Slashback

9

Cal

Present Day

I liked fire.

Not in a sick arsonist burning down a nunnery full of kittens way. But if something had to be burned down or up or sideways, I didn’t mind being involved. It was better than fireworks and no annoying noise . . . or not until the fire trucks arrived.

“It’s an abandoned bridge. Yeah, they were going to fix it up but of course they haven’t gotten around to it.” I waved a hand at the Google Earth pictures Niko had printed off . . . never mind, we all knew what High Bridge over the Harlem River looked like already. “It’s stone and metal. Can’t burn that. But we can get a garbage truck, soak the garbage in diesel fuel for more smoke and a longer burning time, push our way through the concrete barriers off Amsterdam Avenue with the truck, drive onto the bridge, dump the garbage, light her up with my flamethrower, and torch the fucker. Or at least half of it. We need the other half to fight on. If Jack Sprat doesn’t notice that then we’ll get him a Seeing Eye dog and forget worrying about his homicidal and blind ass.”

This was perfect and going right at the top of my resume.

“You cannot have come up with that on the spur of the moment,” Niko protested with what sounded a good deal like suspicion and hope mixed into one. I tried to get a fix on whether he was proud or appalled. I was hoping for both. I did love to mess with Nik.

“Sometimes I get bored. When I get bored, bam, mental mass destruction is my hobby. I’ve had this one on file for a while now.” Did I say that smugly? A little. I asked Goodfellow as Niko appeared too scarred for words, “It’s a gift, yeah?”

“It is that. I could not be more proud if you were a trickster yourself. I wish you’d been around for the whole Trojan horse event.” Something wistful and somewhat secretive shifted behind his expression but he kept that gleeful grin on his face. “Somehow there would’ve been at least a thousand pounds of flaming horse manure involved. Homer would’ve loved penning that part of the tale.” He took out his cell. “Garbage truck. Give me three minutes.”

“You can locate a full garbage truck for us in three minutes?” Niko sounded curious despite his automatic caution. After a few years the combination of Robin and me was beginning to send him into Stockholm Syndrome I thought. About time. It would be better for his mental health if he closed his eyes and enjoyed the roller-coaster ride.

Robin smirked. “In five minutes I could find you a tanker truck of boysenberry-flavored self-warming body oil and six men and women willing to apply it. Care to put it to the test?”

While he made his call, I was digging out the fruits of one of my own from under my bed. I’d made the call last night after our encounter with Jack to my weapons supplier, Rapture. She’d recently added delivery service—you got your weapons in an hour or ten percent off . . . and as always a free cupcake from the bakery that served as a front to the best weapons dump in the tri-state area. That was what I loved about NYC. You could get anything delivered.

I’d decided to up the ante, weapons-wise. Since explosive rounds didn’t work and I couldn’t open a gate and turn Jack into an explosion himself, the bastard, for fear of turning us or innocent bystanders into the annoying potential of hamburger-textured collateral damage, I went with a nice piece I’d been going to hit up Nik for Christmas. An MP7A1 Heckler and Koch submachine gun with suppressor. Compact, not quite twice the size of my Desert Eagle and with the added bonus of forty armor-piercing rounds. If that didn’t make a dent in Jack, I didn’t know what would. He was too damn fast to depend on the leftover grenades I’d also shoved under my bed.

Oh yeah. I made another grab. We needed the flamethrower. This was shaping up to be a party.

“I have the garbage truck and the location to pick it up.” Robin disconnected his cell and checked his watch. “Two minutes forty-five seconds.”

Niko gave Robin and me both a curdled expression: Goodfellow with his smugness and me with an armful of weapons meant to make people go dead in the night. “I know the two of you want me to praise your excellence in thievery and your preparation to kill anything that might escape Jurassic Park.” I did love that movie. “But any encouragement on my part would only push you to greater heights and the eventual destruction of Western civilization. I’m going to get dressed. Cal, unless you want to fight in a T-shirt that says ‘With a good spotter, snipers can find the G-spot every time’ and a pair of sweatpants, you might want to as well.”

I decided that wasn’t a bad idea, more as I didn’t want Goodfellow volunteering for the spotter position. I went with the usual black shirt and dark jeans for night-fighting, but didn’t take my leather jacket as usual. The MP7 hung from a shoulder strap and I dug a knee-length black coat out of the winter-wear pile of clothes on my floor. Nik and Goodfellow went with the long dusters to cover their swords but the last thing I needed was to get snagged climbing over some fifteen-feet-tall chain-link fence and hanging there like an idiot—locked and loaded and nowhere to go. The flamethrower I stuffed into a large duffel bag and hoisted it on my shoulder.

Back out in the living room, I gave the most evil fucking grin I had in me. “Is this gonna be fun or what?”

It was not fun.

I plowed the garbage truck through four Jersey barriers, destroying the top half of the walls on either side of the bridge with the garbage truck—I’d remembered the bridge being wider last time I was in the neighborhood, but what the hell? They were planning to renovate anyway. Braking at the middle of the bridge, we dumped the diesel fuel, obtained from Goodfellow’s car lot, into the garbage, then covered the last half of the bridge with it. Backing away, I lit it up with the flamethrower. All-you-can-eat arson—come and get it. If Jack couldn’t see that . . . if Russian cosmonauts couldn’t see that from space . . . then I didn’t know how to do my job. And while there were a whole shitload of things I didn’t know how to do, my job wasn’t one of them.

It was a good plan and all we needed was Jack to show up and he had. It had looked like it was our turn now. An enormous cloud of billowing black, as dark as the smoke rising from the flames of the burning diesel fuel, had appeared, blocking our way off the bridge. That was fine. We weren’t looking to run off. We were looking for a fight. There had been the spark of those electric blue eyes, the crackle of what I thought might be lightning in the cloud and then it was gone. Jack had vanished—but he’d left some friends. And he did his little trick a few more times. He was a low-flying ace strafing us with bombs of the undead.

I hadn’t seen anything on World War II week on the History Channel that had been anything like this.

This was where the entertainment element plummeted.

“Zombies!” I shouted as they rushed us. It was a slow rush, I’ll give you that, but they were serious and there were a shitload of them. We’d have to get rid of them before we could get Jack back out to play. I kicked one over the side of the bridge that wasn’t currently on fire. “Real zombies! You”—and by you I meant Niko, Goodfellow, and anyone I’d met in the paien community—“said they didn’t exist. Not real. Just legends. Now I’m in the middle of every fucking crappy horror cliché known to man!” I hated zombie movies. If you couldn’t speed walk, then you were too fragile a flower for this world anyway and the apocalypse had always been in your future. I used the flamethrower on the next one before kicking him over. Not that it was necessary or useful as it continued to drag its burning torch of itself along, but it made me feel better. But if it was no use, other than improving my mood, there was no sense in carrying the extra weight and I shrugged the pack off.

“We’ve faced mullo before,” Nik started as he first sheathed his katana in one gaping eye socket to puncture the withered brain, then separated one’s head from its neck. Guess what? It kept coming. That’s why I was throwing them over the side where they could be the problem of the fish, assuming there were any fish alive in the Harlem River that weren’t somewhat zombified themselves.

“Mullo were not real zombies. You said so. Just corpse flesh reanimated by a pissed-off antihealer.” There’d been no bones. No lingering brain stem harboring the chow-down instinct. Basically remote controlled undead Jell-O. “This is not the same.” Considering what we’d fought in the past—gods, we’d fought gods—this was just humiliating. Humiliating, time-consuming, and not at all entertaining. “Why can’t they at least be the kind that can run? That would be something. This is like shooting fish in a barrel. Dead fish. Dead putrid fish that are stinking up a five-mile radius.” I felt grasping hands at my back and flipped yet another one to the river about a hundred and forty feet below. It was brown and stiff with arms like twigs and wearing a wedding dress. That would’ve been sad if I hadn’t been her first bite of “wedding cake.” “Shit.” There was the dull pain/teeth grinding pressure that only came from the bite of blunt human teeth at the base of my neck. “One of them bit me. I’m not only part murderous monster from the beginning of time, but now I’ll be an undead one. A stinking slaughterer running amok, even more unkillable as I’ll already be dead. And I thought it was bad before. Everyone happy now?”

“If your tongue would rot with the rest of you I’d be ecstatic.” Niko gave up on the tried-but-not-true putting metal, bullet, or sword through their brain and did the same as me, booted their undead asses over the crumbling wall down to the water below. One, fresh and gooey, was wearing a horrific red, blue, yellow, orange, and green Hawaiian shirt. He’d been buried in that thing, apparently going with the theme song of “life was just a party and parties weren’t meant to last.”

“And I highly doubt they’re infectious,” Niko added, “or we’d have seen this sort of thing a long time ago. You watch too many horror movies.” He swung his katana again and impaled one moving toward me and flung it through the air over the rail, its frozen limbs windmilling like dead winter tree branches.

“Watch? I live horror movies! Watching a horror movie is a frigging comedy treat for me, okay?” More of the undead were shuffling out from the end of the bridge where we’d rammed our way through with the truck.

Goodfellow had muscled his way through the pack to fight beside me as I threw the latest zombie-wannabe. This one had gone to his heavenly reward wearing the worst toupee in all of history constructed out of possum ass-hair, over the edge. “What’s up, buttercup?” I said, tossing another one. “I’d thought you’d be more pissed over the chunks of rotting flesh on your Armani.”

The puck looked worried and, for once, not about his clothes. “He raised the dead. I don’t know of any storm spirits that can raise the dead. Yet, he has.”

“Yeah,” I said impatiently, although thankfully only about twenty or so and we’d handled most of them so far. “So did Suyolak.” Suyolak, the pissed-off antihealer.

“Suyolak animated their flesh, not the entire body. It’s different.”

I lived in a world where there were different types of mobile putrid undead flesh. That wasn’t disturbing at all, was it?

I gave a one-shouldered shrug, using my other arm to send the last one flying at Niko, who vaulted him over the edge and zombie playtime was over. The smell, however, was going to linger with me for a while. “Suyolak’s were much harder to deal with. They were fast as hell.” Mounds of amoebalike flesh that moved so quickly you couldn’t avoid them no matter how badly you wanted. Considering how they smelled, much worse than these, that was damn badly. I did wonder where Jack had gotten them though. I couldn’t think of a cemetery near this area. But with him appearing and disappearing, a new development I didn’t care for, he could’ve brought them in from Jersey for all I knew.

“True.” But he didn’t sound entirely convinced. “The mullo were more formidable. More power had to be involved. Perhaps. But it’s still not the behavior of your average storm spirit and he’s annoying enough without a new power. He could be a new species of storm paien.” He peered at the back of my neck. “And no worries. That’s barely a hickey. I doubt a zombie lifestyle is in your future. Although with your fashion sense and ability to sleep twenty hours a day, I know Niko might disagree with me on that.”

“It would be a step up in his ability to function,” Niko said dryly as the sirens wailed in the distance. “We don’t have long. We’ve taken care of Jack’s miniature and slow-moving mob. It wasn’t even worth the time and had no amusement value at all. Now where is Jack himself?”

“Jack is here, betrayer of the Flock. I will take your skin but I will not save you.”

He was above us by nearly twenty feet, a cloud with shadow tendrils stretching out, a hundred—no, a thousand small storms. I already had the MP7 out and pointed up. “Hear that, Nik? Your skin isn’t worth saving now. No Niko-shaped square in his quilt. Maybe you should loofah more? Is that what they call it? A loofah? You know, one of those scrubbing things?”

I’d already pulled the middle part of the trigger to disarm the safety and now eased the trigger down. No single shots for me. I had a forty-round magazine and I didn’t plan on taking a single round home with me.

Robin and Niko had already spread out. Jack was too far for a sword and they’d proved ineffective anyway, but Niko had scooped up the flamethrower, our third use now since we’d bought it. It was nice to get the bang for your buck. He sprayed an astounding plume of flames, the finger of a fiery god, at Jack. That, combined with my armor-piercing rounds had Jack spinning, a small agitated tornado. The rounds seemed to be pushing him back. He might be made of rock or crystal or God knew what but it wasn’t much stronger than armor because he felt it. I could see it in the shudder as I aimed the blast higher toward the glow of his eyes.

Jack decided that was enough. Robin had gone away from the fire and Nik toward it to cover as much of the bridge as possible. Jack, who apparently disliked the armor piercing rounds more than flames, fell on me with the force of a demolished building. Knocking both of my arms outward, the MP7 almost skittered out of my hand, almost being key. My breath exploded from my lungs from the force of his landing. I thought I felt a rib or two crack as well. It wasn’t a good feeling and unfortunately I was familiar with it. The weight of him was the same as the night in my bedroom, not crushingly heavy but immovable. I started to gate, this time hoping to take something important of his with me—something he couldn’t live without, but then hesitated. Niko had said that wasn’t the way. Fight like an Auphe, become an Auphe, kill my brother like an Auphe. I didn’t want to die, but I didn’t want to be that Auphe even more.

“You are not mine to save, but, if I wish, you can be mine to kill. I protect the Flock from wolves and vermin such as you.” He was skinning humans, but I was the wolf at the door in this scenario. That hurt my feelings. Okay, maybe not so much. He was a dick all the same though.

His breath was cold against my face, the frigid cold of altitudes so high oxygen clung there precariously. Not that I could see his mouth behind the shaded mist. Not that I wanted to. There were probably teeth there, the kind that would make a great white suck his fin and cry for his mommy. That tended to be the kind of teeth that I usually found less than an inch from my face.

“Cal, gate! Gate now!”

That was Nik. Nik was telling me to gate. If Nik said it was okay, I was going with that.

And go I did.

I tried to take half of Jack with me through the gate I built around myself in the span of a thought. It should’ve worked. It would’ve worked . . . if he didn’t disappear in the very same instant as I did. I saw it as I went. He was there. He was gone. I reappeared near Robin as he was the least armed of us. Too old school for our new toys. I wrapped an arm around my ribs and scanned the bridge, the part not burning. He had gated, the son of a bitch had gated. Well, not gated, but he’d done something.

I spotted his form in the air in less than a blink. Literally. I was looking at Nik and there was only flames behind him; I blinked and Jack was behind him, silhouetted against Sodom and Gomorrah or the Towering Inferno, whichever catastrophe-type media you were into.

“Nik! Behind you!” I shouted and gated again.

I shouldn’t have bothered with the warning. Niko had already been turning when I traveled. He could’ve felt the change in temperature—Jack ran ice-cold. But against the flames of the bridge behind him that might not be so. It could be Nik knew because Nik knew these things since he was . . . shit . . . fifteen. Nik knew things humans couldn’t know although he was one. He knew things paien couldn’t know although they thought him a sheep. I didn’t care how he knew as long as he did. He needed to watch his back long enough for me to get there and do it for him.

I gated above Jack’s whirlpool form of smoke and racing electricity, but not too far above him. This wasn’t an action movie, which meant when I appeared in midair, I immediately fell, no hovering, no momentary suspension of gravity or shit like that, convenient though it might be. I simply fucking fell. With Jack, I wanted to fall the least amount I could. I did not want to skewer myself on whatever glassine spears that hid in that dirty dark haze.

Landing on top of him and feeling the skin of my legs split open—not good. I jammed the MP7 into the mass below me and fired at least ten more rounds before he vanished again and I fell to the concrete beneath me. That didn’t do my ribs any good at all. Instantly I saw Jack appear again, this time by Robin. It hit me, a memory close to as fucking freaky as Jack himself.

We had a neighbor once, we had lots of neighbors that we used for, you know . . . reasons. Good reasons. Getting us medicine if we needed it. Calling us in sick to school. Signing flu shot forms—all things Sophia couldn’t be bothered with or was sober to do. Most of them were nice old ladies and one of those nice old ladies had given me a toy when I was five—the same year I’d found out about the Auphe and how I was half one. She meant well. The people who screw up in the most interesting ways mostly do.

She gave me a jack-in-the-box. I’d never seen one before. There I was, an unsuspecting kid, because monsters were lurking outside the window, not in an innocent box a nice lady gave me. I cranked and cranked, the music screeched and played as best as its rusted innards let it and then . . . pop goes the weasel!

A clown came exploding into my face. And this clown, he’d been around a long, long time. His once white teeth were brown, dirt you’d say, but I knew better—it was dried blood. The blue eyes faded to a blind white . . . but the blind that could still inexplicably see you. The carved hands curled into talons from the damp. That’s what Niko had said, the damp. I wanted to believe him, but, shit, I knew better. Five years old and I knew better.

Jack-in-the-boxes were evil. Beginning, middle, and end.

This Jack was no different.

I staggered up with Niko’s hand on my elbow, careful and slow. He could tell by the way I was breathing, shallow and panting, that I’d messed up my ribs. With most people that would’ve bugged me, knowing that much about me with one sweeping observation. With Niko I expected it and I didn’t mind. Again, that’s what Niko did. What he’d always done.

Jack was drifting closer to Goodfellow and I could hear the music in my head. Hear it plain as day. Round the mulberry bush, the monkey chased the weasel . . .

Robin had his sword between him and Jack, but would that be enough?

I watched as Jack grew, a storm cloud no one wanted to chase.

Probably not enough.

The monkey thought ’twas all in fun . . .

“Let go, Nik,” I said urgently. He hesitated, then let go of my arm. Robin was one of us. He knew that the same as I did.

I was gone and then back again, right between Jack and Goodfellow and firing the MP7 at nothing. That was how quickly he flickered in and out. He was something and then he was nothing and then . . .

Pop goes the weasel!

He was on me again, grinding me down into the rough surface beneath me. This time the MP7 did fly from my hand. “A wolf who hides among the Flock. I am not surprised,” he said as thickly cloying as the first time I’d heard his voice. “That is why the Flock needs saving.”

At this point my vision was wavering between bizarre paien serial killer and a jack-in-the-box clown from hell. To be fair, weren’t all jack-in-the-boxes and clowns both from hell? I didn’t wait to sort it out. I gated again.

I was back with Nik, who’d moved closer to the action and who was still scanning the sky with the flamethrower ready as Jack had disappeared at the same time I had. Beside Nik, the gate around me fading, it took me a second to get my balance with both arms wrapped around my ribs. Cracked definitely, the first time. They might be broken now. I let my head hang for a second and concentrated on shallow breaths to ease the stabbing pain. “I lost my gun. I fucking never lose my gun,” I panted.

Niko and I both knew now wasn’t the place for an impromptu physical, and he knew just by the way I was standing I had either cracked or broken ribs. The medical advice would have to wait. But he wasn’t waiting on another type of advice. “Cal, you idiot. I didn’t mean die instead of gating. I meant if there’s another way then use it. If not then at least weigh the mental cost to you later, after the fight, but don’t let yourself be killed if it can save you.” His arm hooked lightly around my neck, his breath a human warmth and not Jack’s frostbite cold exhaled against my jaw. “Can you fight? If we can get your gun back?”

I gave a nod. “Yeah, I’m good. You know how much that gun cost?” Ruptured spleen? Lacerated liver? Screw that. I laughed at internal bleeding. I truly loved that gun.

“Then let’s see if we can save Goodfellow’s ass as Ishiah treasures it so much. And, Cal, do not die,” he ordered. “Or I’ll have this Jack raise you from the dead so that I might kill you all over again.”

“You’re a marshmallow inside, Nik. I’ve always known it.” I grinned as best as I was able with a distinct lack of breath and gated again, scooped up my gun, and gated one more time to end up beside Robin, a bruise of a light—purple, gray, and black—still swirling around the outline of my body. “Hey, Jack, we can both come and go. That makes this game more interesting, doesn’t it?”

It did. Besides Auphe and half Auphe, I’d not seen anyone who could do what Jack and I could. Although I was ripping holes in reality. Sometimes I tore them open and stepped through them, sometimes I opened them in monsters that deserved it and they exploded/imploded—a little of both—sometimes I built them around myself and it almost looked as if I were teleporting, but I wasn’t.

Jack wasn’t building gates. As far as I could tell, Jack was teleporting. He was here. Then he was gone and he was quicker than I was as I hadn’t managed to take any of him with me when I went. Now he was almost on top of Robin again who was fighting him off with his lighter version of a broadsword. He was having slightly better luck than I’d had with my combat knife on Jack’s first visit, but he also had hundreds of thousands of years of fighting experience with weapons. Millions with a pointy stick and a hefty rock. His blows were so fast they were a blur.

“Enough banter with the psychopath,” Robin spat. “Shoot the malaka and be done with it!”

The sirens were seconds away, lights were getting brighter and closer, I could hear the people collecting down in the park by the river. We were out of time, but we weren’t winning this battle. That left the war and for that we needed Jack’s attention on us and only us. “Got your attention with the bonfire, didn’t we, Jack? We’re bad, bad boys. If you don’t take care of us we’ll do the same tomorrow night and the next and the next. None of us are the Flock. We’re the pack and we’ll eat what you want before you ever have a chance to save it in whatever special Serial-Killers-R-Us trophy case you got from IKEA.”

The eyes transmuted from pale electric blue to nuclear white. “Fire is for the pure. Fire is for the punishment. None of you are worthy to use it.” While Jack waxed poetic on fire safety or whatever the hell he was talking about, I emptied the rest of the magazine. Lightning roiled in him and for a second in the mist I thought I saw something glittering. A vein of the purest white diamonds, the curve of a wing, but it must’ve been a trick of the dark cloud, the lightning, and the fact that Jack was gone. The same as if he’d not been there at all.

I could hear the voices of the police and firemen making their way through the smashed barriers and unless we thought we could survive a hundred-forty- foot jump to the water, which I didn’t, and wanted to swim the Harlem River, really didn’t, then there was only one way home. Niko was already running toward us, but still too far. I threw up a gate directly in front of him that swallowed him—a hole in the world—then grabbed Robin’s arm and took us through one of our own.

Then we were home and we didn’t know a thing more about how to take down Jack than when we started. Hell, we knew less if anything.

What a waste of a good fire.