Authors: Charlie Human
I lick my lips. ‘I don’t know.’
She lifts her hand off her gun. ‘How about we don’t find out? I believe my partner, Radnick – he’s the assistant you saw downstairs – is dead. You’re in no better position than I am, so how about we don’t shoot each other?’
I take my hand off Legba. ‘OK. But you really need to explain what’s going on.’
She sits down next to me. ‘I’m from the Bone Kraal. The
real
Bone Kraal, Baxter, not the idea of the Bone Kraal that Lefkin has been using to bend the Hidden to his will.’
‘So the Bone Kraal really exists?’ I say.
‘We always have.’ She reaches up and pulls away part of her left ear, and then does the same for her right. She holds the prosthetic plastic in her hands. Her real ears jut from her head, proud and pointed.
‘You’re Azikem?’ I say.
‘Indeed.’
She stands up and retrieves a dossier from a briefcase under the bed. ‘Lefkin Demishka. The Muti Man,’ she says, handing me photos of a young Crow. ‘The youngest Tengu ever to have risen in the Crow hierarchy. In 1987 he was captured by dwarven black ops and subjected to experiments.’ She hands me another set of photos. It shows the thing I saw at Hexpoort, half human, half Crow, all twisted and deformed.
‘They should have killed him. He was released as part of a deal between MK6 and the Crows that culminated in their misadventures with Basson. The failure of their operation, thanks to you, left a power void that Lefkin stepped into. His methods have gradually become more and more extreme, and he’s used the name of the Bone Kraal as a way of securing support among the Hidden.’
‘Why?’ I say. ‘To what end?’
‘Revenge. He intends to punish dwarves and humans for what they did to him.’
‘So why aren’t you helping him?’ I ask. ‘Doesn’t the Bone Kraal want the same thing?’
‘The Bone Kraal, the
real
Bone Kraal, wants the power imbalance to be redressed. But the wanton bloodshed that Lefkin is aiming for won’t do that. It’ll tip everything into chaos.’
‘So we stop him.’
‘Yes,’ she says.
She cleans the blood off my short sword on the white duvet and hands it back to me. ‘A nicely balanced weapon,’ she says.
I hold it in my hands. ‘You killed a goblin with it. First kill. That means you get to name it.’
She looks at the blade. ‘Anatole. It’s the name of someone who was special to me.’
‘Anatole it is.’ I slide the sword back into its scabbard.
An explosion rocks the hotel and the windows in the room rattle. ‘Ronin,’ I say into my mike. ‘You OK?’
‘The Flock,’ he says, breathing heavily. ‘They’re heading to your location. Get away from the win—’
There’s an explosion of glass as several winged Amazons smash through the window of the room. Their faceplates are down and they have swords and handguns held in front of them.
‘Get out of here, Baxter.’ Mermi swings her assault rifle up. ‘You have to find Lefkin and destroy the egregore.’
‘You’ll be OK?’ I say.
She plants a kiss on my cheek and opens fire, punching one of the Flock across the room with a barrage of bullets, and sending the others scattering.
‘Darling, I’m always OK.’ She pushes me to the door and ducks behind the bed as return fire rips into the modern art on the wall.
I slam open the door and run into Ronin. Five goblins are coming down the corridor towards us. He grabs my arm and pulls me towards the stairs. We duck around the corner and I fire into the rapidly approaching grey shapes. One of them tumbles and the others return fire.
‘You feeling all right?’ I say, searching Ronin’s eyes for any inclement psychological weather. No reply. ‘Ronin! You OK?’
‘OH GOD.’ He has his back up against the wall, and rivulets of sweat are streaming down his face. ‘It’s here.’
‘What?’ I say, looking down the flight of stairs.
‘The wolf.’
‘There’s nothing there,’ I say. ‘Seriously. You said that Lefkin was dosing people with that drug. You ate from the buffet. What if he poisoned that?’
‘I knew it would come to get me.’ He flattens himself against the wall. ‘Eventually.’ He draws the Blackfish and fires down into the empty stairwell.
‘Ronin?’
‘GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME!’ he screams, and is up and running down the stairwell before I can stop him.
‘RONIN!’ I shout. ‘Jesus, you insane motherfucker. Stop for a second. There’s nothing there.’
He stops abruptly, turns and pins me to the wall. The knife is out of his boot and against my cheek before I can react. His eyes are no longer their usual calm, everyday insane. The pupils are huge and his left eye is twitching uncontrollably.
‘You’re working with it, aren’t you? You and the wolf are partners.’
‘Ronin,’ I say softly, painfully aware of the knife that is poised below my eye. ‘Ronin, it’s me. You ate poisoned food. It’s made you crazy. Well, more crazy.’
He looks up as if he’s heard something. ‘The howling. Why won’t the howling stop?’ Then he vaults up and sprints down the stairwell.
I take a deep breath and get up to follow him, but goblins appear above us in the stairwell and open fire. I press myself against the wall and empty Legba’s clip upwards. There’s silence as I reload, and I make a break for it. Gunfire follows me as I leap down the stairs, but I reach the ground floor alive. I sprint through the foyer and skid to a halt in front of the familiar figure I see hiding underneath an antique chaise longue.
‘Kyle!’ I say. ‘Jesus, I’m so glad to see you.’
He crawls out from his hiding place and we hug for a length of time that would be completely awkward under any other circumstances.
‘What. The. Fuck?’ Kyle’s hands are shaking with adrenalin and his eyes are wide.
‘What happened to your date?’ I say. ‘Is she OK?’
‘Er,’ he says. ‘OK, fine, I didn’t have a date. But that’s why I was here, I was working on it, OK?’
‘Your NLP speed-seduction shit is never going to work,’ I say with a grin.
‘IT IS! I’ve almost isolated the formula. Any time now.’ He gives me a rueful look and then breaks into a grin. ‘So what do we do now?’
‘We steal a car and get the hell out of here,’ I say.
We steal a yellow Ferrari. Kyle is so excited that his extensive online car-stealing research has finally paid off that he can barely contain himself. He struggles with the door for a few minutes before popping it open, then gives a triumphant fist pump and gets into the driver’s seat. He fiddles for another few moments before the car starts up with a throaty roar. The wheels squeal as we lurch off towards the entrance. The goblins in balaclavas manage to squeeze off a couple of rounds before Kyle ploughs through, and a bullet punches the windscreen between us. Kyle does a handbrake turn out into the road and pounds on the steering wheel with glee.
‘Witch,’ I say into my mike. ‘Ronin has gone AWOL. Do you copy? Katinka, Nom. Anybody. Do you copy?’
Nothing but static.
Kyle’s phone buzzes and he steers with one hand and holds it with the other.
‘Oh shit,’ he says, spinning the car around a corner. ‘Look at this.’
‘Oh shit,’ I say. The hashtag for Fashion Week has changed thanks to a Vintage Mindy blog post.
#KILL is lame
, it states under a picture of me taken from Facebook.
The new hashtag is #KILLBAXTER. Put it on your blogs, your Twitterz, your Books of Face. If you see Baxter Zevcenko … well … give him a special Vintage Mindy high-five. To the face. With a chainsaw. LOL! Just kidding. No I’m not. Srsly. Kill Baxter Zevcenko.
‘Bloggers want to kill you?’ Kyle says. ‘That seems a little harsh, even for the Internet.’
I explain the situation to him.
‘Damn,’ he says. ‘How many other people has this psycho dosed with the drug?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t even know how we’ll be able to tell who has been dosed and who hasn’t.’
Kyle slams on the brakes. A group of kids – tweens and early teens – have blocked the road up ahead.
‘Oh, I think we’ll be able to tell,’ Kyle says as he puts the car in reverse. ‘Shit,’ he adds, and I look over my shoulder. More of the little bastards have blocked the road behind us.
‘Should I drive through them?’ he says.
‘What? No, fuck, Kyle, they’re like eleven-year-olds.’
Kyle shrugs. ‘Well OK then, Mr Conscience, what do we do?’
‘We get out and talk to them. They’re kids. Even if their juice bottles have been dosed, we should be able to convince them that they’re being conned. They’re not really going to try to kill me.’
I get out, holding my hands up, a smile plastered across my face. The line of pre-teens move forward like troops on the front line. I notice that most of them are holding placards with pictures of pubescent males with coiffed hair: Heart System, the latest teen boy-band sensation.
BAXTER MADE HEART SYSTEM CRY, one of the placards reads; another says BAXTER WANTS TO HURT HEART SYSTEM.
‘Hi,’ I shout, making my voice as friendly as possible. ‘Um, that’s not true, you know? I didn’t make anyone cry.’
The posse of girls, all in Heart System T-shirts, their faces painted with glitter hearts, move forward. I have seen and fought some seriously diabolical creatures. Never before have I felt such terror as looking into their dewy, evil eyes.
‘THERE HE IS!’ screams their leader, a freckly red-headed girl. ‘KILL BAXTER.’
I turn and run, drawing Legba. Kyle sees me sprinting and turns to run too. The look in their eyes has ignited a primordial fear in my brain stem of being prey. So I run like I’ve never run before.
We take an alleyway between two buildings and sprint to the end. The hysterical screeching behind us has reached a terrifying peak and we don’t even stop to catch our breath. I grab Kyle by the shirt and pull him towards a bunch of large recycling bins. We clamber inside one of them and I put a finger to my lips. Kyle nods.
The pitter-patter of tiny ballet pumps grows in volume and then dissipates as the posse disappears into the night.
‘We’re going to have to regroup with MK6,’ I say.
‘And try not to get killed by boy-band groupies,’ Kyle replies.
‘Exactly.’
We peek out of the recycling bin. The streets are empty except for a group of cyclists taking a night ride.
‘Well that was close,’ I say.
‘Um, Bax?’
‘Fuck, I never, ever thought I’d be hunted down by a bunch of boy-band groupies. Can you think of anything more ri-goddamn-diculous than being assassinated by tweens?’
‘Yeah,’ Kyle says softly. ‘I can. Cyclists.’
I look up and see that we have been encircled, hemmed in, laid siege to by the group of Lycra-clad cyclists. Along with their dorky helmets and water bottles, they have kitchen knives and garden implements.
‘We saw you driving earlier,’ a guy in lime-green Lycra says as he adjusts his tight shorts around his crotch area. ‘You definitely weren’t Thinking Bike.’
There’s an angry murmur of agreement from the group.
‘Is it really so difficult?’ green Lycra says. ‘You drivers are all the same.’ He shakes his head. ‘Some people just never learn. We’re going to have to teach you.’
He pushes off from the pavement and pedals towards me. I lift my arms just in time to fend off a vicious blow from his bicycle pump. It glances off my forearm and a white-hot bolt of pain shoots up my arm.
‘Arrgh!’ I scream. ‘Fucking hell!’
Kyle grabs me by the collar and pulls me out of the way as another cyclists whooshes past and narrowly misses braining me with her helmet.
‘Time to get out of here,’ I say, and Kyle nods enthusiastically. I draw Anatole and hand it to him. ‘Here.’
‘You’re letting me use your sword?’
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘You’re my friend. You always will be.’
‘Hell, yeah.’ He swings it wildly. ‘Let’s Braveheart us some cyclists!’
‘Don’t celebrate yet,’ I gasp, as we hop over a small wall and on to a large cobbled plaza filled with benches.
I can hear the whizzing of bicycle wheels in unison behind us. Overall, things are not looking positive. The cyclists are like pack animals hunting us as a finely tuned unit. Like sharks they flow through the night and neatly cut off our avenues of escape. They’re in formation, a lethal peloton of knives, machetes, spades and hammers. We run again, but this time they have the advantage of speed. As they whizz past us, a cruelly serrated cheese knife cuts a gash across my face.
I aim a punch at a cyclist in purple Lycra, but he dips his head and my hand bounces off his massive helmet. Kyle picks up half a brick and hoists it at a rider in pink and orange with a bulbous mushroom helmet. It sails through the air, bounces off the oversize protective headgear and knocks him off his bike. Kyle blocks a hammer strike with Anatole and then jams the sword through the spikes of a bike. The rider is catapulted forward and lands on the tar with a wet thud.
‘Climb!’ I scream.
We scramble up a fire escape and look back to see that the cyclists aren’t following. When we get to the third floor, Kyle unzips and pisses down on them. I grab his arm. ‘We need to go.’
We break a window and make our way through a deserted office block. ‘Let’s try the back entrance,’ I say.
We get out through a fire exit and run for as long as we can before stopping and taking some deep, gulping breaths. No cyclists have followed us.
‘Nom, Katinka?’ I say into my mike. Still nothing. ‘We’re going to have to find the Muti Man’s lair ourselves.’
‘Well, your …’ Kyle waves his hands around his head, ‘special powers or whatever should come in handy.’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘We’re close to the community centre. If I can get Harold to let us in and lock the doors, I’ll have enough time to do some Dreamwalking.’
‘Cool,’ Kyle says. ‘You think you can find him?’
‘If I can find my True Self, it should be a cinch.’
He shrugs. ‘Good enough for me.’
We keep to the shadows. We’re almost there. Almost home free. But a crunch of boots on gravel up ahead stops us, and a group steps out of the darkness: many guys in Spock outfits, a healthy chunk of people in Jedi knight robes, a few Lara Crofts, several Thundercats, a handful of Aragorns, a smattering of Wolverines, twelve or so Jokers.