And then Momma stepped out of the shadows and onto the skull.
“Not dead,” she ground the skull into so much powder. “Not hardly.”
Carnival nodded, glad to have her on his side.
“Momma’s not dead, but you are, Poppa. You sure as hell are.”
Carnival waited to feel something breaking in his chest.
Nothing.
Was he gone?
Was he out of Carnival’s life?
Carnival couldn’t be sure.
Maybe he would never be sure.
“Are we going to end this, or not?” Momma asked.
“You bet,” Carnival said. “We’re going to end this. Once and for fucking all.”
Chapter 85
City Magic
Carnival telephoned Chollo.
The little thug picked up the telephone on the first ring, as if he’d been expecting it.
“Are you ready for some trouble?” Carnival asked.
“You’re fucking right I am,” Chollo said. “I got another shot at my audition. I’d like to celebrate.”
“What happened to the other Romeo?”
“He had an accident. He broke his leg. Both of them.”
“An accident?”
“A terrible, dreadful accident.”
Carnival tried to picture Chollo as Romeo. The shortest, strongest, ugliest looking Romeo you ever saw. A Capulet who would cap you if you pissed him off.
Carnival diplomatically held back his laughter.
“I need you down on the waterfront.”
“Just me?”
“You and anyone else crazy enough to come. We’re apt to be messing with something the size of Detroit.”
“I’ll bring a gun,” Chollo said. “Are we hunting vampires?”
“Something bigger. Bring a gun. A big gun. The biggest moose-blaster you can find. I’ll meet you down on the waterfront. We’re gunning for King Kong’s older brother.”
And then because he just couldn’t help himself he had to say it.
“Good night, sweet prince, good night - parting is such sweet sorrow.”
Chollo hung up on the second good night.
Carnival wasn’t offended.
He was too busy being scared shitless about what he was going to face down at the waterfront. He was thinking about something as tough as King Kong and Godzilla rolled into Hulk Hogan.
This was going to be a lot harder than gutting a one-legged drunk.
And where would Maya be in all this? She wasn’t an accident, and if the Shambler had her dirt than she might go along with what it wanted.
“When do we go?”
Demon Momma’s voice was so close to his ear he damn near jumped out of his skin.
He whirled, nearly tripping over his feet.
“Practice your ballet later,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“You can’t come.”
“Why not? I’m dressed for it.”
She had a point. Wearing the skin of a demon sure didn’t hurt you any when you were getting set for a firefight with the god of blood.
“I was going to get a taxi. You won’t be able to fit.”
“Leave it to me. Come on.”
They stepped outside into the street. The night seemed frozen. There was a red glare rising up from the waterfront. That’s where it was all going down. The sky seemed to have forgotten how to breathe. The stars hung there, like the bullet holes of heaven.
Demon Momma jammed her talons into her jaws and whistled up a raise-the-dead shriek. From out of the darkness their cab pulled up. It was Mario and his flower cart but he looked worse for the wear. His face was rotting. Pale blue, and tattered with gore, like he’d been bobbing for blood clots in an all-you-can-eat chili buffet.
“He’s under your Poppa’s spell,” Momma said. “It doesn’t do much for the complexion.”
“Damn it. Mario was one of the good ones.”
“He still is,” Momma said. “Being dead or not dead doesn’t change much. It’s all fate, and you can’t change that.”
“Can’t change fate? What the hell am I doing right now?”
“Whatever you can,” Momma grated from behind Carnival’s neck.
Carnival climbed in, and Momma braced herself on top of the flower cart’s roof. She looked like some kind of gargoyle mounted up there next to the taxi’s roof light, the world’s biggest head wobbling doggy decoration. The bulls started to gallop. The cart rolled forward. Momma hung on up top, her big red tongue lolling out like a terrier in the breeze.
The flower cart wove through the street. The ride was wilder than ever. A night transport, hauling a trailer loaded with bargain lingerie jackknifed in the street as a panicked driver slammed on the brakes. A midnight bicycle courier tipped over a rack of peekaboo pink nighties, and broke his arm against the pavement. They were traveling fast, but Carnival’s mind moved faster, past the windshield, down to the waterfront.
He was thinking about Maya. Where was she?
When they got there, Chollo was waiting in a rickshaw.
Chapter 86
Rickshaw Rescue Rangers
Chollo sat in a rickshaw, looking like a short ugly overweight Mandarin warlord.
There were two other guys there with him. One of them was holding what looked to be a very large automatic cannon against the rickshaw driver’s skull.
“What the fuck is that?” Carnival asked, pointing at the gun that was pointing at the rickshaw boy’s skull.
“An M-60 machine gun. You said bring big guns.”
As scared as the rickshaw driver was, the sight of Demon Momma’s eight foot plus frame looming over all of us from our phantom bull-ride flower cart and zombified chauffer wasn’t doing anything for his sense of calmness.
“Great,” Carnival said to Chollo. “Nice job. You hijacked a rickshaw.”
Chollo shrugged. Momma didn’t impress him that much. Nothing much did, once he had a gun in his hands. Once he was comfortably in his element.
“I’ve always wanted to ride in one of these things. I never could find anybody big enough to pull me. Now I did.” he shrugged a second time. “My life’s ambition is complete. I can die now.”
“You’ve come to the right place.”
Chollo got out of the rickshaw. He was carrying a trio of sawed off shotguns, welded and wired together with a thin metal bar shoved straight through the triggers and bolted to the sort of lever you’d find on a come-along.
“What the heck is that, a pocket howitzer?”
“You said bring something big,” he repeated, half-aiming the triple-shotgun at Momma. “Is that what we have to kill?”
Carnival shook his head.
“She’s on our side.”
That was good enough for Chollo. He didn’t need to ask any further details. If she was on Carnival’s side, she was on his side.
“I brought friends too,” Chollo said.
The first guy, a big tall ugly Mexican named Tupo, was holding the M-60 on the rickshaw driver. The second, a pot-bellied prison-pallored forty something thug named Carlos, cast his gaze up at Momma’s great winged form, like he was having a fearful vision of doom.
“How you doing?” Carnival asked Carlos.
“Not too bad,” he said, but he sounded as if he were lying.
Tupo threw Carnival a flat-faced nod. If he knew how to speak, he wasn’t letting on. He wasn’t anymore bothered by Momma than Chollo was.
The driver, a young college boy with pumped up biceps and long gangly stork legs, looked like he was getting set to puke chowder. He wasn’t saying much either, just making a soft sort of gobbling sound, that sounded a little like a slow drowning turkey.
“Don’t worry,” Carnival assured him. “You’re safe with me.”
“Don’t listen,” Chollo said. “You should see what he does to pizza boys.”
Carnival scowled at Chollo.
“Why didn’t you just pay him?”
“He didn’t like driving
with dangerous cargo.”
Carnival looked in the rickshaw. A couple of propane tanks were parked on the floor of it. The tanks were wired together with something that must have been a detonator.
“You figured we needed a bomb?”
“No sense in being unprepared.”
He couldn’t argue with that logic.
“You still could have paid him.”
“Hey that’s expenses. I leave that to management.”
Carnival paid the boy.
“Run home,” He advised the boy. “Tell your boss the rickshaw exploded.”
“Leaky gas tank,” Chollo suggested. “Got to watch those beans and burritos.”
Carnival heard a horrendous roar. The waterfront lit up like the ocean was filled with burning blood. It was worse than when he’d called the Aggregate. Way worse.
The rickshaw boy waited half a heartbeat, and then ran into the night. The sensible part of Carnival wanted to follow him.
“That’s where we need to be, Valentino,” Momma said.
Chollo’s eyebrows shot up.
“Valentino?”
“Let’s do this,” Carnival said. “Are you ready for a fight?”
“Damn straight,” Chollo said.
Carnival could tell that Chollo was looking forward to it.
His buddies, Tupo and Carlos, did too.
Even Momma seemed game for a fight.
Carnival wished to hell he could share in their enthusiasm.
The five of them headed down towards the water.
The Magnificent Seven, minus two.
Good thing nobody could count.
Chapter 87
Monsterama Thunderdome Jamboree
Carnival didn’t need to get any closer to the action to see what was going on.
Down at the water’s edge the Red Shambler was wading into the Aggregate in a no-holds-barred, winner-take-all free-for-all. It looked like an all-night Toho monster movie jamboree – GODZILLA KING KONG MEETS ORIGAMI, THE SMOG EYED ARMAGEDDON MONSTER FROM HELL.
Try and picture a giant seething radioactive bloodthirsty booger carelessly flicked upon a humongous mechanical Tinker Toy – Lincoln Log - Lego Block – Meccano Monster from Mars and you are somewhere in the crazy ballpark. The Red Shambler, in his true form was nearly formless – a huge clot of a deity suckered to the side of the slab-like city incarnate known as the Aggregate.
“Oh my god,” Carnival said.
This was major arcane. The fortune teller was way out of his league and he knew it. Momma at least was dressed for the fight, wearing the repossessed carcass of a second rate demon flunky like it was her own custom made flak jacket.
“What the hell are we thinking?” Carnival whispered.
“No time for second thoughts,” Momma said. She soared up on her leathery wings, tackling the Red Shambler right by his throat.
“Tear him a new one for me, Momma!”
The Red Shambler threw Momma aside like yesterday’s newspaper. She hit against an abandoned warehouse, caving it in.
Chollo reached the wharf second. Or rather, what was left of the wharf. Half of the creosoted lumber was crushed beneath one of the Red Shambler’s many heavy paws. The Red Shambler stretched itself out to something nearly the size of a twelve story building. The big fucker kept changing its shape and size, like it couldn’t make up its mind. Maybe that was some form of natural camouflage, or just a demonstration of the beast’s innate perversity.
Chollo pumped his triple barreled shotgun and let fly, blasting a sheet of gunpowder and flying lead through a sheet of window pane halfway up the Aggregate’s left side.
“Not him,” Carnival shouted. “Get the other guy.”
Calling either the City Aggregate or the Red Shambler guys was something of a misnomer but Chollo got the idea quickly enough.
“Now you tell me,” he shouted back. “Get him muchachos.”
Tupo went to work with his big M-60 machine gun, working a running gouge of bullet spray and torn up funky chunks of Shambler flesh, straight up the big brute’s wharf crushing leg. Carlos joined in with his pistol, lobbing a couple of loose grenades to make up for his underwhelming arsenal.
“Get the motherfucker!” Carlos shouted.
He was a one-man short and hairy pep squad, making sounds like a berserk bull ape. Carnival didn’t know who he was shouting at. They were all doing their best.
Tupo still hadn’t said a word.
Carnival wasn’t sure what the hell he was doing down here. He picked up the nearest weapon he could see. A loose chunk of two by four, splintered off the wreckage of the wharf. If this failed, he supposed he could fall back on his jack knife.
Chollo stepped even closer, pumping and blasting with his triple barreled nightmare cannon, as quickly as he could fire. There was a glow of heat surrounding him from the constant blaze of firepower, or maybe it was the chili he’d ate before the battle.
Not to be outdone, Carnival stepped in even closer than Chollo and made like a hyperventilating Babe Ruth with his two by four, swinging and banging on what either might have been a semi-vital organ or most likely the big brute’s biggest toe. When you were fighting a super-booger like the Red Shambler it was just too hard to tell where one part began and the whole rest of it got started. It was like battling a bowl of jellied eels, with a mess of chainsaws, false teeth, contact mines and rattlesnakes rolled all into one.
The Aggregate made good use of the pitiful distraction, and began working on what Carnival guessed to be the Red Shambler’s head, twisting mandibles off and yanking out tentacles as fast as they appeared.
“We’re winning!” Carnival shouted. “We’ve got the big red bastard on the run.”
Carnival should have known better.
The Red Shambler rose up, sprouting fangs and thorns and other ugliness, digging at least a half dozen giant mouthfuls worth of teeth into the Aggregate’s stony neck. The Shambler sucked and seemed to draw unholy strength, growing larger by the minute.
Carnival could see what was happening.
The Red Shambler was trying to suck up the Aggregate, to inhale it in a kind of occupational osmosis, possessing, like the straw becoming soda pop. He could feel the beast whispering wetly through the dead ends and the broken doors and the hungry alleys of the city itself and something inside him told him that the Shambler was determined to take over the entire city.
To breathe it in and swallow and digest it and it wouldn’t stop there.
It wanted everything.
Carnival saw it, like a vision from Hell. Like a bastard marrying into a family tree, the Red Shambler was figuring on taking over the world, one city at a time.
“We’ve got to stop it!” Carnival shouted.
“We can do it,” Carlos said.
Carnival was waiting for the little man to pull out a set of cheerleading pom-poms, but before he got a step further the Red Shambler turned and stomped Carlos flat, just as he was about to chuck another futile hand grenade.
The grenade blast went off beneath what Carnival guessed to be the red beast’s heavy paw or at the very least some kind of semi-supporting pseudopod. Carnival spitefully prayed that the grenade had given the Red Shambler a terminal case of cosmic athlete’s foot.
Carnival kept on swinging the two-by-four but he was fighting a losing battle and he knew it. He should have brought more magic. He kept trying to think up some kind of fantastic spell. What would Mandrake the Magician do right now? Probably gesture hypnotically and make the Shambler think it was nothing more than an impacted boil, which was almost what it looked like.
“We are absolutely fucked,” Carnival said out loud.
And that’s right when Maya appeared, hurtling down from the evening sky like a kamikaze death bat.
“Yes,” Carnival shouted. “Get the bastard.”
He wasn’t sure what she could do to the brute, but she sure seemed to know what she was doing, and they could use all the help they could get. The Magnificen
t Seven had jellied down into a puddle of Marx Brothers, just that quickly.
The Red Shambler whirled about like a sumo wrestler suddenly sprouting ballet slippers and tumbleweed toes, knocking Tupo into the water and right out of the game.
The quiet little man didn’t even have a chance to say “Oof”.
Chollo made up for the big man’s silenced adios, cursing and trying to reload all three shotguns at the same time, making nearly as much noise in their unloaded state as they had while they were firing.
Carnival kept swinging his two by four. He knew it wasn’t doing any real damage. It just felt good to do something.
“Get the bastard,” Carnival shouted again. “Kill the fucking great red eyesore.”
Chollo didn’t seem to be listening. He dropped his shotgun and ran for cover, headed for the street.
Shit. Carnival had never seen the big man run from anything before now.
Your friend has developed a coward’s sense of priority.
“Poppa?”
I wouldn’t leave my boy alone at a time like this. Too bad your pet thug doesn’t share my loyalty.
Carnival supposed he couldn’t blame Chollo. It was up to him and Maya right now. He could see her buzzing about the Shambler’s topside, like a beautiful mosquito whirling about the world’s largest nuclear booger.
The Red Shambler turned toward Carnival, standing there all alone with his ridiculous two by four, a gone-to-seed David with a sadly busted slingshot.
“You are alone, Gypsy,” the Shambler said, it’s voice rumbling and rupturing from a half a hundred mouths and most of them full of brick and window glass.
You were never alone my son.
Carnival felt his Poppa moving through his body, taking hold and control. No, not taking control, but standing with his son, the two of them, father and boy finally standing together.
He felt something like a soft wet tickle in the back of his throat. He reached for it and felt the touch of something sleek.
A scarf.
Fight him like a Gypsy, boy. Fight him like the Rom you finally are.
Carnival pulled the scarf out of his own mouth like a long wet chain, like some crazy street magician frantically trying to wow the crowd with one last big stunt, looping it lariat-style over his head and throwing it, the scarf running like a cobra on high-tension barbiturate, streaking and greasing and ripping into the inner working guts of the super-nuclear booger monster – the Red Shambler.
Gypsy Blood Page 28
