Chapter Four
Forget the WWE or whatever those spandex-wearing, steroid-chugging, testosterone-poisoned prima donnas of the wrestling world are labeling their “sport” these days; the Ultimate Smackdown took place some six thousand years ago. According to the Old Testament, dude named Jacob got involved in a wrestling match that lasted all night. He was prepared to go longer but, when the dawn came, his unnamed opponent pulled a bogus move and dislocated ole Jake’s hip. Time and duration alone would have made the event worthy of the record books but that’s not why it’s remembered to this day . . .
The author of the Pentateuch is a little ambiguous about Jake’s opponent, calling him a “man.” The prophet Hosea later said Mr. Anonymous was an angel. Jacob, however, ups the ante by stating afterwards, “I have seen God face to face and lived.”
Maybe the tale grew with the telling: I can’t figure The Big Guy taking all night when an ordinary angel would have you in a sleeper hold before you could say “Samson does steroids!” And I could say that with some authority because I was getting my butt kicked. Or, for purposes of anatomical accuracy, my fist slammed back against the bar.
Don’t ask me how I wound up in this silvery-white . . . room? Space? Everything was indistinct and hazy . . . including how I got detoured out of my tunnel to the afterlife and into this generic, white space/waiting room with a—black bar? Counter top? Crossing arm? Whatever it was, it had a flat surface a foot across and appeared to be infinitely long, stretching into the distance to my left and right until it was swallowed up into the diffused milky distance.
Distant landscapes, however, were less important at the moment than the immediacy of my predicament. The angel wasn’t releasing me. My hand was swallowed up in his fist, my fingers lost in the ivory, ham-sized hand that kept me pinned at an uncomfortable angle. He leaned in close and hissed in my ear, “You shall not pass!”
I grimaced, wondering which was worse: the pain in my arm and shoulder or implications of this being some kind of supernatural roadblock.
“So what are you saying, Mikey?” I grunted. “Mama Cséjthe’s baby boy is destined for ‘warmer climes’?”
The angel I knew as Michael shook his head, his eaglelike visage flickering like a distant thunderstorm. “It is not your time, yet.”
“Could have fooled me,” I grunted, pushing back: I couldn’t really win; I was just trying to keep my shoulder from being dislocated. “Ten-ton truck comes out of nowhere and flattens my SUV with me inside . . .”
“You are not fated to die by accident.”
I shrugged. Half a shrug, actually, as my right arm and shoulder were effectively paralyzed. “Figured it wasn’t an accident when she came barreling up the off ramp at ninety miles an hour, though a flaming cop car, and kamikazed my wheels on the shoulder. Especially with Moira the Suspiciously Clueless Intern in the cab.” I shook my presumably ectoplasmic head. “Got to hand it to her. Timing the gas leak, rerouting the Agency calls to her cell phone and getting me to reveal my whereabouts, tipping off the available fangs to take me out—or at least slow me down and soften me up—and then using an eighteen-wheeler like the world’s largest sniper bullet.”
“You speak as if you approve of your own murder.”
“I admire the style and execution—no pun intended. Not too simple, not too convoluted. It beats undead doofuses—doofii?” I shook my head again. “It beats vampires of questionable intellect brandishing firearms and cutlery.” I grinned. “And you just used the phrase ‘your own murder’ in reference to me.”
“Nevertheless,” the glowing and glowering entity insisted, “you shall not pass.”
“Wowsers,” I panted, pressing back into his grip a little more vigorously. “Your delivery needs some work. You might want to check out The Fellowship of the Ring DVD. Sir Ian McKellen in the Mines of Moria really knows how to sell that line.”
He sighed. It was a most un-angelic sound. Not that I’d know: Mikey was the only angel I had ever met and my previous encounters had been brief and unenlightening. I didn’t even know which side he was working for or whether I was his pro bono freelance project.
“Look down,” he said.
The fog around my feet rolled back and I could see straight down into the ambulance.
“Hey,” I said, “an emergency vehicle with a sun roof!”
“And to think,” the winged being muttered, “I actually shared the blood of the Elohim with you at our last meeting . . .”
“Is that what that white stuff was? I was guessing the milk of human kindness.”
“Such a waste either way.”
Below me the paramedic was holding cardiac paddles in his hands and looking for a couple of unbloodied patches on my torso.
“You’re right,” I said. “Just postponed the inevitable.”
“You really do have a death wish,” Michael growled.
“Why does everybody assume I have a death wish? I’m just a pragmatist. I mean I know I’ve survived some pretty heavy damage these past few years with no scars to show for it—”
“No outer ones,” the angel muttered.
“You got something on your mind, Mikey?”
“Giving up is the coward’s way of dealing with grief.”
“Hey, screw you and the seraphim you flew in with! Nothing I do is going to make any kind of difference! Living, dying . . . the people I love are beyond my reach in this world. And the next!” I looked down and was surprised to see that I’d forced his hand back a good six inches. He looked surprised, too.
“You wanna bust my chops for my lack of enthusiasm? You go back and tell your boss that I’ve done everything that was required of me. I helped save the world but lost my wife and daughter. Twice. My unborn son. Lupé. Deirdre. Zotz. J.D. . . .”
“It’s not your time,” he said. “And you still have a purpose—”
“Says who?” I snarled. “You? The Big Guy upstairs?” I looked around. “Or maybe down the hall? Enough with the enigma! What’s the plan? Keep Cséjthe around to suffer a little longer because karma’s a bitch? Or are you guys asking me to suit up for another End of Days Bug-hunt? Because if it’s the latter, I’ve pretty much had it with being your cleanup boy! End of the world? Goody! My troubles will finally be over. Not the end of the world? I wasn’t around for Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot so I imagine you can manage without me!”
“A door is about to open,” he said abruptly.
I stared at him. “A door,” I said finally. “That’s it? A door will open? What does that mean?”
He cocked his head as if listening for permission to elaborate. “You must close the door before it opens,” he said finally.
“What does that mean? Close the door before it opens? Is that some kind of koan, like ‘what is the sound of one hand clapping?’ Because I know the answer to that one!” I demonstrated by snapping the fingers on my free hand. “See? So what is the sound of closing an unopened door? Or is this like when one door closes another window opens?”
He stared at me and his granite-like features seemed to soften. “You are angry because you are trying so hard to die now.”
“The hell!” I growled, freshly enraged. “It’s not a question of desire! At least not mine. And it’s not a lack of will, either! It’s Physics One-Oh-One! This kind of massive blunt-force trauma—there’s no way to heal fast enough to stay ahead of the biological cascade.”
“You are no longer human,” he said. “You’ve survived worse than this.”
I shook my head. “Maybe a couple of years ago. But everything’s changed now. My nanites got nuked by Cthulhu’s EMP-exit back to his own dread dimension. The necrophage has been compromised by my blood abstinence for most of these past two years.” I tried to pull my hand out of his smothering grasp. “So, let’s just get on with it. I’m tired. I want to go . . . home.” My voice almost broke on the last word.
“You mean Heaven?”
“Home,” I reiterated. “Where the heart is. Or belongs. What it yearns for.”
His expression was enigmatic. In other words, redundant.
“Sailor, sea,” I tried. “Hunter, hill?”
Below me the EMT had yelled “Clear!” and applied the paddles to my chest and side. I flopped “below” and twitched “above.”
Michael smiled. Well, the corners of his mouth twitched upwards a fraction. “You’re sparkling.”
“What—?” Sparkling wit? Sparkling personality?
“Look down.”
I looked. My stomach clenched and a wave of nausea rolled over me as I looked back down.
My bloody and battered carcass was sparkling like I’d been dipped in electrified glitter!
“Oh this is just wrong on so many levels!”
The angel released my hand. “Real vampires don’t sparkle,” he observed.
“Not. A. Real. Vampire,” I muttered as gravity began to pull at my legs. “No. Nonononono! Beam me up, Mikey . . .” The wave of nausea was followed by a tsunami of dizziness.
I fell down into darkness.
When I dream, New Orleans is still the New Atlantis.
Submerged some thirty leagues south-southeast from the shores of Arkansas and a hundred and twenty feet beneath the green waters of the New Gulf of Mexico. It is not The Big Easy after its Catholic-style baptism by Katrina but Dead Easy as it was after the Holy Roller twist-and-shout, hold-you-down-deep-under-the-water burial by Hurricane Eibon.
In my dreams multicolored fish still pass through the turnstiles of the Aquarium of the Americas some twenty fathoms down. They swim about the floating remains of the humans that bob along the surface of the great captured air bubble at the top of its glassy rotunda.
Justice for ten thousand overfed goldfish.
There are nights in this reality—the new now— when the survivors of Katrina toss and turn in their beds. The years peel back and they dream of levees collapsing like mud soufflés and black waters up to their armpits. Eventually they awake to a city still on the mend, a city that may always be on the mend.
But in my dreams The Big Easy is still the submarine city where the French Quarter is invaded by the amphiboid Deep Ones and engaged by an army of drowned vampires sent by the resurrected Captain Nemo to oppose them. They skirmish in slow-motion silence while sharks and octopi glimmer at the edge of my vision like prehistoric revenants. Around them the corpses of buildings have begun to soften and dissolve like the remains of the city’s once vibrant population.
And often, when I wake in sweat-soaked, tangled sheets, muddled with the nightmare memories of that other timeline, I wonder . . . are these dreams true portals to that other/where and other/when? The one next door to this “here” and this “now?”
Is there still a separate reality where the clock was not turned back and New Orleans was not saved?
Where it still lies deep and green and silent in the ocean’s revised embrace?
If so, does the war beneath the waves continue on? Does Dakkar still direct his troops from the Nautilus with Irena at his side?
And am I there, as well? My doppelganger self on the other side of the looking glass, still trapped in Alice’s Aquarium?
Or was that history completely unwound from the mainspring of Time, my sleeping visions nothing more than the random firings of misplaced memory neurons? Tattered hopes shuffled and patterned by my subconscious: the desire to redeem order from loss and chaos?
What of Lupé? And Deirdre? And the children—my unborn son and my reborn wife and daughter? Are they there as well? Do they play at hide-and-seek in the blue-green twilight behind curtains of foam and froth?
Or was Fand as good as her word, taking them between that world and the next? To that “deep romantic chasm which slanted down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover” that Coleridge described? Do they now dwell in wood and dale where sacred river ran to caverns of ice still measureless to man?
Or are they forever dead in this world and the next?
There has been no answer these past few years. All that I know is that I still have obligations. That, in the absence of answers, against the loss of love, in exile, there is still duty.
Till human voices wake us, and we drown . . .
“I think he’s coming around, Doctor.”
“Better not be. We’ve got at least four more hours before we can close and bring in the Ortho team.”
“I’m seeing signs of arousal.”
“Yeah, Jenkins, you’d be our expert on arousal.”
“I’m serious. I think he’s waking up.”
“So he’s sucking propofol like he’s sucking blood? Christ! Twenty units of O-Neg in one hour and I don’t know where the hell it’s going! Give him some more.”
“Blood or anesthesia?”
“Both!”
“I don’t know how much more prope to give him! He’s already had twice the optimum for his body mass!”
“Well, give him some more of something! Jenkins is right; he’s definitely wak—”
The doors of memory reopen.
As always my dreams are not dreams but rooms of the past where I have lived and loved.
And lost.
Here is the barn where a forced exchange of blood with an ancient horror poisoned what was left of my life and infected everything that was to follow.
And there is the morgue where I awoke after the car crash that killed my family—awoke to see the remains of my wife and daughter on the tables beside me, a post-mortem family reunion.
As I take the familiar tour through this labyrinth of horrors, I pass windows that offer momentary glimpses of the Now and its fresh parade of indignities.
“—losing him!”
“Maybe you should call it.”
“Not yet. Charge to two hundred. Clear!”
In this room I revisit the macabre puppet show orchestrated by a three-thousand-year-old necromancer against the people whose lives I loved more than my own.
“Nothing!”
“Charge to three hundred.”
There’s a high-pitched whine, like a gentle dentist drill. I feel tingly all over.
Sparkly.
“Clear!”
A buzz and a thump.
“What the hell!”
“Holy shit!”
“He’s—”
In that room, the demon Lilith who had blazed a trail of death and destruction around the globe and across the centuries until her designs to bring about the end of the world brought her to my back yard.
Once again, I lost an extended family.
My first attempt at full consciousness put me in a front-row seat for the Marquis de Sade Show. A team of Torquemadas wearing surgical masks were twisting long metal skewers into my leg. They were assisted by a torture device that consisted of four concentric metal rings that encased my right leg from ankle to mid-thigh and the sharp, metal spikes on each ring’s inner circumference were being driven through my flesh to anchor in my tibia, fibula, and femur.
It took longer than it should have for me to pass out again. Enough time to realize that sword-wielding vampires didn’t seem like such a big deal after all.
A deathless Dr. Josef Mengele and his army of cloned Nazis were next on the Cséjthe Nightmare Memory Tour, his Frankenstein construct lumbering through my last home like a jigsaw juggernaut of unholy hatred and sadistic glee . . .
Then there were tubes down my throat.
More than one; less than five. It hurt to scream so I stopped right away.
A woman wearing scrubs and a surgical cap loomed in my narrow field of vision. “You’re in Recovery. You’re not supposed to be awake, yet.”
I tried to apologize for waking up too soon. But there were tubes down my throat.
She wasn’t paying attention, anyway. She turned her head and called to someone. “Can we get more blood, here? He’s already out! Yes, agai—”
And, finally, the showdown with voodoo queen Marie Laveau and the mad monk Rasputin that sundered me from the last remnants of friends and family.
The supernatural storm that turned New Orleans into an underwater city.
And the departure of the ancient-before-time starship, carrying the giant, squid-headed alien god back to his own dread dimension, fracturing time as I knew it . . .
“. . . monitors! I want this patient hooked up to every possible monitor, telemetry device, and alarm that ICU has on the board and then bring in anything portable with the volume turned up! And put a goddamned fire extinguisher next the bed! In fact, make it two—”
A woman appears in fresh darkness.
Ancient. Something between grande dame and crone.
She wears a maroon, long-sleeved, ankle-length dress with white laced cuffs and high collar. A purple wrap drapes around her thin shoulders and an ebony broach stares from her throat like an alien third eye. She sits like a queen upon a gothic Victorian armchair, her withered hands grasp the carved claws at the end of the armrests like twins to the wooden appendages beneath.
Her hair is so white as to be nearly transparent and she has kaleidoscope eyes . . .
“Come with me . . .” Her voice is the whisper of the wind from a thousand winters. “. . . come against The Darkness. . . .”
A great and terrible funerary urn appears at the heart of a maze. The seals on its heavy, ornamented lid are flaking and the cap trembles as if from some great inner tumult . . .
I turn and flee toward the light.
It is a mistake. Pain thunders through my body and lightning flashes and cracks inside my skull. There is a fire and I try to reach for the alarm but I cannot move my arm. Then I realize that I am The Fire.
I rampage like Godzilla and set everything around me ablaze.
The world burns.
Darkness returns in a rain of cinders.
When I awoke again I was in two-thirds of a room. The room was white and too bright. It hurt my eyes. I closed them and my left eye felt immediate relief.
My right eye continued to burn and throb like the dying heartbeat of some great, ancient beast.
One arm seemed heavier than the other. Which one? Sleep returned before I could decide.
Shirley Temple wears Dorothy Gale’s pinafore and does not sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” W. C. Fields chews Emerald City scenery as The Wizard. A young Buddy Ebsen dresses up like Jed Clampett stuffed with straw—a true hayseed long before the Beverly Hillbillies. And Gale Sondergaard cavorts with the flying monkeys as a sexy Wicked Witch of the West—wrong and disturbing on more than one level!
Then another house falls out of the sky . . .
No.
Not out of the sky.
Comes out of nowhere.
Out of some otherwhere.
Gee, Toto; we’re not in Oz, anymore.
The fields are green and gold and trees dance in circles, spaced out from the house like points on a compass.
There are three stories here, two there, and possibly a fourth hidden among the puzzle box facade that combines Italianate, Romanesque, Victorian, Neo-Gothic, and Châteauesque styles with towers, turrets, pediments, arches, cupolas, quoins, a couple of balustrades, a hodgepodge of ashlar and rustication faces, random lancet, sash, awning, and stained glass windows. A single, octagonal tower rises like an ancient Roman lighthouse above a sea of wheat and soybeans.
The windows are darker than the unlit interior might explain but the vaulted doorway is bright with light, haloing a strangely familiar woman standing within.
Jenny.
My poor dead wife smiles at me and I began to weep as if all that has come before was merely prelude . . .
* * *
Someday the darkness would go on forever.
But not today, it seemed.
The darkness began to pulse and turned into a giant grey cell that proceeded to divide and re-divide, turning itself into multiple grayish blobs that oozed about and began to make noise. Gradually, the blobs resolved into hazed forms and fuzzed noise became articulated sounds.
I was in a hospital bed, in a hospital room, surrounded by monitors and IVs and machines whose purposes I couldn’t begin to guess at. I was attached to a number of devices via needles and shunts and electrodes and catheters. Somewhere in the distance, behind the boops and beeps and humming sounds of the forest of electronics, I could make out two voices in a whispered conference.
“He’s had another ten units this morning, alone!”
“He must be bleeding internally.”
“If he is, we can’t find it. His body just seems to be absorbing it like a dry sponge . . .”
I missed the rest as my focus was pulled to where my right leg used to be. It had been replaced by a giant, misshapen sausage that was suspended a few inches above the mattress by a couple of hanging slings. Surrounding the red, white, and purple monstrosity was a cage of metal rings and rods. Steel pins pierced my bruised and swollen flesh at frequent intervals and they should have hurt. The fact that they didn’t was even more disturbing. I remembered the name of the contraption, now: an Ilizarov apparatus, an external fixator used for treating complex bone fractures.
I also remembered the name for the pair of steel rings holding my left arm immobile.
Handcuffs.
One ring was locked around my wrist, the other around the safety rail of my hospital bed. I pulled on it and it made an unpleasant clattering sound as it slid up against the reinforced crossbar.
A face appeared between the EKG screen and the computerized morphine dispenser. Blond, blue-eyed, and dimpled, he smiled pleasantly enough and said, “Christopher L. Cséjthe; you’re under arrest.”
I closed my eyes and submerged again.
* * *
My sleep was finally dreamless and I awoke to a dream of peppermint.
Curvy peppermint.
The poke in my ear jumpstarted my attention and I refocused.
Red-and-white-striped jumper. Candy striper.
Taking my temperature with an electronic thermometer.
A scent of attar of roses and lavender soap.
Blonde hair. Grey eyes that strangely contrasted the smooth, lightly freckled features.
A veritable slinky chain of bracelets and arm jewelry that clinked and softly rattled as she puttered by my night stand. As I studied the ornaments that slid around her wrist she studied the two pairs of restraining bracelets that now cuffed each of my wrists to the stainless steel bed rails on either side of my mattress.
My fuzzy brain assembled the disparate images and compared the result to recent memories.
Maybe it was the five layers of pain that coated everything, including my eyelashes.
“You!” I exclaimed, remembering the nocturnal teen driving the red MG.
Actually, it came out more like a mumbled “yuh . . .”
An anachronistic oral thermometer was hastily produced and shoved into my mouth. She held it there so I couldn’t spit it out.
“If you want to get out of here alive,” she murmured, “you will do as I say.”
I tried to give her The Look.
Unfortunately, having one’s mouth pinched shut around a thermometer tends to undermine the intimidation factor. Plus, one of my eyes didn’t seem to be working. Being handcuffed to the bed didn’t help either.
“If you come with me,” she continued softly, “you will live. For a while longer, anyway. If you stay, you will be taken into custody and probably not live long enough to see the inside of a cell.”
Great: my would-be jailbait-rescuer from the night before was a government conspiracy theorist.
“If you come with me, you will have the chance to rescue your family. If you do not, this world may well fall . . . and the Daoine Sídhe will have no allies to resist the coming Dark.”
Okay. She had my attention, now.
“I will get you out of here if you do as I say. Do we have an understanding?”
It wasn’t like I had a lot of options for the moment: I nodded slowly.
“Good. Just relax for now but be ready to follow me when it’s time to leave.” She laid a hand across my throat as she withdrew the thermometer and made a pretense of reading it.
So what is your name? I asked.
Or would have asked if any words had actually come out of my mouth. There was a tingly numbness around my voice box.
“Is he really awake this time,” another voice asked, “or is this just another bout of semiconscious eyerolling?”
I rolled my head to the side and looked at another woman seated in a visitor’s chair by the window. She wore a dark suit over a white button-up shirt that was open at the collar. The side of her jacket was turned back just enough for me to see an inch or so of shoulder holster under her right arm. A leftie. Her whiter-than-white hair was layered in a short shag that was just two missed salon appointments away from an emerging mullet. Pale, ice-blue eyes gave the slight edge to pure Scandinavian-over-albino antecedents.
She stood up. And up. Long legs unfolded and she rose, clearing the five-foot mark while still bent at the waist. Five-four . . . five-six . . . five-ten . . .
Somewhere around the six-foot mark she stopped: a statuesque Swedish supermodel in a monochrome pantsuit.
Well, supermodel might be a bit overgenerous but she did have a gun and I felt it best to keep a deferential tone even if only in my own head for the moment.
She walked over to my bed and looked down at me. “You will live?” She almost sounded disappointed. She also sounded Swedish.
“Gee, I can’t tell,” I said sarcastically. “Seeing you, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.” Oops: this time words actually did come out of my mouth.
She smiled down at me. It was a nice smile until you noticed that it was totally disconnected from her eyes. “I want you to remember those words when the time comes.”
What did that mean? I raised my wrists the whole three inches that either pair of handcuffs would allow.
“The one on your right wrist is mine. I don’t know who cuffed your left.”
I sighed and rolled my head to work out the beginnings of a serious neck kink. The TV swooped into view as I did a half shrug. Arnold Schwarzenegger was on the screen, standing behind a podium with the presidential seal on it. The set was a pretty faithful recreation of the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House West Wing but the dialogue seemed pretty dull for an action flick. “What are we watching?” I groused. “Comedy Central?” Getting killed and then waking up handcuffed to a hospital bed always puts me in a grumpy mood.
“Blame the previous reality star for amending Article Two of your Constitution. Perhaps you Americans would prefer to go back to electing lawyers for world leaders . . .” Stretch Blondstrong reached down for the bed’s channel changer. “Tell me what you would rather watch.”
Normally I would opt for the news but I had a feeling it would only make my headache a lot worse, right now. “I’m easy. How about switching it to Turner Classic Movies?”
She snorted. “Easy?” She shook her head. “And, I’m sorry, what kind of classic movies?”
“TCM.” Maybe I was mumbling. “Turner. Classic. Movies.” I enunciated slowly.
She stared down at me. “Sorry. Not familiar with that one. Though I am surprised you’re a fan of the classics given your reactions to The Wizard of Oz.”
“Funny,” I thought, “and here I just had a dream about The Wizard of Oz.” Then I realized that I had spoken my thoughts aloud. Again. Damn painkillers.
She shook her head again, muttering, “Painkillers . . .”
What? Did I say that out loud, too?
“I guess you were tripping pretty good last night,” she said. Another smile. This one didn’t touch her eyes, either. “It was on the television last night and you were critiquing The Wizard’s performance. You were pretty slurry but, from what I was able to make out, you seemed to be less than pleased with a fair number of the cast.”
Something cold and slimy slithered down my spine. “What?”
“You kept asking, ‘Where’s over the rainbow?’”
“Excuse me,” said a slightly more familiar voice. “Who are you and what are you doing in here?”
The slightly more familiar voice belonged to the blond, blue-eyed man with dimpled cheeks who had presumably belonged to the other pair of handcuffs. His suit was nearly identical to the Scandinavian supermodel’s, its major difference being the addition of an accessorizing dark tie. He was holding a Styrofoam coffee cup in his right hand so his reaction time was slowed as she turned and the flair of her jacket provided another peekaboo hint of a shoulder holster.
She got her gun out first, yelling, “Interpol!” while he chimed in with “Federal agent!” The coffee cup went flying but he was still several fractions of a second late in displaying his weapon.
Maybe it was steely nerves and professional reflexes. Maybe it was a mutual history of jurisdictional disputes. Neither one shot the other. There was, however, a protracted negotiation on how each other’s free hand would retrieve their badge and I.D. There followed a carefully choreographed mirror dance until each was simultaneously satisfied as to the other’s bona fides.
That settled, there followed an equally tense argument over who had jurisdiction over me.
Apparently the FBI was looking into my complex financial situation, expressing interest in my multiple identities and offshore accounts. Tax fraud? Terror funding? Conservative voting record? The I.R.S. was freezing all of my accounts and assets until they could fully investigate a series of anonymous tips that had come in over the past week.
Interesting . . . that undead learning curve had just become a parabola. The New York demesne had finally figured out that guns and swords and even semis weren’t sufficiently deadly: Now they were going to whack me with government bureaucracy. It wasn’t a bad strategy: I had bested every supernatural threat they had thrown at me so far.
The Internal Revenue Service was a lot scarier.
Hopefully Diggs was relaxing on a beach someplace where there were no extradition laws.
We were just getting to Interpol’s stake in all of this when a killer nurse walked into the room.
There’s a scene in Quentin Tarantino’s pulp movie classic Kill Bill where assassin Elle Driver walks into a hospital room to murder the movie’s heroine. Like that one-eyed member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, my nurse was wearing the white cap, uniform dress and stockings, and matching white eye patch. The big difference was Daryl Hannah had still been a stunner at the age of forty-two when she played the role. My nurse looked at least forty-two years past the mandatory retirement age. And her eye patch lacked the sporty little embellishment of a tiny Red Cross appliqué—though it was a detail easily lost amid the seamed and wrinkled features of her dried-apple face.
She was holding in her right hand what, in the medical lexicon, is known as a “Big-Ass Syringe.” She shuffled toward my bed and, for a moment, the movie memory of Elle Driver was replaced by Snow White’s evil queen disguised as the elderly hag. Only a poisoned apple would be a lot less intimidating than the giant needle that seemed to grow an inch with every step that she advanced.
And it seemed all the more ominous as the room had gone quiet.
“Excuse me,” a voice said finally as Nurse Leatherface closed within five feet. “But what’s wrong with this picture?” It was Ms. Interpol.
She was answered by her armed and badged counterpart: “You mean the fact that all of the other nurses in this hospital are wearing scrubs?” Then he nodded at the girl on the other side of my bed. “Or that no one’s worn a candy striper outfit like that outside of a bad porn movie since 1987?”
The syringe never wavered as it came closer and closer: Maybe the old woman was half deaf in addition to the eye patch. She reached toward the injection port on my IV as a hand fell on her humped shoulder. “Excuse me, ma’am . . .” FBI Guy said.
With a shriek, the ancient nurse turned under the blond man’s arm and slammed the syringe into the center of his chest. As he stumbled backward with the force of the blow, the tube turned dark red with heart’s blood and the plunger erupted from the end, sending gouts of crimson splashing across the room. He collided with Agent Sultry on his way to the floor and they both went down.
I tried to roll away as the old woman turned back toward me but the handcuffs barely allowed more than a twitch. Her fingers curled claw-like as she raised them in a menacing manner and her nails were long and ragged, thick as horn and discolored with great age. They looked like they could gouge through wood and sheetrock.
Another hand intruded. Caught the left withered arm by the wrist.
“Why, Deino,” the candy striper said sweetly, “fancy meeting you here!”
The old woman’s eye widened. “Σκατά!” she snarled.
Don’t ask: It was Greek to me.
Then Candy Stripe punched Nightmare Nurse in the face and tugged the eye patch over to cover her good eye. The other eye socket was as empty as an ancient and endless cavern.
The old woman shrieked again—more panic than malice this time—and began flailing about.
Candy Stripe stepped back, pulled a bobby pin out of her hair, and went to work on my handcuffs. She had me free of the first pair just as the creepy crone got her patch readjusted. The Interpol agent was on one knee, now, her right hand pressed to the FBI agent’s bloody chest, her left hand bringing her gun up to bear on his assailant. “Don’t—” she started to say and was interrupted by the arrival of a couple of nurses, an orderly, and a doctor.
All of whom were wearing scrubs.
And blocking her shot.
The Wicked Witch of the Ward turned back toward me and rushed the bed.
Candy Stripe tripped her.
The old woman was tough; she stumbled but didn’t go down. The girl jumped on her back and grabbed at her face. Crazy Crone went from shrieking to a full-on imitation of a tornado siren and flung her tormentor away. Serendipitously, it was in the direction of my bed where I was trying to figure out how to unlock the second set of cuffs while keeping an eye on the insanity around me.
“Here, let’s trade,” she said breathlessly, taking control of the bobby pin and dropping a gelatinous spheroid into my cuffed hand.
I stared down at the object.
It stared back.
I was holding the old crone’s eyeball.
“The hell?” I asked, almost shrieking, myself.
“No, but close,” she muttered, the pink top of her tongue peeking from the corner of her mouth as she moved the metal pin around the keyhole. “Would’ve been a lot closer if Enyo had showed up . . .”
“Wait . . .” I put my free hand to my head. Concussion? “Enyo? You called her Deino.” I shook my head. Nothing seemed to come loose. “What are you saying? That she’s one of the Graeae?” The eye seemed to roll in my palm as if to look over at its former owner.
“The operative phrase is ‘one of,’” she grumbled as the pin turned against something and the steel bracelet popped open. “We’ve got to go! Now!”
It was a lot to process in such a short time. And the meds weren’t helping. “Give me a moment,” I said.
Actually, considering my shattered right leg, I was going to need more than a moment. I began pulling out IVs and assorted shunts and ports.
While the downed FBI agent was hustled out of the room by staff reinforcements, a nurse and an orderly approached the blind hag who was still freaking out. The orderly went flying across the room. The nurse went sliding under my bed and came to a softer stop against the far wall.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Stop that right now!”
My command had all of the weight of a political campaign promise.
“Who wants to watch me squish this eyeball?” I asked more quietly.
The whole room went still. The crone, suddenly frozen in place, slowly turned toward me.
“That’s better,” I said. I waved off the blonde with a gun when she took a cautious step toward the old woman.
“Give me the eye and I’ll let you go,” Deino hissed.
“Yes you will,” I agreed, “and you’ll do more.”
“Christopher Llewellyn Cséjthe,” Candy Stripe murmured, “we need to leave before her sisters show up!”
I blinked. She knew my middle name? No one knew my middle name!
“Come on!” she urged. “The Liar, The Bitch, and Needs-a-New-Wardrobe will be here any minute!”
“I promise to let you go for now,” the old witch elaborated, “and upon our next encounter I will give you a swift, merciful death rather than a protracted and painful ending.”
“How about I just stomp on this thing and reduce the chance of our next encounter to just about nil?”
“Then you would have to go through us,” said a new voice from the doorway.