Resurrection Express (24 page)

Her victory.

My death.

So close . . .

Her smile goes away as she leans even closer.

My hand is gripping the gun.

My hand is gripping the drink.

“And in your eyes right now I can see it,” she says. “I can see the
look
of that very same dog crawling in his own blood. A dog who doesn’t even know he’s dead already. The question you have to ask yourself now, Mister Coffin, is really very simple: How long do I want to make this last? How long do I want to crawl in my own blood? Ask yourself that.”

On her face, finally . . . the look of the devil.

Right on her face.

It’s good. It’s right. It’s complete truth.

“
Ask yourself that
.”

I let go of the gun. Take a sip of the drink. It doesn’t taste like anything. The grunts from the bar surround me. I’m okay with this.

Everything’s cool.

“Now, Mister Coffin. I think we finally
really
understand each other, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me where the disc drives are located. All of them.”

I say the words she wants me to say.

It doesn’t matter anyway.

My rage is broken.

It’s all over.

The world is evil and we cannot be resurrected, not any of us.

Now, I see her face.

My love, my Toni . . .

I tell her what she wants to know.

Jenison smiles. The men from the lobby advance, pulling machine guns from under their jackets. And then a really funny thing happens.

They all start shooting at each other.

11

00000-11

THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY’S ENEMY

T
he first shots crack off in the lobby like a string of tiny bombs. I’m shaken momentarily from my trance, the drippy sweet ooze following me, pouring over everything in a neon overdrive, making it all look like a video game. It comes rolling on fast-forward, high-def in 3-D, and I get every detail. Everybody who isn’t a shooter throws themselves on the floor. I freeze, like the ice tinkling in my glass, and I catch a glimpse of Jenison still just sitting there in the chair in front of me, crossing her legs again with a bizarre expression that might be the shape of resignation, or might be a crooked grin signifying some sort of victory. The four guys surrounding me go for their guns, spinning on their heels pretty fast for meat puppets, and I can see that it’s an ambush from the rear flank of men in the lobby. There were three waves converging on the bar, two men each, and the third wave in back is the one picking the fight, ripping away with a scythe of what might be 35-caliber bullets from compact machine guns—though caliber is hard to get much of a real bead on with all that big-time reverb keening back across the walls and marble floor, blowing my circuits every other microsecond. It all turns into one giant, ear-thrumming megaphone blast of killpower running together over the screaming sounds as I bolt for the nearest cover, which is the couch I was sitting in a few seconds ago. I think I jump right over it. Whoom. My glass hits the floor and explodes
there. Crash. The two guys near the back of the lobby take down four men instantly and the big guys over here readjust their target priorities as the bodies hit the marble. Their Glocks and Rugers rip muzzleflashes and create a lot of property damage—it’s all mostly panic shots—but a couple of bullets get a little more ambitious and blow holes in one of the shooters with a machine gun. The middle two flanks of men in the lobby are obliterated in the crossfire without a chance, but it doesn’t take long before the five or six other guys who were watching the exits get into the act and everything turns into a war zone. I can’t even tell who’s shooting who by about thirty seconds in—the shit’s hitting the fan with such velocity that the whole place is splattered and sloppy in a glorious rush, with stray shells hacking out pieces of the bar and shattering bottles and taking out the smoked glass and chumming the whole front desk into bits of shrapnel. I crouch low and keep my head down in a duck-and-cover, but I’m dead if this shitstorm gets any closer to me and I have to move my ass. You only get so much of a lifeline. I hear large men yell out just as their lungs take massive doses of lead poisoning, and their screams deflate as they fall over and die, like talking dolls cut short in mid-sentence. One of them kisses the glass coffee table just on the other side of the couch and a crackling shower of diamond dust and glittering crimson blood-beads does this incredible detonation thing, exploding in the air as the firefight seems to die off for just a few seconds . . . and that’s when I decide to run like a bastard. I was in a wide-scale gun battle once like this, with my father, and he got us through the gauntlet without a nick. I’ve played a lot of video games, too. The secret isn’t necessarily to stay low—the bullets can get to you wherever you are—but in a room with this many shooters firing all crazy at deflective surfaces and advancing on your position, you don’t want to stay still for very long. This is so easy to put together in my mind. So fast, and yet with all the time in the world. Vanilla ooze. The zing of funny little cartoon insects
all about me. I’m scrambling around the couch, skittering like a spider, grabbing Jenison, who still seems like she’s just sitting there smiling with a cocktail in the middle of World War III, and I throw her in front of me. I find my rage again, like it’s a special power-up on the final level of a first-person shooter. My whole body becomes a burning, seething weapon. Let’s see if you care about my gun
now,
you bitch. Bruce Willis cheers me on. A fake crystal chandelier I never noticed before disengages from the ceiling just a few feet away and comes crashing down in a razor-slashing death-from-above surprise package—it makes a lot of noise and sends glass everywhere. Jenison tries to wriggle loose when my mouth yaps open at the spectacle but I jam a fist into her windpipe—a weak effort, but it has the desired effect. I
think
it does. It’s like pushing my hand into chewy taffy. She struggles to breathe. I drag her backwards on the floor, hoping she doesn’t get shot because I really think I need this woman alive for some reason, or maybe I just want to kill her later, all by myself. My head is spinning. I really don’t know what the hell’s going on here. The next wave of shooting busts out now and I see that the rear flank has taken cover by what’s left of the front desk. There’s blood everywhere, bodies all over the place. It all just happened so fast. Blinked my eyes and there it was. I have no idea which of these shooters are the good guys. Jenison thunks a limp elbow into my midsection and squirms, trying to get free. She’s not afraid of me, but I’ve got a pretty good hammerlock over her throat now, the power of some mad phantom whoopie spiraling in my bloodstream like corpuscles set on fire, injecting pure rocket fuel right into my heart and my hands. One of the last two meaty guys standing—the one who gave me the drink, I think, and wasn’t that damn awesome of him?—finally notices his boss being dragged off and spins to do something, and that’s the moment when a crisp fan of machine-gun fire stitches through his face like a jagged connect-the-dots tracer burn, blowing his right eye out,
turning his personality into a thick pink-and-red
ploosh!
It splashes all over the face of his buddy next to him—a slightly smaller fellow who’s already down on one knee with three in the chest. The brainless, eyeless wonder on his right falls like an anvil in a cartoon and they both go down for good—piles of meat wearing cheap clothes. I hear footfalls behind me almost as fast as I react, the fire in my muscles spinning me in a weird sort of slow motion as a new push of euphoria hits me, two shooters coming into my line of sight. I forget about Jenison—what did I even want her for in the first place?—and I try to do something with the gun, but my finger won’t pull the trigger. The two shooters covering me have really inefficient weapons: Uzi 9-mils. Gangbanger junk from 1982. I see all the primitive little lever-action cogs on the slick metal of the two machines in their hands as another circuit in my brain flash-fries—and, holy shit, I get a
really detailed memory flash
about how my father said you never wanna go full auto with one of those because you only get about a second and a half of continuous fire and the eighth round or so almost always jams in the breech, causing your average dumbass to reach for the bolt on instinct, and that’s when your average dumbass will touch some part of the noninsulated metal and burn the hell out of his hand, causing him to drop his weapon . . . and the memory flash dies down . . . and I’m looking at my death, which comes in the form of really cheeseball weaponry purchased from a clip-out coupon in the back of some jack-off magazine for weekend mercenaries, and these men are going to kill me but that’s cool because everything’s a video game now and I’ll get an extra life and I can hit the reset button and . . . and . . . AND . . . the euphoria wave backs off me, and the world calms down again just for a second. And they’re gonna kill me. But that doesn’t happen. They don’t shoot at all. One of them opens his mouth and words come out that I don’t understand. All the sound in the room goes gooey again in the next second, my vision tilting and whirling. The drug
was
time release
—I realize that somewhere behind it all, the most logical part of my mind screaming at me in a room full of insane people. It’s dragracing my system now, hitting me hard. They never planned on having me under the knife—wanted me to talk, not bleed. She was going to sit in that chair and we were going to talk about betrayal and best laid plans and Bruce Willis movies until I was hallucinating that she was my best buddy and I’d tell her whatever she wanted to know. Did I tell her anything? What else did we talk about? I feel something writhe loose under my arms as the next wave crashes into me, and it feels terrific, something cold and warm and full of the best parts of being a child, the room all streaking by now, the shots from the guns behind me—all a fun little bit of nothing special, or maybe it
is
special, maybe it’s firecrackers on the Fourth of July, maybe it’s hands clapping for my latest triumph . . . maybe my brain is melting and that’s just fine . . . just fine and dandy . . . and here I go . . . under the
goosh
of it all . . . and I try to stand up . . . and the two shooters with Uzis are running towards me . . . and someone screams . . . I think it might be
me
 . . .

. . . and down I go, into a deep, dark hole now.

Something pulling me back as I go . . .

A voice.

A woman’s voice
.

•  •  •

I
’m back up.

Turbines to speed, one-quarter impulse power.

Batman and Mr. Sulu, fighting for control of my self-destructing brain.

I’m running down a stairwell, following a big meaty guy, and our footfalls bounce off the walls like basketballs, slapping against my eardrums. I’m waking up running. That’s never happened to me before. The euphoria is still hanging on like the clingy remnants
of a really amazing dream. And it sleets back in tiny little slushies as I feel another presence in my system, like a cavalry charge delivering a new attack, backing me up somehow. My logical mind is wondering if the drink they gave me back there was some sort of reagent to take the edge off my hallucinatory state, or maybe I was hit with something during my blackout? My senses quickly drown out Mr. Logical as we get to the bottom of the stairwell, and a door opens and I smell the stuffy subterranean concrete. Seems like a parking structure. Something out of an old dream I had years ago. Someone is shoving me from the back. A screech of tires on smooth concrete. The smell of burning rubber and gasoline.

The hands shove me forward again. That woman’s voice again. It’s like Tinkerbell back there, telling me to move my ass or Captain Hook will stab his naughty metal pig sticker right up in my bad place. It’s almost like being a kid again. I wonder why I never tried recreational drugs before tonight.

I’m suddenly in the backseat of a car that smells old and moldy, and there’s a woman on my right side and a very big person on my left. Feels like there’s a lot of room back here. Who’s driving? Does it matter?

“He’s fucked up,” the woman’s voice says. Someone shines a penlight in my eyes. Then she says something else, something about my pupils being dilated.

The big guy next to me smells very familiar. Why does that comfort me? The car accelerates as the next wave tsunamis over my brain. I feel this one like a wall of water, splashing in my face. Wait. It
is
water.

Someone just threw water on me.

“Stay with us,” the woman’s voice says.

Why can’t I see her?

Why can’t I see anything?

The fast neon and glimmering lights of the city hit my face—
we’re racing up into the street. I’m jerked around as the driver makes some fast moves, getting us into the chaos of downtown. Oh great. Downtown Houston in the middle of the night while I’m overdosing on some lab-grade truthtell. I’m about to really lose my mind, I think.

But the fear buries itself fast, smothered in a wave of security, as a voice comes out of the neon in my eyes:

“Hang in there, kid. You have to detox. Just try to stay awake.”

It’s really familiar, the man’s voice.

The cavalry.

I see his face in the streetlights flashing by above me and he smiles, his bleached blond hair sparkling, like maybe the way an archangel is supposed to look after it saves your ass.

“Franklin,” I manage to say. “What the hell took you so long?”

I see him give that old smile of his, and he makes some kind of remark that sounds funny, but I can’t tell. I don’t hear it all the way because by the time he finishes talking I’m under the wave again and the woman is telling the driver to stand on it. I turn in the direction of her voice and I try real hard to see her face. The neon dreamlight sparkles her up as we come out from under an elevated freeway overpass, and she looks really familiar.