Fantasmagoria (18 page)

Grindstead stood and bounded up the stairs. Kane and Maryn shuffled as fast as they could through the grime and climbed the worn stone steps two at a time. They struggled with the rope ladder, but soon emerged from the well into the old stone watchtower that guarded the base of the Serrated Hills. They stopped. Maryn hunched and vomited. Kane let her fall.

An array of figures stood motionless and silent in the courtyard, blocking their exit. They were tall, female, and clad in black leather uniforms that reached to the ground. Their faces were obscured by bulbous protective masks, and several carried automatic rifles. The gaunt symbol strapped to their arms was unmistakable.

One of them held Grindstead’s severed head. Sinew and bits of vertebrae dripped his blood. His body lay broken and twisted on the ground like fresh road kill.

The holder spoke from under her helmet. “I see you found the back door.” Her voice was metal and silk.

The bodies of Serenity and Marcus Kildevil lay wide-eyed at the base of the tower. They had stayed behind to keep watch. They were Kane’s oldest friends. He had been the best man at their wedding.

“Run!” Kane grabbed Maryn’s arm again, but it was slippery from the muck and he was already half-turned toward the well. His friend and lover slipped free after two steps.

Kane heard automatic gunfire and the thud of bullets entering flesh. Maryn fell forward and knocked Kane down the well-hole in the floor. He hit his head on the jagged rock wall and landed with a clatter of loose equipment. He lost his breath and his head was spinning, but his blood burned with adrenaline. Kane stood and staggered to the worn and uneven steps. There his injuries got the better of him, and he tripped and tumbled down the stairs. His flashlight bounced free and landed sideways in the blood. Light reflected off the mucus and covered the room in a soft, red glow.

The flabby skin of a ruptured sac dangled from the ceiling. Fresh, pustulent slime was settling across the bloody floor underneath. A woman—tall, voluptuous, naked, with pure white hair and skin like ivory—stood in the filth, head cocked, staring at Kane with black eyes. Her sharpened nails were black. Her lips dribbled black saliva. Her eyes ran black tears. She was beautiful.

“Hello.”

Kane didn’t speak. He knew exactly what she was, but he couldn’t believe it. He stood, mouth agape, gripping the wall for support, and stared at a creature of legend.

The white woman scowled and felt her bare stomach. It rumbled. “I’m very hungry.” Her voice was thick and syrup-sweet, almost like a child’s. She studied Kane’s face. “I must eat.”

(NINETEEN) Assault with an Instrument of Learning

When Vernal and Velma were teenagers, they blackmailed a math teacher, but not for money or good grades, although they ended up with both. They were in danger of being expelled a second time, which left only the gender-segregated workhouses, and that meant Velma couldn’t consummate her as-yet unrequited love for a certain varsity boy, or anyone else for that matter. The teacher, Mrs. Jankins, was the chair of the disciplinary committee and a stickler. But without her consent, the siblings would never be expelled.

The pair orchestrated detention, repeatedly, until they were alone with Mrs. Jankins, whom Vernal—a stub of a boy even then—assaulted with a slide rule, forcing the woman to defend herself, which, as expected, she did a bit too vigorously. Armed with their dad’s old 35mm, Velma recorded the woman choking Vernal with both hands, teeth bared, face contorted with the frustration of twenty years’ teaching.

The following week Mrs. Jankins learned that Vernal’s voice was permanently grated as a result of her actions, and that, should the kids ever be up for review, they should always be given another chance lest the film make its way to the authorities. (This was later expanded to include cash and passing marks in math.)

And so it went for the better part of the school year until the former Mrs. Jankins happened to get divorced and decided she’d had enough. She admitted to the assault but suggested to the police that the presence of camera equipment in Velma’s backpack proved it had been staged, and asked for leniency. The police came and searched the Wort household, a dirty old flat in Parkus, along with the trunk of Velma’s jalopy where the irresponsible teens had left the film through months of scalding hot weather.

Without any physical evidence to back up her story save some melted film, the former Mrs. Jankins lost her job shortly after losing her husband and shortly before going to jail. The Worts were expelled at the end of the year, but not before Velma consummated her amorous affair with the meat-head Dobie in the school parking lot, the same Dobie who, years later, became a prize fighter and introduced Velma to his best friend and fellow boxer, Cecil Mays.

All of this flashed through Vernal’s mind in the last seconds of his life. As the saurus’s foot landed on top of him, he contemplated how none of this would have happened—Cecil’s horrible crime, the Jackals, his backhanded dealings with Dobie, his sister’s drug addiction—if he had not assaulted a teacher with an instrument of learning. And yet here he was, lying naked in a street, missing a finger, covered in his own vomit, and about to be squashed by a giant dinosaur.

It was some small consolation to him that, shortly after his death, the world was going to end anyway.

But Fortune is not without a sense of humor, a fact Vernal realized as he saw “Blackjack” Fulcrum travel overhead strapped to the belly of the rampaging megalosaurus, the very man Vernal had been trying to find, the one who’d gone missing from his roost at The Dive, the gunslinger, the Murderling, and the absolute only means of escape from a world on the brink.

The saurus’s massive heel spike pierced the pavement between Vernal’s legs, and he felt it press against his squirming manhood, still half-erect from the bugbear intestine. His head, cocked sideways on his neck, was crammed against the inside of the creature’s foot pad. It felt like high-grit sand paper, and Vernal lost some skin off his prominent forehead.

But as the giant foot lifted off him, its splayed toes curling for the next stride, Vernal was alive—very much alive—where a taller man would have, like LaMana, been castrated and squashed on the street.

Vernal’s conviction sprang anew. He was going to get off this rock before the Travelers erased it.

Vernal reached to his crotch to feel if he were whole. Satisfied, his adrenaline surged. He jumped up and screamed for joy. It was a sing-songy yelp—half hymn, half roar.

This caught the dinosaur’s attention, and it stopped and turned and Vernal was staring at its massive horned head, the size of a city bus. He couldn’t see Jack, only the beast’s yellow, bloodshot eyes. It smelled the little man, and Vernal felt snot from its bloody nose splatter over his face and chest. But he still reeked of citrus, and the saurus turned and marched back down the street with ground-shaking steps, head high, sniffing the air. It was after something, but Vernal wasn’t it.

The little scoundrel had held his breath through the encounter, and it was only the sight of Dobie crawling away from the crumpled car that brought it back. Dobie’s neck and half his face were covered in blood. The dinosaur’s kick, which had thrown Vernal free, had impaled the vehicle on a snapped telephone pole, like a beetle on a pin, sideways and tilted to the sky.

Vernal couldn’t see the mechanoid woman. His face contorted in a snarl. He growled and ran at the fighter, bare feet slapping on the pavement. He wasn’t aware of it, but the stirge larva’s numbing agent was well at work, and Vernal didn’t feel the sand-like glass he trod at full gallop.

Dobie stumbled forward, mouth agape, staring without comprehension at charging, snarling, naked Vernal. The boxer watched as the little scoundrel picked up a mangled, hockey stick-shaped bit of metal debris from the road. Vernal swung with a vigor for life he hadn’t felt since he was a boy. He hit the big man as hard as he could, right in the balls. Once. Twice. Three times.

Dobie hit the ground clutching his crotch as Vernal beat his skull. The first blow bounced the fighter’s head off the pavement like a basketball. The second left it there. The third, fourth, and fifth knocked him out. Vernal wanted to think he had done real damage to the man, but the truth was he was not very strong, and Dobie had a boxer’s brain.

Vernal dropped the bar with a clatter and dug through Dobie’s pockets, pulling the ancient brass key from his shirt along with a balled wad of cash. He wondered who Dobie had stolen it from. He shrugged a naked shrug and for a moment stood proudly over his fallen enemy, half-erect penis dangling in the breeze.

A roar.

Vernal turned as the saurus, two blocks away, disappeared around a corner. “Damn!” He heard more sirens in the distance as an autogyro buzzed overhead, jockeying amid the nearby skyscrapers for some clear news footage. The good citizens in the buildings above were standing at windows and pointing at the unfortunate people panicking through streets and alleys. No one wanted to be anywhere near the rampaging monster.

Vernal looked up at the autogyro chopping the air. Channel 5. “Damn!” he repeated. He couldn’t be on TV. Too many powerful people were after him.

Vernal ran into an alley. He would cut through Gunnerson’s Park. The short, chubby scoundrel took off in a sprint, numb and pumping adrenaline, belly bouncing in stride.

He emerged from the alley and ran right into the street as the scaly behemoth strode down Lexington, scraping office towers, raining glass on the pavement, and roaring at the fleeing pedestrians below. There was a constant buzz of terror, the whirr of the autogyros overhead, and rumble of the monster’s every step. Vernal could see its head bounce over the top of some loft apartments. A car slammed on its brakes behind him.

A white-haired grandmother in a flower print dress rolled down the window of the round-topped clunker. “Get out of the road, cocksucker.”

Vernal turned. “Cocksucker? Don’t you realize there’s a dinosaur loose, you old hag?”

“Who you calling a hag, you limp-dicked buffoon?” The old crone opened her door. “I’ve seen bigger wieners in a can of baby sausage.”

Vernal, heart pounding, would have none of it. Nothing could stop him now. Not Dobie. Not Pimpernel. And certainly not some sailor-mouthed octogenarian. Burdened with the dead Traveler’s memories, Vernal saw what was coming. Machines. Great flying discs a hundred meters across. They would level everything, the entire planet, and there was nothing in the world that could stop them. But he was going to live. Dammit. One way or another, he was going to get off this feral madhouse.

Vernal clenched his jaw and bore his teeth like a lion. He had a single inch on the stooping senior, but he rushed her all the same. She swatted with her cane.

“Ow!” He grabbed his stinging arm. She was stronger than she looked. Vernal snarled and popped her in the face like a boxer.

Her head danced and she lost balance. The old granny fell backward and braced herself against the car as the saurus crushed a jungle gym. Parents were herding their slow-moving schoolchildren out of the park with all deliberate speed. Everyone was screaming.

“Why you little . . .” Granny lifted her cane and whacked Vernal right in his bare sack.

He went down, but his body was numb. He smiled up at her. “You shouldn’t have done that.” Vernal grabbed her feet and yanked.

The old woman fell to the pavement with a yelp, banging her head against the car on the way down. Vernal grabbed the shoulders of her dress and tugged hard.

“Wha--” The old woman’s arms flailed up and down as Vernal tugged repeatedly. The dress came free.

In the distance, the megalosaur crushed a police car in its teeth and threw it into the sky. It crashed into a school.

Vernal threw the dress into the car and jumped naked into the driver’s seat.

“You motherfucker!” the old grandma screamed in a shaky voice. Her hands were wrapped around her ample bra. Her legs were covered by bloomers. “You dog-faced shit-eater! Come back here so I can shove my fist up your ass!” She released one hand to flip him the finger.

Vernal hit the gas and took the corner of the park on two wheels, tires screeching.

Over the din, he heard the old woman curse.

(TWENTY) Enter the Dragon