I was more annoyed than afraid. "Let me get this straight. I've been in town two days, trying to figure out how to keep hundreds of undead killers from turning all of New England into their own coffin-and-breakfast while dodging assassins so that I can live long enough to institute some positive change. And you, Miss Lived-Among-The-Vampires-All-My-Life, take a few minutes off from your job as PR flack for Uncle Kurt to lecture me on collusion with the enemy? If that isn't a case of the pot calling the thimble black, I don't know what is!"
"If they knew that I was working against them, I wouldn't live long enough to accomplish anything."
"And it's beyond your comprehension that I might be working from the same script?"
"There are obvious differences between us, Cséjthe. I do not traffic with the dead. I have never acted to save nor had physical congress with the undead. Despite maintaining my cover for many years, I have never been seduced by it. I know who I am and what I stand for. The Hunger and the Bloodthirst have never had a foothold on my soul. I have passed through the fire and have not wavered."
"Yeah, unthinking fanaticism is like that."
"If you really want to bring down this evil empire, take solace in the fact that your death will accomplish more toward that goal than an entire lifetime of administrative Mickey-Mouse."
"Oooh, nice turn of phrase. But you're not thinking clearly. I offer more advantages as an ally than a lever for political instability."
"At least you're not out and out begging. I like that. You're presenting a cool and reasoned argument for what you believe are logical alternatives. But that just underscores how dangerous you would be as Doman. You would find all sorts of intellectual justifications for the evil that would flourish under your benevolence. You lack passion. You are already becoming undead, yourself. You accept what other humans would not. I'm doing you a favor by pulling the trigger now: you may not yet possess a hellbound heart."
"And so you kill me and, of course, another powerful wampyr takes advantage of the resulting paranoia to make his move. Will your cause be better served if Cairn becomes Doman?"
She shook her head. "You still don't get it, do you? Like my mother before me and hers before her, I am Cairn!" Her finger tightened and a hissing, spitting, somewhat singed cat leapt upon her as she squeezed the trigger. Her arm was moving off trajectory as the cat became something else but an express train was already smashing into me, knocking me off my feet. Thunder roared and I smashed into the wall of the tenement building beyond the sidewalk like a rag doll hurled by an angry child.
A giant bubble of pain swelled and burst in my chest.
Bloody red-shift to white and I was asleep in the light.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
I awoke in rainbow-spangled darkness.
Dark and mysterious shapes encompassed me, their dim outlines refracting the available light in spectral shifts like the event horizon of ghostly prisms.
FLASH!
The world was suddenly ablaze in hellish red, as if the great dragons of Hiroshima and Dresden and Nagasaki had arrived to breathe their benedictions on my soul.
FLASH!
The blue ice of Ragnarok sucked all warmth, all color, all hope from the world in the vicious name of Entropy.
FLASH!
Red.
FLASH!
Blue.
FLASH!
Red.
FLASH!
Then blue . . .
Then red . . .
Blue . . .
Red . . .
I turned and found direction.
Dirty basement window.
Outside, on the street, a police car strobed the fire-lit night with its red and blue light bar. A cop stood over huddled shapes, speaking into his transceiver. Another knelt next to Suki, adjusting a blanket about her shoulders as she hunched over like someone caught in the bitter throes of mal de mer.
A banshee keened in the distance.
I was numb.
I was in shock.
I had been knocked into the building when the gun discharged . . . fallen through the basement window, down into the cellar.
I tried to climb back out but I couldn't get the proper purchase on the window frame to boost myself back up.
I turned to look for another way out, wondering what had happened to Darcy Blenik. Had she escaped? Had she shot Suki and run away instead of coming after me?
The banshee wailed louder.
I staggered through an obstacle course of barrels and boxes, shelves and racks, finally finding an old staircase leading up to the first floor. The treads seemed mushy with age and I hesitated as an odd sound penetrated my mental haze.
Not the squeak of a stair but the susurrus of whispered voices.
I turned and scanned the basement, looking for infrared signatures in the hazy, flickering dark.
Nothing.
Nothing warm that is.
Something purple-dark, maybe.
Something colder than room temperature . . .
I went up the stairs backwards, stumbling on the mushy treads but unwilling to turn my back on whatever whispery things there might be scuttling about in the musty shadows.
The floor in the lobby was just as old and rotten as the cellar stairs. It was like walking on pillows and feeling that one misstep, one overly rotten plank, could send me crashing back down into the basement.
I went through the front door and staggered to a stop on the front stoop. Malik's brownstone was engulfed in flames down the street and fire engines circled it like stalking lions.
There were two fires, however.
Within the red, yellow, and orange jets of flame another conflagration roared. Tattered flames of blue and green and purple fluttered and flashed, their rhythms and patterns reminiscent of negative film stock run in reverse.
Dark shapes frolicked at the fire's core. Distorted silhouettes chased one another about though the inferno like children running through a cool fountain on a hot summer's day. Distorted faces, like blackened commedia dell'arte masks, peeked through curtains of hot gasses, grinning or grimacing as they sought and fled from one another.
"Scary, ain't it?" asked a familiar voice.
The Kid sat on the limestone-capped brick sidewall that ran alongside the steps.
* * *
The multihued blaze, the red/blue flashing strobes of the fire trucks, cop cars, and ambulances, seemed to make no impression on the electric lime green zoot suit that he wore. It seemed to glow in the predawn light with a radiance all its own. He wore a broad-brimmed hat of matching color tilted back on his head and his chalky hands were clasped below one knee, pulled up toward his chin, as he took in the organized pandemonium with me.
"You're dead," I said, unable to articulate the various imports that implied for my current circumstances.
"Well, natch, Daddy-o. Been dead for close to a century, now."
"I'm. Dead," I managed, coming closer to the core issue.
"Hmmm." J.D. turned his attention to me and appeared to ponder. "Maybe. But there's dead and then there's dead. And then there's dead again."
"'Death is but one and comes but once / And only nails the eyes,'" I quoted.
"Yeah? Who wrote that?"
"Emily Dickinson."
"She must've wrote that while she was still alive because she don't know from nothin'."
"Really."
"Look-it, she might be the bee's knees in certain literary circles but I sure wouldn't ask her to inventory Shineola in the afterlife. Now that guy what wrote Peter Pan, he got a much better idear when he said 'To die will be an awfully big adventure.'"
"You've read Peter Pan?"
He shrugged. "Guy wrote about boys who never grew old. Seemed relevant." He unfolded himself from his perch next to the steps. "But instead of jawing about a bunch of literary know-nothings maybe you ought to be thinking about copping a ride." He pointed at the nearest ambulance. "They're loading your body on now."
I turned and the world spun about me. By the time I could orient myself, the back doors on the emergency vehicle were slamming shut and an EMT was climbing into the driver's seat. "Hey!" I yelled, "Wait!"
I ran down the steps, stumbling a bit on their mushy surfaces, and sprinted toward the ambulance. The siren whooped and the van chugged forward just as I caught the back door handles. I managed a short hop and glimpse through a rear window before slipping and falling into the pavement. What was strapped to the gurney inside didn't look like me. There was a lot of blood and pads and an oxygen mask, and a paramedic was working feverishly to do something. Suki was sitting on the other side, huddled in a blanket, staring at all of the blood as if she might never want to taste any again.
Darkness.
Pulling myself up out of the pavement was like falling facedown in a sea of mud and trying to drag myself free of the tremendous suction of muck and mire. I got my head up just in time to see the ambulance turn the corner several blocks down. "Hey!" I yelled. Like it was going to make any kind of difference.
Now what should I do?
The ambulance was gone and I could spend days walking the length and breadth of Manhattan trying to find the right room in the right hospital in an utterly alien city of 8 million people. And if I was dead what would be the point?
I looked back at The Kid. "I could use a little help here."
His mouth twitched. "Sure." He got up, ambled over and reached down as if to assist me. "Take my hand," he said.
I reached up and grasped his hand. Or tried to. My fingers passed through his without even a tingle. "I'll be damned."
"Could be," he agreed.
Chapter Fifteen
It took us two hours to walk two miles. Something about being noncorporeal and being disconnected from the physical plane seemed to put us into a different time/space continuum and bollixed up moving from one point of reference to another. We made deep sea divers look like Olympic sprinters.
There were other issues as well.
"Okay," I said as I looked up at the predawn sky, "I think I've got the basics down: noncorporeality versus surface tension, electromagnetic radiation versus synaptic cohesion, dimensional overlaps."
"Really?" The Kid thrust his hands into his Captain Kangaroo pockets and shook his head. "And here I thought I was giving with the lowdown on how to make the haunty scene."
"If you really want to give me the lowdown, you could tell me where I'm supposed to go now. Heaven? Hell? Purgatory? Paradise?"
"Hey, just because lots of people told me where to go when I was undead don't make me no tour guide now that I'm all phantomy. Dead ain't the same as undead."
He was plainly spooked—no pun intended—and I figured that if someone like The Kid could be afraid long past the point of having a life to hang onto, my chances of R.I.P.ing were sure to get ripped up before the ectoplasm settled. Still, there was no point in getting grave before the grave was actually dug. "Don't fret, Junior," I said, trying to clap his nonexistent shoulder, "you're still the ghost with the most."
He brightened. And I mean that literally. "Thanks, Big Daddy. It's been rough trying to work this out on my own. Now that you're here, I figure on having some kind of purpose."
"Besides annoying me for eternity?"
"Aw, man . . ." He grinned but the smile faded in reverse Cheshire style and he looked away. "See, here's the thing. I been around almost a century, alive and undead, but when I finally get dusted, I dunno whether to be pissed off 'cause I'm so mad or piss on myself 'cause I'm so scared."
"I can relate," I said, thinking that the reality of my own demise had yet to sink in.
"You? You're in a smooth groove. Don't nothin' rattle you even when you buy the big one. Here you're dead without even cashing your three-score-and-ten and you're just as cool as a cucumber. What's your secret, Stan?"
"Spook softly, Junior, and carry a big shtick." I didn't explain that this was a euphemism for maintaining denial and stalling for time.
"Good advice," he decided. "Especially since the sun will be coming up soon. We need to find some shelter and hunker down."
"Why? Do the dead undead burst into flame?" Dead undead? Sounded better than "undead dead . . ."
"What? No. At least I don't think so. It's just that we ghostly types get all watered down and fadey when the sun comes up. Go blind and can't hardly move. Kinda like Superman and kryptonite, ya know?"
"That's what I meant when I said electromagnetic radiation. Maybe I should have called it photonic sensitivity."
"No matter how you dress it up with the fancy language, Chief, daylight can mess with you real good!"
"But does it destroy us? Or just stun us until nightfall?"
"Don't think I want to find out. 'Specially since there's worse things—" He was interrupted by pale fingers of sunlight sliding between the buildings to our left. The night was turning into dark bars of shadow—slabs of darkness that were starting to seep back down into the cellars and basements around us. The Kid stiffened. "Oh crap! It's later than I thought!"
He grabbed at my hand and tried to pull me off the street. His fingers passed through mine again and he staggered through a lamppost. "We've got to get inside!" he said.
"Hey, if I'm dead, what's left for me to be afraid of?"
As if in answer to my question, someone started screaming off in the distance—two or three someones. One of the voices abruptly choked off but the volume of the remaining terror continued to grow. Something came around the corner three blocks ahead of us.
The Kid was doing everything he could to grab onto me and tug me toward the nearest building. "Come on, we gotta scram! They're coming!"
"Who's coming?" The sudden flash of sunlight was dazzling me, making it hard to think.
Two men were coming toward us, running full tilt, but moving in slow motion like the inhabitants of a languid dream. They wore rumpled suits of indeterminate color, the hues bleached out by their flickering transparency. While they moved like film stock slowed down to half-speed, the shrieks emanating from their open mouths were high-pitched like audio set on fast-forward.
"Cséjthe!" The Kid bellowed. "Run!"
I took a step. My foot came up like it was coming loose from hot tar.
Something else came around the corner. It wasn't moving in slow motion.
"Get off the street!" The Kid was shrieking.
The thing that was coming around the corner was joined by two more things. "Things" were the best I could come up with at first. Perhaps they were a trio of creatures, perhaps three distinct "swarms" of many creatures. Whatever they were, they were as scary as hell!
Although the man in front wasn't moving particularly fast, his companion was falling further and further behind. The creatures were gaining on both.
"Cséjthe, don't look at them! Look at me! Run toward me!"
The Kid's words barely penetrated. I was seized with an overwhelming urge to run in the opposite direction. I took another gummy step.
The Old Testament prophet Ezekiel described heavenly beings which resembled wheels within wheels, amalgams of eyes and wings. As they whirled closer, these creatures looked more like the cartoon Tasmanian Devil in full spin mode, only with red eyes and green talons and flashing silver blades.
They caught up to the slower of the two runners in moments, surrounding him like a trio of unholy dust devils. The shrieking intensified, the sound coming from dozens of throats instead of just two. A sound like the howling of the wind—containing multiple velocities, the din of horn and bone and metal all rubbing together with a high-pitched chittering overlaying all. The spinning accelerated and the creatures began tumbling like multilayered gyroscopes
made of teeth and claws and spines of rust-spattered iron. Faster and faster they fluttered and flashed, tightening their orbits. Then they rushed together like colliding cuisinarts and the runner at the center disappeared in an explosion of fog and vapor, his screams fading down a long invisible tunnel.
My equanimity evaporated, as well: I turned and began a sticky, slow-motion sprint toward The Kid and the dubious shelter of a flimsy steel and stone building.
The howlingwhirlingshrieking sound off to my left intensified and began to grow in volume as I pushed my feet against the gummy pavement and clawed at the air in an attempt to pull my way forward. With each step my feet seemed to sink a little deeper into the gelatinous asphalt and I fancied I could feel the hint of a breeze against my neck, the backwash of air from the razored Turbines of the Damned as they closed in for their second kill.
The Kid was backing into the outer wall of the building, merging with the stone surface like an entertainer taking his final curtain call. Only there was nothing entertaining in his eyes. They were wide and haunted, eyes that had seen many deaths over the long decades and looked as if they were only really seeing it for the very first time now.
The shrieking intensified behind me and I knew that they had caught up with the second runner just as he was catching up with me. He began to gibber and howl as my toes sank through the edge of the sidewalk and I knew that I had less than a minute before they were upon me, as well.
Don't listen
Don't think
Focus
See the ground as solid
Believe yourself to be as solid as you are real
The voice inside my head wasn't my own but I wasn't inclined to argue. I pushed against firmer ground and accelerated toward the wall where J.D. was submerging into a sea of rock and mortar.
Habeas Corpses Page 25
