All Who Wander Are Lost (An Icarus Fell Novel) (47 page)

I stared,
struggling to control my breathing and keep panic from rising in my
chest.

It’s Poe’s
fault this happened.

My son was gone,
the Carrion disguised as a guardian angel to blame. I spun back
toward the angel of death.

“
Where
are they?”

The other cages had
disappeared, too, and the tents and the trees. I stood facing Azrael
and the boy across a smudge of orange-brown dirt scattered with
straw. Neither of them answered my question.

“
Where?”

“
It
is time to choose.”

Another thunderous
clap echoed, the force of it buffeting my chest and forcing me to my
knees. My head spun with the impact, my ears rang with the sound. I
closed my eyes to settle my brain; when I opened them again, the
ground under me was no longer soil and straw. Instead, my knees
rested on a piece of soggy cardboard spread across pavement. I
raised my head. Azrael and the boy were gone.

To my right was an
over-flowing garbage bin sitting in front of a brick wall scrawled
with graffiti. I recognized the place, or places like it, at least.
A man sat across the alley from me, staring, a moth-chewed blanket
pulled across his shoulders.

Orlando Albert.

“
Icarus,”
he said.

His voice came out
a croak, like a toad lived in his throat and needed to speak with
me. No surprise given the damned souls who’d had a go at him
at the labyrinth had done quite a job. Crooked, yellow teeth showed
through holes in both cheeks. His breath wheezed through another
hole in his throat; he lacked both ears; one eye bulged on the verge
of bursting out of his head, the white tinted pink with blood.

“
No.”

I got to my feet,
wobbled to get my balance right, then sidestepped away from him. I
didn’t know where to go—the alley appeared to stretch on
pretty much forever in both directions—but I knew I didn’t
want to be there.

Orlando struggled
to get up, propping himself against the brick wall to do so. When he
finally made it to his version of standing—more the slouch of
a man well into his centennial year—the tattered blanket fell
off his shoulders. He was naked beneath, though the word doesn’t
do justice: no clothes and little flesh. Bone and muscle peeked
through what remained of his shredded skin, bite marks showing at
irregular intervals, pieces of meat hanging from his legs and torso
where the job of rending his flesh was left not-quite-done.

“
Please.
I shouldn’t be here.”

“
What
are you talking about? You ruined lives, killed people. Why
shouldn’t I leave you here?”

“
Because
I gave you what you wanted.”

I don’t know
where he’d been hiding the needle he waved at me—naked
men have few options for concealing things. The one possibility I
could think of made me shudder.

“
Take
me with you and you can have it again. All you want.”

He shuffled forward
a step, a loose bit of flesh flapping where his genitals once
dangled.

I gagged.

“
I
don’t need it anymore.”

As the words left
my mouth, a shiver pulsed beneath my skin, an itch. My gaze fell on
the needle in his hand and stuck.

“
Yes,
you do.”

The croak of his
voice echoed in my head as he came closer, arm extended. Offering?
Trying to stick me? Saliva filled my mouth, threatened to over-flow
as though he offered a particularly appetizing meal rather than a
substance which had stolen my life and came close to ending it.

I licked my lips,
rocked back and forth on the balls of my feet. My body remembered
the feel of the drug coursing through my veins, the way it made my
head inflate. The rush, the calm.

I shook my head,
dislodging the thought.

“
No.”

I turned my back on
him, unafraid he possessed the energy or ability to jump me, and
walked away.

“
Please,”
he croaked after me. “Please, Icarus. Don’t leave me
here.”

I ignored his pleas
and the itch bubbling under my skin subsided. Six paces passed
beneath my feet when the alleyway began to fade around me. I
hesitated, waiting to see what was going on before I continued into
the unknown. Unfortunately, the half-eaten man was more dexterous
than I’d thought and he lunged, the needle piercing shirt
sleeve and flesh as the last of the alley disappeared. I jumped
away, rubbing my arm, and my thigh bumped against a chair.

Orlando was gone.
The stench of garbage and excrement: gone. I found myself surrounded
by tables and chairs, a wooden-topped bar. The place hadn’t
been aired-out in a long while and the smell of dried beer spilled
by intoxicated hands permeated the room.

I’d ended up
in a bar.

Sully’s
.

I let my hand fall
away from my arm and took a step forward, wondering if I merely
needed a tetanus shot or if he’d gotten some of the evil
liquid into me.

A minute later, the
feeling in my head, the sensation in my limbs, answered the
question.

Shit.

Bruce
Blake-All Who Wander Are Lost

I glanced over at
the bar, expecting to see Sully’s ever-present smile peeking
out from beneath his bushy Ned Flanders moustache, but the area was
vacant. Bottles sat lined up in orderly rows along the back bar,
little galvanized pails of peanuts at regular intervals along the
bar’s dark wood surface awaited hungry fingers, but no
bartender.

How’s a
guy supposed to get a drink?

For the first time
in my life, I struggled against the feeling revving up in my brain,
in the muscles of my arms and legs like a pencil wound at the end of
an elastic. I took a few steps toward the row of stools at the bar,
intending to peer over and see if someone hid behind it, but the
clink of glass against glass caught my attention.

The room was empty
of people except for the two men seated at a table by the big screen
TV in the corner. Images flickered across the screen, a contest
which might have been considered a sport in ancient Rome involving
men dragged behind horses and skeletal beings with over-sized axes,
but I didn’t let my gaze linger once I saw the first man
beheaded, choosing to scrutinize the men at the table instead.

The growing feeling
in my brain made it more difficult than it should have been, but I
eventually recognized Marty and Todd.

“
Yah,”
Marty cried out and pumped a fist in the air at an event on the TV.
“I told you they’d take it this year.”

I took a careful
step toward them, thinking I’d succeeded at being quiet until
they whirled around as if I’d stepped on a cat.

“
Look.
It’s Ric Fell,” Todd said.

“
Hey,
Ric. Come sit with us.”

Marty pushed a
chair away from the table with his foot by way of invitation and I
felt drawn to it. Hell, I needed to sit down. They watched as I
crossed the room and settled my ass onto the chair’s
faux-leather seat.

“
Ain’t
seen you in a long time,” Todd said and raised his half-empty
beer glass in toast. Marty did the same but paused before drinking.

“
Wait
a second, Todd. Ol’ Ric doesn’t have a drink. Hey
barkeep.” He raised his other hand and gestured. “Bring
my friend a drink. Vodka soda with lime, right Ric?”

My brain said
yes—exactly what I needed to calm my increasingly jangled
nerves—and I thought it told my head to nod, but the damn
thing shook side to side instead and my mouth followed suit.

“
No,
I--”

A man placed a
drink on the table in front of me, interrupting my renegade words.
Ice and clear liquid filled the tall glass, sweat ran down the side,
a quarter lime perched on the rim. The man’s presence startled
me—I thought only the three of us occupied the bar. I looked
up to thank him out of habit and, for a second time in a row, it
surprised me not to see Sully. Instead, I looked up at the man I’d
last seen ogling teenage boys in a Hell-bound locker room.

“
Tony?
What are you doing here?”

He wiped his hands
on the short, white apron around his waist as if he was normally a
bartender rather than a borderline-pedophile high school coach. In
life, I’d never seen Tony at Sully’s or any other bar,
but this wasn’t life, this was Hell.

At least, I assumed
it was still Hell. In a bar, with a drink in front of me and a major
buzz brewing in my head, didn’t seem like such a bad place to
be.

“
Never
mind him,” Marty said. “We need to talk.”

I looked from the
misplaced Tony to Marty as he leaned forward, smiling. His nose
seemed to have grown, his ear lobes flopped at the side of his head.
I repressed a giggle and looked at my drink as Todd pushed it toward
me. The droplets of water running down the side of the glass looked
so refreshing, the lime so tempting. I swallowed hard and licked my
lips, trying to concentrate hard enough to shrink myself down and
dive right in.

“
Yeah,
we have to talk,” Todd repeated.

“
So
talk.”

I reached for the
drink and tried to imbibe its refreshment through the fleshy pads of
my fingers as they touched the cool glass. When that didn’t
work to my expectations, I went to pick it up, bring it to my mouth,
but Todd held its base and wouldn’t relinquish his grip. My
tongue lolled across my bottom lip.

“
You’re
our ticket out of here,” Marty said, voice hushed to keep our
conversation from Tony standing at my elbow. “You can make
things right.”

I started to shake
my head but Todd interrupted.

“
We
wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you.”

I glanced from
Marty to Todd. If not for the drugs distorting my perception, he’d
have looked much like he did in life: red veins stood out on his
nose, dark circles colored the area below his eyes. In my current
state, they stood out comically, like he was a caricature of W.C.
Fields.

“
But
I--”