Lance tried and failed to peer over Sullivan’s shoulder while he read the lies. Jake was nearly a foot taller, and it didn’t help that Lance had taken on a sort of permanent bad-posture stoop because one of his legs was shorter than the other. A particularly nasty demon had taken a chunk out of him and there hadn’t been a Healer around. “I heard talk you’re going to be declared public enemy number one. I saw that movie. James Cagney is too pretty to play the likes of you.”
Sullivan crumpled the newspaper in disgust and threw it on the ground. “Damn Hearst and his excuse for journalism. Whatever happened to reporters checking facts themselves? That man will print anything that makes an Active look like an animal.”
“Us being animals seems to be the popular sentiment over there today, too.” Lance nodded at the capitol. “The president is going to live, thank God, but all Actives are footing the bill. Dark times are coming, Jake.”
“Well, let’s go risk our lives finding this Pathfinder to protect all these ignorant bastards so they can sit around and bitch about our kind. You know this very spot should’ve been blown up by the Geo-Tel.. what, twice now?”
“Last year and ’08. Feeling bitter?”
Sullivan didn’t respond for a long time as he surveyed the wreckage of the camp. “I’m not going back to Rockville. I’m done breaking rocks. I’m not going back in a cage. I’ll die first.”
“I’m rather disinclined toward tight spaces myself.” Lance chuckled as he took a flask out of his pocket, unscrewed the lid, and took a swig. “Ahh… That’s good stuff. Well, you could always put out to sea. Pirate Bob said you’d make a fine executive officer.”
“Maybe I should. There’s no law out there except for what a man makes himself.” Sullivan took the offered flask and took a long pull of bootleg booze. It burned going down. He coughed. “You find that in a bathtub?”
“Turpentine gives it that special something.”
He took another drink, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and passed the noxious swill back over. “What do you think I should do?”
“I don’t rightly know that myself.” Lance was one that understood sacrifice. He had been a self-made man, successful and respected, and he’d given that up to protect Magicals. He’d lost his entire family in the secret war against the Imperium, yet here he was, still fighting, and he would probably keep on fighting until the day he died. “Nobody would blame you if you took off. Not with that kind of heat on your neck.”
Quitting was not a concept Sullivan was familiar with. “You know what this place is?”
Lance surveyed the ruins. “I took a look around through the eyes of that poor hungry beast. Tent stakes rusting away in the dirt, shacks in a nice grid all laid out with streets, latrines dug. Feels like a military camp.”
“Sort of. Ten thousand men dragged their families here because they tried to collect early on what was promised them. A buck and a quarter for each day served in the war. They were out of work and stupid enough to think that they could get what was theirs before the notes came due. Should’ve known better.”
“Ahh. The Bonus Army.”
Sullivan’s eyes wandered over the flats where a shanty town had been destroyed. A handful of the people here had been survivors of the 1st Volunteer Active Brigade, just like him. “An army.” He snorted. “They were just desperate folks looking for help from a nation that didn’t have two nickels to rub together. Congress said no. When the crowd didn’t leave, the real Army forced them out with tear gas and tanks, then put the whole damn thing to the torch… People got hurt. Kids died.”
“Sad day, that.”
Sullivan kicked at a rock. “They should’ve left peacefully when they lost the vote.”
“Would you have?”
They both knew Lance already had the answer to that. When a man like Sullivan set a course, it was seen through to the end. “They weren’t expecting to be treated like that. I know what they were thinking, the marchers that is. After what they went through in the war, they figured it meant something.”
“I was in the war. AEF,” Lance said. “Dan was too. We were staff officers, though. That’s how we met Pershing. I heard it was much worse for you 1st Volunteer boys.”
Sullivan took the flask back and drank some more. It wasn’t as awful this pass. “I can’t speak for the others, but the 1st… We got gassed, burned, bombed, fought demons, undead… Jesus, wave after wave of the undead. Slept in the mud, lived in the mud, killed in the mud, froze and died in the mud. Then we had the biggest battle in history, Active on Active, gun, knife, and tooth. Fire in the fucking sky and rivers of blood hip deep for days. We killed a million Germans and scorched Berlin off the map with a Peace Ray. All that for a buck twenty-five a day. We were a hell of a deal.”
Lanced helped him keep watch on the Flats as the sun fled. “You know, Jake, I do believe that’s the most I’ve ever heard you say in one sitting. Melancholy renders you downright talkative.”
Sullivan shrugged. “I’m Irish.”
Headlights illuminated them and a horn buzzed. Dan Garrett had arrived.
“Well, I got a truck bed full of goodies. What do you say we go kidnap an Iron Guard and make a little mayhem?” Lance thumped him on the back. “That ought to cheer you up.”
Sullivan took one last look at the remains. They had come looking for a fair shake and had got burned out for their troubles. Life was never fair. Only suckers bought that line. “Maybe you’re right about going out to sea, joining Southunder’s crew. I can make a new life, quit living under somebody else’s boot. Fight the good fight as a free man.”
“Sounds mighty tempting when you put it like that.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’ll do… after we save these ungrateful fucks again.”
Dan met them with a firm handshake. Their Mouth didn’t look like much, late thirties, soft around the middle, losing his hair, and wearing thick glasses. In his case, looks really were deceiving because Dan Garrett was one dangerous operator. His magic lay in his voice.
“Evening, gentlemen,” Dan greeted them.
The Mouths liked to call it Influence. The antimagic groups liked to call it mind control. Whatever it was, Sullivan was glad to have Dan on his team.
“How you feeling?” Lance asked.
“I’m fine.” His dark expression gave evidence that he was anything but fine. That raised an interesting question: when a Mouth lied to himself, did he believe it? “Heinrich died fighting. That’s how he would have wanted it.”
“He wouldn’t have had it any other way. Where’s Jane?” Sullivan asked.
“She’s fixing up the local safe house. It’s been empty for a long time.”
Lance and Sullivan exchanged a glance. It went unsaid, but they’d both been hoping for her to tag along. A Healer was a mighty valuable person to have around when you take on an Iron Guard. “She okay?”
“You mean, is she still having nightmares from being kidnapped by Madi?” Dan shook his head. “My wife is far braver than folks give her credit for. No. She wanted to come. I didn’t want her to.”
“What?” Lance sputtered. “One of us catches a Jap sword and we’re gonna be wishing she was here.”
“I told her not to come. I lost her once. I didn’t want to risk it. Something else maybe, but not when Iron Guards are involved. I put my foot down. I talked her out of coming.”
“You talked, or you talked?”
That must have stung. “Go to hell, Lance. She’s my wife. My decision was made. Briefly anyway. Then she told me to take a hike. She’s going to meet us on the way. The woman’s stubborn.”
Lance grinned. “Looks like you married up in more ways than one.”
“Yeah, I know. She’s got more guts than I do. Still, I don’t want her anywhere near an Iron Guard again, but she’ll be tailing close in case one of us gets hurt.” Dan pulled a folded paper out of his coat and passed it to Sullivan. “See if you recognize this.”
He held the page up to catch the last bit of sun. The drawing was in charcoal. It was a complex spell, far beyond anything he’d been able to pull off. Sullivan was one of the only men alive who had seen the Power as it really was, a living creature shaped from alien geometries, and because of that he recognized a few of the spell’s segments, the biological design of the Healer, the interlocking triangles of nuclear forces, even a touch of the hexagram shape of gravity, but as a whole its purposes were a mystery. “Can’t say that I do.”