******
The Short Cut
“What is this place?” John Fortune asked. He was flushed with excitement. Sitting next to him, Ray could feel the heat flowing off of him in waves.
“The Short Cut, lad,” Bruckner said expansively, as if that explained everything.
It was good enough for Ray. He looked out the windshield. The green sun was moving slowly but perceptibly across the sky. Soon it would set, though “soon” in this place seemed a concept hard to define. The road was flat, straight, and well-maintained, though the plants crowding its verge were like nothing Ray had ever seen. They were like trees, but their branches had no leaves. The trunks were bulbous, fleshy things, in shades of green, violet, and vermilion, shot through with scarlet veins which circulated a fluid which Ray was uncomfortably sure resembled blood. He watched them suspiciously as they whizzed by in Bruckner’s lorry, something bothering him. He realized that their branches were moving, though not in a wind. They writhed in several different directions at once, as if at their own volition.
He was about to point this out to Angel when something, suddenly and out of nowhere, hit their windshield with a horrific splat, squashed against it and spattered like a water balloon tossed out of ten story building. A wash of purplish goo instantly covered the windshield. Bruckner clenched his teeth on his cigar as he turned on the windshield wipers.
“This could be a problem,” he said, downshifting as the wipers and the windshield glass itself started to smoke.
“This ever happen before?” Ray asked.
“Rarely,” Bruckner said, “sometimes the locals raise a bit of a tussle.”
“This place has locals?” Angel asked.
Bruckner grinned without humor. “Oh, yes. Best if we stay clear of them, but sometimes we don’t have much of a choice. They used to be real quiet. Never bothered me. But in recent years... something’s stirred them up. It’s like, sometimes, they want my truck.” The lorry braked to a halt, and he looked over at Ray, Angel, and John Fortune. “We’d better get that windshield off before the acid eats all the way through. But not to worry. I carry spares.”
“And the locals?” Ray asked.
“Figger you and the lady can handle them, me lad. That’s why you’re here, after all. The boy can help me replace the windshield. You two guard our flanks, front and back.”
“Guard them from what?” Angel asked.
Bruckner grinned again. “Anything that looks strange.”
Ray and Angel exchanged glances. Ray nodded, and she put her hand on the door handle.
“Oh, one more thing,” Bruckner said.
“What?” Ray asked, starting to get annoyed.
“Funny thing, but guns don’t work in this place.”
Ray shrugged.
Angel said, “I’m covered.” She paused for a moment, frowning. “At least, I hope so.”
“I carry some stuff in the back you can use.”
Ray nodded. “All right. I’ll go to the back, with you. Angel, watch the front.”
“All right,” she said.
“All right,” John Fortune said.
They all looked at Bruckner.
“All right,” the Brit said. “Let’s do it.”
The air, like everything else in this place, was strange. It felt odd on Ray’s tongue. It had a bite to it, like a summer night after a lightning storm. The quality of light was also odd, probably because of the different colored sun, now hanging on the horizon.
Bruckner rolled up the trailer’s rear door, and for all his size, lightly leaped up into it. A weapon rack was bolted on one side of the wall. Swords, spears, bow and arrow.
Too bad Yeoman isn’t with us, Ray thought.
“What do you fancy?” Bruckner asked.
Ray decided to keep it simple.
“Those.” He nodded at the brace of morningstars.
“Good choice,” Bruckner said. “But watch out for splatters of what passes for blood among these boyos. Sometimes it can be corrosive.”
Ray nodded, and Bruckner tossed him the weapons. Their handles were black iron, as long as his forearm. Their heads were the size of Texas grapefruit, spiked. The chains attaching handle to head were about two feet long. Ray swung them once or twice to get their feel. He nodded to himself, and ran through an extemporaneous kata as John Fortune watched with his mouth open. Like all weapons, they felt like he’d been born with them in his hands.
“Right, me lad,” Bruckner said, clapping John Fortune on the shoulder. “Ever change a windshield before?”
“No,” the boy said.
“Nothing to it,” the Brit said cheerfully. “Give me a hand with these suction cups.”
Ray turned his back to the truck, scanning the land. It was flat and relatively featureless. If there’d be trouble, it would come from the weird forest a dozen yards from their flank.
Bruckner and John Fortune got the spare windshield from the case where the trucker kept it among a plethora of other spare parts, and part of Ray listened as they went to the front. Bruckner greeted Angel, who answered in a steady voice, and then issued a stream of commands as he and the boy attacked the ruined windshield.
Thoughts of Angel slipped languorously through Ray’s mind, though most of it was focused on the odd-moving trees, if that’s what they were, bunched by the side of the road, if that’s what it was.
Suddenly it became darker, almost without a sense of transition. Ray looked back to the horizon, and saw that the green sun had gone under. The light took on a quality that Ray had once seen while snorkeling in the Bahamas at a depth of thirty feet. It seemed denser, darker, and somehow a lot less friendly. A full moon rose rapidly on the other side of the horizon, splotched and diseased looking, shining with a greenish, almost phosphorescent light the color of gangrenous flesh.
As if the rising of the leprous moon was a signal, things started coming out of the oddly moving trees.
They were many-legged, spider-like creatures whose bulbous bodies were held high off the ground by too many skeletal legs. Big spiders were one thing, Ray thought, but these had heads and features that were disturbingly human. Except for their protruding fangs which dripped ichor which steamed when it spattered on the ground. They scuttled like crabs, moving fast. Their bodies, white and bulging and hairless, were the size of large dogs.
“Angel,” Ray called out. “You’d better get over here. Quick.”
There were twenty or so in the pack, and they didn’t seem to be afraid of Ray.
Ray whirled at a sudden sound at his side, but it was only Angel. She looked as if she were about to make a remark, then saw the spider-things. “My God!” she said.
“Don’t blaspheme,” Ray reprimanded.
She shook her head. “I wasn’t blaspheming. I was praying.”
“Pray harder,” Ray said, “because here they come.”
The arachnids were on them, tittering like high school girls as their fangs clacked together, dripping steaming ichor.
“Save my soul from evil, Lord,” Angel said, “and heal this warrior’s heart.”
Ray caught a burst of light in his peripheral vision, and the arachnids reared back, screaming, as Angel plunged into their midst, her flaming sword held high. She screamed. Ray couldn’t tell if it was from anger, fear, or revulsion, as she swung her sword and sheared through the front set of legs of one of the things. It collapsed, grimacing ferociously. Angel lunged. Her sword speared the thing’s body, white and hairless like a dead fish, and it burst like a balloon, spattering her with droplets of ichor that steamed as it ate into her fighting suit.
“Watch out for their blood!” she shouted in warning, pirouetting to cut the legs out from under two others that were trying to circle them.
Ray realized that they were in a bad spot. He danced into the midst of their attackers, swinging right and left with the morningstars. One missed, the other crunched an all-too human-looking face. The spiders’ titters changed to disturbing high-pitched screams, but they still came.
Ray turned and twisted like a dervish. He saw Angel shouting wordlessly as she held off half a dozen of the things with long sweeps of her sword. Thankfully, the spiders seemed more afraid of her, or perhaps it was the light emitted by her weapon, than they were of him. So many gathered about him that he had to shift constantly to avoid their lunging, clacking jaws. Luckily they couldn’t spit venom, but it was only a matter of time before they’d both be splattered with enough of the poison to do some serious damage.
The pack was all around them as Ray caught something out of the corner of his eye—a human figure, talk and bulky, dressed in a long leather duster that swept to the ground, standing and watching.
Perhaps, Ray thought, directing.
Ray moved in a seemingly random pattern as he attacked the hunters, taking off a leg here, battering a head there, pulping a squishy abdomen, clenching his teeth as venom spattered, clinging to and eating away his fighting suit. It soon looked as if gigantic destructive moths had been at it.
Half a dozen of the things were broken around Ray, screaming like girls with broken arms, but still dragging themselves after the pack, their fangs clattering angrily. He hadn’t spotted Angel in long moments, but he could still hear her fighting at his back as his seemingly irregular movements took him in a curving path to the observer watching the hunting pack, maybe ten feet away. One of the spider-things stood at his back, between them.
Another hunter lunged at him from the front. Ray pulped its head like a bug on the bathroom floor, whirled, and dove to the ground. He slid between the legs of the arachnid behind him, who stood there with a look of almost human astonishment on its caricatured features. He raked the bottom of its gut as he went by, twisting desperately to avoid the deluge of steaming fluid that burst from it like a ruptured bladder, and grunted aloud when some splashed on the back of his hand. He turned a complete somersault and came to his feet face to face with the observer, morningstars raised high.
And he froze.
The thing had no face. Its head was a featureless white cone that tapered to a wet red tentacle that quivered like an eager tongue.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Something clung to its neck, its mouth fastened onto its dead white flesh, its large eyes regarding Ray with unblinking hatred.
“Ti Malice!” Ray blurted aloud.
Not many knew about the obscene Haitian ace who had wreaked unaccountable havoc before vanishing from human ken over a decade and a half ago, but Ray was a compulsive reader of secret government files and there wasn’t much he didn’t know about obscure aces. Especially the bad ones.
The Haitian’s tiny arms encircled the thing’s thick white neck, his slug-like body hung down its back. Malice rose up, his mouth coming free from his mount’s neck with an audible slurping sound. Malice’s mouth was like that of a lamprey: round, ringed with tiny, sharp teeth, and a tube-like tongue that sucked the blood from his host. He hissed at Ray, spitting dark, purplish blood. The thing he rode raised its featureless face to the moon and somehow howled, sending shivers down Ray’s back.
It moved. But Ray moved faster.
He blocked the thing’s lunge with one of the morningstars and swung the other like it was a baseball bat and Ti Malice’s head was the ball.
He hit a home run. Malice’s head splattered at the impact. The feeble grip of his arms around the creature’s neck broke, and Malice shot backward and hit the ground twenty feet away, bounced and rolled, leaving a smeared trail on the thick, gray grass which twitched agitatedly above the tiny body, and finally closed over it like hungry snakes.
The creature slumped to the ground, shuddering all over. Ray stood over it, undecided. It lifted an arm, as if in supplication, and behind him Ray sensed all movement stop. He held his blow as the thing stood. Not quite human-shaped in its long trench coat, it regarded Ray with its featureless face. Ray forced himself to look back. Forced his gorge to stay down. After a moment, without making sound or gesture, it walked backwards among the trees.
What was left of the hunting pack followed it, taking a wide berth around Ray as it did so. As they vanished among the eerily-moving trees, Ray let out a long breath he didn’t realize that he’d been holding. He turned to look at the battlefield, the ground splashed with ichor and littered with smashed and slashed spider bodies and parts.
“Angel!” he called, and realized that she had slumped to her knees, her head down, unmoving.