Firewalkers

by Chris Roberson

  “If it was that easy to stop them, why didn’t he do it before?” Izzie asked.

  “Because it wasn’t that easy,” Jett answered. “Charlotte said that Freeman had been talking about staging a frontal assault on the Guildhall for years, but wasn’t sure that he would survive long enough to bring them all down. And even if he did, he knew it wasn’t likely that he would be coming back alive, and he worried about leaving the city unprotected. Because even with the Guildhall gone, there was every chance that someone else might come along and make the same sort of pact with the Otherworld that they had. But the old Mayan had started training Aguilar by that point, so Freeman must have felt like it was time to take that risk.”

  “In Aguilar’s journals he talks about spending most of his life protecting the city against invaders from another world,” Izzie said.

  “His journals,” Jett repeated, sneering. “He kept his own journals, did he? Probably just because he couldn’t get his hands on the ones that Freeman left behind.”

  Izzie arched an eyebrow.

  “That was part of the reason that he and Charlotte fell out,” he explained. “The old Mayan died not too long after Freeman, and Aguilar figured that left him in charge. But his training wasn’t quite complete, and he said that he needed Freeman’s own secret journals to study. But Charlotte just couldn’t bring herself to part with them. They were all that she had left of him. Aguilar seemed not to have handled things as delicately as he might’ve, and said some unflattering things about Freeman. Charlotte got her back up, and dug in her heels. She locked the journals away where Aguilar couldn’t get at them, and told him to go eat sand, in so many words.”

  Izzie wondered whether that accounted for why she hadn’t come across any mention of Alistair Freeman or Charlotte McKee in Aguilar’s own journals. Which reminded her of the references that she had read about the daykeepers and the Sight.

  “But Aguilar didn’t have the knack, did he?” Izzie asked.

  The old man shook his head. “Not to hear Charlotte tell it. She said that he had to use some kind of brew that the Mayan had brought up from the Mexican jungle with him. It let him see the shadows, not quite like Freeman could, or me for that matter, but well enough to know they were there.”

  That would be the ilbal, Izzie knew. The same drug that Aguilar would later pass on to Nicholas Fuller, the last two vials of which Patrick had taken from a file box in the 10th Precinct station house’s community room, and which were now sitting in a gun case in his living room.

  “I was lucky that I got to know Charlotte when I did,” Jett went on. “She was already in pretty poor health, and she didn’t have too much more life left in her. When she passed, it seemed to me like she’d held on until she could find someone to hand off the torch to, and when I came along she felt like she’d earned her rest. Aguilar was still at it, of course, but he pretty much concerned himself exclusively to his own people down in Oceanview, leaving the rest of the city to fend for itself. But Charlotte told me that the things I’d seen since coming to Recondito—the shadows, the thing out in other space— it all meant that the same darkness that had taken root back in the Guildhall days was coming back, and that someone would have to contend with it. So Charlotte looked to me to pick up where Freeman had left off, and I think that’s why she left his journals to me in her will.”

  “You have his journals?” Izzie leaned forward, eagerly. “Everything he wrote about the Guildhall?

  “Had them,” the old man answered. “Boxes of the things, along with one of Freeman’s silver-plated Colt .45s and a case full of rounds. The pistol would end up coming in handy, but I ended up losing all but one of the journals in a fire back in ’78, which seemed kind of fitting, considering how Freeman had ended up himself. There wasn’t anything in them about that last night in the Guildhall, of course, since he didn’t live long enough to write anything down. But they were full of all sorts of stuff he’d gathered about the Guildhall members and their allies over the years, and what he’d learned about the Otherworld, the Shades, and the Ridden. And that helped me understand what I was seeing on the streets of Recondito around me. Somebody was taking normal folk and corrupting them, turning them into the Ridden. Only I didn’t have the first idea who was behind it.”

  The old man pulled the blanket up higher around himself, shivering almost imperceptibly.

  “So I did what seemed natural. I went on recon. Started tailing the folks I could see out at night, with the shadows hanging around their heads. Seeing where they came from, seeing where they went. I asked after them with people I saw them talking to on the street, got a few names to track down. I went around to the Recondito PD to see if any of them had rap sheets, and got stonewalled until I found a friendly gal in the Records Division up in the Hall of Justice who said she liked my smile, and agreed to run the names in exchange for a meal and a couple of drinks. Most of them were young folks, and turned out that some of them were runaways, or had been reported by their families as missing persons. There were a lot of kids out on the streets in those days, you have to remember. This was a few years after the Manson murders had put the lie to all of that flower power bullshit, but there were still more than enough hippies out on the street corners in the Kiev, busking or panhandling or what have you.”

  “Did you try talking to any of them?” Joyce asked. “The people you were following?” The old man nodded slowly.

  “Sure did. Found one all on his own one night, and made like I wanted to bum a smoke, just to see if I could get him talking. He was all spacy, like he was hopped up on something, but I’d never seen any of them smoking grass or taking pills, nothing like that. Said he didn’t have any cigarettes, but that he had something better that he could share with me. The truth. Damned fool started preaching at me like a Jehovah’s Witness at your front door, jabbering about opening yourself up to wisdom from above, letting the light of the hidden universe into your soul, that kind of nonsense. But the first sign I showed that I wasn’t interested in any of that self-help guff, he clammed up tight and walked away. Like it was bait on a hook, and if I didn’t bite he was going to go off and find another spot to fish.”

  He chuckled ruefully.

  “I braced a few more of them in the nights that followed, and I got the same sales pitch from every one of them. I figured they were all part of the same church or cult or whatever, and I got to thinking that’s what they were doing out on the street in the first place, looking for other lost souls that they could bring into the fold. I didn’t know for sure whether any of them even knew what they were carrying around in their heads, but it stood to reason that whoever had made them all Ridden was behind that self-help nonsense. It was round about that time that I heard from my lady friend in the Records Division. Seems that the calls she’d made about the runaways had gotten back to the families who had filed the missing persons reports in the first place. The RPD brass had told the families that they didn’t have the manpower to go chasing after a handful of kids, and that unless there was some evidence of criminal activity that they were on their own. So the families were looking to hire a private investigator to find their kids for them, and my lady friend put them in touch.”

  “This was the families of Muriel Tomlinson and Eric Fulton, then?” Izzie asked.

  “Yeah, their families and the parents of a couple of other kids, too,” Jett answered. “Now, I didn’t have a California private investigator’s license yet—I ended up taking the exam and making it official when this mess was all over—but the families didn’t seem to mind. And the fact that I wasn’t asking for one thin dime up front probably didn’t hurt matters any. I told them that they could pay me if I managed to get their kids back to them, and otherwise they could keep their money.”

  The old man kneaded his hands together, and glanced up briefly at the sky overhead. It was still a few hours until sunset, but it seemed to Izzie as though he was checking to make sure that the sun was still up.

  “I had pic
tures of the kids I was after, yearbook photos and family portraits, that kind of thing. Four kids in all, ranging from their late teens to mid-twenties. I’d seen each of them at least once out on the street at night, fishing for new recruits, but damned if they weren’t anywhere to be found as soon as I went looking for them in particular. There were others, of course, so I figured my best bet would be to tail them, and see if they led me to the kids I was after. It took a few days before any one of them went anywhere but the rattraps they squatted in or whatever fleabag hotel they were living in, but then one night I trailed one of the Ridden through Hyde Park, and spotted a few more approaching from the other direction. And then a couple more came down a side street. I hung back, watching as six of them stood there together on a corner, like they were waiting for a bus. Then a panel van came along, they all climbed in, and it drove away. I managed to flag down a cab quick enough to follow them, but when the van continued on past Northside and turned onto a winding road heading up into the hills outside of town, the cab driver refused to take me any further. I had my suspicions where they were headed, though, and when my lady friend ran the license plate number I’d taken down, they were confirmed.” “The Eschaton Center,” Izzie said.

  “Got it in one.” The old man sighed. “There wasn’t much else up in those hills except coyotes and boarded-up mines, so it stood to reason. But once I started looking into Jeremiah Standfast Parrish’s self-help gospel, it sounded an awful lot like what those Ridden were pushing on the street. Now, I’d heard about the Eschaton Center already, of course, but as far as I knew it was just another place that mostly catered to rich white folks who wanted to feel better about themselves, willing to pay through the nose so that somebody would tell them that they were special and deserved every nice thing that happened to them. So what were they doing busing in a bunch of kids to go beating the bushes in the city looking to recruit people who probably didn’t have two dimes to rub together? And how did the Ridden factor into it? Anyway, the next morning I bought a junker from a used car dealership in my neighborhood, enough food and sodas at the corner market to last me a day or two, and cleaned up, oiled, and loaded Freeman’s old 1911 Colt .45.”

  “You were going in to shoot up the place?” Joyce sounded alarmed.

  “Wasn’t planning on it,” the old man said, equivocating, “but I wasn’t ruling out the possibility either. The knack was itching at the back of my head, telling me that I was walking into trouble, and after more than four years of never heading out on an op without the tools to defend myself if necessary, I wasn’t about to start then. But the plan was to stake the place out for a bit, see what went on up there, and hope to spot any of the kids I was after.”

  He took a deep breath, but before he could continue they were interrupted by an orderly calling from an open doorway on the far side of the courtyard, brandishing a clipboard.

  “Mr. Jett? I hate to break up the party, but it’s time for your physical therapy.”

  The old man glowered, his brows knit together.

  “What’s the point of all that nonsense?” he growled as the orderly walked over.

  “Don’t shoot the messenger,” the orderly said with a long-suffering grin, “it’s doctor’s orders.”

  The orderly flashed a smile at Izzie and Joyce while he took hold of the handles at the back of Jett’s wheelchair.

  “Mr. Jett’ll be done in about thirty minutes, if you gals want to stick around.”

  Izzie had no intention of leaving when they were just getting to the meaty part of the old man’s story, and from Joyce’s expression is was clear that she felt the same.

  “We can wait.” Izzie stood up from the cold bench, rubbing her hands together. “But maybe inside, though, instead of out here? I can barely feel my fingers.”

  “You two go on to the waiting room, then,” Jett said as the orderly wheeled him away. “I’ll meet you there as soon as these sadists get done torturing me.”

  Izzie stuffed her hands in the pockets of her jacket and watched as the old man was wheeled inside, thinking over everything that he’d told them so far. Joyce hopped up off the bench and started walking toward the door with purpose.

  “I don’t know about you,” Joyce said, glancing back over her shoulder at Izzie, “but I could use a cup of coffee.”

  “Oh god, yes,” Izzie sighed, falling into step behind her.

  “But a good cup of coffee,” Joyce insisted. “I figure we could drive over to Monkeyhaus or maybe Sacred Grounds and get back before the old guy is finished up.”

  The thought of good caffeine was enticing.

  “If you’re driving, I’m buying,” Izzie said, holding the door open and stepping aside to let Joyce through. “Let’s do Monkeyhaus, though. I had a cappuccino there with Daphne the other day, and it was strong enough to keep me juiced up all day. And today, I just might need two of them.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Patrick had spent the better part of two hours tending to the marks that his Uncle Alf had made decades before on the houses of his block. It had been a strangely familiar sensation, quickly settling back into routines he’d all but forgotten about for years, muscle memory taking over as he pulled away vines and weeds, brushed away caked-in dirt and debris, and touched up cracks and gaps in the glittering paint. He found the work went faster and more easily than when he was younger, in part due to his taller height and greater strength and stamina, but also because he was more motivated now to move quickly. Back when he was a kid, his goals had been to earn enough quarters to buy comics or candy bars at the corner shop. Now, it was a question of life and death.

  When he was satisfied that the alley behind his house and the surrounding streets were once again relatively secure against encroaching Ridden, Patrick checked his phone and saw that it was almost time to meet up with the kids from Powell Middle School. The trio that he’d run into that morning on the way back from the bakery—the Kienga twins, Ricky and Joseph, and Tommy Hulana—had agreed to spread the word around the neighborhood that he needed as many kids as they could round up to meet him at the blacktop behind Powell Middle School.

  He had just enough time to run into the house, wash some of the grime from his hands, and guzzle a quick glass of water before he headed off to the school yard, grabbing a jar of paint and a fistful of brushes on his way out the door. Izzie’s friend Daphne had ducked out a short while before to run some errands, and he’d given her the spare key so she could let herself in if she got back before he returned. But he hoped that this meeting with the kids wouldn’t take long, provided enough of them showed up at the schoolyard.

  Powell Middle School was only a few blocks to the south, on the far side of the Church of the Holy Saint Anthony, and still looked pretty much the same as it had when Patrick had been a student there a lifetime ago. As he approached, he had the same odd sensation he usually did when seeing the school grounds, the sense that if he were to turn the corner at just the right moment he might see his old classmates loitering out by the basketball court, still children, talking about the cartoons they’d watched the past weekend or bragging about their collections of action figures. And when he left the building and came back outside, there was always a little part of him that expected to see his mother waiting for him on the corner, the day’s groceries in her arms, to ask him what he’d learned that day. As though the past was a physical place to which one could return, even by accident, if you just could work out the way there.

  When he rounded the corner, the blacktop behind the school still looked pretty much the same as it had when he was young, but it wasn’t his classmates as children who were standing around in small groups over near the basketball court, but the children of his classmates. At least, that was how he usually thought of them. There were only a couple of students whose parents had actually been in the same graduating class as Patrick, but many of them where the offspring of kids that he’d known from the neighborhood growing up, or who had hung around or gone to school
with his cousins, and even a few whose mothers or fathers had been enlisted by Uncle Alf to look after his marks on the weekends. The majority of them had at least one Te’Maroan parent, and some had two, but there were a couple of Latino and African American kids who didn’t have any islander ancestry at all, and had just started showing up to Patrick’s informal classes at the school for the heck of it.

  The Kienga twins were off to one side with Tommy Hulana and the rest of their usual clique, and seemed pretty pleased with themselves for having been able to get so many of their classmates up to the school on a weekend. There were a bit over a dozen kids in all, it looked like, which represented about half of the attendance at Patrick’s regular school-day sessions. Sandra Kaloni and the knot of girls she ran with were on the other side of the group, huddled close and talking about anime and video games, like they usually did when given a spare moment of free time. A couple of kids were sitting cross-legged on the blacktop, seemingly in a world of their own, one reading a paperback novel and another drawing in a sketchbook, and the rest of them were passing a basketball back and forth and making mostly unsuccessful attempts at shooting hoops.

  “Okay, everybody,” Patrick said as he approached, “huddle up.”

  He put the can of paint on the ground at his feet and put the stack of brushes on top.

  “Hey, Coach Tevake,” Nicky Tekiera asked, still dribbling the basketball, “what’s this all about?”

  “I’ve got a project I need some help on,” Patrick answered, wincing slightly. He hated being called “coach,” and had successfully gotten the rest of the kids to break the habit, but Nicky had refused to let it go.

  “What kind of project?” Regina Jimenez was still sitting on the blacktop, and barely looked up from her sketchbook as she spoke.