Dead Red - M.R. Forbes Page 0,7

the few small patches of it where they couldn't easily go? "It won't help him much if they decide to send in a ghost team."

She seemed to relax a little bit with the understanding that I knew the truth about the new world order. "No, but the head of Orange wants him personally. He never told me the whole story, but from what I've gathered he treated Orange's son, and then the son died. He knew the kid wasn't going to make it from day one, but Orange was insistent, so he was ready to make a run for it when the inevitable happened. You can't cheat death, right?"

I felt the shiver in my bones. You could cheat death. At least for a while. I remembered the threat. Only for a while.

How much longer could I escape it, and how big was the hole I had dug myself by defying it in the first place?

That was the terrifying truth I didn't like to have to face.

FIVE

Death becomes him.

We reached Dr. Strange's office without suffering any more spikes, though there were a few tremors that left me reaching out for Lila's shoulder to help me stay upright. She took it like a champ, and even reached out and held my wrist for a brief second one of those times.

We had bonded over our mutual disdain for the place.

The marijuana shop was exactly as described. Paraphernalia, plants, and whatnot all displayed prominently in the windows, and all kinds of goods on offer inside. After the shift, pot had been the least of the world's concerns, and so getting it legalized everywhere had been easy. I don't know if anybody expected anything special to come of it. It hadn't. It was just one more income stream, one more occupation, one more way to collect taxes. I had considered using it to help manage the pain on more than one occasion. I rejected the idea of it. I didn't want it to make me complacent.

"Doc, you here?" Lila said when we entered. There were no customers. I wondered if that was ever not the case.

She waited a few seconds. There was no reply, and I didn't hear any motion like he would be coming to greet us.

"He's probably got his headphones on again," she said. "I'll go in the back and grab him."

"Okay." I turned towards one of the shelves and examined a bong. It was handblown glass with bursts of rainbow colors. Hippie-chic.

I heard Lila's heavy feet moving down a set of stairs. If Dr. Strange was like Dalton, he had a hidden underground lab or store room for his less-legal pursuits.

I felt a sharp sting in my leg. My head snapped down, and I saw a wisp of smoke rising from my coat pocket, where I kept the mask.

"What the-" I reached for it, my fingertips scraping the top end. "Damn." I pulled my hand away, the fingers burned. The field vortex was still swirling, but there was no top-end jolt that would have caused the mask to react. In fact, the fields had settled to almost nothing.

The absence of the magic hit me harder than the overabundance. A sudden sense of dread worked its way into my head.

A short, muffled scream sounded from somewhere below my feet, almost in unison with the similarly muffled sound of gunfire.

Shit.

I reached under my coat for the 500, nestled in a holster on my hip and hidden by the coat. The first bullet whistled past my ear. It was followed by a lot more.

I let my legs fall out from under me, dropping behind a shelf at the same time the shop windows exploded inward, the shrill sound hurting my ears. The shelf in front of me pinged and clanged, and holes appeared too close for comfort. I dropped onto my stomach and pulled myself along the floor, hand over hand towards the counter and the back room. There was something bad down there too, but maybe I could get the drop on that target. Whatever was spraying from outside was definitely the bigger threat.

Somehow, I made it to the counter, throwing myself behind the wood and glass enclosure right before the bullets tracked along where I had just been, splintering the tile and making a loud mess. I reached into my pocket again, and then cursed and pulled back my hand. The mask was still on fire though I didn't know why. I could have kicked myself for putting it and the dice into