The Wrong Goodbye tc-2

by Chris F. Holm

  “Never better,” said Theresa. “Did you really die back there?”

  “This body did,” I said. “But only for a sec.”

  “A sec. Right. ’Cause that’s a lot less fucked up than dead for good.”

  “Not saying it’s less fucked up. But from where I’m sitting, it’s sure as hell preferable. Looks like we’re on foot from here. You up for it?”

  “You askin’ ’cause I’m blind? That’s discrimination, friend.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I was asking Gio.”

  But Gio didn’t hear me. He was just sitting there, one hand to his chest, his face pained and slick with sweat.

  I put a hand on Gio’s shoulder, tried to rouse him. “Gio?”

  “I can feel it,” he muttered, more to himself than to me.

  Theresa leaned forward, put a hand to Gio’s cheek. “Feel what, hon?”

  “I can feel his hands around my soul! Clawing,

  gouging, tearing it free of my flesh… Jesus, Sam, is this what it’s like to be collected?”

  “Afraid so. And when we take you, we feel everything you’ve ever felt —up to and including your collection. Which means that’s what it feels like to collect as well.”

  “But why… why didn’t I remember?”

  “Shock,” I said. “But that particular get-out-of-jailfree card only comes up once a deck —next time, you’ll feel it, and you’ll remember.”

  “If there is a next time,” Theresa said.

  “Right,” I said. I didn’t have the heart to tell her sooner or later, there was bound to be a next time. “But right now what matters is that feeling means Danny’s close.”

  Theresa cocked her head and frowned. “Let’s hope he’s closer than those sirens,” she said.

  I listened for a moment. She was right. They were distant, but approaching fast. “We need to move.”

  We set out at a trot past the strip mall down a gently curving street that some overzealous city planner likely thought of as “organic.” Arc-sodium orange from the streetlights lit our way past lowslung ranches on modest lots, and put me in mind of faded sepia photographs, pale golden-hued mementos of better times that never were. The night air was cool and crisp, low seventies at most, and was alive with mariachi music, spiced meats, and something more sinister —the faint ozone scent of magic. At first, we saw no signs of celebration save the makeshift altars set out on stoops and sidewalks: votive candles, marigolds, children’s toys, and sugar skulls surrounding pictures of the departed both young and old —the flowers, sweets, and trinkets intended as ofrendas to the dead. But as we ran —me out front, the shotgun held tight to my chest so as to attract less attention, Gio and Theresa hand-in-hand behind me —we happened upon passersby bedecked in their Dia de los Muertos finery: their outfits a garish funhouse reflection of their Sunday best, their faces painted up as skulls, or hidden behind ornate calavera masks. As they made their way westward toward the festivities, they laughed and hooted and whooped, and shot off rapid-fire Spanish at one another. If they noticed us, they gave no sign. It was as if we were the spirits that walked invisible among them.

  Invisible to them, perhaps, but not to all. For all around us —on every streetlight, every rooftop, every fence post and power line in sight —were the jagged silhouettes of thousands upon thousands of crows. Their heads turned as one as they tracked our progress, their ink-black eyes unblinking as they watched us pass.

  We’d lost the chopper when we abandoned the commercial strip right off the freeway and disappeared into the relative darkness of the neighborhood beyond, but it hadn’t given up on us. It hovered low over the rooftops, its searchlight tracing out a grid below. Searching. Probing. Advancing ever toward us. But the costume-clad around us paid it little mind. Even blocks away, the music from the festival was loud enough to drown out the thrumming of its rotor, and perhaps the sight of searching helicopters was all too common to the residents of LA.

  “What exactly are we looking for?” asked Theresa. “Uh, metaphorically speaking, of course.”

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “Gio, where are we going?”

  He considered the question, his face sweat-slick and deathly pale. “That way,” he said, indicating the direction most of the foot-traffic was headed —the direction of the festival.

  Theresa frowned. “How do you know?”

  “’Cause my gut is screaming bloody murder to run the other way.”

  “Yeah,” Theresa said, flashing a wan smile, “you never were one to listen.”

  We pressed on. As we did, what had begun as the odd passerby coalesced into a crowd. Into a party. Into a sea of deathly faces staring back at us. The neighborhood to our right gave way to a city park, its rolling lawn flush with people dancing, its parking lot a makeshift marketplace where booths sold sugar skulls and loaves of pan de muerto, cheap sombreros and calaca figurines.

  The rooftops of the booths and tents were alive with crows —silent, watching. Tree limbs sagged beneath their weight. Occasionally, some celebrant would snap a cell phone pic of them, the flash piercing the night and reflecting off the liquid black of their feathers —but still, they did not move. They remained as stock-still as the Yeomen Warders who stood guard before the Tower of London, Charon’s own dark sentinels of the In-Between.

  “Why come here?” Theresa said. “What attracted your Danny to this place?”

  “Belief is a powerful thing,” I said. “If everyone you see here tonight believes a little bit —even if it’s only in that deep, primal place in their mind that still fears the dark and makes them cross themselves when lightning strikes —that this night provides a window between the land of the living and of the dead, their combined force of will is enough to nudge the universe such that it’s closer to being so. Believe me when I tell you,” I said, my thoughts turning to my encounter with Abyzou in the nightmare realm I’d traveled through to return from my unintended skim-trip, “you have no idea what might be pressing up against the glass right now and looking back at us. Or how easy it might be to crack that glass and unleash a cleansing fury on this world. And I hope to God you never find out.”

  “Dear Lord,” she said, “I bet you’re fun at parties.”

  Gio clutched his chest and took a knee. A woman in a tattered orange ball gown and a matching veil looked down at him as she pressed past us through the crowd, a churro in each hand. As she noted his obvious distress, her bone-white painted face creased with worry.

  Her eyes met mine, her intent clear —does he need help? —but I shook my head and smiled what I hoped was a reassuring smile, the shotgun tucked behind my back out of her line of sight. She hovered for a moment until Theresa took Gio by the elbow and helped him to his feet, and then she disappeared into the teeming throng.

  “You OK, hon?” Theresa, her voice tinged with worry.

  “We’re close,” he said, sucking wind like he’d just run a marathon, his face gray and slick with sweat. “Too close, if you ask me.”

  I caught a glimpse of flashing red and blue two blocks to our east, and shook my head. “Not close enough,” I said.

  “Could he be masked? Mixed in with the crowd?”

  “I doubt it. The kind of ritual he’d be working would require space. Someplace where he wouldn’t draw too much attention. Somewhere he wouldn’t be disturbed.”

  “So… somewhere like that?”

  My eyes tracked to where Gio was pointing. Diagonal across the park from us stood a construction site, three-odd floors of half-finished building —all concrete, steel girders, and plastic sheeting, which billowed like curtains in the breeze. It was surrounded by a high chain link fence topped with three lines of barbed wire, which slanted outward overhead. Floodlights shone at ground level to deter any would-be trespassers. I shouldered through the horde of celebrants to get a better look, drawing my share of half-hearted Spanish curses —and shouts of alarm from those few who noticed the shotgun in my hands. One passerby, who looked for all the worl
d like an undead bullfighter, shouted “¡Escopeta!” and panic rippled through the crowd. As I’ve said, I don’t know a lot of Spanish, but that’s one word I understand. Means shotgun. Means our chances of staying hidden in the crowd just dropped to nil. So I said to hell with hiding, and took off full-bore toward the building —the crowd parting before me, Gio and Theresa following close behind.

  When we reached the fence, I saw the building was of a peculiar structure. Something about it set my Spidey-sense a-tingling, though at first, I couldn’t put my finger on why. Then I spotted it: a sign, graffiti-spattered and bolted to the chain link fence, proclaimed the site as the future home of Asphodel Meadows Condominiums, with a projected completion date of three years back. The sign was illustrated, showing an artist’s rendering of the completed building —six stories tall and complete with landscaping, rooftop pool, and smiling, happy tenants. And from the angle of the illustration, it was clear the footprint of the building was a five-pointed star —also known as a pentagram.

  A pentagram is a common focal object for all manner of mystical rights. Upright, it’s said to represent the wounds of Christ. Inverted, the pentagram is the sigil of the demon Baphomet, long rumored to be but one aspect of the Morning Star himself, also known as Lucifer.

  No telling from where I stood which way this pentagram faced. But it was fucking big. Which meant it was capable of channeling some serious power.

  And lest I think it was a coincidence I stumbled upon a giant fucking pentagram in the middle of this Dia de los Muertos celebration, the name of the place had Danny’s fingerprints all over it. He always was a cheeky motherfucker.

  According to Greek myth, Asphodel Meadows is the land in the afterlife dedicated to the dead whose lives straddled the boundary of good and evil without ever tipping to either side. Guess that classics education of his was finally paying off. But this building, if it were his, represented years of planning, investing, careful construction —maybe decades. The Danny I knew couldn’t be counted on to plan lunch.

  I was beginning to think I’d never really known Danny at all.

  Something else about the building troubled me, but it took me a sec to figure out what it was. The buildings across the street were covered in crows. Ditto the ones on either side, and the three barbed wires that topped the fence surrounding it. But despite the fact this place —with all its nooks, crannies, and exposed girders —should have been a perfect roost, its every perch was bare.

  Then I noticed the birds perched atop the fence weren’t watching Gio, Theresa, and me like the others. To a one, they faced away from us.

  They were looking at the building.

  At Danny’s mammoth pentagram.

  I couldn’t help but feel they were waiting for me to do something. I wished to hell they’d tell me what. Because if the red and blue that spilled across the crowd on either side of us was any indication, I didn’t have much time.

  The music cut out to the angry protests of the deathly crowd nearest the stage, who were not yet wise to the crazed gunman in their ranks. Over the PA, one of the boys in blue insisted they disperse. He said they were in danger. That there was a killer in their midst. Both those things were true enough, I suppose —they were in danger, and God knows I’d killed plenty —but tonight, at least, the killer they should be worried about wasn’t among them, but hidden somewhere within the skeletal frame of the building before me.

  The crowd reacted, some with jeers, and others with blind panic. A mob of cartoon skeletons, threatening to bubble over into chaos. Police cruisers dotted every intersection in sight —parked at harsh diagonals in the centers of the intersections, their lights and sirens a vulgar parody of the festivities they’d interrupted.

  Officers, ten feet apart, had formed a line along Cesar Chavez Avenue to the north, and pushed southward into the crowd —no doubt hoping to drive me out. Some of the drunker celebrants taunted them or refused to move, while others fled —by reflex or necessity, I wasn’t sure. But though the cops’ progress was slow, it was unrelenting; they knew full well the freeway blocked any chance of egress to the south, and no doubt the routes to the east and west were covered. They had me cornered, and it was just a matter of time before they found me.

  “Gio, listen —you and Theresa need to get out of here while you can. They’re not looking for you. You can use the crowd for cover. Just leave, and don’t look back.”

  “Fat fucking chance, dude.”

  “Gio, don’t be an idiot —there’s nothing more you can do for me. And remember, if you can sense Danny, Danny can sense you. If you encounter him, he won’t hesitate to collect you.”

  “I ain’t leaving you.”

  “Damn it, Gio, don’t you get it? I’ve been using you. No matter what happens tonight, things aren’t going to end well for you. Stopping Danny won’t change that. The best you can hope to do is extend the time you’ve got. Because once it’s done, there’ll be hell to pay.”

  “You think I don’t know you’ve been using me? Shit, Sam, that’s all anybody ever does. We use each other to get ahead. To pass the time. To cure the boredom, kill the pain. Half the time, ain’t even nothing wrong with that. Shit, you see this lady here? A daily dose of her, and I feel like a better man than I got any right to. I done my share of nasty shit, Sam; you know it as well as I do. You think I don’t know how this’ll end for me? Some part of me’s suspected all my life. Truth is, I don’t mind.” He took Theresa’s hand in his own and smiled, his eyes wet with tears that wouldn’t fall. “Just knowing there’s a heaven’s good enough. But if you think I’ve come this far to give up now, you’re fucking nuts.”

  Theresa laughed. “Baby, if you ain’t noticed, fucking nuts is our boy Sam’s specialty.” Then, to me: “But he’s right. We see this through.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said, but she raised a hand to stop me.

  “I go where my man goes.”

  Great, I thought. The cops are closing in, and I’m off to stop a modern Deluge with a blind chick and a dude who needs a breather when he climbs a flight of stairs.

  This should go well.

  “OK, first we’ve got to find a way in.”

  Turns out, there wasn’t one. Sure, the fence had a gate and all —one of those slidey deals with rollers and a track, big enough to drive a dump truck through, but it was fastened with a chain as thick as my arm, from which dangled a stainless steel padlock the size and shape of a child’s lunchbox. Disc tumblers, not pins, which meant I’d need an hour and a decent set of tools to pop the fucking thing.

  “Hold this,” I said, handing Gio the sawed-off. “I’m going over.”

  “The hell you are,” he said. “That barbed wire’s gonna tear you all to shit —and no way the two of us’re gonna be able to follow.”

  “Speak for yourself, Tons of Fun,” said Theresa.

  “Oh, excuse me,” Gio shot back. “I’m sure you’d scale the fence just fine once I point you at it.”

  I eyed the barbed wire, the crows wing-to-wing atop it. “Give me your shirt to toss over it, and I’ll be fine.”

  “You kidding me? I ain’t giving you my shirt. Then I’m standing here half-naked with a fucking shotgun when the fuzz shows up. Ain’t you ever seen an episode of Cops? It’s always the shirtless dude who gets arrested.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, boys —quit arguing!”

  Theresa, who’d been feeling around the fence while we two bickered, grabbed the shotgun from Gio and made for the gate. Before I could shout at her to stop —that lock’d stop a load of buckshot without so much as getting scratched —she unloaded two quick blasts. They pierced the night like thunder, and set the crowd screaming. I only hoped the echoes were enough to mask its origin. Somehow, though, I doubted it.

  But she hadn’t shot the lock. She’d shot the metal track the gate’s rollers were seated on. Ripped a hole clean through it. Then she grabbed the corner of the gate and pulled. Freed of its track, the gate swung outward until the chain
halted it, leaving a triangle three feet wide at its base to squeeze through.

  “You boys wanna hurry this along? We don’t have much time until the cops get wise.”

  We crawled through the narrow aperture. Theresa first, then me. Gio was last, and it’s a damn good thing —the opening was so narrow, we had to grab his arms and pull. Once he was through, we yanked the gate back into place. Maybe it’d take our pursuers a couple minutes to realize where we’d gone.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t take Danny that long to figure it out.

  “Sam?” he called down from somewhere high above —the voice unfamiliar but the accent unmistakable. “Sam, is that you? So nice of you to stop by, mate! Of course, if you hoped to get the drop on me, you’d have done better to leave the Giordano soul at home —I can sense his presence, after all. You may as well have draped yourself in Christmas lights —but then, subtlety never was your strongest suit. I’d suggest you both turn your arses around and bugger off while you can. As I understand it, this ritual can get a little… unpleasant for those nearby.”

  Son of a bitch. I was hoping to approach the place unnoticed —to get the jump on Danny before he ever knew what hit him —but thanks to the fucking coppers’ interference, it looked like subterfuge was off the table. I guess the lesson is, if you plan on sneaking up on somebody, don’t leave a trail of mayhem half a continent wide in your wake. That, or never stop for breakfast at Rosita’s.

  Once we’d cleared the gate, we’d taken refuge between a pile of cinderblocks and a heap of warped, discarded lumber, which served to shield us from the building and the street both. From our hidey-hole, I shouted back, “Don’t do this, Danny! It’s not too late!”

  “Would that that were true, old friend. But I fear it’s been too late for quite some time.”

  “I’m coming up!” I said.

  “I wouldn’t, if I were you. You’ll find the path is not without protection.”

  I took the shotgun back from Theresa, popped the floodlight nearest us. Night engulfed our quarter of the building’s lot.

  “Come on,” I said.