“Don’t.” Jimmy wasn’t sure how to put it, other than, “She’s dead, man. …They’re all dead…”
Terry wasn’t so willing to accept that, disappointed his friend had given up so easily. “You don’t know that, man…”
“No. You’re not getting me.” The steady, seriousness of his tone caught Terry’s notice. “Look.”
He gestured with his head for him to look back at the girl’s body.
Terry froze for a moment, examining the truth in his friend’s stare, trying to decide if he was just being his usual, paranoid and pessimistic self…but could tell by his expression he wasn’t. He looked through the passenger window at the broken corpse and watched as it, like the last, disappeared before them, shattered glass and all. His confusion still mounted but his frustration was slipping away, being replaced by something more like helplessness. It was strange, but somehow his scared, nervous little buddy was more in control than he was. He desperately looked his friend in the eyes, pleading for an explanation.
“I…uh…” Jimmy still wasn’t sure how to go about it, so he decided on starting from the beginning. “I saw Kitty…when I went back in the store…”
“What?” Terry was even more confused now than before, and Tara peeked her head out from her defensive huddle to listen to what Jimmy had to say.
“She…she didn’t know who I was… It was like we never met.” He realized by the blank expressions on their faces he still wasn’t giving them any answers. “I think… I think she was dead already… And her…spirit, or something, was trapped in that store, reliving how she died…”
“Wait…wait… What do you mean dead already? You mean like a ghost?” Tara was willing to listen but needed it spelled out for her, and Terry was just as eager for him to explain.
“Yeah… I guess… I just know what I saw. And she was back in the store, right where we first found her, and she didn’t remember anything…”
“Fuck…” Quicker to accept Jimmy’s words than Tara, Terry put his hand on his head and tried to take it all in while she still had to get a few things straight.
“So…so that man… The one who was running towards us…?”
“Yeah. And the girl who we just saw fall out of the building.” Jimmy had a few extra minutes to adjust to the idea so it was a little easier for him to put it together for her. “They were all already dead. They’re just…stuck, I guess… Reliving their deaths here in the streets…”
“Then where’re all the rest of the ghosts? There was obviously a lot more people killed here than just these three.”
“I don’t know… Maybe it’s only the ones who can’t accept they’re gone.”
Terry shook his head and put the truck back in drive.
“We need to get the hell out of here. Jimmy, close the door. No more stops.” Jimmy shut the door and Tara straightened out in her seat. “We go to Alex’s. We wait there ’til she shows up or ’til morning – whichever comes first. Then we all find a way out of this fucking city.”
God himself couldn’t have been more absolute in his decree. It was becoming more and more apparent that Los Angeles, California was the last place on Earth anyone should be right now. A simple drive across town to a friend’s house was turning out to be a moonstruck detour through insanity and dementia. The longer they spent drifting through the blood-mists of this New Hell, the more they could see what was really out there—
Spirits of dead victims were trapped in stores, offices and cars, unable to escape the horrors of their repeating fates, beating on panes of glass like padded walls in an asylum – it was death that haunted them, not the other way around. The alleys were so black it felt like their souls were in danger of being consumed by the void as they passed… And they were. A deep groaning hummed above from slithering leviathans infecting the sky, blocking out Heaven’s view of the foul disease of evil spreading below. There were eyes in every reflection, every shadow, every crack they passed, watching them drive deeper into the city. Every stoplight was blinking red. Every streetlight would flicker as they drove under, threatening to leave them blanketed in dark. Every wall perspired with crimson droplets leaving a metallic stink waiting to taint their lungs. And their every breath was a reminder of the surrounding death they had to maneuver through to find their friends.
Tara reached up and closed the vents so to not have to taste the blood in the oxygen they breathed.
What the hell are we doing, she asked herself. I don’t want to be here… I want to be anywhere else but here…
Terry looked over at her nervous and uncomfortable eyes. Her hands were shaking. He reached out to put his hand on top of hers and squeezed.
2
“Shit…d’you think they saw us?” The Cabby ducked from the view of the National Guard in the distance, not realizing his efforts were in vain. Even if the military couldn’t see him, they could still see his cab.
They were driving at a drunken snail’s pace through back alleys and side streets five blocks north of a military checkpoint.
“It’s hard to tell from here…but I don’t think they noticed.” Alex was fairly certain they’d slipped by undetected. It was just as she figured: if she just sat back and left her future to the whims of fate, everything should fall into place…
“Oh-crap-oh-crap-oh-crap-oh-crap…”
What place the patrolling policeman behind them who’d just flipped on his lights played was yet to be unveiled.
“Don’t…don’t panic…just…”
“What do I do?! Do I pull over?!”
She had no idea what to do… “Maybe if you keep going they won’t follow us in.”
“Yeah…okay…”
After a few seconds, the policeman gave his sirens a chirp and undoubtedly alerted every other vehicle within the limited range of their radios to their location.
“Shit! Now what?! He’s still tailing me… Should I gas it?”
She was at a loss. There was no way this cop would let them continue into a quarantined zone if they pulled over for him, and if they took off too quickly, they might be seen as some kind of threat to government security. Or, worse, crash the cab from a lack of being able to see where they were going beyond the mist wall. But they had to make it in to find Marty, she just knew it. It was her fate. She was sure…
“No.” She slipped into her confident persona to give him his answer. “Just pull over.”
“But…”
“Trust me. We’ll get through this somehow.” She sounded convincing enough, but really was terrified that this was where her journey would end.
“Shit…” Todd the Cabby was not okay with her suggestion, but too much of a coward to make a decision on his own. Plus, he instinctively knew to trust this young girl he kept imprisoned in his backseat. Beyond his fear and even his instinct for survival, there was that. “Okay… Okay, we’ll do it your way.”
They came to a stop in the alley and the cop pulled up behind them, lumbering in their rear for a good twenty seconds that felt like thirty millennia.
“What the hell is he waitin’ for?” He wasn’t thinking clearly. The answer was obvious.
“Backup.”
“What…now? I’d run right into him…”
“No… he’s waiting for backup.”
“Oh, yeah…” He knew that… “Shit…that’s not good…”
“Just… don’t act natural…”
“Don’t act natural?”
“You’re naturally a spaz… Just… I don’t know… Pretend you’re me, or something.”
“Yeah, okay…” He let loose a deep breath, calming his nerves. “…I’m a hot chick who’s ready to singlehandedly face down a demon from Hell to save the universe… I can do this…”
“Maybe I should do the talking…”
“Yeah. You… you just let me know if you need me to
chime in.”
For a hostage taker, he was pretty easy to get along with…
The cop lingered authoritatively, leering at the cab through his windshield. His backup was less than a block away and should be rounding the corner behind him at any moment. He decided to get a head start on his fellow law enforcers and get this whole interrogation process rolling. What the hell this cabby and his fare thought they were doing was beyond him. Who’d be dumb enough to stroll into that wall of eerie, red fog in the middle of an obvious evacuation and quarantine protocol? Whoever the hell they were, they’d earned themselves a stern talking to…
“Whoa…”
The Caucasian officer in his mid-thirties was caught off-guard when Alex turned her head to look his way. The attractive silhouette of a sexy, young woman was a welcome sight on a night like this. Before he stepped out of his squad car, he decided a few refreshing squirts of Binaca to the back of his tongue was in order…and also a small mercy considering his coffee breath was infamous for growing tendrils and reaching out and choking unsuspecting folks this late in the evening.
He removed the cap and gave the top of the tiny spray-bottle a pinch but to no avail. He tried again after rattling it up and down with the outcome being the same. The little gingivitis-battling soldier was all out of ammunition. With no means of defense in the war against halitosis there were likely to be civilian casualties.
“Shit-balls…”
He looked down between his seat and the center console for any leftover peppermints or Altoids and spied a speck of white at the farthest reaches of the crevasse beside him that often housed his loose change. There were no nickels or dimes to speak of, but a hint of a rogue Mentos was calling out to him from beneath some old pocket lint and granola crumbs. He reached his fingers as far as he could and had to expend considerable focus on clutching the little breath-freshener between his digits, but eventually prevailed. He hoisted the mint candy out of its premature grave and gave it a good blow to dust off the muck.
“Bonus!” he exclaimed when his victory was complete and triumphantly popped the Mentos into his mouth, eyes shifting to the street in front of him. “Shit!”
He jumped out of his car as if he might get a better view of the blank canvas outside where there was supposed to be a rogue, Yellow Cab with his dream girl waiting inside. But the empty street looked just as empty from outside as it did in. And as if the whole police force was in on the prank, three squad cars pulled up beside him just in time to see he’d somehow lost his detainees.
“Double shit!”
“What happened?!” A large black man exited the first cop car to come to a stop, wanting to be filled in.
“I… I don’t know… I lost ’em…”
“Huh?” He reacted as if his fellow officer’s words didn’t even deserve a respectable response.
“Look… I don’t know what happened, okay? I turned my head away for a second and they were gone. It doesn’t even make any sense! They didn’t have enough time to make it around the corner!”
“Unless you had your head turned for a little more than a second, you mean.”
“Um, yeah, uh, officer ‘Blow Me’, is it?”
“Bowman, dick…”
“Well, Officer Dick Bowman, they couldn’t have gotten far, now could they? You wanna stand here all night and talk about how long I had my fucking head turned or you wanna help me find this disappearing cab?”
“Whatever, man… Let’s just clean this shit up before the rest of the National Guard gets here. Because if we don’t, were gonna have one more civilian out there we don’t need in the middle of a fucking warzone…”
“Two more. There was the driver and a girl in the backseat. Possibly Hispanic with black hair. Looked like a younger, hotter version of Catharine Zeta Jones…”
“Ah. Right. So…what? You were lookin’ for a napkin to wipe yourself off when they saw you were distracted with your johnson and made a run for it?”
He gave his fellow officer a scowl and a rigid, middle finger as he got back in his car. He had no clue how they could’ve driven off without him noticing, but was determined to track them down and ask. Nobody slips away from Officer Grant B. Buterhanz and makes it home to laugh about it.
“What the hell are they talking about?” The Cabby and Alex were right where they were supposed to be, starring back at four police cars and their officers who were acting as if suddenly they couldn’t see them parked right under their noses. “Holy shit… I think they’re leaving.” He could hardly believe his eyes. “What the hell’s goin’ on?”
Alex kept her eye on the first officer to pull them over as he got back in his car, cursing to himself under his breath. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she had a pretty good idea of what might be happening.
“They can’t see us.”
“What? Why the hell not?”
A familiar tightness in her chest shortened her breaths as her attention was pulled back to the front of the cab. She quickly scanned over the alley ahead, hoping she wouldn’t find what she suspected was out there…but her hopes were only optimistic and naive.
Two yellow eyes pierced through the night air and red fog, standing watch over them from less than a block away. Tessura, it would seem, was never too far from their path. She must’ve used her mind tricks on the officers behind them to make them believe they were staring at an empty alley. Her abilities were cunning and powerful and made Alex feel unprepared. If she was awed by her aunt’s pet, how would she feel when she was soon faced with the Queen herself?
“I don’t know.” She outright lied so to spare him the discomfort of knowing Tessura was keeping such a close eye. “But we should probably take advantage of it while we can.”
He’d seemed to be getting a little more comfortable with their situation up to this point and she thought it a good idea to keep him at least halfway sane. She meant what she said about wanting him to make it out of this alive. She really felt that saving him was something she had to do. The good guys desperately needed a victory, no matter how small. If she could save this man from that thing out there, then she would be on her way to becoming this savior, or saint, or whatever the hell it was she was supposed to be. At least, that’s how she figured it…
Truth be told, she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to save anybody. From the way her father was talking, it seemed she was just supposed to survive this more than anything else. For all she knew, the part she was intended to play might not be for years to come. She might be destined to live out her life in hiding and fear until the time came when she could actually make a difference. And when that might be was a total mystery to say the least.
Don’t get ahead of yourself, girl… She knew enough to know worrying about the future was a futile waste of energy. One problem at a time, she thought. Get this guy out of this mess…then we’ll deal with whatever the future might hold.
“Let’s just get out of here before one of them accidentally runs into us on their way out.”
“Good idea.”
He decided to oblige her advice and put his cab into gear. The thick wall of red in front of them was less than a block away now and looking more and more like the point of no return. The Cabby wasn’t looking forward to driving Alex into the city any more than Alex was, but he knew he didn’t have a choice. That demon who held the lease on his life still haunted his every thought. The warmth of its foul breath still turned his stomach, and the memory of its eyes poked searing holes straight through his soul. He felt like he was bleeding-out internally, slowly dying a torturous death of fear and anxiety. If it weren’t for the strength of the young woman in his backseat, he may’ve already lost it completely and failed in his chance to win its favor. Not gaining its favor would’ve undoubtedly been the death of him since he was sure the beast was close by, waiting for the moment he’d try to escape or grow a conscience and decide to let th
e girl go.
More and more he questioned his own motives for staying alive. Trading one life for another was something he may’ve been okay with if he hadn’t gotten to know the girl. But talking to her, seeing the goodness in her eyes and hearing the strength in her words was making him wonder if what he was doing was something he’d be able to live with. Then the thought of being food for a giant drooling monster bulldozed its way back into his mind and he realized that that was also something he wouldn’t be able to live with. …But at least it’d be over quickly…
“I, uh…” He couldn’t believe the words that were about to come out of his mouth… “I don’t know if I can do this…” She looked him in the eyes as he spoke; them meeting each other’s stare through the mirror above. “…Keep you prisoner, I mean.”
She was almost so shocked by the sentence that she thought she may have heard him wrong, but could tell by his tone what he’d said he meant.
Her first thought was that maybe they could figure something out together. Come up with a plan of escape that’d get them both out of this mess… But she knew better. Neither of them had a choice. But she appreciated him trying to give her one anyway. She smiled softly and reached up to put her hand on his shoulder.
“You’re not keeping me prisoner.” She squeezed to let him know she wasn’t going anywhere. “You’re just giving me a ride to where I need to go.”
He let out the breath he was trying not to let her know he was holding and sighed in relief. He really was willing to let her go, but knew it would’ve been the death of him and wasn’t sure if he was ready for that yet.
He nodded back to her and tried to smile, his heart so wound up at the thought of having to face that beast he couldn’t get his lips to move the way he wanted them to. He took another breath and shifted his eyes back onto the road ahead. Their little discussion took up just enough time for them to reach the wall of fog, and when they entered, they both had a renewed sense of purpose. He was no longer holding her captive, and she was no longer his prisoner. Now they were both in it together, and that unity brought a feeling of strength to their cause. …Suddenly he felt they both just might make it out of this mess alive.
Blood Magik- A Cold Day In Hell Page 40
