Highways to Hell

by Bryan Smith

  Jack smirked. “You’ll see.”

  Raven let out a grunt as her right foot shot forward with tremendous force and knocked the door off its hinges.

  Lucien said, “Oh.”

  Jack chuckled. “Yeah, but there’s another reason, too. Let’s go.”

  Raven moved through the dark opening and into the warehouse. The men clambered up the steps and followed her into the darkness.

  7.

  Full-Tilt Rock and Roll

  The threaded barrel of Raven’s Ingram M10 was fitted with a Sionics suppressor. The weapon made a flat, snapping sound when she fired half a clip into the face of the first alien they encountered. The thing’s head nearly disintegrated, spewing white goo as it toppled to the concrete floor.

  Jack’s voice was a barely audible whisper in the darkness: “That’s why.”

  Raven remained on point as they moved deeper into the warehouse, moving in crouches as they progressed from one row of steel shelving to another. She dispatched five more alien guards with the same lethal efficiency. Each of the men fleetingly wondered whether the slightly built (but deceptively powerful) girl would accomplish this entire mission single-handedly.

  For his part, Jack sincerely hoped not. He admired the hell out of Raven, but his male ego reacted in typical fashion, urging him to take out his share of bad guys before the evening’s festivities were finished. He managed to suppress the urge, an all-too-rare case of common sense winning out over his baser impulses. Heavily armed though they were, this was an extraordinarily dangerous situation they’d walked into. Better by far to proceed with relative stealth, allowing Raven to pick off stray aliens with her Ingram, than letting loose with a barrage of attention-drawing shotgun blasts.

  The darkness began to fade as they moved closer to the warehouse’s center, where banks of flickering florescent lights gleamed overhead. They reached the last row of shelving and crouched down behind a rusting forklift.

  Jack’s blood boiled as they surveyed the scene at the heart of the warehouse. Pushed against the far wall were the remnants of some sort of assembly line. The warehouse’s center floor area had been given over to an array of gleaming metal tables. Each had a naked, drooling human strapped to it. Aliens in white cloaks stood over the tables, poking and prodding at the bound humans with various instruments. The men and women on the table barely reacted, even when something sharp was inserted into their flesh.

  Drugged, Jack thought, his teeth grinding.

  More humans crouched in cages suspended by chains from the ceiling. Men and women, even a few children. All of them nude, all of them drugged to insensibility. Armed guards patrolled the perimeter of what Jack instantly thought of as the “operating theater.” There were maybe a dozen of them in all, each of them carrying rifles or handguns. Jack began to smile as he studied them. They were sloppy. They didn’t expect intruders, so they weren’t looking for any. They milled about like bored high school students lounging outside the cafeteria between classes, talking and occasionally laughing.

  Jack looked at Andy and held out a hand. “Stunners.”

  Any nodded and reached inside his jacket. He snapped a stun grenade off a strap and pressed it into Jack’s open palm. He passed another to Lucien, and another to Raven, then palmed one for himself.

  Jack said, “These bastards aren’t half as disciplined as the worst of Saddam’s front-line conscripts. Look, the one group of complacent sons of bitches is wandering back to the other group of complacent sons of bitches.” He looked at Andy again. “How’s your pitching arm?”

  Andy flexed his shoulder, limbering up. “Pretty good, I think.”

  Raven nodded.

  Lucien grunted an affirmation.

  Jack pulled the pin on his grenade and the others did the same.

  “Count of three.”

  Jack counted off, then leapt to his feet, his arm coming forward in the same motion, sending a fist-sized black blob hurtling through the air. Three more followed it in similar arcs. The alien guards didn’t realize anything was amiss until the grenades clattered on the floor and rolled between their legs—and by then it was too late. The M429s erupted in nearly simultaneous blasts of flame and smoke. The guards pitched to the ground, most of them losing their weapons in the process. Jack and his gang of liberators charged out of their hiding place, speeding past the startled “doctors” and moaning “patients” en route to the still-stunned guards.

  A couple of them had already managed to stagger to their feet and begin to raise their weapons. Jack aimed his shotgun and squeezed the trigger, blowing apart the first one’s head. The roar of another shotgun, this one wielded by Lucien, blew apart the neck of the second. It remained upright and continued its labored effort to bring its weapon to bear, but Lucien just chambered another round and shot it point-black in the face. Most of the remaining guards stayed on the ground, still stunned, a few even holding their trembling hands up in supplication. Andy leveled the barrel of his weapon at the back of one’s head, then squeezed the trigger. It jerked once and slumped to the ground. His face expressionless, he moved to the alien next to it and killed it, too. Jack and Lucien followed his lead, systematically executing the remaining guards. They’d discussed it beforehand—none of them were to be left alive.

  Raven left them to it and hurried after the fleeing faux-doctors. She was faster than a normal human, but that was because she wasn’t a normal human. The descendent (from her father’s side) of a refugee clan of wizards from another galaxy, she had alien blood flowing through her veins, too. Which kind of made things more personal for her—these interplanetary thugs offended both aspects of her nature.

  She swung the Ingram back and forth in wide arcs, taking most of them down within moments. She ejected the spent clip, snapped another one in pace as she pounded after the few still-mobile aliens, and started firing again. The final three aliens fell to the floor and Raven quickly finished them off, obliterating most of their heads with close-range bursts from the Ingram. She then went back to the initial group of wounded white-cloaked aliens and used another full clip to do them in. When it was done, she flicked the gun’s safety on and returned to where the men were standing.

  Jack looked at her. “You okay?”

  A corner of Raven’s mouth twitched. “All in a day’s work, boss.”

  Lucien’s gaze swept over the rows of gleaming tables and strapped-down slaves. He glanced at the ceiling, too. “Okay, so the bad guys are vanquished. That was the easy part. What do we do about these poor bastards?”

  Andy flipped open a cell phone. “Got it covered, mate.”

  Jack grinned. “Come on, Lucien. You knew he’d say that.”

  Lucien shook his head. “The mysterious, all-knowing Svengali thing freaks me out a little sometimes.”

  Jack said, “Yeah?”

  Andy moved away from his friends, turning his back to them and talking in hushed tones for a minute or two. Then he turned back to them and snapped the cell phone shut. “A clean-up crew and medics are on the way.” His gaze flicked upward. “Let’s do our part and figure out how to get those people down from there.”

  Before Jack could ask how they were supposed to do that, a portal opened and a big man in a blue-and-white Hawaiian shirt stepped through it. He was followed by a team of white-suited men and women carrying first aid kits and other medical supplies.

  Jack blinked rapidly for a few moments. “Well…that was fast.”

  The white suits immediately started attending to the people on the tables, and Mr. Hawaiian Shirt came over and bear-hugged Andy O’Day. Andy slapped the other man’s back. “Good to see you again, mate.”

  They separated and Andy said, “Jack, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine. This is Fred Grimm.” Andy winked. “No relation. I think.”

  “Huh.” Jack shook the affable man’s hand. “Are you sure we’re not related?”

  Fred’s eyes twinkled with amusement. “Oh, pretty sure.’ He half-turned away from them, taki
ng in the totality of the situation. His voice took on a graver tone. “We’ll handle all this. Go on and get out of here.”

  Andy glanced again at the caged humans hanging from the ceiling. “But—”

  “You’ve done enough tonight. We’ve got this covered.” Fred grinned again. “Even superheroes need a little rest.”

  Jack frowned. “Superheroes? Hey, listen—”

  Andy clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t argue with him, brother. My advice, someone calls you a superhero, go with it. There are worse things to be.”

  Jack let out a sigh. The man had a point.

  Better heroic than Damned anyway.

  “Okay. Fine. Let’s get out of here.” He looked at Fred, studying him intently for a moment. “We’ll talk again, you and I.”

  Fred smiled. “Oh, I don’t doubt that.”

  The members of the Grimm Detective Agency walked out of the warehouse exiting through the rear door Raven had kicked down less than half an hour earlier. They moved slowly down the steps, each of them feeling that deep tiredness that comes in the wake of surviving a battle, a sapping of energy that had more to do with the relief of high-level stress than with physical exertion.

  As they reached the parking lot, a hunched figure lurched toward them out of the darkness and Jack instinctively raised the shotgun.

  But Lucien pushed the barrel down. “Don’t.”

  The figure came closer and Jack saw it was just a grime-covered man in filthy clothes. The man staggered like a drunk, and in a moment Jack realized it was because he was in fact, very, very drunk. Jack shuddered, and a vague chill settled in his gut. A part of him sometimes suspected he’d wind up like this poor fellow one day.

  Duke Carlyle gasped at the sight of all the weaponry. “Don’t shoot me.”

  Jack said, “Go sleep it off elsewhere, fella.”

  Duke squinted at him. “Who’re you to tell me what to do?” His gaze went to each of them in turn, lingering for a moment on Lucien. He frowned. “Why ain’t you got no clothes on, boy?”

  Lucien smiled.

  And shifted to hound mode.

  Duke fainted.

  Lucien reverted to human form. “That’s why.”

  Jack sighed. “What do we do with this guy? Leave him here? It’s not like he’s got a home to go to.”

  Andy shook his head. “You have something of a point, but that’s not what superheroes do.”

  Jack rolled his eyes. “Again with that nonsense.”

  Andy said, “We’ll get him to a shelter, see he’s looked after, at least for tonight.”

  Jack was silent for a long moment. He looked up at the sky and tried to see any stars through the haze of city lights and pollution. He didn’t see any. Not a single one. He could almost believe this world he inhabited was the only world, that the billions of living things inhabiting this sphere were the only living things in all existence.

  But, of course, he knew that wasn’t true.

  He looked at the unconscious drunk again and said, “Okay.”

  Because tonight he knew only one true thing for absolutely certain.

  Tonight they were heroes.

  8.

  Unfinished Business

  Lucy Martin grinned and plunged her fangs into the girl’s tender, exposed neck. The euphoria hit her immediately, faster and more powerful than the strongest drug rush, and she slurped the girl’s blood greedily, drinking and drinking, until she’d drained her. She relinquished the girl’s limp form reluctantly, allowing it to fall to the bloodied sofa.

  Lucy stood up and released an exultant hiss of satisfaction.

  She heard a sudden sound, the creak of a floorboard, and whirled to face the interloper.

  Jack Grimm sighed. “You killed her.”

  Lucy grinned. “Yes. And now I’ll kill you.”

  Jack moved further into the room, his deliberate movements indicating wariness of the vampire’s power but no fear. “Tell me something, Lucy. How does it feel to become what you hated. Do you think it’s right? Is there even one shred of humanity left in you, one tiny piece of your soul that doesn’t want this, that wants you to stop?”

  Lucy grinned again. She licked blood from her lips. “No. The weak, helpless little girl who came begging for your help is no more. I’m better now.” She took a step toward Jack. “You shouldn’t judge me. You have no clue how good it feels to drink and kill. Maybe I’ll show you. Maybe I’ll turn you, make you my slave. Did you know vampires can enslave those they turn?”

  She kept coming at him, her dark, soulless eyes gleaming.

  Jack said, “Yeah, I know that.”

  Lucy laughed. “And maybe that’s why you came back. Maybe you want to live forever like me. Or maybe you just want me.” She giggled. “Oh, don’t think I didn’t see the dirty old man lust in your eyes every time you looked at me. Give in to it, Jack. Let me take you, let me make your darkest, fondest dreams come true.”

  Jack shook his head. “You’re wrong, Lucy.”

  The vampire smirked. “Oh.”

  “Yeah.” Jack brought the crossbow from behind his back, aimed it with as much precision as he’d ever aimed his .45, and said, “You’re not gonna live forever.”

  He clicked the trigger and the wooden bolt shot forward, piercing Lucy’s heart.

  She glanced at the protruding bolt, then looked at Jack with an expression of wide-eyed, beseeching terror. “No.”

  Jack sighed and lowered the crossbow.

  Lucy’s eyes went blank and she fell dead to the floor.

  Jack regarded her a moment longer, then walked out of the house. He stood in the backyard and smoked a cigarette, silently contemplating the starry night sky.

  9.

  Angst

  The next afternoon Jack and Andy were sitting at the bar in the Sherlock Holmes Pub. Andy was drinking Irish whiskey and Jack was nursing his second pint of the day. They’d already laid down their usual big tips, their way of thanking the bar’s staff for their usual lack of cooperation with the authorities after the big shootout in the street the week before.

  Andy said, “You did what you had to do.”

  Jack sipped his stout. It tasted bitter. “You’re always saying that.”

  Andy chuckled. “And I’m always right.”

  Jack nodded. “Maybe.” He looked at his brother. His friend. “They’re still after me, you know. Satan’s people.”

  Andy stared into his dwindling glass of whiskey. “They’ll always be after you, Jack. Until your dying breath. But you already knew that.”

  Jack sighed. “Yeah. But sometimes I think how nice it’d be to…” He signed again. “I don’t know, live a normal life. To not feel constantly hounded and hunted. To not feel the weight of worlds on my shoulders.”

  Andy finished his drink and pushed the empty glass forward for a refill.

  He looked at Jack, smiling but with a hint of sadness in his eyes. “It’s okay to dream, brother, but you and I both know you were born for this. So was I.”

  Jack chuckled bitterly. “Slaves of destiny?”

  Andy received his refilled glass with a smile and a nod, then raised it for a toast. “To the very end.”

  They clinked glasses.

  Someone sounded a few tinkling notes on the piano. Jack and Andy swiveled on their chairs and grinned at the sight of Raven sitting on the piano bench. She played a few more notes, her confidence growing, then began to sing the opening lines of “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life.”

  Before long, everyone in the Sherlock Holmes Pub had joined in.

  Jack’s voice was the loudest of them all.

  The last day of John Marlowe’s mortal life began with a hangover. He woke up, opened his bleary eyes, took a good look around, shuddered at the disarray in the bedroom, and went back to sleep for a few more hours. When he got up again, he shrugged into the clothes he’d worn the day before, stumbled into the kitchen, and opened the fridge.

  It was still there.


  The severed head sat in an aluminum pie tray, the ragged stump of its neck buried in a layer of cookie dough. Strands of blood-flecked blond hair dangled through the shelf slats, brushing the plastic lid of a bowl of tuna salad.

  “Fuck. I really did it.”

  John Marlowe was forty-two. He hadn’t killed anyone since his early twenties. In those days, he’d had some level of ambition, as well as a young man’s elevated sense of his own importance in the grand scheme of things. He’d wanted to make his mark in the world. Do something big and become famous. As a teenager he learned to play guitar and tried starting a band. The rock star life seemed like a good gig. Groupies and all the drugs you could handle. Problems set in when he discovered he couldn’t sing or write even one half-decent song. So he gave that up and decided to become a novelist. A celebrated man of letters. He imagined a different kind of fame and fortune. National Book Awards and interviews on NPR. The bigger literary names even had their own kind of groupies. Brainy women who would pin their hair back and wear owl’s-eye glasses, hide their sleek and wanton bodies in modest clothes. The sexy librarian type. But in the bedroom they’d be foul-mouthed, dominating hellcats. If anything, it was an even more appealing prospect than the abandoned dream of busty, miniskirt-wearing rock star groupies, all of whom would have been empty-headed bottle-blond bimbos straight out of a 1980’s Poison video. Not that there was anything wrong with empty-headed bottle-blond bimbos. It was just a question of whether you more enjoyed the refined taste of an expensive wine or the simpler taste of a cheap domestic beer. There was a time and place for both, and at that point in his young existence John had decided he was going to be the kind of man who preferred the finer things in life. All he had to do to make this happen was sit down and write the Great American Novel, and perhaps follow it up with maybe half a dozen lesser novels over the course of the next thirty years or so to keep the cash and lit-slut groupies rolling in.