Swords of Waar (4 page)

“I’m calling the police!”

I waved my hands and started for the kitchen door. “Don’t! Please! It’s here! I can sense it! It’s in your house!”

Yeah, I am aware how crazy that sounded. I
was
crazy. It was so close. I had to get to it. I had to find it.

Leigh shrank back as I ran up her back steps and rattled the kitchen door. She was crying into the phone. “Yes, Holliston Street! Hurry! She’s trying to break into the house!”

“I’m not trying to break in, Mrs. Gardner. I’m not going to hurt you. I just want you to open the door. I know the transmigration ray is in your house.”

Leigh hung up the phone and backed through a door, out of sight. “I—I have a gun!”

I didn’t believe her. I banged on the door. “Mrs. Gardner! Open the door! Please! Just let me talk to you.”

Nothing but whimpering. Goddamn it! There was no time for this. The cops were coming. I had to be gone before they came, and I would be if I could just find that gem!

“Mrs. Gardner! Are you there? Can you just—”

Right there in mid-sentence, my patience ran out. It was there one second, gone the next, like a drop of water on a hot skillet. I saw red. I snarled. I put my fist through the back door window, then cleared the shards with a couple more punches and reached down to the latch. A second later I was in, knuckles and arm bleeding.

I heard a scream from the living room.

“It’s okay, Mrs. Gardner. I’m just going to look for the transmigration ray now.”

I stepped into the dining room, dripping blood off my knuckles. The whispering got fainter. I backed out and crossed to the door to the living room.

BLAM!

I jerked back as a bullet splintered the door frame beside my head. The silly bitch
did
have a gun! A fucking Dirty Harry magnum revolver, of all things. Fortunately, firing it had knocked her on her ass, and she was heels-up across an occasional table with her head in a dish of butter mints, her forehead turning purple where the recoil had smacked her in the face.

I jumped across the room and snatched the howitzer out of her hand before she could recover.

She threw her arms over her face. “Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!”

I flipped out the barrel and shook out the five remaining bullets onto the carpet. “I told you I wasn’t going to kill you. Now, stay put!”

I stuffed the gun in the back of my jeans and stood stock still, trying to listen past the pain in my arm and hand and find the whispering again. My ears were still ringing from the gunshot. It took a while. Leigh looked up at me like I was crazy. Well, duh.

After another minute I could hear it again, and it felt like it was stronger above me. I ran for the stairs.

Leigh whimpered from the floor. “Where are you going?”

“Out of your life, I hope.”

I heard sirens as I reached the second floor, and not too far away, either. Shit! The cops must have had a cruiser in the neighborhood. I didn’t have much time.

There were bedrooms to the right and left, with a bathroom and a closed door in between. The whispering was definitely louder up here. I ducked into the left bedroom, Leigh’s by the slippers under the bed and the curler set on the vanity. The whispering got quieter. I backed out and went into the other, a guest bedroom—neat as a pin. Quieter here too. Damn. The bathroom didn’t give me any love either. What was behind door number two?

I threw it open, expecting a linen closet, but it was a set of stairs going up. The attic! Of course!

I bounded up the stairs, and nearly cracked my skull. The attic was an L-shaped space with a slanting bare-beamed ceiling coming to a point only a few inches over my head. I hunched down and looked around, then groaned. The place was packed with junk! Hat boxes, trucks, crates, piles of old magazines, clothes bags hanging from a rod, an ancient baby buggy. And the sirens were only blocks away. I was never going to find the gem in time!

It was almost impossible to stop myself from tearing into the boxes at random, but that wouldn’t get me anywhere. I needed to clear my head and listen. I stopped, heart pounding, and closed my eyes. Right. It was to the right. I turned to the long leg of the L and squeezed down the narrow path between mounds of junk. The whispering got louder. I was on the right track.

I slipped around the rectangular brick pillar of a chimney and pushed to the far wall, which had a little window in it. The whispering was behind me now. I’d passed it. As I turned back, a flash of red and blue out the window caught my eye. The cops were outside. They were getting out of their car.

“Fucking cops. It’s goddamn deja-vu all over again!”

I forced myself to go ahead slowly, feeling for the moment when the source of the whispering slipped behind me. Just past the chimney, it did. I turned and looked around. There were suitcases piled up all around it. I started tearing into them like a crazed badger, dumping out dusty clothes, old letters, silverware sets, diplomas, and throwing the luggage behind me. Nothing.

As I stomped open another case I heard a knock on the front door downstairs, and Leigh wailing, “She’s upstairs! And she has a gun!”

She was answered by reassuring cop murmurs and the squawk of cop radios.

I flipped over the case, spilling it. Checkers, chess pieces and Monopoly money. I tore open another one. Postcards and souvenir spoons. I kicked it aside and spun around. I’d cleared all the suitcases around the chimney and it wasn’t in any of them, and the whispering was going crazy now, like the last act of an opera. My whole head was ringing, and I was hearing creaks and squeaks as the cops tip-toed up to the second floor. Where the fuck was it! Under the fucking floorboards?

I leaned against the chimney and mopped my forehead with the sleeve of my hoodie, catching my breath and wondering how I was going to tear up heavy wooden planks. I froze. The singing was right here! It was drowning everything out. I stepped back and stared at the chimney.

“Norman Prescott Kline, you sneaky son-of-a-bitch.”

I looked around for something heavy. There were a pair of greenish bronze statues of big-boned gals in long robes looking toward heaven and holding up laurel wreaths. I grabbed one under the tits and swung her at the chimney. She was sturdy and her base was marble. It did some damage.

I spit out brick dust and grinned. I’d be through in five.

“This is the police! Slide your weapon to the top of the stairs where we can see it and come forward with your hands on your head.”

Goddamn it, not now! I was almost there! I had to stall ’em. Time to play as crazy as Leigh thought I was. The cops killed burglars, but they were always real nice to wackos who were a danger to themselves.

“Don’t come up! I’ll kill myself! I’ve got a gun!”

There was a pause. I could hear the cops whispering to each other. I swung the statue again, and cracked mortar. Bricks were hanging loose.

“Hey up there, take it easy! What are you doing?”

I laughed like a maniac and swung again. “I’m digging my own grave!”

A brick tumbled out of the chimney, and more cracked and shifted.

“Come on, now. Stop that. Put down the gun and let’s talk this out. What do you want?”

Smash! I hit the chimney again. “I want out! I can’t stand it anymore!”

“Well, we’re here to get you out. We’re here to help.”

Another swing and the marble base went flying, spanging off a stack of cookie tins. But bricks went flying too, and through the gap I could see wood. I dropped the statue and started tearing out the loose bricks with my bare hands. There was an old wooden box back there, all scarred up, with writing burned into it—Army of the Confederacy.

“Hey, did you hear us? We’re here to help.”

I shouted over my shoulder as I worked my fingers behind the box and tried to lever it out of the hole. “I don’t want your help! I wanna leave this world behind!”

I heard a step on the stair. “Listen, I’m just gonna come up there and we’ll talk this—”

“Don’t come up! I’ll shoot myself! I swear I will!”

The cop retreated. “Don’t do that. Come on. This is nothing to kill yourself over. You haven’t hurt anybody. We can resolve this.”

I braced a foot against the chimney and wrenched as hard as I could. The box ripped out, showering bricks everywhere, and caught me in the chest. It was like an engine block. I staggered back and went ass over tits over one of the suitcases I’d dumped, the box crushing my ribs then slipping off and slamming to the floor.

“She’s down! She’s down! Go go go!”

I sat up, gasping, and saw the shadows of the cops charging up the stairs, guns out. I looked at the box. The lid had split and something inside was glowing a pale lemonade green. Time to go.

I shoved the lid aside. There was another rocket-finned clock thing in there, just like the one in the cave. I stretched for the gem in its center.

The cops saw me reaching. “She’s going for a gun!”

The last thing I heard as my fingertips touched the cold smooth surface of the gem was the double bang of two police-issue nine millimeters firing at my heart.

CHAPTER FIVE

TRAPPED!

A
t first I thought they’d hit me. It sure as hell felt like
something
hit me. There was an impact like a car wreck, but no noise except weird voices jabbering in my ears, and no sensation except a cold like skinny-dipping at the North Pole. Then I was falling.

Forever.

Okay, not forever. ’Cause, you know, eventually I woke up. It sucked.

Like when I’d done this before, I came to buck-naked with the bed-spins making me feel like I was doing loop-de-loops even though I was lying still. Unlike the time before, I hurt everywhere. All my various aches and pains, which I’d been a little too busy to pay attention to in my last minutes on Earth, all lined up front and center and shouted, “Ma’am, yes ma’am! All present and accounted for, Ma’am!”

My butt and legs throbbed where I’d landed on ’em after falling over the suitcase. The cuts on my knuckles and arm throbbed and stung like someone had poured rubbing alcohol on them, and they were still bleeding—like, a lot—but those were nothing compared the pain in my chest. My ribs ached like—well, like I’d dropped a safe on them—which I had. I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath, and I got nasty zings all down my sides every time I tried.

Worse than that, I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t even know for sure if I was on Waar. I’d had the idea—stupid, I know—that I’d show up in the same place I had last time. No such luck. There were no wide, blue-flowered plains around me. No saw-toothed mountains on the horizon. No horizon at all. In fact, if I hadn’t known better, I woulda sworn I’d ended up in some VIP lounge at the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta.

I was in a high, round room that looked like it had been designed by Swedish people in the seventies—all egg shapes and white plastic walls and arched doors as tall and wide as the back end of an eighteen-wheeler—and no furniture, just the white marble disk I was lying on, and a console by the door that looked like an ATM. Recessed lighting glowed the same soft white as the walls, and an electronic chime filled the room with a mellow GOONG sound. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a place so clean-looking in all my life, and it made the hackles rise on my neck, ’cause no part of Waar I’d been to had been this spotless, this white, or this high tech.

Where the fuck was I? Had the damn teleport thingy sent me to the wrong planet? It had to be. Waar had been nothing but stone and red dust, and they’d barely invented the wheel. I rolled over, groaning as my ribs stabbed me in seven different places, and looked for the gem in the center of the disk. I had to get out of here before whoever lived here found me and did science experiments on me.

The gem was glowing. It was working! I could get back! I reached out my bleeding hand to slap it, then stopped. What was I thinking? It was only seconds after I’d left Mrs. Gardner’s attic. I’d be going back to the cops searching for me under the boxes, and if I suddenly popped back in front of them they were going to shoot first and ask questions later. Even if they didn’t fill me full of holes, I’d be arrested for breaking and entering, assault, and of course the manslaughter rap I’d been running from the first time I touched one of these gems. Maybe I’d better see what was up on this end of the interstellar poop chute after all.

I got my arms under me and pushed up—and sent myself flying sideways to land on my face and shoulder. It hurt, but I couldn’t stop laughing—which hurt more. What a fucking idiot. You woulda thought this time I woulda expected a different gravity, but, well, gravity is one of those things you take for granted—like a pocket you keep reaching for even when you’re wearing the pants without the pocket. You’re kinda surprised when it’s not there.

I pushed up more gently this time, and got to my feet without falling over again. I was gonna have to go easy for a while, but it felt great to be so light again. I hadn’t known what I was missing before I left Earth, but bouncing around like I was some kind of red-haired jackalope had been the coolest thing ever, and the thing I’d missed most when I’d been sent back—except Lhan, I mean. He was kinda fun to bounce around with too.

I bobbled over to the door like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade balloon on its tip-toes but couldn’t find a handle. It was just two plain white slabs that looked like they slid apart. I tried to get my fingers between ’em and pull, but they didn’t budge, and the effort made my ribs creak and twinge like I was being stuck with needles. I stepped back to breathe and massage my ribs, then looked around at the ATM thingy. Maybe that was how you opened the door.

There was a red light blinking on it, and now that I was closer, I noticed the GOONG sound was coming from it too. Was it an alarm? Was it some kind of phone? Was there an incoming call? Was— My heart skipped as I realized that
I
was the incoming call. The thing was letting the natives know someone had come through the looking glass and was waiting on the doorstep.

Just as I figured this out, I heard voices through the door. They were too muffled to catch any words, but they were coming closer. I looked around. There was no place to hide in the room, so I backed to the far wall, praying that the guys who lived in this airport weren’t as tall as their doors.