Hang Wire (28 page)

Even with the lights on, the warehouse was shadowy. The bulbs were bare incandescents, but they hung high from the ceiling above and were only just up to the job. Bob suspected they were original to the building. They knew how to make light bulbs last in those days. He thought he could remember this block going up in the 1920s, after the area had been razed by the quake of ’06.

For the purposes of their mission, Bob considered the warehouse their “ground zero” – it was from this warehouse, full of foodstuffs imported from China, that the fortune cookies supplied to the Jade Emperor restaurant had come. Given that one of them had held a particular surprise for Ted, it was as good a place as any to start looking. But for what, exactly, Bob didn’t know.

Benny stopped and turned around, shook her head. Bob sighed and sat on a packing case. Benny sat next to him, and swept off her baseball cap to scratch her head.

“I don’t get it,” said Benny. “Why would Nezha hide his power in a fortune cookie? Nobody even knew he was here. It was Tangun who sensed something was wrong and made me follow the trail of energy leaking from the cookie back to the Jade Emperor. He thought I could pick it up, only it was Ted who got the cookie, not me.”

Bob frowned. “Why did you wait until Ted’s birthday party? Why not just intercept the fortune cookie before anyone else got caught up in all this?”

“Tangun didn’t direct me to the cookie until the night of the party,” said Benny, “and then the cookies got swapped somehow.”

Bob raised an eyebrow. Benny held her hands up.

“Dude, I swear, it just happened.”

“Nezha the Trickster playing his final game? Great.” He sighed. “I’m too old for this.”

Benny laughed. “I thought gods didn’t get old?”

“I didn’t come back to the Earth to be a god,” said Bob, shaking his head. “I chose to leave all that behind.”

The pair sat in silence: the ancient god from across the oceans who had retired, the human host of an ancient god visiting from the heavens.

There was a sound from close by. Bob and Benny both stood from the crate and turned around. A second sound, the cracking of an old door being pushed open, and a triangle of light pierced the gloom of the warehouse, spotlighting the pair.

Two figures were silhouetted by the light from an open door – one large and chunky, the other smaller, thinner. As they stepped forward, the large shape resolved into that of a man, middle-aged and rotund, dressed in a shirt and open blue waistcoat. He had a handlebar moustache like a Nineteenth Century showman.

Next to him was a woman. Fair-haired, blue-eyed, she stared straight ahead, hypnotized, apparently unaware of her surroundings.

“You are here, as I knew you would be,” said the man. He gestured with open arms, one with a thick loop of what looked like rope hanging from the elbow.

Bob looked the newcomer up and down, then turned his attention to Alison. “Alison? Who are you, and what have you done to her?”

“I’m sorry we haven’t had a chance to meet, yet,” said the man. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am the one and only Magical Zanaar. I killed one god, and I’m here to kill two more.”

Bob and Benny looked at each other. The Magical Zanaar grinned and pointed at Bob and at Benny. The ground began to shake beneath them, the cement cracking and then breaking into angled shards. Bob and Benny stumbled, unable to move, as they sank into the ground and were held fast.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the Magical Zanaar, “step right up and behold the greatest spectacle on Earth! One man against the heavens, and lo! See how the gods themselves are powerless against the Cold Dark. See how the Thing Beneath stirs from its eternal dreamless sleep!”

The Magical Zanaar advanced on Bob and Benny, the loop of steel cable slipping from his arm and into his hands, his eyes glowing red in the dim light of the warehouse.

Darkness and heat. Moisture and salty dampness.

Bob’s eyes flickered open. Around him the world was a dark void filled with geometric brown shapes stacked in some kind of order. He blinked, and the shapes began to resolve themselves. Packing boxes. They were in the warehouse. It was night outside. And…

Something else now. Something confusing, frightening. There was no pain, although there was discomfort. But there was something else, something Bob had not experienced for hundreds, maybe thousands of years.

Lost time. Lost memories. He’d been unconscious. Bob didn’t sleep. That story about him was actually true.

There were other things that Bob didn’t need to do. He didn’t need to eat, or drink, or even breathe. He didn’t need to look like a human male in his late thirties. Everything was an illusion, from the toned physique and chiseled jaw to the carefully worn blue jeans. But he’d settled on his appearance many millennia ago. The blonde hair and fair skin had frightened his people, out in the Pacific. Fear was an emotion he enjoyed.

Bob also couldn’t feel pain, and he couldn’t be killed. It wasn’t that he was indestructible, or impervious, or had steel skin or unbreakable bones. These concepts just didn’t apply to him. They had no meaning.

Losing consciousness was therefore… unprecedented. To knock out someone who didn’t even exist on this plane of reality was quite an achievement.

Bob blinked again but the warehouse still spun on a slow axis around him. He frowned, and moved an arm, but this only made his vision wobble. He kicked with his feet and found only air beneath them.

There was something closed tight around his throat. As he spun slowly around, another shape came into view.

A body, next to his, suspended in mid-air, slowly rotating. It was lifeless and covered with blood, which seemed to have poured unchecked from the throat. The body was hanging by the neck from a loop of woven steel cable tied with a simple slipknot. The body’s head was drooped forward. The steel cable had nearly separated it from the body.

Bob squinted and gritted his teeth, trying to clear the smoky confusion from his own mind. Knocking out a god left a hell of a headache.

In the dark, the body next to him rotated again until Bob was able to recognize the insignia on the shirt it was wearing – a man wearing a football helmet and eye patch, two crossed swords behind him.

The Oakland Raiders football team.

Benny.

Bob gasped airlessly, and his hands flew to his own neck. There was the cable, tight against his skin. Tight enough to kill, certainly, and slick with blood. But Bob was a god of life as well as death, and his neck had healed while he’d been out. The cable was still tight enough to asphyxiate, but Bob didn’t need to breathe anyway. The Magical Zanaar had been careless. He’d been able to kill Nezha, assisted no doubt by the evil power within him, but Bob was a different category of deity. Especially now he was starting to use his powers on the Earth, just a little. Bob was a god much harder to kill.

He reached up and tugged the cable above his head experimentally. It was solid, rock hard. Straining his neck against the noose, he looked up, tracing the course of the wire as it vanished upward into the dark ceiling.

Bob looked back at Benny and felt his stomach roll. Benny may have played host to an ancient god, but while Tangun was absent she was mortal. Her death had been violent, sickening. Here, swinging so close to Benny’s body, Bob could feel the urges rise, the hunger stir inside. There was power in blood, in death. Bob knew it – it was part of him – and clearly the killer knew it too. He was using that same power to wake the Thing Beneath. The brutality, the savagery of the Hang Wire murders had a purpose.

Zanaar had power. Real power, enough to overpower both him and Benny. The Cold Dark – Bob didn’t know what that was, but Zanaar seemed to be connected to both that and the amorphous evil stirring beneath the city. The Thing Beneath.

Bob cleared his head and began to swing his legs. The steel cable squeaked as it took his weight without strain. This amount of cable could hold up a bus. High above there was a very low groaning sound, virtually inaudible, as the rafters around which the cable was tied sighed with the strain.

As Bob moved in the air, he analyzed the strength of the cable, the tension, the flexibility. He pushed a little with his mind and understood the weft and the weave of the fibers bound inside the cable with the clarity and accuracy of an electron microscope.

Then he pushed a lot with his mind, and the steel cable around his neck broke down into its constituent atoms and fell to the warehouse floor in a cloud of glittering silver dust.

Bob floated in the air next to Benny. Above him the remains of the cable whipped back up into the darkness as the weight on it suddenly evaporated. The end of the cable snickered past one of the hanging light bulbs, then it whipped back and shattered the globe. Without thinking, Bob reduced the falling glass shards to individual molecules of silica. Then he looked up, realized what he’d done, and refocused his mind. Once he started exercising his long-dormant powers, they’d started to take over. The glass had been no danger to him, but part of him was starting to enjoy the freedom, the power to manipulate the world around him. He had to focus, concentrate, do only what was necessary.

Bob drifted down. He and Benny had been hanged ten feet from the floor, in the open space between the crates, opposite the main warehouse door. He looked up at Benny’s lifeless, blood-soaked corpse, swinging on the cable, and blinked.

The cable holding Benny disintegrated into powder. He held Benny’s body in the air, then gently lowered her to the warehouse floor and the great pool of blood that had collected underneath her body.

Bob shook his head. It was a waste, senseless and unnecessary, another example of what went wrong when the gods meddled in the lives of people. Benny was dead, as were five other innocents, killed by someone wielding a power with no control.

Bob could bring Benny back to life. It was easy enough, as easy as a simple command, a push at the fabric of the world. But it might be enough to push Bob over the edge. He was afraid of what the power he wielded might do to him if he decided to use it.

He had been both a god and a devil, and he wasn’t sure which side was stronger.

Benny was dead, but Bob knew that Tangun the Founder could not be killed, at least not like this. But when Tangun visited Earth, he needed a host mind and body. Benny’s family tree stretched back to the Three Kingdoms of Korea, nearly two thousand years of history, destined to be the host line. Tangun was wound within her DNA.

Another of the god’s mistakes.

Bob stood over the body. No – Benny deserved better. He wouldn’t let her just be another victim of the games gods play.

“
Benny, ho’olu komo la kaua
.”

There was a gentle splash as two golden boots settled in the pool of blood. Tangun’s golden mask smiled at Bob. Bob stepped back in surprise.

“Kanaloa, my friend,” said Tangun. Behind the smiling gold mask, Bob could see Benny’s eyes were bright and alive. Her chin and neck were clean, with no blood, no injury. He’d resurrected Benny, who had brought Tangun straight back to Earth.

Bob bowed. “Tangun, King and Founder. We must act quickly.”

The golden mask was suddenly a scowling visage of rage and terror, the frozen, screaming face of hell. Bob flinched. There was something different about his friend now. Tangun was ready for war.

“We dally,” said Tangun, his voice booming like thunder in the warehouse. He rose two feet in the air, his golden armor sparking with energy. “Come, the chase is on.”

— INTERLUDE —

CONEY ISLAND, NEW YORK

The city was burning. Not Manhattan, not down where people sat on lawn chairs on the sidewalk in the warm July night, drinking and talking and gazing in wonder at the empty, black glass towering over them on all sides. Not in Midtown, where cops were busy freeing the old and the wealthy from dead elevators. Farther up, where the decay of New York had really taken hold, where buildings were empty shells and where graffiti covered every surface and the gangs had control. Up there, in the Bronx, in the war zone, where the creeping failure of the city was at its most severe, where people were desperate.

There, the city burned.

The power went out at 7:23 p.m., and just like that, the largest city in the United States became impotent, floundering in the sudden darkness. It was inevitable, perhaps, the final embarrassment of a city so deep in debt that even the President had told it to go to hell.

Maybe that’s where they were now, in a hell of darkness and chaos, of utter confusion, paralyzing fear. For some there was opportunity in the darkness. Fear and anxiety and hopelessness bred anger and hate and desperation. Bred crime, lawlessness.

The looting began, coupled with rioting and fighting and then, in the darkness, a light flared.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx was burning.

Joel watched from shadows under the eaves of a closed restaurant as the emergency services worked, and worked hard. The power was out at Coney Island. On a hot summer’s night the place should have been burning bright, nothing but lights and the smell of hot dogs and popcorn and the screams of the happy and the happily terrified.

With the power out, the shadow under the eaves was an almost impenetrable blackness, not even the strobe of the cop cars and ambulances across the street were able to penetrate. Joel was out of sight, invisible in the night.

The street in front of him was packed with people. Getting everybody out of the amusement park was a big task, and there were people still stuck inside, in a rocket-shaped car at the high point of its orbit or swinging at the top of the Ferris wheel, with nothing to see but the dark city from horizon to horizon.

There was fear here, Joel could feel it – the electric charge in the air, the cold burning in his waistcoat pocket. The fabric of the place was thick with it. But the firemen and the fairground operators were hand-cranking the Ferris wheel’s gears, and people were being helped out of the swinging seats as each reached ground level. Out on the street, hotdog stands were doing a flying trade, their cookers operating on gas, the owners not needing electricity to count the dollar bills accumulating in their apron pockets.