Vainglory 1.2 - Crash Course

2 – Crash Course

Ward snorted again and raised a thick brown eyebrow, locking his blue-gray eyes with Grace’s strange, fiery ones. “The hell do you mean the lowest world? The hell is Vainglory?” Grace might not have realized it, but at that moment, Ward decided she wasn’t real. As far as he was concerned, something had snapped in his noodle, and he needed to start figuring things out, needed to get himself straight.

Grace stepped to the edge of the boulder and dropped down out of sight. Ward felt some relief when she vanished. Maybe his delusion was fading. “Well?” her voice rang out clear as a bell. “Come down and walk with me, and I’ll explain on the way.” Ward walked over to the edge and looked down to see her standing on the charred ground. From this distance, he could see the ash was mixed with dirt, and little sprouts of green were poking forth here and there.

“Why?”

“Why?” She frowned and gave him that glare again. “You just want to keep adding questions, or would you like to get some answers? Let’s move, old man!” She turned and started lightly springing over the ashy loam, her delicate feet somehow remaining clean with her passage.

“Old man?” Ward grumbled, then sat on the edge of the gigantic boulder and slid down the edge, dropping five or six feet to the ground. The drop further convinced him that he was in the midst of a delusion—he landed easily, his knees bending to absorb the impact, and not one of his joints protested. “No way.” He dropped into a squat and stood up, then repeated the movement three or four times—not one click or twinge of pain from his bad knee.

“Are you coming?” Grace called, and Ward looked to see her a good thirty yards away, standing between two blackened tree trunks and waving. He stood and started forward, determined to get some answers from the feminine delusion. As he approached, she turned and started walking again, albeit more slowly. He caught up, and she spoke, “There are seven Vainglory worlds. They’re called that by common consensus because the first explorers to work through some of the challenges called them that. Vainglory, boastfulness, you get the idea? If they survived, they returned to other settled worlds and bragged about their accomplishments, and so the seven worlds and their suns became Vainglory.” She squinted and pointed at the suns over Ward’s left shoulder.

Ward opened his mouth and took a breath, but before he could ask another question, she kept speaking, “Cinder is the lowest because the challenges are the easiest.”

“We’re in another solar system?” Ward chuckled, shaking his head. “I like sci-fi, but I didn’t think I’d dream something like this up. I wonder how bad the coma is. You reckon everyone’s just standing around my bed waiting for me to die?”

“Everyone, Ward? Whom do you mean? Your sister? I suppose your brother-in-law and nephew might come to the hospital . . .” She stopped speaking, and her eyes flared with brighter flames as she scowled at him. “Ward! Stop with the nonsense! You’re not in the hospital! You’re on Cinder, and I’m stuck in here,” she jabbed a sharp pointer finger into his chest, “so you better get with the program!”

“Okay, lady.” Ward shook his head, grinning wryly. “Can you explain why we’re here?” He paused and rolled his eyes. “I get it, you jumped into my body ‘cause I was dying, but why are we here? Why aren’t we still in the old ballroom under Seattle?”

“Well, I told you there would be a cost . . .” She folded her hands in front of herself and looked up at Ward almost guiltily. Ward would have almost called the look demure if not for the fire in her eyes. “You see, I was in a good host back there, but we were stuck on Earth! The anima on Earth is so thin, Ward! We could hardly get anything done. I tried to get her to bargain with me a little, to give me a little soul anima so I could open a portal to a better place like this, but she was scared and stingy. I was almost grateful those cultists took her. The rite they performed, with the old book and the blood sacrifice—it made the portal a lot cheaper. I hardly had to take any of your soul anima to make it work.”

“Come again?” Ward frowned; something about the offhand way she’d mentioned the soul anima was giving him a queasy feeling in his gut. Something wasn’t right.

“Well, there are different sources for anima. My people can’t interact with natural anima like I’m hopefully going to teach you to find, but we can use soul anima, which many, many types of people can share with us. See? I help you, and you give me some soul anima—just a little—and we both win. I believe that’s called a win-win.”

“You took some of my soul?” Ward, for some reason, held his left hand to his chest.

“You’ll hardly notice it’s gone. Ward, the important thing is that I got you here, where the anima is rich, and I’m going to teach you so much. I’ve already given you a lot: I healed you and freshened up that old flesh of yours.”

“Freshened up?” Ward held up his right hand, still clutching the polished walnut grip of his snub-nosed Smith & Wesson. He stared at the back of his hand and the wrist sticking out of his jacket. Something was off. He snatched his left hand up in front of his face and spread his fingers wide, looking at the back and then the palm. Was he losing it, or were there a lot fewer wrinkles around his knuckles? Was his skin thicker and more vibrant? “Did you, uh, did . . .” He couldn’t bring himself to say it, afraid he’d sound hopeful and sad, exposing himself to ridicule.

“Make you younger? I’d say I shaved a good ten years off you, old man. Back in your thirties again. Does it feel good? Think how great you’ll feel after you harvest some anima, and we get to work improving that weak flesh of yours.”

“No way . . .” Ward yanked his coat open and jammed the pistol into his shoulder holster, then he shrugged out of his raincoat, letting it fall to the charred ground. He pulled his shirttails out of the top of his trousers, noticing they felt significantly looser and roomier, and started to unbutton his shirt.

“What are you doing, Ward?” Grace had hopped atop a burned stump and stood on her painted toes, looking down at him with a narrowed eye, wrinkling her nose.

“Gonna see if you’re full of shit or not!”

“By getting naked? Why don’t you just snap a selfie?”

Ward froze, then slapped himself on the forehead and dropped his half-unbuttoned shirt. He jammed his hand into his pocket, the one that wasn’t full of extra bullets, and yanked out his phone. He held it before his face, and it clicked and opened, displaying his home screen, though several lines of distorted static repeatedly ran through the display. Had he fallen on it and cracked the panel beneath the glass or something?

He had four text notifications, but before he touched them, he looked at the top of the screen and saw he had no service, no Wi-Fi, no anything. His battery was at thirty-two percent. He touched the text icon, noting the four messages were from his partner, Tony:

10:17 – Huh? A hole in an alley?

10:19 – Are you drunk, man?

10:24 – Ward, my man, you need to let me know if this is a prank. Like, now.

10:32 – Okay, calling the watch sergeant to send you backup. If this is a prank, or you’re drunk or something, I’m gonna forward your text to the entire department.

“Jesus, Tony!” Ward sighed and shook his head. “He waited fifteen minutes to call the backup in.” Thinking of the minutes, Ward glanced at the time on his phone and groaned when he saw it said 11:47 PM. “My phone thinks it’s midnight.” He glared around at the blue sky, then touched the camera app. He held the phone in front of his face, and then he couldn’t stop the idiotic grin that exposed his teeth. “You really did it! You really took ten years off.”

“I’m not a liar!” Grace frowned and crossed her arms over her chest. Ward barely heard her; he was looking at the taut skin around his neck, the absence of age spots, the dark stubble along his jawline, and the lack of gray in his eyebrows and short, thick hair. He grinned wider, looking at his teeth, and was sure they looked a bit whiter than they had that morning. “Is this permanent?”

“Well . . . you understand how time works, right?” She suddenly sounded very concerned.

“Huh?”

“I took ten years off, so, you know, as you continue to age . . .”

“Oh, right, right.” Ward laughed idiotically and put his phone back in his pocket.

“If you listen to me and follow my guidance, there’s a good chance you’ll be even younger looking soon. There’s a good chance you might never have to worry about aging again.”

“All right, lady, you’re starting to get my attention. I don’t see how I could dream up such a goofy scenario.” Ward leaned over, snatched up his jacket, and hung it over his shoulder. He took a good look at her, the tapered cut of her slim-fitting dress slacks, the black blazer, clearly tailored for a perfect fit, and her spotless, starched white shirt, buttoned to the collar. She certainly looked sharp. Would he dress her like that if she were a figment of his imagination? He couldn’t imagine it.

She grinned slyly as though she could read his thoughts. “Starting to believe?”

“Let’s just say my doubts are moving in new directions.” In all honesty, Ward didn’t know what to believe. He was a forty-four-year-old man; he’d had plenty of dreams, and this wasn’t like any dream he’d ever had, nothing close. The air was warm but carried hints of odors that seemed new to him, though he couldn’t place how. The ground was crunchy where the ash had solidified, but beneath it was a layer of springy loam, and when Ward bounced his weight up and down, his shoes squeaked as they broke through the crust. He could feel sweat building in his armpits and along his brow. He was aware of his breathing, his heartbeat, and the weight of his coat on his shoulder. In short, everything seemed too real to be a fantasy.

“Are you ready to follow me?” Grace hopped down from the stump, and Ward sized her up. She wasn’t tiny, but she wasn’t a big woman. Maybe five-five, he figured. She winked at him as his eyes came to rest on her face, and Ward looked away and cleared his throat. “Relax, Ward. I told you. I’m in your head! Hah!” She turned and started to saunter away through the ash, passing by a tremendous, blackened fallen tree. Ward figured it had to be a couple hundred feet long, and Grace looked antlike when she walked in its shadow.

Ward got moving, trudging along in her wake, and called, “Where are we going?”

“East!”

“Why?”

“Well, Cinder burns in an east-to-west progression. We’re in a place that burned not too long ago, so if we go east, we’ll get to parts that have recovered more.”

“It burns?” Ward’s eyes drifted around the blackened hellscape.

“Slowly. There’s a band of fire that stretches from pole to pole, and it moves around the globe, burning. It takes a long time, though. Centuries.”

“I don’t . . . that doesn’t sound possible. Sustainable.” More doubts sprang to life in Ward’s mind.

“You need to stop thinking about things in terms of Earth, Ward. The universe is a big, mysterious place, and when you account for things like anima, which you humans have very little understanding of, things can get pretty weird.” She hopped up the side of a hill, hardly disturbing the ashy soil, and Ward followed after her, trying to make sense of her words. He was about to ask about anima when he noticed he was stepping into one of her slender footprints, and a new thought occurred to him.

“I thought you said you were in my head? Not real for other people.”

She paused at the top of the slope and looked down at him, frowning. “The footprints?”

“Yeah,” he grunted.

“Ward. I’m very real for you—you see me, hear me, feel me, and your brain will fill in things like footprints in ash. If we stand here and chat for a while, then you turn back to look at your progress, you’ll see that only your footprints remain.”

“Can we?”

“So eager to test me?” She frowned and folded her arms over her chest again, but she didn’t move. “I know you’re wondering about anima.”

Ward nodded as he finally got to the top of the slope. When he looked past her, further east, he supposed, he saw a long, gentle slope dotted with slender, burned stumps, but farther, almost as far as he could see, he saw more green. “Yeah, I was. Also, are we almost out of the burned area?”

“Well, lucky for you, we came in near the edge. We could have been hiking through ash for weeks.” She sighed and kicked her slender, pale foot through the ash, digging up a furrow, sending a puff of gray into the air, and scattering loose, dark soil over the top of the outer crust. “Okay, eyes up here.” She pointed to her face. “Listen to me for a few minutes, and then we’ll confirm that I’m not corporeal.” Ward complied, looking into those dancing flames buried behind her red irises.

“So, anima. Obviously, you’re familiar with the idea of a soul; imagine that the universe has a soul. That’s natural anima. Now, I’m not telling you to start attending church again, Ward. Soul is one word, but others consider it more of an essence, a driving force. It’s an elusive, mysterious stuff that some people can interact with more than others. More than that, it’s richer in some areas than others, and no one knows why, not really. Some species in the universe are older; they’ve evolved more and did so in an area rich in anima. Those species have a real leg up on humans like you, Ward.”

“So, the playing field isn’t level.”

“Not in the slightest!” She grinned and punched him in the shoulder, not hard, but enough to jostle him. “You’re catching on quick! Don’t worry, though—not everyone has a helpful little devil like me.”

“Devil?”

“Oh, don’t let the word scare you off. Call me an alien if you want. The point is, I’m in your head and will help you figure things out. There are ways to make you tougher, to open you to anima, and to give you the means to make use of it.”

“And you’re helping me because . . .”

“Because I think it will be fun. Also, you gave me some soul anima, and, Ward, it was so, so, so good! Plus, I’d be stuck on Earth if it weren't for you. Who knows, if I help you get strong enough, you might make it to the next world or, heck, old man, maybe all the way out of the Vainglory System!”

Ward frowned, rubbing at his stubble, enjoying the rough texture on his fingertips as he contemplated. There was no way his brain was coming up with all this shit. Something had to be happening outside of his mind, and he couldn’t think of any reasonable explanation. Was this lady legit? He looked at the ash near his feet and saw the divot she’d kicked out was gone, the area smooth and untouched. “Yeah, but there’s gotta be more in it for you . . .”

“Hush!” Grace held up a finger to her lips, then slowly turned in a circle. “Oh, dammit! Shit! Time to run, old man!”

“Huh?”

“Go! East! Keep moving. Come on, run!” She started ahead of him, and Ward, straining to hear what had bothered her, started jogging. He felt surprisingly good, much better than he had last time he’d exercised. His ankles and knees were pain-free. His lower back didn’t protest. And, despite them having been hiking for quite a few minutes in the steady light of twin suns, he didn’t feel overly taxed.

“I feel pretty good.”

“I know you do! I healed all your old injuries. Come on, Ward! We don’t want those scavs to catch us. Even on Cinder, they probably have some anima control.”

“Scavs?”

“Scavengers, come on, sharpen up, old man!” She leaped over a fallen trunk four feet high. Ward didn’t think he could clear it, so he slowed and used a hand to vault it.

“What the hell are they scavenging out here?” Ward gestured to the expanse of ashes and burned trees.

“There were cities and towns out here that got burned when the fire passed. They’ll dig for the basements and cellars, looking for old treasures.”

“Don’t the people who fled the flames come back?”

“Some, but let's be real, they’d have to circle the globe. Most just move ahead of the flames enough to live in peace for a few decades.” She slowed down, sighed heavily, and shrugged her shoulders, turning to look at him with a funny expression. She wore half a smile, and yet her eyes looked at him with sympathy. “Oh damn, I’m sorry, Ward.”

“What?”

“Well, I’d hoped I’d have some time to introduce you to Cinder a little slower, let you maybe meet some friendly folks. Looks like it’s out of the frying pan and into the fire for you. Those scavs are running this way, and they’re moving a lot faster than you can. Maybe they won’t kill you. Maybe they’ll just rob you . . .”

“Nah, hell with that,” Ward growled, yanking his .357 out of his holster. “How many?”

“Three, but Ward . . .”

She trailed off as, hooting and yowling, sounding much like a pack of wild dogs, three tall, loping figures crested the top of the slope where Ward and Grace had been chatting. They were each well over six feet tall, and they had long, wiry limbs jutting out of weird apparel that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a Star Wars set. At this distance, Ward couldn’t make them out clearly, but he thought it looked like they had animal snouts and high, pointed ears; they almost looked half dog and half person. They caught sight of him and howled with greater fervor and began loping down the slope, rapidly approaching.

“Get on the ground!” Ward barked his old go-to phrase, lifting his gun.

The scavs carried packs on the backs, satchels over their shoulders, belts, and bandoliers laden with knives and, if he weren’t mistaken, pistols. When he hollered for them to get on the ground, he saw them grab hold of those knives and guns, and Ward didn’t hesitate; he squeezed the trigger.

Back in Afghanistan, some of Ward’s buddies in the Marines accused him of having ice in his veins. He never got rattled during an engagement. No, Ward saved that for later. When he’d gotten home from his deployment, he’d spent many nights waking up in cold sweats, images from the war fresh in his mind. Once he’d been hired onto the force, the department had probably shelled out double his salary to the various shrinks that had served his unit over the years. He went in voluntarily and also on the captain’s orders after his many violent encounters with felons.

All that said, when his first shot dropped the scav in the lead, sending him careening head over heels through the ash and tumbling down the hill, he didn’t flinch when the others returned fire. Their guns barked loudly, sending clouds of black smoke into the air with each shot, and Ward heard their bullets zing nearby, kicking up clouds of ash and dirt and splintering into a burned-out tree he stood beside. Nonetheless, he held steady. He took aim, and he blasted. The S&W barked in his hand, and the scav on the left, now only fifteen yards away, cried out and grabbed at its throat, dropping its pistol.

Ward couldn’t help thinking of the scav as “it.” They looked like bipedal dogs wearing clothes, and he couldn’t tell if they were males or females or something else altogether. As the scav tried in vain to hold the blood inside its body, it fell to its rump with a sad, almost pathetic whimper. The other scav, the last one, dropped its gun and stooped low, looking up at Ward in much the way a dog might if you caught it pissing on the rug, a look of guilt and surrender in its eyes. “Please,” it begged in a surprisingly feminine, human-like voice. Before Ward could come to grips with that, it struck him that it spoke English.

“Get on the ground,” he growled, defaulting to old habits as his mind whirled. To his delight, the scav complied, laying on her chest, snout to the side, hands spread. Ward checked the other two and saw the one he’d first shot was lying in a heap, unmoving against a burned tree, and that the other, the one he’d shot through the neck, was lying on its side, panting in short quick breaths. Ward had a feeling he or she wasn’t long for this world.

“Well! That went better than I thought! I knew I liked how you handled those cultists!” Grace stepped out from behind a nearby tree and approached him. “You should just shoot this other one. You don’t want her to find you in the night and slit your throat.”

“Why the hell can I understand her?”

“Huh?” the scav asked. She was squeezing her eyes shut, but she peeled one open, a big, honey-colored orb wet with moisture, and rolled it in the socket to better look at Ward. “Did you ask me something?”

“She can understand you because you’re speaking her language. Well, I’m doing it for you. I told you I would help you, didn’t I?”

“You’re what?” Ward was very damn sure he was speaking English. He could feel his mouth moving and hear the words in his ears.

“Ward, you gotta get with it . . .”

“Sir, my brother, he’s dying!” The scav sounded desperate, and Ward had to take a beat to realize what an asshole he was being. The guy might look like he was part dog, and he might have been trying to kill him, but a man shouldn’t be so callous while another person was bleeding out in front of him.

“Can you help him?” he asked his prisoner.

“Yes!”

“Do it. Don’t try anything funny, or I’ll have to start shooting.”

“Oh, brother! What’s going on here, Ward?” Grace took two quick steps toward him, reached up, and flicked one of her pointy red nails against his earlobe. It felt like a wasp stung him.

“Ouch!” He slapped a hand to his ear and scowled at her. “What the hell?” The female scav who’d scurried over to kneel over her gasping, bleeding brother jerked her head up and narrowed her strange lupine eyes at him.

“Ward! What are you going to do with these scavs? Suppose she saves the hurt one? Now you’ve got two people with vendettas against you loose in the world. Just finish them off!”

Ward whirled on Grace and growled, “I don’t do that kind of shit!”

“What? Come on, Ward! I saw you basically assassinate Lafferty and his crew . . .”

“That’s different. There were dead bodies around; they had you tied up in a circle . . .”

“Not me . . .”

“And they came at me with knives!” Ward waved off Grace’s objection, and in the process, he let his gaze fall on the scav and saw she was staring at him with wide yellow-brown eyes and an open mouth from which hung a pink tongue.

She ran that long tongue over her snout and sniffed. “Are you okay? You’re not talking to me, are you?”

“Now you’ve done it,” Grace sighed. “Pretty soon, everyone on Cinder’s gonna be talking about the raving lunatic in the burn belt.”

“Can it, Grace.” Ward sighed and shook his head, then walked over to the scav. “He gonna make it?”

“No.” She made a faint whimpering sound, and Ward almost reached down to stroke her furry head between the ears. He stepped back, though, reminding himself that this was a person and she’d just been set to kill him.

“Look, I’m sorry about your loss, but you folks were aiming to kill me, right?”

“I suppose.” She sniffed and rubbed a hairy arm over her moist, black nostrils.

“Well, I’m gonna take one of your packs and all the guns, and then we’re going to walk in separate directions. Understand?” He’d folded his arms over his chest, but he still held the .357, and he tapped it against his elbow, letting the metal clink as a reminder that he was in charge.

“The first reasonable thing you’ve said.” Grace walked around in a slow circle behind the scavenger, scrutinizing her. “She has a long knife sheathed in the back of her belt.”

“You can keep your knife, but keep your hands away from it until we’re gone.”

“We?” The scavenger looked left and right, then scrutinized Ward, and, despite her canine appearance, he could read what she was thinking—he was nuts.

“Yeah,” he covered, “you and me. You can play with your knife all you want when we're both gone from here.” He looked past her to the crumpled corpse of the first scav he’d shot. “I’ll get his pack, but you need to come with me. I’m not going to turn my back on you. Got it?”

The scav whimpered as she stood up from her brother’s body, but she complied, and soon, maybe ten minutes later, Ward had a big backpack filled with random odds and ends, three big-barreled, breech-loading pistols, and a cloth sack full of brass cartridges. The bullets were long and wide, almost the size of a 410-shotgun shell, but unlike any caliber Ward was familiar with. Grace paced and muttered the whole time he’d been going through the scavs’ packs and weapons, clearly irritated with him and the mercy he’d shown.

When Ward shouldered the heavy canvas pack, he looked to the surviving scavenger and watched as she carried a stone over and set it beside her brother’s furry leg. “You’re gonna build a cairn over him?”

“Yes. I promise I won’t follow you after I finish.”

“Oh, come on, Ward!” Grace called from further down the slope.

“Right. Well, good luck.” Ward thought about it for a minute, and then he reached into the sack where he’d stuffed the pistols, took one out, and set it on a nearby stone. “I’ll leave a couple of bullets a bit further down.”

“Thank you, stranger. I’m Lizzy.”

“Ward.” He nodded to her, then turned and, after taking ten or fifteen steps, put two big brass bullets on a rock. He glanced back to see Lizzy watching him, and then he continued marching toward Grace’s distant, slender, black-clothed form. When he caught up to her, she was sitting on a flat stone beside which a tall, green sapling grew. It had tiny branches, and from them sprouted thousands of little V-shaped leaves.

“Take a seat.” She pointed to a stone next to her.

“We’re not going further?”

“Sure, we are, but not yet. We’ll wait for your girlfriend to leave, and then we’ll see if you can sense or, if luck is with us, even see anima.”

“What’s it got to do with her?”

Grace shifted, folding her legs under her, and then met Ward’s eyes with hers. She stared at him for a long moment. “Anima gathers in living things and some extraordinary things that aren’t alive. Well, not in the way that you’re alive. When something dies, the anima is released. If you leave a body alone long enough, the anima will disburse into the universe, but if you have the talent for it, some people can see it and even gather it. We’ll see if you’re one of those people.”

“You think I am?”

“I have a sneaking suspicion, but I’ve been wrong before.”

Ward grunted and sat down on the rock she’d pointed to, then asked, “What if Lizzy takes it?”

“The anima? No chance. There wasn’t a trace of talent in those three, which was damn lucky, by the way, Ward. You could have run into far worse!” She yawned and stretched out her legs, laying back with her fingers entwined behind her head, supporting it. “Now, just relax a while and wait for that little scav to wander off, and we’ll see what’s what.”