S. Stirling - Dies The Fire

"Yes," she replied. "He stores it for me so I can use it at the RenFaire and the festivals and meets over the summer, and he boards Cagney and Lacey for me. My pickup's out behind his barn right now. I was supposed to drive down to Eugene to meet my coven after I finished up here."

She'd have liked nothing better than to live out of the wagon the whole summertime, ambling along behind the two Percheron mares; it was a real old-style tinker-traveler-gypsy house-on-wheels shaped like a giant barrel. Not practical, of course.

Or it wasn't, she thought, with an icy crawling feeling. Now it may be high-tech. Damn, but I hate being scared like this.

"I think we should get moving. Get out of town, find someplace real remote, and hide like hell," Dennis said. Then he hesitated: "If you want my help."

"Oh, hell, yes, Dennie," she said.

To herself: I know you're trustworthy, and I can't get in touch with Rudy or anyone else in the coven and I certainly don't want me and Eilir out there alone right now. Maybe some of the others will have the same idea. Rudy certainly will.

She went on: "The cabin up in the Cascade foothills would be perfect and I'll be glad to have you along. We'll have to cross the valley: "

"You think this is going to last long enough for that?" Dennis said, his voice neutral.

Her brows knotted. "You were right; we've got to act like this was all over the world, and for keeps. If we do and we're wrong, we just look stupid and scared. If we don't and it is like that, we could die. I'd rather look weird than be dead."

Her impish smile came back for an instant: "As if I wasn't weird enough at any time!"

"Right," her friend said, nodding vigorously. "That's just what I was thinking."

They clattered down the stairs again. Nobody was left but a couple of the staff, talking together in low tones.

"Boss," the cook said, coming out of the kitchen and drying his hands on his apron. "I stay and help, but my kids-"

"No, Manuel, you get home where you're needed," Dennis said. He hesitated, then went on: "You could think of getting out of town, too. And take some of the canned stuff, whatever you can carry. I think things could get, uh, hairy for a while, with this power failure and all."

He spoke a little louder: "That goes for everyone here. Take what you can carry."

The stocky Mexican gave him an odd look, then handed the three of them a platter of sandwiches and went, grunting a little at the weight of the cardboard box of food in his arms and the sack of dried beans on top of it. The rest of the staff trailed out in his wake, similarly burdened.

Juniper looked at the pastrami sandwich he'd made.

Well, there's the farmer and his tractors, and the trucks, and the packing plant, and the refrigerators, and the power line to the flour mill, and the baker, and the factory that made the mustard:

Her stomach contracted like a ball of crumpled lead sheet; she made herself eat anyway, and wash it down with a Dr Pepper.

Juniper kept her mind carefully blank as she and Dennis worked. She changed back into jeans and flannel shirt and denim jacket, then helped the manager- ex-manager – load their bicycles with sacks of flour and soy and dried fruit, blocks of dark chocolate and dates, blessing the Toad's organic-local cuisine all the while.

"No canned goods?" Dennis said, as she chose and sorted.

Juniper shook her head. "We'd be lugging stuff that's mostly water and container. This dried food gives you a lot more calories for the weight, when it's cooked. And throw in those spice packets, all of them. They don't weigh much, and I think they're going to be worth a lot more than gold in a while."

The garage out back held a little two-wheeled load carrier of the type that could be towed behind a bicycle; Dennis used that for some of his tools before piling more food on top, and she didn't object. They stowed as much as they could in the storage area of the basement; that had a stout steel door and a padlock. When that was full, they stacked boxes of cleaning supplies and old files in front of it, hiding it from a casual search at least.

"Wait here a second," Dennis said.

When he returned he had the shotgun from under the bar. He turned it on a stack of cardboard boxes and pulled the trigger.

Click.

It was his hopefully nonlethal backup for an emergency that had never happened-the Hopping Toad wasn't the sort of place where a barkeep needed to flourish a piece every other week.

He worked the slide twice and the second time he caught the ejected shell; then he cut off the portion that held the shot and set the base down on the concrete floor.

"Stand back," he said, and dropped a lit match into it.

There should have been a miniature Vesuvius, a spear of fire reaching up from the floor to waist height into the dimness of the cellar, blinding-bright for an instant. Instead there was a slow hissing, and what looked like a very anemic Roman candle, the sort that disappointed you on a damp Fourth of July.

"What's happening!" Juniper cried after they'd stamped out the sparks and poured water to be sure.

"Juney: Juney, if I didn't know better, I'd say someone, or some One, just changed the laws of nature on us. As far as I can tell, explosives don't explode anymore. They just burn, sorta slow." He ran a hand over his head. "Shit, you're the one who believes in magic! But this: it's like some sort of spell."

Juniper raised her brows. She'd always thought Dennis was a stolid sort, a dyed-in-the-wool rationalist. She started to cross herself in a deep-buried reflex from a Catholic childhood, and changed it to the sign of the Horns. The idea was preposterous: but it had a horrible plausibility, after this day of damnation.

"Well, the sun didn't go out," Dennis said, scrubbing a palm across his face. "And humans are powered by oxidizing food, and our nerves are electrical impulses: Maybe some quantum effect that only hits current in metallic wires, and fast combustion?"

Juniper snorted. "Does that mean that the dilithium crystals are fucked, Scotty?"

Dennis was startled into a brief choked-off grunt of laughter. "Yeah, that's bafflegabic bullshit, I'm no scientist- I just read Popular Mechanics sometimes, and Analog. We don't know what happened; all we know is that it did happen, at least locally: but who can say how local? Like you said, Juney, we gotta act like it's the whole world."

He went over to another corner of the basement and dragged out a heavy metal footlocker. "I was keeping this stuff for John, he had it left over from what he sold at the last RenFaire and Westercon, and it was less trouble than taking it back home or all the way out east."

"East?" she said.

She'd met John Martin now and then and liked him, although Dennis's elder brother was also a stoner whose musical world had stopped moving about the time Janis Joplin OD'd; besides that he was a back-to-the-lander and a blacksmith. Mostly he lived in a woodsy cabin in northern California, and made the circuit of West Coast dos and conventions and collectors' get-togethers. Of course, he and Dennis worked together a fair bit, with Dennis doing the leatherwork.

"Yeah, John's in Nantucket, of all places. He's got a girlfriend there, and there are a lot of the summer home crowd who can afford his ironwork and replicas. I hope to God everything's all right in Santa Fe East. John's a gentle sort."

He unfastened the locker and threw back the lid. Reaching inside, he took out a belt wrapped around a pair of scabbards and tossed it to her.

"Put it on," he said. "Jesus, I wish John were here. He's a good man to have around, under all that hippy-dippy crap."

What she was holding was a palm-wide leather belt with brass studs and a heavy buckle in the form of an eagle. It carried a long Scottish dirk with a hilt of black bone carved in swirling Celtic knotwork and a broad-bladed short-sword about two feet long. She put her hand on the rawhide-wrapped hilt and drew it; the damascene patterns in the steel rippled like frozen waves in the lamplight. It was a gladius, the weapon the soldiers of Rome had carried from Scotland to Persia; the twenty-inch blade was leaf-shaped, tapering to a long vicious stabbing point.