Gods and Monsters: Unclean Spirits (18 page)

Frank finishes the bomb by adding a hunk of homemade plastic explosive. It stinks like someone chucked rotten eggs into a too-clean chlorinated pool. Dueling stenches. Cason blanches.

“The smell,” Frank says. “Yeah. Doesn’t bother me too much. It’s the potassium chlorate. It’s not real stable, so I had to make a fresh batch last night. And it ain’t like baking cookies.” He pauses, shrugs. “Though it is a little like making coffee. High-test horse-kick coffee.”

They stand in Frank’s apartment. Cason still doesn’t see a cat, but smells the animal just the same. Frank explained earlier: “She likes her privacy. She’s around here somewhere. Under the sink. In a toilet. Out in the hallway eating rats.”

“So this’ll work?” Cason asks, tossing a thumb at the bomb.

Frank rolls his eyes—and given the lack of eyelids, it’s a far more profound gesture when he does it. “Will it work? Are you seriously asking me if it’ll work? Please. Case-of-beer, c’mon. You’re talking to the Wolfgang Puck of god-killing bombs.”

“And yet I’m the one carrying the thing. So I want to know.” That was what they agreed upon: Cason doing the deed. “Why am I the one bringing the bomb, again?”

“Revenge. You got a right to it.”

“I’m happy however he gets blown to shit. Whether you’re holding it or I am.”

“Fine. Take a good look at me, then take a good look at you. I’m like a... man made out of tinker-toys and naugahyde. I’m not exactly an all-star athlete. You, though...”

“I’m nowhere near what I was.”

“C’mon. Even over the last couple days you’re looking tighter. Leaner. Meaner than a starving monkey.” Frank’s right. Cason
is
looking different. Better. He’s barely had time to work out, but it’s like his body remembers the way he used to be. He still needs to tighten up the loose skin, but the flab beneath it has started to disintegrate, as if it was never there in the first place. “See, you got the physicality I don’t. Easy for you to chuck the bomb and run. Me, I’ll trip on a loose wire.”

“You’ve taken out others just fine.”

“Just three. Your boss. The Sasquatch Man. And...” His eyes lose focus. “That’s a story for another time.”

“But you have a reputation. As some kind of bomb-making genius.”

“Your brother may have inflated that story a little.”

Cason cocks an eyebrow. “You said my brother sold me out.”

“Still true.”

“But that means you talked to him before I did.”

“So?”

“You were looking for me.”

“Kinda. I was hoping
you’d
come looking for
me
. I wanted to work with you. Like I said, ants, elephants. I didn’t want to do this alone. I figured we were kin.”

“I don’t like people keeping secrets.”

“I’m not! I’m not. I should’ve said something. I’m sorry.” Frank opens his hands and shows his scarred palms in a mea culpa. “Seriously. I’m sorry.”

Cason leans back. Beholds the madness of Frank’s apartment—dusty strings connecting photos to articles to sketches and back to photos. A flow-chart for the insane.

“You really think this’ll work?” he asks Frank. “The bomb.”

“I do. I feel it in my guts.”

“And Nergal. He was involved. In the thing with Alison and Barney.”

“Had to be. He’s local. This is his bag of tricks. It’s him.”

“Is it time?”

“Soon. Nighttime. So nobody sees.”

T
HE DEATH FACTORY
looms. The wind blows and Cason catches a scent that at first he thinks must just be his mind playing tricks on him—the sour pickled smell of something dead. But then as he stalks along the fence, he sees: a rat, dead. Big as a poodle. Ripped into thirds, the red parts almost artificial looking, like a spilled cherry slushie. In the moonlight, he sees the rat’s coat ripple. Maggots beneath the fur?

Frank’s hand falls on his shoulder and jostles him.

“Stinks,” Frank says.

“Yeah.”

“You ready?”

“I dunno. Nergal, he...” His jaw tightens.

“Hey, you can say it. You’re scared.”

“I’m not scared.” But he is. He really is. It’s like from the old days—about to get into the ring with a fighter twice his size and with a helluva lot more skill. Like when he fought Manny Corrado. Or Paul Kevitts. Or Udo, that rabid German who went by one name like he was Madonna or some shit. Stepping into the ring with those guys was like diving into an ocean teeming with sharks. Sharks you could see. Sharks you
knew
were there,
knew
were hungry, who saw you like one big bag of frothy chum.

Of course, he beat those guys. Each one of them.

Cason Cole.
The Beast
.

This time, versus Nergal. The God of Death. The Lion. The Dragon.

Ding
. The fight bell ringing. Cason’s body tenses.

“How do we get in?” he asks. Fists balled at his side. By the looks of the place, it’s pretty well bound up in chain-link fence. Barbed wire atop it. And, peering through the darkness, he sees another fence, deeper in, by thirty feet or so.

Frank answers by pointing down.

Cason gives him a look.

“Sewer. We go down, then we pop up like gophers at the hole.”

Above their heads, thunder tumbles across the sky—a steady clamor of rumbling boulders behind phlegmy clouds.

That’s not a great sign.

Frank just laughs, and heads to a manhole in the middle of the street. He twirls a small blue crowbar pulled from his backpack. “Once more into the breach!” he hoots.

T
HE POP-HISS OF
a signal flare, and the sewer tunnel is lit by crimson fire, the blood-red torch carried tight in Frank’s scar-knuckled grip.

It stinks down here, but not like Cason thought—sewer to him means human waste, but this is mostly just street run-off. Oily water. Condoms and condom wrappers. Big cups from 7-11. Mysteriously, a one-eyed teddy bear snarled up in a tangle of wire.

They move through the tunnel. Elbows rubbing against old stone.

Cason hears scratching ahead. Like rat claws on porous brick.
Scritch-scritch. Skitter-skitter
. Water dripping, too.

And, sometimes, a breath of damp hot air moves down the tunnel. Through them, over them. It smells of rainwater. It carries a sound like someone moaning, then someone laughing. Then it’s gone again.

Frank doesn’t acknowledge it.

So Cason decides to ignore it, too.

“There,” Frank whispers—the whisper a loud susurration crawling along the tunnel on the back of an echo. He points ahead—a small rusty ladder climbs to another manhole cover.

Cason heads over. Tests it with a boot. It squeaks, shifts with a complaining groan—it’s only a ten foot climb, but he doesn’t feel like falling down into filthy city water. The tunnel keeps going. “Go deeper?” he asks.

“Nah,” Frank says. “Take this one.”

“Not too stable.”

“It’s a ladder. If you can’t handle a ladder, I’m not real sold on our chances with the Sumerian god of death. Grow a pair and climb, big guy.”

Frank’s a real asshole sometimes.

Cason climbs. The ladder sways like a homeless drunk, the satchel bomb on his shoulder swaying with him—a tiny spark of fear alight that the whole thing will go off suddenly, that the bomb is unstable and the swaying will blow it to hell and then he’ll never see his wife or son ever again. But then a rain of rust flakes falls and interrupts his thought—Cason coughs, spits, blinks them out of his eye. He hears Frank grumbling beneath him, so he climbs faster. He presses his head and shoulder snug against the manhole cover and grunts as he presses his boots hard against the ladder rung.

The cover shifts, starts to rise. Clanging. Scraping.

Cason plants one hand, opens it up, climbs out.

He tilts the lid back like the head of a Pez dispenser, holds it there as Frank drops the flare and starts to ascend. The ladder again shaking beneath his feet.

“Case-of-herpes,” Frank calls, “gimme your hand, this damn ladder—”

The bolts holding the ladder in place shear, and it drops. With Frank on it.

At the same time—

Thunder booms above. Vibration in the ground.

The edge of the manhole cover beneath Cason’s palm suddenly bites—a sharp electric sting—and before Cason can do differently, he yanks his hand away.

The manhole falls back into place with a reverberating
bang
.

“Fuck!” Cason says, shaking his hand like he just palmed an angry hornet.

From beneath the manhole cover, a muffled “ow.”

Cason kneels down, gets his hands in the thumbholes on the metal disc, tries to lift.

Nothing. Doesn’t budge.

And Frank has the crowbar.

“Frank,” Cason yells. “Can you hear me?”

Another muffled: “Ow.” Then: “Yeah. Yes. Fuck.”

“I need the crowbar.”

“And how’m I supposed to get it to you?” Frank coughs. “I’m not magic.”

“I’ll see if I can find something.”

“I’ll head down the tunnel. You got the satchel charge?”

Cason yells down an affirmative.

“And the trigger?”

In his pocket, the trigger mechanism—a radio transmitter built off a small remote control once used to steer a toy speedboat. It’s just a green box with a black dial on it. Frank showed him—turn the dial hard from 0 to 10 and bomb go
boom
.

“Yeah. Yeah, I got it.”

“Good. Then go meet me at the next manhole.”

Another growl of thunder.

A greasy, cold rain starts to fall.

Shit.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Seven

T
HE RAIN PICKS
up—a hard knife-slash of water that falls at an angle, needles of rain lit bright by pulses of lightning. Cason hurries along, the factory grounds rising up around him in black shapes darker than the backdrop of night; he tries to keep to a straight line, hoping he knows where the next manhole cover might pop up.

The sudden storm isn’t helping.

And something gnaws at him, too.
Nergal was once a storm god, wasn’t he
?

Is this just a storm?

Or is this
him
?

Cason tries to remember whether or not he checked the weather today. Was it supposed to rain? He doesn’t know.

Doesn’t matter. Onward. Find Frank.

Ten yards. Twenty. Fifty. A hundred. Boots splashing in swiftly-formed puddles. Cason thinks he sees something along the roof-line of one of the buildings—a rusted hulk with a hundred shattered windows, each a broken eye—but when he follows his gaze upward he sees nothing. Just shadow against shadow, just the lightning and the rain.

And what
doesn’t
he see down here? Another manhole cover.

Damnit.

The rain picks up. Cason can’t see. Can’t hear. The downpour sounds like the pounding surf; white noise drowning everything out.

He pulls the satchel charge tight against his shoulder, ducks left and darts under a concrete overhang whose pillars are crumbling—each with big hunks taken out of them, like something bit through the cement, exposing rusted rebar bones.

Then—

A scuff of a boot behind him.

Cason wheels, body tensing to a defensive stance—

“Dude, whoa.”

It’s just a kid. Some teenage wasteoid—his ratty blond curls sticking out from under a red-and-white trucker hat that says FUCK YOU. Thin frame beneath a tattered Operation Ivy t-shirt and stuffed into a pair of slashed jeans hanging too low on the kid’s knobby hipbones. He’s got his hands up, mouth in a surprised
O
, backpedaling.

Cason asks: “The hell are you doing here? You scared the piss outta me.”

Thunder booms. The ground shudders.

“Dude, yo, are you here to see him, too?”

“Who? See who?”

The kid smiles a snaggle-toothed grin. “The Tacony Hermit, yo.”

Cason wants to look around. See if someone’s playing a prank on him. Half-expects Frank to be hiding behind that snarled tangle of wire over there—it’s all a joke, all of it, the gods and goddesses, the freaks and the monsters, there is no Sasquatch Man, no beautiful Aphrodite, no Nergal and no bombs that blow these divinities back to whatever cosmic seed-bed they came from—but then Cason hears the sound of his wife screaming inside a burning car, hears hands slapping against window glass and against a melting dashboard, and knows that this isn’t a joke. It’s all too real. And all too horrible.

“What hermit?” he asks.

The kid laughs. Waves him on. “Come on. We got a bead on him. I’ll show you.”