Cold Hearted: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode Two)

by James Hunter

  I wanted to shoot her something in return, but it damn sure wasn’t a wink—I was thinking about something with a much higher caliber.

  She walked from the room, accompanied by Ferraro, and the door swung shut behind the pair. My life.

  ELEVEN:

  Black Out

  “Yancy Lazarus,” Agent Ferraro said, sounding pleased. “That’s a new one—I’ll have to add it to the list.” She took out a note pad from her pocket and casually scribbled the name down, then slid the pad back into its place. “So you’re going to cooperate … That seems, unlikely.”

  The lights flickered again, the wind sounding unnaturally loud in the night—man, this was like the set-up for a bad horror movie. There was energy out there in the night, I could feel it even without being able to touch the Vis. That no-goodnik Old Man Winter was manipulating the weather—calling up a storm and simultaneously weakening the bonds between Earth and Outworld. With all that distortion, it’d be easy for Randy to conjure up some tentacle-clad, horror-show. My life just wouldn’t be complete without one of those.

  This was going to turn out terribly—there was no way it couldn’t.

  “Look Ferraro, I’m not interested in confessing. Not exactly—that lawyer … she’s a little off kilter. But maybe there are a few things we should talk about. Just kinda clear the air a little. That sort of thing.”

  “Oh, I’m listening.” She pulled out the chair across from me and took a seat, seemingly at ease, though I knew it was all show. My guess was that Ferraro was never at ease—lady probably took a bubble bath with a glass of wine in one hand and her Glock in the other.

  But I needed her help. Something was coming—I could feel it swell, rise, and fall, like some invisible tsunami inbound for our little slice of Earth. A hazy cloud seemed to melt through the roof, a rolling, bubbling pool of black—visible to me, but invisible to Ferraro. The energy lashed out at me, its weight settled into my bones, and around my shoulders like a heavy winter jacket. Sinking down, into my skin. I shook for a second, just a brief muscle spasm that probably looked like little more than a set of chills. It was a helluva lot more than chills, though, let me tell you.

  I’d just been cursed.

  Well, cursed in a manner of speaking. Douche-waffle Randy had just anchored his summoning construct to me—whatever was about to break in from Outworld wouldn’t stop until one of us went down for keeps. I’m a gambler by trade, and I was gonna call in my bet for the other guy.

  My time was running out damn quick. “Shit. Okay, look … so those people.” I picked up the photos and leafed through them, looking at each face. “They weren’t really people. And yeah, maybe I had some part in their … let’s say disappearance, but you gotta believe me—they were monsters. And not in the metaphorical sense. These were the kind of monsters with fangs and spikes and fur. Or bat wings in some cases.” I pointed at the picture of the little girl, the Tiktik. “Underneath this kid’s flesh mask, she looked like a Walking Dead cast reject—except with a five-foot tongue and a pair of bat wings. Crazy shit, right there.”

  “You son of a bitch,” she said. “You’re going for an insanity plea—that’s your game plan, huh? Well, it’ll never stick. I’m gonna see them lock your ass away in the Florence Supermax until they put the needle in your arm.”

  “What? No. Look, I’m not trying to game the system here. And no, I’m not trying for an insanity plea—though that’s a hell of an idea. Listen, these things were no-shit monsters—supernatural creatures from the darker parts of reality. At the time it was sorta my job to deal with them, to keep regular folks safe. Like a cop I guess. See, I can do magic. Well, we don’t call it magic—I can use the Vis, which is kinda like doing magic. Sort of …” Boy, to some Rube cop, I bet this sounded like crazy-banana-pants, madman gibberish.

  “Magic,” she said, her voice as smooth, flat, and cold as a frozen winter lake. “Prove it. Do some magic for me.”

  Dammit all to hell. Stupid Randy. Stupid, deathless Koschei. Good-for-nothing Lady Luck. “Well … I can’t exactly do any magic right now.” I tapped my fingers against the tabletop. “It’s complicated, but I’ve temporarily been poisoned by an evil mage …” I just trailed off at the end and finished with a sigh. Hearing myself, even I thought I sounded about five cans short of a six-pack. No one would ever buy this, at least not until the monster showed up.

  “How convenient,” she said. “You have to know that no grand jury in the world is going to be stupid enough to buy that line.”

  I sighed again. What I wouldn’t do for a cup of coffee. “Fine. Whatever. None of this even matters right now; what’s important right now is that the shit is about to hit the fan, explode through the ceiling, and turn into something out of a Tales from the Crypt episode. Some kind of monster is about to bust up in here and turn this station into a Wes Craven movie. Seriously. There are officers here that will die. Shit, we might all die, unless you let me go. Unless you help me—”

  “Just stop,” she spat. “Who knows, maybe you really do believe what you’re saying. But don’t try to suck me in to your delusion. This isn’t my first time around the block either. Monsters. Please.” She smirked.

  The lights died half a second later and, for a moment, complete blackness enveloped the room, the howling of the wind and my own heavy breathing too loud. With a buzz and a click, the backup generator kicked on, casting the room in muted yellow light.

  “Manegia. Smalltime, B.F.E. police departments,” she muttered, her smirk melting away.

  The door popped open, and an older officer with brown hair sprinkled with gray poked his head into the room. “Sorry to bother you, Special Agent Ferraro, but we might have a situation down in the basement.”

  She slammed her manila folder down on the edge of the table, got up from the chair, and headed for the door. She shot me the most vicious glare I’ve seen in years. “Don’t think I’ll fall for your head games. We’ll continue our chat in just a few … Why don’t you use this time to think about your story—see if maybe a little bit of honesty would be the more prudent move.”

  “Agent Ferraro, I’m telling you, this is it. Get those officers armed. Tell them, please. Flak-jackets, riot gear, shotguns, assault rifles, whatever they can get their hands on. Call the National Guard, maybe.” She opened the door and stalked out. “Tell them to get ready!” I called after her. She just kept walking, not even sparing me a backward glance, swinging the door closed behind her.

  I needed out—I wasn’t about to sit here, chained to a friggin’ table like a meat buffet for some freaky-deaky creature. Just a set of handcuffs and a door between me and safety.

  Thankfully, my means of escape sat right on the edge of the table: a small metal paperclip, attached to the outside of the folder Agent Ferraro had so carelessly set down. In any other circumstance, she probably never would’ve made such a mistake—she was sharp, and even relatively minor missteps were beneath her. But these were extraordinary circumstances; plus I had Lady Luck on my side, and this was nothing if not a lucky break. Still, stupid, no-good Fortuna.

  A paperclip is such a small thing in the grand scheme, almost not worth thinking about, but in the right hands—in my hands—it was a one-way ticket to Freedomville. Sure, I didn’t have my power, but I still had all my other unsavory skills, including the ability to pick a lock. And handcuffs are easy peasy. Standard-issue cuffs—like the Smith and Wesson model 100s on my wrists—have been around since the early 1900s and have remained almost unchanged since their inception. Someone with a bobby pin or a paperclip and the right set of skills can get through ‘em in about ten seconds.

  The dossier was too far to reach with my bound hands, so I doubled over at the waist, cramming the table’s edge into my gut and lying my chest flat against the tabletop. Having my hands all bunched up underneath me hurt, and the whole thing was as awkward as a teenager in puberty, but I could grasp the folder between my teeth. I snaked back to my seat, worked the paperclip free, an
d bent it into shape. Working out the kinks and curves until only a single straight strip of metal remained, then bending it in half, so I had a U.

  I went to work, and though it was tough going, the cuffs ratcheted open after a minute of tinkering, leaving me a mostly free man. I rubbed at the red rings around each wrist—the officers had made sure the things were tight as a second skin. Not an ounce of wriggle room. Smart move—it’d made picking the locks a mite more difficult.

  No one burst in to arrest me yet, so that was good, lucky even—probably there weren’t many officers working in this station. Small regional place like this, at night, with a bad snowstorm in place. A small staff would be scrambling to get the power going, handle traffic calls, and deal with any other issues.

  I padded across the room and tried the door.

  Lo and behold, it swung open, which was good news since the door didn’t have a lock at all—it was one of those buzz-in mechanisms. Ferraro had shut the door, I’d seen it for myself, but the bolt hadn’t fully clasped. Maybe the power outage had temporarily disrupted the locking mechanism? Another lucky break in any case—fine, I guess having Lady Luck for an accomplice was a little cooler than I’d initially thought.

  Still, a paperclip and an unlocked door weren’t exactly jackpot wins … Jeez, if I were the personification of luck I’d sure as shit have done things with a little more flair. Would it really have been too much to ask for Agent Ferraro to offer me a cup of coffee and have the cup turn out to be the Holy Grail? Now that would’ve been lucky.

  The hallway was mostly dark, the emergency lights shed only small pools of illumination, leaving great swaths of darkness. An open door stood off to my left. An observation room, furnished with a table, a couple of worn office chairs, and a view of the interrogation chamber via a one-way mirror. The room was blessedly empty and it looked like whoever had been there had vacated in a hurry—a couple of cups of coffee, still steaming, sat on the table.

  I loitered for just a second before deciding to dip into the room and snag one of the coffees. Now, I want no judgment here—you’re probably thinking, What? Don’t do that, there’s a monster on the loose, which was true. Your point is valid, but—and this is a helluva big but—it was coffee, the bitter nectar of lesser gods. I’d been up for hours, hadn’t slept in what felt like ages, and was dragging ass big time. The wonderful, life-giving caffeine in that cup might well save my neck. Plus, coffee. I love coffee, and if I was going to die, I wanted to go after having a cup of joe. ‘Nough said.

  I grabbed the fuller of the two cups, blew a couple of times, and slurped the hot liquid into my mouth—so strong, black, and bitter that I thought it might actually be straight jet fuel. Absolutely perfect, no one makes better coffee than the cops do. Hot, but not too hot—I got down a good couple of mouthfuls, set the cup back on the table and headed back out into the hallway. The situation still looked pretty grim: too quiet, scary-ass hallway, bathed in weak yellow light with oceans of darkness in between. Right, life was still terrible. Check. But now a little less terrible, because, you know, coffee.

  I crept down the hall, my feet nearly silent on the carpet, though my breathing sounded positively thunderous. I came up to a T-intersection, with hallways jutting off left and right. I pressed my back against the wall, and carefully glanced each way. To the right lay a few closed doors with metal placards on the front of each—likely offices and conference rooms for the brass. To the left was a hallway with a closed door at the end. I could see a blur of movement through the frosted window.

  “Now stop right there,” came a muted voice from the room beyond the door. “I mean it buddy, stop right there—put your hands into the air and get onto your belly or I’ll shoot. I swear, I’ll do it.” The speaker sounded just about scared out of his wits.

  “STOP!” he hollered again, followed by the bark of several gunshots. I broke into a run, not away from the shots but toward them. Confession time—this was phenomenally stupid. Pro tip: when you’ve been arrested for multiple murders and have just managed to escape capture, the best policy is not to run toward armed police officers. At least not if freedom or life is important to you.

  With that in mind, I couldn’t leave some poor cop out there going toe-to-toe with some preternatural baddy who was here hunting me. I didn’t want to see some guy or gal die a horrible death on my account. So instead of heading toward the offices and trying to find another way out, I charged right toward the shooting, and whatever lay beyond.

  TWELVE:

  Horror Show

  I burst through the door to look on a scene that really did belong in a horror flick—a bad one, with a shoestring budget. The little office room was trashed. Desks overturned, computers smashed to pieces, broken glass littering the tile floor, sickly light coating the whole scene. The far wall was a bank of large windows, which looked out onto a raging blizzard—white snow swirling and turning, beating up against the glass before plummeting to the earth somewhere down below. Directly in front of me stood Officer Out-of-His-League, maybe early fifties, balding on top, with a slight paunch straining against his uniform.

  Directly in front of him stood the biggest, scariest-looking son of a bitch I’d seen in a good long while. Maybe six and a half feet tall and four feet across the shoulders, with a prodigious gut and giant flabby arms stained and spotted with blood and shit. Literal brown shit. Guy had to weigh in at four hundred pounds, easy. A black rubber apron—like the kind a butcher might wear—strained around the guy’s torso, and a crudely stitched-together pigskin mask covered his face. In one meaty fist he held a massive cleaver and in the other he clutched a pitted meat-hook. A couple of small bullet holes dotted the maniac’s apron, but he wasn’t bleeding, nor did he seem to be particularly bothered by the wounds.

  Awesome, this would be easy. Fortuna gave me a paperclip, an unlocked door, and a cup of coffee. In return, I got to deal with a giant pig-mask wearing freak with a cleaver. Ugh.

  The officer scrambled back, scooting around an overturned desk, dropping his spent clip and reloading another from his belt pouch. The Butcher lumbered forward and swatted aside an overturned office chair with one clumsy swipe of his hand.

  Crack-crack-crack-crack, the officer’s gun barked, a few more holes bloomed across the Butcher’s chest—a few tore through the pig’s mask and into Big-and-Ugly’s head. Guy didn’t flinch, didn’t slow down, didn’t give two shits about a couple of measly ol’ human bullets. With a prodigious overhand strike, the Butcher drove his meat-hook through the desk between him and the officer. With a tremendous heave and a flick of his hook, the desk toppled lazily over to the side.

  Then, a swift horizontal slash with the cleaver. The officer ducked beneath the blow—keeping his head for the time being—but tripped over a downed computer monitor and sprawled onto the floor, his impending doom now towering over him like a mountain.

  My heart thumped in my chest, fear and terror clawed at my insides like a pack of angry, gibbering chimpanzees protecting their young. Though it was cold as balls—the building heat must’ve gone with the power—great fat drops of sweat rolled down my face and coated my palms. Surely, this was what a small, defenseless, caged animal felt like as the hunter approached: panic, doom, terrible impotency. Some deep reptilian thing in my brain demanded I creep back out the door and find cover, find some safe place to hole up for a while. Some place easily defensible where I’d have more control. Gigantor over there was gonna split that poor cop like a log of wood, and what could I do to stop it?

  A day ago, fighting some pig-faced asshole would’ve been terrible, but, simultaneously, familiar ground. Well, sort of—I’ve never actually fought a pig-faced, supernatural serial killer, but after the first dozen death-dealing monsters, they all kinda start to blend together. A day ago, I would’ve blasted this shithead with my Vis-imbued hand-cannon, maybe blown him back into the Dark Ages. Or I could’ve charbroiled him with a gout of flame powerful enough to be seen from space. Shit, a day ago I coul
d’ve whipped up a whirlwind of smashed office furniture.

  And today?

  Today, the best thing I could do was run.

  So I sprinted.

  Not toward the door and safety, but rather toward the downed officer. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t just turn tail and scram—if I didn’t step in to help, that poor cop would wind up hanging from the rafters on the business end of a meat-hook.

  Fear is okay. Shit, it’s better than okay. Fear and I are close buds, and he’s kept me alive more times than I can count. Generally, it’s wise to be afraid of a guy bigger than a pro wrestler with a pig-mask and a cleaver—ignore that fear to your own determent. But neither should fear be your master; it’s a warning beacon, but sometimes you need to act in spite of that gut-gnawing badger chewing up your intestines: that’s courage. Courage can make you do some inanely stupid and heroic things, so try not to use it too often, but once in a blue moon, it’s the right thing to do.

  I scooped up the base of an office telephone and launched the square of plastic with all the might I could muster; it plowed into the side of Pig-Face’s head and bounced away uselessly. Yesterday, awesomesauce supernatural powers and specialized monster killing equipment—today a busted-ass plastic telephone. So this was how monster fighting was for all the other mortal folk out there … boy did it suck a bag full of asses.

  Pig-Face turned from the officer, honing in on me.

  “That’s right, ass-bag.” I bent over and picked up a desk lamp, with no shade and a busted lightbulb protruding from the end. “You leave him be … I’m your Huckleberry.” I’ve always wanted to use that line, but somehow I felt a little less cool than Val Kilmer, all doped up on opiates with his badass Doc Holiday pistols. The lamp just wasn’t the same.