The Old Tank in the Woods

Aisling

Thin puddle ice, sharp as a northern pike’s teeth, sliced into the bare soles of my feet. The March air burned cold in my lungs as I sprinted flat-out down the old rural road, bare heels flying over potholes and loose gravel, heading for a place human law could not follow: the old tank in the woods.

It waits deep among the old pines, back where roads don’t go anymore. There, strange purple vines twist and twine around the rotting husk of an old American army tank, blooming regardless of the season in huge, lurid blossoms of toxic violet. Their scent drifts across the snow, seducing, enticing. During the invasion, the Minnesota Guards tried hiding gear in the backwoods. They failed. Elsecomers blasted it with a Radiant weapon. Contaminated and abandoned, it has rusted slowly away for over two decades, mutating everything that comes near.

For those already irradianced, it’s a perfect spot for a secret meeting.

The sheriff will have Sara’s trail within two hours, max. Help needs to reach her before the dogs arrive.

I risked a glance over my shoulder, but no one had followed when I fled.

I’ll heal, and no one’s tracking me.

That raw wind blew through the old pine trees. Their needles whispered the ancient songs of the north, low and patient. Deep in the forest, a raven croaked.

Someone with wings could find Sara before the posse catches her trail.

I leaped across a muddy old drainage ditch. My bleeding feet hit the ground on the far side and I plunged through tangled underbrush, emerging into lingering snow and the cool hush below the pines.

The dogs are coming from Hermantown. That’s at least an hour away, given the state of the roads. Sara ran into Jay Cooke Park, another eight miles from here; bad terrain for tracking. If she’s coherent enough to remember our games in the woods, she’ll know to hide her tracks on exposed bedrock or in the river. But we’re hard in the spring melt; the St. Louis is all flood and whitewater. The torrent could kill her as easily as the posse.

Another crust of ice crystals cracked against my toes and I tried not to wince at the blood trail I was leaving. It didn’t matter – no one was following me – but it was sloppy.

There is no room for sloppiness in this line of work, my mother used to say, sharpening daggers before dragging me along to yet another assassination. Before the invasion, she’d been in the sort of business that started – and sometimes abruptly ended – wars and revolutions. She’d kept the Northland free of warlords during the early, messy years after the Broken Dawn. Professional sloppiness was anathema to her.

Meanwhile, her daughter lives in just about the messiest situation imaginable.

There was a deer track back there, but the woods were a mess of muck and snowmelt, and it wasn’t as obvious as usual. I cast around, trying to spot it, stumbling on a fallen branch hidden under a drift.

Vicki said Sara was Changing fast, that tusks were already growing from her lower jaw when she fled. She’ll be in pain and terrified.

Memories flashed of the times she’d holed up at my place, hiding from a world still cruel to anyone different. She’d been a skinny kid with box braids and rainbows painted on her shoes, seven years younger than me. She’d hide out in my room reading my lost uncle’s old Black Panther comics, flopping on my bed while I did homework.

Somehow babysitting the neighbor kids had morphed into harboring them when things got rough. Somehow that turned into an odd little friendship of its own. I was the one who was half-alien, if passing; Sara just had the darkest skin in her class.

I finally found the path. Old rage at the injustices of our broken world lent wings to my heels.

She was my tiny sidekick. She’s under my care, no matter what she’s turning into. They won’t get her too!

I loosened my grip on such humanity as I could claim, worrying less about being seen now that the forest hid me. Trees flashed by me, and a mile disappeared under my feet in two silent minutes. Behind an abandoned farm’s collapsing barn, I pulled rocks off a pile of fieldstones, yanked my little pouch of trade goods from my pocket, and ditched my threadbare jeans and flannels in a watertight tote hidden there years earlier.

Time to lose the farm-girl look. Can’t let the worldless tribes know my daily-wear face.

I stood up naked in the snow, the chill bringing my skin alive. My fingers fumbled at my choker.

But sometimes you can’t play it safe.

My chilled fingers found the hemp woven clasp and pushed the knot out through it, melting my human façade. A thread snapped as it pulled out, not quite structural, and the frayed end shivered in the wind.

Coldness rushed through me, and then a feeling of warmth, as if a fine-boned hand reached for mine. A sensation as of long feline teeth grazed the nape of my neck, and I froze.

Mine, something growled, not quite in mindspeach, not quite in words. Soon. But I have other prey to occupy me now.

*Who’s there?* I sent, bristling, and was answered by nothing but a flash of green feline eyes and a toothy grin. The presence was gone as fast as it had come, leaving nothing but my racing heartbeat behind.

What the ever-loving fuck was that?!?

No, get it together. Weird shit happens all the time. Sara needs me now.

I stuffed the fraying choker into my jeans pocket and secured everything in the tote, taking a second to shift some rocks back over the cover.

Hiding grows futile. Everything is about to blow open.

I shook the premonition away. No time for a bit of erratic and inconvenient foresight.

The nippy air’s bite faded as magic billowed into me. My hidden truth emerged, birchwood-pale and misleadingly delicate, with pointed ears and some odd beauty no one’s ever described to me well. Because the invaders who broke the world? Mom was one of them. And unfortunately, I took after her.

It’s a fact I hide from everyone, even my closest friends. They think I’m a strangeling, and the elf look is just one of a set of illusions I cycle through as circumstances demand.

Delicate! It’s bad enough that my elven face still looks too young to buy her own beer, I thought, trying not to imagine what Sara might be going through right then. Thank the gods I can keep an illusion on. I’m twenty-four and live in post-apocalyptic, bumfuck nowhere. “Dry” is not an option!

And fragile isn’t either.

My magic stretched, unfurling, lighting my veins on fire. The scrapes on my feet itched as accelerated healing kicked in. The land started singing to me. I gloried, for a second, in being briefly, nakedly, unashamedly myself.

My mother’s otherworldly green armor came at my call, fifth dimensional nanites swirling around me. It defaulted to something really sci-fi looking, but I preferred making it appear like old leathers from Middle Earth. No one would mistake me for a human with it on, but I don’t really look like an Elsecomer either. I shrugged, settling it into place, then stepped off the trail and sprinted the last two miles, skimming the edge of normal space-time to move faster.

Gods between Worlds, I thought, flashing across a stretch of open snow. I wish it were possible to put on enough speed to hit escape velocity on my life.

The light… changed… when I got close to the abandoned tank’s clearing, and the air turned silvery and numinous. There didn’t seem to be anyone or anything else around, but I took my time and went in slow and cautious. Things hunt the dark under these trees. Old things, fast things. Any mistake made out here could be my last.

Gotta focus now. This is the dangerous part.

Shadows hid me in the forest’s edge. The faint traces of fog that always haunt the clearing drifted over the armored vehicle, and for a second I saw not a tank but a sleeping beast, something with steely ropes of muscle and the same vines draped over it. In the swamp beyond the woods, a stiff breeze gusted and teased, filled with the scents of melting snow and thawing mud. I focused my magic, and its peculiar sense of the border between the world and Otherworld, and pushed that version of reality away.

It hasn’t fully opened to Elsewhere. It’s not a true ghostland. Not yet.

The tank solidified into a wreck, not a creature. Magic still shivered through the space, and the air hung still and expectant. Pod-like cocoons hung from the purple vines, something new, and embryonic creatures twitched inside them. The late afternoon sun slunk through wafting vapors, a pale silver disk in a pale silver sky. Its wan light shimmered as if it fell through water, and a strange awareness pulsed through the eerie gloom.

I don’t sense any threats. Just a general feeling that things will soon go wildly off-track. Not now. But soon.

I waited, wary, listening, in case I’d somehow missed a sign of something dangerous. Horrors haunt these woods. I’d rather I saw them before they saw me.

Nothing.

Good.

I stayed still, listening.

Dammit, why can’t we have some grimy cantina for our criminal meetings, like civilized people? With music and cheap booze, obviously. Bad enough the Underhill Railroad has to get past army patrols tomorrow evening. Now local law is out in force here too. I’m gonna have to make sure I’ve got solid alibis all evening. That means no bars, and… shudder… more time with my family.

Still no threats. I tipped back my head and sang out the Call to Trade.

Minutes later, wingbeats brushed the air, almost as silent as an earthly owl.

I braced myself, and stepped forward with my trade goods. If anyone could find Sara and guide her to safety, it’d be one of the Mihooli refugees who came to Earth with my mother’s people.

And the owlies will try squeezing blood from stone, negotiating the terms for their help.