But the gun shot interrupted her. The bullet took a piece of flesh off the back of Wendell’s neck.
It came from the disemboweled man, covered in blood and stretched out on his side like a monstrous slug, holding his gut in with one red hand and the pistol with the other. His face was gray, his arm shaking.
Wendell put a claw over his neck and dashed for the door, with two shots following close behind. Leaving the apartment, he stopped and turned long enough to see Agatha swinging one of the wooden chairs down onto the man, whose last shot went high and drove into the plaster over the front door. Wendell turned and ran towards the stairwell, wobbling under the heavy neons, oppressive and blunt and too white for his eyes. The vertigo was back and the hallway appeared to tilt; blue plumes and starbursts popped and fizzled in his vision. He ran into the wall, sliding along it towards the stairwell door. The door opened and a man burst through carrying what looked to be a shotgun. Without thought Wendell tumbled towards him, watching the man’s mouth open into a bottomless well as he tried to bring his gun up, but wasn’t fast enough. Wendell’s claws found him. White bulbs and blue suns and a despairing gurgle, but Wendell saw none of it as it ended as quickly as it had started, and somehow he fell into the stairwell, the door closing behind him.
Wendell was met with cool air in an updraft that swirled up the stairs. He grabbed the railing to steady himself and looked up, seeing two people looking down at him from the floor above, one a woman in a nightdress and the other a man in a stained undershirt holding a baseball bat.
“Cops’re comin’,” said the man. “We just called ‘em. Y’all’re killin’ this city.”
The woman scowled, then disappeared from view, followed by the man.
St. Jude’s, Wendell thought, just get to St. Jude’s.
He moved towards the stairs, grabbing the railing with both claws as the blue shapes came back to dance in his vision, now ringed with a bright light. He let his hooves—still, after all the action, in their shoes—take each step cautiously, as if he had just learned to walk, feeling his way down the stairs as his vision still spun and sparkled. After one flight walking felt more natural, his head began to settle, and he moved quicker.
Someone else is here, he told himself.
One more flight down and he stopped when he saw Santos. Hunched and facing the corner, cradling his arm, Santos turned when he heard Wendell’s steps. His face was bloody.
“I warned her,” he gasped, “said it’ll all go to hell.” He tested his injured arm, winced, and Wendell saw that each of his teeth was lined with bright blood.
“Was it them?” Wendell asked.
“Them who? The hell you talking about?”
“Or the cops?”
“Ain’t no cops. You know that.”
“But I just got here…I didn’t…”
“Ain’t even gonna get no last rites. Dios mio,” he said, lip quivering, “you ain’t gonna finish me off…” And he shrank back against the wall.
“No,” Wendell said. “No, I’m not gonna do anything. But she’s okay,” he added as he nodded his head upwards, indicating the woman he left two flights above and behind him, “least I think so.” He stepped past Santos and onto the next flight down, not wanting to look back.
“There are more down there,” Santos said behind Wendell.
Move fast enough, Wendell thought, and I’ll cut right through ‘em.
He sped up, and in seconds he saw the foyer, empty of all save the plastic plants and paint-by-number wall hangings. Dust hung in the air, and played in whirls and eddies under the brass light fixtures hanging at odd angles. Now at ground level, Wendell crept forward and peeked out the front doors. His vision was now clear, but there was still some unsteadiness in his legs.
His mouth and claws were wet. He pulled the bottom of his coat up to wipe his lips, saw a vivid smear of blood, and realized why Santos’ face looked like it did. Seeing Wendell’s crumbling face was one thing; seeing it covered in blood was another. He pulled the coat up again and mopped at his face with the inside of it, bringing back more blood. He walked over to two chairs along one of the foyer’s walls, their red upholstery frayed and ink-stained, and wiped his claws on them. Then he jammed his claws into his coat pockets and went to the front doors, pushing them open with his shoulder.
He assumed he would have a moment to survey the street before they noticed him, and certainly before they approached. But as Wendell hit the outside air a man hit him, plowing into his shoulder but stopping, as if unsure of what to do next. Wendell peeled him off and tossed him into the building’s doors. A second man turned Wendell with one hand and with the other brought up a black stun gun, its electric crackling sound met with a fevered blue line of light hopping between its two electrodes. Wendell stopped the stun gun with his claw, turning the man’s hand while squeezing it, keeping the electrodes hot and crackling, and pushing the blue light into the man’s neck. The man shuddered, fell to the ground and tumbled down the front stairs.
There were more men in polo shirts on the sidewalk, flanking the small and pasty Dr. Thane, his baby cheeks turned down in a grimace.
“Those are good men up there,” Thane said, moving from foot to foot. “You just couldn’t do this peacefully, could you?”
Wendell’s mind was calculating how much power would be needed to tear Thane in half when the sirens pealed through the air. Four blocks down, police cars tore around a corner and headed for the apartment building, their line of lights throbbing like a giant migraine aura.
Thane and the polo-shirted men turned, surprised.
Wendell leapt down the stairs and ran in the opposite direction, putting some distance between him and the men before he slowed to turn.
The patrol cars were now at the front of the building with police officers pouring out. Thane had his hands up in a gesture of compliance, and then turned and pointed in Wendell’s direction. But Thane’s hopping and high-pitched squeaks meant nothing when the apartment exploded.
Everyone looked up. There was a moment of stunned silence, followed by officers screaming into radios and running into the building. A moment later, the street was frenzied with the curious and the fearful rushing out of buildings and leaning out of windows to see what had happened.
The six oxygen tanks in his bedroom, relics of one of his mother’s fabricated pathologies, had ruptured, providing too much fuel for a fire that was already devouring the entire room. The apartment windows exploded in a rage of red flames that immediately turned into billowing, acrid black smoke that clung to the side of the building as it wound its way towards the sky. The street below was showered with glass and the charred metal pieces of the window frames. Burning pieces of paper dipped and ambled down in the air like flaming birds oblivious to pain. A small chunk of the building’s brick face hung for a moment at the edge of the gaping and blackened hole, as if deciding what to do next, then tipped forward and plummeted down, landing on the roof of a blue sedan, setting off its car alarm. Anything that was left of Diane Mackey was now gone.
The few remaining officers on the street had their guns pulled and pointed at Thane and his men, and there were more sirens in the distance, but Wendell didn’t wait around to watch. He had already turned and was hurrying in the opposite direction towards Dresden Street and the church.
The rain began, at first thin and cautious, like it wanted to avoid the streets as much as Wendell did, then heavier, persistent. It made everyone look suspicious, with eyes peering out from beneath umbrellas, and conversations hushed between pedestrians, making every whisper a threat. Or perhaps it was less suspicion than shock, Wendell thought, as the peering eyes were fixing on him in outright fear. He was no back alley junky prowling for a quick fix, or a performance art body mod flooded out of some basement rave, and everyone who passed him on the street knew it. He was conspicuously more, and worse. So Wendell sucked close to the buildings and away from the street lights, hurrying down the sidewalk and turning frequently t
o see if anyone was following him.
The wings were pushing against his coat. The fabric wouldn’t last long.
And now it’s all in my brain, he thought. The headaches and vertigo were bad enough, but now he was seeing lights and auras everywhere: around lamps, traffic lights, even the faces that passed him on the sidewalk. Perhaps it was the early stages of night vision, he wondered. Night vision would be an asset in a bio weapon like him. Wendell stuffed his claws deeper into his coat pockets and felt the short sharp blade of the knife. It should have been on the apartment floor, now charcoaled and covered in downed ceiling plaster. It shouldn’t have ended up in his pocket. He hadn’t picked it up.
Did I?
It must have dropped out of Scotia’s hand and onto his coat, slipping into the pocket when he picked it up. It seemed like a bit of a stretch, but he couldn’t think of anything else. And for a split second, Wendell hoped that that man’s belly had been torn open by the blade and not his own fingers. Scotia would have been right, and the eviscerated man would have been murdered by a garden variety mental patient. It all sounded so much easier. It was death still, yes, but death of a more natural sort. But he felt his new fingers, hard and sharp, around the blade handle, he saw his vision changing, he felt the horns—and yes, they had to be horns—starting to bore through his forehead. At this point, being insane was to be envied. He pulled the knife out of his pocket, which was clearly a bad idea.
A few pedestrians stopped suddenly and stared at Wendell. At the knife. The little blade now felt huge.
“Please, don’t hurt us,” said a woman’s voice. Wendell’s vision began to cloud blue again, so he couldn’t see the woman’s face.
“Just take the money,” said a man.
“I’m not gonna do anything,” Wendell told them. He opened his hand and heard the blade hit the sidewalk. He took off, brushing past the people, still hearing the sirens behind him, now with fire sirens added to the mix.
The city around him began to come alive. Between the blue plumes and the halos in his vision were brick buildings that launched up at Wendell and then receded. Opalescent streetlights went supernova and burst into flames, their intense light turning window glass to water. Massive underground gusts shot manhole covers into the air. The sky changed, reddened, and the flying things that Wendell saw right before Agatha and Santos had found him three days earlier had returned, emerging on rooftops. They took flight, black smudges against the red sky, their eyes yellow like tiny headlights. A hum filled the air, like the city itself was growling. Street intersections came to life, multi-eyed in red, yellow and green, fed by black wire nerves, their streets now four-way tarred tongues, swallowing and then vomiting cars and people. The hum increased. A billboard image melted and fell in viscous drops into an empty parking lot, and the faces on the concert posters covering the lot’s walls followed Wendell as he hurried past. Everything he saw became shaky, as did his legs, and Wendell knew that what he was seeing were just the results of a reimagined brain trying to cope with its own new life.
He stopped, shook his head, but realized that it would do nothing. He heard his coat tear. The left wing was stretching out. No pain this time. Almost a sense of exhilaration. The right burst through the jacket. Two human shrieks, now in the distance. Now what happened on the street didn’t matter. He saw only the red sky and its mushrooming blue moons, appearing then disappearing. The streets were behind him.
Below him.
No, none of this is happening.
He still saw buildings. He had just climbed to a roof.
But nothing’s under my feet…
Wherever he was, he saw it, in the distance, a hint of a steeple over a grouping of lower buildings.
Still there was the hum in the air, the growl, increasing. And whoever they were, whatever they were, those things with the yellow eyes, they were flying around him, working their triangular jaws up and down, either chewing at the air or laughing. He moved forward, staring at the sky ahead of him.
The hum was louder now, painful.
“Just get there,” he mumbled, “get there.”
With the increasing noise the sky grew redder, brighter, as if backlit by something beyond the earth. Wendell looked down. The halos intensified, around lit windows, car headlights, the broken yellow lines dividing the streets. The air rushed past his face.
The steeple grew.
They were still there, the flying creatures, now on his sides, and they were laughing. If he turned to look…
Don’t turn.
She would be there, waiting for him. She risked her life to help him escape, so she would be there. Finally, something he didn’t doubt.
The hum, the lights, the sky, everything warring against everything else. Wendell looked down and—
Clarity. St. Jude’s stood before him. His vision returned to normal. Wendell turned in a circle, seeing no one. Looking up he saw nothing but the black sky, and was thankful for the rain, now lighter, soothing his dry and cracked face. He looked down, finding himself standing in a large square of what was once grass but was now mud next to the sidewalk. All that he saw in it were the few footprints that he made while turning, none before him and none behind. A wrought iron fence with little decorative spikes, more quaint than threatening, separated the square of mud from the sidewalk. Wendell stepped towards it, the squench and splunk of his shoes pulling out of the mud audible over the soft rainfall and the thin traffic a few blocks away. Grabbing the fence, Wendell hopped over and landed on the sidewalk.
Steam snaked out of ground vents and rose like swamp gases from a subterranean bog. A dog lapped at a puddle held in a pothole, and the black plastic covering construction scaffolding across the street came untied in the wind and blew out like a bat wing. Wendell leaned in towards the street and looked both ways, the street endless in either direction. He was looking for a car, her car. Hoping for the car, but expecting to see them, a cluster of men who, even in the distance, he would be able to tell were wearing polo shirts and spring jackets, pistols in their hands. Or perhaps a large van without license plates joined by a caravan of darkened police cruisers.
“No, she’ll be here.”
He turned to the church. It had been dropped there by a Kansas twister, or perhaps was there from the beginning, with the rest of the city springing up around it. It was an awkward anachronism, a sandstone brick relic not of that time or place, wedged between an auto parts store and a beauty salon.
At the edge of its roof, two gargoyles stood watch, spewing lines of water out of pursed stone lips, recognizing one of their own in Wendell. The church steps, where Agatha said she would meet the hookers and crack heads with sandwiches, were empty of all but a few scraps of sodden garbage. The wall to the left of the front doors had been sandblasted to remove graffiti, with only a ghost of the paint remaining. At the far end of the mud square was a small makeshift shrine almost drowning in the rain and mud, a white cross with purple and yellow flowers and a little drenched teddy bear leaned against a wall. On the cross in black marker was the name “Sabrina” with a photo of a young girl curled at the edges and stapled to the cross’s center. At the top of the wall and providing a meager triangle of light to the white cross was an ornate light fixture whose decorative golden glass on one side had long ago broken, revealing an all too ordinary light bulb. A crucified Jesus and some attendant saints, carved in stone above the front doors, watched Wendell wait. Wendell stared up at them, and wondered about the world from their perspective.
Voices. Urgent and angry. They were close.
Just hop up, he thought, and sit in between your friends up there, spitting rainwater out of your mouth. They’d never see you.
Wendell again leaned towards the street and turned his head, seeing them as he knew he would, a gaggle of men, silhouetted by street lights behind them, and moving with purpose in his direction.
He could turn and flee, or stand and fight.
Or fly, he told himself. He reached his arm ba
ck, feeling the wings that had folded back up, yet were still quivering.
The dog drinking from the puddle sensed something and ran off down an alley.
Five of them. No, six, forming a skirmish line in the middle of the street.
He would stand and fight. No more running.
But it was all interrupted by movement behind the men. A car fishtailed around the corner sending up a fan of water and quickly righting itself, accelerating towards them. Yellow and with a pained engine that struggled to keep a level hum, it was squat and rusty like the squat and rusty nun behind its wheel. The line of men turned, then scattered when Agatha made clear that they were more targets than roadblocks.
Two of the men fired their guns at the car. One of the rounds ricocheted off the back edge of the roof. Another exploded the passenger side mirror.
Agatha stopped in a splash next to Wendell with one tire on the sidewalk.
“Get in Wendell,” she said through the open window.
He ran around the front of the car to the passenger side and got in.
“You were going to hit them.”
“Yes I was,” she said.
Agatha wrenched the gear shift into reverse, and the tire on the sidewalk sputtered on the wet pavement until it caught its tread and bounced onto the street. She threw the car back into drive and pulled away.
Two more bullets hit the car, one shattering the side window behind Wendell and the other impacting into the top of the trunk. Wendell turned and looked out the back window, seeing the men running after them but shrinking from view as the car picked up speed. He turned back just as Agatha took a hard right and sent Wendell crashing into her.
Two blocks up and the streets got brighter and busier. It was all frenetic: swollen traffic signs and street lights like sunbursts poured past him in a metallic river. Faces blurred, the shapes of cars and bus benches stretched, the world for a moment manic and unanchored. His head swam.
“You were going to kill them,” she said.
“Yes I was.”
Honks. Screeching tires. A pedestrian nearly hit by Agatha’s side mirror screamed profanities at them.
The Death of Wendell Mackey Page 25
