Underground g-3, page 4
part #3 of Greywalker Series
I shook my head, still smiling a little. I didn’t mind that he was interested. I just wasn’t going to tell him the whole truth, and that I did mind. “It wasn’t too bad, so long as you don’t mind the high ick factor,” I replied. “Some homeless man turned up dead in the train tunnel. I found him while I was looking for someone else and I couldn’t leave until the police got there and we discussed it. I’m sure the railroad isn’t thrilled about it, but the SPD didn’t order me to keep it quiet, so I guess it’s just a sad accident.”
“In the tunnel.” He looked a little green.
“Yeah. I figured you didn’t need to see it.” I let the subject drop and changed direction. “I like your day better. How ‘bout you tell me more about puzzle boxes?”
“That one’s really unusual,” he started, pointing at the ball on the table beside me. His eyes began to shine as he went on. Will loved these sorts of odd old objects—and it had been the more accessible mysteries of things like this that had taken him to England and away from the uncomfortable quandary of my strangeness. “Most puzzle boxes are square- or cube-shaped, and the famous Japanese ones have intricately inlaid surface patterns to obscure the moving parts. Normally, I’d call something like this one—a round one—a burr puzzle, but those aren’t hollow and puzzle boxes aren’t usually round, so this is a hybrid.”
I sank into the warm rhythm of his speech, watched his pleasure in the conversation turn the aura around his head a bright gold, and didn’t think about dead men in tunnels for a while and wished this quiet moment wasn’t doomed to end.
CHAPTER 3
As we left the restaurant, stepping back out into the deepened cold made more frigid by comparison with the cozy warmth we’d left, I tucked the puzzle ball into my bag. Beneath the restaurants doorway lights, a handful of moths trailed ghostly doubles in front of my face, making hash of my vision as we stepped onto the sidewalk and I slipped a little on the icy cement. Will caught my arm and kept me upright, the warmth of his touch spreading through me. The flutter of moth wings sounded like spectral whispers in my ears.
“Can I give you a lift back to your truck?” Will offered. “Mine’s just under the viaduct.”
He’d have been foolish to refuse a two-block walk to a comfortable ride in favor of walking the six frozen blocks to my parking structure or standing in the cold waiting for a bus. And having put a few patches over the rough spots of the morning and afternoon, the rest of the evening looked encouraging. I accepted and we began walking toward Elliot Bay.
The viaducts elevated double-decker road looms over the flatland of the waterfront like a concrete house of cards waiting to collapse onto the desolate parking lot wasteland beneath it. Blocks of old warehouse buildings on one side face the patchwork quilt of the waterfront businesses on the other. Crazed, pitted blacktop, striped with parking stalls and lane markers, stretches the width of the missing city block between them. An uneven fringe of stunted shrubs marks the edge of the old trolley line, but nothing else grows under the viaduct’s unloved shade.
I batted at the moths that muttered around my head and nearly missed the small animal that darted out from the scruffy hedge. Wan yellow light from the streetlamps on the waterfront gleamed on its russet fur. Doglike with huge pointed ears and a brush tail, it ran into the empty lane and then darted a few steps toward us before it cast a look over its shoulder and bounded away into darkness, dragging a shadow behind it.
Will stared after it and asked, “What was that?”
“A… fox, I think.” I didn’t know why, but a shiver of dread swept over me.
“Fox?” he questioned, taking a couple of steps away from me, following the vanished animal. “Where did it come from? We’re a long way from the zoo to be spotting an escapee.”
I turned to look where the fox had glanced and saw two vaguely human figures emerging from a shadow that should have been too small to hold them. The world around them boiled in the Grey and heaved layers of time like stacked plates in an earthquake. I faltered forward a step, and the figures moved into a thin slice of streetlight.
In the ordinary light, they looked like two men dressed in rags, stumbling a little from drink or debility, but as they moved forward into shadow again, they shed their normal aspect in my eyes. One was the shaggy creature that had braced me in Occidental Park and it was leading the other, shambling and putrescent, toward me. The clinging cowl of black threads and Grey strands like spider web wasn’t necessary for me to know that the thing was dead—a walking corpse. I gagged on the stink of decay the zombie carried with it.
The hairy man-thing held out a hand to me. “Help, lady. Free—”
Will pulled me back and stepped between us. “Don’t touch her,” he warned the scarred creature. “We don’t have anything for you. Go your way.”
“Will,” I started.
He put a protective arm up in front of me but kept his eyes on the two creatures. I knew he didn’t see what I did. He must have thought they were just a couple of bums panhandling a bit aggressively.
I began objecting again. “No, Will. Don’t!”
Will tried to push me back. The matted hair on the furry one’s head and neck rose like hackles on an angry dog. It lowered its head and growled. “No. Need lady!” Fury sparked in its green eyes and it jumped at Will, butting its head into his midsection.
Will tumbled backward and both the monstrosities rushed for him, voicing weird cries. Bright lines of Grey energy rippled around them as the three figures tangled on the ground, thrashing.
“No!” I shouted, plunging into the fray. I didn’t want to touch the Grey things and I didn’t want them to touch Will any more than they had. I grabbed onto him and hauled backward as hard as I could, pushing back on the Grey as I went. I shoved the edge between us and the shambling, furious things that flailed at Will. “Stop it!” I yelled at them. “Stop!”
Will’s hand connected with the zombie’s face and a chunk of rotten flesh fell away, trailing Grey strands on Will’s fingers like glue.
The dead mans jaw sagged open, unhinged on one side. Will recoiled with a shout, stumbling back and staring at the gaping thing and its feral companion. His shout turned into inarticulate sounds of horror, but I didn’t look back at him.
The shaggy thing lurched forward again and I slammed my forearm across its chest, shuddering at the touch of its matted hair and knotted body.
“Stop!” I ordered. “Stop now or I won’t help you.” I was panting from the adrenaline surge. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? My help?”
The thing whimpered with frustration but turned its gaze to me at last. “Yes. Help,” it whined. It reached for the undead man and drew him closer to me.
“Trapped. This spirit, tangled here. One of my people, before your kind. Free it.”
I peered at the standing dead man and saw a tangle of Grey threads, yellow, blue, and black under the unnatural spider web of soft Grey—similar to the stuff I’d seen in the train tunnel—that seemed to bind the rotting flesh together. The threads were inside the body, but the rot was well advanced and only the web of Grey held it to form. I’d pulled a living Grey thing apart before, deconstructed it by force, hating every burning instant. As I looked at it, I could make out a shadow of a face amid the tangled strands of energy and magic, a face that suffered and implored with a look where voice had long failed.
It was disgusting and repellent, but… I’d have to make the best of it. I didn’t know if I wanted the blue strand or the yellow one, but if I pulled them both out, I could disentangle them more easily. This old corpse shouldn’t have been walking around for any reason—he’d been dead a long, long time and deserved to lie down for good. My stomach lurched, but I braced myself to do it, sending a muttered “Gods help me…” to the sky as I pushed my hands into the rotten flesh.
The threads of spirit felt like live wires and burned my fingers. I gasped and bit off a yelp of pain as I hooked the living energy in my fists, squeezed my eyes closed against the coming flare of agony, and pulled. Fire and electric shocks jolted up my arms and down my spine, raging through my chest. And then the stands broke free. I staggered back, opening my clenched fists and closed eyes.
The zombie tumbled to the ground, decomposing as it fell. The energy strands slid apart and for an instant two faces looked at me. I gasped. Two? That was all wrong. I stared at the faces—one pleased, one furious—and wondered why the angry one seemed familiar before it flashed away. The other was an Indian—some kind of local Native American, I would guess—and he looked on me benignly for a moment before all cognition faded. He didn’t say anything, didn’t smile or nod, just slowly vanished leaving a sense of profound relief in his wake.
My shoulders sagged and I let my head fall forward as I exhaled. Could have been worse, I supposed. I heard a noise behind me and turned, having forgotten about Will in the pressure of the moment.
Will was staring at me, breathing in panicky pants. “You… you killed that man.”
“Shit,” I muttered. “No, Will. He was already dead.” I tried to close the distance between us, but he backed away from me, so I stopped. “Look at the body. Just look.” I turned my head back to see the rotten pile moldering into dirt as we watched. I glanced at my hands and then at his. A thin greasy dust clung to my fingers where the dead man’s remains had already dropped away. But I saw a knotted thread of blue energy clinging to Will’s fingers and wrapping around his arms where he’d touched the zombie.
I walked toward him again, reaching for his hand to brush the energy strand away, but he jerked back, staring in disbelief at me and then at the pile of dust and dirt beside the now-docile hairy creature. I didn’t know how much of the Grey he could see by dint of the tangle on his hand, but it seemed to be enough. Or maybe he could only see the absence of a body, but that would do. He looked sick and his skin was slick with fear sweat that gleamed in the jaundiced light. He started shaking his head in a stiff manner that signaled the edge of hysteria. I kept my hands where he could see them and stood very still.
“Will,” I said in the calmest tone I could muster. “I didn’t hurt anyone. And I wouldn’t hurt you, either.”
“They attacked you. You—you attacked back!”
“No. They wanted help.”
“You tore that one to pieces!” he shouted, pointing at the drifting pile of dust.
“Will. No. Will, I can’t tear a person up. It can’t be done. The body fell apart on its own. Will. It was a zombie. It wasn’t alive. It was a spirit trapped in a rotting corpse!”
I shouldn’t have yelled. At the sound of my raised voice, Will turned and bolted. I tried to go after him, but the hairy man-creature loped after me and caught me, pulling me back around by the arm.
“Lady, lady, dead lady. Even now.”
“What?” I demanded. “Even for what?” Exasperating thing!
It touched the scarring around its eye. “This.”
“I didn’t do that to you!” I cried, frustrated, horrified, wanting to run away from it, to run after Will, and knowing it was too late.
“This because of you. Scaled man struck me. Because you didn’t come with me.”
I stared at the shaggy thing, halted in my thoughts of Will and forced into another direction. “Scaled man?” I thought hard and came up with pieces that fit. “Wygan? The vampire? The white-haired one?”
It nodded. “Scaled man.”
I swore and spit on the ground, damning him till the air quivered with my fury.
Bloody Wygan! The bastard vampire who’d stuck a knot of Grey into my chest, bound me inextricably to the grid of the Grey for his own reasons and without my consent, and ripped reality in two for me once and for all. So Wygan had sent this bizarre, simple creature to do his dirty work and then punished it for failure. It blamed me as much as him. I didn’t know why Wygan had done any of this and I wouldn’t enjoy finding out—but someday I would.
I take vows seriously. As a kid—pushed into activities and occupations I didn’t choose, forced to pursue my mother’s remodeled dream without heed to my desires—I’d made a vow: to find a way to run my own life, my way. I had done that only to have it all turned on its head. And now, another: I would find out why this had happened to me and what Wygan had done.
The creature patted my chest, wresting me from my thoughts. “Even.” Then it turned and loped off, vanishing into shadows of the Grey that drew around it like curtains.
I looked around, suddenly emptied of rage and action, and was taken in a fit of shaking from cold and a swift: stab of despair. I was alone under the viaduct.
Will was long gone, the dust of the released zombie was already blowing away in the icy breeze off the water, and even the strange moths had disappeared. I clenched my fists tight and felt as if the world was twisting and falling down around me. I stumbled on solid ground, choking on a scream I couldn’t release, and forced myself to walk away, back toward Pioneer Square, away from the empty street under the viaduct. But emptiness came with me, kindled only by the tiny spark of my pledge.
I finished the walk to my truck alone. I drove home in a daze of postconfrontation exhaustion and carried the puzzle box upstairs to my condo, shoving it into a bookshelf at random after the door clicked closed behind me.
Chaos, my ferret, rattled the door of her cage, demanding immediate release. I let her out only to imprison her again against my chest.
“What am I going to do?” I asked the ferret.
Chaos, impatient little beast, wriggled with annoyance as I tried not to break down. I gave up and let her go, dropping onto the sofa and putting my face in my hands. Hot salt water ran against my palms and down my wrists but nothing, not even breath, could pass the stone that seemed to have settled in my throat. I didn’t even have the comfort of howling or sobbing, just stupid, hard tears.
I cried until it stopped hurting and put my head down on the arm of the sofa.
Chaos skipped over to check on me, climbing the upholstery to lick the moisture from my face. “You don’t love me, you just want salt,” I muttered, letting her tiny kisses tickle my cheeks until I stopped feeling so wretched and wrung out.
“What now? I’m not ready to go after Wygan,” I continued. “Not skilled enough for that yet. So… just pick myself up and go on like there never was a William Novak in my life? Yeah, right.”
I wondered what had happened to the thread of Grey that had tangled on Will’s arm. I’d have to check—The ferret stuck her cold nose in my ear.
“Hey!”
She snorted and bounced away, busy as always. Busy.
That’s what Will and I would both do. That’s how we got by; working to avoid dealing with the personal ugliness. He wasn’t likely to let me near him for a while—at least not until he wasn’t so horrified. Much as I wanted to get at that bit of Grey, I’d have to wait and let his mind make some more comfortable suggestion of what had happened before I could. We’d have to talk and it would probably be the last time—I could no more keep on with this mess than he could, after this—and that would be my chance to fix what I could, including the strand, and let the rest go forever. But the Big Break would have to wait for calmer daylight, when there were fewer shadows heavy with reminders of shambling creatures and dark actions under the otherworldly stare of fox eyes and ghostly things.
CHAPTER 4
One of the requirements for my degree in criminal science was a psychology course about criminals and victims of crime. For a week we discussed how victims cope with the results of the crimes—everything from burglary and bank fraud to rape and the murder of loved ones—committed against them. In the end, all traumas elicit one of two major categories of response: break or cope. Breaking down is good for you, I’m told—catharsis and all that jazz—but I rarely indulge in it and never for long. Me, I’m of the suck-it-up school of coping till you crack. So after a night of feeling like a dog that’d been kicked, I dragged myself out of bed, worked out, and went back to my job. But Will was in the back of my mind and I worried in silence while I made myself work.
In between witness checks for Nan Grover, I left a message for Quinton and eventually arranged to meet up with him back in Pioneer Square about three o’clock. Quinton was standing near the bust of Chief Sealth and talking to Zip when I spotted him.
“…Thoreau was protesting the Mexican-American War,” he was saying as I approached.
Zip lipped an unlit cigarette and spoke in an impaired mumble that twitched out of one corner of his mouth. I’d gotten used to his odd speech in the months we’d been acquainted. “So he din’t pay his taxes?” Zip asked.
Quinton nodded. “Yup. And they threw him in jail.”
Under his flap-eared cap Zip looked thoughtful, rubbing his white-bristled chin with one hand that was clenched around his prized lighter. “Huh. So, this in’t new? Tellin’ the gov’ment you in’t gonna pay fer a war?”
“Nope. See, man, you were the practitioner of an honorable tradition.”
“Hm,” Zip grunted, lighting his smoke and stamping his feet to stay warm. “Wish they hadn’t thrown me in the nuthouse, though.”
“Setting yourself on fire may have been a bit much, Zip.”
“I come out OK.” He looked up and noticed me. “Hey’m, Harper.”
I had to shake myself out of my distracted funk. “Hey, Zip. Do you mind if I take Quinton for a while?”
He flipped his hand lazily at us. “Nah. Gonna get dinner in a minute. God Squads got chowder on Friday. S’Friday, right?”
“Has been all day,” Quinton replied.
“Good. ‘Cause y’know, they change that on ya sometimes. Sometimes it’s Wednesday halfway through, then it’s Vienna sausages. Don’ like them. They’s like fingers. I in’t gonna eat no fingers.”
“Not even fish fingers?”
Zip pushed out his lips and frowned, the smoldering cigarette wobbling on his lip like a wind sock in a changeable breeze. “Fish in’t got fingers.” Then he huffed, hunched into his filthy layers of clothing, and marched off.
