Cool customer, Gabriel thoughtlativ>
Then the kid made a small gesture, and one of the crew stripped the hood off the captive, revealing long, stringy black hair that hung to the ground, swarthy skin, and a muzzle clamped over the lower part of his face.
“Jesus,” Zel whispered.
Gabriel flinched at the curse—or maybe it was a plea—but he couldn’t look away.
As the oldster had said, Stamp did have a point to make, but Gabriel wasn’t sure how much it had to do with keeping the Badlands safe. Maybe it had more to do with how Stamp treated those who needed taming . . . like his neighbors.
The kid nodded, and one of the crew, a guy with an old-fashioned miner’s hat and a blond braid winding down his back, took out what looked to be a brass dagger.
“This thing,” Stamp said, “is what’s been sneaking around these parts.”
With a grin, the braided man pressed the brass blade to the captive’s forehead, and as flesh steamed, the victim convulsed, shutting his eyes tight, flopping around as the muzzle cut off his cry.
The crew member yanked the dagger away, but not before the oldster came to step in front of Zel, who’d groaned while lurching forward, as if she intended to stop this torture session. Sammy helped hold her back.
“Now open that monster’s eyes,” Stamp said to his crewmen.
The employees enthusiastically forced the captive’s lids open so that his eyes were big and glaring.
Eyes that were a spangled black—as startling and bright and endless as the old star-ridden sky.
Gabriel’s mind raced. What was this man? Better yet . . . what was this monster Stamp had caught?
And why hadn’t Gabriel been able to identify it right away?
At Stamp’s next gesture, the blade-wielding crew member pressed the dagger to the captive’s neck, creating another sickening hiss. The other thugs laughed, as if this were a prelude to some live carnerotica.
Stamp’s low voice scraped over Gabriel. “Do you know what this piece of work is, Mr. Gabriel?”
“I’m not . . . sure.”
The kid paused, as if deciding whether Gabriel was lying. Then he said, “A demon.”
Gabriel tried not to respond. He’d never knowingly met a demon before. Shouldn’t he have some kind of violent instinctual reaction to or sympathy for a fellow monster . . . or was it all too true that the other kinds were too hard to identify?
Worse yet, should he be glad it’d been caught because it was Gabriel’s rival in the race to survive off the remaining humans in this area of the fractured earth? Should he want his competitor’s death?
He wasn’t sure if vampires were supposed to be allies or enemies with other preters. According to the vague pamphlet his creator had given him, vampires had long ago nursed a preferred avoidance for anything else supernatural. But the rules had changed during the scramble for survival. Every creature did its best to keep to itself out of necessity, never exposing what it was so that it might test any theories of who were friends and who were foes.
As the torture continued, Stamp put his hands on his hips again, as if taking in a sporting event like mash baseball or killfight. “When one of my meht t sight of this loser prowling around Cedric Orville’s gutted body last night, he thought he saw it changing shape, from man to red cloud and then back again.”
As the demon flailed under the brass knife once more, Gabriel strived to appear untouched by the creature’s pain. It’d been out there, somewhere, last night, maybe even yards away from Gabriel and Chaplin, and he’d never even known it.
Wild things, he thought. What else did the New Badlands host? No wonder the community stayed close to home.
He managed to respond to Stamp. “A shapeshifting demon.”
“Yes, but it’s not shifting now; brass can bind and harm this one. And also?” Stamp’s words got graveled in obvious bitterness. “It’s clearly a man-eater.”
And it’d been feasting on Stamp’s crew.
The kid added, “The employee who spied it thought fast enough to take a jetpack closer to the hubs, where she was able to secure Nets reception. She did some quick research about ways to handle situations like this, then persuaded a bunch of fellow employees to catch it, with each of them trying different methods. Fortunately, one of the boys was slinging brass, and it worked to bind and disable this scourge. I didn’t even know about the hunt until they were done.” Stamp smiled. “Now, that’s a crew a boss can hold some pride in.”
Zel was breathing hard, a hand clamped over her mouth. The oldster and Sammy just seemed frozen.
Questions rained down on Gabriel. The community had existed out here for years and had to have known a creature of this order was near. Had they been doing something to appease this demon, to keep it from coming to their home?
Gabriel searched his mind for any evidence of that, but he came up with nothing.
As the crew kept at the creature with the brass blade, one of the men pulled down his arm glove and accessed his personal computer screen, reading out loud from it. He must’ve uploaded the information into his own database.
The words weren’t familiar to Gabriel, but his best guess was that they were Hindi, and they made the captive squirm even more.
Expelling the demon from its shell, Gabriel thought.
He shut his mind to the sight, thinking that this torture could’ve been his own if he hadn’t been so determined not to flaunt his vampire powers, even on the night he’d arrived here and Stamp’s men had roughed him up.
As the crew member’s words got louder, faster, the demon stiffened, then . . .
Much to Gabriel’s horror, the captive’s body burst open, letting loose with a group of ten screeching black heads, all with long necks and mouths that snapped at the air, then began tearing into each other. While the crewman raised his voice at the peak of his incantation, the heads whirled into one screaming mass of red, then ripped away from the prone host body, hovering in the air, then seeming to melt into a flood of gore as it fell to the ground, seeping into the dirt until there was nothing.
In the aftermath, all went still. No one spoke. Not until the crew started whooping and high-fiving each other, taking kicks and swipes at the decimated mass of flesh and bone dripping upside down from the poles.
Gabriel turned away, expecting the blood from this body that the demon had possessed to tweak his appetite, though it was from a dead man whose blood wold be no good for him.
But. . .
He smelled it—the polluted blood of an urban hubite. And the sustenance didn’t pull at him as it usually did.
The peace he’d shared with Mariah. Her imprint was still alive in him, wasn’t it? And it’d strengthened Gabriel against himself, even temporarily. That had to be it.
He straightened, looking Stamp in the eye, confident that his monster was pushed so far down that the kid wouldn’t detect it. And when Stamp just smiled, then looked away to watch his men kick around like giddy idiots, Gabriel knew he was on firm ground.
Then Zel burst out from behind the oldster and Sammy, and Gabriel caught her before she got to Stamp.
“You fiend,” she yelled. “That was—”
“Justice,” the kid said, sending her a collected, and even somewhat puzzled, look. “And isn’t justice beautifully simple in a place like this?”
Maybe, as a cop, she’d seen too many bad guys like Stamp, and she knew when to back away. Whatever the reason, she put distance between her and the kid as she headed for Mariah’s entrance.
“There’s a place for people like you,” Zel said, sounding different, as if some vital portion of her had flipped.
“Believe me,” Stamp answered as she opened the domain door, “I’ve already been there.”
Sammy followed her, but the oldster went only halfway in.
“Our squabble has been settled, I take it,” he said.
The glimmer in the kid’s black-hole eyes sent chills over Gabriel.
“Just bei
ng a good neighbor,” Stamp said, “keeping us all informed and safe. You can count on cordiality from now on.”
And then, as Gabriel settled himself at the entrance, too, the kid walked away, toward a rumbler, signaling to his men, making it unnecessary for the Text-fluent crowd to read his silent intentions of leaving.
They followed their boss, deserting the carcass of the former demon in what Gabriel took to be a dire warning for anything else that might decide to go hunting in the night.
20
Mariah
All I could do was watch the visz to see that the vehicles and men wearing FlyShoes left the area before Gabriel shut the ladder door behind him, then descended. Everyone surrounded him, just as numb as I was, even before he got to the ground.
“That wasn’t just about Stamp clearing out a killer,” Sammy said. “That was about showing us what he’s made of. He’s declared himself at the top of the chain.”
“Not only that,” the oldster said. “I get the feeling that above all, Stamp would love to see us run. He plans ahead, that boy, and I’m sure he’s got his sights set on what we’ve claimed here, namely water.”
Zel was huddled into herself, arms wrapped round her legs as she sat on the ground. Her hat was still on her head, but the off-kilter angle of it didn’t cover a ten-mile stare that told me she was in another time, another place, when the world had started to go crazy. Now it was happening here, again.
“What the hell did we just see?” Her voice was low and garbled, so I went over to her, knowing that this was the first sign of Zel losing it. I put my hand on her shoulder, just to steady her and, underneath her shirt, I felt the heat of her skin.
Oddly, I seemed to be the calmest person round. Irony at its best.
Zel’s “hell” curse had jarred Gabriel, but he hid it well by training his gaze on the visz bank, which featured a screen that showed a clear view of the torture device Stamp’s men had set up. Maybe I was calmer than the rest because I’d only seen the tragedy from a distance. That, coupled with the peace that was still in me, probably made a difference.
“All we did was stand by while they went at him,” Gabriel said, his words barely audible.
Everyone grew quiet, even though the victim had been a demon. I wasn’t sure how we should feel about its termination. Lore had it that demons were awful news, but a possessed man had been involved in this case, and it might not have been a voluntary possession. If it wasn’t, killing him was appalling. As Gabriel had told me before, some bad guys are grouped in with the rest, even though they might not have thoroughly earned the title.
His comment still hung in me, like that body outside, swaying in the wind.
Pucci and Hana stayed away from everyone else. He was gaping in that fretful way one had when he could barely believe what he’d just seen. But that was Pucci for you.
“We can’t have demons here, anyway,” he said. “A demon! The lowest of the low—a monster that’d suck the life out of any of us.” He laughed a bit, his nerves clearly addled.
Idiot. “Now’s not the time to lose it, Pucci.”
“Then when is the time?” Pucci chuffed. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Mariah, but didn’t Hana and I come back here to your place in time to bear witness to . . . what the tar do they call it . . . ?”
Hana was standing next to Pucci, but there was a space between them. “An exorcism.”
As Pucci nerve-laughed again, Hana stayed silent. She was a thoughtful one, as if she might already be a step ahead of us all about how to build that bridge with Stamp she’d suggested last night. I’d wished many a time that she’d leave Pucci in the dust, but she always stuck with him. I couldn’t understand why such a smart girl stood for him unless she got something out of all his yelling and bullying. Something a little sick, if you asked me. But it wasn’t like we were a template for normalcy out here.
The oldster had bent over, resting his hands on his thighs. He’d seemed fine before, but now it looked as if reality was just hitting him. “A demon. In all my life, I’ve never seen one of ’em. I heard about ’em, but . . .”
We all just looked at each other, excluding Gabriel from what passed in our gazes. But the oldster didn’t need to say it out loud, anyway.
How was it that there’d been a demon running round the New Badlands and we hadn’t known it?
Gabriel leaned back against the ladder. “So you all had no idea it was out there.”
“No,” we said in unison.
“You weren’t doing anything ridiculous like making sacrifices to this creature so it’d hunt away from your community?”
God-all.
The oldster looked horrified. “Are you kidding, Gabriel?”
“After what we just saw, I’m afraid not.”
Blowing out a breath, the old man stood straight. “Fair enough. But when we spoke of wild things outside at night, we never included a demon in the equation.”
Sammy asked, “What do you think brought it here?”
I had an answer. “Some sort of exodus from the hubs?”
Even while I said it, I didn’t like what it meant. If monsters started moving out to the New Badlands, this community might end up restarting the cycle of violence we’d tried to flee in the first place. To protect ourselves against this magnitude of threat, we might have to become a new version of Shredders, killing stray monsters who’d bring attention to us out here.
Monsters like Gabriel.
But there was no way I’d reveal his secret. He was worthy of my efforts, because . . .
Was it because of the peace he could give me and that was it?
Zel glanced at one of the viszes, where the remains of the demon swayed in the night.
“This isn’t justice,” she whispered, sounding far off, eons away from where any of us were right now. “Not all monsters are beyond hope. I’ve even heard of demons who could bargain for a decent cause if there was a good trade in it for them.”
I tightened my grip on Zel’s shoulder, wanting to keep her contained. She could have hair-trigger emotions, like me. Like all of us. And it would only come to harm.
Sammy ignored her comment, lowering to his haunches. Now he was belatedly spent, just like the oldster. “So Stamp got his kicks. Maybe that’s all he wanted.”
“I don’t think so,” Gabriel said. But then he didn’t seem to have any more answers than we did. Tonight he was one of us—unsure and slightly pissed off because he’d just stood there, too, letting Stamp do what he’d done. Gabriel seemed the type to have higher ideals, and here we were, dragging him down to a place where those standards couldn’t exist.
“Stamp’s gonna turn his attention back here, certainly enough,” Gabriel finally said. “You know he will.”
Suddenly I wasn’t just thinking about Stamp. I pictured the men who’d attacked my old home.
“He’s the type who likes live torture,” I found myself saying. “Mental, physical—it does something for him. Carnerotica isn’t enough because he can’t smell it or be next to it. Beings like him, they do it because it’s the only way for them to feel alive. Filling his emptiness with someone else’s pain is all that keeps him going.”
Zel spoke again in that drifting voice. “Stamp’ll get away with it, just like they all do.”
The oldster gave her a worried glance, then gestured toward the exit, where the night waited outside. “Hate to break in with this, but there’ll be carrion feeders arriving to pluck that demon’s body clean. And we all know that shades tend to think that there’s more to come, and they sometimes hide among the rocks to swoop down on anything else that comes by. We should clean up before that happens.”
As if the oldster hadn’t said a word, Zel again set her gaze on the outside visz screen, with its focus on the skeleton of the three joined poles the demon had been executed and the shell of its body twisting in another gust of wind.
“With every passing day,” she said quietly, “we good cops saw things get worse, not better. And
every time we managed to put a bad guy away, a technicality would surface due to a rotten cop purposely screwing up procedure for a payoff. Or there’d be a command from the government and their corporate interests to release the criminal. After a while, there was no use in keeping on with it.”
“Zel . . .” the oldster said.
But she wasn’t listening. “The . . . time . . . came when I had to leave the hubs—”
I clamped my hand on her shoulder, and she blinked. Stiffened. Regrouped.
Then she added, “A rogue psychic—a criminal informant who set up a secret fortune-telling business in a free-housing reservation—told me to head west. That’s all he said. Out of not knowing where else to go, I did. And I found you guys.”
The oldster was looking at the ceiling, as if it were an old movie screen showing the day Zel had arrived. He was smiling slightly until her next words.
“Out here there was good. There was some bad, too, but it wasn’t beyond redeeming.” She reached up to hold my hand, and I gripped her, my throat getting choked. “I thought I’d outlive the day when I’d encounter pure evil again, and I can’t watch it grow and take over now. I won’t.” She gazed at us. “Tell me we’re going to do something about it.”
Seconds ticked by. No one volunteered. I was afraid to because of what it might bring on this time. We were already in too deep.
It was as if Zel had been drilled through with a bullet, and she slightly jerked under the impact of it. Then she wobbled to her feet, pushing her hat off her head as she wandered out of our circle. We let her be as the talk turned back to Stamp and our options. And our non-options.
The discussion grew loud and heated between the oldster and Pucci, in particular. But we didn’t get anywhere further than we’d been before.
About fifteen minutes in, Pucci said, “Maybe we should just up and go to another place before we’re taken over by people like Stamp. This area we once thought of as a sanctuary has been found, my friends. There could be more of him to come.”
A laugh chopped out of me. I didn’t mean to use it to get everyone’s attention, but that was just what it did.
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