Spires of Infinity (5 page)

Other people had non-animal related deformities. Withered limbs, grotesque

facial features, large, visible tumors, and the like seemed rampant. There was even a man with a third hand sprouting from the base of his neck. Millie’s words about pure human DNA were starting to make a whole lot more sense now.

One girl caught his eye as he stopped in front of what looked like an inn with a picture of a bed on the wooden sign hanging over the sidewalk. She was one of the animal people, and seemed to have been following him. Her silvery hair fell to her waist in two long braids and she had a bushy wolflike tail. Her eyes gleamed golden in the red sunlight. Baring her midriff, her clothes were plain and rather dirty, and her blue jeans hung low on her hips, dipping so low in the back under the base of her tail that it was a miracle they didn’t drop around her ankles while she walked. Despite apparent teenage youth, she had a spectacular rack. Even taking the tail and wolf ears into account, she’d probably be extraordinarily hot in five years or so. While not the strangest thing he’d seen all day, the black cat lounging across her shoulders did seem a little odd.

Wondering why she was following him, Gabriel tied his horse-cat to the post in front of the inn. As soon as he moved to do so, the girl scampered off into a back alley. .

Tying the strongest, biggest knot that he knew around the post, Gabriel slung his saddlebags across one shoulder, shoving the shotgun into the holster he’d discovered strapped to his back. He’d found a large pouch of what appeared to be money, triangular metal chips with numbers on them, in the bags when he’d stopped to rest and take stock of his belongings. Making sure it was still in his pocket, Gabriel stepped into the inn.

Sitting behind a counter, a youngish woman read from a magazine, chewing

loudly on a piece of bubblegum. She seemed the embodiment of pop culture dropped into a blender with the old west. The contrast was jarring.

Peering at Gabriel over the top of her magazine with an expression of bored

indifference, she blew a big pink bubble with her gum. It popped and she sucked it back into her mouth.

“You a Law Man,” she drawled, eyeing his guns, pronouncing lawman as two

separate words. Gabriel was pretty certain that he could use the twang in her voice to tune a banjo. It took him a few seconds to pull up his mental hick to English dictionary and translate.

“Uh, no,” Gabriel replied. “I don’t think so anyway. Why do you ask?”

“Yer packin’ iron ain’cha? Only Law Men is allowed to carry them things.”

“Right then. You got me. I must be a lawman. I need a room for the night.”

Gabriel’s stomach rumbled loudly, reminding him that he hadn’t had anything at all that day. “And something to eat too.”

Flipping through her magazine, the woman behind the counter blew another

bubble. “You talk pretty Law Man.”

“Uh,” Gabriel said, looking over the top of the magazine. “Sometime today,

please?”

“I heard ya the first time,” she replied. He vaguely wondered if she ever needed to floss or if the twang in her accent took care of it for her. “I ain’t seen the color of your chits yet.”

“Oh, right,” Gabriel muttered as he reached into the pouch in his pocket and

pulled out one of the triangular chits. It was gold with a 20 pressed into one side. He placed it on the counter and she sat up with a big smile.

“Welcome traveler,” she said. “How long will ya be stayin’?”

“Uh, just tonight, maybe tomorrow,” Gabriel said. “I need to do some

information gathering in town. I don’t know how long it’ll take.”

“We’ll call it two nights room and board,” the innkeeper said as she snatched the chit and counted out a couple silver and bronze ones, setting them in a neat stack in its place. “Want longer you come back to me and say so in two marnin’s.”

“All right,” Gabriel said. “That works, I guess.”

“I assume you got a cathor due to them saddlebags,” she said with a nod. “I took stablin’ costs out already.”

“Cathor,” Gabriel mouthed. It took him a second to realize that she meant his horse-cat. He nodded his assent. “So, my room?”

“Hold on,” the innkeeper looked him up and down like a piece of meat. “You

look mighty fine pure blooded. How clean is yer DNA?”

Gabriel gave a start. He could imagine a night in bed with this woman, and doing so made him want to puke. She looked like one of the crack whores you saw on street corners in bad neighborhoods from time to time, willing to sell her body for her next fix.

There probably wasn’t a number high enough to count all of the STDs she was carrying.

“Uh, twenty one percent drift,” he hastily spat out.

“Pity,” she said in a disappointed tone, raising her magazine again and tossing a key onto the counter. “I knew that pretty face of yers was too good to be true. Up them stairs, last room on the right. We’s got pure, unmutated beef tonight. I’ll send some up once yer settled. Welcome to Holston Law Man, as long as you got chits that is.”

“Uh, thanks. I think. Um, I was wondering if maybe you’d know where I could

find a guide?”

“Oh, just about everyone here’s would guide ya most anywhere if there’s enough chits in it fer them. Could start with the Hunter’s Guild. They’s probably the most learned hereabouts. Where ya goin’ anyhows?”

“The Spires of Infinity.”

The innkeeper’s eyes instantly narrowed, shifting around as if to see that they were alone.

“Now why ya wanna go all the way out thar,” she asked.

“It’s my mission,” Gabriel said, finding it slightly easier to explain things by taking on the role of the lawman she thought he was.

“Makes sense. Them Spires is ground zero, deep in the Red Zone. Ain’t no one that ain’t NVM is stupid enough to go out there. Too much radiation, even fer those of us what’s been immunized. And them bastard Children of the Chosen’re makin’ troubles for travelers lately too.”

“Ground zero,” Gabriel asked, mind drifting automatically to the remnants of the World Trade Center in New York before he remembered that was the term for the

location of a nuclear detonation. “You had a nuclear war!”

“You feelin’ all right Law Man? Hit yer head or somewhat?”

“Uh, yeah,” Gabriel nodded.

“There’s a doc over on the wesside can look you’s over,” the innkeeper blew

another bubble. “Though he’s sommut addicted to more feen.”

She pronounced morphine as two words, accenting the second syllable strangely.

“Ya might try waitin’ for an NVM caravan to New Hope,” the innkeeper

suggested. “They’s go out near them Spires every few months. Them NVMs don’t get radiated like us normal folks.”

“Uh, thanks,” Gabriel said, filing that tidbit away for later.

Turning away, he climbed the stairs and went to his room. It was small and there was a thin coat of dust over everything. He’d never been so glad to see electricity and indoor plumbing. Wrapping his mind around his situation was hard enough without those comforts. Tossing his saddlebags aside, he removed his duster, hanging it on the back of the only chair in the room before dropping onto the bed and burying his face in his hands.

Yesterday he’d been a rich, powerful, and well-known lawyer. He’d had

everything he wanted. Money, power, a huge house, a sweet car, and a whole internet full of beautiful young women willing to take off their clothes and do just about anything for a low monthly fee. Now he had nothing at all. Had he really died? He could remember the feeling of the bus hitting him and everything going blank.

Things like this just didn’t happen. He had to be in a coma somewhere. He was just having a very vivid and very elaborate nightmare.

“Wake up Gabriel,” he growled at himself, pounding his fists into his forehead.

“Just wake up!”

But he didn’t wake up, because somewhere, deep down, he knew he wasn’t

dreaming.

All his life he’d read sci-fi and fantasy books, played role playing video games and tabletops, and dreamt of other worlds, adventures, and heroics. Now that he was actually in a completely different world, on some sort of holy quest given by god—or at least god’s middle management—all he wanted was to go home.

When his meal arrived, a plate of two ground beef patties with some sort of gravy and a slice of bread, he ate ravenously. If anything resembling real beef had ever touched it he was freaking Ghandi, but he was so hungry that it didn’t matter. Setting the cleaned plate on the floor, he curled up into a little ball on the bed to bemoan his fate, and was soon asleep.

Chapter 5: The Wolf and the Cat

Gabriel wasn’t sure what woke him. No sound broke the complete silence of his dark room, but there were two sets of glowing eyes watching him from the chair in the corner. Sitting up abruptly, he reached for one of the pistols he’d fallen asleep wearing.

Before he could yank it out of the holster the light flicked on and he was blinded.

Squinting, Gabriel forced his eyes to adjust to the sudden brightness as he freed his pistol and leveled it at the intruder. It was the young wolfgirl that had followed him through town earlier. She sat on the chair backwards, with her legs straddling the back and her arms folded across the top. His coat had been tossed unceremoniously onto the floor. Her head rested on her arms, and the cat lounging on her shoulders yawned widely before licking one of its paws. He’d thought it was a toy earlier, but apparently it was a pet.

“What kinda pathetic Lawman are you,” she asked. “I mean, I only walked right into your
unlocked
room and sat here watching you sleep for an hour.”

“I’m not a Lawman,” Gabriel growled. “Who are you and what are you doing in

my room?”

The girl eyed the gun in his hand, tail swishing while one of her ears twitched.

“Really? Coulda fooled me. Two pistols, two Sa’Dhi, and a shotgun. You’re a Lawman, or I’m hiding a dick somewhere in these tight pants.”

Sighing in exasperation, Gabriel lowered the pistol, though he didn’t reholster it or take his finger from the trigger. “What do you want little girl, I need sleep.”

“Little girl,” she sniffed indignantly, adjusting her skimpy shirt for a better display of her cleavage. “Is this the rack of a little girl? What else would I want with a hot man that appears to have pure DNA?”

Gabriel gaped at her. She couldn’t be older than fifteen! Seventeen at the most, and that was being
very
generous. What kind of crazy world was he in where fifteen-year-old girls chased after men for breeding purposes?

“I’ve got, uh, twenty-one percent drift, sorry,” Gabriel said.

“Yeah, you and every other pure-blooded male. I’m Sam, by the way, short for

Samantha, but if you call me that I’ll rip out your lungs. You won’t mind a little blood test to prove you’re not pure, will you?”

“Go away Sam. It’s far past time for little girls to be in their beds.”

Before Gabriel could even react Sam hopped over the back of the chair and

jabbed him in the arm with something.

“Ouch,” he cried, rolling up his sleeve to see a tiny pinprick of blood beading on the skin.

The object in Sam’s hand beeped steadily for a few seconds as her tail swished impatiently.

“Come on already,” she muttered as it beeped one last time.

Grinning excitedly, Sam looked from the device to Gabriel. Her tail began

wagging and her ears laid back against her head.

“Ninety-eight percent pure human,” she cried and threw her arms around him.

She was a lot stronger than she looked. “Oh my
god
! You’re
perfect
!”

“Ninety-eight percent,” Gabriel asked, feeling somewhat let down by the missing two percent.

“Now, if you’d be so kind to spill a little figurative Mayo in my figurative taco, I’ll be out of your hair in no time, and I won’t tell another soul you’re pure, it’ll be our little secret, okay? You being a Lawman and all, I’m sure you’ve got important things to do and don’t have time for every woman hereabouts.”

“Eeew. That’s
disgusting
!” Gabriel gaped at her. Mayo in her taco? It was rare that he heard a new euphemism, especially coming from a
girl
her apparent age. “Wait,
what
!”

“Oh come on, with pure DNA, you must get this all the time,” Sam said with a

grin. She seemed to think that he was joking.

“Does the word jailbait mean anything to you!”

Sam thought about it for a second, one of her ears twitching.

“Uh, nope, should it?”

Gabriel sighed. “Where I come from it’s illegal for someone my age to spill any Mayo anywhere near the taco of someone your age, figurative or otherwise.”

“Oh wow. Really? You must live in a really uptight place, mister Lawman. First of all, Nano Voluntary Mutation,” she gestured at lupine her ears, “slows aging. I look like the age I was when I got NVM, but I got ID to prove I’m older. And second, we don’t actually have to turn on the bow-chicka-bow-wow porno music. I mean, you could just, you know,” she made a jerking off motion with her hand, “in a cup or something.

I’ll even strip for you if that’ll help. Won’t take more than five minutes of your time and I do have, if I might say, a spectacular body. I mean, look at me. I’m the hottest thing you’ve seen all day, admit it.”

“Are you insane,” Gabriel cried.

“Uh, nope,” Sam replied with a shrug. “I don’t think so. Why? Don’t tell me you’re shy.”

“How old
are
you, anyway?”

“Old enough to have a child,” Sam sniffed indignantly. “Old enough to have a

good job to provide for it, if that’s what you’re worried about. Old enough to know more than a little about pole dancing, if you know what I mean. Get it,
pole
dancing? No?

Not even a chuckle? God, you’re boring!”

Somewhere in the back of Gabriel’s mind an alarm was screaming jailbait over

and over again, and his mental encyclopedia of law was running through all of the meanings and possible punishments for statutory rape.