Gods and Monsters: Unclean Spirits (21 page)

Head forward, legs beneath him—

He lurches forward, bowling someone over, not sure who, doesn’t matter.

Tucked shoulder. Body rolling, feet beneath him, suddenly standing—

It’s like they’re traveling in slow motion.

He, far faster, far more aware, every second sliced into its composite moments—

He howls, louder than they—

A lobster claw snapping at his face. Cason takes it, twists it, cracks the shell, pink and bloody meat sliding to the floor and plopping wet against the concrete—

Hands around bug parts, yanking down, uprooting the mandibles the way you’d rip a fist of weedy taproots from the earth, wet rip, sound of celery broken, hornet wings and panicked crickets—

The rebar comes—foot out, hand up, catches the rusted metal bar, pulls it, crashes it against a tiger’s head, feels the bone give way—

Breaks the bird fingers at the end of Shorn Scalp’s leathery hand—

Collapses Op Ivy’s pale throat, the monster choking on his own tusk bits—

Rebar forward, thrusting through a crow-eye, into the brain, won’t come back out—throws her and it to the ground—

Cannibal Corpse sees what Cason has wrought.

The lion turns tail and runs.

Everything slow, languid, time trapped in cold honey as the final monster flees, each foot falling slow against the concrete, the sluggish pivot of his leonine features as he turns to see if Cason is following—

All is slow until the lightning.

A scorching white lance of electricity comes from above.

The lion is just shadow and X-ray and then a cooling pile of charred skin. The smell of burnt hair fills the air.

A man stands over the body of Cannibal Corpse.

The tall shadow says: “Bow before the Lord of Cutha.”

Cason bows. Because he can do nothing else.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Center Of The Circle

N
ERGAL.

The tall, broad-shouldered man steps forward. Long wild beard hanging down to his bare, muscled chest. Flies nest in the kinks and curls, fat black bodies catching what little light there is to catch. His own scalp is bare—his legs swaddled in leather strips and torn rags. Bare feet slap against the concrete as they approach.

And all around are the bodies of dead teenagers.
Children
. No longer wearing the features of animals. All human. All dead.

“Worry not,” Nergal says, his voice deep, crisp, but there lurks an almost regal trill to the words he speaks. “They were dead long before you came. I just borrowed their bodies to house my Sebittu. My seven protectors. I will have to find new... volunteers.”

Cason cannot stand. Not yet. But he forces his hand to the pocket. Where the trigger for the bomb waits. He slumps a shoulder, lets the pack slide off.

“You bested them all,” Nergal says, now standing tall over Cason. The man—
the god
—smells of ozone, of streets after a rain, of an infected wound, of musk and flesh and electricity and death. Flywings buzz. “You have the beast in you. Wants to rise to the surface, doesn’t he?” Nergal runs a callused thumb over Cason’s brow. “Here. And here. The marks of that beast. Fading. But they’ll come again.”

Cason has no idea what the man is talking about.

Doesn’t much care, either.

Frank’s gonna miss the show.

“You brought my wife and son back to life,” Cason says.

“Did I?” The god seems bewildered. “Oh. Good.”

“I want to thank you.”

“Of course you would.”

“I got you this.” Cason shifts a shoulder—lets the bag hang off his forearm.

Nergal stares at it like it’s naught but a fossilized turd, as if to say,
this
is my gift?
He sneers and scratches the beard—flies take flight before roosting once more in the dark twisted folds of hair. Cason thinks,
he’s not going to take it
, but then, sure enough, Nergal—the god of storms, the Lord of Cutha, the inadvertent king of the underworld—reaches down with a hand and haughtily raises the bag in front of his face to give it a long sniff.

Cason grits his teeth, breaks free from his subservient position, and leans backward—

Just as his hand spins the dial on the remote control in his pocket.

Boom
.

The air pops—a brief wind shoves Cason back—and there’s a flash and a bang. His ears ring and a stray thought flits through his mind:
blowing up gods is getting to be a real habit
—and then he’s crab-walking backwards and scrambling to stand.

When the white smoke clears and the middling darkness resumes, lit only by the faltering barrel fire, he sees the broad-shouldered shadow of Nergal the Storm Lord standing there. Silent. Trembling.

All around, little white pieces of burning paper float to the ground.

What Cason expects: Nergal slides into component pieces, like a cartoon knight sliced into chunks by a swift-cutting sword.

What Cason does not expect: Nergal brushing himself off as if nothing happened.

The latter is what happens.

“That was no gift,” Nergal’s voice booms. A voice that seems genuinely surprised, as if incredulous that any would dare give him anything less than a chest of the richest gold, the finest silver, the rarest gems. It was an attitude Cason remembers in Eros—his boss always seemed to expect the world to bend to his will. And it almost always did.

Little pieces of paper smolder in Nergal’s beard. Flies gather to extinguish the cinders of the smoking adabs.

The bomb didn’t work.

That’s not good.

“You made a terrible error,” Nergal says.

And before Cason can do anything else, the Lord of Storms is standing before him. From ten feet away to ten inches, in the space of a single heartbeat.

Cason does what Cason does. He fights. Throws a punch. Connects with Nergal’s face—the god’s head snaps back and a cloud of flies coughs into the air. Gut punch. Knee-kick. Elbow to the throat. Nergal stands there. Takes each blow the same way a building takes a bird flying into its side: with complete and utter disinterest.

One more, for good measure—a deal-closer in the ring, when he was afforded the rare chance to pull it off. Cason snaps a high kick to the side of Nergal’s head.

The god stops it.

He reaches up like a lord waving to his serfs and catches Cason’s ankle. Balance gone, Cason’s other foot skids out from under him—

Nergal reaches with his other hand, grabs Cason’s knee. Then, one hand low and one higher up, he twists.

The bone snaps.

He drops Cason like a sack of potatoes.

Then Nergal steps on the other leg. Lends it his full weight—an inhuman weight, the weight of a horse, a truck, a mountain.

The bone creaks. Grinds. Then snaps.

Cason screams like he’s never screamed before. Not in the ring. Not ever.

Nergal grabs him by the scruff of his neck and carries him like a mother cat carries an impudent kitten.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Broken Legs

B
ARNEY RUNS AROUND,
whacking the remote control against everything: window sill, chair tops, heating vents. Cason catches up with him, gently plucks the remote from the one-year-old’s hand.

Of course, the kid cries.

Alison, in the kitchen washing dishes, looks out—the apartment is all pretty open, so it’s not hard for her to see. “I swear, he’s only one and we’re already into the terrible twos.”

Barney does this foot-stompy, hand-wavey angry baby thing when something he wants is taken away. And that’s what he’s doing now.

But Cason has a trick. He takes Barney, spins him around once, twice, then a third time, and when he’s finally done spinning, Cason gives Barney a favorite toy: a little wobbly plastic police car with one rolly ball in the center instead of four functional tires.

All the tension in the boy’s face melts away. He smiles—showing off his two goofy looking teeth jutting up out of his lower jaw like a pair of tiny white stones—then grabs the toy and toddles off like a drunken robot.

Cason heads into the kitchen, comes up behind Alison. Hands around her middle. The flats of his palms under her shirt, across her stomach.

He kisses her neck.

“That was a smooth move back there,” she says, leaning back into the kiss.

“It’s aikido.”

“I don’t think I saw you karate kick our son.”

He laughs. “Aikido isn’t karate, Al. It’s a different martial art. Means the ‘Way of Harmony.’ It’s all about redirecting energy, right? Attack comes in, you move them a different way—redirect their energy, leave them vulnerable to attack. That’s all I did. Redirected his energy a little.”

“Well, you’re good at it.”

His hands travel lower, sliding past the hem of her jeans.

“I’m good at a lot of things,” he says. She moans.

Then:
fump fump fump fump
.

Cason feels arms wrap around his knee. Then a string of babbled gobbledygook rises up from behind him. Barney’s at that stage now where he doesn’t say words so much as he fountains forth whole paragraphs of complete and total nonsense.

“Hey, Barn,” Cason says with a sigh. “You’re kind of c-blocking Daddy over here.”

Alison twists her neck, plants a kiss on his chin. “The joys of parenthood.”

“Nobody told me celibacy was one of them.”

“Do you regret it? Being a Daddy?”

“Not one bit.”

“Your Daddy did.”

He lowers his voice, grumbling. “Well, my Daddy can go to hell. Besides, he’s not even my real Daddy, anyway.”

“Maybe you should try to find your real Daddy.”

He ducks down, grabs Barney, flies him around the kitchen before plopping the kid’s diaper-clad butt down on the kitchen counter—an act that earns him a cockeyed look from Alison, who likes to keep the counters clean. Cason ignores the look and says, “I don’t need any more family than what I have in this room, right now.” He kisses the top of Barney’s head, who squirms and giggles. “All right. The fighter fights. Back to training, babe.”

C
ASON AWAKENS WITH
a gasp—pain jumps between both legs, zig-zagging between them. His eyes cross, everything blurry until they start to adjust—

A room lit by fire. Torches bolted into the wall, giving the industrial space a gloss of the medieval.

Old red brick. Flies buzzing.

A metal desk turned on its side in the corner. A few framed photos hanging on the wall—dusty, the glass cracked, pictures of men from decades past.

A few papers slide around the room on unseen currents of air.

Then there’s him.

The Storm Lord. Nergal sitting on a throne made of white wood—each piece carved and sculpted, the wood smooth as untouched snow, gleaming like polished bone. And that’s what it’s made to look like: bones. Skulls and femurs and rib-bones—and many other bones that don’t seem human, don’t even seem
mammalian
, giving the throne less the look of a chair one sits in and more the look of a dead steed one rides into the thick of battle.

Nergal slouches in the chair. Gut out. Beard of black hair and blacker flies draped across his chest. Every time he shifts, the delicate chair shifts with him. “You are awake.”

Cason pants, tries to see past the pain—looks to his legs, which lay in front of him, useless, bent at wrong angles like the legs of a dead puppet. He grits his teeth. Tries to sit. Fails. Lays there instead, sweating.

“Go to hell,” Cason says, the words a misery even to say. It’s not just his legs; his whole body feels like it’s been run through a gauntlet of the world’s top fighters.

“Hell.” Nergal says the word like it’s foreign. “One realm of many. One for which I care little. The Devil’s domain. And he has not been seen in years. It is a realm that is closed to us, so your wish cannot be granted.”

“Fuck you.”

“You do not want that either, weakling. I’d split you open like a pomegranate. Your insides spilling out all over the floor like red arils.” Nergal sits up straight, his back stiffening. “Besides. I am taken.”

“You’re pussy-whipped,” Cason says. A laugh—a crazy one, at that—bubbles up out of him. Part of him hopes to enrage this fly-bearded fuck. Maybe then Cason can be put down like a dying dog; some small mercy to help end the misery. But then, in the dark of his mind, Cason hears Barney’s voice—a giggle from many years ago...