Ink

by Jonathan Maberry

  The bikers howled as they rushed him, but Monk saved his breath for the killing.

  127

  Patty pulled Gayle down the hall toward the door to the basement.

  “Run!” she yelled, and they both clattered down the steps. The basement was damp and there were puddles of rainwater. Old boxes of stuff left over by previous tenants moldered in stacks, and some had fallen over, blocking the back door.

  “Help me,” cried Patty as she grabbed one box. It was soaked and crawling with roaches, but she flung it aside. Gayle grabbed the next and in seconds they had the door free. And Patty jolted to a stop, staring at the lock. At the double deadbolt.

  “Where’s the key?” asked Gayle, terror rising in her voice.

  Patty felt her heart sink. “It’s upstairs.” She could see it in her mind, a sturdy Yale on a ring hanging from a hook by the cash register. Up where the fighting was raging so loud it muted the thunder.

  Gayle pulled out her cell and punched in 911.

  Before the call even went through there was a massive whump! against the door. The blow was so heavy it shook the hardwood panel in its frame. Patty pressed her eye to the peephole and saw that the tiny yard was crowded with Cyke-Lones. One of them, a monstrous man with a bald head, a wild red-gold beard, and skulls tattooed on his forehead, had his foot raised for another kick.

  Gayle was now screaming into her phone, but Patty knew it didn’t matter. Even if the dispatcher sent every cop in town right now they would never get there fast enough.

  They were going to die down here.

  The image of a laughing little girl appeared in her mind. Faded but recognizable.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” murmured Patty. “Mommy’s so sorry.”

  The next kick tore the whole lock out of the frame with a spray of wood splinters.

  128

  Mike drove way too fast. The tires hydroplaned across the surface of a black puddle and the cruiser swung around, the back end crunching into the door of a parked Mini-Cooper with bone-jarring force. Mike cursed under his breath, stamped the gas, and fought the wheel. Then an Amazon delivery truck came out of a side street, forcing Mike to jam the brakes, which sent the car into a complete three-sixty. He felt like the whole damn world was trying to prevent him from reaching the store. Mike was a man who seldom cursed, but he fired off a blue streak of particularly foul invective as he corrected again and plowed through the rain toward Boundary Street.

  Beside him, Dianna was strapped in and had one hand on the inside handle above the door, the other clutched around her crystal pendant, and a foot braced on the dash. Her brown face was shocked to a butter paleness and she was saying rapid-fire prayers to spirits or gods or angels. Mike didn’t know which, but he hoped some of them were listening.

  They splashed through another puddle, one that hid a pothole, and the jolt rattled Mike down to his bones. And then they rounded a corner and raced up a side street to the intersection of Main and Boundary.

  Lightning flashed with showy drama, revealing a scene from one of the outer rings of hell. Motorcycles everywhere. Men with weapons crowding in through the shattered front window. More of them climbing over the fence to attack the cellar door. The flash of gunfire and the mad howls of attackers driven beyond sanity.

  Mike slammed on the brakes, skidding half a block before the tires burned their way through water down to asphalt. The cruiser stopped hard and rocked on its springs.

  “Get out,” Mike ordered. “Find someplace to hide. Call nine-one-one. Tell them ‘officer in need of assistance.’”

  “No,” she protested.

  Mike grabbed her forearm. “Listen to me: something’s going to happen right now. I don’t want you to see what I’m going to have to do here.”

  He saw Dianna search his eyes and knew the moment when she saw his eyes change. Her nostrils flared as a scent filled the car—an odor that was in no way human. Something older, strange, primal. The scent of what he was beneath his skin.

  “Get out,” he said, and already his voice was deeper, harsher. More of an animal growl than anything human. It was the secret he guarded so closely. One that only Crow, Val, and Jonatha knew about. It was something tied to the complexities of his parentage, tied to his survival and his shame. He cared about Dianna, even if he could never have her, and he did not want her to see this aspect of him. Not now or ever.

  Dianna unclipped her seat belt, then surprised him by leaning over and kissing his cheek.

  “I love you,” she said, and through his heartbreak he understood what she meant. And in her eyes he saw an understanding that ran very deep. She was psychic, after all, a sensitive, and Mike knew that on some level she understood him. It made him ache for her all the more.

  Dianna jerked the handle and slipped out. He looked in the rearview and saw her duck behind a parked SUV, the phone already to her mouth.

  Mike gunned the engine, spinning the wheels on the blacktop and then releasing the brake. The powerful Ford Police Interceptor shot forward, accelerating from zero to sixty in the eight seconds it took to reach Patty’s store. As the change worked its way through him, he could hear, even at that distance, the sound of an active fight inside the store, not in back. If the Cyke-Lones got in the back they’d crush all four of the people inside between a hammer and anvil. So Mike angled his car toward the bikes parked by the back fence.

  His cruiser was a missile when it hit.

  Two big Harleys flew into the air and the car’s grill wore a third one as it punched through the fence and smashed into the bikers in the yard.

  Dianna Agbala peered over the hood of the SUV, staring in horror as Mike’s cruiser crashed through the bikes and bikers. She was a nonviolent person by nature and didn’t even like watching action movies. This … God, this was awful.

  But then it got worse.

  As insane as the last few days had been, as bizarre as tonight had become, those last seconds in the car with Mike had spun things up into the funnel of a tornado. She had actually seen Mike Sweeney begin to change. His eyes first, then his voice … and by the time she was getting out of the car, even the shape of his face was undergoing a fantastic metamorphosis. It was as if his bones were melting beneath his skin and re-forming into something else.

  She knew what that thing was. Her insight told her, but even now, as she saw the hideous shape spring from the open cruiser door and hurl itself at the bikers, Dianna was afraid to think the word.

  Because this was the world and there were no such things.

  He could not be such a thing. Mike was a kind, sweet guy. A friend. A good person. However the creature that pounced on the Cyke-Lones was not any of those things. It was a beast, running on four legs, its massive muscles covered in stiff red fur, its ears raised to tufted points.

  And the howl.

  That awful howl of red delight.

  She wanted to look away, needed to.

  But that thing was still Mike Sweeney, and he was fighting to save Gayle and Patty, Monk and Crow … and maybe all of Pine Deep.

  And so it would have been a failing of trust and a weakness of her belief in the Larger World to deny being a witness.

  129

  Monk Addison was barely able to stand.

  Crow leaned against the wall, blood running from his nose and mouth and from too many cuts to count. He looked like he’d aged forty years in five minutes.

  Patty Cakes stood with her arms around Gayle, and both of them were white-faced and unable to speak. They kept throwing terrified glances toward the hall that led to the basement. Monk had heard strange noises down there. Shouts and screams and some kind of awful animal howling. Had the bikers brought a dog to this fight? If so … what happened to it and the Cyke-Lones who’d tried to come in through the cellar? From the looks on the women’s faces he was pretty sure he did not want an answer to that question.

  Not now anyway.

  And where the hell was that big kid with the red hair?

  The nigh
t was filled with flashing red and blue lights. Local cops, EMTs, state cops, and even the fire department. Swarming in, each of them trying to make sense of what had happened in the context of their own jobs. Failing utterly.

  Dianna came in, escorted by the female cop who’d been outside of Patty’s room. She looked as shocked as the other women. What the actual hell?

  Monk sagged down and sat on the floor, hands dangling off his knees, head sinking down on his chest. He saw a flash of black and looked up to see nightbirds flapping in through the window. They lunged here and there and it took Monk a moment to realize what they were doing. Flies were rising from the bikers, from the living and the dead, and the ragged black birds were attacking them, snatching them out of the air with a ferocity every bit as savage as the human fight that had just ended. But each time one of the birds crushed a blowfly between its beak, there was a splash of color lit by a tiny burst of light, as if the life spark of the insects was detonating. And each time a bird killed a fly, it died, too. A sacrifice of a kind Monk did not understand. Not the science of it, or the magic, or whatever it was. But he understood the why of it.

  He watched in weary, sick fascination as the birds devoured every last one of them. Then the cops and EMTs rushed in, scattering the birds, who squawked and flew back into the storm, leaving their fallen brothers behind.

  Monk wept for those birds.

  Then he let the tide of officialdom sweep over and around him and carry him away from this place.

  130

  Monk and Crow both wound up in the ER. Fifty-three stitches for him, forty-four for the chief.

  Monk saw a tall, black-haired woman with an almost regal face with Crow. His wife? If so, he was punching way above his weight. It made him wish that Sandy was there for him.

  Sandy.

  They’d spent exactly one day together and already she was a seed planted in the strange soil of his heart. She was damaged goods, too, but really … could he ever expect to be with someone who wasn’t? Sandy had a purity about her that shone through, and it felt like a beacon to him.

  In the ER, Monk was bemused to find that he had the same doughy nurse, Mäsiarka, and the same ten-year-old doctor, Argawal. However, this time, Patty was there with him, as a friend and spokeswoman, taking charge and making sure Monk was given the best care. That seemed to amuse the doctor but annoy the nurse. Whatever.

  “It’s going to be okay,” said Patty when they were alone in the ER cubicle, though her voice lacked all conviction. “We have his name now. Owen Minor.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Crow’s people matched the name to registrations at more than thirty tattoo conventions. He was Dianna’s first client that day. And I think that might have been the name he gave me when he came to my shop.”

  “Well … shit.”

  “And there’s more,” said Patty. “In the store, while the cops were taking our statements, I saw some drawings on the floor. They must have fallen out of my sketchbook. You know the one I use when I’m working with a client on a new tattoo? Want to guess what it was a drawing of? Want to guess what he had me tattoo on him?”

  The nurse came in and injected something into his IV. “Something for the pain, Mr. Addison,” he said. “Might make you a little sleepy. It’s okay if you drift off because we’re waiting for a room to open.”

  “Go for it, kid,” said Monk. “Maybe give me a double dose because I am not digging being awake right now.”

  While the nurse worked, Patty shifted to a more neutral topic. “Dianna’s a sweetheart. Since my whole place is a crime scene, she’s going to let me use her spare bedroom. And Gayle called her husband and told him some story, so she’s going to stay with me. Good chance we are going to get very, very drunk.”

  She cut a look at the nurse, realizing how that might sound after her last visit here, but the man smiled. “I don’t judge. I give out drugs and empty bedpans. From what I heard it was a really bad night for you guys. I’m going off shift, but Karen will take care of you. She’ll be in to take fresh vitals in a bit. Hope you all get some rest.”

  He nodded and left.

  The painkiller was a doozy and Monk could feel it kick in. The narcotic—along with sheer physical exhaustion—was trying to push him over the edge into sleep. “Pats,” he said weakly, “what happened down in the basement?”

  She looked away, and it took her a long, long time to answer.

  “Mike happened,” she said simply.

  “Yeah, but what was that roaring?”

  An even longer pause this time, and by then Monk was fading, slipping, falling.

  “That was Mike,” she said. There was more to what she said, but it made no sense. It was impossible, and so Monk stopped trying to hold on and let himself fall.

  131

  Patty Cakes stopped at the liquor store and bought wine, vodka, beer, mixers, and as much junk food as she could carry. Chocolate was a factor. Then she drove over to Dianna’s place. There were two cars there already, and Patty assumed the other was Gayle.

  She parked across the street and let some time pass, giving the two women a chance to have some kind of normal conversation. Maybe even a brand-new first kiss. It was so strange a thing that it was hard to think about, and yet the thought that there was maybe some tenderness going on inside comforted Patty. Tenderness belonged to the world she wanted to live in. She wished she were in that head space, but she’d tried relationships before, mostly male, sometimes female. None of them worked. Hell, even she and Monk had tried it, but they quickly discovered they were friends making love rather than actual lovers. She had some occasional one-night stands, but didn’t think she could remember three names out of five if she were at gunpoint.

  Last night’s rain was done and the sky was partly cloudy, allowing some rays of light to slant down. Pillars of heaven, some people called them. But these were crooked, as if heaven was ready to tumble.

  That thought plunged her into sadness.

  “Tuyet,” she said, and then the tears came.

  As fractured sunlight glinted on the lingering raindrops of ten thousand leaves, each of a different shade of red, Patty Trang sobbed alone in her car.

  Inside the house, Dianna and Gayle held each other.

  They were dressed and on the couch. They had kissed, but it was tentative and strange, and Dianna knew that if they were going to ever be intimate again it would have to start slow. There was no guarantee that it would go anywhere, but if not … they were friends now and that was a beautiful thing.

  There was a lot of silence going on. Things known but not said. Experiences that were miles away from being processed. Dangerous memories. Dangerous expectations, too, because the madness at the tattoo shop had all the drama of a finale, but it wasn’t. It was only a battle, because the Lord of the Flies—Owen Minor—was still out there somewhere.

  And fear.

  So much fear.

  Gayle’s handgun had been confiscated as evidence. Dianna didn’t own one. First thing she did when she got home was go around the house and check every window and door. Then, with Gayle watching, she got several knives from the kitchen, and a screwdriver from her tool drawer, and tucked them behind cushions and on shelves.

  “Arming for war?” joked Gayle, but it fell flat. Of course she was arming for war. Gayle sat and watched, and then got up and helped.

  After that they held each other for a long time on the couch. Not kissing. Sharing warmth and light and safety.

  The doorbell rang and Dianna let Patty in. The tattoo artist’s eyes were red and puffy, but no one was indelicate or dense enough to ask why. Dianna hugged her, and so did Gayle. Then they saw the shopping bags on the porch and everyone laughed as they brought the contraband inside.

  “We need some actual food to go with this,” said Gayle, inspecting the boxes and bags of chips, salsa, cookies, and chocolate assortments. “I can make a run…”

  “Nah,” said Dianna, reaching for her phone. “I’v
e got delivery menus for every kind of food known to womankind.”

  They ordered Chinese. Dianna started a fire in the hearth, put on some John Legend, and they started pouring glasses of comfort. Outside the birds sang in the trees.

  They did not notice the dozens upon dozens of nightbirds who sat in silent ranks on telephone wires and all along the roof of her house.

  132

  Mike Sweeney sat in his cubicle at the station with two desktop computers running and his laptop open. The printer was chugging out page after page of the names of those from the tattoo conventions who’d offered to cooperate without the requirement of a warrant. Privacy policies for events like that were internal and informal, and many of Mike’s requests came in via local FBI offices. Besides, it wasn’t like he was seeking political or medical information.

  Mike was systematically going through the printouts while also running database searches to cross-reference information. The slowdown was that no two of the conventions used the same damn programs for registration, so there was a ton of cutting and pasting.

  Work was therapy for him. He was in a lot of pain from last night. Only some of it was physical. Most was what Crow called an “existential freak-out.” Gayle and Patty had seen a side of him Mike hated to show, and he was afraid Dianna had, too. He was deeply ashamed of that “other Mike.” The animal Mike that was a legacy from the Trouble. It didn’t matter—or, mattered a tiny bit less—that he’d risked that transformation for a good cause.

  But it was a risk. His control in such situations was always a crapshoot. Although he’d never lost that control yet, he had to accept that it was a possibility. There were thousands of years of folktales arguing that real control was impossible.

  He’d had to go all the way home like that, too, because his clothes were shredded rags in what was left of his cruiser. That was still something he’d have to explain.