Aces & Eights

by Dale Lucas

  Gideon planted the meat cleaver edge-on into the goon’s face, splitting it down the middle. The soldier convulsed under the strike and his hands spread. His gun fell free.

  Gideon snatched it into his now-empty left hand.

  All this unfolded in a breath; two at most. Gideon raised his pistols, two-fisted, ready to blast Wash a storm of new assholes.

  Wash’s Webleys cocked and bore down on Gideon, barrels wide, black and staring, like the eyes of some sea beast.

  Behind him, Gideon heard the Dread Baron beating a thunderous death-march with his twin .45s. Gideon joined the march and opened up on Wash.

  Wash opened up on Gideon.

  Dozens of slugs passed in mid-air, whizzing murderously toward their quarries. Gideon felt two tear into his leg and down he went. Wash took two—one in each shoulder—and toppled, still pulling the triggers on his empty wheel guns.

  Down they went, each granted a reprieve.

  Gideon blinked, vision astir with darkness, ears ringing, nostrils singed with the scent of cordite and freshly-spilt blood. A moment later the world came back into focus. His boys stood before him, guns trained on something above and behind him, cursing, telling whoever it was to drop his heaters, now.

  Gideon rolled over and saw that the Dread Baron was the only man left standing. He’d taken out all of House’s men alone: close to a dozen of them, lying in a heaped, scattered semicircle on the dais amid overturned dinner tables and the shattered glass of the front windows.

  As Gideon watched, he noted that the Baron’s pistols were both jacked open, mags and chambers empty.

  Clack, clack. The slides snapped forward again. The ejection ports clinked shut.

  Empty? Or just freshly-reloaded?

  There was a long silence as the Baron stared, guns high. Gideon’s men waited.

  “Your move,” the Baron said, and the sound of his voice made Gideon’s spine crawl.

  “Stand down!” Gideon managed, barely finding the breath to speak.

  “Boss?” Dorey asked.

  “Took two in the leg, but I’m breathin’,” Gideon answered. “Put your guns down before the Baron here adds you assholes to the body count.”

  The Baron dared a glance down at Gideon, where he lay heaped on the floor. “Smart,” he said.

  “You wanted us dead, we’d already be there,” Gideon said, and coughed, breath suddenly short.

  “Your boss needs a doctor,” the Baron said, addressing the men.

  Gideon still held Samedi’s gaze. “They got the Queen,” he said, then pushed himself upright, sitting now. He got a nasty head rush and a wave of nausea for his trouble.

  “See to your boss,” the Baron said, giving orders without compunction. “She’ll be at Papa’s warehouse by the river.” The Baron never lowered his guns or took his eyes off Gideon’s men. Gideon was glad the men listened. He wouldn’t have been able to stand without Dorey and Croaker speeding forward to help him up. As he rose on shaking legs, leaning on his captains, he looked to the Cemetery Man.

  The Baron was circling them, guns still drawn, on-guard.

  “Where you goin’?” Gideon asked.

  “My business is hereabouts,” the Baron said. “You got something nasty on the premises. Needs extraction.”

  Gideon didn’t quite understand, but he accepted that answer. He turned to see what had become of Wash.

  House’s first officer was gone, nothing but some blood and his fallen sawed-off remaining where he’d collapsed only moments before. When Gideon craned his neck round to look back over his shoulder and question the voodoo man, he found him gone as well.

  Son of a bitch. Busts in through the front windows—second floor windows!—and takes off without a word.

  “Boss?” Croaker asked, sounding like a scared little kid.

  Gideon couldn’t blame him. He felt the same. All the rage and fight had gone out of him. It was replaced now by nothing more than weariness, pain, and fear.

  Fear for the Queen.

  Fear of the Cemetery Man.

  “Let’s get the fuck outta here,” he said, and the men did as they were told.

  XX

  Dr. Dub Corveaux was not himself. He was horsed by Ogou, the warring; the contentious; the iron-willed; the bloody-handed; the all-powerful lwa for whom war, fire, bloodshed and death were house pets; the stuff of daydreams as well as nightmares. Dozens of evil men had fallen to the thunder in his blood, the rage in his heart, the hunger for justice in his gut. By all accounts, being horsed, victorious, and unstoppable, he should have felt no fear.

  But fear still lived inside him. It coiled in his hot guts like a cold, clammy serpent. Killing men—criminals and hoods—that was one thing. The Furies awaiting in the cellar of Aces & Eights... that was another entirely.

  You ain’t a man, Ogou snarled in his ear, riding his back like a junkie’s monkey. You’re my fire and sword; you’re the nail-studded staff in my right hand, the machete in my left.

  Dr. Dub Corveaux, in the guise of a man of the grave, marched forth toward the side corridor that Gideon Mann and his soldiers had emerged from; the corridor that led to the side stairway; the side stairway that led to the ground floor; then the ground floor corridor that led to the basement stairs.

  The basement. The entryway to the underworld that he would have to brave and return from—like Orpheus or Dante—if he hoped to survive the night. He marched with purpose, guns ready, back straight, knowing that the Queen Bee’s men might glance back and see him here. And if they did so, they should see him upright; staunch; unafraid.

  But he was afraid. Beneath his terrifying skull-face and the rough armor of his great-coat and the Serpent d’Ogou round his throat, he was afraid, as any man might be.

  You ain’t a man! Ogou growled. You’re my soldier!

  I am a man, Papa Ogou, Dub answered inwardly, and I do feel fear.

  Anything hurts you before the sun rises, I take that hurt when I depart, Ogou assured him. Sunrise comes, you’re good as new.

  And what if it ain’t done with me by sunrise? Dr. Dub Corveaux asked.

  Ogou didn’t have an answer for that. A long silence followed Dub’s wondering. Finally:

  Don’t think about it, Ogou said. Just do what you came to do.

  Ogou, speechless. That gave Dub little comfort.

  XX

  The droplights in the lower corridors swayed to and fro like the earth itself shook beneath them. Deformed, elongated shadows danced on the floor and the walls. The Baron pressed on through the narrow corridor, toward the swinging door at the far end the opened onto the foyer. He had nearly made that door when he heard something behind him.

  It came from the kitchen; the slough-drag of heavy feet; something large and awkward moving slowly, deliberately, toward him. The Baron froze in the corridor, the whole world around him tilting crazily in the drunken, swaying light and tarantella of the shadows.

  Slough-drag. Slough-drag. Slough-drag.

  “What in the hell... ?” he croaked, Ogou’s rusty-iron voice sounding from his lips.

  At the far end of the long corridor, the kitchen lay beyond another swinging door with a small, round, porthole-like window in it. Beyond that tiny window, the Baron saw a slow-moving silhouette appear. It filled the porthole, and then the silhouette set its weight against the door and pushed.

  The Baron decided the time was ripe for a reload. In the two or three breaths it took for the heavy, slow-moving form to push the swinging door wide, the Baron popped his mostly-empty magazines, pocketed them, drew out his spares—two of the last four remaining—and slammed them home in the stained walnut grips of his pistols. The slides were jacked and fresh rounds rammed home in the still-warm barrels. He held his guns aloft just as the form from the kitchen came stumbling, herky-jerky like a drunken marionette, through the swinging door.

  It was a thick young man, dead as Noah, his melon cleaved wide open like a crack in some old boulder on a mountaintop. Even in the swaying, fe
verish light of the corridor and the backlight from the kitchens, the Baron saw the glint of bloody gray matter in the open-air skull; saw that the young man’s whole, bulky, lifeless body hung loose and raggedy, a puppet whose half-stitched limbs were all tearing loose.

  Someone had taken an ax or a meat cleaver to the kid. But here he was, slumping jauntily toward Dub with dead, white eyes and a gaping mouth.

  No need to waste bullets. The Baron could easily outrun the dead thing. He pushed through the swinging door at his back into the front foyer, knowing that the stairs down to the basement waited fifteen feet dead ahead of him.

  Fifteen feet—choked with more of the upright, animated dead. Some were well-dressed townies, probably casualties from the turkey shoot outside; others were House’s dead men from upstairs, tilting and toppling as they thumped down the stairs from above with stiff-legged, mindless determination. All their wounds gaped black and crimson; their eyes were clouded like the long-uncleaned windows of houses marked for demolition; their strange gaits made it clear that they were no longer living men and women, nor conscious. Someone—something—was animating their corpses; directing them; closing in, moment by moment, on the Dread Baron.

  The curse engine knew he was here to end it. It was fighting back with the best weapons at hands: the dead who’d fallen under its watchful, eldritch gaze; whose blood-sin and evil fed it even as their souls fled to their final rewards.

  Save your bullets, Ogou said. They won’t do any good.

  The Baron holstered his guns.

  Then he drew the Machette d’Ogou. The flames of the machete burned bright in the dark and crowded foyer and the Baron felt its heat on his skull-painted face.

  The cleavered kid burst through the swinging door at his back just as the crowd of street-dead and House’s minions filled the last empty spaces between the Dread Baron and the basement stairs.

  Behind the mask of the Dread Baron, Dr. Dub Corveaux’s human fear melted in the infernal fires of the Machette d’Ogou, and he laid into the dead without mercy.

  The machete screamed as it sliced the air, cutting wide arcs back and forth across the corridor. Heads were severed and rolled like stones in a landslide; grasping hands and arms were hacked and strewn about like jungle vine on a pathless march through the Congo; torsos were cloven wide to spill out their steaming contents; legs were cut out from under tottering, deathless husks in motion.

  They kept crowding him, reaching for him, their mouths yawning as though they were hungry and they wanted his flesh to feed their deathless appetites. He hacked; he slashed; he yanked and shoved and clove and strove, keeping his eyes on the stairway, so close and yet so far away, through this tangled, grasping forest of the undead.

  In moments, the Dread Baron laid waste to the zombie horde, his white skull-face stained with the gore of slaughter. The bodies twitched and flopped about him, still struggling in vain to reach their quarry and failing. The pulsing flames of the Machette d’Ogou stank of brimstone and smoke-filled charnel houses.

  Move, Ogou said, before it comes up with something else.

  The Dread Baron did as bade, sheathing the Machette d’Ogou and racing toward the dark stairwell that would take him into the cavernous cellar.

  XX

  The air grew cold and damp as he descended, so swiftly and surely that he knew it could be no natural change in climate. The Dread Baron thumped down the long flight of wooden stairs, through a door, and found himself in the northwest corner of the basement, at the head of a small cellar antechamber that opened onto a larger one. Beyond, in the next large cell, sentinel rows of towering industrial shelving stacked with canned goods, boxes, crates, and nameless, purposeless bric-a-brac awaited. He marched forward into the larger storage chamber, made it five steps without incident, then heard a groaning in the rafters above.

  The shelves, anchored to the roof beams, tore at their bonds and broke free. One by one, the shelves surrounding him began to sway, like prisoners bound in chairs rocking back and forth in an attempt to topple themselves. The Dread Baron couldn’t wait. He sped down the center aisle as the shelves heaved sideward, spilling their heavy contents with a clamorous, apocalyptic roar. If the animated dead could not stop him, perhaps an avalanche of forgotten junk could.

  The demons denned below Aces & Eights would bury him, one way or another. They would bind him; break him; end him.

  The Dread Baron ran faster as the roar of the falling shelving rose around him and the air filled with choking, ageless dust. Midway through the long, narrow cell, he crossed the broad central aisle of the basement and made a hasty, careening left turn. The old, plugged sewer line where the curse engine waited was fifty yards, dead ahead.

  The avalanche raced alongside him, the shelves along the large center aisle now tearing loose from their anchorage in a thundering rain of champagne, fine china, and spare silverware. The Dread Baron called on Ogou’s strength and launched skyward on his boot heels, sailing up and over the dusty, creaking miasma of rent iron and splintered lumber. He sailed twenty yards in a low arc until gravity took him, then down he went. He landed hard on a newly-made mound of debris, tripped on jutting ironworks and splintered slabs of lumber, then dove into a roll to stop himself.

  He came to rest amid a central conglomeration of shelving that was double-bolted to the rafters. Like their fellows, they creaked and strained against their bindings, but they could not free themselves.

  This was the place where he’d discovered the curse engine just a two nights before. They’d double-anchored the shelves here because they’d already fallen once.

  Trying to crush him.

  No time for caution now. The double-bolting would buy him some time.

  The Dread Baron marched forward and tore the hundred-pound manhole cover off its maw. The stoppered pit beneath vomited a cloud of rotted air and gravesmoke.

  There at the bottom of that pit lay the sculpture of skulls, bones, and animal detritus that was causing all the trouble.

  Magda’s curse engine.

  Waiting.

  Ready.

  Dub tore the stoppered gourd containing the Petro Packet powder from his coat’s deepest inner pocket and set to work, pouring out the powder in a broad, circular cordon nearly 20 feet across that encompassed himself and the forgotten well.

  This would lock it in—and he with it.

  Circle of protection in place, Dub next fished the mummified dog from its pocket and laid the paper-light corpse down in the well, atop the curse engine. Now all that remained was to invoke the powers of the Furies, to draw them like hungry beasts into the baited trap of the mummified little pup with an offering of blood. And once the Furies were trapped therein, he could destroy the mummified pup and let the whole thing be consumed in flame.

  Dub drew a soldier’s bayonet from its sheathe and held his hand out above the well, the pup, and the curse engine.

  You’re forgetting something, Ogou said.

  Dub ignored him. He had forgetten nothing. He knew that the Machette d’Ogou would be the weapon of choice when destroying the beast upon manifestation. He wasn’t a fool.

  He said the words of offering, invoking the Furies by name as though they had been lwa. “Vouchsafe this offering as the purest I can obtain,” he said, resting the sharpened edge of the bayonet against his outstretched, uncovered palm. “Nemesis, Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone—I bid you fill the empty vessel I’ve provided, and show yourselves to me as a humble petitioner.”

  He drew the bayonet over his hand. His blood welled, steaming in the cold of the haunted cellar, and he made a fist to bring it forth faster.

  The blood splashed down, wetting the mummified pup and the curse engine beneath it. As Dub watched, the little, wrinkled animal stirred, moving with some semblance of life.

  Fire, Ogou said urgently.

  The Dread Baron drew the Machette d’Ogou, and its fire filled the darkness. He readied himself to yank the pup out of the well at the first sign of manifestat
ion—the first indication of supernatural life.

  Not that fire, Ogou said.

  The mummified pup stirred, warped little paper-twist legs suddenly kicking. It shot upright, emitted a strange, throaty yelp, and then the Furies made their presence known. As the Dread Baron watched, suddenly sure that this would not play out as he’d hoped, the mummified pup sprouted and grew like some cancerous tumor.

  The pup turned itself inside-out. Tendrils of old, dried muscle and sinew burst through the papery skin, engulfed its tiny form, then spread out, grasping, toward the edges of the well. As the Baron stared, the tendrils thickened and grew more maleable—ropy and alive. These tendrils sprouted shoots; the shoots sprouted flesh-flowers; the flesh-flowers sprouted more tendrils and more shoots.

  It happened in the span of two or three breaths. First it was a mummified pup; then it was a creeper vine of flesh and cartilage and sinew and gristle; then the whole mess roiled in on itself, burst outward, filled the well, and rose toward Dub where he stood at the well’s rim.

  He threw himself backward. The roiling mass burst up and out of the well, blooming toward the ceiling and the edges of the protective circle. Suddenly, the Dread Baron understood what Ogou had been trying to tell him.

  Fire. He needed to light the Petro powder and seal the protective circle.

  He brought the flaming Machette d’Ogou whistling down onto the protective circle. With a sound like a great, in-drawn breath, the whole circle suddenly threw up a wall of heaving flames, twenty feet across. The tendrils hit the firewall and shrank, seeming to emit a high, quailing scream. The thing swelled and knotted then in protest, pressing outward on all sides. As the Baron crouched on guard, fire at his back, blasphemous, grasping malignancy before him, a quartet of the heaving, whipping tentacles rose above the center of the mass. They were long, thick, and ready to burst, like giant bean pods, or bloated, pus-filled sacks of flesh nursing deep infection.