Roadkill: A Cal Leandros Novel (Cal and Niko)

by Rob Thurman

  Revenants, on the other hand, were a different story. I’d never met a revenant who didn’t eat people. That’s what they did. That’s who they were. They were sharks, and people were walking, talking chum. And that meant there was no such thing as a revenant that wasn’t better off dead . . . not in my book.

  After the shower, I found a note in the kitchen from Nik. He’d taped it to the Lucky Charms cereal box so I wouldn’t miss it. Gone to work. Back for meet. Gate and I’ll baptize you face-first in the toilet. Short and to the point, my brother.

  It was Tuesday, so that meant he was kicking ass, taking names, and being paid for the pleasure at the dojo on West Twenty-fifth. Most other days he taught as a TA at NYU. Mythology, history, fencing, all while supposedly pursuing his master’s—or was it a doctorate? Hell, I could never remember. Never mind, the Auphe had put an end to his early college days quick. Robin Goodfellow had friends . . . philosophical friends from the good old days of orgies and gladiators . . . who still taught even today and pulled some strings to provide Nik with a degree from a Greek university.

  Good for him. He more than deserved it. I, on the other hand, already knew more about the world than I cared to. The back of the cereal box was good enough for me—that and the weight of the guns in my holsters and my knives. Many knives . . . and then there was the occasional explosive round. I liked to think that made me easy to please, not paranoid and homicidal. You couldn’t be paranoid if they were not only out to get you, but had gotten you. And homicidal? I took a bite of cereal and crunched. In my world even the beauty queens were homicidal. I just passed on the tiara.

  I hit the street, checked my voice mail—still no Delilah—and decided which revenant hangout to hit. During the night they walked the streets, the human clothes and gloom enough camouflage against all but the closest looks. During the day, if they kept their sweat-shirt hoods up and heads down, and slimy hands in their pockets, they could get by. But it was a risk. But just as peris had bars, so did revenants—if you took away the other customers, the bathrooms, and the whole sanitation issue. In other words, they drank alcohol in pools of their own filth.

  Festive.

  Revenants were sewer rats mainly. They were either too stupid or too lazy to get jobs unless it was for the Kin, and the only meal that really turned them on was human, so they would find a deserted place to take over and congregate. There were probably about twenty places like that scattered around the city. I’d been to only two in the past and that had been enough. No matter where they were, above or below, you could bet on one thing: They would be rank. Revenants were all about slaughter and nice, ripe gobbets of flesh, but hygiene? They weren’t lining up for deodorant, that was for damn sure.

  But this time I wasn’t going down into the sewers. I’d had my share of those on a previous case and trying to track down revenants there by stench was a losing battle. Natural versus supernatural stink—I wasn’t that good. I was still going to get wet, though, which is why when I knocked at Robin’s door, I was surprised he was holding a cat carrier. I’d called him to see if he was up for a hunting trip and he’d been oddly enthusiastic. Now I saw why.

  “Um . . . ,” I said, hesitating as eyes made up of what looked like yellow candlelight peered at me through the metal bars. “Why? Cats don’t like water. I don’t think mummy cats would be much different.” In addition to the eyes, there was a mouthful of fangs that showed when she grinned—and she always grinned.

  Robin had managed to get the equivalent of “followed home” by a mummified cat during our last . . . “adventure” wasn’t the right word. More like our last FUBAR. Whatever you called it, it didn’t matter. What did matter was that shaking a mummy cat off your trail was a lot harder than shaking off a normal feline.

  “Look, kid, I didn’t say I’d go with you for this little interrogation/extermination project simply because the car lot offices are being painted. The Hair Club for Cats here needs some exercise. She’s getting antsy and you remember what happened last time she got antsy. She arranged some playtime on her own.”

  She—Salome—had gotten out of Goodfellow’s condo, killed a neighbor’s old, senile Great Dane that was using the hall for exercise, and then left the carcass on Robin’s pillow as a present like a good little mummified kitty. Mummy cats didn’t eat, but they did like to play the same as live cats. And if no neighbors had any big-ass dogs left to play with, she might decide the neighbor himself would do just fine.

  A hairless paw, with perfectly normal-looking claws that obviously weren’t, came through the bars, followed by a dry-as-dust mrrrrp. “There, there. Who’s a good kitty?” I said, taking a step back. I didn’t pull a gun, though. In my eyes that gave me balls of steel. In Salome’s eyes, steel would just make them all the easier to roll across the condo floor.

  “You love her, don’t you, Goodfellow?” I said, taking another step back. “Admit it. She’s your pookie bear.”

  “She’s a boil on the cheek of my finely toned ass,” he grumbled, but he let the paw hook around his finger. Robin, from what we knew, was hundreds of thousands of years old . . . if not older. Friends came and went quickly from his perspective, especially human ones, but mummy cats—who knew how long they could live? Wahanket, the mummy who’d made her, was older than the pyramids. She could hang around for a long while. When friends were mayflies in comparison to you, a mummy cat wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “So, I’m in my casual clothes.” By that he meant his non-Armani slacks, shirt, and long duster, which was good for concealing swords. It was when he concealed his sword without a duster that I started worrying. “Where are we going hunting?”

  I grinned. “How do you feel about nature hikes? Wetlands? Save the yellow spotted leech?”

  From the spitting of Greek curses an hour later as we splashed through the calf-high muddy water, surrounded by a cloud of mosquitoes, he thought about the same of it as I did. It sucked.

  “Wet enough for you?” I commented, and ducked the water he kicked in my direction.

  “Ai pidiksou,” he spat, but continued after me.

  We were at the Flushing Airport, abandoned since before I was born. Thanks to Robin’s owning a car lot, we had access to whatever we needed . . . including a Jeep . . . if the subway and bus wouldn’t get us where we needed to go. “This is what happens when you build an airport on a swamp,” I grunted. Swamp was the non-fancy name for wetlands. Built in the twenties, closed in the eighties, and located on top of a damn swamp was the sum total of what I knew or cared to know about the place.

  That and it was home sweet home to a bunch of revenants who worked for the Kin. This was actually a sort of reward situation for them. If they’d done good and not messed up for several months, a long stretch for a revenant’s reasoning and willpower, you got hauled out in a party bus with several dead or mostly dead humans, twenty kegs or so, and left for a week or thereabouts to lie around, eat, drink, and do whatever revenants do to make little revenants. The last was yet another thing I didn’t need or want to know.

  There were two hangars and one smaller building. The blue sky reflected in the still water ahead of us and it was warm enough that I’d shed my jacket and left it in the Jeep. There was no one to see out here but revenants, and since I planned on their seeing my weapons up close and personal, there was no reason to hide them. Except for the mosquitoes, the mud in my shoes, and the stink of our prey, it was a nice day. Not that there weren’t other opinions on that.

  “Poseidon’s barnacle-ridden testicles,” Goodfellow snarled as he held the cat carrier up as I sloshed along. I sloshed. He moved through the water like a shark, soundless and with barely a wake. When you were possibly older than mankind itself, you were good at things like that. The temper hadn’t seemed to have improved over the years, though. “Pick a building. I’m hot, I’m surrounded by water and mud . . . mud without naked women or men wrestling in it, mind you, and I’m not pleased. And why isn’t Niko here? Surely he’s not avoiding his duty?”
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  “Niko had to work, and the day it takes more than two of us to handle a bunch of drunk and passed-out revenants is the day we get a job stuffing teddy bears at the toy store. And speaking of naked mud-wrestling women, how is Ish handling your wild and woolly ways?” I grinned wickedly. “You talk him into the whole orgy scene?” Pucks loved a good orgy, or two, or a hundred. “Or do you just swing by his place afterward and cuddle?”

  “Do not go there,” he said with a grim set to his mouth.

  I picked one of the hangars and headed for it. The other ramshackle wooden building was too small and the stench was everywhere, but a little stronger toward one of the hangars. “Don’t get me wrong.” I held up my hands. “I don’t want details. I so don’t want even a single detail. I don’t even want to know that details exist. I’m just curious how it’s working out since he’s a little holier than thou and you’re . . . well, unholier than pretty much the whole world and all alternate dimensions. In the sex area anyway.”

  “I said, don’t . . . go . . . there,” he gritted. “Or my sword will go someplace you think equally private. Are we clear?”

  It was a big change from Robin’s usual bragging ways. I’d once learned more in one hour from listening to him boast than I had from two solid years’ worth of porn mags. He’d been the one to first get me laid. Not with him. Even if I were into guys, and I wasn’t, but if I were . . . I’d once accidentally seen him naked. Walk softly and carry a big stick was one thing. Walk softly and carry the Washington Monument was another altogether.

  “Okay. Okay.” If Robin didn’t want to be his normal bragging self, it was weird, bizarre, and probably a sign of the end of days, but it wasn’t the time to yank his chain about it. It was time to slice and dice some revenants. And that, more than the sun and the blue sky, was what made this a nice day. As we approached the chosen hangar, I pulled my Desert Eagle, matte black, and my serrated combat knife, same color.

  “You realize black really isn’t very adroit camouflage in broad daylight,” Robin drawled.

  “Believe it or not, the Eagle doesn’t come in sunshine yellow,” I grunted before pausing at the partially askew huge metal doors. “Looks like a good place to turn her loose. You know they’re waiting inside, right? She’ll have to be quick.”

  “What? You think they heard the splashing of a tsunami crossed with a beached whale that is you walking through water? Surely you jest,” he snorted.

  “And I suppose you just walked on it in your day?” I snorted back as he opened the door to the cat carrier to let Salome bound out.

  “Rumors. Lots and lots of wine and rumors. And the tide was extremely low.”

  Salome, finding herself in and surrounded by water, picked up a wet paw and looked at it, then back at Robin with woeful betrayal in those glowing eyes. Then her hairless ears perked as her head turned back, the whiskerless muzzle opened to scent the air, and she was gone—like a streak of lightning . . . wrinkled, bald, undead lightning. Okay, that wasn’t exactly poetry, but she was fast as shit. I heard the ring of the hoop earrings in the tips of her ears and then I heard outraged screams. No way I was letting her have all the fun. I slipped through the crack of the two slightly agape doors and shot the revenant that immediately attacked me. I shot him in the face, which was good for killing a lot of creatures . . . and movie zombies . . . but for a revenant, it was just another hole in the head, literally. Granted, with a Desert Eagle .50, it was one almighty big hole, but it didn’t take him down; it only slowed him down for half a second. Sometimes half a second was all you needed.

  He staggered back from the force of the shot and I tackled him, taking him the rest of the way down, switching hands to saw through his neck and spinal column. It was the only way for revenants. Chop off an arm or a leg and they’d just grow it back in a month or two. Blow a hole in their brain—hell, they didn’t use them that often anyway. Cut one in half at the torso—they’d die, but it would take weeks, and chain saws, props to Bruce Campbell, are goddamn heavy to carry around. Entertaining, yeah, but not very practical. Too bad.

  Through the spinal column of the neck was the only way to put them down permanently and quickly. And fighting them is rather monotonous. You might have one trying to gnaw through your throat while another tries to beat you to death with the arm you just chopped off him. Or you might have one trying to break your neck while one beats you with the leg you just blew away. From what I could tell, the slimy shitheads never sat around strategizing a whole lot or watching old kung fu movies and taking notes.

  Off to the left in a spill of light from a hole in the ceiling, I saw Robin swinging his sword and heads flying. Salome I didn’t see, but from the howling from farther in the darkened recesses of the hangar, she sounded like she was having fun. I finished with my first revenant and turned to the next. “You,” it hissed. “You dare come here. We know you. The Kin know you. You think you’ll leave here without one of us tasting your defiled flesh?”

  “Defiled? Big word for you. Big word for me too; I won’t lie.” He was smarter than most of his fellow flesh eaters. That made him the one I wanted to talk to. “Wait here, would you?” I tossed the knife into his chest just to distract him before pulling at the broad axe I had strapped to my back and swinging it one handed. Its head was three times the size of a normal axe . . . Viking stamp of approval all the way. I could use a sword and was good enough to get by, thanks to Nik’s training, but I’d never be a sword person. And there was that heavy chain saw issue, but an axe . . . If there wasn’t anyone human around to see it, that didn’t work too badly either.

  I swung and cut him in half at the waist like a magician with his assistant, only there was no putting this one back together again. “Abra-fucking-cadabra.” The milky white eyes widened, and mottled yellow and brown teeth, stained with blood and rot, bared in a silent scream as he separated and both halves tumbled into the shallow water. The lingering smell of a dead woman’s perfume on his breath didn’t make me too sympathetic. “Don’t go anywhere.” Then I gave him a savage smile. “What the hell, if you can go somewhere, give it your best shot.”

  Retrieving my knife and sheathing it, I moved on. I took on three more revenants with gun and axe, reloaded, and went after two more. I tried not to look at the floating body parts that drifted here and there, but I was used to seeing things like that and going on with the fight. It was what you did. Or you slipped up and you died, and I’d done a damn lot in my day not to die.

  Then there were the times in my life I had wanted to die.

  But that was then and this was now. Things were different—a world of different. The only way I planned on dying now was if I screwed up, and I wasn’t planning to screw up. A weight tackled me from behind. I hit the water, rolled over onto my back, losing a few deep stripes of flesh on my shoulders to revenant claws trying to hold me down. Niko had taught me to break a hold like that and this revenant was no Niko. I dropped the axe, shoved the Eagle under his chin, and put two through the top of his bald head, the color of a toad’s skin. The skull shattered, which staggered it slightly. It was when I put the muzzle of the automatic to its neck and emptied half the clip into it, destroying the spine, that it was blown backward, never to get back up.

  I surged to my feet, taking the axe with me, and headed toward about ten of them rushing Robin. Robin tended to have that effect on anyone who crossed his path. They either rushed him to molest him—I was sure that if it was for molesting, he was happy to have it—or to kill him. At least I knew he did have a problem with that last one.

  “Why is it when I’m with you,” he remarked calmly as he took two heads in one stroke, “I’m given the tour of New York’s most odiferous locations? Never are your enemies running perfumeries or fine gourmet chocolate shops. No. Sewers, troll caverns, abandoned asylums full of decomposing corpses, your building’s basement on your laundry day. I still debate to myself which has been the worst.”

  “Think of your cat. It’s all for your cat,” I
said as I took a head of my own with the axe and finished the clip off on my Eagle into another revenant. I didn’t take the spine out, but I did take both arms. If it wanted to kick me to death or take me out like the world’s biggest snapping turtle, it could go right ahead. And naturally it did. I didn’t have much respect for revenants, and compared to other predators in the city, they weren’t quite as efficient in their murderous ways. But that didn’t mean they weren’t killers or weren’t stubborn enough to come after you if all they were was a torso with one arm left to pull it along.

  This time I passed the axe blade through his neck and his head flew into the darkness. All his stubbornness disappeared with it. I waited for more to come boiling out of the darkness in the rear of the hangar, but none did. But I heard something—hissing, groaning, and splashing, and quite a lot of all three. Followed by Robin, I headed into the dark. It was instinctual for people to stay out of the dark; that’s where the bad things were. My human half had outgrown that core of self-preservation a long time ago. Now the dark was where the money was. With the axe in one hand, I pulled my gun back out and used the rest of the clip to fill the roof of the hangar with holes. Daylight streamed in, letting us see better than any flashlight. If it was something we wanted to see.

  It wasn’t.

  It absolutely, completely was not.

  Once . . . what was I thinking . . . a thousand times when I was being homeschooled by Niko, he dragged me to museums. If they didn’t have weapons or dinosaurs, I wasn’t much interested. But sometimes things stuck with me, like when your brother lectured you about fertility figures. The combination of horror and boredom etched itself into your brain. One museum statue he’d used had been a Venus. Not the good one, not the naked marble Venus with no arms, but nice breasts. No, he chose a small figure that would fit in your hand. Found in Germany or Austria or someplace with beer, it had a head but no face, and enormous pendulous breasts that hung over an equally enormous and pendulous stomach. The legs were tiny, the arms almost nonexistent. It barely looked human. In fact, it looked like Jabba the Hutt’s girlfriend. It was enough to put off a seventeen-year-old me from trying to get the newstand guy to sell me nudie mags for a week or two.