Shotgun Sorceress (32 page)

She took a deep breath. “So I guess that’s a long way of saying, I think we probably have just one shot at it. And I’m kinda worried that if the first thing we do is blind David, the shadow will know something’s up and just hightail it for the river.”

I hadn’t thought of that; I was still feeling pretty feverish, the heat and sun weren’t helping, and my brain was more than a little addled.

“Well, that changes things,” I replied. “Does David keep a lot of the meat puppets around?”

“I think so, yeah. I think he uses them as … toys.” She loaded the word with a variety of unsavory implications. “And when he’s done with them, he feeds them to the shadow.”

“Hm.” I pondered the problem.

“Might I suggest,” Pal said to me, “that going in spells and guns ablaze might not be our best strategy? If we could find some way of catching the shadow off guard, that would give us a greater likelihood of succeeding here.”

“Right,” I replied, shrugging out of my backpack. “Okay. Change of plan. Pal, shrink yourself down as much as possible.” I started to pull the saddle pad and saddlebags off his back.

He blinked at me. “How small, exactly?”

I stacked his tack in a pile against the drive-in’s pale brick wall and laid my shotgun and pack on top. “I want you to look like nothing more than a common wolf spider and ride on Charlie’s shoulder. Can you do that?”

“I suppose so.” He sang himself down until he was the size of a small tarantula. “Is this good?”

“Good enough, I think.” I scooped him up and set him on Charlie’s shoulder. He blended in reasonably well with her gray T-shirt; I doubted anyone would be able to spot him at a distance.

Charlie didn’t look entirely happy to have Pal sitting on her. “What now?”

“Now we walk over to the gardens.” I pulled my kitten out of my sling and handed it to her, then took the sling off and threw it onto the pile of gear. “You’re going to tell David that I’m your prisoner, a gift for the shadow. You’ve changed your mind and you want to join them in their merry life of murder and plunder and zombie raising.”

The girl stood there holding the kitten, staring at me as if I’d sprouted a second head that was reciting French existentialist poetry. “You … want me to hand you over to the shadow? Are you
nuts?
”

“Yes, I do, and no, I’m not crazy. I have a plan.” I gave her my best Cooper-style, everything’s-gonna-be-okay smile. “Convince them that you’re serious about joining Team Shadow, and then follow my lead. Oh, and one other thing: if all of a sudden I look like I’m not myself? I’m probably not. Get away from me as fast as possible.”

She stowed the kitten in her sling with its twin, and we followed the sidewalk to the Civic League Park. The front gates were rusted open. The path inside the park led us through displays of long-dead rosebushes down to a ravine shaded with hemlocks and live oaks. Once we’d crossed a limestone footbridge over a small natural pond filled with koi, we came out of the trees into the big bowl-shaped water lily garden. The air stank of human filth and rotting flesh. I put my hands on top of my head.

“Put your gun at my back,” I whispered. Charlie did as I asked.

On the opposite rim, a small cottage shaded by oaks and pecan trees overlooked the garden, which was roughly the size of a couple of Olympic swimming pools set side by side. In it were eight rectangular, raised concrete water lily ponds with wide limestone rims. Most of the ponds were in varying stages of decay and algae-choked neglect with a few lilies bravely blooming here and there; one pond, however, was nothing but foul-looking sludge, black as crude oil.

A skinny young man of maybe nineteen or twenty with a shaved head was dragging something down the path from the cottage. He was wearing just a pair of muddy canvas sneakers and a ragged blue Superman T-shirt.

He heaved once more on his burden, and then I heard him snarl, “Get up, dammit!”

The burden twitched, and laboriously stood. It was another thin young man, completely naked but for a huge American eagle tattoo on his chest. His mouth hanging slackly open, he took three tottering, marionette-like steps and then collapsed onto his knees.

Cursing, David hauled the meat puppet up and half carried, half dragged him toward the pond of black sludge.

“God,” Charlie whispered. “He looks even worse than he did before.”

David, intent on his task, didn’t notice us. He hauled the puppet to the edge of the sludge pond, stood him up, and pushed him in. As soon as the puppet landed inside, the sludge heaved up around him and then ripped him to shreds as if the liquid were made of a million vicious blades. In seconds it was all over, and the sludge was still again, gleaming quiet and dark in the sun.

David was leaning forward on his knees, catching his breath, but he turned his head sharply toward the sludge as if it had said something to him, and then he stood up, squinting at us.

“Who’s there?” he yelled.

“It’s me,” Charlie called back. “I … I thought about what you said, and you’re right. It’s stupid to be on the losing side. I want to join y’all. And I got a present for the shadow.”

“Well, heyyy, how about that!” David grinned, looking as excited as a six-year-old on Christmas morning. His teeth were rotted gray stubs in his mouth, little tombstones in his bleeding gums. “I knew you’d come around! We got us some good times ahead, girlfriend. Why don’t you and your present come on down and let me take a look?”

We slowly walked toward David, my hands still on my head, Charlie’s rifle at my back. As we got closer, I saw that his head wasn’t shaved; the hair looked like it had mostly all fallen out except for some stray long greasy strands here and there. Even his eyebrows were gone. His eyes were a sickly yellow, and he didn’t look or smell like he’d bathed in months. His face was blotched with acne, and his bald genitals were crusty, pitted with chancres.

“Well, ain’t you a tasty-looking piece?” he asked me, his jaundiced eyes shining. “Too bad you’re a girl, but you look like you got some muscle in your bustle, so we can play a little make-believe. I bet you’re a whole lot more lively than what I got around here.”

David snapped his fingers, and there was a mass rustling in the trees and brush ringing the top of the garden. At least thirty meat puppets in various stages of dress and undress emerged and stood at attention. Most of them appeared to be captured ROTC cadets, and they were armed with axes and baseball bats.

Hoo boy. This could go badly.

“My very own gimp squad.” David laughed. “They do exactly what I tell ’em, but sometimes that gets a little boring, you know? So, hey, Charlie, thanks.”

“Sh-she’s for the shadow,” Charlie stammered, looking horrified.

“Aw, the shadow don’t mind sloppy seconds. That’s the deal, I always get first dibs.” Then his expression soured. “Well,
Miko
gets first dibs, but that ain’t gonna have to go on too much longer, ’specially not now that you’re here, Charlie.”

He beamed at her. “Good times, I’m telling you! We’ll bust on out of here with all the loot I got up at the house, drive to Vegas, live like gangstas!”

David suddenly turned toward the sludge pond like a dog that had been chain-jerked. “Aw. Seriously? … Fine.”

He turned back to Charlie, petulant as a kid who’d just been denied an ice cream cone. “The shadow wants to see her. Get her up on that ledge over there.”

Charlie poked me in the back with the barrel of her rifle, and I stepped toward the sludge pond, my heart hammering in my sweaty chest. At least with my jacket on over my bull-riding glove, David couldn’t see my fire, and with a little luck the shadow wouldn’t be able to sense it until it was too late.

Jessie …
I heard the little-girl voice inside my head. It was just as creepy as Charlie had described.
Tell me what you want, Jessie
.

Licking my suddenly dry lips, I climbed up onto the pond’s ledge and stared down into the shiny blackness. Tried to blank out my thoughts, in case it had stronger telepathy than Charlie had suggested. I started to replay the lyrics to Beastie Boys songs in my head, over and over, no sleeping till Brooklyn, it was sabotage.

Come on, you can tell me
, the shadow wheedled.
I bet you don’t like that Miko much, do you? I don’t like her, either
.

Suddenly, I had an image in my head of myself killing David, taking his head right off with one of the puppets’ axes, and taking his place. I wouldn’t become a diseased wreck like him. I was strong, so much stronger than the boy, and the shadow and I could defeat Miko together. And then we could rescue my men and leave the town. I could have anything I wanted, and with the shadow’s power, nobody could stop me.

It was a compelling vision, all right, and for two milliseconds I might have even believed it.

“I hate Miko with the white-hot passion of a thousand burning suns,” I whispered, crouching down on the ledge. The surface of the sludge was bulging slightly; I knew the shadow was right there below me. “But you know what?”

I whipped off my glove and plunged my flaming hand into the sludge, and as the shadow shrieked inside my head, I pulled us both into my hellement.

I was standing in my old bedroom, and before me was what looked like an overturned five-gallon bucket of raspberry jelly, only it sure didn’t smell like any fruit you’d want to eat. It didn’t have any visible eyes or mouth or any other features, but the thing shuddered as if it were startled, disoriented.

“I hate slimy, parasitic little devils like you a whole lot more,” I told it.

The jelly shrieked and whipped spiky pseudopods at my legs. I jumped backward onto the bed to dodge the swipe, rolled across the mattress, and landed on the other side. The jelly was sprouting pseudopods everywhere, the red tentacles shooting up to stick to the ceiling, the walls, lifting the boneless body up off the ground as the jelly separated in the middle, forming a toothy, noxious maw. Worse, the jelly was swelling, growing, apparently feeding off the dark energies that still irradiated the hellement.

“That was a nasty trick, bringing me here,” the jelly said in its little-girl voice. “I’m going to kill you for it.”

My sword and shield were by the dresser where I’d left them; I snatched them up barely in time to slash at a pair of pseudopods shooting at me from across the bed. The cut pseudopods retreated, whipping away, spraying me with ichor that sizzled painfully on my face and arms. The jelly was growing so quickly that in a few minutes it would surely suffocate me with its sheer bulk.

“If you kill me, how are you going to get out of here?” I yelled, trying to ignore the pain from my acid burns.

My question registered, and seemed to stymie it for just a minute. I quickly blinked through several gemviews with my ocularis, hoping I’d see something … and there it was: a pulsing heart in the middle of the gooey mass.

There was no time to waste. I launched myself back across the bed at the monster and rammed my left arm right into its soft body. Instantly my flesh was burning, my skin melting, and the creature was shrieking, whipping my back and arms with its pseudopods, and I knew I’d be dead in just a few seconds if I didn’t kill it. Right before the nerves in my hand died, I felt my fingers close on its nasty little heart and I gave a hard jerk, pulling it free. The pseudopods went slack, and the jelly fell to the floor with a tremendous splat.

I staggered backward into the dresser. My left hand was nearly skeletal, and the blue-black heart slipped from my fingers onto the floor. The organ sprouted centipede legs and started to scurry back to the jelly mass, presumably to regenerate the monster. I took careful aim with my sword and speared it right to the floorboards. The heart spasmed around the blade, then began to disintegrate into a nasty gray liquid. The jelly body, too, was decaying to a pool of sour blood on the floor.

Once the burst of adrenaline subsided, I realized that my left arm was in tremendous pain, and the acidic ichor was continuing to eat its way through my flesh and bone. Time to leave. I hopped over the puddle and opened the red portal door with my good hand.

The return to my body was disorienting and unpleasant. I couldn’t see; there was a thick, stinging liquid in my eyes. My face was wet and sticky, and there was blood and something else in my mouth. I spat it out, just as a dozen death-memories hit me, and I spent the next few minutes being violently ill.

When I’d purged most of the blood and the memories along with it, I wiped my eyes with my arm—thank God, I was still wearing my dragonskins—and blinked, trying to see.

I was sickened but not even remotely surprised to see the mangled corpse of a meat puppet at my feet. But I wasn’t in the garden. I looked around; I’d run up into the trees, I supposed to find more puppets to kill. The garden below me was the scene of a massacre; it looked as though David had sent a half-dozen puppets after me at the sludge pond, but then I’d run around killing anything I could lay my hands on. No one was moving.

My heart dropped. Charlie. Where was Charlie? And then I saw her kneeling beside David. She looked like she was okay, or at least not badly injured. David’s jaundiced eyes were staring wide, and I could see a dark pool of blood under his head.

The exhaustion hit me all at once, and I had to lean against the trunk of a nearby pecan tree to keep from keeling over. I got my second wind after a moment or two, and I made my way down the path toward Charlie, my arms and legs shaking and muscles twitching and fever at full burn.

“Charlie,” I croaked. “Are you okay?”

She nodded, not replying. Tears were running down her cheeks as she stared at David’s body.

“Did I do that?” I asked.

She shook her head, then gently turned David’s face toward me so I could see the bullet wound in his temple. “I did, when he sicced the zombies on you.”

“I—I’m sorry you didn’t get to say something to him, before, you know …” I trailed off, then thought,
Pal, where the heck are you?

“I’m over here, on this lily pad. I wasn’t sure how I could do any good; Charlie reached safety on her own and attempting to stop the Goad rampaging in your body seemed rather perilous even at my full size.”