Lincoln, Fox and the Bad Dog Read online

  Lincoln, Fox and the Bad Dog © 2015 David Roland Hess, Jr.

  For inquiries, contact the author directly: [email protected]

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Visit the author's website:

  http://www.lincolnfoxandthebaddog.com

  This book is dedicated to all the hours lost from my family while writing it.

  Chapter 1

  When it flies this way, it’s like magic, and there’s nothing better in the world, I swear it.

  My fingers moved on their own, using some direct line to a part of my brain that I was barely in control of. The outlines, guides and comments on my screen quickly became real code that wouldn’t even make sense to me three months from now if I tried to read it. Some people say that being in the flow when programming is like playing jazz or shooting or sculpting. You put your brain in the same state for all of them.

  Turn up the motor and watch what happens from a distance.

  And then Dan busted in and ruined it.

  “Hey buddy,” he said. “How about you take that shiny piece you’ve been working on and give it a try?”

  He was talking about the .45 revolver I’d built from scratch. It incorporated a lot of the stuff I’d learned from dissecting the Zoro and even more stuff that I’d learned from Dan himself. The gun’s name was Fox (yes I named my gun), and while he had basic functionality, he wasn’t ready for prime time. You never, never deploy a new system to production without complete test coverage.

  I don’t want to say that Dan made me feel inadequate sometimes, but it’s hard to overcome what our lizard brains see. He’s 6’1”, built like a Division 1 quarterback with black hair and blue eyes that make the ladies go oo-la-la. Compare that to my own completely pedestrian, perfectly average height self, situated about like what you’d expect from someone who spends most of their time behind a keyboard and just a hair on the safe side of the ginger/blond border. I wouldn’t say that people who look like me have evolved specifically to socially fear people like Dan, but it’s certainly possible.

  “Nope,” I said. “Fox is not ready for real world conditions.”

  “Lincoln, you’re making me sad.”

  “You’re sad because you just generally suck,” I said.

  Dan grabbed the rolling stool from beside my desk and plunked himself down. He waved his hand across the surface of my monitor with a flourish, and the air seemed to warp around his fingers. Energy crackled. The last time he’d pulled that, two weeks ago, he’d glitched the screen.

  “Oooo,” he said. “Your monitor’s not going all crazy. What did you do?”

  Dan is a pretty powerful Praecant, which in the common parlance would be “wizard” or “sorcerer,” but they prefer Praecant because, obviously, it’s way more pretentious. Under normal circumstances, the flexing of wizardly muscles around electronics would lead to a temporary disruption. Maybe he expected my monitor to fritz.

  Over the last year, I’d come up with some methods for hardening my stuff against this kind of disruption, which is good, because I’m not a Praecant. I have to balance the scales somehow. I’d just built it into my monitor yesterday.

  So bite me, buddy.

  “Come on,” he said. “You know you want to take Fox out for a spin. It’ll be fun.”

  Dan’s ideas of fun and mine had some overlap, but it was probably only in the 10-15% range. I gave him a look.

  “Just like the Mini race down Forbes was fun?” I said.

  “How about this,” he said. “You stop being whiny President Lincoln and start being awesome DJ Lincoln, the gun-slinging purveyor of total awesomeness.”

  “You’re really selling it.”

  Dan was good to have around for picking his brain about all things magical, but he was impulsive, and I don’t think he sometimes really got other people, and that they weren’t motivated by the same things that he was. In his mind, everyone else was just another Dan.

  He wasn’t really a bad guy. He just lacked perspective.

  And I had work to do. Goals. It was already 4 a.m., and I had wanted to get this latest revision to the Fox software compiling before I went to bed at 6. It had been a long night.

  “Dude,” he said, “Do you have any beer?”

  “Just grab one.”

  Instead of walking, he rolled the stool across the room and into the kitchen. The wheels went chunk when they hit the transition from the wood floor to the tile. I winced, and turned back to my code. I had completely lost my train of thought.

  So that was that. I could tell.

  Nothing else good was coming out of me tonight. The moment was lost. Damn it.

  “It’s all hoppy stuff,” he said, looking into the fridge. “Don’t you have anything good?”

  “Why don’t you magic one of them?”

  “You’re hilarious.”

  Whether or not I went with Dan, I was done working for the night. With a few clicks, I commented out the unfinished code I’d been cruising on and fired off the commands to build and compile. I hadn’t gotten nearly as far as I’d liked but at least I’d made some progress.

  I heard a beer bottle hit the trash can.

  “Thanks man,” he said. He’d chugged it. “Look, tempus fugit. I have a short window, and I’d really like your help.”

  “I’m not saying okay, but what’s up?”

  “There is someone right at this very moment in the Strip District who is stupid drunk.”

  “I’m shocked.”

  “His name is Vasily Gross. A Praecant. Everyone calls him ’Stoneface.’"

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s a gorgeous bikini model. Now shut up. Back when I lived in San Diego, I knew him, and he stole something from me. It took me a long time to find it in the first place, and it had some pretty powerful juju. I just found out he’s up in the Strip, almost certainly plowed out of his mind, and he probably has the jacket with him.”

  “Jacket?”

  “Yeah. That’s what he took.”

  “You’re after a magical jacket?”

  “It’s pretty valuable.”

  “And you need me because…"

  Dan gave a patronizing look.

  “Because Stoneface is a total badass,” he said. “I figure if something goes really weird, it wouldn’t hurt to have Fox along.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I am not going to be doing this.”

  “I’ll make you a deal. We go down there. If he’s passed out in his car or something, we grab the jacket and go. If he has muscle with him or if anything is funky, we keep on walking. Okay?”

  I was really tired.

  “Nope,” I said. “I’m going to bed. Door, ass, et cetera.”

  Dan did a half-sigh, half-growl, like he’d just conceded some kind of argument with himself.

  “If we recover the jacket, I’ll let you have it for two weeks.”

  Argh.

  “Two weeks.”

  Two weeks with a powerful magical artifact. That was… insanely valuable to the research I was doing. I’d been able to build Fox and some other stuff based on my initial dissection of the Zoro, as well as two other minor magical items Dan had provided for me.
Well, that and my electrical engineering, compsci and biochem degrees. And the insurance money. And Dan’s help. But.

  Insanely.

  Valuable.

  I winced again and mouthed the word “okay.”

  “Yes!”

  He started doing The Robot in triumph.

  “Beep-boop. Beep-boop. Yes, yes, yes.”

  He stopped.

  “Gear up,” he said.

  “I shouldn’t need to gear up, right? Because if he’s not passed out or if anything’s funny, we’re out of there, right?”

  “Gear up,” he said. “Better safe than sorry, Mrs. Lincoln.”

  “Give me five minutes.”

  The checklist:

  Fox in shoulder holster

  Sports jacket, so you can’t see Fox

  Wallet, including concealed carry permit, because even though Fox isn’t an actual firearm no one who would see him would know the difference

  Glasses, which I don’t strictly need, but which I’d built so I can see magic when it’s around

  Ball cap with certain magic-resistant properties

  My boots would have looked better with the jeans and jacket, but I wasn’t going to be hitting a club. Sneakers then, mostly in case I had to run for my life.

  I had some other magically protective gear in the workshop. Gloves that went halfway up my forearms, an apron (a manly one, I promise), and a bomber hat. They were great for machining things like Fox but total overkill for something like this and would look ridiculous out on the street.

  My stomach was growling, so I grabbed a pack of cheese and crackers and a Diet Coke from the fridge.

  “I’m eating, so you’re driving,” I said. “And we’re taking my car.” It might give him some extra incentive to actually try to make it back here.

  * * *

  Unlike a lot of other cities, Pittsburgh is basically dead at 4 in the morning. Hit the Schuylkill Expressway heading into Philadelphia at that time, and you’re still going to be swearing at crazy drivers, but not here. Things are actually pretty dead by 1.

  That’s good because there’s zero traffic, but it’s bad because the police don’t have anything better to do than hang in their cars and wait for speeders.

  In theory, one could get from my place on Fisher Alley to the Strip District in about six minutes. That would be flagrantly flaunting speeding laws, hitting all the lights perfectly (or just ignoring them because you’re 2x’ing the speed limit anyway), and not having to deal with traffic. In practice, it was more like thirteen minutes.

  And I have to be honest about something. I didn’t build Fox for nothing. The whole point of having him would be so that some day, in the vague far-off future, I could use him to help … I don’t know. Balance the scales? It had only been a year since I’d been educated firsthand to the reality of magic. The Zoro had tracked me and tried to kill me, but instead I’d been lucky, and everything else had come from that.

  If I remember that night too vividly, I get aftershocks of the adrenaline and the scrambling panic, and I have to work really hard to push it away. Which is why I stay away from it.

  And yeah, I’d been using Dan for his knowledge of magic to help me set up my shop, and do everything I’d been doing. It turns out that Praecants don’t know a whole lot about the power that they use beyond just how to use it, which they got genetically anyway. But I was able to figure it out, how it works–even though I don’t have the DNA to use it natively.

  So: Engineering boy wonder, sky’s-the-limit career, horrible family accident, coma, depression spiral, almost killed by magical beast, reverse engineers the actual mechanism behind magic and starts to build shit with it. I’ll admit it’s pretty cliche.

  But yeah, I didn’t build Fox for nothing.

  I figure I could keep saying that he wasn’t ready for the next ten years if I let Weak Lincoln run the show. But not everything is software development. The only way to get better in the real world is to say “Yes” even when things are a little uncomfortable. You don’t think about the whole thing because that’s too hard. You just put on your jacket. That’s easy. You’ve done it a thousand times. Then you walk to the door. Then you put your hand on the doorknob. Then you turn it. That’s how you get where you need to go.

  It’s nice that I’d get to study a high-level magical artifact for two weeks if we could get Dan’s jacket back. Super useful. But I think that was just the cover that Strong Lincoln was giving to Weak Lincoln because Strong Lincoln knows that sometimes you just have to fucking saddle up.

  We cruised down the Boulevard of the Allies, a little faster than I would have driven but whatever. Dan was good with the mind magic. If we did get stopped, he could totally Obi-Wan Kenobi them. I’d seen him do it.

  There’s the city to right. It looks nice tonight. And there’s the prison on the left. It looks sad. Here’s a great idea: let’s put the huge, depressing County lockup down amongst the skyscrapers on the waterfront, so everyone gets to see it on their way into and out of work.

  A couple of minutes later, we got off the Boulevard and jumped onto Liberty, past the train station.

  “Where are we headed, exactly? You have some kind of tracking spell on him?” I said.

  “Don’t be an idiot. Hold on.” Dan grabbed his phone from his pocket. He thumb-texted with his right hand as we cruised up the street.

  Three seconds later his phone buzzed and the screen lit up.

  “We’re going to head down 23rd,” he said, “and park it by the Cork Factory. Stoneface is on the loading side of the flats, and I don’t want to tip him off.”

  Pittsburgh’s Strip District is pretty cool. It’s a 10ish block stretch that’s full of stores and vendors that are all fresh or direct-to-you or farm-to-table or whatever. You can walk through the Strip on a Saturday morning and build yourself a breakfast of the most awesome stuff on Earth.

  On Penn Avenue, there’s a five block long, low building where the back side faces the river and is nothing but loading bays, and the front side is pretty much just warehouse openings for everything from home brewing supplies to bulk pasta to electronics.

  That was a block and half away from where we parked. There were no other cars in the lot, and Dan put it in the back corner of the place, closest to the river where the big sodium vapor light on the Cork Factory didn’t quite reach.

  “Don’t get out yet,” said Dan.

  “Magic?”

  “Shhh…"

  Dan took his hands off the steering wheel and placed them deliberately in his lap. He closed his eyes and took a centering breath. He started to whisper the words, and as he did his hands came up. They moved, and it looked more like something was pulling them through the tiny, intricate motions than like Dan was doing it himself. I tried to listen to the words, but just like always, they slipped away from me.

  I’d recorded them before, and even when I listened to those they fell through my mind like sand in a sifter, leaving debris but nothing useful. There was something psychoactive about the sounds themselves. So I’d run some voice recognition algorithms on it. When I read the phonetic transcript, I could tell that it’s what I heard before, but I couldn’t make it work by reading them myself. Just like being a fashion model or an olympic athlete, you need the genes to pull it off.

  I waited until he was done, only about twenty seconds or so. Whatever he was doing would have to be something subtle. Pittsburgh is a terrible place to invoke high-powered magic, due to the residue of decades of its wildly polluting steel production. The smoky mills are long gone, but almost everything around here is just lousy with molecular iron. So, a terrible place for magic? It’s more like impossible. In my experiments, I’d determined that it follows a power rule– the math kind, not the magic kind. Although I suppose in this case it’s actually both.

  Iron damps magic.

  You can draw and use a little bit of power, and it’ll work. But the more power you try to use, the more the iron in the environment bleeds it off.
So you can, say, “make your shoelaces glow” without too much trouble, but you’re not going to be running around shouting “Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!” and have anything happen other than you looking like an idiot.

  Now, if you’re clever and you’ve set things up well, you can still do some pretty cool stuff. Proper preparation and efficiency of design are just as relevant in spellcasting as they are in engineering.

  Dan finished his spell.

  “I’ve made us Ignorable.”

  “Awesome,” I said. “What is that?”

  “I’m not a good enough Metrist to make us invisible or hide our sounds, so I came up with some Sentics that will encourage people to not want to see or hear us. They’ll find a reason to ignore us.”

  “How well does it work on Praecants?”

  “Not too well,” said Dan, “but it will keep regular folks from getting in our way.”

  “Okay, that’s better than nothing,” I said. “That means anyone we see looking right at us is trouble, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “And if that happens, we’re out of here, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “Why don’t I believe you?”

  He got out of the car and gently closed the door behind him. I did the same.

  It was damp, and the late September air had been dipping into the 50s overnight. We’d had a ton of rain, and I could tell that the Allegheny was swollen. Debris floated past in the distance, darker silhouettes against the darkness of the river.

  Dan started walking toward the loading dock side of the flats, and motioned for me to follow. I fell in about half a pace behind him, to his right.

  No one was around. I could hear the occasional car on the Vets bridge, but only every minute or two. Things were pretty quiet. I looked around as we walked, knowing that my glasses would highlight anything of a magical nature for me. Nothing on that front either.

  As we came up around the back of the flats, I began to get the feeling I’d had the first time I’d snuck out of the house at night as a kid. Hyper alert but removed, almost like I was watching myself from a third person perspective. Certain that at any moment someone would see me and the universe would be turned upside down.