The Lucifer Messiah (30 page)

In a few short moments, Sean's face was gone. Maggie found herself staring at Vince Sicario again.

“Mother of God,” she gasped. “That morning in front of the apartment, with Paulie … the other day, when you were suddenly better … the alley with the kids.”

“I know it must be hard to understand,” Sean attempted, though she did not allow him to finish.

“Where is he?” her expression suddenly took on a fierce glimmer.

“What?”

“Vince. If he's not here, then where is he?”

“He's alive,” Sean replied, his face grotesquely reforming as he spoke. The change did not seem to bother him, but for a slight shiver.

“Where is he, Sean!” she shouted. “Enough lies, tell me the truth for once, damn it!”

She winced when she yelled. The pain was evident in her eyes.

“He's with my master, at a church on the Lower East Side. He's safe, I assure you,” Charybdis answered, suspecting that Sean might not.

“I want to see him,” she said.

“That's too dangerous,” Sean answered.

“Dangerous? After what happened here you're telling me that's too dangerous? No Sean, you're going to take me to Vince, right now. Understand?”

He looked at Charybdis. The pale figure nodded.

“Fine.”

“I don't know what the hell is going on, and maybe I don't want to know. But this charade has gone on long enough, and you better have some goddamn answers,” Maggie said.

Sean looked away, to the pool of her blood in the dirt.

“Not now,” he said.

She was about to yell something back at him, but Charybdis intervened.

“He's right. You are owed an explanation my lady, without a doubt, but not here. The locals hide now, but they will be out soon to investigate. We must get back to the city, back to a safe place. Then there will be time enough for answers.”

F
LANAGAN'S GAR HAD TAKEN THEM AS FAR BACK AS
Harlem. Then the gas had run out, and they were in no shape to seek out a filling station.

Charybdis had another option; one that she guessed would be safer anyway. The tunnels.

Sean was skeptical, but he knew it made the most sense. He could pass unnoticed among the crowds. Both she and the still-bleeding Maggie could not.

Once they had walked for about an hour, Maggie stumbled. Sean tried to pick her up, to carry her the rest of the way. They saw that she needed rest more than anything else.

Sean set her down at a junction where two old IRT lines had once met. The darkness of the underground swallowed them, so deep within the bowels of the city that the stench of rot and grime enveloped them fully. The reek no longer bothered them. They didn't even notice it anymore.

They were safe, for a time.

The pause left a gaping silence that seemed to magnify every drop of sewer water and every skittering shuffle of a
rat in the darkness. Sean finally broke the pall.

“Now you've seen me. Now you know what I am,” he said, exasperated.

“I know who you are, I think. But what? I haven't a clue, Sean,” Maggie replied, wheezing from the pain, more animated by her anger than anything else.

He nodded, and let himself ease backward, out of the filmy light. In the wet shadows, she could barely see him.

“The other day, at Vince's, you asked me about where I went, what I did after I left. I never really answered you. Now I suppose I can,” he said.

“I'm waiting,” she answered.

There was a second long pause, so long in fact that Maggie thought he was not going to make good on his word. But then he spoke, and she found herself quickly in awe.

“Obviously I am not like you. I guess I've always been this way, but I never knew for sure until the first time I saw another one of my own kind. That, I remember, was a freakish thing,” he began.

“Your own kind?” she asked.

“In a manner of speaking. Most of us are not like me. In fact, I'm really quite the oddity, even among a bunch of the oddest folk walking the good Earth. I don't molt, at least not unless I want to, which is why I never really knew what I was back here all those years ago. Oh, I had my suspicions, but I never really
knew,
not until France.”

Though she couldn't have been sure, with the darkness hiding most of his face, Maggie thought he took on a different expression then. If she was right, then Sean was sad,
and she wasn't entirely sure why.

“I met Howie on the trench-line. He wasn't an original member of the Fighting 69
^th
like me, but he got placed with us like a lot of newbies after things got rough and we starting losing our New York boys. I'd describe him to you, how tall he was, how his blond hair was cut or the way he smoked a Camel, but it really wouldn't be worth the effort, since, as I eventually found out, none of that was really him anyway.

“Men tend to make friends pretty quick when bullets are whizzing by their heads, and that was how it was with me and Howie. Being the way that I was, why I'd left New York in the first place, I didn't have many friends in the regiment. I kept to myself mostly, even when the fighting got heavy.

“Howie ended up with us after his own boys were wiped while he'd been laid up with what the docs first thought was the flu. It turned out to be just a head cold, so the brass wasn't about to send him home short of his commitment.

“Anyway, he didn't know anyone else, and we happened to be bunked next to each other, so we ended up talking. Small talk at first, mindless conversation. What I noticed right away, though, was that it wasn't the same shit everyone else talked about. In a trench, in the mud and the trenches, when you know that every day might be your last, all anyone wants to tell you about is his sweetheart back in East-wherever-the-fuck. Or maybe the smell of the prairie grass in South Dakota or something. With all the new guys coming in from regiments outside New York, I'd heard it
all by that time.

“Not from Howie, though. He talked about all the places he'd seen, all the things he'd done. And he'd been everywhere, and done almost everything. At least it sounded that way to me, a little punk from Hell's Kitchen who had never left the city, much less the country, until Uncle Sam came calling.

“When I couldn't sleep one night because of the noise from the Kraut shelling, he told me I'd get used to it, just like he had in Cuba during the Spanish-American War and in South Africa during the Boer War. I didn't know a damn thing about either one at the time, so I just acted like I knew what he was talking about.

“I remember once a bunch of guys in the unit got real severe gangrene, since we never had dry socks and it rained all the time. Howie said it was like Korea, all the mud, that is, only it was a lot colder there.

“Then, and even I knew this one was a little weird, we started taking heavy casualties trying to take a German machinegun nest over a hill. He said it reminded him of
Fredericksburg.
Said he could still see the horror of Irish volunteers just like us charging toward him behind a stone wall. Cut down in the grisliest piece of human carnage he'd ever laid eyes on. Human blood mixed with pieces of men and scraps of blue uniforms on a great big, cold field. That's what he said, anyway.

“I really didn't want to hear any more about that under the circumstances.

“When I finally did ask him how many places he'd been
to, though, he just laughed and rattled off a list of cities I'd mostly never heard of. Milan, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Cairo, Baghdad, Moscow, Tokyo. You name it. He'd seen it.

“Seems he had no family to speak of, no wife, no special someone waiting at home, not even a home to go back to. As far as I could tell, he'd spent most of his life just wandering around from place to place, staying a while and then moving on.

“I thought that sounded terrific. But almost anything sounds terrific compared to stale rations, French mud, and German bullets. He didn't seem to think so, though. That was what struck me about him. He'd been all over the world, over a time span I later figured out would've made him something like eighty years old by the time we shared a tiny corner of hell in the summer of 1918—even though he didn't look a day over twenty-five. But all it left him with was a bunch of stories. That, and the saddest set of eyes you'd ever want to see.

“Looking back, I think I know why he latched on to me the way he did.”

“He knew you were both of the same sort?” Charybdis asked, not quite following Sean's logic, if that's what it was.

“No, not yet. At least I don't think he did. He was just alone, and he wanted someone to talk to. It was only the dumbest of luck that we ended up having so much more in common than either of us suspected.”

“So how did you find out about his … secret?” Maggie questioned.

“It was July 1918. We were fighting at a place called
Champagne, if you can believe that. We were starting to pick up steam. Our guys were pushing the Hun back day after day. There were a lot more ground assaults then. We spent more time running around from trench to trench than sitting and waiting.

“Things didn't go our way forever. One night our squad was doing a reconnaissance sweep over some cottages. We were hit by a German ambush. The crossfire downed most of us right off the bat. Only a few, including me and Howie, managed to find cover.

“We ducked into a hole, just barely. Howie was hit bad by the time we settled in. The previous residents were still there, two German gunners, but they weren't much more than rotting corpses. As it turned out, we ended up stuck there for a while, because the Germans who'd hit us were the leading edge of a counterattack. Their fire kept us pinned down for two days.

“It ended up being Howie's last two days.

“I knew he was dying, as soon as I set him down in a puddle of blood and muck, tracers constantly buzzing overhead. There wasn't much I could do for him, but that was just about the least of my concerns, because by the end of the first day things had already gotten so weird that I was scared out of my mind.

“First he got all pale, which is not so strange when you're shot. But then other things started happening, things I never could have imagined.”

Maggie stopped fiddling with her hair. She fell still as Sean's voice got lower, and quieter.

“His eyes got all white, like a snake, and he quivered. The bullets had shred his coat and his shirt underneath had fallen away from his body when I set him down. I tried to move him, not that I thought it would help, but I didn't have any idea what else to do. That was when I first saw it.

“It looked like his skin was petrified, like those trees in Nevada or Arizona, all purple and hard like he was turning to stone. I thought the blood might have congealed and dried on his back, and that he must've been wounded worse that I'd thought. But there was no blood. Not a drop. With all the smoke there wasn't much light, and it was hard to make out what was going on, but the closer I looked the weirder it got.

“He was cocooning, preparing to die,” Charybdis stated.

“Right, but I had never seen that before,” Sean agreed. “After a while his whole body got like that, his chest, his arms and his legs, even his face froze up and hardened like a statue.

“At this point I was ready to ditch the foxhole and take my chances with the Germans. Howie was a good guy, but the shit that was happening to him scared the hell out of me.

“I stayed, though. I watched him lay there, entombed in his own skin, or whatever it was, for a whole day. By the next morning, something had happened. The shell cracked. Just a little at first, but by the evening it was breaking, and I could see something pushing from inside, trying to get out.

“I don't know what kept me there. What I was watching was the most disgusting thing I'd ever seen. For some reason, I didn't mind looking at it. As he lay there, hatching like a big, ugly slug, I knew that we were more connected than two lost soldiers. I knew I had to stay.

“Once the shell had broken away, I could see what was left of him. Howie, the Howie I knew, anyway, was just a memory.

“Instead of skin, he had this grayish, gelatinous covering. I was afraid to touch it for a while. When I finally did I kind of shuddered. It had the consistency of something soft, almost unformed, the way you'd imagine the skin underneath your fingernails to feel if you peeled them away.

“It's okay to touch,
he managed to say.
I won't bite. No teeth anymore.

“I think he started laughing then, but it wasn't like a regular laugh, and that's something I don't think anyone could describe.

“In a few minutes his entire cocoon had broken off him. What lay there in front of me was truly a sight. They say that nothing can really prepare you for the horrors you encounter in war. Well, this was way beyond any of that. He didn't even look human anymore, more like a slug drowning in its own slime.

“He didn't seem to have much time left, and he motioned with what used to be his left arm—it was by then more like a flipper or a tentacle—I knew he wanted me to lift up his head.

“That mop of blond hair had almost all fallen out, but
some of it lingered, suspended in the slimy film that covered what had once been his cranium. His eyes weren't white, but they weren't even really eyes anymore. More like dark holes where eyes had been. The mottled yellow-gray skin of his head was writhing, moving around like there was some dirty liquid sloshing underneath, pushing the surface up in one place and sagging down in another.

“I could see he was fading. I'm not sure if that was why I did it, or if it was something else. Empathy for a friend? I still don't know, but that's when it happened.”

“When
what
happened?” Maggie asked.

“I let myself change.”

“I don't understand,” she said.