‘You won’t,’ she whispered. ‘You need me.’ At ‘me’ Marie leapt forward into the street, weaving among the cars like the dang spook she was.
“Fine,” I shrugged. “Here I go. You see? I’m popping it. I can already see you fading. I hope you enjoy the empty boringness of Limbo, because I’ve got a whole stash of these now and I’m going to keep—”
‘Oh screw this,’ Castor spoke up. ‘It’s halfway down Beta Circle, between 36th and 37th.’
“Thank you, Castor,” I said, and promptly popped the B-drop.
Marie zoomed up to me, making me stumble backwards. She tried to sock me in the gut. When that didn’t work, she smiled.
“Oh crap,” I groaned as Marie attempted to possess me. I danced around trying to avoid her. That’s when the taxi pulled up beside me.
As I jumped in, Marie drifted into the cab for one last try at the old possession bit. I shimmied over as she began to fade. Outside in the rain Castor shrugged and faded too. Soon they were both out of sight. I relaxed. When I opened my peepers, it was to the sight of a grizzled cabbie goggling me.
“Oh, sorry. Please take me to One-Hundred and First and Beta.”
He stared for another ten ticks, probably just to make me uncomfortable, and then turned around and pulled away from the curb. “You a runaway?” he asked a little while later.
“Kind of.”
“There’s nothing on One-Oh-One but dollar stores and pizza places. You got a place to stay?”
Was he coming on to me? I shivered and then shivered again, the second time because I was cold and wet. “I’m meeting my uncle at Pontillo’s Pizzeria.”
“What’s his name?”
What was this, an interrogation? “Uncle Castor.” I set my elbow on the window and pressed my ear against my hand, hoping Nosy Cabbie would get the drift.
It wasn’t until we pulled up to the curb on 101st and Beta that I realized I had no way inside. Last time, Miss Anne Thrope had helped me enter. But now? Big Dominic wouldn’t let me in without a member of the City. I plopped down on the top step, assuming the Thinker position. “What would Ash do?” I wondered aloud. He’d have a way inside, the clever little zipperdick.
The doojee was coursing through my veins now, so that was dynamite. But it had banished my spooks, so I didn’t have anyone to give me any advice. It’s a real slap in the face realizing how helpless you are without your friends. I sat there, drenched and high but humbled by my blunder, and all the while Ash was back at PHS, plotting his way into Mythcorp.
A flabby man in a knit cap staggered down the street towards the stairs, spotted me, and then walked by. A few moments later he returned. Seeing me still there, he walked past the steps again. On his third trek the man seemed to grow a pair. He stopped, head hanging limp as if he’d lost his top few vertebrae and found the sidewalk remarkably fascinating.
“Wutuduinhere?”
“Excuse me?” I asked.
This time he raised his head. I wished he hadn’t; his face was all pockmarked and it looked like he had traded his teeth for asparagus tips. “What are you doing here? Who are you?”
“Why?” trying not to look at those unholy teeth.
Flabby grunted. “Do you even know what’s inside?” He was getting all jittery now and wheezing through those flimsy teeth. I kept expecting green dentures to plop onto the puddles. I dug inside my pockets. “If you let me come in with you,” I said “and tell Dominic there that I’m your son, I’ll give you—” yanking out some bills, I sighed “—fifteen bucks.”
Flabby man snorted and trudged up the steps past me. He knocked on the door. I stood, intending to sneak in behind him, but then plopped back down when it became clear I was a head taller. The smidge metal slot situated peeper-high in the door, slid open. Dark eyes peered out at Flabby. Words were spoken, locks were unlocked, and Flabby was swallowed by Vera City.
I was alone again.
Rubbing my temples produced no answers. I couldn’t think. Everything was grand and blurry. Lightning shivered down in the distance, striking the top of one of the sky-ticklers in Virgil’s Nave. In the sudden flash I caught the outline of Malthus across the street, making me cringe. As thunder boomed something whizzed by my face and splattered against the door. The whizzing object stuck fast to the metal—and it was ticking.
“Holy crap!”
I leapt off the stoop in a slam-bang rush, landing on the sidewalk in a heap. I struggled to rise, cursing in pain. Even with the doojee, it was too much. I couldn’t run, at least not for a few hundred ticks. Behind me the sticky bomb was ticking away, counting its last moments with stoic indifference.
Crawling-crawling-crawling.
A magnificent force pummeled me. I thought, this is it, I’m totally buggered now.
But the force lingered and neither increased nor decreased. Rain splattered against my face and squeezed into my peepers. I’m moving, hovering. Was this what death was like? Did everything slow down to allow you time to ponder your demise? What a megabomb slap in the face. Let it end, I prayed.
But when it didn’t end, I figured I might as well pay attention. Wind and rain blasted my face, and something gripped me around my waist with a vice-grip pressure.
KABOOM
“What the flip?” glancing behind me.
Fire during a rain storm is an awesome sight, sure as sure. But did this mean that the explosion had only just happened? Slowly I guided my peepers from the blast to a spot four feet above me. I screamed and writhed and cursed, all to no effect. Malthus had me in his arms (or rather arm; apparently gaunt suckers like me don’t weigh enough to justify being carried by both arms).
The grip on my body tightened. I forced myself to take a deep breath and to think. It was difficult with the drugs coursing through my system, mucking up my noodle, but I did my best. Okay, Malthus has saved me from the blast, which was his doing, and now he is toting me like a basket of dirty clothes. Where could he be taking me?
“Where are you taking me?” I asked. It came out like ‘were you tagging me?’ though.
The big galoot didn’t answer. He didn’t even slow down.
At least it was dark outside, and with the rain pouring Malthus probably came off as a rearguard jogging down the street with me as his gym bag. That was my hope anyway. I wasn’t ready for death-by-embarrassment.
After a lifetime of this nonsense, Malthus released me. That is to say, he dropped me onto a particularly hard slab of pavement. I groaned and writhed and when I opened my peepers, I was relieved to find Marie dancing beside Malthus, her white dress twirling, immune to the storm. It was even nice to see Naked Charlie staring down at me—but not that nice.
I set my cane upright and used it to hoist myself.
“You almost killed me back there!”
But then, taking a good look around, I smiled. “This is the back entrance, isn’t it? Marie, where’s the door?”
The spook ignored me. Lightning flashed. In the interval of light, I got a look at Malthus. He was motionless as a statue and his creepy ability to merge with shadows was a constant reminder that he was not human.
“Oh, ah,” I stammered, “I was talking to Marie. Do you remember her? She used to pal around with Knox?”
To my astonishment, the demon lifted his prosthetic hand and pointed directly at the spook. As if to make his point crystal clear, he proceeded to point at Naked Charlie and Castor in turn.
“You can see them? Wow.”
He shifted his mondo arm. At first I expected to see another spook, maybe Her Royal Highness, but instead, following his direction, I saw a wall. It was nice as far as walls go; solid red brick not yet old enough to have decayed into an image of rotting teeth.
‘It’s the door,’ Marie said.
‘Duh,’ Castor added. ‘What an idiot.’
Another look proved just as unrevealing to me. “Where’s the door?”
‘Right here,’ Marie skipped through the air to an unremarkable section of wal
l. A closer inspection revealed hairline cracks in the cement between the bricks, adding up to the shape of a door. An even closer look revealed the porthole-window through which Faustus and I had looked out. It was filmy and a section of graffiti ran through it, concealing it. I shoved until my shoulder was bruised; all the while Malthus looked on in silence, as revealed through lightning flashes.
“You want to lend a hand here, big guy?”
He made a kooky gesture before retreating into the darkness, disappearing.
My hands flew up.
‘Obviously the door only swings outward,’ Castor said. ‘What did I do to deserve this? What did I do so wrong that the fates would scourge me with watching your dumb-ass for eternity? Must be some sort of ironic punishment; stick a genius with a retard or something.’ The cig flapped up and down in his mouth as he spoke. I wondered if he’d died with it in there.
Without the big demon around to hulk out on the door, I was forced to try something more subtle. I hobbled up to the brick again, found the hairline cracks and, after drawing the sword out of its bone-shaft, wedged the tip into the crack.
A few ticks of struggling and a good amount of finessing later, the door stuck out an inch.
“Okay,” gripping the edge, “here goes.” I yanked on it. Fingers slipped. Naughty words slipped out of my mouth right after this and then my feet, observing this slip-fest, slipped out from under me and I ended up on my rump. Now that my bones were sodden and my bruises had their own bruises, I figured “Screw it,” and slipped another glorious heroin-laced butterscotch candy into my mouth.
“Why’d that big galoot have to go and leave?” I complained to the spooks. “Why couldn’t he open this for me first? How much trouble would that have been for him? Wham-bam thank you m’am and boom it’s done.”
‘Quit your whining, Morgan,’ Castor mumbled, trying to light his cig.
“Yeah, there you go,’ I snapped. “Thousandth time’s the charm.”
Before he could rubber band my not-so-snappy one liner, the brick door shot open all the way and a short woman stumbled out. She was too busy snooping around inside her paper bag to notice me—or even that she’d opened the door, apparently.
I darted forward, stretching the bruise on my rump, and caught the door as it was closing.
After stopping to stick my tongue out at Castor, I sneaked inside Vera City through its super secret back door.
As far as I could tell, this back room was the only section of the City where people were allowed to smoke. And believe me, they allowed the hell out of themselves. A wheezing fit is nothing to sneeze at (wait . . .), but once I got my breathing under control, real troubles began to sink in.
I realized I had to find two people in a place as densely populated as Tokyo. Only one idea struck my noodle on how to accomplish this in less than a century: get into a tussle.
Chapter 28
Getting into a tussle is not as easy as you’d think. I tried bumping into people, but after one dude used the opportunity to grope me, I lost interest in that method.
My second grand idea was to steal stuff from people’s bags. I ended up covered in a box of yogurt-covered crickets, a black-and-blue pretty on my mouth from running into a fist.
Frustrated and afraid of being run over by the crowd (incited, no doubt, by that mysterious explosion at the entrance), I plopped my butt down onto a wooden bench for a think. What would my father do in this situation? As I stressed my noodle, tapping the cane against the concrete, two men, dressed in thick dark gray uniforms (probably polymer Kevlar) marched by, toting bizarre looking semi-automatics. Arthur’s Knights, I suspected.
Red and blue Neon lights from Smith Wesson’s Guns and Weapons booth twelve feet away washed over me. A particularly brilliant snake of blue light caught the crow-head peepers of the cane. I stopped tapping to gaze at the purple peepers.
Hmmm.
I looked both ways. When the traffic (people, not cars) became somewhat sparser, I rotated the crow head so that its bejeweled glories were pointing at the weapons booth.
This was going to be so naughty and attention-getting.
My father would approve—if he weren’t a block of ice, that is.
I pressed the no-no button. A stream of amethyst lightning sizzled across the path, striking the neon ‘W’ in the Wesson’s sign. The letter exploded. I jerked to the side but somehow resisted the urge to scoot. This was my fault and I would pay for it. Well, someone would pay for it after I recruited the Wards who would come and take me away.
Amidst a flurry of screams the ‘W’ kablammed out from its place in ‘Wesson’ and clattered inside the booth. A few ticks later a soul-shaking boom erupted and blew out the front of the booth. Smith Wesson himself (he was sporting a mustache, so who else could he be but a weapons dealer named Smith) ran out from the back. He went right to work on the blaze with a fire-extinguisher while his beefcake guard scanned the crowd. Behind the crowd sat a lanky young man who was suspiciously sitting down. When Beefcakes peepers landed on moi, he shoved his way through the ranks of gawkers and grabbed me.
Gawkers did what they do: they gawked as the Beefcake dragged me along the paths of Vera City, at last depositing me on a bench outside the Court. I bit my tongue against a pain in my rump. Beefcake completed the call on his FAD. A few minutes later Kana and Faustus strode up, dancing neon lights as a backdrop. It was all very dramatic but I was in no mood to clap.
Faustus struck me with eye-daggers. “Thank you, Todd,” he said to Beefcake. “We’ll take it from here.” Todd toddled off. The Mythicons turned back to face me with crossed arms and withering glares. “What are you doing back here?” Faustus demanded. “Are you being intentionally dense or did you just miss my handsome face?”
Kana backhanded him in the gut and he doubled over in mock pain. The petite woman settled down beside me on my bench. She smelled of cinnamon and was dressed in a wisp of a pink-laced black dress that was short enough to give me hope of it riding up. Naughty thoughts invaded my mind. Oh man. “Earle Combs, Mark Koenig, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig—”
“What are you doing?” Kana asked, hand on my shoulder.
“—Bob Meusel, Tony Lazzeri, Joe Dugan,” I bit my tongue. “I came”—wrong word—“because I need your help.”
At last the hottie removed her hand and looked up at the gingersnap, who snorted before leaning against a pole—apparently to practice looking cool. “Help with what?” Kana asked.
“I need to get inside Mythcorp, like now,” I looked down to avoid the sight of Kana’s perfect gams. “Since you two have actually been in there, twice, I thought maybe you’d—”
“Maybe we’d what?” Faustus said. “Maybe we’d jump at the chance to get bitchslapped again? Are you high? Knox was always high, too.”
I sighed and accidentally caught a peep of Kana’s panties when she crossed her legs. “Listen, I just need you to help me get inside, get my father out—and then maybe also help me to destroy the place so no one can ever reopen it.”
“Oh, is that all?” Faustus quipped.
“Of course we’ll help,” Kana said, patting my leg again. “Won’t we, Red?”
Faustus stopped playing with his switchblade. “Um, no. Jeez and good God, Tiny. Don’t you see? This is exactly how it always went with Knox. He’d come to us to lay out his latest harebrained scheme and we, the constant idiots, would follow him. It’s all ooh’s and aah’s at first, but then there’s running and screaming.”
Kana’s face brightened. “The Lost World, right?”
“Congratulations,” Faustus sighed. “You finally got one of my Jurassic Park references. It’s a thirty-two year old reference, but still. Point is,” turning to me now, “we’d inevitably end up shot or captured. So no thanks. We’ve lost enough friends.” He returned to whirling his knife around flawlessly.
We were all silent, watching him for a moment until he spoke again.
“Look, you remember Sawyer, or Sigurd, or how about Marie, yo
u remember Marie, don’t you, Tiny? What happened to Marie when Knox asked for her help?”
“It won’t be like that,” Kana said, but she sounded about as convincing as a televangelist.
“She’s right,” I quasi-lied, standing with the aid of my cane. “It’ll be different this time. This time no one’s inside Mythcorp, waiting to kill you. I just need help finding a way into the building.” After shaking off a bit of nausea from the doojee, I tapped the ground with my cane and said, “It’s time for you two to do that hoodoo voodoo that you two do so well.”
My smile quickly faded when I realized they were not impressed by my rehearsed line.
Kana yanked the gingersnap off to the side and whispered something into his ear. I doubted it was sweet nothings—probably more like bitter something’s.
They stopped whispering abruptly. Grabbing me by my less-than-sumptuous biceps, the two Mythicons started dragging me away. I skirted my head around to sneak a peek at what was up. Smith Wesson was charging up the warpath behind us.
Oops, I’d almost forgotten I was supposed to be in trouble.
Kana picked up the pace, dragging me behind as she zipped and weaved through the booths here at the ass end of Vera City. “You got in trouble on purpose, didn’t you?” Kana asked. “So we’d come. But why’d you have to blow up Smith Wesson’s booth of all places?”
“It was the closest one?” I said.
Faustus chuckled. “You really can pick ‘em, junior.”
“What?” I asked. “What’s so bad about Smith Wesson?”
Smith was starting to lag behind. He was old and decrepit, and jogging is not a certified sport for decrepit old farts, not least because their jowls bounce violently.
While rounding a booth showcasing girls and women in skimpy outfits, Kana said, “Wesson is Arthur’s blacksmith and personal arms dealer. He forges all the firearms for Arthurs Knights.”
“In other words, Lisbeth, you kicked the King’s favorite hornets’ nest,” Faustus declared.
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