Fantasmagoria (17 page)

Just pick up and drop off. Easy.

Five kids—four boys and a girl—ripped, bandaged, scared. The doc had surgically altered them, and they were heading for the Dark Red. One boy, maybe ten or eleven, was limp and struggling to stand. His eyes were wrapped in bandages, as were his arms and legs. Jack couldn’t tell why under all that cotton, but the boy didn’t look right. They’d done something to him.

The saurus groaned and woke Jack from his memories. It collapsed against a multi-level department store and shifted the foundation. Anything in a frame cracked. Doors splintered. Display windows showered glass onto the street. Jack’s entire right side was pressed into the concrete sidewalk by tons of armored, pulsating meat. He felt his arm—his right arm, his draw arm—bend backward and snap free of its casing. He heard his own metal groan.

That was it. A sign if there ever was one.

Pressed there between death and the sidewalk, Jack made his decision. As soon as the monster was clear of the crowd, he would trigger the bomb in his gut, killing them both. He wouldn’t make the same mistake he’d made that night.

Jack had watched as men he knew, some he even liked, lifted the limp boy into a restraining chair and loaded him into the back of the van. The other children watched in silence, clutching their injuries. Jack saw their eyes. Part of him wondered why they didn’t struggle, why they didn’t run or scream or fight, why they just sat there. Surely they knew what was coming. But then he knew that face. He saw it in the mirror every day.

The doors of the van closed and locked and Jack’s companions laughed at some joke. The doc shrank back down his hole, wiping his hands on a blood-stained smock. The stars twinkled overhead. In the distance, waves lapped against the pier. And with speed no man could match, Jack drew Rosa from her holster and vaporized the three men, his friends.

For a moment, nothing happened. But Frenk and Zeek had been trailing in a sedan. They had parked at the end of the building and raced forward. Jack vaporized the hood of their car before it knocked him through the sheet wall. Frenk pulled a reverberating rifle out of the trunk while Jack struggled to stand. Frenk had a bead on him, right at his head, point blank. Jack lay there, making that face.

He squinted as Frenk’s brains bounced off his face. Zeek shot the man in the head. Then she dropped her revolver and backed away in shock.

Jack stumbled over and picked it up. They stared at each other in silence.

“In the leg,” she said and bit her purse straps.

Jack shot her. Not even a yelp. Then she hobbled over to the van in high heels. Jack gave her a contact, someone who knew how to make people disappear.

“Find Vernal Wort. Don’t trust him.”

Zeek drove away and Jack walked back down the stairs to the doc’s surgical theater carrying a bottle of whiskey and some rags. He tied the man to his operating table and left him there, screaming, as the flames engulfed the gritty, oily chamber. The fire spread, and three big warehouses burned that night, including, it turned out, the one next door: the one with a dozen other children waiting for their turn under the knife.

There was no situation not made worse by an idiot with a gun.

Rosa disappeared that night and Jack never went back to the gang. He expected every day after would be his last. But every day nothing happened. No Zen-ji. No mob of angry Murderlings. Just the long, ticking hours and the gears in his chest winding down. And Erasmus. Like the tides.

Fucking Erasmus.

But that was all over now.

Jack felt himself heaved across concrete. Sparks flew as the saurus scraped him across the potholed ground. The monster was struggling to stand.

Somewhere out there were some other kids, faces covered in gas masks, fingertips stained with chemicals, hunched under a vacuum hood making drugs. Erasmus loved his kids, his orphans. He advertised for unwanted children all over the Empire. And when they were low on quota, the clowns lured them away from the carnival. Kids made textiles. They made auto parts and munitions. Why not drugs?

It wasn’t much of a life, but they’d live. Or at least they wouldn’t die because of Jack. Not this time.

The saurus stumbled to its feet, and Jack looked down at himself. The concrete had shredded the right half of his body. Large swathes of his pseudoflesh were gone, matching the damage left by the sledgehammer. He looked like he’d erupted from a grave. His arm was bent backward. He couldn’t even wiggle his fingers. Everything hurt.

He’d never draw again. Not that it mattered.

He heard sirens. People were running, but they were only a distant clatter. The monster’s respite had given most of them time to get clear, and as it stumbled back down the street, roaring at the unseen foe in its mind, Jack took a deep breath.

After waiting for months for his silent stalker, Jack would get a soldier’s death after all.

Time to die.

End of Part One

(INTERLUDE) Curse of the White Woman

Three weeks ago…

Kane McMasters stood brooding in blood. It was congealed and thick and his feet sank into it. He shone his flashlight down as he lifted his favorite boots. The red-black mucus stretched from his sole and dribbled to the floor like clot-filled taffy. “Shit.”

Maryn pointed her flashlight at Kane’s feet. “What is that?”

Kane scowled. “I don’t know. Blood. And mucus maybe.” It was everywhere, and it gave the floor of the stone chamber a soft, vinyl-like sheen. Insects pranced across it. “Something probably died down here.”

“It looks like bloody snot. Disgusting.” Maryn wrinkled her nose. The whole chamber smelled of iron and fear.

Kane nodded. He was a tall man, athletic but not overly muscular, with a shaved head and a nose that had healed wrong. His eyes were different colors. “You know . . . just once I’d like to go somewhere without bugs or snakes or any kind of vermin.”

“You’re in the wrong business, buddy.”

“You might want to wait here.” Kane wagged his light across the floor. “There could be venom wasps.” He shook the insects off his slime-covered boot and started forward through the grime.

“Nice try, cowboy.” Maryn followed.

“Did you hear that?” Bil Grindstead stepped down the stairs and into the muck. His feet squished. “Oh, fuck . . .”

Kane cocked his head. “Hear what?”

“It sounded like something moving in the next room,” Grindstead whispered. He was a full head shorter than Kane but stout and well-tanned. He wore a bowler and thick work clothes.

“I didn’t hear anything.” Maryn wiped her brow with a bandanna and put her auburn hair behind her ears.

“There it is again.”

“I heard it.” Kane nodded. “But I’m not sure it came from the next room.” He shone his flashlight around the subterranean ruins, but there was nothing but insects and filth.

“Think someone beat us to the treasure?” Grindstead asked.

Maryn shook her head. “How? No one knows this place even exists.”

“Not treasure, Bil. Artifacts.”

Grindstead scowled. “Whatever.”

Maryn looked at Kane. “Do we risk it? Bil has the only revolver.”

Bil tapped the holster at his side.

Kane thought for a moment. They had been searching for six months. His teammates were veteran hunters and knew the value of secrecy, and none of them had anything to gain by leaking the location of the ruins. But then, if his team had found them, someone else might have as well. It was a three-hour hike from Midwitch to Freecity and a two-week journey back home. “We came all the way out here. Let’s just make sure we found the right place and then we’ll come back with the rest of the team.”

Grindstead nodded. “I’ll stay here and cover the exit.”

“That’s what you always say.” Maryn smiled.

Grindstead tipped his bowler. “And I always mean it.”

Kane led Maryn through the slime. His feet made sucking sounds each time he lifted them. “See this?” He shone his light on the stone archway opposite the stairs. It was the only other exit from the round room.

Maryn stepped closer and examined the markings that stretched across the arch. “Looks like early Heyan script.”

Kane nodded. He knew his way around ruins, but Dr. Maryn Dale was the real expert. “What do you think? Thousand years old?”

Maryn shone her light around the base of the floor, which was ringed in spiral etchings. She produced a small notebook from her vest. “Twelve to thirteen hundred, probably. Some of these look pre-Heyan.”

“I told you it was here,” Grindstead called in a loud whisper.

“Yeah, yeah.” Kane shook his head and walked through the arch. The path ahead was pitch black, but at least there was no more slime.

“This is the lost temple!”

Maryn stepped closer to her companion. “I really don’t want to listen to that little prick gloat all the way home.”

“Me neither.” Kane shrugged. “But he wasn’t wrong. This may very well be the lost temple to Kraxus. And if it is . . . think about it, Maryn. No one’s set foot in here in centuries.”

“By the gods!”

The pair emerged into a cavern so large that their light disappeared into the air. Everything was still and damp. There was a sound of distant dripping.

“Look.” Maryn pointed her flashlight ahead. The floor stopped two inches from Kane’s toes and plunged straight down.

Kane raised his eyebrows. “Close one.”

Fragments of rune-carved pillars and crumbling stairs suggested a platform or altar had once risen over the expanse. Little of it remained.

Kane squinted. “Wait. What is that?” He shone his light out across the crevasse.

Maryn drew breath. “By Kraxus, look at the size of it.”

A massive boulder, like a small mountain, curved up and away from them and disappeared into the bedrock in all directions. It was crested in irregular spikes, like the shattered edge of a steak knife. It was massive.

“Wow . . .” Even Kane got goose bumps.

“What do you think it is?”

Kane shook his head. “I have no idea.”

Their flashlights darted back and forth across its surface. The mountain within the mountain was made of something other than stone. It was cracked in semi-regular grooves, jagged, but in a pattern too structured for igneous rock.

“Look at that.” Maryn turned her light to the left. A set of metal stairs was bolted to the side of the cliff face and disappeared into the dark.

Kane grit his teeth. “That’s not twelve hundred years old.”

“It’s not new, either. Look how it’s rusted at the edges.”

Kane opened his mouth to speak when Grindstead yelled. Kane stopped. “Bil?”

Grindstead yelled again. His profanity echoed through the hall and out into the expanse. Then silence.

“Bil!” Maryn turned and ran into the antechamber. She stopped and gasped.

Kane rushed right behind her and knocked her forward into the muck. She cursed from the floor.

Grindstead was lying on the stairs with his flashlight pointed at the ceiling. His face was contorted and frozen in a wide-mouthed mask. Kane looked up.

A menagerie of man-sized sacs clung to the dark stone dome. There were dozens, stretched across the breadth of the curved ceiling. They were large and gray and folded like loose, leftover skin. Some looked fresh. Others oozed red from creases and sores. It dripped to the floor in long strands of silk.

“Oh gods . . .” Maryn was on her knees. Her face and hands and the entire front of her body were thick with bloody, clot-specked mucus. She held out her hands and looked as if she was going to cry. Scurrying insects held mass on her chest. She squealed.

Grindstead was transfixed on a single shape revealed through a wrinkled, translucent sac by the beam from his flashlight. It was dark, merely a shadow, but it was humanoid.

Kane raised his light to the same sac.

The shadow twitched. Then it started moving.

“Let’s get out of here,” Kane growled and grabbed Maryn’s arm.