The Blue Blazes (25 page)

“You.”

Candlefly doesn’t hesitate. He pulls his pistol. Empties the magazine into Mookie’s chest. Werth’s ears ring. Gunpowder haze fills the air.

Mookie’s shirt is torn.

On the skin are stuck flattened mushrooms of lead.

Which drop to the floor, one by one.
Plink, plunk, thunk
.

Mookie roars, stomping toward Candlefly.

From upstairs comes another scream. Nora.

Like that, Mookie turns, bounds up the stairs, his feet cratering each step. And as Candlefly turns his attention to the fleeing monster-man, Werth ducks down the hallway and hides.

 

Mookie is hell on two feet, the Beast that slouches toward Bethlehem. He is Behemoth and Leviathan. He is the end of the world surfing on a tide of blood and lava.

He hears his daughter scream. He moves fast. Skin tight. Muscles bulging. Bones heavy as oaken crossbeams. At the top of the steps is a Snakeface masquerading as the killer Lutkevich. Killed you once. Kill you again. The black-scaled Naga lunges, fangs out. Mookie punches through its face. Pulls the back of its head through its mouth. Then throws the lifeless blood-pumping body back down the stairs.

The other one–

Spall. Not-Spall. Golden eyes. Lithe. Climbing up the walls. Lunging at him from the ceiling. Mookie bats it to the ground like a badminton birdie.

Then he stomps on the monster’s head. Once. Twice. Three times, it’s red paste and porcelain bone. Plump brains ooze.

Mookie throws open the door.

He cries out for Nora – but her name is hardly a name, and in the hollow of his head he hears the echo of his ragged roar.

 

The shadow thing is lifted off Nora’s body. She feels the pressure gone. Feels breath fill her lungs and the noise flee her mind. The thing screams.

And then, just as her eyes open, she sees it torn in half. Its eyes drop to the floor like loose buttons before the entire creature disappears as if it never even existed.

Her father stands by the bed.

Except, it’s not her father. It can’t be him.

He’s bigger. Far bigger.
Inhumanly
bigger. It’s like what was fat is now all muscle, inches of sinew and tension – brawn in its purest form – layered onto his already prodigious form. His eyes are blood red. His lips peeled back, white teeth bared – a picket fence of crooked slats.

He growls something. It might be her name.
Who are you?
Like he no longer recognizes her. Who is she? Who she is, suddenly pouring out of her. Like an overturned glass, a broken teacup. She catches a glimpse of herself in a gilded floor-to-ceiling mirror standing in the corner. Nora now understands what someone means when they say a person looks “ashen”. Her color is indeed the pile of ash in an ashtray: the color of rain puddles and clay, the color of cemetery slabs. Monster-Mookie chokes the color – and the life – right out of her.

 

25

 

I’ve found a body. A golem – a Trogbody. I missed the corpse the first time, dismissing the strange shape as just another part of the insane topography of this place, but I doubled back (without meaning to), this time with a glow-stick in my hand. (That’s what I call it when I find a way to break apart some of the glowing fungi and smear them on a branch or stick – it affords me reasonable light down here in the dark.) The golem lay collapsed against the wall, his geode head smashed open, the rose crystals glittering within. His body like lava rock: black and shot through with holes, for his flesh was once bubbles in cooling lava. He had a book, if you can call it that: a stone book, the pages slate and looped together with a binding of dry twine. Some kind of religious book, all symbols. But I remind myself that our alphabet is just symbols, too. I see eight pages with large glyphs carved upon them. I see a dead tree with a some kind of bottle in its hollow; a fat-bellied bell hanging from a bound scroll; a candle with a fly atop its wick instead of a flame; a gravestone with a horse-head at its crest; a monstrous pig with sharp teeth; a tower made of crystal; a musical note with a worm or snake wrapped around it; and finally, a lamb with a key held in its mouth and another around its neck. As I beheld the book, the voices in my mind returned with renewed vigor.

– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

 

Everything is fire. Everything is alive and angry and vibrating at a frequency Mookie’s never felt before. His fist pulses like a heartbeat. It’s covered in blood and flecked with bits of marble and splinters of wood. Pulling Sorago through the floor felt like the best meal of his life. Punching a hole through the one Snakeface and stomping the other’s head into a treacly mush and tearing that reaper-cloak fucker in half felt like that moment just after an orgasm: toes curling, then a deep and enduring
satisfaction
.

But now: hands around his daughter’s throat. Crushing her trachea. Her gray face going blue. Eyes popping out of her head. He’s killing her. He knows he is. And it feels great. Which in turn feels awful. Like he’s watching someone else do it from inside their mind. The Rage has him. It begs him to do it. To pop her head off her neck and throw it through the door.

He tries to quiet the fire. But this isn’t fire. This is napalm. This is lava. It sticks to the walls of him and won’t let go.

Her face looks suddenly unfamiliar to him. You don’t know her, a horrible voice inside bleats. She is a stranger. She is an enemy.

She hates you.

She betrayed you.

Kill her
.
 

He tries to say her name. Tries to ask her who she is. The words don’t sound like words. All she manages is to squeak out a single word:

“Daddy?”

And that does it. The water that quiets the fire. The wind that cools the magma. It’s still there. Inside him. Inside his
belly
. But for now the cast iron door is shut. The fire is contained inside the furnace that is Mookie Pearl.

He lets his daughter go. She gasps. Blood flows fresh from her wound.

Then: a voice from behind him.

“Mookie Pearl. Loyal until it all starts falling apart.”

He spins.

Standing there in the door: the Boss. A small man made smaller by Mookie’s size.

That accusation:
disloyal
. All the years that Mookie has given to the Organization – to the
man
standing before him – come rushing back. A cruel accusation, disloyalty. Mookie’s been nothing but loyal. The furnace door inside him pops open again. The fires of anger belch out. Napalm spills.

He stomps forward, cracking the wooden floor. He reaches for Zoladski–

But suddenly the man leaps in the air, fast as a jungle cat. He clings to the ceiling. Wisps of white hair waving. Mookie sees his blue eyes glittering.

Through the roar of blood in his ears, Mookie thinks:

The Boss doesn’t have blue eyes
.

Something roils beneath the Boss’s flesh. Something that no longer aims to be contained. Mookie swipes at the Boss, but the man drops from the ceiling, and skitters backwards into the hall – and as the old man moves, his body rises as his arms lengthen and his legs distend. As he stands to full height, what was once a small man is now as tall as Mookie.

The creature’s fingers stretch and splay. Something begins to grow from their tips. Black spears glistening. Slicing at the air. Similar nails poke through the man’s shoes.

His jaw shifts, cracks. At first Mookie thinks it’s opening wider and wider like the mouth of a Snakeface, but then the lower jaw breaks in half and peels away, all the way back to the man’s ears. What it reveals is not a human mouth at all but some kind of leech maw: rings layered upon one another, a threshing contorting sphincter of shark’s teeth.

All sense of loyalty to the man is gone then. Because the man himself is gone.

Mookie looks forward to killing this thing.

He storms forward. An inelegant approach – the single-path march of a locomotive looking to explode a cow upon its tracks. But he can’t help it.

The Red Rage cares little for finesse.

The Boss drops to all fours and scuttles forward, nails clicking.

Mookie clasps both fists together: a knuckled hammer. He leaps forward, bending at the hip, dropping the hammer of his flesh–

The Boss is gone. Mookie’s coupled fists hit the floor.

The scuttling sound comes from behind him.

The thought strikes him: He’s fast. A stupid, obvious thought; one proven true as the Boss soundlessly leaps upon his back.

Claws like iron nails drive deep into Mookie’s side. His flesh is hard, unyielding, able to stop bullets, and here Zoladski has no difficulty. The wounds are cold in the heat of his rage. He stands, screaming, flailing. The thing’s mouth clamps down on the flesh just below his neck. Razor teeth spin and bore. Something wet and cold like a tongue slithers into the wound and begins to coil around his spine. His body lights up with a fireworks display of pain.

 

Nora staggers out of the room. Numb. Bewildered. At first she thinks, I’ve peed myself, but it’s not piss, it’s blood, her blood. Her throat throbs. Her head pulses. Images of a dead city parade before her. Like now there’s an open door inside her mind and anything can come through it. She sees visions of goblins cooking humans over barrel fires. Of snake-men slithering through the darkness of an alley.

She sees a pattern of dots.

She says it aloud: “Pattern of dots. Blast. Bone dry.”

Again: “Pattern of dots.
Blast
. Bone dry.”

And a third time. The words don’t make any sense to her. But there they are.

In the hallway, Mookie the Monster fights…

It’s him. It’s Konrad Zoladski. Except he’s not human anymore, either.

Nobody’s human anymore. We’re all monsters now.

The two smash into walls. Bannisters. Wainscoting. Pictures tumble off walls. A vase shatters. Blood sprays.

Then the Boss-Thing crawls onto the back of the Mookie-Monster. It bites down. Back of Mookie’s neck. Crunch. Tongue splashing in blood. Her father drops to his knees. Wails in pain.

A body. Nearby. One of the Snakefaces. With the golden eye.

A gun at its hip.

Suddenly it’s in her hand. She barely remembers picking it up.

Barrel wavers. Sights dip and swerve.

Bang
.

A wall sconce goes spinning on the wall like a prize wheel.

She pulls the trigger again. This time, the bullet finds its target. It clips the Boss-Thing in the head – it wrenches its neck backward and howls in pain, letting go of Mookie’s neck in the process. Nora gasps. Sobs. Steps through a doorway into a study and collapses on the floor, all the strength leaving her body as warm blood splashes.

 

The Boss is back up. A flap of skin has peeled back from his forehead – like a bundled tear in the felt of a pool table made by a stuttering cue – and beneath is something that looks less like flesh and more like a bottomless hole.

Mookie turns. Sees Nora stagger into a nearby room.

A small voice beneath the hurricane of rage: She’s safe.

That moment of distraction is all it takes. The Boss leaps, the suit and shirt tearing as his midsection extends, stretching like taffy–

Mookie catches the old man by the throat.

There. The steps. Sorago stalks up them toward the scene. Looking like he’s been run over by a city bus – dust and splinters and smoking motor oil blood.

He’s flanked by a pair of walking shadows: black sheets with knife fingers and eyes like shining coins. They float up the steps like foul wraiths.

Zoladski’s body begins to bend and coil around Mookie’s arm–

Snap
.

Mookie’s arm breaks, bending the wrong way at the elbow.

 

Werth hides. In a coat closet, of all places. He pulls out his phone. Texts Haversham:
HAVE THAT GUN READY.
Upstairs, the ground shudders. Banging. Crashing. Gunfire. The walls of the house actually shake.

Werth thinks, I have to go
.
Now’s the time. Run away. Get out of the city.

But Mookie. Mookie saved his ass. And he didn’t do shit for him.

Loyalty, Werth thinks. Do I even know what the fuck that is anymore?

He decides, suddenly: yeah, yeah he does.

The old goat man creeps out of the coat closet. Another gunshot upstairs. Something – not some
one
– screams. Werth darts back into the foyer, then to the bottom of the staircase: there, at the bottom, is the body that rolled there. The Snakeface that was pretending to be Lutkevich and now is just a dead Snakeface, skin like gunmetal scales hanging on black leather. At his feet is a gun. Werth picks it up–

Just as Candlefly comes in from the kitchen. A phone pressed against his ear. Ernesto is looking up toward the ceiling as the house shakes. Werth catches snippets of him yelling over the din: “–still don’t have the Ochre, and now this–”

But then he sees Werth.

And Werth has the gun pointed.

Werth makes a gesture:
Put the phone down
.

Candlefly scowls, rolls his eyes, and sets the phone on the floor.

“You’re making a big mistake,” Candlefly says, then adds: “Etc., and so on.”

“You’re a bad man.”

“Who said I was a man?”

“Then what are you?”

Candlefly’s smile spreads – like jam on toast. “A daemon.”

Werth pulls the trigger. The bang is loud: too loud, impossibly loud, and the kickback on the pistol is worse than he figured, so bad that he can feel it vibrating in his arm,
in his chest
, like a fist punching him in the heart–

He suddenly can’t get a good breath.

Candlefly looks behind him at the bullet hole in the wall.

Then says, “Thank you, Haversham.”

Haversham
?
Werth turns. Sees the company man behind him. With a small Walther. Little smoke signals drifting from the barrel, carrying one message:
I’ve made my choice.
 

“Haversham,” Werth blast. “You shit.”

Haversham pulls the trigger again, and it’s lights out for James Werth, the old goat.

 

It’s not pain so much as pressure. The arm goes the wrong direction, and Mookie can feel the unnatural way it bends. The Boss-thing wraps its elongated body around it, tightening and twisting, making the break worse.

And now Sorago, the Snakeface he dragged through the floor and left for dead, is coming up the steps.

With two of the black shadows.

Panic. Anger. Two warring feelings. Part of him wants to stay here, stand his ground. Keep fighting. Fight till they whittle him down. Fight till he dies on his feet. He could do it. Burn up like an asteroid tossed into the sun. Go nuclear. Take someone with him.

But Nora’s face floats before him, again pushing the wall of fire back. The panic tells him it’s time to go. Panic is a rat on fire; a bear hounded in bees. It wants to run. It wants to escape the pain. Most of all, it wants to live.

Mookie, though, doesn’t give a shit about living.

He cares a hell of a lot about Nora living, however.

Which means it’s time to figure out a way out of here. The window, he thinks. Maybe the window. Nora’s in the study. There’s a window in there.

Panic wins. But not before anger takes one last bite. With his good arm Mookie grabs Zoladski by the head, rips him off his broken arm – an act that only makes the break worse, compounding the fracture as bone bites through skin – and pulls the Boss-thing’s undulating body upward, its leech-mouth gnashing–

Then he smashes his head forward as he pulls his hand toward him.

His big bald dome crashes into the creature’s mouth. Teeth shatter against his skull. Embed in the meat of his forehead. The thing screams.

It’s distracted.

He wings it toward Sorago – who now stalks the hall toward him.

Snakefaces are fast, lithe, a bundle of snakes in humanoid form – but right now Sorago’s slow, probably from getting dragged down through marble and wood and metal pipes.

It knocks him down. The shadows duck it by disappearing through the floor.

It affords Mookie an opening. A short one.

He seizes the moment. Runs like a Mack truck toward the study door.

Mookie dives through it. Slams it shut behind him. His panic is a gleaming beacon, a lighthouse beam swooping over his very few options. They’ll be through the door in two seconds.
Move, move, move
. He reaches out with a big arm, grabs one of the bookshelves, yanks it out of its mooring. It brings hunks of plaster wall with it as it tears out anchors.