James Baldwin - Stained Glass

“I manage I.T at the Museum,” she replied. “That’s my job there… I’m part of the I.T systems project team for the Smithsonian. Can we set up a table near an outlet?”

The question was directed at the room more than it was at any one person. I stood and swayed, catching myself before I stumbled and hit my head against the railing of the bunk. Everything turned black for a moment, and I suddenly found myself on the other side of the room, my arm resting over Zane’s shoulder as he sat us down.

“You need to rest,” he said. “You’re about to pass out.”

“The house was really very unpleasant,” I said. It made sense in my head to point that out. “The computer is in the car outside. You should probably take it somewhere else and leave it far away from here. The car, that is.”

“No worries. But you need to lie down.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” I replied. “I might have hit my head a few times.”

He and Talya ended up arranging pillows into a mound and resting me back against them. My head was pounding with slow, thunderous pain that gathered between my eyes and knocked in time with each heartbeat. When someone gave me pills and water, I didn’t bother to check what they were. I took them, and as soon as the light was turned out, I fell asleep.

It was still dark when I next roused. The moon was full and fat outside the window, and while it was still windy enough to make the panes rattle, the rain had stopped and the clouds had cleared. My headache had gone from an eight to a five, but I felt queasy and parched. Binah was curled in a tight ball between my ankles, while Josie slept on her bed on the other side of the room. Her saline bag was nearly empty.

Groggily, I threw back more painkillers and chased it down with an anti-nausea tablet, then rummaged through my medical supplies. I’d been doing more healing than killing since leaving the Organizatsiya, and I had fewer bags of sterile fluids than I had boxes of ammunition. The necessity of going to a pharmacist and restocking was on my mind as I stumbled out into the house, expecting it to be quiet. Instead, the lights were blazing and the common room was laid out like an armory.

Jenner, Zane, Duke and Talya were still awake. The Tigers were finishing getting ready for a bear-hunt: soft body armor, leather jackets, boots, helmets, crossbows and shotguns. They had assembled the computer on the bar counter. Talya was working at the keyboard, scanning lines of white text as it tumbled down a featureless black screen.

“Has something happened?” I moved forwards, relatively steady on my feet. Sokolsky men have always been notoriously resilient to head trauma.

“It’s five in the morning and Mason hasn’t come back,” Jenner said, her voice flat with forced calm. “Neither have John or Michael. Something’s wrong. We’re going there to search, now.”

“Let me get my things,” I said. “I’ll go with you.”

“You sure you’re up for this?” Zane shrugged on his heavy jacket

“Of course.” I cracked my neck and rolled my shoulders, then carefully turned around and wobbled off back the way I came. It was absolutely a lie, but I had no choice – when it starts raining shit, you never get a trickle. It’s always a flood.

Zane and I took the Buick, while Duke and Jenner rode behind and beside us on their hogs, visors down against the spitting rain and gusting wind. Zane chewed a toothpick, worrying it down to fibers while we cleared the city limit and hit the highway out of town. Binah was fixed to my shoulder, her flank pressed against the side of my head, meowing with excitement as she stared out the window. If pirates could have shoulder parrots, I guess I could have a cat.

The sun was just barely warming the horizon when Zane finally spoke. “What do you think we’ll find there?”

“Not a clue,” I replied. In the back of my mind, I was turning around the words I’d use to discuss his fight on Saturday, the one that I needed him to throw. I could be honest, and tell him what finding Celso meant to me, or I could lie and say it was about the children. For the sake of expediency, I was leaning towards the latter.

“I’m worried,” Zane said. “Someone taking out a couple of Christian counselors is one thing. Mason… man. Mason’s a machine.”

I opened my eyes from where I was dozing against the window. Binah was in my lap, now, sleeping in a tight, twitching ball on my knees. “I guess you must know him well.”

“Yeah.” The big man’s jaw worked. He’d lost the toothpick by now: we’d been driving for nearly an hour. “He went to Vietnam because he wanted to fight. Joined the Marines in 1964, went to war in ’65, and stayed until 1969. He was a true believer back then, he told me. But then he met Jenner.”

I’d been a child during the Vietnam War, far too preoccupied with the depredations of my father and my mother’s death to pay it more than cursory attention. The most significant Vietnam War-related event in my life was its end. “Is she… his wife?”

“No. He wishes, but Jenner isn’t really the marrying type.” Zane smiled, momentarily at ease. “She was Viet Cong, though. That’s the weird thing. They started out as enemies. Jenner was really young – only sixteen or so. She was already unit commander of a rural guerilla team, and she ambushed Mason’s unit and cleared them out. Killed them all. Mason shifted to survive, and she saw it and had to shift to fight him off and protect her men. She kicked his ass and saved their lives, but then her unit and their command basically went and lynched her.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “Humans make precious little sense.”

“It’s a pretty common outcome for Weeders. But anyway… somehow, ages after that, she and Mason ended up running into each other in this prison camp. She’d let herself get captured, because she was planning to change and massacre the place. Mason was touring through there with intelligence looking for this one guy they needed to talk to, and he recognized her. So he set up some time with her and they talked. He learned she was an Elder, and the War was lost by then anyway, so they put things aside. He helped her escape and they went to Thailand for a while.”

“I suppose that if you can remember multiple lives, any single war would seem foolish and transient,” I said.

“Yeah. Being an Elder gives you a new perspective on things, I think,” Zane said. “So they organized to split together. I don’t remember the full story of how they got here, but they started the club in 1980 and kept recruiting. I found them when I started fighting. Mason and me went to Thailand together… they’re like my mom and dad.”

I thought about the strong fraternal bond I’d shared with Vassily and was able to draw some kind of parallel. “Mm.”

“Something has to have happened to them.” Zane was shaking his head, mouth grim, brow furrowed. “But I don’t know how. Have you figured out anything about the murders? I mean… you found Josie.”

“I think it’s one person,” I rubbed the joint of thumb and forefinger and stared out at the dark rush of forest from the window. “An individual killer. Maybe hired, maybe on contract, maybe a summoned entity. I’m leaning towards the latter. I don’t think they’re human.”

“What? Why?”

“The computer,” I said. “Everything else had been trashed, including some of the older electronics. It was almost as if whoever was in there didn’t know what it was, to the point that they overlooked it completely. A demon or summoned fetch wouldn’t know what a computer did, even if they’d been instructed to break all of the telephony. It would look like a rock, or a storage hutch or something. Besides that, there’s evidence that the murderer is supernaturally strong and fast. No footprints, no fingerprints. The tendency to leave messages and codes, as well. In the age of forensic evidence, it’s… old-fashioned.”