Marnie sat down again, still wary. “I don’t know. They said there were…landslides.”
“Landslides” was an obvious euphemism. I wondered what for as I made a show of letting my shoulders slump. “Aw. All the heat and steam making a mess of the underlying soil, you think? Maybe I can find someplace rockier—”
Marnie said, “No,” sharply, then curled her lip. “I mean, maybe, but they said—they were up pretty high, where the treeline stopped on that snub-faced mountain, so there wasn’t much soil. Rock slides, not landslides, I guess. I just don’t think anybody should be out there.”
“You’re probably right.” I finished my salad and had another sip of milkshake. “That’s the best vanilla shake I’ve ever had.”
That restored her ease and earned me a smile. “It’s our specialty. We’ve got customers who drive out from Spokane and Olympia once or twice a month for a Sunday brunch with milkshakes.” Her smile faded as she looked toward the steamy windows. “They’re not going to keep coming if the river keeps boiling. I don’t know what I’ll do if this place closes. There aren’t a lot of jobs out here.”
“I’m sure it’ll settle down. These things do.” Another customer came in as I spoke. Marnie gave me another smile, grateful if disbelieving, and got up to say, “Sit anywhere,” and offer menus. I put a twenty down on the table and left. She would think it was over-tipping of the finest degree, but to my mind, I was paying for information as well as the meal. I knew more—a little more—than I had when I’d sat down, and that was worth a lot.
In the car I pulled up a web interface and put in a search for boiling rivers, dry pipes, rock slides and supernatural origins. An unsurprisingly short list came back to me. I opened the most-likely looking pages onto the windshield and scanned them, thinking that Joanne would have skipped this step. She could afford to rush in where angels feared to tread, though. All I had was combat training and silver bullets. I’d never met anything that specifically had to die by silver, but I hadn’t met much that wouldn’t. Better safe than sorry.
Most of the search hits were a miss. The one that looked most promising also looked the least promising, as in “Don’t be stupid, Ash: call Joanne in on this one,” least-promising. Demons and godlings were out of my league. I double-checked the data from the normal channels against the undernet sites most often used by adepts like Joanne and reapers like me, and didn’t come up with anything better. Either I was on the money, or the thing I was chasing was so obscure not even the connected world-wide efforts of scholars, demon hunters, and magic-users could had a database entry for it.
I cleared the windshield and muttered, “Joanne’s mobile,” to the car, which phoned her as I pulled out of the diner’s parking lot. Her phone went to voice mail, which made me check the time. No, I wasn’t calling at a bad hour, she just wasn’t picking up. Fair enough. “Hey, Jo, this is Ash. I’m heading for Keechelus Lake and maybe a Sumerian demon. If you’re not busy this afternoon I could probably use your help. The river’s boiling and the mythology says a god killed this demon back in the day. Give me a call if you can make it.” I hung up, drove back toward the lake, and pulled off the road where the bushes along the roadside were densest.
It wasn’t dense enough, to my eyes. I backtracked to fluff grass up where I’d stepped on it, and to drag deadfall into more of a blockade, but I still thought the car stood out like a sore thumb. That was potentially a huge problem. This far out of town I had to worry about State Troopers, and they were the leos with the millimeter wave scanners that a lead box in the trunk couldn’t trick. But there was road and there was mountainside. Not much choice in the matter. Not for the first time, I regretted driving an older vehicle: my Cadillac was three times as long as the newest electric cars. I could have buried one of those in the roadside bush without a problem.
But new cars minimal trunk space, and unlike Jo, I couldn’t afford to go into battle with nothing more than my charm and good looks. She had a magic sword, for Pete’s sake.
I had a grenade launcher.
I wasn’t supposed to, of course. Nobody was, especially since the country-wide crackdown after the election riots when I was seventeen. That was part of why I’d gone into the Army instead of becoming a cop—it had become clear there would be advantages to having friends who worked in military supplies. As a result, the trunk of my Caddy looked like I was preparing for the zombie apocalypse, though from what I understood, zombies were extremely difficult to raise and that threat was negligible. My arsenal was meant for other, more likely scenarios, and the grenade launcher was the least of it.
Most of the grenades I carried were flash-bangs, not frags, but I had lethal capability if I needed it. I also had stun guns, pistols, knives, a garrote, and a slingshot. I’d been surprised at how loud a gun with a silencer was, the first time I shot one. Movies lied. So I’d learned how to use the slingshot for when silence really mattered, and if I thought I would be doing range-hunting, sometimes I took the compound bow out of the trunk too.
Not today, though. I packed grenades, flash-bang and frag alike. I took my space blanket, in case I was out too late and needed warmth. The brand name was something else, but the common name had stuck through the decades, even though a modern space blanket was nothing like the sheet-of-Mylar old ones. Mine didn’t just trap body heat. It absorbed and re-focused solar power, and could be set to release warmth either slowly or quickly. I folded it over my backpack so it would gather heat while I hiked, then slipped my phone’s tiny flat-panel subwoofers into the pack’s outside pockets, muttering, “In case I’m out too late and need a party in my pocket to keep me going.” It sounded like something Joanne would say, which pleased me. I strapped knives to both thighs, slid the stun guns and one pistol into the backpack along with the frags, and shouldered the pack on before sliding my Glock into the custom holster built into the pack’s straps. I put a water bottle on my hip and shook my shoulders, a slosh inside the backpack assuring me the second bottle inside the pack was full, tucked snacks into pockets, and went hiking.
Asag. Sumerian demon of sickness, who, according to my undernet search, made rivers boil with his ugliness and had sex with mountains to make rock-demons to protect himself with. Rock demons and landslides had enough in common to make the link, especially with Marnie’s discomfort about what the kids had reported seeing. The boiling water was a clue, too, even if I couldn’t imagine what a Sumerian demon was doing in the Pacific Northwest. There’d been no reports of unusual sickness in the area, but it was possible he brought sickness, rather than followed it. With boiling rivers and drying-up wells, it was easy enough to see how sickness could come in his wake.
And he’d been defeated by a god in Sumeria. Ninurta, god of sunlight and of healing. I would probably have to wait until Joanne caught up with me to take Asag down, but at least I could locate him on my own.
Marnie had claimed the kids were up at the treeline. I doubted it. Most of the Cascades had a timberline around six thousand feet. Keechelus Lake was just south of Snoqualmie Pass, which was only about three thousand feet above sea level. If the local teens were getting hit by rock slides a couple thousand feet above the mountaintops, I was not only out of my league, but way envious of the flying teenagers.
The terrain wasn’t bad. Low underbrush sprang back after I passed over it. Fir and pine trees provided cover from afternoon sunshine. Birds and squirrels scolded me for intruding on their territory, but weren’t disturbed by anything stranger than me. I wasn’t in the right area yet, in that case. I worked my way up the mountain, switch-backing around a few steep hills covered in huckleberry bushes. Another month and they’d be ripe. On the off chance I had time to go berry-picking, I stopped and recorded the latitude and longitude on my phone. Then I started uphill again, combating mosquitoes until I had to stop again and dig the subwoofers out and hang them on my pack. I couldn’t hear the sonic buzz that vibrated the air in a way that made bugs back off, but I could feel it crawling on my skin. Hikers had been using the tech in lieu of bug spray ever since the sound industry—with some help from the military industrial complex—had turned stereo speakers into something you could roll up or put in a back pocket. They were covered with a solar screen that stored about sixteen hours’ worth of low-level power usage, too, so they could be used as back-up batteries. I vaguely remembered that when I was little—when I’d first met Joanne Walker—cell phones and cameras has to be plugged in, but cars didn’t. Even knowing it had been like that in my lifetime didn’t make it seem any less strange.