Firewalkers

by Chris Roberson

  The old man looked down at his hands, flexing the knobby-knuckled fingers.

  “I bundled them through the door and into the stairway without getting noticed, and it wasn’t until we got up to the classroom-looking level at the top of the stairs that they started to struggle. If they’d been sleepwalking, now it was like they were starting to wake up a bit. The girl started squawking about the ‘special ceremony’ I’d promised them, and the boy wanted to know why I was taking them away from the sacrament. The girl just seemed annoyed, but there was a desperate, hungry edge to the boy’s voice, sounding like a junkie who’d just been denied a fix he’d been waiting for for a long, long time.”

  “But they were Ridden, right?” Izzie asked, leaning forward on the couch. “It doesn’t seem like they were completely under the entity’s control if you were able to trick them like that. Aren’t all of the Ridden connected, somehow?”

  “Yes and no.” The old man smiled slightly as he nodded. “In his journals, Freeman talked a lot about how all of that business worked. There were those folks who’d been tainted by the Otherworld but not yet fully possessed, folks who were influenced but still had minds of their own, and folks who were pretty much nothing but puppets, with hardly anything of their original selves left in them. Tomlinson and Fuller had a touch of the Otherworld on them, and were hungry for more, but they hadn’t lost themselves to it completely yet.”

  That lined up with what Izzie and the others had observed, with some Ridden able to go out into the world by daylight, and others too far gone to even step a foot outside until nightfall.

  “I was able to get them on up to the ground floor before the two of them started acting squirrelly. It was coming on dark out, and neither of them was in any hurry to go outside. But I wasn’t about to let go of their arms, either, and I had the inches and weight on them to drag the both of them after me. Some of the cleaning staff saw them struggling and looked like they might be getting ready to raise some kind of alarm, and that’s when I took out that silver plated Colt .45. I kept hold of the girl’s arm, and told the boy that if he took one step wrong that I’d shoot him. Then I told the cleaners to keep their distance, but with the knack I could see that none of them were Ridden, just regular working folks, so I didn’t need to tell them twice. Then I marched those two kids out the back door and hustled them toward the spot where I’d hidden my car.”

  “Wait,” Joyce interrupted, “you rescued runaways from a cult at gunpoint?”

  The corners of the old man’s mouth tugged up in a slight smile.

  “Wasn’t the last time, either,” he said. “But it got the job done. I had the girl drive the car while I covered her and the boy with the gun from the passenger’s seat. The farther we got away from the Eschaton Center, though, the less trouble they gave me. And by the time we got back to the city, they were jittery, but they weren’t putting up any kind of fight. I took them by my lady friend’s place, and asked her to keep an eye on them while I took care of some business. I called police dispatch from a payphone, and told them that there were a whole mess of drugged-up runaways in the basement of the Eschaton Center. I ended up getting passed around like a hot potato, transferred from one department to another while I tried to convince them that I was on the level, and that I wasn’t a prankster or some acidhead coming down off a bad trip. I finally got transferred to a detective in a bunco squad that had been trying to put together a case about Parrish and the Eschaton Center for months, and enough of what I had to say jibed with what he already knew.”

  “They were already investigating him?” Izzie hadn’t heard about that angle of the case before.

  “A couple of detectives had their eyes on him,” the old man answered. “A lot of money was flowing into the Center, but it wasn’t clear just where all of it was going. Some of the guys who worked the fraud unit thought there might be some dirt on Parrish, but so far hadn’t found anything they could move on. But the detective I talked to was convinced by what I told him, and his say-so was enough to convince the higher ups to authorize a full-scale raid on the place.”

  “But you told them about the . . .” Joyce searched for the right word. “The rituals that were taking place underground?”

  Jett shook his head. “They wouldn’t have understood if I tried. Anyway, the detective told me to hang back and let them take care of things, but I thought there was still a chance I might be able to get the other two kids I was after out of there. So while the police were still gearing up and getting ready to make their raid, I drove right back up the hill and got there about an hour before them.”

  “And?” Izzie realized that she was perched on the edge of the couch cushion, but didn’t care. She was eager to hear how this played out. “Was everyone already dead? Killed by each other or by their own hands?”

  The old man’s frown deepened.

  “The official story was that it was a mass murder/suicide, yeah,” he said after a long pause. “But that’s not the whole picture.”

  Before he could continue, there was a knock at the door. Izzie turned, and saw that the orderly had returned.

  “Sorry, folks,” he said, tapping his wristwatch. “But I’m afraid visiting hours are over for the day.”

  Izzie started to object, but the old man raised his hand and motioned toward the window.

  “Looks to be coming on night soon,” Jett said, wearily. “And I’m guessing that you two don’t want to be out and about if there’s Ridden on the streets.” He paused, and then gave Izzie a hard look. “And there are Ridden out there again, aren’t there? That’s what this is all about.”

  Izzie nodded.

  “Yes,” she answered, swallowing hard. “They’re back.”

  The old man put his hands on the wheels of his chair, and pushed himself over to where the wooden footlocker sat at the end of the bed.

  “You two come on back tomorrow and I’ll give you the rest of it,” he said, straining to reach over and lift the lid of the footlocker. “But before you go, there’s something I suppose you should have.”

  He reached into the footlocker and pulled out a battered old cloth-bound journal.

  “This was the only one of Freeman’s journals that didn’t go up in that fire,” he said, holding the book out to Izzie. “Might be something in it you can make use of.”

  Izzie pushed herself up off the couch and walked over to Jett’s wheelchair. When she took the journal from his hands, she could see that the corners of the cover were scorched black by flames.

  “I don’t think I’m long for this world,” the old man went on, breathing heavily. “And there are times when I’m surprised that I’ve lasted as long as I have. But maybe I held on as best I could until someone came along that I could hand the torch off to, just like Charlotte handed it off to me. When I lay my head down to sleep that last time, I’ll go a little easier knowing that there’s somebody left to carry on when I’m gone.”

  Izzie stood in front of the old man, holding the journal in both hands, struggling to think what to say.

  “I’m sorry, folks,” the orderly called from the hallway, “but I’m going to have to ask you to say your goodbyes and head on out.”

  Joyce stood up from the couch and came over to stand beside Izzie.

  “We’ll come back tomorrow,” Joyce said, touching Izzie’s elbow lightly.

  “Fair enough,” the old man said, and there was something in his tone that made Izzie suspect that he wasn’t sure he’d still be around by then. “But you two best tread carefully, and anybody else that’s mixed up in this, too. That night underneath the Eschaton Center, when I confronted Parrish . . . I wasn’t talking to him, really, but to whatever it was that had hollowed him out and pulled his strings like a puppet. That demon from the Otherworld. It saw me, and it knew me, and it promised me things if I would just walk away and let it be. Power. Wealth. Anything I wanted. But I told him to go to hell, and with one of Freeman’s silver bullets from that Colt .45 I sent him on his way
there. And when he went, well, the rest of those Ridden went with him. Now, the time may come when you folks find yourself in that same position. And it might be hard to refuse. But you’ll need to stay strong.”

  The orderly cleared his throat noisily in the hallway.

  “Just a damned second,” Jett said, raising his voice and shouting toward the open door. Then he turned back and added, quietly enough that only Izzie and Joyce could hear him. “Just know that there’s been many a man and woman faced with that same choice in this city over the years, and those that went along with the darkness caused nothing but pain and misery for the rest of us. You’ve got to be able to look at the shadows and not blink, no matter what the cost is.”

  Izzie turned, and started toward the door, but the old man reached out and grabbed hold of her elbow while she was still in reach.

  “But you’ve got to be able to see the shadows to know what you’re up against,” he added, an urgent undertone to his voice. “If you can’t see them, you won’t stand a chance. And if you don’t have the knack, you’ll have to figure out some other way.” Izzie nodded slowly.

  “I think I have an idea,” she said, laying her hand on top of the old man’s for a moment. “We’ll be careful.”

  The old man sighed as he released his hold on her arm and settled back in his wheelchair.

  “Best you do. Because it seems to me you’ve got work to do.”

  As Izzie followed Joyce to the door and out into the hallway, she remembered the waking dream she’d had of her grandmother telling her much the same thing a few nights before. You got work to do.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Patrick parked his car up the street from the address he’d taken from Regina Jimenez’s phone, which turned out to be a modest single-story bungalow in a somewhat rundown corner of Hyde Park. As he got out, he glanced around at the other houses on the street. The developers who bought up older houses to remodel and then flip on the market hadn’t gotten to this area yet, and many of the people that were out on the street were older retirees walking their dogs, or working-class types heading home from the liquor store. In time, Patrick was sure, the houses would all be outfitted with new porches and pristine new paintjobs, with young professionals parking their electric hybrid cars in the driveways while nannies kept careful eyes on pampered toddlers playing on neatly manicured lawns. That was assuming that some developer didn’t just bulldoze entire blocks and put up overpriced apartment buildings instead, like they’d done out in the Kiev. But either way, the people who lived here now likely wouldn’t be able to afford to stay in just a few years’ time.

  Patrick had picked up his firearm and badge from the house on the way, and was debating with himself how to play this as he walked up to the front door of the house. He was off duty, and not on any official police business, but flashing a badge could open doors that might remain closed to a simple concerned citizen. But at the same time, he didn’t have a warrant, and what little he knew was pretty sketchy to justify probable cause, if the need arose to justify his actions in court.

  The fact remained that it was likely that a group of kids from the neighborhood were about to unknowingly inject a mind-controlling parasite from another dimension into their bodies if he didn’t do something about it, so Patrick decided that he would have to play it by ear and worry about justifying his actions when and if the need arose.

  It was late afternoon, the sun sinking over the buildings to the west, and would be getting dark soon. He was somewhat comforted by the tohuna mark amulet and sandwich bag of salt in his pocket, but even so, he hoped to be back home before the sun set.

  There was a ratty old screen door that was barely held up on its hinges, and when he pulled it open there was a screech of metal against metal. He rapped his knuckles on the door, noting the flaking paint on the wood. Through the peephole in the door Patrick could see a pinprick of light from within.

  He was about to knock again when he heard footsteps approaching the other side of the door, and muffled voices. The pinprick of light in the peephole was snuffed out as someone looked out from the other side, and Patrick did his best to appear unthreatening, keeping his badge out of view in his pocket and his pistol still in its holster under his jacket.

  The clack and clatter of locks being turned went on for a few seconds, suggesting that the house was more well-fortified than its somewhat shabby exterior might suggest. And when the door finally opened it was only for a few inches, with a security chain stretched taut from the leading edge of the door to its base on the door jamb.

  “Yeah?” a gruff voice said as an eye peered out the gap in the door. “What do you want?”

  “Is Hector Jimenez here?”

  The eye disappeared for a moment, and angry whispers could be heard from inside.

  “Who wants to know?” the voice said when the eye returned.

  “I teach at his sister’s school,” Patrick said, deciding to play the concerned citizen for the moment. “I just want to talk to him for a second. Is he here?”

  The door shut suddenly, and for a moment Patrick thought that they’d slammed it on him. But then he heard the rattle of the security chain being slid back, and a moment later the door swung open wide.

  A skinny white guy in his mid-twenties stood in the open doorway, a lit cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He was wearing a stained white t-shirt, tattered jeans, and scuffed up sneakers, with a patchy tuft of beard on his chin and long, greasy hair. He had a glassy-eyed look, and smelled of marijuana smoke. From the interior of the house, Patrick could hear the sounds of electronic bleeps and the simulated gunshots and screams of a video game being played.

  “You don’t look like any teacher I ever seen.” The skinny guy sounded pretty stoned as he looked Patrick up and down. Then he narrowed his eyes with suspicion, and studied Patrick’s face. “Are you five-o?”

  So much for playing the concerned citizen, Patrick thought. There seemed little point in denying it now. He pulled his shield out of his jacket pocket and held it up, cupped in the palm of his hand.

  “This isn’t a bust,” Patrick said, keeping his tone level and soothing. “I just want to talk to the kid for a second.”

  The skinny guy made a move to shut the door, but Patrick stepped forward and put his shoulder against it. His feet were still on the threshold, so technically he hadn’t entered without being invited, but from this vantage point he was able to lean forward and look past the skinny guy into the living room beyond. He could see a bong, grinders, pipes, and an open sandwich bag half-filled with bud, which not long before would have been enough to justify probable cause for a search without a warrant. Seeing that it was legal now, Patrick would have trouble making that stick. But the skinny guy didn’t necessarily know that.

  “Look, friend,” Patrick said, leaning in close to the guy while keeping his weight on the door. “I didn’t come here to make any arrests, and I don’t have a search warrant. But I’m seeing a lot of drug paraphernalia on your table there, and I’m thinking maybe I need to do a thorough search of the house to see what else I can find.”

  A look of alarm registered on the skinny guy’s face, and Patrick wondered what the guy was worried he might find. He didn’t have the look of a dealer, and didn’t show any of the signs of Ink use, but instead seemed to be just what he appeared to be: a stoner who had a place for others to come over and hang out.

  “But,” Patrick hastened to add, “if you let me in for a second to talk to Hector and his friends, I’ll be on my way. And since I’ll be too busy talking to notice anything, there won’t be any need for a search or for any arrests. Does that sound like a deal?”

  The skinny guy narrowed his eyes and Patrick could probably see the thoughts bouncing together in his head.

  “So I let you in, then you leave,” the guy said. “But if I don’t let you in, then you’re going to come in anyway and search the place, and arrest me if you find any dirt?”

  “That’s about th
e size of it,” Patrick answered with a smile.

  The skinny guy nodded slowly and stepped back, taking his hand off the door.

  “Just don’t make too much noise, okay?” he said, padding back into the living room. “My grandma’s asleep upstairs.”

  Patrick followed the skinny guy into the house, his eyes roaming around the room warily, keeping his hand close to his holstered pistol.

  “Hey, Hector,” the guy said as he walked through a doorway into a dimly lit room beyond. “Get your ass over here, already.”

  Patrick stopped in the doorway. Inside, a handful of teenage boys crammed onto a couch watched as two others mashed buttons on video game controllers while computer-generated soldiers in powered armor exchanged fire on a flatscreen TV. Patrick recognized Hector in the bunch, as the boy turned to him with a guilty expression on his face. There were beer cans on a low table, and the smell of marijuana smoke hung heavily in the room, but Patrick didn’t see any sign of Ink injectors.

  “Come on, kid,” Patrick said, “I just want to talk for a second.”

  Hector pushed himself up off his chair reluctantly, and slouched over to where Patrick stood.

  “Yeah, what?” the kid said, trying to sound tough. “Your sister thinks that you and your friends were planning to try Ink for the first time today,” Patrick answered. “Any truth to that?”

  Hector’s eyes darted to the kids on the couch, who were studiously pretending not to notice the police officer standing in the room.

  “My sister’s just a dumb kid,” he said, turning back to Patrick. “I don’t know anything about . . .”

  Patrick held up a hand to interrupt him.

  “I’m not here to arrest you again, okay?” Patrick said. “And this isn’t about your probation. I just want you to know that Ink is bad news. Seriously. It will destroy you. And I’m not talking about some kind of ‘Scared Straight’ gateway drug lecture stuff, either. It will literally rot your brain, and once you start using there’s no going back.”