In the Garden of Rusting Gods
Page 8
The saddle bags tugged at her leg, and she killed the excuse mid-breath. Her muscles screamed as she struggled upward, inch by agonizing inch, dragging her pups with her. Slick with ancient grime, she could barely move one limb while supporting herself with the other three. Below her, John inched upward, supporting the saddle bags and their precious cargo with his shoulders.
Lightning flashed, and thunder slammed the breath from her lungs. She wanted to rest, to stop, to give up, but had nowhere to go. So she climbed. And climbed and climbed. Halfway up, John swore, and the rifle clattered to the bottom.
“Leave it,” she said.
He chuckled, a harsh sound devoid of humor. “Planned on it.”
For an eternity she played Sisyphus. Muscles locked, even a rest gave no rest, and the higher she climbed the worse the rain slicked her arms, legs, and the soot-covered brick. The space crushed her, squeezed her lungs, strangled her rational thoughts and left her chained in a cage. Thunder rumbled, lightning flashed, revealing John below, murmuring words of encouragement and comfort, though to her or the pups or himself she couldn’t hear.
At last the sky broke above her, and she grasped the edge of the chimney with a cry of despair just abated. Tears lost in the downpour, she hauled herself out and then lay flat on the cold slate roof, saddle bags clutched in her arms. The pups whined and yelped, and she prayed the rain would drown out their feeble protests.
John dropped next to her and they lay there, frozen in place in the deluge, for several minutes. She knew she had to move again, but wanted to close her eyes in the rain and let it wash her away into nothing. Her shredded muscles couldn’t compete with the agony in her gut, the fire in her chest. But the sky, oh, how she’d missed the sky. Under the sky, in the rain, she could die happy.
“I can’t do this,” John muttered.
Anger fueled her, anger that he’d abandon her, that he’d give up on their pups. “You can. You will, dammit. We’ll—” She caught his smirk in the lightning flash and wanted to kiss and kill him. “You son of a bitch, you got me.”
As adrenaline sparked by anger burned through her, he smiled. “Next flash, to the edge.”
She nodded, and tensed.
The sky lit and she rolled, arms tight around their precious bundle. She hit the wrought iron spikes on the edge of the roof and froze. Another flash, and she hauled over them, hung down as far as she could, and dropped.
Her stomach lurched. A tree exploded in a flash of white on a nearby hill. She hit the ground and cried out as her foot slid, wrenching her calf. Red-hot pain seared up her leg to her lower back, worse with every limping step to the shelter of the tool shed. John appeared beside her, and took their children from her arms.
Laughter and music rang out around them, the torrential downpour doing little to depress the spirits of their hunters. In every direction, campfires fought the rain, but no cries of alarm came from them.
“Are you all right?”
She shook her head, and kept her voice as low as his. “Landed funny. Hurts to walk.”
“Okay. I’ll help you.” She shifted much of her weight onto his shoulders, and took a cautious step. “We’ll go right through them. Just act naturally.”
“No.”
They whirled at the high-pitched voice, and John snarled.
A blonde girl stood not ten feet away, rifle slung across her back, hands empty and outstretched, palms up. Her ponytail stuck out from a Bass Pro baseball cap, and the water rolled off of her camo hunting suit. “Go South. Bill and Derek are drunk. I’ll lead you.”
John looked at Beth, deferring to the alpha female. Beth pressed her hand into his back, toward the girl. John stepped, she followed.
The girl smiled, pretty white teeth in perfect rows. “I’m Hayden. This way.”
Beth grabbed her shoulder. “Why are you helping us?”
She shrugged. “My dad says you’re monsters. You don’t look like monsters to me.”
They passed an unconscious man lying in a pile of beer cans. Beth snatched up his shotgun on the way by. Double-barreled, with six rounds tucked into a Velcro-and-elastic holder on the butt stock, it weighed a zillion pounds. She put it over her shoulder without complaint and plodded through the mud between the child and her husband, gritting her teeth against the pain in her ankle.
They walked for twenty minutes, then forty, stopping at a small creek to drink and fill Hayden’s water bottle. The girl picked her way with easy assurance, one foot in front of the other without hesitation or even a hint of nervousness, every once in a while stopping to check a GPS she kept in her pocket. She glanced more than once at Beth’s limp, but said nothing.
Another ten minutes and Beth stopped, set the shotgun in the dirt. “Wait, please.”
They stopped. Beth smelled the wariness boiling off John, the jumbled discomfort of her pups.
Hayden smelled like soap and sweat and hot, bloody meat. She put her fists on her hips, an almost comical gesture in the pouring rain. “It ain’t much farther.” A pup whined, and Hayden looked at the bag. “Y’all got kids?”
John blinked. “Pups. Six. We need to get them to safety so they can nurse.”
Beth hung her head, almost unable to speak. “I need food. Painkillers. I can’t keep doing this.”
Hayden smiled. “Safety’s just around the corner.”
“Where are we going?” John’s voice projected distrust edged with contained hostility.
“A hunting cabin. The whole crew’s supposed to meet up there tomorrow. After … after you’re dead.” She turned and walked, forcing them to lose her or catch up. They stumbled after her. Sure enough, they rounded an outcropping and in the distance saw a small cabin with a wrap-around porch, a single naked bulb shining out through the front window.
Beth cleared her throat. “And no one’s there now?”
“Nope.” Did she hesitate? Just for a split second? “They’re all staking out your fortress. Plan to go in at sunrise, take you down. Hurry up!”
She took off at a jog.
Beth looked at John, read the desperate hunger there, felt it herself. She nodded. “Yeah.”
He handed her the saddle bags on his way past. By his third step he’d changed, a seven-foot wall of sleek muscle, claws and teeth. He snarled as he leapt. Drool rolled down Beth’s chin, and she almost fainted at the thought of fresh meat.
Hayden dropped prone, and John fell on top of her. He didn’t catch himself, didn’t land on his feet. Then Beth heard the shot, sharp and crisp.
She screamed.
~
Hayden grunted as the dead weight blasted the air from her lungs. Gushing liquid, so much warmer than the rain, ran down her face and hands, filling her mouth with the taste of iron and meat. The creature’s musky scent overpowered the rotting leaves and new grass, and its thick fur almost blocked out the woman’s scream.
A shotgun blast rang out. A rifle responded as she wriggled her way out from under the massive frame. Heavy footsteps stopped just behind her, and she rolled to her hands and knees and took the offered hand, rough with callouses and so, so strong.
Her dad hauled her to her feet.
“Did I do good, Daddy?”
He spat, a brown squirt of tobacco juice that disappeared into the carpet of dead leaves. “Yep. That male’ll fetch us fifty grand, give or take. And ain’t nobody else needs to know we got him.”
“What about the female? She had pups.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Pups, now? That’s interesting.”
“Six of them. Why interesting?”
He spat again. “I know a man’s got a preserve up Ottawa way. You raise those pups right, you got one hell of a hunt in a few years.” He took off her cap and rubbed her head, freeing strands of hair stained a muddy red-brown. “She’s limping, and armed. You catch her, the pups are yours.”
THE EXTERMINATION BUSINESS
1
It was a Dark and Stormy kind of night, and I’d had four by the time the dame walked into my office. You know the deal: black dress, red lipstick, half a cigarette hanging from her mouth. Thing is, she couldn’t pull it off. You ever scratch your ass and get more than you bargained for? Yeah, she looked like that.
“Mister Szymanski?”
“S’what the door says, toots.”
Fatter than my ex-wife and twice as pretty, she tossed an envelope on my desk.
“I have a rat problem.”
Yeah, the extermination business ain’t glamorous, but it keeps the lights on.
2
I picked up the envelope, flipped through the bills. Twenties, a hundred of them, give or take. Smart girl. Even a dame doesn’t come to Mike Szymanski short.
“Where?” I said, eyeing her up and down.
Something about her seemed so familiar, like I’d seen her at a Bat Mitzvah plowing through the rugelach, or behind the dumpster at Eddie’s doing favors for the local flavor. Nothing wholesome, nothing nice.
“You know the apartments off Loyola?”
“Sure.” I wouldn’t call them “apartments” so much as a warren, one of those high-rise projects the cops avoid if they know what’s good for ’em. Good way to get eaten. “Lots of rats in a place like that. What’s a broad like you care about it?”
“They took my brother. He’s only twelve.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
No way the boy was alive, but no use telling her that.
I shoved the envelope in the back of my pants, scooped my gun off the desk and stuck it in the holster under my flask. On second thought, I stuffed an extra handful of silver bullets in my pocket.
Wererats. I fucking hate ’em.
3
I followed her down the stairs, silver bullets jangling in my pocket.
“I’m Mindy, by the way.” She took one last drag and flipped her cigarette butt into the gutter as we exited into the tiny parking lot. Four spaces, three empty, the last occupied by my rusty white panel van circa Johnny Carson was still on the air. “Michael Szymanski, Exterminator” stood out in touched-up green on the side over a painting of a legs-up roach with exes for eyes.
“Where’s your ride?” I asked.
“My boyfriend dropped me off. Figured I could ride with you.”
I paused, ran my tongue over my teeth for effect. “Did he, now?”
She nodded.
“What if I didn’t take the job?”
“We knew you would. ‘Sides, the check cleared.”
I spat. “All right. Hop in.”
She got in the passenger’s side after I unlocked it, and we got on the road. By the time we hit Rangel Avenue, her funk had invaded my nostrils and was taking hostages; cigarette smoke and unwashed hair, body spray too manly—probably her boyfriend’s—and a musty, farty something that reminded me of a guinea pig cage that hadn’t been cleaned in too long.
The beat-up coup three cars behind us switched lanes when I did, twice. Put on my blinker for the wrong exit, and so did it, then we both drove on past.
“So,” I said. “We going to do this here, or wait ‘til we get there?”
4
She stared at me, the kind of stare you get from a disgruntled cashier when you try to be funny. And they’re all disgruntled—just buy your crap and get out of the way.
I made a show of putting on my seatbelt, then snuck my gun out of the holster left-handed.
I don’t know what went through her head at that moment. I’d like to think it was good thoughts, maybe about her boyfriend if he was real, about her kids if she had any, puppy dogs and butterflies or something. Something better than what would go through it later.
When those big buck teeth sank into my arm, I swung the pistol toward her morphing body and pulled the trigger, twice. I expected the transformation, the elongating skull, the wiry fur sprouting from her everywhere, even the ferocity and speed of the attack. But I hadn’t expected her to jerk the wheel.
We served hard, skidded sideways at seventy miles an hour, and with a gun in one hand and a giant rat-faced psycho gnawing on the other, we hit the curb, hard. The van flipped, rolled, her teeth still savaging my arm and still growing. All of which totally would have been survivable if we didn’t flip right over the overpass railing and into the traffic below.
Timing is everything, I guess.
5
My van crashed into the asphalt with a sickening crunch, staving in the passenger side and throwing Mindy or Linda or whatever her name was right on top of me. Addled and shell-shocked, for a second neither of us did anything but stare and wrangle up our ability to think.
She’d gone full rat by then, six feet long, lean and wiry and bloody-mouthed, and her breath was like getting slapped in the face with a sweaty wrestler’s hairy armpit. I put my gun under her chin, only I no longer held it—like everything else in my van, it had become so much flotsam.
So instead, I pushed, pinning her head against the ceiling long enough to undo my seat-belt. She scratched and clawed at my arms, and her back legs shredded my shirt and made mincemeat of my stomach.
I’d just about started to get angry when a wailing horn and the screech of air brakes announced the arrival of a speeding tractor trailer with no room to swerve.
It obliterated my van, the dame, and me, smeared us across several hundred feet of highway in a red-brown streak of blood and gasoline.
And that really pissed me off.
6
I rose up from the cold metal slab and shook to clear the cobwebs from my brain. Or at least to get the spiders off ’em.
Looking down, I couldn’t help but notice the clean boxers, simple black cotton with bright yellow smiley faces on them, like a too-cheerful Batman.
The baby-faced coroner stood over another body—Mindy—chest cut open to put each flabby breast face-down on either side, organs in a tray on another table. Her face still sported a good chunk of charred fur, and her incisors hadn’t retracted. He dictated another sentence and then switched off the recorder as I hopped down.
“Hey, Mike.” He jerked his head to indicate a plastic bag by the door. “Your stuff’s over there.”
“Did you put these on me?”
He grinned. “No, Sheila did.”
“You know I hate it when you guys dress me.”
Dave shrugged. “Wasn’t much to dress. We had to play a little ‘leg bone connected to the shin bone.’”
I shuffled across the cold floor and looked down at her.
“So what gives?”
He shrugged again. “The accident drove her right shoulder through her skull. Looks like someone shot her in the right shoulder with a silver bullet, so it proved fatal. Know anything about that?”
“How could I know anything? I wasn’t even here.”
I grabbed my stuff on the way out the door.
“See ya next time.”
7
Zofia Szymanski was the kind of woman who would loan a cup of sugar to a neighbor, then give them shit about it for the next thirty-seven years. I couldn’t quite say that, because Bob died at year thirty-six-and-a-half, probably from regret that his ex-wife borrowed a cup of sugar from my mom thirty-six-and-a-half years earlier.
“What are ya talkin’ about, ya need to borrow the car? And what are ya doin’ in your underwears?”
I pushed past her into the apartment—not much more than a shoe box with a giant plasma TV. Mom grunted in annoyance but let me through, hobbling after me on her walker as I helped myself to the bottle of scotch on the table.
Duncan’s Dew. The perfect blend for stripping graffiti from bathroom s
talls.
I poured two fingers and swallowed them, savoring the burn in my stomach and shuddering at the taste of peat and burnt hair aged in urine barrels.
“My van got totaled, Ma.”
She grunted as I slapped her hand away from the smiley-face boxers.
“That was you that died last night?”
I sighed at the rhetorical question and the muttered Polish blessings and blasphemies that followed, and poured myself another double.
“Can I borrow the car or not? I have a job to do.”
“Sure, Mikey,” she said. “Take the Benz. But don’t scratch it.”
8
A jet black 1971 Mercedes-Benz W108 should have been a classic car, especially with a single owner over all of those almost fifty years, but the two things no machine can hold out against are entropy and Zofia Szymanski. I opened the creaking door and slid inside, the cracks in the leather seats catching at my leg hair as my ass shoved aside a McDonald’s bag smeared with moldy ketchup. It didn’t quite latch when I closed it so I opened it again and slammed it hard. Ancient upholstery rained on me from the ceiling.
Mom groused out the window at the rough treatment. I ignored her. She loved this damned car so much she’d have breast-fed it if she could have.
At least the engine sputtered to life on the third try.
I backed out of the drive and headed to the office—there wasn’t much chance they’d be looking for me there, what with my being dead and all, but maybe they knew something most people didn’t. So just to be careful I popped the glove box and pulled out mom’s Taurus 454 Raging Bull. One of the original five-rounders, the revolver sported a 2.25” barrel, a hair trigger, weighed a ton, and kicked like a mule. Each slug had been made special, lead for weight, silver for trouble, blessed and benedicted and danced over by priests and rabbis and imams and shamans just for good measure. The hollow-points had been filled with gelatinized holy water.