Immortality Is the Suck
Page 24
“Calm down, for Christ's sake,” said a familiar voice. Stan came around
the corner and leaned in the doorway, looking in at us with an amused
expression.
“Oh, thank God, Stan. They have Peter. I—”
“You can take full blame for whatever happens to Peter, Bertoni,” Stan
said. “You fucking idiot.”
To say my heart sank is not to fully express the despair I felt. More like my
heart was torpedoed and all men on board were lost.
“You've got to do something, Stan.”
The oddest expression crossed Stan's face. “You really are that stupid,
aren't you?” he said.
“What?”
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A big, ugly biker whom I recognized as Thug One appeared next to Stan,
his inked arm flung over Stan's shoulder, his mouth bloody.
“Hey, man, you sure you don't want a sip? You don't know what you're
missing.”
“No thank you, Charlie.”
There was something wrong here. It only stood on end for a minute,
though, before I saw it all clearly.
“You son of a bitch,” I breathed.
“Oh, please,” said Stan. “You can't talk.”
And then we heard a woman scream.
Stan looked uncomfortable. “I thought you told me that room was
soundproofed,” he said to Charlie.
It was completely unacceptable that the one man in the world that Peter
trusted was dirty. It was even more unacceptable that I was trapped in a
bathroom while just down the hall, people were being murdered. And worse,
these weren't just people on the street, or semiwilling victims. These were
people I knew. A young boy with wide eyes, a snarky computer nerd. Peter.
“You fucking bastards,” I said. “Let me out of here. Let me talk to Ozone.”
Charlie wiped his mouth lazily with the back of his arm. “Ozone isn't in
charge anymore.”
“Ozone lacked the necessary leadership skills,” said Stan. “He's been
replaced.”
“Bastard!” I hit the wall again.
“Settle down,” said Stan. “You're not helping yourself with these theatrics.”
“Fuck you!” I yelled, and I picked up the wooden stool and hurled it across
the wall of lights. Stan and Charlie jumped back.
Charlie seemed to think this very entertaining.
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Stan wiggled his eyebrows in a way that I supposed Peter would have been
able to interpret but which only aggravated me further. “He'll calm down when
he gets a little hungrier,” he said to Charlie. “Once a junkie, always a junkie.
He'll do pretty much anything you want for some blood.”
They retreated down the hall again. I found I was breathing hard and
remembered Drew telling me it wasn't necessary. So I stopped. I shut my
mouth and closed my eyes. Felt the hysteria back down a notch. Enough so I
could sort my thoughts out a bit.
As far as I knew, Peter and the other prisoners were still alive. Dead
women can't scream and Stan had referred to Peter in the present tense.
Backup wasn't coming, obviously. But there might still be time for an alternate
plan.
“Fuck, I'm hungry,” said Albert. “Ese was right about doing anything for a
sip, man.”
“You just ate last night.”
“How long can you go without eating?” asked Albert, surprised.
“I had a bad day when I went almost twenty-four hours,” I said. “I almost
ate you.”
He blinked up at me, and I saw the memory of that night at his trailer
coming back to him. “I would have eaten you,” he said.
“I think all this twelve-stepping has taught me how to resist temptation,” I
said. I'd resumed pacing. Wall-to-wall. This side had the source of the lights, a
series of holes that I'd already tried to block with a shoe. Apparently blocking
the lights set off an alarm, because four big guys came into the room shortly
afterward and forcibly removed our shoes from our feet.
“Hey Albert, let's try something.”
“Not again, Demonio. That cholo, he almost broke my neck, man.”
“We don't get out of here, it's inevitable, right? I saw a dead man once; La
Eme had cut off his cojones first.”
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Albert grimaced and, reluctantly, stood straight. “Now what?”
“These things run on electrical power, right?”
Albert frowned and shrugged. “Maybe.”
I looked around the room. “This was a bathroom, once,” I said, running
my hands along the tiles. Like everything else in the compound, they seemed to
have been laid rather sloppily. Here and there I could feel an unevenness in the
way they had been plastered in. “There must be pipes still.” In the position one
might find a bathtub faucet, three tiles had been pressed into the plaster, not
quite square to the others. I chipped at their edges with my fingernails.
“Why you want to find pipes?”
“Here, Albert, help me out. We have to knock these out.”
We took turns kicking and hitting the wall. Yelling curse words and, when
the occasional flunky came by to glare and tell us to shut the fuck up, we took
turns standing between the doorway and the damage we were doing to the
tiles.
After a time, we were able to tear a hole and could see the pipe inside, a
metal plug covering the place where the spigot had once been.
“Help me knock this off,” I said to Albert, kicking it hard enough to leave a
bruise on my bare foot.
He pursed his lips and said, “The whole place will flood, man.”
“We'll have to direct the water so it hits the lights,” I said.
He sighed and moved his shoulders in an expressive gesture for
“whatever” and kicked the spigot hard. “Fuck, that hurts,” he said, and did it
again.
Now when we screamed curses they were in earnest.
Soon the water started to dribble out and then I shoved Albert out of the
way as the water pressure shot the cap across the room, smack into the
opposite tiles, which exploded in a puff of plaster and broken ceramic and
spewed all over the room.
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Within seconds, we were two inches deep in water and it was running
toward the hallway. Albert and I struggled to withstand the pressure, using our
hands to redirect the water until we managed a steady fierce stream trickling
down the wall where the lights were.
Sure enough, one of the lights sputtered and went out. Then another.
Then sparks flew from a couple and they spat glass as they went out. Flames
came out of one light, then a flicker of all of the lights, and a moan from the
very walls, as if some great beast were dying.
Which was true, in a sense, because we'd just short-circuited the front of
the compound.
The place was suddenly pitched into darkness.
Albert swore creatively as we slid and slopped across the wet glass and
broken ceramic-strewn floor and skidded into the hallway.
“Which way?” he whispered.
I figured our odds of survival were about 20 percent to nil. “You go east,
I'll go west,” I
said. “I've got to get the survivors out.”
“Suit yourself, crazy white man,” said Albert, and took off down the
hallway.
I went the opposite direction, coming out into the main room, where
soldiers, brandishing their heavy swords, were mostly accusing each other of
sabotage. The room was chaotic with big men shouting loudly in two
languages, water pouring across the floor, occasional sparks shooting from
outlets. Nobody seemed to notice another big guy sneaking around the edges. I
followed my nose, finding Peter's scent in a small room near the kitchen. He
had been tied up back-to-back with Drew, who was obviously terrified. I
couldn't see the people whose home we had broken into.
Perhaps because Peter and Drew were humans, and tied up, only one
small thug had been left to guard them. He was easily knocked down. I stole
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his sword, decapitated him with it, and then decapitated another thug who
came around the corner.
I used the tip of the sword to cut through Peter's bindings.
“Can you see at all?” I asked him.
“Enough. Did you just cut off a man's head?”
“You have to get out of here,” I told him. I'd released Drew, who was a
blubbering, useless mess, clinging to me and sobbing. I transferred him into
Peter's arms. “There's an exit they leave unlocked, over the kitchen door. To
your left.” And when Peter seemed to hesitate, “Save the geek, Peter. He'll give
you the evidence you need.”
We'd been maybe two minutes and the chaos still raged outside, but
somebody remembered the prisoners and came back to check. He managed to
cry out an alarm and engage my sword in two swinging arcs, the metal
screaming as we clashed.
And then they were all on me.
I was encircled completely by big ugly bikers waving swords with varying
degrees of expertise.
At the edge of my vision, I saw Peter and Drew disappear toward the
kitchen. They'd need as much time as I could give them to get clear of the
compound. I hunkered down in my spot and faced the room. Okay, I'd always
known I'd go out in a blaze of glory. Truth be told, I'd kind of looked forward to
it. A neat end to a messy life. I allowed my face to go into its “demon” mode,
raised my sword.
Bring it.
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Chapter Twenty-three
Glory is overrated.
What followed was mostly a lot of work. Blood and pain, as some bastard
got in a lucky stroke and opened up my left biceps. Embarrassment when
another son of a bitch clipped me in the head and I cried out like a kid. A few
dumbass, and in other circumstances, really humorous moves as we all tried to
handle the big, weirdly balanced swords.
I planted mine accidentally in a door frame and that was that, I figured. I
was a goner. Some Angel came at me, laughing. His mouth open so wide, I
could see that the only teeth of his that weren't rotten were the biting ones. I
couldn't help but throw my hands up before me, like that would do any good.
Suddenly I saw a blade cut through his red neck and dirty yellow hair and
he exploded into dust. Freeway stood behind him, looking disgusted. “Mierda,
'mano, why do they do like that?”
“Freeway!”
He ducked, just avoiding a swinging sword blade. His face was all broad
smile and wild eyes. That stupid black sombrero pushed back on his head.
“Get your sword, you pendejo bitch!” he yelled, hopping and swinging his sword
in a wide arch as he yelled, taking a man in the belly.
I planted a foot on the wall and managed to jerk my sword free. “What are
you doing, Freeway?” I asked, jabbing at a biker's woman who had gotten hold
of a sword and seemed to be doing a fairly good amount of damage with it.
“Back off me,” I said, poking at her again.
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Freeway grabbed the woman around the waist and threw her across the
room. She fell into a sofa covered with blood and ash. “I got your back, mi
her'mano,” sang Freeway. He spun and caught a big black man in the ribs with
his blade.
It was the last thing I ever heard him say. Because at that moment, Hell
happened. A wall of the compound lit up. As if a light had gone off inside it.
Half a second later, every object in the room near the wall seemed to lift and
float. The light grew larger. A dozen other smaller lights bloomed around it.
And then the lights went out.
* * * * *
“You stupid fucking bastard,” said Peter. His face was white and smeared
with ash. Starlight danced behind his head, the strobe of LAPD and EMT
vehicles throbbing off every surface.
I could feel his hand on my face. No pain, though.
“Am I dead?” I asked him.
“Jesus.” He looked up and away, blinking the shine from his eyes. I felt
his fingers carding through the cowlick at the front of my hair, rhythmically.
“What were you trying to do?”
Had I, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, passed out at the Marina and, just
now, come to? “I just had the strangest dream, Peter. You were there
and…I…fuck, you wouldn't believe it anyway.” I tried to sit up, but a pain in
my chest pressed me back to the ground.
“Don't get up,” said Peter. Turned out the pain was his knee where he
knelt on me to keep me supine. “The medics found you first and when they saw
you weren't breathing they brought you out. I just managed to stop them
carting you off to a hospital.”
Oh. I hadn't dreamed any of it, then. I was lying on my back on the damp
lawn of Ozone's compound. The entire LAPD, it seemed, was working
purposefully around me.
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“What happened?” I asked him. His hand was still in my hair, petting. It
was both unbelievably soothing and the most erotic thing I had ever felt.
“Your Asian friend and I fell out the kitchen window right into the laps of a
SWAT team. Seems your friend, Alli, called the troops.” He grimaced. “Top-
notch cop, that woman. Read some file you sent her, did the math, and called
my boss.”
“Your boss?”
“Stan set it up,” said Peter, his voice bleak. “This joker, Ozone, was paying
him to tamper with the evidence. It could have been years before we connected
the dots.”
“And by then they would dominate SoCal,” I said. “Where's Stan?”
His jaw clenched. “Dead. He… one of the others bit him.” Peter placed two
fingers on his own neck, in the position of probable puncture wounds. “He was
cold and drained when I found him. But SWAT hadn't secured the area, and I
needed to help them press towards the rooms at the back.” He blinked. “I still
can't believe what we found back there. When I came back to Stan, he was
gone. There was ash everywhere…”
“I'm sorry, Peter.”
“You know, I knew. When you told me Stan was undercover, I knew. It
didn't add up. But I couldn't let myself see it. Instead, well, I figured you were
up to something and I tailed
you.”
He petted me, thoughtfully. “I saw you go home with Alli.”
Fuck.
“I needed a place to crash. Nothing happened.”
“You don't need to explain to me.”
“Yes I do.”
He looked down at me and away. Sirens wailed and drifted into the night.
“Stan's wife won't even have something to bury,” he said.
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* * * * *
They'd be sorting through the mess for days, but Peter managed to
expedite my necessary involvement so that I could leave before the sun rose.
We walked through the scene, examining what was left. The flood water
had washed through the entire front of the compound. Swords and muddy, wet
ash lay all over the gleaming white tile. There was a remarkable absence of
blood, considering.
A uniformed SWAT officer came into the room from one of the hallways,
talking to someone. “…at least a hundred in these rooms. All showed signs of
extreme blood loss.” He stepped into the room, followed by Alli.
“Any IDs?”
“None, and quite a few seemed incoherent.”
“High-grade heroin,” said a familiar voice. Albert appeared behind Alli.
She smiled at me. “Your friend secured the entire back of the compound
and then just waited for us to move in,” she said. “It was very impressive.”
“Can I talk to you a minute?” I said to Albert.
He followed me into the kitchen while Peter chatted with the others. “What
are you up to?” I asked him.
“She's a beautiful woman and she thinks I'm machismo, 'mano. What can
I do?”
“Keep your bloodsucking hands off her, Albert.”
He looked at me with wide, shocked eyes.
“Or I'll march out there and explain why you were able to subdue a room
full of terrified human males single-handedly.”
“Can't a man fall in love?”
“You can't.”
“If you can, 'mano, anybody can. Relax. She saw me 'el diablo,' shall we
say. In my other face. She didn't even flinch. What a woman.”