Chapter 7
A Hearse Is A Hearse, Of curse, Of Curse
I didn’t want to open my eyes, but the glare of the streetlights kept interfering with my desire to not be conscious. I was in an automobile of some sort. I could tell as much by the engine’s hum and the rata-tat-tat of the asphalt beneath the tires as by the driver’s constant swearing as she navigated the vehicle through busy traffic. When I tried to sit up I heard Mike’s admonishment to stay down. I mumbled something about thinking I had to puke. When I felt the vehicle lurch to the right and shake furiously as it decelerated on the roadway’s shoulder, I knew I had to.
From the driver’s side of the vehicle came the stern voice of our short-tempered driver. “Okay, somebody get Upchuckles out of here before he makes me sick! I can’t take the smell of vomit! Get him out now!”
A moment later the door at my feet was unceremoniously jerked open and I was dragged by my ankles halfway out of the cabin into the cold night air. I sat up and pushed a set of arms out of the way as I propelled the rest of my body out of the door and threw up. Footsteps approached as I emptied my stomach of two non-alcoholic Bloody Maries. I shoved the owner of the feet away when they got too close. “Get the hell away from me and don’t manhandle me again!” I shouted once I was done.
“Here sparrow,” the female said as she thrust a handful of napkins into one of my hands. “Take these and clean yourself up.”
I took them and cleaned my mouth off, thankful that spicy tomato juice tasted the same coming up as it did going down. An upright posture had to wait a few more minutes before I gathered enough of my wits to stand. When I did, my body kept going the other way and the driver cried out, “Grab him!”
A pair of hands from a different, more masculine set of arms stopped me from going all the way over. “Oh . . . thanks, Mike.”
“I knew you weren’t ready to get up yet,” he said mildly as he guided me back into the vehicle’s cabin.
The vehicle turned out to be a massively armored black SUV of the general type driven by the H.A. squad back in the demon’s Principality—or what would have corresponded to central North Carolina in my world. I thought it actually was still called North Carolina, but in name only. What we had just escaped from sure as hell wasn’t one of the thirteen original colonies. When I gingerly managed to seat myself without throwing up again, I moaned pitifully, “Oh Jesus I feel awful; how long have I been out?”
“Long enough for us to drag your sorry ass a mile through the woods and drive a hundred miles, bird boy,” the driver said unsympathetically. “And I would appreciate it if you don’t say that name again.”
I already wanted to kill her and I hadn’t even gotten a good look at the speaker yet. “What name? Jesus?”
A sound like a goose yacking and a dull nail scraping across a chalkboard erupted from beside my open door. “Are you deaf or stupid?” the driver spat.
When I held my eyes open long enough to identify the angry female driver, I wished I hadn’t. Standing beside me was the helpless, innocent Nightwatch victim I got knocked unconscious rescuing. She stood about five feet tall, with long chestnut brown hair that spilled in curly tangles to her shoulders and a thin, attractive face made even more attractive by a narrow pair of perky lips. The blouse she wore had been torn during her captivity, nearly allowing two small, perfectly sculpted breasts to all but spill out. But for her constant shuffling and drawing the top back over her chest, they most certainly would have tumbled out. I felt too lousy to give her an appreciative second look.
“Hey flyboy, I’m up here,” she snapped at me.
“You’re welcome,” I shot back, tempted to deliberately ogle her out of spite.
The driver sniffed and stamped petulantly. I opened my mouth to ask her what her problem was, but the words froze before I managed to produce them the moment I noticed she stood on hooves instead of feet. Two small horns poked through the hair on the top of her head above her bangs. Then I saw that two bat-like wings were folded tightly against her back and a long, twitchy tail extended from the bottom of her backside to a point four feet behind her where it ended in a sharply barbed tip. I also noticed a faint aroma of brimstone.
“Who the hell are you?” I demanded.
A naughty smile played across her symmetrically perfect mouth. “I’m Angelica.”
“Angelica?” I asked, placing an emphasis on the syllables forming angelic. “Oh no you’re not!”
Our driver tinkled with dark laughter.
“We just got away from one of her kind,” I said, moving to unbuckle my seatbelt and preparing to hitchhike a ride to anywhere away from the Queen of the Damned. Mike placed a calming hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay, Jack. She’s not exactly what you think.
“Well what is she then?” I asked, wincing as I continued to toy with the seatbelt release.
“I’m a member of the Sisterhood of Reformed Succubi,” she declared, but there was enough uncertainty in her voice to make me question the “reformed” part.
“You’re a succubus.” I said slowly and turned to Mike. “We’re in the car with a succubus and you’re telling me that it’s okay?” I couldn’t control the rising pitch in my voice. Within one day I had met a vampire, a wereschnauser, the infernal minions of a demon, and now one was getting into the SUV in front of me. I felt tapped out. I was ready for my supernatural meter to go from Dawn of the Dead to “I Declare This House Cleansed.”
“She’s not entirely a succubus,” he told me in calm, soothing words.
“I really don’t have very many of my old powers anymore,” she said.
“Why would that be?” I asked, making a mental note to find a Bible or a couple of vials of holy water.
“She can’t tempt men,” Mike said.
“Because I don’t think I like men anymore,” she seconded him.
“And that makes a difference?” I groaned.
“It does when you’re actually only a half-succubus,” Angelica added. “And possibly sexually confused.”
Her voice may have trailed off, but the confusion in it was contagious. “There are an awful lot of ‘possiblies’ in that,” I pointed out while clutching my gut.
“I told you I’m half-succubus!” she growled.
So now I had myself quite the trifecta of halves. “Well don’t go leading us into temptation or anything like that,” I warned her.
Angelica gave me a pouty look in the rearview mirror. “The night is young,” she said mirthfully.
“Miiiiiike,” I started darkly.
“Children, children,” Mike admonished us. “It looks like we will be spending a bit of time together, so let’s do try to get along.”
Maybe we can tie them both up,” Max said, eliciting a hiss from Angelica.
“Maybe I can have you neutered,” Angelica growled.
“Maybe we can just talk about what we’re doing next,” I offered hopefully.
“We’re going to Walmart,” everyone answered in unison. I wasn’t ready for that response, though knowing that everyone in the SUV was in agreement about something actually did make me feel a bit better.
“We need to get you some clothes,” Mike said. “You stick out, and right now, that’s the last thing you need.”
Everyone around me grunted in agreement, but I almost laughed. I was surrounded by a group of B-movie monster freaks, and they all thought I was the one that stuck out. After all, I was just a normal southern boy with reality displacement issues. But as I caught Mike looking at my clothes, I started to think about how I was dressed. So much had happened to me today that I honestly hadn’t considered what I was wearing except to note how thin my clothes were, and they weren’t warm enough for the cold night air. I checked myself out and wished I hadn’t.
I had on a thin pair of pen striped business pants, a leather belt that had begun to crack and blister along its surface, and an uncomfortable jacket that was on the verge of falling apart over a dirty white cotton business shirt that had large, unsavory, and dull-colored stains running down the front. Indeed, the stains made me queasy just looking at them, because I had the impression that they had been produced by weeping body fluids—and knowing what the genie had done to me, I didn’t want to think about where those weeping body fluids had come from.
“Oh crap,” I said. I hadn’t realized until that moment that I was wearing the clothes I had been buried in. This observation was underscored by the fact that they were covered in splotchy patches of mold and mildew. I wanted to be sick again, and Mike must have recognized what was going through my mind, because he told me, “We’re almost there.”
I rolled down the rear window enough to catch the fresh air rubbing against the SUV as it barreled down the interstate, and I forced myself to focus on our current situation. “Now that we’ve helped get Angelica here away from those Nightwatch thugs, they’re still looking for several of us. How safe are we going to be in this principality?”
From behind the driver’s wheel, Angelica snorted with laughter.
“You’re in the Playground,” Max said with a dry smile. You’ll do well to remember that you’ll never be safe again. Not since you’ve gotten yourself noticed by a local Baron.”
“We were followed for a while,” Angelic said, “but turn about is a real bitch. I used the SUV’s defensive systems against the bastards.”
“Defensive systems?” I asked dumbly. I was about to ask what she meant when something heavy and metallic slammed into the right side of our vehicle, throwing me hard against the side door. I instinctively took ahold of the ceiling grab-handle and locked my legs in the space beneath the driver’s seat as the SUV took another hit, this time just on the other side of my door.
“Oh no the hell you’re NOT!” Angelica spat venomously, fighting with the steering wheel to keep the vehicle from rolling. She jabbed her finger at a series of buttons on the console, and the intense beam of a searchlight came on. Angelica quickly used her left hand to push a control, directing the beam back toward our attacker, and she snapped at me, “Tell me what you see, Sparrow!”
I looked out of my window and saw what looked like an armored hearse with steel-plate colored windows and spikes jutting from its side like some mechanized, vintage, Mad Max movie replica. Through its tinted windows I barely made out the shiny plastic body of a mannequin stiffly driving the vehicle. “A hearse being driven by a crash test dummy,” I said, sucking in a breath as one on the other side rammed us. “And there are more than one!”
Angelica slammed on the breaks, forcing the hearses to shoot past us and sending my face into the padded headrest in front of me. She then nailed her hoof down on the accelerator, propelling us forward into the rear of the closest hearse with enough force to send the thing spinning out of control across the road. When it hit the soft shoulder, the hearse attempted to veer back into the outside lane but overcompensated, skidding sideways into the center of the road. At the same time this happened, I watched as a loud swooshing racket erupted from an outside rear panel of the SUV and a bright missile streaked toward the thing’s frame, hitting it broadside and detonating with an explosion that struck me in the chest like a boxer’s right uppercut. The blast sent the hearse spinning through the air in a whirling pinwheel of flaming ruin.
“What the hell was that?!” I screamed.
“Morticians!” Angelica spat the term like a swear word.
“Mercenaries!” Max growled. “Robotic funeral directors for hire.”
“For a fee, they’ll direct anyone you choose to their own funeral,” Mike clarified.
“For a really large fee,” Max added through clenched teeth.
“Cripes,” I squeaked.
Angelica let out a loud, ululating war whoop as she pulled up next to the second hearse. The robot’s head swung smoothly to the right, and I could tell by the thing’s silhouette that it was staring directly at me. Angelica shouted, “Under the seat, fly boy!”
It only took me a second to process her meaning, and when I bent to run my arm into the space below my butt, I found a hard plastic case pushed toward the back. Upon retrieving it, I discovered a number of strangely shaped pistols recessed firmly in thick foam molds. I pulled one out and my eyes immediately opened wide. This was the same kind of weapon the Homeowners Association goons had used to blast trees apart as they chased us out of the demon’s principality.
“Watch where you point that thing!” Max screamed, ducking his head down to keep it away from the pistol’s muzzle.
“Right.”
I rolled the window down and stuck the short barrel out of the window. The hearse veered toward us, and when it slammed against us, metal screeched as its spikes bit into the SUV’s armor. Sparks spat out across the road, lighting up the hearse like a strobe as its driver attempted to grind the lethal projections into our vehicle.
I took aim and squeezed the trigger, and the recoil nearly took my hand off. A brilliant bolt of energy instantly surged into the hearse’s passenger side door and exploded inside the compartment, sending thin, crackling forks of electrical force coruscating across the robot’s torso. I gritted my teeth and took firmer hold of the weapon in both hands. The recoil sent sharp needlepoints of pain shooting up my forearms. My aim was true, however. The round of energy hit the hearse’s engine compartment like an elephant running through tin foil. Dull red fire kachunked around the seams of the hood and geysered through the crumpled impact hole. I saw the cab fill with flames and oily smoke, and I watched with satisfaction as the technical monstrosity veered off the road and struck the guardrail with force.
“Yeeee!” Angelica cried out. “I’m keeping this SUV!!!”
My nerves were lit up like a honky-tonk neon sign, and my hands shook from adrenaline and pain. I quickly put the pistol in the inside pocket of my burial coat. At least I now had some firepower on my side. When I rolled up the window beside me, I blurted out, “I’m sure they have a tracking device on this thing!”
Angelica flashed back in an annoyed voice, “And I’m sure I disabled it.”
“How did those things know where to find us, then?” I demanded. When I looked at Mike, his face held a troubled and pensive expression.
“Get us onto a back road,” he said. “Quickly, please. I don’t like this either, Jack. This is extreme to be just a case of a simple principality troublemaker.” Max and Mike exchanged an unsettling look.
“Apostate?” Max asked.
Mike’s voice became darkly serious. “I have to wonder.”
Before I got lost in the Playground jargon, I held my hand up quickly and said, “I don’t know what that is over here, people.”
“Supernatural beings that refuse to play by the rules,” Mike said. “The Supernatural Compacts were set up a long time ago as a way of making sure that powerful predators—demons, zombies, vampires, politicians, journalists, and the like—got along with a minimum of conflict. The Pacts established the principalities and baronies that make up the majority of territories on this plane of existence. The Pacts also set up the rules governing the patterns of coexistence between supernatural beings and mundane humans.”
“Is that why the Playground loosely resembles the world we come from?” I asked.
Mike hesitated in a way that told me the topic was more complex than that. “Yes and no. Since nearly everyone here can be considered prey in one way or another to the natural inhabitants of the Playground, the Powers that crafted the Pacts made sure that most humans living here could live in a reasonably stable world—”
“Didn’
t want to rile up the herd too much,” Angelica piped in. “Probably because panic tends to make meat taste gamey,” she said absently.
“So normal people are kind of like livestock for the barons, and the Playground is the farm,” I said with a sinking feeling in the pit of my gut. “That’s horrible. I want to go home.”
“Most people will live their lives here without ever experiencing a noticeable moment of threat or danger,” Mike said. “Not much more so than what you get back in our world.”
“Most?” I asked. “What happens to the other fraction that get’s culled from the herd? How do you stand this place?” I demanded.
“And this is what makes him an apostate,” Angelica said in a sing-song voice and then turned back to wink at me. “I think I’m honestly impressed, fly-boy. I didn’t see that one coming.”
“What makes me one of these apostates?” I asked firmly, letting out an explosive breath of frustration with the question.
“Somebody’s worried about you,” Max said with a harsh growl. “The demon doesn’t pull out his Vandugga for just any threat. Someone thinks you’re a danger to the established order—otherwise, we wouldn’t have been chased twice in one night into the heart of another barony.”
I didn’t want to ask my next question, but I did anyway. “What is in charge of this barony?”
“The Old Confederate Union,” Mike said. “They actually have one of the better baronies to live in . . . aside from the Order of Enlightened Zombies, that is.”
“Here,” Angelica said, tossing a flyer over her shoulder as she pulled into a service station. “I got this for you at a rest area while you were still out cold. How about reading it after you show me what kind of gentleman you are. Fill us up, okay?”
I sighed. My head hurt. I didn’t want to do anything but slip into a coma and dream about living in a world that made more sense, like Sesame Street or Mr. Roger’s neighborhood. With my luck, though, Big Bird would probably turn out to be a velociraptor.
The night air was cold enough to irritate my throat, which was already irritated from all the stress. Mike got out to use the pay phone beside the front of the store as I looked at the fuel selections on the pumps beside the SUV. In my world, I only had three grades to worry about: regular, mid-grade, and premium, unless I was driving something with a diesel engine. Things here weren’t so simple. Among other things, the pump carried dragon’s breath, elven urine, and virgin’s blood.
“Ummm . . . what does this thing take?”
“Knowing the Homeowner’s Association and the Nightwatch, the thing probably runs on children’s tears,” Angelica said through the driver’s side window. If the place doesn’t carry that, I’d go for the synthetic stuff. Dragon’s breath makes everything stink, and elven urine will only clog up the injectors and make the engine skip. That stuff’s been bad ever since the elves started coming down with STDs. I can’t believe the stations still carries that crap.”
“Virgin’s blood,” I muttered under my breath. I didn’t want to think about how they collected the blood. A sticker beneath the logo proclaimed “It eally makes your engine screeeeam!”
While I waited for the tank to fill, Mike came back from the service station’s interior with a packet of something that looked like roasted insects and a can of Sprite. He gave them to me and I held the items on my hand, unsure whether or not I should throw them away. “The things in the bag taste like peanuts,” Mike said.
“It’s not that,” I told him and held up my drink. “I just want to know if this really has a sprite in it.”
Mike chuckled, but his voice was hard and serious. I could tell that something was wrong. “That’s the kind of thinking that will help keep you alive here, Jack. And no,” he said as we both got back into the SUV, “Here, a can of sprite is just a sprite.” Then he cleared his throat to get Angelica and Max to pause in their conversation and listen. “I just got off the phone with our friend across the street from the cemetery, Max. The mausoleum’s been raided,” he said bitterly.
Max let out an angry growl. “How did they find it?”
“Demon’s been looking for us for some time,” he said in resignation. “Wasn’t a matter of if, but when he tried to shut us down.”
We drove for some time, keeping to roads that took us in a southerly direction. After an uncomfortable silence, Max spoke up. “What now?” he asked, fidgeting in his seat as if the anxiety was pushing him to start scratching himself with his feet.
“We’re near Columbia, now,” Mike said. I think we’ll head down into Georgia and go to St. Simon’s Island. I have a contact there that can help us.”
“You’re talking about Cardigan Calli, aren’t you?” Max asked.
“She’s always helped relocate anyone I’ve sent to her in the past,” Mike mused. “I just never thought she’d have to help hide me.”
“Hey jabber-heads, did one of you mention St. Simon’s Island?” Angelica’s tail twitched angrily in the air. “We’ve got a convent there.” Something in that thought seemed to trouble her, but she went on without pause, thinking aloud to herself as she looked at me nervously from the rearview mirror. “I’m going to have to ditch the three of you before I’m shot just for being too close to you.”
“Why not just leave us on the side of the road,” I said. After all, it wasn’t like we had just saved her life.
“I’m a reformed succubus!” she shrieked. “Reformed! Don’t you get that? You can just be glad I didn’t stick a pitchfork up your—“
“—We are grateful for your help,” Mike interjected. “But I’m not sure you’ll be out of the woods yet, either.”
“And you never said exactly why those Nightwatch goons crossed into another principality to capture you,” Max said.
“None of your business,” she said hotly. Her tail grew as stiff as a spear, and the tip of the thing quivered ominously. “I already warned the two of you that I don’t want to talk about it,” she hissed. Was it just me or had the scent of sulfur in the air grown stronger? I must have missed the first conversation while I was out cold.
Mike let the issue go for the moment, and instead turned his attention back to me. “Do you still have that screamer with you?” he asked suddenly.
“Um . . . I’m almost afraid to ask what that means.”
“He’s talking about your gun. The pistol you dug out from under the seat,” Max said in a grouchy voice.
“Yeah,” I said a bit uneasily. I wasn’t about to give something that valuable up. Not in a place like this.
Mike nodded his head and simply said, “Good.”
“Why?”
Mike motioned with his hand toward a luminous sign in the distance. “Because we’re almost at Walmart,” he said.