Savage Prophet: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode 4) (14 page)

Packed a sea bag, tossed it into the back of a beat-to-shit ’66 Toyota Stout—paint peeling, shocks shot, windows cracked—and drove away.

Disappeared.

It’d been a tough decision, and one I always regretted, but deep down I’m still convinced it was the right one. In my world, close relationships were only weaknesses waiting to be exploited. If I’d stayed with my family, they would’ve been a target. Someone would’ve found them. Would’ve used them against me—I’d seen it happen to plenty of magi in the Guild, men and women too weak to do what needed doing.

Not that I’m judging, not exactly. Shit, years later, I broke my own rules and let Ailia in, which’d been so good. Nine brief years of happiness. Then, in an eyeblink, the Morrigan took her from me. Took her because I’d been too soft, too weak, to do what I should’ve done.

And now? Now, I was doing it again. Allowing history to repeat itself.

I’d walled my heart off, but somehow Ferraro had managed to drop-kick her way through my defenses. What if something happened to her? Losing Ailia had almost killed me—I spent years living at the bottom of a bottle, shuffling mindlessly through life. Eating, drinking, sleeping, travelling, all in a muddy, booze-induced haze. Could I weather that storm again?

I pushed myself to shaky legs and wobbled my way to the bathroom, trying to put those dark thoughts from my mind.

TEN:

Hub-Side

Ferraro, Darlene, and I stepped into a rank alley, not more than a couple feet wide, located in the heart of Little Bangkok, Hub-side, which, despite the name, wasn’t so little at all. A million residents, easy, and that didn’t account for whatever lived below, in the twisting sewers and the endless, cavernous passageways beneath the city streets. Dark stretched out behind us, but the alley opening ahead was aglow with light. Hypothetically, it should’ve been day, but in the Hub it’s never really day. It’s never really night, either. The sky overhead was a muddy brown mixed with swirls of deep, rusty red, which cast everything in a weak perpetual twilight.

Always and forever muddy, ugly twilight.

Ferraro had let Darlene and I sleep for six hours before rousing us. We’d hit the road after that, snagging a bite to eat and a couple gallons of gas station joe—the only thing keeping me going—before setting out on a three-hour drive south to Norfolk. Once more, Darlene’s seemingly unending knowledge of procedure and the field operations manual turned out to be a pretty awesome asset. In order to gain safe passage into the Hub, you need to know where the entryways happen to be, and there are literally thousands of those suckers scattered in cities and towns all over the country.

All over the world.

But she had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of their various locations and led us to a spot which let out right into Little Bangkok. The entryway ended up being tucked away behind an Applebee’s off of Portsmouth Boulevard in Norfolk.

Unfortunately, Darlene’s memory didn’t extend to the Hub itself. I had the location of our target committed to memory—a temple called Wat Naga Thong—but I wasn’t sure how exactly to get there.

The Hub’s a big friggin’ place, after all, and even knowing it was in Little Bangkok didn’t help a whole helluva lot. But as long as we could snag a Tuk-tuk or a trio of motorcycle taxis, we’d track it down easy enough. The taxi drivers in Little Bangkok were moderately terrifying and more than moderately reckless, but they could get you where you needed to go, and they could get you there fast. Riding with one of those guys was like riding shotgun with Speed Racer, if Speed Racer were blindfolded and strung out on caffeine pills.

“This way,” I said over my shoulder, before trudging out to the alleyway entrance. The dark around us teemed with motion. Flutters of movement along the walls or in the open sewer drains, which I knew, without even looking, were either Ectopedes—lovingly referred to as Hub-roaches—street rats, or corpse toads. Something crunched underfoot, wet and juicy, and a heartbeat later something big ran over the toe of my boot then scuttled off into the night, chitinous legs rustling in a pile of garbage.

Hub-roach. Definitely. And definitely disgusting.

I shivered in spite of myself, goosebumps breaking out over my arms and along my neck. I’m not a huge fan of bugs in general, and roaches absolutely gross me out to the friggin’ max—the only thing worse is centipedes—and the Hub-roaches were no joke. Nasty, hissing brown things, half a foot in length, strangely intelligent, and malicious. The Hub’s homeless population was always careful in the back alleys. If you were dumb enough to get shit-faced-drunk and passed out in the wrong place, the Hub-roaches might carry you off, down into the deep places, to eat you and fill you with their swarming young—not necessarily in that order. Which is maybe the most craptastic way to go. Ever.

I hurried my steps along, eager to leave the alley behind, and emerged on a narrow sidewalk
bordering
a street wide as a river, slick and gleaming black from a recent rain, and packed to the gills with traffic of all shapes and sizes.

Cars and trucks puttered along at a laughably slow pace, horns blaring as they jockeyed for position. A toddler on a Big Wheel could go faster. Tuk-tuks—green, three-wheeled tricycles toting passengers in the back—weaved past, cutting wildly between the larger cars, in an often fruitless attempt to make better time. And the motorcycle taxis, mopeds in a multitude of hues, zipped by like a never-ending swarm of locusts, filling every nook and cranny of available road space. They zigged and zagged, darting in here, dropping back there, handlebars often brushing the door panels of nearby vehicles.

Those, at least, hustled along at a good clip.

I didn’t come to Little Bangkok often, but I’d walked these streets on a couple of occasions. It could be a fun place to visit, but sensory overload set in almost immediately.

Glaring lights in a hundred hues assaulted you from every conceivable direction like a flamboyant gang of street thugs mugging your retinas. Signs in a multitude of languages advertised everything: women, men, meat, cleaning supplies, tech upgrades, human-skin handbags and belts. Then, there was the constant blare of traffic, the rumble of a thousand voices, the squawk of livestock—chickens, roosters, pigs—or the yowls of hungry cats and dogs, all mangy and scar laden. That racket was further intermixed with the cry of peddlers hoping to sell you fruit or food or massages or handmade brooms or cheap T-shirts.

The sheer volume made me want to press my palms into my ears and shut out the noise.

And then, there were the smells. Oh my God, the smells …

I breathed deep, taking in the strange scent of the air, which was like no place else in the Hub. A hodgepodge of aromas all fought, Royal-Rumble-style, against each other in my nostrils: something sweet and tangy—fresh pineapple, cane sugar, and mangos—twirled and danced against the counterpoint of something sharp, spicy, and vaguely pungent—chili pepper, day-old fish, and the heady, garlic scent of sizzling meat. Underneath all of that were the smells of humanity, of exhaust and raw sewage, of unwashed bodies and old vomit.

“Something crawled over my foot,” Darlene said, breaking clear of the cramped alley. “Something big and slimy and disgusting.” She paused, mouth falling open as her gaze landed on the street running riot with lights and vehicles and oddball shops. “Amazing.” She looked around, head on a swivel, eyes drinking in everything they touched.

“You never been here before?” I asked, genuinely surprised. Sure, this wasn’t the kinda place a mild-mannered soccer mom would probably frequent on the reg, but it was the kinda place everyone should visit at least once.

“Gosh no,” she replied, shaking her head. “No, no. Nope. Nope-a-rooney.” She ran her hands over the fabric of her pants, wiping her palms clean of imagined dirt. “Generally, I try to avoid the Hub. Every year the Council holds the United Peace-Accord Talks—always hosts in the Hub, though, since a lot of the attendees can’t gain access to Inworld—but they always book a hotel in the …” She paused, nose scrunching up in distaste.

“Well, the nicer districts,” she finished weakly. “Other than that, though, I stay away. You wouldn’t believe the number of incident reports I read every year, tied to the Hub. The organ trade. The black market. Hit squads. Unauthorized body augmentation. That awful auction every year—there are hundreds of deaths each year, directly or indirectly tied to the things sold at that auction. I’ve managed just fine without all this.”

“Cities like this are always home to the darker elements of society,” Ferraro said, sliding up in between us, hands settling on her hips, eyes narrowed like an Old West gunslinger surveying Main Street at high noon. She looked a little like a gunslinger, too, albeit a futuristic one. Her Glock sat at her hip, and she’d donned dark, tactical cargo pants and a black, modular flak jacket. Several pouches dotted the front of the vest, presumably filled with grenades or extra rounds. A mean looking assault shotgun rode her back, slung cross-body with a tactical sling. “And the Hub is the absolute worst. Place still gives me nightmares.”

As though to emphasize her point, a man—at least I think it was a man—strutted by. His upper body and face were human, though his hair was colored in brilliant shades of metallic blues and purples and greens. His lower body, on the other hand, was that of some otherworldly bird: long, double-jointed legs, tipped with ruby talons and covered with the stunning plumage of a peacock. The creature bobbed its head at us, the movement pigeon-like, then he uttered an oddly harmonic, “Good evening.”

“Still,” Ferraro continued after a brief shake of her head, “you’ll find unsavory elements in any community if you’re willing to look hard enough for it. That’s one of the things I’ve learned as a special agent. There’s no such thing as a sleepy town. The weirdness is just buried under the surface a little further.”

“But this place is so … so
awful
. All the terrible shops, all the god-awful monsters,” Darlene replied, staring after the bird man, which I thought was called a
kinnara
.

“You’re right,” Ferraro replied evenly, “but in some ways you’re also wrong. The Hub is a terrifying place, but in some ways it’s easier, too. Here”—she waved a hand toward the street, toward the craziness—“everything’s out in the open. Everyone wears what they are on their sleeve. Everything’s plain. Humans can be just as bizarre as any of these creatures, we’re just better at covering up our eccentricities, which is just as scary in its own way.”

We lapsed into thoughtful silence … Well, silence apart from the racket all around us.

“Well, we’re on a time crunch,” Ferraro finally said, clapping her hands together, “so let’s get moving.”

“Right.” I bobbed my chin. “A regular cab in this traffic could take us hours to get where we need to go, so we’re gonna be taking motorcycle taxis.” I hooked a thumb toward a line of mopeds loitering at the mouth of a street not far away. Each driver wore a bright orange vest, most stained and well worn, marking them as certified members of the Transport Union. Now, that might not sound like much, but being a certified T.U. member was actually a big deal. In the Hub, going places—pretty much anywhere, anytime, for any reason—was potentially a life-threatening endeavor.

But if you got into the cab—or in our case, on the back of a rickety moped—of someone with the Transport Union, you were more or less guaranteed to make it to your destination without being drugged, sold into slavery, or carved up for spare parts. Which, as far as guarantees go, is pretty groovy, since I don’t know a single person who digs being roofied, slave-traded, or dismembered.

I hustled over to the motorcycle queue, glanced up at the street name in case we needed to head back this way—
Prachrat-bum-phen Soi
12. Try saying that five times fast—and waved down the first man in line.

It took a few minutes of discussion, made all the more difficult by the language barrier, before I was reasonably certain he knew where I wanted to go. The driver, in turn, informed the next two taxi drivers in line and, in short order, each of us was loaded up on a different scooter. Ferraro and Darlene were both carted away in a blink, their miniature motorbikes slipping into oncoming traffic with practiced ease, then rocketing off into the ever-flowing river of car lights.

My driver, a short guy with an overlarge helmet, which for some reason had Hello Kitty ears glued on, took a few minutes longer to get settled in. So, I pulled out my iPod, popped in the earbuds, and set the player to random. By the time we got on the road, Ferraro and Darlene were already long out of sight, but I put them from mind as I grasped the back of my seat and let the road envelop me.

Since I left the Guild back in ’98, I’ve basically lived on the open road, meandering across the rolling expanse of America, hopping from town to town, bar to bar, motel to motel, without any thought beyond my next meal or my next gig. A rambler. A traveler. A vagrant. Call it what you will. It was the retirement I’d never really planned on, but which was somehow sweet all the same. I suppose it was sweet, because it was the retirement Ailia had always wanted for us. True, it was lonely at times, but everything in life has its price.