“How you holding up?” Letitia says, wandering over to me. As she gets closer, everybody else stops paying attention to her, too. I pushed a lot of juice into this sticker.
My left hand is a throbbing mess and blood is starting to seep through the bandage. The Xylocaine wore off hours ago and it’s taking a lot to push the pain away. Every conceivable surface of my body inside and out hurts. I’m bone-tired. I want to sleep. I’m not sure I want to wake up again.
“Fantastic,” I say. She gives me a sidelong glance—it’s obvious bullshit even if she wasn’t a walking lie detector, but she doesn’t question it.
“You want to get out of here?”
“The powers that be are letting you go?”
“They’ve got my report. It’s one of the more prominent ones—losing chunks of two freeways and an interchange kind of gets attention—but it’s only one of thousands right now. Cleanup Crew will leak my name to the press and it’ll be a shitshow for a while, but it’ll give us more control of the situation.”
“And me?”
“With that thing on your chest? Put any more magic into it and people will forget you exist.”
“Not a bad idea.”
“Yeah, right. Come on. I want to go see my wife. And you need to get that hand looked at.”
In the car, a different Crown Vic that hasn’t been through so much punishment, Letitia calls ahead to Gabriela’s warehouse. We take surface streets and even with the sirens and lights it’s slow going. Culver City to East L.A. is a parking lot of panicked drivers, emergency vehicles, burning cars.
And then there are the fires. Some streets are blocked off because every building on both sides is a massive block-long blaze. The fire crews have stopped trying to put them out, and instead are letting them burn. Some of the taller ones are a lost cause, and the most the crews do is keep people out of the way of falling debris.
We pull into Gabriela’s lot a couple hours later, some of her crew running us inside with guns drawn. Seems in all the chaos there’s a lot of gunfire in the neighborhood, some aimed, most not. Give people an excuse and they’ll shoot guns in the air. One guy got a round through the head that way a couple hours ago.
We stagger in exhausted, and I hang back, letting Letitia go ahead. Vivian’s waiting for her and she disappears into the infirmary to see Annie. I’ve kept the sticker on, and all the normals ignores me. I go sit in a corner and watch people buzzing around the warehouse, around me. Even at almost 6 a.m. things are always in motion.
“I hear you had a problem with a roofer,” Gabriela says. She sits in a chair next to me, wincing. Vivian does good work, but she’s not going to be at her best for a while.
I show her the bandaged hand, blood crusted over the gauze. “Could have been worse. Could have been a drywaller.”
“Ya know, Vivian could—”
“Don’t even finish that sentence. She’s got enough shit to deal with without me taking up her time. It’s not like she’s the only mage doctor in town. Some of them owe me favors. Might take a few days, though.”
“Gonna suck until you get it fixed,” she says.
“That’s why God made Oxy,” I say.
“That shit’s gonna catch up to you one of these days, man.”
I shrug. “Oh, I know that. That’s nothing new. But that’s what detox spells are for. If magic can’t let you do a shit-ton of drugs, then what good is it?”
Gabriela shakes her head and pulls herself out of the chair. “We’re fucked up, you know that? Not just you and me, all of us. I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore or why I’m doing it but I can’t stop. Do you know why you do it?”
“Trying to not make things worse? Fuck knows I’m not making things better.”
“Maybe try harder. Now go get some sleep. You look like shit.”
“Stones and glass houses, chica. Stones and glass houses. Just gonna sit here for a bit, then I’ll be on my way.”
“There’s a bunk around here somewhere you can crash on, ya know.”
“Thanks, but I’ll pass.”
“Suit yourself.” She heads back and meets Letitia and Vivian coming out of the infirmary, the relief on Letitia’s face taking years off of her. I hope she can make it work with Annie. Maybe Gabriela and I don’t know why we’re doing what we’re doing, but Letitia sure as hell does.
I catch snippets of conversation. Letitia tells them about what happened, about the freeways, the tlepilli, all of it. Well, most of it. She doesn’t know about me and Santa Muerte, or that I have the bottle. I’d like to keep it that way a while. Gabriela will figure it out before too long. She knows enough of Darius’s history to piece things together.
I catch them glancing at me every once in a while. Particularly Vivian. Like I’m some weird organism she’s never seen before.
They give me space and I don’t intrude. Vivian starts to come over, but Gabriela stops her with a hand on her arm. Eventually their conversation shifts away from the nightmare the city has become.
Letitia talks about the Cleanup Crew, about how she and Annie met. Letitia’s good people and has a good sense of a person’s character. I mean, she did stab me and all.
Vivian and Letitia recount stories of high school. Gabriela talks about her family in Mexico, stories I’ve never heard, how she killed an El Cucuy to save a boy on a train, how her grandmother told her to be a revolutionary before she died.
They’re exhausted and wired at the same time. It’s funny to watch people tighten the bonds that hold them together. By the time they finally head their own ways they’ll be thick as thieves. You can see it all slowly come together and then it clicks, and you can’t imagine a time when they weren’t. Gabriela looks more at ease than I’ve seen her in months. Vivian actually laughs. I haven’t heard her laugh like that since before I left L.A.
This is theirs, and I’ve got no place here. I wait until they’re all engrossed in each other’s conversation and then get up and limp out of the building. The air outside is filled with smoke and reeks of burning chemicals. It will for weeks, I’m sure. Nobody pays attention to me as I leave. I’m okay with that.
I break in to a car that hasn’t caught fire or been vandalized a couple blocks away. I turn on the radio and listen, still parked, to an AM news station. It’s a grim night out there, and when the sun comes up it won’t be much better.
A litany of places damaged or destroyed. Staples Center, the entire row of old theaters on Broadway, Grand Central Market, Grauman’s Chinese, Hollywood and Highland, the Bradbury Building, Olvera Street, most of Chinatown. Huge sections of Beverly Hills, Studio City, Encino, Tarzana, Boyle Heights, Leimert Park, Burbank, Pasadena, El Segundo, Long Beach, North Hollywood, Torrance. On and on and on. Nothing has gone untouched.
There’s no final death toll yet, but they’re already saying it’s in the thousands. They’re not even close. I’ve felt the deaths until they all blur together into one seamless montage of agony and fear, and even I don’t know how many died.
But I do know how many new ghosts there are. I can feel them as far south as Long Beach, as far north as Pasadena. It’s a general sense, like listening to static and gauging decibels.
In general I’ve found around 1 in 5 people who die of trauma become a ghost, and the few other necromancers I’ve spoken with about it have told me the same. Echo, Haunt, or Wanderer, those numbers are pretty solid. I don’t know why. I’m sure a mathematician could work it out. If they hold true here, and I really hope they don’t, this will be the worst disaster the U.S. has ever seen.
There are about 25,000 new ghosts across the whole of the Southland. I can almost deal with that number. I can picture 25,000 people. That’s half of Dodger Stadium. But that means 100 to 125,000 died tonight. I can’t fit that in my head. It’s too big, too abstract. The dead at Hiroshima numbered 150,000. Nagasaki, 75,000. They’re statisti
cs.
In one night, over a hundred thousand dead because I pissed off some psychotic wind god with an axe to grind and wouldn’t do his dirty work for him. He made everyone in this city pay. All those deaths are on my hands.
No. I push the thought aside. Plenty of time to place the blame once everything’s, well—not back to normal, but stable? I can’t think about this right now. It’ll eat me alive if I let it.
I start the car and head back to my motel, not sure if it’s still standing until I get there. A couple buildings a few lots over have been reduced to ash, but it’s just fine. I ditch the car a block away and head into the courtyard. I fumble for my room key in my pocket, a thin plastic card. But when I look up, my door’s not there.
Instead there’s a red, leather-upholstered door with large brass tacks set in diamond patterns from top to bottom. I need sleep, not this crap. But it’s not like I didn’t know it was coming.
Fuck it. Fine. Might as well get it over with. I push the door open and instead of walking into my motel room, I end up in an empty speakeasy, the inside of which I haven’t seen in a while.
It’s empty of customers. Chairs are overturned and stacked on tables and lights are dimmed, except for one piercing bright light by the bar. Darius, the Djinn, stands in that light polishing a couple of shot glasses. A massive black man, he has thick biceps, linebacker shoulders. He looks like he’s been carved from stone.
He puts the glasses down, picks up a bottle of tequila, and pours a full measure into each. I limp up to the bar, the only sound my shoes against the wooden floor. I pull out a stool and sit. I put both hands on the bar. His eyebrows raise at the bandaged, blood-soaked hand, but he doesn’t say anything.
We lift our glasses in a silent toast. To what, I don’t know. To surviving? To life? To death? To one more day that there’s a chance to make a difference? Or one more day that there’s a chance to destroy it all?
We down our shots in single gulps. The tequila burns on the way down, a warmth in my belly far different than the temperatures I’ve been baking in all week.
“I understand,” Darius says, refilling our glasses, “that you found yourself a bottle.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Blackmoore is a writer of crime and horror whose work has appeared in the magazines Needle, Plots With Guns, Spinetingler, Thrilling Detective, Shots, and Demolition. He has also written essays on LA politics and crime for the website LAVoice.org and the LA Noir true crime blog.
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Fire Season Page 26