Paternus

by Dyrk Ashton

  What the crowd can see is both men frantically tapping out in surrender on Kabir’s broad back. And very soon, thanks to a multitude of smartphones, so will a lot of other people.

  * * *

  Kabir marches Stag and Dinky into the outer lobby. They’re surrounded by a boisterous mob snapping pictures and shooting video with their phones—and there are more in the lobby.

  Who needs paparazzi these days?, Kabir groans to himself. He considers the aftermath of his actions appearing on social media everywhere. He can already visualize the tagline: “Stag Larsen Bitch-Slapped by Aging Bouncer.” What was I thinking?!

  He hands Stag and Dinky over to a half dozen of Detroit’s finest then ducks into a “No Access” hallway that leads backstage. The cops can talk to him later if they need to. He’s got work to do. His earpiece chirps.

  “Hey Kabir.” It’s Rosen, head of security.

  “Yeah.”

  “Nice job out there. Impressive, as usual. Thanks.”

  Kabir doesn’t respond.

  “Anyway,” Rosen continues, “the boys out back say some homeless guy made his way into the car port. They don’t know how he got there. Could’ve been sleeping in the trash all day, I guess. Will you check it out?”

  “Why not just bounce him?”

  “Well, they say he asked for you by name.”

  Kabir scowls. Must be some mistake. “I’ll be right there.”

  * * *

  Kabir continues along the hall toward the back of the building. Through the walls he hears the cheering of the crowd and the music kick in as the encore begins.

  Maybe it is time to do something else, he considers. It’s been on his mind of late. He’s known too well in this business, by too many people. They’ll begin to wonder, if they haven’t already.

  Kabir pushes through the heavy double doors to the private section of the parking garage reserved for talent. In the car port near the exit to the alley, two personal security guards in suit and tie, and a driver, lean against a stretch limo.

  The taller bodyguard, Hansen, sees him first. “Hey Kabir. Sorry, man. We were just gonna haul his ass out until he said he knew ya.”

  Kabir grunts in reply. Hansen’s young and not real competent but nice enough.

  “We asked him to wait in the alley,” the shorter bodyguard, Spelling, adds. Kabir’s worked with Spelling for years. He’s an ass but good at his job. “Just a little bitty dude. Fucking weird, though. Creeps me out.”

  “Wearing like three coats,” says Hansen.

  “And sunglasses.”

  “Definitely has a thing for sunglasses.”

  “And smells like shit.”

  “Nasty.”

  “Real nasty.”

  Kabir rounds the limo and heads to the exit.

  The limo driver watches him go. “Strong silent type, huh?”

  “I think he invented it,” says Spelling with a grin. “Did I tell ya the guy’s a legend?”

  Kabir squeezes past the gate arm into the alley and takes a deep breath of the cool wet air, inhaling the familiar scent of dirty water and diesel fuel. Ah, Detroit. He checks the sky, a flat gray haze dimly infused with the light of the city, and the position of the blurry blot of a moon. Just after midnight. Colored beams of searchlights slice the thick atmosphere. The vibratory beat of the music can still be heard from inside.

  The alley where Kabir stands runs between buildings alongside the concert hall. Access to the main street is a block up to the right where a key card is required to open the ten feet high gate topped with razor wire. Not the kind of climb the homeless usually tackle. Like Rosen said, the bum could have been sleeping in the trash. Right now there’s no sign of him. To Kabir’s left the drive ends at an adjoining building and turns right into a blind alley. Kabir heads that way. This guy was probably a roady some time ago or an alcoholic door man, maybe a washed up junky musician. Or it could be Kabir doesn’t know him at all. Anyway, he’ll get this straightened out and get back to work in short order.

  Kabir’s mind wanders back to his previous line of thought. Maybe he could take some time off. He’ll find another job eventually. Always does. Have to change his identity, give up his most recent name. The one he took in honor of his mother’s side of the family. No big deal. It’s not like he hasn’t done it before. Maybe he’ll go someplace remote and just relax. He used to travel for work. That got too risky, increasing the chance of running into people he once knew too soon. Unlike some of the others of his kind, he can only alter his appearance so much. But a chance to see the world again would be nice.

  A genuine smile spreads across his ordinarily stony face. That’s what I’ll do. See some old friends, visit family. Hell, I might even see if I can track down Father.

  He rounds the corner to the blind alley, lost in thought, then slows as he hears a male voice singing a nursery rhyme, high, soft and angelic:

  “Oh, the Incy, Wincy Spider,

  Climbed up the water spout.

  Down came the rain,

  And washed the spider out.

  Out came the sun,

  And dried up all the rain,

  And the Incy Wincy Spider,

  Climbed up the spout again.”

  A foul odor reaches Kabir. The voice becomes creaky and discordant.

  “Here, kitty kitty.”

  Kabir balks. His mind grapples with the vaguely familiar scent and voice. Ahead of him to the right are two dumpsters against the wall. Beyond them the alley is blocked by a chain-link fence topped with coiled razor wire like the gate out front. There are usually plenty of lights back here, high on the walls. All are now broken but one back in the main alley, striking inky shadows. There’s no sign of anyone.

  Kabir stalks forward cautiously, makes out the shape of a figure crouched in the darkness between the dumpsters. It stands slowly to no more than five and a half feet tall, but Kabir’s skin prickles and the hair on the back of his neck and all down his back bristles straight.

  This is the “homeless man” who knew Kabir’s name—or at least what Hansen and Spelling saw as a homeless man. In that form it wouldn’t be the least bit menacing. What Kabir sees is no vagrant, however, but the creature’s true form, its Trueface. And it sees Kabir’s.

  Kabir reproaches himself harshly—how could he have let his guard down?! His guard! It’s been so very long. He’s gotten soft.

  “Max...” the name passes Kabir’s lips as an exclamation of deepest loathing.

  Max hunches low to the ground. “Hello, Zadkiel.” He chortles. “My apologies. I mean, Kabir.”

  Kabir has never fled from anything only to save himself. Now, faced with this little homeless man, he considers it for the first time in his very long life. But he knows, running will not save him. Not from Maskim Xul. And it’s always better to go down fighting. Always.

  It leaps.

  * * *

  In the garage by the limo, Hansen, Spelling and the driver are jolted by a roar so inhuman and ghastly they question whether they heard it at all. Spelling tries his radio, calling for Kabir. No response. Hansen and the limo driver stand frozen in place, but Spelling heads straight for the back of the car. “Open the trunk!”

  It takes a moment for the command to register before the driver fumbles the keys out of his pocket and hits the button to pop the trunk.

  Spelling snatches two shotguns from a case inside and shoves one in Hansen’s hands. “Come on.” He calls on the radio for Rosen to send police as he and Hansen approach the back of the alley, then pulls a small flashlight from his belt.

  Hansen’s having difficulty differentiating between the muffled pulse of the music from the concert and his own pounding heartbeat.

  They round the corner with shotguns raised.

  No sign of Kabir or struggle. Just scattered rubbish. They move carefully to the front of the dumpsters, shotguns at the ready. The space between them is clear. Spelling checks inside. Empty. He tries Kabir on the radio again and hears a tinny squ
eak at his feet. He nudges a moldy piece of newspaper with his shoe, uncovering a coiled, shiny object. He trains his light on it and crouches.

  “Shit.”

  It’s Kabir’s earpiece. The squeaking sound they heard was Spelling’s own voice. He pulls the paper away and sees something else. He hands the flashlight to Hansen, reaches into his breast pocket, retrieves a pair of latex gloves, the kind security employees carry in case they need to search someone.

  “Is that a bone?” Hansen asks.

  Spelling picks the thing up, hefts it, finding it surprisingly heavy. Six inches long, ivory white, serrated along one edge and tapered to a deadly point. He tips it up in the light. Bits of meat and tendrils of nerve hang from the wider end, dripping blood.

  “Dude, I think it’s a tooth.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Obsidian

  The cavern pool is dark and still, the only movement the flickering reflection of amber torchlight and feathery mist that crawls on its surface. With barely a ripple, Ao Guang’s bald head and long angular face rise until his nose is just above the water. Breath escapes in a slow huff, dissipating the mist, and he sniffs the humid air. His lime-green eyes scan a domed chamber of glassy purple obsidian. Wide chiseled steps lead up and out of the pool. In the middle of the straw-strewn floor above squats a roughly hewn altar of stone. Torches jut from the walls, held by crude sconces of pounded gold. Ao cuts through the water and trudges up the steps, a lumbering giant, long-limbed and intimidating.

  Baphomet emerges next. Short white hair and goatee, noble features, light complexion, with eyes of the faintest pink. He comports himself proudly to the floor of the chamber.

  Dimmi follows, dark of skin, eyes and hair, sputtering as he stalks up to Baphomet’s side. All three wear the same military-style khaki shirts, pants and boots, drenched and dripping.

  “No need for cloaking here, I’d imagine,” says Baphomet in Olde English. Ao Guang clacks his crooked angling teeth together once, loud and unnerving.

  The men’s images shudder like reflections in a shaken mirror—and become no longer the images of men.

  Dimmi has peaked furry ears, black marble eyes beneath a jutting brow of golden fuzz, spotted black, and a mouth like a smiling gash. He shakes vigorously, spraying water from his coarse coat of hair the color of sand, with jagged black stripes. Baphomet glares at him.

  “Sorry,” Dimmi apologizes in a language known to linguists today as Akkadian. “I’ve never liked the water, ever, never ever.”

  Of course not, it might make you clean, Baphomet remarks to himself, folding his arms to his chest. Tall horns climb from his forehead, sweeping in a backward curve to end in dagger-sharp points. White fur covers his goat-shaped head and his waist down to his cloven hooves, but he refuses to shake himself, preferring to drip dry in a civilized manner.

  “Anything?” he asks. Dimmi bounces softly on his stubby legs, digging at one ear with a black claw. Can’t he ever be still?, Baphomet wonders.

  But then he is. Dimmi closes his eyes, his ears twitching. He snuffs deeply with his wet black nose. “Something. But...” He shakes his head. “I do still hope it’s female, business and pleasure, fun fun fun!” He chitters and yips at the possibility.

  “Ssshhh,” Baphomet cautions.

  Dimmi forces a yawn in an effort to stifle himself, his face becoming a ring of jagged fangs around a fat pink tongue. He boasts he can fit an entire parvulus’s head in that mouth, and has been known to rip the face from the skull with a single twisting bite—one of his favorite tricks—especially when he manages to remove all the flesh in one piece, leaving the eyes intact so he can see his victim’s shock before the pain takes hold.

  Baphomet turns his attention to Ao Guang, “Ao?”

  He’s just feigning regard, Ao Guang is convinced. He doesn’t care what I think. He straightens to his full eight feet of height. Torchlight slithers across smooth gray scales that cover his chest and stomach like armor plates. His algae-colored back is even more heavily armored, ridged to the tip of his tapered tail which still hangs in the water. His head is crocodilian but his snout exceptionally long and thin. He cracks his mouth, droplets of water forming at the ends of needle-sharp teeth that edge the length of his jaws, and snaps it shut with a clack.

  It frustrates Ao Guang deeply that their master retains Baphomet as his most trusted adviser and made him the leader of this little sortie. Ao is five times his age—and the years make him strong, even more than his size and the species of his gharial mother. Baphomet may be an accomplished leader with a compelling personality second only to the Master, but Ao Guang is not without legend or glory.

  Few Firstborn who have lived in the age of the parvuli have not become legend. Their histories are rich and very long, and their names virtually countless. The history of human civilization is far lengthier than any parvulus knows today, having begun well before the Second Magnificent Holocaust, even before the First. High societies and literate, artistic cultures have come and gone, risen from primitivity, been knocked back into stone ages or wiped from the face of the earth by natural disaster and war, then built and again destroyed. But the memories remain, handed down generation to generation. And before the humans, there were Firstborn. There have always been Firstborn. Almost always. There has always been Father.

  Most of the Firstborn are now dead and forgotten. Even the knowledge of those still living endures only in myths and hushed fables told to frighten troublesome parvulus children. For the most part, today’s humans not only don’t realize Firstborn exist, they don’t believe they ever have. Except for a precious few, the most primitive and faithful among them, they’ve completely forsaken the gods and monsters of their forefathers. Ao grins as much as the structure of his gharial mouth will allow. That’s all about to change.

  He snaps his jaws again, the interlocking teeth clearly visible even with his mouth closed, and takes a deep rumbling breath, concentrating on the task at hand. Clear nictitating membranes open downward over vertical black pupils. He eyes the altar then peers at the openings of two crevices, one in either corner at the back of the chamber.

  “Looks like the right kind of hole for a Firstborn.” He speaks in pre-Sino-Tibetan, from before the last Ice. His voice is deep and grating, the sound of shoveling gravel. The lips at the bulbous end of his snout move like a human’s might, but spiky teeth protrude every which way, forcing him to enunciate deliberately.

  “I’ve stayed in a few like this myself,” Baphomet replies. He’s smaller in stature than Ao Guang, less than six feet tall, but his horns rise as high as the top of Ao’s massive head. They call him The Goat, though his mother was more like a mountain Ibex. Still, his knees bend backward like his mother’s did, and the pink irises of his eyes are cut across by horizontal pupils. Unlike his bovid mother, however, he has humanlike teeth with sharp incisors—gifts from Father, like his roughly humanoid physique—and a taste for flesh.

  Baphomet is fully aware that Ao Guang resents him, considers him a shameless seeker of status and attention, but he couldn’t care less. Besides, it’s true. He’s always garnered worship from Firstborn and parvuli alike. He likes the company. He’s had to operate in the shadows since the Second Holocaust, careful to avoid the prying eyes of Father and his loyal Deva, but he’s been manipulating humankind through dark cults and secret societies for millennia. At one time he had hundreds of thousands of followers all over the world. There are still quite a few. Some hold positions in the highest echelons of government and industry.

  Recently, he and the Master combined their significant resources to seek out and assemble the remaining Asura, the Firstborn who opposed Father in the First and Second Holocausts, as well as locate their enemies, the Deva, Father’s Firstborn warriors.

  It hasn’t been an easy task. The Asura lost both great wars, and those who survived have been hiding or sleeping for much of the last two myria. Until only a few years ago the mighty Ao Guang, once worshipped as the Dragon King of the Eas
tern Sea by clans who later became the Chinese, was lolling in the mangrove eco-regions of West Africa where the natives whisper warnings of a terrible beast they call Ninki Nanka. Dimmi had been less reticent. Maintaining his human cloak, he’d been hiring himself out as a mercenary to whomever would pay the most in diamonds, gold and flesh. He was prowling Sub-Saharan Africa, taking advantage of the strife there to fuel his fiendish proclivities for torture and rape, when the Master and Baphomet approached him.

  Now after centuries of preparation, they’ve recruited enough of the surviving Asura and learned the whereabouts of a sufficient number of Deva to proceed with the master’s plan.

  At the last minute, their networks submitted a report of a mysterious swamp beast in one of the most inaccessible regions of South America. The Master’s scheme was already in motion, but he doesn’t like loose ends. Three days ago Baphomet, Ao Guang and Dimmi were air-dropped by helicopter into the muddy Brazilian Amazon River, just over the border from Peru. They are tasked with finding out if the rumors of the creature are true, and if so, if it is Firstborn. They are to recruit it to the Master’s cause if possible. If not, they’ll just have to kill it.

  It rained the first two days they slogged through sucking mire and clinging jungle in search of the unidentified swamp beast. Eventually they followed a tiny tributary because Dimmi smelled smoke, and came across a tribe of native parvuli, naked and brown, who’d been entirely undaunted by the sight of the strange adventurers, even when they revealed themselves in Trueface.

  The natives proved remarkably stolid. One by one they were questioned while the others forced to watch. Ao Guang hung them upside down over a fire pit, reveling in their screams, the odor of burning hair and roasting flesh. Other than the wails of agony of the tortured, none of them uttered a word. Only the last surviving among them, a female child, finally spoke of a powerful bruja, a witch who appeared out of the jungle to heal them when they were sick. But only after Dimmi painstakingly chewed off her soft grubby hands and gnawed one of her arms up to the elbow did she confess her people made offerings near a hidden lake located to the north. Dimmi had taken this as good news, particularly liking the idea their quarry was female. The Goat himself was encouraged, though it gave him pause. There have never been many female Firstborn, and they are strong.