Intermusings

by David Niall Wilson

  Zolotow could only recall one other time when he’d hurt this bad and in this many places. Oddly enough, Katherine had been there that time too. In fact, she’d also been tied up on that other occasion.

  He wanted to fall. Both legs tried to go out from under him as he experienced that sick, dizzy feeling that always comes with the realization that one’s been shot. What kept him up was knowing that Bennet would be coming through the door as soon as he realized Bill Gates wasn’t returning fire. Instead of falling, Zolotow lunged against the door, heedless of the fact that other bullets were likely to be passing through the wood at any second, heedless of Gates standing to one side. Ignoring pain, ignoring dangers fore and aft, Zolotow slammed home the iron bolt on the inside of the door.

  "Zolo!" Katherine screamed.

  Gates came at him with a ceremonial rattle hung with snake vertebrae and beads, tipped with a small but deadly blade. Asson was the Haitian word for the houngan implement. Zolotow categorized it even as he dodged to the side to avoid having his throat ripped open. The barn door shivered with a tremendous crash and Bennet bellowed from outside, "This is the police, Gates! Open the fucking door!" Gates was momentarily taken aback by the shout. In that instant, Zolotow chopped down on his wrist, knocking the asson from his hand. Two fast, straight punches to the face and the black lawyer stumbled backward. As he raised his hands to protect his face, Zolotow swung again and struck the bloody stump of his thumb. Gates howled and went down on his knees, whereupon Zolotow put a boot in his face. Gates went over backward in the mud and lay there whimpering.

  "Zolo, get me down from here," Katherine cried out.

  "Just a sec, babe." He went down on one knee and clawed the Walther from its ankle holster. When he tried to stand, his legs refused to cooperate. For a long minute, he knelt there in the mud, feeling warm blood running from half a dozen wounds, feeling his remaining strength dropping in increments timed to the beating of his heart and the pounding in his head.

  The barn door shuddered again and one of the screws holding the bolt to the old wood shot out and plopped into the mud.

  "Zolo!"

  Bennet hadn’t fired through the door again, which Zolotow took to mean he was concerned about running out of ammunition. Bennet had emptied the revolver in the cornfield and had probably only been carrying one speed loader. If Zolotow was right, Bennet only had two shots left. The door shuddered again. Zolotow considered shooting through it, but doubted the little .380 caliber rounds would penetrate the way Bennet’s .357's had.

  "Zolo . . . the water. Get me down from here!"

  He turned and saw the jet of water for the first time. In fact, for the first time, he took in the whole trap that Gates had designed. The stream created by Bennet’s first round had arched an impossible ten feet across the room and was now splashing across Katherine’s calves. From there, the water, which should have simply run off and joined the mud on the floor, was inching up the back of Katherine’s legs.

  Zolotow picked up the asson and surged to his feet. He went to Katherine’s legs and was about to slice through the ropes when he realized the weight of her swinging down on her arm restraints would surely set off those charges. "Shit!" he growled, running to the glass on either side of her.

  The barn door shuddered again and the bolt’s clasp swung loose on its last screw, letting the door gap open several inches. Bennet’s fingers wrapped themselves around the edge of the door.

  Gates’ plastique charges were wired rather simply. There were no fail-safes, no collapsing circuits, no tricks. Zolotow cut the detonator wire from the ropes on the right side. As he turned to cross the room, he saw Bennet’s hand straining at the edge of the barn door.

  "Garza said to say ‘hi,’" he yelled. He took aim with the PPK and squeezed off a shot. Bennet bellowed as the bullet punched a hole through his hand.

  Stumbling in what was intended to be a sprint, Zolotow crossed to the other side of the barn, kicking over the bucket of blood in passing. He was cutting the detonator wires to that side, when Bennet forced the door open. It swung back, striking Gates and for the moment concealing him behind it. Zolotow turned and half raised his pistol, but Bennet already had the .357 raised and sighted in his blood-drenched hands.

  "End of the line, Zolo. Say goodnight to the lady."

  Where it waits, there are no bars, no chains, no restraints of any kind. I often wonder what keeps the beast there, what allows me the small measure of control I seem to have gained over it in this last year or two. I don’t understand it. Equal parts of me loathe it and appreciate it for what it is. There are times when it almost seems we’re of one mind, like the night Zolo made love to me—to us. And there are times when the beast has a mind all its own, a mind craving blood and death and something more, something darker than death, something as tangible in my victim’s entrails as urea and bile. It’s that darker taste which I’ve found only in the blood of those who have, like me, slaughtered others for pleasure. Bennet’s blood would taste as sweet. Bennet’s blood would leave the beast sated and full for some time.

  Changing, I tore free of the restraints on my arms. There were no explosions; Zolo had disconnected the detonators on both sides. My weight fell forward and would have set off the charges connected to the lines on my feet, but I was moving in a hyperactive reality where time had become both impotent and unlimited. Doubling at the waist, I reached back, extending four inches of razor-sharp talons which slipped through the nylon ropes at my ankles like they were no more substantial than cobwebs. To my heightened time-sense, it seemed as if the ropes falling free behind me drifted almost lethargically to the ground.

  Like all cats, I landed on my feet. My legs as they struck the ground were compressed energy and they propelled me at Bennet.

  He was fast. I’ll give him that. He swung his gun from Zolo to me and the big revolver belched flames and lead. It staggered me. Until that very moment I hadn’t been ready to admit just how weak I was. The bullet exploded against my shoulder blade, shattering bone and spraying blood, chunks of flesh, and scraps of hide. The foreleg went out from under me and for a moment I plowed into the mud. As I was coming up on three legs, he fired again. His second shot caught me in the chest and sat me back on my haunches.

  Time and energy. Two relatively simple things. They were all I needed to regenerate. But if he fired again, I wouldn’t have the luxury of either.

  I watched as he squeezed the trigger. Watched as the hammer rose and made its descent. Flinched as it fell against the firing pin and emitted nothing more than a sharp, insignificant click.

  Zolo’s gun barked and Bennet stumbled back against the open door, blood springing from the shirt sleeve of his gun arm. The empty revolver slipped from his fingers and splashed into the mud. Zolo fired again and a chunk of bone jumped from Bennet’s right knee. "Fuck!" Bennet screamed. Before Bennet could drop, the gun barked again and there was a small hole in his other thigh.

  Bennet went to his knees in the mud. "Christ, Zolo, hold your fire. I’m done, man. I’m finished."

  "I’m not," Zolo hissed. He crossed the room, glancing just once at me. In his eyes I saw something as dark as the beast, something ancient and powerful. It was like looking in a mirror. There was no mercy there. No remorse. Only hatred and a cold, bitter recognition. He, too, had recognized the unholy communion between us. He recognized it and he knew what he’d become.

  He also knew he was far past the point of no return.

  He shot Bennet again in the legs, in both arms, unmercifully pumping round after round from the little automatic into the detective’s extremities.

  "Go ahead and arrest me!" Bennet screeched.

  "Fuck that," Zolo replied. He leaned close, pressing the muzzle of the pistol against Bennet’s temple. "I told you I was going to kill you, Bennet."

  There was a flash of polished steel as Bennet brought the big knife out from under his jacket and thrust it at Zolo’s chest. Zolo caught the weak thrust easily and took the kni
fe away.

  "You read my mind," Zolo whispered. "That’s exactly what I was looking for." Tossing aside his pistol, he pulled Bennet’s head back by the hair, stretching out his neck until Bennet’s Adam’s apple stood out like a regulation baseball.

  "Please," Bennet croaked.

  Part of me wanted to cry out and stop him, but the greater part of me only laughed.

  "Remember the hooker," Zolo asked. "Remember Janice? This is for her." The blade drew a line from earlobe to earlobe. Blood sprayed.

  Zolo, my love, what have I done to you?

  There’s a point where every man snaps back from the brink, where he realizes that the moment in which he has gone too far has passed. For Martin Zolotow that moment came as Bennet’s blood gushed out and spilled hotly down his muddy pants leg, as the detective’s neck sagged open in an oozing, red parody of a grin, as his final gasps for air hissed through that gaping wound. When the light faded from Bennet’s eyes, the last of Zolotow’s energy and anger went with it.

  What have I become? Zolotow asked as Bennet’s weight went dead, leaving the detective hanging lifeless by a handful of hair.

  "Please don’t kill me, too," begged Gates from where he cowered behind the barn door. In the shadows, his eyes were as wide and white as china saucers.

  Zolotow looked back to where Kat sat in the mud, quivering and bleeding. He tried to see through the animal to the woman he loved, but all he could see was the beast, a huge black leopard, panting through jaws that could crush skulls.

  What had he done?

  I saw it all in his eyes.

  He looked at me and I saw that he knew what his love for me had cost him. In the year that he’d spent chasing me, in the hours that he’d spent in my bed, in the rush to save me no matter what the cost, he had sold his soul to the devil. He had traded his honor, his sense of right and wrong, his commitment to justice, for the path that I had chosen, the path of the ruthless vigilante.

  I saw him realize just exactly what he had lost.

  But I saw something else, something which he, at that moment, couldn’t possibly have even realized himself. I saw that it didn’t matter. That he still wanted me more than truth and honor, more than justice and humanity and maybe even the blood of innocents . . . more than anything.

  I had taken the man and destroyed everything good about him. In time, he would be ruined. And, worse, he would know what he had traded and what he had traded it for.

  I couldn’t take him there.

  I loved him too much.

  My shoulder was already partially healed, brittle new bone and tender tissue knitting the ravaged path left by Bennet’s bullet. Rising to my feet, I tested its strength, growling deep in my throat as pain shot through me. My head swam with dizziness and my limbs trembled. I was incredibly weak, weaker than I could recall ever having been in my life.

  The Voodoo Killer saw me getting up and he knew. "Keep it away from me!" he screamed.

  "Katherine?" There was disbelief in his voice. He wanted to think that it was over.

  I needed to feed. I needed the blood of this murdering psychopath, the dark, psychic energy of him and all his victims. And more, I needed to show Zolo a thing or two.

  I love you, Martin Zolotow, but I love the man you were meant to be, not the monster that I would make of you.

  This will show you just exactly what you would trade your humanity for.

  Zolotow shouted for her to stop as she sprang across the room, batting aside the intervening barn door to fall upon Gates. As the savage jaws closed on Gates’ throat and the silver talons tore the very ribs from his breast, Zolotow’s mind did one of its flash tricks.

  For an instant, it wasn’t Bill Gates she was ravaging. It was Tony Saucier.

  Tony screamed and flailed at the black monster on his chest. Blood sprayed in a crimson jet from his throat. The cat’s paws raked open his abdomen, prying aside gleaming white bones, spilling organs and blood out in the mud. Tony screamed for Zolotow to help him, for God to save him, for someone, anyone, to stop the horror. As the cat released Tony’s neck and thrust its head into the cavity of his chest to feed on his heart, Zolotow let Bennet’s lifeless body fall free. He stumbled back, his legs ready to drop him in the mud.

  She’d killed Tony.

  She’d ripped his fucking throat open.

  She’d torn the insides from the young detective and eaten his goddamn heart.

  Zolotow hadn’t been there. He’d let his partner down. And now, to top it off, he’d slept with the murdering monster and would let her go free.

  God, what had he become?

  Gates was done screaming. His thrashing had deteriorated to one spasmodically twitching leg and a hand half-raised in a futile claw. The beast had its head buried in the corpse, feeding noisily.

  Zolotow saw his Walther PPK there in the mud where he’d dropped it, but he knew the gun wouldn’t hurt her. He lunged for the back wall of the barn where the ropes that had held her legs were stretched out in the mud, still attached by wire to the detonators and the plastique spread across the glass. She heard him scrambling through the mud and raised her bloody face from the feast, but by then it was too late. He already had the ropes in his hands.

  When he pulled the ropes, there was more sadness in his eyes than anything else. I think he wanted to feel triumph or satisfaction, or just the assurance that he was doing the right thing. But all I saw, all I think he felt, was an incredible, weary sadness.

  The charges on the back wall went first, spraying water and shards of glass. Zolo was standing too close. The blast threw him face first into the mud, bits and pieces of glass burying themselves in his back. From the back wall, the wiring carried the detonation sequence around to the side walls, and they went too. I rushed through this chaos and leaped through the onslaught of cascading water, shattered glass, and collapsing wood frames at the back wall. The water crashed around me with a vengeance, clawing at my face like something alive. But I had taken it by surprise. I passed through the falling wave unharmed. The focus of the trap was the door; that’s where I was supposed to have run.

  Where the plastic sheeting lay against the back wall there was a square indentation which I’d noted earlier. I went through it, punching through the plastic and the glass window it had concealed. My freshly-knit shoulder snapped when I hit the ground outside, but I was full of energy, high on the blood and the flesh and the psychic energy I’d taken from the Voodoo Killer. I healed almost instantly.

  There was no moon. The cornstalks cloaked a darkness to match my own coat. As I slipped into their umbrage, I bid the only man I’d ever loved a silent farewell. I hoped that he would forgive me. I hoped that he would forget me.

  Zolotow licked at the salt on the rim of the glass and then took a long pull on the straw. It seemed like centuries ago that he’d searched the Riverwalk for the perfect Margarita. Now he knew that such a delight could not be bought. It could only be had for free, here on Hector Garza’s front porch.

  "More?" Garza asked, extending the pitcher.

  "Does a bear shit in the woods?" Zolotow replied, extending his empty glass.

  Garza did the honors, then set the pitcher aside so he could transfer his own drink from the arm he still carried in a sling. "Drink enough of these," he said, "and nothing hurts anymore."

  Zolotow smiled. That statement was almost true.

  "Will you follow her?" asked the Hispanic.

  Zolotow had been wondering the same thing. When he tried to think of her now, what came to mind was a Shakespearean sonnet. It bothered him that he could only remember the first four lines and the last four, the intervening six having been lost somewhere in his jumbled and backwards brain.

  My love is such a fever, longing still

  For that which longer nurseth the disease,

  Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,

  The uncertain sickly appetite to please.

  He wasn’t sure what it meant, his losing pieces of prose he
had fought so hard to memorize in his youth. Maybe it meant he didn’t need them anymore. Maybe he’d found a cure of sorts, somewhere there on the darker side of reason, there where he’d encountered the beast within himself.

  He still loved her. He was certain of that. But he was equally certain that she was not all that his cross-wired mind had made her out to be.

  My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,

  At random from the truth vainly express’d;

  For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,

  Who are as black as hell, as dark as night.

  "Zolo?"

  "No," he whispered. Then, again, louder, "No. I won’t be following her anymore." He probed tenderly at his side where the doctors had just two days before dug out Bennet’s bullet. It ached. So did a hundred other places, including those not so obvious. "I think it’s time I went back to San Valencez and tried to put my life back together. If the department there will take me back."

  "Muy Bien, amigo." Garza took a long pull at his drink. "As Martha Stewart would say, ‘this is a good thing.’ I think you have thrown away enough of your life. And if those pendejos in California don’t want you, there’s always San Antonio." He extended his drink for a toast. "I think we’d make a hell of a team."

  Ribbons of Darkness over Me

  By Brett A. Savory & David Niall Wilson

  Edmond Curit sat with his chin propped up on his fist, watching Abner cycle through the maze. Abner's nose and whiskers wiggled, his tail slithering behind him like a fat little snake. Edmond's eyes were on the rat but his thoughts were turning, spinning out of control with his new discovery. He could hardly wait to break the news to the world.

  As a graduate student at the University of San Valencez, California, Edmond had been fascinated by the concept of biochemical electronics. He'd spent long hours in the lab, analyzing, categorizing, and wondering at the many minute signals detectable in a living organism. Then, quite by accident, he'd stumbled across a means of varying these signals in laboratory animals through a pattern of electromagnetic fields alternated at extremely high frequency. The results were astonishing, though at first, disappointing as well.