by Scott Sigler
Bryan climbed the last three steps toward the ledge, toward John and Adam and Alder.
Rex tumbled off the rail and crashed down hard to a trench floor below. The monster was too strong! Rex looked back up to the prow to see his enemy — the old man stood on the rail, naked and blistered, blood and soot covering his skin. Savior looked more like a monster than ever before.
He had a knife in his hand and madness in his eyes.
The old man gripped the handle in both hands, bent his legs, then lunged out into the air.
Rex reached up in time to catch the monster’s wrists. He fell back hard, struggling to keep the knife point from driving into his eye.
Eyes watering, his vision a shimmering blur, Bryan fell to a knee. He couldn’t make it. He heard screaming — Adam’s voice — shouting over the whipping wind, urging him and the others on, telling them to hurry. He looked up to see John Smith holding the black-haired girl tight, his green hood up around a face that dripped with sweat.
“Get up, Clauser,” John said, then carried the girl into the tunnel. The others ran past Bryan, a coughing mass of legs and arms following John in.
How could Amy Zou feel so heavy?
Bryan felt hands on his shoulders, dragging him up by his coat.
“Bri-Bri,” Pookie said, then coughed so hard bits of blood flew out of his mouth. “This is not nappy-time. Move.”
Bryan stood, adjusted Zou on his shoulder, then followed Pookie to the tunnel entrance. They stumbled over corpses stretched out all over the ledge — John and the others had been busy. Before he entered the tunnel, Bryan looked back out at the cavern one last time.
The flames were already dying down. The ship glowed like living coal, waves of orange light washing through the sagging vessel. The mast burned like a torch; a steady rain of skulls dropped off to tumble into the embers below. As Bryan watched, the mast tilted, then fell, smashing through the deck in a shower of sparks and spinning cinders.
The arena spectators had fled. The place was empty.
Almost empty — in a trench in front of the ship, Bryan saw Rex on his back, Erickson on top of him trying to drive a knife into the boy’s throat. Rex fought, his torn face screwed up into a horrid mask of rage, his shaking hands holding Erickson’s wrists. Smoke swirled through the trench around them, reminding Bryan of the thick San Francisco fog that rolled down streets in the late-night hours.
The knife pushed closer.
Then a blur of smoldering black hit Erickson and drove him into a trench wall. The Ka-Bar knife spun and dropped to the ground.
Rex slowly rolled to his feet. So much pain. His knight had saved him. Firstborn looked horrible — his fur gone, his blistered skin smoking in places, sheened with oozing wetness in others. Burns from head to toe, yet still he fought for his king.
Rex pushed past the pain. He bent and picked up the knife.
“Bryan, come on!” Pookie’s voice. Bryan carried Amy Zou to the tunnel entrance, never taking his eyes off the scene below. Wind shot out of the tunnel, sucked in from beyond to feed the hungry fire. In the center of the cavern, a large chunk of ceiling gave way, dropping down to smash the trenches like an asteroid hitting a planet. The place was collapsing.
Rex watched.
Rex waited.
The end of one era, the beginning of another.
Firstborn’s back muscles flexed and rippled. He had his hands around Erickson’s neck. Erickson reached up to claw at Firstborn’s face, but the old man was already weakening.
Movement on Rex’s right. He turned to look — his heart surged with joy.
“My king,” Sly said.
Rex tried to talk, tried to say you’re alive! but winced at the pain shooting through his mouth.
“Don’t speak,” Sly said. “I am here.” He smiled wide, his needle-toothed grin full of love. He had a few burn marks on his clothes, but looked mostly unharmed.
Sly held his hand out, palm up. “May I kill the monster?”
Rex looked over to Firstborn. The great knight still had his hands locked around the monster’s throat. The monster’s hands moved weakly — he didn’t have long.
Rex nodded, then put the knife handle in his friend’s palm.
Sly’s green-skinned hand closed around the handle. “Thank you, my king,” he said, then thrust the knife deep into Rex’s chest.
Rex stared into Sly’s smiling face. What was happening? Rex looked down. The knife handle stuck out. He couldn’t see any of the blade. It hurt. It burned.
Sly put his arm around Rex and pulled him close. “Thank you for making me your successor,” he said quietly. He gripped the knife handle, pulled it out, turned it, then shoved it home again. Rex felt the hilt thump against his sternum, felt the tip poke out of his back.
It burned.
Sly had lied. He was just like all the others. Rex’s only true friend had hurt him, just like everyone else in his life.
Rex fell to his knees.
Sly knelt with him. “I could never have taken over on my own. Firstborn was too strong. Now, I will tell everyone that Firstborn killed you. Good-bye, Rex.”
Sly let go. He ran off down a trench, vanishing into the smoke.
Rex closed his eyes and fell to his side.
Bryan saw Firstborn let go of Erickson. The old man didn’t move. The smoldering creature turned.
Firstborn stared at the knife sticking out of Rex’s chest.
It was over.
Bryan walked into the wind rushing out of the tunnel. Everyone stood there, waiting for him — everyone except Alder Jessup. The old man lay on the ground, unmoving, a neat, black hole in his blood-smeared cheek. Bryan looked up at Adam, had to shout to be heard. “I’m so sorry.”
Tears streaked Adam’s face. He shook his head. “It’s what Gramps wanted. We can’t help him. Leave him here.”
Bryan started to object, but Adam was right — they couldn’t get a dead body through the booby-trapped columns.
He heard another chunk of ceiling give way somewhere behind him. The ground trembled beneath his feet, just a little.
The columns.
“Come on, we have to move!”
He held Chief Zou tight and ran deeper into the tunnel.
Bryan’s flashlight beam danced across a jagged, stacked column. He skidded to a halt before he hit it, sliding feet kicking dirt onto the hodgepodge of masonry. The people behind him — he braced his feet just as someone big plowed into his back.
“Everyone, stop!”
The sound of panting and coughing filled the air. Almost there …
He set Amy Zou down on her feet, gave her a little shake.
“Chief, snap out of it,” he said. “You have to walk on your own.”
She blinked at him, a glazed look in her eyes. So many blisters, so much scorched flesh; she had been beautiful once, but would never be so again.
“Step where I step, Chief. If you stumble, if you fall, you die and so do your daughters.”
That hit home. Zou straightened, seemed to call upon some inner reserve of strength. She nodded.
Bryan looked at the little girls. Now wasn’t the time to be nice. “No room for mistakes. Step where the person in front of you steps. You screw it up, you die and kill everyone around you. Got it?”
Their eyes were wide, their little faces streaked with sweat and smoke. They nodded just like their mother.
He looked at the rest: Adam, Robertson, Biz-Nass and Pookie nodded as well. Everyone knew the stakes.
Bryan took a deep breath. The air was clearer here, pouring in from the train tunnel beyond. He eyed the narrow spaces between the columns and the wall.
“Hey, Pooks,” he said.
“Yes, my Terminator?”
“You better suck in that gut.”
Pookie did, tried to hold it, but he was exhausted and his air let out in a tummy-puffing huff.
“I guess I’ll go last,” he said.
Bryan nodded, then trained his flashlight be
am on the floor and started working his way through.
He made it out, then waited. Zou came next, then Tabz, then Mur, the one who had killed Pierre. Biz-Nass followed, then Adam. As Sean Robertson crawled out of the hole, the ground trembled again.
Bryan leaned in. Pookie was halfway through the columns.
“Pooks, move!”
A pebble dropped from the ceiling and hit Bryan in the head. Both men looked up — the ceiling above Bryan was a single, wide piece of chipped concrete.
More pebbles dropped from around its edges, trailing little comet-trails of dust.
Pookie drew in a big breath, then scooted faster.
Two columns to go.
“Pooks, slow down.”
“You slow down.”
Pookie was panicking. He moved too fast. His elbow hit the second to last column.
Bryan stepped through the hole and reached. He grabbed Pookie’s arm and yanked him forward. Bryan grabbed his stumbling friend in his arms, then threw himself backward out the hole as the tunnel collapsed. A thick cloud of dirt and dust billowed out around them.
As the dust settled, eight people sat on the train tunnel’s narrow walkway, coughing and gasping.
They had made it out alive.
Big Pimpin’
FOUR DAYS LATER
Pookie Chang limped up the steps of 2007 Franklin Street. The porch had been cleaned of debris. Yellow hazard tape was strung between posts, marking the danger of the broken rail that Bryan had driven Erickson through just a few days ago.
Pookie glanced back to his Buick. Night was falling. The streetlights were slowly flickering on. John Smith leaned against the passenger door, sipping on a cup of coffee. He smiled and gave Pookie a thumbs-up.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Pookie tucked the manila folder under his arm. Someone had replaced the wooden front door. The new door was tasteful, artistically etched, and solid steel.
Pookie pressed the door buzzer.
He still ached. He was beat to hell. His body would recover, but would his mind? That shit had been too much for anyone to see, let alone a modest, God-fearing boy from Chicago.
The door opened. Bryan Clauser stood inside. He looked fine. Days earlier, he’d had burn blisters, broken fingers and a line of staples up his ravaged cheek. Now the only thing marking that face was a neatly trimmed dark-red beard.
At least his face looked okay. His eyes? They stared out in a way they never had before. Bryan had seen too much, too soon.
“Bri-Bri,” Pookie said. “How’re they hanging?”
Bryan shook his head. “Sorry, Bro, the name is Jebediah now, although I may just go by Jeb.”
“That does have more of a Dukes of Hazzard feel to it, but I’d rather not see you in short-shorts.”
“In that case, just call me Mister Erickson.”
Pookie laughed. “Yeah, sure, I’ll get right on that. You gonna invite me in or what?”
Bryan nodded quickly and stepped aside. Pookie walked in. Like before, the house’s old-time finery overwhelmed him. Only now the place didn’t belong to some crazy old man … it belonged to his crazy best friend.
Pookie followed Bryan into the living room, again taking in the teak, marble, polished brass and fancy-pants picture frames. Emma sat curled up in a beautiful, gold-gilded Victorian-era chair. The dog had a white bandage wrapped around her head. She saw Pookie and started wagging her tail, although she made no effort to get up.
Pookie pointed at Emma. “Bri-Bri, I know you have all the culture of a stale Milwaukee’s Best spilled in the bleachers of a tractor pull, but you might want to get the dog off a chair that costs more than my Buick did when it was new.”
“Emma can sit wherever she wants,” Bryan said quietly. “She lives here.”
Pookie heard the tone in Bryan’s voice. Emma was the man’s last connection to Robin. The dog would have the run of the house, to say the least.
Pookie walked to Emma and carefully twirled her ear. Her eyes narrowed in a quiet doggy smile. He patted her rump, then turned back to Bryan.
“So you own all this now?”
“Sort of.”
“What do you mean, sort of?”
“Well, Erickson still owns it,” Bryan said. “It’s just now I’m basically Erickson.”
“You’re looking pretty fly for a seventy-year-old.”
Bryan nodded. “Yeah, well, the mayor is going to take care of that. He knows some people.”
“What kind of people?”
“I’m not sure,” Bryan said. “Powerful people. All I know is now I’m the Savior. I’m willing to go along with it for now.”
“So you’re not going to make this insanity public? You suddenly buying into Zou’s line of BS about property values and how people don’t need to know?”
Bryan chewed his lip, then shook his head. “I don’t care about that right now. I think Sly got away. So did Firstborn, maybe. There were hundreds of those things, but we didn’t see hundreds of bodies. The tunnel we came out of is gone. I need to figure out where the rest of Marie’s Children went. And if Robin’s killer is out there, I have to find her. Hunting is going to occupy my nights, Pooks. I don’t give a shit who foots the bill.”
Pookie nodded. His moral imperative to bring a vigilante killer to justice wasn’t quite the same when said vigilante had saved his life. Twice. And after the things Pookie had seen, how close he’d come to death … maybe this way was better after all.
“Hey, you clean out that wacky basement yet? Could have one hell of a yard sale, I imagine.”
Bryan shook his head. “Hell no. A trophy room is for trophies.”
A trophy room?
“Uh, Bri-Bri, you’re not taking up taxidermy, are you?”
Bryan shrugged, said nothing.
Pookie could only pray that Bryan kept at least a shred of his sanity and didn’t go down the same path Erickson had.
“I’ve got some good news,” Pookie said. “Word at Eight Fifty is that Chief Robertson is clearing you of the murder charges for Jeremy Ellis and Matt Hickman.”
Bryan nodded. “The mayor made sure that would happen. Robertson brought him to the hospital yesterday to talk to Amy.”
Chief Amy Zou was now just Amy?
“Is it true she’s staying here?”
“Once she gets out of the burn ward, yeah,” Bryan said. “Amy’s a wreck, Pooks — physically and mentally. She won’t talk at all. She’s not all there, man. I don’t know if she’ll ever recover from what she did. I’m getting her help, the best money can buy. The girls are staying here until she gets out.”
Bryan Clauser, former bachelor-cop, now the caretaker of two little girls. “You know anything about raising kids?”
He shook his head. “Nope. Until a couple of days ago, I didn’t know anything about killing monsters. You figure out which one is more complicated. What about Aggie James? Anyone pick him up yet?”
“Yeah, that’s the not-so-good news, Bri-Bri. It seems there was a lot of confusion at the hospital after the shootout. At about six A.M. that morning, an Officer Johnson walked into the maternity ward.”
Bryan shook his head, then laughed admiringly. “No way.”
“Way. Funny thing about a badge and a gun is most people don’t stop to validate your ID. Once he got in the maternity ward, he just took the baby and ran. We’re looking for him, but as of yet he and the baby are nowhere to be seen.”
“Jesus,” Bryan said. “That baby, he’s like Rex. We have to find him.”
Pookie nodded, but wondered what Bryan would do if he found the child. Killing a monster was one thing — murdering a baby was quite another indeed.
“So, Bryan, if His Highness the Mayor cleared your name, why don’t you go back to being my good buddy Bryan Clauser?”
Bryan paused. He looked at Emma. “Because Bryan Clauser never really existed at all. And after all that went down … well, he’s just gone, Pooks. Leave it be.”
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Pookie would, but only for now. Chief Zou wasn’t the only person wrecked by all of this — so was Mike Clauser. No matter what it took, Pookie would patch things up between the father and son.
Bryan looked down to the folder in Pookie’s hands. “That for me?”
Pookie handed it over. “The Handyman struck again last night.”
Bryan opened the folder and glanced over the crime-scene photos. “Victims five and six,” he said. “And again with cutting off the hands.”
“We’ve got nothing, Bri-Bri. He leaves the symbols, but that’s it. You and I both know the police will never find this guy. It’s you, or he keeps going.”
Bryan nodded. He closed the folder. “That seems to be the way things are. Pooks, it’s getting dark. You want to come out hunting with me?”
Pookie had known that question was coming, yet all his well-rehearsed and oh-so-clever answers had vanished. Bryan was made to do this — Pookie Chang was not.
Pookie shook his head as he walked to the front door. “I can’t. Me and my new partner have to look into a murder in Japantown.”
Bryan seemed confused at first, then he opened the front door and looked out to the street, to Pookie’s Buick. John Smith waved.
“Black Mister Burns is your … your partner?”
“If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’.”
Bryan stared, then nodded. “Yeah, that’s good. John came through big-time, Pooks. You could do a lot worse.”
Pookie wanted to say I could do a lot better, if only I was man enough to go hunting with you, but he didn’t.
Bryan forced a smile. “If you don’t mind, I gotta get ready to go to work.”
“Say no more, Brother.”
Bryan held out his hand. “Thank you, man.”
Pookie shook it. “Thank me? You saved my life for the second time.”
Bryan looked down. “Yeah, well … I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t stood by me. Now that Robin is gone, you … well, you’re all I’ve got.”
Pookie pulled him in and hugged him. “Gimme some sugar, you big lug. I’m glad you pinched off that emotional nugget before you go back to being all reserved and resigned and whatnot.”