Gods of Manhattan (28 page)

Crane jerked, as if stung. "N-no, I -"

"Or cyanide? I did leave some lying around." He grinned, looking Crane in the eye, and suddenly the rich brown of his eyes was a bright, piercing red. He offered the cup to Crane, who shrank back, pressing back against the wall of the little room. "What's the matter? Don't want any?"

Crane shook his head, too afraid to speak. Lomax was perhaps six inches taller now than when he'd come in, and the seams of his clothes were starting to come apart under the pressure of his expanding form.

Lomax grinned, and something was wrong with his teeth.

"Sure? I could make you drink it. Might teach you a lesson." He drained the cup, then passed it to Crane. "More. And this time go easy on the poison. Just half a spoon for flavour."

He leaned back, the chair creaking in protest. "Anyway, me and Venger were a team. He was crazy about me - literally - and I strung him along because he was about the most useful guy you could imagine. Except." He sighed, flexing his fingers, watching them thicken. "If you know there's a master of disguise running around who can't do emotions, then suddenly your master of disguise isn't that useful any more. Hey! There's a guy who doesn't smile and speaks in a monotone! It must be Anton Venger! Get the cuffs!"

He looked off into the distance. "God, that voice was creepy. That monotone voice singing 'Happy Birthday, Mister President...' I didn't ask him to do that again." He shook his head, as if shaking off the memory. "Anyway, it occurred to me that things would run a lot more smoothly if he was dead. If the world knew Anton Venger was dead - if Doc Thunder had told them so - well, everybody would stop looking for him, right?"

He stretched, and the shirt burst off his back, splitting right down the middle. Crane started, making a little whimper. Lomax just smiled.

"It was a great plan. Team up with N.I.G.H.T.M.A.R.E., have a very public falling-out with Venger, dose him with something I invented that'll slow down his life signs to the point of death, then - while Thunder's being tortured to death, which is a nice little bonus - go rat Silken Dragon out to S.T.E.A.M. and hole up somewhere until the fireworks are all done with. I already had people in place to fake the autopsy and ship the body to a secure location..." He took the fresh coffee from Crane, taking a sip. "No cyanide at all in this one! What did I tell you?"

"I - I thought you were joking." Crane looked at the door again. Only a few feet away. If he ran now-

"I never joke about coffee. You're starting to get on my last nerve, Parker. Maybe I'll pop your head like a zit and see what comes out." He followed Crane's line of sight. "Don't look at the door, Parker. You'll never reach it in time. You don't mind me calling you Parker, do you, Parker? I figure after all these fun times we had together - you know, you pushing me around, treating me like a joke, like your pet science gimp - I figured we'd be on first name terms by now. I never kill people I'm on first name terms with. Are we on first name terms, Parker?"

Crane swallowed, hard. He couldn't look away from Lomax now. Every few seconds, a new muscle would pop up on his shoulders, like a bubble coming to the surface of a lake. A lake of skin. The veins on his arms were starting to pulse a livid purple.

He didn't look like Doc Thunder at all.

He looked stronger.

"Parker! Focus!" Lomax yelled, and his voice was a deep, angry growl.

"Yes." Crane whispered. "Yes... Lars."

"Actually, my first name's Timothy, but nobody calls me that. Even my parents called me Happy." Lomax laughed. "And believe you me, I'm happy now. Anyway... the plan. The big plan to rehabilitate Anton Venger as a productive corpse. It all went off without a hitch, unless you count Thunder breaking out early and clocking me upside the head with a big chunk of masonry. By the time I broke out of prison, Venger had spent six months in a packing crate in a state of living death." He shrugged. "Didn't do a lot for his personality, frankly. He was even more devoted to me when I got him out, on account of how he thought I'd saved his life. The plain fact of the matter is I could have left him in there a lot longer and I kind of wish I had..." He paused, looking at the way the thick red hairs were growing on the back of his hand.

"Anyway, I needed to keep him sweet, give him some kind of reward for all the time he spent in that crate. So I figured we'd go kill the Blue Ghost. He was getting old, getting slow. He was basically just a mascot for that bike gang his foster kid formed, so I figured, okay, we'll knock him off, give Anton something to keep him from going completely off the rails." Lomax looked at Crane, eyes steely. "Only we were too late, weren't we? Why don't you pick up the story from here, Parker?"

Crane shook his head. "I don't know what you -"

"Oh,
please
. You were the fresh new head of Untergang after whatever old coot that replaced Donner finally retired. You had a lot of big, sexy plans. Not as sexy as mine, but pretty big and sexy nonetheless. You took a look at the Blue Ghost - mysterious masked avenger, operatives all over the place, big fan-following with the working classes, and you figured... we need one of those. Just take away the Japanese orphan kid and replace him with a foxy Aryan chick - and how's Marlene doing, anyway?"

Crane spluttered. "How do you know about -"

"Wouldn't you like to know? Anyway, give your brand new Blue Ghost some guns so he's not getting beaten up all the time, package it all up to appeal to Untergang's core voters... I've got to hand it to you, Parker, I know a winning strategy when I see one. There was just one thing wrong, wasn't there?" Crane shook his head, unable to meet Lomax's eyes. They were entirely red now, the white of the eye subsumed, the pupils two black dots in a bloody sea.

Lomax laughed. Crane didn't dare to look.

He had fangs.

"You needed a vacancy! There's no point being the all-new, all-Nazi Blue Ghost if the old Ghost's still around, right? So you strangled him with your own two hands and dropped his body off a pier, and poor little Easton West's been trying to solve the murder ever since! I felt for the guy, I can tell you. And poor Anton! That was all he'd been thinking about for months in his box, and you got there first. Shame on you!" Lomax shook his head, the red eyes burning with mock indignation.

"He wanted to do away with you there and then. In fact, he was all for killing you and taking your place. Running Untergang for our own concerns. I thought about it, I'll admit..." Lomax stood, rubbing the base of his spine. His head almost banged against the ceiling of the room, three feet above Crane's head. "But... that was a little too obvious. I wanted all the benefits of taking over your whole organisation without any of the downsides of actually having to run it. I mean, who wants to run Untergang? Not even
you
want to run Untergang! You've driven it into the ground while you lived out your crazy vigilante fantasy!"

He smiled, turning to Crane and leaning down. Crane thought he smelled brimstone on the monster's breath.

"So
that's
when I came up with the
real
plan. Get ready, Parker."

He loosened his belt enough for the tail that was growing out of his spine to poke over it.

"This is where it gets
weird.
"

"...that's right." Doc Thunder nodded, as the bike cop put another quarter into the payphone and wound the clockwork handle on the side. Doc gave him a brief thumbs-up and continued talking into the mouthpiece. "I've got El Sombra with me. Yes, the man with the sword, Donner's killer. No, he hasn't put a shirt on. Look, we're going to go try to catch Lomax before he gets away, but I need you to call Jack Scorpio and co-ordinate with S.T.E.A.M. If Lomax has done what I think he's done, the army might not be enough." He listened for a moment, then broke in. "Okay. If I don't come back inside six hours... well, you know. Bye." He put the phone down and sighed.

"Trouble with the missus?" the cop asked. Doc blinked.

"You're very perceptive, Officer... McNulty, was it?"

McNulty nodded. "The way you ended your call. Listen, last time me and the wife had some trouble, you know what I got her? A baby pig."

'"A baby pig." Doc rubbed his forehead. "Officer-"

"Mr. Porkins, we call him." The cop smiled brightly. "'Course, he's a little bigger now, and it's hell hiding him from the building super, but as soon as Joanie saw his cute little nose wrinkle it up, she forgot all about the whores."

Doc sighed. "Thanks, Officer. I'll bear that in mind." He turned to see El Sombra walking out of the station, cleaning marble fragments off his sword. "What took you so long?"

"Just a hunch, amigo. Who knows, it might end up paying off, hey? Could make all the difference." The masked man patted the pocket of his suit trousers.

Doc rubbed his temples again, shaking his head gently. "Fine. Get up on my back, and hold tight - hook an arm through the back of my shirt. This is going to get bumpy. You remember where we're going? East Village, right?"

El Sombra looked sideways at him. "What, you're going to fly there?"

Doc nodded. "Close enough. Let's go."

He jumped.

Lomax paced slowly around the boxy, closed-in room, his tail twitching and swishing to and fro like a cat's.

"First of all, Anton Venger needed to take Miles Hamilton's place. If I wanted to get Thunder's blood, that was the best way to do it. Get Venger undercover and wait for him to get his personal physician to supervise a blood transfusion. Bound to happen within a year, two at the most." He laughed, sourly. "Ha! Well, the best laid plans, and so on. Anyway, I couldn't send Hamilton in if I was still on the loose. Thunder would smell a rat. He'd probably smell a rat anyway.
And
I needed a way to get in with your people, so I'd have access to all your equipment and knowhow. If I tried extracting the serum from Thunder's blood on my own, well, I'd probably end up giving myself nut cancer. But standing on the shoulders of your giants..." He turned, giving another hideous, fanged grin. "How am I doing? Better than the real thing, right?" He flexed his immense hands, marvelling at the carpet of red hair that now reached from his back all the way down each arm.

"The answer? Combine it all into one. Kidnap Hamilton, hand him over to Venger's tender mercies - and Venger had a lot of frustration to take out by this point, let me tell you - and then play the whole thing out with Venger in Hamilton's place."

"P-play what out?" Crane was slumped in a corner by this time, clutching at his head, staring at the thing Lomax was becoming, step by awful step, in front of him.

"My death, of course! My beautiful death! Torturing Hamilton in front of Doc's lovely assistant! I'd kidnapped her for the purpose of leaving Doc some obvious clues. All on a big balloon filled with enough hydrogen to set the whole damn place on fire when I fired a bullet through it! Except for the nose, of course - fireproof, crashproof, loaded with supplies for an unscheduled stopover in the Amazon rainforest, and also loaded with Hamilton's skeleton, de-fleshed and pre-charred to take my place. I do my big torture scene, and of course with Venger's squishy face it doesn't do more than tickle, then in comes Thunder, we fight,
bang
goes the gun! Fire everywhere!" Lomax gleefully acted it out, his huge muscled arms sending tables filled with equipment flying, glass shattering against the walls and floor. The tables were solid oak, but to the thing Lomax had become, there were as light and flimsy as paper.

Crane felt his bladder let go.

"Thunder rescues his steady - rescues 'Hamilton'-" The creature held up crooked fingers to make the quotation marks. "-and I crash into the rainforest, ejecting my skeletal stand-in into the flaming wreckage before taking off to hide out in the deepest darkest jungle for a while. Needless to say, poor old Doc's too distracted by the flame-grilled crispy death of his number one foe to look too closely at Venger. And even if he wasn't, what's he going to say? Hamilton's not acting like himself? The guy just got through being tortured! And even if Doc does think Hamilton's gone weird, he's not going to think 'oh no, Anton Venger', since he saw Anton Venger die and all... I mean, it's perfect-" He stopped, sniffing the air.

"
Christ,
Parker! Do you know how that smells through these nostrils? I thought you were meant to be a dark avenger of the night?" Lomax leaned down, the vertebrae on his back pushing up through his skin, making small popping sounds. "Seriously, haven't you ever seen a man turning into a monster before?"

"The serum." Crane croaked. "It doesn't work properly. This - this is too much -"

Lomax laughed. "Says you. It's underperforming as far as I'm concerned. I wanted devil horns." He rubbed his temples experimentally. "Nope, nothing yet. Seriously, Parker, do you honestly think I wanted to be as good as Thunder? What's the point of that? He'll just call in S.T.E.A.M. or Maya's Leopard Warriors Of The Something-Something or, I don't know, that British guy, what's his name? Troy Mercury? Perseus Quicklime? You know who I mean, Untergang must have a file on him a foot thick." He shrugged. "Whatever. I need to be big enough to beat them
all
, Parker. Everybody in his little black book, one at a time or all together." He paused, scratching his chin. "My thinking's getting a little random, though, I'll admit. I keep getting this craving for raw meat. Where did I get up to?"