Prepare to Die! (20 page)

The demon trotted past me, eating a sandwich. Peanut butter and jelly. He held it up to me, half eaten, and asked, “Last meal?” I shook my head and kept following the trail.

The trail went over houses (I had to climb them, and follow the trail precisely) and the trail went through backyards (dogs would bark, cats would either run away, or pretend to not care, or honestly not care) and the trail went up into a tree that I had to climb, and then went past a woman’s third floor window, and then vanished for nearly a minute, leaving me, maybe humanity’s greatest remaining hero (meaning there weren’t many of us left) crouching on a branch, praying for the resumption of a trail of bread loaves while a woman (I determined her age, but it’s best to leave it indeterminate) was not ten feet away, naked, reclined on a bean bag, with her laptop computer recording a webcam show that involved her lower body, and her fingers, and three items normally considered as food. The cat demon was slowly climbing the outside wall, inch by inch, and was no more than a foot from her window when the trail of bread loaves reappeared. I moved on, hoping the demon would come with me, and it did.

The trail led straight through three different houses, an office building, a bakery (
Tarts
… closed for several hours, by that time) and in each of these places I moved through as quietly as I possible, picking locks when I had to (I’m good at this… because the skill is necessary in my line of work) and wondering what my picture would look like if I was arrested for breaking and entering. I wondered if Macabre was just trying to humiliate me. I wondered if Macabre was truly going against Octagon and his
two-week
grace period. If so, I wondered if Macabre was forgetting what had happened to the last member of Eleventh Hour who had gone against Octagon. Brambles, the man who could control plant life, had only been a member of Eleventh Hour for one week before his public rebellion (during the Louvre incident) and had been found only three hours later, in stasis, frozen in time, at least physically, because his eyes were alive and terrified and moving back and forth. His mouth was shaped into a scream, but hasn’t moved at all since that time. It’s been fifteen months now, more or less. I personally can’t sit still for two minutes.

The trail of bread loaves led up to the top of Greenway’s original water tower. I climbed the ladder, and as soon as I put my hands on the rungs all of the bread loaves (floating above) succumbed suddenly to gravity, falling down, showering me with bread, bouncing off my shoulders and head. Macabre has a low watermark of amusement.

I found him on the top of the water tower, hovering in place, with the small demon racing about the edge of the tower. It was sixty feet down. The demon didn’t seem concerned. I’m not sure it’s technically possible for Macabre to fall, and of course I’ve fallen from somewhat more impressive heights.

I said, “Octagon gave me two weeks.”

“Two weeks is…”

Macabre had threatened Adele. I wasn’t in a talking mood. My speed (always… always… always) took my opponent by surprise, and I leapt for Macabre’s throat. A shield (glimmering like glass, radiant as car headlights, shaped like a Roman’s tower shield) appeared in the air a foot in front of him, just before I hit, absorbing almost all of the impact, but I managed to break a fist through and grab Macabre by his arm. I yanked as hard as I could, pulling him forward into the shield and nearly knocking him unconscious. The demon leapt onto my shoulders and tried to bite my face, but my skin was too hard for its teeth to break through. I couldn’t see for shit, though, and it stalled me long enough for the dazed Macabre to mumble some words, and then suddenly the water tower developed a blowhole, like a whale’s, right beneath me, and an abrupt spout hurled me far into the air. I twisted about during my flight, trying to maintain a sight line on Macabre, because the damn thing about the son of a bitch is that you never know what he’s going to do next.

I landed on a car dealership, rebounding off the neon “Quincy’s Cars” sign (
Super Deals for a Super Town
) and fell onto the roof of a display station wagon from the 1970’s, put in place as a cautionary tale of what you might end up driving if you went anywhere but Quincy’s. I smashed through the windshield, crushed part of the hood and would have rolled away if the steering wheel hadn’t grown tentacles and pulled me into the driver’s seat. Glass had gotten into my left eye… chunks of glass as big as gravel, and I struggled with sight while trying to fend off a car that had been given life by a madman.

“Road trip! Road trip!” the demon yelled in my ear, appearing in the back of the car. “Daddy! Let’s go on a road trip!” It leapt over the back seat and started trying, as far as I could tell, to reach down my throat and fish around in my stomach. Its arm was furred and barbed and began choking me. I was aware that Macabre was outside the car, standing in front, directing the chaos with waves of his hand, but I needed the glass out of my eyes and the demon out of my throat before I could deal with anything else. I didn’t want to be the first recorded person in the history of the world to choke to death on a demon’s arm.

The car began rolling forward.

“Seriously,” Macabre called out. “Two weeks? I wouldn’t have given you
two minutes
. How much does someone like you need to prepare to die? Who gives a shit if your hair is combed or you’re wearing proper funerary underwear? So what if you leave behind a few unpaid parking tickets? Does this shit seriously mean anything to you?

“I’ll tell you what,” he said, with his head growing so large it was the size of a horse, of an elephant, a building, and was looking into the car like someone peering into a dollhouse. “I’ll tell you what, after you’re dead, I’ll reanimate you as a zombie, and then you can go around and pay those parking fines. Do that last load of laundry. Eat a few brains.”

The car was speeding forward.

Macabre was perched on the hood, staring in at me. The steering wheel’s tentacles were trying to go up my nose. The demon’s entire arm was down my throat, plunged down to his shoulder so that his face was against mine, nuzzling like a cat, like Wiggles, like Adele’s cat… a cat that was probably not thinking of me, right then, because cats don’t give a shit. But women do. Adele would care if I died. Beyond that concern, I’d been given two weeks, and I was feeling cheated.

I grabbed the demon and ripped it in half, digging my hands into its face and parting it, ripping with a sudden wrench that opened the creature from head to crotch, like a zipper, only bloodier. The bowler hat toppled from the torn head and vanished from existence. The arm down my throat gave a spasm, the hand still clutching at my lungs, but I pulled it out (I remembered the breathing tube at the hospital, and wished to hell that Paladin was on his way to me again, ready to give me an explanation, once more, for how life had turned out, and to give me another hug) and I slammed the dead demon’s arm onto the car seat, then thought better of that and picked it up and tossed it as hard as I could at Macabre.

It caught him in the chest. Knocked him off the car. The steering wheel’s tentacles flailed briefly, devoid of direction, and the glass finally fell out of my eyes. Things were going my way, suddenly.

Except, now that I could see, I could see that the way we were going was straight to hell. Literally. The car was travelling at a good pace, faster than the old station wagon had ever been able to achieve back when it was powered by gas instead of magic. And we were headed right for a Grand Canyon-sized chasm from which the fires of hell and the stench of sulfur were erupting. Winged demons were circling overhead, poking each other with pitchforks because I guess they had nothing better to do. Demons are like tattoo artists that sit around together all day. Somebody’s going to get a shitty tattoo. Somebody’s going to get a pitchfork in the dick.

“Road trip!” Macabre laughed. He was in the back seat, now, laughing that laugh of his (it sounds like a clown’s, but played at the wrong speed, and injected with cayenne peppers) and as soon as I saw him I planted my feet on the dash and pushed as hard as I could, ripping the front seat from its mooring and sinking my right foot into the glove box, and slamming backwards into the madman.

I think it broke a few of his ribs.

“We’re here!” I told him, maybe thinking that I was a father pretending to have reached the destination (though I didn’t want to reach our intended destination at all) or maybe trying to make some statement of being at the end of the fight, or maybe not thinking at all. Thinking is way overrated in a fight. Just… act.

The whole car came to life, growing tendrils from the dash and the seats and the windows and grabbing at me, trying to stab through my flesh (sorry… too tough for you) and emitting acids (it burnt like hell, but what seemed to be a real and actual hell was only about three blocks away by then, so I could put up with a skin rash) and soon screaming at me (sound is one hell of a weapon, because it nails you through and through) and not one bit of it stopped me from pinning Macabre beneath my knee, the two of us in the cramped back seat (I’m not going to say anything at all about lovers, here) and me succumbing to media pressure, to the way people want me to be, saying the things that people love to hear, even though nobody else was around.

“Take some time off!” I told Macabre, and I punched him in the face. I punched him. And I punched him. And I punched him.

Again and again.

And again.

Because he was too dangerous to let up on.

Because he had threatened Adele.

I punched him.

Again and again.

The station wagon rolled to a stop only thirty feet before the lip of the dropoff, but it didn’t matter much. The Grand Canyon of Sulfur, the Lake of Fire, Hell… at least Macabre’s version of it… was fading. Slipping away from existence.

I’d probably punched Macabre twenty or thirty times. Nineteen to twenty-nine of those blows hadn’t made any difference. I’d snapped his neck and shattered his skull on the very first punch.

I had to rip myself free of the twisted car. I tore myself free and staggered onto the streets of the small town of Greenway. By then I was in the spotlights of the SRD helicopters, coming down from above.

***

Wiggles, the cat, stood atop the kitchen table. He wavered back and forth as I tip-toed across the porch and through the kitchen, with him thinking about running, thinking about coming closer to me, obviously wondering where the hell he and I stood in the new-world post-magician order, but only ultimately mewling once before wandering off, padding up the stairs. I wished that I had Mistress Mary’s powers, her ability to go to ghost form, float through walls, turn invisible, that kind of shit. Instead, I was going to have to go upstairs and check on Adele, and I would make accidental noise and almost for sure wake her up. After clearing the battle site with the SRD I’d even thought about not coming back at all, about avoiding this encounter, but between knowing that I would worry that Macabre got to her after all, and knowing she would worry if she woke up in a house without me, I’d opened her front door and gone inside.

I’m one of the strongest heroes there are… but I still struggled with the weight of that door.

I pretended to study the paintings on the stairway. I made noises enough that Adele, if she heard me, could have come out of her room and asked me what I was doing, and I could have then said something about the paintings and nothing at all about sneaking into a woman’s bedroom at almost five in the morning.

I coughed.

I shuffled.

I even faked a sneeze and talked out loud to myself about the paintings on the wall (“
Dracula looks less menacing with glasses, I believe
,” and, “
A mummy in spectacles looks more studious
!) but all that happened is that Wiggles came out of a small bathroom and looked at me like I was insane. Maybe he was a super cat with amazing powers of deduction, or maybe it was just that patently obvious.

There were four doors in the upstairs hall. One of them, the small bathroom, was wide open. The other three were all partially open, as if to invite someone to take a finger (one that could push into solid steel) and test their strength by moving the door an inch or two inward. One of the doors was Laura’s (and I did wonder what her room looked like, what sort of toys might by laying in view) and one was Adele’s (I knew which one, because I knew she’d taken her parents’ old room) and the last was a mystery. I thought briefly about solving that mystery, but knew it would have only been delaying (avoiding) what I had to do, and also would be that much more of a chance to make some sort of damning noise.

I pushed Adele’s bedroom door open, using Wiggles (who wondered what the hell was going on) by holding him around the stomach and pushing his head at the bottom of the door, hoping it would just appear (from the other side) that the cat was coming into the room. It was something that a sixteen-year-old would have thought of, and because of that I was proud.

The door swung far enough in that I could see most of Adele’s room, but not her bed. I thought of how the room had once belonged to her parents, how it was possible she’d been conceived in this very room. I pushed the door farther open. There was a slight resistance. The door was pushing something along on the floor. It panicked me. It could have been anything. It wasn’t all that heavy, but Macabre had been in the house, and that meant there wasn’t anything to rule out. Horrors rushed through my head, and I felt nauseous.

I peered around the door.

It was a book.

It was a book titled, “
Reaver
.” One of the many unauthorized biographies with my picture on the cover. Adele was the author. Did that explain the slam I’d earlier heard? Probably. I could picture Adele mad at me, slamming the book onto the floor. Maybe the resulting noise hadn’t been loud enough to suit her. Maybe it had landed so she couldn’t see my face. Or maybe so she could. Either way, I could picture her picking the book back up, slamming it down again.