Kill the Dead (27 page)

“What’s that?”

“Whatever you said to Lucifer at the studio shot a bottle rocket up his ass. He’s been sending me into the Codex all day. Looking at sections I didn’t know were there. Digging through footnotes and diaries and commentaries. Some of the writing is old. Like beginning-of-time old. Some of it’s written in an angelic script I bet even Mason never saw. I think it might be the first one. The original script. The first writing for the first language in the universe.”

“Hallelujah. I’ll buy the cherubs a lap dance when this is done. But right now, I’m up to my ass in little fortune-cookie
facts and I don’t know how any of them go together.”

“Here’s something. The big man had me do a brain dump on you and he saw the drawing you did of the belt-buckle thing. Know what happened?”

“He ordered one from QVC?”

“He freaked the fuck out. It was so strong I felt it. I mean, we’re supposed to have a one-way communication system. I send and he receives. But when he saw that drawing, the blowback out of his brain went all the way up the line and back into me.”

“So, what is it?”

“I don’t know yet. The writing around the edges is more of that old angelic script. I can’t read it yet, but I’ll figure it out.”

“Whatever it is, this means that Lucifer knows that I know about the belt buckle.”

“Yeah, but I can block things from him. All he knows is that you saw the image. He doesn’t know you really saw the thing or know where it is. If I were you, I’d move my ass and get it. Whatever it is, the buckle is strange enough to scare Lucifer and it’s definitely connected to the zeds.”

“Let me finish my beer.”

“Of course. The end of the world can wait.”

N
O
, I
GUESS
it can’t. I go through a shadow and into the boarded-up movie theater with the bottle in my hand, finishing the last dregs of the beer. The place is dead black when I get inside. The owners must have done a better job sealing the place up after the cops came by. I just hope they didn’t clean it. I throw the bottle at the wall and wait for
the crash. But there isn’t one. Just a dull thud as it hits something soft. I get out Mason’s lighter and spark it.

The beer suddenly tries to come back up my throat. It’s not like wanting to puke. It’s more like the beer is smarter than me and it wants to run away and leave my dumb ass where it’s standing.

The bottle didn’t smash because it didn’t hit the wall. It didn’t hit the wall because it hit a zed. Or a Lacuna. I can’t really tell the difference, but this would be a good place to learn about them because there are about a hundred Drifters mobbed together maybe twenty feet away.

I lurch halfway back into the shadow when I realize that I don’t have to. None of the shamblers are looking in my direction. Not even the one I hit with the bottle. They’re just standing in a big circle among the seats. A few moan quietly, but it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with me. They’re all looking down at the same spot on the floor. I think I know what they’re looking at.

The gun and the na’at aren’t going to do me much good in these close quarters and I don’t want to use any hoodoo on the off chance it’ll break the buckle’s hypnotic hold on these meat sticks. What I really need is about a hundred pounds of C4, but I must have left it in my other coat. I get out the black blade. It’ll be hard to use, but better than nothing. If the belt buckle is at the center of the mob, I’ll have to put away the knife to get it. But until I’m sure, I’m staying ready to slice and dice.

I take a couple of steps closer to the mob. It’s a mixed bunch. Some of the dead are very recent. They look like regular civilians who’ve missed a night or two of sleep. Others
aren’t much more than gristle and bones in decaying rags. A lot of the older ones are eyeless, so whatever brought them here must be pretty powerful hoodoo.

I’m right behind them now. I could touch the one in front of me without stretching my arm. He’s wearing shorts and sandals and an orange “I’m Not as Think as You Drunk I Am” T-shirt.

I put the knife to the back of his neck. If he so much as twitches, I can take his head off and slice up the nearest ones enough so the others will trip on them when they come for me. But I don’t have to do anything.

Slowly and steadily I shoulder my way between the stinking dead, inching toward the center of the room. I keep the knife up, but none of them have the slightest interest in me. They’re all hypnotized by what’s on the floor.

It feels like it takes a week to get to where they’re all looking. And there it is, lying on an altar of broken glass and crushed Mickey’s malt-liquor cans. Eleanor’s belt buckle.

I’m sorry I ever doubted you, Eleanor. I should have known that the stunt in public with the flamethrower and the mad dash home to the theater weren’t accidental. You wanted to get caught. You wanted someone to find you and whatever it was you’d stolen and kill you for it so Mommy and the rest of the Sub Rosa would know what you’d done and what happened to you. That’s a lot of pain for a kid to be hauling around. It makes me not mind you frying my arm so much. I know what it’s like to want to cook the world. I’m sorry I didn’t figure it out sooner, but, for what it’s worth, I’m here now, and if I don’t end up a Quarter Pounder with cheese in the next few minutes, I’ll take your
buckle and do something with it. If I do end up eaten, well, I’ll buy you a Happy Meal in Hell.

At the center of the crowd, the Drifters are so packed together I have to knock a zed on his face to squeeze through. I freeze, waiting for the crowd to lunge. But the zed on the floor just stands up and goes back to staring. I know they can smell me. I’m sweating like a three-legged racehorse, but even now when I’m about to pick up their holy grail, they ignore me.

I’m in too deep to back off now. I put the knife back in my jacket and hold the lighter close to the floor so I get the buckle without wasting time. Crouching, I touch the edge, ready to back off at the slightest reaction from the Drifters. Nothing. I get my hand around the buckle and slowly lift it a few inches, then a foot off the ground. Still no reaction. Either I was wrong about the buckle or Drifter brains are so slow to process information it’ll take them a while to notice that the family jewels are gone. I hope it’s the second one.

I slip the buckle into my coat pocket, but keep one hand under my coat. Slowly, I push my way through the Drifters back the way I came. They stay put, though the moaners are getting louder.

Without warning, they all step forward at once. They sense that the talisman is gone and want to get closer to where it was and soak up the residual hoodoo. There’s a hundred or more of them trying to squeeze into a space about the size of a phone booth. I lean forward and put my shoulder into them. I have to use all my weight to move forward. I’m getting through, but the farther back I go, the more they press forward.

The mood is changing. The place was a church when I got here. Cool and contemplative. Getting the buckle wasn’t much worse that pushing to the front of the stage at a hardcore club. Now the air is getting bad. Jittery with panic and confusion. I’ve been here before. I know what’s coming. Time to de-ass the premises.

Fuck close quarters. I pull the .460 from its holster and pop a shoulder-level shot between two zeds I want to move. The blast knocks one off its feet and rips the other’s arm loose, so it’s hanging by a few strands of tendon. With just the loose limb in my way, I push past them without slowing down. I need out of here ASAP and get into a rhythm about it. Take a step. Blow open a porthole. Take a step. Fire. Step. Fire. It’s working. I’m moving faster now. My only worry is slipping on corpse leakage or a severed arm.

Just as I’m about to step out of the circle, it tightens. Pins me where I am. I can’t even raise my arm to shoot.

Then the mob relaxes. The magic in the center of the room is gone and they have no reason to crowd there anymore. I break free of them and head for a wall. It’s taken me longer to get out than I counted on. Plenty of time for even these rotten brains to figure out that something is going on and look around for what. I have a bad feeling that if I turn around, a hundred pairs of dead eyes will be aimed straight at me and what’s in my pocket.

“Who the fuck are you, motherfucker?”

I know it’s stupid, but I can’t help it. I turn and look.

So that’s what a Lacuna looks like. Cabal was right. I wouldn’t notice him in a crowd. He’s in a double-breasted gray suit, and if it wasn’t for all the dried blood on his jacket
from the ragged bite mark in his neck, I wouldn’t look at him twice. He’s looking at me like a starving wolf. Like he’s trying to read the theater marquee through my chest. Blank-eyed shamblers behind him are turning this way.

“I said, ‘Who the fuck are you?’”

I take a step back and hold the lighter so he can see my face.

“You can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man.”

He rushes and the mob follows; a tsunami of black, broken teeth and putrid meat crashes down on me.

But chatty and bright as the Lacuna is, he’s still a dumb, dead piece of shit. When he rushes me, my back is already to the wall and I’m stepping through it. He’s not going to make it in time. He’s going to be the smartest deli slice in the slaughterhouse when those other hundred Drifters splatter him against the wall like a car crusher. Good thing he’s dead or it might hurt.

R
ITCHIE’S PLACE IS
in Laurel Canyon. Back in the sixties, rich hippies, movie moguls, and famous bands lived up here. Between the dope, their biker friends, the Manson wannabes, and all the free love that was never really free, the place turned into
The Killing Fields
with a Jefferson Airplane sound track. Don’t you want somebody to love? They were Khmer Rouge in designer jeans, and when the dope and the money ran out the canyons and deserts bloomed over the bodies they buried there.

I drive up the winding road to the address Brigitte gave me. I’m in a stolen Lexus because I want to be boring tonight. And I don’t want to take Brigitte back through the
Room if I can help it. Eventually she’s going to ask questions I don’t want to answer.

It’s about 2
A.M.
when I stop in front of Ritchie’s gates. I can see the house at the end of a long circular drive. It looks like a claw machine in an arcade plucked an Italian villa off a hill in Rome and dropped it down in the middle of the manzanita and coyotes. The place is pretty, but looks ridiculous here. Like something you’d build to win a bar bet.

Brigitte is waiting for me in the shadow of a eucalyptus. She’s holding her leather jacket tight around her to keep out the canyon cold. She should have something heavier, but when you’re sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night like a teenybopper running off for backseat groping with your boyfriend, you can’t exactly take the time to squeeze into Lancelot’s armor.

She gives me a quick kiss when she gets in and immediately starts playing with the car heater.

“How does this work?”

“I have no idea. How is Ritchie not going to notice you’re gone?”

“I put a powder in his drink. An old family mix and not at all harmful. He’d probably approve if he knew. It’s all organic.”

I take her down the hill the way we came, then head for Springheel’s place. The heater is going and she starts to relax. She opens the glove compartment and pulls out the contents into her lap, like a kid going through her Halloween candy. I spot a pack of cigarettes.

“Score.”

“Take them. I quit before coming to L.A. Rich men like their girls pure inside and out.”

“Darlin’, purity has nothing to do with why Ritchie went for you.”

“You know what I mean. Trophy girlfriends have to make you look good in front of your friends. Here that means no smoking. The next place I go hunting, it will be somewhere like France or Japan. Somewhere they don’t believe they’ll live forever if they give up everything that gives them pleasure.”

“Speaking of you hunting, I still don’t know much of anything about you. You’re like Van Helsing in drag, but you have a whole public life on video. How does your life go that way?”

“What don’t you understand? The revenants or the pornography?”

“I understand the porn. Lots of Sub Rosa and Lurkers do it out here. But I’ve never met a professional Drifter exterminator before. How does that end up the family business?”

“The Hussites ate my grandmother.”

“That was going to be my second guess. What are Hussites?”

“Protestants. They were angry over corruption in the Church and the Church rewarded them by burning their leader, Jan Hus, at the stake. My village didn’t care. They were all fools to us. But the Hussites and the government went to war, and monsters, which love nothing more than chaos, came with them. One evening, a Hussite band came to our village. They took as much food as they could carry and some goats and left. We cursed them, but would have saved
our curses if we had known what was to follow. More soldiers came, but these were different. They were ragged and stank of death. Some were little more than bones and none of them spoke. Grandmother was a
čarodějnice.
A witch. She and the other old women, with nuns from a local convent, went together to drive off the ghost soldiers. They carried Bibles and my grandmother and the old women carried potions and magical objects. None of them ever returned.”

“Damn.”

“Two days later, a few of the women and the nuns returned, including Grandmother. But it was not really her. She was nude. The flesh from her breasts, her belly, and her legs had been eaten away. Most of her face was gone, but Grandfather recognized her and went to her. She gouged out his eyes and devoured him in the main room of our little house, under the crucifix her mother had given them at their wedding.”

“You didn’t have to kill them yourself, did you?”

“This happened six hundred years ago, so no, I didn’t, but we still remember.”

“So your people decided to go after the ghost soldiers.”

“The bravest, boldest men went after them that night. They all were eaten or turned into revenants themselves. Other men were able to capture a few of the beasts and, over time, we learned how to destroy them. After that, my family were no longer farmers. We were killers. Like you. And like you, we do whatever we have to do to live and continue our work.”