Roadkill

by Rob Thurman

  That little piece of BC art bore one hell of a resemblance to what was squatting in the back of the warehouse . . . except she had three rows of those huge breasts. She really was the size of Jabba, times two, and she was expelling fully formed and grown revenants through her giant—oh jeez. Okay, now I wasn’t off nudie mags for a week; I was off sex, and that was a much bigger loss.

  I’d specifically not wondered where baby revenants came from when we’d gotten out of the Jeep. And here I was, finding out anyway. Ain’t that life? Life and pained eyeballs I suddenly didn’t want anymore. The new revenants would slide out and land in the water, splash feebly for a few seconds, then get to their hands and knees and crawl up the massive form that birthed it and, voilà, baby’s first swallow. Breast feeding, it was a beautiful thing.

  Mommy had no legs from what I could tell, and small arms ended in flippers that she flailed around as she hissed at us, then gurgled slowly, “I hunger. Mother hungers.” The milky eyes were fixed on us, the mouth big enough to swallow one of us whole. “So very huuuuungry.” All the new revenants turned toward us, including the one that just plopped out with gnashing teeth and swiping claws, and wet with more than water. Green and black, mucus or slime—whichever, it flew through the air. The smell that went with it was equally as appetizing.

  “Yeah. Okay. The miracle of birth.” I slammed a new clip home and tried not to gag. “You take care of this one, Goodfellow. I have some . . . ah. . . .” Another one came gushing out. Plop. Splash. That was it. Celibacy. The priesthood. That was for me. “Interrogation. I have some interrogation to do. Have fun.”

  “What?” Robin sputtered. “You bastard. You’d best not take a single step. . . .”

  I’d taken thirty of them before he even said the word. Dashing past me in the opposite direction was Salome. Apparently she liked what she saw a lot more than I had, because I heard her loud and raucous purr all the way back at the front of the hangar where I’d left my Einstein revenant. I’d never heard a happier sound in my life. Damn, she really was a tiny patch of living hell in a rhinestone collar. And I thought I had monster cred.

  The extra smart revenant wasn’t where I’d left him. Brains and motivation. Too bad he hadn’t gone to business school. He’d have a corner office by now. It still didn’t take long to find him, though. You could only go so far when you were nothing but a torso and arms. He’d pulled his upper half into a patch of blackness, but I could still smell that distant hint of perfume. A woman had put that on one night, for her husband, her boyfriend, her girlfriend or just for herself, and probably thought for a moment that she was pretty and ready for the night. But it had been the night that had been ready for her.

  I reached into the darkness for him, ignored the savage bite on my forearm, and yanked him into the dim light. Once I got him there, I used the barrel of my gun to pry his jaws open and remove my arm more or less intact. Blood probably stained the long-sleeved T-shirt, but that was the great thing about black. It didn’t show blood and it was slimming—a must-own for pudgy serial killers everywhere.

  I planted a mud-covered combat boot on the revenant’s chest. “All right, Professor, I was in a damn good mood yesterday. Now tell me why two Kin Wolves and one of your kind cared to blow it to shit.”

  It snarled, a show of teeth now broken from the metal of the Desert Eagle, but said nothing. And really it had nothing to lose. It was dead. It might take weeks to get there but even a revenant couldn’t regenerate an entire lower body. So nothing to lose . . . but something to gain. Pain. Nobody liked pain, not even revenants. Sometimes the threat was enough; other times it wasn’t. I think the woman who’d died in her favorite perfume, the perfume on its breath, would understand that I didn’t give a shit which way this bastard went in that regard. I unsheathed the combat knife, its serrated smile as unrelenting as my own. “Let’s try this again. Who is fucking with my Zen?”

  It was tough. I had to give it that, but in the end no one is tough enough. Everyone talks. Everyone. But sometimes the carrot worked better than the stick. I believed in equal opportunity. I used both. Weeks dying of starvation wasn’t a good way to go. Neither were your fellow revenants or Mommy eating you alive. I promised it a quick death and I gave it a taste of what it’d be like not to have one. And when it talked, I gave it that quick death. Not because it deserved it . . . It didn’t; not because I gave my word . . . A thing like it didn’t merit my word. I did it because that’s what exterminators did. Got rid of the nest of poisonous spiders in the closet. I didn’t leave them half alive and waiting around for someone to stumble into.

  “Did it talk?”

  I turned my head as I wiped the blade against my jeans. “Yeah, it did,” I said absently to Robin, who, as usual, had managed to do a nice tidy slaughter without getting one drop of blood on himself or messing up his hair. Only the wet bottom half of his pant legs was ruined. I, on the other hand, was soaked, muddy, bloody; the usual. If only there were lobster bibs big enough for monster hunting.

  “Good. I’d hate to think I had to kill a kindergarten class of revenants and see a vagina large enough to drive a Volkswagen through for nothing.” He used the back of my shirt to clean his sword. I didn’t complain. I deserved it, leaving him as the world’s most unlucky birthing coach. “Perhaps I should shove you up there. Expand your sexual horizons.” Now that, nobody deserved. I stood and put away my blade.

  An “I hunger” drifted mournfully from the back of the warehouse. He’d killed the revenants, but mom—which to be fair, you couldn’t kill without a rocket launcher—was still good to go, which had me good to go as well.

  “Well?” he said, beckoning for the information with impatient fingers. “What did it say?”

  “It wanted to know where your cat got that rhinestone collar. Said it was tacky as hell.” I headed for the opening to the outside, leaving our Venus out of sight, out of mind, and hopefully out of horribly disgusting dreams as well.

  “It’s rubies, not rhinestones, you fashion heathen, and I know you didn’t drag me out here in New York City’s version of the Everglades, ruin my shoes, my pants, my ability to function with anything female for the foreseeable future, and my entire morning to not tell me what you found out,” he demanded.

  “Pucks, you can’t stand it when someone knows something you don’t, can you?” I commented as I passed into the sun and headed for the Jeep. “Where’s Salome?” Robin had picked up the carrier at the door, but it was empty.

  He didn’t answer me any more than I’d answered him. He did manage to call me every equivalent of jackass he could think of, keeping it all in English so a nonbilingual moron like me could understand each one. I nodded, snorted, and gave him the occasional “good job” when it was a really filthy one. When we got back to the Jeep, Robin still didn’t have his answer, but I had mine. It turned out Salome had beaten us back to the Jeep. She was batting a revenant head around the floorboards with waning enthusiasm. To a cat, it was no fun when they didn’t wriggle and squirm. She yawned when she saw us, her teeth suddenly much bigger with the gray furless lips peeled back, then went to her usual grin.

  “No, no. Absolutely not,” Goodfellow told her. “You are not taking that home and rolling it across my finely crafted floors. Do you realize how hard it is to remove blood from marble grouting? I thought not.” He tossed the head into the water as he slid behind the wheel while holding the carrier. He picked up Salome whose Egyptian dusk eyes narrowed. “Yes, very fearful. You’re the feline fatale. Take a nap.” She was deftly popped in the carrier and it was placed on the backseat.

  “Do dead cats nap?” I asked, although at the moment I wasn’t particularly curious, but I was hoping to distract Robin. I should’ve known there wasn’t much chance of that, and there wasn’t.

  “So obviously you feel this is a need-to-know situation. I and my ruined wardrobe can both assure you that I need to know.” He started the Jeep as I settled into the passenger seat.

  “Oh, I know you n
eed to know. Can’t stand not knowing. Are flat-out dying to know.” I closed my eyes and crossed my arms. I didn’t know if dead cats napped or not, but I did. “But guess what? You’re not getting to know.” I ignored him as his cursing escalated and I closed my eyes tighter against the bright daylight.

  Hell, I wished I didn’t know.

  But in the end I did tell him. He was right. He deserved to know. It was safer for him if he did. After I told him, the swearing stopped and he squeezed my shoulder sympathetically. “I am sorry, but I would be lying if I said I hadn’t seen it coming.”

  I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t admit the same thing. I’d learned in the past where lying to myself got me . . . in a world of hurt. Instead, this time I kept my eyes shut and did everything I could not to think about anything. No lies, no truth—nothing at all. As most things tended to do when you needed them the most . . .

  It didn’t work.

  3

  Cal

  Abelia-Roo and her clan were at a campground in the Catskills. They would be tucked away in a less scenic and more private corner of the RV park where they could avoid any contact with outsiders, gadje. That wasn’t to say they weren’t running some cons, doing a little tarot or palm reading; Abelia- Roo wasn’t the best role model or leader, but they’d be more likely to do that in the nearest town. Wouldn’t want the natives having a map to the front door of your Batcave, or considering Abelia-Roo, to your volcano hideout complete with lasers for toasting the genitals of your luckless hero.

  It was a two-and-a-half-hour trip late that same afternoon and Niko actually let me do the driving. We retrieved his car from where Robin let us park it at his lot, although in the back, far separated from the other cars like the old days of leper colonies. To give Goodfellow credit, it did look contagious: patches of different-colored paint, older than either Niko or me; no MP3 player; no disk player, cassette player; not even an eight track player. I wasn’t exactly sure what that last was, but it would have to be better than the AM radio, which is all we managed to get. And with that luxury option, the big brown and maroon monstrosity was slightly better than his last car, which had bit the dust six months ago.

  I was still surprised my brother let me drive his latest shitmobile. This one was a Cadillac Eldorado convertible back from the days when they were apparently made to double as tanks in case war broke out on the Jersey turnpike. He was possessive of each and every one of his massive, beat-up babies, although he’d yet to clue me in on why he kept his weapons, his clothes, his routine, his bedroom, his life immaculate, but the cars—they were the opposite. When I asked, he always said with a faint trace of condescension, “One day you’ll understand, Grasshopper.”

  There were many one day s. I just chalked up the car one with the others and was grateful I actually made it in the big-boy seat. Granted, my window didn’t roll down and the air conditioner . . . There was no air conditioner. I sat and sweltered in the heat, which had climbed since morning. “Jesus”—I mopped sweat from my face—“let me break the window. Come on, Nik, I’m begging you.”

  “And won’t that be refreshing when January arrives?” He gave the rearview mirror an annoyed look at the bright red cubes that swung back and forth as I swatted them his way. “And what did I tell you about the fuzzy dice?”

  “Hey, they’re from Goodfellow. You’ll take it up with him. Besides, if you drive a car that looks like fuzzy dice were in the option package, you’re going to get fuzzy dice.” I slammed the heel of my hand against the radio to shut it off. It stayed on. It always did. “Who the hell is Air Supply and why do they hate me so much?”

  “Did you tell him what you learned from the revenant? And it’s a band from the seventies.”

  Music before we were born and an evil that made revenants look like fuzzy puppies fighting over a chew toy. “How do you know that? You couldn’t possibly listen to that crap.”

  “Because I know everything,” he said as if it were the most simple of conclusions. And with Niko, yeah, it was. “And Robin?” he said, pushing.

  “I told him. Better safe than sorry when dealing with the Kin.” I trusted Robin with my life and he’d come through every time. That kind of trust was a huge step for me, and Goodfellow had never made me doubt he deserved it . . . at least not since the first time he’d saved Nik and me. Trust didn’t have anything to do with why I almost hadn’t told him, changing my mind only at the last minute. The reason was simple enough: I just hadn’t wanted to talk about it. I had thinking to do. I also didn’t want to do that. Not yet. My Zen, one-with-the-universe, happy-frigging-lucky mood had disappeared in that hangar—no getting it back, but it didn’t mean I wanted to dwell on it.

  It was hard to lose something that was almost impossible to find to begin with.

  But I had told him all the same. The revenant had said the Kin had found out about Delilah and me, all of the Kin—not just her former screw du jour that I’d neutered in the park. “I didn’t have to tell you though, did I?” I asked Nik.

  And I hadn’t. I’d walked into the apartment and he’d seen it, what I’d learned, behind my blank eyes and blanker face. He’d known, because he could read me like a book. He had asked what the revenant had said the Kin were going to do about it, though. But, that, the revenant hadn’t known. It was easy enough to guess. They’d either kill Delilah or give Delilah the opportunity to redeem herself by killing me. Simple. To the point. The Kin weren’t much on Machiavellian-style schemes. Hump it, eat it, or kill it—that was good enough for them.

  Niko didn’t dwell on it after the short discussion, which was what I needed. He let me drive the car too, which I’d thought I’d needed, but now I was wishing for his side with the window that worked. Cooking in a sauna was a distraction, but not the most entertaining one. I’d switched to short sleeves and left the Eagle and Glock at home. This time I was carrying my SIG Sauer. I had to rotate my toys so they all got action. My jacket was in the backseat in case we were pulled over or had to stop at a public place and I needed to cover up the holster. The bandage taped over my forearm did the same for the revenant bite. I wouldn’t have bothered hiding it behind a bandage after cleaning it; it had stopped bleeding early on, but people tended to notice what looked like a human bite mark on your arm. Oddly enough, that kind of thing didn’t label me friendly, cheerful, and trustworthy to the world at large.

  “It is unfortunate,” he began, deciding the subject needed more discussing after all. “I’m only surprised it didn’t happen sooner,” he said, echoing Robin’s earlier comment and my own thoughts. In sympathy, I guessed, he hit the radio with a much lighter tap of his hand and this time it immediately shut off. “When are you going to talk to Delilah about this?”

  “You’ve had this car six months and you couldn’t do that before now? And when I absolutely can’t avoid it,” I griped, annoyed at the months of horrific excuse for music I’d suffered through. I was scarred. My eardrums were scarred. From what I could tell, the seventies had been a time of singers whose balls hadn’t dropped yet. Voices so high I couldn’t believe they hadn’t shattered every window in the Titanic’s rusty cousin we were cruising in. Although at the moment that would’ve been a good thing, since even with the top down the heat was god-awful. I mopped at the sweat again dripping along my hairline, thankful I’d pulled the now-damp strands back into a short ponytail.

  “What fun would that be—not torturing my little brother?” He eased his seat back. “And avoiding it only makes the uncertainty last longer. This is something I would think you wouldn’t want to be uncertain about.” He closed his eyes, lecture over. “I’m going to meditate. If you see a Sasquatch looking for a ride on the side of the road, keep going. There’s not enough legroom in the back.”

  I didn’t bother asking if Bigfoot was real. I’d stopped asking questions like that when I was eighteen. Sooner or later you’d find out one way or the other. Why spoil the surprise? In other words, my brain couldn’t begin to store all that was re
al, all that wasn’t, and the rest no one had a clue about one way or the other. I left that to Nik. It was easier than getting a pocket encyclopedia entitled When to Shoot, When Not to Shoot, and When to Run Away Like a Little Girl in Pigtails. Not to say a little girl in pigtails couldn’t be scary in her own right, especially if her teeth were pointed and her eyes glowed green in the dark. And you could bet your ass there were some out there like that. I might not have known the name or have seen one before, but the world was full of nightmares I hadn’t seen yet. It didn’t mean they didn’t exist.

  Diversity: It made the world go round.

  “Meditate away, Cyrano.” I tried to put my seat back. Naturally it was frozen completely upright and made for the comfort of the anal-retentive driver, stick up the ass a luxury option. “If I go through a drive-through, I’ll ask for a bag full of grass and oats for you. Maybe a lactose-free, chemical-free, flavor-free shake to go with.”

  “You do that.” He folded his hands across his stomach, linking fingers. “And don’t think I’ve forgotten our discussion about gates. I’ll give you a break for now, because of the unpleasant day you’ve had.” The eyes, opened for a sideways gaze, steely and implacable, had me giving an internal wince. That was too bad, considering what I had planned for the rest of the day. It was too bad for me and too bad for my ass, which would receive a kicking requiring an organ donor with an Auphe/ human-compatible gluteus maximus. And those were hard to come by.

  “But sooner or later,” he went on, “we will talk about it.”