Columbine

“Pass me the orange juice.” Charlie said a little to loudly. I gave him a look that I hoped would shut him up. He’d been unusually cheerful --and annoying -- ever since we’d gotten back from our musical debut.

“We don’t have any orange juice.” Sarah told him, and I realized that she was right. There were a lot of things that we didn’t have for breakfast, or for any other meal time, period. The muffins that Sarah had managed to call back from the land of the dead had pretty much been a one-time thing.

“Do you think Valentin’ll bring back some food?” Sarah asked. I stiffened involuntarily. I hadn’t told anyone that I’d met him while he’d been keeping the Demataxt off of our trail. He’d done a pretty good job, to my limitless surprise.

I was also feeling a lot like a person who’d fraternized with the enemy felt -- like I hadn’t been myself at all.

“Charlie?” Sarah asked.

“What?” Charlie snapped, having lost some of his cheerfulness over the missing orange juice.

“When was the last time you drank blood?” She asked.

I froze. A feeling of monumental stupidity descended over me as I realized that I’d somehow not made the connection between the fact that Charlie was a vampire and that he was a blood-drinker. Such had been the intensity with which I’d been worrying about the ten thousand other things that there were to worry about.

Scarlett and I looked at him, and Charlie suddenly looked incredibly embarrassed.

“Do you mean real blood?” He sneered. “Or Scarlett’s stupid synthetic plasma?”

Scarlett looked mad to have her synthetic plasma be referred to in such a crude and disrespectful fashion. Of course she’d be mad. It had probably taken work to make it, all for a vampire that didn’t even appreciate it.

“Real blood.” Sarah said.

“I’d say almost two weeks ago.” Charlie said.

He was acting just like I’d have been acting if somebody’s asked me when I’d last gotten my period. I winced, and began to feel involuntary sympathy for Charlie’s uncomfortable situation.

“And how do you feel with the plasma stuff?” Sarah asked.

Charlie scratched his head, considering the question. I could instinctively tell that he was being sarcastic. Sarcasm in him could have meant anything from great joy to a homicidal urge. Under the current circumstances, his sarcasm was leaning more toward the latter.

“It’s just great.” He grimaced. “My distributor really knows what she’s doing.”

“I do!” Scarlett said with conviction. “It may not be as tasty, but it’s got more vitamins than the healthiest person you can find for miles.”

Damn, did she believe in her research, or what? That’s the kind of determination that scientists needed, as long as they didn’t use it for making better bombs and breeding deadlier diseases, or raising cross-bread mutants on farms in the Scottish highlands under the guise of a kind-hearted sheep farmer named McOwen.

“You don’t get it.” Charlie sighed. “There’s more to blood than vitamins and hemoglobin, or whatever else makes blood what it is.”

Uh-oh. Was he going to start a philosophical rant in a sentimental and nostalgic voice. Was it raining fire outside? More fire than usual, anyway?

“All right,” Scarlett huffed, “What’s some drug-addled podunk’s blood got that I can’t make?”

Charlie took a deep breath and smiled with fake nostalgia. Sarah and I shared a glance filled with mixed disgust and entertainment.

“It’s got life, is what it’s got.” Charlie announced. “It’s fresh. That’s what separates your gutless synthetic plasma from the real stuff.”

Scarlett seemed to consider this for a while, then suddenly snapped her fingers.

“You mean it’s been oxidized!” She exclaimed. “If I can do that to the plasma, then it’ll be practically the same!”

Charlie’s head dropped, hopeless, into his hands. Sarah and I snickered to ourselves. I’m sure Charlie heard us, but if he did, he didn’t say anything about it.

“Like I said, you don’t get it.” He sighed brokenheartedly.

And then it happened again. Another earthquake.

“Oh, god, no!” I cried as the walls began to shake and almost move around me. Sarah grabbed my arm and pulled me into the nearest doorway.

“Make it stop!” Scarlett yelped as glow sticks began coming off the ceiling again. A guttural, digestive noise surrounded us as the earthquake grew stronger and stronger.

Sarah took a series of deep breaths. I’d never been up close to her when she’d been casting, but now that I was, I immediately wished I wasn’t. The reason for her dual voices was immediately made clear when I saw her body twitch just enough to make it known that she was not alone in it. The changed, now totally black color of her eyeballs was also a big giveaway.

My attention was distracted from her new, scary eyes, but an enormous chunk of the ceiling coming loose and collapsing onto the floor. It’s a very bad thing to be underground during an earthquake -- especially an earthquake that isn’t caused by rising magma, but by a centuries-old curse being broken by a group of mages. You’d think that the rising magma scenario would be worse, wouldn’t you?

Sarah raised her arms out in front of her and began speaking, her dual voice almost as scary as her new eyes. Even now, when I was not a foot away from her, I still didn’t know what the words coming out of her mouth were. I’d always been too scared to open a book and actually read about the subject, just like I’d been too scared to read a book about demon lords, mages, vampires, and whatever other screwed-up creatures had managed to squeeze themselves into the makeup of earth’s total population.

And then, just as quickly as the earthquake had begun, it stopped. It stopped just like life itself seemed to stop, because I suddenly found myself in a totally dark space. I wondered if I’d gone blind, but then again, I wasn’t hearing anything either. Neither could I feel anything, or smell anything. Some miraculously unaffected part of my brain decided that I’d managed to somehow stumble into a sensory deprivation tank.

I held my hand up in front of my eyes. I saw that, at least. I opened my mouth and called out, “Hello!”, which I managed to hear. With the reassurance that I could at least know what my own body was doing, I began to scream for help.

“Hey!” I yelled furiously, “Sarah! What the hell did you do?”

“Yeah, Sarah!” Charlie joined me. “What the hell have you done to us? Where the fuck are we?”

“Exactly.” Scarlett said breathlessly into my ear.

I saw to my immense relief that Charlie and Scarlett were with me in the darkness. They looked just as confused as I did. You try being surrounded by nothingness and see how you take it all in.

“Thank god.” I muttered.

“Don’t you thank anyone!” Charlie spat.

“Where are we, anyway?” Scarlett asked, looking around, as if she were hoping to find something in the darkness. I began, at that point, to worry. If it ever came to the point that Scarlett knows as much as I do, then you know that you’re doomed. Things were at that point of doom then.

“Beats the shit of me.” Charlie answered her. “Three-hundred fucking years and I don’t even know what the fuck this is!”

And who could blame him? It’s not every day that you suddenly drop into a sensory deprivation tank and not know how it happened, given that there wasn’t anything that came even close to one anywhere around.

“Maybe Sarah put us here.” I suggested. Charlie screamed angrily. I had a feeling that if a wall had been anywhere around, he would have punched it -- maybe even destroyed it altogether.

“That fucking bitch!” He yelled. I winced. Although I did object to being shoved into a dark place that was beginning to scare me, it sure beat a steady shower of chunks of ceiling, in the middle of an earthquake.

“I don’t care what kind of spell she put on me, I’m going to tear her goddamn throat out!” Charlie yelled.

“You wouldn‘t dare.” Scarlett said. Charlie glared at her, but she didn’t so much as swallow loudly.

I looked down at my feet, and bore down on the floor that may or may not have been there. It was totally dark, so I couldn’t exactly see. I found it odd that we could all see each other if there was no source of light anywhere. I shook off the confusing thought and got down on my knees while Charlie and Scarlett had their staring contest.

I concentrated on what I felt beneath my hands as I dragged them over the floor. It took a while, but I eventually felt what I thought was linoleum. When I realized that, I dragged a hand over a corner of a wall that sprouted from the floor.

A rumbling noise reached my ears, as well as everyone else’s.

“Oh, god, what is it now?” Scarlett whimpered.

Splotches of light came into focus, blinding at first, but then I noticed that I was back in the doorway, and that everything around me was still shaking with frightening force. Sarah was still casting, too, her dual voices still going strong. What the hell had happened? It was almost as if we’d never even left!

“Hey, Sarah!” Charlie yelled. For a moment, I was afraid that he’d make good on his promise earlier and actually tear her throat out.

Sarah’s eyes widened when she saw us.

“What happened?” I asked shakily.

“You weren’t supposed to leave!” She yelled, Sarah’s actual voice gaining volume over the other one that had scared the crap out of me.

“Leave?” I yelled over the sound of the ceiling smashing overhead. “Leave where?”

“Damn it, it was supposed to keep you safe!” Sarah yelled. There was genuine worry in her eyes.

“What was it?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you when our lives aren’t in danger, okay?” She said. And with that I found myself back in the sensory deprivation tank.

Charlie and Scarlett joined me later. Just like me, they were creeped out of their minds. I knew too little about the workings of witchcraft to make any sense of the situation, and my infamously prejudiced instinct was against it anyway.

“Well, isn’t that a relief?” Charlie asked nobody in particular. “She can banish us whenever she wants!”

I swallowed. He was right, of course, but he was the only one likely to be banished. The rest of us, on the other hand, were less carnally inclined.

“How did we get out last time?” Scarlett asked.

“I’m not sure, but…” I swallowed. “We should probably stay until the earthquake’s over.”

Nobody was happy about the idea, but it was the best way to stay alive at the given moment. While we waited to be freed, I tried to remember what I’d been doing before we’d found a way out. Was finding the floor all we had to do? If that was the case, then banishment was a piece of cake, and all those people the Demataxt had allegedly sent away before deciding that execution was better were idiots. Or was it harder than that? I shook off the thought before I started to seriously contemplate it.

“What if we never got out?” Charlie asked. “What if we die here?”

“We won’t.” I snapped before he started ranting again.

“How can you be sure?” He asked.

“We have a better chance of surviving here than in the lab.” I snapped.

And where was ‘here’, anyway? I decided that I didn’t want to know.

We didn’t know how long we spent in the tank. With Charlie bitching during all that time, it felt like it had been an eternity by the time Sarah let us out. We saw that the earthquake had left an enormous hole in the ceiling and dents in the floor from where the ceiling had fallen. There was no doubt that this earthquake had been worse than the first. Much worse.

“Holy shit.” I whispered.

If just this room was practically destroyed, I didn’t want to imagine what the rest of the lab looked like. I immediately reached under my shirt and grasped the flash drive for comfort. As long as my worthless piece of hardware was unscathed, life was still worth living. And as long as either Charlie or I were alive, there was still music to be heard by plenty. I think I speak for the best interests of everyone when I say that Charlie is by far more expendable than I am. At least I’m too shocked to bitch about catastrophes when I’m in one.

“No kidding.” Scarlett said. She wiped tears from her face as she murmured “my lab” to herself over and over again. I pitied her then. With her glasses askew and her hairstyle ruined by flakes of plaster, she looked more pitiful than I’d ever imagined she could look. Even her three-inch heels didn’t make her seem powerful any more.

“We’ve got to clean this up.” Sarah reminded us. She was back to normal now, her eyes back to their normal color and her voice back to its sweet, dulcet, feminine tones.

“This is going to keep happening, isn’t it?” Scarlett whimpered.

“Until the curse is either broken or left alone, yes.” Sarah told her.

This seemed to be Scarlett’s last straw. She sat down in a dent on the floor and began openly weeping. This made everyone uncomfortable, though Sarah managed to work through that and sit down next to Scarlett and pat her shoulder.

Now it was Charlie and I giving each other looks that both said “This is fucked up.” And it really was. Every time the Demataxt had a victory, it was our lab that collapsed in on itself. Wasn’t there anything that could be done to prevent that? I asked Sarah, who looked at me like I was crazy.

“Do you know how huge a barrier like that would have to be?” She squeaked. “Miles huge!”

“I know, but could you at least try?” I asked.

“You mean will I kill myself in the process?” She elaborated.

“Why not?” Charlie stepped in, as uncavalier as usual. “Are you selfish enough to let Scarlett’s lab get destroyed? Next time you might not be around to put us in a box, and we’ll get killed, too!”

“Shut up, Charlie.” I growled.

“No, you shut up, Columbine!” He growled back. “Sarah here needs to know the score.”

Sarah had become so pale that she could easily have blended in with bed sheets. I couldn’t believe Charlie could do this. I’d always known that he was a manipulative asshole in the larger half of his heart, but even this seemed unreasonable for him.

“So either you put up a barrier, or you risk us dying!” Charlie declared.

Sarah’s eyes had gone so wide with shock that I could see the veins of her eyeballs. She stood up and walked up to Charlie. She raised her hand, and I thought she was going to make him fly back into the wall again, but all she did was slap him.

The smugness seemed to have been knocked from Charlie’s face. In fact, he looked downright shocked. Sarah glared up at him, angrier than I’d seen her in a while. Her expression reminded me of the time in the marketplace, when she and the mage had fought each other. It was an expression that I hadn’t thought I’d see her wear here.

“Don’t be a pig, Charles.” Scarlett said. She’d stopped crying in her surprise. “You can’t ask Sarah to do that for you. Especially when you wouldn’t do it for her.”

I swallowed. So did Charlie, who had heard every unspoken part of that sentence. It may have been my imagination, but he almost looked ashamed.

I didn’t dare say anything. There was enough hostility in the air that even an axe couldn’t have cut through it. I looked around and swallowed even harder as I took in the amount of damage that had been done. The giant hole in the ceiling was probably nothing compared to the damage in other places. It was going to take an enormous shitload of teamwork to clean up this mess. How could Charlie not have seen that? We should at least not have pissed off our only witch, who could probably have been the most helpful, had she not been insulted by the man-shaped pig that was Charlie.

“I’m going to check downstairs.” I muttered, and practically tripped over my feet trying to run from the room.

I picked up one of the fallen glow sticks and shook it as I went carefully downstairs to the bedrooms.

There were fairly large cracks in the walls and some chunks of ceiling had fallen to the floor. Luckily they were smaller than then ones upstairs. Last time the lower floors had received the least amount of damage -- maybe because the earthquake was coming mostly from above and not below. Maybe it was only reaching underground because the curse was so enormous. If that was the case, maybe we didn’t need a complete barrier. Maybe all we needed was to set up a barrier a mile or so away so that it would stop quakes emitted by the pyramids before they came close to the lab.

I peeked into my room, which had stayed relatively intact. The bookshelf had collapsed -- again -- and an enormous pile of books was littering my floor. With a groan, I leaned the shelf back up against the wall and started putting books back where they belonged.

I caught a glimpse of the clock on the bedside table and saw, to my dismay, that it was barely midday yet, and we were already neck-deep in crap and plaster. We would never have thought two days ago, when we’d given people the gift of a real Halloween, that this would be happening. We’d been too busy being happy and other useless things like that.

This was one of the moments when I hated the Demataxt with more vigor than at other, less life-threatening times. Like they had just now, they messed up people’s breakfasts with earthquakes and other deadly distasters. Despite the alleged inferiority and typically powerless way of life that humans led, at least we didn’t cause our own earthquakes. We were quite happy with the ones that came about naturally.

“Can you believe that jerk?” Sarah’s voice wafted into my room as she came in and ploinked herself onto my bed. I could have sworn that I saw steam wafting out of her nose and ears. “He actually wanted me to die making a barrier!”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” I blurted before I could stop myself, “And I think that if we put a partial barrier about a mile out in front of us, that’ll be protection enough.”

Sarah blinked.

“We can do that.” She said. “But can you belive him? Who the hell does he think he is? A god? He’s not nearly hot enough for that!”

I just kept putting books back on the shelf while Sarah unleashed her frustrations out on me. And believe me, I felt every scalding bit of them.

There’s a general rule that says that when men get frustrated, they fume in silence. It also says that when women get frustrated, they talk about it until they feel better. I don’t mean to discrimintae against my own gender, but I’d rather deal with a frustrated man than with Sarah. Such is my revulsion to emotions.

“Next time he does anything like that, I swear I’m going to make him sorry he was ever born!” Sarah threatened. “What kind of person says that? I mean, even for a vamp, he’s a bigger jerk than I’d have imagined!”

It went on like this for the next hour or so. It was a wonder that my ears didn’t start bleeding. With the entire day left, I was dreading the moment that the real cleaning began. Because she could just make objects fly into the garbage bags, I doubted Sarah was going to be out of breath any time soon.

It was going to be a fucking nightmare.