Now it was out of his hands and Carnival could only stand there, braced as the scarf ran from his mouth and into the Red Shambler’s wet inner workings.
The Shambler didn’t even flinch.
“You can’t kill me,” roared the Red Shambler, or he might have been whispering, it was hard to tell. “I am blood and pain and destruction. I am a god and Hell, all in one.”
He gestured towards Maya.
“Take him, daughter,” he said. “Kill the gypsy for me.”
Maya swooped straight down toward Carnival.
“Oh hell,” Carnival mouthed around the running mouthful of scarf.
Blood will out, every time boy.
She was hurtling straight towards him.
“Yeah!” shouted a rough voice from out of the darkness.
Carnival looked around.
He couldn’t believe what he saw.
Here came Chollo, charging the Red Shambler with the propane-loaded rickshaw rolling out in front of him like a kamikaze balsa wood wheelbarrow.
“If love be rough with you, be rough with love!” the big man shouted as the rickshaw smashed up against one of the Red Shambler’s many red scaled booger-blubber pseudo-legs. Chollo yanked the detonator and dove headlong toward the dirty harbor water.
Maya scooped Carnival up and suddenly he was airborne the scarf tailing out behind him like a long kite string.
The tank exploded and everything went red.
Chapter 88
Unexpected Redemption
An instant later Carnival opened his eyes. The explosion had cleared everything. He didn’t know how he’d survived. There was no sign of Chollo, Tupo, Momma or Maya.
The Red Shambler stood over him, bigger than death and twice as dangerous.
At least he looked a little less booger-like.
Right now he just looked like a hyper-thyroidal love-spawn of a sumo wrestler and Fat Bastard, poured out of clotted mess of tomato aspic and lime green Jell-o. He could see the scarf twisted through the Shambler’s inner workings like a red marker tracing of the way through a garden maze. An end of the scarf tattered out like the last banner over a fallen Foreign Legion fort, long after the last sergeant and propped the last rifle beside the last dead legionnaire’s corpse.
The Shambler was smiling, kind of like Buddha with acid indigestion. Carnival wondered if the old god was mellowing with age.
Carnival didn’t know how the Red Shambler had survived. He could see pieces of the Aggregate clinging to his hide. Maybe the Aggregate had soaked up the blast. Maybe the Red Shambler had sucked the city familiar up entirely, or done enough damage to chase it off Maybe that’s what had protected him from Chollo’s rickshaw blast.
Carnival couldn’t say for sure.
Things were happening way too fast.
The big bastard looked down at him. Carnival didn’t know if he remembered anything about that golden leash chain. He didn’t know if that was all Cantanker or if the Red Shambler had switched places in mid slavery. He couldn’t tell how much the old god knew about what had been done to him in the past.
But he sure looked pissed.
Carnival was a lowly hors d`oeuvre about to be rendered hors de combat. That’s fancy French for he was fucked, seventeen ways to sundown.
And then all at once his rescuer appeared.
A small figure that looked no bigger than a firefly, next to that big red rock-eating monster. Maya buzzed the Red Shambler’s head, like Tinkerbell flying interference on a heavily laden Captain Hook, and Robin Williams was nowhere in sight.
The Shambler almost had her twice.
Carnival threw himself on the big bastard. He grabbed hold of what looked like a heel, and tried to drag the big bastard down.
He might as well try to body slam a mammoth.
Then the Red Shambler had her.
Damn it.
Carnival redoubled his efforts.
The mammoth didn’t grow any smaller.
The Red Shambler latched onto Maya with one of his great hairy suckers. He leaned back and inhaled. She paled like she was fading away. He wasn’t just sucking her blood. He was draining her essence.
“Maya,” Carnival shouted.
He might as well have been yelling at a distant star.
He drew her in but it was a battle. The nightwalker would not die. She pulled herself grimly down his long leg, fighting for every inch. Carnival reached up to her, sending her what he could.
He felt Momma inside him, even felt Poppa, reaching out to her. Sending the strength of a million long lost Rom into her being.
Try boy!
He didn’t know whether that did the trick, or whether that was just wishful thinking, but Maya found the strength to drag herself inch by painful inch as he sucked her every drag of the way, down towards the distant water.
It was no good. He couldn’t reach her.
Stand aside, boy. Let your Poppa drive.
“Drive this, Poppa,” Carnival rasped, reaching within himself for the strength, reaching out for Maya’s hand.
“MAYA!” Carnival yelled.
She heard him, and reached harder.
Carnival caught her hand.
She was holding something.
He felt the tattered end of the scarf.
Maya pushed the red scarf into his hand.
“Touch the water,” she pleaded.
Carnival looked at her, half confused.
“Touch the sea-water,” she screamed.
Carnival reached out and dangled a foot into the advancing tide. And then Maya sucked in, drawing the ocean through Carnival, up through herself, and up into the Red Shambler.
That’s the thing about vampires.
They sucked.
And being bit by a vampire and touching her now made Carnival a part of the blow job of the century. He felt himself grow loose and liquidish as the waters of the Atlantic Ocean flowed through his aching veins.
Maya kept on sucking.
The Red Shambler got larger and thirstier. He’d already inhaled half a city. Now he was taking in an ocean on top of that.
Urban developers have a phrase for it.
They call it over expansion, getting too large for one’s own good.
Carnival could see his fat red cells looming as large as voluptuous vampiric Volkswagens, humping and bumping one upon the other, like a thousand Eschers on an ocean of bad acid. The ocean shrunk. The harbor looked like a frog pond. Carnival saw bodies down in the muck. Concrete overshoes and men wrapped in chains. Abandoned pirates and fallen fishermen. It looked like a discotheque of the dead and damned. Men lay down or swept in from a thousand leagues of sea. Twisting and moving and being sucked into the huge red vacuum.
And the great beast kept growing huge and fat and turgid.
Carnival reached into his pocket with his one free hand. He didn’t know why. Maybe Poppa told him to do it. There, in his pocket was the tattooist’s needle. Carnival reached up and poked the Red Shambler with it. Poked him in the ankle, like Talos, bursting the over stressed cell walls.
Like a hundred ruptured Amsterdam dikes, it all came flowing out.
But that wasn’t enough. He kept sucking that up. I thought he would burst but even that wasn’t enough.
How big could he grow?
Just then Carnival felt something hard and long pushing against him. He turned around. Olaf stared him right in the face, his turgid death-cock shoving hard against Carnival’s leg. The chair bound corpse had a knife in his hand, reaching out for Carnival’s throat.
“Well bugger me,” Carnival whispered, but he didn’t really mean it.
Olaf grabbed him. Suddenly Carnival was simultaneously fighting for his life and his anal virginity, and he couldn’t be certain which concerned him more.
He saw the Red Shambler high above him, pulling himself back together.
“Olaf, you’ve got to stop it.”
But Olaf wasn’t listening.
“He wants the world,” C
arnival told Olaf. “It’s bigger than both of us. We’ve got to stop him.”
“Fuck the world,” Olaf swore.
He meant it. His cock was huge and engorged. He’s thinking with the little head and not with the big. Only the little head isn’t all that small. If he has his way he’s going to tear Carnival a new borehole the diameter of the Brooklyn Tunnel.
But he had shown Carnival his weakness.
He had shown Carnival his priorities.
“If he gets away with this there’ll be no world left to fuck,” Carnival argued.
Olaf paused.
Carnival could see the thoughts slowly processing through the man-thing’s slow dead brains. And then Olaf turned towards the ocean. Towards the sea of undead unburied men. He waved his arm like he was General George Patton.
“Come on then,” Olaf shouted.
The sea rose up.
All of those dead unburied sailors and gangsters and lost love suicides came storming out of the muck and the mire. Churning up into life stirred by the energy of the Red Shambler, and the Aggregate and maybe even a little of Momma, me and Maya.
“Let’s fuck this big red bastard up,” shouted Olaf.
He led the harbor dead in a Balaclava charge against the towering blood god. They followed Olaf because he was freshly dead, and he had lain in their great mother’s belly for at least a little while. They followed him because they were bored with their sea bottom existence. They followed him for the hell of it, climbing atop the Red Shambler, like ants taking down a behemoth. They piled on top and gangbanged the Red Shambler. Pumping him harder and higher than he’d ever dreamed of growing.
It just doesn’t pay to fuck with the dead.
The Red Shambler grew and then he fell like a great redwood coming down in a forest of blood and tears, he toppled ground ward.
Right on top of Maya.
Chapter 89
Doing the Gypsy Stomp
The Red Shambler fell like the leaning tower of Jenga.
He hit the pier and the remaining four by eights heaved upwards and fell about like a rain of jack straws. It was party games all around, and up to Carnival to have the last hopscotch. The Red Shambler was down, but Carnival had to finish him off.
Carnival stomped upon him, stomped upon each of his swollen blood vessels like a small boy stomping on an acre of jellyfish. Carnival burst the rest of the Red Shambler’s blood cells, one by one, until he was tattooed in blood and cathartic pain.
Do you know how many cells there are in a giant mad blood god’s reanimated body?
Carnival counted them all as he stomped them flat.
He counted them carefully, coming up with a number that could never be told.
He counted just the same.
Why not?
The Rom love to keep their secrets.
Finally, he came to Maya.
She was beneath the wreckage and the ruin, lying beneath the Red Shambler’s carcass.
He touched her cheek.
It felt cool.
He prayed that meant she was still alive.
He kissed her on the lips.
He felt the barest tug of her vampiric thirst.
She was alive, as alive as any vampire could be. Just barely, but the sunrise was coming.
“Don’t die,” Carnival begged.
He worked his knife out of his blood soaked pocket. The knife, where all the trouble first started.
No. That’s not it. It started long before he ever thought of using his knife.
He stuck the blade into his own throat. Opening himself, freely and of his own free will.
“Drink,” he said.
Carnival pushed her mouth against the wound, and involuntarily Maya began to suck.
For a second time that night, everything went red.
Chapter 90
One Final Kiss, Hello, Goodbye
Maya put her lips upon against Carnival’s wounded throat.
The blood must have tasted so sweet to her. The Red Shambler had sucked her so damn dry.
Then, all at once the tide changed.
Carnival felt it change.
She softened his flesh, forcing the blood back into it. Pumping her self back into him.
She was killing herself, leaving her self too weak to flee the sunrise.
Carnival tried to fight her but the blood loss left him weak and helpless. He tried to rise up, but he couldn’t. It just wasn’t healthy trying to come back from the dead more than twice in one day.
She pulled back from his throat as the sun rose.
Just for an instant he heard her laugh.
And then the burning.
He grabbed at her as she started to burn. He seared his hands beating at her flash, softly first and then frantically pounding at her, calling her name as she rose up like a flame in his very arms.
“Maya! Maya! Maya!”
Too late.
She was gone.
Long gone.
There was nothing left but ashes and cindered bone.
Did she understand what she was doing?
Did she know?
You bet your ass she knew.
Freely and of her own will.
Carnival lay there, wet and blood soaked and basking in the morning light.
The sun should have felt good, but it didn’t.
Chapter 91
Fortune’s Fool
It had been a long day.
The haze around the waterfront slowly cleared.
Carnival could see the hermit already beginning to gather up the chunks of what was left of the Aggregate. He’d rebuild it, Carnival knew he would. It would take a while, and quite possibly he would mix up some of the chunks of Red Shambler with the Aggregate rubble, but that was simply evolution.
For a time the city would live without a collective spirit.
He didn’t think anyone would notice.
He gathered up his own hallowed remains. Scooping up what was left of Maya into a green plastic bucket that he recovered from the hermit’s warehouse.
Later he found Chollo and Tupo, sitting under a fallen dock, passing a bottle back and forth.
It figured. You couldn’t kill that bastard with an axe.
Tupo was singing a soft Spanish song. For a man who never spoke he had a gentle tenor that was surprisingly easy on the ears.
“Your Momma went home,” Chollo said.
Carnival looked up into the sky, his heart sinking.
She was gone.
“No, not home that way,” Chollo corrected. “She just went home. She said she’ll hide in the tattoo parlor, until you can find an old church steeple for her to live in”
Carnival looked at him.
I’d never told him who the demon had been.
“How did you know who she was? She looked like Stevie Nicks, the last time you saw her.”
“Hey, I’m Spanish. We know many secrets.”
Tupo kept on singing.
Carnival asked Chollo what the words meant.
“It’s a very old, very sweet love song about a man mourning for his runaway mule.”
“Asshole.”
“Even assholes can mourn for their lost mule.”
Carnival heard a ringing.
“It’s for me,” Chollo said, rooting into his pocket until he found his portable telephone.
“You brought a cellular to a firefight?” Tupo asked, aghast.
Carnival stared in wonder.
Besides the singing, it was the first words he’d heard Tupo speak.
Chollo said hello.
Then he listened.
Then he smiled.
“I got the part,” he said.
“Romeo?”
“No hombre. Mercutio. A good man in a fight. You didn’t really think I was trying for Romeo, did you?”
Carnival laughed and wept at the same damn time.
Chapter 92
Resurrection, One More Time
It had been a long day and a long wa
it for nightfall.
Carnival mixed the ink and ashes together and tattooed them on to what was left of Maya’s bones.
It was more of a melding, than a tattoo. Trying to tack two heaps of nothing together is damn tricky work.
He wasn’t an artist but he would do what needed to be done.
What the hell? If it was good enough for the Red Shambler it was good enough for Maya.
He had to make a lot of spells, and talk to three more demons, but he negotiated a resurrection.
He’d pay for it all later, in services rendered.
In hell, or somewhere else farther down the line.
She looked up at Carnival. Her eyes, soft in the moonlight. Her skin, nearly transparent, her flesh a gentle mirage.
“There’s probably a few chunks of coffee table and broken china mixed in there. Maybe a few stray hairs of my father.”
She raised one eyebrow.
Damn. He was going to miss that look.
“Your Poppa is in me?”
“It’s okay,” Carnival said. “You’ll like Poppa. He’s dead.”
She laughed.
He definitely was going to miss that laugh.
“My kind of people,” She said.
She looked at the ashes.
“Think maybe you could give me something nifty, like a Technicolor dragon?”
Carnival shook his head.
“I’m more the Pollock school of art.”
“It’s funny, you don’t look Polish.”
She smiled. Carnival laughed.
And then they both grew quiet.
“You know,” He said. “I can’t hold you here any longer.”
“You never did. It was your Poppa’s doing. He bound me to his service, using the power the Red Shambler gave him.”
“I know, but its different now. You’re not a vampire, any more, but you’re certainly not human. I made you into something different. I’m not sure what.”
“I’ll figure things out,” she said with a soft sort of smile.
Hell.
He really was going to miss this girl.
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