Mavis looked at Doug.
“Don’t be pessimistic. We’ve killed these things before. Odds are good though, your buddy has turned.”
Doug frowned. He heard her words. He felt low, but had to agree. “Every time you get bit, you become one. Seems that much is true in myth. It’s how their numbers double. And it’s how we lose. It’s only you and me left, Mavis.”
Jimmy spat into the sink, splattering the pile of dirty dishes. “Nobody lost yet. You yellow? Wanna be some vamp’s bitch boy? Thought Mama said you fought in the Eye-raq war with the ragheads? Now you give up? Where’s your damn American Spirit?”
Doug slowly turned towards the taller brother. Mavis threw a rotten apple at her eldest son. Then pointed her fiinger at Doug.
“ Quit the dick measuring, and get serious here. No one in this room is afraid to fiight. We’ve slew a couple of blood sucking soldiers, but that leaves the head honcho. And that son of a bitch be one tough sucker to kill.”
Jimmy whipped another apple core at George’s head when the little brother laughed. “Anyway, we need all of us to stop them. Nothing about it will be easy.
You know what the runt did with the real black box?”
Doug nodded. Holding the jamb of the door, he slid down to the tile. Slowly, he related the entire story of what had happened in the restaurant the night prior. How and by whom the entire restaurant had been slaughtered. Erna’s legacy.
“Great. Sounds like many of those jackasses were bitten as well.” Jimmy interrupted. George muttered an a fffiirmation.
Continuing his tale, Doug explained how he and Cray had beaten Erna in the cellar, slain her, yet had not found the leader. The black box had fallen out of Doug’s pocket during the fiight. Abernathy had told him it was a last resort, that what he had given Doug was a phony prop made to entice and fool the creatures.
Mavis looked somber smoking on her cancer stick. Smoke furled up to the yellowed ceiling collecting there. The kitchen light itself was tan after years of intimate contact with tobacco. It probably had cancer too. The whole room remained dour, thick with roiling smog.
“There was no prop made. The little bastard lied. Great news for us.” Mavis rasped.
“Why would he do something like that? I just can’t fiigure out why.” Doug asked.
“This little guy a midget?” Prodded George. Jimmy glared at him. Mavis ignored him. “People do strange ass things in the name of love. What he did, he did. No use crying over split milk. He betrayed us for Chuck.”
“Mama, it’s ‘spilt’ milk, not ‘split’.” Corrected George. “Not when I can cut it with a knife. Now shut your pie hole, dummy. Your momma’s making plans.”
Jimmy leaned over and slapped his brother on the shoulder. George yelped, rubbing it.
Mavis looked again at the stolen documents. “Anything lef at his home? That place held some incredible weapons. We might be able to use them.” Doug leaned against the frame of door now. The air was sweeter below waist level. “No chance. It had been ransacked before I got there. And there was no sign of Abernathy. I’ve told you. The entire building is gone. It’s a smoking hole, now.”
Mavis considered his words as she smoked. Jimmy grabbed two more beers from the six ring his brother offfered him. Doug was the one who saw the glare from behind the worn kitchen curtain.
Dancing strands of light. What appeared like flares jumping in the dark. “So what the hell is this ugly thing supposed to be?” Asked George in between jamming his maw with rufffled potato chips. Jimmy took the scroll from his brother giving it to his mother.
Mavis stared at the drawing on butcher block paper. Crude simplistic drawings sketched with black grease crayon actually seemed delicate and intricate in their detail. The paper was vellum. The words were written in Latin. She angled the paper towards Doug. He shook his head after trying to make sense of what he was seeing. He had no reference for what it was.
Around the edges of the scroll were ten cubes. Arrows drawn to geographical points on it, like a map. The continents drawn were old world. Land masses looked familiar but looked nothing like the current ones today. In the middle of the sketch, was a gateway surrounded by flames.
“Boys. It appears that the black box was the important part of a door.” Mavis whispered.
“What part, ma?” Jimmy was enrapt. “It’s a knob.” Doug blurted out as the image came to him. He was still trying to see what was causing the bursts of light seen outside the kitchen window. He rubbed his eyes.
Mavis sucked on her cofffiin nail. “Basically. The box is used as a key. I learned about many arcane truths from the Mother Superior at school. She knew everything about the damned thing. It’s a historically dangerous object. Dunno how it works, but it’s a good bet the big bastard knows. Probably why he was buried here.”
“Maybe it’s one of those Rubik cubes toys from the 80s.” Mumbled George.
Mavis ignored him. “Not a plaything. It’s more like Pandora’s box. Whatever it’s capable of opening, it’s not got any good attributes to it. Don’t like to think about what Gray wants to do with it.”
Doug rubbed his forehead. He drank water from the tap using his two hands. All of the madness from the last few days was dragging on him. He felt the heavy pull of the insanity. He exhaled. Another spark of light drifted across the horizon outside.
Doug was tired of droning on. His fury was returning. “I saw what he’s capable of. It’s nothing good he wants to use the box for.
Are we strong enough to stop him?”
George emptied a potato chip bag, his face greasy and covered with nagging crumbs. Without listening, he flipped the thumbs up. Mavis glowered sourly at her youngest son. She turned towards Doug carefully snufffiing out the cigarette.
“Strong enough? No. We ain’t even close. You saw what he did to Charles?
This bastard, the Gray? He’ll be the nastiest one in the bunch.”
Doug rubbed the back of his neck. Jimmy chimed in. “So, we got no chance? How do we beat him?”
Mavis smiled revealing yellowing tobacco stained dentures.
“Are you stupid, son? We cheat.” “Fire.” Doug whispered. He pulled back the window curtain seeing flames lick at a structure adjacent to Mavis’ house across the alley. Jimmy tousled Doug for a look. Then the older brother raced through the maze of free-standing junk to open the back door, leading to a more cluttered back porch.
Across from them, an entire house was burning, the flames engulfiing it licking the sky. Doug pulled on his skull cap, venturing out into the cold once more. Mavis followed, a cigarette still in her mouth.
All four crunched down the back steps to watch as one A-frame after another went up in flames.
“Jesus.” whispered George. “Who’d do a thing like that?”
Chapter 17
Gray had relieved his newest acolyte who apparently was an idiot. Good help was hard to fiind, the huge man decided. His long black boots crunched past the snow covered frozen body of Craig Deshirlia. Gray had already forgotten him. He was following the long thick cables overhead. They were attached to all the buildings. The tall edifiice fiilled with the old men, the street lights, even the exit lamp dimly lit were powered by some device linked to these cables.
He walked two hundred feet around the parking lot fence that provided security for the now useless vehicles. Cars had improved since he had slept. But batteries still froze. The entire parking lot was fiilled with dead automobiles.
Attached to a large metal box perched high upon the light pole was a main black cable. It was suspended good twenty feet up in the air between the pole and the YMCA building. The two structures next to the YMCA were under construction, home-renovations undertaken by rich suburbanites wanting a taste of Chicago City life. The structures were half completed.
Gray walked through the work space. He destroyed everything he saw. Electricity was just beginning to be used when he last walked the earth, so the rudimentary basics eluded him. Gray decided to
just tear down the humming wires overhead and fling them into a cache of flammable materials.
Walls without ceilings, exposed conduit, all of it looked vulnerable to mayhem. The half completed structures also had wiring in them. Gray tore at them, bundling the wires all together, crushing them together.
Gray was nearly fiinished when the Fiskars 46 inch shovel hit him in the head. From a garage in back of the incompleted homes, a bald man dressed in sweats emerged silently. Gray cared not who the squatter was, deciding instead to integrate him into his whirlwind of destruction. Barry, a 41 year old itinerant exYMCA occupant had decided to camp out in the back garage. He’d been watching the construction crews come and go for months from his YMCA window. No worker had been back to the site since the storm began. He decided the garage would suit him fiine if things went sour.
‘Always good to have a back up plan’, he thought. Juan was the YMCA front-desk Nazi who’d always had had it in for Barry. Juan always suspected the man was bringing in drugs or alcohol but could never quite catch him. That is, until fiive days ago, when the desk-Nazi had been standing outside Barry’s door and caught him lighting up a doobie.
Halloran gave the Spanish bastard the bird and lef t to take up residence in the garage next door. The door was merely hasped with a small key lock. Easily picked, since he’d learned to break and enter from hoodlum friends back in his Schurz high School days. Barry had been a nubile punk.
Cooling his heels literally in the frigid garage, Barry had been keeping insensate with alcohol bought with proceeds from his last unemployment check. Yeah, it was balls up nasty cold. But Halloran fiigured if he were numb, didn’t matter no how anyway.
But numb don’t mean dumb. He could hear just fiine. Barry knew a torch artist when he saw one. The black bearded arsonist was bigger than him, sure. But Barry would get his licks in.
He swung his shovel at the burly wrestler trying to burn down the house. The flat blade thunked true into Gray’s cranium. There was a moment both men registered what had just happened.
A pause held. Until it snapped. Gray grabbed the younger man’s skull, pushed the shovel handle down, then his teeth ripped into the back of Halloran’s neck. He tore into Barry’s spine crushing it. The attack caused the man to go limp. Barry couldn’t breathe. His unmoving body perished in Gray’s mouth, another human life force siphoned into his.
Flames from Gray’s handiwork leapt floor to floor engulfiing the entire skeleton of the house. Even in the frigid cold, there was enough fuel and material to gut the structures.
Gray tore Barry apart like fiinger food, tossing limbs and torso into the fiire. He was tired of newly dead acolytes proving themselves to be useless. He’d have no more failure.
Gray strode into the empty garage re-invigorated. It looked devoid of any combustible material except that of the wooden structure itself. The human he’d drained lived sparsely, having created small creche for himself. Gray scanned the whole garage again. This wouldn’t do. He needed a larger distraction to draw the frightened citizenry out.
His black boots hissed in the snow returning to the burning house. The humans surrounding him must have seen the flames by now. But he couldn’t be sure. In the time he had been alive, Gray had known of fiire brigades. Indeed, in his day there were horse drawn bucket brigades. Eyeballs would be noticing this conflagration.
But he needed more destruction to be sure. Gray grasped a flaming two by four carrying back into the garage. He lit the pile of clothing the dead squatter had owned. Flames slowly crawled up the fiiber glass insulation in the garage walls. It took but a few minutes to alight the entire space itself.
Still, it wasn’t enough for the dark man. Hissing in the snow, his boots walked no more than ten feet to the chain link fence. It was a flimsy barricade separating the YMCA parking lot from the burning garage. He gripped the steel links tearing them open like opening a fragile Christmas present. A row of elms along the fence line sheltering the cars from snow and ice had given Gray his next gift.
Gray did not know how to operate any automobile, but he had listened to their sounds for decades lying there in the dirt offf of Grace Avenue. It was how the older vampire had learned.
He’d listened to the Irving Park elevated trains being built, the expressway constructed and even the iron trestle soldered together. His imagination ran to how such wonderful human inventions operated. Facing him now were a row of snow covered Ford Explorers, Dodge Chargers and even an older Prius. Gray touched the handle of one door. It appeared to have only numbers on it. He frowned. These humans no longer used keys?
The dark man thrust his fiist through the driver's side tinted window. The alarm went offf as Gray peeled offf its door peering into its interior. Shrieking cars, highly annoying, he thought.
Gray fumbled with knobs, turning brusquely any switch he could fiind. Interior lights on, he noticed an arrow pointing to what he decided was a fuel gauge. It was at the top. Full tank of something he hoped would catch afiire. More latches were released, among them the front hood. Gray’s head poked out of the cab as the front carapace of the vehicle popped up. He slid back out into the gusting wind, lifting the white metal.
He saw it was an infernal device. Something known it as a combustion engine. Pulling with his bulk, the hood tore offf clanging into the Prius next to it. The entire Explorer engine block was exposed now. Gray smiled, pulling hoses and digging deeper into the machine. Oil spilled from broken fiilters, gaskets gurgled with their release and the smell of petrol assaulted Gray’s nostrils.
Healthy ames crackled no more than fiifteen feet away as both the house and garage roared away defying the strength of the winter storm. Gray strode into the smoking garage collecting burning wood and clothing. Packing it into the Explorer engine, the liquids caught quickly, fiire engulfiing the entire vehicle. Gray threw more petrol caught with his hands into the interior of the auto to keep its hulk burning.
Gray tittered at a fond memory of long ago when he and his vicious clutch caused such chaos in Olde Chicago proper. His band of terrible devils started the Great Chicago Fire. But the real story had never been told.
Gullible authorities knew Gray had started the Chicago Fire during the hot October of 1871. But the fearful mayor and aldermen refused to acknowledge Old World threats. Instead, the authorities came up with the ‘Mrs O’Leary’ fable.
Gray laughed at the conceit of the humans. That whole episode had been a near thing. Back then, Chief McBride and his gang of righteous vigilantes had nearly slain Gray and his clutch. It was only during that massive bloody fiight that the dark man’s luck had provided an out for him. By starting the Fire during the extremely hot fall, it provided an immense distraction.
Hundreds died, thousands of buildings were consumed, while Gray escaped to heal
A tale to be revelled in at another time. He was enjoying the dancing licks of flame when the Explorer exploded. Gray was knocked sideways over two more vehicles. Another Ford caught next and a Charger also began to smoke.
Removing a smoldering screw embedded in his cheek, Gray dusted offf bits of debris from his clothing. He knew this demonstration would get his quarries attention. Gritting his teeth with glee, he began smashing other car windows looking for the hood releases.
This all would get out of hand quickly, Gray hoped. Humans needed their creature comforts. He would hunt them like the animals they were. All creatures gave offf spore. The hunter needed his prey to panic. When a victim didn’t think clearly, it made them easier to subdue. Everyone one of them will die, he promised.
The vehicles began to explode in succession. It gave Gray time to scent the wind. If lucky, he would be able to smell his quarry even from far offf. Human musk was distinct, even through fiire and ash.
Gray concentrated walking onto Kildare Street. It took a few minutes, but there it was, hanging in the air like a glittering diamond.
The scent of the man from before, at the mansion. His sweat mixed with a cluster of other di
rty, desperate humans.
His boots took offf into the gusting squall. Gray ran down Kildare alley, bu fffeted by blizzard winds, his nose smelling burning tobacco. The acrid stench of it assaulted him.
Gray followed the cigarette smoke. The sweat of the man who burned him. He set offf after his prey. He picked up his pace, his boots crunching down center of the alley. Voices in his pocket from the box chittered. They all wanted blood.
Hell literally came walking.
Chapter 18
A huge reball erupted somewhere over on the next block. Mavis crossed herself. Doug winced. Jimmy burped and continued drinking beer. George’s eye were wide.
“Shee-it.” The younger brother said.
“How far is it?” Asked Doug. “Maybe over by the mansion.” Mavis exhaled a long plume of acrid smoke. There came the sound of rhythmic explosions. Detonations loud enough to be heard over the prevalent roaring of the wind. They all heard the sound.
“Those are gas tanks.” Stated Douglas. “Someone is blowing them up.”
Jimmy grunted. “How can you tell, genius? Y’got 40/40 vision, or something?”
Douglas glanced at Mavis.
“They’re too evenly spaced. They aren’t going up all at once. Just …”
“Like they’re overheating, expanding and blowing up?” Finished Mavis.
George shook himself. He exhaled a curse then retreated to warmer environs. “Whatever, man.” Jimmy burped again, crushed the can then threw it into the wind which picked it up, returning to him. He batted it away. The crumpled aluminum careened offf the side of the house landing in a gutter overhead. Jimmy muttered.
“Everything’s out to get us, Ma. Christ on a ten speed.” He half-ducked returning indoors too.
Mavis drew on her cigarette. Douglas watched the end of it burn orange, then red.
Grayland: Chapter Three of the Dark Chicago Series Page 8