Authors: Bryan Smith
So Mitch gave up.
He stayed there on his back and kept staring at the moon. Whatever marginal trace of a fighting spirit he’d managed to dredge up withered and died. He was again resigned to facing his end in this stinking ditch.
He cried some more.
Spit up some more blood.
He thought,
If only I could hurry up and die, if only I could kill myself somehow…
If only I hadn’t been so stupid.
After a while—it seemed like a long,
long
while—he began to feel lightheaded. The pain ebbed some. He was either losing consciousness or finally dying. He prayed for the latter. His vision blurred again, and the sliver of moon loomed large, magnified by the flood of moisture in his eyes. It bloomed like a brilliant flower, an explosion of beautiful light that obliterated everything else.
He didn’t see the pale, dark-haired woman stepping out of the line of tree beyond the ditch.
The dizzy feeling became more pronounced.
This is it
, he thought.
I’m almost dead.
Thank God.
The dark-haired woman knelt next to him in the ditch. Mitch became aware of a presence other than his own, and it brought him back from the brink for a moment. He blinked and saw the woman. When he saw how beautiful she was, how very much like an ethereal goddess of legend, he reached out to touch her cheek.
She smiled and kissed the back of his hand.
Then she gathered him in her arms and lifted him off the ground.
Mitch thought, This isn’t real.
He was hallucinating, his ebbing consciousness filling his mind with dream-like visions of things that couldn’t be. No woman, especially no woman as slender as this one, could life him with so little discernible effort.
But the vision persisted.
The woman carried him out of the ditch and into the forest. He was aware of low-hanging tree branches, the chirruping of crickets, and the occasional glimpse of lovely moonlight through the branches.
Oh, Mother
, he thought again.
Oh, Mother moon…
Then, at last, the world faded to black.
Consciousness returned by degrees. His first awareness was tactile, a cool, smooth surface beneath his body. A warm fire crackled nearby. He rolled closer to the heat source, curled up in the fetal position, and slipped away again. He’d been too tired to register anything beyond the curious fact of his continued existence.
A while later, he awoke again.
He was in a small cave.
A fire burned in a pit a few feet away. He smelled food and a heavy scent of incense. The dark-haired woman sat cross-legged on the other side of the fire. The ankle-length dress he’d seen her wearing before was gone. She was nude, and the light from the fire bathed her body in a mellow, flickering light.
With a groan, Mitch sat up.
The woman smiled.
Mitch frowned. “Who are you?”
She tilted her head and something silver glittered beneath the hollow of her threat. Mitch squinted and leaned closer. His eyes widened when he saw the little silver crescent dangling from the delicate chain around her neck.
The moon
, he thought.
The woman spoke. “I’m Diana.”
The woman’s rich, mellifluous voice was like nothing he’d ever head. It evoked so many feelings simultaneously. It was at once beautiful and forceful. It conveyed compassion and power. It was a lover’s delicate whisper in his ear, and it was a stentorian, commanding
presence
.
It was an impossible voice.
Mitch wasn’t sure what Diana was, but he knew she wasn’t human.
He swallowed hard. “Why do I feel no pain?”
Her smile widened. “Because you belong to me now. You called me. You are a child of the moon.”
“I called you?”
She rose gracefully to her feet. “Your spirit called me. You will serve me now.”
She walked to the mouth of the cave, beckoning to Mitch with a curled forefinger. He got to his feet and followed her into the wild night.
A fat man was being tortured in an office of an abandoned warehouse. Handcuffed to a chair, he was bleeding from multiple straight-razor nicks to his bare torso. He was trying to talk to his tormentors, but what emerged from his mouth was reduced by sheer terror to nonsensical blubbering.
Logan Caine and Derrick Mullins paced about the room, their hard faces looking ominous in the harsh lantern light. Logan drew in a lungful of cigarette smoke, while Derrick twirled the straight-razor in his fingers.
Logan blew smoke in the fat man’s face. “I don’t think you’re telling us everything, George.”
“But I am!” A spray of spittle flew from the fat man’s mouth. “Jesus, you guys know I’d never rat out Mr. Ligotti. I’m not that stupid.”
Logan laughed. “Horseshit, George. You were stupid enough to wind up here, weren’t you?”
He put his cigarette out on George’s shoulder and laughed at his scream. He slapped the fat man twice to shut him up, seized a handful of his hair and yanked his head up. He leaned in close and said, “You talked, George. I know it. You know it. Derrick here knows it. And Mr. Ligotti sure as hell knows it. The feds hauled you in on a clean bust. You should be sitting in a cell right now. But you’re not. Know what that tells me?”
George tried to talk but he’d become inarticulate again. “I-I-I…ooohh…”
Logan twisted the handful of hair, eliciting a yelp. “George, it tells me the feds scared your ass. They offered you a deal and you ran your mouth like a beauty salon gossip hag.”
Derrick closed the straight-razor and put it away.
He produced the Sig Sauer from his shoulder holster. “I guess the feds didn’t like you, Georgy Porgy. You oughta be in the WitSec program right now.”
George blubbered some more.
Logan relinquished his hair and stepped away. “Fuck it. Cap the fat bastard so we can get out of here.”
Derrick aimed the automatic pistol at the fat man’s head.
Then the door to the office creaked open.
Mitch smiled at the identical thunderstruck expressions on the faces of his killers. Their mouths drooped open like those of kids at a magic show.
Mitch pulled the door shut. “Howdy, fellas. Glad to see me?”
Logan’s voice emerged in a ragged whisper. “This shit ain’t happenin’. You’re dead, MacCaffrey.”
Mitch looked at the man handcuffed to the chair. “Hey there, George.”
The fat man’s wide eyes glistened with tears. “Jesus…they told me you were dead, buddy.”
Mitch began undoing the buttons of his shirt. “They were right, George.” His gaze went back to Vincent Ligotti’s thugs. “You guys wanna see something cool?”
Derrick shot a nervous glance at Logan. “I don’t like this.”
Logan Caine never looked away from Mitch. He pulled out his Glock and jacked a round into the chamber. He aimed the gun at the phantom’s head. “Lock and load, Mullins. Let’s do it right this time. Head shots.”
Mitch tugged the shirt-tail out of his trousers.
Derrick’s hand shook as he raised the Sig Sauer. Sweat streamed from his scalp and got in his eyes. He palmed the moisture away and glanced again at Logan. “Logan…”
“Derrick—”
Derrick took a step backward. “I really don’t like this, man. Asshole shouldn’t be up walking around, even if somebody saved his ass.” He moved backward a few more steps, yelping when he collided with a desk. “Something’s fucked-up here…”
Mitch shrugged the shirt off and let it fall to the floor. He smiled again. The ragged holes where the bullets had punctured his flesh were still there. He raised his hands high over his head like a ballerina and twirled slowly around so they could see the gaping exit wounds on his back. When he stood facing them again, he probed one of the wounds in his abdomen with an index finger.
Derrick Mullins shrieked.
Even the normally unflappable Logan Caine looked rattled. His jutting lower lip trembled and the hand holding the Glock began to shake. He grimaced when Mitch pushed the finger through the wound up to his top knuckle. When the walking dead man appeared to wiggle the finger inside him, Logan’s stomach convulsed.
He choked back bile.
Mitch pulled the finger out. It glistened with an oily substance that might have been blood or some other bodily substance. Still smiling, Mitch stuck the finger in his mouth and slowly tongued off the viscous fluid.
Derrick’s Sig Sauer fell from his fingers and clattered on the floor. He bent over, braced his hands on his knees, and spewed his pasta lunch all over George’s blood-stained trousers.
Mitch laughed.
He stepped forward.
Logan’s breath came out in a pant. Mitch could almost hear the jackhammer rhythm of his terror-juiced heart. “St-st-stay where you are, McCaffrey!”
He took a step back.
Mitch continued to advance, but he appeared to be in no hurry. “The most incredible thing happened when you guys left me to die in that ditch. I met a goddess. A real, honest-to-gosh
goddess
. Yeah, I know it sounds nuts. I know you don’t believe me. But think about it guys.” His grin broadened a little more. “It it any more far-fetched than the idea of a reanimated corpse returning to take revenge on his murderers?”
Logan Caine’s trigger finger twitched.
A bullet punched through Mitch’s shoulder.
Mitch barely flinched.
A moment later, he seized Logan’s gun hand, pried the Glock loose, and tossed it away. “You won’t be needing that anymore, Logan.”
He gripped Logan by the throat with one hand and ripped open the thug’s guayabera with the other. Logan’s exposed torso was shiny with sweat. The outstretched fingers of Mitch’s right hand pushed through the soft flesh of the doomed criminal’s abdomen with astonishing ease. Logan screamed and spasmed as Mitch pulled out a long coil of intestine. Mitch wrapped the length of wet, steaming viscera around Logan’s throat, then he punched through the dying man’s chest cavity and yanked out his still-beating heart.
There was an explosion in the room.
George screamed.
Mitch relinquished his hold on Logan and saw that Derrick Mullins had recovered his Sig Sauer. Logan tumbled dead to the floor. Mullins was slumped against a blood-spattered wall, the barrel of the gun protruding from his mouth.
Mitch’s smile faded. “Coward.”
He felt cheated.
He snapped the handcuffs off George’s wrists, picked up his shirt, and departed without another word.
Mitch felt a sense of exhilaration as he drove through the city streets. He repeatedly reviewed the images from the warehouse office, savoring especially the way smug Logan Caine had lost his cool.
He felt all-powerful.
Like a god.
Was that what he was now? It didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility. Hell,
nothing
seemed out of the realm of possibility anymore. The moon woman’s strange magic had allowed him to continue existing on the physical plane even though he was dead. It had invested him with unnatural strength.
There’s no limit to what I can do now
, he thought.
I can go after Mr. Ligotti next. Hell, I can take over his organization. I can run this city’s underworld myself and make more money than I ever dreamed of making.
The prospect was intoxicating.