Wicked Prayer (10 page)

That kind of deal called for Kyra Damon’s peculiar talents.

And—Johnny grudgingly admitted—Raymondo’s.

“Park it here,” Raymondo said.

Johnny did. “Man,” he said, “this sure ain’t no
Garden of Everlastin’ Fuckin’ Peace.
This place is pretty putrid.”

Raymondo chuckled. “Maybe so, but it’s the perfect location for our needs. Now, untie me. I’ve got to make sure you do this right.”

“I’ll do it right,” Johnny said, bristling. “I don’t need no pint- sized watchdog on my back.”

“Actually, I’ll be around your neck . . . and you damn well
better
do this right. We wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for Johnny Church and his itchy trigger finger. You’re the one who wasted those two sacks of excrement in Scorpion Flats. And now you’re the one who’ll bury them.”

With supreme effort, Johnny kept his mouth shut. But his right hand tightened into a fist, spiderweb-tattooed knuckles bulging, fingers alive with heavy silver rings. Man, just once he’d like to bust Raymondo’s tiny black jawbone, tear through his mummified flesh, mash his brains like a bowl of monkey pulp.

Kyra Damon’s hand dropped over Johnny’s trembling fist like a cool white sheet.

“Do what Raymondo says, Johnny. And then we can get the hell out of here.”

“Not soon enough for me,” Johnny said, relaxing a little under Kyra’s touch. Standing this close, he could feel her warmth. Her long dark hair smelled like night-blooming jasmine and something subtler, darker.

Infinitely darker.

Johnny sucked a deep breath. Man, when this shit was over . . . when his own personal mojo was thoroughly stoked—

When he and Kyra were
immortal
—

“Soon,” Kyra whispered, her eyes burning like green embers. “Soon. But first—why don’t you make like a good husband and take out the trash?”

Johnny Church had, since the age of fourteen, worn the obligatory punk fashion accessory—the dog collar—around his thick neck. Black leather, chrome studs and buckle, and a leash ring that slapped against his gullet when he walked.

Johnny untied Raymondo’s wiry black hair from the rearview mirror, threaded it through the chrome ring on his collar, and tied it in place. He wasn’t particularly enthused about doubling up with
the rancid little fuck. The whole deal reminded him of some old horror movie or something.

Johnny was heavily into the retro-horror scene. It wasn’t exactly an interest he’d stumbled on all by his lonesome. Erik Hearse, the lead singer and guitarist for The Blasphemers, was big into horror, too. Hearse was a major collector He owned a mansion stuffed with lobby cards, posters, models, videos and laserdiscs, plus props that had been used in classic fright films. To say Hearse had it all and then some was an understatement. Hell, the singer had even married a horror movie actress, some chick who did Italian vampire flicks.

So Erik’d know just how Johnny felt—if the singer had happened to be hanging around the dump, that is. He’d understand Johnny’s cinematic frame of reference when it came to excursions of the two-headed variety.

In this case it was simple, your basic Creature Features double bill:
The Thing with Two Heads
and
The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant.
Johnny was sure that Hearse would agree—both guy- with-two-heads movies made for extreme psychotronic kicks. But of the two, it was
The Thing with Two Heads
that Johnny enjoyed most.

What he didn’t enjoy was playing Rosey Grier to Raymondo’s Ray Milland.

Raymondo seemed to know it, too. “C’mon, Johnnyboy. Time to tote that barge and lift that bail.”

Shit, sometimes Johnny thought that the little fuck was psychic. The shrunken head even
sounded
 
like Ray Milland . . . with his voice channeled through a theremin, of course.

Raymondo
Milland.

Church snatched his keys from the ignition and stepped out of the car, the heavy soles of his motorcycle boots squelching a soggy flap of cardboard into a puddle of decomposing muck. Man, the smell out here was enough to put the curl in anyone’s pubes.

Johnny walked to the back of the Merc and unlocked the trunk. He raised the lid and stared down at the corpses that lay on the plastic drop cloth he’d used to protect his precious vintage baby from leaking bodily fluids.

The Indian chick’s back faced Johnny.

“Nice ass,” Raymondo said, dangling from Johnny’s collar. “Too bad it’s
grass
...”

The corpses had shifted during the wild ride. Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin’s head was now scissored under Dan Cody’s left arm. Her long black hair fell over her face in a shiny pall, one side of it sticky with blood from Johnny’s pistol-work.

Johnny rolled the dead woman on her back. The pretty blue eyes that had once looked straight through him had been hastily removed, courtesy of Kyra Damon’s brand-new Mountain Clan Crow knife. Leticia’s left cheek was carved to the bone, face washed in a river of blood that had seeped down a hollow cheekbone hill, filling the dead woman’s half-open mouth with a clotting reservoir deep enough to drown the loudest scream.

Hardin’s chambray shirt—blue as her plucked eyes and embroidered with a bright, traditional Native design—was soaked with blood. The shot from Johnny’s .357 had exploded the Crow woman’s rib cage. Guts had leaked out all over the damn place.

“Damn it,” Johnny said. “How am I supposed to get her out of there without getting blood all over my trunk?”

“Why don’t you make like a good doggy and lick up the mess?” Raymondo suggested. “Or if you’re finicky. I’m sure we could find a
straw
somewhere around this place.”

“Smart-ass.”

“Uh-uh, Johnnyboy. There’s where you’re
wrong.
I don’t
have
an ass. Not anymore. I lost that shriveled portion of my backside on the Amazon River. That was during the 1919 expedition. Piranhas chewed their way through my hindquarters. Didn’t finish me off, though. I can thank the cannibals for that—”

“Put a lid on it. Head. I don’t have time for your personal fuckin’ memoirs right now. I’m kinda busy.”

Johnny reached around Leticia Hardin’s corpse, grabbing the heavy-duty flashlight that lay beside the jack. Shadows jumped eerily as he switched it on and aimed the beam at Dan Cody.

Leticia’s cowboyfriend was a mess . . . even by Johnny Church’s standards, and that was saying something. Cody lay on his back, his
head pointing toward the backseat, his face lost in darkness. The left leg of Cody’s jeans was stiff with drying blood from thigh to ankle, his knee a riot of exploded bone and crimson jelly. The leg wound was peppered with bits of grit and gravel, a result of Cody’s desperate belly crawl across the parking lot. His leather jacket was torn, the shoulder beneath it a mess of gleaming white bone and bloody meat where the slug from Kyra’s Walther PPK had ripped through solid muscle.

Johnny stared at the cowboy’s corpse, shaking his head. Though he couldn’t see it, Johnny knew there was another hole blasted through the back of the leather jacket. After all, Johnny had put the .357 slug there himself. That was too bad. Cody’s jacket was pretty hardcore, even if it was a little beat up. Now, with all that gore on it. . . well—

“Man,” Johnny said. “I should have shot him in the head.”

Or maybe not. Johnny smiled. After all, the .357 bullet hole lent Cody’s jacket a sort of badass Terminator look that was pretty cool. And he could repair the tear in the shoulder with some chain link, or maybe some anarchy pins. Shake up a six-pack, hose down the coat with warm beer. Yeah. That’s what he’d do. No way he’d get rid of
this
coat.

But all that could wait for later. Johnny skinned off his pricey leather jacket with the metal Blasphemers badge and set it on top of the Merc’s gleaming purple roof, well out of harm’s way.

No way he was getting any blood on
that
baby.

On his flesh, now that was something a little different. It was easy to wash bloodstains off flesh. Just one of the facts of life, like sweat or semen.

“Here goes,” Johnny said.

Setting the flashlight on the ground, its beam pointing up at the sky, Johnny rolled the Indian chick onto her back and lifted her out of the trunk as easily as one of the cornhusk dolls at the Spirit Song Trading Post. He tossed the corpse over his shoulder, and Pocahontas’s hair swept down his back like a black cobweb.

“All right, Raymondo. Where to?”

“Up there, stud.”

"Up
where?”

“If I had
hands,
I’d chart our course with a sextant, even draw you a map. Since I don’t . . . well, you can just start walking, Johnnyboy.”

“Back off, Raymondo.”

“I’m
so
frightened.”

“I’m
warnin'
you, dickhead—”

"Please.''
The shrunken head laughed. “Let’s get serious, Johnny—if you even
dreamed
you could take me on, you’d have to wake up and apologize—”

“Stop it, the both of you.” It was Kyra’s voice, and it came from behind. “I need it quiet. Can’t you see I’m trying to work?”

There was a nauseating, gaseous belch as a dead rat’s swollen body popped under Johnny’s pivoting boot heel, but Johnny hardly heard it as he turned his attention in Kyra’s direction. Stark naked and lean as a panther, Kyra stood in front of the Mercury. Her skin was bathed in a clean white headlight glow, and a junkyard cat was cradled in her arms, and she rocked the clawing animal like a baby—back and forth, back and forth—wild white light haloing her sleek curves.

Johnny licked his lips. Kyra was a nightmare silhouette with a pulse. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. She leaned over the hood of the car, her eyes trained on the pages of that big black book, the one that had brought them to this place on this night, the one that had lured a feral cat into Kyra’s unyielding embrace, the one with a tattered cover ridged and cracked with tiny fissures like scars ... or the almost imperceptible gaps between a Crow’s feathers.

There wasn’t much in the world that scared Johnny Church, but Kyra’s book did the job and then some. It gave him the all-over creepy-crawlies, and not in a good way. He didn’t know the name of the book, couldn’t read the language it was written in. He didn’t want to know. The book was Kyra’s baby, and Johnny didn’t even like touching it. The big gearhead didn’t know exactly what kind of skin the cover was fashioned from, but he had his suspicions. All he knew for sure was that the book radiated its own strange warmth, like a dying man racked with fever, as if it hid a wild, beating heart somewhere in its pages.

Kyra’s cold eyes scanned those fevered pages, and words spilled from her lips, words written in the blood of long-dead sinners. Then Kyra closed the book, and she turned, dancing, the cat still cradled in her arms, and she turned again, moonlight washing the sharp angles of her face.

Kyra smiled at Johnny, her white teeth gleaming.

Johnny shivered as she lifted the stray cat by the scruff of its neck, raising it to her black lips.

The cat yowled . . . but not for long.

Cartilage crunched as Kyra’s teeth closed on the cat’s windpipe.

The feline’s hissing wail chopped to silence.

Johnny grinned, forgetting about the book. Man, this kind of action he could understand. Forget the creepy book. This was the real deal, better than any spookshow stage-o-rama Erik Hearse could cook up. Talk about your
Blood Feast
for the new millennium. One look at this gorefest and Herschell Gordon Lewis himself would be thoroughly
stoked
—

Kyra held the cat above her head, stood under a bright red rain.

“I hope she’s had all her shots,” Raymondo said.

“Which one?” Johnny asked. “Kyra or the
cat?”

Johnny Church, breathing hard, hauled Leticia Hardin’s corpse toward a cathedral of garbage.

Yeah. That’s what the trash mountain looked like. It loomed in the darkness like a gothic dream gone bad—rotting two-by-fours formed clumsy arches while rusting road-sign spires twisted skyward to whatever God or Devil waited there. Scrap metal formed twisted pews. The congregation scuttling toward the bashed cardboard pulpit was a family of cockroaches.

“So are we there yet?” Johnny asked. “Pocahontas here is startin’ to get heavy.”

“Almost. Just a little farther.”

Johnny paused a moment, the dead girl swinging half off his shoulder as he squinted into the darkness. He could make out the dim outline of something at the top of the trash heap cathedral, backlit by the bone-yellow moon.

The thing looked like a teetering obelisk.

“What the hell is that?” Johnny asked.

“In the parlance of the funerary trade, that’s a
sepulchre,”
Raymondo said. “Head for it, my boy.”

Johnny sucked a deep breath and kicked aside a television set with a busted screen. Then he trudged forward, slipping and sliding over squelching piles of plastic garbage bags.