The Terminals by Michael F. Stewart Page A

two leather straps looped about his neck. He drew the thinner of the two straps out. At its end was the crystal doorknob; his face distorted in its glass, but younger, fairer and—may the Aeon Sophia forgive his vanity—handsome. Strong jawed, and with a fierce brow and full lips. He chuckled and the sound was rich and sure.
    Attila had warned him that connections were fickle and the doorknob was only a focus for the psychic, some sort of inter-planar geodesic marker. Charlie lifted the doorknob to his lips, as if it were a CB.
    â€œThe whole Christian—just ask forgiveness thing? It now seems a better route,” he said. But he couldn’t be certain Attila could hear, yet another leap of faith. What was the lag time of messages sent between planes?
    To his surprise, Attila answered. It came with a whiff of coffee scent. “Happy hunting—”
    The flippant response recalled the memory of the big doctor’s final words. There will be no pain.
    Charlie licked his lips, and his grip tightened around the bulb of glass. “Go to hell,” he whispered.
    He fingered the thicker leather strap that hung around his neck and pulled what weighed there to his hand. The wooden gunstock was warm to touch and covered in the same symbols as his arms. The gunmetal shone blue, the barrel inscribed in black. After a short, straight length, the muzzle bloomed like an antique elephant gun. Charlie lowered it, braced the butt at his shoulder and fired. The runes at his arms flared, and a bolt shot through him and out the muzzle, shattering the bridge between two distant upper mesas. The recoil lanced through his shoulder, but it was already almost healed.
    Somewhere behind him a screech resounded, and he searched the rivers that swam about his mesa for the source, looking up at the sound of another second screech. Above, the ceiling ran with the arteries of a hundred luminescent tributaries. Deep within a great delta was a blur of darkness, and a thousand flapping wings. Something else shone beneath the fabric of Charlie’s robe but it was only a hint of color, and at the noise of whatever he’d awakened, he decided not to linger.
    He slung the shotgun across his back as he walked across the mesa to peer over the edge. The cliff dropped sheer to the river, easily a thousand feet below, running swiftly, and at times in alternate directions so that standing waves formed where they clashed. At the peak of the wave, another cloud formed, and flashed with an explosion that shook the earth beneath his leather boots. No bridge. No path down. His brow furrowed at the dilemma of how to get off the mesa.
    Charlie turned to look for the birds, bats, whatever came for him, and smiled. Set on its kickstand, leaned a motorbike shimmering with cerulean chrome and black glossy enamel. It gave Charlie his age. Twenty-one. The same age he’d last straddled a hog so fine. The same motorbike he’d inherited at Jo’s death and given up shortly after to join the monks. He jogged to it, the shoulder pain gone, and started the bike with a swift punch of his boot. When the chop had settled into a throaty beat, he shut his eyes and felt for Hillar.
    The first dart struck his side. Charlie cried out and fell off the bike, landing hard on one knee.
    With its long needlelike beak, the little bat-like creature had impaled itself deep in his flesh and was already becoming engorged. Another one shot into his shoulder and immediately braced its many talons into his flesh and suckled. Tears sprang to Charlie’s eyes, and he realized that these didn’t feast on his blood, their beaks sucked the marrow from his bone: bone-bats. He ripped their snouts from his body and stomped on the bats until their legs curled to their abdomens. A cloud of them neared, the whistling of wings urging him on, as they moved between bursts of exploding vapor.
    He mounted his bike and squeezed the throttle, aiming for a lip at the rim of the