Lethal Control, page 22
part #3 of The DuPage Parish Mysteries Series
He shrieked, and in a blur of movement, bent and seized me by the neck. The thick yellow claws cut into me as he pulled me upright and then, without any apparent difficulty, lifted me into the air. I kicked—not because I wanted to hurt him, but because panic was taking over my rational brain—but the blows just skated off his thigh and stomach. Finally I managed to bring myself under some kind of control. The crowd’s noises became a steady droning. My pulse beat in my face and ears. The blue eyes staring back at me were bright the way ice can be bright and blue at dawn. He tightened his grip and began to crush my windpipe.
I choked out three words: “This isn’t you.”
I fought him, kicking and flailing, as darkness flecked the edges of my vision. The black specks whirled faster and faster, crowding my sight until it was like I was looking down a tunnel, looking into this far-off place of cold, blue fire.
Then I hit the floor, the sawdust only partially absorbing the impact. My head cracked against the boards. I flopped onto my back, sucking in air. Above me, the flames of the kerosene lamps bent in a draft. To my watering eyes, each flicker of light had its own nimbus. Like angels, I thought. And then I thought maybe my brain had been oxygen deprived for too long. Or I’d hit my head way too hard.
I sat up. I found Eli standing with his back to me. He still didn’t look like Eli, but I recognized the slant of his shoulders, the way he hugged himself. Around us, the hoots and howls and screams had escalated. Another bottle of Jax exploded on the floor, spraying a nova of glass. As I got to my feet, a handful of change hit me in the back. And then somebody’s lighter clipped my arm and caromed off. What I was pretty sure was a woman’s diaphragm bounced off my shoe.
“E?” I said as I limped toward him. It sounded like somebody had just finished scraping my vocal cords. “Eli?”
“Don’t.” Tears made the word almost unintelligible. He held a hand behind him, warding me off.
Some numbskull pitched his shoe at me, and I swatted it out of the air as I shuffled closer. I touched Eli’s back first, and he shivered and drew away. But then I put my arm around his waist, and when I tugged him, he came to me. He pressed his face against my neck; the cuts there stung, and his skin felt cool and unnaturally smooth. I stroked his hair.
The speakers overhead squealed, and Nelda Pie’s voice came on. “Very disappointing. But the show must go on. Kill Posey and the man. Leave the rougarou and the half-breed for me.”
Eli and I turned at the same time, looking back toward the cell where we had entered the ring. Dutch stood inside the cell now, the door hanging open behind her. She adjusted the shotgun against her shoulder and drew a bead on Posey, who still lay motionless. Lurnice inched up until she was standing just behind the other woman, baring her teeth in anticipation.
And then Kennedy—Miss Kennedy, our Kennedy—stepped into the cell. She wore a stab vest over a man’s flannel shirt, with jeans and hiking boots, and her face was tight but composed. Dutch gaped at her for a moment, and then she swung the shotgun toward her.
Kennedy was faster. In a smooth, almost exaggeratedly careful movement, Kennedy brought up her hand, her palm flat. Then she pursed her lips and blew. Dust lifted from her hand and flew into the air, carried by her breath. Even at a distance, even in the weak lamplight, it was a dull red. The cloud struck Dutch in the face, and Dutch made a weird, inhaling/sneezing combo noise. Then she screamed. She stumbled back, knocking into Lurnice, and released the shotgun with one hand to claw at her eyes.
Moving after Dutch, Kennedy grabbed the shotgun to wrestle it away. Lurnice barreled into her, though, snapping her teeth. It was easy to see the chimera now—unlike Reb, she didn’t shift or change, but like Posey and other chimera we’d met, there was a sense of afterimage, of something moving with her but slightly out of frame. She lunged for Kennedy’s throat.
Posey launched himself up from the floor. He grabbed Lurnice by the hair, spun her, and drove her toward the bars of the cell door. I caught that same flicker of movement—the sense of something dark and twisting where he wore the prosthesis. Then he crushed Lurnice’s head against the door. He let her go, shaking blood and hair from his hand, and she fell. I was grateful for the distance; all I could tell, from where we stood, was that it looked like a truck had gone over her head. Then Posey turned and clobbered Dutch. Her screams broke off, and she dropped to the floor. He leaned heavily on the wall, panting. Kennedy checked the shotgun and shouldered it.
Silence, total silence, held the room.
“Took you long enough,” I said. “I thought we had a plan.”
“The parking lot was a disaster,” Kennedy said. “Nasties coming out of the woodwork.”
Then someone screamed, and the crowd broke. Nelda Pie was shouting something over the speakers, the words incomprehensible under the noises of the panicked mob. For ten or fifteen seconds, men and women streamed up the stairs, trying to get out of the pit and escape the Stoplight. Then the crowd stalled.
A woman flew into the air above us, floating out from the observation platform, arms and legs spread like she was performing one of those acrobatic acts, the kind you see a million flyers for in the French Quarter. She didn’t make a noise, as far as I could tell. Not until she hit the wall. Planks and timbers quivered, and her body made a crunching noise like someone stepping on a bag of potato chips.
A moment later, a second figure came hurtling off the observation platform. This one landed easily—a massive creature on four legs that padded toward Nelda Pie, who stood watching the chaos in her red robes. It had russet fur, and although the general shape of the head and body suggested wolf, this thing was not a wolf. It turned and sat on its hind legs next to Nelda Pie, and when she stroked its head, I recognized the thing Joey Jaws had become.
More chimeras appeared, forcing their way down the stairs and cutting a path through the panicked mob: a thing that was part woman and part tiger; another with the body of a man and the head of a cobra; one that was a man from the chest up, and from the waist down, he was a gelatinous blob, and he dragged himself like a slug; a dried-up husk of a woman, in a dress that made me think of Civil War reenactors. We’d seen her on our first visit to the Stoplight. Her mouth made me think of visits to old folks’ homes, when I’d been a kid, and for the first time seen the apple-doll faces of men and women who had taken out their dentures. As I watched, she opened her mouth, and spiders spilled out.
“Bring me the rougarou,” Nelda Pie said. “Kill the rest.”
The thing that had been Joey shook itself, crouched, and jumped. When he hit the bars, they exploded in like they were made of tiddlywinks, and fragments of iron and splintered wood spun across the floor. He bounded toward us. Eli shoved me out of the way and jumped, catching Joey in the side, and they tumbled across the ring. When they hit the wall, they crashed through it.
I started after them, but Kennedy shouted, “Dag,” and I turned in time to see the tiger-lady hurtling toward me.
I threw myself down, and that probably saved my life. Claws sliced the air next to my head; the air from their passage brushed the side of my face. When I hit the floor, I rolled through a cloud of sawdust, and then I came up on my knees. The tiger-lady was already recovering, crouched on all fours and turning easily to face me. Her movements were predatory, almost liquid, and she smiled as she caught sight of me again. I ignored her. The Sig was about ten feet to my right, making the third point of a triangle with me and the tiger-lady. I looked back at her, the muscles in her body rippling as she gathered herself to pounce. Then I kicked sawdust in her eyes.
She yowled, and I threw myself at the Sig. I landed bad this time, and my injured shoulder screamed at me. But I got my hand around the gun, and I brought it up and steadied myself and did what they’d trained me to do: breathe and look through the shot. I fired.
The tiger-lady jerked. Red stained her chest, and for a few horrible moments, she tried to drag herself away. Then she slumped down and was still.
I scrambled to my feet. Eli was on the far side of the pit, facing off with Joey. Posey was swinging the broken timber at the blob-man—when the timber struck the blob, it got stuck, and as I watched, the translucent goo ate away at the wood. Blob-man glided forward, probably planning on dissolving Posey too, but Kennedy was there. She flipped what looked like a gold coin in the air, and blob-man followed it with his eyes. So did Posey. And then I did too, watching it spin as it rose. I had to watch it. It caught the light. It was the only thing worth watching—
The boom of the shotgun snapped me out of the moment. What was left of blob-man began to spread across the floor, a stain of red goo. It hissed as it ate through wood and iron, and Kennedy stumbled back, towing Posey with her.
“That only works once—” Kennedy began to say.
Spiders enveloped her, crawling up her legs, hundreds of them, thousands, until they covered every inch of her. Kennedy screamed and began to dance. Behind her, spiders scurried across the floor of the pit in a line leading back to Civil War lady, and as I watched, more continued to pour from her apple-doll mouth. I brought the Sig up, but I couldn’t shoot the spiders off Kennedy, and I was too far for a decent shot at the Civil War lady.
Then a shotgun boomed again. Not Kennedy’s—the sound was different, and it came from above us. The Civil War lady staggered, and greenish blood stained her ancient dress. She turned toward the stairs. The next blast from the shotgun made the Civil War lady stumble, and more of the green blood soaked the front of her. But spiders continued to pour from her mouth, and Kennedy was still screaming.
Fen stepped into view, taking the stairs calmly, one at a time, as the shreds of the crowd fought to get past her. She let the Browning drop to hang from a strap around her neck, and then she reached for something strapped to her leg. A bottle, I realized. And, as I watched, Fen rolled a spark on a lighter. A rag stuffed in the mouth of the bottle caught easily, and then, with a pitch that would have made a Major Leaguer proud, Fen threw the bottle straight at the Civil War lady. Glass tinkled. And then fire whooshed to life, and the Civil War lady became a column of flame.
I heard a sound I’d never heard before, and even though it seemed impossible, I was sure the spiders were screaming.
Posey and I leapt into action, knocking the spiders off Kennedy with our hands. It was easy now; the spiders were already dropping, shriveling up as the fire consumed the Civil War lady and, in turn, consumed them too. But Kennedy was a mass of swollen bites. Her eyes were closed, and she was unresponsive.
“Get her out of here,” I told Posey.
“But Reb—”
“I’ll get Reb.”
“No, look!”
Posey pointed, and I followed the gesture to see Nelda Pie dragging Reb out of the dogfighting ring. Apparently, she’d decided not to wait for Joey or her other chimeras and was going to handle things herself.
I nodded at Posey, and he lifted Kennedy easily and half-jogged, half-shuffled toward the cell and the ramp that led back to the kennels. Fen’s shotgun went off, and I scanned the chaos of the pit until I found her: she was backing up, steadily giving ground while firing, emptying shot into a massive ape-guy-thing like the one Eli and I had faced at Dauphin House.
Then a crash and the chime of metal made me turn, and I saw Eli picking himself up from where he had slid to the base of the dogfighting ring. He was shaking his head as though trying to clear it, and he was covered in blood—most of it, it looked like, his own. When he saw me, though, he waved at Nelda Pie’s retreating form. “Go.”
I hesitated.
“Go!”
I took another step, and the thing that had been Joey landed in front of me. Up close, I could see that I’d misjudged its size. It was massive, and even standing on four feet, it was almost as tall as I was. Every inch of it swelled obscenely with muscle, and its eyes—Joey’s eyes—were insane. Saliva dripped from one corner of its mouth. In a few places, blood matted its fur, but I realized that Joey was winning. Eli’s focus was divided; he had to spend too much effort on keeping the infected part of himself from taking control, while the Joey thing was maddened and furious and a hundred percent crazy killing machine.
Movement in my peripheral vision told me Eli had joined me. I brought the Sig up as the Joey thing paced forward.
And then a freight train of leathery hide crashed into Joey. I had a moment to glimpse Pascal the parlangua, the one I had wrestled in the swamp, as his massive jaws closed around one of Joey’s arms. Then the two creatures wheeled away from us, and as Pascal twisted his head, Joey screamed.
“Now,” I said.
Eli was still staring at the battling creatures. A muscle in his jaw flexed. Fen’s shotgun boomed.
“Eli, we have to go now!”
He nodded, and we ran after Nelda Pie.
ELI (4)
The tunnel we followed—like the rest of the juke—made no sense. It seemed impossibly long, and we ran forever through the dark. Frostfire still burned inside me, the hashok’s infection struggling to spread. In part, that was a good thing. It numbed me from the pain of the injuries I’d taken in the ring, fighting Reb and then the abomination that had been Joey Jaws. But I had to make an effort with every step to keep from slipping into that upside-down place inside my head, and that wasn’t so good. Dag wasn’t doing much better. After the first hundred yards, he stumbled and staggered more often than not, and he cradled the arm he’d injured at Dauphin House.
At the end of the tunnel, a flight of crumbling iron steps led up to bulkhead doors. When we threw them open, we emerged at the back of the juke—like, literally at the back, with the stilts and the plank walls behind me. It didn’t make any sense. We’d gone so far into the earth, and then we’d followed the tunnel for so long. But like the rest of the juke, none of it obeyed the laws of time and space, and there didn’t seem to be any point worrying about it now.
I helped Dag up the last few steps. The air smelled like gunpowder, overheated metal, and the charred greasiness of the overturned oil-drum grill. Smoke drifted from the oyster-shell lot, stinging my eyes. Two of the three aluminum trailers lay on their sides, and in the one that was still standing, a fire burned merrily at the windows, crawling up the drapes. A few broken-toothed planks remained of the privies; they made me think of the Big Bad Wolf coming along and blowing it down, and that made me think of Joey, or the thing that had been Joey, and I shivered. A broken line in the tall grasses showed where Nelda Pie had dragged Reb.
“Stronger than she looks,” Dag said.
“She’s hopped up on god-juice or whatever you want to call it,” I said, steadying him when he started to drift. “Kalfu still thinks she’s his number one gal, and I bet she’s been drawing whatever she can from him, getting herself ready for tonight.”
“Great. That’s great.”
He started to veer again, and I caught his elbow. “Dag, maybe—”
Dag shook his head.
The grasses, wet and moldering from the storm, hissed as we passed through them, and the blades clung to my arms and made my skin itch—torn sleeves and all that. Where my skin hadn’t changed, I mean. The patches of too-smooth white barely felt anything at all; it was like running my thumb over an ice cube. As we went deeper into the tall grasses, we left the smell of smoke and burning plastic behind. In its place came the sweetness of wildflowers I couldn’t name, the last ones of the year, and more distantly, like a second skin on my tongue, tallow. I recognized it, of course. My mom had gone on a tallow kick at one point. Tallow soap. Tallow for cooking. I’d given up everything except French fries for those six weeks. We pushed through thistles, black and white in the moonlight, and they scratched my hands and left bloody lines. Chadron, my grandmother had called them, and she had taught me to peel them. You could eat them like celery. You could toss them in oil and salt and vinegar. And that was great, that was really useful, when there was a witch up ahead who was planning on killing a demigod and sucking him dry and taking his place, and it would probably take her as much trouble to kill Dag and me as squishing a bug under her shoe.
Then the tall grasses thinned, and the outline of a clearing appeared, its shape defined by the blaze and gutter of firelight. That light sparked on the crushed gold cans of Coors Banquet, and in the shadows, the burst ends of fireworks looked like coneflowers. Caught in the grass high enough for me to read, the plastic package torn open raggedly, as though in great haste, was a wrapper with the words VIAGROW—NATURAL MALE ENHANCEMENT. Great; I was going to die where teenagers came to party. Maybe I’d be lucky. Maybe I’d get to stay as a ghost and haunt the shit out of them.
When we stepped into the clearing, the tallow smell was stronger, and I saw the candles on an Ikea nightstand that had been repurposed as an altar. It was covered with offerings—coins, hand-painted shells, a plastic moon, a bowl full of liquid that looked like amber. Rum, I thought as I sniffed the air. A bonfire was beginning to catch; it had been built where two paths crossed. At the intersection. At the crossroads, my brain supplied. This old, forgotten crossroads where two footpaths met. Where Nelda Pie Cheron would ride a lwa.
She stood next to the altar. In the weak light from the fire, under the cold glow of the moon, her robe looked black. Reb lay on the ground. He had changed again, his rougarou aspect gone, and he looked like what he was—a teenager, badly hurt and alone.
The tall grasses rustled into place behind us, and Nelda Pie’s head came up. She smiled. Her mask of Avon products looked like a plaster cast. Then she drew a knife, set the blade to the inside of Reb’s arm, and cut along the vein. Blood welled up, thick and black.
