The End of the World As I Know It (The Ghosts & Demons Series Book 2) (7 page)

Coffee is the universal beverage over which lives are reviewed before waving the final goodbye. When it comes to the funeral business, I’m a front room kind of girl.

As I pulled at the sheet underneath Eldora, her head lolled my way. One eye looked at me forlornly. The other eye stared up at the smoke detector. That eye — the wild, smoke detector eye with the wide, blown pupil — told me Eldora had died in a panic, probably alone and gasping for breath.

We would all prefer to die in our sleep, drifting off peacefully. We don’t want to die in one of those nasty ways where the bodily systems shut down one by one.

When I see someone like Eldora dead in her hospice bed, I picture an old janitor slowly making his way through a building. Sometimes the janitor starts at the top floor, flipping switches and turning off lights. That’s the brain going dark. If the janitor is in a hurry, that’s a stroke. If the janitor takes his time at the top of the tower and lingers, that’s death by Alzheimer’s.

Sometimes the janitor just throws the main power switch and everything goes at once. That’s a heart attack, quick though seldom quick enough.

Sometimes that old janitor goes crazy and backs up all the toilets and sets the place on fire. That’s cancer.

My point is, there is no good death. There is only a good life.

Nobody wants to die in a way where you see the sudden stop coming. We all want to die in our sleep. It’s not common enough. I looked it up. One in eight Americans die in their sleep, usually around four in the morning. For that reason, the hour between four and five is what some call the Hour of Souls.

As a singer for the Choir Invisible, the odds are excellent that I have chosen not to die in my sleep on white sheets. A demon might tear me apart or stab me with a trident or lop off my head. As I struggled to pull the sheet under Eldora Clemnan and she stared at me with one dead blue eye, I thought death by decapitation runs a close second to dying while dreaming.

After I got the sheet under Eldora, the rule is to wrap the legs and use the shroud to yank the feet over to the gurney first. Make sure the gurney wheels are locked because if the corpse falls to the floor between the bed and a rolling gurney, you can’t get that heavy, floppy body up off the floor without a lot of help and humiliation. (Bodies stiff with rigor mortis are easier to move but there’s usually more mess to deal with by the time that sets in, too.)

I moved behind the gurney and reached to gather up a wad of the sheet as a handle. As I yanked Eldora’s body toward me, her head lolled toward me and her jaw dropped open to reveal a web of semi-congealed blood stretching between her blue lips.

That was a horror impossible to erase from my brain. I slipped into my happy mind mantra as I did what had to be done.
Playful puppies and cute kittens and dancing baby pigs. Playful puppies and cute kittens and dancing baby pigs. Playful puppies and cute kittens and dancing baby pigs!

I strapped Eldora Clemnan to the gurney with two gray belts that look exactly like car seat belts. Out of habit, I looped the belt around her feet twice before cinching her tight and clicking her in. The gurney’s red and black handles can be tricky so if the head or the foot of the gurney drops unexpectedly, a body can slide around. The looped belt ensures the corpse won’t slip out and slide down a flight of stairs in front of horrified witnesses.

I pulled the green velvet up around her body and zipped her into the body bag from foot to head. I slipped the nitrile gloves back into the little pocket last. “Tucked in for the night, Mrs. Clemnan.”

Or so I thought.

Chapter 12

Lightning strobed the city’s skyline. I looked up just as the power went out and the skyscrapers went black. On any other night, New York City would be pretty. That is, as long as you could watch the worsening storm from inside, preferably wearing a big cozy sweater while wrapping your hands around a steaming cup of cocoa.

The thunder struck and the vibration shuddered through my chest. It occurred to me that, for all I knew, the power outage was the first step in the D-Day invasion.

Lesson 116: Don’t underestimate the enemy like I did. Most demons don’t have much to say to humans. They’re all, “
Grr. Arrgh
.” But a few demons are very clever and chatty.
 

Sleet cut at me as I wheeled the gurney to the back of the bus and popped the hatch. I positioned Eldora to slide in head first so the Odyssey’s suspension would take the weight, not me. I pulled the gurney’s red handle and its far legs folded up as I pushed it in. I squeezed the black handle and the gurney’s legs unlocked and folded up. An extra two shoves and the gurney was in place on two steel rails. I grabbed the clamp at the end of the rails and screwed it in place so the gurney wouldn’t shift around in transit. A few seconds later I was tearing down Crown Street, heading back to Castille as fast as I dared.

It seemed weird that Victor wanted Eldora’s body back at the funeral home. If there was some magical rite that would free Rory from his trap, wouldn’t it be more powerful if I headed back to the Keep? You can’t tell with magic, though. Some of it works at a distance. Some of it, you need to touch the person you’re trying to change in some way. I didn’t know much about it. The Magicals mostly kept to themselves, mumbling, fondling beads and sacred stones and runes. The few Magicals I’d spoken to at the Keep also insisted on calling themselves magical
folk
, not magical
folks
. Maybe that’s proper, but it sounded annoying and far too precious.

Manhattan told me she’d hung out with some of them once or twice. “It’s like trying to have a conversation with somebody who is high on acid. It’s not that they’re wrong, necessarily. But they irritate the shit out of me.”

Everybody agreed the Spooks — the small squad of remote viewers from the CIA — were more annoying. They thought they were better than the Magicals because they were, “bringing science to the mystery,” as they put it.

The Spooks also thought they were better than the Choir’s singers because most of them came from the “real” military. They looked on us like we were a bunch of amateurs even though they’d never faced a demon in their lives.

Pop quiz: who is the more badass warrior? The military man or woman who is all trained up and loaded down with survival skills and instruments of death or the average member of the Choir Invisible?

Answer: trick question. Obviously, the trained killer is more badass than we are.

Follow-up quiz for bonus points: Who is braver? The armored grunt surrounded by a team of his buddies backing him up, or a singer for the Choir Invisible, armed with little more than a sword and a prayer?

Answer: trick question. Obviously, we’re mostly a bunch of undertrained kids compared to regular military. On average, we’re braver because we’re going into a fight with less on our side. That also makes us dumb. Skills, weapons and tactics outgun bravery almost every time.
 

Manhattan thought the CIA guys were unintentionally hilarious. “They’re all puffed up, stiff and starched in their combat fatigues,” she said. “It really frosts their nuts that our Casper and the magical amateurs have a much higher accuracy rate than their remote viewers do.”

That’s what the Spooks called Rory every time, pretending they didn’t know his name. “Our Casper,” as in the friendly ghost. They resented him and were more than a little creeped out.

Since his wispy, misty nature was split — “hither, thither and yon,” Rory would say — he was barely at the Keep until this torturous binding spell snagged him. He usually appeared to us as barely there, a cloud in the form of a man. I dared to press the accelerator a little harder and instantly felt the wheels on the bus go round and round, spinning on fresh ice.

I wished Manny or Wilmington were here. The last time I’d spoken to Wil over lunch, she and Manny were making fun of the remote viewers. With dangers lurking, a sad body behind me and Rory in the Keep screaming pain into the storm, puppies and kittens and baby pigs weren’t doing it for me. I needed my friends with me to make me laugh and calm my nerves.

“The Spooks are used to digging up terrorists and spies,” Wil said. “Ghosts and demons aren’t their thing.”

“Rory is the most misty of the misty wistfuls,” I’d told her, “but he zeroes in on evil. Even the lowly seers beat the Spooks out on accuracy identifying pedophiles in the neighborhood.”
 

The day the Spooks arrived, the whole Choir had been thrown into high alert because one of the CIA guys immediately insisted there was one or possibly two demons within the Keep. Armored up and freaking out, we remained pure, demonless and unmurdered after a thorough search of every nook and cranny, tower and dungeon.

Since the false alarm, the CIA guys pretty much kept to themselves except at mealtime. Each breakfast, lunch and dinner, they marched into the cafeteria in a line. Three times a day, they walked around with their sleeves rolled high to show off bulging biceps.

Wilmington called the daily show, “Veins, low self-esteem, doubt and frustration on parade.”

“If they didn’t act like such entitled dicks, I’d feel bad for them,” Manny said.

Then, in a blink, Rory had popped in beside us. “Now, now. Don’t be too hard on them. They’re all volunteers, far from home and terrified to learn there are such things as demons and things like me. They are on our side and they do mean well.”

“They still act like dicks,” Wilmington said.

“Well, yes,” Rory agreed. “But they are brothers in arms.”

“How come there are no sisters in their squad, do you suppose?” Manny asked. “I love a girl in uniform.”

Wilmington rolled her eyes. “Yeah, we get it. You’re into girls. We haven’t forgotten.”

Manny smiled and said, “You haven’t forgotten, but you haven’t done anything about it yet.”

“Hm.”

“I live in hope,” Manhattan said. “It’s just a delightful invitation. Be flattered.”

“I am flattered,” Wilmington said. “I’m also engaged. My honey’s back in Vermont, thinking I got a graphic design job in the City.”

Manny feigned horror. “Then I’m your last chance before you lock that vajayjay down!”

“Girls, girls,” I said. “Take it down a notch. I do wonder why the military volunteers we get are male. Even the Choir conductors are all men.”

Victor Fuentes started the Choir Invisible. Vlad was his second in command. Kevin Chang, my first martial arts instructor, had been third. Peter Smythe, the man I refused to call father, had been fourth.

“I have an answer to your question I think you’ll enjoy,” Rory said. “When I was human, much of my success with women came from bald pandering.”

“Pander,” I said. “We like that.”

“Men have a greater capacity for self-delusion than women,” Rory said. “Give a man an inch and he’ll call it a foot.”
 

We giggled.

“They’re here because they think they’re good at what they do,” Rory said. “I’ve heard those men speak among themselves. I recognize their problem. The worst sailors and the dumbest doctors all have the same malady. They think they’re geniuses. In my experience, women are more humble, and therefore smarter. No one’s so smart they should declare their own genius. That’s for others to say.”

The Spooks’ corporal looked up from his New England clam chowder to scowl at us for consorting with the non-corporeal. Maybe he heard us. Maybe his ESP wasn’t as bad as Rory suggested.

Since their debut in debacle, the Spooks had predicted nothing more. Nobody knew what the remote viewers did in their quarters below the Keep so, naturally, I asked Rory, our most pro snooper. The ghost gave me a wink with one flaming eye. “They play a lot of cards, trying to get better at reading each other’s minds. If they guess a card is a two of clubs and it’s a three of spades, they count that as close. After a while they get tired and play poker.”

I suspected the “real” military would look down on the Spooks, too. Still, as I wound through the dark streets, I wondered if Victor had taken on too much for the Choir to deal with alone. A bunch of Marines blasting through on the vanguard during a demon invasion wouldn’t be unwelcome backup.

We still didn’t have enough blessed bullets, though, especially since each round had to be prayed over individually three times (or as the Magicals insisted on saying, “thrice”.) Gunfire is often far too indiscriminate, trying to make up for ill-placed shots with quantity. Even with the pastors, monks, priests and shamans working in shifts, the first small incursion of the Keep had decimated our ammo reserves. The demons had successfully blown up the library of magical lore which might have kept the doors between dimensions locked tight.

Lesson 116: To prepare for the end of the world, work on becoming a good shot. Think one shot, one kill sniper-type shit. Mucho macho gunners who pray and spray will quickly run out of rounds. When they’re out of ammo, they’ll wish they’d spent more time in the central courtyard swinging swords and learning to duck.

The blackout screwed me up on Troy Avenue. With the traffic signals all flashing red, traffic had come to a stop and start crawl as drivers tried to work out who should advance first. This being New York, not everyone negotiated the morass in the spirit of cooperation or respect for traffic laws. Many drivers worked by the motto, “Me first.” The intersection ahead jammed as the sleet turned to hail.

I pressed the horn and kept pressing. Nothing moved as the hail pelted the city even harder. I was stuck halfway to Castille with Rory burning in torment.

Under assault by chunks of ice as big as babies’ fists, the roof of the Odyssey became a snare drum. The noise was loud enough to wake the dead. Unfortunately, the waking dead lay directly behind me.

Chapter 13

I heard something rustling and looked behind me.
 

Nothing.

Anxious, I reached for my phone to find an alternative route as the traffic slowly pushed forward. A moment later, a narrow opening between cars appeared and I floored the accelerator. The wheels spun, caught, and I shot through, barely missing the back bumper of the car ahead of me. My right wheels went up on the sidewalk as I slipped and swerved around the bottleneck.