The Flux (18 page)

V
alentine had reskinned
them before they walked out onto the front lawn to surrender. Paul was back to being fat old Mr Galuschak, whereas Valentine was clad in the Psycho Mantis garb of gasmask and skin-tight leather gimp suit.

At David’s orders, Tyler’s half-naked men had filed out of the Paper Street house to lie on their bellies on the ground, lines of anti-’mancer mines propped before their noses.

They interlaced their hands behind their heads, face down. Tyler did it with such casual relaxation, he all but sunbathed in the spotlights.

The mines shouldn’t work, Paul knew, but that didn’t relax Paul as he lay down before them. Black-helmeted cops advanced upon them, grasping tasers in black-gloved fists; a fair number sat in back, medics cutting off their boots to examine their shredded legs.

David sat perched in an armored Humvee, surveying the scene with satisfaction.

“I thought your plan would involve something other than surrendering,” Paul said bitterly.

Valentine held up a single finger. He’d given her that same signal, once, when they’d been held hostage:
This is step one
.

“HEADS DOWN!” David ordered, shouting into a bullhorn. “ANY MOVEMENT WILL BE FIRED UPON!”

Paul thought of Aliyah. And trusted Valentine.

“For a ’mancer,” Tyler observed, “You are
totally
risk-avoidant. How the hell are you gonna change the world if all you’re doing is defending existing territory?”

Paul blinked. “You’re out to change the world?”

“Aren’t you?”

The cops approached cautiously, unhooking auto-injectors from their belts. Paul knew from scanning the munition records that each had a cocktail of drugs designed to destroy short-term memory so ’mancers literally wouldn’t know where they were.

The first cop got to Tyler. Tyler rolled over, smiling, bare-chested, as though the cop was bringing him breakfast in bed.

“How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?” he asked, so offhandedly that only Paul detected the ’mancy radiating from his model-perfect abs. The question rankled. Paul bristled, and he wasn’t even Tyler’s target.

The cop paused, bristling. “We were just
in
a fight. And we kicked your ass.”

Tyler chuckled. “No, no, no, Lenny. You went
hunting
. You got yourself a nice big .458 Winchester rifle with your 1.5x scope, and the nice hired hands set you up a blind so the lion couldn’t see it coming, and you pulled the trigger when the safari guides told you to. But that doesn’t make you a man. It makes you a tourist.”

The cops hesitated, mesmerized by Tyler’s words.

“We’re not candy-asses,” the cop muttered. “We’re fucking cops, man.”

“Then
act
like a cop, goddammit!” Tyler sprang to his feet. “Cops don’t fucking hide behind shields and tanks! They whip out their goddamned batons and beat the shit out of people, mano a mano!”

Lenny Pirrazzini ripped off his helmet, revealing sweaty helmet-hair and his useless awful mustache.
Oh, Lenny
, Paul thought.
Not you again
.

Of course Lenny
would
be the most susceptible to Tyler’s spiel.

“LENNY!” David shouted from a bullhorn. “PUT YOUR GEAR BACK ON!”

“Come on, Lenny.” Tyler danced back and forth, snakelike. “Don’t you wanna know what it’s like to go toe-to-toe with a ’mancer? No equipment, no backup?”

Lenny cocked his head back and forth, bumping chests with Tyler.

“Are you calling me a coward?” he asked. The other cops crowded in close, ripped their helmets off, their bloodlust rising.

Tyler shrugged. “Well, I know Paul Tsabo killed two ’mancers with his bare hands.”
Not quite accurate
, Paul thought, but outrage blossomed across Lenny’s face regardless. “I mean, unless you think you’re less of a man than a guy with only three limbs…”

Valentine made an embarrassed wince; Paul realized Tyler didn’t even know who Paul was. Tyler used his ’mancy to pluck factoids out of the air, goading Lenny on–

Lenny punched Tyler in the face.

Tyler cracked his neck, gave that Brad Pitt smirk. Blood trickled from his nose. He shrugged.

“That the best you got?”

“
That’s it!
” Lenny said, ripping off his armor, and the other cops piled on Tyler. Tyler’s men leapt from the ground, punching whoever they could, the cops screaming incoherently and stripping naked and punching Tyler’s men.

“
You can’t talk about this!
” Tyler laughed as he elbowed Lenny’s front teeth in.
“You promised you wouldn’t talk about this!
”

The snipers
, Paul thought, clambering to his feet.
They’ll shoot us
. But no, even the snipers flung their rifles aside, running past a red-faced and shouting David, chest puffed with pride as they raced to take on a ’mancer with good old-fashioned pugilism. Cops with half cut-off boots, their feet still bleeding from the punji pits, shoved the medics aside to limp into the fight. The medics flung aside their scissors to tackle the cops, smashing their heads against the wheel wells.

Tyler’s madness
, Paul thought, terrified.
It’s a virus. He’s infected them with
Fight Club.

He turned to Valentine, ready to pull her away. She leaned against a cop car, covering her shy grin with one hand.

“Oh, how I
do
love to watch him work.” She was lovestruck.

“So what do we do now?” Paul asked. “Just… run?”

“Tyler’s on it. He’s good at vanishing. He just has to handle the cops, and then–”

A gunshot rang out across the field. Tyler jerked back, shocked, blood fountaining from his shoulder; David perched atop the Humvee, clutching a sniper rifle.

“THAT ROUND’S HYDROSTATIC SHOCK SHOULD HAVE KILLED YOU,” David said. “SMASH BE DAMNED, I WILL BLOW YOUR FUCKING HEAD OFF IF ANYONE THROWS ONE MORE PUNCH.”

Tyler collapsed backwards into the arms of his men, who formed a protective circle around him. “No can do, David! In death, I get a name.”

Paul
really
wished he’d seen that fucking movie.

David sighed, exasperated. “FINE. DEATH IT IS.”

An explosion blew off the rear of the house.

“…THE FUCK?” David cried. The cops looked around, as if waking from a dream, touching the bruises on their faces with their fingertips – and then cried out as they saw the bright flames roaring up from the back yard, the smoke blotting out the moon.

“Huh,” Tyler shrugged. “I guess someone got at the napalm tanks.”

“You make
napalm
?” Valentine squeed.

I’ve been waiting all my life for some mysterious stranger to show up and involve me in an Adventure
, Valentine had told him shortly after they’d first met, disappointed by Paul’s cautious nature.
What’d I get? Minimum wage jobs
.

As Valentine flicked away the incoming shards of glass with her forcefield, Paul realized he might not survive Valentine’s idea of Adventures.

Yet the fire engulfing the house moved too fast for napalm. The dilapidated siding went up quickly as matchheads, the rotted wood popping into sparks; the roof became an instant blaze with an oxygen-snuffing
whoof
, every shingle blazing like a gas oven being turned on. The windows turned a molten red before evaporating in a spray of atomized glass.

The cops, wisely, began to flee.

With a glimmer of ’mancy, Tyler pulled out sunglasses and a bag of popcorn.

By the time Paul turned around, the house itself – all three stories of Victorian architecture – had lifted into the air, rising off the foundation like a disintegrating rocket. The floors buckled into heaps of burnt timber and ash, the roof imploding, the chimney snapping in half and spraying out superheated brick – but a great flame vortex hauled tons of blazing architecture upwards even as the house collapsed, scooping the timber up in a roiling mass of white-hot kindling, crushing the home into a rough inferno that rose still higher into the sky.

And Rainbird rode that crumbling conflagration, his overcoat burning, one hand grasping what once had been a weathervane as he straddled the wreckage – as though he rode a cyclopean steed summoned straight from the fires of hell.

His burnt-tree mask’s blazing eyeholes held no possibility of mercy.

“Too much evidence.” Rainbird’s voice was ominous as timber crackling. “Burn it all to cinders.”

Rainbird gestured towards David – and the house rolled towards him, the fiery wreckage tumbling like balls inside a bingo machine, vomiting out scorched couches and twisted iron bedframes and smoking Persian rugs from the sky. David squeezed his eyes shut as the debris bore down upon him in a ragged firestorm, a scourging fire sweeping across the landscape to show David the limitations of his pitiful authority.

The badge at Paul’s hip shivered. Rainbird’s monstrous flux poured into it – even spread out over thousands, it was more than the system could bear. The person who’d been scheduled to be caught in the traffic jam got upgraded to a fender bender, the person who would have had a cold now sprained an ankle, the overdrawn checking account metamorphosed into identity fraud…

A tsunami of fire soared over Paul, and Tyler, and the cops, threatening to broil them all. The policemen stopped running, fell to their knees, begging forgiveness…

“
Valentine!
” Paul yelled, “
We can’t let him–
”

“
On it
.” She grabbed the Xbox controller at her hip, thumbed the green X of its “On” button.

A burst of green energy radiated out from her, her potency matching Rainbird’s, sweeping across the panicked cops as the fire sluiced through them, burning them.

They didn’t burn.

The Humvees burned, the tires flaring smoke, the gas tanks rupturing. The ambulances melted in a grinding brushfire. The tanks were hurled so high into the sky they had hang time, a good three seconds before they plummeted back again, bursting into shreds of military hardware.

But the cops did not change.

Tiny green numbers flared over their heads –
hit points
, Paul knew – which dropped to zero as the attack took them. They dropped to the ground, unconscious. Rainbird engulfed them in angry firestorms, swept their bodies up into the air and shook them, chucked them at the ground – yet those hit points remained stubbornly at zero.

“
It’s a multiplayer co-op match
,” Valentine shouted up. “
Nobody dies here, Rainbird! They only respawn after a cooldown time
.”

Tyler reached up and lit a fresh cigarette off of a burning duvet whizzing overhead. “Oh my God, that girl twists my heart into a balloon animal.”

The badge glowed as hot as Rainbird’s fire; he dropped it. With Valentine and Rainbird clashing ’mancies draining into it, the flux shaded fatal – fender benders crumpling into head-on collisions, sprained ankles crushed into shattered femurs, identity fraud deepending into portfolio collapses…

This much ’mancy strained at the edges of reality; other realities longed to push through into ours. That was how Germany had been destroyed: a ’mancer fight had broached the other worlds and
things
had poured in to devour Earth’s delicious reality.

Paul felt the air pulling apart, the struggle between Valentine and Rainbird punching holes into more hostile dimensions…

Rainbird fluttered down, surrounded by a fiery corona, hands twisted into claws. “
What are you doing, little girl?
”

Valentine held up her controller, which blazed with gamefire. “
Saving your dumb ass
.”

“
They’ve seen too much. This equipment will be reused against us. We need to burn the source – their expertise. Their leader. These men
.”

Valentine was red-faced. “
You fucking moron! Have you seen what happens when you kill a New York cop!? Kill one policeman, and New York will do anything to hunt us down!
”

Rainbird looked pained. “
We won’t leave anyone to tell. Your papermancer will erase the digital evidence – the one thing he’s good for – and this? Will be done.
”

The burning building above them dropped precipitously: a threat. Valentine activated her shield, which glimmered around them: a counter-threat. Paul’s Galuschak suit melted, his cheeks dribbling fake fat.

Worse, bulges appeared in the air around them. Something colorless squirmed, trying to wriggle through:

The buzzsects
, Paul thought, horrified. He’d seen them, once. They were avatars of hunger. They ate laws of physics. They ate ’mancy. They were voracious for the taste of our good clean universe.

The artificial skin sloughed off his left arm, exposing his ever-bleeding wound. He’d stopped them once – but what would it cost him now?

What if he couldn’t stop them, and New York became the next Germany?

“
Valentine! Broach imminent!
”

She grimaced; her skin was still laced with scars from the last demon invasion. “
If I drop it, he’ll kill all the cops, Paul. Can we…
” She swallowed. “
Can we live with that?
”

“
Jesus fucked a donkey
,” Rainbird spat. “
This is war, you fools! War is fire! If you don’t burn the ground so there’s nothing left to take the flame, it spreads! Someone’s going to die, and it’s them – or it’s us
.”

He lowered the wreckage more, resting its full weight on Valentine’s shield. Green sparks coruscated through her as she fought to stave off Rainbird’s power.

The air squirmed, tiny rips appearing, insectoid jaws nipping through.

Paul played with forms. Rainbird could lift houses up on flaming tornados. Rainbird could battle with fire whips, could beat Valentine at her own literal game–

What the hell could he do against that might?

“
You
,” Tyler said to Valentine, “overcomplicate things.”

He socked Rainbird in the jaw. Rainbird tumbled over backwards, unconscious; the rubble dropped from the sky.

With a grunt, Valentine lifted up her shield like a gigantic dinner plate and tilted it, sliding the embers of the Paper Street home onto the empty lot next door.