City of the Lost (27 page)

If my nose hadn’t already shriveled into my face I’d probably mind the smell. As it is, I can barely stand catching a hint of my reflection in the rearview mirror.

Day one I should have gotten myself embalmed.

As I cut through downtown toward the river, I can see I’m not the only one hurting.

There’s a minor riot going on, and the cops are out in force. I can’t help but think it’s Gabriela’s homeless vampires going apeshit. The schizophrenic normals can’t be helping. I can’t tell who’s who.

To everyone else it probably looks like a lot of junkies in Skid Row got the same bad batch of heroin. But in one of the scattered crowds I think I recognize the woman Gabriela brought in the other day to pay Darius. She’s screaming, shrieking like Ethel Merman with her pubes on fire. Doing her part to add to the general noise and chaos. She’s got three cops on her. Tosses them into a street lamp like she’s shrugging off a sheet.

I pass by just as they start in on her with the tasers. I can’t do anything for her.

I turn the radio to a news station. This isn’t the only place shit’s happening. The news reports have already started. The city’s gone bugfuck, and nobody knew it was coming.

If Gabriela and Darius are right, it will be over soon, one way or another.

It starts to rain about a block later. We’re in the middle of a drought. Nothing for six months and now this. It starts as the kind of spatter that you can call rain only because it’s damp and falling from the sky.

But it gets worse fast. It’s slow going as months of road oil lift up, makes the streets slick. If nothing else gets on the news tonight, this will. We do rain like some people do rivers of blood. I can’t think of a better sign of an L.A. apocalypse than water from the sky.

By the time I pull up to Mackay Salvage, sheets of it are pouring down on the city. This isn’t an L.A. rain. This is a winter in Seattle rain.

I pull into the gravel lot, tires sloshing through new puddles. It’s empty but for three cars: a beat up F-150, a Corolla, and a Mercedes that looks like it’s just off the showroom floor.

Danny’s car. Interesting. I wonder if he’s in the trunk.

There’s another wave of gut twisting. They’re coming more frequently now, and the skin on my right pinky sloughs off to bone. If I don’t do something soon, there’s not going to be any of me left.

I shuffle inside, left foot dragging behind, Glock held tight in my hand. It’s getting harder to hold as I lose skin and muscle.

I wend my way through stacks of dead cars, gutted engines, listening, trying to hear for a sign of Giavetti. It’s tough. My right ear has gone completely deaf, and I can barely see through the rain and my tunnel vision. Everything looks like it’s seen through a fish-eye lens.

There’s a growl behind me. I spin toward it, almost lose my balance. One hand on a fender, the other on my pistol. Giavetti’s mastiff stares at me.

The thing is huge. Rain slicks across its back, pooling in its jaws. It’s the size of a fucking horse. Got teeth you could shred a car with.

But it’s not the dog that grabs my attention.

“That you, Joe?” Danny asks. Porkpie hat pushed back onto his bald head, water soaking into his jacket. He doesn’t look scared. Nervous, yeah, but not like he should with that dog towering over him. He shines a flashlight over me, his brain finally getting what his eyes are telling it. The horror on his face thick as clown makeup.

“Yeah, it’s me.” My voice comes through like it’s run through a cheese grater. I wonder how much longer I’ll be able to talk. “What are you doing here, Danny?”

He should be gone. Dead or skipped town, but not here with Giavetti’s mastiff acting like he’s its babysitter.

“He made me a deal.” He sounds dubious. “He’s going to—”

“Make you live forever?” I finish. “I know about his deals. Look at me. This is what you’ll get. Didn’t figure you for stupid. Thought you’d be smart enough to run to Mexico, Giavetti on your ass and all. That story on the phone just bullshit?”

“No,” he says, voice wavering. “He really did tear Bruno’s face off. But he caught me outside the hospital. Told me about the stone, what it could do. What it did to you.” His voice trails off.

I spread my arms out, limp in a slow circle so he can get a good look. “Pretty cool, huh? The ladies’ll fuckin’ flock to you with a look like this, yeah? Come on, Danny, don’t buy into the bullshit. Look at me. This is what he’s offering. This is his idea of immortality.”

Danny’s shaking his head. “He told me about you. What happened to you. Said he screwed things up. Figured it out this time. Told me how you stabbed him in the back and ripped him off. I helped him get the stone back. I’m gonna live forever.”

I laugh. A wet, grinding cough. Bad brakes on a steep hill. “Come on. Like you don’t know a con when you see it. He needs you for something else. Otherwise, once he had the stone, he’d have just thrown you away.”

“Don’t listen to him, kid,” Giavetti says, stepping from behind a stack of trashed cars. “Look at him. He’s just bitter.”

But Danny’s wondering. I can see it in his eyes. He’s not buying it. Narcissistic fuck. A little slow, but he’s not stupid. You can almost hear the gears grinding inside his head.

Giavetti notices it, too. He steps up behind him, slaps a friendly hand on his shoulder. “I keep my word,” he says. “You’ll live forever.”

He shoves a wicked looking blade through Danny’s back, punching it out through his chest. Danny lurches, tries to steady himself, grab at the blade.

“Kids these days,” Giavetti says. He yanks the blade free, wipes the blood on Danny’s rain-soaked jacket. Danny slides to the ground. Still alive but probably not for long.

“Not sure which one of you pisses me off more,” I say. “You for being such a dick, or him for being such an idiot.”

“Hey, I gave him my word. He’ll live forever. More or less. I mean, you know, in me.” He crouches down to Danny. “Sorry kid. I meant to tell you. See, I’m old. Look at me. But you, you’re nice and young and, well, I could use some of that youth, you know? So, I’ll be taking yours. No hard feelings?”

Danny makes a halfhearted swipe at Giavetti and starts a gurgling scream. Giavetti kicks him to shut him up.

“This won’t work,” I say.

“Why? Because Sam’s book is bullshit?” I’m not sure if I’ve got enough of a face left to show my surprise, but he catches it, anyway. “What, you thought I didn’t know about that? Come on. Bitch has been trying to kill me for half a millennium. You think I’m going to trust her now? No, this one’s going to stick.”

He starts to walk away, ignoring me like I’m just some insignificant nuisance. Yeah, well, this nuisance has a big fucking gun.

I take a shot, but my aim is so off it punches a hole in a radiator a good ten feet above his head instead.

The dog springs, ready to jump, but Giavetti stays it with his hand.

“Jesus, you just don’t give up, do you? I don’t have time for this crap.” He pulls the stone out of his pocket. It’s throwing out a glow like it’s on fire. It’s hard to see Giavetti past its brilliance. I tear my eyes away from it, shift my aim.

But I can’t pull the trigger. My arm locks up. Pulling against it just makes it shake like I’ve got chronic Parkinson’s.

Giavetti plucks the gun out of my hand. With a quick slide he dismantles it, drops the pieces on the ground in front of me.

“Doesn’t it suck,” he says, “to have salvation just out of reach?” He turns away to leave. “Bruno,” he says to the dog. “Sic him.”

The mastiff charges. I can’t move. It grabs me in its jaws like a chew toy and tosses me into a stack of Volvos. My gun clatters to the ground. I hear bones crunch. My left arm snaps at the shoulder.

And this time it hurts.

Giavetti watches the dog bounce me around a couple of times before he decides to leave his pet to play with its food. If he says anything, I can’t hear him past the rain and the ringing in my head. Besides, I think my ears have been torn off.

The dog tosses me like a Frisbee. I carom off stacks of old cars, busted trucks. The pain’s so intense I don’t really much feel it anymore.

It would be nice if I could pass out, but the best I can hope for is the dog finally crunches on my skull and makes it all stop.

I come crashing down into the open top of a car compactor, the one I dropped the guards into the other night. My already useless left leg snaps into a pretzel. Without thinking I twitch my remaining hand and grab the edge before falling in. It barely holds.

But it does. Whatever Giavetti did to me is wearing off. I can sort of jerk my body up, grab the edge, inch my way up with numb fingers. I feel like I’m full of novocaine for all the control I’ve got, but with some creative twitching I get myself up and over the lip.

Not that it helps much. I’m lying on a thin ledge of machinery, the ground fifteen feet below me on one side, the yawning gap of the compactor on the other. I’d opt for the ground, but the mastiff’s growl below me doesn’t make that a particularly attractive option.

There’s a blur of black as it leaps to a high ledge to look down at me. It stands on a teetering tower of Detroit’s finest. One jump and a quick snap of its jaws, and it should be over. If I’m lucky.

But I’m not done just yet. It springs from its high perch and with what little coordination I’ve got left, I roll myself off the ledge to the gravel below.

The mastiff hits the compactor with a thud that would put a train wreck to shame. It lets out a bellow, tries to scramble out. But there’s not much for it to grab. Enough time and it will probably find a way.

Better I not give it any. I drag myself over to the controls, strength slowly returning to my shattered limbs. It’s just like what I did the other night. Only with more meat.

I shove my whole weight against the ON button and the machine jerks to life.

The grinding of metal gives way to the shriek of Giavetti’s demon dog as the compactor folds in on itself. Its howling turns to screams, high-pitched squeals that should never come out of a thing that big.

In a few moments there’s no sound but the machinery grinding it into paste.

I pull myself away, a trail of meat and shattered bone behind me. Losing more and more of myself at every inch. I can’t remember where my legs went.

Seconds crawl by. Feels like hours, days. I can’t tell. Every second’s turned into a meaningless eternity. They pile up on each other. Waves against sand, the slow grind of inevitability. At some point they all catch up with each other and time comes crashing back in on me.

It’s still night. The moon is still shining down, a thin white crescent in the dank blue of a darkened sky.

I’m not gone. I’m mostly bone held together by gristle. I’m missing an arm, both legs, most of my face. But I’m not gone. Through rotting holes, I can see the tendons in the hand I have left.

I can feel the stone nearby. Like that one girl you knew you’d give everything for. As soon as she walked into the room, you knew it. The one you swore you’d crawl on hands and knees over broken glass for.

So I crawl.

It takes a thousand forevers. Every foot is a mile.

The hallways of burned-out husks and crushed junkers opens into a field of twisted metal. Cars piled high like trees. Danny hangs upside down, strung from the fender of a Studebaker, one leg suspended, the other crossed over behind it like an inverted 4. I think he’s still alive. But he won’t be for long.

I watch, fascinated. Danny gets older by the second. Fingernails grow long, skin warps and wrinkles. He curls in on himself as his spine shrinks. Every second of his youth is draining away.

Giavetti lies underneath him on the roof of a desiccated Volvo, spread-eagled. What’s left of Danny’s blood drips down onto him. Onto the stone resting on his forehead.

And with each drop Giavetti is getting younger.

The stone’s brilliance catches me for a moment. I can take it. Just crawl up, and it’s mine. Let it heal me, take me away from this horror show I’ve turned into. I start to lurch forward, catch myself in a lucid moment that’s becoming less frequent as the seconds tick by.

If I take it, Giavetti will just come back for it, and I’m back at square one. I’m nothing but sticks held together by bits of gristle now. I’ve left a trail of intestines and blood across the gravel like some demon slug. Skin nothing but shredded paste. My mind is unraveling like a cheap sweater.

I remember what Darius said about killing Giavetti. Maybe taking the stone just won’t be enough.

I pull a chunk of twisted metal from the ground. It’s long and sharp and makes a perfect shiv. Crawl onto the Volvo, look at Danny hanging there. A slice in his throat like a new, bloody mouth stares at me, face slick with rain and his own draining blood. We look at each other. I can see a plea to kill him in his eyes. In due time, kid. I got priorities.

I climb over Giavetti, press the shiv against his throat. I’d say something witty, but my tongue fell off a while ago.

I close my eyes, pray to whatever sick twisted fuck there might be in heaven that this works, and ram the shiv through him as I pull the stone off his forehead.

The effect is immediate. The stone flashes bright and purple, and I can feel my skin fill in, new bones grow, muscles wrap themselves together like cables. My rotted flesh sloughs off to be washed away by the rain.

Beneath me Giavetti screams and thrashes around. I stab and keep stabbing. Slicing jagged holes through him. He reaches up to ward me off, but as I get stronger he gets weaker.

Finally, I bring the shiv down into his chest, tear through the sternum. My hands dig into the hole, make it wider. Yank flesh and bone aside.

I bend my face down to the shredded hole in his chest and lose myself in the feast.

I roll over in a pool of dripping gore,
stare at the sun burning in a crystal blue sky. Most beautiful sunrise I’ve ever seen. The stone is heavy in my hand, pulsing.