The Foul Mouth and the Cat Killing Coyotes (The King Henry Tapes) (8 page)

“I’m a bad friend
. . .” I mumbled.

“Well
. . . it could be worse, I mean . . . you’re at least here in person.  Most my friends are just voices over the internet.”

I really needed to get
T-Bone into a club or something with real women, not just virtual ones.  “Annie B is a vampire baroness.  Met her a few months back.  Be glad you didn’t.”

T-Bone
’s jaw hung open.  “
For real?
”

“Too real
. . .”

“Man
. . . how’d you meet a vampire?

“Ceinwyn Dale.”

“Okay,” he admitted.  “Maybe she is controlling you a bit, but it’s probably for your good.  I’m telling you, she knew if you and the Coyote Nation met up it would be very bad.  I haven’t known you for very long and even I can work the equation.”

Bad
. . . bad alright.  Very bad?  That too.  A war?  We’ll see . . .

That’s when I heard the truck engine over scre
eching brakes outside my shop.

I glanced
up from the two boxes on my counter and out my front window just in time to see Suit, Tatter, Overcoat, and two more guys unload from the back of the same
grande
off-road truck as the day before.  There were another couple guys inside it.

That’s not good
,
I thought in the spare second I had to contemplate how right T-Bone had been about where this whole Coyote thing was heading.  Then I saw they had
fucking machineguns
and I stopped thinking at all.

[CLICK]

So you’ve built yourself a Totem and sanctified it by killing a great many animals and trapping their anima natures inside the Totem field. 
PETA is very disgusted with you . . . so’s Sarah McLachlan, but fuck her, those commercials are depressing.  Now you want to start forming your nation.

With your n
ation on the verge, perhaps you want to be seen as taking charge and will go first, or perhaps you are cautious and will make a friend do it.  It really doesn’t matter as far as leadership of the nation is concerned.  The Totem doesn’t care about leadership; it merely links all of you and your powers together.  The real world isn’t some werewolf romance with alpha males of Scottish descent running around magically dominating in their presence, throwing women over their shoulders and rushing off into the woods.

It is t
he nation members who decide on leadership and how they rule.  It’s the humans who run it, not the animals.  A pessimistic part of me wants to comment that this means a nation is far more horrible than any pack of animals . . . and the politics much more superficial than smelling someone’s ass.

Let’s assume you have yourself a guinea pig—we hope not a Guinea Pig Nation however—and you use your patsy first.  You’ll provide for him his animal and will help him drag his animal over to the Totem.  At the Totem he will first spill his blood inside the field, then will
spill the animal’s blood inside of the field.  This lets the Totem know your anima natures are to be linked together.

Next, you kill the animal, still inside of the field.  Immediately, a piece of the animal in question will be
excised from the corpse and fed to your patsy.  This tells the patsy’s body that their anima natures are linked.  Your patsy is then made to step into the field himself and touch the Totem.  This completes the Matching, binding the animal anima into the human anima.

Next time, we’ll talk about what th
is means for the patsy . . . or for my sister.

[CLICK]

I
t probably speaks highly of my personality that I didn’t think of myself first, instead I thought of T-Bone first.  That’s like . . . honorable, right?  Okay, so I thought about T-Bone first because I knew he’s too much of a tard-flower to dive down on the floor and was about to get himself shot, but at least I
thought
about him.

I could have dived under my counter and let the guy go out in the bang of glory all
Untouchables
style, machinegunned by the gangsters into a million little pieces of T-Bone.  Mancy knows the guy is big enough to make a million little pieces . . .

But I didn’t let
it happen.

What I did
. . . was punch T-Bone right in the gut and then pushed him as far as I could.  I got lucky in the fact that T-Bone had apparently never been gut-punched before.  Or he just wasn’t expecting his
friend
to gut punch him.  Whatever . . . I’m being heroic, remember?  Regardless of the
why
, he reacted perfectly natural—he doubled over, his butt swung back, and his feet rocked on their heels, fighting over whether they would step back or stand straight.

I got to admit, gut-
punches hurt.  Easily in the top five, maybe even top three.  Liver punch is at the top, kick to the balls is second, then you’re fighting it out with some tough competition.  If you’ve got some muscle like me or if you’re some corpusmancer workout freak, you might be able to clench in that second before the fist lands and not feel much at all.  But for most of the human population . . .

T-Bone
is a big guy.  He sits in a computer chair for eight hours a day.  His hobbies are video games, reading fantasy books, and fiddling with electronics to figure out how they work.  About the only exercise the guy gets is when he walks to the store and back to his car.

His gut was not prepared
for my wonders.

He didn’t stand
, he stepped.  I waited for it—one eye on my window and all those guns, the other eye on T-Bone’s shifting body.  He stepped and just as he put his foot down I heaved on his shoulders with everything I had.

You know the saying ‘
the bigger they are the harder they fall
’?  Pure bullshit.  If I’d have shoved a midget that hard he would have went splat ten yards down the road.  T-Bone just kind of crumbled over on his butt not a foot from where he’d stepped.

“What was
that
for?” he growled at me, trying to crawl off the floor and keep up an annoyed face at the same time.

Shit
, I thought,
not good
.  “Stay down!” I told him, with a pointing finger at the floor for extra explanation.

“The Mancy finally drive you mad?”

“King Henry Price!” a voice yelled from outside my shop.  I recognized it as Suit’s.  He was a pissy sounding motherfucker.  “I lied about letting you off the hook!  This is what you get for screwing with me, asshole!”

At that
instant, five machineguns pointed towards my shop, in which I happened to be inside. Heroics died.  T-Bone was on his own.  The bastard gave me electro-anima once a week, not pussy.  I have limits, and to cross the five machinegun limit, electro-anima ain’t enough.  I chose to save my life and hoped for the best outcome with T-Bone sitting on the floor like he was.

Guess that makes
me an optimist.

A really shitty one.

I threw my whole body on the floor. 
On
the floor?  Wrong word choice.  I threw my whole body
at
the floor.  If I could have turned into goo and fallen through the cracks like some vampire, I would have.  My ass was the highest vertical part of me as I smashed face first into the green carpet I’d bought at a discount . . .
let this be a lesson, you shithead, buy linoleum next time
.

And some bulletproof glass while you’re at it
.

The pops started from five places in rapid succession, not so different than my knuckles
on the countertop, just a whole lot louder.  It’s not the same kind of loud as Hollywood makes it.  It’s not a flashy loud.  It’s just loud like a machine doing its work, pieces recoiling from the force, bullets flying spent, little explosion after little explosion.  The flashy loud makes it fun, this loud just clenched up my highest vertical part like it expected some mountain climber to be on the way to plant a very big flag.

What’s most amazing
is how quickly a person can tear through a clip when it’s firing so fast.  We’ll even it out at thirty-five bullets a clip, for five guys, so say almost two-hundred bullets flying through the air of my shop, busting teapots, crashing into mirrors, and making mincemeat of my window.  Two-hundred bullets, but fired so quickly that they’re gone in seconds.

The Coyotes didn’t bother pacing themselves, they just depressed the trigger and let rip.  They all hit empty at the same exact time.  The Coyotes also fired high.  It’s natural to.  Lot of soldiers train to fire low. 
It even used to be a call during the olden days of musket warfare according to my overindulgent education.

‘
Keep low!
’

So you get into their legs and all that torso
at the worst and put them down.  If you start at the torso . . . aiming for the goods first off, by your fifth bullet the kickback is zooming everything over the enemy’s head and you ain’t hitting anything but very unlucky birds.

Guess Horatio
Vega doesn’t make his boys take target practice.

“You alive,
T-Bone?” I yelled from my glorious position on the ground when the popping finally stopped.  My ears rang and my whole body shook with adrenaline.  Second fight in two days!  I was pumped up for this shit!

“
Fucking!  What the bitch was that?
”

Poor guy was so out of it he mixed up his curse words.  Rookie mistake.

“That would be the Coyotes shooting us with machineguns, catch up already,” I growled, looking around to help get my bearings.

The Coyotes had spent their clips.  They probably had extra.  Few seconds to eject the empty clips, few more seconds to put the new clip back in, assuming they had the extra clips on them and didn’t leave them in the truck
. . .

I decided to risk it and pulled myself up on the counter to look outside what was left of my window.

First thing I saw were the two-hundred holes in the window.

Fucking
, what the bitch . . .

Second thing I saw
were the five Coyotes popping clips back in their machineguns, in the process of returning the weapons to their shoulders . . .

“Stay down!” I shouted for
T-Bone.

Third thing I saw were
the two boxes of the toys I’d been planning to show T-Bone.  Neither had been hit in the first . . . volley?  Fuselage?  Broadside?  What do you even call two-hundred bullets coming at you?  I grabbed the boxes and hit the deck just in time to miss out on the second . . . lots-of-lead-aiming-for-my-head.

This one was worse.  It was lower, hitting my counter, hitting a lot more of my merchandize, ricocheting off of the cash register. 
Knew I should have stolen those two twenties . . .

It also lasted long
er, both because the Coyotes made sure to spread the ammo around, and because I was waiting for it to end.  I had a comparison to make with the first time and knew this one was longer . . . expectations still blue-balling me at twenty-two.

When the second ended,
laughter followed the pops from outside.

“
T-Bone?” I hissed.

“Still alive.”

“You pooling?”

“Anima or in my pants? 
I’m doing both.”

“Stay down,” I whispered some more.  “Keep pooling.  I’m going to buy some time.”

“I don’t think—“

“
Stay down and keep pooling
,” I repeated.

“
You alive in there, Price?” Suit called, still pissy and whiny as can be.  “I hope so, asshole—I want you on your knees begging me for your life when I finally walk in there and put a bullet in your head!  Think you can sucker-punch me and get away with it?  I don’t care who your sister is!  I don’t care what dick she sucks!”

If I hadn’t heard comments on JoJo
not meeting society’s pre-determined purity levels since I was the ripe age of ten, that one might have stung.  Welcome to thirteen years ago, Suit.  She’s sucked more dicks than you’ve shot bullets.

“Run out of ammo
, I take it?” I called outside.

S
ome more laughing between the five of them.  “Got plenty,
puta
,” Tatter called, his voice heavily accented and the spanglish not helping him at all, “thanks for telling
donde
you at,
pendejo
.”

My hands hadn’t been id
le through the exchange.  They’d worked the clasps from my boxes, popped open the lids, and showed me that my two latest KHP-certified artifact models were just fine. 
And I know just how to use them
, I thought, pulling the first from its box. 
You cat killers screwed with the wrong mancer
.