“Yes. You. That’s right. Please come up and join me.”
Diogo takes a couple of more steps and stops.
“Don’t do it, kid,” I say.
He looks at me.
“Diogo,” says Hattie.
He’s frozen in the middle of the room. His dim brain is overloading.
Ferox looks annoyed.
“Bring the pig up here,” he says.
Shoggots grab Diogo and drag him, kicking and screaming, up the catwalk.
Hattie and the boys don’t do anything. They’re paralyzed. I reach for the Colt but decide to wait it out. Even with hoodoo, I don’t know if I can take on this many crazies at once.
A couple of Shoggots hold Diogo as Ferox raises the kid’s right arm.
“If I remember correctly from my reading, the technique was like this. A single deep curved slice, severing the skin and connective tissue in one cut. Let’s see if I’m right.”
He draws the blade across Diogo’s biceps, digging deeper into the skin until the Liston disappears inside. He draws it all the way around so that both ends of the cut meet. Diogo screams and thrashes in the Shoggots’ arms. When Ferox is finished they let him go. He falls onto his face and vomits over the side of the catwalk.
Hattie holds on to Doolittle’s arm, whispering over and over, “My boy. My boy.”
“Not bad for a first time, don’t you agree?” The other Shoggots nod and grin. The ones with lips, at least. “We neglected to bring a saw, so we’ll have to go through the bone later. Tie off his arm so he doesn’t bleed to death. Leave the travelers for now. Bring me the other boys.”
“No!” Hattie shouts.
Ferox points at her with the Liston knife.
“I told you not to come back here, Hattie.”
I pull the Colt and take two quick shots at Ferox. The first just misses and he hits the deck before the second can get him. Two Shoggots on my level rush me and I put a bullet through their foreheads. Out of the corner of my eye I see vials fly by as Vidocq throws his potions. Candy blasts away with her folding pistol while Brigitte takes careful single shots. Delon has disappeared into the back with Father Traven. It looks like his gun is jammed.
Ferox whispers an incantation and deflects Candy and Brigitte’s shots into the ceiling. So the Shoggots are Sub Rosa. I was afraid of that. Ferox tosses a ball of white-hot plasma at Doolittle, burning him from the inside like he’d swallowed a pound of phosphorus. A group of Shoggots knocks Hattie down and drags away the rest of the boys as they scream, “Mama!”
I bark some Hellion and send a stream of fat, needle-sharp projectiles at Ferox. He sees them coming and suddenly his arm looks like a skinny porcupine when he raises it to block the needles.
This time he throws a plasma ball at me. I deflect it with some defensive hoodoo and knock it into a big Shoggot rushing at me with Diogo’s ax.
Before I can go after Ferox again, a couple of nearby Shoggots throw their own flashy hoodoo my way. Muscles split open beneath the open cuts in their arms and shoot out at me like quivering pink tentacles. I blast one of the tentacle throwers with the same needles I used on Ferox, catching him in the face. Another tentacle latches on to my Kissi arm and pulls hard enough to knock me off balance. I grab the black blade from under my coat and slice through the muscle in one blow. The Shoggot screams and is joined by two more.
All three hammer me with hexes. I can barely throw up enough of my own defensive hoodoo to keep them off me. I can’t see Candy or any of the others anymore. I think they’ve been pushed back behind me to the door.
I pocket the knife and grab the na’at. Swinging it out like a sawtooth bullwhip, I take out two of my attackers. But three more join the fight. Even in the arena I never went up against this many armed fighters at once.
On the catwalk I catch a glimpse of Ferox hexing rubble, tossing it at me like hundred-mile-an-hour fastballs. I bob and weave, trying to keep off the nearby assholes, when a piece of brick slams into my ribs. I slip and go down on one knee as more debris hurricanes around me. Another brick slams into the back of my head. The nearby Shoggots keep up a stream of blasts. I can’t catch my breath, trying to keep up with them. Blood runs down the side of my head and into my eye. It burns and blinds me on one side. I turn just in time to see a pipe flying at me. And the world goes dark.
I’M LOST. I’M not sure if I’m in Hell, L.A., or Kill City. It feels like I’m in the arena. I’m hunting something and I’m being hunted. I’ve seen the water and the smokes they left behind. But this doesn’t look like the arena. Concrete corridors alternate between long straight lines and sharp turns left and right that double back on themselves. Shit. I’m in a maze. I was just in one of these, wasn’t I? Something like it. I was definitely lost, with something on my tail and closing fast.
Whoever is behind me doesn’t feel human. Even if it was a Lurker, I’d pick up breathing or a heartbeat. Maybe it’s an angel. Maybe Aelita? Maybe Medea Bava has learned some hoodoo to hide her breath and heart so I can’t see her coming.
Maybe it’s simpler than that. I can’t detect what’s behind me because what’s behind me isn’t alive. What is it, then? Vampires? Is Tykho here to take the 8 Ball from me? I doubt it. She’s subtler than that. Maybe it’s Paul. Paul and Trevor and all their mechanical brothers.
Imagine all of L.A. filled with windup men wandering empty-headed and waiting for orders and directions and purpose. That’s L.A. in a nutshell. A city of driven creatures, but no one is a hundred percent sure what they’re driven toward. Wealth. Fame. Power. Love. Revenge. These are all the obvious end points for the citizens of a spectral city, but none of them quite encompass a final goal. That’s more fragile. Something that slips away like smoke the moment it’s in your hands. It’s a moonshine cocktail of desperation and desire, the certainty that you can find perfection through sheer willpower and the cold terror that if you do reach the goal it will have twisted into something new. A new fevered need born of the search for this one. Searching for the next goal will breed another. And on and on. L.A. and Kill City full of Pinocchios with whirring gears for brains, all wanting to be real boys but sunk in the certainty that they’ll never become anything because they’re nothing. They came from nothing and are headed for a further and harder nothing. Condemned by their own stupidity to end up buried deep underground with the losers, the dead, and other people’s trash.