The Foul Mouth and the Cat Killing Coyotes (The King Henry Tapes)

by Richard Raley

  And some bulletproof glass while you’re at it.

  The pops started from five places in rapid succession, not so different than my knuckles on the countertop, just a whole lot louder. It’s not the same kind of loud as Hollywood makes it. It’s not a flashy loud. It’s just loud like a machine doing its work, pieces recoiling from the force, bullets flying spent, little explosion after little explosion. The flashy loud makes it fun, this loud just clenched up my highest vertical part like it expected some mountain climber to be on the way to plant a very big flag.

  What’s most amazing is how quickly a person can tear through a clip when it’s firing so fast. We’ll even it out at thirty-five bullets a clip, for five guys, so say almost two-hundred bullets flying through the air of my shop, busting teapots, crashing into mirrors, and making mincemeat of my window. Two-hundred bullets, but fired so quickly that they’re gone in seconds.

  The Coyotes didn’t bother pacing themselves, they just depressed the trigger and let rip. They all hit empty at the same exact time. The Coyotes also fired high. It’s natural to. Lot of soldiers train to fire low. It even used to be a call during the olden days of musket warfare according to my overindulgent education.

  ‘Keep low!’

  So you get into their legs and all that torso at the worst and put them down. If you start at the torso . . . aiming for the goods first off, by your fifth bullet the kickback is zooming everything over the enemy’s head and you ain’t hitting anything but very unlucky birds.

  Guess Horatio Vega doesn’t make his boys take target practice.

  “You alive, T-Bone?” I yelled from my glorious position on the ground when the popping finally stopped. My ears rang and my whole body shook with adrenaline. Second fight in two days! I was pumped up for this shit!

  “Fucking! What the bitch was that?”

  Poor guy was so out of it he mixed up his curse words. Rookie mistake.

  “That would be the Coyotes shooting us with machineguns, catch up already,” I growled, looking around to help get my bearings.

  The Coyotes had spent their clips. They probably had extra. Few seconds to eject the empty clips, few more seconds to put the new clip back in, assuming they had the extra clips on them and didn’t leave them in the truck . . .

  I decided to risk it and pulled myself up on the counter to look outside what was left of my window.

  First thing I saw were the two-hundred holes in the window.

  Fucking, what the bitch . . .

  Second thing I saw were the five Coyotes popping clips back in their machineguns, in the process of returning the weapons to their shoulders . . .

  “Stay down!” I shouted for T-Bone.

  Third thing I saw were the two boxes of the toys I’d been planning to show T-Bone. Neither had been hit in the first . . . volley? Fuselage? Broadside? What do you even call two-hundred bullets coming at you? I grabbed the boxes and hit the deck just in time to miss out on the second . . . lots-of-lead-aiming-for-my-head.

  This one was worse. It was lower, hitting my counter, hitting a lot more of my merchandize, ricocheting off of the cash register. Knew I should have stolen those two twenties . . .

  It also lasted longer, both because the Coyotes made sure to spread the ammo around, and because I was waiting for it to end. I had a comparison to make with the first time and knew this one was longer . . . expectations still blue-balling me at twenty-two.

  When the second ended, laughter followed the pops from outside.

  “T-Bone?” I hissed.

  “Still alive.”

  “You pooling?”

  “Anima or in my pants? I’m doing both.”

  “Stay down,” I whispered some more. “Keep pooling. I’m going to buy some time.”

  “I don’t think—“

  “Stay down and keep pooling,” I repeated.

  “You alive in there, Price?” Suit called, still pissy and whiny as can be. “I hope so, asshole—I want you on your knees begging me for your life when I finally walk in there and put a bullet in your head! Think you can sucker-punch me and get away with it? I don’t care who your sister is! I don’t care what dick she sucks!”

  If I hadn’t heard comments on JoJo not meeting society’s pre-determined purity levels since I was the ripe age of ten, that one might have stung. Welcome to thirteen years ago, Suit. She’s sucked more dicks than you’ve shot bullets.

  “Run out of ammo, I take it?” I called outside.

  Some more laughing between the five of them. “Got plenty, puta,” Tatter called, his voice heavily accented and the spanglish not helping him at all, “thanks for telling donde you at, pendejo.”

  My hands hadn’t been idle through the exchange. They’d worked the clasps from my boxes, popped open the lids, and showed me that my two latest KHP-certified artifact models were just fine. And I know just how to use them, I thought, pulling the first from its box. You cat killers screwed with the wrong mancer.

  [CLICK]

  You have given blood to a Totem, you have given your animal’s blood to a Totem, you have then killed the animal, and then eaten a piece of this animal, probably its heart or liver. Maybe its testicles, I don’t know what freak stuff you’re into. Finally, you made contact with the Totem to seal the process. Congratulations!

  You are now a Were . . . whatever.

  Lucky you!

  Over the next few days you’ll notice a feeling slowly growing that you are never alone. You’ll feel that someone is always with you or as my sister described, ‘like you have an extra set of teeth to suck on’. This is the foreign anima in your body, surrounding your system. Think of it as a protective coat . . . it does give you the benefit of modest protection against direct Mancy attacks and it makes you taste horrible to vampires. You can also use the layer to repair and strengthen your own body at the cost of the layer’s depth.

  These are the pluses.

  There are negatives.

  That layer . . . it’s still alive. It still has a mind of its own. It wants to take over your body and change your form into the old one it knew. Here’s some more bad news: about once a month you have to let it take over or else it will go away. Back in the old days before calendars and atomic clocks the easiest way to know your month was up was to use the cycles of the moon, either the new moon or the full moon worked best. Hence the werewolf legend. Bullshit like all the rest.

  You might be thinking: why can’t I just use it for a month and then do the ceremony again? Smart idea, but sadly you only get the one shot, buddy. One size fits all as it were. Or as Tyson Bonny would say, ‘the servers are permadeath’. Once a month, you’ve got to Switch or you’ll lose your powers.

  The animal in you takes over, morphs your body into whatever its form is with the help of the Totem’s massive store of anima. The animal is on the inside and you are now the protective layer. Now you have to be a strong enough protective layer to push and pull it where you want it, and especially to take back control and Switch into a human again.

  Choose the animal wisely. Beating up on a coyote’s anima? That’s not too hard. Beating up on an elephant’s anima? Bit tougher. Whatever you do, don’t start to like the Switch. You do it enough and eventually you and your protective layer are going to start to meld instead of being firmly separate. There will be Leakage as the Weres say. Leak too much . . . don’t keep yourself strong enough against the animal . . . and one day you’ll just be mixed up . . .

  Trust me . . . you only have to see it once to know you never want it to happen to you.

  [CLICK]

  I had an artifact in each hand as I rose to my feet, showing myself behind my bullet-ridden counter. Strangely, I wasn’t the least bit worried about getting shot. All I could really think about was how trashed my shop had gotten, that my stock was gone, and that I’d owe Ceinwyn even more money to replace it all.

  My bad for not buying better insurance.

  My mind crashed down on one thing: I get to battle test my artifac
ts. It felt like a birthday come early or a hooker telling you it’s a freebie or a politician actually keeping his word come voting time.

  I grinned at Suit as our eyes met through the glass front of my shop, bullet holes marking every foot, broken pieces of glass shattered down on either side. Here’s a good lesson for you. If King Henry Price ever grins at you like that . . . you ever see those dirt eyes glint in joy . . . you’re about to get fucked up. Machinegun or no machinegun. Werecoyote or no werecoyote.

  You.

  Are.

  Going.

  To.

  Get.

  Fucked.

  Up.

  What must have Suit thought, looking back at me? My brown hair all roughed up on account of rolling on the ground, my mancer’s coat scuffed with dirt and rumpled along the front. The copper ring on my finger, the bright glint of KHP, a weapon he’d felt but not the weapon I would use on him now. In one hand a ball the size of a tennis ball, looking heavy and made of a black metal tarnished without any glow. In the other hand, a fan in the style of those old Japanese folding kind, usually cheap wood and even cheaper paper, this time good aluminum, closed tight for now . . .

  My thumb unclipped the fan’s latch and with a flick of my wrist I opened it at my side, my arm stretched as far away from me as I could, like maybe I expected it to explode. Suit’s eyes narrowed on it. What did he see? He saw tiny filaments of silver spreading over the natural rippling ridges of the fan. He saw the length of the silver blur and he frowned.

  What did Suit see?

  Suit had no idea what he was looking at.

  What did Suit see?

  He could have asked me.

  What did Suit see?

  Suit saw a tornado in my hand.

  Suit saw aero-anima batteries collecting normal air flows along each filament.

  Suit saw my and T-Bone’s idea for the static ring taken from electricity and moved into another school of the Mancy. You have no idea how sore my arm got from waving that thing to build up a charge . . . and I regularly masturbate as practice too.

  I flapped the fan in front of me with a second flick of my wrist.

  The filaments blurred more, air releasing, building up until they met a preset level. Most people wouldn’t think air is any much to worry about. Other than a Ceinwyn Dale papercut at least. But tornados are made up of air. Hurricanes are made up of air. So are those potato gun launchers at your local county fair. Build up enough air and you can move the mountain side . . . build up enough air and you can move a grande truck . . . if that’s what you’re aiming at.

  But I wasn’t. Cars . . . those are for beginners. I’d dropped a car on a vampire, that’s easy. Me? I aimed at the glass of my broken window. Just like that . . . I had myself a whole lot more than two-hundred bullets . . . I had myself thousands of bullets.

  Sure . . . they aren’t lead. Not much stopping power.

  But they’ll cut a bitch.

  The backlash of my fan’s launch of air almost ripped my arm from the socket. I’d expected a kick, but God damn, son! Behind me and to my side, dust and debris formed a halo, a circle expanding out in a puff like those old photos showing the base of a nuclear blast. Before me was even worse. Before me, air slammed forward in an arc of power and pressure let loose with a mind of its own, smashing through my glass window to carry shards and cracked-glass knives onward like an IED on Mancy juice.

  Suit’s nice clothing was ripped, so were his hands, so was the skin on his face. Red dripped from small cuts and punctures all over the five Coyotes, their machineguns not doing them a squat of good. Tatter had a spear of glass a foot long stuck out of his shoulder. Overcoat screamed, holding a gash on his forehead that wouldn’t stop flowing red over his fingers, his own warm waterfall.

  The other two? Forget them. They’re unimportant.

  Suit, he’s the important one. The one in charge. The one who talked these fools into killing me. The one who called my sister a cocksucker. Okay, maybe she was free with the sex. But that don’t mean you bring that into the open. It’s not civil, asshole.

  What did Suit see now?

  Suit saw that my grin didn’t slip as I carefully clipped my fan back up and put it in my box. The lid snapped shut, the only noise yelling and screaming. He knew now. He knew what my grin meant. He was about to get fucked up again. Sideways. With something battery operated. I’d bloodied him, but I wasn’t done yet.

  “Reload! Quit bitching and reload!” he screamed at his fellow goons.

  “What was that?” T-Bone asked, somewhere to my right. “You do something with aero-anima on that fan?”

  “Cool, huh?”

  “It was awesome!”

  “Got enough of a pool yet?”

  “Almost!”

  “Me too,” I whispered. I had more than enough actually. Guess that made me faster than T-Bone. Not really important now, how about you measure dicks later? I told myself.

  Suit brought up his gun, fighting to push the clip all the way in. I call it a machinegun, but hell if I know what kind. I’m not a gun guy. Wasn’t an Uzi, wasn’t an AK. That’s my vast knowledge of guns. Looked high-tech though. Not that it was going to do anything to me now. Clip or no clip.

  The metal tennis ball flew from my fingers in a slow toss, clanging against the sill of my vacated window. The tennis ball didn’t bounce but stuck immediately in place. A hiss escaped from it . . . then . . . clanking. Soft clanking. Like the world’s smallest engine. In reality, no engine at all, only geo-anima at work, unwinding the dense material of the ball and spreading it, spider-web thin, into the air.

  It rose to form a wall, a wall with less width than the head of a pin, with barely even room for angels to dance. Metal strands coated the area where my window had stood moments before. The wall, as it was, swayed from the cold March wind. You could see through it, to Suit and the other Coyotes, like through fogged glass. Fuzzy shapes finally managed to insert their third clip and then brought their guns to shoulders cut raw by shards of glass.

  I didn’t bother ducking.

  “King Henry!” T-Bone screamed.

  Bang, bang, I thought.

  The pops echoed just as loud and the wall in front of me reeled from the impacts. Reeled like fabric stretched out will reel, but just like fabric it’s not so easy to punch your way through it. You need a knife. You need to tear.

  The pops stopped and not a bullet got through. They were left stuck in the wall of threaded metal. “Like it?” I asked T-Bone.

  He finally got up to stand next to me. He was breathing heavily . . . guy really needed to exercise more if he planned on hanging out with me and getting shot at all the time. Wait until he met his first vampire . . . he’d wished he’d done Tae-Bo then. “What is it?”

  “Self-Expansive, Metal Defensive Exterior Wall. SEM-DEW. It’s charged with geo-anima to extend and then strengthen it. Outside of that it’s as flimsy as it looks. You could walk right through the thing. It only stops metal . . . like bullets or knives,” I explained.

  “Now that’s impressive . . . how’d you get all the geo-anima to make it?”

  I shrugged. “Can’t give you all my secrets.” Especially when it comes to the Shaky Stick.

  “What the fuck?” Suit called from the other side. “What’s this shit?”

  “It stopped our guns, man!” Overcoat whined.

  “Maybe we should dejar,” Tatter added, “This is bad mierda. They got the Mancy by now. Policías be coming soon from all the shooting.”

  “Fuck that!” Suit said. “He’s right there, I can see him! I’m not leaving him alive to tell how he beat up on the Coyote Nation twice!”

  Like that’s anything special judging by your performance so far, I thought but kept the mocking to myself as I asked T-Bone, “You pooled up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t hold back.”

  “Mordecai Root taught me Elementalism as a Weapon just like you, King Henry.”

  “Only it was Fines
Samson who taught me. Special job on the Lady’s orders, just my year.”

  He glanced over my way in disbelief. “I hear he’s a nutjob who got retired for trying to kill students to keep them on their toes.”

  “Spiced my life up.”

  “No wonder you’re so mad all the time.”

  “If I had to listen to Mordecai Root teach me for eleven months, I’d be even worse. I hate that cocksucker more than any necromancer alive—including Welf.”

  “You hear that?” Suit yelled. “They’re chatting! Fucking chatting and mocking us like we aren’t even here!”

  “We’re out of ammo, man!” Overcoat complained.

  “Cosas malas, very bad shit,” Tatter added. “Cops get us and Vega matar us instead of sacarnos.”

  “Drop wall,” I said and the voice trigger—talk about some complicated artificing—I’d built into the SEM-DEW ball activated to turn off the geo-anima field, destroying the support structure holding the wall in place. The web-like metal, bullets still embedded, drifted to the ground, stopping at my feet as I stepped around my counter.

  T-Bone settled at my shoulder. He tried to look tough, and okay, he’s a six-foot-four black guy, he should have been able to look tough, but instead he looked like a geek who’d just had his game controller stolen. “How about you guys scram and save us the trouble of washing up all your blood?”

  Okay . . . the threat wasn’t bad. ‘Scram’ though? What was it? The 50s? Get the fuck out of here. Beat it, asshole. Off my turf, bitches. And he chose ‘scram’?

  I did my usual, not waiting for words. I let go with the anima pool I’d stored. A good sized pool, little more than seven minutes . . . plenty of pool to do what I needed to do with it. Instead of using it all in one place, I remembered the lesson I’d learned first time with the Shaky Stick, grabbing at all the anima to break off pieces. I managed three, not a single one the same size as the other and losing some anima to the ether, but that’s okay, it wasn’t a lot of metal I aimed for anyway. And me? I do breaking much better than building.