Kill the Dead (36 page)

I kneel down by Johnny’s leg and roll up his sweatpants. He’s still studying the model.

“You ready?”

“Sure.”

I lay the blade on his inner thigh and press. He doesn’t react. I press harder until I break the skin. Still nothing. His surface nerve endings probably died off a long time ago.
I shove the blade in until it hits bone, then slice down his thigh until the skin falls open. He doesn’t flinch.

Johnny’s blood is dark and thick, like black maple syrup. It isn’t easy scooping it out, and getting it into the flask is just as hard. I have to sort of trowel it in. I don’t want to rip into Johnny’s leg too much. He still needs to be able to walk. It’s slow going.

“Don’t be shy,” he says. “I don’t know how much you’ll need, so take a lot.”

I scrape out his arteries and veins until the bottle is almost full. When I’m done I look at Muninn. I have no idea what to do with the dissected leg. Muninn hands me a roll of duct tape.

“Can you hold the skin closed for me?”

Johnny puts down the model and holds the two halves of his thigh together. I run tape around his leg from the crotch to just above his knee. When I’m done, he flexes and nods.

“Good as new.”

I stopper the bottle and press it down, making sure it’s tight.

“Mr. Muninn, I have a feeling that your handwriting is better than mine. Would you write down what Johnny said to do with the blood?”

“Certainly.”

He gets a quill pen, purple ink, and an old Fillmore West flyer and scribbles the formula on the back.

I can barely think. There’s something like relief rumbling in my gut, but I push it down. I can’t deal with it until I see what happens with Johnny’s magic juice. I didn’t see Alice in the Backbone and that’s both a disappointment and a
relief. I don’t know what I would have done if she’d been there. I’m not a hundred percent sure I could have survived that. There must be a lot more of Stark left in here than the angel wants to admit, because the guilt and fear and anger and hopelessness are squirming around my skull, making the few seconds of relief I felt earlier easy to ignore. I have to keep it together and keep thinking. I want to kill my way out of all this confusion, but that won’t work this time. Going after Mason was simple. Chasing the Kissi was simple. I knew who they were and what they wanted. I’m lost at sea right now, but I have to see this through. Too many people I care about are locked in their apartments hoping they make it through the night. I don’t want to lose any more friends. The Kissi killed a waitress at Donut Universe last New Year’s to get my attention. I don’t want any more dead donut girls on my conscience.

“There you are,” says Muninn.

He takes the flask, holds the note against it, and wraps them together with silk ribbon.

He says, “Go and help your friend. And when you finally figure out what all this business is, your only debt will be to come back and tell me the whole story.”

“It’s a deal.”

Johnny puts the Visible Man down.

“Keep it,” says Muninn. “We can’t send you home empty-handed.”

“Thank you.”

“Come on, Johnny. I have to get this to Brigitte and take you home.”

“No thank you. I’d rather stay down here.”

“You sure?”

He puts his hands in his lap and looks down at the floor.

“Yes. I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I think I’m tired of being alive. I’ll miss Tracy and Fiona and I’ll never get to finish the dictionary, but I like it down here. It’s quiet. I don’t think I want to answer anyone’s questions anymore. I want to smell the dirt and be in the dark for a while.”

“You’re welcome to stay here with me,” Muninn says “You’ll have access to all my toys and the Backbone is just a stroll away.”

Johnny looks around the piles of junk that seem to stretch forever in every direction.

“Do you want to ask me things?”

“I’ve been down here for a long time and will be here for quite a bit longer. Life and death don’t interest me terribly much.”

Johnny nods.

“Okay. I’ll stay.”

He turns to me.

“Will you tell Fiona and Tracy that I’m sorry and that I’ll miss them and to not worry about me?”

“Sure. Thanks again, Johnny. When I come back I’ll bring you some jelly beans.”

“That would be nice.”

“Thanks, Muninn. If you don’t hear from me in the next couple of days, look for me out in the Backbone.”

There’s a good shadow by the bottom of the stairs. I step through and leave behind the nicest dead guy I’ve ever known.

I
COME OUT
in the old apartment. Vidocq and Allegra are studying a pile of books.

“Jimmy, are you all right?” asks Vidocq. “Allegra told me about what happened with the revenants.”

“I’m fine. Everything is fine. This is for both of you, but you in particular.”

I hand Allegra the flask.

“You want to be a healer? Here’s your chance to be a famous one. Follow the instructions on the paper and you’ll be the only person alive who can cure a Drifter’s bite.”

Her eyes widen.

“What’s in here? Where did you get it?”

“I’ve gotta go. We’ll have lunch after the apocalypse. Have your people call my people.”

I go back out the way I came in.

I
COME OUT
on the corner in front of the building just to see what it’s like in the street. It’s not pretty.

I can see a couple dozen Drifters from where I’m standing to the next corner. Most are just doing the dead-guy shuffle, but a couple of dumb-ass civilians are belly-crawling behind parked cars. What is it with regular people? They don’t seem to get the idea that extremely bad things can happen to them until they’re on fire at the bottom of a ditch or handcuffed in the back of a cop van on their way to central lockup and their first night as a prison bride to a three-hundred-pound crack dealer.

Plus, they don’t know how to do anything. These geniuses think they can scuttle along like crabs and not get
spotted. A good belly crawl is slow and steady, moving like a tree sloth. Why? Because you’re simultaneously moving and fucking hiding from the fucking enemy. Zeds might have kitty litter for brains, but I’ve seen them in action, and like all predators, they have a good sense of smell and their eyes pick up motion before they see anything else. The moron twins doing the dog paddle from the VW Bug to the Camry are sending out every prey signal in the book. Just ask the Lacuna who’s spotted them and is scrambling over the Camry’s hood.

Whoever owns the car keeps it in good shape. It must be waxed because the Lacuna is slip-sliding back and forth and lands right on his head between the cars. Even if he’s clumsy, he’s fast enough to run down a couple of panicky idiots.

When the civilians stand, the Lacuna finds his footing, which alerts the other Drifters, who move in on them. I pull the Smith & Wesson and turn the Lacuna’s head into a pretty pink-and-bone-colored cloud, which gets everyone’s attention.

“Run home, assholes. And don’t go out again or I’ll feed you to these shit sacks myself.”

I don’t have to tell them twice.

At this point, I could just use Eleanor’s buckle to get the Drifters to lie down, crack each other’s skulls, or square-dance. But I don’t. I put away the gun, get out the na’at, and let them come at me.

I’m not too subtle, but I’m not too greedy either. I only gut a few of them. The angel inside me is getting impatient, but Stark loves the sound of their spines snapping and
watching them fold in half when there’s nothing left to support their upper bodies. Seeing a Drifter come at you with just its legs working, dragging everything from the waist up on the ground like a bag of dirty laundry, is a sight I recommend to anyone who gets the chance to see it.

But the angel finally wins the argument and I grab the buckle and tell the Drifters, “Sit,” and they do. “Good doggies. Now wait there until someone comes along to burn you like Yule logs.”

I step through a shadow under a streetlamp and come out by the hospital that’s the entrance to Cabal’s place. It’s dark enough that I can only make out the hospital’s outline with the angel’s vision. The darkness extends for blocks in all directions. A blackout. That means no decent shadows to get inside. No problem. This place has glass doors, too.

The locks are strong, but the doors are the usual crap aluminum that most institutional places use. One good kick and they swing open like the saloon doors in
My Darling Clementine.

I’m halfway to the morgue when my cell rings. It’s Kasabian.

“Druj Ammun.”

“Gesundheit. You might want to put the snakes down. You’re speaking in tongues.”

“Actually, I am.
Druj Ammun
is from the same old angelic language I saw on your belt buckle. It means ‘Sleepless Aegis.’ It’s a seal of protection that was on the gates of Heaven.”

I duck and go around TV cameras and microphone booms the crew left in the hall.

“Protection from what?”

“Who else? Lucifer and the fallen frat boys. God put it there to keep them from sneaking back into Heaven. It mind-fucks any fallen that get near it. Turns them into Muppets.”

“You dug all this out of the Codex?”

“Well, Kinski helped. He pretty much knew what it was when I showed him the drawing. I found the rest after.”

“So what’s the
Druj Ammun
doing here?”

“You know how the Kissi like a little chaos with their morning coffee? The story is that they stole it off the gates and dropped it on earth just to see what would happen.”

“Okay. That still doesn’t explain how Eleanor got it or why it affects Drifters.”

“I don’t know about Eleanor, but the zed thing makes perfect sense. Remember the story that the first zombies were civilians who’d been attacked by the fallen angel that landed on earth? It must be true. Zeds were made by that dying angel’s blood and saliva. They have a direct blood link to Hellions, so the
Druj
affects them the same way it affects any of Heaven’s rejects.”

I make it to the morgue, but don’t go in since I might lose the phone signal.

“Nice work. It’s good to know what this thing is. I’d hate to end up gnawed to death because the batteries ran out.”

“Hey, man. I don’t know if you’re zeroing in on the big picture. Not only can you control those coffin jockeys from skull-fucking tourists, but the
Druj
is kryptonite to Hellions. That means you can stroll into Hell, make one of Lucifer’s generals tell you where Mason is, go right up to the
son of a bitch, and put a bullet through his head and no one is going to stop you.”

I get out the gun, push open the morgue door with my foot, and take a look around. I don’t want any surprises when I step inside. The room is empty.

“Speaking of strolling into Hell, have you talked to Lucifer?”

“No. He’s not answering his phone. I’ve left messages, but the way things are, I don’t even know if my calls are getting through.”

“Okay. Thanks for the spook story. I’ll swing by the Chateau Marmont when I’m done making Cabal cry.”

I hang up and push open the wall to Uncle Cabal’s Haunted Mansion ride.

I don’t get more than a few steps inside the front room when my heart is broken. I’m not going to make Cabal cry. Someone has beaten me to it.

Cabal’s body is scattered in about fifty pieces around the table where Brigitte and I first talked to him. If Drifters didn’t do it, then it was someone doing an A-plus impression. I follow a trail of bones and splintered furniture through the curtain and into the room where Cabal’s party guests had been asleep the last time I was here.

It’s the same story. Shredded bodies spread across the floor and furniture and splattered up the walls. There’s one Drifter left. A female at the back of the room. She’s hunched over the body of a naked boy. His chest is cracked open and someone has been gnawing on his exposed ribs. The female has the boy’s heart in her hands and she’s working on it hard,
trying to bite through the tough muscle. A couple of her teeth are embedded in the shiny meat. It’s a good few seconds before she sees me and gets up to attack. That’s when I see her face. It’s Cosima. I hoodoo her back against the far wall and pull out her spine fast with the na’at. Even though I never really knew Cosima, ripping apart someone whose face you recognize isn’t as much fun as gutting a stranger. Go figure.

Bottles are scattered around the furniture and bodies. I rescue an unopened bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the depths of a beanbag chair and a bottle of wine from a moldering stack of Italian
Vogues.
Go back to the room where Cabal lies in peace. He was nice enough to die on the other side of the room and not get blood or meat all over my chair.

Stark and not-Stark are going at it inside my skull. Jack Daniel’s versus no-name wine. Stark is too weak. Wine wins. I slice off the top of the bottle with the black blade and drink a toast to my dead host.

“You were a prick and a crook, but no one deserves to go out the way you went. I hope it was over quick and that you tasted like ass all the way down. Amen.”

So much for suspect number one. Under other circumstances, I might think Cabal ending up a Hot Pocket was just a case of bad juju or karma coming home to roost, but he was too good a magician to let some dumb Drifters wander in here. And he just came into a load of money, which sounds like he’d done some iffy magic for someone. I’m sure he’s the one who sold the glamour to Rainier, which makes him suspect number one in Cabal’s death.