Midnight Taxi Tango
Page 25
I edge along the perimeter walkway toward Carlos. Caitlin whirls at me, enraged. “Carlos,” I say. He peers at me around Caitlin.
“Quiet, brat,” Caitlin snaps.
“She wants you to kill her; that’s the whole thing. Some kinda resurrection-spirit transference plot. Just like she wanted you to kill Jeremy.” Carlos glances down at an arm and a hideously mangled torso half submerged in the icky water.
Jeremy.
Carlos looks back at me.
“Either way,” Caitlin says, “you can’t stop the Master Hive. They are well on their way to their new host.”
Something flashes in Carlos’s eyes, and for a second I think he’s gonna kill her on general principle. I know I want to.
I hear Gio grunt and turn to see another Blattodeon collapse beneath his flurry of kicks. Rohan helps Rigo wipe the roaches off his face.
“We have to go find the twins,” Carlos says. I can hear the sorrow and rage fighting inside him. “Now.” His voice is a hoarse whisper.
“How we lookin’?” Riley yells from across the room.
“We have to go,” Carlos says again. “Now.” He’s about to explode. “Rohan!”
“What it do, gray guy?” Rohan pulls a final roach off Rigo and strides through the muck toward us.
“You guys have any way faster than driving to get us to Long Island?”
Rohan belly laughs. “Faster than—?” A ghostling flashes up into the air in front of him, then splatters across his face. Little arms scratch at his throat. Rohan gurgles, stumbles backward.
I’m in the water, and it doesn’t matter. I clear the ten feet between us in seconds, reach up without even thinking about it and pull that nasty little monster off Rohan’s face. Gio and Rigo are on either side of him, holding him up.
“The . . . the fuck . . .” Rohan gasps. Dark splotches mark either side of his neck.
The ghostling squirms in my hand, growling and hissing, but his little arms can’t reach me. “I’ll take that,” Sylvia Bell says, hovering up beside me. She snatches the little guy and shoves him in her bulging sack with the rest of the ghostlings.
Behind us, something splashes into the water.
Caitlin.
She’s gone.
“Riley!” Carlos yells. “You gotta handle this. I gotta . . . I gotta go.”
“Go, man!” Riley says. “We’ll find her.”
“Kia, I need your phone.” He breaks into a run along the walkway. “Rohan, you okay, man? I gotta . . . I need to . . .”
“I’m alright,” Rohan says. “But there’s . . . there’s . . .” Carlos has already disappeared into the tunnel.
“Who are those glowing people?” Rohan says.
Oh boy.
“I’ll explain later,” I say. “Right now we gotta make moves.”
• • •
Outside, Carlos borrows my phone. He pushes some buttons and then just stutters into it, so I take it away from him. “Who this?”
“Victor, Carlos’s friend. Who this?”
Ah. I get it. “The EMT?”
“I’m a paramedic.”
“Whatever, man, nobody gives a fuck. We need your help.”
“What’s wrong? I’m working. I—”
“Perfect. I’ll explain when you get here.”
“Get . . . Listen, I can’t just—”
I step away so Carlos can’t hear me. “Listen, mothafucka, the twin babies Carlos didn’t even know he had are about to get turnt into a festering hive of evil prehistoric-ass cockroaches of death. We need to get to Long Island to stop them, and you’re gonna help us get there, because I know for a fact that Carlos has helped you out or saved your perníl-eating ass at least once, and if he hasn’t, then I’m quite sure he one day will, so I don’t give a full-fathomed fuck if you’re working. I need you to pull whatever bureaucratic shenanigans you need to do to make this happen and still have a job. And then be here. Fast.”
“Fuck,” Victor says. “Where are you?”
• • •
Fifteen minutes later we’re flying down the Jackie Robinson. Cemeteries stretch out to either side. Flickering shrouds rise out of the darkness like glow bugs, but they’re not bugs at all: it’s the dead. I wonder if my family’s out there in the night.
“Yes, this is five-seven X-ray,” Victor says from the cabin behind me. His voice sounds shaky. “Calling for a transportation decision out of the regulated parameters. Yes, I’ll hold.”
In the driver’s seat, this huge West Indian dude named Del shakes his head. “This is ridiculous,” he says in a thick Russian accent. I don’t ask.
“Yes, can you connect me to the telemetry doctor?” Victor says. “I understand that the protocol is to talk to the phone medic first, and I’m saying, connect me to the . . . Hello? Yes? No.”
“Fuck,” Del snarls. “Give me phone.”
“I have a patient that needs to be transported to . . .”
“Victor! Give me phone!”
Victor grumbles something under his breath and hands the phone up. We swerve hard around a corner, and my stomach almost flies out my mouth while Del shoves the cell into his shoulder. “Yes? Hello? Telemetry medic? Listen: we have a sixty-five-year-old male with history of endocarditis, hypertension, and pulmonary edema complaining of right-sided chest pain times four hours; patient states he was released from Long Island Jewish two days ago following open-heart surgery and would like to be transported back to this hospital as they are aware of the particulars of his medical condition.” We swerve around another corner, then hit a snarl of traffic. “Patient is morbidly obese and refuses transport to any other hospital in the area and has been appraised of risks involved with bypassing other hospitals.”
In the back, I hear Carlos whispering curses.
“Vital signs,” Del finishes triumphantly, “are stable.”
There’s a pause. Then he nods and says, “Spasibo.” He tosses the phone over his shoulder. “Permission requested: granted. Let me just turn off GPS . . .”
“Just got a text from Reza,” Rohan says from the back. “The Long Island Expressway’s backed up.”
“No problem,” Del grunts. He flicks a switch on the dash panel, and the night around us explodes with a pulsing red splatter of lights. The siren bleats out a frantic, ear-shattering staccato, and the gridlocked cars haul ass to either side in front of us.
“Put on seat belts,” Del says. “Now, we fly.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Reza
I was off the night Angie went missing. I had learned to tame my mind, mastered the once-incessant barrage of what’s she doing? and who’s she with? I’d made dinner and was settling in to eat when Charo called.
We tore through the house she’d been sent to, Charo and I. Didn’t turn up a goddamn thing and had to pull out when one of the neighbors came by and threatened to call the cops. We burned up and down the block, sent Rohan and Memo and Bri out in a frantic scurry through the whole neighborhood.
Nothing.
Went back to the house later in the night, and I felt the exhaustion of hopelessness grind down on me. My hands shook. It never happens, not in these decades of facing down my own death. But Angie . . . Angie. Someone had her, and the sheer wall of impossibility between me and getting her back cast its shadow over my every move. The house was abandoned, emptied out completely, and I put my back to one wall and slid to the floor while Charo raged silently through it one more time.
I held my hands in front of my face, willed them to still.
They trembled on.
Closed my eyes.
I knew she was gone, even that first night. Everything in me knew, everything held tight anyway. Hope was gone, the whole search a lie. But it was all I knew how to do. Which meant I had to create some sliver of possibility and anchor myself on i
t.
I stilled my hands, slowed my heart, unclenched my guts, all on the strength of a lie called hope.
Stood.
Followed Charo through the house, eyes scanning endlessly like searchlights, eyes empty as searchlights. Lost. But I had stilled myself, braced by the lie.
And now we’re in traffic. On the fucking Long Island Expressfuckingway.
Fuck.
“How long ago did you lose her?” Sasha says. Her eyes are closed. She’s been deep breathing since we dropped off Carlos. Trying to calm the urge to destroy everything, I’m sure. I see a little bit of me in her, the me from that night, willing the stillness into my hands. I hope she doesn’t have to anchor it on a lie.
“What?”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I know it’s invasive. I didn’t mean to . . . I just . . . I need to take my mind off this.”
Right. Carlos had mentioned his weirdo supernatural abilities, the way folks’ memories and thoughts swirl around us like little satellites to him, whole histories unraveling from a simple touch. Makes sense that his weirdo girlfriend would have the same skills.
“It’s fine,” I say. “I don’t mind. Four months ago. The roach guys got her.”
“I’m sorry,” Sasha says. Her eyes are open now; she watches the side of my face.
I shake my head. “Not as sorry as they’re about to be.” But it sounds weak, considering we’re stuck in fucking traffic on the fucking LIE instead of storming the fortress or whatever this place is.
I’m just thinking how I don’t even know where the fuck we’re going when my phone buzzes. I click the earpiece.
“Reza?” a gravelly voice says. “Dr. Tennessee again. How you guys moving?”
“Not well. What you got?”
“I’m at the library, looking through the file now. Seems Garrick Tartus’s third structure is located on the marshlands at Caumsett Park. It’s a little outlet on the north coast of the Island, connected by an isthmus.”
“An isthmus, huh? Fancy vocabulary for a librarian.”
Dr. Tennessee lets out an amiable chuckle. “That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”
“This by Oyster Bay?”
“Yeah. Remote as fuck, marshy, nasty, godforsaken. Home to some obnoxious wildlife and a bunch of scenic outlooks and abandoned little roads.”
“Sounds like my kinda dive.”
“If you’re looking to bury a body, yeah.”
“I just might be.”
She sips something, and then I hear a lighter flicker.
“Having yourself a nightcap?” I ask.
She chuckles again. It’s a warm, raspy sound. “Rum and a blunt. I’d offer you some, but technology’s just not there yet, alas.”
“Alas.” I’m smiling. It feels strange. We’re going to find this maniac half-dead dude and save kidnapped twin babies from the wrath of an evil swarm of cockroaches. I shouldn’t be smiling. I am though. Soon, Sasha will notice, and I’ll feel like shit. She’s back to her trance though—eyes closed, hands in prayer position against her face.
“I’m gonna get off this highway and take the local streets,” I say.
“Okay,” Sasha says quietly.
“Great,” Dr. Tennessee rasps. “Lemme pull up the map app on my tablet and see if I can guide you along.”
“I’m by Jericho.”
“Oh, I don’t even need the app.” She takes a sip and then a drag. “Take Route 25 past Crest Hollow and then head north on West Oakwood.”
“Old stomping ground?”
“I used to fuck this divorced supermodel in Huntington.”
“Ah, of course.”
“She was a volunteer firefighter in her spare time. Some of the best head I’ve ever had in my life, Reza.”
“You know what they say about divorced volunteer firefighter model chicks . . .”
We both laugh as I pull off the expressway. Sasha opens one eye at me, and I tell Dr. Tennessee I’ll call her back when we get closer.
The darkness closes in around us.
• • •
“Listen,” Sasha says as I maneuver us through the endless Long Island nightways, “I know you all have your ways of doing things.”
I already know what she’s going to say and I don’t like it, but she’s right. Memo says, “Whatsup?” from the back.
“And I hate when people tell me how to do my shit,” Sasha continues. “But my babies . . . will be there somewhere. And . . .”
“No guns,” I say. “Until the twins are secured.”
Sasha exhales.
“But, Reza . . .” Bri says. In the rearview, I see Memo put a hand on her arm. She shrugs it off. “We don’t even know . . .”
“No guns.” My voice doesn’t leave room for debate. “There’s machetes in the back. There’s a chain in there too. And some other shit you can kill with. And I got some insecticide grenades. I know we usually roll with more going for us, but I’m not opening up a shooting gallery with two babies in the mix. Fin de cuento.”
Bri sighs and retreats to the darkness of the back.
“Thank you,” Sasha says.
My phone buzzes once. These roads are narrow, and the dense marshland forest rises up on either side. Somewhere not too far away, the ocean roars. I’m doubling the speed limit and praying not to pass any cops, so I only glance at the text. It’s a rambling mess from Rohan—Jeremy’s dead and that turns out to be a bad thing; something called the “Master Hive” is swarming our way and apparently going to infest one of the twins. That seems to be the gist of the plan anyway. And something about shining people and the spirit world and Kia, but really, I can’t be bothered.
I text him Dr. Tennessee’s cell number so he can find out where we’re going and then pocket my phone.
The Blattodeons are up to some sick reincarnation game. Makes sense, what with Caitlin fake recruiting Carlos to do her dirty work. I can’t tease out the whole scenario while I’m driving, but I’m sure Jeremy approached the Survivors with a deal, or one of them anyway. Gregorio must’ve weighed out the options and put his money on the Blattodeons. Charo tends to let other organizations underestimate us, and that comes in handy during surprise attacks, but in this case . . . well, here we are.
The phone buzzes again, and I click my earpiece.
“Still on the Island?” Dr. Tennessee asks.
“And ain’t it fine.”
“You hit West Neck Road yet?”
“Yeah, we on it now.”
“You’re fast.”
“That’s what they tell me.”
“You’ll cross the isthmus soon then.”
The sky opens up to either side of us, dark, dark water spreading out into the night. To the right, trees darken the horizon in the distance. “As we speak, in fact.”
“Great. Hook a right down the first dark unmarked road after you’re over. It’ll be muddy—you’re in swamplands now—and you’ll go through a wooded area. Past that, there’s an open, marshy field and a lighthouse at the far end. That’s Garrick’s.”
“A lighthouse?”
“Not on the shore, I know. He was clearly a freak though, so I’m not that surprised. The door’ll be on the far side from where you’re approaching. Other than that, best I can tell, it’s your average random ol’ lighthouse in the middle of nowhere. And seems there’re some tunnels underneath; don’t see them lead anywhere though. All the guy did his whole career basically was build tunnels. Tunnels, tunnels, tunnels. The human fricken mole. And this one tower.”
The turnoff comes quicker than I thought it would, and I have to screech the brakes to pull onto it. In the back, Memo curses.
“Gear up,” I say.
“Who, me?” Dr. Tennessee asks.
I chuckle. “Sounds like you’re already set for the night.”
“Yeah, sorry ’bout that.”
“Nah, I’m a night owl. Plus I wanna . . . you know . . . make sure you come out alright.”
A few seconds of silence pass.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Call me when it’s all over, whatever the hell it is. And whoever the hell you are.”
“Thank you,” I say again, this time allowing some warmth into my voice.
“And be careful, Reza. If you get through alive, maybe we’ll grab a drink somewhere.”
“I’d like that.” It comes out before I think too hard about it. Which is probably for the best.
“Unless you smell bad. I don’t date smelly women—sorry.”
“I don’t,” I say through a smile. “Promise.”
“Yeah, you don’t talk like you smell bad. Bet you smell like fresh Egyptian cotton sheets and rainy mornings.”
I stifle a chuckle. “And the occasional Conejo.”
“I prefer Malagueñas now that Carlos introduced them to me, but I can get with that.”
I cut the headlights, plow forward carefully. The forest becomes the whole world: shadowy branches blot out the moon, the light from the street behind us, everything. Dr. Tennessee says something, but her voice keeps cutting in and out. An unexpected emptiness settles in me when the call blips off.
“That librarian an old friend of yours?” Sasha asks.
I squint to see the dark road ahead. “Apparently so.”
• • •
“Think they know we’re here?” Bri asks.