Flicker & Burn: A Cold Fury Novel (23 page)

My hands moved with minds of their own to her perfect throat.

I squeezed soft flesh, thumbs digging at a fibrous trachea—it was delicious to murder her—as her eyes popped with screaming, vibrating flecks of gold.

And then my fingers were being bit and burned by a live wire, like touching an exposed, thrumming outlet, and Heather grinned with shark-blue voltage behind it. I freed her, screaming in pain, my palms scarred as I stood swaying, barely on my feet, like being punch-drunk. “Tell me!” Heather shrieked. “How does ghiaccio furioso
work
?
How
am I able to do this to you? Tell me about
me
!”

The words spilled like water over a dam as I babbled, “It begins with extreme emotions . . . love, anger, hatred, loneliness . . . igniting a cold blue flame in my gut. But now I can will it into existence. All I do is think and blink.”

“The really powerful part, the electricity . . . where does it come from?”

“I don’t know.”

“Liar,” she hissed, grabbing me roughly at the neck. “Tell me.
Now!
”

“All I know,” I rasped, “is that those intense feelings . . . have to evaporate . . . they have to die inside me. What’s left . . . is the overwhelming urge to kill someone who I believe has done me wrong.”

“Yeah. I know the feeling,” she said, as the squeal of an approaching train sounded. I was lifted into the air and Heather grunted delicately before throwing me onto the tracks. I was mostly paralyzed, but I was also from Chicago, where people stumbled, leaped, or were pushed beneath the steel people-movers weekly, so I curled into a human burrito, clumsily pulling in my appendages. The train’s horn blared, tenor-high and apologetic for killing me. The train clattered overhead, spitting oil and snapping sparks as it complained to a slow, rusty stop, not crushing me, not cutting me to pieces. I lay on the tracks, inhaling the impossibility of being alive, licking petroleum, knowing without a doubt that the preordained time and date of my death had been wrong. There were voices on the platform, desperate to help but certain I was dead, as I clawed myself to freedom, seeing no more Heather. From the street below came the merry tinkle of an ice cream truck as Frank Sinatra rose up, singing the anthem of a city he loves.

Or maybe this time it was a celebration at finally bagging his prey.

I ROSE SLOWLY TOWARD THE BIRD CAGE CLUB
in the elevator, smelling like someone who’d gotten run over by a train.

After the fight with Heather, I still was unsure of how cold fury worked
against
cold fury, although it was plain she’d grown stronger by the day. After seeing my fear, she was also aware of my family’s precarious situation. I gnawed a thumbnail, knowing it didn’t matter since the ice cream creatures had almost certainly taken her. I was appalled by what she’d done with Max and tried to do to me. But if she’d been carried away to the same horrific place as my family, then I’d try to save her too.

It’s possible to dislike someone for who they are, but not how they became that way.

The
who
part is up to the person, constructed from conscious decisions she makes as she grows older, each resulting in a (sometimes bloody) consequence. But
how
a person is shaped and molded has nothing to do with the person herself. Where she’s born, to whom, and whether or not those people love and protect her, or abuse and use her, just isn’t up to the person. In all of those categories, Heather got a bum deal. Still, there’s a point where everyone has to stop being a kid and decide who she’s going to be.

That’s why I didn’t hate Heather.

I saw now that she was weak and damaged.

Maybe because of how she’d been raised, the universe had bestowed upon her a level of gorgeousness that caused the general public to flirt, fawn, and sometimes faint. But she had a responsibility to decide what to do with that ethereal gift, and she had chosen the most selfish and manipulative path.

I shuddered, knowing what Juan Kone would do to her.

He had my dad’s blood but lost mine, and he needed those six precious vials.

I wondered if they’d begun to draw them yet from Heather’s brain.

The end would come soon afterward, not just for her, but for my family too. Juan would finally have collected enough blood to isolate enzyme GF, Heather would be lobotomized, and the services of the Rispoli clan would no longer be required. The trail would go cold, since Juan wouldn’t need me anymore, either. The creatures and their little black trucks would disappear, along with any chance of following them to the Mister Kreamy Kone factory. All of my desperate efforts had failed miserably, and now I was out of leads. When those six vials were full, the cosmic hourglass would be empty.

I had only one supremely dangerous card left to play.

I would get Lucky alone. I’d use cold fury to force the old man to order the entire Outfit—every killer, pimp, and bookie—to tear Chicago apart searching for my family. It meant admitting that they’d disappeared, which would expose my dad to life-threatening charges of being a rat (and me too), but there was nothing else to do. I was in that moment of silence before a dam broke, and if I didn’t act immediately, it would carry all of us away, forever.

I closed my eyes, visualizing my parents, asking them to help me do the very thing I’d spent the last four months trying to avoid—putting us all at the mercy of the cold-blooded Outfit—and whispered, “Please . . . help me . . .”

“Please . . . say something. Anything,” Doug murmured.

I walked around the corner, seeing him sitting across from Johnny on the couch. “You’re awake,” I said.

“More than this poor guy, even though his eyes are open,” he said. “Actually, sort of open. The red one is like a searchlight but the blue side is pretty droopy.”

“I think Sec-C cut really deeply into his brain. It’s like he’s teetering on the edge of recovery or . . . you know.” I shrugged.

“Could’ve been me,” Doug said quietly.

“How do you feel?”

“Like I’ve been turned inside out, tongue first,” he said, sipping the Screaming Banshee and shuddering. “By the way, this earns its name. I’ve been screaming out both ends.” He tried to explain how he felt, physically and emotionally, describing the first like a savage flu—his guts rejecting everything, all of it pouring out deep red—and the second as being trapped in a wonderful dream that became a hellish nightmare, then a dream again, over and over. “Taking Sec-C, all of your happy emotions are intense, like you love someone to
death,
and flowers are
beautiful,
and sex . . . ,” he said, pausing, “is actually a possibility someday. And that’s life-saving! It’s a release from being the unattractive fat kid, and because you stop eating, you’re really
not
him anymore! Except the drug ebbs away, and then you are again, at least in your head. You crash like Wall Street, and it’s brutal. The unhappy emotions take over, and you hate yourself to
death,
and flowers are
disgusting,
and sex does not occur because you love someone or even like them. Instead, it’s raw manipulation. It’s telling a terrible lie with your body. And then you slurp more Sec-C and it starts again.”

“Are you done with it, Doug?”

“Maybe. Probably,” he said. He added sheepishly, “Are you done with me?”

I petted Harry vacantly, scratching beneath the little dog’s chin. “That sort of betrayal . . . allowing me to walk into that suite?” I said, shaking my head and looking directly at him. “The only reason I’m not dead is because of a wild baseball.”

“I know,” he said, welling up, “I hate myself for it. I’ll
always
hate myself.”

“Everything I’ve fought for, every inch I’ve clawed toward my family, could’ve ended right there,” I said. “So yeah, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Doug Stuffins, Mister Popularity, was totally unforgivable.”

“Sara Jane . . .”

“That’s why I’m forgiving
you.
Those internal suspicions you have, those mental whispers that you’re unlovable and destined to be alone forever? The ones that made it easy to take Sec-C? I know they’re nonsense,” I said, “because I know the real Doug. The smart, loyal person who would never have done that unless his mind was twisted by some very bad drugs. So there’s no ‘maybe’ or ‘probably’ when it comes to being done with Sec-C. If you want my friendship and confidence, there’s ‘definitely’ and ‘forever.’”

Doug pinched moisture from his eyes. “Definitely. Forever,” he said quietly. The way he looked at me wasn’t pleading or hopeful; it was resolute, full of truth, and meant as much to me as his declaration. He patted his deflated belly and said, “I get to keep the body, right? My version of post-rehab Heather Richards?”

“Speaking of,” I said with a sigh, and I told him about her and cold fury, her and Max, and her and the ice cream creatures. With a shudder, I repeated Lucky’s request—correction,
demand
—for Johnny’s red eyeball. Doug had a million questions and observations, convincing me that he was finding the best parts of his old self. Finally, I explained my last-ditch effort to save my family by using cold fury on Lucky.

When I finished, he said, “What if?”

“They’re already dead? Well . . . then at least I tried.”

“Then you would have outed yourself for nothing. The Outfit needs a counselor-at-large, I get that, but not so badly they’d allow the daughter of a dead rat—no offense—to mediate their dirty business. Besides, you know what Lucky will do if you get him in a cold fury headlock,” he said. “Look, if your family is . . . not here, there’s still a whole life left for you to live. If you can’t help them”—he shrugged—“maybe it’s time to step back.”

“No. Never. I’ll keep at it until there’s nothing left . . . them or me.” I sighed. “It’s just that I’ve wasted so much time trying to comprehend a dead language—”

“Hey!” Doug said, taking the Screaming Banshee away from Johnny, who’d lifted it like a glass of ice water and gagged down a mouthful.

“So much time trying to crack the code of Ice Cream Cohen and Weston Skarlov . . . ,” I said, the words trailing off as Doug and I watched the effects of the noxious concoction on Johnny, who was shaking all over, staring at me as his lips began to move.

“Weston,” Johnny mumbled through a foamy dribble, “west . . . on . . .”

“Wait a minute,” Doug said. “Are you . . . trying to talk?”

“Skarlov. S-s-s-karl . . . ov,” he said, dissecting the words with his teeth and tongue. “S-s-s-karl . . .”

We moved closer as his eyes widened, seeing something terrible that wasn’t there. “It must be Screaming Banshee,” I whispered.

“Please don’t let them take me back,” he gasped. “There’s blood in the air . . .”

“Where?” I asked.

“Weston,” Johnny said, biting down on the syllables, “west, on . . . skarl . . . s-s-s-south karl . . . ov . . . av . . .”

“Avenue,” Doug said slowly.

I put it together, saying, “West . . . on South Karl Avenue?” Doug attacked his laptop as I thought aloud. “Uncle Jack’s scrunched handwriting, recording the location of the Pure Dairy Confection headquarters so long ago. His small
o
—ov—looks just like a small
a
—av. The phrases that faded away between the word
partner
 . . . I assumed it was a name, but it was directions to a place.”

“Then who helped Ice Cream Cohen rob the Bird Cage Club? Who was the partner?” Doug asked, pulling up a map.

“Who knows?” I murmured, looking over his shoulder. “Another dead secret.”

“Here it is, South Karl Avenue!” He pointed. “A dead-end near Back of the Yards! It has to be the place!”

After all of this time, seeing the tiny digital street as an actual place was unreal. Joy and relief flared and faded, replaced by regret as I asked myself,
What if I’d been smarter reading Uncle Jack’s hidden pages, or faster tracking down Juan Kone?
What if I hadn’t been so fearful and had told Heather everything about cold fury?

And then, before my eyes, South Karl Avenue began to glow with possibilities.

I turned for the elevator and the Lincoln, yelling for Doug to bring Johnny.

It had to be the place because there were no other places left, and no more time for what-ifs. There was only now, before it was too late.

NOT LONG AGO, MANY OF THE NATION’S
hooved and cloven animals were turned into meat in a small neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. This bastion of butchery, called the Union Stockyards, spawned numerous side businesses since something had to be done with all of those animal carcasses. In the world of recycled snouts, bones, organs, and tails, one institution rose above all others when it came to stinkiness—the rendering plant, where leftover parts became lard or tallow through a process of boiling and straining, which smells exactly like what it is—animal corpse soup. It’s a putrid stench that assaults a person’s senses, conjuring up images of milky maggots, of flies swarming roadkill. Although the majority of Chicago’s South Side rendering plants have closed, the odor lingers, especially on warm afternoons.

It was unseasonably hot when we crept westward on South Karl Avenue.

The humidity made it smell like driving through the rancid sweat sock of a giant.

It was a dead end on the south fork of the Chicago River, that notoriously foul stretch nicknamed Bubbly Creek. A chain barrier blocked the end of the road where, a few feet later, water the consistency of yogurt belched up pockets of methane gas from a century of decomposing animal carcasses on its muddy floor. I creaked to a stop, seeing the burned-out shell of a factory on one side of the street, its brick walls still black from a fire that must’ve happened decades ago, and a boarded-up warehouse on the other, its windows covered in warped wood. “That’s got to be it,” I said, feeling my heart beating in my throat. I’d be going in there with cold fury that didn’t affect Juan Kone or his creatures, and the presence of my family—my intense love for them—deactivating the electricity. I looked at Doug and said, “The answer is no.”

“Because there are dangerous things that only you can do in there, you want to protect me, blah-blah-blah,” he said. “Listen, I’m
always
going with you, no matter where it is. So why waste the words?”

I saw the determination on his face, nodded once, and turned to the backseat, where Johnny sat staring straight ahead, rigid but not completely disconnected from the present. We’d given him an additional dose of Screaming Banshee, which had drawn him out of his walking coma even more. Softly, I said, “Stay here, okay? If something happens, take the car . . . if you can drive.” I nodded at the boarded-up warehouse. “How do we get inside?”

A tremor crossed his shoulders. “Not there. There,” he said, pointing at the torched shell of a building across the street.

I looked at the structural skeleton through which the moving river was visible. “Is there a basement or something?”

He pointed into the brown water. “The boat. Touch it.” I looked through the building at a red skiff in the distance, then back at Johnny. “The boat,” he whispered, and sat back with his eyes closed.

Doug and I exchanged a look and then slipped out of the car. As we crossed the cracked, weedy street, I could’ve sworn that everything—the burned-out structure, river, and red boat—moved slightly in the breeze. We approached the building and, cautiously, I poked at the scene, which rippled softly beneath my finger. “It’s digital,” I whispered, amazed. “A huge, flexible screen, draped over the whole thing.”

Doug licked his lips. “Push the boat.”

I did, carefully, and a section of the screen—a digital door—popped open softly. My mind was going like a hummingbird, and I heard Doug’s hurried breathing as we stepped inside and looked up at the hidden building—three stories of white brick with the words
PURE DAIRY CONFECTION COMPANY
over the facade. There were no cameras looking at us, no touch pads to gain entry; the building was well hidden, of course, but the lack of electronic safeguards spoke more to Juan’s ego and arrogance than airtight security. I gripped the .45 as we entered the building, Harry’s claws tick-tacking on the floor, and paused outside the only door. I turned to Doug. “Ready?”

“No,” he said seriously.

“Here we go,” I said. I counted to three and pulled it open.

It was a room as deep and vast as an airplane hangar, purely, hygienically white, illuminated by enormous hanging light fixtures. The floor was cut into four quadrants. In a far corner, a fleet of black trucks sat gleaming, ready for a chase. In another was a steel vat bearing the words
SECODAL CORTEXITRATE.
Tubes ran from it into a large, droning pump, while sticky red puddles pooled at its base. A third corner held a sophisticated laboratory behind glass walls. It was outfitted with a computer bank attached via hundreds of slim wires to a large, industrial refrigerator marked simply
ANTHONY RISPOLI
; instinctively I knew it held gallons of my dad’s blood.

A steel box as large as a small house, with a narrow door and single barred window, squatted in the fourth corner—my family’s prison.

I wanted to sprint for it and tear the door off by its hinges.

I would’ve, if it weren’t for all of the bodies in my path.

I stood with my feet cemented to the floor, looking at a scene eerily reminiscent of the Catacomb Club massacre.

It was twenty or thirty perfect-looking dead people with chiseled features and gray, parted lips, staring into eternity. Their slim model bodies lay where they fell, as if it were a big game of musical chairs and they’d all lost. A smeared red trail of Sec-C led from the vat to them, the dead, right into their hands holding empty silver cones. It was so still—being around so much fresh death made it feel disrespectful to move, but I had to, there was no way I couldn’t. I gave Doug the .45 and said, “Find a safe place and cover me.” He didn’t seem to hear me, his gaze pinned to the bodies, until I touched him roughly. He turned with tears in his eyes, nodded, and led Harry away. I tiptoed through the corpses to the steel box and stepped inside, whispering, “Mom? Dad? Lou?”

Nothing, silence, a muted gasp of breath.

I felt along a wall, found a light switch, and stared into a nightmare. All of those simplistic movies show a prison cell as a little home away from home with a tidy shelf of books, sparrows landing at the window, and a spare but clean toilet and sink. Instead, I looked at a dank, dirty hole where people were thrown to die. The complete inventory—stained mattresses with handcuffs; a jug of brown water; bits of moldy bread and bowls of slop; cases of empty baby-food containers, the labels marked
High in Iron!
to fortify my dad’s blood; a heart-wrenching message scrawled on the wall. Seeing it written in something thick and auburn, looking at the crude drawing of a Ferris wheel, I became murderous hatred incarnate. The words spoke only to me:

We are alive

in Sara Jane

Each day we wait

for Sara Jane

Our daughter, our sister, our savior

Sara Jane

“Creepy, huh? It’s like a . . . a prayer,” someone slurred, and I spun to see Heather emerging from a dark corner of the cell, except it wasn’t her. It was the alternate-universe version of her—a staggering living-dead with red, leaking arteries and burn marks seeping at her temples, painfully visible since her golden tresses had been shorn away. She was wrapped in a hospital gown fouled by scarlet streaks and spatters. Her eyelids fluttered, and if I hadn’t thrown out my arms, she would’ve fallen on her face.

I eased her onto a mattress, asking urgently, “Where are they? My family?”

She parted her lips, her voice rustling like dry grass. “You’re too late.”

Three little words—the summation of my quest—made me want to scream in her face, to run for the door. Instead I shook her lightly, trying to keep the insanity strength out of my grasp. Heather’s eyes opened slowly; the irises weren’t blue anymore but ashen gray, drained of an essential element. “Gathered them up. Took them away,” she said, her words a garble. “Wouldn’t take me . . . told me to die. Said it’s better for a junkie like me.” Her gaze shifted to nothing. “Made me drink something . . . made me sick.”

My heart raced and my body surged, knowing I’d missed them by torturous minutes. “Who took them? Juan?”

“One of them. With the red eyes, but different . . . ,” she murmured, as a line of spittle leaked from her mouth. “Your dad, so weak, barely moving. Your mom asked where they were being taken but it hit her, oh God, hit her so hard . . .”

“Sara Jane!” Doug bellowed, his voice rolling across the floor.

I stared at the inscription on the wall, inscribed it on my heart, and carried Heather across the floor, trying not to look at the bodies beneath me. Doug stood outside the laboratory, waving me over. He did a double take when he saw Heather, dropped the .45, and helped me carry her into the lab and onto a gurney. He nodded past me then and said, “Look.” I stared beyond the computer screens glowing with digitized brains and alphanumeric data at a plush velvet chair and ornately carved desk. Juan sat crumpled behind it like a large-headed spider on a spindle body, greedily sucking a straw jammed into a bag of life-sustaining blue goop. Empties were scattered across the desk like squashed jellyfish.

When he glanced up, the
R
I’d punched into his forehead winked painfully red. His eyes were crazed, the only part of him besides his lips that moved. I moved closer, cautiously, seeing his reedy shoulders and concave chest folded in a jackknife, nearly touching his paralyzed hips and legs, while he clutched at his middle with a bony hand. Things were leaking out of him between his fingers, some red and bloody, some blue and goopy, and that’s when I understood—the pump in his stomach was gone. He removed the straw from his smeared lips, squealing, “Judas!
¡Renegado!
Look what it—that traitor!—did to me! It worked among us, lived among us, disguised as one of my very own creations . . . and then tried to
kill
me! Oh, my beautiful pump. The murderous thing ripped it right out of my body!”

“What about them?” I said, unable to look out at the massacre.

“I worked my fingers to the
bone
creating that workforce! And
it
had the
audacity
to wipe out every last one of them! Murdered them all with a tasteless, odorless poison . . . slipped it into Sec-C!”

“Oh no,” Doug murmured, glancing at Heather, who was barely alive.

“And then—
¡hijo de puta!
—it took
my
test subjects!”

“My family,” I said. “Who was it? The person disguised as a creature? The one who betrayed you?”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” he said, his voice dropping conspiratorially, “unless I install a new pump quickly, I’m in trouble
muy grande
! Without a consistent source of this pulpy protein, my body will eat
me
!” His gaze moved to Heather as he drank. “So the traitor poisoned her, too? Ah well . . . she was useless. Years of substance abuse had compromised her enzyme GF. But you . . . you’re as pure as the driven snow! Lay on that table and I’ll draw the blood, six small vials, which we’ll add to your father’s,
sí
?”

“How do you plan to make me do that?” I said.

“Not me. It,” Juan said, and I turned to Teardrop entering the lab like a deadly skeleton in a crisp black uniform, eyes glowing like hot coals. “I sent you out to snatch her, and instead she came to us!” Juan said cheerily. “
Es maravilloso,
yes?”

I was without a weapon; Doug had dropped the .45 somewhere. I pushed him aside, as far out of harm’s way as possible, while blinking cold fury to life. My hope was that the electricity would follow before Teardrop ripped my head off.

Instead, the creature stared out at the bodies. “They’re all dead,” it said quietly.

“What? Oh, yes, an unfortunate incident. A rat in the woodpile, so to speak,” Juan said. “Never mind that now. Let’s get to work.”

The creature turned to him, its face pale and empty.
“Muerto. Todos.”

“Primero,” Juan said sharply, as if disciplining a child, “I can
always make new ones
! Now,
put
her on that table and
open
a damned artery in her head!”

Teardrop turned to me, and I pointed at Juan, saying, “The things you’ve done for him? Terrible things. All you’re going to get for it is sudden death, like them. He told you all about it. Did you forget so soon?”

“
¡Mi creación!
Do as I command!”

“
Él no es Dios.
He doesn’t create things,” I said. “He only destroys them.”

“He made me who I am,” Teardrop said. “He said I was broken and discarded . . . forgotten . . .”

“But human,” I said. “Now you’re less than that, and still all of those things. Look at them out there and
remember
what he told you . . . you were made to
die
!”

“
¡Bastante!
Enough!” Juan shouted, and it snapped Teardrop from its reverie. It began moving toward me and then hesitated, veering toward Juan. “Yes, of course . . . save me first!” he said. “The replacement pump is just there, on the shelf.
¡Rápidamente!
”

A red line creased Teardrop’s cheek. “You killed them. You killed us all.”

“No, no . . . I was
betrayed,
don’t you see? By someone disguised as one of you!”

“We’re all disposable . . . human garbage, like you call the street people, the ones I help you recruit. I was one of them once, but I’ve forgotten so much,” Teardrop said, swatting the blue-goop-filled bags from Juan’s grasp and lifting him like a rag doll.

“You’re taking me to the pump,
sí
?” Juan pled, his head wagging violently, the only physical protestation he could make. “You’re saving me,
sí
?”

“It’s too late to save either of us,” Teardrop said, hurrying past with his quivering cargo, exiting the lab, headed out of the warehouse.

“Stay with Heather!” I said to Doug, and ran after them. “Who was it? The one who took my family?”

“Help me!” Juan said, looking over Teardrop’s shoulder. “Please, help me now, and . . . and we’ll be partners, you and I! With your blood and my brains . . .”

Teardrop advanced toward the dead end of South Karl Avenue like a robot on a mission, and I asked again, “Give me a name! Please!”