Mayhem Read online

  MAYHEM

  MICHAEL MOLISANI

  www.MichaelMolisani.com

  ©2019 Michael Molisani

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact: [email protected]

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, gods, spirits, and otherwise, living and/or dead, or actual events, or locations are is purely coincidental.

  978-0-578-45070-4 Paperback

  978-0-578-45071-1 eBook

  Author: Michael Molisani

  Content Editor: Athena Driscoll

  Copy Editor: Kristen Busman

  Cover Artist: Nan Fe

  Cover Design: Anita Stefanie

  eBook Conversion: Michael Molisani

  Illustrators: Karolina Jędrzejak (RinRinDaishi), Audia Pahlevi (Moonarc), LacticWanda & SapFire

  INTRODUCTION

  Welcome to Veilfall. This is a world that follows the Collapse. I want to thank Athena Driscoll for being such an important aspect of the creative process. Besides her role as content editor, she’s the one person who I can talk to about Veilfall. I love her for that, and a thousand other reasons. I also want to thank Kristen Busman for always being supportive. Her enthusiasm and drive behind these projects have been beyond my wildest hopes. You don’t know awkward until you’ve discussed the adjective “mucilaginous” regarding a sex scene with your copy editor.

  This book is self-published. You’re probably going to see a typo or two. I’m not even sorry. We spent thousands of hours working to eliminate 99% of all errors, but I’m sure a few made it through. You should probably just get over that. People will like you more.

  I also want to thank Nan Fe, my amazing cover artist for “The Bruja,” and “Mayhem.” Her work is peerless, exciting, and horrific. I consider myself both honored & grateful each time I work with her.

  I also want to thank Delilah Vex, Erin Abid, and Melissa Johnson. Melissa, you may know, is another author who will be working with me on a forthcoming Veilfall anthology. A collection of short stories & novellas which flesh out Veilfall. She’s asked me a lot of questions in the last year that I couldn’t answer – and when I did, those answers often became a part of this book.

  Last, but certainly not least, I want to thank my wife; Kimberly “Gats” Molisani. She has been, and will always be, a key ingredient in my success. Its hard being an author’s wife. I have a day job that requires long hours, and those long hours become even longer when I sit down to write, revise, or edit.

  Now that I’ve thanked everyone – how would you like to read a book about a witch named Margaret?

  Contents

  March 14th, 7 Veilfall

  8:32 pm January 8th, 39 Veilfall

  11:02 pm January 9th, 39 Veilfall

  3:03am January 10th, 39 Veilfall

  8:30pm January 11th, 39 Veilfall

  11:02 pm January 11th, 39 Veilfall

  11:21am January 14th, 39 Veilfall

  11:34am January 17th, 39 Veilfall

  5:40pm January 17th, 39 Veilfall

  10:35pm January 17th, 39 Veilfall

  4:08am January 18th, 39 Veilfall

  10:35am February 20th, 39 Veilfall

  2:01pm February 20th, 39 Veilfall

  8:18am February 25th, 39 Veilfall

  6:02pm February 27th, 39 Veilfall

  6:44pm February 27th, 39 Veilfall

  9:30pm February 27th, 39 Veilfall

  10:23pm February 27th, 39 Veilfall

  11:00pm February 27th, 39 Veilfall

  December 4th, 32 Veilfall

  12:02am February 28th, 39 Veilfall

  12:22am February 28th, 39 Veilfall

  3:18am February 28th, 39 Veilfall

  11:30am February 28th, 39 Veilfall

  6:37am March 1st, 39 Veilfall

  10:44am March 1st, 39 Veilfall

  2:20pm March 1st, 39 Veilfall

  6:45pm March 1st, 39 Veilfall

  11:05pm March 1st, 39 Veilfall

  12:15pm March 2nd, 39 Veilfall

  10:22am March 8th, 39 Veilfall

  9:05pm March 8th, 39 Veilfall

  2:34pm March 17th, 39 Veilfall

  4:04pm March 17th, 39 Veilfall

  11:18pm March 17th, 39 Veilfall

  5:02am March 19th, 39 Veilfall

  9:09am March 19th, 39 Veilfall

  10:42am March 19th, 39 Veilfall

  1:08pm March 19th, 39 Veilfall

  November 2nd, 20 Veilfall

  10:45am March 25th, 39 Veilfall

  1:28pm March 25th, 39 Veilfall

  8:03pm March 25th, 39 Veilfall

  10:13pm March 25th, 39 Veilfall

  10:34pm March 25th, 39 Veilfall

  11:20pm March 25th, 39 Veilfall

  11:48pm March 25th, 39 Veilfall

  12:18am March 26th, 39 Veilfall

  9:08pm March 26th, 39 Veilfall

  10:20am April 15th, 39 Veilfall

  12:08pm April 15th, 39 Veilfall

  12:41pm April 15th, 39 Veilfall

  1:04pm April 15th, 39 Veilfall

  1:28pm April 15th, 39 Veilfall

  1:34pm April 15th, 39 Veilfall

  2:02pm April 15th, 39 Veilfall

  2:34pm April 15th, 39 Veilfall

  8:22am April 16th, 39 Veilfall

  11:44pm December 4th, 39 Veilfall

  8:32 pm January 8th, 40 Veilfall

  (END)

  March 14th, 7 Veilfall

  Crafton, Pennsylvania

  “Are you,” the boy pauses, flexing a fist, thumb knuckle popping, “a witch?”

  The two children couldn’t have been older than fourteen. The girl is scrawny, her shoulders are misshapen, and one clavicle is slouched down. Her fingers are black, sooty, and her broken nails grind into a lump of charcoal. She sketches flurries on a concrete wall, sweeping lines in monochrome. A spiral of flames pressed and pulled by opposing winds.

  “Yeah.” The little girl nods, refusing distraction.

  “So,” the boy flexes his fist again, “can you read my mind?”

  The girl nods a second time, “I know how you feel. I know if you’re afraid, or if you’re happy. If I touch you, I can see pictures.”

  “I’m not afraid,” the boy blurts out, hands pressed to the floor.

  There are layers of carpet, woven thin, underneath both children. Each one is a conflicting color or pattern, dusty with age and wear, covered in debris; small twigs, pebbles, crumbs and broken shards of coal.

  The little girl stopped. “Yes, you are.” Her auburn-red hair tied back in a ponytail with a long strand of paracord. When she nodded, it would bounce on her faded sweater.

  The boy knew this was his ruin. His eyes turned murky with all the drama a child could leech from such a moment. He had nothing to hide behind, no tough exterior, no biting fury or savage bravery. He was, instead, exposed and naked in front of the girl. All the words in the world could not hide his cowardice.

  The girl turned from her umbra flame, laying charcoal down, “I know you’re sad. But I don’t know why. Why are you sad?” What was the boy to tell her? Because pretty girls don’t like cowards. Before he could open his mouth and stammer out a denial, the girl answered; “You’re not a coward. A coward would run away. A coward wouldn’t come here.”

  The boy had spent much of his short life working to be brave. He knew that he could hide fear with noise. He could shout orders to the younger children and they’d never know how desperate his fear was. The little girl with black paracord in her red hair was defiling that notion. Ripping up his rule book, laughing in his face
.

  Except, she wasn’t laughing. She was smiling at him. Not in a mean, or cruel way. She was smiling at him with eyes that liked his compliment. The compliment he’d never spoken. Why wrap up thoughts inside his ribs where no one could find them? This girl clearly could.

  “I think you’re pretty.”

  The girl leans sideways on her hip, bracing one dirty hand to the rugs and reaching for the boy. “I’m going to touch you, okay?”

  The air in the girl’s room is thick and musty. Sharp with unwashed clothes and adolescent pheromones. He pulls away, causing her to pause, with a hand suspended mid-stretch, “Why?”

  “Because you think I’m pretty.” The girl says this as though it was the most obvious answer in the world. It is as if someone has reached into the boy’s heart, crawled up his throat and wrapped his mind in warm blankets. The girl reaches forward, her weight shifting as she comes up on her knees. With fingers covered in scabs and scratches, under charcoal stains, she presses a hand into the boy’s forehead.

  Daniel Hasgard knew his parents had died in a plane crash, a day before the Collapse. His uncle had told him the details, something about a bomb. He didn’t remember, it was easier to forget. All he knew of that day was the way his polyester comforter felt after it was hot with tears and snot. Printed in deep blue skies and cartoon airplanes, it felt like a betrayal. He ripped them off the bed, throwing them as far as he could. The sky wasn’t harmless. It had killed his mother and father.

  The little girl doesn’t like this.

  Part of her trickles into Daniel Hasgard’s skull, a faucet left to dribble across dirty dishes in a brimming sink. Her mind is black and sooty, just like her charcoal, wrapping around his memories. She can’t take his pain away, she can’t erase his sorrow or loss. She can only dull it, as she had dulled his fear a moment earlier. She can make him comfortable, give him a respite where he needn’t be the tough guy. Here, alone with her, he was safe.

  It's only us, the girl speaks in Daniel’s mind. I won’t let you get hurt.

  Daniel feels as if he is floating in that same cartoon sky of his polyester sheets. It doesn’t make him angry now, it feels peaceful, and warm. As warm as the little girl’s palm pressing into his face. He knows she’s kissing him, and he doesn’t mind.

  The girl pulls him close. Blackened fingerprints cover his skin and clothes, even his dusty blonde hair. Each charcoal stain is an impression, turning his veins the color of night. They bind him closer, as her mind continues to expand across his memories. His loves, his favorite foods, and his most hated chores.

  The girl, lost inside Daniel’s mind and memories, never heard the door of her room unlatch. Yet, slamming shut, it breaks her focus. The severance is violent, and she can’t protect Daniel anymore.

  “What the fuck is this shit?”

  The girl’s mother is slim, with a hawk nose and deeply onyx eyes. Her ill-kept hair spills across a tank top that exposes layers of colorful ink across her skin. In one hand she’s holding a glass bottle, quarter full of brown fluid.

  “Bruja!” the boy shouts, pulling away. He knows who this woman is. Everyone knows who Maggi Lopez is. “I’m sorry, we were only talking!”

  The little girl stands quickly. She can hear her mother’s words before she speaks them. It creates a disjointed echo in her mind, “Only talking,” Maggi yells, “Don’t lie to me you toe-head fuck!”

  The boy is getting ready to stand, holding his hands out, sputtering and spitting. His terror is a tangible animal in the room, it flits and squeaks like a cornered hare. The little girl can see air bubble and bend around her mother’s fingers. She knows what that means.

  She’s going to burn him. She’s drunk enough to burn him alive.

  Maggi is pulling from the world around her, borrowing flame, summoning it to her free hand. The magic smells of peeling and twisting muscles.

  The little girl can’t calm her mother when she’s this angry, but even an attempt to reach into her mind might shake the older woman’s focus and draw her away from Daniel. Even if it only quieted Maggi’s flame for a few seconds, the girl would try her best. In an instant, the woman with dark eyes tips her head to one side, favoring the little girl. A look of betrayal darts across her face, lips parting in a snarl.

  Daniel was a smart boy and used this opportunity to stand and bolt. He’s not fast enough, and his left shoe catches on the rugs, tripping him. When he steadies himself, Maggi raises her left hand, swinging the bottle down to strike.

  Although the little girl with paracord in her hair owes Daniel nothing, she jumps up. She’s seen too much of his mind to not care. She won’t break her own promise, she will protect Daniel. Even if that meant placing herself between him and her enraged mother.

  The bottle of alcohol strikes the girl squarely in the head. The glass is thick and when it shatters, it covers her in pungent decoction. Broken shards rain, falling down her shirt, and lodging in her auburn red hair. The last thing she sees is Daniel fleeing the room, she’s given him safe passage. She’d told him that her mother wouldn’t be home, the witch that he feared most.

  The witch everyone feared. The Bruja.

  “Who the fuck was watching Alexander while you played tongue-twister?” Maggi yells at the little girl who’s pulling herself up off the rugs. Maggi has none of it, landing an open palm down on the back of her head, hard enough to create an echoing thump.

  “He was asleep,” the little girl repeats, “He was asleep.”

  “One fucking week I was gone,” Maggi yells, her voice husky and sharp with a clipped tone. She shortens all her vowels and bites hard into each statement, “I can’t always fucking be here. I have to fight, and I trusted you with my fucking son.”

  A second time Maggi strikes her with an open palm. This time it hits the girl’s face, raising a warm glow from under flesh. Maggi's rage fills the room, acrid and smoky, suffocating. The little girl could block it out, but now her own focus has evaporated.

  “How dare you abandon my son!” Maggi shouts, striking the girl again. The contact with her mother’s flesh was like a knife sliding under skin. Prying away at a splinter, wriggling around and bracing nerves. Maggi was always a heavy drinker after she fought in the field. She always tasted of bitter medicine and loathing when returning home.

  The little girl doesn’t answer.

  Maggi’s yelling slips out of English and into Español, but the girl is no longer listening. Only after her catatonia became clear does Maggi fall quiet. When she speaks again it is a growl that slips from her throat. Without slur or fumble, she communicates her point with precise hatred. “I swear to fuck Margaret, I should have fucking left you in that parking lot seven years ago.”

  Maggi storms out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

  Margaret doesn’t pull herself up off the mismatched rugs that had worked so hard to trip Daniel. She lies there, still. The blood at her lips is darkening, scabbing, and one of her eyes has begun to swell. Maggi could hit hard.

  Margaret wouldn’t have cared if her mother beat her every day, if only she would never say those words again. I swear to fuck Margaret, I should have fucking left you in that parking lot seven years ago. It was an extravagant wish, pulling and pulling until she felt her organs might rip apart.

  It was an irony, of course, that Margaret could ease the pain of others, but could never console her own. The best she could do was retreat to a lumpy mattress and pretend that this had never happened.

  8:32 pm January 8th, 39 Veilfall

  Stockton, California

  The band that performed toward the ballroom rear was made up of two violins, a flute, and a wide hurdy gurdy. The man who slung that heavy wooden instrument from his shoulders wound a crank with rhythmic stops and starts. He was young with brown hair that almost turned gold under gas lamps, nodding his head in time with each tap and turn of his right hand.

  Margaret watched him, enamored, and properly drunk. She could lose parts of herself in a musicia
n's mind when she wished, a swimmer at sea, pulled into the wake of a great wave, filling her mouth and ears with freezing water.

  Beyond the performers, at Margaret’s flank, the ballroom moved with the same predictable rhythm of a hurdy gurdy crank. She could feel them shift and turn at the edges of her mind. They weighed the measure of each step, the final template of how others judged them. Liars, all of them, presenting their best smiles, perfumed and lascivious. Military commanders chatted, joined by minor nobility, landowners, and various captains of farm and factory; not dancing to Margaret’s music, but rather their own pulsing rituals.

  This ballroom was part of the former House Owens palace, built into an old university that occupied central Stockton. Paintings, sculptures, row upon row, looked down at a long, narrow dining table from high walls and broad windows. Shining, wooden stairs dipped into a floor of black marble, polish reflecting silhouettes. The air was rich in smoked meats and cheese, pungent vinegar dressing and citrus sides hanging like a fine mist, clutching at Margaret’s throat in a casual dance of culinary desire.

  It was only with an empty wine glass that Margaret chose to break away from the bucolic calm and return once more to a grander stage. Her mouth was dry, and she was consumed with uncomfortable thoughts about where her eyes should land as she stepped, and who she ought to greet with a nod. House Owens nobility presented themselves with oblique brocades on jackets and dresses, pandering to the Imperials with understated colors, muted in the wake of occupation. They showed her their respect, tipping formal caps of yellow or white wool, but it was not what she heard them whisper with pursed lips.

  Witch. Antecedent witch.

  The Antecedent officers; however, gaited about in their white breeches, deep navy jackets, and brown leather sashes, gleeful, antipodal in their grace. They tried to maintain a decorum appropriate to the event, but they were too rough at the edges, chewing sausages on long forks with their mouths open, and loudly regaling each other with sagas of whores, rum, and blood. Unlike the elite Owens society, they smiled at her, or perhaps smirked, their thoughts a fricassee of respect and lust.