Awakenings (7 page)

Cal lunged, swinging the nightstick hard. The man-thing ducked, avoiding the blow. Instead of bringing the nightstick back around, Cal brought the Maglite in his other hand down, smashing it into the top of the man-thing’s skull. Then he backhanded his nightstick into the assailant’s face to finish the job.

The creature crumpled to the floor, groggy with pain. Cal snapped his handcuffs around the thing’s wrists. The attacker had residue on his skin, like the sticky stuff he had touched earlier. It had an acrid organic smell. He searched the floor with his light and recovered his gun.

“You have the right to remain silent,” Cal recited. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

The officer continued reciting Miranda while shoving his prisoner into the hallway. Crossing the threshold, he caught a glimpse of someone from the corner of his eye and raised his Maglite in time to deflect a sword from cleaving him in two. Sparks flew as old steel met new steel. Cal could tell from the force of the blow that this new attacker, a bronze-skinned swordsman dressed in a black leather jacket and jeans, was Mack-truck strong.

Cal pushed his prisoner down the stairs, grabbed his steel-jacketed Maglite like a rolling pin and warded off a second thrust head-on only to find himself holding half of the cleaved flashlight in each hand. Cal drove a hard kick into the assailant’s solar plexus. The swordsman went down gasping for breath. Then Cal kicked him in the head. He was going for his pistol again when the little gray man grabbed him from behind. Its arms, free of the manacles, wrapped around Cal like a snake. They continued to coil until Cal was bandaged tight, his right arm pinned underneath. Then, the gray man bit him in the neck.

Cal lunged backward, smashing into the corner of the door frame repeatedly until the arms loosened. Reaching over his own head with his left hand, Cal grabbed the gray man by the scruff of his neck, then leaned forward, pulled his attacker over him, and slammed him hard into the floor at his feet. The swordsman came at him again. Cal picked up the gray man like a shield just in time to block a thrust, which came through the gray man’s rib cage just under the heart. The man bled blue. Shocked by the act of piercing his associate, the bronze man hesitated. Cal pushed the gray man toward his friend, giving him the second he needed to pull his service revolver.

“You’ve got a lot of nerve to ambush a cop!” Cal yelled. “You guys on drugs?”

The swordsman propped his companion against the wall and pulled out his blade. The gray man coughed dark ink. He held his side where blue liquid seeped into his shirt from the wound.

“I can get an ambulance here in minutes,” Cal said. “Put down your weapons.”

“Symian will be fine,” the swordsman man said, with no indication of haste. “His kind’s constitution is different than ours. Like stabbing putty.” It did not look that way to the gray man, who was in great pain, but declined to object. The swordsman kept his weapon between himself and Cal.

“Put the weapon down!” Cal repeated.

“Time has done you justice, my captain. If you had fought this well in Aandor, the city would have never fallen.”

Cal thought the bronze man mentioned something familiar, but he had trouble wrapping his mind around all these events. Guys with swords. Gray men with blue blood that clung to ceilings and contorted like they had bones of rubber—nothing in Cal’s training had ever prepared him for this. These attackers have climbed out of a Cirque Du Soleil sideshow. Maybe the butter cookies the old lady had given him were spiked. If this was the new breed of perp, the NYPD was in serious trouble.

“We should have waited for Hesz,” the gray man said, through a fit of coughs. “Captain MacDonnell is formidable.”

“I haven’t even made lieutenant,” Cal interjected. “You morons don’t even have the right cop.”

“That’s what you think,” the gray man said in a raspy, guttural voice.

Cal was confused. Being called “captain” had a familiar ring.
Aandor
? Things were making less sense by the minute. This mess was just a routine call over a trespasser. But these perps knew things Cal didn’t even realize he knew until they spoke them aloud.

Cal’s eyes went wide.
Oh my God! My dreams
. He stood there frozen with his gun trained on them, wondering if this was a dream. Was he really still in the cruiser, dozing, as Erin blasted Tito Puente from the stereo?

Cal never heard the person creep up behind him. A hulking figure in a black fedora slapped the gun out of his hand and grabbed him by the throat. The giant’s irises were blue as a Siberian husky’s. His cold breath numbed Cal’s face. Cal punched the man in the jaw and nearly broke his hand. The giant lifted the officer off the ground with one arm and crashed him against the wall. Cal slumped to the ground against the door frame.

“Dorn said to wait for me. You are lucky to be alive,” the giant said in a voice that rolled like thunder.

“Not at all,” said the gray man. “It never even occurred to him to kill us. Thirteen years have taken the edge off the good captain.”

Spots appeared before Cal. He concentrated on the new assailant’s deep baritone voice and tried not to black out. The man had to be close to eight feet. He had a jutting jaw and heavy brows. His lips were like two fat bloodworms copulating. His nose was broad, his bottom teeth protruded, and stuck out even when his mouth was closed. They were speaking in a foreign language he never studied, yet he understood every word. The giant called them Symian and Kraten. They called him Hesz. Cal committed the names to memory.

Kraten found Cal’s wallet and pulled a photo from it. “MacDonnell has a woman,” he said, showing the picture to his cohorts. “And a brat. Many will find that very intriguing back home,” he said with a grin.

“He does not even know who he really is,” Symian continued. “Besides, if we had guns this would have been easier.”

“No!” said Kraten. “I’m a warrior. I want to touch death through my sword. Bolts are for children and archers.”

“How will they take to you running through maidens and allies with your sword back in Aandor?” Symian said. “Perhaps we can run it through MacDonnell’s wench next,
great
warrior.”

The swordsman was ready to run his accomplice through again when Hesz interceded.

“ENOUGH!” he bellowed. “Guns are loud. They draw attention.”

“This mission was a waste of time,” Kraten said. “MacDonnell is a pawn waiting for his pension.”

Cal tried to get up and stumbled. Hesz put his foot on the officer. Hesz crouched low to look Cal in the eye and in a mocking tone whispered, “Is this lie you live so complete, MacDonnell, that you will die a stranger to yourself?” Frost clung to Cal’s cheeks and they turned numb. “Where is the boy? I promise your death will be quick.”

Cal threw a right cross at Hesz’s face. The blow glanced off his jaw with little effect. It was like hitting a wall of bone. Hesz grabbed him by the throat, lifting him off the ground. Cal went numb; Hesz’s breath was giving him frostbite and he couldn’t inhale for the grip. Cal kicked Hesz in the groin with little effect. The other two laughed.

“If only his father could have seen that wench’s move,” Symian said. “What would his father have thought?”

“You know Hesz’s grandsire was a frost giant, boy,” Kraten said. “The family jewels are recessed to keep from freezing.”

Cal started to black out. He wished he’d had more time to sort things through … to say good-bye to Cat and Bree, to learn the mysteries of his past. So many things undone. He wondered if the blinding ball of white light flashing across the hallway was the gateway to the afterlife.

2

Symian screamed as the side of his face burst into flames. He covered his face with his hands, trying to smother the fire as blood poured from his eyes. The shock caused Hesz to loosen his grip, which allowed Cal to gasp a gulp of sweet air.

An insight about frost giants danced beyond the reach of Cal’s mind. If only he could remember. Hesz and Kraten looked in the direction of the flare. They failed to notice the figure coming from the other direction. All of a sudden, Kraten’s head was introduced to the broad side of a Louisville slugger. He fell like a sack of bricks.

Hesz hit the batter with a backhanded slap, which sent the man tumbling down the stairway. He turned toward the floating flare, which had subsided to mere illumination. A tall young woman with red hair held a ball of crackling blue-white light in her palm. Hesz released Cal and charged her. Cal leaned on the door frame and tried not to slip down farther as he watched the fight, unable to help. A devious smile graced the woman’s lips. She turned around, exposing her back to Hesz, then bent over as though picking up a penny. Hesz had nearly reached her when suddenly he went flying across the hall in the other direction, and smashed through the wall at the end of the landing.

Hesz shook his head. He slowly got up and brushed the debris from his suit. He looked to the girl across the hallway with some understanding of what she had done. A murderous smiled spilled across his face. “Your bag of tricks is small, acolyte. Could they not find a grown-up for this mission? Or are all your sorcerers dead?”

“They may well be, giant,” she answered, solemnly. “But you are one mage short at the moment, and all the dead sorcerers in Aandor are of no advantage to you right now.”

Cautiously, Hesz stepped through the hole. He ripped off a large chunk of the banister to use as a club, and moved toward the girl. The woman stepped back into a defensive stance, her arms and hands raised, elegantly poised in a precise manner.

The giant hesitated a moment … then continued toward the girl, raising his club, intent on creating carnage. As he did so, Hesz exposed his underside to Cal, who was still groggy on the floor braced against the door frame and trying to pull himself up. Then it occurred to the policeman, the thing that was just beyond the border of his thoughts a moment before; something about a nerve cluster. Cal braced himself against the door frame, gathered his remaining strength, and kicked upward, hitting Hesz’s external oblique muscle. Hesz let out an inhuman howl. He dropped his club and fell to his knees, clutching his side shaking. Pleased, Cal slumped back to the floor.

The woman approached Symian, who still lay on the floor holding his face and whimpering. Blue streams like ink from a busted pen flowed from his tear ducts. She pulled a small piece of the flare out from the larger ball, which crackled in her palm, and dropped it on the gray man. The residue on his skin caught fire, burning blue like a gas jet. Symian screamed again and tumbled down the stairs.

“YOUR RACE WILL DIE, WITCH!”

“Hey,” Cal managed, attracting his female rescuer. He pointed to Hesz. The giant had gathered the bronze swordsman and went through the hole he had made. They could hear his clanging as he flew down a rear fire escape.

“We had the element of surprise,” she said to Cal. “I was able to incapacitate their magic user before they realized they were under attack. Only a fool stays to battle a sorcerer without protection. It’s best not to push our luck.” The young woman crouched over him. Her face was broad and her eyes were deep as fjords, repositories for all the deep mysteries of the world.

The man with the bat rejoined them. He had a great welt on the side of his face. He reminded Cal of a young John Lennon.

“Fucking shit! This isn’t worth having a place to crash!” he yelled. “I’m better off at a shelter! You never said we would be fighting eight-foot linebackers with fucking swords!”

“Are you with Anti-Crime?” Cal asked. He could hear sirens approaching. He felt hot and groggy.

“The troll bit him,” she said. “We have to treat the wound before it festers.”

“Take him to the hospital! I’m done with this crap!” John Lennon insisted.

“What’s going on? Where’s Erin?” Cal insisted.

“Your partner? She’s on the second floor!” John Lennon said. “Both pieces!”

“The hospices won’t know how to treat him. We’ll take him to my place,” the woman said.

“No,” Cal said. His strength was draining every second. He struggled to talk. “Cat! Bree! They know where…”

John Lennon found Cal’s wallet and revolver on the floor and handed them to the woman. “They know where he lives. We need to tell his cop friends and let them handle it.”

She studied the wallet. “He has a woman and child,” she said, pondering. “This will cause problems for his family.”

“Please,” Cal said, barely conscious.

“Will they really go after his family?” the Beatle asked.

“Anything’s possible,” the woman answered. “At some point maybe … if they’re desperate.”

The sound of police running into the building echoed up the stairwell. Radios blared, footsteps pounded, threats were issued. Cal’s vision turned gray. The girl pulled an ornate compact from her satchel.
Great time to do your makeup,
Cal thought. Then everything went black.

CHAPTER 4

HARD-KNOCK LIFE

1

Daniel Hauer worked at his latest masterpiece: an ink drawing of the Green Lantern blasting away a Khund armada with his magnificent power ring. The hero’s primary weapon being in fact a ring and not a lantern never seemed odd to Daniel. What made a hero great was his strength of character; he must be a true paladin of virtue and honor. Although there were many manifestations of this hero, dating back to the 1940s, Daniel preferred the second variation, test pilot Hal Jordan. He suspected that other incarnations since Jordan had been designed by a marketing department that had read too much Spider-Man (a good character in his own right, but not appropriate for the Green Lantern).

The ballpoint scratched a groove into the varnished wood as it traced the pattern of the lantern logo on the hero’s chest. As Daniel put the finishing touch on it, a gray shadow sprawled across his desk. The young man looked up into the dour face of Mr. Palumbo.

“That’s a beautiful illustration, Mr. Hauer. Can you explain to the room how this drawing relates to societal class structure in precolonial India?”