I move the beam of my small LED flashlight over the empty storefronts as we move beyond the food court. They look ancient. Like caves for Neanderthals. This is the part of town the Flintstones don’t come to after dark.
Sofa cushions lashed together are makeshift beds for whoever lived there. Pits for cook fires are gouged out of the linoleum floors. Gray piles of ash dumped outside the folding-glass doors.
Scuffling sounds and a whisper come from a derelict high-end stereo store. Something glitters inside. Eyes. I look around at the other stores. Lots more eyes in there. I pull the Colt and cock the hammer, holding it up so everyone can see.
“Sit back and watch the show, folks. Do nothing more.”
We walk for over an hour, sticking to shadows when we can. We only move out into the open when there’s no other way around piles of rubble. I don’t know about anyone else, but I can hear footsteps keeping pace with us one or two floors up. I walk closer to Hattie.
“Friends?”
She shakes her head.
“No one to be worried about. A mongrel Lurker pack. Bunch of softies. We’ve put them in their place before.”
Diogo and some of the other boys throw stones up into the dark. They bounce off the walls and shatter already broken windows. You can tell from the sound that they never hit whoever’s following us.
One of Hattie’s other sons, a tall boy she called Doolittle, drops his pants and moons the upper floors. A second later, a stone flies down from the dark and hits him in the ass. He screams and curses. Hattie cuffs him on the ear.
“That’s what you get when you act a fool.”
Up ahead comes the unmistakable sound of skin slamming into skin. Boots colliding with something soft. Heavy, short breaths. Three gulping air hard. One grunting and coughing as each kick threatens to collapse bruised lungs. I run toward the sound.
The three on their feet look like extra-hard-luck street people. Layers of filthy coats and patched pants give them the look of bears in wino costumes. Whoever is on the floor is trying to fight back, throwing kicks and punches, but from that angle they don’t have enough power to make the grizzlies back off.
Still running, I kick the closest one in the small of the back and he goes down on his face, teeth or something else important clattering across the tile floor. The one on my right swings a wedge of scalpel-sharp glass mounted on the end of a chair leg. I punch him in the throat, take the homemade hatchet, and slam the wooden grip into his knees, knocking him off his feet. The last of the guys is smaller than the other two. He has a butcher knife, and by the way he moves, it looks like he knows how to use it. I point the Colt between his eyes.
“Put it on the ground.”
He does it.
“Now scoot before I get a finger cramp and this thing goes off.”
He backs away slowly until he’s out of the light. I hear someone running away and put the gun back in my pocket.
Whoever was taking the beating is still on the floor, but at least his eyes are open. He’s skinny. Young-looking and small. Not much bigger than a kid. He’s dressed from head to toe in dirty, loose gray clothes that look like heavy pajamas.
“You okay?”
He doesn’t say anything.
“I don’t think they’ll be back for a while. You can get up.”
The kid struggles to his feet, holding his left elbow tight to his side. His face is bruised and bloody, his upper lip swollen.
“You got a name?”
He moves slightly to his right. Hesitates. That’s when I see the sword lying a few feet away. The kid dives for it, rolling more gracefully than I would have expected with his injuries. The blade is beautiful. Perfect, polished steel. It glints in the harsh LED light. Maybe the kid knows that. He flashes it, making several passes, light shining from the flat of the blade and leaving trails in the air. For a second I’m blind and I put my hand in my pocket for my gun. By the time I can see again, the kid is gone. Quiet little bastard. I didn’t hear a thing.
From behind me Candy says, “Friend of yours?”
“Apparently not.”
“Maybe instead of your blunderbuss you should use your na’at. Shoot the gun once and everyone in the Lower Forty-eight will know we’re here.”
“Yeah, but no one in Kill City knows what a na’at is, so it doesn’t help to flash it. A gun is like love. The universal language.”
“I can’t decide if that’s poetry or a desperate cry for help.”
“We should keep moving,” says Hattie.
The dark closes in around us again, like we’re marching straight up a dinosaur’s ass. Or we’re lost in an old haunted fortress in a Euro-horror flick. Tombs of the Blind Dead. A hapless bunch of schmucks trapped in a cracked palace with an army of Templar zombies.
How do Kill City’s residents live like this? I remember hearing about people living in New York’s abandoned subway tunnels. Mole People, they call them. Some scavenge outside during the day, but others never leave the tunnels. I guess you get more than used to the dark. You come to think of it as home. It sounds a bit like Hell. It’s the most awful place you can imagine, but after a while you start relying on the filth and blood, the cozy familiarity of betrayal and casual brutality. It’s more than coping. It’s adaptation. You go into the dark one species and mutate to fit your surroundings. Grow better eyes and ears. Get used to the feel of the air so you can tell when something is coming at you. After a while you’re so suited to the environment you’re a whole new species. Except for the ones who can’t make the change. They never stop struggling with the dark. They’re always looking for a way out. Those are the ones who build paper meditation walks dedicated to the world or kill so cleanly for their Hellion master that it’s completely unexpected when you finally cut their throats. Of course, if you make it out, what you’ll find is you’re now a stranger in two worlds because the dark changes you and you’ll never got back to what you were before you got lost.
“Look at this,” says Vidocq. He’s crouched on the floor looking at a plastic water bottle. He holds it up. “This is new. So is this.” He picks up a half-smoked cigarette and sniffs it. Holds it out to me. I sniff it too. I pull off the filter and examine the tobacco at that end. It’s fresh.
I say, “Tykho told me that someone else knows about the ghost. I guess we’re not alone. The question is, are they ahead of us or are they lost and stopped here to get their bearings?”
“We have to assume the worst,” says Delon.
“I agree,” says Brigitte. “We have to assume that they know more than we do.”
“Or they’re lost and are doing the simple thing,” says Candy.
I say, “What’s that?”
“They’re circling around behind and following us since we’re the ones with not one but two certified guides.”
I look at Delon and Hattie.
“How much longer?” I ask the old woman.
“We go down another level just ahead. It will be harder for anyone following us to keep up.”
“Let’s get there and shake these fuckers.”
Up ahead we come to a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Diogo goes in first, and when we’re through, he takes out a padlock and secures the door from inside. The lock is big, but I’m not convinced it will keep any motivated people out for long. Still, any lead it might give us is a help. When we start moving again I make sure that Delon stays up front with whichever son is leading the way.
We go down to a floor with mall administrative offices and lockers full of maintenance equipment. It’s cooler down here. Less green with vegetation, but there are thick black patches of mold over all the air vents and the air is thick. Water drips down from overhead pipes. Vlad the Impaler could move in and start scaring peasants from this doomsday dungeon.
Hattie looks me over in the pale lantern light.
“You’re Sub Rosa, aren’t you?” she says.
“How did you know?”
“You stink of it.”
“Sub Rosa?”
“Judgment. About my family.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t give a rat’s ass—half a rat’s ass—about your family. Besides, I’ve seen worse.”
“Where?”
“Right in town. You remember the Springheels?”
“Charm makers. Used to be high-and-mighty but aren’t held in much regard anymore.”
“If there were any left, you’d be fighting over the same stale pretzels and moldy Big Macs.”
“What happened to them?”
“The last son, Jack, he had a fetish for demons. He called up an eater one day and the party didn’t go the way he planned.”
“The eater got him?”
“Technically, a High Plains Drifter, a zombie—”“I know what a Drifter is. Just because I live in the boonies, don’t count me as stupid. Now go on.”
“Anyway, a Drifter got him in the end, but if it hadn’t been one of them, an eater would have done it sooner or later. He was begging for it.”
She thinks about it for a minute.
“I suppose we look quite respectable compared to that.”
“Yeah. You’re mother of the year and I’m king of the Mouseketeers. We’re a couple of lottery winners with money to burn.”
“You’d have killed my boys back there, wouldn’t you?”
“Every one of them.”
“Is that how you got that face? Doing things of that sort?”
“This? I was skipping through a field and fell on some dandelions. They hurt more than you’d think.”
She looks at me.
“Who’s the little Lurker?”
“Don’t worry about her. She’s with me.”
“I thought so. The face of a killer and a Jade on your arm. Your mama must be proud.”
“My mother wouldn’t know a Jade from a lawn flamingo.”
“Once we drop you off, you won’t be coming back, will you?”
“Much as I enjoyed the room service, I have another hotel to get back to.”
“I have your word on that? We won’t see you again?”
“Hell yes.”
“All right, then.”
“So, you’re calling it off?”
“You mean my boys killing you all and leaving you here in the tunnels? I expect I will.”
“Good call.”
“We’re done here.”
Hattie falls back to where Diogo is walking and says something to him.
“Aw, Mama.”
She slaps him.
“You mind me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
We go down a long side corridor to an unmarked door. Doolittle tries the handle. It doesn’t open.
“Trouble, Mama,” he says.
“Allow me,” says Vidocq, and gently pushes the boy out of the way. He takes a leather wrap from his pocket and opens it to reveal a set of delicate tools. Brigitte and Traven hold lights over his head and he takes a couple of them and picks the lock.
Hattie coughs and says, “A good man to have around.”
“You should hear him sing karaoke.”
Hattie turns to the group.
“This wasn’t always locked. Guess the Shoggots are even worse about folks wandering into their territory. You sure you want to do this?”
“We have no choice,” says Delon.
Hattie looks at me.
“What kind of secrets can a dead man have that you need so much?”
“I’m hoping he knows where I left my car keys.”
She shakes her head.
“There’s no helping some people.”
A click echoes off the walls and the door opens a few inches.
“Et voilà,” says Vidocq.
“Voilà yourself,” says Delon. “Look at this.”
On the other side of the door, twisted wire cables are bolted to both sides of the wall and the base of the doorjamb. They stretch away from us into the gloom, and it takes me a second to figure out why. There’s stars above but nothing below the door except a wide rocky chasm. Sometime in the last few years this section of roof collapsed, taking several levels of floor with it. I point my flashlight down, but I can’t see the bottom. The cables form a V-shaped bridge. Two tightly spaced cables are the bottom of the V with a single waist-high cable on each side to form the top. Rickety isn’t the word for the thing. I look at Hattie.
“You’re fucking kidding me.”
She crosses her arms.
“You want to go? This is the way.”
Delon has stepped back a few feet from the door. He’s looking down the hall.
“I’m guessing this isn’t on your map.”
“Nothing even like it.”
“Perfect.”
Hattie smiles.
“We can go forward or we can go back, but either way I keep Nehebkau’s Tears and the Gihon salt.”
“Then we keep going,” I say. I turn to the others. “Agreed?”
Everyone but Delon gives me a yes.
“You have something to say, Paul?”
He looks at his feet.
“I didn’t know about this. I’m not good with heights.”
Beautiful. So Norris Quay is afraid of heights. What an exciting piece of trivia. You’d think fucking Atticus would fix something like that when he made his windup clones. Maybe crossing the Grand Canyon bareback never came up before.
“We’re all going. That means you too.”
“I’m not sure I can.”
“We’re going to need the map in your head when we get across. That means if I have to tie your arms and legs and kick you across like a soccer ball, you’re going.”