Skullcrack City (21 page)

Then I saw the carrying case. I wasn’t sure how Ms. A. selected which scarabs to use for her ritual, so I’d brought down a plastic box full of the things. I grabbed the case and crept closer to the door, pistol in my other hand. When it sounded like the men were about ten yards away, I flipped the lid to the container and slid it as hard as I could down the hall.

Gunshots erupted. Plastic shattered. A man screamed.

I rounded the corner as low as I could to see Toro collapsed on the ground, frantically trying to knock the beetles from his body.

“They’re in my fucking pants, Pedro!”

Pedro looked up from his friend in time to see the man who’d beetle-bombed them, but I had the drop. I pointed in Pedro’s direction and closed my eyes reflexively and squeezed off three shots. The first knocked me on my ass, and I heard the second ricocheting down the concrete corridor, but the third shot was accompanied by a grunt. Pedro was on the ground now, too. And he was smoking.

No, he was…steaming?

His skin bubbled bright red. Vapor rolled from his mouth, ears, and nose, and the hole in his abdomen. He looked up at me just as his eyes erupted outward and two puffs of steam floated from his face.

What had Dara called these? Boiler rounds? Why did something like this exist?

Toro was rising to his feet, pushing up with his good arm, covered in crushed Coleoptera fragments. I aimed at him, eyes open this time, but that seemed to throw me off. My three remaining shots went wild, embedding in concrete or flying off down the hall. Behind Toro I could see all that was left of Ms. A.: flesh-and-blood wallpaper showing the blast pattern of the detonated grenade.

Toro charged, firing his gun. I dove back through the doorway to Dara’s room. Thudding to the concrete stole my breath. I couldn’t reach the scalpel on the surgical tray.

Toro rushed through the entrance, shoulder-checking me so hard I flew against the back wall and slid down to the floor. He lifted his gun and aimed and pulled the trigger. It clicked on nothing because he’d wasted his bullets on beetle shelters and hallway concrete. Undeterred, he charged toward me and swung a boot into my ribs and I fell over and he brought his boot down on my chest again. I reached into my back pocket with the arm pinned underneath me, realizing my pilfered knucks were all I had, and held up my other arm to shield off his boot as he tried to stomp my head.

My fingers laced in through the silver knuckles and the thing felt warm and heavy in my hand. Toro lifted his leg again, swinging it back in a full pendulum arch, and I reached out and grabbed his other leg and pulled it toward me as hard as I could.

Toro dropped and let out a sincerely felt, “OOF!” and then I was above him on my knees and I aimed my heavy metal hand for his jaw, but he raised both his arms and my punch glanced downward and caught him right in the center of his chest.

Which, it turned out, was exactly what I was supposed to do with those things. But at the time, per my M.O., it was dumb luck.

Dara explained the Core Purge to me later: It was a Vakhtang weapon they’d secured, and it did something to bone and cartilage which caused it to vibrate at precisely the wrong frequency for the human body.

So at that moment, when my punch landed square in the middle of Toro’s xyphoid process, it turned his rib cage into some kind of ungodly tuning fork. He vibrated on the floor and his eyes rolled back in his head. Having just seen what boiler rounds were capable of, I knew well enough to step back.

Toro reached out his arms to me, as if I could stabilize him, and then his back arched until his horns scraped on the floor beneath him, and there was a low rumbling from his mouth as the purge came: body-wracking spasms rolled through him and he flopped onto his side and there was a heaving sound and then a splash as he let loose the liquefied slurry that used to be his organs.

It only stopped once his esophagus prolapsed and hung from his mouth like a massive cow’s tongue. All of this took about a minute, but time stretches out when you’re witnessing an abomination.

My hands were shaking. I pulled the silver knuckles from my fist and threw them across the room.

Those were in my back pocket. Jesus. What if I’d sat down too fast?

I looked at Dara, sliding in and out of consciousness, stirring on the stretcher. We had to move. It was possible Toro and Pedro had launched their rogue assault on the fly, but what if they were always transmitting to the Vakhtang organization, sending their experiences to some kind of central hive? I understood nothing, truly, aside from the fact that people were trying to kill us, and they would not stop. And the compound, painted in a fresh coat of Ms. A., wasn’t a safe place anymore.

I rolled Dara into another room, so if she woke she wouldn’t find the puddled remains of Toro. I ran from room to room and gathered what I thought we might be able to fit in the blue sedan. Every little sound was Them, someone else who’d come to kill us. It was tough to focus through the fear, and I couldn’t stand being away from Dara while I knew she was incapacitated.

I piled our gear by the front door—Ms. A.’s radio, Deckard in his enclosure, one suitcase filled with clothes and cash, our guns, my backpack. Was this all we had?

I found an old picture of Dara by her sleeping cot. She was much younger in the photo, her arm wrapped around another girl, both of them smiling on a picnic blanket. The younger girl was leaning to one side, doing her best to conceal a missing arm. I popped the picture out of the frame and slid it into my pocket.

I rushed back toward Dara’s room, passing the steel door with the white symbol painted on the front. Clarence heard me walk by and called after. “They’re here, pallies. I can feel them. All will be aligned at last! They’re closer than ever!”

I yelled back, “Shut the fuck up, Clarence!” But he was right. They were closing in. I could feel it too.

I reached Dara and tried to wake her gently. I placed one hand against her cheek and brushed back her hair with the other.

“Dara?”

Her eye fluttered open briefly, then rolled back in her head. She moaned in complaint.

“You’ve got to wake up. We have to go. I think the Vakhtang know we’re here.”

Their name hit her like freezing water. She opened her eye and focused on me.

“I’m still alive?”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck. My bad eye? They did something to it…”

“We got it out.”

“Where’s Ms. A.?”

“She’s gone.”

“She left ahead of us?”

“No.”

“Oh…”

“I’m sorry.”

“We’re in real trouble.”

“Yeah. I think so. We’ve got to go now.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s a hell of a plan.”

“I came up with it myself. I only know we need to go, and now. Do you think you can walk?”

She pushed herself upright on the stretcher. Dead scarabs fell from her chest, their signal-blocking services rendered as sacrifice. She swayed and held her head. Staying up was taking all her focus. “My balance is kind of a hot mess right now. Think you could button up my shirt?”

I could.

“That’s better. Now you think you can put your arm under mine while we walk?”

I did.

There’d been no time to alter the hallway’s abattoir status. Dara leaned on me and we walked softly through the remnants of what was left of her world, trailing bloody footprints on our way to a future that neither of us could any longer imagine.

If there was another compound set up and waiting somewhere in the city, the only woman who knew about it had been vaporized. As business resumption plans went, the mission’s was far too dependent on key figures not being murdered.

Dara asked me to drive, slow and steady, while she combed her contacts for someone sympathetic to our cause. But it turned out that even people who’d contracted for Ms. A. in the past weren’t too keen on the idea of taking in a one-eyed woman, a known fugitive, and his turtle.

Leon Spasky ran guns to the mission, but his industry demanded no ideological loyalties be shown. “I’m not snitching or anything, but I take you in and that goes public, maybe I lose a major client. Maybe worse. Sorry. Good luck, y’all.”

Claire DuBois worked undercover for narcotics. She’d survived deep cover in a low level Hex distribution ring thanks to information fed to her by the mission. Ms. A. had literally saved this woman’s life before, and yet: “There’s too much heat on your pal. Rumor mill is saying he killed two of ours. They find you guys with me, that’s a death sentence. I can’t. I’ve got to go.”

I realized I
had
killed two of theirs. Just not the two they knew about yet. Still, I riled at the scapegoat status I was catching from every side.

Better call a press conference and clear things up.

Dara turned to me. “Last chance. Here goes.”

Huey Sheppard called himself a psychic energy adjustment agent, and saw himself as a healer, repairing chakras, auras, and like, freeing consciousness, man. Which was all semi-tolerable, considering he was also a hell of a drug dealer.

“You’ve reached Megaton Consulting. May I ask who’s calling?”

I could hear the voice on the phone, clearly the kind of forced falsetto a man would put in place when trying to sound like a woman.

“Huey, it’s Dara. You know voice rec software would still pick up your audio signature, right?”

Huey cleared his throat and came back with an even higher voice, some kind of chipmunk/dolphin hybrid. “My dear, I simply don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Wait, are you supposed to be southern now? Goddamn it, this is serious. How much longer do you need me to talk?”

“A moment more, dear.”

“Alright. A moment’s about all I have to…”

“Okay, okay. I’ve gotcha.” Huey returned to what I assumed was his regular voice: low, male, scratchy and worn, the sound of a larynx run ragged by too many nights of shouting acid-head epiphanies.

“You know there’s better software now. You could have picked up my voice in a couple of seconds.”

“I know. My voice rec is fast. It’s my new tracking system that takes a minute. You guys are near my hood. Why?”

“We need a favor.”

“What? I just delivered Ms. A.’s dry cleaning last week. I told her the next round is going to take a while longer to tidy up. The amount of laundry she wants done, it’ll take some effort.”

He sounded exasperated. I knew we’d been running through the mission’s perphenadol stash at top speed, and I guessed the theft at St. Mercy wasn’t making it any easier to come by.

“That’s not it, Huey. I’m up in the air right now, and I need an emergency landing.”

“Any other passengers with you?”

“Only one. And a turtle.”

“
Cool
. What kind?”

I spoke up. “He’s a red-eared slider.”

“Whoa. Who’s that?”

“I told you, I’ve got another passenger.”

“Put him on.”

“Hello?”

“The alphabet, pal. Get going.”

I made it to Q before he cut me off.

“Okay. Can you give the phone back to Dara please?” I passed it to her, my eyebrows raised, hoping I hadn’t blown it.

“You trust this guy? News says he’s involved in some serious shit.”

“The news is lying. Come on. You know better than to buy their line.”

“I know, I know. But it’s the brain stuff. I like my brain. I’m fond of it, right where it is inside my head.”

“That’s not him. Trust me, it can’t be. He’s just a guy who got caught up in a bad habit and made a few mistakes at work.”

“He’s clean now? What am I saying? He’s with you, he’d have to be. Any chance you guys are still in possession of some of his, uh, workplace mistakes?”

We can buy this guy.

I’d never felt that sensation before, the thrill of money turning into real power.

“We are, and we’re in the mood to be rid of them.”

“Then I think I can help you with your problem. The runway is clear for your emergency landing. Ring through when you’re near the rear service elevator and I’ll make sure Orwell takes a nap.”