Scott Westerfeld - Touching Darkness

Melissa stood before the woman, reaching out her hands.

“There’s no time!” Rex shouted. “The desert’s only half a mile away. Whatever’s coming will be here soon!”

“She’s the smart one, Rex. You should have felt her mind. She knows what’s going on.”

“What’s going on is we’re about to get overrun by darklings!”

“Get ready, then. I’ll be downstairs in five.”

Rex flinched. Why didn’t anyone ever listen to him? Especially at times like this, when it really mattered. However expensive it looked, this house was a darkling place. Not for humans. He could see that; Melissa couldn’t.

He noticed that the sliding glass door of the balcony was now open.

“Make it three,” Rex said coldly, and ran downstairs.

He burst through the front door and ran to the car, not bothering to check the skies. They had a few minutes, anyway. Even Jonathan Martinez couldn’t have gotten here this fast.

Perversely, he hoped that something big was coming. The oldest ones lived in the deep desert and would take longer to get here. And having to face something really scary might convince Melissa to listen to him next time.

Of course, if it did turn out to be just some second-string darkling and a few slithers, Rex wasn’t going to complain.

He reached into the backseat and pulled out his duffel bag. It was depressingly light; they hadn’t brought any serious metal tonight, thinking they’d be facing a human threat and not some darkling house party.

Rex cursed. The awesome power of the flame-bringer had made him overconfident.

The duffel bag’s zipper caught in his nervous fingers, but he managed to yank it open. A big plastic flashlight, useless without Jessica to spark it up. A ball-peen hammer called Arachnophobia. A bag of assorted screws and nails for throwing. And a tire iron with the name Stratocumulus that Rex only now remembered had been used to ward off slithers before. Its power had probably sizzled down to nothing. Melissa only kept it in the trunk to change tires.

That was it.

Time to break out the big guns.

“Back left, back left,” Rex muttered to himself, slamming the door and running around the car. He pried at the Ford’s left-rear hubcap with Stratocumulus, useful for something at least. As he pulled, Rex allowed himself a satisfied grin. He and Dess had worked hard on this one, agreeing to use it only when absolutely necessary.

Which would be now.

The hubcap sprang off, clattering to the street. Around its inside edge were a host of tiny symbols, Stone Age pictograms, thirty-nine of them, etched by Dess as per Rex’s instructions. She had used a drill bit stolen from shop class, made from a tungsten alloy so high tech, it could bore through steel like wet plaster.

Rex shoved the hubcap into the bag, hoping it would be enough.

He ran back to the open front door and shouted up the stairs.

“Melissa!” She didn’t answer. “Come on!”

Then he heard a sound from above.

She was whimpering.

Rex found her on her knees before the woman, her fingers still splayed in their mindcasting grip, shaking her head and moaning.

“Something’s coming…

He sighed. “Like I said.”

“It’s so sick, Rex…”

He swallowed. It wasn’t like Melissa to freak out at darkling thoughts. She always said their ancient, arid minds were a hundred times easier to tolerate than those of humanity.

“Come on.” He hauled Melissa to her feet and pulled her toward the stairs. She didn’t fight him, just trailed along, making hiccuping noises, like a kid trying to keep from crying.

Rex tried not to think about what she’d seen.

The front door was still ajar, and he kicked his way through. The house across the street looked occupied, hopefully full of shiny metal and modern machines. Rex had one more trick up his sleeve—or stuffed into the buckle of his right boot, actually.

Melissa ran with him across the asphalt, finally shaken out of her panic. But when he looked back at her, the cold light of the rising blue moon glimmered from a single tear on her cheek.

She was crying. Melissa was crying.

Rex swallowed hard. We’re dead.

The front door was locked, so he swung Stratocumulus through the little stained-glass window at its center, stuck his arm in, and searched for the knob on the other side. Broken glass stabbed at the crook of his elbow, but his fingers found the dead bolt and spun it. As the door swung inward, Rex heard the sound of tearing cloth coming from his sleeve.

“Kitchen,” he said. Always the best tools there.

Melissa ran ahead as Rex paused to check his arm, spreading the ripped cloth to reveal torn flesh. As the blood welled up from the wound, the red color leeched away, turning to a steely blue-gray before his eyes.

“In here!” Melissa shouted from the back of the house.

He tore his gaze from the cut and ran, wondering for a moment if darklings were anything like sharks. Could they be driven into a frenzy by the smell of blood?

The kitchen was huge, bigger than Rex’s living room, with long stretches of counter space and two full range tops. The ambient blue light of the secret hour glowed from metal appliances and a block of knives.

Rex smiled. They weren’t dead yet.

He pulled open drawers until he found the silverware and brought a spoon up to his sharp eyes.

“Stainless Korean,” he read happily, and thrust the whole drawer into Melissa’s arms. “Find a room upstairs with no stiffs.”

She nodded mutely, her face still blank with shock.

Rex ransacked the kitchen, filling his duffel bag with nonstick ceramics, high-temperature alloys, all the spaceage materials that always started out in jet fighters and wound up in frying pans. After thirty frantic seconds he hoisted the heavy, clanking bag over one shoulder and grabbed the knife block with his free hand—the knives looked fearsome if nothing else. He headed for the stairs.

Melissa had found the perfect room. It was a study, with only one small window that looked out across the street at Darkling Manor. A computer dominated a small desk, and a pegboard full of cables filled one wall. More clean metal for the taking.

She was staring out the window, shuddering again.

“They’re almost here.”

Rex dropped the bag and slammed the door shut. Drawing a knife from the block and peering closely, he smiled.

“Somebody likes to cook.”

The knives were Japanese and gorgeous, bearing the magic words, Never needs sharpening. That meant high titanium content and laser shaping, the modern-day equivalent of a late-solutrean spear point—the Stone Age technology that had finally driven the darklings into the secret hour.

He pulled the slip of paper from his boot strap and unfolded it, then turned to the door and thrust the knife hard against it. The wood split with a satisfying thunk.

“Abnormalities.” Rex pulled another knife from the block. “Aboriginally,” he read from the piece of paper. Thunk. Pulled another knife…

He smiled grimly. This was one little resource Dess had never thought of (not that she needed help finding tridecalogisms).

“Acceptability.” Think.

The piece of paper was the second-to-last page of a Scrabble dictionary, the only kind of lexicon Rex had ever found that listed words by length.

“Accidentalism.” Whatever that was. Thunk. The door would be rock solid once he got to thirteen…

The knives ran out at twelve.

Rex squeezed his eyes shut tight. Why hadn’t he counted before starting? Nine would have been good enough. And anything would have been better than twelve.

He whirled around and grabbed a butter knife from the silverware drawer, turned back, and propelled it against the door with all his strength. The blunt tip skated off, taking his wrist a few inches from the serrated edge of a beautiful Japanese carving knife.