The Axeboy's Blues (The Agents Of Book 1)

by Andy Reynolds

  “But he's still traceable?”

  “Yes. It's much more difficult, but yes.”

  “Good. I'll keep to Bourbon Street. Where is Edith?”

  “She's on the rooftops keeping watch. She decided to take a break from the glove.”

  Julius nodded. “Get with Roman when the night's over. In the morning, when you two are rested, I want you at headquarters so that she can copy your memories. Your memories are very valuable, and I'm afraid there isn't going to be time to extract them later.”

  Adelaide nodded. “I was going to suggest the same course of action.”

  “Just remember that the memories are secondary,” said Julius. “Extract them when The Axeboy won't be hunting anyway.”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, I'll let you get back to work.” He wandered to another artist's stall.

  Adelaide shuffled through the photos for a moment longer, then left the Artists' Market. When she was back on the rooftop, she had a conversation with Edith across the street by way of flicking and snatching up words.

  “Only tonight and tomorrow night left,” said Edith. “Then it's Trumpet Fest.”

  “Yes,” said Adelaide. “Somehow I don't think Julius believes we'll find The Axeboy before Trumpet Fest. Julius wants us to find him, but I think he knows something we don't.”

  “Do you think we'll find him?”

  “I believe we'll find him tonight. That's the only thing I let myself believe.”

  “Then I'll believe that too.”

  Adelaide nodded, her eyes scanning over the thousands of people walking through the streets below her, her ears sifting through the hundreds of instruments. She was going to miss Edith, as strange as it would be to miss someone who would be born decades after you were going to die.

  File 51 :: [Julius Marcos]

  Keeping to the shadows as best he could and hiding himself amidst the weeds of tourists, Julius waded his slow way through the neon lights and plastic cups and bead necklaces of Bourbon Street. He grimaced against the ragged stench that the street wore like a filthy coat each night – a unique conglomeration of rancid beer and sickeningly sweet liquor swirling together with the distinct odor of vomit and urine, all these smells mixing with the nearest food cart or shop selling hot dogs, pizza, or burgers.

  He passed the nearly naked strippers luring passersby into their dens as well as the con artists and thieves talking people out of their money, then walked by the faux-homeless kids with their cardboard signs and cell phones, fishing in his pocket for dollars and change and dropping it into the hats and boxes of a few of the real homeless. Julius peeked into each club that hosted live jazz music. The old fashioned songs brought back a couple lifetimes worth of memories – many of the songs he'd seen performed by the greatest jazz musicians the world had ever known.

  He knew that any entity could easily see him as he passed, but he hid anyway in case The Axeboy was lurking about. The boy hadn't seen this incarnation of him, but Julius still didn't want to come up on the boy's radar. The hours came and went as Julius stalked the streets, and it wasn't until just past midnight that he finally heard what he was listening for – that barely audible sound of trumpets, as if being played far off in the distance. He could hardly hear them past the classic rock and pop music and awful karaoke that poured from the bars, but he let the animalistic parts of him rise to the surface enough so his sense of hearing became more acute. Unfortunately his sense of smell became acute as well, and he had to concentrate very hard on the hunt to not become nauseated from the vile smells of Bourbon.

  He followed the echoing sounds down the street, walking with the slightest hobble past the crowds, careful not to trip on all the empty plastic cups and beads that littered the sidewalks and the street. The sound got louder and louder and led him off of Bourbon and onto a nearly empty side street. He saw a few people talking several buildings down in the shadows underneath a balcony.

  “Awe, that's so cute!” said a woman. “He wants your autograph!”

  “Of course I'll give you an autograph, kid,” said a man. “But are you supposed to be out this late? Where are your parents?”

  Julius walked quick as he could while trying not to make too much noise with the damned metal leg and cane. The couple's back was to him, blocking him and the boy from seeing each other. Julius shoved his way between them, knocking the man to the ground with his shoulder. Julius let go of the cane and grabbed the front of the the startled boy's shirt, lifting him off the ground.

  The woman screamed and began kicking his good leg and slamming her purse against his head, but things like that didn't tend to hurt Julius – though he did have to struggle to keep his balance.

  “Time for you to go back where you belong,” said Julius.

  “Like hell!” yelled the boy, then reached out towards Julius' chest, but Julius slapped his hand away with the stub of his arm and then turned and slammed the boy against the wall.

  “Yeah, I know that fucking trick, you brat,” he said.

  “Let him go!” yelled the woman.

  Then the man, presumably a trumpet player, swung and punched Julius hard in the jaw. The man cried out and held his hand, which would most likely have been sprained. The Axeboy reached out with his hand and Julius moved him aside as the silver axe flew to where the boy's hand had been, hitting the wall and then falling back to the ground.

  Julius tossed the boy up into the air and caught him by the neck, then began to squeeze.

  “Someone help!” the woman screamed. “He's killing him!”

  “No,” said Julius. “Just knocking him out.”

  Then Julius' body spasmed and he collapsed onto the ground shaking, dropping The Axeboy. He struggled to breathe and stop shaking as he saw the woman standing above him holding a taser. She crouched down next to The Axeboy. “Are you alright?” she said. “Don't move, we'll get an ambulance and call your parents, alright? You're going to be ok.”

  “Run,” coughed Julius.

  “You shut up!” said the man, who kicked Julius in the ribs.

  Julius tried to shake off the effects of the taser, but his body was still numb and his vision was flickering from side to side. He watched the axe fly through the air and into the boy's hand, and The Axeboy swung it into the woman and knocked her to the ground.

  “What the fuck?” yelled the man.

  The boy quickly got to his feet and pointed the axe at the man, who raised his hands. Julius could see the hesitation in the boy's eyes – deciding whether or not to leave the trumpet player. Then the boy turned and ran.

  Julius moaned and pushed himself up onto his knees. He grabbed his cane, squinted at the running boy and threw it through the air. It spun and spun and then knocked into The Axeboy's legs, sending him tumbling to the ground. The Axeboy jumped back up, then turned and looked at Julius, who merely raised a hand and pointed at him. Julius had the boy's scent now, so between him and Adelaide the boy would only be able to run amok for so long.

  The boy sheathed his axe and then continued running, turning down the next street.

  Julius got to his feet, knowing that if he tried running after the boy he would look sloppy and slow in front of the entities of The Quarter, and the boy would just shift to the ghost world anyway.

  The trumpet player had already helped the woman to her feet and was leading her back to Bourbon Street. The Wonder-pumping fountains Roman had constructed across the city would ensure their minds made excuses for everything they'd seen. They'd probably just think they stopped a mugging or saw an avant garde performance.

  Julius headed back towards Frenchman. He'd tell Adelaide what had happened, in case the information helped her figure out the boy's movements, and then he'd go hunt for the rest of the night – he'd hunt as long as the jazz music played.

  File 52 :: [Edith Downs]

  Her body jolted awake as the ringing of the bell dove through her ear, grabbed her traveling mind with clawed hands, and dragged her up and out of at
least five layers of dream. She reached over and hit the alarm clock a couple of times, but having never used it before she wasn't sure how to turn it off. “Damn it, stop!” she said, and the thing turned off.

  The clock was one of the memory-infused antiques she'd acquired over the decades. For many years she'd used her cell phone as an alarm, but since the robbery her cell had barely worked – it was basically an expensive alarm clock – and the night before (or morning technically), even the alarm on it stopped working. She might have to quit being an Agent just so she could use her cell phone again.

  The antique alarm clock was round with two bells on top, right out of a Donald Duck cartoon. It had never worked before, but she'd spoken to its mems the night prior and they'd done something inside to fix it. Maybe she could get them to make it a little quieter, because good god it was loud.

  Edith was still exhausted. She'd set the alarm an hour earlier than she and Adelaide had agreed to get up, hoping she'd get an hour to herself. Being around people all the time was beginning to make her antsy.

  She put on a green robe and splashed some water on her face. Looking in the mirror, it occurred to her that the streak in her hair and the discolored eye had become so natural, such a part of her appearance in so short of time. Her reflection smiled at her before she realized that she was smiling.

  Edith got a glass of water from the kitchen, wanting to make coffee but knowing it would wake Adelaide, then went downstairs and outside to the courtyard. She sat down on the wooden bench below the tree and felt the sunlight on her skin. Hearing the leaves rustling above her from the wind, she thought of Wole and imagined him saying good morning to her through the leaves.

  Then she watched the trio of little blue mems running across the grass towards her. They looked like little toy soldiers in a jungle. When they reached her, they scurried up one leg of the bench and then onto the bench's back. One was from her blue apron, another from an old picture frame, and the third from a perfume bottle she used as a decoration in her bathroom.

  “How is the area?” she asked.

  One of them stepped forward, sending her a picture of a map of the surrounding area and a sense of security.

  “Good. Keep expanding the perimeter, but not too quickly. I want all the mems to know their surrounding mems and for them to establish strong lines of communication. And I want them to know that they can come to me for any reason.”

  One of the mems sent her an image, not unlike a crayon drawing of her speaking to dozens of little blue mems, word bubble and all.

  “Yes, I'll speak to all the mems, but not until after The Axeboy is taken care of. The Agents Of need me, and being an Agent is the best way for me to make sure that the memories of the city are protected. I believe that if I keep establishing this relationship with The Agents Of, then they will step up and help us when we need them.”

  The mem nodded.

  “Stay safe, my friends.”

  They ran across the back of the bench, shimmied down to the ground and then ran back through the grass towards the apartment building.

  Edith's bond with the mems had grown exponentially in the past weeks, and she felt a growing commitment to making sure they were taken care of. She had made it her goal to know them, to start meeting all the mems that she could. Not only were they living creatures that no one else knew about (or at least cared about), but Edith was beginning to feel that they were one of the forces that held the city of New Orleans together. Roman and Julius often spoke of such forces. If somebody who wished the city ill ever suspected the mems of holding such power, the mems would be completely defenseless.

  Besides, the mems trusted Edith. With them she had a growing network of informants – eyes and ears that could perceive things that Julius' and Roman's networks could not. Soon enough she would have her web of mems in place throughout the city, and she would become invaluable to The Agents Of, who would in turn be invaluable to her goal of protecting the mems.

  Edith smiled and laughed to herself, realizing that her whole life had been leading up to this point – that creating, nurturing and managing her own business had been preparing her for the creation of this very network. She had always tried to foster a mutually beneficial relationship with her employees as well as her customers, creating an everyone-wins kind of situation. And the part of her mind that had been so good at managing her business over the years was the part that was mapping out the next few months worth of strategy to contact and manage the mems. She could already see the growing safety of the city's mems (as well as her contribution to the Agents) in the form of pie charts, graphs and spreadsheets that her mind was automatically producing.

  All she needed to do was to get this pesky Axeboy out of the way and back to his time period so that she could fully engage with the mems. Of course that meant Adelaide getting sent back too, and Edith hated that idea. She felt like Adelaide had already taught her more than a decade's worth of life lessons, and Edith yearned to keep learning from her - but at least Edith would still have Mars. The two Agents were almost polar opposites in Edith's eyes – Adelaide being the physical and experienced sage; the hunter; the teacher. Then there was Mars, whose crazy head was packed full of knowledge about this new-to-Edith world and whose youth and utter vitality awakened something in Edith that she thought was gone forever – an explosive kind of wonder that drew her to appreciate the threads of magic that wrapped around and shaped each piece of this world that had secretly always surrounded her.

  Edith took a deep breath and relaxed. She leaned back on the bench, all consumed in her green robe, letting her thoughts be bleached away by the sunlight's warmth seeping into her skin, reaching its warm hands of light deep into her body. She decided she'd just float there for a while, unhindered, until it was time to wander back into the apartment and wake Adelaide with the smell of brewing coffee.

  File 53 :: [Mars]

  The morning was warm and bright – the kind of bright that creeps around the edges of your sunglasses to slice you across the eyes all Salvador Dali style. As Mars walked down Saint Phillip Street in The French Quarter she saw the tourists already meandering down Royal Street just ahead, off to eyeball the antiques and art and street performers. She stretched her neck until it popped. She was dead tired, but wouldn't have traded the last few days for anything.

  Mars had left the Noisco members in charge of the quarantine zone, gotten coffee, and checked in at headquarters. Edith had been there with Adelaide, who was sitting back in a chair while Edith extracted her memories. Roman had been emptying the memory cartridges (of which he'd constructed a couple more). Edith was almost too fast for him – she wasn't looking at or feeling the memories, just copying the ones Adelaide pushed to the front of her mind and moving on. Just in the brief time that Mars was there Edith copied dozens of them.

  Roman had been unloading the memories as fast as he could. After realizing that there wasn't going to be a good time to talk to him, Mars had walked up and spoke quietly. “So I'll see you later.”

  Roman nodded. Mars watched for a moment longer. She didn't see any memories or lights or anything, just Edith moving the fingers of that big honking glove in front of Adelaide's forehead. Then Mars left and made her way down into The Quarter to where she now stood in front of Flanagan's Irish Pub. She walked into the 24-hour pub and there were only a few people at the island bar in the middle of the wooden and brick room, one of them eating and two drinking, accompanied by the electronic sounds of MGMT sauntering out of the speakers and prancing around the darkened bar.

  “Where the hell have you been hiding!” said the tall bald man behind the bar. He wore a Batman T-shirt and a long black skirt.

  “Hey Huggy! I didn't know you'd be working!” She ran around to the opening in the back of the island bar and jumped up to give him a hug. He bear hugged her, picked her up off the ground and walked around in circles with her dangling from his arms.

  “Where've you been?” he asked, setting her on the ground. “We
've got to do another Anime night here. It's been a while.”

  “Been really busy.”

  He motioned to the large needles sticking out of her hair. “Busy doing your energy work?”

  “No, doing other kinds of work that... uh... I'm not sure I can talk about yet.”

  Huggy mimed zipping his mouth shut. “Mums the word. Well, your first drink's on me, Mars. What can I get you?”

  “Actually I'm meeting some people here. It's work stuff, but if some Jameson fell into my coffee I wouldn't tell anyone.”

  Huggy nodded, grabbed a bottle and poured a healthy dose into her paper cup. “Is this work the same thing you can't talk about?”

  She nodded, then saw that there was a black curtain covering the entrance to the side room. “That's not set up for a meeting, is it?”

  Huggy grabbed a bottle of root beer and took a long swig, his eyes never leaving Mars. “You're here to meet with them.”

  Mars took a swig of her Jameson-flavored coffee and smirked. “Maybe. Are they here yet?” Her smirk fell away when she saw the heaviness in Huggy's eyes.

  He leaned really close to her and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Mars, you have to be very careful working with these people. I understand what they do for the city, but everyone I know who's worked with them is dead. And what they're meeting about today is very serious business.” He nodded to her coffee. “Best drink slow. Keep your wits about you.”

  A chill ran down Mars' spine and she nodded. She'd rarely heard Huggy be so serious. “I will. You're... not working by accident, are you?”

  Huggy glanced at the black curtain. “Roman asked me to work this shift.”

  “I didn't know you knew the Agents.”

  “Sometimes I wish I didn't. Julius is in there already.”