I snorted. “It might as well be a cave, Charlotte. It’s all concrete, and on top of the concrete, there are trees and shrubs growing. We’re invisible so long as we stay put.”
She walked around the dusty cool room and pointed to the scorch mark on the floor. “You had a fire here,” she said flatly.
I nodded. “You might say that … listen, are you hungry?”
She nodded emphatically. “Yes.”
I motioned for her to follow me and we strode over to the small common room adjacent to the main entrance. I’d installed metal shelving a few years back, and it was stocked full of canned goods. I’d even bolted an industrial-sized can opener onto the wall. There was a table with a steel wash tub next to an immersion heater that vented straight up through the concrete and next to it, I’d installed a Yukon stove, a small foldable wood stove with a cooking surface. It was rustic – in an army surplus shop kind of way. At least we wouldn’t starve.
“There you go, kiddo,” I said displaying all the food on the shelf while channelling Vanna White. “Anything you want, we got. You know, as long as it’s not steak or an Egg McMuffin. I’ll get the camp stove going, and we can have something resembling a warm meal, sound like a plan?”
She nodded as she eyeballed the shelf, pulling out a can of ravioli. I checked the small camp stove’s fuel tank and found that it too was at least half-full of naphtha. I pumped the plunger a few times and lit the stove with little difficulty. Charlotte handed me the can and I popped it under my industrial can opener. In seconds, I was stirring the ravioli in a small enamelware pot on the camping stove. It heated quickly, and I dumped the contents onto a paper plate which I then placed on a small folding table along with a drinking box of apple juice and a plastic spoon.
“Eat up, little girl,” I said easily. “I’m going to get a cot for you and a sleeping bag. You finish up and then go hit the hay for a few hours.”
She shovelled a large spoonful of ravioli into her mouth and chewed a few times. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to clean this place up and check on my electrical generator so I can get us some power. We should have hot water for when you wake up if you want to have a shower or something.”
“No bathtub?” she asked, slipping another spoonful of ravioli into her mouth.
I pointed to the large galvanized steel tub I used for washing dishes. “This place isn’t a hotel, and we have to conserve water. There is no indoor plumbing here, and I must carry water in from in a bunch of plastic water cans that weigh more than you when each one is full. There’s a shower hooked up to an immersion heater. When you’re ready, I’ll show you how the shower works.”
“Um … okay.” She continued shovelling ravioli into her mouth.
I leaned against the wall and pulled out a pack of Player’s shit ends. I slipped a cigarette into my mouth and lit it with a flick of my Zippo lighter. The girl looked up at me from her paper plate and flashed me a disapproving look.
“What?” I said taking a deep haul on my cigarette. I knew what was coming.
“You shouldn’t smoke,” she said flatly. “You’re killing me with second-hand smoke.”
I took another deep haul and exhaled a thick blue plume of smoke. “Kid, second-hand smoke should be the least of your worries right now seeing as how there are other more immediate threats to your life. And anyway, my life is shi … er, lousy these days. A good smoke is one of my few pleasures so, you know, hold your breath or something.”
What she said next reminded me of my encounter with His Herald a few months back.
“But you are not human,” she said, using her guidance counsellor voice. “Your life is neither good nor lousy as you put it, because you are not alive. You must be alive to have a life. If anything, you are a symbiote.”
I blinked. “A what?”
“A symbiote,” she commented. “You are an uninvited passenger in another man’s body.”
I narrowed my eyes for a minute and then grabbed my smartphone. I Googled the word ‘symbiote’ and learned that it is a fictitious extra-terrestrial which bonds itself to a human host. The search engine went on to describe the comic book villain Venom; a symbiote latched onto Eddie Brock’s body, first appearing in The Amazing Spider-Man #252.
The little girl wasn’t entirely wrong about me, though she left out the bit about my host being dead before I invited myself into its body. I decided I’d leave that bit out for fear of Charlotte freaking about a walking, talking dead man sharing the same space as her. She might even make me disappear like she disappeared the guy who killed her mother. I grabbed a folding chair and sat down. I took another drag off my cigarette and then butted it out on the cold cement floor. I needed to learn more about what precisely Charlotte Simms was because I knew what she wasn’t: a harmless eight-year-old little girl.
“There are two Charlottes I have had the pleasure of speaking with over the last couple of hours,” I said carefully. “There is an eight-year-old girl, and there is the Charlotte who talks like she is a museum curator. Is this the same Charlotte or is this an entity inside her body— a symbiote?”
The little girl wiped her lips clean of any ravioli sauce with the sleeve of her nighty and tilted her head to the right. “That is a curious question. It’s within the realm of possibility that you would not understand the nature of what I am.”
I leaned forward on my chair. “Try me.”
Charlotte cocked an eyebrow and said, “I am. That is all you need to know right now.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, kid?”
Charlotte pushed her tomato sauce stained plate away and yawned. “Mister Richter, is there a place for me to take a nap? I’m pretty tired now.”
So much for my attempt at getting to the bottom of what precisely Charlotte was.
I stood up and motioned for the little girl to follow. “I’ll get you situated. After you’ve had a rest, we need to have a talk about all that stuff you wrote on the wall of your bedroom.”
“It is known as mathematical notation,” she said quickly. “An amalgam of moderately complex taxonomy, and it also includes visual elements which are universal in scope.”
I spun around and gazed down at the eight-year-old. She’d just uttered a pair of sentences that flew way over my head at around sixty miles an hour, and I wondered for half a second why she hadn’t been scooped up by some prestigious university to become the youngest faculty member in the history of advanced education.
I waved a hand. “When you have your nap, I want you to think about why you know so much about math and calculus.”
“It is the universal language,” she stated. “It is the truth of all things.”
I grunted. “I also want you to have a little wee chat with that other person inside your brain because I need to know who I am talking with.”
Her face knitted into a tight knot. She folded her arms across her chest in what I was certain is the universal pose women utilize before giving a man a blast of shit.
“I am me!” she snapped.
I thought for a moment that the earth might open up and swallow me hole because the look on Charlotte’s face could melt the hull of an aircraft carrier. I motioned for her to calm down and said, “We’ll just leave questions about who and what you are alone for now, okay?”
Charlotte nodded and followed me to the small anteroom where I’d set up the sleeping arrangements during Amy’s brief stay in Das Bunker. It took me a couple of minutes to create a comfy little nook in the corner complete with a cot, an air mattress, and a spare sleeping bag. I placed a small battery powered lamp on a milk crate beside the makeshift bed and then tossed a copy of Muscle Car Fury on the bed.
“What’s this?” asked Charlotte, holding up the magazine.
“It’s a magazine filled with pictures of classic American muscle cars. I don’t have any kid’s books in here, and we’re not heading to town to get any until we figure out a plan for how to keep you safe.”
&n
bsp; She tossed it onto her bed and then crawled inside the sleeping bag. “Well?”
I arched my eyebrows. “Well, what?”
“Are you going to zip me up? It’s not a real bed so you can’t tuck me in, but you can zip me up, Mister.”
“What is that—some parental ritual or something?” I asked, immediately regretting it.
Charlotte sniffled for a moment and then wiped her nose. “I miss my mom,” she said in the tiniest of whispers.
And a strange thing happened. I felt a flutter in the centre of my chest. A tiny ache that I’d never experienced before in all my years walking the Earth and living inside human skin. I wasn’t entirely sure what it was—possibly a tiny case of heartache? A human feeling of empathy? The tiny girl had lost everything over the last few hours. She was attacked by her mom’s boyfriend, an Abraxas-possessed social worker and then a truckload of demons—all in a matter of hours. If this was the way her life had always been, then I had to question whether it was a life at all. The girl was powerful—too powerful based on what I’d already witnessed. All that power trapped inside a child’s body; something was bound to give.
I didn’t possess any form of parental instinct, but that tiny fluttering in the centre of my chest wasn’t going away as I watched the girl sob into her pillow. I had to do something that instinct would allow me to do without thinking but I didn’t know what it was.
And so, I just leaned against the wall opposite the cot and slid down until I was sitting on the floor. It would be my first shift on sentry, and I reckoned the first of many until I could figure out why Charlotte was on Hell’s hit list. She sobbed for about five minutes before crying herself to sleep. I was asleep about five minutes after that.
Even death-dealers need a bit of rest from time to time.
“The girl can’t live like this.”
It was the last thing I said as I dozed off.
5
I managed to get a bit of rest. Not that death-dealers ever really need sleep; but when you’ve borrowed the body of a deceased human and your elemental presence brings it back to life, you have to follow the rules. There are three rules for occupying a human body. Rule number one is you have to eat. Rule number two is you have to get some sleep, or you will burn out that body and rule number three is a big one. Don’t get too attached to your host. They tend to break easily.
I had been drinking and smoking hard for too many months after I lost Amy. I still liked liquor, and I loved to smoke cigarettes, but I had to remain sharp if I was going to keep Charlotte safe. As I woke up with a stretch, I decided that I would stay off the bottle until Charlotte was no longer in my care. That and I wanted to set a good example. That was basic human desire, wasn’t it? Protect the children?
I glanced at my watch. It was just past eight in the morning, and I could see threads of daylight filtering into das bunker through the thick firing slits in the concrete that faced the mouth of the harbour. I shivered for a moment and smiled. Though most would complain about waking up in a cold and damp concrete bunker, I wasn’t about to. The tiniest sensations still thrilled me after nearly a century living among humans. I’d existed for aeons as a function of lives lived; a nameless entity whose sole purpose was to claim human souls for their next journey. Those fragmented reactions to cold or sunlight or even the way the breeze felt brushing against my skin on a chilly morning; each was a gift to one who’d never felt a thing since the moment I came into existence.
I slowly got back to my feet with a groan. My back felt like it had been twisted into a pretzel shape, and my knees shrieked their displeasure as I stretched. Across from me, Charlotte slept peacefully. I quickly went to work getting some hot water going for the girl to wash up. The immersion heater inside the kitchen area was bone dry, but there were more than twenty full ten-gallon plastic water cans. I dumped four of them into the immersion heater and then filled the fuel tank with gasoline. Five minutes after that a constant drip of unleaded burned inside the burner assembly and in about thirty minutes there would be enough hot water to wash up.
The next order of business was to get the generator going but to do that I’d have to step outside the bunker, and I wasn’t about to leave the girl alone. I decided she could help me prime the motor and start the machine up. It couldn’t hurt for a little girl to have a bit of basic mechanical skill, though I suspected that Charlotte probably understood two-stroke engines better than your average eight-year-old. I imagined she understood the complex mechanics of a lot of things and I made a mental note to share the pictures of her bedroom wall that Sparks had texted to me.
I scrounged around the food shelf and found a tub of skim milk powder along with four boxes of cereal I’d bought during my last supply run more than a year ago. I checked the best before dates and found that both the cereal and skim milk powder were still good. At least the girl could have a decent enough breakfast while I tried to figure out my next move. There were a lot of questions that needed answers if I was going to get to the bottom of why Charlotte Simms was on hell’s hit list. I’d have summoned that asshole demon Abraxas to find out if I didn’t think he’d take another shot at her.
If I were going to find out why the bad guys wanted Charlotte dead, I’d have to get the girl answering questions. The only trouble was that I didn’t know the questions. Outside of ‘what the hell are you,’ I was drawing a blank. Perhaps if I summoned Ezekiel, my former boss. He’s the Angel of Death and Transformation, and he gives all Reapers their marching orders. He’s the one who kicked me out of my order nearly a century ago, and we’d been bitter enemies until recently when I saved his life at the hands of the girl I couldn’t save, Amy.
A fat lot of good that did. He didn’t try to save her. He’d tried to tempt me.
I’d also sworn off any interaction with the angel at Lawrencetown Beach, though, I might have been a bit hasty. I decided that I would summon him only as a last resort.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out and saw that it was a number I didn’t recognize. I hesitated for a moment. Only two people had my number. One was Dane Woolcott, an ally of mine who runs a gay bar and the other was Detective Sergeant Carol Sparks. Throwing caution to the wind, I decided to answer.
“Yeah,” I said into the phone.
“It’s Sparks. I’m on a pay as you go so add me to your contacts list. Where are you?”
I exhaled in relief and said, “At my safe house. We’re okay. What’s going on?”
“I’ve been sent home after a grilling from Internal Affairs. There’s another detective taking the Victoria Road killing. Are you both okay?”
I nodded into the phone. “It was a very long night, Sparks. We’re as good as can be expected. They took you off the case, shit.”
“They put me on administrative leave. There are media crawling all over North End Dartmouth. I’m contemplating talking to a lawyer because with a missing girl, a murder victim, three dead cops and a dead social worker; they want to know why I am still alive.”
I arched my eyebrows. “Are they thinking you had something to do with it?”
“I would if I were investigating,” she said with a sharp edge to her voice. “People are going to lose their shit when they read the news online this morning. Citizens get nervous as hell when cops get killed in their neighbourhood.”
I clenched my jaw for a moment. Sparks had stuck her neck out for me in the past, though in the case of Charlotte Simms, it was the detective who asked for my help and not the other way around. I didn’t know a lot about the internal machinations of the local police, but I’d read enough crime novels to know that when a police officer is placed on administrative leave, it usually means they’re in deep doo-doo.
“Shit, Sparks, I’m sorry about all this,” I said with an air of resignation in my voice.
“It’s not on you,” she stated calmly. “I called you in for help on this case. We both know the killer of those police officers isn’t anything the Halifax Police Service could
ever deal with, let alone understand. I made a choice to help you fight the dark shit that exists in this world. I’m still very much a newcomer to all of this, and I won’t lie to you; I’d have preferred it if our paths had never crossed. I’m good at catching human bad guys, but all this heaven and hell stuff? I’m in over my head, Reaper.”
“Don’t think for a second your contribution hasn’t been noticed,” I quipped. “Remember what His Herald said to you; that He was well pleased.”
“Uh-huh. Well, maybe He can make sure I don’t get busted down to beat cop over this. I don’t mind helping you out, but I do have a mortgage and credit card bills.”
“The kid is going to be up soon,” I said glancing across the bunker at the still sleeping child. “I need answers about why she’s a target. Wouldn’t hurt if you were here to help with all that.”
Sparks sighed heavily. “I’m on administrative leave. I might as well come out and meet you. It’s not like I’m doing anything else at the moment.”
“Fair enough, you know where to find me. Talk in a bit.”
I slipped my phone back into my pocket and then walked over to my storage locker next to the firing bay. I unlocked the railway switch lock and gazed inside at the assortment of firearms I’d collected over the years. I had everything from my Parker-Hale sniper rifle right down to a pair of Glocks and a backup pair of nine millimetre Beretta handguns. I grabbed one and checked that it was loaded, then slipped it beneath my waistband in the small of my back. Next to the locker was an olive drab wooden crate. I flipped open the lid to gaze down at five M-72 anti-tank weapons, each containing a sixty-six-millimetre rocket with a shaped explosive charge.
Underneath were more than a dozen M-66 hand grenades and a pair of ancient claymore mines that if discovered would net me about a million years in prison. There was a smaller crate containing sticks of C-4 explosives and on the bottom shelf of the storage locker sat a cylinder containing more than a dozen non-electric detonators next to a large coil of safety fuse. I hadn’t used any explosives in a long time, and there was just enough C-4 to booby trap the entire bunker if we were forced to abandon it. I’d long ago planned on destroying the place rather than let it fall into someone else’s hands.
The Girl On Victoria Road: A Tim Reaper Novel Page 5