Black_Tide (10 page)

Matt closed his eyes.

Monica gave the eggs one last whip and upended the bowl into the pan. She hollered into the living room so Matt could hear her over the morning news. "You want bacon or sausage, baby?"

Some talking head droned on about the upcoming election, upset at everyone for not violating the laws of nature and economics.

"Baby?" She stepped back and cast a glance over her shoulder.

Matt lay on the loveseat, legs draped over the side. Ted lay on his chest, head resting on Matt's thigh, both of them fast asleep. Monica frowned. It wasn't like him to sleep in, and since augmentation he never took naps anymore.

"Baby!"

Matt's eyes popped open and he recoiled from Ted's rear end. The dog slid off Matt, wedging between her husband's body and the back of the loveseat.

"Hey, baby. Yeah, just resting my eyes."

"Really?" She stepped back to the stove and stirred the eggs, just starting to cook under medium-low heat.

"Yeah," he said from the other room. "Oof. Just a little sore. I'll be good in a minute."

"Don't pull that macho crap on me. You don't get hurt, not for long, and you're never, ever sore, so if something's wrong you need to go to the doctor."

His arms folded around her, enveloping her in his warmth and scent, gun oil and cheap coconut shampoo and a hint of yesterday's Old Spice. "I'll be all right."

She leaned her head back against his chest. "You'd better be. You die on me, Momma will kill you."

They ate breakfast and chatted about house repairs and Christmas plans. Matt ate six eggs and four buttered biscuits, so his appetite hadn't changed, and despite his complaints he moved with the same fluid grace she'd come to expect.

She opened her mouth and he cut her off.

"Yeah, no problem."

She froze and waited.

He looked up from his plate. "What?"

"I didn't ask yet."

He looked from her to the plate and back to her. "Huh. Yeah, that's been happening more often lately."

She leaned in to look in his eyes. "Is that okay? Is it safe?"

"Yeah, of course." He answered too fast. "Just another Aug resurging, like the others. Janet knows. I'm in good hands."

"What about 'No safe levels?' Gerstner?"

He frowned. "I'm in this either way, but right now it looks like Gerstner's influence is totally gone. I shouldn't—You don't have anything to worry about."

She smiled and put her hand over his. "You know I'm going to."

He squeezed. "I know, babe. But you shouldn't have to."

She kissed his nose. "It's my job."

*   *   *

Matt flipped stations on his way to the store, the scan transitioning every few seconds between country music, rock and roll, and drumbeat hysteria about the looming blizzard. A familiar voice took him back to a cramped shop in St. Augustine, before they knew the truth about Jade, ICAP, and fallen angels. The discordant blend of Florida-Georgia hick and high-falutin' diction belonged to the proprietor of the tiny store Rastogi had taken them to, tall and gaunt with rotting teeth and something dark slithering behind his eyes, hostile to Augs and stingy with information. He'd found an audience on NPR.

"—aren't the cuddly cherubs of Valentine's Day cards. When God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, he sent his angels to do so. When the plague took the firstborn of Egypt, he sent his angel to do the reaping. They're not living creatures the way we think of them; they're embodied shards of divine will."

"And you think they're among us?" The host kept his voice too soft in the habit of public radio personalities.

"How could I doubt? God saw the hubris of augmentation and smote the wicked to the ground. Arakiel's cult slaughtered thousands before he disappeared. And let's not forget Ramiel in many places at once, until that man revealed his true form as an Ifrit, a monstrous creature of fire and sand. These names are not coincidence, they are known to us. They are the egregoroi, the Watchers, who came down from heaven to lie with human women and for their crimes were cast into the pit of Tartarus."

Matt pulled the truck into the crowded parking lot and killed the engine but not the radio. The man spoke at length, prodded by the host, about angels and devils and the occult, a mish-mash of religions and legends informing his opinions. He got the nature of Gerstner Augmentation dead wrong, but his hypotheses about Arakiel's "vanishing" hit a little too close to home. As far as Matt knew, that egregoroi—or the glass pillar he'd become—collected dust in a cold iron cage at a black site in Mumbai.

"Well," the host closed, "you're listening to Religion Today on National Public Radio. We've been talking angels with Nigel Rush of St. Augustine, Florida, Doctor of Ancient Mythology, Divinity, and Archaeology. Thank you, Doctor Rush."

"Pleasure being here. Be safe."

Matt grunted. He wouldn't have pegged the gawky, creepy man a "Nigel."

Bumper music trickled out of the speakers, so he killed the power and went into the store, grabbing a cart from the rack on his way in.

He sighed at the lines. Nothing provoked panicked spending on things you should already own like an impending snowstorm. People packed aisles half-emptied of staples like bread, batteries, and bottled water, their carts overflowing with more of the same. The hurried, harried crowd made the case for shopping cart traffic laws and still managed to bog everything to a standstill. Matt grabbed a gallon of milk, two packs of diapers, and a forty-pound bag of dog food, then headed for the checkout.

Twenty minutes later and fifty bucks poorer, he pushed the cart out the door. And stopped.

Two men in Titans jackets leaned against the truck, one brown-haired with a smarmy, used-car-salesman's smile, the other a frowning brute, maybe six-three, two hundred fifty pounds, with a purple-and-yellow bruise stretching from temple to ear. Matt pushed the cart to the truck and loaded the groceries in the back.

"Can I help you gentlemen?"

They circled the truck so he couldn't see their hands, or whether they had anything under their coats. Matt leaned against the tailgate and tried to look as nonchalant as possible.

The brute spoke. "We know who you are, Rowley."

"Well that's obvious."

Smarmy lost his smile. "We know what you are." He rounded the truck, hand in his jacket.

Matt raised an eyebrow.

Brute stepped up to sneer down at him, a gesture that would have intimidated Matt a few short years before. The large man struck not the slightest twinge of fear in him.

Matt ignored him in favor of staring down Smarmy. "Okay, so here's how this works. By that bruise I figure you're the assholes who threatened my wife and kid, so that makes me inclined to hurt you. She didn't shoot you, but she's a lot nicer than me and doesn't kill people for a living. I'm not going to throw the first punch, but at the first hint of violence I'm going to cripple you both. And that hand in your jacket's looking mighty violent to me."

Smarmy pulled his hand from his jacket and rested it on his hip.

Matt locked eyes with Brute. "You said you know what I am. Good. I've killed men twice your size with my bare hands and didn't even break a sweat. You ever see what the Hulk did to Loki?"

Brute didn't blink, but he took two steps back.

"That's better." He looked from one man to the other, then stepped forward to stare up into Brute's eyes. "Now what do you want?"

Brute took another step back, so Matt grabbed his jacket and yanked him closer, raising his arm to lift the man to his tiptoes in a lightning-fast show of casual strength.

"You're not going anywhere." His eyes flicked to Smarmy. "You, either. Y'all came here for a reason, so let's hear it."

Brute's smile revealed a chipped front tooth and clean, minty breath. "You think you're hot shit, but you're not. I'm—"

"You all right, Rowley?" Chris Wilcox leaned one arm out of his car window, his massive frame wrapped in a black down coat fit for Siberia.

"Sure. Would you mind calling the sheriff? I'm looking to have these men taken into custody for menacing, attempted kidnapping, and I'm going to guess illegal possession of a loaded handgun without a valid Tennessee carry permit. Meantime, Chris, you might want to clear the area."

Chris's eyes widened. He fumbled with his phone and the clutch at the same time. The car lurched, then rolled out of sight as Matt turned his attention back on his prey.

"Where were we? Oh, right. You were telling me why you're here." He let go of Brute and dusted his hands off.

"You won't get away with this," Smarmy said.

A tiny laugh escaped Matt's lips. "I think of the three of us, only one is on a first name basis with the police force in White Spruce. Y'all come into my town, threaten my wife and child, and—"

"Your child isn't the only demon-spawn." Brute's grin had returned.

Matt squared off against him, putting his back to Smarmy. He felt the impact of the bullet through his skull a half-second before the pistol had cleared the holster. His foot darted backward, crushing Smarmy's fingers against the pistol at his hip.

Brute grabbed his neck.

He spun, pivoting Brute on his hip, and brought him down as hard as he could. The large man's head shattered on the asphalt, splattering blood and brains across Matt's boots. He rolled left, letting Smarmy get off one off-hand shot for the cops' benefit before crushing his wrist against the side of the truck.

Smarmy screamed as the gun fell from limp fingers.

Matt kicked the weapon away, smashed his palm into Smarmy's, denting the truck on the other side, then snap-kicked both knees hard enough to tear cartilage with audible "pops". Smarmy fell on his back, and Matt stomped his right shin, obliterating the bone.

He knelt next to the whimpering blob of meat and spoke, his voice soft like an NPR host. "I warned you."

A man wailed, a frightened cry of pure sorrow.

Matt whirled.

"Someone call an ambulance!"

"Oh, my God, she's been shot!"

"Call 9-1-1!"

Matt bolted toward the voices.

Bob Morgan's daughter lay on the sidewalk in a ring of people, blood pooling beneath her. The fifteen-year-old gritted her teeth, and tears poured from her eyes. Matt shouldered his way through, dropped to his knees, and jerked up her shirt to expose the wound.

A tiny hole below and to the right of her belly button gushed blood.

Matt wiped his gore-spattered hands on his pants and pulled out his multitool. "Gauze. Now!"

Someone ran for the store, but his life condensed to the immediate. More blood gushed. He couldn't wait.

He tore a strip from his shirt one-handed and passed it to somebody. "Wad that up." The knife sliced across the bullet hole. She writhed, and he begged her to be still. He hacked through her abdominal wall, fascia, and muscle to expose the viscera below, sawing more than he wanted to with the not-quite-razor-sharp blade. She kicked, and he straddled her legs to hold her down. Pushing her intestines out of the way he exposed her left iliac artery, clipped by the bullet on its way through. Hot blood washed over his fingers, but he grabbed the wad of cloth from his other hand and squeezed it around the throbbing, sticky, pencil-thin band.

Shit wafted up to his nose.

He looked up, right into her father's worried eyes. "Bob, I've stopped the bleeding. She's going to be okay, but we need that ambulance, now."

It took eight agonizing minutes—whispering encouragement and squeezing to ligate the artery and trying not to scream at his own stupidity for letting Smarmy fire his weapon—for the paramedics to arrive.

Sarah Mason put her petite, latex-gloved hands over his, then slid around it to grip the shirt. "I got her."

Matt shook his head.

"Matt, I got her!"

"You don't. I've got her artery ligated, but when I let go, she's going to bleed out. You're not strong enough. Nobody's strong enough. You need staples, clamps, something. Now."

They locked eyes, then Sarah nodded. "Okay, Matt. I'll get clamps."

"And her intestine's perforated!"

Sarah gave him a bloody thumbs-up on her way back to the ambulance.

Some time later, they hefted Morgan onto a gurney and put her into the first ambulance. The police stood around the second, eight uniformed officers keeping people away from the scene, waiting for the detectives and lab techs en route. Matt watched the first ambulance pull out, sirens blaring. He wiped his hand on his shredded shirt, smearing blood across his abdomen, and approached the police.

Deputy Broadbent hitched up his belt and reached out a hand. The black-haired, skinny twentysomething shied back when Matt held up his own, still wet with the Morgan girl's blood.

"Tell me what happened here, Rowley."

Matt looked down at the human filth who'd threatened his wife. Brute couldn't get any deader, and paramedics swarmed Smarmy's unconscious, sedated body, his legs twisted at odd angles on the dark gray pavement.

"These men attacked me. I defended myself."

Broadbent squirmed in place. "Cory says you had that guy by his jacket before he called."

Matt nodded. "I did. The other pulled a gun when the big guy tried to strangle me. I reacted."

The interrogation lasted ten minutes in the parking lot, the car ride to the police station, and then another three hours. He recounted every detail, exactly, a dozen times, and had to explain eidetic memory to three separate detectives, even demonstrating it with parlor tricks before they let it go.

He only left out letting Smarmy—Brendan Coleman based on his ID and fingerprints—fire a shot to justify his deadly response. They released him without charges at two p.m. and gave him a ride back to the parking lot. He called Sakura on the way to the hospital.

"Yes?"

"Hey. Where are you?"

"Hotel. This after-report on Atlanta is troublesome. I don't know who will believe it."

"Don't spin it," Matt said. "Just report what happened and let the powers that be worry about what's true. That girl those guys found, the one from the boat, she wake up yet?"