A Dozen Black Roses, page 19
Suddenly a burst of nearby submachine-gun fire drew the priest’s attention back to the window. He peered out onto the street, then stepped back, crossing himself.
“What is it?” Sonja asked. “What do you see?”
“Esher’s men,” he replied. “Dozens of them. They’re walking up the middle of the street, headed for the Black Lodge.”
Sonja pushed herself into a sitting position, even though her head felt as if it was swinging on the end of a tetherball cord. “Help me up.”
“You’re in no condition to move—!”
“I need to see what’s going on,” she replied as she struggled to stand.
Father Eamon clucked his tongue in reproach, but looped his arm under her shoulders and helped Sonja to her feet. She staggered slightly as her vision was momentarily filled with black specks like a connect-the-dots game. He helped her to the window, where she clutched the sill with trembling fingers.
The street in front of St. Everild was full of Esher’s followers, both human and vampire, armed with what looked like military-grade assault weapons. As she watched, a group of Black Spoons opened fire on the advancing invaders, only to have the salvo returned sevenfold, their Glocks and Lugers no match against the Pointers’ Kalashnikovs.
The over-amplified thump of industrial-strength rap, its bass-line thick as boilerplate, signaled the Batmobile’s approach. The vintage Caddy was flanked on either side by heavily armed gang-members, who trotted alongside the vehicles like Secret Service agents escorting a presidential motorcade.
“Looks like Esher’s bringing the fight to Sinjon,” Sonja muttered. “I guess ‘say it with flowers’ really does works.”
The Batmobile halted directly across the street from the Black Lodge to as one of the attendant bodyguards to open the rear passenger door. Esher emerged from the back seat and scanned the jumbled barricade of old furniture, broken masonry and timber erected in front of Sinjon’s stronghold. Behind the barrier stood the Black Spoons and Sinjon’s brood, their faces smeared with blood and soot. Esher reached back into the Batmobile and retrieved a bullhorn, which he lifted to his lips.
“Sinjon! I’ve come for what’s mine! Do you hear me, Freemason?”
Sinjon stepped out onto his third-story balcony and glowered at the assembled army at his doorstep. “What is the meaning of this, Esher?!? Have you gone mad like the rest of the rabble in this wretched place? First I have crazed derelicts attacking my men with torches and brickbats, now you! It’s less than an hour before dawn, you maniac!”
“Don’t play coy with me, you bastard! You know very well why I am here!”
“You are mad!” Sinjon spat, rolling his eyes in disgust.
“I want my woman! I want the cocaine you took from me! But most of all—I demand that you hand over the traitor called Sonja!”
“I have no idea what you’re raving about!” the vampire lord said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Return to your territory before the sun comes up!”
Esher lowered the bullhorn and made a quick, chopping gesture with his hand. The Pointers opened fire on the Black Lodge with their military-grade weapons, the bullets gouging thumb-sized holes in the building’s facade.
Sinjon flinched as an incendiary bullet whistled by his ear. He quickly withdrew from the exposed balcony, shouting at his minions to return fire.
“Daddy-what’s going on out there?” Johan asked. He was naked save for a black vinyl jockstrap, and his eyes were white with fear. He hadn’t been this frightened since Sinjon had taken him from the downtown bus terminal three months ago.
“The wizard’s lost his mind!” Sinjon replied. “He’s jabbering on about giving him back the girl and the drugs! And he seems convinced we’re harboring that Sonja-woman.”
“Did you tell him she’s not here?” Johan suggested helpfully.
Suddenly there came the sound of breaking glass and a grenade landed with a thud on the carpet. A second later the explosion sent glass and debris flying out of the windows and down onto the Black Spoons. Those members of Sinjon’s brood gathered behind the barricades lifted their pale faces as one, their scarlet eyes glittering with panic, and raised their hands in supplication, wailing in fear, calling out their sire’s name.
The situation outside the Black Lodge was indeed grim, with dead and dying gang members sprawled three-deep on the sidewalk. The vampire called Tristan—his body blown away from the waist down—dragged himself along his elbows, battening onto the wounded humans in hope of draining enough blood to hurry his own reconstruction. The dying gang members struggled feebly to escape the vampire’s grasp, their cries for help drowned out by the noise of the running firefight.
Esher’s forces fell back, taking cover behind front stoops and in doorways of the few nearby buildings that had yet to succumb to arson, while their master sat in the back of his bulletproof Caddy, watching the slaughter with a preternatural calm. During a lull in the combat, he glanced at the Rolex on his wrist and pulled a cell-phone from his pocket.
“King Hell to Firebird,” he said in an oddly tranquil voice. “Begin the suite.”
A pair of Pointers armed with M202 Flame Assault Shoulder Weapons zigzagged their way across the street, protected by covering fire from their fellow gang members. As they reached the steps of the church opposite the Black Lodge, one of them was shot in the head, but the other kept on moving.
A second later an incendiary rocket shot from the launcher and landed behind the barricade, splashing vampire and human alike in a shower of napalm. The jellied gasoline ignited instantly, and Sinjon’s followers shrieked in terrified agony as the flames ate through their clothes and skin. Those that leaped over the barricade in a desperate attempt to escape the inferno were instantly mown down.
The rocket-launcher fired a second time, sending its fiery cargo through a second-story window into the Black Lodge. There was a chorus of shrill screams as thick smoke began to pour forth. Figures began to flee the building, most of them on fire. A couple of vampires hesitated on the threshold, eyeing the lightening sky with dread, only to be forced out by the flames at their backs. As they tried to make a run for it, they were greeted by a hail of automatic weapon fire.
Esher smiled as he watched the bodies pile up on the street and the gutters fill with the blood of his enemies. Satisfied, he gave the signal for his vampire followers to stand down and return to the barracks. The sun would be coming up at any minutes and he had no desire to risk any more of his brood. He alone would remain behind, within his sun-proofed vehicle, and watch the fall of his enemy.
Tongues of flame leapt from every window of the Black Lodge, and thick black smoke boiled forth like a biblical swarm of locusts. Without warning Sinjon’s favorite, Johan, came running out of the inferno, his hair on fire and his blistered flesh hanging in large, flapping patches on his face, thighs and back. Blood trickled from his ears and nose from the concussion grenade that had detonated in his boudoir. He waved his arms frantically in an attempt to escape his pain, his screams as high and piercing as those of a child.
“Save me, Daddy!” he wailed. “Save me!”
The crossfire tore the boy to shreds in a matter of seconds, spinning him like a top. Johan staggered a few steps, a look of confusion on his ruined face, before finally collapsing onto the gore-soaked sidewalk.
Father Eamon lowered his head, crossing himself as he began to recite the Latin prayer for the dead. Sonja wanted to tell the priest that the boy was probably beyond such help, but held her tongue. As it was, she had to struggle to hide her pleasure at the carnage outside the window. Things were working out better than she’d hoped.
As she returned her gaze to the burning ruin across the street, Sinjon appeared in the crumbling doorway. The vampire lord’s finery was scorched and his powdered wig was gone, revealing a scabrous scalp through which his skull wetly gleamed.
The Pointer in command of the human wing-commander then turned to bellow at the others, waving at them to lower their weapons as Sinjon clambered over the barricade and made his way to where his favorite’s body lay in the street.
“Oh, my precious boy—look what they did to you!” Sinjon moaned as he pulled Johan’s ruined corpse into his arms, cradling it as he would a child, and rocked back and forth. All of his beautiful, beautiful boys were dead. Well and Truly Dead. Johan, Tristan, Ethan…All of them. The loss struck him like a knife twisted in a wound. Everything he had had built for over two centuries was dying all around him, consumed by flames and madness. He had been usurped. As he raised his eyes heavenward he saw, to his horror, the first fingers of daylight stretch across the early morning sky.
“You win, Esher!” the vampire lord shouted as he got to his feet, swaying like a drunken man. He staggered across the debris of the battlefield to where the Cadillac sat, its polarized windows rolled up tight against the coming dawn. “Deadtown is yours! I surrender! I recognize you as victor!” He pawed with trembling fingers at the rear passenger window as he glanced over his shoulder at the rising sun. His voice grew panicked, until he was all but sobbing. “I will swear allegiance and gladly surrender my blood to you! I will make myself your footstool and never once raise my hand against you, for as long as the oceans are wet! I promise you all that I am, Esher—just don’t let me burn!”
Sinjon’s skin prickled and itched as if he were covered in ants. He hissed in anger and pain and tried to shield his eyes with his lifted forearm, to no avail. He pounded his fist against the impassive black glass of the Cadillac, but it refused to shatter. He staggered away from the car, back toward Johan’s body, but collapsed before he could take a half-dozen steps.
He had never known such agony in all the centuries of his undeath. He lay panting on the ground, his eyes filling with tears and blood as the fluids inside him began to boil. His instincts told him to find shelter, to go to ground somewhere dark and cool and safe from the burning rays of the sun, but it was too late. There was nowhere left to escape to. He clawed at the pavement beneath his belly for a few frantic seconds, in hopes of burrowing into the earth, but his wildly scrabbling fingernails met only unyielding cobblestones.
His flesh blistered like bacon in the pan. He could smell himself cooking. The skin on his face bubbled and sloughed away like wax. His eyes turned dull white as they were boiled in their own ocular fluid. Despite the magnitude of his wounds and the pain he was in, Sinjon continued to crawl forward, groping blindly with his fleshless hands. Although he no longer possessed a sense of touch, he knew he must be close. He wanted to tell Johan he was sorry it had come to this, but his tongue was a piece of blackened leather. He wanted to kiss him one last time, but he had no lips. There was so much he wanted to do. But now, after nearly five centuries, the unimaginable had finally come to pass.
There was no. More.
Time.
As the early morning breeze scattered the Freemason’s ashes, Esher could no longer contain himself and began to laugh. “It’s time to return home,” he told his driver between guffaws. “There is nothing more to see here.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Sonja watched the Batmobile bounce over the broken, bleeding bodies strewn throughout the street as Esher withdrew from the battlefield. The Pointers shambled behind their master’s car, looking as dead as their enemies. By her estimates, Esher had lost well over half his human servants to the riots and battle with Sinjon. She let go of the window ledge and sank to her knees, pressing her forehead against the cool stone.
“You need to lie down,” Father Eamon said.
“That leaves only the one, now,” she grunted as the priest helped her back to her makeshift bed.
“Sinjon was bad enough, but Esher—he is the devil made flesh!” Father Eamon spat. “Now the gutters of Deadtown will truly run with the blood of innocents!”
“Don’t be too sure of that. Do you have something to write with? I need you to take a message to a friend of mine.”
The priest left the room only to return a couple of minutes later with a tiny pencil stub and a flattened paper bag big enough to hold a fifth of whiskey. Sonja hastily scrawled an address and phone number down of the brown paper sack.
“I need you to take this to Eddie. He’s an older guy who lives in a basement squat a block or two over from here …”
“You mean the hippie?”
“Yes, the hippie,” she replied with a dry laugh, which abruptly turned into a violent coughing spasm that brought up clotted blood.
“I can’t leave you while you’re in this condition!” Father Eamon protested.
“Do what I ask you!” she gasped, shoving the paper into his hand. “Do it or I’ll die anyway! I can feel everything that’s wrong inside me. There’s a piece of rib stuck in my heart and my right lung has collapsed. If I were human, I would have died hours ago! There’s only one thing that can help me right now—and that’s blood. The address on this piece of paper is that of a man who specializes in providing black-market plasma to those like me. I need Eddie to arrange a buy from him. I need blood, and I need it now.”
“Yeah-what do you want?” Eddie growled, peering suspiciously at the grubby old man on the other side of his door. At first he assumed he was a derelict, then he noticed the priest’s collar about the other man’s throat.
“I was told to come here and give you this,” Father Eamon said, holding up the scrap of paper by way of explanation. “She said you’d know who she is.”
Eddie’s eyes lost some of their suspicion, but not their anxiety. “Sonja sent you? She’s alive?” He slipped the chain off the door and ushered the priest inside. “Sorry I didn’t recognize you, Father! I’m just not used to receiving company. Especially after a night like last night! I spent most of it trying to keep those fuckin’ loonies from torching my squat—pardon my French.”
Father Eamon stood in the middle of the front room, staring at the piles of books surrounding him. “I see you are a man of letters,” he said, not without some surprise. “I never dreamed there were so many books to be found in Deadtown.”
“They help pass the time at night,” Eddie replied. “Now, what about Sonja? Is she okay? Is she hurt? The last I saw her, that crazy bitch Decima was carrying her over her shoulder like a sack of flour. Then all Hell broke loose, and I had my hands full the rest of the night.”
“She is alive, but badly hurt. I found her on the steps of my church. She asked for sanctuary, so I brought her inside. I tended to her wounds and have tried to make her as comfortable as possible. She says she needs blood.” It was all Father Eamon could do to speak the words out loud without vomiting. “She says she will die without it. She gave me this address and phone number of a black marketeer to pass along to you.”
Eddie took the piece of paper and frowned at the scrawled information. “Tell her to rest easy, padre. I’ll take care of it.”
As Father Eamon started to leave, he turned to fix Eddie with a quizzical look. “May I ask you something?”
“Go ahead, Father.”
“Do you believe this woman is a thing of the Devil or a child of God?”
“I honestly don’t know what she is,” Eddie replied. “I always thought guys like you knew more about those kinds of things, though.”
“True,” Father Eamon admitted. “But Satan is devious. His devils can wear any number of skins. Sometimes even those of priests.”
“I couldn’t tell you anything about that, padre. But I can tell you what little I know about her. I’ll admit that she scares the bejesus outta me. But she’s saved my life more than once—and she didn’t have to. She helped that kid, Ryan, get back with his mom, and made sure they got away safe. She didn’t have to do any of that, but she did it anyway. I don’t know who she is, or what brought her to Deadtown, but it’s obvious she’s not like Sinjon or Esher—or anything else I’ve ever seen wandering the streets of this hellhole. She ain’t human—but I’m not too sure if that’s always a bad thing.”
Father Eamon picked his way through the wreckage left by the riots; fire had wiped out many of the neighborhood’s tenements, reminding him of the newsreels of the Battle of Britain he’d seen as a boy. Corpses littered the sidewalks and the stink of blood and smoke filled the morning air. The majority of the dead were human, dressed in the identifying colors of the Five Points Gang and the Black Spoons. Several of the gang members looked like they had been torn limb from limb. He glanced up and spotted a pair of Nikes dangling from a telephone line, the owner’s feet still inside. Scattered amongst the carnage was the occasional fleshless skeleton with oversized canines, proving that Death had come for the devil’s own as well as the sons of Adam. He knew it was his duty as a priest to go among the dead and administer last rites, but the task was a daunting one.
Everywhere he looked, he saw nothing but ruin. While the Dance Macabre on the Street With No Name appeared relatively untouched, Rackham’s Pool Hall had been reduced to a charred and gutted shell. Father Eamon noticed with a twinge of panic that the liquor store he frequented had been looted and torched as well, along with the handful of bodegas that served for what passed as Deadtown’s business community.
The priest’s mind kept turning back to the creature in the basement of St. Everild. He was certain now, more than ever, that she was responsible for the destruction that surrounded him. Was the woman a demon or an angel of the pit? He wished he could be certain of her motivations. What the old hippie had told him confused him even further. Could a monster have a soul? Could an angel cause the innocent to suffer? And what did it mean that he—the most wretched of sinners—was the one to whose door she came crawling?
He found her where he’d left her, curled up in a fetal position on the pile of moldy vestments. Her skin was cool and dry to the touch, like that of a snake, and she did not appear to be breathing. At first he was afraid she was dead, but when he prodded her with his foot she moved sluggishly and one of her eyelids flickered open, exposing a blood-filled white. Satisfied she was what passed for alive amongst her kind, he headed back upstairs.
