The Lazarus Heart (26 page)

"I am the river," he whispers, like a prayer, and the barrel of the gun moves slowly from the space between its breasts to a spot just beneath its chin. "I am the conduit for all that is pure, and you have polluted me."

But he can't kill it, not yet, not here. There's still too much it has to tell him about the nightmares and the black-winged creature chasing him across the sky. And it still has an important role to play in the trap he's set for the faggot police detective. It
will
die, but it has to die later, slowly, somewhere else. For the moment something else will have to do.

Something more subtle,
he thinks. "Something more poetic," he says aloud.

Jordan uses the barrel of the gun to push aside its skirt. His gloved hands expose its clever, deceiving sex. His penis stirs awake inside his pants and he bites down on the tip of his tongue. He's never done this, not even once. He's never allowed himself to be fooled by Their masquerade and so there's never been any danger of that sort of contact, that sort of weakness. He's known from the very beginning that it was part of Their game, like the spiny jaws of a Venus flytrap spread wide, waiting for the flies.

But this is different, Jordan tells himself. It has nothing to do with desire, nothing to do with anything as base as lust. This will be a message to Them that he will not be violated again, that to violate him is to invite the rape of Their own. It's ingenious, really. And he will take proper precautions to protect himself from anything inside it that might be meant for him, from any viruses or nanites that might have been installed during the final stages of its reassignment.

"I am the river," he says again, and his trigger finger begins to relax.

Jordan unzips his pants and checks the clock on the mantle to be sure that there's time, that he won't miss the detective, and then he lays the gun on the floor of Jared Poe's apartment.

Jared and the crow are watching Frank Gray from the front porch of an abandoned house on Millaudon Street. Across the street from them the detective curses and rips a second patch of Mylar from the bole of a pecan tree. Then he struggles against the storm and climbs back inside his car. "The killer's playing with him, isn't he?" Jared asks, and the crow answers him softly. Only her head is poking out of the front of Benny's frock coat.

"Keeping him busy. Baiting him ..."

And then Jared hears Lucrece, hears her so loud and strong that the force of her knocks him backward a few steps until he collides with the boarded-up front door of the old house. A voice without sound that rushes straight through him; not even words, just a crippling flash of Lucrece, Lucrece hurting and afraid for him,
warning
him. Then she's gone again. Jared slumps, trembling, against the weathered boards at his back, shaken and sweating beneath the leather hood she placed over his bullet-shattered skull.

"Lucrece," he whispers. Then the crow caws loudly, shifts impatiently inside the rubber coat. Jared looks up and sees that Frank Gray's car is pulling away, heading

north up Millaudon Street.

"If I lose him now, I might not get another chance," Jared says. The crow makes a sound that seems like confirmation. Already the detective's car is just a dim pair of taillights in rain.

"Jesus, Lucrece, be careful," he says. "And thanks." He steps off the porch into the waiting storm.

The second note has led Frank to a convenience store on a run-down stretch of Magazine Street.

All the windows have been covered with fresh yellow-brown sheets of plywood and the place appears to be deserted, the owners and employees having long since fled the hurricane.

Smarter motherfuckers than me,
he thinks, and spies a third patch of Mylar nailed to the plywood. He can see that there's a small brown paper bag stuck up there as well. The wind knocks him off his feet twice on his way to and back from the front of the store, sends him sprawling into the flooded street. There's almost a foot of frothy slate gray water flowing down Magazine Street now, and by the time he gets back into the car he's so wet he might as well have swum as tried to walk.

He sits behind the wheel holding another swatch of Mylar from another ruined balloon. This one says Congrats! in eager cursive. Frank tosses it into the backseat and takes a deep breath before he opens the paper bag.

This is the last one,
he swears to himself.
Unless there's something really goddamn convincing in here, this is the last stop on this wild-goose chase.

Inside there's another plastic bag, and this one doesn't have just a note. There's an index finger as well, severed cleanly at the knuckle, a smooth bit of white bone showing on one end and a nail painted black at the other.

"Shit on me," Frank groans as he opens the bag and fishes out the carefully folded note. There's dried and not-so-dried blood on the yellow legal paper, crimson still tacky to the touch, and it comes off on his hands as he unfolds the page. There's the next address in the same handwriting. "Just in case you're doubting me," it says at the top.

Frank refolds the letter and drops it back into the bag with the finger, puts them both back into the paper bag and shoves the bag under his seat.

Out of sight, out of mind.

"Yeah, right," he mumbles, shifting out of park into reverse and backing away from the convenience store. "Whoever said that wasn't sitting on top of a goddamn severed human finger."

Frank puts the car in drive and rolls back along the makeshift tributary of the Mississippi that Magazine Street has become.

Lucrece wakes up very slowly, drifts by almost imperceptible degrees from a dream about Aaron Marsh and the Eye of Horus, a dream about the stuffed dodo in its glass case. Only in the dream the dodo bird was the one from
Alice in Wonderland,
the one from John Tenniel's drawings, with hands and a walking stick. And it had been not inside the case but standing next to her and Aaron, watching the rain fall through the shop's display windows.

"The race is over," Aaron said, and Lucrece said, "As wet as ever. It doesn't seem to dry me at all."

And the dodo said very solemnly as it tapped its cane against the floor,
"Everybody

has won, and
all
must have prizes."

Lucrece is just about to ask the dodo if the thimble from the pocket of her dress will do, if it's a decent enough prize, when she smells ammonia and begins to cough herself awake.

She opens her eyes and there's a bright light somewhere close, so close that she can feel the warmth of its scalding bulb. The heat makes her remember what it was like to touch the man's mind, the man who forced his way inside the apartment, the man who killed Benny. She forgets the dream and remembers that sizzling flood of power from his mind, remembers his hands on her, the perfect
wrongness
of his soul. She coughs again, her throat dry and rough as sandpaper. Then a plastic straw is thrust between her lips.

"Drink," the man says. He's standing very close. The straw bumps insistently against her teeth, stabs at her gums. "Drink," he says again.

She sucks on the straw and her mouth fills with lukewarm water. She swallows and it helps a little, so she sucks another mouthful from the straw.

"That's enough," he says, and takes the straw away. It trails a string of thick saliva from her lips, down her chin.

Her wrists are still bound together, tied to something overhead, and she's hanging naked in the glare of the light. Both of her arms have gone completely numb from the weight of her body. She stretches her legs and the tips of her bare toes brush a hard, cold

floor, like gritty concrete or sandstone.

"I was just saying it's a shame there's not time to do this properly," the man remarks.

The light seems to move, plays across her body. "I was just saying that you're a prize."

The air smells like dust and distant rain, mildew and oily rags. The ammonia is still burning her sinuses. She can hear the storm outside, but now it sounds very far away.

"Where am I?" she asks him. Her voice sounds almost as bad as her throat feels. "Where I need you to be, Lucas. At the nexus, at the heart of the snare."

"That isn't my name," she croaks, but he ignores her.

"I could learn things from you if there were more time. If I had time to do the whole procedure. But he'll be here soon and I've hardly even started."

It doesn't matter that she has no idea what he's talking about. Whatever it is, it means he's going to kill her. He's a predator and she is his chosen prey, stripped and hung up for the slaughter like a hog waiting for the blade across its throat. There's nothing else she needs to know.

"None of this is what you think," she says. "You don't have to do this again."

"Oh, it's
exactly
what I think," he says. She can almost see him standing in the shadows behind the light, a darker patch in the rough shape of a man. "It's much too late now for any more lies. I saw your back when I was . . . I saw your back. The scar."

"Nosy little fuck, aren't you?" Lucrece realizes that it's hard to get her breath, that she's slowly suffocating, as in a crucifixion. She might have been hanging here for hours.

"Tell me about the bird, Lucas. I
dream
about the black bird, and there's its mark on your back."

"You want to know about the black bird?" she replies, gasping for the air she needs to make the words, to remain conscious. "I can tell you about the black bird. Get me down from here and I'll tell you about the fucking black bird."

"I can't do that," he says sternly, reproachfully. "You know that, Lucas. I can't risk that. There's not time."

"Then I can't help you," she gasps. "Sorry. You'll just have to find out about the bird on your own." She sucks in another stinging breath and adds, "He's coming, very soon." "I'm not afraid of you or any of Them," the man sneers, but she can tell that he is.

That he's very much afraid. "You can't trick me into letting you go by trying to scare me."

She can taste his fear now. Because it is so fucking delicious, so sweet and ripe and maybe all she'll ever know of justice, Lucrece says simply, The crow is
his
vengeance, motherfucker, and you're
her
victim."

She expects immediate retribution, swift punishment served in exchange for the truth he didn't really want to hear, a knife or a needle for her honesty. But the man just stands very still on the other side of the light. She can hear him breathing.

"Things fall from the sky," he says. "Shining, bleeding
things
fall from the sky and the fabric of humanity itself is altered. And They expect me to watch and do nothing? Did They really think that not a single man would stand against Them?"

"You're insane," Lucrece whispers, and knows that if he doesn't finish it soon, she'll begin to cry. There's simply too much pain and she's too scared of dying alone in this stinking dark place. And she doesn't want the son of a bitch who killed Benny to see her cry.

"Don't tell me about vengeance, Lucas DuBois. I am the whole world's vengeance against Their atrocities."

"No," she croaks, and swallows, shaking her head, wishing she had the strength to laugh, the strength to show him how ludicrous he is. "No. You're just a sad, crazy asshole who likes to kill people. And that's all you are. That's all you'll ever be."

And then there's the sound of metal against metal, the sound of small sharp things, and

Lucrece closes her eyes because she doesn't want to see.

By the time Michael's outer rain bands have crossed the ribbonlike barrier of the Chandeleur Islands the storm has become a monster even by the monstrous standards of hurricanes. Its swirling cyclone bulk blankets the coast from the mouth of the Pascagoula River all the way across the southeastern corner of Louisiana. Born somewhere off the west coast of Africa, it has grown from an embryonic disturbance, a disorganized fetus of showers and thunderstorms, and has traveled the trade winds almost six thousand miles to the Gulf of Mexico.

Now it is ready to spend its fury against the Mississippi delta. By late afternoon there are maximum sustained winds of more than 195 miles an hour, and Michael is upgraded to a category-five hurricane.

At its calm, unblinking eye Michael has lifted a mound of seawater a foot and a half high and almost fifty miles across, a storm surge pulled up by its violently low pressure and aimed at the already rain-glutted bayous, at cypress swamps and small towns

barely above sea level to begin with. And at New Orleans, the red bull's-eye at the end of its long odyssey across the Atlantic.

At 4:35 P.M. a tiny shrimp boat named
Eloise,
caught deep inside the storm, radios for assistance from its location somewhere in Breton Sound near Fort St. Philip. The captain reports that his ship's barometer is reading 26.10 inches; three days later he and his two-man crew will be found floating in the Gulf, but his report will be cautiously noted by meteorologists as the lowest pressure ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere.

At 4:57 P.M. a reconnaissance plane tracking the storm, dumping its load of instrument-laden dropsonde canisters into the eye of the hurricane, nervously reports a gigantic shadow, "like a huge black bird," falling across the" relatively calm waters of the fifty-mile-wide center of the storm. The pilot and crew will later dismiss the incident as a mistake, as nothing more than the shadow of their own plane or a trick of the clouds.

At 5:03 P.M. a weather satellite in geostationary orbit twenty-two thousand miles above the Gulf sends back color images of another shadow, an India-ink-black smudge that will eventually be described in an internal NHC report as "the crow anomaly." Less than thirty seconds later the satellite's computer vomits a frantic, senseless stream of data and shuts itself down.

Michael turns, dispassionate as cancer, unstoppable as fate, its silver-white back turned to heaven and its bruise-dark belly laid across the face of an angry, impotent world. And a terrible, raging night comes to the living and the dead of the city of New Orleans.