An Arcane Engineer in Another World: Book I, Exile, Chapter 8

I opened my mouth. Please don’t eat me? Where are your parents? Young lady, that’s not appropriate?

I ran through all of the possible things I could say to the mob of kids, holding sticks and pointing them at me.

I suppose in an adventure saga I’d leap up and stop them, but… The only way I could do that would be to risk hurting the kids. I mean, seriously hurting them, and I wasn’t there yet. And also… the girl holding the weird object was holding it pointed at me… like she could hurt me with it.

And I wasn’t gonna assume she was just holding it for show.

Also, she was really cute. Blond hair, blue eyes, a very sexy—

“Do you have an older sister?” Stupid, stupid, stupid hindbrain!

“What?” she said. “How did you know?”

“I, ah, have special powers.” That was a good recovery. Almost as good as the time I accidentally dated two girls at once—you know what, that hadn’t been a good recovery. So… “Anyway—“

“Are we gonna eat him?”

“Darice! No, we’re not going to eat him!” the blond said.

“But Mindy, Jake said all people marooned in a snowstorm end up eating someone!”

“Don’t listen to Jake!” she said. “In fact, Jake, what are you telling—“

And she actually turned her back on me, so I took a chance and lunged up and grabbed the stick out of her hands.

She shrieked and jumped away from me, which every self-defense book I’ve ever read says is the wrong thing to do, but since she looked like she was about 16, I figure she’d not spent a lot of time learning to be a fighter.

The stick had two hollow tubes, along with some kind of switch, like a boltcaster’s trigger. There was a table behind me, and I kept an eye on the kids and the girl, the would-be cannibal girl now looking very pale, while I gently put it down behind me.

Whatever it was, I didn’t want to find out how dangerous it was the hard way.

“Okay!” I say. “First of all, no cannibalism. Secondly, I’m Marcus, I have a headache and do you hit everyone over the head?”

“You were coming in!” one kid says. “And the storm was out, so we didn’t think you were a person.”

“What…” I look at them. “What did you think I was?”

Suddenly, the kid looked down at his feet. “Things.”

I glanced up at Mindy and she was keeping her distance. “Okay, Mindy, what things are we talking about because I came up the road, and I almost got killed by a bear that should be dead.”

She shivers. “We saw one… A police horse…” She shook her head. “But he’s not talking about them.”

“How did you get all the way up here?” another kid said, evidently deciding that since I’m not on the menu and haven’t tried to kill them, I’m safe.

“Walked. Storm almost caught me.”

“It’s gonna be bad,” Mindy said. A moan sounds further up the building, and she tensed. “Sis is out, I thought you were her but then…”

“Wait, you do have an older sister? And she’s out in this?”

“She was looking for more food,” Mindy shook her head. “It’s… We have some but not a lot.”

“And we can’t make a fire,” another kid said. “Because of Carbon.. Mon-oxide…”

I didn’t know the chemical term, but I knew what he was talking about. That was another reason heat stones were so popular.

“You don’t have any heating?”

“We put curtains and blankets on the walls,” Mindy says.

“Fine, great,” I look around. “Where are your parents?”

Suddenly there’s a dead silence.

“Don’t know,” a little girl said and followed it up with a sniffle.

Shit. No. Dammit. Give me a dragon. Give me something I can fight, even if I’m not a fighter, Don’t tell me I just…

“They’re probably fine!” Mindy says, glaring at me. “We just…missed the train.”

“So, kids, wanna see a magic trick?” I said. Everyone fell silent, and then there was a chorus of ‘ooohs’ as I conjured a little globe of purple light and sent it zipping over them. The kids looked amazed. Mindy stared at it with confusion.

“How are you…”

“Magic. Come over here, Mindy, please?” I led her away from the kids (and the stick of whateverthehellitdoes).

“What is that?” she said.

“Magic. More importantly, where are their parents or other adults?” None of the kids heard my whisper, but Mindy just seemed to sag.

“It’s, you know, what happened…”

“Okay, pretend that when you clonked me on the head, you didn’t just give me a headache, you blasted my memory. Tell me everything.”

“The…the Shroud.”

“The cloud between this world and the sun.”

“Yes, there were meteor showers, but things got colder, and the weather more violent. The weathermen couldn’t explain it.” Mindy looks back. “They were moving people from the interior to the coast and down south, because it’d be warmer there.”

“And this ends up with you here how?”

“We were loading up. But the first of the big storms, like this one, started… we were one of the last loads but there were still more people than train seats…” She looked back at the kids. “Cecelia…”

“Your sister?”

“Yes, she was a college student, but she was an adult, and they put her and me in charge of the kids. They’d been lost or were gonna meet with their parents… but then the storm hit and people said there weren’t gonna be any more trains, so they started fighting over the train. People were hitting, they were… I saw someone get shot and so we took the kids here, to the library.”

“Why the Library?”  I asked.

“Cecelia figured it’d be safe, nobody would come here.”

Well nobody but very firm bibliophiles. “So why are you still here?”

“The train never came back. The storm was the first but not the last, and Cecelia thinks we’d die if we tried to march out… But there’s still food… sort of.”

If people were running… yeah, there might be food. But how much?  And this place was cold—not as bad as outside, but even with all the blankets and carpets nailed to the walls, floors and ceilings… yeah, not exactly warm. And the food will run out…

“How long since you had anyone else talk to you from the outside?”

“About a month.”

If they could have come back, they would have. We’re stuck here. Damn. It. 

“Okay, last question. The things he’s not talking about. What are they?”

Be elementals, be elementals…

“They…” Mindy looked around. “They talked to Sis and Me, when we went out. That’s why we hit you. They walk around in the cold, only they’re not wearing clothes…and some of them…”

Oh. Shit.

“Mindy?”

“There was another group down the street. Last week we went down to see them… they’re friendly and we… But the door was open. They were all dead, frozen, but they looked… Terrified.”

“But no food had been taken.”

“How did you know?”

“Because I’m thinking of the worst thing I can think of.”  Unclean Spirits. An eater. 

People fighting for survival. Dying, possibly dying during an act of unrepentant murder… And this wasn’t back home where it was hard for an unclean spirit to manifest. If I was right, and I bet I was right because why would I be lucky at this late date, an age of Wyld magic was upon us and there were gonna be a lot of spirits. Nothing to stop them, no wards or great magics and so… Man dies trying to murder someone, not simply to survive but unrepentantly, he freezes but he’s left a perfect vessel for the spirit to enter. It wasn’t something a guy like me spent much time on, other than reading the articles in Sorceress Weekly (I didn’t just subscribe for the pinups!), but nobody knew if the spirit was made unclean by possessing the body, or an unclean spirit was actively looking for a suitable vessel.

And it’ll keep killing. The act of murder, of fear was what they fed on, and they gained power through it. And a city like this… I bet the kids aren’t the only ones here. Other groups, isolated, more frightened, desperate…

It’d be a buffet for unclean spirits.  That was probably why the kids were still alive. According to the stories, to unclean spirits, anticipation was nearly as enjoyable as the feast.

They’d be more vulnerable in the daytime. I could wait until the day, and head out, scavenge what food I could, try to make it further south but…

But there was no way you could do that with a bunch of kids.

So I really didn’t have a choice, did I?

“Hey kids,” I said. “How long has it been since anyone’s had hot soup?”

“Forever!”

“Right, got water and a pot?”

“We can’t start a fire!” Mindy said.

“Magic,” I replied. She made a weird arm-flapping gesture and just stared at me. “Oh, I’m gonna put that… stick of yours.”

‘Gun.”

“Gun, right. I’m putting it in the drawer. Wouldn’t want an accident.”

A few minutes later, it’s safely away from her, and for that matter, the horde of kids.

There must be at least 25… how did you think two people were gonna be able to watch them? The answer came back. Nobody expected a riot.

Soon they had the pot full of water, and I tossed the stone in, triggering it. Not the best way to treat it, but I’d just make another. A few minutes later and the water was starting to steam, the kids staring at it in awe, along with Mindy.

Then, I pulled out my soup concentrate.

Are you really doing this?

Yeah. I wasn’t brave. So I was gonna remove the temptation to just take off on my own. This was nearly half my remaining food, divided among the kids it’d be a nice meal…and it would tie my fate to theirs.

Also, they looked like they really could use a hot meal.

And with that, I got to cooking.