Chapter Two
“You’re Eddie Marlowe, aren’t you?”
“Get away from me, man!” Eddie yelled.
Mike heard the words in one ear and tried to ignore them, focusing on the blazing pyre that had once been Butcher’s roadhouse.
Jim jumped into the door of the inferno and slashed at the lizard with his sword, driving it back again into the fire. Twitch slapped at Adrian’s face with the back of his hand and tapped him on the forehead with his club-like drumstick, and they were all in the way of Mike’s shot. For a split second, Mike thought about just shooting himself then and there. But he was too rattled from seeing Chuy and from the other strange events of the evening, and not nearly drunk enough, so instead he turned to see what was happening at the van.
It was Shiny Shoes. The shoes weren’t so shiny any more, and he was scorched from head to foot. He held his hat in his hand, burnt black, and he looked like he was begging. Firelight danced in the high sheen of sweat all over his head, making him look feverish and fanatical.
“Please, Mr. Marlowe, I know it’s you. I’ve seen videos, and I know what you can do. I’m here, look, I’m here even with all this—” he gestured at the burning building. “Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“It tells me you’re crazy,” Eddie muttered. “Get the hell outta here.”
Mike had to agree with Eddie. With all the insane, impossible things happening tonight, the absolute craziest might just be this guy who stuck around through it all so he could talk to Eddie. What on earth could the guy be thinking? Irritating maricón.
“I want to sign you, Mr. Marlowe, I’m an agent. I can book you with the Rolling Stones tomorrow.”
Even crazier. Mike shook his head.
The lizard howled again. The sound made Mike’s hair stand on end, and his stomach churned like he might throw up again. He didn’t know what Eddie was doing, he couldn’t help Adrian, he couldn’t get at the beast without running past Jim into the fire. He was helpless.
Eddie dove with both hands into a dog-eared cardboard box, rummaging. “I didn’t send video to any agents,” he complained.
“You didn’t have to,” Shiny Shoes said, sweating. “Some kid filmed you in Montreal last summer, when you did Flight of the Bumblebee on tambourine. They put the clip of you on YouTube.”
“Damn Internet!” Eddie gruffed.
“Look, I—”
ROAR!
Whatever it was Eddie Marlowe was trying to do, Shiny Shoes the agent was getting in his way. Mike stepped forward and slapped the pistol against Shiny Shoes’s forehead. “The man said no!” he yelled.
Shiny Shoes dropped his hat and stared up at the barrel of the pistol, which made him look cross-eyed. “Are … are you signed with someone else?” he ventured.
“Yes!” Eddie shouted. Only his feet stuck out of the Dodge door now. “Go away!”
“Wh-who?”
Mike pointed his pistol at the sky and fired off a round. “He’s signed with me!” he shouted, and then poked Shiny Shoes in the cheek with the smoking muzzle.
“Ouch,” Shiny Shoes whined, and started to back away.
ROAR!
Mike risked a look over his shoulder. Twitch was dragging Adrian to his feet, but the organist lay as limp as a stringless marionette.
“Got it!” Eddie scooted out of the van, holding up a bandolier—
hung like a cluster of grapes with hand grenades.
Shiny Shoes turned to run. “You haven’t heard the last of me!” he called. “I’m not giving up on you, Mr. Marlowe! I’ll be back!”
Mike watched the would-be manager run, and movement caught his eye. In the sky, over Shiny Shoes’s head. Something shimmering and metallic, but moving through the air. It was like someone was out flying remote control toy airplanes, Mike thought, in the middle of the night on a deserted New Mexico highway.
“Fire in the hole!” he heard Eddie shout behind him as Shiny Shoes disappeared, and then he remembered.
“My bass!” Mike shouted, and wheeled around. Eddie lobbed a grenade neatly over Adrian and Twitch, bouncing it off the ground beside Jim’s feet and landing it neatly in front of the jaw-snapping lizard-lion.
Jim spun about and sprinted.
KABOOM!
The beast disappeared back into the flames roaring and spitting, and pieces of concrete launched into the air like mortars—
“My bass!” Mike shouted again, impotently—
crash!—
and a chunk of cheap masonry smashed down in the center of the Impala’s roof, crashing through the front seats, driving a hole through the floor of the car and kicking out a cloud of dust and sand as it plowed to rest in the ground underneath.
“My car,” he groaned.
“We got bigger troubles than that,” Eddie said, jerking open the shotgun door of the van as he threw the bandolier over one shoulder. He pointed into the darkness. “Zvuvim. Keep an eye out for the Baal.” From a pocket in the door, he pulled out, of all things, a shotgun. Twelve-gauge, sawed-off. Mike swallowed back the urge to throw up again; a lot of working bands carried some protection, but he’d never seen anyone like these guys.
“Keep my eye on the ball?” he snorted. “What ball?”
Eddie chuckled. “All of them.”
Jim raced in the direction Eddie pointed, sword up. Beyond and above him, the things that Mike had thought might be remote control airplanes were coming in. But they weren’t airplanes.
They were flies.
Flies the size of Dobermans, with clacking, scythe-like front legs and jaws. They were black and dusty-looking, except for huge eyes that glittered like clusters of Christmas tree ornaments, and enormous jagged mandibles that gleamed like steel and clacked together as they flew.
“Cagado,” Mike observed.
“Zvuvim,” Eddie said, as if that made any kind of sense at all. “They can be killed.”
“They can?” Mike asked weakly. “By what? Giant flypaper?”
“Also, they’re kind of stupid until the Baal actually gets on the scene. Twitch!” Eddie shouted. “Get Adrian up now, we need daylight, pronto, or we’re dead meat!”
“I’m on it!” Twitch called back.
“Dead meat?” Mike gulped. “I thought you said they could be killed.”
“They can,” Eddie said, “but there’s an awful lot of them.” He pumped the shotgun, raised it and fired, blasting one of the giant flies out of the air before it could jump on Jim’s back. He stepped forward, pumping the weapon again.
Jim slashed with his sword, backing in a constant quick circle as flies swarmed him like a herd of flying black murderous sheep. He looked like he was trying to scratch them with his blade, rather than impale them, and that made sense to Mike—if the big guy got his weapon stuck inside one fly, the others would pile onto him. A fly zoomed in too close, biting for Jim’s knee, and the big guy flipped forward, cartwheeling right over the creature as it missed.
“Twitch!” Eddie called, and aimed at one of the Zvuvim.
Boom!
The shotgun blast shredded the giant fly like a piñata, throwing black flesh and steel shards in all directions.
Mike looked over at Twitch, and then shook his head to clear it before looking again. He would have sworn that the drummer was a man, but from this angle, Twitch looked more feminine than he … she … did before. And he clearly had breasts.
She.
“Come on, Adrian,” she said, and she leaned over the boxy organist and her hair fell around them both like a veil. “There’s no one here but you and me, you handsome devil, and I need you to cast a little spell.”
Mike shook his head. He’d lived with some pretty odd things in his life, sure. He’d been a gangbanger and a thief as a kid, he’d seen death and he’d caused it, and he’d lived all his adult life with a ghost who tormented him and drove him to constant drinking. That, he knew, was more strangeness and darkness than most people ever encountered in their entire lives, and it was enough strangeness and darkness to push him to the edge of suicide. But the step from his brother’s ghost to the events of this evening—the swords and guns, the grenades, the gender-ambiguous drummer, the giant fire lizard, the silver horse, the flies as big as wolves—was a giant leap, like the NASA guys might have said.
But the flies were headed his direction, and suddenly Mike found that he didn’t want to die, not really. Siding with the band seemed like his only shot. Mike raised the pistol and started firing.
“Come on, lad,” he heard from Twitch.
KABOOM!
Another grenade went off, its concussion waves staggering Jim but throwing a carpet of flies off his body.
Mike heard a chittering and a buzzing sound behind him, and he spun, still firing. He should have counted his bullets, he thought as he plugged a fly right between its thousand-faceted eyes just as it was about to plunge steel mandibles into Twitch’s back. Oh, well.
Adrian sat up. “Twitch?” he asked. He seemed lucid, but the way he looked only at Twitch despite the fury and chaos all around him gave Mike the impression that the organ player was stoned.
Bang! Mike blew away another … Zvuvim?
ROAR!
A loud crash on the far side of Butcher’s warned Mike that the big ugly thing inside had probably smashed down the back wall and freed itself. Any moment, it would be in the parking lot and after blood.
KABOOM!
Another grenade exploded, followed by a series of shotgun blasts.
“Ah, Adrian, you big handsome lunk. I’ve got you alone at last, and isn’t it sweet and quiet here in the meadow?”
Mike would have scratched his head in puzzlement, only he was too busy shooting giant flies. He blew away a second, and then a third, and then—
click.
“Fundillo!”
He jammed the empty gun into his pocket, resisting the urge to throw it away. The open side door of the Dodge van caught his eye, and he lurched over to look inside.
“I do like a picnic,” Adrian said. He didn’t sound dazed or crazy, but his words were totally nuts. Or stoned. “Where’s everybody else?”
The inside of the van was a mess, clothes and crumpled food cartons and maps and coffee cups, and in the back he saw the head of a bass guitar poking up behind the seat. And there were weapons.
Lots of weapons.
Mike grabbed the nearest thing, which was a long-barreled silver revolver, like you’d see in a Clint Eastwood film, Mike thought. He spun the cylinder once to be sure it was loaded, then turned—
and a fly crashed into his chest.
He fell backward, slamming into the side of the van and tumbling to the ground. He couldn’t aim, but he fired—
Bang! Bang!
The giant fly stank like sulfur and its flesh was dry and gnarled. Cold steel cut into Mike’s shoulder as it bit him.
“Aaagh!” he screamed, and tried to bring the pistol to bear on the thing. The gun’s barrel was too long, and he couldn’t get it properly aimed at the fly, but he managed to jam one elbow up under the bug’s mandibles and hurl it away a couple of feet.
It swarmed back at him and he kicked it with both feet, like a mule, knocking it further away.
It rushed a third time and Mike rolled under the van.
“You’ll see everyone else,” he heard Twitch tell Adrian. “They’re all here. Only it’s dark, isn’t it? Why don’t you cast a little spell, nothing hard, just a little light for us to see by, so we can continue our picnic?”
The fly hit the gravel where Mike had been. It bounced off and for a moment he hoped it would go away, but almost immediately it landed … stayed down … turned … and looked at him. He gulped, trying to scuttle backward on his belly without dropping the pistol.
“I can summon daylight,” Adrian said. “I’m good at that,” he frowned, “so long as nothing interferes.”
The giant fly skittered forward. Beyond the fly, behind Twitch, Mike could see something approaching. It looked like it had feet, might even be a man, but if it was a man then he was covered in swarming flies, like bees around a hive.
“And what could possibly interfere?” Twitch asked.
The fly sprang for Mike’s head—
bang!
He shredded it, spattering the underside of the van with its withered, husk-like bits. An explosion of bitter black dust, like gunpowder, made Mike’s eyes sting and water. He coughed and slapped at his face, trying to clear his eyes, but he kept moving.
Mike rolled out from under the van. He had a bullet or two left, he was sure, and he raised the revolver, blinking away tears as he stumbled toward the fly-covered man.
Only it wasn’t a man. It was man-shaped, but at least eight feet tall. It stank of rotten meat, and when the curtain of flies parted Mike could see that its flesh was the dusty black of a beetle carapace, mottled with gray. Its head was three times too large for its body, with fly-like eyes and tusks like an elephant.
It stepped toward Twitch and Adrian. Mike didn’t hesitate.
Bang! Bang! Click.
With each shot, the cloud of flies shifted and the monstrosity stepped back slightly, but it didn’t fall, and it didn’t bleed.
And then it turned to look at Mike.
“Mierda.”
“Per Isidem lux!” Adrian called. He sounded cheerful, like he really was at a picnic, and he waved his hands, in one of which he held a bit of glass.
The parking lot was suddenly full of light. It didn’t come from anywhere, it just was. And it was the warm and yellow light of day, which was really damn weird, since the sky above still glittered with diamond-like stars in a field of midnight black, but Mike’s shadow underneath him looked like the shadow he’d cast at high noon. The high sandstone butte above Butcher’s that had been a dark shadow before was now a wall of brilliant red.
Raaaaraaaraarrrghhhhh! shrieked the fly-covered giant.
“Isn’t that nice?” Twitch said to Adrian, and pulled his head to her shoulder.
The fly-giant staggered back, swiping at the flesh of its own arms and chest with big, razor-sharp talons. Mike rubbed his eyes to make sure he wasn’t seeing things—the swarm of little flies on the big guy’s body looked like they were melting off. He—it—whatever, lurched away, trying to find the darkness again.
Mike stumbled around the van to the open door and looked for something else to shoot with, or more bullets for the semi-automatic or the revolver. He was interrupted by Jim and Eddie running up behind him.
“I’m almost done here,” Twitch said, and she sounded drained and weak.
“Load in,” Eddie said. The guitarist grabbed Adrian by one shoulder and yanked him to his feet. Mike noticed that Eddie seemed to have a drifting eye, or some kind of nervous fidget. One of his eyes, anyway, seemed to slide sideways as he manhandled Adrian, and then the guitar player shuddered.
“Hey!” Adrian objected. “Twitch and I were having a conversation. A private and personal conversation.”
“Idiot.” Eddie threw the organist onto the back seat of the van. “Hold on, Twitch,” he said.
Mike looked around the gravel lot. Butcher’s burned in a yellow bubble of light. Just beyond that bubble, Mike could now see that the darkness fell, and in that darkness swarmed flies. “Jeez,” he said.
Jim leaped into the driver’s seat of the van, shoving his rapier in beside the seat.
“Good luck,” Eddie said, and grabbed Mike’s hand to shake it. “I’d give you your share of the night’s take, but I don’t have it. By now, it’s probably burnt to a crisp. I suggest you hide.”
“My car,” Mike said stupidly. If they left him, he’d be sober and alone and without a loaded gun. He found that he didn’t want to die, but he really didn’t want to die nibbled to pieces by gigantic flies.
Twitch staggered over to the van and threw herself in, flopping onto the middle seat and swaying back and forth.
“Where we’re going, it only gets worse,” Eddie said. He said it gently, like he was breaking a hard truth to a kid, but it was still a no, and it still meant Eddie was going to leave him alone in the desert. “Keep your head down here, you might just make it.”
“I need a ride,” Mike said. “I can’t be out here alone.”
Jim pivoted in the driver’s seat and stared at Mike. His eyes, Mike now saw, were the color of ice, so blue they were almost white. He stared at Mike intensely for several long seconds, and Mike felt that that big Viking was learning something intensely private about him. He felt naked.
ROAR!
Jim nodded to Eddie, held up a hand palm-first and fingers splayed apart, then started the van.
“Get in!” Eddie said, his tone one hundred percent changed, and shoved Mike with his shoulder to help make it happen. The man was all skin and bone, but he had a gift for leverage, and Mike found himself sitting in the van and the door sliding shut before he could say anything else.
And beyond the door, blazing with blue and black fire and jetting tendrils of smoke from its cracked, dry skin, the lizard-lion beast turned the corner of the smoldering ruins, saw the van and charged.
Eddie jumped into the shotgun seat and slammed the door. “Hellhound at three o’clock,” he said to Jim, and started cranking down the window to bring his shotgun to bear.
“Hellhound?” Mike asked.
Jim punched the Dodge into gear and slammed on the gas. The van lurched left onto the two-lane highway and accelerated toward the edge of the bubble of daylight. The flies swarming in the darkness massed around and in front of the van, chittering and clattering at the edge of the light and waiting for their prey.
“Gone,” Twitch muttered, and she slumped against the window.
“Son of a bitch!” Adrian yelled. He sat bolt upright, staring at the Hellhound charging across the gravel.
“Keep it together!” Eddie shouted, and leaned out the window to fire his shotgun. Boom! One fly exploded, and its neighbors scattered, but the hole in the wall of demonic fly-flesh immediately sealed shut again. The fly-shrouded giant lumbered with long steps toward the asphalt. “Can you move the light?”
“Of course I can,” Adrian said. “If nothing interferes.” He patted his pockets and muttered.
The Hellhound was getting closer. Mike scrabbled around in the junk inside the van for a weapon and came up with a big curved Arabian Nights-style sword.
“Good!” Eddie shouted at him with an encouraging grin. “Open the door, and when it gets close, let the thing have it right in the eye!” He turned back to shooting at flies. He looked totally calm and relaxed, which contrasted sharply with Mike’s own feeling that the world had turned completely upside down.
Mike yanked on the door handle and pulled it back until it caught. The ground whipped past underneath him unnervingly fast. He wrapped one fist in his seatbelt, watching the Hellhound bound closer over gravel and then over sagebrush, while ahead the tusked giant moved to intercept the van on the highway—
thump!—
the van hit something, maybe a big rock, at the edge of the road, and careened off its wheels at an angle—
Mike slid halfway out the door, only catching himself by the hand he’d tangled up—
the Dodge sailed briefly through the air, and—
thud! crashed to the asphalt again. Twitch slid down the middle seat toward the open door and Mike moved to save her, jamming his body in the way. The leather queen bumped up against Mike’s hip before she could recover herself enough to grab onto the seat. She smiled at Mike.
She kind of smiled like a man, Mike thought.
“Hey!” Adrian yelled, clinging with both arms to the seat in front of him. “You can’t do that to a wizard! Stay on the road, Jim!”
Eddie blasted another fly and shrugged. “What do you expect from a guy born in the sixteenth century?” he laughed.
Adrian’s eyes bugged out like he was about to yell something back—
and instead, he passed out.
Like a snuffed candle, the daylight disappeared.
The van raced pell-mell into the seething cloud of flies, the Hellhound snapping at its rear tires.