him to pick it up the first time had deserted him. Or maybe the subliminal chant hadn’t started yet. He looked at a TV monitor and saw big digital clock numbers in the middle of the stage’s proscenium arch of lighting gantries. 11:52. Whatever was coming, it wouldn’t happen until midnight. And the song would be done before then.
Orlando felt his passion for the tune draining away, but kept on anyway, until it ended. He heard the telltale pop of his mic being cut off. Tom had another and was speaking into it. Orlando shouted that no one should listen to him, but he was drowned out.
“All right, people!” Tom called. “You having a good time, Brussels?” The crowd roared. “I can’t hear you!” The crowd roared louder. Orlando had always hated that kind of by-the-book audience rousing. So that’s how the world ends; not with a bang, but with a cliché. “Are you ready? Are you ready for the sky to come alive? Are you ready for the unveiling moment of the Ochykyk Project? Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome a visionary. A true friend, to me and to humanity. A man you’re really going to get to know in the months ahead. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in giving it up for the founder and CEO of Ochykyk International, Maxim Zhakharenko!”
Zhakharenko strolled out from the wings, wearing an all-white suit with purple shirt and pocket handkerchief. He clasped his hands together and shook them over his head in the international sign for meaningless victory. Tom handed him the mic, and he launched into a speech so full of clunky generalities Orlando could scarcely process it. He saw Tom rushing over to him, anger in his stride. Tom grabbed for the mic stand. Orlando didn’t know why he wanted it, but the mere fact that he did was enough to want to keep it from him. Orlando yanked it away and held on for dear life.
“Give me that!” Tom growled.
Orlando stuck out his tongue. He glanced significantly over Tom’s shoulder at the crowd gathered at the front of the stage. “You’re looking like a clown again,” Orlando said. Shaking with thwartedness, Tom withdrew, stalking back past Zhakharenko, who was still yakking away blissfully. The crowd began to chant impatiently. Orlando’s eyes followed Tom as he strode into the wings, looked around, saw what he wanted on a wall, and made a beeline for it. He grabbed it down and set it against a speaker, just out of the audience’s sight line. It was a fire axe.
Tom crossed back to the Russian sorcerer’s side. “...My pleasure that the honors of our inaugural launch be performed by this man. People all across the world, please welcome our host for tonight, and the driving creative force behind your favorite band, The Dogs—Please welcome Tom Lockhart!” As he said this, another riser came up from the floor, this one bearing a chrome and plexiglass lectern, on top of which rested a sleek black laptop computer. Tom cracked his fingers together and headed for its keyboard.
You scum-sucking rat bastard, Orlando thought. Deceptive gloating! That whole business about not having to worry about the stars being right because, he, Orlando, would be the sacrifice, as the perfect object of Tom’s love and hate—that was all a load of the finest-grade bushwah, meant to mislead him from what was really going on, just in case he figured out how to stop it. It was the Ochykyk Project that would make the ritual possible again. Those mirrors wouldn’t beam down light onto its specially selected cities. They’d be arranged in the pattern of the conjoined constellations the summoning required. The Ochykyk Project was nothing more than a multi-million dollar technological effort to make the stars right! And sure enough, as if to confirm Orlando’s realization, the cheezy synth fanfare that arose as Tom readied himself to activate the satellites rang with those hidden notes, the digitally encoded incantation. The ritual had begun, and Orlando was still chained to the spot.
He looked up into the sky. It rippled, bulged. He glanced back at Carlo, curled up into a ball behind his drum kit, moaning like a gut-shot dog. He looked up at the sky again. A giant eye coalesced there, he was sure of it.
He examined the loops of microphone cord in his hand, mentally assessing their length. The last time Tom tried this, Orlando drew on the hallowed hymnal of Saint Pete Townsend, delivering righteousness with a windmilling arm blasting across the strings of his guitar. Now he would have to invoke the flipside of that transcendental duality, invoking the bravura and precision-swung microphone of Saint Roger Daltrey. Orlando whipped the mic around his head to charge it up with kinetic energy, and, focusing all of his being on his inner Daltrey, let go of the cord, watching it as it flew unerringly towards the notebook computer. It flew to pieces, its crystal screen detaching and thwacking Zhakharenko in the upper thigh. Keyboard keys exploded everywhere, landing like a rain of frogs on the metallic stage.
An angry scream shook the sky as the ripple shimmied, quavered, and imploded. An angrier scream flew from the open mouth of Tom Lockhart. Orlando wasn’t certain, but he thought he heard the words ‘no’, ‘you’, ‘bastard’ and ‘done it again!’ Tom ran to the fire axe and turned to charge. The stage, a good sixty feet wide, gave him plenty of space to pick up momentum.
Ack, Orlando thought. He felt the mic stand, warm against his now-chilly hand. What was so important about this, anyway? He unscrewed the connecting ring that held the stand’s two pieces together. The base dropped away, revealing ten inches of razor-sharp, machine-honed spear head. This was the weapon Tom had planned to use to sacrifice him, after the sky opened and the hungry entities made themselves welcome in the material plane. Very nasty. Orlando looked up. Tom, axe upraised, was fifteen feet away. Ten. He didn’t have time to think. Did he really want to—
Orlando held the stand up, bracing to receive Tom’s charge. He saw Tom’s eyes widen at the last moment, the realization in them that the charge was too far along to be reversed. The axe flew wildly overhead as Tom’s chest landed on the gleaming blade. He fell further into the impaling haft, the blade poking out his back, coated in gore. His eyes fluttered open as Orlando released the stand and he sank to the stage floor.
“You’ll be—you’ll be—without me,” Tom choked, blood gouting in rhythmic pulses from his mouth. Orlando put a hand on his old friend’s forehead. He wasn’t sure what it was supposed to accomplish, but many hours of television watching suggested that it was the thing to do in this circumstance.
“Don’t use up any breath,” Orlando said. All around him rang the sounds of chaos. Just like before, the dissipated, frustrated energy of the whatevers from beyond had seeped into the crowd, which was going wild: setting things on fire, hurting each other, performing acts of orgiastic violence. In his peripheral vision, he glimpsed Zhakharenko as reaching arms pulled him down into the mosh pit.
“Orl—Orlando,” Tom said.
“Ssshh. Shssh.”
“Orlando—I don’t know why I did it, either.” Then he gasped for a little while more, like he wasn’t getting enough air, and died.
Kacie and Carlo sat together, Indian-style, on the stage. They stared out onto the expanse of a trashed and deserted stadium. Some of the seats still smoldered as fire crews took their leisurely time dousing the last of the small fires. Carlo was already reciting the twelve steps, promising himself that this little setback wasn’t going to affect him. The heroin had not been his decision. Outside of his control. But he would resume control. Maybe he would find a new cabin, somewhere else. New Mexico, perhaps, or Utah. Kacie just listened, patting him on the hand.
Orlando walked over to join them, having concluded yet another brief conversation with a representative of the local police. He had not been through this drill so many times, not compared to Mom and Grandma, but he had the grounding to see where it was headed. The locals would handle the case gingerly until the specialists arrived. They’d help craft the cover story, fan out to find and eliminate any remaining clues. Orlando would cooperate fully with their effort.
“No sign of Zhakharenko?” Kacie asked.
Orlando shook his head. “I could have sworn I saw the crowd get him, but there’s no trace. He could have been torn apart, I guess, but, with his powers, it’s more likely he scarpered. Th
e specialists are probably raiding all known Ochykyk facilities as we speak. Maybe they’ll find a paper trail, who knows?”
“Think we’ll have to worry about him now, coming back for vengeance?”
“Dunno. He presented himself as not the type to take it personal.”
Kacie punched buttons on a borrowed cell phone. Her previous calls had already located Sphinc at the hospital in Wellsboro. Now she was arranging for flowers and reading material.
Orlando drifted over to the spot, stage left. The paramedics had already carted away Tom’s remains. What was that second last thing he’d had tried to say, anyway? Orlando would be what without Tom? Freed?
Or lost?
About the Author
The novels of author and game designer Robin D. Laws include Pierced Heart, The Rough and the Smooth, and The Worldwound Gambit. Robin created the GUMSHOE investigative roleplaying rules system and such games as Feng Shui, The Dying Earth, The Esoterrorists and Ashen Stars. Find his blog, a cavalcade of film, culture, games, narrative structure and gun-toting avians, at robindlaws.com.
Look for New Tales of the Yellow Sign, Robin’s upcoming short story collection of weird tales and fractured mental states,