City Of The Damned: Expanded Edition

by Stephen Knight

  Schwimmer was unbothered by this, so captivated was he by the silver-in-black gaze that held him in its sway.

  The woman faded away like an apparition in a dream. Schwimmer dared to do nothing else but stare at the empty space where her face—and those eyes!—had been just an instant before. His eyes adjusted their depth of field, and he found himself focused on the still form of his wife, Miriam. Her blue-gray hair was in perfect order, her expensive lavender pantsuit pristine. It only vaguely registered on his consciousness that a great gaping hole had been torn in her neck, from which blood and a curious clear fluid slowly seeped. That his wife of some 30-odd years lay on their bed in such a ghastly state of disrepair was only a distant thought.

  “Noam.” The voice was a pleasant baritone, lightly accented, seemingly only an inch from his left ear. “Noam… do I have your attention?”

  “Yes,” Schwimmer stated, his eyes still locked on the horrible wound in his wife’s neck. He glanced over at Rosario. She had a similar injury, and another on the inside of one of her fleshy thighs.

  A hand alighted on his face, cupping his jaw. Schwimmer did not resist as his head was gently turned toward the owner of the voice. Schwimmer could feel power in that hand. A power greater than anything Noam Schwimmer had ever before encountered.

  The man was tall, at least six foot four. His face was finely constructed, with high cheekbones and a strong nose. A European face, Schwimmer thought idly. And dwelling deep in the man’s head, below a mane of dark hair punctuated by a shock of white at the widow’s peak, was a pair of silver-in-black eyes. The man smiled, revealing fangs.

  “We have things to discuss, Noam.”

  Schwimmer nodded. Again, completely arrested by the dual-tone gaze, this time forever… and he knew it.

  ***

  Acheson logged off his workstation at 10:00PM. He called Sharon an hour ago telling her he was on his way; it appeared he’d lied. Well. He’d make his amends. Tomorrow.

  The 68th floor was mostly vacant, save for the small group of intelligence analysts who worked the graveyard shift. They were Julia’s spooks, the ones who kept an eye on the late-night happenings, monitoring police bands, media outlets, anything that might provide an early indication that an infestation had taken root. It was thankless work, but they had all they needed piping through their keyboards and headsets.

  Acheson left the office.

  In the hallway outside, Claudia Nero stood facing the elevator doors. She was the Group empath, a tall, curvaceous woman with dark hair and lovely olive-colored skin that reminded Acheson of days spent on a Mediterranean beach. She wore shades of black and gray as always, from her light long coat to the shoes on her feet. Like all the empaths Acheson had met, she was at times remote, as if she preferred her own private world to the world without.

  And, like most empaths, she was afraid of him. Like Helena Rubenstein had been.

  Acheson cleared his throat as he approached her from behind. Claudia gave no indication she was aware of his presence, which in and of itself wasn’t odd. That she was standing in front of the elevator when the DOWN button hadn’t been pressed was. Acheson reached around her and tapped the button.

  “Claud,” he said by way of greeting. When she still didn’t respond, Acheson stepped closer. Yes, she and most other empaths were frightened of those field team members who actually went out and killed, but they were rarely so poorly socialized as to be outright rude.

  “Claudia?”

  Acheson looked at her profile. Her dark eyes were open, pupils dilated. Her full, sensuous lips slowly moved, as if she were having a silent conversation with herself. She was Seeing. When Claudia Nero was assigned to the Group as Helena’s replacement two years ago, Acheson had been told that her talent was “wild”, to a large degree uncontrollable. There would be times when the Seeing would overwhelm her, sometimes for minutes, sometimes for hours. Sometimes, she could not recall what she had seen or felt, whereas at others, she could recollect everything with amazing clarity.

  Ding. The elevator arrived. Claudia swooned slightly, squeezing her eyes shut. Acheson reached out a hand and steadied her; she recoiled.

  “Claudia, it’s me,” Acheson said.

  “Mark,” she said after a brief pause.

  “You all right?” The elevator doors closed after a few moments.

  Claudia stepped away from him and rubbed her eyes. “How long was I gone?”

  “I think you left the office almost half an hour ago.”

  Claudia stamped her feet a few times, still rubbing her eyes. “This not blinking stuff is murder on my contacts.”

  “I’ll bet. You okay?”

  She nodded and stopped rubbing her eyes. She ran both hands through her dark brown hair. Acheson knew that for her one of the side effects of Seeing was an itchy scalp. It was an odd reaction, he thought.

  “See anything?”

  Claudia crossed her arms beneath her breasts and stared at the carpeted floor. “I don’t know,” she replied after a few seconds. She looked up at him, her face composed, regarding him frankly. “I’ll have to go under with Julia tomorrow. Do you have the time?”

  Acheson pulled back his jacket sleeve and checked his watch. “Ten fifteen,” he said. Yikes!

  Claudia smiled thinly. “She won’t be mad.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Sharon. She’ll understand.”

  “You saw that, did you?”

  Claudia smiled wanly. “Woman’s intuition.”

  “We’ll have Julia regress you to 9:45.” One of the ways to get Claudia to report was through hypnosis. It wasn’t always effective, but the only other solution was drug therapy, and Claudia’s handlers in Washington had ruled that out long before she had been attached to the Group. Drug therapy, while useful on certain subjects, made Claudia Nero clinically depressed. Her ability to See when depressed disappeared entirely.

  “So you don’t remember anything?” Acheson pressed the DOWN button again. Ding. The elevator doors slid open.

  “Sorry,” Claudia said as she stepped into the elevator. Acheson sighed and followed her. They rode down in silence. Moments later they were in the first level of the parking garage. Acheson headed for his Tahoe, Claudia for her silver Audi TT. He stopped by the Tahoe’s rear bumper and turned back to her.

  “Was it Osric?”

  Claudia looked at him over her shoulder, surprised. “I’ve never felt Osric before. I really don’t know.”

  With that, she climbed into the Audi and drove away.

  ***

  Scabby Eddie was usually oblivious to the goings-on of Santa Monica after midnight, either courtesy of the bottles of cheap booze he’d been able to score while begging around the pier or from just plain, good old-fashioned sleep. He almost never was conscious enough to pay attention to the way the breeze made the palm fronds sway, or how the patrons of the bars stumbled toward their cars after last call. After midnight, Scabby Eddie was usually so far gone that the only things he might have noticed were his dreams; in those, he was still a young fourteen-year-old boy in Morrison, Colorado, living a happy life and contemplating the adventures that lay before him on the road of life. In those days, he had thought of California as some sort of golden land of opportunity, where anyone could make it, even young lads who came from abusive homes where the women wept and the men were violent and, perhaps, murderous.

  This night, however, Scabby Eddie was awakened not by the wind rustling through the jacienda plants or the palm tree fronds, or even from the traffic pushing along Palisades Beach Road. He’d had the better part of a fifth of Jim Beam which he’d bought with the day’s wages from a liquor store on Pico Boulevard, and usually when he’d pulled down that much liquor, he wouldn’t even wake up to obey the call of the wild, he’d just piss his pants where he lay wrapped up in his old blankets, surrounded by his bags full of dirty clothes. In fact, Scabby Eddie usually couldn’t even wake up when the other bums and vagrants came by and picked through his meager
possessions, taking whatever they fancied. It was for that reason that Scabby Eddie usually drank all of his booze and smoked all of his cigarettes before passing out. Otherwise, he’d be left with nothing come dawn.

  But tonight, something called him away from his treasured dreams, something that he could not immediately identify. For a few moments, he lay inside his blankets, his sunburned, whiskered face barely exposed. He could see the base of a nearby palm tree, and further out, a single car meandered its way past driving far too slowly. To no doubt, another drunk like him, but one who was too stupid to sleep it off. He sniffed the air, and could smell the salty tang of the Pacific behind him, as well as his own body odor and the hint of his own urine.

  “Wanna sleep,” he murmured, and closed his eyes. “Wanna sleep again.”

  Sleep eluded him. Scabby Eddie fidgeted impatiently in his cocoon of blankets and rolled over, facing the empty parking lot and the vacant beach beyond that. High-level clouds scudded past the moon, so insubstantial that they could only hope to cast a shadow on the Earth far below. Scabby Eddie took a quick inventory of his bags, and saw all four of them were still where he had left them, the filthy white plastic fluttering now and then in the breeze. He reached down with his right hand, and felt the bottle of Jim Beam was still where he had left it, inside the blankets with him, right next to his crotch. His hand then snaked upward, reaching inside the hoodie he wore; he could feel the slim cylinders of two Marlboro cigarettes in the pocket of his natty denim shirt. Good. No one had come for his valuables.

  “Wanna sleep,” he murmured again. “Wanna sleep, Momma.” Sometimes, he could still see his mother’s face when he was conscious, though such visions were usually relegated to dream-states. In the dreams, she was fresh-looking and unworried, laughing, her green eyes sparkling as they caught the Colorado summer sun. When he concentrated and tried to recall what she looked like while awake, her features were blurred, almost indistinct, and she emanated fear. The fear of harsh male voices, and heavy hands that only brought pain, never comfort or joy.

  Scabby Eddie whined in his throat and closed his eyes. He wanted sleep, and he wanted his dreams, where he was no longer Scabby Eddie but Edward Alpenhorn, a strapping young boy would could climb the rocks and foothills surrounding his boyhood town tirelessly, and swim in the cold mountain streams with the power of a big fish. And he could be with his mother again, when she too was young and healthy and unafraid.

  A sound caught his attention, and he opened his eyes yet again. It came from somewhere nearby, but Scabby Eddie didn’t immediately look to investigate. When one was living the life of the homeless on the California shoreline, violence was a part of life, and the less he saw the better he felt. He contented himself to look out over the beach at the incoming waves, and watched as the wave tops collapsed into the foamy surf. It glowed in the moonlight.

  Several figures darted past on the sand. One of them stood tall and upright, clad in flowing garments that seemed as black as pitch. Four or five others moved with the tall man, but they were hunched over; some even ran on all fours, like mangy dogs, their queer eyes glittering in the moonlight. Scabby Eddie blinked once, and they were gone. Either they had moved so fast they had vanished from his field of view in less than a second, or they had never been there at all. He reached down for his beloved bottle again, and felt sure it was the latter. Only the elixir doing its good work, making his life a little more bearable.

  Another sound, this time from where Amos usually slept, a choking kind of retch. Amos was a hardy sort of beachcomber, another of the forgotten ones like Scabby Eddie. There was a thrashing, almost frantic, and Scabby Eddie screwed his eyes shut tightly and covered his ears with his hands. He liked Amos, they got along well, and Amos had even helped Scabby Eddie a few times when some of the other homeless had tried to take his stuff. Now, it sounded like Amos might be in a spot of trouble himself, and Scabby Eddie knew no one would help him. Scabby Eddie whimpered inside his cocoon of blankets, torn between common sense—do nothing, and hope that whatever had befallen Amos passed him by—or do the right thing and help his friend. Scabby Eddie hated dilemmas such as this one. What he should do and what he could do rarely conflicted with each other.

  Finally, he took it upon himself to at least look over. To see if Amos was really in any danger, and if he was, maybe Scabby Eddie could do something. Like move away, if necessary.

  He twisted his head back and peered out from inside the blankets. Amos was lying at the base of another palm tree perhaps fifteen feet away. He lay on his blankets, not wrapped up in them to ward off the cool breeze from the Pacific. His legs kicked and shuddered feebly, and Scabby Eddie caught a glimpse of one of his hands, balled up into a fist that slammed into the grass again and again. Amos was in pain.

  The tall man Scabby Eddie had seen before was standing over him, watching as the four feral shapes crouched over Amos’s trembling form. One of the squatting shapes had its head near Amos’s as if it were kissing him. Scabby Eddie blinked and tried to focus, working against the effects of the alcohol for the first time in a long while. No…the figure had its mouth on Amos’s neck, and another one had anchored its mouth against the inside of Amos’s right thigh. Amos had been wearing his favorite pair of jeans, old acid-wash denims that he had rated as his most prized possessions, jeans that he would wash in the sinks of the public restrooms whenever they became soiled. They were now stained with black spots, a blackness that Scabby Eddie knew was his friend’s blood. He tried to make some sense out of what he saw, but there was no sense to make. Amos was clearly in some real trouble, surrounded by five people who were the strangest folks Scabby Eddie had seen in a long, long time.

  The tall man in the flowing clothes stood, watching the other four. He whispered to them softly, and those not attacking Amos looked up at him with rapt attention. They trembled and shuddered, and one of them seemed to hunker down like a cat readying to pounce. As he watched, it launched itself at Amos’s other leg. Moonlight glittered off its fangs for a brief moment before they disappeared into Amos’s denim-covered flesh like steel spikes. Amos moaned and spasmed once again. More inky darkness began to spread from the bite, staining Amos’s jeans further. Amos’s struggles abated suddenly, and he released his breath in a long sigh. The three shapes that had their mouths on his body began kneading his still shape, and Scabby Eddie had an idea what they were doing—pumping as much of his blood out of him as they could.

  “Wanna sleep,” Scabby Eddie whimpered to himself again. He reached down and grabbed the neck of the bottle, though he didn’t want a drink at that very moment. What he needed was a weapon.

  As if sensing his presence, the tall man standing over Amos’s body turned his face in Scabby Eddie’s direction. Scabby Eddie whimpered again, no words this time, just an expression of fear when the moonlight revealed the man’s face. It was all planes and angles, demonic almost, like something out of a horror movie. And his eyes…they caught the moonlight and held it, almost glowing with a baleful intensity that frightened Scabby Eddie to his very core.

  “You wish to sleep?” the man asked. His voice was as smooth as silk, yet as sharp as a dagger. His lips barely moved, but Scabby Eddie could see enough to set his heart racing. This man had fangs too.

  Scabby Eddie yelped and rolled out of his blankets as quickly as he could. He still held the liquor bottle in his right hand, and as he sprang to his feet, he kicked over one of his white plastic bags, sending his t-shirt collection flying across the neatly manicured grass. He turned toward the street and started to run as fast as he could.

  The tall man was before him then, as if he had teleported from where he had been standing. Scabby Eddie gasped and swung his bottle at him with all his strength, but the man merely leaned back, allowing the glass vessel to miss him by scant millimeters. He caught up Scabby Eddie as he crashed into him, a victim of his own inertia and held him fast. Scabby Eddie struggled, his knit cap falling from his head, and his shaggy blond-gray hair fell
into his eyes. The man’s grasp was stronger than anything he had ever felt before; it was as if he had been caught up in a steel vise. No matter how much Scabby Eddie struggled, he couldn’t loosen it. He dropped the bottle to the grass and placed both of his hands on the man’s chest and pushed with everything he had. The man laughed lightly and released him suddenly. Scabby Eddie fell onto his back.

  “Don’t struggle,” the man whispered to him. “Struggling only makes it worse.”

  “Wuh!” Scabby Eddie scrambled away but didn’t get far. The trunk of a palm tree was suddenly against his right shoulder. Scabby Eddie had always liked the palm trees before. Now he was cursing them, all of them.

  “Wuh! Who the hell are you?” Scabby Eddie croaked. He’d meant to shout it, but his throat was tight and constricted in fear, and he could barely breathe as it was. “Wha’ you want wi’ me? I don’t want no trouble!”

  “No trouble here,” the tall man said. He stepped closer, and Scabby Eddie saw his eyes were black and silver. They glittered like jewels. “No trouble here, my friend. You wish to sleep, so sleep you shall.”

  “I-I-I-I…” Scabby Eddie could only stammer now, fixed by the man’s eyes. There was something calming there, something that cut through the fog left by the booze, something that was soft and velvety and warm and comforting. For a fleeting instant, Scabby Eddie wondered if his mother’s eyes had been like that before he had run away, before his father had beaten her so badly that she had fallen asleep and never woke up.

  “It’s so much better if you don’t struggle,” the man said again, voice still soft and barely audible above the breeze. “Sleep will be with you soon. Relax, let it happen.”

  “Huh,” was all Scabby Eddie could say. He found his body doing exactly what the man ordered. He relaxed, his muscles unknotting. The man was standing over him now, looking down at him with those incredible peaceful eyes, and Scabby Eddie found his conscious self receding. He sighed and let his head settle to the soft grass.

  “Wanna sleep,” he murmured. “Wanna sleep and see Momma.”