“And Oxana?”
“She is family, too. She is like my favorite sister.”
It didn’t sound like that late at night, but I wasn’t going to quibble over definitions. We were skating around the edge of downtown, headed toward the apartment towers along the edge of the bay. Not every waterfront building in San Judas is a showpiece, and we were going to one of the non-showpiece type.
I hadn’t seen any sign we were being followed, so when we got there I parked in front of the building. We went up to the sixth floor on the world’s slowest elevator, then I knocked at number 68.
Cubby Spinks opened the door. She’s about sixty years old and absolutely round, with hair in a military crew cut and a tan like walnut furniture oil. The tan comes from sunning on the balcony all day during the summer, listening to baseball games, although by this time of year she had faded to a dull teak color. She was wearing her usual outfit, Bermuda shorts and a wife-beater T-shirt. “Bobby D!” she said. “Come on in!” She looked at Halyna and raised an eyebrow. “Wow,” she said in an extremely loud mock-whisper, “so you’re dating high-schoolers now. You told me that Parmenter kid was just business.”
Halyna looked at her, unsure of whether or not she was being made fun of. “Ignore Cubby,” I told her. “God ran out of senses of humor, so He gave her something else.”
Cubby’s husband Gershon appeared, dressed pretty much the same as his wife, except for the addition of an apron, and made his way gracefully through the piles of electronics boxes stacked all over the living room—no easy task, because he was even rounder than Cubby. “Hey, Bobby.” He extended a hand encased in a padded potholder. I shook it. “I’m just doing some satay under the grill. You and your friend want to stay?”
“Can’t, sorry, Gersh. This is Halyna. We need some new phones. Five or six, I’d say, just in case some get lost.”
We spent the next fifteen minutes or so waiting while Cubby and Gersh trolled through various crates. At last Cubby found what they’d been looking for. “Brand new,” she said, handing me the box. “Cheap, because all the instructions are in Serbo-Croatian. They fell off a truck in Belgrade, if you know what I mean. They’re totally clean, though.”
We haggled over price for a while, in a friendly way, which lasted long enough for the first of Gersh’s satay skewers to come out of the oven, the chicken just right, juicy and smelling divine. We had a couple, thanked the Spinkses, and then headed back downstairs.
“They are nice,” said Halyna. “Remind me of Ukrainians.”
“I’ll tell them you said so. I’ve known them awhile. They’re good people, that’s for sure. Cubby used to be in the Navy. I think Gersh was some kind of drug dealer back in the sixties.”
Halyna nodded. She wasn’t the judging type. I liked that.
We had almost reached the expressway when she said, “Oh, I know where this is! The apartment is near. Can you stop there? I want to get something.”
“Our old apartment building? Tierra Green? I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“It is important. That is the truth, Bobby. Please stop, just for one minute.”
That’s when I made my one, really bad mistake. I was immersed in planning mode, thinking out who should get the phones, where we would go if Caz’s place was compromised, and how I was going to deal with a summons from Heaven if I got one. In other words, I was distracted. “I guess,” I said. “But it has to be fast, and I’m not parking anywhere near the place.”
We stopped two blocks away on Hilton Drive, and I let Halyna out. I stayed with the car, sat low in the seat, and kept my eyes open. Although it was near the end of the working day and lots of people were on the sidewalks and streets, I didn’t see anything that worried me. But when Halyna hadn’t come back in fifteen minutes, I began to feel differently.
I left the car locked, with the new phones under the seat, and walked a casual route through the deepening twilight, back toward my old apartment building. I watched the place for several minutes, but although a few people went in and came out, I didn’t see anything that looked like serious trouble. Even so, I was holding my gun in my coat pocket and was just about to head in when Halyna appeared. She kept looking from side to side as she walked, a worried expression on her face, but she didn’t look hurt. I waited until she was out of sight of the building before I crossed the street to join her.
“Bobby!” she said when she saw me. “I saw one. I saw one man.”
“Hold on,” I said. “Not so loud. What man?”
“A man I saw before. Black Sun, the one with yellow hair. He was in the back of the apartment, I mean downstairs. I saw him from the window!” She looked far more worried than I would have expected from a woman who could probably turn most grown men into hamburger in any fair fight.
“Shit.” I was angry with myself, so worked up about Anaita that I had all but forgotten my neo-Nazi friends. I’d made it clear I wasn’t going to help them, and had probably fucked up their local operation pretty good by calling the police, but even if they just wanted to punish me for that, why were they hanging around an apartment I hadn’t visited for a long time? “We shouldn’t have come here, damn it. What did you have to get that was so important?”
She held up a rumpled brown paper bag, folded into a package the size of a hardcover book. “Letters from my sister.” She looked sad but defiant. “I could not leave these. She is the only one from my home I still care about!”
“Yeah. Well.” I didn’t really know what to say. I was angrier with myself than with her. “Just hop in and let’s get out of here.”
As we pulled out, I saw something skitter along the sidewalk near the car and disappear into the bushes. It might have been a squirrel or a cat, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t either of those things. I cursed, but I decided not to tell Halyna. Instead, I concentrated on making sure we weren’t followed.
It was getting dark and the commute was in full flow, so it took about twenty minutes to escape downtown Jude. I wasn’t going near the freeway at that time of day, so I took the bumper-to-bumper route along the Woodside Expressway until I could turn onto Middlefield. South of the expressway there’s a long belt of industrial buildings before you reach the edges of the Atherton district, and I thought we’d be able to get home faster that way. In most circumstances, I’d have been right.
The sky to the west had been red when we were on the expressway, but the sun had just dropped behind the hills, and in front of us the horizon had cooled to such a dark blue it was nearly black. The streetlights were on, but the sidewalks and buildings seemed largely deserted.
“It is too dark,” Halyna said abruptly.
“This part of town shuts down after five,” I said, but the Amazon had twisted in her seat and was staring into the back of the car.
“Bobby,” she said, “something is on the window.”
I slowed down and looked over my shoulder to see what she was talking about. It took a moment before I realized that the back passenger window on her side had gone black. Totally black, although I could see lights all around us through the other windows.
The wheel of the car bumped up a curb, and I had to look at where I was going, just in time to avoid ramming a soap-scribbled showroom window. I got back onto the road, narrowly avoiding a fire hydrant.
“Something is coming through the window,” she said, her voice shaky. “Like black snakes . . . !”
I looked back in time to see something squeezing through the top of the window, something dark and faintly shiny that had made itself almost as flat as paper to slide through the crack between window and doorframe. An instant later, the questing tendrils became a streaming, rubbery sheet, ribboning into the back seat like someone was pumping in liquid latex.
A tentacle of the dark, rubbery stuff whipped out and grabbed my neck. Another flopped over my eyes. Halyna screamed in surprise and kept screa
ming. I probably would have too, except the blob around my neck was now blocking my mouth as well. Whatever had crawled into the car seemed to have no shape, no bones or limbs, but I felt something sharp biting at my arm. And I couldn’t see. Did I mention that? Not good when you’re driving.
Still mostly blinded by the thing wrapped around my head, I jerked the wheel to the right and jammed my foot down against the accelerator. The Datsun leaped ahead and hit the curb again, this time so hard that I could hear the tire blow out. Then something like a giant fist rocked the entire car. The Datsun was way too old to have airbags, but the jelly-like substance that was currently smothering me kept me from going through the windshield.
The collision with whatever we’d hit had stunned the rubbery thing just enough for me to get my arm up and yank the slippery tendril loose from my eyes. The windshield was spiderwebbed with cracks but still intact. We had smashed into the side of a building; chunks of plaster and brick were piled on the ruined hood. Halyna was still screaming, but she was also struggling with the strands that had grabbed her.
I still didn’t have the slightest idea what we were fighting. It was ridiculously slick, shapeless, and definitely stronger than a human—that is, if it was just one thing. I grabbed at the tentacle or pseudopod or whatever the long, sticky thing was that had snared Halyna, and pulled hard, trying to get her free. Meanwhile, the thing began exerting itself to drag me into the back seat, where the dark, shapeless bulk of it still lay.
I was almost standing on the driver’s seat now: it felt like fighting a giant octopus, something immensely strong and slick, but with no actual shape I could make out. Luckily, my struggle distracted its attention enough that Halyna finally got the passenger door open and fell out onto the pavement. After a moment, she kicked her legs free and rolled a couple of yards away.
“Run!” I yelled just before the thing slapped another slithery arm over my face, but I didn’t have time to see whether Halyna had escaped because now something was also trying to eat its way into my chest. Using my legs as well as my arms, I finally managed to wrench the pseudopod loose from my face.
By this point I was nearly upside down in the driver’s seat. My unwanted passenger started to flow over me, and that didn’t seem like a good or healthy thing. I yanked a hand free, reached down to the floor, and grabbed the first item I could find, the bag of phones, then used it to bash the nearest rubbery arm as hard as I could. It knocked the blob-creature back a little, but didn’t discourage it much. The problem was that I was stuck half under the steering wheel, with no room to maneuver. I pushed myself around and toward the passenger seat until I could finally draw my gun. I fired straight into the thing, silver slugs, four or five as fast as I could pull the trigger. The noise was ear-splitting in the enclosed space but the shots did absolutely fuck-all, making several holes in the jelly-beast that quickly closed right up again, and some in the roof of my Datsun that didn’t.
I knew I had to get out of the car or I was dead. I didn’t know what this boneless monstrosity would do to me—the word “absorbed” flitted briefly through my imagination—but I knew it wouldn’t be good, so I dropped the gun and reached into the glove compartment, hoping to find something sharp to cut myself out of its grip. I was lying across both seats, gear shift poking my back and open passenger door only a foot away from my head, but the thing had wrapped itself around my legs, hugging like a python, while the rest of it tried to ooze over the seat and smother me, like two hundred pounds of lust-crazed gelatin.
I couldn’t find anything useful in the glove compartment, and every second of fighting one-handed brought me closer to destruction. Maps, a garage-door opener, all kinds of crap came tumbling out, me trying to figure out what they were by distracted touch. Pens, a road flare—a road flare! I tried to pull it toward me, wondering if fire might succeed where bullets failed, but the blob slapped at my head and arm with one of those flapping jelly tentacles and the flare flew out the open passenger door.
Now it was most of the way over the seat, its flabby bulk pressed against the dome light cover, and the only thing holding it away was my kicking legs. I reached out and found the bag of cell phones again. I started to beat the creature as hard as I could with it, over and over, but it was like punching the world’s biggest, nastiest gummy bear. Then it finally got between the driver’s seat and the ceiling and poured slowly down on top of me, the weight pushing my knees back against my chest. Then I saw the great, blunt knob of the nearest jelly arm begin to change.
It hardened, at least that’s how it looked—like ice forming on a windshield. The dark, rubbery material turned paler, almost white, then split. The pale bits were getting longer, sharper, a Moray eel’s mouthful of ragged fangs. I’m so fucked, was all I could think. Because this thing was growing teeth on the end of its arm.
I had just a half a second or so to prepare for getting my face bitten off, when something incredibly bright white and red shoved in from the passenger door. The limb with the new teeth jerked away from the glare, pseudo-mouth gaping. It even hissed. I think it did, anyway, though it might have been the flare that Halyna was holding.
The jelly monster retreated halfway into the back seat as the flare came near, flattening itself into a shape somewhere between a sunflower and a buzzsaw. I scrambled toward the passenger door. My automatic was lost somewhere under the seat, but I grabbed the bag of phones before I tumbled out onto the sidewalk, then kicked the door shut behind me.
We had crashed the car into the side of a big white building that said “Carquinez Auto Repair” in block letters along the top, but I didn’t think a mechanic was going to do us any good. The thing in the car was going crazy, thumping the windows until they were all cracked, making the small vehicle shake like a pudding in an earthquake. Halyna did her best to help me up. Her face was covered with bloody scratches. I grabbed the flare out of her hand.
Crash! A big, purple-black arm knocked a hole in the back seat window. The thing was already starting to ooze out the opening when I tugged open the gas tank cover. Thank God this car was old enough that the cover didn’t lock. I shoved the flare in, grabbed Halyna by the arm, and ran.
A white-yellow jet of flame jumped out of the gas tank, then a second later an immense whump of an explosion knocked us staggering. Pieces of metal and plastic began to rain down around us. When I turned, the Datsun was engulfed in flames, the new black paint bubbling, so that, for a moment, I could see bits of the old green paint beneath, then a second later those bits turned black too. Inside the car, the jelly monster thrashed in the flames for long moments before sinking down out of sight. I had a second or two to breathe, then a dark arm, flat as a ribbon, pushed its way out through the tiny space between door and doorframe, like something shat out of the Devil’s own Play-Doh Fun Factory.
Whoompf! Another explosion sent flames even higher, and the flattened, reaching arm straightened and then began to shrivel. A bit of the end dropped off and fell on the pavement where it lay, twitching. People were running toward us now from several directions, so I hurried forward and held the flare against the fallen piece of awfulness until it turned to greasy char.
“Fuck,” I said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck! My car!”
“Your car is fuck,” said Halyna sadly. She wiped a sweaty ringlet of red hair out of her eyes. Her face was ghost-pale. “Totally fuck. Now how do we get home?”
I could hear sirens in the distance, coming closer. The pyre of ashy black smoke had risen far above the building, and the flames reached almost as high. People could probably see my burning ride from every tall building in downtown Jude.
twenty-two
fortune’s favorite
BY THE time I’d finished dealing with the police and we got a cab home (or at least close enough to walk home, since cab companies keep records of where they drop you off) I was in about as shitty a mood as you’d expect. It wasn’t the loss of my car so much—well, yes, i
t was, because cars are expensive, and I was going to run out of money at this rate long before I’d planned—as the feeling that I’d dropped the ball.
While Oxana rushed off to find first aid for Halyna’s scrapes and cuts and bruises, I sat down and examined my own injuries in good light for the first time. Nothing too severe, but a number of weird bite-shaped traumas on my arms and legs.
“Okay,” I said. “Can anybody tell me what that was?”
Halyna and I had tried to discuss it while the police were there, but all she’d been able to whisper to me was that it was a “bug,” which made no sense, unless they were raising bugs in nuclear reactors these days.
“Black Sun gets them,” said Oxana on her way past with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. “Bird bug.”
“There is no such thing as a bird bug.”
“Not bird. Bear bug.” Halyna separated herself from Oxana’s ministrations. “That is the name. I have heard it. Bear bug.”
I stared at her for a long moment, then it clicked. “Bugbear. Not bear bug—bugbear. I’ve heard of those, too. But they’re not easy to summon.”
“Black Sun is very bad,” Halyna said. “We telled you. Told you. They have things like this they can call.”
I groaned. “Great. So not only do I have an angry goddess after me, the Black Sun Faction is now trying to kill me with vicious pudding monsters.” But it did seem strange. I’d never seen one of the four-limbed Nightmare Children before or even heard of them, but I knew a little about bugbears, and they were no small potatoes in the Monsters of Ancient Darkness category. How could a bunch of idiots like Baldur von Ridiculous and his merry band of racists call on something like that? And if they thought I had Eligor’s horn stashed somewhere, or just knew how to find it, why were they sending monsters to kill me instead of just following me?