Interesting People (Interesting Times #3) Read online

  Interesting

  People

  Matthew Storm

  Copyright © 2015 Cranberry Lane Press

  Follow Matthew on Twitter: @mjstorm

  Matthew Storm is also on Facebook. How exciting!

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For Alaska

  Your faith in me has always been inspirational, even though it is completely unfounded.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As always thanks to Michele, who has been putting up with this nonsense for twenty years now.

  Also thanks to Yoko Kanno, Banks, Chaos Chaos, In This Moment, and Nobuo Uematsu, for the music.

  Prologue

  The sun neither rose nor set in the Nether Lands, which made it difficult to gauge the passing of time. There were no seasons, and the weather never changed. The sky was always overcast, looking as if it was just about to begin to rain, but the rain never came. In spite of this, Armitage would have been willing to guess he had been a prisoner here for around three hundred years. He was well aware that there was a considerable margin of error in his calculations, but he was fairly certain he was close.

  Some of this he had discerned by questioning new arrivals to this cursed place. They came to him desperate for shelter and protection, which he had no qualms about giving. Armitage was a magician, but he wanted to be a king. These poor beggars he would question about the time and place they had been banished from. He studied the clothes they arrived in and the way they spoke, taking care to note changes in body language and social manners as the decades went by. He’d long since learned that it wasn’t enough to simply ask what year it had been on Earth when they’d left. There was something odd that happened to time in the crossing of realms, something he’d never been able to express in a formula. A man and a woman who had come through the gate to this land on the same day had claimed to be from 1927 and 1732, respectively, and in his questioning he could find no reason not to believe either of them.

  Armitage was able to glean more information from a scrying pool he’d constructed in the center of the city he’d built shortly after he arrived here. Gazing into the pool, he found himself able to observe the world he’d lost in what appeared to be a more or less linear fashion. His magic could only keep the pool active for a few minutes at a time, but the visions he saw therein taught him much. The wars he witnessed were far more brutal than any that he could remember from his own time. Men always fought, but they had found ways to do so much more efficiently, and in far grander a scale than he’d ever expected. Chemical warfare had not surprised him. He’d nodded as he watched deadly gas roll across the fields of Europe, suffocating the men it found hiding in their trenches. He’d come up with something similar in his day. This was nothing different; it was just so much more. The appearance of giant metal boxes rolling on treads, shooting fire from long trunks like those of an elephant, did come as a surprise. It startled him, and those of his minions brave enough to gaze into the scrying pool alongside him had cowered at the sight. The power of the bomb that came later was nearly incomprehensible. A hundred thousand people were vaporized in the blink of an eye, with only a mushroom cloud to mark their passing. That was high art, as far as Armitage was concerned. He wondered if the inventor of the device might join him here at some point. Surely that man would face exile from his world, as well.

  The scrying pool only showed a small part of the world at a time, and it could be difficult to select the thing he wanted to look at, but a few times he managed to catch sight of her, the one who had banished him here. His heart quickened every time she came into his view. Throughout all her years, only the clothes the girl wore changed. She was the closest thing to immortal that he could imagine. Not a god, certainly, and he’d never been able to gauge her abilities properly, but the fact that she never aged was certain. She could be killed, but it was always only temporarily. Shoot her and the wound would heal. Drown her and she’d wake up only to expel the water from her lungs. As much as he hated her, he did admire her resilience. He’d served her once, long ago, and she’d betrayed him and sent him here. He would have had to admit he’d planned to betray her, eventually, but he hated that she’d beaten him to it.

  The girl had new servants every time he’d seen her, as was her custom. Humans had such short lifespans. That had always bothered him. He wondered how she chose them. Were any of them magicians, like him? Or had she abandoned those who practiced that particular art? After what he had done, it would have been a prudent course of action. Magic appeared to have largely died out in the world, anyway. It occurred to him that perhaps that had been the girl’s plan all along.

  On many days Armitage took leave of his city and walked the lands around it. There was very little to see; the Nether Lands were virtually featureless, flat and empty as if a tornado had come through and sucked everything of note into the sky, never to return. He enjoyed the walks, anyway. A dozen or so of his minions, those brave enough to leave the city’s high walls, would scurry along behind him at a respectful distance. He was aware that they called themselves his “royal guard.” The thought was laughable, but he didn’t bother to chastise them for their arrogance. The only reason anyone came to his city was to be kept safe from the things that wandered the Nether Lands. Monsters roamed freely, huge things with claws and teeth and eyes like fire. Some were easily ten times the size of a man. Armitage had yet to meet one that was a match for his own power. There were times he wished he would. Life here was unbearably dull. He craved conflict. Challenges. Power meant nothing if it wasn’t used. If he were a cruel man, he might have tormented his minions for his own amusement. Perhaps he’d have put them into a gladiators’ ring and forced them to fight him to the death. But the sad truth was that would have been no more interesting to him than pulling the wings off a fly. Of all his minions, he’d met none with any magical ability. They were mostly killers and sadists; truly some of the worst humanity had to offer. But they were mundane. He expected one day he’d get bored and level his city, likely with all of them inside it. Then he’d wander the Nether Lands until he found a new site he liked to start afresh.

  Armitage and his ragged little retinue were out walking half a mile from the barrier, the impassible energy field that marked the border between the Nether Lands and the real world, when the ground beneath them began to shake. The minions cried out in fear and threw themselves to the ground. Armitage merely frowned and knelt down to put a hand on the dirt beneath him. There had never been an earthquake in this place, not for as long as he’d been here. What could have happened? Had a new creature come here that was capable of making the very world tremble? If so, he’d welcome the new arrival. It had been too long since he’d had a good fight.

  He closed his eyes and concentrated, letting a small bit of his power flow through his hand and into the ground below. After a moment of probing, he smiled. This was no earthquake, and no fearsome creature was approaching. Something new had happened. Something interesting.

  When the ground was still again the magician rose. He looked ba
ck at his minions and was not surprised to find that two of them had vanished. They weren’t running away. They simply weren’t there anymore. Armitage could barely contain his excitement. This gave credence to his theory. The missing people were gone because they’d never been there in the first place.

  “Return to the city,” Armitage commanded them. His voice did not brook any argument; it never did. “Find the Ripper and tell him I am going to the barrier. He is to join me there.” His minions hesitated. “Go!”

  With that, the others rose up and began running back for the safety of the city walls. Armitage turned and began walking in the other direction. Time was a factor now, in more ways than one. He needed to inspect the barrier personally.

  Armitage walked at a brisk pace and found himself at the shimmering barrier quickly. As nearly as he had ever been able to determine, the barrier was an energy sphere that surrounded this entire realm, even going into the ground, curving, and emerging to join its other half hundreds of miles away. He couldn’t imagine the power required to maintain it. He did not know the nature of the energy itself, but it was more powerful than anything he had encountered before. He could touch it, and even though it seemed to give a small distance before his hand, he could not penetrate it. He’d thrown every kind of destructive magic he knew of at it back in the early days, back when he’d been full of rage and desperate to escape. He’d never managed to make so much as a scratch in it.

  Now he sat cross-legged before the barrier and shut his eyes, reaching out and probing it with his mind. He did not move again until he heard a voice behind him, perhaps an hour later. “Sir?”

  Armitage turned slightly and opened his eyes to see the Ripper behind him. He was a wiry man, tall, with oily black hair. He wore the same coat and vest he’d had on the day he’d come to this place. Much like the prisoners here, clothing aged slowly in the Nether Lands. The Ripper didn’t bother much with the top hat he’d arrived in anymore, but he’d never taken to wearing the plain grey robes the magician provided for his people, a kind of uniform they wore to demonstrate their allegiance and gratitude to him. Armitage didn’t take offense. He liked the Ripper’s sense of self, even if that self was a murderous psychopath.

  “She’s made a mistake.” Armitage turned back to the barrier.

  “Who?”

  “Who else would I be talking about?” Armitage asked. “The one who sent you here. The one who sent me here. The only one that matters.”

  The Ripper took a step closer and looked at the barrier. “It’s still there, isn’t it?” He glanced at Armitage. “Does this have something to do with the earthquake? I’ve never felt one here before.”

  “Not an earthquake,” Armitage said. “That was a timequake.”

  “What’s a timequake?”

  “It’s like an earthquake,” Armitage said, “but with…never mind.” He nodded at the barrier. “It’s trembling.”

  The Ripper took another look. “It looks the same to me.”

  “Of course it does,” Armitage said. “However, it is not. I don’t know what she did, but the natural timeline of our world was broken. Shattered. Everything is wrong there now, which is why the barrier is reacting as it is. It’s as if it doesn’t know where it’s supposed to be.”

  The Ripper reached out tentatively and touched the barrier. His fingers seemed to press into it as if it were made of gelatin. “We still can’t get through it.” He pulled his hand back.

  “Not yet,” Armitage said. “But she won’t let the fracture stand. She can’t. It defies everything she stands for. She’ll fix it, whatever it was that went wrong. There will be another timequake when she does. It will be time resetting itself. The barrier will weaken again; it may even vanish for a few moments as the borders are redrawn. When that happens…”

  “You think we can get through?”

  “Oh, yes,” Armitage said. “As easily as walking to the chemist’s.”

  The Ripper crossed his arms in front of him and eyed the barrier warily. “You want I should go back and get the others?”

  “No,” Armitage said. “I have no need for that weak rabble. What happens to them is immaterial to me. You’re the only one I want.”

  The Ripper gave him a curious look. “I didn’t know I was that important to you, sir.”

  Armitage smiled. “Don’t overestimate yourself. You’re not important to me. But you’re fearless, and you’re strong. You know a great deal about violence. And we have a common enemy.” He turned and looked the Ripper in the eyes. “Anyone else would have their own agenda, but you and I want the same thing.”

  “Revenge.” The Ripper nodded. “I’ll cut that bitch a new face, yes I will.”

  “No,” Armitage said. “You won’t touch her. I have something else in mind. Something that will be significantly more permanent.”

  The Ripper snorted. “There are a number of people who would say what I do is very permanent.”

  “Not to her,” Armitage said. “You could cut her into a hundred pieces and burn them in a fire, and a year later she’d be knocking on your door.” He frowned. “Perhaps even less time than that. I’ve never seen her recover from that much damage, but there is no doubt that she would recover.”

  “You know a way to kill her for good, then?”

  “Yes,” Armitage said. “I do.” The truth was that killing the girl was only part of a plan he had formed three hundred years ago. He had grander designs than that, but he’d decided against sharing the rest. Smaller minds would never be able to appreciate what he was doing. They could marvel at it later.

  “Well, then,” the Ripper said. “What do we do next?”

  Armitage reached out with his mind to probe the barrier again. It was still holding, and there was little doubt it would until the girl fixed whatever had gone wrong with time. How long would that take? And how long until the effects from it rippled through the universe and hit the barrier? There was no way to know.

  “We wait,” Armitage said. “We wait.”

  Chapter 1

  In his former career, Oliver Jones would typically spend a Monday morning sighing and shaking his head along with his co-workers as they greeted each other at the office. “Another Monday,” they’d say. “Back to the old grind.” Or something like that. In hindsight, Oliver found he couldn’t remember exactly what any of them had said, but that seemed to have been the gist of it. The grumbling was so routine it seemed almost scripted, but at the time it had seemed very sincere.

  As the zombies began breaching the door of the long-abandoned church he and his team had taken shelter in early one Monday morning in September, he suddenly found himself missing those days very much.

  “They’re getting in!” Tyler Jacobsen shouted from his position near the church’s wooden front doors. He was attempting to bar the entrance with his body, but Oliver knew that would ultimately be futile. There were far too many of the zombies outside, and they were much stronger than he would have thought possible given that they were made mostly out of decaying flesh and muscle.

  Tyler’s Hawaiian shirt was in tatters from a close call they’d had outside half an hour earlier. He held an axe he’d found nearby in both hands. His .45 had been a much more effective weapon against the undead, but he’d long since run out of bullets. Oliver wasn’t sure what he had left in his own Beretta. Less than a full magazine, that was certain. Three bullets? Maybe four? It was easy to lose track. Things tended to go in a blur when you were shooting zombies in the head.

  Mike Lewis stood near the center of the church, an empty revolver held at his side. He wasn’t a member of their team. Instead he worked for their boss, Artemis, as a kind of roving “spotter.” Spot something unusual? Call the cavalry. Oliver and Tyler were the cavalry. Mike had been the one to realize what was going on in Millford, South Carolina. There had been a mining town here once, but nobody had lived here since the 1970’s. The citizens had left their dead buried here when they’d gone, though. And now the dead were outsi
de, ravenous and unstoppable.

  “We’re dead!” Mike cried. “We’re dead, man!” The poor man was shaking like a leaf.

  “Just keep them off me for a few more minutes,” Oliver told him. He turned his flashlight back to the leathery scroll laid out on the floor in front of him. He’d been studying the letters written there for the last ten minutes. If he managed to read it correctly, the zombies would drop. Or maybe they’d explode, or turn to dust. Artemis hadn’t been clear on that point. Nor had she mentioned that the scroll might be written in a language other than English. Oliver had no idea what he was looking at, but he was sure it wasn’t any form of English that had existed over the past few hundred years. Nor was it French, German, or anything he could recall having seen before. He recognized most of the letters, but he had no idea how to pronounce the words.

  The noise from outside, the incessant moaning of the dead, wasn’t helping him as far as keeping his concentration went. Nor was the thudding of fists against the doors and walls around them. Oliver hadn’t had the time to make a count, but he was willing to bet there were roughly two hundred zombies surrounding the church on all sides. There would be no escape unless he could read the scroll correctly.

  Oliver took a deep breath. “Kowalu zed iklatin de moran…” he began, and then flinched as a large section of the door Tyler was holding shut splintered and an arm reached through. Tyler lopped the grasping arm off with his axe as Mike wailed in fear. There had been a point when Oliver had planned to suggest that Mike be added as a third member of their field team once this was all over. That wasn’t going to happen now. Mike was a good guy, but he wasn’t cut out for this at all. Very few people were. Maybe he’d do better in one of the Vaults they maintained, cataloguing the hundreds of items they still didn’t know the function of. That might be more his speed. Also, it was safe. Mostly safe, anyway.