Bones and Bagger (Waldlust Series Book 1) (24 page)

“How?” I said. 

“No idea,” Bernard responded.

He looked around to see if he’d left anything.  Satisfied he hadn’t, Bernard aimed a sharp bow at Helmet. He stood straight and looked at me.

“Let’s go,” he said.

“One more thing,” I said.  “You haven’t mentioned Sarah Arias.”

“Of course not,” he said.  “She’ll just be watching.”

Both Helmet and Karl followed us to the front door.  It seemed like a goodbye moment so I turned to them, but the worried look on Helmet’s face changed my mind.  Goodbye felt overly final in this situation and I decided it better to just get underway. I closed the door behind me and the hardware clicked with the loud sound of a coffin lid. There’s another Sparky story in that.  We headed down the stairs. And for another one of the countless times in my life the path I took would bring me to battle.

Chapter 32

I made it down the first flight and looked behind.  Bernard still stood up by the door, playing with his phone.  He put the thing in his pocket and stopped beside me on the first landing.

“Do me a favor,” I said, and reached out a hand.

Bernard looked down at it for a moment and then up at me in confusion. 

“Take it,” I said.

He mumbled something like “Bloody hell” under his breath.

“Humor me,” I said.

Bernard shrugged and put one of his little pygmy hands into mine.  Even I didn’t know where I found the cojones to hold hands with one of The Seven.  That’s the way we walked down the next flight of stairs and that’s how Herr Doktor saw us when we paraded past his door. 

Herr Doktor took a quick glance and returned to pretending to oil the peephole.  Sometimes you can measure the time it takes for what’s imprinted on the optic nerve to register in the brain.  Old Doktor’s neck mechanism sounded like it needed some oil of its own as he whipped his head back around for a closer look. 

Hand-in-hand, Bernard and I paused on the Doktor’s landing, and I offered an exuberant good evening.  The old guy stood for a moment in pure shock, and then quickly opened the door so Frau Dimpled Fanny wouldn’t need to see it all through one small—and newly oiled—peephole. 

She’d been monitoring all right. A cigarette burned untended on the floor, and her slack-mouthed expression matched Herr Doktor’s.  After a second, both jaws closed in unison.  Why do my descendants always seem to be marching?  And there it was, the smiles on both their faces.  Herr Garrett found a little boyfriend.  It’s the way things are done by crazy Americans.  Comforted by evidence of continued balance in the universe, they waved and watched Bernard and me walk out the door.

Those two could be the magic cure for blood lust. 

Bernard threw away my hand once we got outside.

“You’re a real bastard,” he said.

I think that’s a compliment when it comes from a Brit.  I was going to say something about how much Bernard looked like he was enjoying it, or don’t get used to it, or don’t you want my number, or something like that.  I mean, tons of material could apply to this situation and I wanted to make sure I chose the best line.  But a car drove up before I spoke.

“You were texting upstairs,” I said.

“Obviously,” Bernard replied.

The car was a matte black, high-end sports car.  One of the newer four-door models for the German who wanted to prove they could afford the two additional handles on top of the exorbitant price.  Bernard opened the front door like he owned the car. He did, BTW.

I don’t know how truth-in-advertising laws run in the European Union, but you’d think four doors would imply a backseat. Not so much.  More like a lingerie drawer.  I folded myself into it. In comparison, my little pygmy friend’s feet didn’t make it halfway to the floorboard in the suite he took for himself up front. 
He
could be a bastard, too.  That’s
not
a compliment when it comes from an American passport-holder.

“Who’s the driver?” I said after I’d added knees to the major food groups and got myself situated.

“He’s safe,” said Bernard.

Safe, heck.  He looked somewhere north of one hundred years old, and I’m not talking vampire years.  This guy didn’t look like he could drive a little rascal, much a less five hundred horsepower black rocket.  We turned onto the autobahn and he sped up to two hundred kilometers per hour.  That’s 120 MPH.  Maybe safe is one of those words with different meanings on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

“Bernie,” Bernard said.

Was he introducing himself to Speedy McCodger?  I thought he already knew the guy.  Said he was safe.  How could Bernard know if he never met the guy?  Or was the pygmy taking our relationship to the next level?  We
did
hold hands.  Maybe he read too much into it.

“Bernie?” I said.

“Yes,” said Bernard.  “Bernie, our driver.”

I got it.  Bernard was introducing Speedy.  I hoped the old bat would forego the courtesy of looking back at me during the introduction.  He needed to keep both eyes on the road.  That way they would remain in his head and not wrapped around a German tree. And by the look of him, his remaining time for watching roads—or anything else—was evaporating by the second.

“South African,” said Bernard.  “Used to be one of those nasty apartheid policemen chaps.”  Bernard patted Speedy’s knee and the old guy smiled.  “We helped him shed all that.  Been with us since.”

Bernard the little pygmy and his white supremacist driver pal Bernie.  Bernard and Bernie.  More loon power gathered in a tiny car than at a Las Vegas convention for alien abductees. Lucky me. Like everything else in the last twenty-four hours, I had no choice but to roll with it.

“Nice to meet you, Bernie,” I said. 

I wondered when I’d given up on life.  Was it Sparky? Soyla and her sexual antics? No Face? My chain-smoking guardian? The Seven?  Any one of them provided enough excuse to hide in a corner and cut out paper dolls for the next two centuries.  But roll on we did.  Bernard interrupted my pity party.

“We’ll need to address your blood lust,” he said.

Bernie laughed at that.  At least I think he laughed because it sounded more like a steam kettle venting.  I could only hope the old guy wouldn’t begin venting in the other direction.  Small car, confined cockpit and all. The new-car smell wouldn’t last long.

“Blood lust?” I said.  I thought I did a reasonable job of covering it.

“Come on man,” said Bernard. “Are you going to be able to control it or is it going to be a problem?”

“Not a problem,” my mouth said. 

“Big problem,” my brain argued.

And now that he mentioned it, Bernie was beginning to look pretty good to me.  Not Sarah Arias good, but good in a way a thirsty man looks at a frozen, one-liter beer mug with the right amount of ice-flecked foam at the top. That worried me. The blood lust was progressing too quickly. Perhaps the unprecedented stress over the last few hours synergized the normal desire. Yeah, chances were high my blood lust would get in the way.

“Are you sure?” said Bernard. “Because you know it will spoil the lot.”

Another cackle from Bernie
.  Just keep it coming out the top side, old fellow
.  Bernard looked at his driver and grinned.  At least two people in the car understood the joke.  A rolling psycho ward.  And with “ruin everything” came the threat “I can’t let that happen.”  Bernard was up front calculating whether or not to abort the mission.  Whether or not he should abort me. I needed to change the subject.

“Sarah Arias,” I said, “our discussion sounded a bit thin when it got around to her.”

“Your point?” said Bernard.

Was he really not interested in how a super-natural being might impact his party, or was he just hesitant to discuss her? Perhaps he took the mention of her as a subtle threat.  Mess with me and my guardian angel takes you out.  Would she?  Sarah Arias showed little propensity for intervening on my behalf thus far. I mean, I could have saved stab wounds and various bumps and bruises had she taken her job seriously.

But maybe it wasn’t in her job description.  Bernard called her a watcher.  That minimized her role.  Not a participant, but a watcher.  If I believed Bernard then Sarah Arias would shy away from intervention.  That’s how’d she’d played things thus far.  Almost.

She did pitch in once.  At least it appeared so.  The previous night as the rest of the bagger gang waited outside for me to walk downtown and start our Friday night. 

I’d found Bernard in my apartment.  I still didn’t know whether it was an ambush or he was just snooping.  Bernard played a little rough with me and Sarah Arias popped in to make him stop.  She did allow him to say goodnight by sending me flying out my own window.  But no more damage than that.  I didn’t know if he wanted to kill me, what I did know is that he didn’t have as much information then as he did now.

Bernard had no idea what he’d stepped into.  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Sarah Arias stopped Bernard from going too far.  And it’s not easy to think in the backseat of a toy car with your legs wedged behind your ears

“She has a part in this,” I said.

“Who does?” asked Bernard.

“Sarah Arias.”

“Why do you think that?”

Good question.  Why
did
I think that? Bernard wanted to dismiss the subject.  He’d called Sarah Arias a watcher.  But that didn’t taste right. Hadn’t she also given me the dry bones hint?  Ezekiel 37, she’d said.  And that was after she told me not to give them what they wanted.  If she truly didn’t want me to hand over Chucky’s dry bones then wouldn’t the best way to ensure that be to not tell me a thing?  Not help with previously indecipherable clues?

Instead of ensuring I’d fail, Sarah Arias ended up giving me the key—OK, I only held the key, Bernard used it—and made sure of the opposite.  She provided the necessary targeting information.  “Don’t give them what they want.”  She didn’t say not to break into the casket and retrieve the bones. 

The more I thought about it, the more it made sense.  Sarah Arias wanted something all right.  The dry bones.  Like everyone else, she wanted the dry bones. 

Would she kill me for them?  No.  Could I hand them over to one of the “interested parties” or hang them over my fireplace? I thought so, but only because that’s how I imagined a guardian angel would act.  A final question orbited around the notion of a guardian.  Would she allow any of the bad people to kill me?  Maybe not intentionally, I thought.  But all bets were off if it all happened while she stood outside the cathedral taking a cigarette break.

So Sara Arias wouldn’t kill me and wouldn’t try and stop me if things with the bones didn’t go her way.  She might even protect me if things didn’t go
my
way.  That made her different from Soyla’s people and different from No Face.  It also made her different from my petite partner sitting in the voluminous front seat while I sat packaged in the back.  At least I’d be cushioned by Bernard’s mush when his pet Bernie drove us all into the back of a truck.

“Are you going to respond?” said Bernard.

“Huh,” I said.  “Respond?”

“Egad, man,” he said. “Do you think Sarah Arias has a part in this?”

I answered by instinct and I answered immediately. 

“No,” I said.  “I can’t think of one.”

I can’t think.  Perfect choice of words for the arrogant little twerp who bought that line without even considering the price tag. He seemed to share a common opinion with Herr Doktor when it came to Americans. 

I felt a shiver and knew blood lust was politely knocking at my control room.  In about an hour it would kick in the door.  Once that happened I wouldn’t be able to think.  Not until I’d done my feeding.  And here I’ve been chiding Bernard as a murderer and man-eater.  Once you consume a human, do varying quantities make you better or worse?

My answer satisfied Bernard.  He turned to face forward.  We drove most of the distance to Aachen in silence.  The Captain and Tennille up front mumbled back and forth a few times in Afrikaans, and I heard Bernie venting steam a couple of times. Nice to know those two could yuk it up.

Bernie discovered the brake pedal as we pulled off the Autobahn on a local road heading into Aachen.  He found an industrial area outside of town and maneuvered the car into a parking space between two buildings.  Some Germans had left their cars there for the night.  Fortunate camouflage.

Bernard hopped out and walked around to the rear of the car.  I did my accordion imitation and fell out of the back seat.  I paused beside Bernie and motioned for him to roll the window down.  He did and I threw a two Euro coin onto his lap.

“Keep your heart running,” I said.  “I should be back in my next lifetime.”

Bernie rewarded me with a few venting snorts of laughter.  At least the man was still breathing.  I met Bernard in back of the car where he popped the trunk and pulled out some gear.  I usually didn’t bother with helmets or body armor.  No way to know how many bullets they’d spray my way so I took the vest Bernard offered.  It fit.

He closed the trunk and waved to Bernie.  Old Officer Apartheid gave us a cheery salute, rolled up the black tinted window, and disappeared from sight.  He better hope we returned before his pacemaker battery went dead.  Bernard led off in a trot.  It wouldn’t take us long if we kept a steady pace.  My nerves screamed at me to sprint.  In the other direction.  And my blood lust settled in for the ride.

We came to the places people lived.  Europe isn’t spread out like the United States, so if you’re near a town you’re among the people.  I didn’t see any single homes, just one apartment building after the other.  These first were the shabby ones occupied by non-German citizens of the European Union.  The Germans would live in the more upscale properties closer to the town center.

We didn’t pass anyone on the streets.  Good.  Also on the plus side, a thick overcast above fought off any moonlight picking its way to earth.  My eyes adjusted to the dark with no problem.  If you’ve seen the view through a military-grade night vision goggle then you can approximate what we see.  Reflective heat provides nearly the same clarity as the sun in daylight.  We can’t pick up colors, so if a vampire needs to wear a tie he should wait until morning to pick it out.