Authors: Richard Kadrey
He points behind us.
“It’s the silver Beamer.”
“Give me the keys.”
He does. I pick him up and toss him over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry.
The BMW is a silver four-door coupe. I open the rear driver’s door and toss Aki in so he can straighten out his leg and bleed somewhere that’s not on me.
It feels funny to start a car with its own key. Blasphemous almost. Who would want to own something like a BMW? You’d have to take care of it like it’s a pet. The whole idea of owning things makes me queasy.
I adjust the mirrors and look back at Aki in case he has another pistol hidden under the seat. If he does, he’s not pulling it. He’s flat on his back, sweating and bone white.
“I don’t want to drive around in a puke-smelling car, so if you need me to stop, say so.”
“Okay,” he says. “Thanks.”
I turn the ignition and we head for the Chateau Marmont.
I
T’S ONE LONG,
wet shit storm from the hospital to the hotel. Drifters and civilians fill the streets. Civilians run and the slow-moving Drifters bring them down in groups, like hyenas. They grab people at gas stations and all-night markets, off buses, out of cars, and chase them off the roofs of nearby buildings.
The pack is the Drifters’ real weapon. A motorcycle cop in the intersection manages to get away from one group and runs straight into the arms of another. There are just so damned many of them. I have to drive on the sidewalk and over a few stop signs to get around all the abandoned cars. The Beamer is heavy enough that it makes a pretty good battering ram, so along the way I splatter as many Drifters as I can on the hood. Mostly I go for Lacunas, the vicious little pricks. They’re easy to pick out. Zeds lumber like windup toys, but Lacunas can run and climb and hunt specific people. And they’re intelligent enough to understand what’s happening when I crush their spines and skulls under my wheels. By the time I get to the Chateau Marmont, the front of the car is a slaughterhouse spin-art painting.
Aki moans and whines every time the car bumps into something.
“Aaaah! I’m losing a lot of blood back here.”
“If you were losing a lot of blood, you wouldn’t be able to talk, so feel free to bleed faster.”
I steer us into the hotel parking lot, minus a headlight
and with a lot more dents in the hood and skull fragments in the radiator than when we started. Fuck me for having too good a time on the way over. I don’t spot the vans following us until I kill the engine and the vans are moving into position to block the only exit to the street.
“The cavalry is here. Want to give yourself up, kid?”
Aki pulls himself up into a sitting position using the passenger-side headrest. He looks outside through the windshield.
“Who’s that?”
“That’s a law enforcement combo pack. The Golden Vigil and Homeland Security.”
“Golden what?”
“God’s G-men. If you think I’m bad, see what happens when those feds and sky pilots get hold of you.”
“No way, man. No cops and no preachers.”
“At least we agree on that. Keep your head down and don’t make a sound.”
The doors slide open on the sides of the Vigil vans and they make a big show of moving their troops outside. There are a dozen true-blue men in black. None are holding guns, but all have the distinctive jacket bulge that says they’re packing. There will be more and heavier artillery in the vans.
I recognize the two guards on the gate from a few days back. I’d taken the Shut-Eye, Ray, on a roller-coaster tour of Downtown. Most of the others I recognize from when Wells tossed me out of his clubhouse and off the Vigil’s payroll. Even Marshal Julie is there, though she looks like she’d rather be on an ice floe wrestling polar bears.
Wells stands in front, hands behind his back, a corn-pone Napoleon.
“Hold it right where you are, Stark. Put your hands behind your head and move away from the vehicle.”
“Are you arresting me?”
“I sure as shit am, junior.”
“For what?”
“General assholery in the face of God and reason.”
“You know, just because you’re in love with that angel hiding in your van doesn’t mean you have to be her monkey on a chain.”
He shakes his head.
“You heard stories about Gitmo? We have black prisons over in the Arctic that make Gitmo look like the penthouse at the Bellagio.”
“Does that come with a continental breakfast?”
Aelita steps out of the van and into the green fluorescent glare of the parking lot. In the flat light, everyone looks like a corpse. Only Aelita looks alive. The jittery fluorescent light doesn’t seem to affect her like the rest of us. It sort of flows around her, leaving her looking more alive and human than anyone in the lot.
“Good evening.”
“Good nothing. Did you happen to notice what we just drove through? Why are you people here playing games with me when you should have your troops and firepower out there burning down those Drifters?”
“Los Angeles isn’t our concern anymore. These lost souls will be dealt with by God. Or not.”
She gives me a conspiratorial wink.
“My guess is not.”
“It’s every man for himself now? I must have missed that Commandment. Why did you send those Lacunas after me? They almost sliced a friend of mine.”
“Whoever the friend was, I’m sure they deserved it. And I didn’t send any golems after you. Marshal Wells was good enough to put a tracking device on you, but that’s all. Trust me, if I had sent something, it wouldn’t have been to frighten you.”
She’s telling the truth. I can’t read angels like civilians, but the angel inside me can and it isn’t picking up any lies. So, who would want me to stop what I’m doing? Cabal? Aki? His mother or someone working for her? Maybe. Maybe it’s Brigitte’s people wanting me to stay out of their business. Hell, Fiona and Tracy might have talked to some of the other zombie minders. They all have reasons for wanting me not to get too close to a Savant. Not that worrying about it really matters. Cabal is already dead. Aki, Koralin, or whoever else it might have been won’t get another chance to ambush me. Everything ends tonight. All debts paid. All accounts closed. Tonight is the end of someone’s world. If it’s mine, it’s going to be messy.
Wells turns to someone in his crew.
“Marshal Sola, arrest this man.”
Marshal Julie looks even more uncomfortable. But she reaches under her jacket and pulls out a set of handcuffs.
Aelita shakes her head.
“No. We’ve discussed this. We’re not doing that. Not with his type. He’s a walking heresy. An Abomination, and
anywhere he stays or stands becomes corrupt, even prison. Kill him.”
Wells looks at her for a minute, then at me. He turns to his people and gives a small nod. Suddenly I’m looking down the barrels of an awful lot of guns.
“Did you forget what we talked about a few months ago over donuts? The dead man’s switch and the Mithras?”
She nods.
“Yes, if you die, the Mithras will be loosed and it will set fire to all creation. I remember. And I know you’re lying. You’re too attached to this world to let that happen.”
“You silly bitch, you’re going to kill everyone in L.A. because you’re too good to help them? How many Deadly Sins is that? Pride. Anger. Greed. Envy, too, maybe?”
Aelita turns away from me. I take a couple of steps toward her and a bullet rips into my right arm. It’s Ray, the Shut-Eye, getting back a little of his own. I look at him and he seems as surprised as anyone else that he fired. Without a verbal order, the other marshals are unsure if they should follow up.
Ray’s bullet is just a grazing shot. It ripped off a lot of skin near the deltoid. Surface shots can tear up a lot of nerves and nine times out of ten they hurt more than a killing shot. This one burns like a hot wire pressed against my arm from the shoulder to the wrist. I hate to admit it, but the pain catches me off guard. It comes quickly enough that I close my eyes reflexively when it hits. I don’t see Aelita turn to her people, but I hear her voice.
“You are the Golden Vigil. Holy Crusaders on a mission
from Heaven. You have no reason or right to hesitate. Kill the Abomination.”
It’s her voice that hits me, not the threat. Something about the deep and beyond-time certainty of her tone. It’s like she’s shouting my death from the bottom of a well halfway across the galaxy and a billion miles deep. When she tells the marshals to kill me, she’s really giving the order to kill the world. She’s an angel. She’s seen stars and worlds come and go. We’re just mayflies living on this one. Maybe humans really are made in God’s image. That makes us harder to kill, but sweeter, too. Angels want revenge. Everything alive wants revenge, even if it’s simply for the affliction of existence. The sound of my death sentence and the death of everything I’ve ever known, cared about, or hated rattles and clangs in my skull, getting heavier every second as the weight of all the aeons it took to get from the Big Bang to my ears drops down on me. God went to all the trouble of creating the universe, the angels, the stars, and this world just to murder us. Alice and me and everyone else.
Even angels want revenge. Everything alive wants revenge.
The moment the thought crystallizes, Aelita wins. The solar winds and deadly vacuum freezing the empty space between the stars blows the last of Stark away. He falls into the dark. He doesn’t make a sound. He’s not surprised. He saw this moment coming. He fixes his eyes on me as he falls. That’s the last I see of him, the light reflected in his eyes as they go from white orbs to pinpoints to nothing. Then he’s gone and I’m alone.
Only the angel left in here. No humans allowed.
My eyes are still closed. The world has gone electric. I hear the rustle of fabric and the stretching of muscles and tendons as the marshals adjust their stances. Their heartbeats and breath go from fear to resignation. Ripples spread out like waves in a pond from their fingers as they increase the pressure on gun triggers. Metal shifts against lubricated metal. The muscles in their arms tighten. They’re already anticipating the explosions when the guns go off. The sound. Muzzle flash. Recoil. The pleasant reek of cordite.
I’m not angry or concerned. Time is slow and cold and it never stops. What’s going to happen will happen and nothing will stop it.
My arm burns and the heat throbs all the way down to the bone.
I hear a rattle of explosions as the marshals fire.
I’m not afraid. I see all this happening from the bottom of a well halfway across the galaxy and a billion miles deep.
The pain in my arm makes me double up. I’m burning alive.
When I open my eyes, the marshals’ bullets glide toward me in slow motion. I sweep my arm across them and my arm is made of fire. The bullets glow red, then blue, then white, and disappear like they’re made of steam. I swing my arm back and a dozen human faces gape at me. I look at my arm. It’s not burning, but it’s glowing red from the heat of the flaming Gladius in my hand. An angel’s weapon. Something Stark would never be capable of summoning, much less holding, but it’s my birthright.
The marshals don’t know what to do. They’re here for Stark, but Stark shouldn’t be able to manifest the sword.
They don’t know that I’m not Stark anymore. I’d try to explain it to them, but they’re busy pulling triggers, filling the air with more slow-motion metal snowflakes. I brush them away like moths and keep moving.
I kill Ray first. He started the bullet party, so he deserves the first dance. His eyes open wide. He expects a high blow, that I’ll slice him from above, so I swing the fire blade under and up, taking off his legs. Before his torso hits the ground, I swing again and give him the downward stroke he was looking for. I take two more Vigil agents in the time it takes for a hummingbird to flap its wings. I cut each of them in half at the waist and let them collapse onto each other, the top half of each man trying to hold the other up so he won’t follow the other down. I catch the next marshal with a thrust into his gut. He’d already moved into fighting position while I was killing the first three, and when I stab him, his gun goes off by my ear. The ejected shell bounces off my temple. Before it hits the floor, I’ve pulled the blade up and out through his head. As I kill the others, each gets off one or two shots. In their confusion, most of their bullets hit each other. Ejected shells arc through the air and bounce off my cheeks and chest. The last few marshals all fire at once. The shots I can’t sidestep, I vaporize with the blade. When eleven are dead I move in to kill the last one, but when I raise the Gladius my arms stay up. She’s not like the others.
I stare at Marshal Julie for a moment and lower the burning sword to my side.
“You’re Sub Rosa,” I say.
She nods.
“We try to be like them. To have a few eyes everywhere,
like them,” she says, inclining her head toward Wells and Aelita.
I look down at the gun in her hand. The steel barrel is black and cold. No trace of warmth there. She didn’t fire. When she sees that I’ve seen, she shakes her head.
“I wouldn’t hurt you. You’re one of us.”
“No. I’m not.”
That scares her, but it’s not what I intended.
“You should go now,” I tell her.
“No she shouldn’t.”
I turn and there’s Wells with a big .50 Desert Eagle pointed at my head. He gives me his Clint Eastwood stare. He’s scared to death, but disciplined enough that it doesn’t matter. He’d kill me without hesitation or regret if I let him.
He says, “If she’s a pixie spy, she can rot in prison alive and in Hell right next to you when she’s dead. You killed my people and she just stood there. Fuck both of you.”
I’m running at him with the Gladius at throat level, but Aelita is already moving to him and she’s closer. She’s as fast as I am, so while she’s a blur to others, to me she looks like a normal woman walking to a man and plucking a gun from his hand. She holds the pistol with the barrel up to indicate she isn’t going to shoot. I stop, but keep the Gladius high.
In real time, human time, Marshal Wells looks at his empty hand and starts. He turns, looking for his weapon.
Aelita shows him that she has it. He doesn’t say a word. His gaze is as puzzled as it is wounded.