She’s gone when I hit Broadway. This part of town isn’t that crowded on Sundays. I have a clear view in both directions. No perky blondes running down the street in flames. It’s mostly stores and office buildings down here, but all the offices and most of the stores are closed. There are a few open doors in the small shops, but Eleanor is too smart to get cornered in one of those little cracker boxes. There’s only one place a smart girl would go.
God said, “Let there be Light, and cheap take-out Chinese,” and the Grand Central Market appeared. The place has been on South Broadway since before the continents divided. Some of the meat they use in the burritos and Szechuan beef is even older. I think I once saw Fred Flintstone’s teeth marks on some barbecued ribs.
Inside, I’m facing down tacos and pizza. There’s a liquor store to my left and ice cream against the far wall. Every spice known to man is mixed with the smell of sweat and cooking meat. Not too much of a crowd at this time of day. Some of the shops and kiosks are already counting up receipts. I don’t see Eleanor down the central walkway or either of the side ones. I start down the middle of the place, cut to the right-hand and walk by a fish stand. I’m reaching out. Listening, smelling, feeling the movement of the air, trying to pick up any tiny vibrations in the aether. I’m getting better at this kind of hunting. Ambush predator stuff as opposed to my old Tyrannosaurus-with-a-hard-on moves that don’t go down quite as well in the streets of L.A. as they did in the arena.
Subtle hunting, acting like a grown-up, I really miss Hell sometimes.
A tourist dad asks me how they can get back on the freeway to Hollywood from here. I ignore him and he mumbles something about his taxes and how come we don’t have more cops to clear out these drug addicts.
Six months after the New Year’s bash at Avila and I’m still not used to this place, these people. In a lot of ways civilians are worse than Hellions because at least Hellions know they’re miserable sacks of slaughterhouse shit. More and more, I want one of these mortal types to have to face down a vampire, a Jade, or a bat-shit demon elemental. Not a ghost glimpse in the dark, but having to stare straight into a beast’s red meat-grinder eyes hungry for the souls of the terminally clueless.
Be careful what you wish for.
A long orange jet of fire rains from overhead and there’s Eleanor, standing on top of the glass-and-chrome cases at a spice kiosk. The business end of the flamethrower is a little thing, no bigger than a .45 semiauto. A tube runs from the pistol to an Astro Boy backpack, where the gas and propellant are stored.
Eleanor moves her arm in a wide arc, torching produce, signs, and the backs of a few slack-jawed market workers. She’s smiling down at us. Annie Oakley and Charlie Manson’s demon baby, jacked up on that sweet and special prekill adrenaline.
Then she’s down and running with a small bubbling laugh like a naughty six-year-old. I take off after her, running deeper into the market. She’s small and fast and a second later she cuts left, down the far aisle, and doubles back toward Broadway.
I can’t catch her or cut her off, but there’s an empty utility cart by a produce stand. I give it a kick and send it through the empty dining area. Tables and chairs go flying. The cart slams into her legs at the end of the aisle, knocking her through the counter of Grand Central Liquor. Suddenly it’s raining glass and Patrón Silver. Right on cue, people start screaming.
Eleanor is back on her feet a second before I can grab her. She’s not smiling anymore. Her left arm is bent at a funny angle and a chunk of bone the size of a turkey drumstick is sticking out just below her elbow. She has the flamethrower up, but I’m moving flat out. No way I’m can stop. Instead, I go faster. She pulls the trigger and I’m drowning in fire.
I hit her a millisecond later. I can’t see anything, but I know it’s her because she’s the only thing in the store light enough to fly like that. My vision clears, but even I don’t want to see this. When she pulled the trigger to hose me down, all the liquor on her clothes and the floor went up. Eleanor is an epileptic shadow puppet pirouetting around in a lake of whiskey fire.
Vampires don’t scream like regular humans. I don’t know how they scream at all without lungs, but when they let loose, it’s like a runaway train meets the screech of a million fighting cats. You feel it in your kidneys and bones. Tourists pee and puke at the sound. Fuck ’em. Eleanor still isn’t going down. And the fire is starting to spread. Grease on the grills of nearby food stalls starts going up. A propane tank blows, setting off the sprinkler system. When I look back, Eleanor is sprinting out of the market back onto Broadway, still covered in flames.
Chasing a burning girl down a city street is a lot harder than it sounds. Civilians tend to stop and stare and this turns them into human bowling pins. Slow, whiny bowling pins. You’d think that on some basic animal level they’d want to get the hell out of the way of a burning schoolgirl screaming loud enough to crack store windows and the stupid son of a bitch chasing her. Not that I’m doing this for them. I’m doing it for the money, but they still stand to benefit from it.
When Eleanor runs across Fifth Street she isn’t burning anymore. She’s a black beef-jerky Barbie doll running on charred stick insect legs.
Up ahead, there’s an abandoned wreck of a movie theater called the Roxie. The lobby and marquee areas have been converted into an open-air market. Eleanor blows past the racks of knockoff T-shirts and toxic rubber sandals. Slams straight through the inch-thick plywood screwed over the theater doors where the glass used to be. I follow her inside, but hang back by the smashed door, letting my eyes adjust to the dark.
The na’at would be a smart weapon in a place like this, but I feel like shooting something. Besides, Eleanor won’t know what a na’at is, so it won’t scare her the way I want. I retired Wild Bill’s Navy Colt pistol a while back and replaced it with a Smith & Wesson .460 hunting pistol. The thing is so big and mean it doesn’t even need bullets. I could beat Godzilla to death with it if I stood on a chair. The gun is loaded alternately with massive .460 rounds and shortened .410 shotgun shells, all coated in my special Spiritus Dei, silver, garlic, holy water, and red mercury dipping sauce. It only holds five shots, but it does its job well enough that I’ve never had to reload.
When you’re going in someplace blind, don’t know the layout or what’s waiting inside, a place you know a Lurker likes to hang out, a smart guy will hang back, circle the perimeter, and look for traps and weak points. I’m hot, annoyed, and in a rush, so that’s exactly what I don’t do. Besides, I’m just chasing one dumb little Kentucky fried blonde. She can’t be much trouble now that she’s cornered. Yeah. That’s probably what all those G-men said about Bonnie Parker before they saw the tommy gun.
Inside the theater, it’s a sauna. Burst water pipes in a sealed-up building. I haven’t moved and I’m sweating like a lawyer at the pearly gates. It smells like they invented mildew in here. How the hell did suburban Valley girl Eleanor end up day-squatting here? She didn’t run into the theater by accident. She knew where she was going. By the sound of all the broken beer and wine bottles under my feet, so do a lot of other people. Make that “did,” past tense. The winos are probably what attracted her to the place. Who doesn’t love a free lunch? I have a feeling that there aren’t too many random squatters in here anymore.
Turns out I’m half right.
The squatters aren’t random. They’re vampires. Friends of hers. A guy and a girl.
They jump from the balcony and the guy slams a piece of two-by-four between my shoulders. I go down on my knees in the crunchy glass, but I roll with the blow and come up with the .460 cocked. That’s when Eleanor’s other friends hit me. Two more guys from beneath the seats on either side of the aisle. I grab the smaller one by the throat and toss him into the second. The girl vampire pair hits me from behind and jams a broken bottle into my arm. I drop the gun and it’s too dark to see where it went. I throw an elbow back and feel the side of the girl’s skull crack. She jumps up like a gazelle and stumb
les over two rows of seats, screaming. That gives me a second to sprint down the aisle toward the screen and put some distance between Eleanor’s dead friends and me.
That’s where Eleanor has been waiting. Not only is she smart, but she has titanium balls. Even when she was on fire and running through the boarded-up front doors, she never let go of the flamethrower. The other bloodsuckers fall back as she opens up.
The shot back at the market was her just introducing herself. This one is a “fuck you very much and good night” just for me. Eleanor pulls the trigger and doesn’t let up until the gun is empty.
Stabbed and cold-cocked, I’m still not dumb enough to just stand there. I dive to the right, behind a row of seats. Fire wraps around them like it’s reaching for me. I’m getting burned from above and below, steaming like a pork bun in my leather jacket. Even when the flamethrower is empty, the burning seats keep right on cooking me, and the two-by-four shot left me too dizzy to move very fast. I stagger over to the wall and try to run up the aisle, but I’m tripping on the garbage snowdrifts and land face-first in candy wrappers, needles, and malt liquor bottles.
I’ve turned into Buster Keaton and Eleanor and her friends are getting a real kick out of me gimping along on all fours. She’s burned beyond any human recognition, but she’s a juicer and they get over pain pretty quick. I do, too, but I’m not there yet. Not even in the same time zone. I give up and lie down on the sticky-sweet carpet to do what I should have done in the first place.
I press my right hand down into the broken glass and put my weight on it. The jagged bottle shards slice deep into my palm and I keep pushing until I feel glass hit bone. Most hexes don’t need blood to work, but a little of the red stuff is like a nitrous afterburner when you want a hex to come on hard and fast.
Eleanor takes the two-by-four from the boy bloodsucker and thumps it on each seat as she strolls over to me.
“Hey, Speedy Gonzales. You like chasing things? Why don’t I knock your head across the street and you can chase that?”
“Get him, Nellie. Look at that scarred piece of shit. He’s too ugly to drink. Waste that faggot.”
It’s one of the boys talking. The one who got me with the chunk of wood. He has a southern accent. Somewhere deep, old, and hot. You can almost hear the kudzu wrapped around his words.
Eleanor says, “Shut up, Jed Clampett. Jethro is waiting for you to blow him in the parking lot.”
Everyone laughs but Jed.
While Eleanor does an “Evening at the Improv” thing for her dead friends, I do a Hellion chant over and over, keeping my hand in the glass and letting the blood flow. For once, Hellion’s guttural grunts work in my favor. The Lost Boys think I’m moaning.
“Why were you following me, asshole? Did Mutti send you? Mom, I mean? Does daddy know? All she has to do is put on her knee pads and she can get him to do anything.”
The wind starts as a breeze from the back of the theater, sweeping down from the balcony and ripping down the rotten curtains that flank the dead movie screen. Eleanor drops the comedy act and the others go silent as the wind picks up force. Now they’re the ones unsteady on their feet.
Even though I can’t read the dead like the living, vampires still have minds and I feel around for Eleanor’s. I can’t tell you her lottery numbers or her kitten’s name, but I can pick up images and impressions. She’s gone from pissed to nervous and is steering into the skid, heading for scared. She hasn’t been a Lurker long enough to run into anybody with real hoodoo power and she can’t figure out what’s happening.
Mommy is in her head, too, a black hole of anger and fear. Eleanor might even have gotten herself bit just to spite her. She has a secret, too. She thought it would save her in the end, but now she’s having her doubts.
A gust blasts down the aisle like an invisible fist, knocking all five of them ass over horseshoes into the air. Eleanor loses the two-by-four and lands on top of me. I can smell the fear through her burned skin. The wind keeps going, moving up from Hurricane Katrina to space shuttle exhaust.
With all her strength, Eleanor pushes herself off of me.
“It’s him! He’s doing it!” she yells. “What do we do?” Jed Clampett hauls his ass up off the floor and pulls himself to me using seat backs like crutches. I’ve changed the chant, but he hasn’t noticed yet.
The wind shifts from a wind tunnel to a swirling twister. I haul myself to my knees and shrug off my leather jacket. The twister rips the carpet from the floor, throwing a junk-yardful of broken glass into the air. The shards circle us like a million glittering razor blades, which doesn’t do much more than annoy Eleanor and her friends. They bat the glass away like flies. Each of their hundred cuts heals before the second hundred happen. But I’m getting cut, too. In a few seconds I’m the fountain in front of the Bellagio Hotel and all that broken glass is doing a water ballet in my blood.
The swirling air turns pink as I bleed out, which Jed and his girlfriend think is goddamn hysterical. They stick out their tongues and catch drops of my blood like kids catching snowflakes. About ten seconds later they’re both screaming and tearing open their throats with their fingernails. Then the other three start to feel it. They try to run, but the wind and glass are everywhere. It’s one big Veg-O-Matic in here, spraying my tainted blood down their throats and onto their million wounds.
Eleanor already looks like a Chicken McNugget, so it’s hard to tell what’s going on with her, but the others are starting to sizzle and glow from the inside like they swallowed road flares on a bet and lost. That’s what happens to vampires dumb enough to drink angel blood.
It doesn’t take long for them to go catatonic, then flare fast and hot. Human flash paper. They sizzle for a few seconds and cook down to a fine gray ash. I growl the end of the hex and the air grows still. The vampires are all dead, except for Eleanor. She hunkered down and held on to me during the twister. My body blocked enough of the wind for her to survive, but just barely. She moves her cracked lips like she’s trying to talk. I lean my ear close to her.
“When you see Mutti, tell her I’m sorry. I only did what I did to scare her like she scares me and Daddy sometimes.”
When you’re hired to kill someone, the last thing you want is to have to give them absolution. You want them dead fast, not lying there asking you to be their therapist. Worse, you don’t want to hear anything that might make you feel sorry for them. I don’t want Eleanor’s mommy trauma in my head. She’s a monster just like me, but I want her to be a dead monster like her friends. She lets go of my leg and gives me a Say Good Night, Gracie sigh. A couple of minutes ago, I wanted to stick her on a spit and toast marshmallows on her while she burned. Now I cover her eyes with my hand and get out the black knife.
“Don’t move.”
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Ginger Clark, Diana Gill, Holly Frederick, Sarah LaPolla, Nicola Ginzler, Suzanne Stefanac, Paul Goat William, and Pat Murphy.
Thanks to Lustmord, Controlled Bleeding, The Germs, Tool, and Les Baxter who provided most of the soundtrack for this book. Also Zamfir for “The Lonely Shepherd,” the best spaghetti western theme that’s never been used in a spaghetti western.
Thanks also to the folks at Borderlands Books and Mysterious Galaxy for their support.
ALSO BY RICHARD KADREY
Sandman Slim
Copyright
Songs quoted.
Ballad of Thunder Road
by Don Raye and Robert Mitchum
© 1958 Universal MCA Music, ASCAP. All rights reserved.
I’m Waiting for the Man
by Lou Reed
© 1967 Oakfield Avenue Music, Ltd. (BMI). Rights for Oakfield Avenue
Music, Ltd. (BMI) administered by Spirit One Music (BMI). All rights reserved.
KILL THE DEAD. Copyright © 2010 by Richard Kadrey. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferab
le right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN 978-0-06-171431-3
10 11 12 13 14 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
EPub Edition © 2010 ISBN: 9780062066640
About the Author
RICHARD KADREY has published four novels, including Butcher Bird and Metrophage, and more than fifty stories. He has been immortalized as an action figure, and his short story “Goodbye Houston Street, Goodbye” was nominated for a British Science Fiction Association Award. A freelance writer and photographer, he lives in San Francisco. His dramatic, primarily fetishistic photography can be found at www.kaosbeautyklinik.com.
www.richardkadrey.com
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Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SANDMAN SLIM. Copyright © 2009 by Richard Kadrey. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.