Bride of Death (Marla Mason) (26 page)

“The great savior on a children’s crusade,” Nicolette said. “Let’s say you save, oh, twenty kids. Make it thirty. Will that
make you feel better? Wash away some of the guilt for all the people you’ve killed and screwed over?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You think I’m stupid, don’t you? I know you’re on some kind of quest for redemption, or atonement, or whatever.”

“Like I’ve got anything to feel sorry for. I enjoy beating things up, that’s all, and if I beat up monsters, I make the world a better place in the process, so why not?”

“Now who’s spouting bullshit?” Nicolette chuckled nastily. “There are two dozen ways you could track down monsters to kill, Marla. You’re not the most talented sorcerer in the world, but even you can do the kind of divinations that would lead you to disturbances in the Force or what-the-fuck-ever. You’ve got rich and powerful contacts, gifted sorcerers who could line up worthy victims to keep you busy for decades. Instead, you wander around like a vagrant, with the head of your worst enemy in a cage, choosing to travel with somebody who hates your guts. And you want me to believe you
aren’t
punishing yourself? Of course you are. Don’t get me wrong – I’m
glad
. You deserve to be punished. I’m no angel, but you’ve fucked things up for people on a scale I could never match. But don’t pretend I’m the only one in a cage here. You’re bad, at least as bad as I ever was, but you don’t have the guts to live with yourself, to
embrace
it, so you do all this bullcrap to convinced yourself you’re
good
–”

I braked as hard as I dared – with no trailer hitched up, there was no risk of jackknifing, and the street was pretty empty here. The truck lurched, jerking me forward hard, banging my chest painfully against the oversized steering wheel. Nicolette’s cage flew forward, hit the dash hard enough to dent the bars, and then fell into the footwell on the passenger side, bouncing her head around a lot in the process – painfully, I hoped.

Nicolette started cursing like she does, and I turned up the radio loud enough to drown her out, and felt a lot better. For a little while.

A mile later I took the GPS unit off the dash – it was one of those portable ones, not built-in, so I didn’t have to break anything – and left the truck parked not far from where I’d stashed my motorcycle.

I couldn’t do anything about the Eater right then, though. I needed sleep – I’d spent the past day driving, which was exhausting enough, and my recent exertions hadn’t exactly re-energized me. I needed sleep, but the motel I’d paid for was obviously no good anymore. I wasn’t too far from Lubbock, so I got Nicolette strapped in, dragged myself onto the bike, and set off along the hated freeway, rumbling along in the full dark.

I prefer to stay in that vanishing breed, grungy little roadside non-chain motels – the clerks tend to value your privacy there – but I was sufficiently tired that I pulled into the first gleaming chain motel I reached on the outskirts of Lubbock. The clerk really wanted a credit card, but I bullied him into accepting a cash deposit with a sob story about how I’d had all my cards stolen. I snuck Nicolette into the room – no pets allowed, natch – and stuck her in a closet, then collapsed on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

I couldn’t sleep, tired as I was. I was on the
hunt
, now, I had the scent, so I picked up the GPS and tried to make sense of its history, which went back months. A lot of destinations had been punched in, but one got returned to several times, a tiny town in New Mexico called Moros. (Not to be confused with El Moro or Mora County, both also located in New Mexico – a stunning lack of originality on the part of place-namers there.) Moros was practically next door – I’d damn near driven past it on my way to Texas in the first place. I could check it out the next day, and see if there was anything worth murdering there.

I still couldn’t sleep. Too keyed-up. So I started writing again instead, filling more pages in the notebook that Pelham was kind enough to leave for me.

And, uh, here we are. This is getting crazy long. Luckily, I’m done – that brings us up to date, dear me. I’ll write more after I’m done wiping the Eater, whoever he is, off my boots.

DEADER THAN EVER

Reader, he killed me.

I took the fight to the Eater, but I did not know what the fuck I was getting into. Fortunately, he didn’t know how to deal with
me
properly, either, or I’d be down at the bottom of a well in captivity instead of writing this from the comfort of Pelham’s RV.

So let me back up and tell you how I got into this situation:

I got a call from Squat shortly after I finished the last chunk of this real-time memoir. He’d settled whatever he had to settle – somehow I doubt he had to sublet an apartment or cancel a newspaper subscription, but we’ve all got our shit to deal with – and was ready to come roaring across the state to see me. I told him to meet me outside Moros instead, and we’d formulate a plan of attack.

That was a lie, pretty much. My plans can usually be summed up in a single word: attack. I’m good at improvising, and plans always fall apart
anyway
– witness the debacle in Tolerance – so why waste a lot of time formulating an approach that’s going to be rendered irrelevant by circumstances anyway? Sure, rampaging into a town and trying to find a hornet’s nest to knock down was arguably foolhardy... but I was
immortal
, and so apparently was my new assistant Squat. I could make the earth move and call up hellfire with a wave of my hand (as long as I didn’t think about it too hard). I was armed with a dagger that could cut through ghosts and an axe made of a shard of moonlight (probably). I had a bag full of nasty enchantments I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to employ. How could I lose? I was the Terminator. I was Freddie Krueger from
Nightmare on Elm Street
.

I was an idiot.

•

Moros, New Mexico was a little piece of nowhere, and it was surprisingly hard to find. In the course of my frustrating travel across the state I saw signs for places with names like Angel Fire and Elephant Butte and Bottomless Lakes and Wink and Texico, but no Moros. Eventually I got closer to my destination, in a part of the state that was more woods and mountains than rocks and sand, but despite trying to follow the directions on the GPS, I kept getting turned around. Roads would curve in great slow loops, sending me back where I started, the dot on the map on my phone drifting around aimlessly instead of moving consistently toward my destination. “Shit, Nicolette,” I said. “There’s some kind of topological crumpling going on here, or a spatial distortion field. But it can’t be absolute, obviously the truck driver was meant to make his way through with his cargo – maybe there’s a magical beacon on the truck, some fetish-bag stuck under the hood that lets it penetrate the border. Think you can see your way through to the center?” I was stuck in a repeating pattern of asphalt and curves, and chaos witches have a knack for tearing patterns apart.

“Oh, fine. Let your conscience be your guide,” Nicolette said. “In this scenario I’m your conscience. And, by the way, speaking as your conscience, I’d just like to say, you’re a terrible
person
.
”

“If you guide me off a cliff or into a tree and send me to my doom, you’ll be stuck in a cage in the middle of nowhere,” I said.

“And yet, it’s still so tempting. Okay, turn left up here, in about a hundred yards.”

“Turn left onto
what
?” The road was a straight shot, lined by pines, with a soft shoulder on either side.

“I’m stuck under a drop cloth back here, so I’m not distracted by what you see with your lying eyes,” she said. “I see what’s
really
here, and there’s a path through the trees.”

I slowed the bike to a crawl, then a stop, parking it on the shoulder near this supposed left turn. I walked into the trees, frowning – and then I was through the illusion, standing on a well-maintained blacktop road that branched off the path I’d been following around and around. I walked back out again, and the illusion didn’t recur – once I’d gotten past it once, I was immune, apparently. I gave Nicolette a grudging “Good job,” then called up Squat.

He answered after a few rings, the sound of his idling engine almost drowning out his words. “Where are you?” I said.

“Driving in fucking circles!” he said. “I’m parked on the shoulder now, and I swear I’ve been past this same spot four or five times already. I recognize this beer bottle in the ditch.”

“It’s good to have old friends,” I said. “Keep riding, you’re sure to run into me eventually. I think I’ve been circling the same loop, but I found a way in.”

“Will do.” He hung up, and I busied myself checking my supplies, casting occasional glances down the newly-revealed blacktop track – it ran straight as a rich man’s teeth for a quarter mile or so and then dipped over the horizon and dissolved into the blur of distant trees. After ten minutes I heard the big aggressive growl of Squat’s engine. His bike had been nice once, but it hadn’t been well maintained, and when I’d asked him about it, he’d shrugged and said he won it off a guy in an arm-wrestling contest and didn’t know shit about motorcycles, really. I had the distinct impression that if it ever stopped running he’d leave it where it fell and acquire other wheels by a similar method. I wondered if the guy he’d arm wrestled still had his arm attached.

Squat saw me and pulled over, and I walked him through the illusion, too, holding his hand, even though touching him was repulsive in some deep way I couldn’t articulate. He grunted when he saw the road. “One way in, and hard to find. Even so, if I was a hypothetical bad guy, and this was my home base, I’d have somebody watching this road, just in case.”

“Good thing we’re indestructible,” I said.

“You know how some tombstones say ‘Too beautiful to live?’ Mine would say ‘Too ugly to die.’ Except I guess I’d never get one, on account of not dying.”

“You could write it on a welcome mat or something. Maybe one of those samplers people sew and hang on the wall.”

“I am full of inspirational teachings. So what’s the plan?”

“Drive into town,” I said. “Look around. See if Nicolette’s chaos-sense can lead us to the guy we’re looking for. I doubt we’ll find a sign that says ‘Here Lies the Eater,’ but you never know.”

“What are you planning to do when you find him? Or it?”

I shrugged. “The guy stole a bunch of kids, and from what you’ve told me about Sarlat’s dealings with the Eater, he’s stolen other people, too. I doubt he’s rounding them up for an ice cream social. ‘Evil’ is a slippery word. People have called me that, for some pretty defensible reasons. But for me, the definition of evil is simple: it’s treating people like objects, and working against life. I’ve got every reason to believe the Eater’s doing that. I could try to threaten, or bargain, or whatever, but... probably I’ll just kill him.”

“Simple and direct, I like it,” Squat said. “Mount up?”

“Mount up.”

•

So then we rode into utopia.

Moros was nestled in a valley surrounded by hills and trees. It was a picture-postcard kind of small town, the kind that doesn’t exist anymore, and maybe never did, outside of the movies. I’m talking picket fences, lush green lawns – yeah, in New Mexico – perfectly maintained streets, every building freshly painted and pristine. The weather was gorgeous, and people were out enjoying it, riding bicycles, trimming hedges, mowing the grass. The place was so familiar-looking, from a thousand TV shows and paintings, that your eyes kind of slid across it without friction, but there were a couple of jarring notes. We passed a church, but it didn’t have a cross on the steeple, and instead it bore a strange sigil – a single vertical line that split into a Y-branch at the top, and then each branch split again, and each of those branches split yet again, so it looked like a child’s drawing of a tree or a diagram of a neuron.

There was also the way everyone
looked
at us, from every front porch and sidewalk, through the windows of the diner and the hardware store – children, adults, old people, teenagers, they all turned their heads in unison to silently follow our progress.

“Nicolette,” I said, as we rode slowly through the streets, obeying the posted twenty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit. “What’re you getting?”

“You’re heading in the right direction,” she said. “There’s something up ahead, like a tumor growing on reality.”

“You’re not getting... I don’t know, a weird vibe about the whole town?”

“I don’t get even a whiff of chaos here,” she said. “In fact, it’s weird how
little
disorder I’m sensing. It’s almost like nobody lives here at all. It might as well be a town in a model train set.”

I paused at a stoplight – the only one we’d seen so far, at a four-corner intersection with a gas station, a grocery store, a gym, and a bank, though the latter was closed, the windows boarded up. I noticed there were no prices on the sign at the gas station, either. Definitely weird. People came out of the gym and store and garage, sauntering with no great haste in our general direction.

“This is some Stepford wives shit,” Squat said, drawing up beside me. “Also Stepford husbands, sons, daughters, neighbors, mailmen –”

“No mailmen,” I said. “Or so I assume. Because there are no mailboxes. Didn’t you notice? Not in front of a single house, and this is the kind of town that should have lots of mailboxes, novelty ones shaped like covered bridges and St. Bernards and shit. No mailboxes, the bank is closed, no prices on the gas station sign, a weird church...”

“I am missing a lot being under this stupid cloth,” Nicolette said.

“That stop light isn’t changing,” Squat said. “It’s just sitting there, red.”

“I noticed that, too,” I said. “Let’s be scofflaws before the welcoming committee reaches us.”

We drove off – it’s not like there was any other traffic, though there were plenty of gorgeously gleaming cars in the driveways – and the crowd converging on us all seemed to lose interest and wandered back toward the buildings they’d emerged from.