by C. L. Bevill
“Nica!” she yelled. “Get him! Get Patrick Byrne! Stop him!”
Nica immediately stopped yanking on Coco’s bindings and his head twirled to where Sternstein was pushing through reapers and deadies alike in an effort to flee. It even occurred to Tavie that Sternstein might be able to go to the other Deadsvilles and be out of her range forever and more.
Nica launched himself after the fleeing deadie. The expression on the reaper’s face was both intent and deadly. He moved more quickly than any typical human being, and vanished in a second. In the next instant he was in front of Sternstein and the former priest rebounded off the reaper’s body. Nica swung a roundhouse punch that put the deadie onto the floor. There was a round of appreciative murmurs from the attentive crowd.
Tavie looked back in time to see Barastyr on his feet. He wiped frantically at his eyes, tears and mucus streaming down his face. It wasn’t his best look and Tavie suspected he knew it. She braced sore muscles in preparation of his attack. He bent forward slightly, his red-rimmed eyes on hers, and then he smiled. It was that same chilling smile that sent a shiver down her backbone.
Uneasiness flowed through Tavie. She probably couldn’t beat Barastyr. God of the dead versus deadie cop. God would trump cop almost every time. Maybe she could put him on his back long enough to get back through the portal, to scream up Thana, or something that would work.
“All out of weapons?” Barastyr asked shrewdly.
“I’ve got a few left.” Cheese. Cheese. Cheese. Cheese on toast. Cheese on tater tots. Cheese on macaroni. Cheese on top of frickin’ cheese with cheese sprinkles on top.
Barastyr straightened up. The ten-gallon hat had been smashed by one of them in the struggle. His eyes settled on it momentarily and Tavie realized he was a little ticked off about the hat. She would have spit on the hat if her mouth wasn’t as dry as the Gobi Desert.
“All those cowboys from the talkies were wimps,” she said before she thought better of it. “Give me John Wayne any day. Or Clint Eastwood. Hell, I’d take Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid.”
Barastyr growled. “You can’t possibly hope to best me.”
“Gary Cooper could kick your sorry, inbred, knuckle-dragging tushie from here to Tijuana,” Tavie said. She was getting geared up.
The rage faded from Barastyr’s face and was replaced by crafty speculation. Talk about a sure fire way to make a girl nervous, she thought. Cheese. Cheese. Cheese.
Nica appeared by Tavie’s side. “I can’t help you, Tavie,” he murmured. “Barastyr is technically my boss. He’s one level up on all the reapers.” He cast a regretful look over his shoulder. There were more deadies in the back of the church and interspersed among them were a dozen reapers. Their eyes glowed in the gloom. Their scythes swayed as they waited.
“It’s all right,” Tavie said. “You stopped Sternstein and put him out of action.”
“Who’s Sternstein?”
“Patrick, I mean, Patrick,” Tavie muttered. “How did they get you anyway?”
Nica flinched. “They took my scythe,” he said lowly. “I’m not the reaper I was, but I still have some of the reaper’s powers, but they’re draining away from me. It wasn’t enough.”
Barastyr watched them with an astute eye. “I see. The sheriff and the reaper, it should be a serial novel.”
“You should know that there’s always a big ending, then,” Tavie said. Gary Cooper. She thought about Gary Cooper. The film that Charlie Solomon had always liked was High Noon. It was one of his favorites. He’d seen it about a hundred times and worn out two VHS tapes of the movie before Tavie had helped him upgrade to DVDs.
What was it about old movies?
“I think we should just move this along,” Barastyr announced and his right hand shot upward. Sternstein’s knife was in his hand, the decorative knife that someone might purchase in a mall’s knife store. He grinned at Tavie, silently challenging her to stop him. Too late she realized he was standing next to Coco, and Coco was still struggling to get free of the tape.
Tavie leapt for Barastyr as the knife began its horrible plunge.
However, Nica was there first. Using whatever he had left, the reaper put himself in between Coco and Barastyr and the knife didn’t stop.
Barastyr put his weight behind the knife and it sliced into Nica’s chest. There was a moment when no one moved. Slowly, Nica leaned forward, seemingly carefully putting his head on Barastyr’s shoulder.
“No,” Tavie whispered.
The god of the dead didn’t lose his grin. “Well, it wasn’t the girl, but it’ll work,” he said cheerfully. He twisted the knife and Nica groaned. The groan echoed throughout the church as if the building was empty.
Tavie heard the sound come from Nica’s mouth, the last sound he would probably make, the end of a man who was still trying to pay for his misdeeds. She bent and almost absently raised up her pant leg. It wasn’t the leg that had the Leatherman in the holster, but the other leg with the backup weapon. There was another Glock, albeit a smaller one, at less than half of the weight of the first one. No one knew about that one, and she forced herself to think, CHEESE! CHEESE! CHEESE! She drew it up and pointed it at Barastyr’s head. The GOTD was still focusing on the reaper and had disregarded Tavie.
With Tavie’s left hand, she pulled the slide back and chambered a round. The click that it made sounded like a huge gong being struck in a cavern. Barastyr let Nica go and the reaper slid to the floor with the knife still stuck in his chest.
Without hesitation, Tavie fired. Six times in all because it was all the smaller model Glock held in its magazine. Because she wasn’t that far away from Barastyr she hit him with all six rounds. “G42, you creepy bastard,” she whispered. “Any cop with a brain carries a backup weapon.”
Tavie dropped the weapon because she didn’t have a spare magazine for the G42 and went to Nica. She spared Barastyr a brief glance. All six rounds had hit his head and there wasn’t much of anything left there except skin, bone, and dribbles of ectoplasm. The bullets of the smaller Glock were .380 caliber, but they had done the trick. As for Nica, the knife was planted center of mass in his chest. She knew that his heart had been hit and then Barastyr had made doubly sure in twisting the knife.
The dead was dead again. Ironically he had died from a knife wound not once, but twice.
Tavie sat beside Nica and dragged him into her arms. How did someone accept so much death when they were living in the land of the dead? Did they simply learn to accept that death was as much a part of living as breathing was? Did they become cold and uncaring like Barastyr had become? Did they learn how to hide everything? Did they ever stop missing the ones they left behind?
She tenderly brushed his dark hair back from his face. Behind her, she could hear Coco struggling with the duct tape. Someone else came up and started to help her. Tavie looked up for a moment and saw Maximillian with his tantō blade out and slicing row after row of tape so that the teenager could get up.
Tavie couldn’t bring herself to care at the moment. She leaned her head down and rested her cheek on Nica’s cheek. He smelled like someone who had recently bathed and used Dial soap. He didn’t smell like death. It all seemed more than a little unfair to Tavie.
There was a forceful gasp from somewhere and Tavie knew that she should have lifted her head to look but everything seemed so heavy. Finally, she brought her head up and saw Barastyr totter to his feet. The western shirt was inundated with ectoplasm and the scarf was askew. Even his ornate boots were scuffed. He put his hands over his face and coughed.
“Can’t I get anything right?” Tavie asked herself. She looked up and Coco fled down the aisle of the church, headed for the portal. The deadies and reapers parted obediently.
“Do you have any idea how much that hurt?” Barastyr demanded. His voice sounded odd, probably because his face hadn’t reknit together. It was taking him a little bit of time to recombobulate.
Tavie almost giggled. Maybe she could stop this. Co
co might be able to get to Thana or to Enoch. Thana would protect her. Tavie glanced around. Nica’s death hadn’t started the apocalypse so perhaps it needed to be Nica, Coco, and herself. Or perhaps it needed to be Sternstein wielding the knife?
Tavie almost couldn’t bring herself to care. She was down to handcuffs, zip ties, and a Leatherman knife. If she couldn’t bring down a GOTD with a Glock, then she needed a bazooka or possibly a cannon, which wasn’t exactly falling from the skies. A large block of Semtex explosive would have been helpful.
Barastyr staggered a few steps toward the audience and bellowed, “What are you looking at?” He glared over his shoulder at Tavie. “Damn you, woman! Damn you straight to hell!”
Tavie shrugged and patted Nica’s head. “Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt,” she said.
There was a distant roar that made Tavie look up. At first she thought it was Barastyr again, but it sounded like a lawn mower’s engine. It revved up and up until it screamed. Every individual in the church looked toward the back. The pitch increased, growing louder and louder until it felt as though her eardrums would explode because of the pressure.
Then the Polaris snowmobile Tavie had seen in Hungry Hippo Herman’s place came barreling through the portal. Deadies and reapers alike jumped aside to get out of its way.
The Polaris landed on the wooden floorboards with an inhuman squeal that spoke volumes about how snowmobiles were never meant for dirt and wood. The rear tracks screamed as they made contact with rough-hewn planks, and then it was moving again. Just before it came to a screeching stop on top of Barastyr, Tavie saw Enoch in the front seat yelling, “YEE-HAW!” and Thana in the back seat, grinning like the Cheshire cat from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
“Well, you don’t see that every day,” Tavie said.
Chapter 24
Death comes to us whether we are standing or sitting. – Philippine Proverb
~
“No one said death would be boring.” – Octavia Stone
~
“Well, then, what’s been happening around here?” Thana asked as she climbed off the back of the snowmobile. The green jogging suit she wore was one shade shy of neon lime and the contrasting white t-shirt announced, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Below that line was “Except for bears. Bears will just kill you.”
Pudd let the large dog’s throat go and gave him a final venomous snarl. The animal crawled away with its tail between its legs and went to where Barastyr’s hand stuck out from under the Polaris. Who knew a large dog that outweighed weighed Pudd by a good 100 pounds could be intimidated so thoroughly?
“I always wanted to do that!” Enoch yelled chirpily. “I ain’t never got to do nothing like that back in Texas.” He jumped off the Polaris and glanced down at Barastyr. “Dang. He ain’t really dead, is he?”
Thana regarded Barastyr’s arm, which was about the only part of him visible. “Unfortunately not,” she said with recognizable regret.
Enoch and Thana both looked at the rest of the room. Thana’s eyes crawled over the unconscious Sternstein. He was being systematically wrapped in duct tape by Maximillian, who was smiling broadly. Apparently, he had discovered Sternstein’s supply of duct tape. Lillian looked on approvingly.
The god of the dead looked over the crowd of deadies and reapers. Then she finally looked at Tavie, sitting with Nica’s head in her lap. “Ah, I see you figured it all out,” Thana said to Tavie.
Tavie sighed. “Almost all of it. Sternstein, er, Patrick Byrne waited a long time for revenge. He just didn’t know that it took time and effort by Barastyr to get all the right deadies in the correct place, so he was here a lot longer than everyone else. Then there was the issue of Charlie Solomon.” Her bright eyes stared at Thana. “I don’t remember what happened.”
Thana waved her hand. “There were opportunities available that I saw with wide open eyes. Someone was supposed to die, and it didn’t always work out the way the big plan said it was supposed to work out. A girl has to know when to take advantage of a situation.”
“I don’t like the way you put that,” Tavie said coldly. “It’s high-handed and unfeeling. You’ve lost any humanity you had in you. Do you even care that someone had to sacrifice himself in the name of whatever this was?”
Tavie glanced down as she stroked Nica’s head. She didn’t know what she felt for the reaper, but it was lost now, and she would never get it back. Besides the whole being dead thing, and the whole Nica-was-a-reaper thing, and the fact that they didn’t know how long they would be in Deadsville, she would have wanted to give it a chance. She felt cheated that he had died again, and died in a way that meant he wasn’t going to get that second chance he’d worked at so diligently. Would the soup kitchen outside of Chicago notice his absence on Thursday nights?
Thana slowly smiled. “But you bested one of the gods, you came out on top.”
“That would be the snowmobile, not me,” Tavie said.
“Still, it’s over.” Thana motioned at one of the reapers, who came forward. She pointed at Sternstein. The reaper approached Sternstein and Maximillian instantly jumped backward to get out of the reaper’s way.
“Patrick Henry Byrne,” the reaper said.
Sternstein’s eyes opened and he looked at the reaper with horror. He awkwardly twisted to see Barastyr under the snowmobile. Tavie could see his expression go from dread to reluctant acceptance as his entire body abruptly relaxed. The truth was that he was hoisted by his own petard in the form of lots of duct tape. “Accept your judgment,” the reaper finished and touched the end of the scythe to Sternstein’s cheek. That was the end of that. They both vanished in less than the blink of an eye.
“And that’s the end of that particular problem,” Thana said.
Enoch took a deep breath. He turned to look at the crowd of deadies and reapers. “Say, Bob,” he said loudly. One of the reapers moved so that he could see the deputy. Tavie could see that it was the same reaper who had come for Enoch before she had come through the portal to the church. “I think I kin go now. Ain’t that right, Tavie?”
Tavie nodded. “Thank you, Enoch. I hope you see your wife and child very soon. I’ll be praying for you.”
“Bob here,” Enoch said matter-of-factly with a genial hand gesture as the reaper stepped up next to him, “is a pretty cool head. Did you know we both have kinfolk in Dallas, Texas? I reckon his are from the turn of the 20th century, but you never know. We might be kissin’ cousins, several times removed.”
“Enoch Jeremiah Green,” Bob the Reaper said. Tavie could see a little red flags on the cheeks underneath the cover of the reaper, as if he hadn’t wanted Thana to overhear the whole Bob or cousin things. “Accept your judgment,” he finished with a high pitched quaver that didn’t fit into the reaper epitome.
Again a scythe moved. Enoch smiled and he was gone, along with Bob the Reaper.
“Is it my turn yet?” Tavie asked.
“What? You want to leave all this fun and games behind?” Thana asked with evident discontent.
“I haven’t paid my dues yet?”
“It’s not up to me,” Thana said. “Wish it were. Besides which, you have a few more mysteries to solve, don’t you?”
“But you twist the rules, don’t you?” It was a question but it was also a statement.
“I’ve been here a very long time, Octavia,” Thana said.
Tavie looked up and saw some of the other gods of the dead there. Anapa still appeared as though he had walked off a papyrus. He was oddly striking with his black hair and the pale linen cloth contrasting against his burnished skin. He nodded at her as he approved of her actions. Behind him the crocodile thing moved in the shadows.
There was also the skeletal man with the huge eyes. He looked like a conspiracy theorist’s embodiment of proof positive. He didn’t really have an expression on his face so it was impossible to tell what his reaction to recent events was. A pale rat scurried over his shoulders from one
side to the other.
Baron Samedi looked on from another corner. Deadies and reapers alike tried to inch away from him in the crowded church. He puffed on a cigar and his top hat perched jauntily on his head. The albino snake leisurely moved as it turns its head to look at Tavie. The baron winked at Tavie and Tavie nearly winced.
Tavie had had so many feelings of uneasiness that it was difficult to sense a new one washing up over all the old ones. Something was still wrong. Nica was dead and gone and she couldn’t tamp down that wretched feeling that another shoe was about to drop.
The Polaris snowmobile, a very large shoe indeed, moved once and clunked down on floorboards. It was a loud noise that made everyone jump.
“I told you he wasn’t dead,” Thana said idly.
With a tremendous shove the Polaris tipped over to one side and Barastyr said, “You wouldn’t believe how much that stings.”
Tavie should have realized that since six bullets to the head couldn’t do in the GOTD, a paltry snowmobile wouldn’t have done it, either. “Don’t you people die?” she asked bitterly.
“Well, no,” Thana answered with clear surprise. “Gods of the dead and all that. We’re in charge of the dead until someone says we’re not in charge of the dead.”
Barastyr struggled to his feet and brushed off his clothing, teetering as he stood. Parts of him were oddly flattened. Other parts had burst. He slapped the side of his head and one eyeball popped out. “Whoops,” he said. “I’m going to need that.” It rolled by Thana’s feet. She picked it up daintily and tossed it back to him. Barastyr caught it and shoved it back into the socket.
Tavie wasn’t sure if she should be impressed or whether she should throw up.
It took a few minutes but Barastyr put himself back together and with a wave of his hand, his outfit was pristine again. He grinned at Tavie’s dumbfounded look. “Perks of the job,” he said. “Sure we can be hurt, but we always bounce back. Kind of like the deadies.” His eyes fell on Nica’s body. “Well, most of them, anyway.”
