Oblivion Stone. James Axler

not a man given to introspection, Edwards was taken aback. “I think you want to be careful what you breathe in around here,” was all he could think to say. “Lot of nasty crap in the atmosphere just now. Quake churned up a lot of shit.”

      The stubbled man nodded. “Thank you, sir. Won’t you stay and help us to rebuild?”

      Edwards smiled and shook his head. “Not today, ace.”

      As the people stood watching the strangers in their midst, grease from one of the cooking birds spit and the fire flared brighter for a second.

      Wary of the locals around them, Edwards and Domi made their way slowly out of the sunken building, both of them feeling somewhat unsettled by what they had seen.

      “Seven of them,” Edwards growled, “and they’re planning on rebuilding a ville. Waiting for the new baron to appear. Crazy.”

      “The villes do shitty things to people,” Domi told him. “Mangle them.” She glanced back, confirming that no one was following them.

      “But there’s no barons anymore,” Edwards pointed out. “They all vanished and became overlords. So what’s drawing these people back?”

      Domi stopped for a moment, fixing Edwards with her demonic eyes. “Like I said, the villes mangle people. Give them tangle-brain. The Outlanders know this, and that’s why we didn’t come to the villes unless we had to.”

      Edwards looked at the petite woman, his brow furrowed in confusion. “Didn’t you grow up in Cobaltville, Domi?” he asked.

      “No,” Domi told him, shaking her head. “Settled there for money. Saw the way people were on the inside.”

      “Hah.” Edwards laughed. “You make it sound like a prison.”

      Domi said nothing. While she had recognized the differences in ville dwellers from Outlanders, she had never seen anything quite like this—people coming back, choosing to live in the ruins while they waited for the next epoch to begin. It was almost as if the villes themselves had some kind of magnetic pull over their citizens. Domi, who had spent a portion of her life as a sex slave in Cobaltville, knew little of the scientific principles of magnetism, but she understood fatal attraction all too well.

      Outside of the wrecked skeleton that had once been a building, Domi and Edwards found Harrington sitting on a mound of rubble that looked out over the ruined streets. He had found three chunks of rubble and was juggling them while he waited for his partners.

      “You find anything?” Harrington asked when he noticed Edwards and Domi approaching.

      “What do you think you’re doing, man?” Edwards barked. “This is a danger zone—gotta keep alert.”

      “I am alert,” Harrington replied petulantly. “You think I can juggle like this when I’m asleep?”

      Edwards shook his head, muttering something about eccentric scientists.

      “We found a wannabe Magistrate,” Domi explained, “and a group of people waiting for the next baron.”

      Harrington sighed. “And so the system reboots itself,” he said. “Are we reverting back to…well, the Deathlands era? Jumped-up little barons fighting it out for their little piece of land?”

      “There’s no baron,” Edwards clarified. “They just think there will be. So they’re waiting here, eating rats and setting up a hierarchy of Magistrates to keep the peace.”

      Domi looked around her, taking in the ruined structures of the ville once more, seeing the mangled struts where its old Administrative Monolith had once stood noble and proud. “Somehow, the villes call to people,” she said. “Like boys in heat, hormones drawing them to the honey trap.”

      Edwards shook his head. “You may be right, but it’s all way over my head.”

      Chapter 2

      “They say that the gods came from the sky,” Papa Hurbon said as he led the three-strong party through the Djévo room, his wooden leg clomping on the decking of the floor.

      Ohio Blue’s response was to offer the man an indulgent smile. “I never held much stock in gods,” she admitted as they walked through the large room of the wooden shack, its air as hot and as damp as the night sweats.

      Ohio Blue had brought two bodyguards with her—a man and a woman—who followed her and Hurbon as they paced slowly through the room, moving just as fast as Hurbon’s false leg would allow. As per the rules of the meeting, her bodyguards were unarmed, and in return Hurbon had kept his own people out of sight, though it was understood that they could appear in a moment upon his request.

      Blue felt the man’s eyes play across her for a moment. She was a tall, slender woman in her midthirties, and her thick, long blond hair was cut in a peekaboo style, leaving only her left eye boldly visible. The eye was a brilliant blue, dazzling as a polished sapphire. She wore loose combat-style pants with a silk vest top that shimmered as she moved. Over this, despite the stifling heat of the Louisiana afternoon, was a neatly tailored jacket that was cut short, reaching barely to the small of her back. Her clothes, like her name, were blue.

      “You ever meet one?” Papa Hurbon asked, his voice so low it sounded like the rumbling of distant thunder.

      Hurbon was a large man, both tall and corpulent, with the lustrous, dark skin of an octoroon. His skin glistened with free-flowing rivulets of perspiration, which he wiped from his heavy brow as they trudged through the Djévo, passing glass jars filled with herbs, feathers, snail shells and other curios. Hurbon wore a sweat-stained undershirt and cutoffs, with a homemade sandal on his remaining foot. His right leg was missing below the knee, and a wooden strut had been shoved in its place that he used to totter forward with a lunging, rolling gait that looked as though he might overbalance at any moment. Hurbon’s shaved head was shaped like a bullet, wide at the bottom and tapering at the top, and when he smiled it was a gap-toothed maw that seemed to engulf the whole width of that impressive, bucketlike jaw. Both of Hurbon’s ears were pierced in multiple places, both at the lobes and along the archlike helix of the ear, and what appeared to be two tiny fetus skeletons depended from their bulbous lobes.

      “I’ve never had that pleasure,” she admitted, her long blond tresses sweeping across her back as Ohio Blue shook her head.

      Hurbon offered his wide, all-encompassing smile. “Ain’t no pleasure,” he told her. “You can take my word for that. Ezili Coeur Noir came here one time, ’bout a year ago. Mad bitch took my leg. Laughed the whole time she was doing it, too. When she was done she held it up before my congregation, blood spittin’ everywhere, and she laughed and told them to do the same. Mad bitch.”

      Ohio blanched at the story. “And did they?”

      Hurbon’s brow creased in a frown. “Did they what?”

      “Remove their legs?”

      Hurbon nodded. “Some did,” he said, resignation in his voice. “They wanted her blessing, lizard-skinned vision that she was. That sound crazy to you, Mam’selle?”

      “Like I said, I never held much stock in gods,” Ohio told the corpulent man as they passed through an arched doorway and into the center of the voodoo temple.

      Papa Hurbon stopped for a moment, openly admiring Blue’s shapely figure from head to toe. “With the gams on you, that’s probably for the best, little peach,” he said with a rich basso laugh.

      Through the archway, the inner room was much smaller than the Djévo, roughly square and just nine feet from wall to wall. Lit by candles, this was a mirrored room, wherein one side balanced the other. Thus, it featured a door to the far side, precisely opposing the one that Ohio’s party had entered. Several figures could be seen milling about in the room beyond that far doorway, and Ohio’s bodyguards tensed as they eyed them through the gloom.

      This inner room was uncluttered, holding just a few objects. A polished broadsword