Desperate Souls (36 page)

As he left the building, he glanced up at the Tower a block away. It no longer seemed like the sole symbol of supernatural evil in New York City.

Walking back to the garage, he processed the information Laurel had provided him.
Why doesn’t Katrina want me or Edgar dead? She certainly didn’t show Gary Brown and Frank Beck any mercy. Does this mean that the zonbies who chased me over the Brooklyn Bridge acted independently of her? What about the hit squad that broke into the building later that night?

Loading his arsenal into the Monte Carlo’s trunk, he formulated a plan of attack. He needed to buy some additional supplies, and then he intended to find a place to park the car and rest until sunset.

Jake decided to start on Montclair Street, near Flatbush Avenue, because that was where this colossal mess had started for him. Killing the car’s headlights, he parked with the corner of Caton in sight. Three fresh faces had replaced Louis and his partners in undead crime. Well, not
fresh
faces, exactly. Two young African American men and a Chinese girl in her late teens. All three wore hoodies and stood as still as statues when not serving customers. Scarecrows skulked the sidewalks, made their buys, then melted into the shadows. No other people dared to walk the street.

An entire neighborhood destroyed by Black Magic,
Jake thought.

The prostitute he had seen twice before rounded the corner. When she did not beg the zonbies for drugs, he knew that she had crossed over. She circled the block, her bones sliding beneath her skin, and Jake supposed she had been “promoted” to lookout status. The second time around, she made a beeline in his direction.

Keep walking, you skank.

But she walked right up to his window. With no other choice, he lowered the window. She set her skeletal hands atop the door and leaned forward, staring at him with bulging eyes and running her purplish gray tongue over cracked lips.

Jake wanted to vomit. Easing his Glock off the seat beside him, he said, “Suck on this,” and blew her soul out the back of her head. Even with the silencer affixed to the gun, the muzzle flash blinded him for a moment, and he did not see her strike the lopsided sidewalk.

The zonbies on the corner turned their heads toward him in unison, so he threw the car into gear and floored the gas. The Monte Carlo lurched forward. He waited until he was closer to the curb, then switched on his high beams, blinding the dead things. Their faces appeared like skulls in the intense white light.

Stopping just shy of the curb, Jake jumped out of the car and pulled the scoped Remington from the cradle he had created for it between the front seats. Standing behind the car for cover, he aimed the sleek black rifle at the farthest corner boy and squeezed the trigger. A bullet hole appeared in his head, and he fell backwards to the sidewalk. A moment later, his soul rose and faded.

The other man and the Chinese girl drew their handguns at the same time. Jake took out the man, but the girl surprised him by charging around the car at him, her pistol leading her like a heat-seeking missile.

Jake’s heart thumped in his chest. He didn’t have time to aim the cumbersome rifle at her, so he waited until she was almost on top of him, and then he slammed the rifle’s butt into her face, smashing bone and cartilage. Her legs flew out from under her, and she crashed to the asphalt. Stepping on the wrist of her gun hand, Jake aimed the rifle at her with calm precision and fired a round through her forehead, blowing brain slime out the back of her head. She stopped moving, and her soul flickered up and faded.

Without missing a beat, Jake scooped up her pistol and tossed the Remington into the car and popped the trunk. He threw her handgun into the trunk, then collected those of her companions as well. He had already decided not to use Edgar’s Glock, so as not to implicate him in any of this, so the more firepower he obtained the better.

He removed two glass liquor bottles filled with gasoline and dish detergent from the trunk, which he closed, and set the bottles on top of it. As he lit the cloth fuse on the first bottle, the black SUV that had chased him over the Brooklyn Bridge raced around the corner, its tires screeching. Touching the unlit fuse to the one already burning, he walked into the street and spread his arms wide.

The SUV bore down on him, and he hurled the first Molotov cocktail at the oncoming vehicle’s windshield. The bottle shattered and splattered the chemical mixture across the glass, and an instant later, blue flames danced across the windshield. The SUV stopped beside him, and he threw the second cocktail through the rolled-down window before the zonbies inside could fire their automatic weapons. The chemicals ignited, transforming the interior into an incendiary hell. Fire consumed the occupants, which continued to move without making a sound. Two of them fired their AK-47s, and Jake ducked behind the SUV’s hatch as the Monte Carlo’s windows exploded across the sidewalk.

Hearing one of the SUV’s doors open, he ran around the vehicle, crouching low to the ground, and came up behind a zonbie staggering around in a ball of fire. Presumably blinded by fire, the zonbie fired his AK-47 in random blasts. As Jake approached the burning figure, he felt intense heat on his back from the vehicle burning beside him and on his face from the zonbie hunting for him. Aiming his Glock at the smoldering and blackened head, he squeezed the trigger, and the zonbie pitched forward to the asphalt.

Maneuvering around the crackling flames, Jake kicked the AK-47 aside. He didn’t bother to watch the dead thing’s soul rise through the blue flames. Facing the SUV, he saw that the figures inside had stopped moving. He knew he could not free their souls; hopefully the fire would accomplish that.

Turning back to his car, he glimpsed the fires reflected in the darkened windows of abandoned buildings. Then he discerned silhouettes separating from shadowed doorways and alleys. Half a dozen figures crawled out of the darkness on their hands and knees, their desperate countenances ghostly in the firelight. They did not care about the twin bonfires or the man in their midst holding a machine gun. They only cared about taking free Black Magic off the corpses on the ground.

Seven down,
Jake thought.
But these six look half dead already. They probably will be dead by sunrise, and then they’ll rise again.
He felt tempted to shoot them now and spare himself a return trip, but he couldn’t kill them in cold blood.
I’ll do that when
their
blood is cold.

He got into his damaged car, popped four Tylenols, and drove back to Manhattan.

It’s going to be a long night.

Jake circled the Polo Grounds twice before parking in an illegal spot with a clear view of zonbies dealing Black Magic from a park bench located between two enormous housing projects. He saw no police and knew that the housing cops could not contend with the level of crime occurring now. Scores of scarecrows traversed the walkways. Jake didn’t see a single healthy human being in the vicinity.

Leaving his car, he penetrated the parkway, scanning the haunted faces around him. Once upon a time, his white features would have elicited automatic suspicion among junkies and dealers alike, but neither zonbies nor scarecrows paid any attention to him now.

A line of scarecrows twenty deep extended from the park bench. Three zonbies sat on the bench, the one in the middle sitting high on its back. He seemed to be the supervisor. The zonbie on his left collected cash, and the one on his right dispensed packets of Black Magic.

Jake walked straight to the bench and drew his Glock.

“Hey, get back on line!” a woman with a strangled voice said behind him.

The zonbies stared at him with dead eyes.

Jake fired a round into the supervisor’s head at point-blank range. The kid fell backwards off the bench, and his soul rose. Jake shot the second zonbie in the head as the third drew his own Glock. Jake swung his Glock in that zonbie’s direction and fired first. The zonbie’s head absorbed the hit, and he fired a shot into the crowd behind Jake.

Someone screamed as the scarecrows scattered in all directions.

With his Glock held loosely at his side, Jake returned to his car. He heard the scarecrows stampeding to the corpses he had left on the ground.

Three down with twenty soon to replace them,
he thought.
I
need to kill Katrina fast.

His cell phone rang as he got into the car. Checking the display, he took the call. “Hi, Maria. What’s new?”

“Edgar’s been missing for twenty-four hours now, so Missing Persons is taking over the case. I’m being shut out. The only way I’m allowed to help is from my desk. Can you believe that shit?”

He started the engine. “Has anyone spoken to Joyce?”

“Yeah, she and Martin are worried sick. Everyone knows this isn’t like Edgar.”

He pulled into traffic. “What can I do to help?”

“Well, you’re a PI, right? You must know a thing or two about finding missing people.” She lowered her voice. “And you’re a free agent, so the department can’t interfere with your operation.”

“I’ll do everything possible to help you find him,” he said as he sped through a red light.

Jake drove downtown to Battery Park located on the southern tip of Manhattan. He saw a crowd gathered near the waterfront, mostly white people in casual attire.

Yuppie scarecrows,
he thought as he pulled over to the curb.
Black Magic doesn’t discriminate.

He got out of the car with the AK-47 held in both hands, and as he approached the crowd, he raised it over his head and fired a burst into the air that sent panic-stricken scarecrows scattering. He approached the trio of white-faced zonbies with his machine gun lowered.

With their baseball caps backwards on their heads, they stared at him with dull, lifeless eyes. One pulled a revolver from his waistband, and Jake blasted all three of them, strafing their chests. As their bodies jerked on the ground, sawdust pouring out of their wounds, Jake fired a short burst into each of their heads, decimating them. He continued to fire until the AK-47 made a clicking sound.

The zonbies stopped moving, and Jake returned to the car, where he checked the luminous clock.

Almost midnight. Plenty of time to make more stops.