Lydia almost got me for good, a few days later. Closest I came to total surrender, completely losing my soul to her, and it started with a trip to the grocery store.
She started nagging me after the sandwich, insisting that I get real food in the house. She said she needed to walk around in the real world anyway, and she didn’t trust me to do my own shopping, so I finally gave in.
She met me at the door in her human suit and said, “Don’t worry. I won’t touch you. I won’t touch anyone.” She paused. “I might touch the vegetables.”
I ran into trouble immediately, because all my old Judy reflexes were kicking in, and I couldn’t safely use any of them with her. Do you know how hard it is to walk down the street with a beautiful woman and not hold her hand? It almost drove me insane, before we even got to the door.
The HDI distribution center wasn’t exactly a grocery store, but they had groceries, and dad’s old discount card still worked. I wasn’t an active corporate employee, so I couldn’t just swipe whatever I wanted for free, but the discounts were still a lot better than retail.
Intellectually, I knew how long it had been since Lydia had seen the Earth, but I hadn’t really internalized how much new technology we had, or how much it would freak her out.
It started with the energy curtain at the front door, the open-air force field that let people walk freely in and out. Before I could stop her, she was hopping back and forth in and out of the field, just to feel the sensation on her skin.
That was the second time I almost touched her, reaching to grab her arm and pull her in before people started to stare. Then we got to the hovercarts. She immediately ducked down and started swiping her arm back and forth under it, watching the cart bob and weave as she disrupted the field. She would have crawled under it, right there in the store, if I hadn’t gotten in the way.
The trip took hours, because she insisted on sniffing every single item I tried to put in the cart. She rejected four different kinds of hamburger and lunch meat before finally allowing me to buy the most insanely expensive grass-fed beef they had in the organic aisle. I had never had enough money to even walk down the organic aisle before, and now she wouldn’t let me buy food from anywhere else.
Then she got to the produce and gave every item a full comprehensive sniff; not a polite little housewife sniff, but a deep forensic examination that made people stare.
She sniffed some eggs and a jug of milk and said, “Timothy, have they done something to the cows?”
“Cows? I haven’t seen a cow since Texas.”
She frowned. “I guess the milk is drinkable, but we really need to find a farm. And I don’t trust these white eggs. Get the brown ones, please. Once we have some money coming in, we may need to get our own animals.”
This grocery bill was going to be astronomical, and it would have been absolutely budget busting if I hadn’t negotiated an advance on the museum job. None of this food was processed, so that should have kept the cost down, but she was buying lumpy farm to market vegetables that I had never even touched before; stuff that would have required hours of frustrating preparation if I had tried to do it myself.
It had been so long since I’d tried to cook for myself, I had to buy new knives and all kinds of miscellaneous kitchen stuff. Finally, we assembled our mountain of meat and vegetables, swiped dad’s legacy discount card, and rented a delivery cart to get it home. Most people just did this kind of thing online, but I couldn’t trust drone drops this close to the Zone.
We unloaded the groceries at my front door and Lydia slipped her whole body under the cart before I could stop her, lying prone on the grass as she poked the bottom. Then she jumped in it, right there on the sidewalk, bouncing up and down, before jumping out and running her hands under it again.
Finally, she huffed at me and said, “It’s not magic, but it can’t possibly work.”
And that’s when she almost got me, in the kitchen, just putting up groceries.
* * *
She started doing it for me, grabbing items one at a time, asking me to point to where they go. I went to my grave remembering how she looked that day, wearing jeans and a loose yellow top, exposing her belly when she stretched. Hair down to her shoulders like always but imitating some modern cut she saw a woman wearing on the street.
She looked so normal, so sweet and human doing this ordinary human thing. Seeing her like that hit old, deep structures in my brain, triggering memories of simple domestic moments from childhood, when I still had two parents and a family that loved me. Remembering all those times with Judy, all the times I had her in Dad’s kitchen, lifting her onto that counter with her wearing nothing but my t-shirt, sliding my hands up and down her body, the kind of sex you can only have when you’re young, without a thought in your head.
I got up and brushed past her to grab a bag of oranges. My sneakered foot brushed her leg, and she was right there. My hands were already headed for her hips. In about ten seconds I was gonna have her on that counter, and a few minutes later, she would own me. A few months later, I’d be killing for her, and coming home every night to have her just like this, with a big smile on my face.
To this day, I don’t know how I stopped.
My hands stopped an inch from grabbing her, and I jumped back like she was on fire. I stumbled backwards two more steps and bellowed. “Get back on the wall! Change back to your natural form, and don’t ever look human around me again!”
My breath was coming in short, sharp gasps, almost hyperventilating with terror and desire. My voice was tight and panicked, seconds from a total breakdown.
“When you look like a demon, I can fight you. But this? When you look like this…” I hissed at her through clenched teeth. “When you look like this, I want you so bad I can’t take it. I thought I was stronger than this, but it’s been so long, I can’t…”
I was distracted by a strange sound and a rush of air. My new knives were vibrating on the counter. The glass top of my dining table was shaking like it was about to crack, and my aura was so bright in the visible spectrum, my living room looked like dawn.
I had never felt the magic like this, strangling me, drowning me, coming in so fast, building like a giant wave at my back.
I hit my front door at full speed, running all out like a child running from a nightmare, desperate to find one of Nergal’s footprints, and get clear of innocent people before this wave hit.
* * *
I ran faster than I had in years, trying to outrun a bomb building up inside my own body. The sun was almost down by the time I hit the closest footprint and felt the magic hit. It was just like the rift, trapped in the center, while the storm raged all around.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
My aura was blazing white, throwing flames and shadows in the visible spectrum. Every muscle in my body was tense and shaking with the effort of it, trying desperately to keep this power outside of me.
I was still so angry, I couldn’t relax. I could hardly breathe. In a few minutes, my strength would fail, and the storm would have me. The only safe option was to use it, to bring the magic in and direct it to something, to limit the damage and make sure nobody got hurt.
“Fine! Fuck it!” I shouted aloud. “Let’s see what a full tank feels like!”
I jerked my head up, spread my arms, and gave myself to the storm. The magic felt so good coming in, better than the rift because this was real Earth magic, answering my call, so strong and pure, I felt like I could do anything.
I hit some kind of threshold and the power started to surge out of me uncontrolled, releasing every few seconds in a perfect circle of blazing white light. Not just visible in the gray, this was happening in the real world, hot enough to cause real damage.
Whump. Dead yellow grass crisping to black as the light hit it.
Whump. Old bottles, cans and trash blasted and burning in a circle at my feet.
Whump. Old dead tree shedding limbs and starting to smoke.
The circle was getting bigger and stronger each time. If I didn’t do something fast, it would start smashing buildings.
I still only knew one spell, so I cast levitate with five symbols and looked for the heaviest thing I could see. One of the old skyscrapers was tilted, exposing rebar with a chunk of foundation still attached. I grabbed as much as I could and poured all my power into moving it. No way I could move something that big, so I figured I could just focus everything into one spot and wear myself out.
It was already working. The overload stopped and the concrete chunk started to glow. My aura went dark as the power concentrated there, with just a little flicker left in my eyes. It felt fantastic, like a real workout, like I was trying to lift that building with my bare hands.
I focused my power to a pinpoint, until I was finally using more than I had coming in, feeling more control as the spell bled magic off, calming me down. Then the concrete slab cracked somewhere underground, and I heard the shriek of rusted metal as the building started to fall.
I panicked and tried to shift focus, taking my eyes off the foundation, trying to control how this thing was gonna fall. The levitation spell was incredibly difficult to control in any direction other than up and down, so I had to push the building sideways in short bursts to keep it from falling on me.
I was finally able to tilt it back in the opposite direction, but for a few seconds, I swear I was levitating the whole damn thing, before I finally relaxed and let it collapse into the river.
And then I was just Tim Kovak again, standing alone in Nergal’s footprint, desperately hoping nobody saw that. I looked down and realized I had stopped in the exact center of it, without even trying.
* * *
Lydia was back on her perch when I got home, obviously terrified, but incredibly relieved to see me. When I turned the light on, it looked like she had been crying, but that had to be fake, right?
“It’s okay,” I said. “Power is gone. Nobody got hurt.”
I grabbed a bottle of tea from the fridge and slumped in my chair. “I’m gonna be pretty pissed if it turns out my magic is powered by sexual frustration. At least you’ll still have a job.”
* * *
“I’m just glad it took you a couple weeks to figure out that costume change. If you’d hit me with that the first week, I would be…”
“You would be what,” she snapped, “you would be sleeping in my arms right now? Timothy, there is no prize for resisting me. Deny me for a thousand years and it won’t change one word of that contract. You are suffering for no reason.
“I know you’re scared of doing missions, but I promise, by the time we send you out, you will be happier, healthier, and stronger than you have ever been. It’s the same story every time. Your ancestors started just like you, afraid of conflict, afraid of their power, then they realize how easy it is and come back to celebrate. The night after your first mission will be even better than our first time. I can’t wait for you to see.”
* * *
“I’ve never seen a Kovach like you,” Lydia said. “Completely immune to promises of wealth and power, but ready to charge the gates of Hell for a girl in blue jeans and a home-cooked meal. What happened to you? What happened to your world, to make you like this?”
“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “I guess it’s the way I grew up. I don’t take little stuff for granted anymore. We moved to the compound in ‘45, a month or so after money stopped working in the U.S. I remember them constantly playing the clip of the president on TV. ‘This isn’t the end of this great country; this is just a bump in the road.’ And the name stuck. Thirteen years later, they still call it the Bump.
“We should have been protected when the president declared a mortgage freeze, but I think dad stopped paying on it months before the first bank failure. They were about to send the sheriff to take our house, and we missed the bus to the FEMA camp, so he called his Texas buddies, and suddenly I was in the back of this dirty old truck, sucking gas fumes and bouncing on dirt roads for hours until we were at this big ranch in the middle of nowhere.
“It was just a long camping trip at first, until we started to run out of food, and had to start living on fish, vegetable gardens, and whatever the men could shoot. We were cold, filthy, and hungry most of the time, but I was so happy.
“Suddenly I had all these adults around, and everybody wanted to talk to me. Everybody else sent their kids to a new place in the mountains when food started running out, so I was the only child left in camp. At twelve years old, I went from barely having a dad to having like twelve dads.
“They kept trying to teach me things I hated, like fishing, hunting, planting stuff, and shooting guns. I shot at deer a few times, but I never hit one. Animal insides smell so bad. That’s how I knew when I got really hungry - when I didn’t mind dressing game anymore, and finally started to like feral hog meat. One of the men tried to feed me a pig heart once, but I couldn’t choke it down.
“Finally, Mister Braddock realized what kind of boy I was and took me to the radio room, where I was really useful for the first time, helping him rig packet networks and bootleg satellite comms to connect us with other groups.
“My own dad would still barely talk to me, but at night I could stand by the fire and be with the other dads. They would joke with me and make up nicknames for me and ask if I liked girls, just to watch me squirm.
“They tried to hide what they were planning, but I saw the email traffic weeks before they did it. They were planning a coordinated protest, a massive demonstration surrounding a dozen distro centers at once. That’s what they called it: a protest, but everybody was bringing guns, and everybody knew, if they wouldn’t give us food, we were gonna take it.
“But they were ready for us. Somebody tipped off the feds, I guess, because by the time our guys showed up at the campuses, everything was protected by armed drones and autoguns. I saw some of it on video, long after it was over. Not guys I knew, thank god, but enough to be sure what happened to them.
“Robots don’t care if you throw your gun down. Robots don’t care if you run away. Robots don’t even care if you lay down with your hands behind your head. All robots care about is a friend or foe badge, and if you don’t have one, you are just fuckin’ dead.
“Dad and I left the day before the attack. We snuck out in the middle of the night and got picked up in this fancy flying car from HDI. They flew us to a corporate octagon in Providence, and I never saw any of them again.
“I missed it so much. I was never lonely in the compound. The Braddocks treated me like their own son. Sure, sometimes you went to bed hungry, and sometimes you had to sleep too close to the fire to stay warm, but I was important. I wasn’t “stupid” or “lazy” or “in the way” like I always was at home. Grown men counted on me to do my job when I was only twelve years old.
“It’s funny, the time I spent there, learning to do grown up work was the only time I got to be a child.” I lowered my head like I was talking to myself. “It didn’t matter if your dad was drunk because you had twelve other dads, and it didn’t matter if your mom was dead, because you had like six moms. You could walk up to any one of them and they would hug you and feed you and put a band-aid on…” My voice cracked and I sobbed silently, fighting to control myself while my shoulders shook.
Lydia started to come down and I snapped at her, “Stay away from me!”
She scrambled backwards and leapt back to her perch, like I had just slapped her in the face.
I coughed and wiped my eyes. “I can’t believe I’m crying in front of…” I took a deep breath to steady myself. “All the women lived. And the children. The wives did federal time, but they only had to serve a few years before the amnesty. I’ll never be sure about the men. I’m not stupid, okay? I know they’re dead. Even if I can’t find the records, I know they’re dead. I just… Sometimes I dream about them, that they ran away and hid in the mountains or something, and one day they’ll just come down and be with their families again.”
I looked up at Lydia. “If I’m any kind of man at all, it’s because of those guys. Everybody knows Captain Cobalt is my hero, but really, he’s just the only one I have a poster of.”