Ballistic Kiss

by Richard Kadrey

  The fire has caught up to the crawler. By the time it’s at the top of the mats, it’s a mass of twitching meat slowly roasting in a blazing furnace. The heat forces everyone back from the trail.

  “Get in the vans,” shouts Dan.

  No one needs to hear it twice. The filthy mob piles inside and we speed away. No one says anything, not the whole two hours it takes to get back to L.A.

  Because we’re not married and I’m not a family member, the clinic won’t let me stay with Janet overnight, but I arrive bright and early the next morning to get them out of there. They look good. No longer fish-belly white. And they can walk on the bad leg, though with a slight limp.

  When we reach the parking lot Janet says, “Where’s your bike?”

  I just take their hand and pull them into a nearby shadow.

  We come out in the flying saucer house. Janet drops down onto the sofa and I bring them a glass of water so they can take a Vicodin.

  When they’re done they say, “I like that thing you do with shadows.”

  “I’ll tell you more about it, but right now I need to ask you something. You said I’d understand why you like the Lodge once I saw it. But I don’t. What is it exactly that you get out of the place? You’re not crazy like those other people. I just don’t get it.”

  They reach for my hand and hold it loosely in theirs.

  “I’ve been scared my whole life,” Janet says. “I was born sick, without much of an immune system. I was afraid of people. Of my doctors. I was terrified of animals. I was afraid to leave my room. When I was older and got the right treatment, my parents wanted me to be a lawyer like my dad. But I always liked music. It got pretty abusive there before I moved out. Later, when I realized I was different, I got scared in a whole new way. I wasn’t really a straight cis person. But I wasn’t gay. I wasn’t a man or a woman. I thought there was something wrong with me.”

  They squeeze my hand and I squeeze back.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you’d had it so rough.”

  “It’s why you teaching me how to shoot was a big deal for me. I might not have shown it, but I was terrified.”

  “You covered it up very well.”

  “I’ve had a lot of practice.”

  They look around the room, then back to me.

  Janet goes on, “I’m well now, but I take a lot of medication and know that it could stop working at any time. Everybody is dying, but I’m dying a little faster than most. For me, the Lodge is a way to never fall back into my old patterns. I have to overcome the old fears when Dan and Juliette come up with their wild ideas. And after I’ve made it through one, there’s no other feeling like it.”

  “Even after everything that happened at the canyon, you haven’t thought about quitting?”

  They shake their head.

  “Not for a minute.” Janet laughs and says, “Besides, it’s the Zero Lodge. Quitting isn’t an option.”

  I look at her.

  “Did they threaten you?”

  “Of course not. But there are things you don’t understand yet.”

  “Like what?”

  “It’s like you and the shadow trick. I’ll tell you, but not right now.”

  I think about it for a minute.

  “Janet, I’m a killer.”

  They look at me like maybe they heard me wrong.

  “For a long time, I was a private hit man. Since then, I’ve been pretty much freelance. At this point, I don’t know how many things and people I’ve killed. And while I was doing all that killing, I found my way into the Room of Thirteen Doors.”

  They sit up straighter.

  “Did all this happen here in L.A.?”

  “Some.”

  “Where then? Stop being so coy about it.”

  I let go of their hand.

  “It happened the same place I got all these scars.”

  “Where?”

  “In Hell.”

  Janet flops against the back of the sofa, looking mad.

  “Come on. For real.”

  “I’ll tell you about it, but I’m going to need a drink first. Then, if you don’t believe me and want me to not bother you anymore, I won’t.”

  I come back with bourbon and explain the whole sordid story. From Mason to Lucifer to my escaping and coming back to L.A. To my surprise, Janet doesn’t want me to take them home. I guess that means I’m stuck in the Lodge for a while. But at least I don’t have to dance around the truth anymore. I don’t know what any of this means in the long run, but for now, I’m happy we’re both sticking around.

  They lean forward to kiss me and I hear something funny. Like someone left the stereo on next door. Only there isn’t anybody next door. And the song is strange and high and dangerously familiar.

  The first ghost walks in from the kitchen. Two more come out of the wall by the bedroom. A fourth emerges from the front door.

  “Stark, what’s happening?” says Janet.

  “Get down on the floor and stay there.”

  While I’m getting Janet down, the kitchen spook slashes my left arm with a sickle. I knock her back with a kick and go for the bedroom ghosts. They both have clubs, so I get low when I charge them.

  I get the first spook around the waist and ram him into the second. They crash onto the shag carpet, but they’re not really hurt. Spooks don’t work like that. You can muscle them, kick them, knock them down, but unless you can convince them to go away or destroy them, you’re stuck with the bastards.

  I don’t wait for the fourth spook to attack. I take a club from one of the bedroom ghosts and throw it. But I’m worried about Janet, so I get sloppy. The creep by the door sees the club coming from a mile away. She dodges it and throws a knife. I twist away—mostly. The tip catches me on the side, just above my kidney. By now the bedroom spooks are back on their feet. I look over at Janet just as the kitchen spook makes a move for them.

  No more fucking around. Even if I set the whole place on fire, that’s just how it has to be.

  I duck as the door ghost throws another knife and manifest my Gladius. Kick the coffee table out of the way and bring down the blade on kitchen spook’s sickle arm. Then slice up again, cutting the ghost in two. It instantly blips out of existence.

  One of the bedroom ghosts smashes me across the back with its club. It hurts like hell, but I swing the Gladius wide and take them both out with one slash.

  The knife shade keeps tossing blades my way. I rush it, using the coffee table as a shield. Pin the spook to the wall and run it through the gut with the Gladius.

  The room goes quiet. I look around for more dead killers. Make a circuit of the room with the Gladius, ready to burn anything strange out of existence. Check the kitchen. Check the bedroom. Nothing. I pull Janet from the floor and help them back onto the sofa.

  “What the hell was that?” they say.

  “Dead people.”

  “Ones you killed?”

  “No. Just some random assholes.”

  “Does this kind of thing happen to you a lot?”

  “It depends on your definition of ‘a lot.’ I told you before, bad things can happen to people who get close to me.”

  Janet looks at my arm and my back.

  “You’re bleeding.”

  “I’m hard on clothes.”

  “So you said.”

  There’re holes all over the coffee table where the ghost knives embedded themselves. Another hole in the wall where the knife spook dodged the club I threw. Singe marks near the bedroom door where I took down the other two. All things considered, the place could be in worse shape.

  I help Janet to their feet.

  “Time for you to go home.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  I take them back to their place. They don’t ask me up this time.

  Janet says, “Did you get that flaming sword in Hell too?”

  “No. From my father.”

  “Your family is a lot more interesting than mine.”


  “I wouldn’t mind them being a little duller. You’re not going to work today, right?”

  They nod.

  “I thought about it, but after the snake bite and your Haunted Mansion ride, I think I’ll take it easy today. But you’re coming to the next excursion, right? Promise.”

  “I can’t stand those people.”

  “Promise?”

  It’s clear Janet is going, and who’s going to protect them if I’m not there?

  “I promise.”

  My phone beeps. I check the screen. Abbot left me a message.

  “Sorry. I have to go and talk to this guy.”

  Janet kisses me and says, “I never kissed a killer before.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I never kissed anyone like you before.”

  They limp inside their building, blowing me a kiss before they close the door.

  I go back to the flying saucer house and drag the coffee table back to where it’s supposed to be. In the bedroom, I grab another one of Kasabian’s cast-off paperbacks—Personal Finance for the Power Entrepreneur—and shove it in the hole where it belongs.

  A lot worries me these days, but what has me right this minute is the certainty that the ghost attack was nothing more than a feint. Someone or something was just testing the waters. The spooks will be back and next time it’s going to be worse.

  I get some coffee, put my feet up on the wrecked coffee table, and call Abbot.

  “How goes it with your assignment?” he says. Not even a hello. That’s not like him. I need to give him something.

  “I know a lot more about the Stay Belows than I did before.”

  “Stay Belows? Where did you learn a term like that?”

  “You partner with people who can help. I do the same thing.”

  “What more have you learned about them?”

  “Chris Stein is the key to the whole thing. The rodeo clown that all the bulls come after. If I figure out Stein, all the cows will wander home.”

  I hear Abbot take a breath.

  “Whatever it is you’re learning, whatever it is you’re doing, do it faster. The spirits are cracking the wards. They won’t hold forever. I’ve had to post people there already to look out for breaches.”

  “I’m going as fast as I can. I’m working a few angles.”

  “What angles?”

  “Forever yours. Forever mine.”

  He doesn’t say anything for a minute.

  “Stark? What the hell was that? A spell? A hex?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Damn. I was hoping it might be a Sub Rosa thing. Something you blue bloods say.”

  “I can assure you that I’ve never heard anyone say ‘forever yours, forever mine.’ You think it’s important?”

  “It almost got me killed, so yeah.”

  I tell him about Stein’s attacking me, then what Flicker said about Zadkiel.

  “There’s an angel involved? I knew you were the right man.”

  “I hope so.”

  Abbot says, “You think if you can figure out ‘forever yours, forever mine,’ you’ll have everything you need?”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  “Keep me in the loop. I have the whole Sub Rosa council ready to burn Little Cairo. I can only put them off for a little while longer.”

  “You can’t do that. I told you. There are civilians in there.”

  “I can probably give you until the end of the week.”

  Samael and now Abbot. Everyone wants a present and they want it now. I should have kept the yule log. Merry Christmas and fuck you all.

  “What about Brigitte’s situation?” I say. “What can you do for her?”

  Another breath on the line.

  “Listen. I’m still looking into it, but your friend has lousy timing. Immigration is a hot topic right now. It’s easier for the authorities to deport than to look at individual cases. The politics are just not on her side.”

  “Keep trying. I’m holding up my end of the bargain. You do the same.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  I was going to say something else. Something angry and stupid about Abbot, the council, and all the blue bloods on all the councils in the world. They hop from country to country without the Feds’ looking at them twice. Their families too. If anything happens to Brigitte, I’m going to make a lot of them very sad.

  Instead of being dumb I say, “You want me to go faster, get me an address on a Lisa Thivierge. She’s an old movie director who went underground years ago. She’d be in her eighties by now.”

  “I’ll look into it.”

  “One more thing. Do you know Avani Chanchala?”

  “Of course. My in-laws bought their house from her.”

  “Lucky them. They’re doing business with a pimp. You all are. Bye.”

  I hang up on him.

  That was a waste of a conversation, but it gave me an idea.

  I get a marker from a kitchen drawer and draw a wide circle on the marble counter, then a smaller circle inside it, and scrawl a few runes in the blank area between the two. Inside the inner circle, I scrawl the basic shape of L.A. County. It’s not a map. It’s more like something a kid would do when they’re not potty training or making hand turkeys. But it’s the best I can do without a paper map of the city. If I can pull off some location hoodoo, maybe I can get a sense of what neighborhood Thivierge might be hiding in—if she’s even still alive.

  I don’t have an athame anymore, so I have to use the black blade as a platen, hoping it will point me in Thivierge’s direction. Once the map is finished, I hold the blade above it and chant some Hellion hoodoo.

  The blade moves instantly, but it doesn’t point out a neighborhood. It pulls my hand into the air a couple of feet. Then it feels like something reaches right out of the marble and grabs me, plunging the blade hilt deep into the map. The marble countertop cracks and the whole house begins to shake.

  An earthquake? Is it just my flying saucer or is it the whole city? The shaking goes on and on, getting worse by the second. The refrigerator slides away from the wall. Appliances jitter to the edges of shelves. Glasses and plates fly out of cabinets. And the earthquake just gets worse. To keep from falling I have to lean on the counter and hold the knife with both hands, hauling back on it with all my weight. Finally it pops out and I slam down onto my back, cracking my head on the marble floor.

  Once the shaking stops I haul myself to my feet. The kitchen is a disaster, but there’s a knot on the back of my head and I’m too dizzy to do anything about the mess. There’s a scorch mark shaped like an obscure Hellion death hex in the center of the cracked kitchen counter. I grab the bourbon and kick my way through the debris to the living room. I have to turn the sofa upright to sit down.

  All in all, it’s been a delightful twenty-four hours. Janet got bitten by a snake. I saw an intestine monster eat some people, then get cooked like bad brisket. I got my ass kicked by some third-rate spooks and now my nice kitchen looks like a drunk brontosaurus tried to fuck the dishwasher. If tomorrow is this much fun I might have to pack it in and go back to Hell. At least there all the houses come pre-wrecked and I won’t feel guilty about breaking this place.

  I wake up a few hours later. Still feeling guilty about the kitchen and whatever cleaner elves come by every day, I find a dustpan and shovel as much of the broken plates as I can out one of the windows, followed by the broken appliances. Someone told me it’s what Martha Stewart does with her burned quiches, so I’m feeling pretty good about myself.

  Candy calls about getting together and we decide to go to the Devil’s Door drive-in.

  I steal a T-Bird convertible from a vintage car lot in Beverly Hills and pick her up a little before eight. We speed over to Flicker’s and find a space good and close to the screen. It’s a strange feeling being out with people so many times these last few days. I’ve become so used to being alone that the feeling is a combi
nation of relief and tension. At least with Flicker we were fighting monsters. And with Janet, we were trying not to die in the desert. But with Candy right now, it’s just the two of us. No missions. No big agendas. Just us learning to be around each other again.

  Flicker changed the movies and tonight it’s a triple feature, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, and Son of Frankenstein. I’ve always felt bad that Frankenstein is my least favorite of the three, but tonight it’s helpful because it gives me and Candy time to talk.

  When I get the top down on the T-Bird Candy says, “How’s the spook business?”

  I light a Malediction.

  “Better, I suppose. Flicker came along and showed me some of her tricks for dealing with the Stay Belows.”

  “She teach you to call them that too?”

  “Yeah. She knew a lot more about the situation than I did, so I just played passenger while she did all the work.”

  “What did you learn?”

  “That our dead pal had a girl, and I think she might be the one who killed him.”

  “Any idea who it was?”

  “An angel named Zadkiel. But I don’t know why. If it was a simple angel problem, I could probably fix it. But it’s not. There’s someone else he’s connected to. I’m sure of it. Someone secret. Someone with money. Maybe a thief or an ex-thief. I need to figure out who it is.”

  “Oooh. Catwoman!” says Candy playfully.

  “I’m ready to believe anyone right now. Anyway, I’m tracking down more leads. Abbot is getting me an address.”

  She sits up, looking more serious.

  “Is he going to help Brigitte?”

  “He’s trying. But it’s bad timing with the Feds being so deportation happy right now.”

  “Fuck. You know, I’d like to find out who got her into this mess.”

  “Me too.”

  “If you find out, tell me so I can pay him a visit.”

  “We can go together.”

  “Hell yeah. Like old times.”

  “Like old times.”

  She brightens and says, “You should come by the store on Friday. Alessa’s and my band are playing a little gig.”

  “I guess I haven’t heard you play guitar since I came back.”