Chapter 6

Another note to self: Someday find the guy who made that null-bomb and repeated kick his balls until they fly up out of his mouth! Then for good measure, punch them (and all of his teeth) back down his throat again ... and repeat the cycle for a few hours.

I wasn't at all sure that I could channel magic right now, but I knew that I didn't have any time at all to waste. After another stabbing pinprick of torture in my star-filled eyes, I managed to gather up at least some of my strength. It wasn't much, but I needed to act now! The idea was to immediately trans-locate myself right into the center of our hotel room with my aversion field to hide me, but I wasn't at all sure that I could actually manage two things at once. It sort of worked; the aversion field was pitifully weak, but somewhat just barely adequate enough to hopefully hide me as I looked around the room at my normal, and quite unharmed opponents lurking in readiness in the shadows.

As I anticipated, I faced two shooters; each crouched in the darkness at the two corners of the room along the left wall from the entrance, each giving each other a clear unrestricted shooting path towards the doorway. As the null-bomb had gone off pretty much right into their faces it had acted much like an abrupt flash spell inside the room, my would-be mundane assassins were still trying to refocus their still semi-blinded eyes to spot me. They were both normals, immune to the massive magical rending effects of the device, but it had gone off with a pretty big flash right at point blank range. The lights were off inside the room but there was some dim light from the hallway, enough so that I could see just what I needed, a glimpse of where both assassins were exactly lurking so that I could fire off my next spell. This was a somewhat clumsy mentalist spell that ought to cloud their senses just enough for them to mistake each other for me.

I'd never been good at mind control magic ... I'd always been pretty awful at it actually, but Bel had taught me a few simple schoolyard tricks that she'd learned. With their eyes blinking from the bright flare dots of the null-bomb in their retinas and the residual cloud of rapidly dissipating magical smoke; my deceptive spell served its purpose. With their near instant reflexes, they fired simultaneously at the very first thing that looked like me ... namely each other. Being highly skilled professional killers, they didn't miss either. One neatly shot the other right in the heart, the other equally skillfully shooting his partner in the head, nearly right between the eyes.

It's hard to silence a revolver, and these assassins hadn't even tried. Together, the two gun shots sounded almost simultaneous to my ears and with the rear bathroom window of the hotel room rather wide open, as I soon discovered, the gunfire would have been quite audible to anyone in the waiting dark sedan outside below, just what had been intended by the big local FBI boss waiting below.

I risked a little bit of light and turned on the bedside light briefly. The assassins would have wanted to positively confirm their kill before departing anyway. There was no immediate sign of Stan, but there was a rather ominous blood pool in the carpet very near where I had teleported into the room. A trail of easily visible blood droplets led me quickly to the closet, where I found Stan's body stashed away, lying just inside of the hidden panic room. Stan had told us earlier when we had first arrived here that only one other person knew of the existence or location of this secret inner hiding place. That helped rather convincingly to confirm for me the identity of the top ranked traitor within the local FBI field office. Stan's local field boss and the man the poor young agent had mistakenly trusted. Now I just had to decide, and quickly, how I was going to deal with him. There is just some shit that I won't put up with.

If you can look at someone else's face, it's not too difficult to do an illusionary mask spell. It's an easy mentalist spell that every half-way competent magical kid learns by middle school ... especially around Halloween time. It's encouraged by the teachers, in fact, to appear for that week in magical middle school as your favorite movie monster or horror show actor or actress. I've always admitted that I hardly ever studied or paid much attention in school, with one important caveat ... if something interested me, and if was also a bit anti-social or anti-authority, then I was all-in. For sixth grade I was the very best appearing zombie in the entire school, complete with a faux rotting stench and an ongoing illusion of endless bits of rotting bits of putrid flesh constantly dropping to the floor. I won second place out of the entire school and earned a wildly unlikely 'well done' from the head wizard, who was already certain even at my tender young age that I'd never amount to anything.

Halloween was still a few weeks away, but this old simple trick could be performed in just minutes, which was nearly all of the time that I wanted to spare. Within the effect field where the null-bomb had exploded I couldn't sense any leys and even basic magic channeling from within my own energies took extreme concentration and effort. The magical exertion again brought the tears right back to my eyes and gave me an instant screamer of a headache that showed no signs of diminishing. Still it would suffice to get me close enough to the boss to deal with him. Sean's various innate gifts were all apparently working as well and with a few quick popping sounds of translocation, our meager possessions, my satchel and money-belt I'd kept stashed away in the closet saferoom disappeared into my friend's seemingly endless hidden pockets. This exertion was followed by a rather pronounced earsplitting moan, so like me, Sean was still more than a bit fazed by the null-bombs extended blast effects.

There was no point in wiping the room down of our older prints, it was a cheap hotel room and would have hundreds of other stranger's prints here as well to sufficiently confuse mundane forensics. However, I did made sure that I didn't touch anything new except for one of the dead assassin's revolvers, and then only briefly for a moment to lightly mage-mark it. This weapon belonged to the shooter who had two empty cartridges in his gun instead of just one. That identified the shooter and the weapon that had shot Stan earlier today and this gave me a vague notion or two as to how best to obtain just a little bit of justice for my friend's murder. The lingering area effects of the null-bomb explosion would mean that forensic wizards would never be able to sense anything that had ever happened in this room, before or afterwards. Like the wreckage of the rail yard, this entire hotel and the area around had become another magical null zone, perhaps permanently.

I gave the room a second look before leaving, but Sean had already retrieved everything important and there was nothing else left in our room that was ours. We still only owned one set of clothes, the ones we had on our backs. As for Stan's body, I just left it and the bodies of his killers exactly as we found it. I felt like I wanted to cry and I had the urge to just let go and vent my rage, to rampage and just blast this entire city block into smoking ashes ... but my head remained calm and cool. I couldn't channel that much magic here anyway now within the null zone and making the attempt at trying it would have likely caused me to burst a blood vessel in my brain.

Someone else could deal with all of the bodies, friendly or otherwise, later ... now I had to deal with other more immediate problems first, like Stan's boss, the head agent of the Cleveland field office.

"Wrong place ... wrong time." The FBI boss muttered from the driver's seat through the open window of his large dark government sedan as I walked up to him. "Waste of a potentially great future field agent though ... isn't that so Zak?"

Well so much for my piss poor adversion field! I dropped it like the heavy rock that it was but it didn't give my headache the slightest bit of relief. I didn't care how we sorted this out ... it was all going to end tonight, and right now. This was the final link in the chain to be dealt with and I was almost disappointed that he didn't even draw a gun on me to put up at least a token effort at a fight. The will to keep going had gone right out of him. He was alone and just waiting for the inevitable messy end.

"No point in running, not for me ... and not after tonight, considering what you did at the glass factory. They called me on the radio here, while I was waiting, that you'd arrived and then everything went silent. Then I heard about the major fire there ... the unbelievable destruction with no survivors. That left just me, alone, but with a null-bomb that Rose, the FBMR boss had given me for an emergency last resort, and I used it. Now ... here we are, and what's the point of running or hiding anymore, besides, I knew you'd want me alive, at least for a while ... so you could know why."

"Why?" I stammered in annoyance, "I'm not even sure I care. From where I'm standing, this all looks like garden-variety greed and treason. Would you care to contest that?"

"Nope. Spot on accurate. It was all just about the money, at least at first. Rose and I were almost ready for retirement and then we found out last year that the government was going to reduce our pensions, again. We had to do something. Rose had a normal friend who worked at that glass factory and she thought her agents could making some petty Arc-Tec stuff that we'd then boat over to French Canada for sale. Petty shit that no one would care about, so we formed a partnership, just so that we two old workhorses could retire with a little bit of comfort. It was just that at first, then the French-Canadians came to us with plans and ideas for some critical glass weapon tube that was extremely tricky and almost impossible to make. They couldn't make it work on their own and promised us the moon if we could ... and Rose made it work! We thought we'd at last made enough to cover our own retirements, but by then we found out whom our French bosses were really supplying the tubes to, Deseret ... and then we knew it had become treason ... but we were already trapped and couldn't back out."

"And Stan was starting to piece together the various bits of the operation, especially when Crazy Irene started to become obsessed with finding The Mole's hideaway. An honest kid that couldn't be scared or bought off ... and he stupidly trusted you."

"I didn't know that he was even here this morning, not until after he'd gone straight up to your room first before our appointment to meet later on. I liked the kid ... would have found some way to misdirect him, told him some lie to get him safely out of town and away from you ... and away from Rose and Irene, but my hired guns found him first, thinking he was you. A waste."

"It was ... everything that happened since we came into town on the train. Yet more government weasels with their petty secrets and crimes to protect and everyone scared that one travelling Texas wizard was going to take a long wet piss all over their corn flakes. Well, it's all over now ... and as for any more why's, I just don't care." I really didn't.

The boss started to say something but by the time his fat mouth opened up again I already had the assassin's mage-marked revolver trans-located right into my handkerchief-covered hand and with a single final pull of the trigger, I put a final but rather messy end to the entirely sordid matter. Just one round into the center of his forehead was sufficient and I resisted the urge to empty the remaining four rounds of the revolver into his already lifeless body for good measure. It wouldn't help to bring Stan back, or any of the nearly three dozen other victims of their scheme.

With a briefly flick of my hand and a bit of will I removed the wizard-mark and magically returned the revolver right back into the cold hands of the dead assassin upstairs. This final magical effort of forcing magic within this null zone had now given me a nosebleed but I still had my handkerchief ready and I made sure that I wasn't leaving a blood trail of my own on the ground near the car. No droplets so far, good.

Mundane police forensics of the assassin's revolvers would show that one of them had killed Stan and the local FBI boss, but then died in a shootout with his partner upstairs afterwards. Neat and simple. Very simple and tidy for the police to easily wrap-up without having to think too hard. There was certainly not anyone else remaining alive in either the local FBI or FBMR offices to say otherwise. The blast of the null-bomb would make magical forensics useless. Nothing done here tonight even whispered that Zac Zyphyr had ever been here or had done any of these unfortunate things. Miranda and I could now leave as ghosts, with no version of the tale left to tell of this sad grubby business except for our own.

I for one would be happy to forget every minute of my visit here. My nosebleed was showing no signs of diminishing and it was time to get away from here before I started bleeding all over the pavement. Turning around to leave I saw Miranda, who was standing in shocked silence just a few yards behind me. From the unhappy look on her face, she undoubtedly had other thoughts about my final conclusion to this unhappy visit.

There were tears in her eyes, and an obvious look of shocked dismay and even disbelief as well. She'd just watched me execute ... perhaps even murder a man in apparent cold blood. She wouldn't understand the need for this man to have died, and in the casual and even callous mundane manner I'd so carefully performed it. It was her next expression that hurt me the deepest, the look of utter disappointment within the souls of her eyes.

Her hero, me, had died along with Stan's boss, in her eyes now as well. The sense of adoration that she'd once held for me, the pride and even that mysterious look of love were now quite gone. I'd stripped away those illusions that she had held, leaving behind in their wake just Zak, a remorseless and soulless monster who'd destroy like an avenging angel everything and everyone in his path.

It seemed that her faith in me was gone as well and slowly and silently she turned her back on me entirely and we walked together, but slowly apart, back to Dixie's Diner. Our late night supper would have to start without Stan, and I wasn't sure that I'd ever really be hungry again.

I don't think Miranda and I exchanged more than five words with each other over the space of the next week. For starters, we hardly seemed to see each other now and our paths hardly ever crossed even in the friendly confines of the renegade's underground refuge. We could have been on the next bus out of town, but we wanted to make sure that our collection of refugees could manage an escape as well.

It had been my intention to bear the heavy weight of the getaway planning, like a modern day Moses eager to deliver his chosen people to the Promised Land, but nearly right from the start Miranda pretty much usurped that role and made herself the go-to organizer for the entire operation. And I let her. For two zinc US cents, I'd have let her go physically with them as well, but I'd made some promises to her father that I'd look after her ... whether she now wanted me to or not!

Miranda was showing some aptitude for mundane logistical planning and was actually handling things at least as well as I could have done right from the start, but sometimes standing behind 'the boss' there needs to be a scary sort of menacing figure lurking in the background. She could handle the carrot parts of the planning well enough but I wanted to make sure that everyone knew that I could be the stick, and smack heads around, if needed.

The first morning right after melting down the glass factory, and the entirety of the opposing wizardry remaining in the city, I called a group meeting of all of the renegades and their families. I wanted to catch everyone here while they were still in hiding down below, before the more confident folks began returning back to the art school and commune upstairs, thinking everything now was safe and back to normal. It was, but it also wasn't ... and I wanted to explain and make things perfectly clear right from the start.

"I'll make this brief," I started off by loudly announcing during group breakfast while standing up on a table, "but there is a lot of information that you need to know right away and a few rather urgent decisions also need to be made almost immediately." That got their attention.

"First, yes, Irene is dead, also her FBMR boss Rose, not to mention the entirety of their local government agents, and also more than a few other interested parties from elsewhere. Cleaned house, gone ... completely. In theory, yes, that means that going back to your lives upstairs is safe now ... and it probably could remain so, at least for awhile. For a good week or maybe two anyway. The point is, the group of people that you have been hiding from are gone, but they're all going to be replaced, and sooner rather than later ... and those new folks are going to be more than bit annoyed and confused at how and why their predecessors all vanished. They're going to comb through all of the files with a magnifying glass and start looking for suspects. Actually, they're really just going to be looking for scapegoats, someone to put all of the blame on, and unfortunately, this is quite likely to be you! It's not going to take them long to figure out that Irene had been doing some serious renegade hunting and that's going to point the long fingernails right at you."

Now this really got their attention.

"No, there's no point in blaming me. I was just the messenger, warning you that trouble was on the main track heading straight for you. That runaway freight train of trouble was already heading your way long before I ever set foot into town. Well, I've taken care of that bit of trouble ... don't everyone thank me all at once. Now what I am saying is that you just can't go back to pretending that more trouble won't follow. You've got a week, maybe two ... that's about how long you've got before the next set of renegade hunters start sniffing down your trail once more. Irene found you, maybe she even left a complete set of street addresses right on top of her desk to point them right straight at you? Probably not, but how long can you last or survive with an entire city soon to be after you? Do you want to guess what the reward money will be for the capture of a terroristic group of renegades that took out the entire FBMR local field office? That's exactly the way they're going to spin this disaster, putting all of the blame on you. Your own relatives will be fighting to turn you in ... and I think by then you'll want to be long gone and as far away as possible. Frankly, you don't have many options."

Good. Now they were all scared and everyone was starting up and yelling at everyone else. Now that they knew that they were drowning it was time to offer them the lifeline. Maybe even a few of them might even be grateful, well maybe later anyway.

"Options ... they're mostly not good ones. Basically you have 'fight or flight'. If you choose fight, well ... you're on your own this time. Miranda and I will be gone on the next bus out of town and you'll have to handle the next Irene all by yourselves. Maybe you could ... until they bring in after that a trainload of Irene's, like a major FBMR magical combat assault team. Good luck with that one. I don't fancy your odds, nor will you like the examples they'd make of your families. There'll be a nice fancy show trial and guilty verdicts followed by swift public executions, and that's just for the innocents ... especially the innocents. As for the guilty folks, well, let's say things will be worse. Let's just skip that fight option entirely ... which leaves flight."

I gave them a moment to process their thoughts through and let the 'fight' faction have their chance to realize that they didn't have any ghost of a chance. Time to feed out that lifeline now...

"Flight. Nope, I don't think I can find you a plane, but we've already started the process to find you a big enough travel bus to load everyone and everything onto. Miranda is already coordinating this with a friend of ours, and if we need two buses or even three, we'll get them. Enough for you and your families and perhaps even a few friends, if there are seats enough, to get you all as close to the southern border and across it to safety as we can. We're arranging for guides to smuggle you across the border and get you as safely and conveniently as possible to a Great Western Alliance consulate and from there, safely to Texas. You're magicians, well at least many of you are, and you have skills that you can use in a land of freedom, or at least a whole hell of a lot more freedom than you're enjoying right now hiding as renegades. In a nutshell, this is what we are offering ... a chance at living a new life as a respected practitioner of magic – or else you can just keep hiding here with your head down and pray that the swarm of wizards that will be hunting for your skulls somehow manage to miss you all. That's the choice that we're offering. I'm not sure that there is a Plan C, but if you come up with one, fine ... but it won't involve our help. Good luck with you all, whatever you choose to do."