I Kill Monsters: The Revenants (Book 2) (39 page)

The second rolled past the first and was on
Boone as he regained his senses, processing what was happening
here—
Ninja
vampires
!—the Ninja leaping into the air
and latching onto Boone’s neck with both hands, bringing its knees
into the young man’s chest, driving the breath from his lungs and
propelling Boone further back, Boone turning into it, smashing the
Ninja into the wall behind them. The Ninja twisted around on
Boone’s shoulders, its feet never touching the ground, getting
behind him, one arm against his throat, the other against the back
of his head, pressing Boone into the choke, the blade of the sword
clanging against the wall as they struggled.

Boone snatched his hand out and grabbed the
sword’s blade, squeezing. He felt it open his palm, felt the
wetness in his hand. He reached up and grabbed the arm that was
across his throat. The touch was enough. The vampire dropped off
him, its limb smoking where Boone’s blood had contacted its skin,
the ninja forgetting about Boone, shaking its arm frantically.
Boone reached out with the same bleeding hand, pressing it to the
exposed area of the vampire’s face, under the hood, like he was
anointing it. It fell to its knees shrieking, grasping its smoking
face in its hands, wailing until it promptly disintegrated.

“
That
was impressive.” Rainford’s
daughter remarked from the lower stairs. “And please don’t touch
me.”

“Where’s this go?” The passageway stretched
away from them. The Ninja and the soldiers had been in a hurry to
get somewhere.

“The nursery.” Rainford’s daughter gripped
the shotgun, Damian’s H&K slung on her back.

“
Nursery
?”

“Yes.” She had her hand around Boone’s arm,
intent on the stairwell.

“Nursery like babies?”

“Yes. What did you think—plants?”

Boone shrugged her off and started down the
corridor.

“Wait!” Rainford’s daughter called after him.
“What are you doing?”

His hands like his insides, empty. The .44
was back on his hip. The machete sheath on his thigh was empty, the
blade buried in the jailor back in the dungeon. Boone’s H&K
hung at his side on its sling. Blood dripped from his clenched hand
to the corridor floor.

They passed one body, then more. Soldiers,
Ninja, Thuggee—all posed in death. A hand reaching up from the
floor, fingers curled and frozen in place.

“They were protecting them.” Rainford’s
daughter followed Boone through the carnage.

Protecting
who
? The thought
registered in Boone’s distraught mind as he pushed through a wooden
door into the chamber beyond.

The room was warmly lit, electric lights and
various medical equipment running off backup generators. Rows of
bassinets like a maternity ward in some hospital. A wail of
infants. Boone looked down into the nearest cradle, nothing but ash
and a puncture mark in the mattress.

“Oh.” Kane was down on one knee over at the
wall, twisted around with his 9mm fixed on Boone. “It’s you.” He
lowered the pistol and went back to his task, affixing plastic
explosives. His sword was propped against the wall next to where he
worked, its blade stained.

“What—Kane, what are you doing here?”

A baby stood in its crib, legs unsteady,
screaming at the Wrath. The little thing had worked itself into a
fervor, its skin flushed pink, little fangs showing. Other babies
cried where they lay.

“I’m setting the charges. The layout of this
keep,” Kane gave the screaming baby a look, “we’re looking at the
foundation,” patted the wall, “right here.”

“No. What are you doing to these…?”

Kane stopped what he was doing to scowl at
the screaming baby. “They’re not babies, son, if that’s what’s
bothering you.” The Wrath took up his sword and crossed to the
crib, impaling the protesting child, lifting it from the crib. He
held the thing up for Boone to see, its little arms and legs
wriggling furiously. “They’re not babies.” The child blanched,
disintegrating to ash around his hand.

“I kill monsters, son.” The look on Boone’s
face disappointed Kane. “Don’t go getting all soft on me now.”

“You kill…”

“I kill monsters,” as Kane said it,
Rainford’s daughter stepped into the room behind Boone. “That’s
what I do. Hello there, miss.” The look that came over Kane’s face.
“Well,” he recognized what she was.

“Not her you don’t,” Boone told the Wrath of
God.

Kane looked from the girl to Boone, made some
kind of mental calculation then sighed, sheathing his sword. “Some
other time then,” he promised, going back to his explosives.

She had her hand on his arm again and Boone
let her lead him this time, away from the room, away from the
wailing babies and the monster that knelt against the wall planning
to bring it all down around them.

“Was that…” Rainford’s daughter started to
say to Boone in the corridor. “You know what? I don’t want to know
who that was.”

Mitchell lay under an old army blanket on the
floor on Dodd’s mattress, gripped with fever, babbling
incoherently.

Dodd sat across from him in the bare
apartment, his back to the wall, one leg drawn up, the other
stretched out. The .38 was tucked away in the beltline of his
jeans, the 9mm on the floor next to his cell phone.

Mitchell’s infection was spreading. Dodd had
bathed the wound on his friends’ hand, cleaning it out. But it was
showing no signs of getting better. The skin around the bite was
turning grey and shot through with black lines, like the
capallaries had frozen and rose to the surface of his skin.

Dodd had stripped off the man’s jewelry and
laid it beside the mattress in a little pile next to his
sneakers.

He couldn’t find any of Mitchell’s crew. His
driver, Trey, gone. Dodd’d thought Malik and a couple of the others
had stuck around, but they were nowhere to be found. He’d called
Mitchell’s studio from a pay phone. The voice that had answered
hadn’t sounded too friendly. Talking about where he at, they come
pick him up. Dodd had hung up on them. Somethin’ wasn’t right.

He could try and talk to one of the Conyers
soldiers, maybe one of the brothers themselves…thing was, right
now, nobody knew where Mitchell Givens was, nobody except Dodd.

There’d been crime scene tape outside the
Moses houses the morning before, police tape blocking the street.
Mitchell’s Mercedes being towed away. The cops had cleaned up fast
and left.

Some boys had found Busta hiding under the
ping pong table in the rec room in building three. Come and got
Dodd. Dodd had told them they’d done good, given them some money,
told them to keep quiet about this. The one boy was Alizah’s
oldest, name of Terry or Terrence if Dodd remembered correctly,
though the boy’s friend kept calling him
Tore
. Dodd actually
believed these boys might keep their mouths shut, unlike that fool
Luke. Dodd hadn’t seen Luke around for a few days and didn’t care
to.

Mitchell lay there, sweating and whispering
things that made no sense.

The television was on, its volume turned low.
There’d been nothing on the news. Nothing about Moses. Nothing
about Busta Nutz going missing. Not a thing about their world.

Dodd sat there looking at his friend. There
were only so many times he could clean and oil his handguns.
Whatever Mitchell had got himself into, he wasn’t going to get
better on his own. Dodd wondered about the woman over on Atlantic
Avenue in Brooklyn. Thinking he might need to get Mitchell over to
Miss Celeste, see about the gris-gris, see if she had any vodoun
powerful enough to help his friend.

Flames lit the bailey from the buildings
burning inside the castle. Bodies were strewn among the debris.
Machine gun fire sounded from the gatehouse, down into the road
outside the castle, return fire from the road beyond the wall
echoing back. Boone and Rainford’s daughter exited through a sally
port, finding themselves on the far side of the castle.

“Boone. We’ve got to get out of here.” Colson
staggered towards them, bearing an injured Halstead at his side,
katana in his free hand. “We don’t have much time. The
reinforcements have arrived.”

“Who is…?” Halstead saw Rainford’s daughter
first.

Colson knew without being told, his katana
rising.

“No.” Boone brought the H&K around on
them both.

“To never see my Pomeroy again,” sighed
Halstead.

“How ‘bout you?” Boone asked Colson. “Got
anything to say?”

Colson turned his head away in contempt,
elbows rising, sword born aloft in a challenge.

Boone cut them down with the H&K, bullets
treated with his own blood blowing holes in the vampires, Colson’s
katana falling to the ground amid two clouds of ash.

“Let me guess,” surmised Rainford’s daughter.
“You were supposed to escape with them?”

“Yeah.”

“Looks like you pulled a burn then. What was
your escape plan?”

An airplane sounded overhead and they both
looked up. The Wrath stood atop the Keep, the red cross of his
mantle clearly evident. He wore some kind of harness that was
connected to a lift line, the line lighted and disappearing into
the night sky. Far above a balloon drifted at the end of the lift
line. Kane held a detonator in one hand, thumb poised over the
button. His other hand resting on top of his submachine gun, the
weapon against his stomach, slung over his neck. He stood there in
the eerie glow of the flickering flames, waiting patiently.

“
Run
!” Rainford’s daughter grabbed
Boone’s arm and dragged him along until he found his legs and
joined her, the plane’s engines filling the night air, a shadow
coming in over the castle. Soldiers on the road fired into the sky,
the plane zipping over the castle, catching the lift line, whisking
the Wrath from the Keep, his white surcoat trailing behind him.

The machine gun in the tower continued to
fire down into the men on the road until the castle started to come
apart. The lower levels of the Keep blew out, the tower collapsing
inwards. Other sections of the bailey walls and the minor towers
around them disintegrated, building materials and body parts
raining down.

The concussions washed over Boone and
Rainford’s daughter where they sprawled amid the trees, hands over
their heads.

When Boone sat up, the machine gun had
silenced. The gatehouse towers were gone. Great plumes of dust
boiled up into the night.

“Well.” He looked over at the female vampire.
“What now?”

“Come with me,” She said, looking up to the
paling sky. Whatever this was, they were in it together now. “I’ll
get us out of here.”

“How?”

“Just follow me before she comes.”

“
She
?”

“My mother.”

“Well, I already know your father.”

“You don’t want to meet my mother.” The girl
smiled at him, lip raised over an ivory fang. “Believe me.” She
started to get up.

“Wait a minute. Can you drive?”

“Why?” She looked down on him sitting there
like a big, well-armed kid in a white cloak with a large red cross
imprinted on it. “Can’t you?”

“No.”

“Don’t worry. I can.”

“Pass the corn, would you please, Mark.”

Father Mark sat at dinner in the kitchen of
the rectory with the Monsignor and Father Tad. They were finishing
their meal, the Monsignor indulging in a last helping of pork chops
a parishioner, Mrs. Daly, had prepared for them. The Monsignor
liked Mrs. Daly’s food. A nearly empty bottle of red wine was on
the table. The Monsignor enjoyed his wine also, as did Father Tad,
whose face was flush from alcohol.

The Monsignor was telling them about Biafra,
as he did on the nights when the wine had loosened his tongue, not
that the man needed an excuse to talk. He was known as something of
a formidable recantour and his homilies were enjoyed by the
parishioners. In his seventies now, Monsignor was a friendly
looking man, quick with a smile and a kind word.

Mark, who had known him for a few years, knew
there was pain behind his eyes. Times like these the pain came
closest to the surface. Biafra, Nigeria now. The civil war between
the Igbo and the other clans. The Igbo, the Jews of Africa. Things
the Monsignor spoke of and had spoken of before: the Black
Scorpion, Doctors Without Borders, the mercenaries on the side of
the Biafrans. The horrors of the starvation. The kids with their
rectums hanging out of their bodies between their legs, like tails.
That detail had made Father Tad flinch, resort to his wine.

Mark didn’t drink. He’d heard the stories
before, at this very table. Before Father Tad it had been Father
Cameron and before Father Cameron, Father Sherman. Father Sherman
and Father Cameron had been elderly and both had passed on. So now
it was Father Tad at the table with Mark and the Monsignor; Tad,
who was older than Mark but still young enough, maybe forty. Mark
had something he wanted to say to Tad when the Monsignor retired
for the evening. Something Mrs. Daly had confided to him, something
one of the altar boys had told her.

“Igbo or Yuruba, Hausa-Fulani, I don’t know,”
the Monsignor held his wine glass aloft. “I didn’t see the
difference. God didn’t.” The old man drank his wine. “The Egyptians
were the ones bombing the Red Cross centers. So it goes.”

Tad planned to take some of the parish kids
to the ticker tape parade next week. Mark pictured him standing
there with the kids on lower Broadway, in the Canyon of Heroes, all
that shredded paper and confetti reigning down on them from the
office buildings. Their parents trusting their kids were safe with
Tad. Trusting him implicitly, because of who and what he was,
because of his station and the authority of the Church.