It’s nothing but a tunnel of flames, as both sides of the street as far south as I can see burn bright and high. Occasional blue flames lick up from the blaze. Xiuhtecuhtli’s fire still has some life left in it.
I was probably unconscious when people started to die out here and didn’t feel it, but I can feel a fuck-ton of new Haunts and Wanderers down that street now. Will it tip the balance? Will we have another Kowloon in L.A.? I hope not, but I’m not inclined to hang out down there. Still, when all this is said and done, I’m going to have to see how it is.
We stay on Third, the Crown Vic trying hard to keep her in sight. We start to merge with Fourth and I figure she’s going to keep going across the bridge and hit the 101. But she makes a hard right on Central.
As Letitia cranks the wheel I can see why. The rest of Fourth is an inferno. I can see the Fourth Street Bridge engulfed in blue and orange flames, buckling under the heat. As it goes out of sight I hear it collapse behind us, a massive crash of cement, rebar, and history.
All along Central it’s the same scene. Burning buildings, people desperate to put out the flames. Some buildings untouched, but many, hell, most of them are nothing but ash and skeletons of charred wood or steel.
“I think she’s gonna hit the freeway,” Letitia says.
“Isn’t that gonna be gridlocked?” We’ve seen surprisingly little traffic so far besides the occasional emergency vehicle on a side street. Letitia’s calls for backup are too low a priority to get any sort of traction. The rest of the police are helping to put out fires, assisting with rescue efforts.
“Maybe,” she says, “but with all this going on I think it’s a good chance that anybody still driving up there is either trying to get home, or parked on the side watching shit happen. Folks did that during the Northridge quake. Parked their cars and watched buildings go down, transformers explode.”
I remember that. I was driving on the 405 at the time. Even after the shaking stopped the freeways stayed mostly clear. People were either frozen in place panicking behind the wheel or pulled over to the side and out of their cars.
Sure enough, Sastre pulls a hard left on 16th and hits the onramp for the 10 Freeway. Above us, helicopters dot the skies, surveying the fire. News, police, fire. Anybody who can get a bird in the air.
“How far does the Cleanup Crew go?” I say.
Letitia looks up through the windscreen at the helicopters. “Not nearly far enough to hide all this shit. This is all going live across the country. The YouTube videos are probably going viral.”
“I was thinking more about us,” I say. “Everybody knows you’re on this. You called it in.” I’m not crazy about the idea of being on national television in any capacity.
“That actually makes it easier,” she says. “A lot more control over things when it’s official. We’ll figure something out.”
We hit the freeway and it’s like Letitia had predicted. There’s very little traffic, most of it parked off to the side, people out of their cars taking selfies with a burning L.A. backdrop.
I wonder what they’ll call this. The Great L.A. Firestorm? Firepocalypse? I wonder how many churches are packed tonight thinking this is the actual End Times. How many mosques, how many synagogues?
And holy fuck, the cults this will create. The guys walking around with signs on Hollywood Boulevard yelling at everyone to repent for their heathen masturbatory ways or whatever are going to come out in droves. It’ll get blamed on climate change, gays and lesbians, the sex industry, the movie industry, immigrants, Jews, Muslims, Mexicans.
Dammit. As soon as anyone hears about Sastre’s involvement and her link to the cartels, the shit’s really gonna hit the fan.
“What kind of story you think they’ll spin?” I say.
“I don’t know. It’s not like anybody’s in charge. Whoever gets on it first. Hopefully it won’t be something stupid that gets more people killed. But it might.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
The Porsche puts on more speed, and starts to pull away from us. Letitia guns the Crown Vic to stay close, and has to brake hard when Sastre taps her brakes and closes the distance.
Something flies out of the driver’s side window, and just before it lands on the freeway in front of us we both recognize what it is. She’s got some of the tlepilli in the car with her and she just chucked a lit one at us.
Letitia slams on the gas and turns, the blue flaming torch bouncing past us and lighting the concrete of the freeway on fire. I look behind us to see a massive section of the freeway go up. Concrete’s not supposed to burn. But then, the Fourth Street Bridge shouldn’t have collapsed.
Bystanders are caught in the blaze and I feel a bunch of them go fast, each death a little pinprick in my psyche. Goddammit. I roll down the window and draw my Browning.
“What the hell are you doing?” Letitia says.
“Get closer.”
“You’re not jumping on her car too, are you?”
“No, I’m gonna blow her fuckin’ head off.” I unbuckle my seatbelt and lean out of the car, the Browning tight in one hand.
Miriam said my grandfather left me this little piece of evil because only a necromancer could use it. So far, I’ve only seen it make bigger holes in things than it should. I’ve ignored the feel of it under my skin, the sense sometimes that it wants me to do something. Something more than just pulling the trigger.
“All right, you little bastard, let’s see what you can really do.”
A feeling of satisfaction, of “it’s about time,” floods through me. The gun taps into my magic, into something else I didn’t think I’d ever feel again. Tabitha told me I’d have some of Mictlantecuhtli’s power back. But now I can feel it.
I pull the trigger. The gun goes off like a cannon and my sense of time slows, my vision sharpens, and I can track the bullet. I can see exactly what’s going to happen. It’s going to go through the Porsche’s rear window and punch through the back of Sastre’s head.
And then it doesn’t. The bullet hits a barrier around the car, exploding into flames in midair. I can feel the gun screaming in frustration in my head. I cut it off and holster it. It’s furious. At Sastre, at me, at the whole fucking world. It was made for murder and when it finally gets to bring its power to bear it’s denied.
“Jesus, will you shut up?” I say to it, closing myself off completely and shoving it into my messenger bag. If this is what shooting with its full potential is like, I may have to stick it back in the storage unit. I rub my hand across my pant leg. I can’t get rid of the feeling of cockroaches crawling through my skin.
“I thought she didn’t have any magic?” Letitia says.
“I don’t think she does. Quetzalcoatl gave her a bunch of paper charms. She probably tossed one on the Porsche. Probably gave her something for healing, too. I tagged her pretty hard.”
Behind us there’s a tremendous crash and in the rearview mirror I can see the burning section of the 10 collapse behind us. Great.
“Is there anything we can do to block her off?” If we want any hope of catching her, we need to stop her moving. With her tossing tlepilli out the window like hand grenades, getting too close is a bad idea.
“You know, I think I do.” She grabs her cell phone and punches in a number. It rings a few times and picks up. “Hey, Harvey,” she says. “You want to help end this nightmare you’re watching from up there?” Pause. “Yeah, I’m chasing the blue Porsche. No idea where anybody else—Oh, shit.”
“What?”
“We’re the only car in this chase. Nobody’s got time for a pursuit when the world’s ending. That could work in our favor.” She turns back to the phone.
“We need to stop that Porsche. I don’t know how you want to do it, but she’s got these fucking grenades and if one hits your bird, you’re fucked.” She listens more. “Perfect. I’ll see you in a minut
e.” She hangs up.
“Harvey?”
“Pilot with LAPD air support. He’s one of us,” she says. “He’s watching us from over near Culver City. He says the 10 west is on fire right after the 405, and the 405 north is blocked with a ten-car pile-up. Big rig tipped over. Santa Monica, Culver City, and LAPD are all trying to keep people off the freeway. Seems there’ve been a couple more collapsed sections, so they’ve got cars blocking the offramps. Her only option is to head south on the 405.”
“How does that help us?”
“You’ll see.”
We keep playing chicken with Sastre all the way down the 10. She tosses grenades, we dodge them, another section of the freeway catches fire. When this is all over I wonder how much is going to be left. She drives a couple cars off the road and they carom into our path, but between Letitia’s driving skills and me shoving shit out of our way with magic, we manage to get past them without much damage.
Sastre’s probably listening to the radio or has one of those traffic apps on her phone, because as soon as the South 405 interchange comes up, she veers onto it with no hesitation. I don’t know what her plan is, or if she even has a plan. She can’t keep driving that Porsche, and now she’s got the police on her ass and eyes in the sky. She has to know she’s not getting out of this.
Maybe she doesn’t want to.
We take the curved ramp and dump out onto the 405. Once we’re on the straightaway she guns it and tosses four burning tlepilli held together with a rubber band out the window.
She must be getting desperate, because there’s no way we won’t dodge it. But that might not be her plan. If she already knows she’s fucked, she just might want to create the maximum amount of chaos.
When they hit the freeway behind us the flames are incredible. Bright blue and a hundred feet high, each feeding into the others. One took out a section of the 10. Four might take out the whole interchange.
“Jesus. You think she’s run out of those yet?” Letitia says.
“Maybe. Or she hates the 405 enough to use what she had left.”
“Everybody hates the 405,” Letitia says. “We’re coming up to where Harvey’s going to set down.”
“Set down?”
“Yeah,” she says. “He’s gonna bounce his bird off her roof.”
“That’s gonna take some tight timing.”
“He’s an aeromancer. Believe me, he’ll land where, when, and how he wants to.”
Harvey makes his move as we come up on Venice Boulevard. It’s not the controlled landing I was expecting. The police helicopter drops out of the sky like a stone. But instead of crashing, it slows just enough at the last second.
The left landing strut bounces off the side of the Porsche, sending it spinning. It flips a couple of times, then stops right side up. One of the tires is shredded. Black smoke is coming out of the engine.
The helicopter rocks back and forth and then lifts jerkily into the sky.
“Did he just fake a crash?”
“Yeah. He wants to keep his job. Needs to make it look like a lucky accident. He’ll set down at the airport.” Letitia stops the car about twenty feet away from the smoking Porsche.
“How you want to do this?” she says. I think about it.
“Stay here with the engine running. I’ll go check if she’s alive. If she tries anything, run her car over the edge of the freeway.”
“Solid plan,” she says. If sarcasm was currency, she’d be richer than Werther.
“You got a better idea?”
“You got a rocket launcher?”
“No.”
“Then, no,” she says. “I don’t have a better plan.”
I pull the Browning out of the messenger bag and mentally tell the gun to behave. It starts to protest, but I think really hard about melting it down into thumbtacks and it shuts up.
I get out of the car. Stand there a moment. Just based on the death toll from tonight, Jacqueline Sastre has got to be the deadliest person on the planet.
I start walking. One way or another, this ends now. As I get closer, I can see into the car. But I don’t see her. Maybe she’s slumped over to the side. Or maybe she got out somehow. There is a lot of smoke. I slow as I get closer.
“La Niña Quemada,” I say loudly enough to be heard over the distant flames, the helicopters above us stabbing the area with searchlights. “You dead yet?”
She slowly rises from the other side of the Porsche. Her skin is ashen. The left side of her face drips like raw hamburger, her eye along with it. A thick white bandage covers where I tore into her with the nails. It’s soaked through with blood.
“Not yet,” she says, smiling. Half her teeth are missing on the left. “But soon. You killed me, necromancer. If it wasn’t for one of Quetzalcoatl’s charms, I’d be dead already. It’s fading. I won’t be here much longer.”
“Excellent. Where do you think you’ll wind up?” If she says Mictlan, I’ll need to get hold of Tabitha and give her a heads up.
She shakes her slowly, wincing. “I’m Catholic. I’ve known where I’m headed for a very long time. Maybe someday you’ll go to hell, too.”
“Probably,” I say, “but it won’t be yours.”
“I followed you in Mexico, you know,” she says. “Hired by three different cartels. Zetas, Sinaloa, Cartel del Golfo. I saw your handiwork. You’re a very bad man.”
“Never said I wasn’t.”
“Do you know what they called you?”
“El Gringo Sin Ojos,” I say. “The Gringo With No Eyes.”
“They said your eyes were like pools of midnight.”
“I got ’em fixed. Why’d you do it?”
“Hunt you? Because they were paying good money for your head.”
“No,” I say. I wave out to the burning city, the thousands of dead. “This. Why did you do this?”
The smile she gives is wide and bright and filled with the wonder of a child. “I like to burn things,” she says. “How could I pass up a chance like this?”
“Did Chu know about it?”
She shakes her head. “No. We knew he was going to betray us. I was going to kill him and burn down his house, like I had the others. This was all for you. Quetzalcoatl wanted you to know the price of betrayal. You were supposed to burn Mictlan, but you saved it. Why? Everyone there is already dead.”
“They’re souls,” I say. “Strip away everything else and that’s what you’ve got left. If I’d done that, it would have just been more murder. I won’t commit genocide.”
Sastre blinks, her eyes unfocused. “I think I’m dying now. I have to tell you something. Something very important. Come closer.”
“I can hear you just fine from here, thanks.”
“Oh. All right. It’s simple. A last request. Can you do that for me? Something simple?”
She’s playing me and I think I know how. I ready a spell in my mind in case I’m right, and tell her, “Sure, I’ll bite. What is it?”
“Catch.” She pulls a burning tlepilli out from behind the car and throws it at me. I let it get about halfway before triggering the spell. It stops in mid-air for a split-second, then flies right back at her with enough force to embed in her skull just above her good eye.
The flames erupt around her, the look of surprise evaporating from her face as the flesh is consumed from her bones. She falls onto the Porsche, lighting it up.
I’m in a really bad spot. The flames flow across the freeway toward me, but something wells up inside and I stand my ground, put my hand out toward the crawling fire, willing it to stop a few feet away.
It does.
I open my hand and something small and brass bounces through the fires to land in my palm. It should be red-hot, nothing more than molten brass, but it’s cool to the touch. Xiuhtecuhtli might be a dead god, but his fires are very
much alive. I slip the Zippo in my pocket and watch the fires burn until the section of freeway collapses in front of me.
If I were to look in a mirror right now I know I’d see my eyes gone black, like pools of midnight.
Chapter 36
Four hours later, L.A. is still burning. It’s an impressive sight now that I’m not chasing after a psychopathic arsonist with a supernatural Zippo.
Without Xiuhtecuhtli’s flames, they’re all normal structure fires. I overhear a cop say that the only buildings left burning are over five stories tall. That’s a lot of buildings.
We’re still on the freeway. I’m sitting at the edge of the burned-off section looking down on Venice Boulevard, my feet dangling. I’ve got a Hi My Name Is sticker with THESE AREN’T THE DROIDS YOU’RE LOOKING FOR, MOVE ALONG written on it in Sharpie. Between that and an obfuscation spell Letitia’s cast on me, nobody’s paying any attention. I’m just some random guy who’s supposed to be there.
We would have left, but by the time the Porsche went up, half a dozen black and whites that had been covering the freeway on and offramps we passed were pulling up to us. Getting out unseen wasn’t an option.
Letitia’s been spinning a story to the other cops, and then to assorted sergeants, captains, and even a guy from the mayor’s office, about this nutcase throwing out weird Molotov cocktails. Too much was caught on video to deny it outright.
She used the word thermite a few times and pushed a little magic into it. By tomorrow the word will spread and the story that gets out will be about somebody chucking massive thermite bombs out the back of a van or something.
Letitia made a quick phone call in between reports to somebody else in the Cleanup Crew and they let her know the story they’re going with. A series of minor earthquakes ruptured gas lines all over the city. One went off and the others followed. I don’t know how they’re going to back it up, but at least they’re not trying to blame it on terrorists. This city has enough problems without everybody panicking over that, too.
Sastre’s involvement is going to be scrubbed. When Chu said he’d gotten the file out to the masses, it was all horseshit. Only a few people know she was involved at all, and now there’s not even a body.
Fire Season Page 25