King Maker: The Knights of Breton Court, Volume 1 (34 page)

  Wayne and Lott rushed over to break them up, with Lott holding back Baylon. King glared at him, unflinching. This time he was ready in case Baylon decided to start something again.

  "Let go of me." Baylon shook him off. "This fool just got it in his head to try and step to my girl and I ain't the one to get played out, like some punk bitch."

  "What the fuck?" Wayne asked King. "All the stuff going on and you reduce it all to a jealousy beef?"

  It was all slipping away. Lady G. The crew. The Egbo Society. The world he knew raced toward entropy, decaying from the outside in. Soon King's name would be ringing out in the streets. Baylon could sense the momentum change already. For now they were a small band, but they stood true. Should they come out the other end alive, they would be well on their way to becoming legends. Sometimes survival itself was the stuff of legends. He had no plays left here that would have him save face. Except one. Maybe.

  Baylon slipped the knife into his hand. He lurched forward in a stumbling gait, like a wino tromping through an alley trying to steady himself. He thought of Michelle. And Griff. The history of blood and misfortune on this blade. And he determined that King was the rightful inheritor of its pain. With a flick of his wrist, the steel tooth snapped to life and in a fluid movement, he arced the weapon at King before he could react. A searing pain lanced through King's side. The problem with knives was that once they were drawn, the user depended entirely on them. Baylon, off balance and startled, made an easy target. Stunned for a moment at the utter futility and ridiculousness of the attack, King landed an uppercut that snapped Baylon's head back, even as his momentum sent the two of them tumbling onto the lawn.

  "King. Oh shit." Lady G rushed to his side. "He get you?"

  "I don't… I think so," he said, slow to get to one knee before giving up and supporting his weight with an arm then slumping back to the ground. King raised his hands so that he could see them. Blood stained each of them.

  "Don't move. Don't move," she said.

  "It's all right. It's only a flesh wound. Seriously."

  Baylon didn't move, but instead released a low groan. King stooped over him and snatched the knife he still desperately grasped. He rotated it in his hands, examining it as if its touch told him everything he needed to know. He tossed the blade to the side.

  "Just… just stay down. I'm tired and I'm not here to beef with you. If there's gonna be a fight, I'm gonna take it outside of the family."

  "Time grows short," Merle warned, his eyes studying the mood of the day.

  "What do you want us to do?" Lott stared at the still-stunned Baylon.

  "Leave him." King clutched his side and stood up. "We go to the Phoenix."

 
 

Winter had arrived and few had noticed. Like the previous few years on memory, the temperatures were chilly but not too cold, in the mid-40s. The wind didn't rob the body of warmth, not in that deep bone-chill way of the harsher winter of childhood memories. No, these days it more often rained than snowed, not that anyone complained. Had it been cold enough to turn the rains to snow, the blanket of snow would have settled six feet if an inch.

  The six-story complex ran over two city-blocks long and one block wide, a veritable prison of inexpensive accommodation. To the east, past the back parking lots, Fall Creek wound its length, the thin grove of trees separating the apartments from the rest of the city. To the rear of the buildings which formed the Phoenix Apartments, a gravel trail – overgrown, as if something once stood there – led through a canopy of trees. Brown leaves pooled against the base of the black chain-link fence which circled the outer boundaries of the apartments. Cans of Budweiser littered the playground. Concrete slabs, a desert of cracked pavement choked with weeds and broken glass. Nobody wanted to be here, all equally prisoners in a compound of liberal wellmeaning benevolence. Along the sad array that passed for a playground, the ladder of the slide held more rust than paint. One of the swings looped around the top of its frame. The yellow school bus jungle gym had been tagged. RIP Alaina. RIP Conant. A few more RIP notices, names no one recognized.

  The Phoenix Apartments were once central to one of Indianapolis' top neighborhoods, its construction greeted with optimism. One mile east of the state fairgrounds, near 38th Street and Sherman Drive, Edgemere Court ran through the heart of what used to be called the Meadows. In the '50s and '60s this was the place to be as people claimed their pieces of the American Dream, with restaurants and shops crowding the area. But the area saw the ownership of the apartment complex change hands several times over the years and the initial optimism soured. Folks were shuffled into there, the city not wanting to inflict poor black people on their white neighborhoods. Huge swathes of vacant land isolated it. Dubbed too dangerous to patrol by the police, the layers of fencing only further added to the sense that folks were being imprisoned rather than being given space to live.

  By day, the apartments had the thinnest veneer of respectability. The red bricks seemed clean and fresh, distracting from the bedspreads which shielded most windows. The decay was there, first seen in the trees. Wine-colored leaves interspersed with green ones, jutting from dead branches. One tree a stark, unnatural shade of white, gnarled and neglected, with green leaves still sprouting from it. Now, with ninety percent of the tenants on Section 8 housing, and crime, poverty, and hopelessness combining for a cauldron of pain and anger, life in the Phoenix Apartments had been reduced to relentless decay and a cesspool of warrants. Churches nestled densely around the property, a bulwark against entropy. Immanuel Baptist. Church of the Living God. Pentecostal Assembly. Nazarene Church. Temple of Praise. Indiana Missionary. Living Water. Their church signs promised passersby "Don't worry, God is still in control".

  The engine cooling, the five of them sat in the Outreach Inc. van. Wayne drove with Merle riding shotgun, his window slightly rolled down to cut down on his odor. Lady G sat between King and Lott in the back. King watched the denizens shamble back and forth, the silence conducive to his thoughts. They had bandaged his side and taped it as best they could. King refused to go to the hospital, preferring to end this terrible business that night.

  And then there was the matter of the gun.

  "Has anyone wondered 'Why us?'" Wayne asked. All eyes fell on King.

  "Why not us?" King leaned forward to better see them all. "I don't know about you, but I'm tired. Tired of people having no expectations of us. Tired of not bothering to dream because I don't think I'll be around to see it. Tired of not being able to walk down a street without part of me fearing a brother walking my way.

  "Ain't but a few of us here, but even a few good people banded together in the right cause can make a difference. I have to believe that or what's the point of even going on? Good people have to stand for something."

  "Damn, man," Wayne said, "I didn't say go all 'Win one for the Gipper' on us."

  A brooding silence enveloped the apartment parking lot. Dead leaves skittered along the cracked black pavement on a desolate, cold wind. The silence was as pervasive as it was unsettling. Even during colder temperatures, the Phoenix brimmed with activity because fiends and knuckleheads knew no rest. Despite the appearance of a few bodies in the yard, an eerie stillness settled on the apartments. No cars idled, no music poured from speakers, no loud voices claimed the night as their own. Separated like sentries, though locked in their heroin leans, the bodies became more animated as King neared. Some moaned in distress. One man appeared to be attempting to shave the color off his eyeball with a razor blade.

  "It's you. They're reacting to you," Merle said to King.

  "How can you tell? They can't even see me."

  "Exactly."

  "Look at them," Lady G said, "They look–"

  "Dead," Lott said. "Remember what Tavon was saying about the fiends falling out?"

  The weight of guilt bubbled in Wayne's belly for losing track of Tavon. Some faces looked familiar to Wayne and Lady G especially, having encountered them during their street lives. However, the people they knew were gone. Some shambled about with shorn limbs, some having obviously taken gunfire and ran out of blood, yet still stood. The drugs consumed them a piece at a time, but now it was as if their souls had been snuffed out.

  "Got anything we can use as weapons?" King needed the comfort of having some sort of weapon.

  "You have the gun," Lott said.

  King waited impatiently for the facts to settle in his head. The familiar weight of the Caliburn nestled along his spine. "I know, but… it doesn't feel right. Not yet."

  "You'll know when to use it," Merle reassured.

  "I have a crowbar, a baseball bat, and a golf club," Wayne fished through the trunk of the minivan.

  "A golf club?" Lott asked.

  "What? I'm a civilized motherfucker."

  "Fine, you the next Tiger, but only one?"

  "Shit, I ain't made of money," Wayne said. "Figure I just keep hitting shit till the ball gets in a hole."

  "Sounds like a plan for this here game, too."

  "You sure?"

  "They're already dead."

  Lott grabbed the crowbar, then grabbed a couple of the screwdrivers which rolled along the floorboard and shoved them into the sides of his jeans. King opted for the baseball bat, leaving Wayne with his precious golf club. Hardly masked by the slight wind, the smell of rotting meat hit them. The trees loomed, strange fruit dangling from their low-lying branches. As the band approached, the forms coalesced. Small bodies, the flesh peeled back or knotted in chunks hung like ornaments. Birds. Rats. Squirrels. The cloud-occluded moonlight gave the illusion of their tiny jaws still moving. The sight of the squirrel bones especially unsettled Merle.

  The copse of corpses had been dead for nearly a two days and slowly made their way here to this place of power, this place that beckoned them. To wait. Though the fiends had to have ridden the same blast within a day of each other, some were wasted in such a way as to have been dead for months. Even the freshest among them had meat falling from them in clumps. Their tattered clothes starched with mildew, the rot of their flesh infested their wardrobe. Vacant eyes – a condition not entirely unfamiliar to the fiends – tracked the approaching skulkers. Folks held hostage terrified to leave the building now noiselessly under siege. As long as it was quiet – because indeed, no bullets rang out – the police considered it secured. Loitering was one of those law violations enforced in lighter neighborhoods.

  King took point with Wayne and Lott in lock-step behind him forming a wedge through the heart of the milling bodies. Using the bat more like a staff, King jabbed the hand grip into the gut of the nearest fiend, doubling it over as the action forced air from its insides. Its rancid breath choked him. The fat end of the bat smashed into the jaw of one attempting to sneak up from behind. The creatures amped back up, and found their legs again. It seemed easier to think of them as creatures. Stay down, his eyes pled, but the creature stirred. With the sickening accompanying sound of splintering bone, he planted the bat firmly in its skull.

  Wayne took no joy in his task. His goal was to keep the creatures at bay from Merle and Lady G, more a distraction until Lott finished them with a severing blow to the back of the neck or a curt ram through an eye. Distracted by the approach of the first body, three fiends collapsed on him from the shadows of entranceways before he realized they were organized enough to create a feint. Stumbling off the broken curb, Wayne kicked the first one, his foot collapsing the chest of it, then getting stuck on the jagged bones of the shattered ribs once the creature juked. Wayne toppled to the ground, and disappeared under a crush of fiends as they pounced on him. Tavon's face suddenly peered down at him, his open mouth a siege of rotting teeth.

  Swinging the crowbar like a sword swung with skill and precision, an exuberance to the grim task thrilled Lott. Black ichor, more than blood, poured from the slit throat of one. A decomposed fist slammed into his skull, the warning cry of "look out" from Lady G arriving seconds too late. Lott staggered to the floor; the creature's desiccated arm lashed out and lifted him from the ground before he could retrieve his crowbar. Its strength flowed from somewhere else, because its brittle arms didn't hold enough muscle to swat at a passing mosquito. Whatever animated them also burned them up. The creature held him up, waiting for others to see his prize and come tear him apart. As if catching his scent from upwind, some undead striders stopped in midmovement and ambled toward them. Lott fished into the side pockets of his jeans and pulled out the screwdrivers. Plunging the twin daggers, he rammed the screwdrivers into each of its eye sockets, exploding what was left of its eye and piercing what passed for its brain. Landing as the creature collapsed, Lott tugged at the screwdriver which was stuck in the bone of the eye socket. As he yanked it free, it flew out of his grasp and tumbled to the ground. As ravenous for a blast as it had been in life, a fiend fell to its knees, grabbed it and jammed it into its arm.

  Wayne, his foot still caught in the chest of the fiend who didn't know enough to drop dead, dragged his leg bringing the creature with it. The body crashed into the others, which allowed Wayne to roll through the grasp of one of them. Tavon's rasping fingers found purchase in his side and his side burned as the fingers clawed through his flesh. He grabbed Tavon with both hands and headbutted him. Wayne whirled the body like a shield, shoving the fiends back. He threw Tavon to the ground. Any trace of the man he knew was gone, so Wayne stomped on the back of his skull, smashing its jaws on the sidewalk. A hole opened up among the ranks and he waved Merle and Lady G through it. He chanced one last look at Tavon's still form and told himself that he had to do what he had to do.