Chosen One Protective Services

The Chevy rattled and juddered as Steve Colfax took the roads as fast as he dared. Cyrus had the window open and his arm out, to give Bartleby as much space as he could. It wasn’t much. Cyrus had put on a lot of weight, since he’d been in the service, and Steve Colfax wasn’t a slender man himself. Crammed between them, the slight Englishman was smoking to calm his nerves, and the sweet scent of tobacco wisped past Cyrus’ nose and out into the night, torn by the passing wind of their motion.

“I would have been perfectly fine following you in my automobile,” Bartleby suggested. “Two vehicles could have made a difference.”

Cyrus shifted, turning a bit to look at him, and pushing Bartleby against Dad. “See, I would have taken that suggestion up until you told me to let my little brother die.”

“What?” Dad shot them a horrified glance, then whipped his gaze back to the road.

“Cyrus! You’re misrepresenting my words.” Bartleby was the soul of shocked indignity. “I’m telling you, he’s already lost, man. There’s nothing to be done.”

“Like you were lost up on that ridge ‘fore I went back for you? That Langley spook was telling me to cut my losses too,” Cyrus felt his eye throbbing in his skull. “But I didn’t.”

Bartleby looked down. “You didn’t. Dash it all.” he ground the cigarette into the ash tray, sending up sparks that whipped out the window.

“I’m very confused,” Dad said.

“Shut up and let me speak my piece,” Cyrus told him. “We ain’t got a lot of time, and I need questions answered, pronto.” Normally Cyrus worked to keep the Texas out of his voice, especially around friends from afar. But there were greater concerns at the minute, and he was focused on watching his old friend like a buzzard, looking for some meat he could pick off and use. “I’m sayin’ you owe me, Kenworth. And I’m callin’ in the chips.”

“Fuck.” Bartleby summarized.

“Fuck.” Cyrus agreed.

“Well it’s not like you’d be believed anyway,” Bartleby said. “But bear in mind that if you repeat this to anyone, and it gets back to the wrong channels, you will be locked up for a very long time and interrogated by men with no sense of humor and great skills in the area of corpse disposal.”

“Wait, what?” Dad asked, giving them both a double-take.

“Shut up, Dad,” Cyrus said. “Drive! You.” He pointed at Bartleby. “Talk!”

Bartleby spoke, fast and low, and Cyrus had to strain to hear him over the rushing wind. “We’ve had legends forever, of course. Legends in just about every part of the isles. We called them fairies, strange folk that would come out of the wild places, out of the darkness, and take people. I used to think that they were just fables, stories to keep young children and simpletons from wandering alone in the woods. I used to think that.” He fumbled for another cigarette, drew it out with shaking fingers.

It cost Cyrus no small amount of patience to not press him, to wait for him to finish his little ritual without shaking at him and telling him to get on with it. But this was heading in the right direction, and it was something, finally SOMETHING he might be able to use.

And after an agonizing minute, Bartleby continued. “There used to be legends all throughout Britain, but they were rare, old. Nothing to them. Until about twenty years before the turn of the century. That’s when your inventor, Edison, brought electricity to London. And they followed, like moths wiggling their way into a lampshade to get closer to the light.”

Cyrus did the math. “Eighteen-eighty? They’ve been at this for a while.”

“To them, it’s probably not long at all. Time runs differently wherever they’re from. And that’s why it’s futile, even if…” Bartleby shook his head, holding the cigarette with a trembling hand. “I understand that this all sounds positively barmy.”

“I don’t know what that means but I’m guessing it means crazy,” Steve Colfax said.

“Shut up, Dad. Okay, what ARE they?”

“Scotland Yard was the first to notice them,” Bartleby said. “They turned up quite a few recountings, quite a few witnesses during the Ripper murders. Ah, that wasn’t them. That was just a killer who… hm, never mind. But they found at least three reliable points where people had been taken by fantastical figures. Taken and vanished into thin air. Not many places in London where one can abduct someone and not be seen. Always people watching, you see.”

“I’ll take your word on that. What are they?”

“You’re asking the wrong question. WHO are they?” Bartleby was speaking more rapidly. “My mentor made this his life’s work, kept the case alive. It was tricky, there would be years in between disappearances. And I’m rather sad to say that he’d only get traction and backing when someone influential vanished. It wasn’t until the Luftwaffe started bombing us in ‘forty, that we made our real breakthrough.”

“Oh God,” Steve swore.

Cyrus glanced at him. “Shut up—”

“No, look!” Steve took a hand off the wheel, jabbed a finger forward.

Cyrus looked up, and saw fire.

Bunktown was burning on the horizon.

“Shit,” he said.

“No!” Steve growled. “I’m not giving up on her!” And the truck roared forward, with Cyrus and Bartleby rocking and knocking into each other, hanging on for dear life.

“Not giving up on her?” Cyrus gasped. “What the hell, Dad?”

“Shut up, boy. Ask your questions quick, because once we stop we’ll have to move fast.”

Cyrus blinked. It had been a very long time, since he’d heard steel in Dad’s voice.

And it didn’t hurt that the man was right. If there was anything to be salvaged or anyone to be saved, they’d have to move fast.

All the same, Cyrus spent a few precious seconds gazing at the fire, flickering behind the backlit skeleton of the transformer station. Old memories stirred, and he felt the fire creeping up toward him again, felt his muscles screaming and starting to draw tight as they boiled in his skin…

No.

Focus!

“The Blitz. You’re talking about the London Blitz,” he said, drawing his gaze and his mind back to what Bartleby’s account.

“We had a device,” Bartleby babbled. “Maskelyne. He was a magician, a stage magician, not one of… them. He was a genius. Burgess— my Mentor, Sir Lucan Burgess, managed to get him on loan. He made a device that could see where they had been. Like swirls of rainbow, hovering in the air.”

Cyrus felt his eye opening wide, his jaw drop. This was it. This was what he was looking for!

Oblivious, Bartleby continued. “We used it to track them, and we found their door. And we followed them through it. And then everything went to pieces. Everything…” he stared into the distance, lost in memories.

“Kenworth,” Cyrus whispered. “Come on, man. This is hope. This is what I need. Tell me, please.”

“It’s a forest, vast and untamed,” Bartleby said, staring at him. “And we saved the boy from what I can only call a wizard. But when he fled, the door shut. And we were trapped. No way back. We tried to survive. We made it a few days, but hunger… Burgess, he tried to eat some of the local plant life, and it poisoned him. He died. The boy and I, we were starving. Didn’t have the proper equipment to hunt. And they found us. Not the wizard. Someone else. Something else.”

Cyrus rocked to the side as Dad put the Chevy into a long turn, clicking the headlights off. They were off the road now, pulling around the camp.

“Talk faster!” Cyrus urged Bartleby.

“I cut a deal. I cut a deal with HIM. With Ringaldr. With the Lion. Perhaps they’re the same, I’m not sure where he ends and the Lion begins. It’s… I can’t explain it, there’s no time!” Bartleby took one last drag, threw the cigarette out the window. “I came back! I came back after three days there, and it was over two months later! Time is different, there! They thought I’d gone turncoat. Then they thought I was insane. I convinced them, eventually. And they decided to drop it. DROP IT! Lucan’s life work, cast away… and I’d be in the asylum still, if the Reds hadn’t tried to acquire the files.”

“The reds? The commies are in this, too?” Cyrus blinked. He’d only brought up the communists to the FBI to try and get some attention on the case, but now there was something real to it? This was unexpected. And maybe a problem. But that was a problem for tomorrow. He glanced out the window as the truck sped past a host of other pickup trucks and battered cars, saw a small mob of people busy tearing down scrap metal and packing-board shacks as the main offices burned. “How are the reds in this, Bartleby?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” Bartleby said, speaking quickly, hanging on white-knuckled as Steve Colfax swerved around discarded cable spools, and piles of bricks. “I think they’ve been having a problem with abductions behind the iron curtain! There’s a Czech, a fellow named Semyon Kirlian, we think he’s trying to develop a copy of Maskelyne’s device! I don’t know all the details, that’s a different department!”

“I have a device!” Cyrus said. “I see the rainbow when I look at where Rusty vanished! Bartleby, how do I use this? How do I find the door?”

“The door? You have a…” Bartleby stared at him.

“Oh shit!” Steve said, and slammed on the brakes.

Cyrus braced himself with his right arm, and braced Bartleby with his left, stopped him from caving his skull in on the dash. “How do I use it?” he bellowed.

“Triangulate!” Bartleby gasped. “You have to find the residue, and use it to— oh dear!”

A figure, slender and panicked, ran past the stopped truck, disappearing back into the cable spools. She was wearing a skirt, Cyrus had time to notice, and carrying something. Maybe about the size of a toddler, and that made his blood boil as gunshots cracked out, and kicked up dust around her, dust that wobbled in the firelight as the figure either dove for cover or fell wounded, into the darkness behind the enormous wooden debris.

He threw the door open, almost fell out, scrabbled and got his legs under him. They screamed with pain, but he pushed it away, hobbled back to the gun rack. And he thanked whatever God was listening, as he saw that Dad had put the Garand up there. As he heard laughter and jeers coming from off to the right, heard a couple of more gunshots and a whoop, he checked the chamber, found it loaded. Then he reached down and popped open the ammo box bolted to the bed.

It was empty. Dad had grabbed the gun, forgotten the bullets.

Cyrus closed the bolt, eye wide. He heard Dad get out, run toward the whooping, arms out. “No! Stop! What the hell are you doing!”

They’re going to shoot him, he thought, and there was no time to worry about the bullets, as he turned and almost staggered into Bartleby.

“What can I do? How can I help?” Bartleby asked, and there was no trace of nerves in his voice now. His eyes were clear, and this was the man that Cyrus had remembered. The man who he’d shot his way out of a North Korean ambush years ago on a ridge that officially never existed in any reports.

“Are you strapped?” Cyrus asked him.

“What?”

“Do you have a gun?”

“No!”

“You do now!” Cyrus dug out his pistol, pushed it into his hands. “Go around to the flank, cover me if things go bad!”

“Things seem quite horrible already!”

“This is Texas!” Cyrus yelled, to be heard over the fiery collapse and explosion of one of the transformer pylons. “Shit can always get worse!”

And then he stumped out into the light to try to fix things.

One look told him this wasn’t going to be easy.

Dad was kneeling, hands up and out, and that was a problem.

About a hundred feet away, six drunken assholes were yelling at him, and he was yelling back. Most of what they were yelling was racist bullshit, so Cyrus tuned it out, tried to get all the details he could while they were focused on Dad.

It was amazing how the old instincts came back. They were right in the open, completely oblivious. He could have killed any one of them, knew it. He felt his finger tighten on the trigger guard, and shook his head, kept trying to make sure he saw everything before he acted. Because once I start doing, things are gonna happen fast and I won’t have time to adjust.

This was on the opposite side of Bunktown from the river.

They were blocked off from Bunktown and the trucks by a hill of gravel to the right, and a burning building a dozen yards beyond the gravel. That was the side that Cyrus had told Bartleby to creep up on. Hopefully the heat wasn’t too bad, but there were no threats that way.

Beyond the half-dozen men, a few hundred yards south, about twenty men or so were standing in front of the transformer station, chucking stuff on the fire. Cyrus had no idea why they hell they were burning that, had seen enough people doing damnfool things in his lives he figured it was for a dumbass reason. Their backs were to the half-dozen, and they were busy, but he knew that if he fired and missed then he’d risk hitting someone up there. They were making enough of a racket that they probably wouldn’t hear if he screamed.

Nothing to the left but battered old-fence, and the dumping ground that the neighboring ranchers and farmers had turned it into. Rusting truck frames, ancient farm machinery, and scrap left over from the New Deal.

“Listen!” Dad raised his voice. “There’s no point to this! Let them go! You want to go home and look at your families and tell them you killed a woman, shot her in the back!”

“That ain’t no lady!” one of the posse shouted back, and Cyrus’ heart sank as he recognized Buford Stokes. No, this ain’t gonna be settled easily, he thought. Buford spent most of the time he wasn’t drinking in Patman’s bar griping about how the Confederacy shoulda won. Buford did NOT let shit go.

Stokes went on. “That ain’t no lady, that’s a—” a part of the falling transformer cracked, and Cyrus lost his next words.

Another one, a gawky teen that Cyrus thought had the look of the Bridgers, a local farming family, said “Besides, we ain’t gonna KILL her. We’re just gonna… teach her a lesson! We’re gonna let her go. Eventually.”

A low, rattlesnake laugh made Cyrus’ teeth grind together, as he saw Seth Tallman in the posse. Seth had come back from Korea too, but he’d come back wrong. Seth had gotten himself a taste for killing, over there. Killing and worse. And Cyrus knew that he might have to kill someone tonight.

“Please, this is nonsense!” Dad went on. “You know full well they didn’t do anything! For gods sakes man, think of the children!”

“The children are why we’re here! Three lost, and they took them!” burst out the last man Cyrus recognized in the posse. Bud Wheeler. An honest man, a father, and a churchgoer. He was the last sort of person Cyrus had expected here.

Cyrus’ mind flashed to Benjy Custer, to his words months back. But if this gets much worse, I might have to get off of my ass and do something about it. And that’s likely to cause a fair amount of fuss, especially before the harvest.

Cyrus shoved it away, along with a pang of guilt. Cyrus might have contributed to this, might have been the last straw, but there was no time for remorse. Just the now.

So he stepped out, leveled the rifle at Seth Tallman, and bellowed “LOWER THEM GUNS!”

The Bridger kid jumped back, and a spit of dirt flew up a few feet from Dad. The shot echoed right after. “LOWER THEM OR LOSE YOUR HEAD BOY!” Cyrus roared, and the kid dropped his rifle, put his hands up.

The men Cyrus didn’t recognize just turned and booked it. Buford Stokes and Bud Wheeler immediately pointed their shotguns down. But Seth Tallman had a pistol aimed at Cyrus straightaway. Cyrus aimed right back. “You too, Seth. That’s a fuckin’ order PRIVATE.”

Seth flinched, but drifted the gun downward. “Cyrus. Shoulda figured your old man didn’t have the balls to come here alone.”

“He didn’t. And I ain’t the only one with a bead on you right now,” Cyrus growled. “Turn around and leave. You done enough here.”

“That the cripple?” Buford Stokes said. “Get on out of here! We’re gonna set things right tonight!”

“How will this help you?” Steve Colfax stood, slowly. “How will this help anyone? Jesus in heaven look what you did!”

The Bridger kid had the grace to look ashamed, at least Cyrus assumed so by the way he sagged a bit. Hard to see faces as backlit as they were.

But Bud Wheeler was made of sterner stuff. “They’re stealing children!”

“We are not!” came a voice from back among the cable spools. And Cyrus’ heart sank, as he recognized Catalina’s dulcet tones. “We’ve lost children too, you arrogante hijo de un masticador de jerbos!”

“It ain’t her— it ain’t them!” Cyrus yelled. “You checked the buildings yourselves, you see any kids in there?”

The posse looked toward each other.

“They didn’t even check before they started burning!” Catalina yelled. “If there’s justice in this world, god will punish you for—”

“DROP IT SETH!” Cyrus yelled, as Tallman brought the gun up smooth toward her. “OR I DROP YOU LIKE YOU DONE YOUR WIFE!”

Seth flinched, but the gun lowered again. “I… I didn’t. I didn’t!”

“Now Colfax, there ain’t no proof of that,” Wheeler said, hesitantly. “Jury found him not guilty.”

“Yeah, and the judge bought his wife a new diamond ring the day right before,” Cyrus yelled. “This place ain’t big enough to hide that shit. But if you wanna talk proof, where’s your proof the migrants did it? You got any besides someone’s say-so?”

There was silence for a bit, and Cyrus glanced over to his Dad, who thankfully was backing up toward the truck. He couldn’t tell, but the faint noises behind him suggested that Catalina was sidling that way too. All he had to do wat stall them. And he thought maybe he could. The more they talked, the less likely it’d come to bullets.

But there was a time limit. He saw the ones who’d run from the posse up and talking to the mob by the fire. He saw heads turning. It was only a matter of time, and he had one bullet and bad legs. If the mob got here, he’d be a dead man.

“Proof don’t matter,” Buford said. “This is about what’s right! These border jumpin’ assholes had this comin’ a long time. Don’t matter if they did it or not, they’re guilty of plenty.”

“And I’m seeing something, Colfax,” Tallman said, stepping to the side a bit, the eye revealed glittering in the firelight. “I’m seeing that’s a Garand, but there’s no mag on the bottom of it. That thing even loaded?”

“Oh damn, the bullets!” Steve swore, and as time slowed, and Tallman grinned as he raised his pistol, the first thing through Cyrus’ mind was Dad you just maybe killed me.

The second thing through his mind was Maybe I can fix this.

So he lowered his aim a few notches and put a round through Tallman’s belly.

A snap of air past his head, and Tallman collapsed, clutching his gut and screaming, as rocks pattered the back of Cyrus’ head. He knew Tallman had fired, knew it had gone into the dirt pile behind him.

The other three were frozen in shock, backlit by the flames, looking at him.

Quick as a wink, Cyrus pulled out his keys, jingled them, rucked the bolt back, and chambered nothing. He tucked his keys back in his pocket, making sure they flashed in the light. “Yeah, you forgot the bullets, Dad. Good thing I didn’t.”

“You shot me! You fucking shot me!” Seth screamed.

“You shot back, quit whinin’. Ain’t my fault you’re shit at it. You got double my eyes, dumbass, learn to shoot proper.”

“I’ll kill you!” Seth yelled, then coughed and threw up.

“See to him! He’ll live if you help him now!” Cyrus yelled. “We ain’t here, we were never here and neither were you! We saw nothing! Just go ahead and git—”

And the Bridger kid dove to the ground, and scooped up his rifle.

Cyrus turned and ran toward the truck, saw Dad and Catalina scrambling in front, but the passenger side door was shut, and he winced as he saw what he had to do.

The rifle barked behind him, and put a dimple in the side of the truck.

It barked again, and something ripped along his scalp, warm and wet and painful. He staggered, kept on going.

And then a third gunshot, as Cyrus closed his eyes and dove over the side of the Chevy and into the truck bed, crashing into it, not knowing if he was alive and dead…

But in that compressed moment between the seconds, he realized that the third shot hadn’t been the boom of a rifle.

It had been the crack of a little thirty-eight pistol. The one he’d handed Bartleby.

But his world was pain, as the adrenaline ebbed and the Chevy’s engine roared. He turned over, though everything hurt, from the pins in his spine to his throbbing, bruised legs and side, turned over and rolled just in time to move as Bartleby leaped off the dirt hill and into the back of the pickup a second before it screeched to life, and wheeled off into the night.

*****

Some time later, back in the farmhouse with Mom yelling at Dad in the back room, the boys watching in concern and excitement from outside the windows, and the girls upstairs and suspiciously too quiet, they tended to his wounds. Cyrus sat with a scrap of leather in his mouth, hissing as Catalina washed his wound with hydrogen peroxide and bandaged his scalp, all in the light of a Kerosene lantern. The power was out, no need to guess why. Bartleby paced back and forth, staring out the windows. The boys vacated every time he got near, then swarmed back with wide eyes.

“The Bridger kid,” Cyrus said, once he felt he could pull the leather out of his mouth without screaming. “Did you kill him?”

“I presume you mean the one shooting at you? I tried. I don’t know if I succeeded,” Bartleby confirmed. “Cyrus. I can’t stay here. I can’t… there are going to be repercussions for this. My record’s already spotty enough.”

“I know. You already helped. But… can you pull some strings? You got five eyes, might be you could talk to some company men? Get some down here fast? The idiots burned a power station, blame it on the commies, that’ll get them movin’.”

“I can, but are you sure I should?” Bartleby asked.

Cyrus let out a breath. “If you killed a Bridger boy, we’ll need them. Otherwise it’s blood between us, and the town’ll look the other way while they erase us from this soil.”

“Surely you’re being dramatic.”

“Wish I fuckin’ was,” Cyrus looked to Catalina. “How many dead on your side?”

She smiled, grimly. “None. The farmers, they all set us to be paid tomorrow. We cleared out this morning. I stayed behind to pack up the school books. But my ride didn’t come, and when the mob came, I had to hide. Then they burned my hiding place, and forced me out. It would have…” her face twisted. “It would have been bad if you didn’t come.”

Her hand was cool on his scalp, and Cyrus closed his eyes. “Good,” he said simply.

“That… other business,” Bartleby said, and he looked away. “You’re going to see it through, aren’t you?”

“With or without your help,” Cyrus said. “If there’s any chance at all, I have to try.”

Bartleby looked at him, and for a second, for a brief second, his eyes were golden in the lantern light.

Cyrus blinked, and they were normal again.

“Then I will see you again,” Bartleby promised. “Good luck, man.” And without another word, he opened the door and left.

“Where is he going?” Catalina asked.

“Probably taking a long walk back to Patman’s bar. Then, I don’t know where. Best you forget him. We got too much to do to worry ‘bout him now,” Cyrus said.

“What? What are we going to do? We should be running!” Catalina said.

“We might, after it’s all said and done,” Cyrus said, feeling his body scream, as he leaned on his cane and rose up out of his chair. “But we got at least a few hours yet before they come for us. And if we move quick, we maybe have a shot at setting things right for everyone.”