Thursday night and nothing is happening, at least nothing worth blogging about. So I'll leave you with a part of a short story:
I was amazed at the size of the motel room I could obtain for less than one hundred dollars a night. There were two queen-sized beds, a desk with an interface, a separate room for the bathroom, and a dresser with a TV. On the far side of the room was a window overlooking the freeway. I was, of course, in the still relatively empty American West just off the I-5 corridor between the Seattle-Portland and Bay Area megatropolises. In Japan a hundred dollars, about forty yen, got you a coffin for six hours.
I locked the door's dead bolt and pulled my recently acquired gun out of my gym bag. I find guns inelegant but effective and, therefore, useful tools. I checked that the bathroom was empty and the window locked, then closed the curtains. Only then did I relax -- a little.
I moved my bag to one of the beds from near the door where I'd dropped it. I sat at the desk and shoved one of my credit cards in the computer. I still held the .40 caliber semi-auto in my hand as the computer came to life.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Gibbs."
Yeah, as if I'd let a computer know my real name.
"Get me some news." Most of my associates shunned computers out of a basic prejudice against technology. To me, they were just like guns: efficient tools.
"Local, national, international, business, sports, entertainment --"
"No, major news stories for the past -- " How long since leaving Tokyo? " -- thirty-six hours."
It was the third news story. A plane flying from Tokyo to Sydney disappeared over the Pacific and all aboard assumed lost. There was some speculation it had something to do with the continued conflict between the Micronesia Meta Alliance and the Metaphysical Society of Tasmania. Clever, that last part; Kim used the best spin-doctors. There was no doubt in my mind who was responsible. I had booked a seat on that flight in my usual alias. I had sent a DG to buy the ticket and board the plane. I relaxed more. The EAZA thought they had succeeded in killing me.
I wanted to sleep. I hadn't slept for three, almost four days by using zombie spells to stay awake. They'll keep you going but you pay the price. I could probably sleep for twenty-four hours. I would allow myself eight. I set the computer to make sure I was undisturbed until I wanted it to wake me. (I noticed it was Chinese-made; the Reds were trying to do to the Koreans what the Koreans did to the Japanese and the Japanese did to the Americans.)
Call me paranoid. I put alarm spells on the door and window and put the gun on the nightstand. I was worried about picking it up while groggy so I dropped the magazine, ejected the round in the chamber, and reinserted the magazine. That way if I accidentally pulled the trigger, it wouldn't fire. I'd have to jerk the slide back to load a round first.
I took my talisman out of my jeans pocket, held it in both my hands, muttered a few words in the ancient tongue, and the zombie spell dissipated. I barely got the talisman back into my pocket before I fell asleep.
It could have been a few minutes or it could have been hours later when the door alarm woke me. In my mind I saw the door fly open and two armed men rushed in. Warriors, I thought, that's not very imaginative. A bright light, part of the spell, slapped them in the face letting me clearly see their weapons, sawed-off shotguns, and as an added benefit prevented them from seeing me.
I reached out with my right hand and pulled up the gun as I rolled off the bed, rose on my knees and pointed the pistol at them holding it in a modified Weaver stance. Only then did I realize I'd forgotten to put a round in the chamber.
"Freeze!" I called out. "I have a gun and you have five seconds to get out of here before I blow you both away."
The warriors hesitated. No adept gave warriors a second chance: they were expendable. And no adept carried guns, usually.
The window alarm went off inside my cranium. Damn, the warriors had been a diversion. A roc, wingspan of at least six feet, crashed through the glass and ripped through the fabric of the curtain. It had large eyes designed for seeing in the dark and long, obsidian-like talons.
I had one bit of powerful meta I had been saving for just such emergencies. I had to let go of the gun with my right hand, leaving it in my left hand, and pointed at the great bird. Fire jumped from my fingertip, across the unused bed, to the creature, slamming it into the wall and igniting its feathers. The force of the spell knocked me into my bed and radiant heat from the arc of flame burned my hand. I swept my finger across the room to the warriors, leaving a line of fire of the wall. One man was beating a hasty retreat and I got him in the back. His clothes ignited then his skin. He screamed once before the flames entered his lungs and fatally silenced him. The other warrior stood still, perhaps in fright, and passively went up in flames. Both squirmed on the floor a sickeningly long time.
As it burned, the roc jumped around the room spasmodically, almost falling back out the window, and flailed its wings filling the air with flying black feathers. It smashed into the TV and the LCD screen shattered. One of the room's walls was on fire, the roc was ripping up the carpet with its talons, and the dying warriors were spreading the fire to the floor.
Alarms sounded and the fire sprinkler began spraying cold water like some indoor cloud burst over the room, furniture, bed, the broken TV producing sparks and smoke and immediately soaking all my clothes. I jerked back the slide on the gun and emptied the magazine into the roc. As each hollow-point mushroomed in its body it screeched like fingernails on a chalkboard. Its black blood spattered the walls only to be washed down to the wet rug to lie with the ejected shell casings. I heard the great bird's breath rattle out for the last time.
There was another full magazine in my bag. I exchanged it for the one in the gun and stepped over the finally still bodies of what had once been human.
A grizzled man came out of his room across the hall wearing a bathrobe. "What the hell?" he demanded. He saw the burned men and looked around me to see the roc in the motel room. His eyes grew wide. "I'm sorry, Proficient. Is there a fire?"
I looked back in my room. There was a half-cooked roc lying in a puddle of greasy water smelling of roasted bird and wet down and the remains of the men, smelling worse than the roc, but no fire. "It's out."
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