by Anton Strout
Zombie Connor tilted his head at me, his slack jaw falling off onto the floor. “You okay, kid?” it said, slowly shambling toward me. “Did you breathe in some of that smoke? You know you gotta avoid that stuff. Breathe through your shirt.”
I nodded, but pulled my retractable bat out just in case. If I had stopped, dropped, and rolled in the first place, maybe I wouldn’t be wondering if I might have to take a bat to my mentor. But he was a zombie now. I choked the bat up like I was in the World Series.
“You having any strange cravings?” I asked, backing away.
“What?!” the zombie said, shuffling closer. “Like chocolate?”
“Or brains,” I suggested. “Or chocolate-covered brains…whatever.”
Zombie Connor looked at the bat nervously. “Why don’t you put that down?”
It was hard to see through the smoke, and I stumbled back as I tried to think of a plan. Nothing came to mind other than beating Zombie Connor down, but I was reluctant to do that. I stopped when I backed into the wall of windows. I glanced over my shoulder in an effort to find one of the handles, but when my hand found one, the handle bit me. Luckily it was my one gloved hand, but it still hurt. I screamed in pain and Zombie Connor rushed me.
“Give me the bat,” the rotting corpse said, and started prying it from me.
“No!” I shouted. “I’m too young to have my brains eaten!”
“Just give me the bat!”
I held on as tight as I could, but it was no use. Connor’s two hands were stronger than my single one that held the bat. He was strong for a zombie. He tore it away from me and raised it over his head to strike me. Of all the ways I had imagined my death, getting beaten by my zombified mentor while trapped by a cannibalistic window handle wasn’t one of them.
Zombie Connor’s blow never came. He swung the bat down in a fluid arc, but he went wide and smashed through a section of the window. The tiny metal fangs I felt biting into my glove let go, and I pulled my hand away, nursing it while the zombie went to town on the rest of the window. When the one section of the frame was clear of glass, he tossed me my bat, his hand still attached to it as it flew through the air at me.
Zombie Connor looked out the window, then back at me before his eyes melted away.
“Hope you can swim, kid,” he said. He ran for the gaping hole in the window and leapt out. Seconds later, I heard a splash. I could burn to death up here or I could take my chances leaping into zombie-infested waters. I opted for the water when the sleeve of my coat started to smolder. I took one last look at the warehouse full of burning fish and leapt out the window, hoping I could at least use the rotting zombie as a flotation device.
25
Once I hit the water, whatever glamour was being caused by the traps in Cyrus’s warehouse flew away. Connor was already swimming for the shore and I was relieved to see that his flesh wasn’t rotting and his hand was still attached. I could only imagine the amount of paperwork I would have had to fill out if I’d clubbed my partner to death.
Not finding Cyrus here meant that he was still at large, which made me increasingly nervous—especially for Jane. He and whoever he was working with had trapped me so easily. I realized that I really needed to step up my game of Jane and Go Seek before he or the Sectarians found her.
The next morning, Connor and I had the Inspectre send Greater & Lesser Arcana to check out the remains of the warehouse while the two of us filled out mountains of forms regarding the incident. When the investigators returned, the best they had come up with were a few burned pieces that might have been vaguely fish shaped, but could just as easily have been vaguely blob shaped, too. With no leads on that front, I snuck out of the office and headed out to deal with Jane.
I made sure I wasn’t followed to the Upper East Side. When Jane opened the door to her hotel room, I was glad to see she had used the chain across the door as a precautionary measure. It meant she was starting to be cautious, rather than being the slightly naïve girl I had dined with at Davidson’s insistence. When Jane saw it was me, she looked relieved and let me in.
“Why do you smell like smoke?”
“Long story,” I said. “Let’s just get you moved again. I’ll tell you on the way.”
We quickly packed her things and rode silently in a cab to a new hotel, far west in Chelsea, finally giving me the opportunity to slip her journal into the bottom of one of her bags as I helped her unpack. The relief of giving up that guilty burden was tangible, and despite my near death last night, and the danger of Jane’s current situation, I found that helping her was actually a small oasis of fun. Once we were done unpacking, I sat down and told her about my brush with death at the hands of Cyrus’s fire trap.
“My God,” she said with genuine concern. The look on her face was far more sincere that I’d expected from a recently exiled cultist. “Are you okay?”
I nodded, then remembered all the fish art that had been on display at the warehouse, not to mention the stolen fish from Irene’s that we had chased all the way back to Jane’s old employers.
“Do you recall anything from your time with the Sectarians about a fish?” I asked, hoping for something useful.
Jane thought it over a moment and then shook her head. “For a while, we had a lot of fish coming in. I remember the one you were after, but I’m afraid they kept me in the dark as to what they do. I only received and processed the shipments. Sorry.”
I was disappointed, and she saw it on my face.
“We kept pretty accurate records, though,” she added encouragingly. “You’d be surprised what OCD sticklers Sectarians can be about keeping track of things. They’re like the Felix Ungers of the cultist world.”
Maybe there was something useful in that, and I wrinkled my brow while I thought about it.
After I had been silent for several minutes, Jane spoke up again. “You okay?”
I snapped out of my thoughts, none the wiser about what to do. Jane’s concern for me was touching, but it was me who should have been concerned about her.
“How’s your recovery coming?” I asked.
Jane struck a superheroic pose, hands on hips. “Nothing short of miraculous, thanks to that bag of mystical healing thingies you left with me. I’m running out, though.”
I doubted I could easily get access to another emergency kit in a hurry. I still hadn’t told anyone in the Department that I was secretly nursing Jane back to health.
When I said nothing, she said, “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not asking for anything more. You’ve done more than enough already…it’s just that I’m kinda dwindling my savings here…”
I still wasn’t sure how to help Jane other than hiding her, but maybe if I got her out and about, we’d hatch some kind of plan.
“Let’s get you out of here,” I said, “go for a little walk, see how well you’re healed up. I’ve got a couple of errands to run anyway.”
Jane looked a little frightened by the prospect. She hadn’t really stepped foot from the hotels I had been moving her to. “You sure it’s okay?”
I nodded. I doubted anyone from the Department would run into us, and none of the Sectarians would probably do anything during daylight hours if they saw us either. Plus, I had made sure that no one had followed us downtown.
“C’mon,” I said. “It’ll be fun. We can try to one-up each other over who’s been more damaged lately—you for falling off of the roof or me from smoke inhalation.”
* * * *
The metallic blue-checkered framework of Manhattan Super-Storage took up the entire northeast corner of Twenty-Third Street and Tenth Avenue. The sun shone off the boxy building, casting streaks of light from its many windows down onto the sizable crowd gathered out front. I led Jane into the throng as she looked around warily but with a growing good humor in her eyes.
“What is all this?” she asked.
Storage places were never this busy normally, but this was no normal day. The sidewalk was awash with an almost street-fair-like atmosphere
—full of food carts, performers, and people pressed together tight like books on a shelf. The scent of grilled meat and roasted corn rose off the food vendors and filled the air with mouthwatering goodness, but I pushed aside all thoughts of getting a bite. Eating could wait.
“These things keep getting trendier and trendier.” I sighed.
A small table was set up by the entrance to three of the loading bays, and I walked over, found my name, and signed in. The bays themselves had been closed off and turned into a common feeder line that wove around a variety of tables. Each was covered in plentiful piles of other people’s belongings. The rest of the crowd, those who hadn’t signed up in advance, lurked near the line in the hopes of getting a chance to browse as well.
“Lot of people don’t ever come to claim their storage items once they default on payment,” I explained. “The crap that accumulates is auctioned off to make room for actual paying customers. Ever since Time Out wrote it up as a kitsch thing to do, it’s like the Ringling Brothers took over. All these assholes come here hoping to avoid Ikea, but to me, anything I luck into here just goes into supporting my apartment. Hey, maybe I can score you something to help you out with your money sitch until things smooth over.”
“Maybe I should just head back to Kansas,” Jane said, sounding defeated.
“Are you really ready to throw in the towel on the Big Apple already?” I asked, even though, if you’d asked me a couple days ago, I would have said that the city could definitely use one less Sectarian. Like many people who were transported New Yorkers, I felt Jane had something to prove to herself here, and was reluctant to leave. She would probably be safer if she left town, but that stubborn part of her that I could totally identify with was still holding out.
I checked my watch and realized we had a little time to kill. My stomach growled and I led Jane off in the direction of the food vendors. I was hungry enough to eat whatever rat on a stick or cockroach knish they might be selling.
My God, I realized. This feels more and more like a date, doesn’t it? I found that despite Jane’s previous alignment with the forces of Darkness, the idea didn’t scare me as much as I thought it might. Maybe if I approached this like it was a date, Jane might be more likely to give herself over to the forces of Good. In a moment of spontaneity, I approached a guy standing nearby making balloon animals. The twist of green and red he was working on looked vaguely like a wiener dog, and he handed it to a kid with a big grin on his face, who then ran off in the direction of his mother.
“Hey, pal,” I said, fishing out my wallet. “I’ll take one of those. Can you make a flower or something like that?”
The balloon guy was shorter than me, chunky, and wore a fanny pack to store his balloons in. He looked at me and shook his head—his black, shoulder-length mullet swaying back and forth like seaweed in the ocean. “Sorry, pal. I wouldn’t want to send any of the little kids home sad or crying because I ran out of balloons giving something away to an adult.”
I looked around the crowd. There were only a handful of children scattered here and there, most of them already with balloons. “It’s for the lady,” I said insistently. I gave him my most sincere c’mon-be-a-pal-don’t-fuck-this-up-for-me smile.
He shook his head again and I could feel myself going a little Hulkish around the edges.
“C’mon,” I said, lowering my voice. “Not even for the young at heart?”
This time he simply rolled his eyes and began to turn away, but I wouldn’t be deterred. I couldn’t control myself. I grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around.
“Dude,” I shouted. “You’re a guy whose only freaking job seems to be—and correct me if I’m wrong here—blowing and twisting. It’s not that hard. I think you can take two minutes out of your busy schedule here to whip one up for us big kids who are more likely to tip your sorry ass for the trouble than little Billy or Suzy here. Let’s not be a Balloon Nazi about this, okay?”
* * * *
Jane beamed like a kid on Christmas Day as she attempted to keep hold of the barely manageable variety of balloon-made items in her hands. Streaming along with her were a flower, a wiener dog, a pirate sword, a musketeer hat with a balloon plume, a poodle, a sleeping cat, an airplane, a goldfish, and something the balloon maker had feverishly assured us was a flying mouse.
“Oh my God,” Jane said. The wiener dog suddenly made a spirited break for it, but I grabbed it by its snout and handed it back to her. “You are the man! You are totally a rock star in the world of balloon animal negotiations! I bow to your superior scare tactics!”
“It’s my gift,” I said with a flourish of my arm and a deep bow. She laughed and hugged her balloons. One of them exploded with a loud pop and she screamed. It was a moment of fright that should have passed quickly, but suddenly tears were running down her face. I moved to put my arm on her shoulder.
“Hey,” I said, “Jane…what’s wrong? What is it?”
People had turned to stare now, including several children, but I figured that was probably just balloon envy. I moved us away from the crowd toward the edge of the street and next to a cotton candy machine.
“God,” she said. I could hear the self-loathing in her voice. “I hate when I get all small-town spooked.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just try to relax.”
“You try to relax!” she snapped. The tears were still coming, but suddenly she was getting angry. “A couple of days ago my life was going fine. Now I’m essentially unemployed, I’ve lost my dental plan, and I flinch at every loud sound because I think it’s a corporate headhunter trying to put a bullet in my brain!”
I was getting upset as well. I wasn’t really a fan of getting yelled at, and especially not when I was just trying to help.
“Look,” I said after counting to ten to calm myself, “I can’t imagine how much this sucks for you, Jane, so I’m not even going to pretend. We’ll figure something out, I swear. I just need time to investigate things the proper way. I hate every moment that you’re at risk. In the meantime, though, I need you to let me do what I came here for. That doesn’t mean I’m going to neglect you. I’m going to do everything I can to help keep you safe.”
I looked her in the eyes, and she nodded.
“Not that you need to be kept safe,” I added awkwardly. “I mean, I’m sure you can take care of yourself, but, well…I’m in the Good business, so keeping people safe is part of what I do. It’s not a chauvinist thing, I swear.”
I felt like a social retard, so I shut up.
Jane softened and said, “I’m sorry. I’m one of the bad guys. I know you’re doing your best. You’ve already gone above and beyond with all this.”
“Gee, thanks,” I said. Gee, thanks?!? Did I actually say that? Why couldn’t I just shut up and take a compliment?
“You’re welcome,” she said, wiping away the tears. “Besides, you probably thought I was all kinds of crazy reacting so emotionally.”
“No, it’s fine,” I lied.
“It’s not fine,” she said gravely. “I haven’t been totally up-front with you. You don’t know the whole story. But I like you and I think you have a right to know.”
“Know what?” I asked.
Jane took a deep breath, exhaled the last of her hysterics, and looked me in the eye. “Their headhunter—Jason Charles, the one I spoke to on the phone the day I was injured—may be a bit more aggressive about finding me than I might have led you to believe.”
“And why’s that?” I asked warily.
“We sorta dated,” she said, her voice trailing off. Her nose crinkled as she braced herself for my response.
“Sorta?!” I asked. I could feel myself turning fifty shades of horrified. I had just started thinking I might be turning the corner with Jane, making some progress with her, but how could I begin to trust someone who dated a professional assassin? “Sorta dated? Or did date?”
She was fighting to explain it—I could see it in her face—but that didn’t chang
e the feeling of frustration building up inside me.
“I went out with him three times, but that was months ago!” she said as if somehow that excused it. “He seemed nice enough. Well-groomed, business suits every day…but once I realized the type of mentally unstable individual it took to be a hired gun in that creepy little business world of theirs, I broke it off.”
“So how did he take it?”
I wanted to grab her and shake her for her own good. She was a nice girl, but it was becoming increasingly likely that she was going to get both of us killed.
“Well,” she said, “since I worked for the big boss, there was nothing Jason could do to me. So rather than giving me any trouble, he just became inordinately professional in the office and we stopped talking.”
I sighed and rubbed my eyes. “But now you’re fair game. In fact, you’re a target requested by paying customers. Great. Any other little gems I should know about?”
Jane shook her head, but couldn’t raise her eyes to meet mine.
I looked over at the tables full of storage unit leftovers. It was pointless being here. I wasn’t going to be able to concentrate on reading anything. “I have to go,” I said.
Jane looked up. “Where?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just away for now.”
“But why?”
“Because I need to think,” I snapped suddenly. “I keep forgetting you’re tied into hardcore evil, Jane. It’s beyond me how you could have dated someone who kills people for a living. Connor would freak out if he knew I was helping you, and I just need to sort things out for myself.”
I couldn’t think of anything more to say so I turned away. Was I just upset about her withholding information about the Sectarians, or was I experiencing some kind of odd jealous reaction? I didn’t know.
I walked off feeling angry and confused, but I restrained myself from running back and childishly popping every last balloon Jane was carrying.
26
On the way back to my apartment, I started to cool down. Looking back, I knew that Jane wasn’t the only one who had ever made the wrong choices in life. I knew Jane had been displaced from her apartment, her life. Sure, she’d held a little information back, but she’d come clean and it was no reason for me to have gone off on her. I planned on calling her once I got back home, but all that flew out the door when I stepped off the elevator and headed down the hallway to my apartment.