Hang Wire

by Adam Christopher

  “What the hell happened? My God,” she said, leaning in for a kiss. Ted drew her into a hug, pulling her at an angle across the bed. When she pulled away, Ted shrugged.

  “Beats me. I remember going to bed and then I remember going to the bathroom. And then I woke up in here with these two fine people.”

  Alison looked up. Benny and Bob were standing next to each other, mirroring each other’s pose, arms folded, grins wide and white.

  “I can’t thank you enough,” she said. “Where did you find him?”

  “Out on Fourth,” said Bob. “I was out for a walk, bumped into Benny. Then there was this commotion outside. We thought someone had been run over, so we, like, ran out, see if we could help, and it’s Ted, out cold on the sidewalk.”

  “So we called an ambulance. I tried to call you but my cell was out of power.” Benny winced. “Sorry.”

  Bob shrugged. “And I don’t carry a phone.”

  Alison laughed and waved their apologies away. “But you do carry a shirt around, I see?”

  “You know,” said Bob, looking down at himself. “For emergency purposes.”

  Alison turned back to Ted and looked into his eyes. He opened them wide.

  “I’m fine!” he said.

  “Uh-huh,” said Alison. “What with the sleep walking and the amnesia, yes, you’re fine. What did the doctor say?”

  “Nothing yet, just that they want to keep me in. Maybe do an MRI tomorrow.”

  Alison squeezed Ted’s hand. “Sounds like fun,” she said. “So, you really can’t remember a thing?”

  Ted sighed. “Nope. Bed. Bathroom. Hospital. Such is my life. Although my insomnia seems to have gone.”

  “Yeah,” said Bob. “Replaced with somnambulance.”

  Ted scratched his fingers again on the hospital sheets. “Maybe it’s a concussion. I don’t know. I’ve never had one.”

  “Well,” said Alison, “let’s wait and see what they say.” She turned around on the bed to the other two. “Thanks again.”

  Benny jerked into life, almost jumping on the spot. She nudged Bob with an elbow and nodded toward the door.

  “Yeah, well, we gotta be going. Don’t worry about work. Only Zane is in at the moment. Mazzy isn’t back until tomorrow, I think.” She nodded at Bob. “I’ll give you a ride.”

  “Thanks, brah,” said Bob. He nodded at Alison. “Ma’am,” he said, and then he nodded at Ted. “Take it easy.”

  When they’d gone, Alison kissed Ted again. “It’s good to have you back,” she said.

  Ted smiled. “Glad to be back.”

  “So, he really doesn’t know.”

  Bob and Benny walked across the hospital’s parking lot, Bob shaking his head. “Nope, not a thing. Complete division.”

  Benny whistled, low. “Well, I guess that was possible.”

  “Yep,” said Bob. “Trust a trickster god to make things difficult.”

  Benny laughed, but it died as she saw the look on Bob’s face. Bob stuck his thumbs through the belt loops in his jeans and gazed out across the parking lot.

  “Question is, how do we get it out of him?”

  Benny interlocked her fingers on the top of her head. “Should we have called Alison so soon? I mean, before we got Nezha’s power out?”

  Bob shook his head. “The hospital was going to call her anyway. I thought it would be better if you did it first.”

  Benny nodded. “So… would Tangun know what to do?”

  Bob nodded. “I hope so. He’s here to help us, after all.”

  “And if he can’t?”

  “Well,” said Bob. He looked up at the sky. “Then it’ll kill him. If the world isn’t destroyed first.”

  “Yeah. About that. How long, do you think?”

  Bob frowned and looked down at the asphalt. His feet were still bare and he curled his toes against the ground. “It’s different. Not like before. Before there was no warning, it just happened. This time it’s waking slowly, like there’s something poking it.”

  They stood in silence for a while.

  “We need to get it out of Ted,” said Benny. “We should tell Alison.”

  Bob laughed. “Yeah, and how is that going to go? Hey, Alison, your boyfriend is possessed by the power of a Chinese trickster god, only he isn’t supposed to have it and the gods want it back. They’ve even sent someone to collect it. Oh, and by the way, my name isn’t Bob and I’ve lived on the beach for six hundred years.”

  “Point. So, what then?”

  Bob pointed to Benny’s car. “We wait until she’s gone. Then we go back in, and we take him out.”

  Benny looked around, to see if anyone was listening to their conversation in the middle of the parking lot. “What the hell? Alison has only just found him. He’s going to disappear again?”

  “Hey, chill, brah, no worries,” said Bob. “We take him back to your apartment. Keep him there until Tangun comes back, and then we can get the power out of him.”

  “And then?”

  “And then he’ll be fine. We can say he discharged himself, take him back to his apartment. Call Alison. It’ll all be fine. And then we can get to work.”

  “Work?”

  Bob nodded. “To get to the bottom of this, we need to go back to the beginning. Before Nezha was murdered, he hid his power in a fortune cookie, right? We can find out where the Jade Emperor gets its fortune cookies from and check it out.”

  Benny frowned. “That’s not much to go on.”

  “But it’s something,” said Bob. “And if we don’t start on something, we can kiss goodbye to the city, and probably quite soon.”

  — XXX —

  SAN FRANCISCO

  TODAY

  Alison left Ted to get some sleep – much to her own relief, she was almost embarrassed to admit to herself. He seemed fine, he was in good hands, and he insisted she go; he was going to be there until tomorrow anyway, and she’d been up since three and hadn’t stopped since then. And it wasn’t like he could sleepwalk out of a hospital. He’d be moved out of ER into a room, and if anything were to happen, someone would see. Right?

  It was hot outside, the sun already reflecting off the myriad windshields and rooftops of the cars in the front parking lot. Alison paused just outside the hospital’s main doors and, hand shielding her eyes from the glare, tried to pick the direction her car was parked in; in the rush in, she hadn’t paid attention to where she’d stopped. Loitering around were a number of people – patients mostly, dressed in hospital robes, but also a few uniformed staff, nurses, some visitors – idly enjoying a cigarette or two in the morning sun.

  Alison glanced around, wondered why someone in a hospital, whether they worked there or were a patient, would smoke. Not that it was any of her business. A moment later she caught sight of a sign out in the parking lot, directing cars around to the back of the complex. She’d parked near that sign, or at least she thought she had. She stepped off the curb and crossed the lot.

  Soon. Soon.

  One of the people by the hospital doors pushed himself off the wall, watching as Alison walked into the parking lot. He took a drag on his cigar, blew a great blue-gray cloud up into the air. A couple of other people near him frowned, gave him one of those looks, but he didn’t notice. He had eyes only for his next victim. Eyes only for Alison.

  Things were reaching a climax. As the power built, so too it stirred, deep, deep below the city. The light was particularly bright on this woman. With the power from her death the Thing Beneath would stir once more, perhaps enough to shake the city.

  The man dragged on his cigar again, watched Alison drive from the hospital. Her course was plotted. It knew, and it showed him.

  There. She would meet her end… there. So would the two who protected her. The cold power within him stirred as he thought of it. Yes, yes! They were different – not like the women, but like the first he had killed. He had found him by accident in Chinatown, the old Chinese man in the long green coat. But he was different,
he had sensed it – there was a shine on him that made the cold darkness in his mind writhe in pleasure. So he had killed the man and the Thing Beneath had stirred for the first time.

  And now… there were more, like the old man? If only he had known! He would take them as well, and oh, how they would feast. There was such power living within them, the man with the blonde hair, the Asian girl. He had watched them walk into the hospital, their images almost shimmering with light in the man’s eyes. They were like the old man in the green coat. They were… different.

  Yes. Yes. With that power the Thing Beneath would wake, and then it would feed. Murder would become massacre. The entire city would die and then would be reborn, and its minions, its golems, would crawl from the earth, clawing their way to the surface. And then the Cold Dark from the stars could feast, and as it ate it would grow, and grow, controlling the mindless monster as it tore continents apart.

  The Hang Wire Killer was about to slaughter his final victims.

  — XXXI —

  SAN FRANCISCO

  TODAY

  “Back so soon?” asked Ted. Bob gave him a tight smile. Benny pulled the curtain around the bed. Ted frowned.

  “What’s up?”

  Bob looked at Benny. Benny nodded, stepped up to the side of the bed, and pointed at Ted. Benny’s eyes rolled back into her head, her eyelids fluttering, and when she spoke her voice was deep, masculine. It echoed oddly, like she was speaking from behind a metal mask.

  “Sleep.”

  Ted shut his eyes, his head falling forward onto his chest.

  Benny blinked, and shook her head at Bob. “This isn’t going to work.”

  “Shut up and go find a wheelchair.”

  Benny sighed and slipped out between the closed curtains. Bob yanked the edges together after her.

  Now what? Ted was asleep. They could get him out of the bed and into a wheelchair, but people would notice them wheeling him out.

  Unless Bob made it so nobody could see them. Which would mean using his powers… Which would start the hunger, which would…

  The hunger. Death. He was in a hospital. Death was all around him, it filled the building. He could taste it. Delicious and intoxicating, so very close.

  If he used his powers, there was a risk he would lose control. He’d used them before, when the city faced disaster, but with that carnage had come distraction. He had been able to drink it in, use his powers, and the two had balanced. At least that’s the way he liked to look at it.

  Here, all he had to do was reach out, have a taste.

  Benny was back, pushing a fold-up wheelchair through the gap in the curtains.

  “How are we going to get him out, exactly? Someone will stop us. Bob?”

  Bob turned around. The room looked brighter, felt warmer, and he saw Benny retreat against the bed.

  “Don’t worry,” said Bob. “It’s under control. Now.” He turned and pulled the curtains of the exam room open. The ER was busy with patients and physicians, nurses and porters. Nobody seemed to have noticed.

  “What the–”

  Bob moved back to the bed. “They can’t see us,” he said. “Now, help me get Ted out of bed.”

  — XXXII —

  SAN FRANCISCO

  TODAY

  Bob watched as Benny shuffled around the warehouse, peering over wooden crates, looking into dark corners, all the while keeping her hands firmly in her pockets. Bob too. Having deposited Ted back at his apartment, they’d been poking around for an hour, but they had no idea what they were looking for, or what form it might take. It was best not to touch anything, not yet.

  Even with the lights on, the warehouse was shadowy. The bulbs were bare incandescents, but they hung high from the ceiling above and were only just up to the job. Bob suspected they were original to the building. They knew how to make light bulbs last in those days. He thought he could remember this block going up in the 1920s, after the area had been razed by the quake of ’06.

  For the purposes of their mission, Bob considered the warehouse their “ground zero” – it was from this warehouse, full of foodstuffs imported from China, that the fortune cookies supplied to the Jade Emperor restaurant had come. Given that one of them had held a particular surprise for Ted, it was as good a place as any to start looking. But for what, exactly, Bob didn’t know.

  Benny stopped and turned around, shook her head. Bob sighed and sat on a packing case. Benny sat next to him, and swept off her baseball cap to scratch her head.

  “I don’t get it,” said Benny. “Why would Nezha hide his power in a fortune cookie? Nobody even knew he was here. It was Tangun who sensed something was wrong and made me follow the trail of energy leaking from the cookie back to the Jade Emperor. He thought I could pick it up, only it was Ted who got the cookie, not me.”

  Bob frowned. “Why did you wait until Ted’s birthday party? Why not just intercept the fortune cookie before anyone else got caught up in all this?”

  “Tangun didn’t direct me to the cookie until the night of the party,” said Benny, “and then the cookies got swapped somehow.”

  Bob raised an eyebrow. Benny held her hands up.

  “Dude, I swear, it just happened.”

  “Nezha the Trickster playing his final game? Great.” He sighed. “I’m too old for this.”

  Benny laughed. “I thought gods didn’t get old?”

  “I didn’t come back to the Earth to be a god,” said Bob, shaking his head. “I chose to leave all that behind.”

  The pair sat in silence: the ancient god from across the oceans who had retired, the human host of an ancient god visiting from the heavens.

  There was a sound from close by. Bob and Benny both stood from the crate and turned around. A second sound, the cracking of an old door being pushed open, and a triangle of light pierced the gloom of the warehouse, spotlighting the pair.

  Two figures were silhouetted by the light from an open door – one large and chunky, the other smaller, thinner. As they stepped forward, the large shape resolved into that of a man, middle-aged and rotund, dressed in a shirt and open blue waistcoat. He had a handlebar moustache like a Nineteenth Century showman.

  Next to him was a woman. Fair-haired, blue-eyed, she stared straight ahead, hypnotized, apparently unaware of her surroundings.

  “You are here, as I knew you would be,” said the man. He gestured with open arms, one with a thick loop of what looked like rope hanging from the elbow.

  Bob looked the newcomer up and down, then turned his attention to Alison. “Alison? Who are you, and what have you done to her?”

  “I’m sorry we haven’t had a chance to meet, yet,” said the man. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am the one and only Magical Zanaar. I killed one god, and I’m here to kill two more.”

  Bob and Benny looked at each other. The Magical Zanaar grinned and pointed at Bob and at Benny. The ground began to shake beneath them, the cement cracking and then breaking into angled shards. Bob and Benny stumbled, unable to move, as they sank into the ground and were held fast.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said the Magical Zanaar, “step right up and behold the greatest spectacle on Earth! One man against the heavens, and lo! See how the gods themselves are powerless against the Cold Dark. See how the Thing Beneath stirs from its eternal dreamless sleep!”

  The Magical Zanaar advanced on Bob and Benny, the loop of steel cable slipping from his arm and into his hands, his eyes glowing red in the dim light of the warehouse.

  Darkness and heat. Moisture and salty dampness.

  Bob’s eyes flickered open. Around him the world was a dark void filled with geometric brown shapes stacked in some kind of order. He blinked, and the shapes began to resolve themselves. Packing boxes. They were in the warehouse. It was night outside. And…

  Something else now. Something confusing, frightening. There was no pain, although there was discomfort. But there was something else, something Bob had not experienced for hundreds, maybe thousands of years
.

  Lost time. Lost memories. He’d been unconscious. Bob didn’t sleep. That story about him was actually true.

  There were other things that Bob didn’t need to do. He didn’t need to eat, or drink, or even breathe. He didn’t need to look like a human male in his late thirties. Everything was an illusion, from the toned physique and chiseled jaw to the carefully worn blue jeans. But he’d settled on his appearance many millennia ago. The blonde hair and fair skin had frightened his people, out in the Pacific. Fear was an emotion he enjoyed.

  Bob also couldn’t feel pain, and he couldn’t be killed. It wasn’t that he was indestructible, or impervious, or had steel skin or unbreakable bones. These concepts just didn’t apply to him. They had no meaning.

  Losing consciousness was therefore… unprecedented. To knock out someone who didn’t even exist on this plane of reality was quite an achievement.

  Bob blinked again but the warehouse still spun on a slow axis around him. He frowned, and moved an arm, but this only made his vision wobble. He kicked with his feet and found only air beneath them.

  There was something closed tight around his throat. As he spun slowly around, another shape came into view.

  A body, next to his, suspended in mid-air, slowly rotating. It was lifeless and covered with blood, which seemed to have poured unchecked from the throat. The body was hanging by the neck from a loop of woven steel cable tied with a simple slipknot. The body’s head was drooped forward. The steel cable had nearly separated it from the body.

  Bob squinted and gritted his teeth, trying to clear the smoky confusion from his own mind. Knocking out a god left a hell of a headache.

  In the dark, the body next to him rotated again until Bob was able to recognize the insignia on the shirt it was wearing – a man wearing a football helmet and eye patch, two crossed swords behind him.

  The Oakland Raiders football team.

  Benny.

  Bob gasped airlessly, and his hands flew to his own neck. There was the cable, tight against his skin. Tight enough to kill, certainly, and slick with blood. But Bob was a god of life as well as death, and his neck had healed while he’d been out. The cable was still tight enough to asphyxiate, but Bob didn’t need to breathe anyway. The Magical Zanaar had been careless. He’d been able to kill Nezha, assisted no doubt by the evil power within him, but Bob was a different category of deity. Especially now he was starting to use his powers on the Earth, just a little. Bob was a god much harder to kill.