by Rob Thurman
Worse than that, as Goodfellow could puke all day and it’d be worth it to get away from these nightmares sniffing at our heels, was the brain. When I’d first begun to gate, it wasn’t easy. I’d had skull-splitting headaches, nosebleeds, and if I pushed hard enough, I’d bleed from my nose, ears, and eyes. It hadn’t happened to Nik and Robin during gating, but that’s when I was young and I was the one doing all the lifting, light or heavy. I was the plane, they were only the passengers. Nonetheless it’d made me think then what I was thinking now—gating didn’t make for a healthy brain if you were a prepubescent Auphe. I was fine with it now. I’d hit Auphe puberty, was full grown with the physical capability to gate with no effort or side effects. But if you were a human or a puck who already had a head injury, if you were bleeding inside your brain before I took you through a gate, I had no idea if it would make things worse or not effect anything at all.
Snatching a look as I aimed the light over my shoulder, I discovered to no real surprise that shadows and weasels move faster in mud than I do. Put the two together and we were out of luck. And in the confines of what was basically a stone death trap, their snapping jaws and what had started up as they came down the ladder as manic, crazed low whispering was ten times louder, ten times more terrifying. We were about fifteen seconds, maximum, from being eaten alive.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a shadowed recess. It was either a doorway, an alcove for the exhibition of sewer art by some exciting new artist who was big in the 1940s, or a cruel hoax. I didn’t have time to weigh the odds of each. Carrying Goodfellow along, I lunged through the archway. And for once, luck wasn’t something I made myself. The doorway actually was a doorway and as we passed through I saw an iron door resting against the lichen covered wall. Easing the puck down as quickly as I could without actually dropping him, I shoved my gun away, held the end of a dysentery covered flashlight in my mouth and used both hands to push the heavy piece of metal through the mud to close with a muted clang. I barely made it. Immediately something hit the other side with brutal force. There was a lock, a dead bolt, which I shot, but it was wood and while it had once been thick and sturdy, years of dank, humid air couldn’t have been good for it.
Crouching down beside Robin, I peered into his eyes. “You in there, Caesar? Looking for those gladiators or ready to come back to the real world? I hope so, because we’ve really got to haul ass.”
“Caesar,” he echoed, rubbing a slow hand across his muddy face. “He was boring. Always off putting it to Cleo while claiming he was overseeing the training of camels for the Roman cavalry. But you recall that. One of them bit you in the ass . . . no. That was Keos. You’re . . . they took you, William . . . they took you.”
“Will,” I corrected absently, from a time when I had been Will with the only surname given a bastard village boy. Bastards received one surname, all of us. Bastards had whores or adultresses as mothers. Women painted in red. Scarlet. “Will Scarlet,” I muttered, then let it go. That life was over. “Not anymore. It’s Caliban. I’m Caliban.”
“Caliban . . . with the horrible beer.” He looked at the mud on his hand, obviously confused by it. “Where am I? Have I asked that before? Where . . .” And he was gone, wiping the mud from his hand onto my jeans. His pants? No. That’d be insane.
The important thing was he still seemed partially out of it. There was a bloody scrape on his forehead, evidence he’d hit his head on the way down. I could use the flashlight to see if his pupils were even or not, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean his brain wasn’t bruised, concussed, or anything else that might have it leaking out his ears if I gated us away.
He was talking and moving, more or less. Given ten or fifteen minutes, he might improve. “Come on, Goodfellow. Up. We have to go before the weasels break down the door.”
“I’m not up in the penthouse?” he asked absently as he continued to wipe again at his face with scrupulous care. “Take the elevator. No stairs. My head aches.”
“No, we’re not in your penthouse and like you’ve ever taken those sky-high stairs once,” I said with a healthy dose of desperation. “We’re in a sub sewer being chased by weasels made of shadows and I think they missed their breakfast. We need to find a way out. For that you need to help me get you up. Do you get that? Do you understand? We need to move or be eaten by shadow weasels.”
He screwed his eyes shut and his mouth twisted in a pained grimace, but it was a thoughtful grimace. I had faith. He was thinking about getting up, how simple standing was, especially when someone else was doing ninety percent of the work. “Shadow weasels. The tunnel. The sewer.” Opening his eyes, he looked at the door. “My sword went through them. Your bullets too. If metal can go through them”—the whispering outside the door sounded now more like maniacal laughter—“can’t they go through metal?”
Wasn’t that a thought, shiny and crammed full of logic?
“Motherfucker. You putrid, evil bastards.” They were playing with us. For food or for fun, it didn’t matter.
A mass of narrow pointed black heads passed through for a look at the prey of their little game. They slithered back and forth away from the narrow beam of light. Between the laughter and whispers I thought I heard words here and there. “Light . . . dim . . . nothing to fear . . . shine of moonless night.”
Great. I loved it when they talked. Unkillable and untouchable weren’t inconveniently ghastly enough. Let’s raise the bar and have them spit sinister whispers at you for shits and giggles.
Robin was trying doggedly to get his feet under him—getting on them wasn’t going to happen. I lifted him up, slinging his arm around my shoulder and my other around his waist. I kept the flashlight balanced by his shoulder and had put my Desert Eagle in its holster. It was useless anyway. I was able to accomplish it before the weasels came through the door completely, although they had crept halfway by now. I’d raised Goodfellow upright too fast while his feet were too unsteady to hold him, and was again bathing in another waterfall of vomit, but I’d rather bathe in vomit than be eaten alive to avoid it.
“Bite . . . eat . . . take . . . bite . . . eat . . . take.”
“That’s elementary and middle school all over again. Biters everywhere you went.” I dragged the puck away from the door. I could keep backing us up while keeping them in sight and exposed to a flashlight they were less impressed with all the time. Or I could turn and run. If I lifted Goodfellow over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry, I’d make better time than half hauling, half carrying him, but the few moments it’d take to get him and his uncontrolled, limp limbs up off the ground and on my shoulder would take longer. We’d have good odds of being torn to pieces before I could begin to run.
“They hurt you? When you were . . . a child?” The weasels he’d forgotten, but he was outrage incarnate over schoolyard bullying.
Shadow weasels were one thing, but there hadn’t been a day of my life I couldn’t protect myself from another kid like me. Why? For the plain reason that there were no other kids like me.
“Priorities, Goodfellow,” I said. “If we don’t die, you should look into how you rank those.” Ruefully, I went on to admit, “And actually I was the biter, but they brought it on themselves. I’d been small for my age, but I’m a lion. Lions—small, medium, or large—fuck with us and we will kick your ass. Or bite off your ear. Depends on our mood.”
I decided keeping the weasels in sight would get us killed, but it would allow us a few minutes more to think about what a horrible death it would be. Now or in minutes. We’d die the same way—no better or worse there. I’d take the minutes. I’d learned a long time ago, minutes you thought were useless could save your life. The weasels were sliding slower behind us, not as anxious to attack with the light in their faces. Technically, they didn’t have faces—wedge-shaped light-sucking heads. They didn’t fear the light, not quite, but they didn’t like it either. That meant even more minutes.
/> If we were going to die, hell yes, I’d fight for those minutes, every one of them.
I swiped the beam of light to the side and stopped a stealthier than the rest weasel in its tracks as half its jaw vanished. Behind it had been another that leaped at us over its injured buddy. Smacking it across the chest, I stopped it before it reached Goodfellow. Its front two legs became a memory. But our minutes were counting down and no matter what I did to a weasel, it was whole again before it fell farther than halfway down the pack. Keeping us both backing away from the flowing river of shadows, I came close to losing Robin.
“Ah . . . skata.” Robin’s brief surge of energy had in reality done more harm than good. His legs gave out under him, and I barely kept him from falling with a grip tight enough to crack a rib or two if he was unlucky. His eyes closed. “Head aches . . . gamisou, it hurts. Tired. Too tired for . . . all this. This? What is this? Don’t . . . care. Sleep. Bed. Home. I want . . . home.”
Him and me both.
The two of us weary, wanting home, but his home and mine were years apart. The weasels were too close to run now. If it runs, you chase it. If you chase it you kill it. If you kill it, you eat it. Auphe taught me that and lions on TV taught me that. I preferred the lions, but the end lesson was the same. “We are fucked now, you know that?”
He shook his head and immediately hung his head, a groan imprisoned behind clenched teeth. Pain and nausea, that sounded like a concussion. I didn’t have to watch those gory medical soap operas to make that guess. “No . . . we would’ve been fucked . . . if we’d found the gladiators.” He had cleared some, but he was back neck deep in confusion again.
“Can we forget the gladiators? As a favor?” The smell of mud, slime, supernatural lichen on the walls, brackish water pooling on top of the thicker, denser mud, it remained in the air. But there was a new scent. It reminded me of a storm, of the ozone lining the clouds with vicious threat. But warped to something more dangerous, sending an electric tingle down my spine with the same feeling you had when you were eight, lived in a trailer, heard the tornado siren, and stepped outside to see the green sky with a mile wide Wrath of God headed straight toward you.
I shifted us both around, Robin and me, keeping the light on the weasels to stall them, leaving none to see what was behind us. There was nothing I could make out in the dark, thick enough to breathe like air. That was it. I was gating and hoping Goodfellow’s brains didn’t ooze out his ears and he coped with his phobia.
Then came what I couldn’t see. A short, rough laugh—more intelligent than that of the weasels, but more sane? I had a feeling. When predator faces predator, you can scent the rabid on them. It . . . he . . . didn’t sound insane, but the best of us don’t, do we? “Goats for sacrifice. Mutts for stew.” His words were as rough and amused as his laugh. “Bow your head before your better. Kneel as my pets rip bite after bite from your bodies. Your flesh, your blood, it would please me.”
“How about a flashlight up your ass instead? Maybe you’re a shadow too. Nothing goddamned more than that,” I said coldly. He hadn’t been in the truck that had destroyed the bar, or he’d have burned with the others inside. I’d watched. The truck had been driven and precisely aimed. I’d seen no one get out of the flaming heap, no one run away. No, he hadn’t been there. That had been a job for a regular assassin or two, not a waste of a genetically altered monster/human hybrid. He had been Vigil once. As fierce a hold as they’d had over their members, remained Vigil.
Behind the voice lightning flared, sizzled, and struck twenty or more areas of the sewer wall. And it didn’t stop. They kept going, the multinumbered electric arms of an Indian goddess of death. That was bad. If I was hit by one or more of those baleful arms, gating wouldn’t be a subject of conversation for a while. Enough electricity shorted out my ability to gate for a good long time.
The weasels didn’t strike me as that ominous now. Unkillable. So what? It was just a word. On reflection, I wasn’t positive it was a word.
The lightning was blindingly bright, enough so that now it was lighter than we needed or wanted. Vision swimming with white and blue, blinded to the point I couldn’t see the glimmer of my flashlight, or Lazarus. I saw the outline of a storm-shadowed figure at most. The black figure of a man, tall and broad, but I couldn’t make out anything else buried in the dark—until his arms both lifted. There was something in each one. It swung, against the blue-white corona of lightning, the same shaded black—narrow, almost serpentine—and they moved. Or he moved them.
Didn’t care, didn’t know, didn’t want to know. I was done.
Goodfellow had felt a paien he’d not felt before in his life. I’d seen Frankenstein on TV and I knew a puzzle piece monster when I saw one. Human shaped with inhuman powers and control of pets formed from the dark that had herded us to this spot. The Vigil and genetic engineering had done possibly more than they’d expected. Lazarus could be worse than any paien the Vigil had put down.
“They are for you.” The lightning doubled and I was completely blind, but not before I witnessed the swinging movement, the twisting and coiling, as whatever they were came nearer, extended by the eddy and flow that were the outlines of fists. Our clothes crackled with visible static.
I could almost taste his breath beyond the ozone and sewer reek. Almost. But I felt it. It was cold, colder than the ice of a zero degree day frozen in a strangling hand around the metal pole of a street sign. He was there. He could touch us. He could also electrocute us, have his weasels eat us, and do something god-awful with whatever the fuck was writhing in his unseeable hands.
“They are the takers of your last breath.
“As I am the taker of your lives.
“The receiver of your souls.”
I felt the brush of something coarse against my face. Coarse then silken, but moving in the independent S-pattern of a snake or a serpent. Slithering toward my throat. Where else would it go? Taker of my last breath?
All right.
Now I was done.
That whole cope with Robin’s phobia of gates, hope his brain isn’t injured enough to pour out of his ears when I did gate us? Those issues? Nope. Did not give a shit. Fuck his phobia, and right now his explanation could wait. He might rather die or be eaten. Too bad for him only the fully conscious and oriented people got to make that decision.
“If you have the brainpower to waste on gladiator fantasies, then you have brains to spare to survive a gate.” He had tumbled back into half-consciousness and it was a risk, but Lazarus wasn’t a risk. He was a sure thing and that sure thing was death.
Sometimes you have to roll the dice.
When it came to getaways and gates, lightning was pulling up the rear. I was faster, but not only that—nothing passed into my gate that I didn’t want there. I built it around us, no time for dramatic walking through. We were there, we were shining with purples, cyanotic blues, black, and the several shades of corpse gray. It was an odd, strangely colored light, but it shone. Not in the manner most would want to see or be able to see, but it was my sun and my moon and it got me the hell out of Dodge. It was the adrenaline life or death feel of a skydiver’s rush as he plummeted through the air into a desert of glass and stone and the bones of a dead race you’d destroyed before they destroyed you. It was the sensation of your feet hitting the red sand, the burn of acid wind, the yellow sky that watched you from above. I never did go there after my last escape, not in reality, as it was the hell that had eaten half my soul. But for two years it had been home, complete with torture to make me believe it was home. It hadn’t been, wouldn’t ever be. But some feelings the Auphe shove into your brain, you couldn’t get out. This was what I thought of briefly when I gated. The feeling of coming home.
I wondered why it didn’t feel that way to anyone else.
Going home.
13
I had gated in front of the door to the wendigo’s base
ment abattoir, although it took a few minutes for the lightning glare that spread in a white blindness across my vision to clear enough to see I’d put us precisely where I’d meant. I was familiar with that location thanks to my pursuit of makeshift body bags—I did need to make a note to kill it when I had a spare moment. Good neighbor or not with the sharing of supplies, he was eating people. Couldn’t really let that go.
The location was convenient. It was somewhere close to the apartment, but nowhere Cal or Niko would accidentally see me if they were so anxious to die they’d ignored my advice and left their place to poke around for the Vigil assassin on their own. They’d been uncooperative enough to come strolling out in the hall to take a look at Goodfellow after I’d told them, told Niko—the responsible of us two—to stay inside or risk all of us dying thanks to some insignificant change. And it would be long before eight more years, knowing our luck. If I could stop Lazarus and get back home without Cal and Niko seeing me travel as Auphe alone did, that would be the only souvenir I’d need. “I traveled in time, kicked assassin ass, and didn’t give my toddler self a psychotic break.” Slap it on a mug and I was good to go.
If Cal did see it, that would be a spiraling mess of every self-aimed negative emotion in the book, a confirmation of the monster he suspected he was. It’d be an emo-explosion none of us had the time for. At eighteen everything is about you. I don’t have the right car. I don’t have the right clothes. I don’t have the right friends. I’m a monster. I’m an abomination. I’m going to start eating people.
