Gray Widow Trilogy 1: Gray Widow's Walk

by Dan Jolley

  But Grove’s elbow gave way, rolled in a slick, greasy fashion like a ball-and-socket joint, and his shoulder went loose right after that. Abruptly the principle behind Wong’s joint lock no longer applied, and he lost his balance as Grove kicked out from under him. Wong was fast, but not quite fast enough.

  The wall slammed into him, sent skittering glints of pain along his shoulders and back, and before he could try to move Grove stiffened all the fingers of his left hand and sank them into the plaster around Wong’s head, caging him. Wong wished briefly for his knives, which rested in their sheaths in his suit jacket, and thought of Patricia.

  Grove wound his other hand into a slim, dagger-point horn and rammed it through Wong’s heart.

  * * *

  Garrison Vessler had tried to fall asleep, couldn’t, and sat up in bed, groping for the TV remote. He scanned through the channels quickly, paused for a moment on a naked, curvaceous blonde, and finally settled on a documentary on the Discovery Channel about the habits of scorpions.

  Hotel rooms had begun to sicken him. Redfell had never been run like this before. It hadn’t ever been this complicated.

  Vessler realized he was hungry, and shuffled through the collection of menus he’d found in the drawer of the night table. One for an all-night pizza delivery place caught his eye.

  With a small start, Vessler realized he hadn’t turned his phone back on since that afternoon. Damn Stamford, and damn his own aging brain. He powered on the phone and checked his messages.

  The first one made his heart stand dead still in his chest. It came from Jorden’s number, but it was Scott’s voice, high and breathless, and it began with, “Listen to me.”

  Garrison Vessler listened with total attention for just over five minutes.

  By the end of the message Scott was sobbing and, still with the phone to his ear, Vessler was almost fully dressed.

  He was tying the laces on his left shoe when he heard a muffled sound from next door. When something heavy slammed against a wall in Stillwater and Wong’s room, Vessler jacked a round into the chamber of his .45 and glanced at the door to the outside. His skin grew slightly cooler as he weighed his options.

  The decision was made for him as five bone-white tendrils punched through the thin connecting door between his room and the agents’. His eyes narrowed to slits, Vessler concentrated hard, even as the door cracked and pulled away from the frame.

  As the last few scraps fell away, a fine mist, foglike, began radiating from Vessler’s body, and drops of frigid water collected on his skin. His heartbeat accelerated.

  “Knock knock,” a young man’s voice said, and Simon Grove’s widely grinning face popped around the corner. Vessler fired twice at the face, which vanished as swiftly as it had appeared, and sent three more bullets through the hotel room wall where he thought Grove might be.

  He took a tentative step forward, and Grove blurred into the room.

  Damn he’s fast, Vessler thought, and fired again, but Grove bounded around the room like a crazed monkey, and before he could pull the trigger once more the young man crashed into his chest, knocked him backward onto the floor. Three tendrils manacled his gun hand and pinned it to the carpet.

  “This is easy,” Grove said, and giggled. His face began to distort, and the tendrils of his free hand started to spiral together. Just before his mouth became something that could no longer produce speech, he said, “I don’t know what Brenda was so worked up about.”

  Vessler’s breath, which he’d been holding, came out in a smoky white plume at the mention of the name, and Grove paused, frowning. Vessler reached up and touched the spiral horn-blade, very lightly, with the fingertips of his free hand.

  Instantly Grove’s hand froze solid to halfway up the forearm.

  For just a moment both men held perfectly still as the horn turned a strange blue-gray.

  Grove flung himself off Vessler, clutching the frozen tendrils and howling. Vessler covered his ears as Grove’s scream gained volume and the mirror above the dresser cracked. Grove barreled toward the door, slammed into it, and jerked it open with a hand that had reverted to normal. His other hand stayed fixed, the horn-blade frozen and beginning to web with fine cracks.

  The muzzle blast of Vessler’s gun filled the room, not quite as deafening as Grove’s howl but still thunderous, and the bullet blew Grove’s hand into tiny frozen fragments. Most of the pieces ricocheted off the walls and floor, but a few sliced into Grove’s face, and Vessler imagined that he saw the instant when the boy’s last bit of humanity disappeared. Vessler immediately jumped to his feet, slammed in a fresh clip, and fired three more shots, but Grove blurred again, and the shots passed through the open doorway and buried themselves in a Chrysler parked outside. The Chrysler’s car alarm shrieked.

  Vessler paused, uncertain. He couldn’t see where Grove had gone...

  ...but before he had time to think about it, Grove exploded up from behind one of the two double beds.

  The dead-white fingers lashed out like whips. The .45 smashed out of Vessler’s hand and flew clattering under the dresser, and Grove lunged for him again.

  Vessler knew he wouldn’t be able to get cold enough to do anything worthwhile for another half hour or so, and after that probably not for a good four or five hours, but he was far from helpless, especially against someone so thoroughly untrained as Simon Grove, augmentation notwithstanding. As Grove came forward, Vessler sidestepped and drove his right elbow into the side of Grove’s neck. The distorted chin cracked into the corner of the cheap motel dresser, and spiny teeth shattered and flew from the distended mouth.

  The double impact would have rendered even the toughest of men unconscious or, at the very least, no longer willing to fight. Grove rolled over, shook his head, and got to his feet again with an agitated hiss.

  Vessler sprinted out the door.

  His car was at the far corner of the lot, and he breathed out heavy relief as he slapped his thigh and felt the lump of the key in his pants pocket. As soon as he left the glow of lights he threw himself full length on the pavement and rolled sideways under a van.

  Behind him Grove exploded outside. A young woman two rooms down opened her door and looked out, gasped, and immediately closed and locked the door again.

  On his fingers and toes, with his body almost flat to the concrete, Vessler moved sideways again, this time underneath a Pathfinder. He emerged on the far side of the vehicle and glanced up. From two aisles over, where he’d disappeared between the cars, he heard a horrible squeal of rending metal, and saw a car door arc out over the lot with its hinges twisted and mangled. Glass shattered as the door landed. Grove seemed to be tearing the cars apart in his search for Vessler, scraping his way up the aisle like some sort of steam-driven machine. He still howled, though whether in rage, pain, or both Vessler couldn’t tell.

  Vessler got to his knees and took the key out. Grove’s search was disorganized. He seemed to be thrashing blindly about rather than following any kind of pattern, which, Vessler thought, made him only slightly less dangerous.

  On all fours now, Vessler crept down the length of the line of cars and prayed that Grove’s hearing wasn’t augmented, or that if it were, that he wouldn’t be able to distinguish anything over all the noise he was making himself.

  Vessler raised his head and saw the Town Car parked at the end of the line. He’d left it right next to a Ford coupe, but in the past hour the Ford owner had left. Now the Lincoln sat by itself, a gap of roughly eight feet between it and the next car. He didn’t know if Grove would see him cross the gap or not.

  His heart whirred in his chest as he gathered his legs under him and thumbed the key’s buttons, unlocking the door and starting the engine.

  Immediately the sounds of Grove’s frenzied search cut off, but Vessler had already reached the car and jerked the door open.

  He had one leg
inside when he risked a glance over his shoulder and saw Grove barreling toward him across the parking lot, bounding over car roofs, his hands distended and reaching out.

  Vessler slammed the door shut and locked it as he jammed the car into gear. He left two broad streaks of rubber on the pavement as he tore out of the parking lot. The road outside the motel was a four-lane divided highway, and Vessler accelerated all the way across, weaving through cars on both sides of the median as he powered over the narrow strip of grass.

  Vessler’s stomach knotted and rolled as he tramped down on the accelerator. His skin rose in millions of goose pimples as he began to let himself feel a twinge or two of tentative panic.

  Simon Grove hadn’t looked much like his yearbook photo.

  As he sped away from the lights of the motel, a part of the glimpse he’d gotten of Grove coming after him finally registered. He’d been reaching out with those bizarre, grotesque hands.

  Hands. Plural.

  The hand he’d frozen, the one Vessler saw fly apart, had been reaching out after him along with the undamaged one. Regrown from the stump in seconds.

  His own hands covered over with a cold sheen of sweat unrelated to his augmentation. After about ten miles he risked pulling over. His whole body trembled as he tapped in a number he’d long ago committed to memory.

  The phone rang while he stared back down the highway. Vessler didn’t think he’d see Simon Grove charging down the center line toward him, waving those freak-of-nature fingers, but...better cautious and alive than confident and dead.

  The line clicked, and an automated female voice said, “The number you have dialed is no longer in service.”

  Vessler growled and ended the call and tapped the number in again. After a click, the same automated message played, and in the middle of the word “dialed” he ended the call and dropped the phone on the passenger seat.

  Vessler’s eyes stopped focusing. His teeth ground together.

  He grabbed up the phone and stared at it, index finger hovering over the keypad, before he acknowledged to himself that there really weren’t any other numbers he could call.

  “Stamford, you bastard,” Vessler breathed.

  He could imagine how it would look to the rest of the company. An uncatalogued augment, one he might have been able to take in before but had chosen not to, had just killed two ranking employees. Had almost killed him. And only hours before a full project audit.

  He slumped against the wheel.

  “You bastard. You and Jorden. You finally got me.” He swallowed hard, tried not to be sick. How could he have slipped this far? How could he have let so much get past him?

  You’re getting too old, that’s how. Too old and too slow.

  With clenched teeth, Vessler drove back across the narrow median strip and headed for a used car lot he remembered passing a minute or so earlier.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Stover Fitz, also known as The Map Man, really hadn’t expected to see Satan that night.

  Stover groaned and pulled the newspapers up higher. He’d been dreaming about turkey dinners, but the dreams left him and he woke up with a sharp pain in his ankle. He reached down underneath the newspaper blanket and touched the spot, and his fingers came back bloody.

  Damn rats.

  His wife used to cook turkey dinners for him. Turkey dinners and pecan pies, and divinity candy, and barbecued pork chops and steak and biscuits and gravy. The food was the hardest part. Now and then he’d think about her, think about how he always called her Kiddo instead of Lori, and he’d remember her skin and her lips and how she smelled and that’d hurt for a while. But mostly it hurt the worst when he thought about the food. He could usually work on his map some, and that’d make the hurt go away, but now it was dark and he was hungry and he wished the damn rats’d let him be.

  He hadn’t planned it to go like this, with everything in the crapper, and don’t anybody think he didn’t know it was in the crapper, but he hadn’t planned on Lori checking him into the hospital and he sure as hell hadn’t planned on her walking out on him.

  The hospital wouldn’t keep him, of course. They had their own problems.

  Had people to deal with who didn’t even know where they were. So now he lived under a damn newspaper blanket and had rats for alarm clocks, and that was in the crapper, yeah, but he knew where he was. That’s right.

  Because he had his map.

  Stover had found a spiral-bound notebook and a few broken pencils some little while ago—he knew it was on a Thursday—and he rubbed the pencils against a brick wall until they were sharp, and he’d begun his map of all the best dumpsters in the area.

  It hadn’t started out as much, just a sort of connect-the-dots thing, really, but then he made a few notes along in the margins about other places nearby.

  But the notes never really seemed complete, so he kept working on them and adding to them, and he drew in the locations of the other places he’d noted, and to make it a little more pleasing to the eye he drew a border around the sheet and that really never seemed like it got finished. Couple of days ago he sat and worked on it outside the library, on a bench, and looked at a big clock every now and then, and four hours just went right past him in no time at all. That surprised him so he didn’t even mind it when the cop came and told him to move along.

  Too dark right now to work on the map, but Stover rolled over—that was a rhyme, Stover rolled over, Stover from Dover, Stover in clover, Stover Red Rover—and touched the notebook where it rested inside his shirt. Maybe he’d take it out and see if he could make out the lines, just a little.

  The first thing he thought when Satan ran into the alley was He won’t get my map. And to keep Satan from trying for it, Stover lay perfectly still and tried not to breathe too hard.

  Satan looked a lot like Stover had imagined he would. He never had bought into the horns-and-tail bit, and it turned out he was right. Satan had black spiky hair and a mouth like a cross between a shark’s and a snake’s, and instead of hands he had cats-o’-nine-tails all twisty and wiggly. Stover didn’t know why Satan would wear Nike sneakers, but he figured the Prince of Darkness could dress however he wanted.

  It looked like Satan had run quite a distance. He panted and gasped and held himself up against the wall, and turned around and put his hands on his knees and panted some more. Stover stopped breathing entirely, ’cause he thought Satan had seen him, ’cause Satan got real still all of a sudden—and then held up one hand in front of his face like he’d never seen it before. And he changed, Satan did, so as to look like a normal human person, and Stover thought Well, he can be right handsome when he wants to be.

  When Satan looked completely like a regular person he took hold of that hand with the other one and felt of it, and opened it and closed it and shook it around like he thought it might come off. Stover nearly peed in his pants, because Satan jumped up, still holding up the one hand, and he whooped and hollered and danced around and screamed out, “Yes! Yes yes yes! Ha ha, look at this! Whooooo-ha!”

  He danced and danced for most of a minute, Stover reckoned, before Satan reached in his pocket and pulled out a cellular phone—which cemented Stover Fitz’s opinion of cellular phones once and for all.

  Satan dialed a number and talked for a bit but Stover couldn’t hear any of the words. When he was finished he stuck the phone back in his pocket and strolled out of the alley.

  Stover lay there for a full half hour to be sure Satan wasn’t coming back.

  He went out to a streetlight and pulled out his map. Before he scurried away down the street, he drew in his present location on the map, and wrote: DONT GO HERE. SATAN.

  * * *

  Hours passed by in the darkness, and the skeleton of the Hargett Theatre stood silent. The nearby highway was practically deserted, and nothing penetrated the shadows where Janey flickered and stepped out. Sh
e crouched and scanned the wreckage, as she always did.

  She was about to flicker out again, down to the basement, when a tall, lean man stepped out from around a corner into the moonlight and lit a cigarette.

  Janey froze, watching. The man wore a rumpled white shirt and gray slacks. The night vision lit his features clearly; he looked to be in his forties, maybe older, with a brutally seamed face and deep-set eyes. His hair slicked straight back from a widow’s peak. He could have been made of granite.

  Janey flickered, did a fast sweep of the theatre’s grounds. An old tan Jeep Cherokee with a crumpled rear bumper sat near the main entrance. Its hood was cold. Nothing else seemed out of place.

  The weathered man had just touched his Bic’s flame to another cigarette when Janey stepped out of the shadows ten paces behind him and snapped open a baton.

  “Hold still,” Janey said.

  The man froze obligingly. In a deep, unhurried voice, with perhaps a touch of Texas in it, he asked, “May I put away my lighter?”

  “No. Keep it in your hand. Raise your arms, and turn around very slowly.”

  The man took direction well, but his eyes fixed on Janey as soon as his head had turned far enough. Janey’s eyebrows rose under the mask. The man was so blatantly unafraid that she felt a touch of annoyance.

  “I hoped I’d find you here,” the man said. “It was a pretty long shot, but it felt right.”

  The man’s gaze didn’t waver, but Janey began to think her own voice might.

  “Tell me your name and what you want.” That came out cold and dangerous, to Janey’s relief.

  “May I put my arms down?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, c’mon, girl, I’m old and tired. You want to frisk me? Make sure I’m not carrying?”

  “No. You stay right there, and keep your arms up, and do what I tell you.” The man let one corner of his mouth twitch upward slightly in what Janey thought might have been approval. It made Janey twice as cautious. She began to suspect that the man could hold up his arms all night.