Published at 8th of March 2024 7:45 am

Book 2, Chapter 22

This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl

The cops saw us coming and drew their guns. There were five of them, with three cars parked across the end of the offramp. I waited for them to slump to the ground, but they must still be out of Alice’s range as one cop opened fire. The bullet hit the front of the car, making Alice and I curse. I gathered energy to form the bulletproof wall and surprised myself with how easily it came together. In half a second, I formed a shield in front of the car, covering the front and a good deal more with barely any effort. I had to stop myself from doing a mad scientist laugh.

You see, I didn’t have a lot of time to test the Mantle back home. I made sure it was working and wouldn’t blow up, then packed it away so I wouldn’t piss off Alice even more with another delay. The tests I did were mostly about how far away it would extend my reach, if it empowered me at all, etc. But nothing really hammered in results like seeing them in a combat situation.

You could say I was more than a little delighted with the final product.

After the first cop shot at us, it seemed whatever restraint the other cops were holding on to evaporated. Bullets began to hit my shield. I barely felt the strain as the cops were likely only firing 9mm.

We were about a hundred and fifty feet away when Alice suddenly hit the brakes. Simultaneously, the cops rag-dolled and fell to the ground one by one.

“Hold on!” Alice yelled.

We were going fast, and also downhill, with a missing tire. A hundred and fifty feet wasn’t a lot of space to slow down. I quickly flooded the inside of the car with porous textured telekinetic magic, holding everyone in place with the exception of Alice’s arms and legs. I wasn’t about to be bounced around the car again.

The car collided with the roadblock going about twenty miles an hour. We all rattled around my impromptu collision cage, but the collision was mild otherwise. I released us from the magic and looked around. “Everyone okay?”

“Yes,” Ida said with a shake of her head.

“Boof!”

“I’m going to need an entire bottle of painkillers,” Alice muttered while rubbing her temples.

I slammed all the doors open with my magic, as a couple of them didn’t want to open and decided to just give them all the rough treatment. I climbed out of the car, patting myself down as I did. Where was the Webley? Oh God, I hope it didn’t fly out the window during one of the crashes.

I sent my magic into the car and found the gun under the passenger seat. I breathed a sigh of relief as I tugged it out and put it in its holster, glancing up at the freeway as I did. I didn’t see the demon truck, but I also couldn’t see the freeway proper from down here either.

“One of you is going to have to drive,” Alice groaned as she climbed out of the car, holding her head with one hand. “Taking out five people at that distance took a lot out of me.”

Bogo scrambled out of the car and shook himself, bits of broken glass falling out of his fur. He gave me a look that interpreted as “This is a lot more than I signed on for.” I gave him a helpless look.

I looked at Ida. “I could—”

She shook her head. “We need your magic,” she said as she grabbed all the guns from the car and moved to one of the undamaged police cars. She looked through the window and squinted her eyes for a bit. “This one has the keys in it.”

She opened the door and tossed her guns in the passenger seat. Then she came back to the Honda and kicked open the trunk, taking more of my arsenal and moving it to the cop car. I went over to help Alice out. “You okay?” I asked.

She was rubbing her temples. “Yeah, just need a few minutes—”

My danger sense screamed. I dove into her in a tackle while throwing up a telekinetic shield around us.

A second later, half a dozen spikes punched into the wall of magic. I groaned as I felt every impact, like a hammer blow on my mind. These things were way stronger than the three that hit my car. I looked over my shoulder to see the six barbs floating in the air, barely arrested by my magic.

Beyond them, coming down the hill to the left of the offramp, was the pissed-off demon truck. It was sporting a new… organ? Sprouting off the side of where the cab used to be. I hesitate to call it a head, even though it is vaguely round because the only defining feature on it was a mass of little two to four-inch cilia that waved in the air in patterns. You could even tell where it was looking because the patterns flowed in the direction of its targets. You know; us.

I dropped my magic and helped Alice up. “Come on, up, up, up,” I urged, glancing over my shoulder as the thing came barreling down at us. The protuberances on its back started to pulse, looking like it was about to fire another salvo. I heard a rattling of metal as Ida grabbed what she could from my trunk and tossed it into the cop car before sliding into the driver's seat.

Alice got the point from my shoving and ran toward the police car, growling under her breath in pain. She slid over the hood Dukes of Hazard style and opened the passenger door, with Bogo jumping in right on her. Alice looked ready to protest but resigned herself to sit with the not-dog and closed the door. I opened the back door and my foot had barely touched the floor seat before Ida gunned the engine and peeled out onto a 4-lane street in the San Fernando hills. At least, I think this is San Fernando. Where the fuck are we? I awkwardly yanked myself into the car while avoiding the door closing on my leg.

“Where the fuck are we?” I asked as I turned and looked at the demon truck. What is that? Was that a boulder in its hand?

“LEFT!” I screamed.

Ida calmly cranked the wheel to the left as I gathered my magic in a ball and shoved it at the boulder. I grunted as the magic and the rock came in contact, the backlash was immense but… also muted? I had a feeling the Mantle took care of some of the magical recoil.

Ida’s dodge and my magic were enough to move the boulder off course. It slammed into the road to our right and disintegrated into hundreds of pieces, the force of the crash felt even through the floor of the car. The car fishtailed a bit from the sudden maneuver before Ida got it under control again.

“Where the fuck did it get a boulder?” Alice asked, eyes wide.

A sudden anger flooded me. I’d largely fallen back into my reactive mindset when we were attacked, similar to what happened last year on the cruise. Fuck that and fuck them.

“Take us into the hills,” I said.

Ida nodded and started scanning the roads we were passing. Alice suddenly pointed. “There!”

Ida dodged a minivan before swinging the car around and going up a two-lane road that only had a few buildings here and there. I noticed some horse paddocks in a couple of properties. A few seconds later, the truck came crashing onto the street, ignoring the intersection for a shortcut of going right through a house. Oh, Christ. I hope no one was home.

As we raced down the road with the truck slowly gaining, I pulled out the Webley and reloaded it. I took the three bullets I hadn’t fired yet and stuffed them in my pocket, pulling out one of the speed loaders I have been keeping on me since leaving Alice’s place. I almost took the time to collect the spent brass, but discarded them as I placed the speed loader (it’s harder to get.455 ammo than regular.45). I snapped the breach closed and felt the gun practically hum with anticipation.

“Breaking a window,” I said.

The next moment, the rear windshield exploded out as my magic forced the glass from its housing along with the cage above the back seat, which I assumed was there to keep suspects from damaging the glass. I aimed the Webley down the road at the truck, bracing my arms against the back seat.

But just as I was getting ready to fire, the things on the back of the truck suddenly lurched forward and my danger sense warned me. I threw out my magic with a grunt, solidifying it into a multi-layered defense. It wasn’t enough.

Every time that thing fired, the projectiles seemed to get stronger by an order of magnitude. The first spike hit my shield with more power than all the bullets of the cops combined, making me strain. The second and third felt like cannonballs. I quickly changed the shape of the defense to angle the force away, but I wasn’t in time for the fourth spike. It slammed into my defenses and I groaned, barely keeping up the shield. The fifth hit the plane at an angle and skittered off to the side.

The sixth broke through.

Pain exploded in my abdomen as the spike broke my telekinesis, punched through the trunk of the cop car, through the backseat before embedding itself into the side of my belly. I screamed and fell back against the cage separating the front and back of the car.

“Colm?!” Ida said, looking in the rearview.

“Are you okay?” Alice said, then gasped when she saw what was wrong. Bogo was whining.

I growled through my teeth and got up awkwardly, pain lancing up my side as the movements forced me to use my core muscles. The low growl I was making became a roar as I fought through the pain and once again drew a bead on the truck, which had gained significantly with Ida’s distraction.

“Fuck you,” I said and squeezed the trigger again and again, in half-second intervals.

The first shot connected next to the new growth, blowing a chunk out of the top of the truck. The second shot went just below that. The truck tried to break away after the second shot, but I followed it, putting two more shots into its side as it crashed off the road and out of the side, my final shots digging small craters into the road.

“Pull over!” I yelled.

The girls flinched at the double harmonic that had crept into my voice. Ida complied, sliding the car to a stop. I scooted to the door, but it wouldn’t open. I realized I was in a cop car and tore the door off the car with my magic, my rage making me impatient.

I held the spike in my side with my left hand while I reloaded the Webley awkwardly with my magic, walking to where I had last seen the demon truck. Blood oozed from the wound, but it wasn’t gushing, so I wasn’t in any immediate danger.

As I approached the two still-smoking craters the Webley had made in the asphalt, I began to hear the noises of the truck. At least, what I assumed belonged to the truck. The noises sound wet, with hisses that sounded more like pneumatic breaks. A few more steps and I saw the path of damage it did to the plants and trees that had been on the side of the road during its evasive maneuver.

I rounded a patch of dry vegetation, the truck coming into sight. It was trying to put itself back together, pushing the masses of flesh together that had fallen apart from the force of my gun. I lifted the Webley and fired, aiming for the densest cluster of limbs.

The truck, or whatever was controlling it, obviously didn’t think I’d come back for it. It shuddered, still mostly silent except for the wet slopping and pneumatic hisses. It started to claw toward me, but I fired three more times into its center mass. The third shot caused some chain reaction, and I could finally see the distinct red and white U-Haul design under the mounds of flesh. I fired again, creating a hole in the metal.

As I approached, I formed my magic into a long blade. It had occurred to me that if I can form my magic into a porous surface, or a hard pane of force, why not a blade? As an arm darted for me, I used my new blade made of magic to swipe at it and was elated when the arm went flying. The feedback was more than I expected, so I wouldn’t be able to use it often, but it was another way to defend myself. I used it twice more to cut off another pair of limbs that darted for me. I was lucky I was near the hold I had made because I don’t think I could have used it again.

Gritting my teeth, I climbed across the gory and slime-covered flesh and into the truck. There were several smears on the ground that I recognized from Alice’s description of what happened to the cultists we killed, but there were two more lying insensate in the corner of the truck. The third and final figure stood above a summoning circle, made with the classic pentagram and blood.

Now that I got a good look at him, I was kind of impressed. The robe looked like it was made from a high-quality material, and I could feel the energies woven into it. The dagger in his sash also emitted sadistic magics, obviously something used for nefarious ends. The last time I encountered these assholes, they looked like a bunch of drunks on Halloween.

“You will ne—”

The man didn’t get to finish his sentence, because I scraped my magic across the circle he was standing over with the full force of my will. The connection he was maintaining crumbled, and I felt the truck settle around us as the flesh that had animated the truck suddenly went limp. The backlash from the interrupted ritual made the cultist shriek in pain—which was also interrupted as I walked over and pistol-whipped him.

I sighed and holstered the Webley. The “demon” truck wasn’t an actual demon, just a projection from this ritual. Now that it was interrupted, the flesh outside should begin to disintegrate.

Alice and Ida found me dragging the cultist outside the van, the mounds of demonic flesh beginning to putrefy. “Once you’re up to it, you think you can dig in this guy’s brain?” I asked. “He might know where Conner is.”

Alice nodded, but she was looking at me with worry. Same with Ida. I sighed as I dropped the cultist on the ground.

“We’ll talk about it,” I said, looking back at the truck. As the flesh began to melt over the truck, I looked down at the stake in my side. It was also deteriorating, but not to the degree of the truck. I guess because it was denser.

“Fuck,” I said.

“Let’s get back to the car,” Alice said as she crossed over and lifted the cultist over her shoulder with a grunt. “We’ll find a safe place to patch you up.”

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