The two hairs Lyle collected from Vicente were not both his. One had been Juliana’s. Lyle’s spell had touched her without delivering a mission. She had already created her own. A vision had welled up within her, a lovely picture that came from who knows where. The other woman’s head on the tip of a spear.
Chapter Sixty-One
Ragged pavement on bare feet. Chilling rain against soaked cotton clothes. Lung tissue that tore with each inhalation.
Juliana didn’t feel it. She sensed it, but pain was a thing of the past in her new state of mind. She walked the double yellow on CR 12 with one directive, an amplification of the thought she last had before the blue power had touched her and led her out of the wreck. The Other Woman’s time had come.
Headlights flashed down the road. A car approached, a bland silver four-door. The plate on the front read Ask Me About My Grandchildren. The high beams kicked on and Juliana squinted. The car rolled to a stop at her side and the driver’s window slid down.
The rain plastered Juliana’s long black hair down across her face and her view into the car was like looking through prison cell bars. A little old man’s face peeked out at her. Raindrops speckled his glasses.
“There’s a hurricane going on,” he said in a thin little voice. “Do you need a ride?”
“Great idea,” Juliana said.
Before the old man’s smile could leave his lips, Juliana reached in and yanked his head against the door pillar. His glasses flew out the window. His eyes rolled around and bounced. She slammed him twice more until his head went limp. She pulled him out of the car and tossed him in the road. She took her amazing strength in stride.
She sat in the driver’s seat, gave the wheel four turns and slammed the gas pedal to the floor. The back end of the car swung around and she was pointed back to Citrus Glade. The car lurched as the wheels crushed the former driver.
In town, cars filled the lot at City Hall. Excellent. The shelter was full, as she expected. She would throw open those doors and…
The doors gave her an idea, a priceless and painless way to end this one-sided competition. Painless for Juliana at least.
She pulled the car up on the grass by city hall, aimed it at the backup generator, and punched it.
Below in the shelter, a muffled version of a car crash sounded from above one of the shelter’s thick walls. The lights snapped off and the noisy air conditioning fan went silent. A collective gasp rose from the half of the occupants who were not sound asleep. Weak emergency lighting at one end of the shelter flipped on.
Flora snapped on her flashlight and waved it against the ceiling.
“No problem,” she said. “No problem. We just need to restart the generator. We have gas if it needs it. Stay calm. I’ll go check it out.”
She pulled on her rain coat and opened the inner door. There was a thud at the outside doors and the metal creaked like a submarine’s hull under pressure. She flipped the handle and pushed. The door didn’t budge. She leaned a shoulder into it and tried again. Nothing. Something must have fallen on it, like a tree. Or more ironically, maybe the wind ripped the generator off its pad and it rolled on top of the doors.
The generator! No lights meant no power. No power meant…
She rushed back into the shelter and put her hand against the air vent. Dead still. The air conditioning was also the ventilation system. This little underground box was designed to survive a nuclear attack, all plutonium-tinged air kept on the outside. The lack of any insect life down here said the seals still worked.
There were dozens of people down here. She couldn’t do the math, but they would have to use up the air in here pretty quickly. Someone was going to have to come in from the outside, and well before the storm subsided, or the basement of City Hall would be Citrus Glade’s first wholesale morgue.
Back above ground, Juliana backed her carjacked four-door away from City Hall and left the blue compact car she had pushed atop the shelter doors. Go ahead Ms. Slut-of-the-Year. Try to open those against a few thousand pounds of Detroit steel.
Her first problem was solved, or would be when the air gave out. Now she was off to find Vicente. She knew where he’d be, guarding that investment he had in the NSA tower. She drove south to the mill.
Chapter Sixty-Two
Even in the barely navigable darkness of the unlit subdivision, Ricky knew something was wrong as soon as he turned down Paco’s street. Dim, dancing candlelight flickered in windows of most of the houses, but nothing from Paco’s. Just like Barry’s.
He ran halfway across the Diaz yard and stopped short. The house wasn’t dark. It was gone. All that was left in its place was a gaping crater. A few inches of rain had already collected in the bottom. Even in the storm, the ground smelled of sulphur.
No wreckage edged the pit. The house hadn’t exploded outward. It had just collapsed inward, disappeared like the things Paco touched with the wand. Damn, had he disappeared the whole thing? With everything inside?
Ricky remembered the strange state he was in when the magic had possessed him. He had no idea what he was doing or what impact it was having in the real world. Paco could have done anything at that point. Vanished the whole house. Even vanished himself.
If that was what happened, there was one thing that wouldn’t vanish, one talisman that had already stood the tests of time. He slid down the rain-soaked sides of the crater and pawed through the muddy water at the bottom. He retrieved something cold and hard. Paco’s coin. He put it in his back pocket. His cards were in the other.
There was no body, but Ricky didn’t need to see one. Paco was dead. The loss barely registered. Barry’s death had already numbed him.
Hurricane Rita delivered a violent burst of wind. Shingles from the roof next door flew into the air like a flock of startled birds and disappeared into the clouds.
Zach’s house was a few residences over. Ricky didn’t run this time. Soaked to the skin, the weather was not a factor. He had to stop Zach. Lyle might have opened the door to all this black magic, but Zach pushed them all through the threshold. This disaster was his fault. Their friends’ deaths were his fault. Zach was going to stop adding to this madness and he was going to pay.
Chapter Sixty-Three
Running in terror as his face burned away, Shane could barely make out the Elysian Fields hallway through the orange glow. He rounded a corner and glimpsed salvation. A bright yellow mop bucket sat next to the wall, mop handle sticking out of it like a giraffe’s neck.
Shane plunged his head into the grimy water. His skin sizzled like oil on a hot skillet. Water rushed into his nose and he could taste piss and puke and the soles of a thousand shoes. He gagged and got a mouthful of the disgusting muck. He yanked his head from the bucket, rolled right and vomited.
He wiped his face with the sleeve of his shirt. It tugged at him and he looked down to see charred flesh stuck to the sleeve. He had to be fucked up. He didn’t feel fucked up. There was no pain, but the fire… He thought back and even when he was burning, he screamed in panic, but not pain. He spit the taste of puke from his mouth and rose off the floor.
He walked down the hallway. Something, someone, had yanked him out of Dolly the Eco-bitch’s room. He looked in her doorway. The room was mostly shadows but he knew she was gone. She and Injun Joe were both missing. Probably missing together. The power loss would kill the door locks. They could be anywhere.
He scooped his cane from the floor and strode down the hall to his two crumpled cronies. Worthless as they were at Apex. He gave each one a kick to the chest. They both stirred their heads in lazy circles. Denny looked up at Shane and cringed. He backed away across the floor.
“Shane,” he said. “What the hell happened?”
Chester came to life and let out a yelp of fear. Shane walked over to the nurses’ station and looked into a wall mirror that said Always Look Your Best along the bottom.
He was a monster. The tip of his nose had burned away and he had a clear shot of his ch
arred sinuses within. His silver mane was scorched to stubble from his ears to up above his forehead. His skin looked like the ragged shrunken surface of a flambéed marshmallow. His eyelids were gone and tears ran down his cheeks in twin wet trails. With no lids he looked bug-eyed.
“Goddamn it!” He smashed the mirror with the head of his cane.
The bitch was truly going to pay for this now.
He turned back to Denny and Chester. They were on their feet and looked scared as whores in church.
“What’s wrong with you two?” he snapped. “I’m fucking fine. Don’t I sound fucking fine?”
“Yeah, boss,” Chester said. “No problem.”
“Then let’s get out of here,” Shane said. He had to follow the calling now. “We’re going to the plant.”
Chapter Sixty-Four
Zach’s house glowed like a nuclear pile in the night. Amidst the black, unpowered homes of the subdivision, a strange blue-white light spilled out from a window at the rear of the house, Zach’s bedroom window. The light pulsed and throbbed. Static electricity danced in the backyard as if kicked up by the falling rain. Zach was obviously hard at work.
Ricky wasn’t going to hit the rear window like he did at Barry’s. If whatever had killed Barry hadn’t already escaped, it would have probably killed him too. He’d find another way in.
The choice was not difficult. The wide-open front door invited him.
He paused at the threshold under the porch. In the movies this was the moment where the undercover detective always pulled a big gun from the small of his back and carried it in that cool two-handed-half-pointed-at-the-ground way movie cops had mastered. There was something in this house worse than any cop ever faced and Ricky had nothing in his waistband but his scrawny waist.
What he did have though, was more powerful than anything a cop ever carried. He pulled the magic cards from his back pocket. Ricky would fight fire with fire, fight magic with magic.
If he could master the magic. When he’d dealt from this deck in his room, the magic used him, almost used him up. If he said the incantation and gave the deck life, could he keep it from consuming his own? What was to keep that power, amplified by Barry and Paco’s coins, from devouring him first, re-wrapping him in that web of ecstasy and putting him into the stupor of the living dead?
Just his willpower could stop it. And that had better be enough. He held the deck between both hands.
“Bakshokah serat.”
The three coins blazed hot in his pockets. Magic ran up both legs, through his spine and down his arms. It hit the deck and the cards fluttered between his fingers like wild animals trying to escape. That heady, hazy, seductive feeling came over him. All he had to do was let the cards go. He could float away, free of the hurricane and any worries.
Instead he clamped down on the cards. He shook off the siren’s song the magic sang. He focused on his family; his mother, his sister, his father who wanted his children to end up better than he had. He was going to save them, the town, the state. And these damn cards were going to help him do it.
“Bakshokah serat!” he commanded again. This time he did not let the magic run wild through him. He directed it, throttled it, and sent only as much as he needed, in the way he needed it, to the deck in his hands. The fluttering died down to a thrumming. The cards were his to command.
He edged into Zach’s house. He passed the couch where he’d spent countless hours hunting aliens and bad guys in video games. It seemed like a thousand years ago.
Zach’s room was at the end of the hall. The door was open and the blue-white light illuminated a rectangle in the hallway. Inside the light lay Zach’s parents, mother sprawled face up on top of Zach’s father. Both had bullet holes in their foreheads and ragged exit wounds from the back of their skulls. Looked like Zach had borrowed his father’s pistol.
Ricky crept down the hall. With each step he took, the magic within him ticked up a notch as he tapped into the current Zach’s conjuring had aroused. The hairs on his arms stood straight up. The air smelled like melted wiring. He held his breath as he peered into Zach’s room.
Zach sat on the floor, legs crossed like some Eastern mystic. His head twisted back in an unnatural angle so that his cobalt eyes stared at the wall behind him. Both his arms stretched upward, fingers splayed wide apart. His hands were bone white, the blood drained from them long ago when he locked into this position. His mouth was an open smile.
The rings danced over his head like a trio of halos in a figure-eight race. Blue-white light pulsed from each one. On the floor at Zach’s feet lay the pistol that had felled his parents.
Zach was gone around whatever bend the magic took him. He looked beyond coming back. But Ricky didn’t know how bad he’d looked himself when the cards had a hold of him. He might have looked as bad as Zach. He might have looked worse. Angela brought him out of it. Zach’s parents obviously failed to snap him out of it, but his parents were jerks. Maybe he could bring Zach around and not have to…
“Hey, Zach dude,” Ricky said.
Zach’s head pivoted toward Ricky in an independent motion no vertebrae would ever allow. His eyes were solid, burning blue. His face didn’t show a hint of recognition. He lowered his hands to his lap. Then his right hand reached out for the pistol.
Zach brought the gun to bear on Ricky. The black barrel looked like the mouth of hell.
Ricky snapped into action. He let the magic charge the cards and they turned hard as steel. Like a Vegas dealer, Ricky spun two cards in Zach’s direction.
The pistol barked, but the bullet barely cleared the barrel when one card intercepted it with a resounding ping. A second card flew by and severed Zach’s right hand at the wrist. His hand seemed to hang suspended in the air for a second and then hit the floor, pistol still firmly in its grip, severed wrist cauterized clean.
Zach had no reaction, no cringe on his face, no scream of pain. He just raised his left hand and waved the rings toward Ricky. They flew to the doorway.
Ricky flicked cards forward like machine gun fire. They sliced through the rings but the rings did not stop. The rings dove for Ricky’s head.
At the last millisecond, Ricky ducked beneath the whizzing steel and rolled headfirst into Zach’s room. Two rings flew by, but one dropped lower. It passed through his left arm like a circular saw. Pain screamed up through his shoulder. His arm locked in place.
He came up on his knees and whipped a card at Zach’s exposed neck. It went through it like a guillotine. The blue fire left his eyes. His body hit the floor.
Behind Ricky in the hallway the three rings buried themselves in the drywall and went still. The blue-white light winked out.
Zach’s supercharged magic retreated from the room. Ricky let his magic seep back into the earth. He fell back against Zach’s dresser. From across the room, the cards flew back to the deck in his hand. Some were coated in blood. The cards turned back into laminated paper and slept.
His left arm was on fire. He couldn’t move it. He crawled across the floor to Zach’s body and pulled the final coin from his dead friend’s pocket.
He gave his locked arm a tug with his right hand. Nothing. He crawled to the wall and lay down.
At least I stopped the magic, he thought. I saved the town.
But the storm didn’t stop. Outside, an outbuilding toppled over. Wind filled it and exploded it from the inside out. Something else was keeping this hell on earth going. No, someone.
Ricky hauled himself to his feet. He had a good idea where that one person would be. He left Zach’s house to cut the magic off at the source.
Chapter Sixty-Five
Like spying an old girlfriend he hadn’t seen in years, the first sight of the Apex Sugar plant brought back a rush of good memories. Shane drove the car down the potholed drive to the main parking lot, just as he had most days for decades. The shadow of the radio tower in the lot was new, but the plant was still there, just like old times.
“Damn, Shan
e,” Denny said. “How long has it been?”
“Too long.”
Just short of the parking lot, the wind and rain cut off to near nothing, like some big screen filtered almost all of it out save a hazy mist and swirls of ground fog. Shane hit the brakes. Above them bands of blue pulsed from the tower outward like electrical shockwaves across the bruised sky.
“What the hell…?” Chester said.
“Shane,” Denny said, “this doesn’t look good.”
“Shut up you two,” Shane said. He knew it looked good. Perfect, in fact, just like the vision he had.
Inside the plant, Lyle’s eyes snapped wide open. He cut off the incantation he’d been chanting while standing at the center of the circle on the plant floor. The abrupt end to the inflow of magic felt like someone had cut off the water in the middle of a shower.
In the plan for the Grand Adventure, it made no difference. The energy stored within the cavern below was more than enough to sustain his new girlfriend Rita. But the end of the flow was unexpected. The magic stream should have engulfed his four apprentices as they played with their little toys, used them as a conduit for the trip to the Apex plant. In a perfect world the four useful idiots would starve to death after days in the throes of ecstasy. Yet, one by one, the four stopped producing.
He could rationalize that the storm had cut them off, perhaps destroyed their homes. Or perhaps in a strange twist, their parents actually took an interest in what their outcast children were doing and got in the way. Neither explanation held water. The storm was least intense at Citrus Glade, though a true eye had yet to form, and the magic had enough control over the boys that parental intervention would be suicidal. No, something had gone wrong outside of the Apex plant, and it was inevitable that the same something would make its way here.
Black Magic Page 20
