Death Blows

by D. D. Barant

  “The problem there isn’t time—it’s scale and complexity. Like an ant trying to talk to an elephant in a hundred different languages simultaneously.” I nod. “So he was some sort of genius?”

  “Maybe, but he also had help. He carried a mystic gem known as the Balancer, supposedly able to juggle and even merge magical energies. In the comic, he uses it to transfer all the power Wertham has stored into a volcano.”

  “So why do you think Aquitaine was Transe?”

  “I talked to the robe. You wouldn’t believe some of the things it told me…” He shakes his head, grinning. “Incredible stuff. Just scraps, traces left over the years, but whoever wore this has been places and seen things I never even knew existed. Other dimensions, other planets, other times.”

  It sounded eerily like Neil’s description of comic books. “We didn’t find any gem, though,” I say.

  “Neither did my team,” says Eisfanger. “I went back after you found the robe. Scanned the whole place with more sensitive equipment. Nothing.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. I think we’ve just uncovered a motive—a damn strong one, too.”

  “Sure,” says Charlie. “Blame the rock. You got a perfectly good suspect in the treadmill, but as soon as a mineral enters the picture you’re ready to lock it up and throw away the key.”

  “We’ll have to find it first,” I say. “But at least now I have a list of suspects—though they’re not going to be easy to track down.”

  “Who?” Eisfanger asks. “The rest of the Bravo Brigade. Plus any surviving members of the Kamic cult—oh, and possibly Fredric Wertham himself.” I sigh. “This is great. Y’know, dealing with magic, vampires, and werewolves on a daily basis was getting kind of stale—but now I’ve got a homicidal superpowered lunatic to catch. Happy, happy me…”

  THREE

  The first person I talk to is Gretchen. I find her in her own office—one considerably bigger than mine—and close the door before I sit down. There’s no easy way to broach the subject, so I just dive right in. “Gretch, were you aware that Saladin was also Doctor Transe?”

  I think it’s the first time I’ve ever actually seen her show surprise. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Doctor Transe. The sorcerer from the Bravo Brigade comic book.”

  She frowns and thinks hard about it for all of a second, which is how long it takes her to completely revise an entire set of assumptions and replace them with new data. Gretchen’s brain scares me a little. “Ah. That would explain certain things. No, I never knew—never even suspected.” The look on her face now is more fond reminiscence than betrayal. “He was an extraordinary man. I don’t suppose I should be that surprised.”

  “You’re not angry he kept it from you?”

  She sighs. “Considering what I do for a living, it would be like the pot calling the kettle black, wouldn’t it? I suspect I kept many more things from him than he did from me—though, as secrets go, this is impressive. Do you think it’s why he was killed?”

  “Too early to say—but that’s the direction I’m headed in.”

  She nods. “You’ll keep me apprised?”

  “Of course.”

  The next person I visit is Dr. Pete.

  Dr. Pete was my physician when I first got here. He helped me deal with RDT—Reality Dislocation Trauma—and even got my heart restarted once while I was kind of busy saving the world. My heart’s had some nasty things done to it, but Dr. Pete’s the only one who’s actually stabbed it with something large and pointy. I don’t hold it against him.

  It’s kind of hard to hold anything against Dr. Pete—he’s just a plain nice guy. Well, nice thrope, actually, but so’s his whole family. He took me to visit them once, and while we were there he showed something else: his comic book collection. I figure he might actually have a copy of that Bravo Brigade issue, and if so I want another look at it.

  I go to his office, but he isn’t there. His receptionist—a female thrope with short blond hair and overlong eyelashes—tells me he’s at the clinic.

  “The government clinic?” That was where the NSA had put me when I first arrived.

  She blinks once, slowly. I feel a gentle breeze wash over me. “He doesn’t do any work for the government,” she says. Blink. It’s like being fanned by tiny palm leaves. “He’s at the anthrocanine clinic on Pike Street. It’s more of a shelter, really, but Dr. Adams provides free medical aid twice a week.”

  I get directions, thank her, and leave. I wonder if she’s as dumb as she seems, and doubt it. Or maybe Dr. Pete just hired her to save on air-conditioning.

  The clinic’s in a rough part of town, just close enough to the touristy section to make the authorities nervous and ensure a continuous patrol of the membrane between them. On one side are lots of trendy restaurants, kitschy souvenir shops, and an open-air produce market; on the other, decaying waterfront buildings, weedy empty lots, and boarded-up storefronts. It’s funny how many cities I’ve seen that pattern in—it’s like some kind of Skid Row tourism virus, sprouting postcard stands and T-shirt shops in the tracks of winos and shopping carts.

  The clinic itself is in an old logging warehouse, a freshly painted sign tacked over a scratched and dented metal door. I park, hope my car is still there when I get back, and walk up to the entrance. A few thropes loitering in were form at the corner sniff in my direction, their yellow eyes glowing with hostility, but I’m wearing some artificial wolf pheromone Cassius supplied me with; it tells them I’m an alpha female, not to be messed with. Which is true, but it’s a lot less stressful to spray some AWP on than have to constantly prove it.

  The noise—and smell—when I open the door is impressive. Barking and howling and whining and oh my God, the stink. Wet dog and doggy-do and dog that’s rolled in something dead. With just a hint of skunk for added impact.

  I can’t see any actual dogs, just a wire-mesh door set into the far wall, but I recognize the teenager at the counter that blocks access. It’s Alexandra, Dr. Pete’s niece. She and I have become Internet friends—we share similar tastes in music—but I rarely get to see her in person.

  Of course, seeing Alexandra can sometimes be disturbing. She’s into a fad called corpsing, which uses a charm to temporarily let parts of your body decompose; the first time we met, I could see her brain. She seems to currently be intact, studying a textbook on the counter, and looks up when I come in.

  “Hey, Jace!” she says, smiling. “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for your uncle. He here?”

  “Yeah, he’s in the back, getting ready for the changeover.”

  “I didn’t know you volunteered here.”

  She grimaces. “Volunteer? More like sentenced. I got busted breaking curfew and this is my punishment.” She shakes her head. “If any of my friends come in here, I am just gonna die.”

  Ah, the teenage werewolf. Vulnerable to silver, wolfs-bane, and embarrassment. “Not doing the rotting corpse thing anymore?”

  She rolls her eyes. “Uncle Pete won’t let me do it here—worried that one of the inmates is gonna eat one of my eyeballs or something. So what? I mean, it’s not like it won’t grow back.”

  Talking to Alexandra is always interesting. Any time I feel like I’m starting to adjust to this world, I can count on her to remind me there are depths of weirdness I haven’t explored yet. Adolescence is another universe all by itself.

  And then the naked dwarf throws himself against the wire mesh.

  The happy naked dwarf. His eyes are bright and merry, a huge smile on his face. “Yippee!” he shouts. “Yippee! Yippee!” He clutches the wire mesh in both hands, staring at Alexandra and me like we’re his best friends in the world. “Yippee!”

  “That’s Bo,” Alexandra says. “He’s always the first to change—’cause he’s so little, I guess.”

  The barking is dying down. Bo is still yelling “Yippee!,” but now other voices are joining in: a deep bass calling out, “Hey! Hey! Hey!”; a woman shrieking, “
Yeah!” over and over; and a lot of different variations on “Food!,” “Eat!,” and “Hungry!”

  Alexandra looks glum. “Sun’s down. Don’t listen to them—we fed them an hour ago. Changeover always makes them hungry, but it’s not worth the mess they make to feed them again. You sure you want to go in there?”

  The naked dwarf abruptly spins and runs away. “What the hell,” I say. “I love making new friends.”

  I come around the counter and she hits a button, buzzing open the electric lock on the door. I make sure it shuts securely behind me.

  There’s a huge room on the other side, lined with pens and lit by overhead fluorescents. Dr. Pete is down at the far end. He and a tall, bulky man in a black T-shirt and sweatpants are trying to get Bo to put on a pair of boxers.

  I walk the length of the room, glancing in the pens. Each of them contains a naked man or woman, of varying ages, sizes, and races. Some glare at me sullenly, some wave eagerly, some ignore me completely. By the time I get to Dr. Pete, I think I have a pretty good idea what’s going on.

  Bo runs up to me, finally wearing the boxers, and does his best to sniff my crotch. He doesn’t seem to take it too hard when I push him away. “Hey, Doc. What’s the deal with the reverse thropes?”

  Dr. Pete runs a hand through his shaggy brown hair and gives me a rueful smile. I still think he looks a little like a young Harrison Ford, though today his eyes have the tired wisdom of a Humphrey Bogart. “Anthrocanines. Dogs who have the lycanthropy gene, usually passed on by an ancestor who was bitten by a thrope. Infected dogs pass on their genes in two ways—to people through bites or scratches, and to their own offspring. But dog weres don’t transform into wolves—they change into humans. As long as the sun’s down, anyway.”

  “How about during Moondays?” Moondays are festival held by thropes every month to celebrate the three days of the full moon—while it’s up every thrope has to shift to were form, whether they want to or not. It’s kind of like a hairy Mardi Gras.

  “They actually get a little smarter then. Doesn’t last long, but I’ve got some pire volunteers who try to teach them a few things when their IQ spikes.” He glances at his assistant, the large man who’s been studying me but hasn’t said a word. I notice for the first time that he’s also barefoot. “Like Galahad here.”

  Galahad’s hair is a patchwork of brown and white, his skin a pale pink. His lips are big and rubbery, his eyes large and alert. When Dr. Pete says his name, he smiles and his body shakes—I realize that he’s twitching his butt from side to side, ever so slightly. It’s both cute and a little creepy.

  “Maybe this is a dumb question, but—why are they in cages?”

  Dr. Pete sighs and rummages in the pocket of his white lab coat. “Because—despite what they look like—they’re animals, Jace. Homeless animals. They don’t understand the rules and they don’t care. They get hit by cars, they break into businesses and steal food, sometimes they even attack children—though pire and thrope kids can usually take care of themselves. The two kinds of people they’re the biggest threat to are human beings and themselves.”

  “Like urban apes,” I say, staring at one cage. The guy in it is over six feet tall, broad and muscular, with short, bristly brown hair covering his scalp and chin. He meets my eyes and makes a noise somewhere between a growl and a grunt.

  “Yes. We look after them here, give them food and shelter and keep them out of trouble. Most of them are harmless, though there is the odd troublemaker. A few of them have even become addicted to alcohol—and when they’re drunk they get completely out of control.”

  I’ll bet. I had visions of a group of drunken, naked men and women gleefully rampaging through a liquor store, the Tarzan of the Grapes tribe. “So they don’t have the supernatural immunities thropes have?”

  “No. Their life span is only ten, twelve years. They get sick or injured, it takes them a long time to heal.”

  Bo has trotted into an open cage on his own and lay down on his stomach on the bed. Dr. Pete walks over and closes the door quietly. Galahad follows him, always staying exactly four feet behind.

  “What are they, usually?” I ask. “Bo and Galahad, I mean.”

  “Bo’s a pug. Galahad’s a Saint Bernard with a little coyote in him. Gally, go keep Alexandra company, okay?”

  Galahad says, “Okay,” in a friendly baritone, then trots away, his bare feet slapping on the concrete.

  “Let’s go in the back, it’s quieter.” He leads me to a small office in the corner and shuts the door, which muffles the din somewhat.

  The room isn’t large, and it’s mostly filled by a small desk with a laptop on it and a pile of plastic sacks of dog food that reaches to the roof. Dr. Pete perches on the edge of the desk and motions me to take the one chair.

  “What’s up, Jace? I haven’t seen you in a while. RDT not back, I hope?”

  “No, it seems to be gone for good. No more attacks. Felt a little jittery the first week you took me off the medication, but fine since then. The reason I came to see you was less medical and more personal.” He raises his eyebrows and smiles. I feel myself start to blush. Dr. Pete and I are just friends, but—well, there are friends, and then there are friends you sometimes imagine naked. Of course, as my physician, Dr. Pete doesn’t have to use his imagination. “Uh, I should have said professional,” I add. “As in a case I’m working on. I was hoping you could give me some help on the subject of comic books.”

  “Comic books?”

  I give him a brief rundown. Despite what his receptionist told me, Dr. Pete works for the National Security Agency—part-time, anyway—and can be trusted. I don’t mention Gretchen’s pregnancy, though—she deserves her privacy. “Yes, I actually do own a copy of The Bravo Brigade,” he says. “It’s a collector’s item, worth a fair bit of money. When do you need it?”

  “The sooner the better.”

  “I’ll drop it by the NSA office first thing tomorrow, all right?”

  “Yeah, that’ll be fine. How’s your new assistant working out?”

  “Alexandra?” He laughs. “She’s fine. I think the main reason she doesn’t want her friends knowing she works here is she doesn’t want them seeing how much she enjoys it.”

  “Shortening her ironic distance, huh? No wonder she’s upset.”

  “What about you? Doing more than just working, I hope.”

  “Uh… been kind of busy.” He frowns at me. “Jace. I told you, the best cure for RDT is putting down some roots. That means more than just hunting for Stoker.”

  “I catch Stoker, I don’t have to worry about roots.”

  “Your RDT comes back, you don’t have to worry about anything.” I sigh. “Except who gives my eulogy, right? Okay, okay, I promise I’ll get out more. Alexandra and I have a date to hit some flea markets this weekend.”

  “That reminds me.” He opens the drawer in the desk and pulls out a battered cassette tape. “Got this from a friend of mine. Thought you might like it.”

  I take it warily. The faded printing on the plastic reads SIGUE SIGUE SPUTNIK, a name I actually recognize. “I don’t believe it. You don’t have Elvis, but a one-hit-wonder New Wave band from the 1980s pops up on both our worlds.”

  “You’re welcome. And I thought you weren’t fussy when it came to your collection.”

  “I’m not.” Finding music here that’s the same as in my world has become my hobby, and the cultural divide is vast enough that I can’t afford to be choosy. Country, jazz, rock, folk, TV jingles—I’ll take anything I can get. “Thanks, really. I appreciate it.” I frown. “But how did you know?”

  “I have my sources,” he says with a smile. I was a little hesitant to tell him about my hobby at first—I thought he might disapprove of an attempt to hang on to my past as opposed to adapting to the present. He didn’t, though; he said it was actually a healthy approach, one that would help ground me to my current reality. I think he’s just glad I’m doing something other than chasing a psychopath. />
  “Looks like this place keeps you busy. You enjoy it?”

  He grins. “It can get a little intense at times, but it’s rewarding. Dogs and thropes don’t always get along, but I like them. And they’ve gotten more than their fair share of bad breaks on this world.”

  I know what he means. During World War II, dogs in the Axis countries here were rounded up and gassed as part of Hitler’s lycanthropic purity program; it gave a whole new meaning to the phrase mongrel races.

  Dr. Pete glances over at his laptop, then frowns and taps a key. “Not you again,” he murmurs.

  “Problem?”

  “There’s this thrope that’s been hanging around the back door for the last week. Always gone when I go out there.”

  He turns the laptop around, shows me a security feed from a camera. I can see the outline of a thrope in half were form in the shadows, yellow eyes gleaming. Looks like he’s wearing a trench coat.

  “Hanging around a were dog shelter? Maybe he’s just looking for a handout. I’m kind of surprised you even have this level of security—I mean, what are you guarding, your supply of Kibbles and Bits?”

  He gives me a sad look. “Jace, the residents here have the instincts of animals and the intelligence of children. And about forty percent are female.”

  That gives me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Technically, dogs and wolves are the same species, but what Dr. Pete’s describing would be like taking advantage of the mentally handicapped. “Right,” I say tightly. “Excuse me.”

  I’m out the door before he has a chance to say a word. “Hey!” he calls after me. “Hold on!”

  I stalk down the line of pens, exciting all kinds of shouts from their occupants. I notice for the first time that it’s more than just single words: Some of them can form short sentences. A bright-eyed girl with long blond hair falling over her eyes peers at me from her bunk, where she’s perched on all fours. “Play with me?” she asks, trying to wag a nonexistent tail. “Play with me?”

  I’ve built up a pretty good head of steam by the time I reach the wire-mesh door. Dr. Pete steps in front of me. “Jace, take it easy. That guy hasn’t actually done anything wrong—”