Rebirth

by H. P. Mallory

  I yelled out when my body slapped onto the pavement. Damn! That smarted like a…

  Wait a minute… pavement?

  That took my mind off the pain and I decided ta take a better look around me. Well, the Fury managed ta do her job. I was back in Dis! An’ yeah, it looked like my body was pretty good an’ dislocated but nothin’ that a few minutes wouldn’t heal.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Bill

  Now, I gots ta admit. As far as places Furiosa coulda dropped me, there’s way worse places than Dis, which is kind of like NYC… only with one-hundred-and-fifty percent more demons. It’s got all the kind of junkrap you’d see in any city on Earth but at least in Dis you had a fifty/fifty shot o’ not gettin’ jumped by Alaire’s crew.

  I took a quick peek around ta see if I was alone, which was how it looked. Yeah, the coast was clear… no Watchers and only an occasionalized car rollin’ up and passin’ me on the street. That’s when I decided to check the phone.

  One thing I didn’t have to worry about around here was power. The forcefield ‘round this place kept every cell inside it charged up. But then I saw something that wasn’t there the last time I passed through with Lils and Tido. Signal strength round here was decent but never higher than two bars. Now it was all the way up to five and you sure as shit couldn’t blame the weather for that happenin’ down here.

  I picked myself up and had another three-sixty glance around to make sure I was still alone. Which I was. But the longer I stayed out here, the more likely I’d run into trouble all over again. That cheery little bubble is what made me finally notice the dumpster ahead o’ me on the right. Doubt anybody’d think to look for an escapee like yours truly in there. ‘Course I’d rather be chillin’ inside an actual building but ya takes whatever ya gets, right? Choosers can’t be beggars.

  Once I felt sure my legs still worked after my dive from the sky, I went over to the dumpster and tried ta get inside it. It seemed like the window in my cell all over again, minus the booster table. Musta taken about four tries before I finally got a good enough grip on the lip ta haul myself up. When I remembered how I managed to slip through the window, I got ta thinkin’ that maybe losin’ all that extra weight was actually a good thing for me. But when I realized what I was sayin’, I had to like symbolickly punch myself upside the head without actually hurtin’ myself.

  I didn’t so much crawl as slipperate and crash inside. Before I got stuck in Hotel Cali-Fuck-You, the smell from all the crap I was lyin’ on top of woulda been harsh in my nostrils. Now, I considered it mostly overboring. Compared to the castle dungeon, this joint was practically a five-star hotel.

  The garbage was piled high enough for me to reach up to the lid at the back corner, near the hinge. I gave it a good tug and barely got my fingers out o’ the way before it crashed down on top o’ me. My ears started cussin’ me out for makin’ even more noise pollution. For a few minutes I waited for someone to lower the boomstick on me, but it was only me, the darkness and the reekin’ garbage. Oh, yeah, and the cell, which was givin’ off the only light in this whole joint.

  I walk/waddled to the nearest metal wall, takin’ the most comfortable seat I’d sat in for a while and I started scrollin’ through my contact list. That little errand took me a long damn time too ‘cause Billy Angel is popular, if ya knows what I means… wink wink.

  Skeletorhorn was out. Even if I trusted that weasel bastard to actually follow through on a legitegal complaint, I doubted he’d give us any help. It wasn’t even worth the bother o’ talkin’ to him. So I put a call in to the only people at AE I knew would actually help. Or might.

  After the third ring, the phone was answered. “I told you never to call this number again, Bill.”

  Despite the audible growl in her voice, I couldn’t have been happier than if I’d just spent a week-long orgy with Jenny’s girls. “Hey, yo, Polly! How’s tricks?”

  “Don’t ‘Polly’ me, you careless, little letch,” Polly snapped back. “After all the cover-up for that Lily Harper fiasco, my sister and I have more than earned a long stretch of some peace and quiet from you.”

  Won’t lie… that barb stung me a bit. Havin’ known Polly and her sister for centuries, I’d never called in a favor. Well, not since the one when they had ta tone down the language in the report on my epic failure at protectin’ Lils on her last car trip home. If AE knew exactly how badly I’dmessed up, they’d have prolly disincomposed me… if I were lucky. If I weren’t, I’d prolly be makin’ a new home in the Asylum, and spendin’ my eternity as an angel-cicle.

  “Who’s on the phone, Polly?” said another voice on the other end.

  “Nobody important,” Polly told her sister, the less ugly one. When the sound got muffled, I figured she musta put her hand over the receiver.

  Polly and her sister were Muses. Yeah, seriously—Greek goddesses! But only one o’ them was nice.

  “Nobody knows the trouble I seen,” I sang into the phone. “Nobody knows…but Polly.”

  Just like always, Polly’s sister barked out a laugh before I heard a quick scuffle on the other end. I took the phone away from my ear to avoid my ears gettin’ bludgeonocked too much more but the sweet voice I heard next made me put it closer again.

  “Billy!” Sally all but trilled. “It’s been far too long!”

  For what musta been the nine millionth time, I had ta wonder how this pair o’ opposites could actually be sisters. “I know, but hey… places ta go, things ta do…”

  “Husbands to cuckold, drugs to consume and responsibilities to dodge?” Sally finished with another unique laugh. It always made me think o’ the happiest, sappiest song I ever heard, one that still put me in a good mood. Hearin’ it in the middle of the Underground City was about the best thing that happened to me all year.

  I heard a click before Polly’s voice returned ta play killjoy. “Do you have any idea what trouble we’re currently courting by—”

  “Oh, lighten up, sis!” Sally said, and I could tell she’d put the call on speakerphone ‘cause it sounded all echoey an’ shit. “How many times have you said that we could run circles around any investigation that comes our way? We didn’t get to be Junior and Senior VPs of Requisitions just by our outstanding looks.”

  As usual, Polly didn’t like it when her sister made too much sense. “No, but we could lose everything we’ve worked so hard to build by associating with this stone screw-up.”

  “C’mon, Polly,” I said, puttin’ in my two cents. “You can say ‘fuck-up’ if you want. I sure won’t feel offended.”

  “Be that as it may, Bill,” Polly retorted with an edge as sharp as Conan’s sword. “I’m uncertain if you really want to hear everything I intend to tell you.”

  “Well, I’ll see your ‘uncertain’ and raise you with a ‘you’re gonna want to hear this!’ And I swear to God, I’m really in trouble this time.” I wasn’t joshin’ either but Sally laughed all the same.

  “Of course you are, Billy! You wouldn’t be you otherwise! How can we help?”

  “You mean besides getting him that unauthorized phone last month?” Polly snapped at her. “Behind my back, no less!”

  “You knew about that?” Sally asked her, soundin’ very confused.

  “Senior… VP… of Requisitions,” Polly shot back, almost like a death threat. “Not a single piece of equipment goes anywhere in Afterlife Enterprises that I am unaware of or can’t track down.”

  “Anyway, Billy is on the up and up now,” Sally started. “Do you know what he’s been doing for Lily?”

  Polly started really yelling at her. “Besides getting her killed?!”

  “Listen, if I can’t get some help soon, like, yesterday afternoon,” I inter-rejected, “Lils is gonna be in even worse shape than how I left her the last time we talked.”

  Some of the bubbly in Sally’s voice vanished when I said that. “It’s bad this time, isn’t it, Billy?”

  “Leagues worse than anythin’ else I ever
got mixed up in, yo, and that’s sayin’ something.”

  I heard a steady tap-drippin’ noise next to the phone that sounded like tappin’ o’ fingernails. Figured it musta been Polly; she only did that when she was tryin’ to wrap her computer brain around some kinda misunderestimated situation. Eventually, she sighed and said, “Okay, Bill… make your case.”

  So I did a quick recapsulation of everything that happened to me, Lils and Tido since we first set out on this road trip. It took me a while ta remember everything and I had ta backtrack a bit to clear up a detail or two for the girls. But I finally got through my story and the only thing I heard on their end o’ the line was a steady hum and Polly tapping away.

  The tapping finally stopped and Polly cleared her throat. “If even half of this turns out to be true, we’ve got a major malfunction of management in progress.”

  “Knew you’d see reason, Polly,” I told her quiet-like.

  “I said if,” Polly repeated.

  “Really, Polly?” Sally asked, sounding just as disgusted as I felt… and not because I was sittin’ on a bed of garbage as a couch cushion.

  “Don’t you start up too,” Polly said, and I could almost see the finger she most definitely was pointin’ at Sally. “We both know Bill too well! He’s fed us lines like this before and—”

  “Like this?!” I objaculated. “Sure, I’ve told youse some whoppers in my time but never anything like this! No way in hell I’d ever be able ta make all o’ this up neither!”

  “What he said!” Sally added, backing me up.

  “And you wonder why I have such a hard time trusting you when it comes to Bill,” Polly said.

  I started rubbin’ my forehead. The crap I was smellin’ was a sad reminder of where I was. “Look, I know you got the tech to track my cell location. Just trace this call and you’ll see I wasn’t pullin’ your leg about my current locationary position.”

  “Uh-uh,” Polly snarled. “You’ve got some kind of signal hopper that—”

  “Sweet Hera, Polly!” Sally barked out with a laugh that did not sound too joyful. “Did somebody forget how many days it took me to teach Billy Instagram? You really think he’s smart enough to even know what a signal hopper is?”

  “I swears I’m not!” I added.

  Polly sighed again but growled out, “I really hate it when you bring up the facts.”

  That precedenated another round of tappin’ on the keyboard but not like before. If I ever found myself in a room full of monkeys and typewriters, I’d have no problem findin’ Polly just by the way she furiously attacked her keyboard.

  Once the rain of fingers finally ceased, she said, “Well, look at that… you actually are in Dis.”

  “Not exactly my favorite spot ta hangout either,” I reminded her.

  “Hold on… that can’t be right.”

  “Yeah, an ex-guardian angel bein’ down here is the very defenestration of—”

  “No, not that part, Bill. I’m talking about the cell tower network you’re using. It’s completely unregistered… which, FYI, should be impossible.”

  “You said something about knowing where every piece of equipment from AE goes, sis?” Sally teased.

  “Oh, shut up and do something useful,” Polly snapped. I heard some keys bein’ tapped, and I doubted the fingers tapping them belonged ta her.

  “Well, how’s this for making myself useful?” Sally asked a few seconds later. “I just discovered a data trail of shipments destined for Dis that kept changing contents with each stop.”

  “Such as…?” Polly asked, soundin’ more interested.

  “Fifty crates of hellfire brick becoming fifty crates of decorative ceramics turning into fifty crates of spitfire seeds… and that’s just one shipment that went to Dis.”

  “How many more got down here?” I asked as my curiosity became more aroused.

  “I’ve got at least fifteen more I just picked up,” Sally answered. “But that’s not all of it. I’m also seeing a lot of shipments like those going to other parts of the Underground City and using the same name change scam.”

  “Fuck!” I said. Really, there wasn’t much else I could say. Sure, Alaire was always up ta something. But this stuff seemed to sugguessin’ that it was a lot bigger than even Tido coulda thought possible.

  “It seems I owe you an apology, Bill,” Polly said with some reluct-can’ts. “While I can barely tolerate an inefficient and fairly stupid bureaucracy, I refuse to let such blatant corruption like this stand.”

  That made me smile. “Why do you think youse girls were my first call?”

  “Because there were no better options to handle this by yourself?”

  That made Sally laugh even harder than before. “She’s got your number, Billy.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yuck it up,” I replied. “What about that car I saw Tido gettin’ into at the castle? Know where it is now?”

  Sally laughed again, but not as hard. “You know, Billy, one of these days, you’re actually going to ask me to do something I find difficult.”

  “Well, I just did,” I teased her while she tapped on some more keys. “But you keep puttin’ an unhealthy distance between mini Bill and your beautificent legs.”

  Polly grunted while her sister chuckled. “Just how did you wind up becoming a guardian angel again?”

  “Think I got it,” Sally suddenly said. “A Maserati Gran Turismo was dispatched to the castle gates yesterday. But the GPS data gets fuzzy after that—”

  “Another thing that should have been impossible, by the way,” Polly intersnected. Meanwhile, outside, I could hear something big and growly comin’ from the street.

  “But to the original question, yes, I do know where it is now,” Sally finished. “It’s in a repair shop about three blocks from where you currently are.”

  “Goin’ which way?” I asked and the growler started gettin’ a lot closer than I liked.

  “Just exit the alley and hang a right,” Sally explained. “You’ll be there in no time.”

  There was so much more that I wanted to ask ‘em. But that thing I kept hearin’ outside told me that I better wrap this up. “You know, I can’t thank you girls enoughly.”

  “Skip it,” Polly snapped. “This is a serious matter you’ve brought to our attention, and that is the only reason we’re still talking.”

  “Really?” Sally piped up. “I thought it was because I got the phone away from you before you could hang up.”

  The thing that was threatenin’ me got close enough to ravage the dumpster.

  While that was happenin’, Polly said, “We need to bring Streethorn up to speed on this.”

  Sally laughed at her. “Why? All he’ll say is…” Then she lapsed into a pretty good imposteranation of Skeltorhorn saying, “I’m certain that there’s a perfectly logical explanation for this misunderstanding.”

  Polly sighed again. “I’m not saying you’re wrong but the data suggests—”

  “Why, Ms. Polly,” Sally said, still keepin’ the Skeletorhorn gag goin’. “I’m surprised that you would ever be so sloppy as to base your theory on data which is so incomplete.”

  “Dammit, we have to tell somebody in charge!” Polly protestosterated. Leave it to Sally to make her mad enough ta finally cuss.

  “Eventually, sure,” Sally admitted. “But right now, let’s just keep this one to ourselves while we build a case.”

  “Apollo, give me strength… How many times have I told you that we are bureaucrats, not cops?!”

  “About as many times as I’ve said I’d rather be a cop than a bureaucrat. It’s sooooo boring being an office drone.”

  Right then that thing outside started scratchin’ on my dumpster. “Listen, girls, this has been a lotta fun but I gots ta go now.”

  “More trouble, I presume?” Polly asked with a schoolmarm snark.

  “If Alaire knows I’m here, you bet,” I replied.

  Sally cooed into the phone. “Try not to mess up too much and actuall
y get yourself killed, Billy. AE is a much duller place without you. Bye!”

  I think Polly was lecterning her on manners when the call ended. That was when the whole dumpster tipped over and I damn near cracked my spine as I flipped upside-down.

  As soon as the lid flew open, I found myself in a good news/bad news quandairy. Good news: Alaire’s boys were not on the other side. Bad news: after seeing what was there, I wished they were. Alls I saw was a lot of sharp teeth on a dude roughly the size of Tido and his mouth was the size of a manhole cover.

  “Oh, hell no!” I shouted usin’ the walls o’ the dumpster as my launchin’ pad. I had ta get outta Dodge and super-fast. On my attempt to get the f out, the garbage truck the dumpster was attached to started up and shot forward. I hit my head on one of the dumpster walls and stars flashed in front o’ my eyes. I barely knew what was goin’ on when the garbage truck lifted the dumpster and then dropped it back down, directly on top o’ the demon that nearly scared the life out o’ me! Talk about good frickin’ luck, yo! After squashin’ the demon, the truck backed out o’ the alley. Next thing I knew, we was disappearin’ down the street. I got a quick look at the alley before we took off… we was goin’ in the same direction that Sally said the repair shop was locatuated.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Lily

  I paced Persephone’s room from one end to the other. It was all I could do ever since I sent Bill away on the Fury Express. Alaire departed right after dispatching Tallis somewhere… Most likely, it wasn’t the Dark Wood. I certainly realized my mistake in trusting Alaire but I didn’t think I had any other choice at the time. Tallis had to be released from this awful place if he had a snowball’s chance in hell of living. At least, he was fully healed now—I hoped he was, anyway—so at the very least, I’d given my Bladesmith a fighting chance wherever he wound up.