by S. A. Hunt
Fuck you. Joel had stumbled away, getting the last word (as he always did, as he always had to). You didn’t even try. He turned around there, in front of the registers, yelling at his brother in front of God and everybody. You didn’t even try to fix her. You ran off and left me to pick up the pieces!
“Why didn’t he shoot me first?” Dry birdshit ground under his thumb like flour. “Why didn’t that asshole shoot the one that didn’t have everything in the world goin’ for him? Why not me?”
He lingered there until he’d collected himself, and went back to walking, watching his feet eat up the sidewalk.
What was he going to do with the comic shop? He didn’t have any idea how to run it. All he knew was making pizza and drankin’ and color-coordinating his clothes. Maybe he could sell it. No, you idiot, you can’t sell it. That’s all you got left of him. Then what? He could move into the loft apartment, maybe. No. Wouldn’t work. Mama’s house was paid for, and Fish was still leasing. Unless he could turn a profit on a store that hadn’t seen black ink since the first six months it’d been open, he’d be out on his ass. He couldn’t even count on his meager savings. That money’d be gone in a flash if he had to throw it at a commercial property.
Didn’t that kid with the magic ring say something about Fish giving him a part-time job at the shop? That was one nerdy-ass kid. Maybe he could get ahold of him and bend his ear. What was his name? Wayne Newton? No, that’s that white dude in Las Vegas. Wayne Parker? Parkin?
“Unh!” he grunted, knocked out of his thoughts as a woman shoved past.
White. Mid-thirties. Had on a red wool peacoat and black leggings, gold hoops in her ears, Ugg moonboots. Her crinkly dark hair streamered out behind her as she ran. “Watch where you goin’!” Joel called after her, dimly aware she was dressed way too nice to be running down the sidewalk.
Another hand slammed into his back and he caught himself over the guardrail. A man in a Members Only jacket sprinted by and Joel surged after him in a rage, snagging his coat. “Who do you—” he started to say, and then the man rounded on him. Instead of the angry warning Joel expected to come out of his mouth, it was the ridiculous, grimacing puff-adder hiss of a movie-of-the-week vampire.
The man’s eyes were the split jade of a cat’s. “What the fuck.” Joel recoiled, baffled, putting up his dukes.
Members Only turned and ran. Another woman came along behind him as well, and that’s when Joel scanned the parking lots and sidewalks around him and realized while he’d been walking with his head down, watching his feet eat up the sidewalk, the world had come alive with running people. In every direction, men, women, and children sprinted north at top speed, some of them loping along like chimpanzees. They were heading the same direction he’d been walking: Broad Avenue.
With an expression of deepest confusion still on his face, Joel jammed the Captain America shop key into his pocket and started jogging in that direction. Whatever was going down, it couldn’t be good, and he wanted to get behind a locked door ASAP.
26
The disfigured man shouted something—screamed, actually, the shrill, mad whoop of a baboon—but she couldn’t understand him over the Suburban’s radio. Then he drew a rifle out of the cab of the garbage truck and settled it into the valley between the open door and the doorpost, hunkering down, staring through the iron sights at her.
“Look out!” shrieked Robin.
Thunder cracked down the street and a hole appeared in the Suburban’s windshield, turning it into brilliant lace. Scrambling for the handle, Kenway opened the cargo door and was about to get out when Gendreau threw the Suburban into reverse and gunned the engine. The sudden lurch threw him on the floor and the door crashed shut, narrowly missing his feet.
“Piss and potatoes,” Gendreau swore breathlessly, turning to look over his shoulder, the wheel shaking in his hand.
Another whip-crack, and the passenger-side window collapsed, showering them in sea-glass diamonds. Through it, Robin could see the blistered mutant with the rifle again, watching them attempt to flee. The street reeled out from under their tires with a juddering scream as Gendreau jerked the wheel and did a flawless J-turn, whirling out in reverse until the car’s nose was facing the other way.
“Good moves,” said Lucas, his foot on the dash.
Unfortunately, the car that had been behind them was still going at surface-street speeds. They were so close, Robin could see the panicked expression on the driver’s face. The magician veered around them into the correct lane and the man with the rifle fired again.
What felt like a bomb went off under the car—no, the rifle bullet had struck their rear driver tire and exploded it. Vulcanized rubber flapped rhythmically against the wheel well like some insane war drum, TUMP-TUMP-TUMP, and the Suburban lurched up onto the sidewalk and into a fire hydrant, knocking it down, filling the cabin with cold spray. It continued on, smashing into a brick wall.
Weirdest thing—just before the impact, she saw Sara hit Gendreau’s seat … and the woman’s face seemed to glitch. For a second, it was like the shock wave had dislodged a digital mask, her features contorting.
And then Robin’s face smashed into Lucas’s headrest.
Silence.
Blood, paint-thick on her fingers. Her nose leaked a bib of blood down her chin. Robin shimmied around, trying to get away from the seat belt, and the tendril-braid-thing under her shirt squirmed angrily, the tape around her dressing pulling loose. Gendreau stirred like the Scarecrow from Oz coming to life, his mental gears winding up, glass falling out of his platinum china-doll hair. Then they all were, Sara and Kenway and Lucas, coming out of their individual daze, docile turtles from shells.
“What the frick!” snarled Sara, in stunned outrage.
“Sending your defensive driving teacher a Christmas card,” said Lucas. He fought the airbag in his lap, trying to get out from under it.
Then: a strange, rising wail outside the car, distant, a faraway siren. But it was high, too high, nonsensical, small and multiformed like a fleet of tiny police cars. Their tiny tin wheels crackled along the sidewalk as they rushed to her aid from some tiny police station, their roller-coaster howl shrilling into the evening. No, Robin thought, as Wayne found his glasses and put them on. The left lens was knocked out, giving him one goofy magnified eye. I’ve heard that before. Those tin wheels were the faint clatter of shoe soles on asphalt.
Familiars.
The city of Blackfield was coming for them.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” she told them all, panic overcharging her system. Loose glass rattled, settling like Pachinko pieces through broken gaps as they undid their seat belts. “We have to go.”
Tumbling out of the car, Kenway slammed the door shut in Robin’s face. She undid her seat belt and tried to open the door, but something pinned it shut. A newspaper box. “The city is full of cat-people, and they’re coming,” she grunted. “They’re on their way here to tear us limb from limb. Cutty’s playing her ace card. It’s a cat-bomb. The entire town just went Night of the Living Feline.”
As soon as she said this, a shadow passed over the oceanic shimmer of the busted windshield and an arm exploded through the passenger-side window, grabbing Lucas by the jacket collar and hauling him out the window, safety glass crashing down his shoulders. Through the ragged gap Robin could see people shuffling back and forth in a dark parody of a mosh pit, crazed faces and clawing hands.
More arms reached in for Gendreau, and he jabbed at them with his cane. “Back! Back, damn you all!”
The rear tailgate door flew open, and Kenway tangled his fist in Robin’s T-shirt, fumbling for purchase on her armpit, trying to pull her through the cargo area. Out in the failing daylight, Robin rested against the Suburban’s rear bumper, a busted taillight throwing hot red across her face. Cold water blasted out of a hole in the sidewalk.
All three of them bled from the glass; Kenway’s shirt had a ragged punk-rock slash over one shoulder, and glass glittered
in Sara’s cardinal-red hair. She was on her hands and knees, blood streaming down her face, looking around in a daze.
“Get off me!” Lucas shouted on the other side.
Robin staggered around the car to help him, but someone tackled her against the Suburban’s rear fender—a big woman in a brown spring parka, a shopping bag still looped around one elbow. The woman hissed madly, trying to claw her throat open, and Kenway wrenched her away, throwing her to the asphalt.
Robin’s demon tendril was going crazy, writhing, pushing out her shirt at an angle. She jerked her bloody shirttail up to her shoulder to uncover it and discovered a grotesque braid of fibers in the rough shape of an arm, bent at the middle in a macabre imitation of a human elbow. Fine red peach-fuzz grew from the backhand side of this new appendage. Bristling from the end were five dark roots as smooth and steely as meat hooks. She willed them to flex like fingers and they did, crimping and creasing in all the right places.
This was her inheritance from the shaggy, monstrous stranger that had attacked her mother, she understood now, suddenly faced with the new normal, this inner darkness, this insidious evidence of her mother’s pact made physical.
Forced to confront it, Robin couldn’t look away. She hated it but was fascinated by it at the same time. She made a fist and slammed it against the Suburban’s body.
It left a sharp dent. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
The intersection seemed frozen in time, idling cars littered all over the road, their doors thrown open, exhaust guttering from their tailpipes. The traffic light turned red for cars going nowhere. A clamorous gang of familiared people had gathered around them. Dozens of brainwashed people inched closer, green and yellow cat-eyes shining at her, their fingers bent into rigid claws, their stupid, blunt human teeth bared in distorted grins.
“Come on!” Robin told them. “Come get me.”
One of them peeled off and ran at her with a choked snarl, and her sinuous new arm lifted him by the throat and flung him back. Another one, a tall woman with a stupid expression and a Carhartt jacket, ran at her and Robin rounded on the woman, slapping her across the face hard enough to cartwheel her into the crowd.
Incensed, they ran at her as one, a surging mass of people.
Behind the teeming crowd, the dark shape of the garbage truck loomed, a glass-eyed green monolith. Kenway was wrestling with two people now, both of them trying to bite his face. The pestilence-mutant fired the rifle again, and one of the familiars, a tall, thick redneck in Wranglers, jerked as if he’d been goosed. A hole blew open in his neck and sprayed Kenway with red gristle. The veteran shouted and threw the man aside, shoved someone else away.
“We gotta go!” Robin shouted to Sara over the roar of the fire hydrant.
One of the familiars shoved his way through the crowd, and at first, Robin couldn’t believe what she was seeing—Joel Ellis? How could he be a pod person if he had an algiz?—but then Joel shouted, “Y’all follow me! Come on!” and took off running east up Broad.
The gunman sat down to reload. Time to move.
“Follow that guy!” Robin shoved Sara and Kenway after Joel, and turned back to the crowd to catch an elbow to the face. A man in a puffy jacket lifted her and slammed her against the Suburban, and lunged at her throat with his teeth. She shrugged, scrunching her shoulders, and his bristly mustachioed face wedged against her cheek as he howled nonsense cat-noises in her ear.
Levitating off of her, he suddenly floated away as if repelled by a broad force. Lucas Tiedeman had snatched him up by his neck and the waist of his jeans.
He flung the snarling man into the crowd as if he were nothing but a suitcase and turned back to Robin, pointing after the others. “Run, I got this.” His spook suit was sopping wet and he was deathly pale—milk-white, even, his skin almost translucent like fine marble. He had channeled the man’s mass into himself, making his own body heavier, his skin more resistant, and his blood was having trouble pumping through it. Lucas was a Greek statue, clothed in black.
Regret burned inside her chest. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to—”
“We knew the risks when we signed up for this field trip. Go!” Lucas lumbered into the fray, fists and feet bouncing off of his stony body, familiars hanging from his arms. “DISTRACTION!”
A hand snatched at her T-shirt, at her arm. “Let him work.” Gendreau, his eyes severe, his hair a nest of milkweed fluff. Deep gouges ran across his eyebrow, blood dripping into his white button-down. “Come on, let’s go.”
Reluctantly leaving Lucas to the fight, she fled with Gendreau and Sara down a city street choked with running people. If she’d seen photographs of it, Robin would have been hard-pressed to tell if the photos were of a European football riot or some podunk town in Georgia. Wild-eyed civilians poured from the restaurants and shops lining the historical district, funneling out of doorways and storming into the road.
Some of them galloped sideways in a simian fashion, pawing across the pavement on their hands; most of them ran like velociraptors, their shoulders bunched up by their ears and their hands bent under into obsequious pianists’ hands, banging imaginary Steinways. It looked like a production assistant in the video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” had been passing out doses of LSD. Kenway led the escape with his fists, forging through the seething crowd toward some point. Robin fought the men and women off with the half-assed Krav Maga and movie kung fu Heinrich had taught her. Augmented by the demon arm, she was a force of nature, throwing leaping haymakers and hammering knees and elbows into chests and faces.
A frantic bark echoed off the buildings flanking Broad Avenue.
The throng of familiars parted and a big black dog came loping out of nowhere, mouth full of green napalm, ghostly fire streaming from his eyes like the Hound of the Baskervilles. Familiars scattered in every direction, braying and hollering. Even Robin stopped short until she realized who she was looking at. The cavalry had showed up to draw the crowd off of them. Gev the church-grim.
Stumbling onto the sidewalk, Joel Ellis stared at the flaming ghost-dog. Surrender flashed across his face as if he were thinking, Hell, that ain’t the craziest thing I’ve seen, and it’s only gonna get worse.
“We’ll hide in the comic shop,” Joel told them, his arms up. Something colorful flashed in his hand. “I got the key!”
The terrifying phantasm-dog ambled along behind them, snarling and challenging the familiars as they got close. A meticulously painted Spider-Man and Batman appeared ahead of them, the comic shop’s window mural flickering into view through the mob. Joel ran for the front door and jammed the key home, his hands shaking. “What y’all crazy-ass white people done got me into now?” demanded Joel, the lock disengaging with a double-barreled clank. “I got people acting like cats, garbage-men shooting at me, and now we got freaking demon dogs in the middle of town?”
“It’s all in your head, my friend,” Gendreau told him as they all ran past into the darkened shop.
“Of course it is.” Joel tossed a hand and rolled his eyes. “It’s all in your head, Joel, it ain’t real, Joel, now put on this pretty white jacket and take your medicine, Joel. Lord give me strength.”
As soon as they were inside, he pushed the door shut on its hydraulic hinge and locked it again. Robin counted them … Kenway, Gendreau, Sara, Joel, and herself. Her heart lunged painfully. “Where’s Wayne?” she shrieked, surprising herself. “Where’s—”
“I’m back here!” a voice called from the darkness.
Such intense relief settled over her, she could have collapsed. Robin fumbled past her friends and into the depths of the comic shop, where Wayne stepped out of the shadows. He’d found a Batman cowl somewhere and was shrugging into it.
She snatched it off his head, eliciting an indignant yelp of pain, and squeezed him against her chest. “I thought we left you out there, kiddo.”
“Nope.” He rubbed his ear. “I’m right here.”
Standing by the window, they watched
Gévaudan distract and fend off the crowd, trotting back and forth, barking ferociously at them. Joel studied the church-grim with a strange mixture of hope and alarm on his face, eyes wide, eyebrows furrowed and high.
“You okay?” Robin asked him.
He slowly surfaced from his reverie, his eyes cutting over to her. “Yeah, I think I seen a ghost, is all.”
As the familiars tested the spectral canine, dancing in to bat at its noncorporeal body and leap back, Gev faded with all the ceremony of turning off a television. The sudden disappearance left the cat-people stupefied, and they boggled at the space where it’d been with vacuous screwhead eyes.
“Get away from the window before they see us,” warned Gendreau.
Heeding his advice, they retreated deeper into the shop, gathering in the clear space at the back where Fisher had once held Movie Night. Someone tripped over a chair with a clatter. Kenway’s face was a smear in the darkness, the windowlight sparkling in his eyes. “Where’d that kid in the Blues Brothers suit go?”
“Lucas?” Gendreau sat in a chair, wheezing. “He’ll be all right, I think.”
“Why didn’t you magic those people?” Kenway asked. “You look like you could more than handle yourself.” He caught his breath, his face drawn into the grimace of a side stitch. “You look like the third member of Siegfried and Roy went off and started a menswear line.”
“What witty commentary, coming from the lead vocalist of a Nickelback cover band. Where is thine sling and shield, warrior?”
Kenway snorted derisively.
The atmosphere in the dark room chilled as everybody paused, and for a long, pregnant moment, Robin thought Kenway was going to take a swing at the magician. Then he chuckled, shaking his head, breaking the tension.
“I didn’t participate in the combat,” said Gendreau, “because I am not, ahh, versed in combative magic.”