Bleak History

by John Shirley

  You didn't tell them that something seemed wrong to you, not when you knew as much as she did; when you were privy to as many secrets as she was.

  Suck it up or move on down the road.

  She took a deep breath. And she nodded. “I'm ready.''

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  That same day. New Jersey.

  Walking down a Jersey City sidewalk that threw heat back in his face, past store windows that glaringly reflected the sun, Gabriel Bleak knew he was again being followed—and watched. The watching seemed to have come in two phases. First, he'd sensed someone was watching him through the Hidden—the name Krasnoffhad come into his mind. Orry Krasnoff? Orrin? Wait—didn't he remember hearing about a ShadowComm named Orrin Krasnoff, out West somewhere? Once in touch with Shoella...then vanished?

  Krasnoff's psychic surveillance of Bleak had suddenly ended, minutes ago. Now it was another kind of surveillance. The twenty-first-century sort. Through a machine, somewhere up above.

  Where was Yorena? The familiar should have turned up by now, to guide him to Shoella and Coster. But he hadn't seen her yet. Maybe the creature was lying low because he was being watched.

  This other watcher was observing him from up in the air, some elevated place—he caught a glimpse now and then. It was harder when they were using cameras—a step removed—but Bleak was able to connect with the observer's viewpoint, from time to time.

  When he did, he saw himself from above. Like watching someone from the roof of a building. But the point of view seemed roughly centered above the street.

  It wasn't Yorena's POV he was seeing. It was a woman, a human woman, watching him through a flying camera, he decided. Some kind of UAV flying overhead, somewhere. Hard to see in the glare. The Rangers had used devices like them in Afghanistan for recon. He knew how to duck them—knew how the Taliban did it. He would choose his moment. But it had to be soon. The UAV was just the beginning.

  He thought he sensed who this woman was. Agent Sarikosca. But someone else was watching too, maybe more than one person. The multiplicity of viewpoint broke the connection for him, much of the time. But he knew the UAV was up there, electronically staring.

  It was a small, oval flying machine, not much larger than a garbage-can lid, with rotors on its undersides, and cameras. Maybe armed. Drones could be equipped to explode.

  Probably this wasn't an assassination drone. Why would they want to kill him? But then—why did they want him so much they were going to this kind of trouble?

  There were other ShadowComms. So why was the CCA dogging him? Because they'd come upon him, so they were following up the nearest lead?

  But maybe not. Maybe there were other reasons, considering what Shoella had told him about Sean.

  Whatever their motivation, it was making him seriously angry. And his military instinct had always been to take the fight to the enemy.

  He was passing a thrift store, on his left. Several stories high. That'd work.

  He ducked into the doors, nodded to the elderly, blue-haired lady sitting behind the glass counter with all the old junk jewelry in it; smelled the mild funk of old furniture and clothing as he found the stairs, in the center of the big room, that rose to the second floor.

  “There's an elevator, if you prefer,” the elderly lady said, as he started up the stairs.

  “This'll be fine,” Bleak said, and in a moment he was on the second floor, which seemed to be mostly chipped old dinette sets. Another flight, the third floor: floor lamps, rusty chandeliers, and, for some reason, used computers. He found a back stairway leading to the roof, loitered near it as a bent, old black man in janitor's coveralls went by whistling a tune. When the old janitor was gone, Bleak climbed the stairs—and found the door to the roof chained.

  He put his right hand on the chain, reaching with the field of sensation around his body, reaching out to the field of the Hidden around him...and his attention to the Hidden revealed the ghost of an old woman, slowly wandering the stairwell, trailing her translucent fingers on the wall, softly moaning that her adult children had given her best furniture to this thrift store. And something else about being sick with cancer on her fifty-fifth birthday and no one coming except the youngest kid. Some ghosts stayed°9 where they died; some wandered. This one had followed her furniture to a thrift store.

  Why are so many of them completely useless to anyone, even themselves?he wondered.

  Bleak ignored the apparition and drew energy from the field of the Hidden, pulling it down through the top of his head, directing it into his shoulders, down his right arm. He used it to form a small “grenade” of sheer kinetic volatility, which he cupped in the palm of his hand, slapping it on the chain, feeling the chain through it, though he wasn't quite touching the links. He drew his other hand quickly back, to cover his eyes.

  The chain burst apart with a crinkling pop. Bits of steel clattered on the floor. He heard the ghost hissing in irritation at his breach of the door.

  “Woman, you are dead, it's ridiculous to follow your furniture around, and it's time to move on from this place,” he told her, and went through the door to the roof, as behind him the ghost muttered indignantly about “busybodies, stickin' their nose in.”

  It was hot up on the roof—the naked sunlight, reflected from tin sheathing, jabbing at his eyes. An aluminum ventilator exhaled the musty smell of old thrift goods.

  Bleak shaded his eyes, scanned the sky—and saw the unmanned aerial vehicle almost immediately. It was glinting in the sunlight about a hundred feet above the roof, and out over the street; hovering, turning, looking for him. Seeing the drone like this, it was easy to understand how they caused so many UFO reports.

  He formed an energy bullet, took several steps, winding up like a softball pitcher, and threw it underhand straight up, as hard as he could. Saw the energy bullet zip up, and up, like a small, gravity-defying meteor.

  And saw it pass the UAV and fade out.

  “Fuck, I missed,” he muttered.

  The gleaming drone turned to look at the source of the energy bullet streaking past. And Bleak saw himself, then, in someone's point of view, staring up angrily from a rooftop. Looking small downno there.

  Focusing on his own point of view, Bleak decided to take a chance on the noise of a gunshot. And maybe it was taking a chance of a bullet exploding in the chamber too.

  He drew his gun, popped the clip out, rubbed a finger over the top bullet in the clip, extending energy from the Hidden into it. He knew how much he could infuse it with before it exploded in his hand. At least he hoped he knew. He'd only infused the Hidden's energy into a bullet a couple times before.

  He quickly jammed the clip back in the gun, chambered the round, held the gun with both hands, and, squinting against the light, took careful aim up at the UAV as it started to back away from him— and he fired.

  A streak of violet, and the bullet struck its target just behind the camera in its prow. The extra energy he'd infused in the bullet smashed through its armored underside and it rocked in the air, like a boat in high seas, then began to spiral down...and crashed into the rooftop, skidding and sparking.

  Ought to get out of here, Bleak thought. The UAV would have been tracking him to set up another attempt by a CCA containment team. And maybe people downstairs would have heard the noise. He didn't want to have to explain himself to a security guard, or the cops.

  A clear lubricant was leaking from the crumpled metal carapace of the beetlelike UAV.

  Ought to just leave.

  He couldn't resist. Chance to find out something—and maybe discourage this kind of surveillance.

  He walked over to the UAV, knelt by it, held a hand close to its hot metal hull. Closed his eyes. Reached out invisibly, incorporating the field of the Hidden in his probe of the UAV; tracing back to its source.

  He saw people in a room, a marine guard, a man wearing glasses covertly glancing at the woman...

  The woman. She drew his attention. He couldn't focus on the oth
ers. But he saw her—and projected an image to her, through the Hidden. It would look like an apparition of Gabriel Bleak, to her, appearing in front of the little TV monitor they'd used for the UAV. He saw her gasp, a hand to her mouth.

  He said, Agent Sarikosca... Loraine... Why lend your eyes to a vulture? Loraine...

  Strange, wanting to call her by her first name. Loraine. He seemed to see her disembodied, then, a soul rising up before him, a woman-shape becoming a star...flaring...unable to stop herself from reaching out.

  Bleak felt a delicious sense of contact flood his lower being-he had an immediate and uncomfortable hardness at the contact. He felt the woman's shock at the unexpected intimacy and couldn't conceal his own.

  He snapped back into himself, cutting the connection. Had to adjust his pants a little before hurrying to the fire escape that led down to a side street.

  He hadn't expected so electric a response—not from a woman with no power in the Hidden. He had learned that, if he chose, he could use the Hidden to enhance his ability to seduce and excite a woman—but he'd also learned that it frightened them. They felt debauched, frightened of him, so he'd stopped doing it, except, once, with a ShadowComm girl—someone too erratic to continue seeing. But this contact with Loraine—something extraordinary. He'd never felt anything like it.

  The shadow of a bird rippled over him as he climbed down the fire escape, the ladder's metal warm under his hands.

  Yorena.

  He glanced up, saw Shoella's familiar dart over, and down, when the creature was sure she had his attention. Free to engage him now that the drone was gone.

  The choppers would be here soon, Bleak guessed. Yorena knew that and wanted him away from here before CCA arrived.

  He continued down the ladder—and heard the choppers thumping the air by the time he'd reached the ground. But they were still far enough away he could get undercover.

  Yorena flew across the street—a residential street, back here, away from the main street with its merchants—and into a narrow walkway between two old brick apartment buildings.

  Bleak ran across the street, making someone in a small Toyota honk at him irritably. He slipped 112 quickly into the shady walkway. A couple of covered garbage cans stood along the passage, but the walkway was neatly kept, broom marks in the dust on the concrete.

  He ran through to the next street, coming out between two houses. He had to vault over a short metal-mesh fence, then saw Yorena swoop down into the open back of what looked like an old-fashioned bread delivery truck double-parked next to an old Cadillac; the idling truck, its rear doors standing open, had been painted over, by hand, with a thick coat of gray. He only hesitated a moment, then hurried to the small truck and climbed in the back, closed the door behind him. Kind of regretted closing the door—there was an acrid smell back here, made worse by the hot closeness.

  What he was smelling was Yorena and a bum; mostly the bum. Cleaning its wings, Yorena perched facing him on the back of the front passenger-side seat. The man was squatting on the scratched-up white-painted steel floor, behind the driver.

  The guy smelled of booze and unwashed clothing. Pretty obvious he'd been in those jeans and that stained blue shirt for a long time. He had rotting sneakers and a three-day growth of red-brown beard and flicking brown eyes and a stub nose and moons of dirt under his fingernails. His hands trembled on his knees as he looked balefully at Bleak from under shaggy red-brown brows.

  A spiky corona of short dreadlocks flared over the driver's seat—Shoella put the little truck in gear, hurried it down the street, making her passengers brace on floor and walls; the big raptor rocked with the motion of the vehicle, fluttering her wings.

  Bleak sat back against a thin metal wall. “You would be Mr. Coster?”

  “That's who I am,” the bum said, his voice a slurred rumble. “Who you?”

  Bleak ignored the question. He noticed a brown smudge on the floor of the truck. “This a blood spot, back here, Shoella?”

  “Yeah.” She turned a sharp left so that Bleak had to brace himself. “I had to do a ritual in the backs of the truck. Couldn't do it at home, neighbors get funny about it. Had to cut the head off a chicken back there.”

  “The loas you talk to really care about blood sacrifices?”

  “They care about what we expect them to care about. Thousands of years, people kill animals for them, pour drinks for them, dab perfume for them—the loas get to like it. Maybe they eat up a little of that life energy that gets out, when we cut the head off a chicken, I don't know. But, truth to tell, when they get to know you, they don't care you kill the chicken or pig for them, no, cher darlin’.”

  “But you're still cutting off heads.”

  “Was a loa I didn't know before. What do you care, you're not a vegetarian. You don't think down at the slaughterhouse they cut off heads of animals before they skin 'em for you? Look out the back, you see that helicopter?”

  He went to the back window of the truck, squinted up at the sky. “Can't see one. Can't see much though. They had a drone after me.”

  “Yorena told me. One of those little flying machines with the cameras.”

  “Yeah. One of those little machines. I shot it down but they had me located, so...1 guess the chopper was already on its way.”

  “But I think we lost them. We fittin' to go to a house they don't know.”

  “I need a drink,” Coster said, the way an injured man would say, “Get me to a doctor.”

  “We got rum at my place for you,” Shoella said.

  Bleak looked at Coster and thought, Can this man really tell me anything about my brother? Was a man like that ever really in a position to know anything useful?

  It seemed unlikely. But could Coster simply be hustling Shoella for drinks? For money? And just making stuff up? That wasn't likely.

  Hard to put a hustle over on Shoella. Unless she wanted it to happen.

  As if sensing he was thinking about her mistress, Yorena cocked her head and looked sullenly at Bleak. And Shoella turned another corner.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I should feel on top of the world here, Gulcher thought. But I almost feel like I'm back in prison.

  Where he was, really, was in a luxury suite on the top floor of Lucky Lou's Atlantic City Casino. He was lying full dressed on the bed, watching the big-screen, high-definition TV. And seeing his own face, his barefaced mug shot, flickering across it. Good thing he'd grown the neat, carefully clipped black beard. But still—his face was out there, and Jock's too: Watch out for these escapees from prison, believed to be involved in the prison riot that left more than a dozen dead. In prison for second-degree murder, history of drug dealing, fencing, pimping, blah blah blah.

  He was feeling down. He wasn't sure if the on-a-high feeling the whisperer had brought him was gone or, like a drug feeling you got used to, just become a dull part of the background of the trip you were on.

  He changed the channel. There was what's his name, President Breslin, the old guy who said we might just have to do a “later, later” on the general election. Hell, what did Gulcher care? He never voted anyway.

  He changed the TV to the Home Shopping Network. Always found this channel comforting. Maybe because his wife, Luella, liked to watch it. He ever found Luella, he was going to have to kill her, just as a matter of honor, but sometimes it was nice to think about the good times they'd had before she met that bearded-weirdo California pot dealer and run off. On TV, a sexy blonde with hair that was artfully sticking up all over her head—like someone had paid a lot of money to make it look messy in a cool way—was selling “Rolex-style” watches. She kept saying she wished she weren't working for the channel, she'd love to buy one of these herself, they were so great and so inexpensive.

  “Sure,” Gulcher said, out loud. “I'll take two of those and your ass along with 'em.”

  He'd dipped into the casino women. A couple of the cuter, younger cleaning women had been accommodating. He hadn't needed the whisper
er—just the magic of $1,000 to each broad. He had luxury, he had access to all that money in the cash room, nobody ever questioned him, but Gulcher still felt trapped here. He left here, he'd leave the protection of this place. He was hiding out here, but ns hiding in plain sight. He didn't understand it completely, but he knew he was shielded. At least for now.

  “The great power has busted through the weak part in the wail up north,” the whisperer had said, when Gulcher lay there, alone in the night, trying to figure it all out. Having access to his mind, it was starting to talk to him in Gulcher's own lingo. “The wall still works, for now anyway, but while it was weakened, the great power came through. You follow? In this place, where the addicts are getting their buzz, the great power finds a safe place to hole up from the spirits of light. He can suck up energy from

  the addicts, power it can use to grow, and to keep himself hid. Get it? Some are gonna get sucked dry, but only those no one gives a shit about. AH you have to do is dispose of the bodies.”

  “' All you have to do is dispose of the bodies,'“ Gulcher muttered, remembering. “Oh, is that all? Dispose of a pile of bodies.” A job he'd delayed, by storing them downstairs. But what bothered him more was the sense that he had no control over any of this. That he was just a pawn, shoved around on some kind of invisible chessboard, by invisible hands, in a game between invisible players. He didn't like it. He had powers he didn't understand. From things he didn't understand. In the old days, there were guns, there was money, there were drugs, there was pussy, and there was hiding what you did from the cops. Those things he understood. But this—

  Someone knocked sharply on the door to the suite. Gulcher took his pistol from the bedside table, got up, went to flatten against the wall by the door, gun ready.