Chaos Calling, page 20
She gives him a strange look, shoving her water bottle into her bag. “I’m Jenna,” she says as they resume his sprint toward Medical Sciences.
Their feet pound the grass as they run. The campus is eerily quiet. The sirens have died away. The ring road is empty. And then the skyworms roar.
Without xhen, Dave expects Jenna to scream or run in the other direction. Instead, she sprints up the steps of the Medical Sciences building, heading for the glass doors. No! he calls. I can’t fight in there.
“Here,” she counters. The concrete-walled walkway between the Brutalist buildings is full of boxy, concrete sculptures. There’s an overhang on the left-hand side near a set of doors.
“Hide underneath. Blast them as they go by.”
It’ll work once.
She raises a coppery eyebrow. “How many shots do you need?”
Dave glares. Jenna laughs, her excitement brightening the back of his head. “Got a weapon for me?”
No, he says curtly, resenting the distraction. Get to a basement. Pretend there’s a tornado coming. Hide in a doorway or under something solid.
“Nope,” she says firmly. “You’ve got a weapon that works against them. If you die, we’re sunk.” She grimaces as she points into the sky past his head. “Here they come.”
Orange scales flash as the nearer skyworm swoops low over the buildings, its fire-damaged patch of scales clearly visible. Dave waits until it’s practically on top of them. Then he forms and slings the biggest ball of flame he can imagine into the sky.
The creature falters, dropping several metres, but still manages to turn its head and roar. Its mouth tentacle shoots out as its scales glow brighter than a sunset. Then the concrete explodes above their heads.
Dave counters with xhen, forming a wide barrier as Anna demonstrated the previous day. It blocks the debris but not the concussion wave, which drops him to his knees. As he falters, Jenna seizes him by the wrist and hauls him up. Stumbling after her, he concentrates on maintaining the barrier around them as the skyworms dive.
“Stairs!” Jenna shouts. Somehow, Dave makes it down the concrete steps and across more grass toward University Avenue without breaking his ankles. As they run, he alternates between xhen barriers and fireballs as the skyworms give chase, grateful to delegate route-picking.
They’ll use anything large and metal against us, he cautions. We need open space.
As if to prove his point, a sizeable tree and a manhole cover explode on the skyworms’ next pass. Dave blocks most of the debris, but a long, skinny piece of wood slips past the edge of his barrier and slices his thigh as it shoots past. He grunts. Immediately, Jenna pulls his arm across her shoulders and hustles him onward.
Ahead, University Avenue’s southbound lanes are empty except for an abandoned orange taxi in the middle of the road. The teal-green driver’s door and the rear passenger doors stand open. A woman’s purse has fallen into the street, its contents spread under the taxi’s wheels.
“Curb!” Jenna shouts in his ear. Dave winces as he limps beside her in a shuffling stumble. Warmth trickles down from his leg as they reach the trees ringing Queen’s Park.
“Don’t stop,” he pants.
“There’s another skyworm coming up University,” Jenna reports, peering up through the branches. “It’s black.” She gives him a curious look. “What do they do?”
“Fuck if I know.” Dave pokes his head out in time to see the creature soar overhead. Holy shit! It’s double, no, quadruple the length of the orange skyworms. Like a skinny hockey rink took flight, he thinks as its passage temporarily blocks out the sun, throwing the parkland into shadow. He can’t tell whether Anna is on its back, but the orange skyworms are changing course to pursue it, giving them a momentary reprieve.
With Jenna steadying him, Dave scuttles out from the trees onto the legislature’s lawn for a clearer view of the sky. He concentrates on the nearest orange skyworm, which sports the telltale dark patches of previously damaged scales. Xhen leaps into his palms. Dave’s other arm is still across Jenna’s shoulders, which seems to change the amount of xhen he can use. Fire fills him from the soles of his feet to the roots of his hair, doubling what he could previously hold.
Instead of a ball, he forms the energy into a molten stream. It streaks up from his hand, taking the skyworm broadside. Clear fluid sprays in an arc from its ruptured scales. Roaring, the monster pinwheels to the ground, wreathed in Dave’s brighter flames as clear fluid gushes from its massive wound. It crashes into University Avenue right on top of the abandoned taxi.
The impact of its falling body knocks them both down. From his knees, Dave drills a second blast through its head to finish it off. He sits back on the asphalt, panting.
Instantly, Jenna’s on her feet, laughing triumphantly as she reaches down to help Dave up a second time. “That was awesome!” she crows. Her hand throbs in his, her whole being racing with joy. She tilts her head at him, grinning. “What’s your name?”
Chapter 21
Anna — Rodeo
Toronto, ON: Wednesday, August 20
Hands shaking, ponytail whipping in her face, Anna clings to the orange skyworm’s back as it struggles for freedom, bucking and twisting beneath her legs. Shutting her eyes doesn’t mitigate the sickening plunges, which are a million times worse than airplane turbulence. To think I wanted xhen back.
Directly above her is a deep notch in the skyworm’s ridged crest. Grimly, Anna pulls xhen into her body and rises to her knees to peer through the gap. She carefully braces her legs, still leashed within Kalos’s impromptu harness. Holding xhen makes the nausea, shakiness, and disorientation tolerable, provided she doesn’t look down. Experimentally, she pulls on the skyworm’s rightmost neck cord. It lurches left in a banking, downward turn toward the city. Startled by the direct effect, she loosens her grip.
The skyworm throws its head back, evidently trying to crush her between its crest and back. She falls into a seated position as it plunges ten metres. The small amount of slack in her harness slams her head forward. She barely gets her arms up in time to shield her face. I can do this, she thinks. I’ve got to.
Again, she rises and redoubles her grip on the cords, continuously tugging at them to keep the skyworm focused on what she’s doing. Turning it away from Lake Ontario and back toward University Avenue is like playing a scarier version of the monster fights in Tim’s video games.
Thinking of her son is a mistake. Her yearning to be on the ground, far away from danger, with Tim in her arms, is so intense that she nearly loses xhen. Focus, Anna! Kalos left you here because he believes you can win!
Eyes watering in the wind, Anna squints. Ahead, two more orange skyworms circle Queen’s Park, swooping at something on the ground. A second later, she spots a massive ball of crimson fire racing into the sky. It collides with the nearest skyworm. Dave!
Anna grins, hauling on the cords to force her mount in that direction. It drops lower between the buildings, flying fast toward the park as she forms the haziest of plans. It bucks again. Her grip slips. The skyworm twists against a nearby office tower, scraping its sides along the street-facing wall like a horse trying to dislodge a rider with a low-hanging branch.
“Shit!” Frantically letting slack into her harness, Anna scrambles around the skyworm’s neck, yanking her left leg up and out of the way. It’s a struggle to keep her bonds loose enough for movement yet tight enough for safety.
Don’t look down. Do not look down. Her ankle clips a window ledge with a painful whap—Sprained? Broken?—and there’s a scary moment where she fears the leash is unraveling around her thighs, but it doesn’t. Thrilled not to fall to her death, Anna reaches for the neck cords. A fresh wave of fear rolls through her belly as she immediately grasps the skyworm’s strategy. I can’t steer from here. Oh hell!
All three skyworms roar. Every window in Anna’s field of view shatters. Changing direction, her reluctant mount shoots back into the sky, its body shifting left and right as it gains altitude. When they’re well above the tallest roof, it levels off to swing south. Anna clings to it, furiously thinking as she tries not to vomit, fall off, or lose xhen. In the distance, she spots a massive black thing approaching the city over Lake Ontario. Six familiar orange shapes cling to its sides. Kalos was right: there’s ten of them. And the black one is huge.
Her orange skyworm roars, angling to join its pack. Get to its neck cord. Anna releases her harness long enough to grab the first of Kalos’s blades, which she gingerly holds between her teeth like a pirate. The blade feels amorphous in her mouth, its consistency something like cotton-batten crossed with the mild reverberation from a malfunctioning electronic. The buzz echoes along her jaw, sending more pain through her head. Ignoring it, Anna climbs.
The skyworm does two quick nauseating loops, slowing her advance. She clings to its back with muscles and xhen, searching for the rest of the pack. Something dark pulses on her left, recalling the black lights that were trendy in night clubs during her university years. Anna blinks as the flash dissipates. Then she gasps. The ridiculously large black skyworm now blocks her view of the city below. What the hell? How’d it get so close so fast? Roaring, the six other skyworms push off its back—and head straight for her.
Anna redoubles her efforts to get to the gash Kalos cut in the skyworm’s neck, moving as fast as she dares. The nearest skyworm closes. As its jaws open, she spots a slender tentacle inside emitting waves of sound so thick she can almost see them streaming from its mouth.
Her skyworm mount rolls again, turning her directly into the oncoming attack. But that also gives Anna the last bit of momentum she needs. She reaches up with her left arm to grasp its neck cords. Her fingers close on them just as the sonic attack crashes into her. She screams, dropping her knife as pain engulfs her arm and back, blasting her leash apart instead of her flesh.
No, no, no! In an eye blink, Anna’s dangling from the first skyworm’s back, nothing holding her aloft but the sticky, wet cords wrapped around her left hand.
She feels her grip slide as agony—she can’t accept it as hers—wracks her arm from shoulder to wrist. “Kalos! Help me!”
No answer comes.
Pull up! She tries to lift her wounded arm. Fails. The skyworms roar, diving around her in disorienting patterns. Oh fuck, oh fuck, I’m going to fall! A tentacle strikes her hip. As it latches on through her khakis, Anna again glimpses the world through the skyworm’s triple eyes. Her grip slips, as does the skyworm’s tentacle. NO! Her belly lurches as she tumbles head over heels through the air, falling too fast to scream.
In the next instant, she collides with something surprisingly squishy with the force of a belly flop from a ten-metre diving tower. It’s wide. And black. Dazed, Anna spits blood and part of a tooth, frantically reaching for xhen. She forms a harness to lash herself to the black skyworm and—
—loses all sensation. Pain vanishes from her mouth, arm, back, and ankle, along with sight, sound, and smell. Am I dead? Her existence is TV-static nothingness. Even the skyworm is gone. But xhen remains, prickling through her mind, assuring her that she lives. Anna holds her breath, centering herself—
—as she emerges from the non-place, still clinging to the black skyworm’s back.
To her shock, the skyworm pack is several kilometres south of their position, closer to the lake. How the hell did it . . . Is that how they travel? Teleportation? The black skyworm roars, its sound plaintive rather than scary as it loops over Queen’s Park. Its flight is surprisingly smooth compared to Anna’s rough ride on the smaller orange beast. It must be too big for acrobatics.
Behind them, the pack answers the black skyworm’s call, their bodies flattening into sleek, arrow-like shapes as they streak toward Anna and her new ride. It wanted to escape, she realizes, hearing outrage in their roars. And they’re pissed that I went with it.
Anna grins. She flexes her right arm. It still aches, as do her ankle and shrapnel-injured calf, but she’s left the worst of the pain behind. Lucky, she decides, leaning into her remaining discomfort and adding it to her body’s baseline. I had two kids without drugs. I can do this, too.
Gripping her last xhen knife, Anna lengthens the harness holding her against the skyworm’s back, turning it into more of a safety line. Go! She crawls forward as fast as she can toward its crested head, dragging the tip of her blade through the black scales as she goes. In seconds, her nose burns with the rotten-egg smell of skyworm blood. Clear ichor soaks her pants. She shivers in the wind as the creature howls. The sound reverberates through her hands and legs, making her ears ring. Answering roars come from below. Anna peeks over the edge of the skyworm’s body. Two orange skyworms are rising to greet the black one—at least until a stream of fire engulfs the nearest monster, bringing it down.
Dave! She can’t spot him on the ground. Get to its crest. Anna scrambles forward. Its back seems to stretch forever. As she nears the crest, she passes a fin-like ridge of scales so pale a violet that they’re almost white. Did they evolve from the sea?
An orange skyworm streaks over her head, tentacles striking. She flattens to her belly and keeps crawling, abandoning all thoughts of skyworm evolution. Its huge crest is almost in reach, but the deafening roars tell her the main pack is closing in. Don’t stop. Don’t look back.
One last lurching rush brings her to the crest. It ripples in the sunlight, shining indigo, deep violet, and midnight black. And it’s so massive she can’t see a thing around it. Something thuds against the skyworm’s belly, each impact reverberating through her knees. Dave’s fireballs. Anna plunges her knife into the base of the crest plate, slicing through its purplish scales as she searches for the cords. Where the hell are they?
Agitated sparks flash in her head. Malcolm. Anna automatically turns in his direction and spots an incoming orange skyworm, glowing like the sun. Not again! Digging faster, she seizes two of the cords. Which are these? There’s no time. She slices one and yanks the other.
The black skyworm’s body shudders. It veers left, lifting her out of the path of the incoming sonic attack. Unbalanced by the movement, Anna falls heavily to her side. She rights herself, sticking her precious knife back into her pants as the skyworm howls and—
—they’re enveloped by TV static. In the empty calm, Anna’s next move reveals itself as though she’s playing chess with Jason and he’s three moves from checkmate. Readying her courage, she—
—reemerges with the black skyworm. They’re two hundred metres above Queen’s Park. As anticipated, the rest of the pack has closed in on them. And there’s an orange skyworm even closer than Anna dared to hope. I can do this, provided my leg holds up.
Before she can overanalyze this fresh act of lunacy, Anna forms a new leash. It strikes the orange skyworm, snaring its neck as she releases her harness and her hold on the black.
ANNA!! Dave screams. DON’T!!!
No choice! she shouts to him as she sprints the half dozen steps across the black skyworm’s massive back and jumps.
As she falls, Anna wills her xhen to do what it did for Kalos. She flexes the newly formed muscle memory connecting her brain to xhen. Sighting the leashed orange skyworm, she makes the creature the point to which she falls. With a lurch, the leash retracts, dragging her up. Wind rushes past her face, pulling tears from her eyes and blurring her vision. It confuses her depth perception so badly that she doesn’t see the skyworm coming until she slams, face first, against its orange side.
Air rushes from her lungs. Her arms flail, but she throws them wide around the skyworm’s flexing body. She forms xhen into loose coils, lashing her body to its scales. Gasping, Anna gets her feet under her and shuffle-crawls the two metres from her landing point to the skyworm’s crest.
Then Kalos’s knife is in her hand as she cuts open the skyworm’s scales and digs through its tissue. Compared to the black one, its cords are easy to find. Anna grasps the left and wrenches it up, pulling as hard as she can. The skyworm cants to the right, its head pushed up by the speed of their fall.
Because they are falling—straight into a fireball.
Anna braces for the impact, crouching as low as she can behind its crest. Dave’s flames pass around her, scorching her skin. She grunts but doesn’t let go.
The skyworm isn’t so lucky. It convulses, twisting head over tail in a nauseating roll. Anna slices both remaining cords. The flesh beneath her goes completely limp, like she’s severed its spinal cord. I guess I did . . . Unable to dodge, its head is engulfed by another fireball as it pitches down toward the bronzed roof of Ontario legislature. Blackened tentacles flap around her like spent sparklers against the summer sky. Below, the sun-blasted grass rises to embrace them.
Time to get off the ride. Hurriedly, Anna retracts her leash and loops it around her waist. She fires one blast of xhen through the skyworm’s head to be sure it’s dead. Then she crouches on the balls of her feet, holding the loose end of the leash in one hand. Jump!
Her leash flies ahead of her to clasp the top of the Queen’s Park flagpole just like a skyworm neck. Swinging, Anna circles toward the ground, arms and legs flailing as she tries to control her descent. Somewhere in the distance, there’s a sickening metallic crunch. Twisting, she sees the skyworm crash into an abandoned tour bus outside the legislature’s entrance. Wind whips Anna’s jubilant laughter away.
Her glee is short-lived. The landing rushes up, and she’s swinging way too fast. Anna tries to roll like an acrobat but her momentum’s wild, throwing off her timing. Her already banged-up foot jams awkwardly into the grass. The snap is audible.
“FUUUUUUCK!” Her fist strikes the ground in a vain effort to transfer her pain to the inoffensive grass. It’s not fair! I’ve never broken a bone in my life. She screams again, more in frustration than agony, trying to get up on her elbows to search the sky. They’ll regroup. I’ve only got moments. Agony shoots up her leg. Anna grimaces, trying to stand anyway.
