrical sparks arcing between the hairs of its fur. It felt like the static when you put your hand on an old cathode-ray TV screen.

“Mom, do you want to go back to the graveyard? Do you want that? Because I’ll take you back there!”

“Is that anything like sending someone to the cornfield?” the Warlock whispered. I silenced him with a backward kick that connected solidly with his ankle.

Charlie tugged on my sleeve. She was carrying a stack of tie-dyed T-shirts, sheets, towels, and some boxes of white soap. “I have y’all’s keys. We really should go upstairs now.”

We quickly followed Charlie down the right-side hall to the elevators. Once we got in, Charlie and the kittens seemed much calmer.

“They get into fights like that sometimes. It’s really better not to be near them when that happens,” Charlie said.

“So does Sara murder a lot of people around here?” Cooper asked.

Charlie looked pained. “Only when Major Rodriguez ain’t around. And only when they do stuff that makes her really mad. Hurting the cats is right at the top of her list. I feel bad for the padre, but he knew what she was gonna do. He must have lost his shit completely. Or, I dunno, maybe he wanted Sara to kill him, just so he wouldn’t give his soul over to Miko.”

We got out on the eighth floor and Charlie led us down to a corner suite of two bedrooms joined by a large shared bath. Each of the bedrooms were furnished mostly with built-ins: two couches that pulled out into single beds, two blond wood desks, and a set of shelves. The only freestanding furniture was a pair of wooden dressers, a couple of wooden chairs, a torchière-style floor lamp, and an old steel trash can. Narrow sliding doors led to cramped closets, empty except for dust and some wire coat hangers.

“Most of the rooms on this floor don’t have their own bathrooms,” Charlie said, “but Sara wanted you to be as comfortable as possible. I’m not sure what she’s wanting you to do, but she’s got something in mind.”

“Oh, goody,” I heard the Warlock whisper to Cooper.

Charlie set her armload of T-shirts and towels down on the closest couch-bed. “Y’all can get cleaned up and rest up here for a while. They’ll be serving food in the cafeteria until midnight, but it’s just canned beef stew and butterscotch pudding today. There might be some salad left. We’re running pretty low on everything, but the ag students are still able to harvest veggies from the greenhouses every so often. Let Britt at the desk know if you need anything else.”

Charlie left us staring at the stack of tees. The shirts themselves had been tie-dyed in gaudy spirals of orange, yellow, green, and purple, and the fronts of the shirts had been silk-screened with the image of a cheese-dripping slice of pepperoni pizza and the slogan “I Got Me a Piece at World Peace Day!”

“Wow. Those are … bright,” Cooper said. “I think I’d rather just wear the tux jacket.”

The Warlock shook his head. “The lady at JCPenney said I’m a winter. I can’t possibly wear lime green and shrimp orange in public.”

“Laundry charm?” I asked them.

“Laundry charm,” the guys agreed.

I called dibs on the shower, grabbed my remaining change of underwear from my backpack, and pulled Cooper into the bathroom with me. He completely undressed while I stripped most of the way down. I didn’t really want the Warlock handling my dirty underwear on general principle and certainly not after the day I’d had. It wouldn’t take a genius to look at the state of my panties and know what had been going on in my head the past few hours. Besides, it would be easy enough to hand-wash those on my own, even if I couldn’t find anything better than the tacky white institutional soap Charlie had given us with the towels.

Cooper passed our clothes out to the Warlock to charm-clean while I folded my unmentionables, set them aside under the sink, and readied the shower. It had one of those annoying, clunky single-knob controls set in the tile wall, and it provided seemingly a single-millimeter zone between freezing cold and scalding hot.

After a couple of tries, I got the water tolerably warm. “Hey, honey, come on in.”

Cooper got into the shower stall with me and stood under the spray, head bowed and eyes closed, the water running down through his dark curly hair in rivulets over his delicious smooth back and chest. I had the sudden fantasy of Cooper holding me against the damp wall, my legs wrapped around his waist, his hands all over me.

I took the soap out of the tile-bolted dish and lathered it up, rubbing suds into his shoulders. His muscles were knotted with tension, and I could feel a vibration in his body that wasn’t just regular stress. Miko’s fury still had him deep in his guts.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Fine.” The word was a clipped grunt.

I lathered my hands again and ran them in gentle circles over his back, down his sides to his groin.

His spine stiffened and he pushed my hands away from his genitals. “Sorry. Too much on my mind right now. Maybe later.”

Not looking at me, he took a quick rinse and stepped out of the shower, leaving me frustrated and horny. And also feeling too contaminated and rejected to do anything to relieve my own tensions. Yep, if this kept up I was going to be looking for a rope and a ceiling beam that could take my weight.

The rational part of me realized there was no point in making a big deal about it. If Cooper didn’t feel like fooling around, he didn’t feel like fooling around. It wasn’t necessarily because he was repulsed by my infection—his coldness was probably just the result of Miko’s tampering.

And once we took care of her and got the heck out of this godforsaken town, our relationship would go back to normal, wouldn’t it? And if not … well, surely we could find a healer to cure me, at least.

But before we could go after Miko, there was a small, dark matter we had to take care of first.