The Dark Communion (The Midnight Defenders) (16 page)

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20

There wasn’t time for thought, but luckily I’d been doing this shit so long instinct took over. I shoved hard against Ape, knocked us both to the ground, and rolled to the side as Arthur came down fiercely. His clawed hand sparked as it hit the concrete.

Ape stayed down, but I’d taken a knee before Arthur could recover, and my Glock squeezed off three rounds from the hip. At least two of the shots connected, and Arthur reared back, hissed, turned his wrinkly, bearded face at me, and bared yellow teeth in a scowl. Frothy strands of phlegm blew from his lips like streamers on a desk fan.

“Ape!” I yelled. “Would you get your arse up here and help?”

“I can’t, Jono.” He sounded like an idiot, like a man who had just given up, his voice detached and cold.

Arthur ran forward, swiped down at me. I rolled to the side as the claws tore the leather of my jacket. My shoulder felt like I’d been struck by a carnival mallet.

I yelled for Ape. When I turned, I saw Arthur moving toward him slowly. I didn’t hesitate. I aimed and fired, emptied my clip into the back of the old pilot’s jacket Arthur was wearing.

He threw his head back and screamed something horrible and deep, like the roar of a speeding subway train. He spun to me then, his expression vacant. The understanding and malice in his eyes was replaced by something primal, instinctive.

“You want some more?” I asked.

He charged, threw two punches. The first knocked the gun out of my hand; I heard it hit the brick wall next to me and go skittering along the alley. The other caught my jaw and spun me onto my face.

I expected him to finish the job and braced for the sudden impact. There was nothing. I looked up. He was gone. Before I had time to recover, there was a crashing noise as the thick wooden door in one of the alley’s buildings crumbled to splinters. What looked like the loping gait of a large cat leapt into the dim lights and dark shadows beyond.

I scanned the alley and found my Glock, loaded a fresh clip, and holstered it. Ape had pulled himself up into a sitting position and was staring off at the door Arthur had just torn through. I knelt at his side, grabbed an arm, and helped pull him to his feet.

“What just happened?” he asked, as if he’d just woken from a deep sleep.

“Denial’s a fickle bitch.”

He took a deep breath.

“From what I could tell,” I said, “that bum from yesterday…same kinda thing.” Ape’s head was bowed, and I bent low to look him in the eyes. He blinked. “You okay?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“We need to take this thing down.”

He nodded.

“I’m going to need your help.”

He nodded again.

“It may look like Arthur Towers, but that fucker is definitely not your uncle. We go after this thing and you freeze up again, it may very well mean my head. I can’t have that.”

“I’m good, Jono.” He looked up at me, squared his shoulders, and took a deep breath. “I’m ready. You don’t have to say anything else, he’s getting away.”

“I’m counting on you.”

We followed Arthur into the building. It was a store house of some kind, dark and cavernous. I pulled my Glock, clicked on its light, and scanned around the room. Large metal shelving units heavily laden with boxes towered up at regular intervals.

There was an office in the corner, hardly bigger than a janitor’s closet, and a quick sweep of the interior revealed a desk, filing cabinet and stack upon stack of loose papers, mostly shipping invoices. There was a marker board pinned to one of the walls, and it bore a sales graph of some kind and a piece of paper revealing the shipping schedules for the rest of the month.

“Check the drawers,” I said. “Sometimes these old offices keep a gun.”

“How do you know that?”

“Just check them.”

Ape found a penlight in the drawers and a Louisville Slugger leaning against the filing cabinet. No gun.

The desk was old, and one of the drawers stuck. I gave a sharp tug, and it came free, threw me back into the filing cabinet with a hollow roar.

An echoing boom issued from the warehouse, followed by a metallic creaking and the shuffling of footsteps.

I was out of the office first, Ape hot on my heels, but we saw nothing.

He turned on the little pen light and tucked it behind his ear and into the band of the beret he wore, leaving both hands free. “He’s still in here,” he said. “I can feel him.”

Walking the length of the room, we passed the loading dock and shelving units, sweeping each with the Glock’s brighter light as we passed. At the far end, a door had been torn from its hinges and hung sideways in its frame.

“Think he went this way?” I asked.

Annoyed, Ape ignored me and moved through the door. I shrugged and followed, passed through the shadows into the shoe department of a rather large sporting goods shop.

I couldn’t see anything moving, and despite the racks and equipment, the grey, plastic climbing wall and the halfpipe that stood in the center of the store, the area was fairly open. With the high ceilings, I felt exposed, an easy target, and I shut my light off and ducked behind a shoe display, staying low. Ape followed suit, crouched and extinguished his penlight.

“It’s only, what, five o’clock?” I said in a hushed tone. “Why is this place closed?”

“It isn’t open yet. This must be the new place down on Seneca.”

“Obviously, I love sports so much. There’s no way I wouldn’t have known that.”

“You asked, didn’t you?”

There was a loud crash somewhere close. One of the roller skates had fallen from a clear plastic wall shelf, tipped a pyramid of stacked hockey pucks. In the midst of the clutter rolled a shiny, new baseball.

A sharp fwunggh rent the air, and the boxes of shoes stacked behind us toppled over in an avalanche, a baseball knocked against the display less than a meter from my head. I caught Ape’s eye. “Pitching machine,” he said and motioned for me to follow.

I nodded, and he stood, the next fwunggh resounded through the room. Ape swung his bat to a loud crack, sent a line-drive back the way it had come. Then he motioned to me, and we leapt behind a rack of hockey jerseys. I grabbed an NHL helmet from a nearby display and slipped it on.

“You look ridiculous,” Ape said.

“I feel safer.”

Another fwunggh, and a ball hit the climbing wall in front of us with an echoing boom.

“Here’s what we’re gonna do,” I said. “You go around front and distract the pitching machine with your batting skills, and I’ll get a clean shot and take it out.”

“As long as you don’t make me wear one of those helmets.” I arched an eyebrow at him. He ignored me, and ducked off to the right, disappearing behind another clothing rack.

I leapt out to my left, hit an aisle of open floor space, and rolled on my shoulder, brought the Glock up ready. I aimed blindly into the darkness, took two shots, saw a spark glance the side of the yellow goal post that hugged the corner by the dressing rooms. “Fuck.”

“Would you hit it already?” Ape called.

I looked down at the Glock, clicked its light on.

As I looked up, a blur of motion struck me between the eyes. A loud crack pounded against my plastic faceguard with the heavy pressure of a hammer strike. I fell back, ears ringing, a loose baseball rolling beside my ear.

I lay there a minute as the high-pitched tone in my head began to quiet. My heart beat heavily behind my eyes. “Ape!” He didn’t answer, but I heard another shot fire from the pitching machine, the quick crack of a bat.

My head spun, vision blurred. I didn’t want to think what would have happened if I hadn’t put the helmet on. Broken nose, probably.

I sat up, saw my gun nearby from the mounted light, and grabbed it. I listened intently in the darkness, heard the roar of another ball launch toward the front of the store, and judged where I thought the pitching machine was. I took a knee, aimed, and fired three times. The machine hissed and sputtered, then the whirling wheel wound down to a halt.

I stood and looked around. “You okay?!”

Ape didn’t answer. Instead, I heard the low, animal growl of Arthur and felt a warm breath against my neck. I grabbed the Glock’s barrel in my left hand and spun, swung the butt of the grip toward the side of his head. It didn’t connect.

Arthur batted my hand away with the head of a hockey stick and swung the butt up into my jaw. I bit my tongue. “Thunuffabitts,” I spat flecks of blood into Arthur’s face.

The look he gave me never faltered, wearing the anger and hatred in his eyes like colored contacts. He bore a recognition, a glimmer of intelligence, that had abandoned him in the alley. “Who are you?” The gravel in his voice was ominously familiar.

“Fuck you.” I threw a punch, but he caught it and continued to meet my eyes.

“How dare you speak to me that way.” His eyes narrowed. “Gird up your loins now like a man; I will demand of you and you will declare unto me. Speak your name.” There was a sudden reverence in his voice, a biblical quality; he was Chuck Heston come to deliver the Ten Commandments. As he talked, he stepped forward, raised the hockey stick above his head like the scythe of a Reaper, forced me back step by step. His hand closed tighter around my fist like a vice. “I must know who is able to stand before me. Who has prevented me, that I should repay him?”

I could only guess the prevention he so cryptically spoke of was in regards to abducting that little girl.

With a savage growl, he swung down, hooked me under the legs and lifted my feet up over my head. I fell heavily onto my back, slammed my head against the concrete which sent a shock of white across my vision.

He lifted the stick and brought it down like a guillotine. I closed my eyes.

The air surged around me, Arthur cried out, and hangars spilled across the floor in a clatter.

“Give me my Uncle back!”

I opened my eyes to see Ape standing above me, bat out before him as though he’d just hit the game winning pitch over the left fence, a look of defiance in his eyes and a snarl on his lips.

“Your uncle is no more,” the voice said, loud and commanding, the metal of the rack and hangars twinkling as he rose to his feet. “He gave his life freely in the service of a god. He is my vessel now.”

I couldn’t stand right away, my body ached, but I managed to pull myself to a knee as Ape yelled, “Liar!” and leapt forward, bat gripped tightly in both hands and raised high above his head like a club.

My gun had fallen somewhere behind Arthur, and the backlighting reduced him and Ape to silhouettes. It seemed somehow surreal as the hockey stick came up to block the bat, pulled back, and swung in. I heard the wood crack from the force, and the wooden Slugger leapt from Ape’s hands and soared, end over end, into the air, clattering at my feet.

They stood eye-to-eye for a heartbeat before Arthur brought the hook of the hockey stick down against Ape’s neck, and taloned hands grabbed Ape’s shirt and flung him across the room into a display of ice skates.

I grabbed the bat and rushing forward, swung as hard as I could, connected at the base of Arthur’s skull. He staggered forward a few steps but recovered faster than I expected. As I neared for a follow-up strike, he turned in a blur and the hockey stick cracked against my ribs.

I dropped the bat, and he grabbed my wrist, twisted my arm until my shoulder popped and searing pain shot from my hand to my neck. I screamed. He spun in the air, kicked me clear over the half-pipe. I bounced off the jagged metal on the rear of the climbing wall, snagged my jacket on a spoke, and slammed into a display of motorcycle helmets.

I ached. My entire body throbbed as I reached up to my face with an unsteady hand and wiped away a generous amount of blood. At my knees, another shallow, red pool. It was a minute before I understood all of it was mine.

I tried to sit up, screamed, fell back on my face. My arm pulsed with a sharp twinge. From the lack of movement, I knew my shoulder was dislocated.

I took a deep breath.

Years ago, in the Hand, I was teamed with this Marine-Jew called Horowitz against a nest of Lamia. He’d dislocated his shoulder when he fell against the rocks, and I saw him do this trick to pop it back into place. I saw his face when he did it.

After another deep breath, I rolled over onto my back and sat up, bent my knees in front of me, feet flat on the floor. I managed to get both arms in front of my knees and grabbed the wrist of the hurt arm with my good hand and slowly leaned back. The pain was so bad I began to tear up, but after a few seconds, I heard a pop. The pain spiked and shot through me from head to toe, leaving me growling like a feral cougar. Then the pain reduced, and I could breathe again.

My arm was still stiff, but manageable. I somehow shrugged out of the tatters of my jacket, down to my sweat-soaked t-shirt, and stood groggily, knocking into a clothing rack, an assortment of leather motorcycle jackets, bi-colored and sporty. I grabbed the nearest one: charcoal grey across the top of the chest and shoulders, the rest black. I checked the size, tore it clumsily from the hangar.

As I staggered forward, I threw on the jacket, my shoulder still sore, and bit my lip as I lifted the arm to slide it in. It was heavier than my old leather, but wearing it made me feel like a bad-ass. But fuck was I in pain.

There was a rack of equipment at the base of the climbing wall: bound lengths of rope, crampons, and a display of small ice axes. I took one in each hand and ran forward, pushing past the pain, and leapt across the halfpipe.

Arthur’s back was to me, and he moved slowly toward the display of ice skates, shoving racks of hockey jerseys to the ground as he went. He was looking for Ape, which meant he wasn’t expecting me, and I took advantage of that, swinging one axe high and the other low, hooked him in the neck and left thigh with a spurt of blood.

He shook and roared, moved back and forth. I let go of the axes, took a step back, saw the light from my gun out of the corner of my eye, and I moved for it, but Arthur grabbed me from behind.

His mouth bubbled with a thick white, like melted ice cream, and a frothy red I could only assume was blood. He’d grabbed on to the new jacket, held the hem in his taloned fingers. I tried to wriggle free, but the grip was too tight.