Strange Magic: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (10 page)

“Don’t worry princess,” Greg said, noting the look on my face, “I’ve got your back, you’ll see ‘em—”

He didn’t finish the sentence. Everything had been hunky-dory.

One-step changed that.

I could see it all again, like a movie reel playing in slow motion:

Corporal Martin and Benson were playing some silly grab-ass game.

Dio, Collins, and Schmidt were getting down on an impromptu game of Hold ‘Em.

Dickens, Sottack, and Litchfield chain-smoked a round of cigarettes in the shade of a young tualang tree.

Greg was telling me things were going to be okay.

Then: Corporal Martin tripped a little, staggering from a patch of sunlight into the gloomy shade of a squat palm tree.

Everything turned real slow, surreal, shrouded in haze and fog. Martin stumbled a little … a terrible light enveloped him, made his face and arms shine for a moment with radiant light. For an honest to God moment, it looked like an angel had come and scooped him up—like the rapture had happened, maybe. It scooped him up and was kind of beautiful in its way. Then the light was
in
him, in his arms and legs, hands and feet, face and guts—they pulled apart.

The heat hit me like a wave and I was all caught up in the tangled undergrowth of the jungle floor. I’d never seen anything like it before, never seen death—not for real, not close up like that. The light had plucked Martin’s ass right up and tore him to pieces; it scattered chunks of him into the tualang tree that Dickens, Sottack, and Litchfield had been smoking under. Great ropy strings of gray guts hung from the overhead branches like crepe paper at a party.

The light hadn’t killed him, I knew. It wasn’t an angel or the friggin’ rapture, it was a rigged 105 round. The VC had killed him. Then, the shooting began. I didn’t even know whether we were being fired at … shit, I wasn’t even sure there were VC up ahead. The blast had gone off and then the firing had started, but it could’ve been our side or theirs, I didn’t know. All I knew for sure was that Martin was dead and that I didn’t want to die.

“Shit. Someone help!—” I let the scream fall away. There was something rustling in the bushes behind me, I couldn’t see, but I knew a person approached.
A VC ambush
, my brain shrieked. Some pajama-wearing Charlie was about to slit my friggin’ throat!
Turn around,
my maddened brain demanded,
turn around and shoot that asshole into the next world
! I fumbled for my M-16 but it was useless, my hands didn’t want to work and I couldn’t turn anyways, the pain was too much. I steeled myself for the end …
Please God forgive me, please take care of my family, please let that asshole Greg live through this
.
Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, please-please-please-please
…

A hand fell on my shoulder and I almost let go of my bladder.

“I got ya’, bud,” Greg said. He moved into view. Raw red and black flesh—speckled throughout with pieces of melted cammie—wrapped around his left bicep. But he was moving okay, despite the wound. Probably riding high as a kite on all the endorphins and adrenaline running through him.

“I’m gonna get your ass out of here,” he said. “Told you I’d have your back.”

He bent low and scooped me up with a grunt, settling my bulk around his shoulders in a classic fireman carry. My leg wanted nothing to do with it, the hot coals in my skin rekindled anew, my eyes drifted shut from pain. He started running—running—through the jungle away from the VC and back toward our last forward outpost. A little chunk of cadence drifted into my brain:
Running through the jungle with my M-16, I’m a mean motherfucker I’m a U.S. Marine. Sight alignment, sight picture, right between the eyes—slow, steady squeeze and another VC dies. But if I should die in the combat zone, well box me up and ship me home.

I saw a piece of Martin’s face, charred black, lying in a sparse dirt patch, staring at me with one glazed eye.
Box me up and ship me home.

TWELVE:

Game Plan

I woke up a lifetime later, flashes of Vietnam—like the brief burst of a rigged 105 round—fading into the dim, dusty vaults of memory. Martin’s charred face stared at me for a moment, but I pushed it away. Some memories were better left forgotten and buried.

I didn’t know where I was, but I was alive. Score one for me. I knew I was alive because of the pain: the hurt was an inferno in my bones and flesh, almost alive itself. The agony lashed upward from my wounded posterior, danced around my bruised ribs, and finally did a mean-spirited jig on my busted-up chin. Pain like this is only for the living.

But I actually felt better than I expected to. Someone—either Morse and the bikers or the Kings—had taken the time to patch me up and they’d actually done a competent job. I could feel the stiff edge of stitches running over the surface of my ass and there were squares of gauze affixed to my skin with paper tape in a variety of places, including my aching chin. My captors had even hooked me up to a portable IV (admittedly, it was
hanging from a worn-down coat rack), which appeared to be pumping saline fluid and antibiotics into my veins. Nice, though I bet my co-pay was going to be hell. Gang health care is notoriously expensive in the end. Way worse than your typical HMO, though maybe not by much.

The next thing I noticed was that I couldn’t move, like at all. I was still feeling groggy from the lingering effects of the tranquilizing agent, but my immobility was total—way more than some left over tranq juice could account for. I’d been Saran-wrapped to a plastic, folding, banquet table, like the kind a church might use at an outdoor luncheon. I still had pants on, but my captors had stripped away every other article of clothing. The suffocating, squeaky tight plastic looped around my arms and torso in thick swathes, pulling at my body hair. My jeans masked the feeling of the wrap, but a constricting pressure—both above and below my knees—told me they too had been fastened securely in place.

Damn, Saran-wrap was a smart move. I couldn’t risk cutting the stuff with an air construct, or I’d likely filet myself in the process. Likewise, if I tried to burn through the stuff, the whole mess would go up in flames and leave me one very crispy-critter—it’d be like getting blasted with friggin’ napalm.

Well, at least I could move my head, even if it felt like trying to pick up a mountain. I sure hoped the fading aftereffects of the drugs would pass in time. I wasn’t too optimistic though, the damn headache throbbing behind my temples felt like it was probably going to be sticking with me for a while yet. None of that mattered though—I couldn’t afford to lay around waiting to fully recover. I could be dead by then. So, I made an effort to lift my thousand-pound noggin and take a little looksee, even though it caused a renewed wave of hurt to skip through my skull.

If I had any hope of getting out of here, I needed to first figure out where
here
was. I also needed to figure out what kind of defenses I’d be going up against.

The room wasn’t anything special—certainly not the freaky old-brick dungeon I’d envisioned in my mind: a moderate sized living room, which wouldn’t be out of place in any middle-class home. An oversized, wrap-around sofa hugged the wall to my left and disappeared behind my head. Directly in front of me sat a big flat screen, framed by a set of thick brown drapes, covering a large den window, with a reinforced front door to the left. A sparsely filled bookcase and a small table, holding car keys and assorted junk mail, off to my right.

The smell of red-sauce and grilled meat drifted from the kitchen, while the faint aroma of cigarettes and stale pot filled the room. I could hear a handful of muffled voices, mixed with the clink and scrape of silverware. The soft blare of a television, from elsewhere, carried the nasally laugh of Sponge Bob, followed shortly by the high-pitched shrieks of delighted children. Maybe my mind had been fried by the tranquilizers, because I couldn’t figure this out.

I went through the last few things I could remember:

I’d been pumped full of tranquilizers, busted a hole in the back wall of The Full House, got shot in the ass, and had, eventually, passed out in dog pee under a car. Right?

So how’d I ended up Saran-wrapped to a table in white-picket suburbia? This was too small-time to be the Kings, which meant Morse had found me. But why bring me here, of all places?

It didn’t make a damn lick of sense. Morse and the Saints must have had buildings better suited to holding captives, like that bar of theirs—or maybe a clubhouse or even an auto body shop—but not a place where there would be children present. Generally, bad guys don’t torture people in front of their kids. That’s taboo even for the worst of the worst.

A safehouse maybe? No, I doubted it. This living room felt … too lived in. Yeah, that was it. The piled junk mail on the table, the worn and picked through novels on the bookcase, the overall care of the abode. It all spoke of a loving, if busy, hand.

There was also a faint energy lingering in the air, kind of like the hot, muggy atmosphere of a New Orleans night—a palpable, if unseen force. It was the slow, dull, power that builds up around a home with a domicilium seal. Wherever I was, it was a place where people lived; a place where dishes were done and meals cooked, where teeth were brushed, and good night kisses issued. This house carried the weight of reality, charged overtime by the mundane and commonplace—it was more than merely a house, it was a home. There was only one reason I could think of for bringing me to a place like this …

A glance at the antique wall-clock, hanging by the TV, confirmed my suspicion: Five PM. I’d been out for nearly fifteen hours. It also meant it was Saturday evening and that the nightmare, who’d been tearing up LA, was only a few hours away from putting in its weekly horror-show performance.

Here I was, strapped to a table among Morse and his crew—a tasty appetizer for whatever was going to rip its way through the front door when the sun fell.

Morse was planning to use the seal of this home to try and ward off whatever had been targeting their club members over the past month. Morse may not have looked like much of a threat, but he was smart—the home’s natural seal would be more likely to stop a supernatural baddy than all the humdrum human security defenses folks usually employ: concrete, bricks, razor-wire, or guns. Admittedly, those things are awfully handy to have around, even when the enemy you’re dealing with has claws, fangs, or gooey tentacle thingies.

Never underestimate the power of good ol’ vanilla human ingenuity.

The scrape of a chair cut off my thoughts—someone was sitting not far behind me, just out of view.

“He’s awake, boss,” said the sentry, his voice filled with the sounds of slight panic. “He’s moving around—what should I do?”

A door opened and the stifled sounds of eating spilled out with greater clarity for a brief moment, before the door swung shut.

Someone drew near, given away by the muffled sound of footfalls on carpet.

“You sure know how to show a guy a good time,” I said. “Good scotch, gun fights, intravenous fluids, and even Saran-wrap—pretty kinky.”

“Glad to see the tranquilizers didn’t do any permanent brain damage,” replied Morse, “would’ve been a real shame to lose such a sharp wit and keen mind.”

“I’m glad you recognize my invaluable gift to humanity—I am the great philosopher of our age, you know.”

“Obviously,” he said.

His tone annoyed the piss outta me. It was the same tone a long-suffering adult might use with a particularly petulant and dense child. I had thirty years on this guy, easy—age has to count for something, right?—though I suppose I could’ve been a little more grown-up considering the seriousness of my circumstance. But hey, if you can’t crack a few jokes when the chips are down, what’s the point of living? Sure, you can tranquilize me, shoot me, strap me to a table, feed me to a demon, or bore me to death with bad villain monologues, but you can’t make me something other than I am.

“Has your keen philosophical insight given you some clue why you’re alive?” Morse asked, drawing into my periphery.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve given it some thought, but it’s generally not my policy to divulge valuable info to the guy who’s holding me hostage.”

“Okay, Yancy—maybe it’s better you don’t talk anymore. That big mouth of yours is tempting me to put a bullet in your head, on principle.” He took a deep breath, pulled a padded folding chair into view, turned it around, and straddled it with a hunter’s ease. “Let me lay a few things out for you, so that you know why you’re alive and how things are going to go down tonight.”

“Please do tell,” I said.

He pulled out his Ruger and set it on the table, six-inches away, muzzle aimed at my head. “How ‘bout you just try real hard to listen.”

“Okey-dokey.”

“I don’t think you’re the asshole behind this and I don’t think you’re the fucker responsible for calling up this demon, or whatever. So I’m gonna take a gamble on you—I’ve got the whole crew here. The twenty one members left, plus their girlfriends, wives, and kids.
Everyone
. Can’t tell who the Conjurer’s gonna pick, so if we’re all here, the monster has to come here. Right?”