LTUE is Utah’s premier sci-fi and fantasy convention. I remember going as a kid, and being in awe of Orson Scott Card’s beard. Now I’m a novelist myself, and I have my own mustachios.
Here’s my schedule for the con.
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Books by D.J. Butler
A Welcoming Safe Haven
I was a little surprised to find the door unlocked, though I suppose if you wanted the church to be a welcoming safe haven, being open most of the time probably made sense. And it wasn’t like St. Matthew’s had a lot to steal—the inside was pretty Spartan, none of the gold and velvet you’d imagine from seeing the Godfather movies. There was a stone basin of water, a table in a corner with some pamphlets on it, wooden benches with kneelers, and an altar.
No sign of Evil.
What gives? I texted. St. Matthew’s, right?
Side chapel. To the right.
If Father Rojas found me, I guess I’d tell him I came to pray. I skirted the benches and came to the little space on the right side. It wasn’t quite its own room, but the right arm of the cross that the building’s floor plan made. I knew this part of the building had its own name, but I couldn’t remember it. There was a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary in an alcove in the back wall, with an iron rack in front of her holdings lots of votive candles. Only one of them was lit.
I was about to text Evil again when I noticed that the single burning candle sat next to a little rectangle of plastic. A card. I picked it up, and saw that it was a driver’s license. Ronald E. Patten, it said.
It was Evil’s driver’s license.
Evil? I asked.
In response, a picture suddenly appeared in the stream of my text conversation. It was a picture of Evil, wearing the same flannel shirt and Marines Never Die t-shirt he’d worn the day before. He sat inside a bathtub; his hands were behind him and he had a strip of cloth tied through his mouth as a gag.
This isn’t funny, Evil, I told him. My hands trembled.
This isn’t Evil. Pay close attention, now. You’re going to do exactly as I say.
I Went for the Gun
My truck was the only car in the parking lot. The starlight downplayed the fact that the truck was seven different colors. I actually don’t know which was the original—Javier at the Jalopy Graveyard, Howard’s own pick-a-part auto shop, pieced it together from multiple different wrecks. He claims it’s a Toyota Tacoma, but I don’t know how you’d know. It was the closest thing to a homemade car I’d ever seen, and getting it a consistent paint job had not yet climbed to the top of my list of financial priorities.
The truck opened the old-fashioned way, key in the lock. I started the engine and gave the truck and my hands, wrapped around the coffee, both a minute to warm up. This high up, nights are cold in any season. I wondered how far into The Last of the Mohicans Evil had gotten (it was true that it wasn’t my favorite movie, but it wasn’t bad, especially the jumping-through-the-waterfall scene) and was just about to put the truck into gear when something slammed against the driver’s side window.
I spilled the coffee on my leg. “Sheesh!” I shouted, but I had the presence of mind to look out the window before grabbing under the seat.
It was the crazy bum. He leaned against the window and hammered on it with one fist, and he was shouting. “Jackson!” he yelled. “You’re Jackson!”
Not worth going for the gun, I decided. My heart was pounding and I realized that I was shaking like a leaf, but I kept my head, put the truck into first, and started driving away.
The bum threw himself onto my hood. He dug his fingers under the lip of the hood where the windshield wipers are and yelled again. “The trailer! I went to the wrong one!”
I could have just gunned and driven home. Somewhere along the way, the crazy old guy would have fallen off, for sure. It probably would have killed him, though, and I didn’t want that on my record or my conscience. I jammed the truck back into neutral and pulled up the hand brake.
Then, for his sake, I went for the gun.
His Name Was Really Evil
Objectively, Gladys was right; Evil Patten was a good-looking young man. He wasn’t tall, exactly, but he had a lot of masculine charm in his broad shoulders and narrow hips. He walked confidently. His nose was crooked, but his teeth were good and he smiled a lot. He couldn’t ever manage a normal hairstyle—either it was buzz cut like his Marine older brother’s, or it was long and ragged, like he was auditioning to play the stoner kid in some 1980s movie about teens making out a lot and finding themselves. There was no middle ground, and his hair seemed to jump from the one state to the other instantaneously and without warning. Right now it was long, and that was the better situation, because when it was long it hid the fact that his skull was kind of funny shaped, too flat in back. Dad said it was because the Pattens had so many kids, and Evil hadn’t been held enough when he was a baby, had just laid in a car seat all day.
His name was really Evil, too. At least, that was his middle name and it was the name everyone called him. His first name was Ronald. His parents, God bless them, had named Evil after their favorite president, Ronald Reagan, and their favorite motorcycle stunt performer, Evil Knievel. It could have been worse—Evil had a younger brother cursed with the name Abraham Hulk Patten. On the first day of school, teachers just looked at the boy’s name on the roll and laughed out loud.
What Is Steampunk? (City of the Saints)
City of the Saints is finally out in paperback, and available from Amazon.
Apologies for the delay, but I think you’ll find that the amazing cover by Nathan Shumate of Fifth Planet Design — and the rollicking, over-the-top, gonzo action adventure of the tale itself — are worth it.
Her Duster Flared
Raphael turned from following Chuy and jogged down the stairs. He kicked aside a dazed-eyed man who clutched and groped at his leg, aware that Chuy, above him, was halfway along the ramp. He pushed between two clinging women as Chuy approached the altar. He dragged a wild-eyed cannibal away from feasting on the intestines of a screaming man and gave the cannibal an uppercut to the jaw with so much force he heard the man’s teeth shatter.
“Aaaaaaagh!” The scream came from above him, and Raphael knew Chuy had arrived. A snake headed, kilt-clad priest slammed to the ground immediately in front of him, crushing two naked worshippers into an indistinguishable knot of elbows and sweat.
Surrounded by the bloodthirsty, the lustful, and the mad, Raphael stooped and picked up the Calamity Horn. He looked up and saw the Marked Woman, wobbling to her feet next to Snake Collar Chuy.
Kokhabel bellowed, rising from his crutch in sudden realization of what was happening. He lurched forward—
“Qayna!” Raphael called in the Still Small Voice, and he threw the Horn straight up—
the drums fell silent—
Kokhabel slammed into the edge of the tower, sending shattered timbers flying in all directions. Chuy’s borrowed body disappeared in the destruction. Qayna turned and leaped at the last possible instant. Her duster flared out around her body like wings, snapping in the cold night air as she reached out—
and snatched the pistol in mid-air.
Truer Words
“He’s waking up.”
Eddie Marlowe shoved himself into Raphael’s field of vision. He looked more haggard and food-deprived than ever, and even as their gazes met, Eddie’s Infernal eye slid sideways, and he blinked hard.
“Tell me who you are,” the guitar player said in a hard voice. Raphael saw that the other man had a fist cocked back, ready to strike.
“Raphael,” he said. “This body is borrowed. The man is Enoch Emery, and he is in the service of Heaven. And you’re Eddie Marlowe. You and I met for the first time in Azazel’s well of imprisonment, at the waters of Dudael.”
“Dammit.” Eddie sat back.
Raphael sat up. He was in Enoch Emery’s body, all right, but it didn’t respond right. The body had taken a beating, but that wasn’t the problem. His connection with the body was wrong. He wasn’t sure he could put his finger on the issue, exactly.
“I come Bearing the Word,” he said. Chuy sat in the corner of the cage, and Twitch lay on the floor, with a scrap of leather draped over her.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Heaven,” Raphael said. “I come as a Messenger. I have a message for you, Eddie.”
“If Heaven is using you as a Messenger,” Eddie snorted, “things must really have hit the fan.”
“They must have,” Raphael agreed, cracking an awkward smile, “or you wouldn’t be getting a message.”
Eddie laughed out loud at that. “Touché,” he said. “We’re all broken men, but I guess when times are hard you go with what you got.”
“Truer words,” Twitch whimpered from the floor, “et cetera.”
Both Sides Were Wrong
“Why are you doing push-ups?” Enoch asked.
“Son of a bitch hates it,” Chuy sneered. “All that slob wants to do it get drunk, eat candy bars, and pretend he likes girls.”
“What son of a bitch is that?” Enoch wanted to know.
Chuy looked to Raphael and back to the vessel. “Son of a bitch inside me,” he said. “Though it looks like you might know exactly what I’m talking about. Son of a bitch my brother. Son of a bitch who killed me and damned me to Hell because he was anxious to prove he was attracted to women.”
Enoch shook his head. “I don’t know your brother. Sounds like you two had a rough time.”
“Rough time? I had nothing all my life,” Chuy spat. “I got even less now, and that son of a bitch is to blame.”
“You made bad choices,” Raphael said, and immediately wished he hadn’t.
“You think it’s that easy?” Chuy laughed. “Everybody makes bad choices. Everybody! Except you, I guess. Guess that’s why you get to be all glowing and fifty feet tall. ’Cause you’re perfect, you never made a wrong call, not since the day the Horseshoe Crab Nebula crapped you out along with all the other glowing white turds.”
Raphael felt uncomfortable, and said nothing.
Chuy stared the angel in the eye. “Too right, bitch,” he said. “I saw you down there in Hell. I guess you must not have noticed me, but I saw you, and guess what, Silver Surfer? You were on the wrong damn side! It was you and that octopus devil and the fairy queen and the wizard and all the giant flies, wasn’t it?”
“I wasn’t fighting Heaven.” It was a lie, and Raphael knew it. “Both sides were wrong in that struggle.”
Enoch looked away, as if politely avoiding an awkward conversation.
Play
Raphael hesitated. Was this possession or madness? “Can I talk to Mike?”
“You wouldn’t want to. He’s chickenshit, and an idiot. Besides, you don’t need him. If you’re looking for Eddie Marlowe, I can tell you where he is.”
“Oh yeah?”
Chuy pointed out the door into the park. “He’s the guy with the tambourine.”
Raphael looked.
He saw now that he’d been distracted by the boat, by the crowd, and by the presence of Kokhabel, and he’d missed the other occupants of the bark. Four men, two in front of Kokhabel and two behind, stood at the corners of the bark with hooked knives in their hands. Their heads were shaved and their robes, once white, were darkened with blood. From unseen sources at their feet, behind the bark’s rowers, the men with knives pulled a steady succession of sheep, chicken, cats, dogs, and other creatures, holding each up in turn before dispatching it with a single slice of the knife and tossing its carcass to the crowd. As the cultists around the boat snatched at the dismembered animals, they in turn were dismembered by the relentless bladed oars of the bark.
Kokhabel’s hands rested on his knees, and Raphael now saw that the Fallen’s hands weren’t empty. The further hand held a person—the darkness and the various things obscuring his view left Raphael uncertain, but from the curly black hair on the captive’s head, it could be the Marked Woman. The near hand held the silver-haired fairy Twitch, who lay flopped like a fish on the river’s bank, twitching and spineless.
In the front of the bark stood Eddie Marlowe. He glared over his shoulder at Kokhabel with a fierceness that would cut stone, but he stood still. Raphael couldn’t tell whether the guitar player’s ankles were shackled or tied to something, but in each hand the man held a tambourine.
Doom, doom, da-doom.
The bark rumbled towards the front steps of the Institute and the wooden tower resting on the jumble of artifacts. Raphael pressed himself closer into the doorway to see better, and realized there was another element of the scene he had missed. He saw it first as streaks of shadow, zipping through the air between him and the torches, but when he heard hissing sounds from the sidewalk he realized what it was.
Snakes. Snakes in the grass and the street, snakes whipping through the air on Infernal wings.
To a signal Raphael hadn’t heard, three enormous bonfires sprang into life, two in the park and the third in the street that had once separated the park from the Institute, back when there had been automobile traffic. Kokhabel and his bark, including the rock and roll band prisoners, instantly became silhouettes.
“Play,” Raphael heard Kokhabel rasp.
Eddie Marlowe raised the tambourines.
