Black Of Mood (Quentin Black: Shadow Wars #2): Quentin Black World

by JC Andrijeski

  Cowboy frowned, watching him go. Then he seemed to make up his mind. Jaw firm, he walked right up to me, and before I could argue, swung his leg over the seat behind me.

  “You can’t come––” I began, angry.

  “Like hell,” he snapped, raising his voice for maybe the first time since I’d met him. “You gonna drive this bike and lop off vampire heads at the same time? How the hell you gonna do this alone?” He motioned with his chin towards the road. “Let’s go. The others’re comin’ in cars, but they won’t be able to follow far. Not in all this.”

  I stared back at him, frowning, watching as he looped the twin scabbards over his shoulders and back, settling them into place the way I’d seen Black wear them while he practiced. Cowboy was smaller than Black, so the swords rode lower, but the twin handles still stuck up near the top of his back, forming a V-shape behind his head.

  With his scraggly beard, beat up face, motorcycle boots and bloody T-shirt, Cowboy now officially looked like something out of a post-apocalyptic horror movie.

  “What the fuck are you waiting for?” He pulled the Colt Python off his hip and checked that it was fully loaded, clicking the barrel back into place before shoving it into the holster. The whole process took maybe two seconds. “Can you ride this fucking thing or not?”

  I didn’t bother to answer.

  Gunning the accelerator with my right hand, I took my foot off the ground and kicked the bike into gear.

  WHERE ARE YOU? I asked him again.

  I threw the words at him, more than asked him.

  Screamed them, maybe.

  We were racing down 29th Street at maybe sixty miles per hour, heading west, the same way I’d seen Black running. I knew he and Brick might have turned off by then, or left the road altogether, but Cowboy and I were both staring up and down alleys and avenues as we passed, looking for them. It wasn’t easy to do, given all the people on the street, and the parked cars left all over, including some of them in the middle of the road.

  We’d already passed Madison Avenue, and Fifth.

  BLACK! I snapped. WHERE ARE YOU?

  Black didn’t answer.

  I could feel him, though.

  I also felt the surge of frustration-bordering-on-anger that left his light when he realized Cowboy and I were following him.

  Eventually, that anger got the better of him.

  Stay the fuck away from this, Miri. Let me do this. Please––

  Alone? I retorted. Unarmed? No.

  You have no idea what’s going on here––

  I might know more than you think.

  Silence. It felt dense that time.

  If you don’t give a damn about yourself, he sent coldly. Hear me on this. Tell Cowboy I’ll rip out his fucking throat if he lets you follow me...

  I didn’t bother to answer.

  Catching a glimpse of his surroundings through his eyes, I saw a building I recognized and gunned the engine, leaning with the bike as I took us into a sharp right turn at the next major intersection. Forced to swerve to avoid pedestrians that walked out from behind a parked truck, I skidded briefly and corrected, touching my foot to the asphalt just long enough to get my balance before I hit the accelerator hard again.

  Then we were heading north up 6th Avenue.

  It’d been a while since I’d been on a motorcycle, but I felt it coming back to me, even as I darted around more parked vehicles. I also felt that difference in my light, just like when I’d been running in the park. Sharp lines came out of nowhere, enhancing my peripheral vision as I rode, giving me nearly a 360-degree view. I darted around people and debris with a fluidity that felt almost instinctual, from a part of my mind that felt only partly conscious.

  The debris got larger as we reached 30th Street. Chunks of cement and broken glass littered the road, especially to our right, on the side nearest the Empire State Building. I saw broken glass on the ground below north-facing windows, as well, and fires burning in the upper floors of several business and apartment buildings.

  We were getting closer to ground zero.

  Even as I thought it, I looked further down the road and saw a dense-looking crowd of pedestrians up ahead. They still hadn’t cleared out the bomb area. I could see cars moving in a few areas parts, now that we were inside the blast radius, but most of them were gridlocked in the streets and laying on horns, trying to get out.

  The sheer number of pedestrians shocked me.

  In fact, it looked like more people were walking towards the Empire State Building than walking away from it.

  “Where are they all going?” I shouted to Cowboy.

  “Don’t know,” he yelled back. “It’s weird, right?”

  I nodded, not bothering to answer aloud.

  I tried to feel Black in the psychic space again, but that time, I only got a hard wall.

  I scanned bodies as I wove through thinner crowds on the sidewalk, trying to alternate between my light and my eyes to both look for Black and navigate the motorcycle away from parked cars and the people walking in the street.

  Even so, I had to slow way down as the crowd started thickening around us. As we passed, I glimpsed more people with blood on their faces, holding make-shift bandages to their heads and bodies, soot covering their clothes and hair, white and gray powder on their exposed skin.

  “There!” Cowboy leaned forward, shouting in my ear. “He’s there! See ‘im?”

  I followed his pointing hand.

  Up ahead and to my right, I saw Black, running, his legs flashing in an all-out sprint. It took me a moment to take in just how fast he was going––faster than I’d ever seen him run, even when he jokingly raced me on the track in Golden Gate Park. He was running faster than the bike, now that I’d been forced to slow down.

  Frustrated, I looked for a different way through when I saw him pulling ahead. My eyes found a passage between a row of stopped cars where no one was walking yet. Hitting the accelerator hard, I aimed for the opening, even as Cowboy grabbed me from behind.

  “Miri,” he said. “Miri, I don’t think that’s wide enough––”

  But I’d already taken us into the narrow aisle, threading the needle with the bike and hitting the accelerator to speed us up. We clipped two mirrors as we passed, but neither knocked the bike off-balance enough to force me to stop.

  Accelerating past the cars as soon as I hit a relatively clear patch of road, I felt Cowboy tighten his hold on me from behind, even as he leaned up by my ear.

  “Slow down,” he half-shouted. “Do you see Brick?”

  Looking briefly at where Black ran, I scanned the sidewalk in front of him.

  “No,” I yelled over my shoulder.

  Black was still running all-out, his long legs blurred as he wove through pedestrians as if they weren’t there. Truthfully, I’m not sure I’d ever seen anyone run that fast before. I started wondering again if there was still a lot about seers I didn’t know.

  “Miri, slow down!” Cowboy said.

  I didn’t bother to answer that, either.

  Black reached the corner of 32nd Street and cut to the right, heading into Greeley Square, the tiny park that lived in the triangle where Avenue of the Americas crossed Sixth.

  A lot of pedestrians had collected in the park itself, sitting, standing and even lying down in the wedge of green space. They should have made it hard for Black to pass unhindered, but I saw him leaping around and past people, barely slowing as he made his way through. His height allowed me to follow him despite how fast he was moving. He darted around obstacles like an acrobat, weaving around food kiosks and food trucks and only occasionally pushing people out of his way. I lost sight of him even as I made a sharp right, forced to go around the square on the bike by cutting over on 32nd towards Avenue of the Americas.

  “Where the hell is he going?” Cowboy said.

  I shook my head.

  I knew, though.

  I knew where Black was going.

  I had no way of knowi
ng, but I knew, anyway. Black was heading for the bomb site. He was going to ground zero––the real ground zero––along with all of the wandering, blood-splattered people on the streets around us.

  Brick was waiting for him there.

  Somehow, I was sure of that, too.

  Trust me, ilya. Please. Trust me.

  I fought a sudden tightening in my throat. The truth was, I couldn’t trust him. Not if what Uncle Charles told me that morning was true.

  If Charles was right, Black wouldn’t even know I couldn’t trust him.

  Biting my tongue until I tasted blood, I hit the accelerator again, weaving through the stopped cars to get to the other side of the street. I ignored shouts, gasping out a curse when I clipped my leg on a car door as we passed. Pain screamed in my leg but I didn’t let it slow down the bike. Cowboy grabbed me tighter from behind, leaning into me, even as his nerves and adrenaline wound into my light.

  We made it across the street and I jumped the curb, bumping us up on the sidewalk to get around the rest of the cars. I had to concentrate on every window of empty space to get us through to the next street, darting around pedestrians walking the same direction as we were going, and against the tide of the one-way street.

  I honked a number of times to make openings, barely acknowledging faces as people jumped out of our way, fear in their eyes, some of them looking beat up and bruised.

  “Why are they all going this way?” Cowboy asked me again.

  Again, I didn’t answer him.

  I made another sharp right at 33rd Street, hit the accelerator without looking––

  ––and was forced to bring the bike to a grinding, skidding stop.

  Thanks to good brakes and better reflexes than I remembered having before, I managed to stop us right as the front tire hit into a giant chunk of cement and twisted metal. The same piece of what looked like part of a building facade blocked most of the road in front of us.

  Cowboy slammed into me from behind when I hit, nearly toppling both of us over the handlebars. I rolled us back once we’d recovered our balance, and used my boot’s toe to knock down the bike’s kickstand.

  Both of us climbed down and stood there, gazing down the road at the smoking remains of the Empire State Building.

  People filled the road.

  Looking around at them in spite of myself, I found myself as baffled as Cowboy as I watched them walk around and past us, moving as though in a trance towards the smoking remains of the Empire State Building.

  None of them looked at us. They acted as though we weren’t even there.

  Looking at them, a flicker of unease ran through me.

  A scream jerked my eyes and mind to my left.

  The woman screamed again, so close I tensed. I saw her an instant later, stuck halfway in a crater in the road next to us, her legs trapped under fallen debris, screamed as if someone was killing her. She lurched against whatever held her like an animal with their foot caught in a metal trap, but no one but me and Cowboy paid any attention. The few cops and emergency personnel I saw walked with everyone else, dazed looks on their faces that made me wonder if they could even see us.

  I watched Cowboy walk quickly over to the woman in the crater. Frowning, I followed him, my hand on the handle of the gun I wore on my hip.

  “We don’t have time,” I told him. I glanced down the road, scanning for Black. “We don’t have time, Cowboy,” I repeated, my voice harsher. “We have to go.”

  “One minute.”

  I stood over the crater as he tried to calm her, speaking soothing words, patting her reassuringly on the shoulder as if she were a panicked horse. Then he was down by her leg, as if trying to see around the debris that had her trapped.

  “Can you get her out?” I said, biting my lip to keep my voice calm. “We need to go.”

  “She’s all right,” he announced. “But I can’t get her out.”

  Frowning, I shielded my eyes, trying to see past the smoke and debris and people filling the street. More onlookers seemed to be entering the blast zone from the east side of 33rd Avenue, as well. I didn’t see Black. I didn’t see anyone running at all. They were all walking with that same shuffling gait, making me think disconcertingly of zombie films.

  “We have to go,” I urged. A sharper edge touched my voice. “We can’t help them, Cowboy. We have to go. Now.”

  “Ayuh,” Cowboy agreed.

  He climbed out of the small crater. The woman had stopped screaming and was staring up at us, her hazel eyes showing whites all around.

  “I’m late,” she whispered fiercely to me, a note of panic in her voice. “I’m late. I’m going to be left behind. You have to help me... I have to get out of here... I’m late.”

  I blinked, glancing at Cowboy.

  Exhaling, he frowned in her direction, brows furrowed. “She’s trapped, but it’s more like her foot’s caught on something and she doesn’t have room to wiggle it out.” He returned his eyes to me. “Whatever’s wrong with her, it ain’t her leg.”

  Both of us returned our stares to the street in front of us.

  The top half of the Empire State Building was completely intact, but the bottom belched dark gray smoke. Chunks of cement, broken glass, twisted metal, pieces of sheet rock and particle board, pipe fittings and tools covered the street below for almost the full block.

  The buildings across the street from the initial blast looked even worse.

  The facades of those older brick structures remained mostly in pieces, but open cavities showed the remnants of business offices and residential apartments on the lower floors. Office furniture lay on the street, some of it smoldering, along with papers, computer keyboards, broken monitors, at least one full-sized refrigerator and several chairs and sofas blackened by smoke. Shattered windows were visible all the way down 33rd.

  I saw people in the openings of the broken buildings on both sides, looking out windows and out of missing walls. From one of the floors across from the Empire State Building, a whole group of people in office clothes and suits stared over the edge where the floor ended, looking down at the street with blank expressions on their faces.

  They didn’t appear to be talking to one another, or trying to leave.

  Bodies lay on the street in a few places. Some were covered by cloth of one kind or another, but the majority lay alone and broken like discarded dolls.

  I didn’t see any medical emergency vehicles here.

  The main force of the blast appeared to have hit as high as the ten-story mark, from the damage I could see on both sides of the road. The massive, smoking piece of debris that stopped the motorcycle must have been thrown from one of the brick buildings further down the street. The nearest of those missing a large enough piece of its facade had to be a hundred yards away.

  “Jesus,” Cowboy breathed, as I stepped out into the middle of the road.

  I was done looking, though.

  Unholstering my gun, I gave him a hard stare.

  “Come on,” I said. “We’re late, too.”

  After a bare pause, he nodded, his eyes showing he understood.

  22

  EXPECTED

  WE JOGGED-RAN MOST of the way to the Empire State Building from there.

  As we got closer to the south entrance, it got harder to see.

  Hot smoke choked the air near the opening, yet people continued to stand there, not moving away even when they coughed and struggled to breathe. Most of them stared up at the skyscraper’s walls as if in a trance, their faces devoid of emotion.

  As we got closer, I saw that the explosions blew out a good chunk of the southern lobby. The smoke poured out from somewhere lower, though, and I realized the explosions must have come from underneath the lobby floor.

  I was about to enter the building, planning to skirt around that hole in the flooring, but Cowboy stopped me before I could get very far, grabbing my arm.

  “We have to go inside!” I snapped, turning on him.

  “Just
hang on a second, doc! I’ll go with you. But you won’t get far in that smoke if we don’t cover our faces.”

  He let go of me and I stood there as he tugged his T-shirt over his head, revealing a long, tanned body rippling with lean muscle.

  I watched him rip the shirt lengthwise, into two long pieces.

  Walking over to a tumbled pile of plastic-wrapped water bottles that must have been ejected from one of the buildings, he sorted through the burst packs, hissing a few times when he touched the still-hot plastic. Half the bottles were melted and the water evaporated, but he found one with enough water left that he was able to soak the two pieces of cloth from his shirt.

  Walking back, he handed one of those pieces to me.

  I watched as he tied the other one around his face, over his nose and mouth.

  I did the same with the rag he’d given me.

  At first it was hard to breathe through, so I exposed my nose.

  As we got closer to the entrance of the building, however, I lifted the wet cloth up to cover it up again. The two of us reached the line where the building used to begin, and I could see flames shooting up from the hole in the floor, licking around the sides of the walls inside. It looked like the fire in the basement was still raging. The ground floor and the one above it were empty and blackened by smoke. I couldn’t see through the smoke at all by the time we’d ventured even a few feet past that dividing line.

  We edged a few yards closer when Cowboy grabbed my arm, tugging me back.

  “He’s not in here!” he shouted over the sound of the roaring flames. His voice was muffled by the wet rag. “We can’t go in here, Miri!”

  Looking at him, then back into the hot, smoke- and flame-filled cavern of the remains of the lobby, I had to concede he was right.

  Black wasn’t here.

  We backed out of the building even as another burst of flame shot up out of the opening, driving us back in a near-run.

  We stood in the middle of the street, both of us with singed hair, watching the cavern belch roiling clouds of dark-gray smoke.