chapter SEVEN
A’marie gave me a last troubled look, then headed back to the Miata. Lorenzo waved his off hand, motioning for me to walk farther south. Both he and Georgie followed along behind me.
And all of this was happening in an open field in the middle of a city on a sunny afternoon. I was sure the boom had rattled some windows, and that Georgie looked strange even at a distance. But nobody was rushing to my rescue.
“So, Lorenzo,” I said, in the faint hope that chitchat would distract the zombies, make them like me, or something, “you were a human cannonball.”
“One of the first,” Lorenzo answered with surprise and pride in his voice, “and nobody ever flew farther.”
“And now you don’t even need a cannon.”
“No. I admit, it’s a funny sort of gift. I never heard of another Lingerer with anything like it. But it’s what Fate chose for me.”
“And you, Georgie,” I said. “I’m pretty sure I’ve actually heard of you.”
“I guess you watch that Death Row show,” he growled. “Well, guess what? It was all true. I was a drunk. I beat up my family. I shot and killed my daughter’s boy friend. Finally my wife hired a guy to shoot me so I couldn’t hurt her and the kids anymore. Happy?”
“Right now?” I replied. “Not really.”
“I’m not that person anymore,” Georgie said. “At least I’m trying not to be. But it’s not easy when Timon thinks it’s funny to make me go through all the worst moments over and over again in my sleep.”
“Look,” I said. “I realize something needs to be done about him—”
“No,” said Lorenzo, “you don’t. You’re just saying anything that you think might help you. But it’s too late for that. We’re here.”
“Here” didn’t look any different than the rest of the graveyard. Still, it seemed like the zombies wanted me to stop walking, so I did.
Then the strip of ground in front of a headstone grumbled and split. In seconds, it was an open grave with the stained, decaying remains of a cheap pine coffin at the bottom. Loose dirt pattered down on the lid, and the symbols scrawled there in blue and purple chalk.
“Home sweet home,” Georgie said.
“Are you sure you’ll be all right?” Lorenzo asked. “There’s a lot of daylight left.”
“He’s got magic,” said the crab. “Somebody has to stay awake and stand guard. And it’s easier to hide when you’re built low to the ground.”
That was probably why I hadn’t spotted him after he whistled, not that it mattered anymore. I whirled and threw myself at the zombies.
It probably would have gotten me shot, too, except that before Lorenzo could pull the trigger, Georgie threw himself against my legs and tackled me. I fell down, and Lorenzo cracked me over the head with the Smith and Wesson. It hurt a lot. Enough to make me stop resisting.
“Georgie’s going to let you go,” Lorenzo said, “and then you’re going to climb down. If you don’t, I swear I really will shoot you.”
Head pounding, I clambered down into the grave. “You want to get inside and close the lid,” Georgie said. “If you don’t, you won’t have any space between you and the dirt.”
“I could still run out of air and suffocate,” I said. “You know that, right?”
He grinned. “Maybe I’m not as different from the old Georgie as I like to think. Blame your friend Timon. And get in the box.”
I pulled up the squeaky, rickety lid, got in the coffin, and closed it again. One of the hinges had corroded away, and it didn’t shut very well. It also had holes in it, which gave me another second or two of light. They also gave me streams of grit and dust when the ground closed over the top of me. I coughed and struggled not to panic. I didn’t really think the box was going to fill up completely, but there was a trapped-animal part of me that did.
When I got the fear under control, I had to deal with my stomach, at least if I didn’t want to lie there covered in my own puke. The coffin stank as bad as Georgie himself. Not surprising, considering that he’d rested and rotted in it every day for twenty-five years.
It helped when my head stopped throbbing. Then I remembered the new cell phone. Clumsy in the tight space, I dug it out of my pocket and got a lonely, empty feeling when I realized I didn’t know who to call. I didn’t have a number for Timon or the Icarus Hotel. And as far as the rest of the world went, I knew a lot of people, but nobody who’d hop right to it if I claimed I needed him to rush to a cemetery and dig me out of a grave. Oh, and watch out for the zombie who’ll try to stop you.
That left 911. Ordinarily, when you make your living gambling, mostly illegally, you hesitate to call the cops for anything. Timon sure didn’t want them anywhere near his business, and I couldn’t imagine how I was going to explain what had happened to me. But I’d worry about all that after I got out of the hole. I flipped open the phone.
No bars.
Okay, I told myself, okay. The phone wouldn’t work, my physical body was trapped, but I could still spirit-travel. I could fly to Timon and get him to rescue me.
I pictured the lobby of the hotel and wished I was there. I felt a kind of loosening, as ghost me came uncoupled from flesh-and-blood me. I rocketed upward.
For maybe a sixteenth of an inch. Then I felt multiple stabs of pain, from the middle of my forehead down the center of my body, and jerked to a stop. It was like I had invisible spikes sticking in me, nailing my spirit in place, and I’d hurt myself yanking against them.
I remembered the symbols chalked on the coffin lid. They were probably to blame. And if I actually understood anything about magic in general or my own gifts in particular, maybe knowing that would help me.
Come to think of it, maybe it could anyway. If I destroyed the designs, wouldn’t that break their power?
I hooked my fingers in a couple of the holes and pulled with all my strength. I tried not to think about the fact that I was doing my best to tear apart the only thing that was keeping six feet of dirt from pouring down on top of me. I told myself there’d still be a little air to breathe, somehow, someway.
As it turned out, I didn’t find out one way or the other. Not right then. The soggy, decaying wood felt as solid as an up-armored Humvee, not that my buddies and I had actually seen many of those. The same magic that locked my ghost self inside my body was protecting itself against me. I didn’t even end up with any splinters, just stinging spots where I’d rubbed myself raw.
Another wave of fear swept through me. Not for myself, or at least not mainly. I wasn’t having any fun, but I guessed I might have enough air to last until midnight. And even after she’d double-crossed me, I trusted A’marie to dig me up as soon as I no-showed for poker and Timon had to forfeit. But I was scared for Vic.
I told myself that the lord pulling Rhonda’s strings wouldn’t want Vic seriously hurt. Not as long as she was the bait in the trap. But I couldn’t count on a monster thinking the same way I did, and besides, accidents happened. If Vic screamed for help, and a big, mean creature like Gimble or Wotan used too much force to shut her up—
So think, damn it! I was a lord’s champion. In theory, I had magic out the yin-yang. Georgie was just a stinky dead guy with no feet. I should be able to get through or around whatever he put in my way.
Which was what, exactly? Despite Timon’s coaching, I still knew so little about magic that I pretty much had no clue. But it was something meant to hold me in the coffin in at least a couple different ways.
But it didn’t give Georgie any trouble. He’d unzipped the ground and unlocked the box with less effort than it took to pop the top off a beer can.
Possibly that was just because it was his jail and he had the key. But maybe it was because the magic was made to chain down a particular kind of prisoner. Maybe it was made to hold the living but not the dead.
At first, that was an idea that, even if it was true, seemed to lead nowhere. What was I going to do, die and turn into a zombie myself?
Well, maybe. Sort of.
I remembered how Shadow looked in the Egyptian temple. Literally, like a shadow. Not exactly like a ghost, but not like a living person, either. What if I turned into all him, the same way I’d turned into all Red?
I guessed I’d still look like normal me. When I brought Mr. Ka to the surface, nobody said anything about me glowing red. But I hoped Georgie’s hex didn’t see me in the way that a person sees. How could it, when it was just a force, and didn’t have any eyeballs?
I reached inside, found Shadow, and almost flinched away. He felt nasty. But I pumped him up anyway, until he was the only thing inside my skin.
And then I hated everyone.
Mainly, I hated A’marie for tricking and trapping me, and Georgie and Lorenzo for helping her. I had to get out of the grave so I could torture and kill them all.
Then I’d do the same to the other players in the poker game. They’d all tried to hurt me in one way or another. Then I’d get Timon, for bossing me around. And Vic, for dumping me.
And after that, I’d go after everyone else who’d ever messed with me.
I hooked my scraped, bloody fingers back into the holes and tore at the coffin lid again. It still felt solider than it had any right to be, but not as hard and heavy as before. Who knew if I’d really figured out anything about how Georgie’s magic worked? But somehow I’d guessed my way to an answer. The hex was still trying to tie me down, but with Shadow filling me up, suddenly there was a little play in the rope.
Unfortunately, my answer didn’t seem quite as smart when I finally managed to rip a big chunk of coffin lid away from the rest. Then dirt avalanched down into my face just like I’d worried it would.
Forget spirit-traveling to ask Timon or anyone else for help. I only had a minute or two before the dirt smothered me. I clawed and burrowed my way upward.
It helped that the dirt was loose. It also helped that I was Shadow. He didn’t have amazing strength like Red had superhuman energy. But he was a vicious, relentless fighter, and now he was fighting the ground.
One of my hands punched out into air, and then the other. I dug my fingers into grass and soil and dragged my head up into the sunlight. I gasped and coughed for a couple seconds, then finished crawling out, leaving what looked like a big gopher hole behind me.
Georgie had said he was going to stand guard. As I stood up, I looked around for him and imagined his dead slimy flesh in my fingers. It felt good. For all I knew, he knew how to put himself back together like Lorenzo after the human cannonball trick. But even if he did, I’d find a way to rip him to pieces and keep him that way.
Or I thought I would. But then the part of me that wasn’t Shadow woke up. I still felt all that hate, but knew it was sick and wrong. It was also likely to get me killed if I let it hang on now that it had served its purpose.
I struggled to push all the rage and spite away. Shadow shrank back down more reluctantly than Red had. But he did let go, and left me feeling ashamed that he was any part of me.
But before I could even promise myself I’d become a better person, Georgie chimp-walked out of the patch of shadow underneath a stand of oaks. The little bastard really was good at hiding. I’d looked right at the trees without spotting him.
He stood on his stumps and brought up a pistol in both sets of claws. My Smith and Wesson, probably. Backing away from him, I visualized the Thunderbird, tried to make another invisible wall, and felt a shiver of magic jump out of me when the ward popped into existence.
Georgie fired. The bullet cracked against the side of the garden mausoleum behind me.
Apparently the kind of wall I knew how to make would stop a brownwing but not a bullet. It would have been nice if Timon had included that particular fact in my lessons.
I turned and ran. The automatic banged again. Another miss, but I couldn’t see myself just running and running while Georgie emptied the gun at my back. There was too good a chance that he’d get lucky.
I dodged behind the mausoleum. Then I scrambled up onto the roof of it. It wasn’t too hard. There were carved letters and grooves in the marble that gave me finger- and toeholds.
Georgie was smart enough to slow down as he came around the side of the crypt. He was looking for an ambush, but he didn’t think to look up.
I jumped. My feet hammered down on his shoulders and smashed him sprawling on the ground. I almost fell down, too, but staggered a couple steps and caught my balance.
He was lifting himself up when I kicked out some of the rest of his teeth. Then I stamped on the pincer-fingers that held the automatic. Something cracked. I stooped, yanked the gun out of his grip, and leaped away.
He swung himself right after me, just not quite quickly enough. I pointed the automatic, squeezed the trigger, and blasted a new hole in his forehead. Dark gray sludge blew out the back of his skull. It spattered the grass and the foot of the mausoleum wall. He collapsed.
And believe it or not, as I stood there panting, my pulse pounding in the arteries in my neck, I felt bad about it. At least until he groaned and twitched.
“Stay down!” I said. “Or I’ll blow out the rest of your brains, and see if I can twist your head loose from your neck while you’re out.”
He stayed put as I backed away. But he did say, “Billy.”
“What?” I answered.
“We were only doing what we had to.”
“Yeah,” I said, “me too.”
I glanced over my shoulder and saw that I’d almost reached the waist-high wall at the edge of the cemetery. Hoping Georgie wouldn’t chase me any farther, I stuffed the automatic back into my jeans, hopped the barrier, and trotted south on North Boulevard.
After a couple blocks, I came to a convenience store. Everybody gave me the skunk eye when I came in, including the chunky Hispanic woman behind the counter. I understood their point of view. I was filthy from head to toe, I had blood on my hands, and I smelled like Georgie.
But on the plus side, I had lots of cash. I pulled the wad out of my pocket, tossed bills on the counter, and headed for the men’s room.
On the way, I noticed this was one of your full-service convenience stores. Along with the beer, cigarettes, beef jerky, Lotto tickets, and DVD’s of thirty-year-old movies nobody ever heard of in the first place, they were selling cheap underwear, socks, jeans, and T-shirts with Harley Davidson and Iron Maiden logos on them. Figuring that I’d thrown the clerk enough money to cover a change of clothes as well as the use of the john, I found my sizes.
Once inside the restroom, I stripped and cleaned myself up as best it could with liquid soap and paper towels at the sink. When I finished, I checked myself out in the mirror and decided that while I didn’t look—or feel—really clean, what I saw was a big improvement. And then I started shaking.
I’d gone through too much weirdness, and too much of the weirdness had been trying to kill me. I had a high tolerance for bad, but everybody has his limits.
But I couldn’t afford to fall apart while Vic still needed me. I made myself take slow, deep breaths and splashed cold water on my face.
It helped, and then I dressed. The shirt I’d grabbed without looking at anything but the L on the tag was black with green marijuana leaves on it. I made sure it covered the automatic, then went back out into the store.
As soon as I did, I spotted the two Latino teenagers who were waiting for me. One had a 5 in a five-pointed star tattooed on his left forearm. They both had their left shoes untied.
That wasn’t enough to tell me what gang they belonged to—not that I really cared—but it did show they were in one that was part of People Nation. You learn to recognize your fellow criminals when you’re a lawbreaker yourself, even a harmless one like me.
I almost couldn’t blame them for what they had in mind. A crazy-looking guy waving a big roll of bills around? It must have seemed like Christmas had come early.
And maybe it had, but not the way they thought. I fixed my eyes on them and walked right over. Something they saw in my face made their hard expressions soften.
“It’s like this,” I said. “If you try to rob me, I will hurt you bad. But I’ll give you money if you’ve got a car. I’ll pay five hundred bucks for a ride to Ybor City.”
The kids exchanged glances. Then the one with the tattoo said, “I got a car.”
It turned out to be an ’87 Grand Prix with suicide doors and a chain-link steering wheel. Even stressed as I was, the sight of it made me smile. I wasn’t into low-riders, but still, it was somebody’s special, customized pride and joy, and I appreciated it for that. Maybe catching a ride in it was a sign my luck was turning.
Okay, probably not. But I got in anyway.