The Revenant Road

by Michael Boatman

  I fired.

  A gout of blood bloomed across the creature’s massive chest. Blood fountained out of the wound and splashed the floors of Juno Kemantari’s formal dining room.

  The bull-man lunged toward me and I fired again. A red geyser spattered the shoes of the black-haired hunter crouching behind the monster. It was Hernandez.

  This time, the bull-man shrieked.

  The swirling black cloud began to flicker. The lambent particles slowed and began to fade. With a shout of triumph, Hernandez hurled her stave. It pierced the bull-man’s neck and punched through his Adam’s apple.

  Trocious bellowed, and began to shrink.

  The bull-man turned and stampeded toward the open French doors.

  But Kowalski and his crossbow barred the way.

  Trocious put on a burst of speed. But he was considerably slower now, bleeding heavily from his wounds.

  Kowalski fired.

  The bull-man veered to the right and Kowalski’s bolt shot past my left ear and buried itself in the wall inches from my head. Kowalski dove out of the way as the bull-man smashed through the wall.

  Trocious fled, bellowing, into the night.

  I stood there with my gun aimed at a gaping hole in Juno’s dining room wall. Her candle-lit domain was a blood-splattered disaster. Around me, the hunters were scrambling to attend their wounded. I couldn’t move, couldn’t let go of the gun.

  Hernandez got to her feet, her fists pressed against a deep gash in her side.

  Kowalski moved to help the one-eyed brunette. But before he could take more than three steps Hernandez lifted one forbidding hand. Her contempt for him and for me was plain. It shone from her like a silent beacon of rage.

  Kowalski nodded, but a flicker of pain contorted his features as he moved off to help the survivors.

  A delayed adrenaline surge did a Soul Train Line through my nervous system and Kowalski’s gun tumbled from my hands. It struck the floor, bounced once and fired.

  Next to Hernandez, a painted ceramic bust of Juno dressed as Jane Mansfield exploded in a shower of brightly-colored shrapnel. The one-eyed hunter dove onto her face.

  Shattered porcelain rained down on her shoulders.

  Hernandez got to her feet with as much dignity as her rage could stomach. The other hunters glared at me with a mixture of disgust, outrage, and the pity usually reserved for the mildly retarded.

  But there was no pity in Hernandez’s eye.

  27

  The Price

  Eleven hunters had come to my rescue and seven of them would never return to their homes and families.

  Hernandez’s wounds were minor, the worst a deep gash from the bull-man’s horns. The tall redheaded man who’d saved my life had been seriously injured. He lay pale and unconscious on the dining room table, his ribcage crushed by the massive hooves of the Minotaur.

  Eight more people, all wearing black, rushed into the room. Some of them helped to carry out the dead or tend the injured. Photos were taken. One woman recorded the operation with a high-resolution digital video camera.

  Another group of hunters examined the body of Juno Kementari. They scooped Juno’s remains into a black body bag and carried it out under the watchful eye of a bald Hispanic man with a pockmarked face.

  The bald man walked over to the dining table and checked the redheaded hunter’s pulse. The redhead’s skin shone pale from blood loss, slick with sweat. His breathing was labored, a wet rasp straggling in and out of his chest in shallow gulps as he struggled to breathe.

  “What happened to him?” the bald man said.

  Kowalski told him. The bald man nodded and put his hands on the redhead’s chest. He closed his eyes, and something, a distortion of some sort, shimmered in the space between them. There was a burst of light that faded instantly but left a silver afterimage in its wake.

  A moment later, the bald man opened his eyes.

  The man on the table relaxed, his muscles visibly losing their tension, as he settled onto the table. His breathing grew calmer and his skin regained some of its natural color.

  The bald man looked exhausted by whatever he’d just done, but he offered me a jittery smile as the redhead was put on a gurney and rolled out of the room. The bald man spoke quietly to Kowalski. Before they parted, the bald man laid his right hand on Kowalski’s shoulder.

  Kowalski slumped, as if suddenly overcome by a great weight. But a moment later, he straightened. His shoulders relaxed and he seemed to stand a little taller.

  The bald man nodded and left. Through the French windows, I noticed the whirling red and blue lights of an ambulance receding into the distance.

  “Doyle’s in bad shape,” Kowalski said. “His left lung’s collapsed and he’s got severe internal injuries.”

  Kowalski rubbed his face as if he could reshape his features with the heels of his hands.

  “If he does survive, he may never walk again. That thing broke his neck.”

  “What about the others?” I said.

  Kowalski grunted, “The survivors? Couple of broken bones. Nothing too serious. The man you saw tonight, the baldheaded guy? He’s a Bender. Name’s Eddie Moreno. Eddie’s something of a Healer. He can stabilize Doyle and the others until they get to a hospital. ”

  “Why did Doyle do it?” I said. “He pushed me out of the way. That thing would have...”

  I shuddered. The memory of the bull-man’s attack, the dark power it wielded, sent a thrill of horror up my spine.

  “He saved my life.”

  Kowalski looked at me without speaking. For the first time I noticed the livid red scar on his nose, the three lines of scar tissue fading into his hairline. For the first time, I realized how vulnerable he looked.

  “Doyle’s mother was a Locator. She could sense the spiritual energies of a sport and track ‘em down. She and Kevin were homeless, livin’ in a shelter when your father spotted them during a scenario. They were being stalked by a shape-changer, a predator that strangled its victims and assumed their forms.

  “Theresa stumbled upon the squatter while working at the shelter. It murdered thirty other homeless people in the area before she led us to its lair. Marcus and I killed it.”

  Kowlaski sighed. Behind him, a new group of hunters hustled in. The newcomers each wore silver ‘Hazmat’ protective ‘spacesuits.’ Each one carried a compact red tank strapped to his back. As Kowalski spoke, the silver-clad hunters began to spray the walls and ceilings with a strong-smelling liquid from the tanks.

  “Marcus took the Doyles under his wing. Theresa helped put down more than two-dozen squatters before her ticket got punched.

  “She’d been ridiculed her whole life for telling people about the monsters that whispered to her from her closet, monsters only she could hear. Marcus showed her that she wasn’t crazy, that the monsters were real.”

  Kowalski smirked. The smell from the red tanks grew thick and harsh in the dining room, a bitter, chemical smell that stung tears from my eyes.

  “Before she died, Theresa Doyle made Marcus promise to teach her thirteen year old son Kevin to Walk. He was one of Marcus’s first students. In some ways Kevin was the son Marcus never...”

  Kowalski blanched.

  “Jesus, Obadiah...” he began. “I didn’t mean...”

  I waved his apology away. Two weeks earlier I would have been furious at the idea of my father adopting a surrogate son. Doyle was only a few years older than I was. Other than the fact that he was white we might have been brothers.

  But none of that seemed to matter anymore.

  “Kevin knew that you were Marcus’s son,” Kowalski said. “The two of them must have talked about you a great deal. He understood how important you were.”

  I wanted him to stop. I didn’t want to hear what Kevin Doyle thought about me. I didn’t want to make the choice I sensed blazing above the horizon of my life like a comet heralding the End of Times.

  What you want isn’t important anymore.

  �
��I think he came here hoping to meet the son of his mentor.” Kowalski said. “But when he saw that you were in danger he found a better way to honor Marcus’s memory.”

  I had to get out, away from the place where Kevin Doyle had done what I was too terrified or too selfish to do.

  “I need some air.”

  Kowalski followed me out of the dining room. He sat down heavily on a chair near the door and put his face in his hands.

  He hadn’t enjoyed telling me Kevin Doyle’s story any more any more than I’d enjoyed hearing it.

  * * * *

  I sat on the front lawn and watched the last of the hunters evacuate Juno’s house. As the black S.U.V.s pulled out past the empty guard shack, Kowalski closed and locked the front door.

  He walked over and sat next to me.

  “Cleaners,” he said, indicating the last of the black cars. “They’ll make sure no one ever knows what went on here tonight.”

  I stared at the empty house; its windows darkened now, all lights extinguished. It was nearly midnight.

  “Doyle didn’t make it,” he said, simply.

  I nodded.

  The first explosion shattered the windows in the upper storeys of the mansion. In moments, those floors were engulfed in flame. The men in the Hazmat spacesuits had done a thorough job. By the time the fire department arrived Juno’s home would be completely awash in flames.

  Kowalski and I watched the flames rise higher. Soon it would be too hot to stay where we were. We sat, something heavier than speech thickening the air between us. Finally, I asked the question that had been building in my mind since that day in Central Park.

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  Kowalski turned and looked at me. Then, apparently satisfied by what he saw, he grinned. In the raging light of the fire, his smile was too bright, his eyes as extravagant as a demon’s leer.

  “Ever been to Seattle?”

  28

  The Name Game

  We drove south, toward a private airfield near the Westchester Airport in the city of White Plains.

  “You said that my father was a Bender,” I said. “Does that make me one?”

  Kowalski shrugged. “You seem to have the knack. You See. You have a native awareness of the supernatural.”

  “Is it possible to have more than one Bent?”

  Another shrug. “Possible. Rare, but possible. Your dad could pierce the veil of deception that the sports weave to fool the human mind. He was a Seer, one of the best. Marcus could spot a squatter even when it was illusion casting.”

  In the distance I could see the lights of Westchester Airport brightening the night sky as Kowalski spoke.

  “What interests me, though, is what happened when you shot at that...what did you call it?”

  “The Minotaur,” I replied. “A character from Greek mythology. He was the son of a mortal queen and a magical white bull, condemned to live alone in a labyrinth for all eternity.”

  Kowalski shrugged. “Why the hell would anybody want to be something like that?”

  “You heard him,” I said. “He was born a slave. He dreamed of the one thing he didn’t have, could never have had: Power.”

  I shifted in the passenger seat, uncomfortably reminded of how close I’d come to heeding the siren song of my own dreams: Tobi Bernardi would never know how close she’d come to being a sex slave on Southern Long Island.

  “Anyway,” Kowlaski continued. “None of us were making a dent in the goddamned thing. I personally put two bolts in it. Hernandez shot the fucker at least twelve times and it still killed five hunters. We were merely irritating it. The son-of-a-bitch had us dead-to-rights.”

  Kowalski paused. “Until you shot it.”

  “So?”

  Kowalski’s brow furled as if he were mentally flipping through the pages of some internal instruction manual.

  “You know those old movies where a monster hunter shoots a Wolf with a silver bullet, or splashes a vampire with holy water?”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “Bullshit. It’s not a cross that puts a squatter down. Well not exclusively. Holy water, crosses, these things are...well, think of ‘em as tools. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. It depends largely on the skill of the hunter who wields ‘em.”

  “Well, how do you kill them?” I said.

  “Two ways. One of ‘em is by using the one thing that the squatters can’t understand: faith.”

  “But you said…”

  “And I ain’t talkin’ about Church faith,” Kowalski interrupted. “I’ve seen squatters chew up priests and crap hubcaps. Church faith ain’t what this is about.”

  I started to ask him what it was about. How can you kill a werewolf using silver bullets that don’t work? And what other kind of faith was there?

  To confuse the issue even more, I was supremely uncomfortable with the idea of any kind of faith. I’d stopped believing in God around the same time my father left home for the last time.

  The conversation I’d had with Lenore at Marcus’s funeral came back to me.

  I didn’t know Marcus was Catholic.

  I guess as he got older he got...

  Soft?

  I felt the ashes of my former outrage rekindle. If all this was leading up to some half-assed call to embrace religion, God was in for the rudest awakening since National Sodomize Your Clergyman Day.

  “We’re in a goddamn losin’ battle,” Kowalski said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the things we hunt outgun us, outpower us, and outnumber us. I signed up for this tour haulin’ my father’s gun and my tired white ass to the table. Same goes for most of the others. We’re just ordinary people who rarely live to see sixty candles on a goddamn birthday cake.”

  Kowalski slammed his fist against the dashboard.

  “People like your father,” he said. “People like Eddie Moreno and Theresa Doyle even the odds a little. But they’re in the minority. As it is, we’re getting our asses handed to us on a goddamn daily-daily. I’m bettin’ that’s why Marcus thought you might be important.”

  Kowalski reached into his pocket, produced a cigarette and lit it.

  “I think you might be a Fatalist.”

  “A fatalist?”

  “A Deathgiver,” Kowalski said. “A very rare Bent.”

  “What is it?”

  “A Fatalist can use his own life energy, place it inside a weapon, any weapon. He can use that weapon as an extension of his will, a focus.”

  He coughed, lowered his window and spat a thick stream of phlegm into the wind.

  “Goddamn fags are killin’ me,” he said. “I haven’t heard of a Fatalist living more than a couple of years, though. The Hallowed put them high up their hit list. But somehow you slipped through the net.”

  I stared out of the window, unsettled by this latest revelation. Behind us, the headlights of a dark sedan shone briefly in the side-view mirror.

  Kowalski belched.

  “But what the Hell do I know?” he grumbled. “I’m doin’ great if I make it through a day without shitting myself.”

  “Why Seattle?” I asked, changing the subject.

  Kowalski grunted, “’Cause it’s where you’ll learn the whole story. At least as it applies to your old man.”

  “Why not tell me the whole story now?”

  Kowalski shrugged. “Because it ain’t been written yet.”

  I pressed him for more information but he would say no more on the subject. Then I remembered Doyle, the man who had died in my place, and my resolve steadied.

  I would trust Kowalski to the end.

  * * * *

  We arrived at the airport. As Kowalski pulled into the darkness of a small three-story parking garage, the dark sedan slid in behind us and disappeared up the ramp leading to the second floor.

  As we searched for a parking space I remembered the other thing that had been nagging at me since leaving Juno’s house.

  “What’s t
he story with the one-eyed brunette?”

  Kowalski threw the car into park.

  “Maria Rose Hernandez,” he grunted.

  “One of the best hunters in the world: Cold, merciless, totally devoid of simple human compassion. With no Bents, she’s offed more squatters than I’ve had hot dinners. She even goes after the little incursions: malignant sprites, chupacabras…”

  Kowalski shrugged. “Behind her back, the other hunters call her the Blood Rose.”

  “How’d she lose the eye?” I said.

  Kowalski opened the driver’s door and got out of the car. As I shut the passenger door I realized that I hadn’t brought an overnight bag: Flying in the face of a lifetime of Lenore’s earsplitting admonitions, I’d meet whatever strange destiny Kowalski was leading me toward without benefit of clean underwear.

  “We were working a case together. The Rose got into a dustup with a zombie down in Louisiana, a flesh sucker.”

  I stopped.

  “A flesh-sucker?”

  “Yeah,” he chuckled. “Nasty piece of work. Some local white trash had dreamed up the power to raise an army of the undead. But two of the summoners had those goddamn George Romero flicks on the brain. Goddamn things ate the whole town and almost escaped into the bayou. Hernandez and I intercepted them, but it cost her. A walking corpse ambushed her; ripped her eye clean out of her head. Hernandez watched that zombie son-of-a bitch gulp down her baby brown, and then she blew its goddamned head off.”

  I nodded. The one-eyed brunette was just the kind of woman I’d always found irresistible: strong, severe, and bitter enough to make life interesting. The Blood Rose was a subject that rated deeper investigation.

  “I guess that explains it,” I said.

  Kowalski said, “Explains what?”

  “Why she’s such a castrating bitch.”

  Kowalski smirked, his smile as cold as the space between the stars. “She’s my wife.”

  As I speed-shuffled through my mental retinue of sharp verbal U-turns, a figure stepped out from behind a concrete pillar and hit Kowalski with a baseball bat.

  Kowalski dropped like a marionette with its string cut.