by L.J. Hayward
Chapter 18
There was dirt in my mouth when I came to. I coughed to get it out and my chest ached. My throat was sore and I’d bitten my tongue and inner cheek. Lovely. Apart from a bit of pressure in my temples, my head didn’t hurt. However I’d gone unconscious it hadn’t been from a blow to the head, which all things considered, was fabulous news.
Opening gummy eyes netted me zero more intelligence. Well, no. It gave me two options. Number one, I was blind. Bit of a bummer if it was correct. Number two, I was somewhere that was completely dark. For the sake of my sanity I decided to go with option two. A moment later, I realised that the rhythmic whooshing sound was me breathing. Wherever I was it was very dark, and confined, and stinky.
Oh dear Lord.
I was in a coffin.
Fumbling around revealed only torn and slimy satin over a hard surface that sat very close to my body. The sides of the coffin were right there, bare inches from my shoulders and arms, the lid not much further away from my face. The rhythmic whooshing lost its beat, became erratic. My heart pounded so loud and fast I could hear it echoing through the cramped space.
Let’s take a moment here. I’m not claustrophobic. Not at all. But put anyone in a used coffin and see if they don’t freak out.
I was buried alive. Not only did I have the hard wood of the coffin to deal with, but also crap knew how many meters of dirt on top. Ghouls are the natural excavators of the supernatural world. They burrow through cemeteries scavenging for food and make themselves lairs under the ground. With no idea how long I’d been out, there was no way to judge how deep they could have buried me. I could very well be closer to freaking Alaska than Australia.
Okay, calm down. Don’t use up all your air hyperventilating. You need to think. You’re in a bit of trouble and you don’t know the entirety of it. Must find out just how deep in the shit heap you are before doing much else. For that, you need to get out of the box and look around.
Easier said than done, but I had a couple of ways of getting things done.
I laid still, trying not to think of the hard shell around me. Moving from the tips of my toes to the top of my head, I relaxed muscles. It helped even out my breathing and settled my mind into a calm state. Since I’d developed psychic abilities, I’d taken up a bit of general meditation. Dr Campbell was pleased with it, said it would help me curb my ‘impulsive behaviour’. I don’t know about that, but it certainly helped me do other things.
There’s a moment between being awake and being asleep. Your body is loose, leaking out the strains of the day. Your mind is discarding all the issues you’ve had to deal with throughout the day and prepping for sorting through all the issues you didn’t get to. This instant of time is a blank canvas. Not a skerrick of paint, not a sketch, not even an idea of what it’s going to become. You aren’t thinking, you aren’t dreaming. A moment that is empty, but one that can become anything. In that space between one beat and the next, all you are is potential.
And that is where all the cool kids go to get their psychic powers.
Awareness rushed into me through the spot just above the middle point between my eyebrows. This was different to the link with Mercy. That was more internal, a private hot line to the emergency services. What I did now was sort of empty all that out and create, if you will, a vacuum inside that let all the external things rush in to fill up the imbalance.
Everything became sharper, brighter, far more intense. I could sense the coffin, the rotting satin, feel the life that lingered still in the wood and material. I could taste the old death and the new life the decaying corpse had birthed. There was a low level, background hum, pleasant when you weren’t trying to figure it out or where it came from; not so pleasant and a lot scary when you turned your full attention to it. I could almost feel the molecules of air against my skin and knew that I could touch and manipulate them to do some pretty funky things.
I reached out and gathered together those molecules, moulded them into a me outside of me. He formed up just over my physical body, face toward my face, a replica made from air and the energy I poured into it. Behold, Invisible Matt! I suppose I could have used any shape I wanted—sphere, cube, Jessica Alba—but I’ve been in this body for a while now and I think it suits me, so I went with that.
Transferring my mind to Invisible Matt was a little trickier. I found the big whack of energy sitting in my solar plexus and began spooling it out like a fire hose. The cord wavered around for a moment, then hit Invisible Matt in his corresponding solar plexus and plugged in. It was a rollercoaster ride, funnelling down into my chest and then up into the umbilical, tumbling and turning and finally crashing down in my new, temporary home. It was scary like a rollercoaster ride, and fun like one too.
You don’t really ‘see’ when you’re outside of your body. No eyes. But you do sense the shape of the energies around you. It’s a bit like infrared, except in tones of black through grey to white, with spots of silver for the really intense things. You also don’t just ‘see’ out the front, either. Nothing is being filtered to you through two relatively stationary organs. Everything comes in from all angles. That can get very disorientating, so the trick is to find something and concentrate on it, train your mind to pretend it’s still looking out at the world through the eyeballs. Because I always formed up Invisible Matt as if I was looking in a mirror, when I settled into his driving seat, my first order of business was to fix my attention on my own face.
My real body was a dim, androgynous shape to Invisible Matt. It was slightly brighter than the dead wood and material around it, but not a lot. That’s only natural. Part of me was AWOL after all. There were patches of brightness though, around the wounds I’d acquired the night before. I hoped it was just a concentration of my body’s immune system and not hot spots of bacterial hoe-downs. Nolan hadn’t seen fit to give me a prescription for antibiotics before I dropped him like a bad date and escaped.
I rolled Invisible Matt over and forced him out through the tiny cracks and imperfections of the coffin lid. We came out into an empty place. By that, I mean, we didn’t emerge into soil. There was a faint enclosure of light, about ten meters square, the edges lined with the hazy, shifting glow of concentrated, but small, life. I guessed we were in an underground hole. Great. Kermit’s lair. The coffin I’d risen from was a vague patch of pale light and I saw several others about the place, some of them still partly buried in the floor or protruding from the walls. They were probably some of the forty-one criminals from Boggo Road. I didn’t want to think about who’s coffin I was now leasing.
Ghouls, I suppose, lead a rather Spartan life. No need for many material goods when your whole existence centres around eating rotting dead things. There was little in the lair apart from the coffins and two burning points of silver that each flickered around central points, candles or lamps. Of course, there was the two ghouls.
Somewhat disturbingly, they’d stacked three of the coffins into a rough couch construction and both of them lounged on it. One was holding a long, very dim object, much the same proportions as an average femur. The ghoul waved it about like a mad conductor, leaning toward the other one as if in impassioned discussion. Whatever clothes he’d scavenged to wear had a waistband, because a piercingly bright L shape of silver sat over his groin. My Cougar, tucked in the front of his pants. Oh for a Glock that might go off and pulverise his balls.
Hearing while lurking about in Invisible Matt was no issue. Sound was just resonating molecules, and that’s pretty much all Invisible Matt was.
“I still can’t believe it,” the ghoul waving the leg bone about was saying. “He was here all along. What sort of luck is that?” He cackled. “Oh well, I still had fun at least. Should have seen the human cow’s face when she saw me—”
“Someone saw you?” Kermit demanded. “You weren’t supposed to be seen. It was supposed to be a quick job. See if he was at that address and take him out if he was.”
“Well, he wasn’t there, o
bviously, but there were these two others sniffing about the place. I decided to leave a message for Hawkins with them.” He snickered. “She’s not going to say anything. No one will believe her. Even if she does talk, they’ll send her off to be anal probed.”
“Gah. Analysed, you twat. Martínez won’t be happy you were seen, Saif. You’ll be lucky if he doesn’t tear your arms and legs off.”
“Whatever.” Saif gnawed at the bone.
So it was Big Red he’d sold me out to. It hurt. Not a lot, but a bit. Kermit had been a good snitch, as far as snitches go, I guess. But by his very nature as a snitch, he was fairly mercenary in his dealings. I wondered what Big Red had offered him. Heh. Probably much the same he’d offered me—continued life. Mental note, get watch back from Kermit. The backstabbing bastard didn’t deserve it.
There’d been a hit on my house, as well. For a moment, I worried about Mercy, then rationalised it away. No one knew about the house at the ’Cliffe. It wasn’t under my name. I kept a small flat in Ipswich as a decoy, with my name all over the lease, insurance details and bank accounts. That was where the hit would have been.
Shit!
It was a good little neighbourhood. Quiet and full of young families. Miss Browne next door was a bit of a busy body, but she was sweet (a little fond of Roberts, too) and collected mail for me. What sort of ‘hit’ had Saif laid down on the place? Damn him. If any of the neighbours were hurt, he wouldn’t have to worry about Big Red tearing him apart. I wouldn’t leave enough behind for the vampire to find let alone pick up.
Then there were the pair Saif had seen there. Cops? If so, they’d have to be plainclothes because I’m sure Saif would know a police uniform if he saw one. That meant more than a simple matter if the detectives were out looking for me. Crap. What had I done now? Unless it wasn’t the police. But who else would come looking for me? Duh. Saif had, at the behest of a big vampire colonel. A daytime hit when I wouldn’t be expecting it. I guess I had pissed Big Red off so much he was past the negotiation stage. Could then these other pair be snooping around for a similar reason? Who else had I bothered lately? No one, if you ignored Barry of Surf Wars, who might resent me charging him for the pleasure of messing up his business.
This wasn’t fair. Two parties after me and I only knew half the reason. Or maybe it was the whole reason. If Big Red wanted Mercy for his very own, maybe the other clans were after her as well. It was an answer, but not a very encouraging one. Brilliant.
And here I was, trapped underground in a coffin. Chances were it wasn’t daylight outside anymore. Which meant Mercy was free to move around. While she didn’t have to eat every night like most other vampires, she was just recovering from a serious beating and meal of incompatible blood. She would probably be hungry. As if I didn’t have enough problems.
Still, she was out of the cage and mobile. I could reach her through the link and get her to come break me out. Oh, look at that very grey cloud, but is that a silver lining I see peeking through? Whacko.
The good thing about psychic powers is that they go wherever your psyche is. I reached out through the link to Mercy from Invisible Matt. If she was still at home, she was a good forty odd kilometres away. I hadn’t tried to contact her over such a distance before. Of course, I hadn’t needed to in the past. This was about the deepest shit I’d been in on my own. Usually events conspired to get me and Mercy in the one shit pile at the same time. First time for everything.
Mercy was not forty kilometres away. She was a lot closer. At least that’s what I thought when I smacked into her within moments of starting along the link. Excitement didn’t last long however.
Her mind was a solid barrier, a hard mass of seething hunger and anger. She was completely gone into a frenzy, more so than the other night at Surf Wars. There, she’d been hunting. Here, she wasn’t even that focused. Her empty stomach bellowed at her, whipped her into an insane fury. She was operating on the most basic instincts, the ones that required no higher consciousness. This red hot, raging cyclone of purely physical needs and wants was what Mercy could have been all the time if I hadn’t taken her in. This was what she’d been yesterday morning, a vicious, violent creature intent on only one thing. Thing was, she was free tonight.
I felt sick. Even in Invisible Matt’s nebulous form. What sort of carnage was she creating out there? How many people had got in her way? Damn it. I should have put her down when I had the chance. I should never have messed with the natural order of the supernatural world. It was my fault. She was out there and she was a pinnacle predator. Dear God.
The funny thing about getting angry is that you don’t always start off mad. Sometimes, okay, most times, anger comes from fear. You don’t understand something and get the notion that it might harm you, so you get angry. It’s a defensive reaction. See, I did listen to Dr Campbell.
I was plenty scared right about now.
Invisible Matt was a loose concentration of molecules. With a bit of effort, I could turn that looseness into something with more substance. Right then, it was hardly any sort of effort. I channelled my growing fear and anger into it and everything became much denser. Moving now had a weight to it, a drag of resistance. Great.
Invisible Matt—a little less invisible now—spun around and crashed into my coffin. He kicked and punched and tore at the old wood. It broke apart and my body tumbled out of the wreckage. Behind us, Kermit and Saif were on their feet, staring bug-eyed at the shadowy figure breaking their captive from the box they’d stuffed him in. I didn’t wait to see what they’d do. I dissolved Invisible Matt and rode the umbilical back into my physical body. I slammed home and was moving before I’d even fully settled in.
Idiot ghouls had left my pockets alone and I reached for the two handiest weapons.
Still focusing my eyes, I rolled and came to my feet, unsheathed SAS knife in one hand, the other flicking out the telescoping nightstick. The freaks didn’t even see it coming.
I hit Afzal first. He still oozed from the bullet wounds. Ghouls didn’t really care about wounds. He would let the bullets work their own way out or leave them in, whatever. Bacteria meant nothing to something that lived off putrefying flesh. If I was a bacteria, I wouldn’t want to go squirming about inside Afzal if I had a choice, either.
We met in the middle of the room. He came in low, hunched up, arms out wide. I jumped and rolled over his back, landing behind him. A sweep from the nightstick took out one of his knees. He roared and went down.
Then Saif was there. He took a wide swing at me with the femur. I ducked and darted inside his reach. I slashed across his gut with the knife and grey blood spilled. He staggered and tried to take me down with him. Slipping his hold, I twisted around and planted my boot on his neck, forcing him down the rest of the way. Bones crunched, but he managed to grab a hold of my foot. He jerked it to the side and turned it sharply. I rolled with the turn but it put me on the floor beside him.
Saif did this freaky little thing where he seemed to just lift straight up off the ground and land on top of me. His lipless mouth peeled back from his sharp teeth. Oh Lord. His breath stank. That alone was nearly the end of me. His long fingers wrapped around my throat, holding tight but not choking off my air. Ghouls liked their food one of two ways. Rotting or screaming. No real in betweens for them. Saif’s mouth opened wide and then, ugh, hyper-extended. I got a good view of his black tongue curling back in his mouth, which was now wide enough to eat my whole face in one very foul swoop.
Gross.
