“Shit,” I said.
A gun barked next to me. Collins had finally got his pistol out. He pumped a couple of rounds into the bat-creature. Pink blood spurted from its wounds, making it screech in pain. Collins didn’t notice the other bat swooping in until it was too late.
The second creature came smashing through the next window and slammed into him talon-first. I doubted he even knew what hit him before the bat drove its beak into his head and cracked the bone like it was made of balsa wood. His finger squeezed reflexively on the trigger of his gun, firing one more round before he went still. I swallowed back vomit as the creature’s head jerked up, blood and skin dangling from its beak. Poor fucking kid.
The first bat turned its head to regard me. I could sense something, the same weirdness I’d felt before, but right then I was more concerned with ending up as bird food. I stretched for Collins’ fallen pistol. Out of my reach. I was screwed. At least I’d be saved the long death of my poisoning. That was me, the eternal fucking optimist.
The bat’s beak jerked forward. I closed my eyes and waited for the sharpness to pierce my skull. Claudia’s face flashed in front of me. I failed her.
But when the crunch of the bird’s beak came, it wasn’t my head snapped in two. There was suddenly slack in the handcuff chain. I opened my eyes and found the mangled mess of the other bracelet dangling from the chain, no longer attached to the chair. The bird had bit right through it. I was free.
I put my palms on the ground, ignoring the stabbing of shattered glass, and tried to scramble to my feet. But then the creature beat its wings and leaped forward. The weight of the thing knocked the breath from me and drove me back to the ground. Talons dug into my shoulder, so deep I swear I could feel them grinding against bone. I screamed.
The bat dragged me along the floor, then lifted me toward the window frame. My fingers tried in vain to grab at something, anything. I could see over the edge to the street below. Sweat drenched my face, cold in the wind. Below, I caught a glimpse of dead creatures littering the road. A couple of cops looked up at me and the bats perched in the window. I couldn’t decide if I wanted them to try shooting it or not. Maybe friendly fire was better than the alternative.
But before anyone could loose a shot, the bat leaped into the air, dragging me with it. There was a sudden sense of falling. My stomach lurched. The police station disappeared behind me, and then there was nothing between me and a long fall except a flying monster from another world.
As the streets swept by below me, I started to wonder what the hell I’d done to piss off Lady Luck.
SEVENTEEN
I gotta say, heights weren’t my favorite thing in the world. I mean, they usually didn’t cause me much more than an uptick in my heartbeat and a desire to take a step back. But I had my limits, and dangling from the claws of a giant bat-creature a couple hundred feet above the street was one of them.
All my muscles had turned to stone. My stomach was clenched so tight it was at risk of collapsing into a black hole. I tried to shut my eyes, but my eyelids refused to obey. The city continued its horrifying movement below until the pops of gunfire outside the police station faded away and the only sounds were the wind in my ears and the alternating flapping of the creature’s four wings.
The pain in my shoulders had faded to a distant throb. I could barely feel my arms, but that didn’t concern me. Even if I could use them, I was too scared about dislodging myself from the creature’s grasp to go flailing about. I resolved to never set foot in an airplane again if I ever got out of this.
It took me a while to realize the bat was descending again. The other bat—the one that had impaled Collins—was playing wingman, guiding us down. I’d gotten so turned around with adrenaline and fear that I wasn’t sure exactly where I was, but if that light back there was the Bore, we must be headed north, toward the northern industrial district or the airport. Yeah, I could make out the runway off to my ten o’clock.
The creature’s flapping turned into a glide. The ground began to get bigger. My eyes watered against the constant assault of dry air and the first hints of smog. I was sure we were descending too fast, and I wanted a word with the captain.
We were over the oldest part of the industrial district now, where most of the factories and warehouses stood cold and empty. The high fences were no longer able to stop anything, full of rust and holes. Graffiti even marked the roofs of the buildings, proudly displaying some illegible tag or other. One of the spray-painted images resembled a bullseye. For a moment a new wave of panic took me as I wondered if the creature was planning on playing a modified game of lawn darts with me as the dart.
But we continued to descend until a large loading area emerged from behind a green factory with twin chimneys piercing its sloped roof. The bat-creature banked and changed the angle of its wings to slow itself. It wasn’t as slow as I’d’ve liked.
My feet hit the ground, sending shockwaves rippling through my feet and up my legs. The pressure on my shoulders disappeared. I toppled forward, getting my arms up just in time to scrape them along the concrete. Pins and needles poked holes in my arms as the blood rushed back.
Wind beat against my back. The sound of flapping wings faded into the distance.
I struggled to my hands and knees as I heard the footsteps behind me. Heart hammering, I tried to get to my feet. Something sapped me on the side of the head, and I decided the ground wasn’t so bad after all. I felt a pinch in my thigh. I got my vision back in time to see a small syringe sticking out of me, gripped by a Vei’s hand.
I didn’t feel so worried anymore. I didn’t feel much of anything. It’d be nice to sleep.
I was in a bar. Cigarette smoke touched my nostrils. I didn’t mind. The bar stool was soft underneath me. I looked down at my arms and found my jacket clean and unripped. It was old, but it fitted me perfectly. Or maybe I fitted it perfectly. It was hard to tell.
A gentle rain of voices soaked me, overlaid with the trickle of music coming from a jukebox in the corner. I thought about going over and seeing if they had some Keith Jarrett or Miles Davis, but when I put my hands in my pocket, I only came up with a ten dollar note and no coins.
I decided to get a drink to break the note, and the bartender appeared in front of me. I could swear he wasn’t there before, but that didn’t seem to bother me.
“Hey, pal,” I said. “Can I get a beer? Whatever you’ve got on tap.” I slid the note over to him.
The bartender’s face was hard to make out, but I was pretty sure he smiled and nodded. He poured me a drink of liquid gold and put it on a coaster for me. He put my change into a small stack of coins, with the biggest on the bottom and the smallest on the top, then slid them over to me. The coins clinked satisfyingly as I picked them up. I brought the beer to my lips.
“Do you think you should be doing that?” asked the woman sitting next to me. Her voice had an accent. German, I thought.
I turned to her. Like the bartender, I was sure she wasn’t there before. She wore a silver cocktail dress that dropped to mid-calf, and her blond hair was pulled behind her in some sort of clip. A pair of hoop earrings dangled from her ears. She wasn’t the sort of beautiful you’d see in a magazine, but when she smiled at me, it made me happy.
“Tough break,” I said, “when a guy can’t even drink a drink in his own dream.”
She looked around the bar, and I followed her gaze. It was a small place—maybe a dozen tables—but the walls were plastered with photographs and the lights cast a warm orange glow over the place.
“Is that what this is?” Claudia said. “A dream?”
Claudia. As I thought her name, her face came into sharper detail. Her eyebrows were narrow and arched, and her jawline had a squareness to it. The lipstick she wore wasn’t quite enough to cover up the deathly blue of her lips.
I sipped my beer before I spoke, enjoying the warmth as it went down. “Either a dream or another hallucination, I suppose.”
“What�
�s the difference?”
I couldn’t remember. Maybe there wasn’t one.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
“You called me, you asked for my help. But I didn’t help you.”
She smiled and crossed one leg over the other. Behind us, the conversations continued, but when I tried to see who was sitting at the tables, everyone was in shadow.
“Can you forgive me?” I asked.
“No.”
I nodded and took another pull of my beer. “Because what I did was too terrible? Or because you’re a figment of my imagination?”
She shrugged.
“You are a figment of my imagination, right?” I asked.
“You’ve never believed in ghosts. Don’t start now.”
“Why am I having these hallucinations? Am I just crazy? Or is it something else?”
She shrugged again.
I swiveled in my seat and played with the coins in my hand. I considered buying Claudia a drink, but I wasn’t sure if hallucinations could actually drink, and I didn’t want to offend her.
There was something strange about the layout of the bar. A stage was at one end running perpendicular to the countertop, and a pair of doors sitting side by side said GUYS and DAMES. Except the doors were painted onto the wall, and they didn’t have any handles. Then I figured out what was bothering me. There was no exit. It didn’t concern me as much as I thought it would.
“I’m dying, kid,” I said after a while.
“I know,” she said.
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to nail the guys who killed you before I get killed myself.”
“Not the way you’re going now,” she agreed.
I grunted. “You know, for a guiding spirit or whatever the hell you are, you’re not very supportive. Can’t you just tell me everything’s going to be all right?”
“The world doesn’t work that way. Sorry.”
“That’s okay. Not your fault.” I jingled the coins in my hand. “Say, what do you want me to put on the jukebox?”
She smiled. I realized she hadn’t blinked since we’d started talking. “Why don’t you play something?”
“I don’t have my…” I turned and found a black case sitting on the bar. “Oh.”
I unfastened the catches and took out my silver trumpet. It was cleaner than I remembered. We’d been through a lot together, me and it. I was playing it when I fell in love for the first time. But that was a million years ago. I would’ve thought by now I’d be a bit wiser, but it never seemed to happen.
“Got a request?” I asked.
She said nothing for a moment. Instead, she took my hand and slipped to her feet. I let her lead me along the length of the bar, following the soft whisper of her footsteps. And then I saw where she was taking me.
The stage was all set up. Salin sat on a high stool, his dark hair falling across his face and a double bass resting against his legs. On the other side of the stage, a scrawny guy in sunglasses sat in front of a keyboard. Bubbles. They both nodded at me as Claudia led me up the stairs.
“You don’t have to play alone,” she said.
“Is that supposed to be some kind of mystic wisdom?”
She smiled again. The warmth filled my chest again. But this time, it was tinged with heaviness.
“One last song,” she said. “And then you have to go.”
I nodded. “I’m a busy man.”
“Miles,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Everything’s going to be all right.”
I smiled. “Take it, guys.”
We played until the end of time. We played for our lives.
EIGHTEEN
Coming to was like crawling out of a swamp. A warm, pleasant swamp, but a swamp nonetheless. I could still hear the music in my head. The smell of cigarette smoke was more abrasive back here in the real world. Grudgingly, I opened my eyes.
I was inside a factory. Row upon row of giant cylinders attached to rusted machines took up most of the space beneath the high ceiling and the hanging fluorescent lights. The windows were covered up with yellowed newspaper. If I had to guess what the factory used to do, I’d say textiles. But I got the feeling I hadn’t been brought here on a field trip.
There were about thirty guns pointed in my general direction. Most were handguns and shotguns, but I picked out a few nastier-looking pieces among them. One of the assault rifles looked like it could take down an armored rhinoceros in one shot.
It took me a couple of seconds to get past all the shiny death machines pointed at me and actually see the people holding them. Both men and women were among them, with maybe two-thirds Vei and the rest humans of all colors. None of them looked like they’d bathed much in the last week. Then again, I wasn’t one to be talking. Their clothes were mismatched and non-uniform, but they all had a sort of utilitarianism about them. They looked mean enough to send a tax collector running. Whoever these guys were, they weren’t AISOR.
I was in an office chair—tied up, of course—facing the wall where a few cracks of sunlight got past the papered-up windows. My shoulders hurt like hell. I could still feel the handcuff bracelet on my wrist, just below where the ropes rubbed the raw skin. After a few experimental tugs on the rope, I decided I had more immediate concerns.
The crowd seemed to be waiting for something. A few of them glanced to my right. I craned my neck to see what they were looking at.
“Hey, Stretch,” I said. “How’s the dentistry business going? Put drills to any more teeth lately?”
The black-coated giant folded his arms and said nothing. I could make out the shape of his short-barreled shotgun beneath his coat.
Stretch had a way of commanding attention, so it took me a couple more seconds before I realized he wasn’t the one in charge here. A Vei dressed in a leather jacket sat cross-legged on top of a crate next to him. A cigarette stuck out the side of his wide mouth, and a red headband was wrapped over his thickly-ridged forehead. When he reached up to pluck the cigarette from his mouth, I saw he was missing a couple of teeth. The Vei blew smoke and unfolded himself.
“Miles Franco. Heard you were stubborn. Told you to stay outta this.” He spoke like a machine gun.
Stretch nodded and glanced at the Vei. “You should’ve let me tell him harder.”
The Vei grinned, baring his rows of sharp teeth. My mouth felt awfully dry all of a sudden. I could feel my coins in my pocket. Maybe if I stretched…no. Vivian had my Kemia. I was going to give her a piece of my mind. If I had any left by the time I got out of this.
“I don’t like taking orders from…well, anyone, to be honest,” I said. “But especially not people who threaten me.”
The Vei took another drag of his cigarette and walked quickly toward me. His movements were jerky, wild. Vei were normally a bit screwy, but this guy was pushing it. Stretch jerked his head at the others. They lowered their weapons a little and backed away to give us more space.
“Fair enough,” the Vei said, “mmm, fair enough. Name’s Bohr. Daniel Bohr. Like the physicist, yes?”
Something about the name seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “I’d shake your hand, but, you know…” I wriggled in my bonds.
“Yes, yes, a pity that. Surprised to find you unarmed. No Kemia either. Still, can’t be too careful.”
“I don’t like guns,” I said. I glanced around at the wide assortment on display. “So anyway, Mr. Bohr—”
“Daniel.”
“Usually the people who kidnap me aren’t so cordial. You couldn’t fix me a Coke while you’re at it, could you?”
To my surprise, he met Stretch’s eyes and nodded. The lanky giant whispered something to a short, skinny Vei woman. The woman tucked her revolver into her belt, glanced at me with an unreadable expression, and strode away. All right, now this guy’s really scaring me.
I cleared my throat. “Uh, anyway, I was just wondering some things. Like who the fuck you are and why you got t
rained Limbus monsters to capture me. Nice trick, by the way.”
“Thank you.” His grin grew so wide he could’ve fit a whole baby in there. “I knew you’d appreciate it. Been seeing you on the TV. They say you were the first to open a Limbus Tunnel. The creatures aren’t tame, just controlled. A special Pin Hole. I could show you, but I won’t.” He paused an instant for breath. “But your questions, yes. I’m what you’d call the leader of this motley band.” His pronunciation of “motley” was slightly off, like he’d been saying it in front of the mirror too much. “We call ourselves the Collective.”
I probably should’ve seen it coming. That Aran guy certainly had good information. I wondered what all these gangsters and evil corporations did when they weren’t screwing with me. Maybe I was on a list somewhere. Guys That You Can Beat and Kidnap Without Consequence.
“You’ve heard of us,” Bohr said. “Good, good, that’ll save us time. As for the why, well, that’s more complicated. Ah, here’s your drink.”
The short Vei woman appeared in front of me again. The glass she was holding was more suited to a cocktail than Coca Cola, but I wasn’t picky. She moved to give it to me, but Stretch intercepted her. He took the glass from her hands, put it to my lips and tilted it almost tenderly. I sipped and tried to pretend the bastard hadn’t kicked the shit out of me just yesterday. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched the Vei woman blend back into the crowd. There was even ice in the drink. Classy.
“Good?” Bohr said.
I smacked my lips. “Could use some bourbon in it.”
“No bourbon, sorry. I don’t drink. Now, the hard business. There’s a war going on, Miles Franco. You walked into the middle. Into…what is the name? The place between the trenches.”
“No man’s land,” I said.
“Yes, a good name, I like it. Didn’t want you involved. Messy.”
“I’ve never known gangsters to be particularly concerned about collateral damage.”
He shook his head. “Bad for business. Bad for public image. That’s why the Collective doesn’t deal drugs. Too risky, too many communities damaged. Doesn’t further the goal. Smuggling weapons and tech easier.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out what looked like a small ivory handle. But then he pressed something, and a spike four feet long shot out the end, turning it into a glimmering fencing sword. “Made by a hidden Vei tribe. Don’t normally trade with Earth. Very dangerous. Pierces your human kevlar like…like…”
The Man Who Walked in Darkness (Miles Franco #2) (Miles Franco Urban Fantasy) Page 14
