Fantasmagoria (24 page)

Vernal snarled, cocked his wrist, and thrust the stinger into the approaching ninja’s thigh. The hooded killer looked down at his leg in shock. Vernal retracted his hand as the killer began to spasm. His mouth foamed and he hit the ground, dead.

Vernal stood and brandished the stirge stinger. “Get back!”

Everyone knew the weapon—several of the attackers were similarly armed—and they paused just long enough for Jack to grab the fallen prod and shove it into the closest ninja’s face. He shrieked and stumbled back.

Jack held the weapon, which pulsed sparks. “Who’s next?” he panted. They weren’t going to win, but they’d go down fighting.

Two more ninjas leapt down as their leader stepped from the shadows of an alley. He was big, covered with a black-and-red cowl embroidered with a swirling dragon. He held his closed fist in the air and the marauders reached into their robes. Each removed a small plastic tube tipped in a tiny needle.

“Fuck,” Vernal shut his eyes. His head dropped.

“What? What are those?”

Vernal recognized the toxic ooze. He remembered the jars of pestilence in the old apothecary’s shop. “Lycanthropy serum. Virus cultures.”

Jack turned. “What?”

The attackers pushed the needles to their necks and squeezed the tubes, then fell in seizures. Jack and Vernal stood, mesmerized, as the surrounding attackers swelled and convulsed.

A werewolf, a weretiger, a weregoat, a werevulture, a weresnake, and a werewarthog snarled from tattered robes. They were big and fast and impervious to stirge venom. Those with hands lifted their weapons from the ground. Those with fangs growled and hissed. The circle reformed.

“Aw, come on!” Vernal threw his fists. “This isn’t fair!” He clenched his ass cheeks and held them shut with his hand. He was gonna kill that old wizard.

Jack looked at the cattle prod in his hand. He doubted it would do much good against the hulking, dagger-toothed monsters. They growled.

“Come on.” Vernal pulled Jack backward toward the stirge-poisoned ninja as the attackers advanced.

“What are you doing?” Jack held the prod at the ready.

“We’re not going to beat these guys.”

“I know that.”

“I have an idea.” Vernal knelt over the foam-mouthed assassin and removed two needle-tipped tubes from the body. One was red. One was white. Which one had they used? He scowled. “What the fuck?”

“What are you doing?”

The weretiger, half-covered in his dragon-embroidered cowl, snarled and raised his paw in warning.

Vernal pushed the white tube into his neck and squeezed. “I’m not going to die on this stupid plan--” He collapsed and shook. Drool turned to foam as his already prominent forehead erupted in bulbous growths. This wasn’t like the others. Something was different.

Everyone stopped and watched in awe as Vernal’s palms grew fat and swallowed his fingers. The shag of hair on his head turned white and traveled down his neck. He twitched in a snarling, spitting, frothy seizure. His body swelled. The wereninjas stepped back, and in mere moments, Vernal Wort was gone.

“Fuck . . .” Jack breathed.

A pure white unicorn pranced sideways and shook its luxurious mane. It whinnied and lowered its head. Then it charged the werewarthog and nailed it through the heart with its horn. The wereninja’s bellow melted to a scream as it reverted to a man, slid off the unicorn’s bloody, sparkling cuticle, and fell to the ground. The weregoat charged and Vernal knocked it through a wall with his hind legs. As its hooves connected, there was thick crack.

The unicorn whinnied again. It pranced in front of Jack, who jumped onto the creature’s back. The unicorn was large and powerful and fast, and it knocked both the werewolf and weresnake out of the way. Gunslinger and steed broke free and galloped through the alleys of the Old Arcade. Vernal raced toward a gap between structures, leapt over a balcony wall, and landed gracefully on the other side. Jack raised his new eyebrows. It was three stories down.

The wereninjas didn’t pause. The weresnake slithered after the escaping duo, followed closely by the goat. Terrified residents, who had been hiding in the alleys, screamed and scurried out of the way. The weretiger leapt from rooftops and, with claws extended, ran on all fours across the sides of the ragged tenements. It used the uneven roofs to close the gap and was only a leap from the galloping unicorn when the werevulture fell from the sky with a crash.

The unicorn reared and threw its rider free. Jack fell over a railing and down three floors, crashing through tarps and plywood and landing on a stack of caged birds, who shrieked as he shattered their homes. Without pause, the wereninjas leapt after their target, bounding with skill and grace from level to level, batting wires and laundry out of the way, snarling and drooling with swords drawn.

The unicorn shook its mane. Hooves were no good for climbing, and with no way to follow, it took off down the alley at full gallop and disappeared into the maze of the night.

Overhead, the samurai watched.

(TWENTY-SIX) Gilbert Tubers vs. the Wereninjas of the Assassin Cult

On his trek through the old sewers, Gilbert learned what revenge sounds like: a million fluttering wings.

Gilbert screamed at the top of his lungs, and it echoed through the brick-lined tube as his boots kicked water from filthy puddles. The sewer smelled of cat piss and used diapers. Light dropped down in shafts from metal grates overhead. The nearest ladder to the surface was at least thirty yards away.

He’d never make it.

Gilbert’s bounding steps knocked his hood loose, but he dared not turn or retrieve it. The man from the Mayor’s Office had been right about the old sewers. There was plenty to be afraid of: bug-eyed monsters, four-foot scorpions, and at least one troll. Gilbert had avoided all he could with the help of his thick suit, his soft, rubber-lined soles, and the stench, which masked his own. If anything had been tracking him, it would have lost him in the shadows and filth.

But the fairies that infested the city like vermin—knocking over trash bins, killing squirrels, and stealing baubles from old ladies—made their home in the old sewers, and they knew Gilbert on sight. They knew him very well. He’d been hunting them for years.

Behind him in the dark, the cacophony of clicks rumbled like a swarm of locusts. Gilbert could see the ladder ahead, could make out the worn etching in the metal, but before he could take three more steps, the throng was upon him. He dropped to his knees and covered his hoodless head as a rainbow-colored plague descended.

A crack, like thunder, echoed through the hall.

Gilbert watched as a goat-man—not aminal, but not human either—crashed through the brick ceiling of the old sewer and fell with the debris through the throng, which panicked like a herd of spooked horses. The goat-man broke his neck on the floor with an audible snap. The startled swarm spun in a tornado and erupted through the hole like escaping bats.

Gilbert watched as the corpse in front of him shrank into a man. He’d heard about lycanthropy viruses. There had even been a story in the papers a few years earlier about an outbreak of canine dimorphism at a school in Westheria. Apparently some of the children turned violent and created quite a mess. It was later revealed that the Empire had developed the technology in order to eliminate the tactical edge enjoyed by the gorilla soldiers of the Aminal army. It was biological warfare and highly illegal.

But Gilbert’s fascination with the military tech faded as Marcelline’s advice fluttered like fairy wings from the back of his mind.

Follow the bodies.

Gilbert ascended the metal-runged ladder jutting from the wall. A few remaining pixies, the most aggressive, flew round his head and clicked their wings in anger, and he had to swat them out of the way. As he neared the surface, he felt one crawling inside his jacket. It bit him.

“Shit!” Gilbert swatted but merely slapped his own body. The pixie kept biting. He was certain it was a green meanie. “Ow!” Gilbert twitched and clambered through the manhole to the surface.

He ducked as a wereviper crashed through a food cart, spilling a tray of bamboo-skewered grasshoppers. Rust-brown water trickled down the sides of five-story tenements and disappeared into the sewer. Broken neon blinked from behind a crisscross of wires as scrawny, gap-toothed shopkeepers and their crummy patrons ran screaming for cover from a terrible melee.

The radioactive man turned and saw a gaggle of hulking were-creatures beating a large man. His right arm dangled at his side. His clothes had been sliced open and Gilbert could see recently-stitched skin sewn together with thick metal wire. The man was a mechanoid, but not like any Gilbert had ever seen. He looked like shit, and he was getting the crap beat out of him by the genetically-enhanced assassins. The man lifted his head from the ground only to have it pummeled by the fat, furry paw of a weretiger who was covered in shredded red embroidery.

“Ow!” Gilbert swat at the pixie again and stumbled backward into the recovering wereviper, who glowered and hissed through enormous fangs. They dripped candy-sweet venom. Its eyes burned red.

“Hello.” Gilbert grimaced under another fairy bite. His arm jerked and hit the snake, who knocked him out of the way with a swat of its rattled tail. Gilbert landed on wet cobblestones and lost his breath. His weight crushed the little fairy inside his suit, and Gilbert felt its sap ooze across his back. He could feel the dome of its tiny skull pressing against his skin.

“Gross.”

The snake slithered on top of him and Gilbert felt a drop of venom hit his jacket.

But the wereviper stopped. Its scale-cowled head twitched. Its right eye began to grow and swell out of its socket. The viper’s hiss turned to a siren of a whine. The eye turned milky white and expanded like a filling water balloon. The fluid inside churned. It was mesmerizing.

It popped like a lanced abscess.

“Ugh . . .”

Gilbert had studied enough biology after his accident to know that lycanthropes could only change as they did if their cells were growing and dividing at an accelerated rate. He knew those mechanisms of growth and division were what radiation attacked, resulting in cancer. Tumors. Just like what Pugs called him.

Gilbert watched as a disease that would have taken days or even weeks to progress in a normal person erupted from the head and neck of the lycanthrope in front of him. The wereviper collapsed and twitched as bulbous masses sprung from its head, one on top of another like polyps in the ocean, until the poor creature’s scaly head split, sending a splatter of blood and soft, porous tumors in every direction.

“Crap.” Gilbert shook his arms and shivered and danced in a little circle. It was disgusting.

The assassin was still. Over his body the cancers slowed but continued a red swell with the last energy trapped in their cells.

The werewolf, which had Jack’s damaged arm in its maw, spasmed and yelped like a dog. It started turning in circles as if chasing its own tail.

Gilbert put a hand to his forehead. He’d lost his hood in the sewer. Quickly he removed his gloves and jacket, which dripped green fairy sap, and his exposed body bathed the street in powerful radiation.

The remaining wereninjas collapsed in agony. They clutched at their bodies as skeletal limbs grew from their back and fatty tumors swelled from their lips and testicles. The weretiger’s tail split in two as its fur dropped like needles from a pine tree. The werevulture’s skin liquefied and drenched its feathers as its innards bubbled caustic ooze from its anus. It grew a second head, featherless and veined like a chick. The eyeless bulb twitched and yawned at the world.

Jack fell on his ass as his attackers met their doom. He looked to the rooftops, but Zen-ji had disappeared. He turned to the clammy man with the permanent skin flush as the weretiger exploded in a shrapnel of cancers. It splattered over the wet cobblestone.

Gilbert sighed and wiped the wereviper’s ooze from his face.

“Thanks.” Jack scowled from the ground. His clothes were in tatters, and now he was covered in disease. “I think.”

Gilbert looked around at the slowly subsiding growths. The vulture’s second head grew a tiny third head, like an embryo, which grew a fourth, and on like nesting dolls until it finally expired.