Dead Red - M.R. Forbes Page 0,5

door and dropped it closed again. I checked my pocket watch. I had an hour to get to the north side of Hoboken, also known as the Playground.

FOUR

Who knows what fear lurks...

I didn't like the Playground.

I knew that much, even though I'd never been there before. Of course, it was called the Playground for a reason. It was a magically confused stretch of land, about a mile across and half a mile wide, where for whatever reason the fields that allowed users to do what they did found themselves in this odd vortex that created all kinds of sensory feedback and random effects. In other words, you could use magic there, but you were doing it at your own risk. There was no way to know what would happen. That was why I had to go it alone. My zombies were tied to me by a magic string, and the Playground would take that string, knot it and twist it and wind it up, and they might drop, they might rampage, or they might turn on me.

It was also the reason I brought the 500. New humans loved the Playground. They felt the fields differently than us old-fashioned homo sapiens, one of the reasons they couldn't do magic. I'd heard the place was like an aphrodisiac for them, a six-block orgasmic machine. Kind of gross when you gave it too much thought, so I tried not to.

A lot of the new humans - ogres, orcs, trolls - had tough hides and could take a beating. The .50 caliber bullets the 500 fired were a little more than a beating.

I was supposed to meet Dr. Strange at a small marijuana shop near the center of the zone. The area itself was urban, but the shift had converted what had once been a series of five to ten story apartments mixed in with groceries, pharmacies, doctors offices, and the like into a purely commercial area that was heavily focused on marketing to new humans. It was bright, flashy, a little bit dirty, and definitely pushing the erotica angle as hard as it could while still maintaining some level of discretion. That meant plenty of signs that said things like "Improve Your Performance," or "Field Good in the Playground," and a number of brothels and clubs that advertised their wares in their names, but nobody prancing around with their naughty bits threatening to fall out in your face. In fact, the people on the street looked as normal as any twelve-foot monster with thick green skin, or four-foot pixie with wiry hair could.

I knew the minute I stepped into the Playground. Not just because of the welcome sign, but because my magical sense that allowed me to hear the death magic frequencies went totally haywire, like it was playing the Beatles in reverse. The strength of the magic came and went and I heard a few other sounds mixing in. They were random, subtle notes that I would never have recognized if the mask I was carrying in my pocket hadn't allowed me to hear them. Fire magic, air magic, glamour magic. They were like colored sprinkles that had been mixed into my coffee ice cream and were totally throwing the flavor.

"You lost?" a small voice asked me from my left. I turned my head and looked down at the dwarf. She had thick red hair, a round nose, and a petite frame that belied the weight of her dense bones. She was wearing a pair of short shorts and a t-shirt, her genetic mutism leaving her nearly immune to registering heat and cold.

"Not yet," I said. I was wearing a baseball cap pulled low over my face and the collar of my trench was riding high in an effort to broadcast "leave me the hell alone."

"Okay. I was just asking because users don't come in here." She paused and stared right at my face, in a way that no one did. "Ever."

The statement took me by surprise, and I had to fight to keep it hidden. "How do you know I'm a user?"

"I'm a dwarf."

"What does that have to do with it?"

She pointed at my left coat pocket, where I kept the mask. "I can sense imbued artifacts. The one you're carrying is burning a fucking hole in my retina."

I reached into my pocket and put my hand near the mask. I could feel the warmth of it against my flesh. Whatever crazy shit was happening with the fields it was messing