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

by Andy Reynolds

  Edith looked up at the other roof and thought of The Axeboy up there unconscious. “Not if the boy wakes up first and tells his mother I'm an Agent. Then she'll probably just drop me out of the sky.” The Angel glanced towards their roof and Edith looked away, then sat down with her back against the edge of the roof again. She knew so much now, but without the glove or any memories around her – what good was she? She felt naked. “I can't die here,” she said. Her mind raced over all the knowledge she'd acquired, but nothing seemed to pair up with the experience she was having now.

  William crouched down next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Edith, I'm going to get you off this roof. We'll wait a bit and see if they leave. If not, we'll find a way.” The squealing music from The Angel's rooftop started up again and William sighed. She watched his eyes glaze over as he stood up and worked his fingers over the keys of his trumpet. “Sounds like they're playing my song again.”

  Then he was gone – lost in the world of the playing, just like the others. Edith looked up at the shimmering sky. She wondered if that was the Oblivion that Adelaide had told her about – the way The Angel looked up at it, as if waiting for something. As if waiting for her old lover to come back and hold her in his arms.

  File 60 :: [Mars]

  The night air was cool against her skin as she ran across the streetcar tracks, up the steps of Spanish Plaza, then down the steps that led to the fountain. Mars plunged her hands into the water, opening the box and flipping the switch. As soon as the walkway began to descend into the Agents' headquarters, she ran and slid through the opening gap, dropping down into the hallway. She hit the switch to close the walkway and ran through the stone corridors, bursting into the medical room.

  “Holy fuck!” she yelled when she saw Adelaide – the side of the woman's face bloody and bruised. Adelaide was laying back on a reclined hospital bed with Roman hovering above her and sewing parts of her face closed. One of her wrists was bandaged as well.

  “Calm down,” Julius said to Mars. He stood next to the door, his coat off and the shoulder of his shirt bloody. “It looks worse than it is. She's alright.”

  “She'd be better if she'd let me give her morphine,” said Roman.

  “Where's Edith?” asked Mars.

  “Taken,” said Julius.

  “Fucking taken where?”

  Julius sighed. “Presumably Necropolis, beyond the Land of the Dead. Adelaide thinks that he grabbed Edith before he shifted away in self-defense. If he doesn't know she's an Agent, he may have left her there. If he does know, he may have brought her to the Tartarus Realm.”

  “What in the hell is Necropolis?” yelled Mars.

  Adelaide's eyes shut. “I'm sorry.”

  “Don't move,” said Roman, still hovering above her.

  “He wouldn't kill Edith...” said Mars.

  “He doesn't have a reason to,” said Julius. “He might not know she's an Agent, and it doesn't sound like Edith attacked him.”

  “We have to look for her.”

  “How's the quarantine zone?” asked Julius.

  “Self-sufficient at the moment. We had another concert tonight, so they're all happy and sleeping in booze-induced comas.”

  “Good. You and I are going to Frenchman. Roman, when you're done here, go start setting up The Gateway.”

  “What about me?” said Adelaide.

  “Don't move,” said Roman.

  “You're staying here for now,” said Julius. “Rest up. When we figure out what we're doing, we'll come and get you. And there's a small chance Edith will come back here, if she finds her way back to this world, so someone should stay here and wait for her.”

  She was obviously not happy with the idea of staying put, but nodded.

  “Don't move,” said Roman.

  “Mars, with me,” Julius said as he walked out of the room. He was moving pretty fast now on his fake leg and no longer using a cane.

  “I hope you're not tired,” he said when they were in the hallway.

  “I'm not,” said Mars, taking out a 5-Hour Energy shot from her pocket and downing it. “Not like I'd sleep anyway, with Edith out there.” She offered Julius one and he shook his head. She'd bought a bunch of the little plastic energy shots, and had a feeling that she'd be using them on the regular as an Agent.

  They walked into the laboratory and Julius tossed her an empty duffel bag. He grabbed a couple pairs of bulky yellow-tinted goggles from a shelf and handed her one. “Put these around your neck. They're for seeing ghosts.” She followed him around the room as he handed her things to put in the duffel bag. “I know you want to find Edith,” said Julius. “So do I. But we are not looking for Edith because she is our friend. I need you to understand that. We are looking for her as Agents. She is a fellow Agent and we need her to ensure the future protection of the city. This is above us – you are no longer merely a citizen of this city.” She shoved a couple devices she'd never seen into the bag, and Julius looked at her and touched his finger to her forehead. “I need you here. I need you focused.”

  Mars nodded and looked into his golden eyes. “That all makes sense. I get it.” She did actually feel calmer and more focused. “I'm here with you. As an Agent.”

  Julius walked out of the room and she followed. They walked up the entrance and into Spanish Plaza, then down the stairs to the streetcar tracks. Julius took out one of the ancient streetcar tokens, flipped it into the air and caught it, and a streetcar squealed to a stop in front of them.

  “Mornin', Julius!” said the white-haired, dark-skinned man behind the wheel. It was the same driver that had picked up Mars the couple of times she'd used the old token The Function had given her. “Is it early morning or late night?”

  “You're under the illusion that I sleep, Henri,” said Julius as they boarded the streetcar. “Take us down to Frenchmen, will you?”

  “On our way!” The driver pushed a lever to shut the doors behind them.

  File 61 :: [William Town]

  William got to his feet and stretched. With the sky being a big crazy light-show, he had no concept of how long he'd been in that strange world – at least a couple of days, maybe even a week. Since he'd been there he hadn't gotten hungry or thirsty once. The 'Tartarus Realm' is what Edith had called this place.

  It had been about an hour since The Angel had last made them play. She was up on her roof working on something – maybe messing with the horn that made all the trumpet players play sad tunes. It had been about half an hour since they last played, and William had been chatting with Edith, trying to keep worries from creeping into their heads.

  “Are you from New Orleans?” Edith asked. She was sitting with her back to the short wall that lined the flat roof. He could tell that she had calmed down a little since she'd arrived.

  He shook his head. “Idaho. Been here a while though. Idaho is the less interesting part of my life. Now how I got to New Orleans – that's a story.”

  “Yeah?” Edith raised her hands. “Well, you've got a captive audience.”

  “Suppose I do.” William flashed her his smile. “I was about twenty and I caught the travelin' bug. Got rid of all my possessions – everything but a guitar strapped to my back – and I took off. See, I played the guitar back then, but was never very good at it. Hitchhiked over to Memphis and lived there for about a year, figuring I'd meet musicians and get better at my craft – which I did. Being there and listening to so many great guitarists, I fell in love with music in ways I never knew I could. But what I also realized was that although I'd gotten better at the guitar, I just didn't have the knack to become truly great.” He tapped his temple with two fingers. “I had the music up here, but it just wasn't coming out. Something was missing. And then one night I stumbled into some dingy night club off the beaten path, and there she was, playing to a nearly empty room. The bartender was texting on his phone, one guy wobbled on his stool staring at the nick-knacks behind the bar, and a third guy was flat passed out at a table. But she wa
s there, playing her heart out. She was playing my heart out.”

  “Sounds like a love story,” said Edith, smiling. She had a great smile. “Perhaps of the unrequited sort?”

  William laughed. “You won't believe the rest, but I reckon I'll tell you anyway.”

  Edith looked around. “Not sure what I will or won't believe anymore. Not sure if what I believe matters anyway.”

  “Well, I ordered a glass of whiskey and sat down at a table up front, and just watched. She was a fire. She was a dying star. Her playing opened me up and I saw myself more clearly than I ever had before. I knew that the trumpet in her hand was the answer to why I was here in this world. It sounds like I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. When she was done and packing up, I asked if I could buy her a drink.” He laughed and shook his head. “She sat down with me, sipping tequila and telling me that she'd come to Tennessee to find me.”

  “To find you?”

  “When I asked her her name, she said everyone had their own name for her – but that she was the devil.”

  He glanced over at Edith, who laughed before raising an eyebrow at him. “The devil?”

  “Yes. She was the devil.”

  “Wow, what next? Did she teach you to play the trumpet in exchange for your soul?”

  William shook his head. “She said I already had the playing in me – that she just had to show me how to get it out. We got a cheap motel room and the next day I bought a beaten up trumpet from a pawn shop. For two weeks we played day and night, our playing interspersed with long conversations, sitting on the Mississippi, making love. She told me how the universe started, the secrets behind how a city is named, and how to cure the worst hangovers.”

  “Wow, that's a lot for two weeks.”

  “Looking back on it, if feels like two months. I think, in a way, that she reached into me and pulled past lives out, if you believe in all that.”

  “Yeah, I guess I kind of have to believe in past lives now.”

  “I learned the trumpet within days, like I was remembering it. Then it was all fine tuning, learning different theories and finding my voice.”

  “So when you say 'devil,' you really, really mean 'devil'?”

  “Completely. She was not a person, not like you or me. She was never born, and will never die.”

  “But you slept with her?”

  He smiled. “I sure did. But it wasn't like sex, it was like falling. Like seeing all the galaxies at one time. Like being split into a million pieces, pieces that are all glowing.”

  “But wasn't it weird? Knowing you were hanging out and sleeping with the devil?”

  “Strange as it seems, it felt natural.” He shrugged. “I think there's a bit of her in everyone, and hanging out with her was like visiting old memories you haven't looked at in a while. Like hanging out with an old friend, or an old lover.”

  “Well what happened? Why was it only two weeks?”

  “I guess I learned all she wanted to teach me. I woke up one day and she was gone. I didn't know she'd be gone when I awoke, but when she wasn't there sleeping next to me, I knew it was over. I knew there was no need to go and look for her – that I'd never find her. That I'd probably never see her again, not in this lifetime.

  “When I walked around Memphis that morning, I knew it had nothing left for me. It was dry and squeezed out, and I'd tasted every drop of what it had to give me. I was eating a sandwich on the Mississippi and thinking about where to hitchhike to, when a group of hippie musicians wandered by. They offered me a drink of their cheap whiskey and we talked for a while. They were traveling south on the Mississippi – traveling by raft.”

  “By raft? That sounds dangerous.”

  William shrugged. “I was young, I felt like a bullet that had just been fired, and I had just been left by someone I'd come to love. And these people seemed to know what they were doing. It turns out that traveling by raft down the Mississippi isn't as rare as you'd think. We swapped stories and played music and floated through the country. During storms we'd tie the raft up to a tree and hold up in tents. It was wonderful.

  “Eventually we made it down to New Orleans, which has proven to be my place. And that, Edith Downs, is the story of how I got here.”

  “Pretty epic. You know, the more people I meet, the more boring my own story sounds.”

  “I don't know about that. You just got flown through some ghost-version of New Orleans by the supposed 'Angel of Death,' dropped onto a roof with trumpet players who have a spell put on them, and the first thing you did was think about whether or not you could survive jumping off the roof so that you could get to your friends and save the city. If you could just point out the boring part for me, I'd much appreciate it.”

  “Point taken.”

  File 62 :: [Mars]

  Two in the morning near the intersection of Frenchman and Decatur:

  “I heard that a little kid and two women got into a fist-fight.”

  “Things like this never happened before Katrina.”

  “Oh God, there's still blood on the ground! I'm gonna throw up!”

  “I heard one of the women was a ghost.”

  “Shut up! Everyone knows ghosts can't fight the living.”

  “The hell they can't!”

  “What happened here? Was it gang related?”

  “Did anyone die?”

  “I wonder if anyone posted pictures online. Let me check.”

  “You think this is bad? You should have seen things before Katrina! Things like this happened all the time.”

  “Every day Frenchmen becomes a little more like Bourbon. Such a shame.”

  “Probably just some drunk assholes. Luckily the police sorted it out and got them off the street.”

  Mars followed Julius down the cracked and broken street of Frenchman, feeling only mostly conspicuous wearing her bulky yellow-tinted goggles, her over-stuffed duffel bag, and a device that Julius only described as “something that will make ghosts take you seriously.” The device was metallic and wrapped around her arm, wrist and palm, kind of like a metal snake. Every so often it twitched and glowed yellow.

  “When you get used to seeing ghosts,” he'd told her on the streetcar, “you'll see them very often, but only when they're vibrating at a certain frequency. Most of the frequencies they vibrate at can't be picked up by the naked human eye. That's why we wear the goggles.” He pointed to the pair that he also wore. “With these lenses you can see them as long as they're in the Land of the Dead, and not in one of the farther realms.”

  If Mars had felt weird at all walking down Frenchmen with giant yellow-lensed goggles strapped to her face and the glowing metal device coiled around her arm, that weirdness was overshadowed by the determination to find her friend. There were people everywhere, but the few that even glanced at her and Julius seemed to know exactly who the two Agents were and possibly even why they were there, giving them half-interested scowls as they passed. Mars took note of these people, storing away their faces in case they came up later.

  She followed Julius into the crowded, neon-lit nightclub. A woman sang soulfully over sporadic jazz music on stage as the crowd watched and cheered. They made their way to the back corner of the nightclub where there was an unoccupied section of the bar, the man behind which was glowing in the yellow-tinted world of her goggles' lenses. He wore a vest and tie, and had slicked back hair and pointy eyebrows.

  The glowing bartender smirked. “Julius, wish I could say I was glad or not expecting to see you.” He pulled out a cigarette and lit it up. Mars noticed that the bottles on the shelves behind him were also glowing. This was a freaking ghost bar.

  “Bartholomew,” said Julius, “I don't have time to chat. We need to know what happened outside. Where did that boy take the woman?”

  Bartholomew shrugged. “I was on this side of the worlds. I don't know where they went. Why don't you use all your fancy machines to figure that out? Isn't that what you keep the half-Collector around for?”

  Ju
lius tensed up. “I said I don't have time.”

  The bartender raised one of his pointy eyebrows. “Don't have time to function in the civilized world? What a shame.”

  Mars could feel Julius' growing rage seeping into her shoulder and arm by osmosis, spreading quickly through the rest of her body. When she spoke, her words were slow and clear: “No. One of our team is in mortal danger, so we don't have time to play games.”

  “Mortal danger?” Bartholomew blew out a stream of smoke and glanced at Julius. “Don't you know you get fined for letting a pet off its leash?”

  Mars quickly put her hand on Julius' shoulder, his head whipping around at her touch. She knew he was about to rip the bartender in half, or at least try – she really had no idea what he was capable of in the ripping-ghosts-in-half department. She could see even through Julius' goggle-covered face that his eyes were twin suns, both about to explode into fire and chaos. She gave the slightest nod, then she pulled up a stool and ascended it like a ladder, stepping up onto the bar. Then she stepped across onto the back bar, so that she straddled the space between the two with the specter bartender down below her, looking both annoyed and unimpressed.

  “Now, Bart,” she said, “I don't expect you to take the phrase 'mortal danger' very seriously. And why would you?” Mars reached out and swiped her hand along the shelf of glowing bottles, sending several crashing to the floor and breaking.

  “What the fuck!” Bartholomew erupted, shooting a glance at Julius. “Get your toy in line!”

  Mars bent down, grabbed his tie and pulled him closer to her. She raised her other hand next to his face, the device around her wrist twitching and glowing. Bartholomew's eyes widened as he bent his face away when he saw it. “You're very young looking, Bart. Which leads me to believe that you lost at the whole staying-alive game pretty early on, didn't you? That's why I don't expect you to value the phrase 'mortal danger'.” She shrugged and wrinkled her nose. “I mean, I wouldn't if I were you. But I and my team have different standards than you do. That's why I'm really trying to keep my emotions in check, so that I don't get all Batman in here and put you in the ghost-hospital sipping ghost-food through a ghost-straw. That's really just a lose-lose situation, 'cause then tomorrow I'd have to send you ghost-flowers and an 'I'm sorry' note and things would get all sappy and stupid.”