A Gathering Evil

by Michael A. Stackpole

  Then the lights in The Trench went on.

  The bar had taken its name from its most interesting aspect. In the back a pit had been dug that bottomed out about 20 feet below the level of the floor. The sides had been carved into narrow terraces, each being fitted with a railing that had little holders for plastic cups of beer. At either end, up at floor level, catwalks extended over pit level corridors to let the servers get from the bar to the patrons watching the pit.

  The rectangular pit had been fitted with boards and plexiglass walls that looked to me to have been salvaged from some hockey rink. Where the glass had been shattered, chicken wire or strips of chain-link fencing replaced it up to the level of the bar's floor. Above that, secured to the bar's ceiling, more chain-link fencing formed a dome that made the pit a world of its own.

  Natch led me along the catwalk on the right side, and a bouncer at the top of the stairs let the two of us past. We descended to the level of the floor and stood in the corridor. Through the blood-streaked plexiglass at the end of the pit, I saw Bat turn and face the last two of his opponents.

  Bat had looked big when I'd met him two days ago, but in the center of the pit he looked herculean. Blood dripped from his bare chest and washed over his bare legs, but I knew it was not his. His muscles tensed as one man came in and his whole body twisted as he smashed a pile-driver right hook into the man ribs. I winced when I heard something pop, then cringed as Bat's left fist arced in and nearly twisted the man's head off with a solid punch.

  The last man had, at one time, been trained as a martial artist. He flew through the air aiming a kick at Bat's head. Bat, ducked his head out of the way, but held his left forearm up to split the flying man's legs. The collision of bone with groin involuntarily doubled over a number of the spectators and brought an agonized screech from the fighter. But before he could fall to the ground, Bat's right hand closed on bunched muscles at the man's spine, then he took a run at the wall and slammed the man against the plexiglass.

  Then he pulled him back and did it again and again and again. When the man hung like a limp rag in his hands, he tossed him aside and began to look around the pit for another victim. The other four men hastened their belly crawls to the door at the far arena end, and Bat encouraged them with brutal kicks. With a wicked smile on his face, he broke the outstretched arm of one man reaching for the doorway, then laughed loudly as the man begged for mercy.

  I looked at Natch, and she shrugged. "Amateur night. It's never pretty."

  Bat walked back to where the martial artist lay. He picked him up by the waistband of his pants, then dragged him face first through the dirt before tossing him out the arena door like a sack of garbage. Then, alone in the arena, he raised his hands in triumph. Half the crowd roared in his favor, but other people taunted him and threw plastic cups of beer at him. They splashed against the wire to mix with the blood and the dirt in the arena, but left Bat untouched.

  As Bat turned to soak in the adulation of the crowd, I saw his eyes. He watched the people surrounding him like a wolf studying a flock of sheep. They were prey to him, and he'd clearly not had his fill in breaking the five who had faced him. Furthermore, and by far the most chilling of my observations, I knew he was not in the pit for the money or the praise or the need to prove himself at the top of the food chain.

  He fought because he loved inflicting pain on others.

  The lights dimmed again, and Bat left the arena. In the half-light I saw the steel mask of cruelty on his face soften when he saw Natch. It flashed back on his face as he looked over at me, and in that flash of his dark eyes I knew I had an open invitation to fight him any time I wanted.

  I shook my head. "If I want a sanity trial, I'll have it in a court of law."

  Natch looked confused for a moment, then stepped back beyond the catwalk and opened a door into a locker room. Bat cut immediately to a shower cubicle in which a half-dozen nozzles hit him with harsh spray from various angles. The mud melted off, and the blood ran down the drain. Bat shut off the water, shook his head to flick water from his hair, then stepped out of the shower and went for a locker.

  Natch tossed him a towel that had probably once been fleecy and white. Bat doffed his boxing trunks and dried himself off, though he seemed more interested in any blood the towel absorbed than he did getting dry. That made sense in that, in the heat, evaporation would draw the water off quickly enough and summon sweat to replace it.

  The towel came away clean, but Bat looked to have a nasty bruise developing on his left shoulder. He sat on the bench beside his locker and opened the door. Whereas I expected to see the sort of pin-up pictures decorating other open lockers, inside Bat's door I saw a drawing of a winged angel bearing a spear, driving a demon off a cloud. Bat touched the picture reverently with his right hand, then crossed himself.

  He looked over at me. "Ask."

  I frowned. "Ask?"

  "What do you want to know about me?" He pulled on some underwear. "Get it over with."

  "Okay. Why 'Bat?'"

  He shrugged, but Natch answered for him. "His real name is Chwalibog Kabat. It's Polish—his parents came over just before Eastern Europe opened up."

  "Bat is easier, and folks don't get it wrong." I nodded, understanding why folks would not even want to try to pronounce his name and risk offending him. His background also made understanding the angel picture easier. "St. Michael?"

  Bat nodded.

  The patron saint of warriors. Being Polish meant he was probably raised Catholic, and that created a rather strange paradox. Here was a Christian who followed the teachings of the Prince of Peace, yet he worked as a pit fighter because he loved hurting people. Thinking back on what I'd seen in the pit, I had no doubt that whoever his confessor was, that priest got hazard duty pay, and Bat got penance that didn't quit.

  "One last question: How are you and Coyote connected?"

  Bat stood and tucked a T-shirt into his jeans. "I used to fight on the professional circuit. A promoter kidnapped a friend to get me to throw a fight. Coyote freed the hostage, and the promoter died when my opponent flew from the ring and crushed him in his seat."

  Natch, perched on the end of the bench, drew her legs up and hugged them to her chest. "After that fight, a Lorica janitor thanked Bat for winning. He'd bet a lot of money on him—money he needed for his wife's medical treatments. She ended up dying anyway, but in a gang drive-by shooting, not from her disease."

  I folded my arms across my chest. "That janitor was Phil Costapain, which is why you're coming with us. Costapain trusts you?"

  Bat gave me a single nod as he closed his locker. He didn't lock it, but just looking at him told me why he didn't have to. He held out his right arm, Natch grabbed hold, and he lifted her to her feet in one smooth motion. They both smiled at each other, then headed off into The Trench.

  I followed, but until we got to the street, I don't think they noticed.

  Phil Costapain had managed to choose a hiding place that would have kept him safe from the best trackers in the world. Aside from being thought dead, he had the advantage of living in an area where two mobile home parks had mated and metastasized to all the neighboring areas, including what had once been the Greenwood Memorial Cemetery Park. Interstate 10 thundered through the middle of the community and, just beyond it, twisted through the interchange known as the Stack, but had no real effect on Boxton.

  Getting there proved less difficult than I imagined when I learned neither Natch or Bat had a car. We hopped a gypsy bus that angled us across the west side of Phoenix as it dropped folks off and stopped for other riders flagging it down. Big and painted with colors that glowed in the gloom of Eclipse, it lumbered through the grimy streets like a beetle with elephantitis.

  The three of us took up a position behind the driver. As Bat boarded, he paid his fare, then stood and stared down at some drugged-out wastrel sprawled across a bench. The guy looked up and saw that his current trip had just veered into the land of bad vibes. Bat waited
for him to clear out, then he let Natch and an old black woman sit down.

  The guys toward the back looked nasty enough for me to think we might have gotten on a Department of Corrections bus by mistake. Bat grabbed the overhead rail and glared at our fellow riders, which inspired most of them to get off or hang loose in the very rear of our transport. I ended up standing right behind the driver, trying to give the old woman sitting in Bat's shadow a reassuring smile.

  The bus' dim headlights hid more than they revealed, but they gave me a strong impression of the nightmare that made up chunks of Eclipse. Buildings that had once been useful now lay in total disrepair. Whole blocks looked like they had been abandoned and had trash barricades surrounding them. Oddly enough, the barricades looked as if they had been put up to keep things in that section instead of out. Even more strange was the lack of children playing on or around those barricades.

  Because the streetlights in this area of town had been pulled down, shot out or rewired to provide power for squatters living near them, small bonfires had been lit to illuminate the area. The lunacy of starting fires on hot desert days was further compounded by the clouds of oily smoke that hung low, trapped beneath the Eclipse panels. Some of the squatter's nests built on the underside of the panels looked like soot-smudged tumors hanging in place. They could not have been habitable in any serious sense of the word, yet blank faces looked down at us from above regardless.

  A passenger jostled me when he came aboard, and I felt my billfold disappear from my back pocket. Before he squeezed past Bat, I drew the Krait and poked him in the back of the head with it. "As long as you have my wallet, you might as well take this, too. You want it in pieces?"

  The man swallowed hard, then turned and offered me a picket-fence smile. "Sorry, I'm trying to reform. Really." He held my wallet up, and I took it from him.

  He tried to make his way by Bat, but Bat stopped him and grabbed his right hand. He held it up and spread the fingers out by pressing it against his left hand. "You gotta pay the toll."

  "Toll?"

  "Toll?" Bat's face lost all emotion and his eyes darkened. "Which is your favorite finger?"

  "W-what?"

  "Wrong answer." Bat's muscles bunched in his shoulder and arm as he jerked the man into the air by his wrist. He smashed the man's hand into the bus's roof, and the fingers broke like dry spaghetti. "There, now you're reformed."

  The man screamed, but the mere threat of a cuff silenced him. He clutched his broken hand to his chest and stumbled back, being jostled from seat to seat by the bus's motion and the angry riders he leaned against. Finally, in the back, he met a gang who forced him to "high-five" them with his broken hand before they put him into a seat.

  "Thanks, I think."

  Bat nodded. "Quick. Good."

  I sensed some respect in his voice for how smoothly and swiftly I'd reacted, and that pleased me. Still, I found it disquieting that I felt good about respect from a man who had so casually broken the hand of a man who had done nothing to him. Yet, even as I examined that circumstance, I recalled his religious bent and realized he had only inflicted on the man a punishment for his sin of theft. Within his world, he was being amazingly consistent, and I imagined he would even confess to what he had done here, adding to his burden so he could be absolved of it.

  The bus stopped a block from the edge of our destination. Natch preceded me off the bus and crossed the street to where a group of four youths loitered on the corner watching little kids play kick-ball. The youths all wore jackets that had a black disk sewn on the back, and the words "The Plattermen" embroidered beneath it. When they saw her they started preening and moving like lazy snakes. They eyed me suspiciously, trying to figure if I was undercover for Scorpion Security or a mark to be taken. Bat stepped from the bus, and they sharpened up considerably.

  Natch went through an elaborate ritual of knocking fists, slapping hands and pointing with one of the youths, then invited me over. "Caine-man, this is Zinger. He was maxin' in Florence, then he beat the bricks and crawled back under the Nixrock."

  Zinger, a long, lean and languorous black youth kept his hands in the pockets of his bluejacket. "Caine. Is that like in candy cane?"

  I shrugged. "I'm not bent, and it'll take more than you to lick me, so I'd say not. It's Caine."

  "Like the killer," Bat added quietly.

  Zinger looked me up and down, then dismissed me with a sneer. "What chu want, Natch?"

  "Paying our respects to the dead."

  The youth thought for a second, then nodded slowly. He turned to a confederate wearing a red bandana over his head. "Buc will take you."

  "Gratz."

  Zinger grabbed Natch's shoulder. "If anything happens..."

  Like a striking snake, Bat snagged Zinger's wrist and squeezed until the hand opened like a flower. Natch turned and stroked Bat's free arm. "It's okay, Bat, no harm done."

  "Not yet." Bat smiled in a most horrifying way, displaying strong, sharp white teeth. "You were in a crack, Zinger." He released his hand. "She got you out."

  The street boss pulled his hand back but refused to show it had hurt at all. "Girl, you gotta get that man some lithium or sumthin'. He needs to chill. Buc, go."

  Buc, smaller and stockier than Zinger, walked all loose and open like he'd been put together with rubber bands instead of muscles. He didn't say anything and sauntered along as if he wasn't connected to us in any way. Other folks on the street called out to him, and he winked or hissed or hooted at them, but never said anything I could decipher as words.

  Boxton lived up to its name. Mobile homes and more conventional buildings were stacked up in crenelated clusters that brushed the underside of Frozen Shade at its highest points. Rubbish-choked alleys ran between the trailers, turning Boxton into a rat's warren of twisting trails and dead ends. In the places where the pathways were wide enough for, say, a Scorpion Security vehicle to pass between buildings, the paths themselves doubled back constantly. It took no genius to see the vehicle would be slowed to a crawl and left very vulnerable to antivehicle rockets or automatic weapons fire.

  Buc led us into one trailer at the bottom of a pyramid. We entered without knocking and Buc never even acknowledged the family huddled toward the rear of the building. I only saw them in the light of a boxy television, and the slack-jawed look of stupification on their faces led me to believe they never saw any of us. Grandfather, sitting in an easy chair and sucking on a beer, scratched his belly through the thin material of a stained T-shirt. Mom and her eldest daughter both dandled children on their knees, while two other young kids sat on the floor and close enough to the set that I could only see their eyes.

  Looking at the reality of the trailer, it did not surprise me that the only spark of 1ife I saw in their eyes came from the TV's reflection. Both stove burners had pots encrusted with what might have been rice and beans, but they'd been there for days and the beans looked like a rat had fed itself at some point. Pizza crusts and grease-stained boxes littered the little table that folded down from the wall. The faucet bled rusty water into the sink, and it coagulated into an orange stain on a plastic plate.

  The place stunk of too many people and too much beer. The sour scent of stale beer managed to cut through the thick, musty odor of human habitation, but near the sink it lost to the sharp smell of whatever was growing beneath the unclean dishes. Mildew fur ringed the base of the leaking faucet and had spread to the plastic splashboard.

  We passed through the patio doorway into a trash midden at the center of the pyramid. Buc scrambled up an aluminum ladder and entered through a hole in the bottom of another trailer. Natch followed him and Bat brought up the rear. If not for the additional clue of thick smoke and the exchange of a grandmother for a grandfather, I would have sworn we'd returned to the trailer down below.

  Our trek took us through four more trailers; the only cause for hope was that the deeper we went, the degree of decay lessened. I realized, of course, that residents who lived closer t
o the core of Boxton had gotten there by virtue of either longevity or strength, hence their accommodations had changed hands less often.

  The core residents evidenced more life, but only in the fact that they greeted Buc or seemed to recognize Bat. They were neither cordial or hostile to me—they just treated me like I did not exist. Their homes looked a bit less worn down than the fringe ones we'd visited, but even they were leaky, stinky man-nests. Had hamsters somehow evolved to human size, they would have been comfortable in these places—and in most they would have found a layer of newspaper already laid down.

  Buc led us through a tunnel that ran beneath the freeway, then down a narrow pathway that took us through a hole in the fence around the Greenwood Cemetery. There, deep in the heart of Boxton, the trailers had only been stacked two high and looked in very good condition. Here, behind the walls of their own transient citadel, the leaders of Boxton had it very good. They drew running water from what used to be the cemetery's sprinkler system, and it looked like they pulled power by tapping the overhead cells directly.

  The gang member did not lead us to one of the trailer mansions, but directed us to where a mausoleum had been built into the side of a manufactured hillock. The name above the door read "Freeman." "Inside, cats, you'll find what you want."

  In through the dark doorway and down two steps we found a small room with a canvas cot arranged in a corner. A small candle burned on the bottom of an overturned coffee can. Seated beside it, with a pillow under his rump, an old man leaned against the cold, concrete wall. In his gnarled hands he held a paperback book with the cover torn off. Outside we could hear the roar of cars and trucks speeding along the highway.

  He tucked his half-glasses back up on his white-haired head and blinked at us. "Who are you?" He put a postcard in the book to mark his place, then set it down.