Gods and Monsters: Unclean Spirits (28 page)

Frank likes chaos. It is optimal operating conditions for him.

And that, down below, looked like chaos. He gave Tundu the signal over the walkie and, sure enough—

A yellow cab bounding toward the pastoral prison.

The voice, suddenly in his ear. Disembodied.

Are we almost back on track?

The air shimmers when it speaks. He smells a whiff of char.

“Almost.”

Go to it, then
.

Frank climbs down out of the tree and runs toward the barn, grinning like a fool.

C
ASON WANTS TO
kiss him. So he does just that. He hobbles over to Tundu fast as his rickety legs will carry him, throws his arms around the massive human-shaped redwood tree, and gives him a big kiss on his cheek. Tundu laughs, nervous.

“Whoa, man. Prison changed you.”

“I can’t believe you’re here,” Cason says. “Is this a dream?”

“No dream, chief. No dream.”

Then Psyche steps out of the shattered barn-hole. She says: “No dream, but it’ll be a nightmare soon enough. We have to go.”

“Look,” Tundu says, pointing over the roof of the cab toward the distant treeline. Sure enough, Frank is bounding toward the car, cackling like a mad crow.

Psyche bristles. Cason holds out a hand, says, “This gonna be a problem?”

She scowls. Before she can answer—in the distance, back toward the farmhouse, a shriek. An inhuman, impossible shriek.

Psyche stiffens. “The Driver. We have to go.”

Into the car. Tundu behind the wheel. Cason up front. Psyche in back.

Tundu takes a deep breath. Blinks. Cason sees he’s scared. Which has a right amount of sense to it—because Cason’s scared, too. Terrified not just of this moment, not just of the escape, but what happens after.
You’re not human
, a little voice reminds him.
Is that really true?
No time to think about it now.

Because Tundu guns it.

First, toward Frank.

Cason’s knee knocks against something. A shotgun rattles.

Window down. Shotgun up. Pump-action. Stock sawed off, barrel shortened. He jacks a shell into the chamber, checks the safety, hopes he’s remembering how the hell to do this—

Tundu gets the car close to Frank, then pulls the emergency brake and cuts the wheel—the cab’s back end slides around like a pad of butter drifting across a hot skillet, turning the taillights toward Frank.

Frank whoops like a war chief, throws open the door. He’s saying something, clapping Cason on the shoulders—

But Cason can’t hear him.

All he can hear is his own heartbeat as something slams down onto the grass about fifty feet in front of them, the headlights capturing the horror.

It wears a chauffeur’s uniform.

But it has long wings—no feathers, only black skin shining red where the flesh thins around the margins of fat veins.

It has a human face, a
woman’s
face, but then the jaw opens wide and razor teeth glint. Arms grow long. Legs, too. Fabric ribs. White claws—white like pus, not white like ivory—thrust out from the tips of fingers and poke through black boots.

She shrieks. Long whip-like tongue flicking the air, throat ululating.

“Tisiphone,” Psyche hisses.

“Hey!” Frank barks. “What the hell is
this broad
doing here—”

Cason growls. “Shut up, Frank.”

The Driver begins stalking toward the car.

“Oh, shit, shit, shit, shit,” Tundu says, leaning back in his seat like somehow he can avoid what’s coming.

But he can’t. None of them can.

Cason tells him: “Gun it.”

Tundu doesn’t hesitate. He punches the accelerator. The back tires spin on dew-slick grass. The cab’s back-end wobbles and shifts left and right—but it doesn’t move forward.

“No, no, no, no!” Tundu cries. “Go-go-go-go-go, you piece of shit!”

Cason grabs the shotty, pops the door, leans out over it—

He jerks the trigger.

Buckshot sprays the Driver in the face. It’s like throwing M&M’s at a wall. The shot just bounces off and she shakes her head.

The car lurches forward—

The passenger side door closes on Cason’s torso and he winces—

The Driver leaps up onto the hood of the car, howling—

A claw swipes through the air just as Cason slides his body back into the car, the door clicking closed behind him.

The windshield of the car is filled with the beast.

“I can’t see! I can’t see!” Tundu’s driving blind, jerking the wheel left and right, trying to shake the monster—

The Driver’s mouth opens, wide, too wide, her mouth a black abyss, and from that abyss rises a wretched song that causes the entire car to hum and vibrate, pieces rattling against other pieces—Cason can feel it in his teeth, just as all the glass in the car spider-webs, cracks spreading, windows and windshields still in their frames.

Tundu screams.

Cason raises the shotgun, winces—

Feels a hand in his mind. Psyche. Her voice:
I can only get away with this once, before she puts up all her walls—

Psyche reaches out with a hand, a real hand—and points all her fingers toward the monster on the hood of the car. She gives her wrist a twist.

With the turning of Psyche’s wrist, the Driver’s own head wrenches left. Tongue out, eyes bulging, howl cut short. The Driver tumbles off the hood. Just in time to see the Barn zooming up into view.

Tundu cries out, cuts the wheel—

The cab misses the corner of the Barn by inches.

A rain barrel is not so lucky. It explodes, pieces flying up over the top of the cab, murky water sloshing down over everything, again distorting their view.

But the sound beneath the cab’s tires changes from soft to hard. Asphalt, not grass. The water recedes from the windshield.

Ahead, several figures exit the farmhouse, stepping into the driveway.

And it’s then that Cason knows they’re fucked.

The beauty of Aphrodite shines brighter than the moon, and Cason has to steel himself so as not to just open the door and tumble out before her and beg for mercy. A tall man next to her holds his hands by his side, and lightning snaps from his fingertips, licking the ground at his feet. An Asian woman, tall and thin like a wind-blown reed, extends her arms, and even from here Cason can see the tattoos on her arms flickering, growing brighter, colors like running paint. An older woman steps next to her, long red hair in a braid over her shoulder. Her hands pull at a long thread of water like it’s taffy.

The gods have gathered.

Everything seems to slow—

Tundu jerks the wheel right, away from the farmhouse—again the tires bound off the asphalt and onto grass, and again the car slides across the green. The cab blasts through a barberry hedge, cutting a car-shaped swath through it.

The gods stir. They move. They
come
.

The cab leaps back up onto the driveway, and Tundu straightens the wheel. They run the gauntlet of fountains, statues, and trees. The driveway is long. Escape is ahead—it’s night and Cason can’t make out where the road is, but he knows it must be there, must be coming up on them soon—right?

It may not matter.

The gods are coming.

Across the moon, a winged shape flies.

The man with the lightning rises up off the ground, the crackling fingers of lightning carrying him forward faster and faster, his body tilted forward at a lean, mean angle.

The woman with the water flows forward just as swiftly, standing tall on her tip-toes, cresting a small froth-churned wave.

And then come the dragons.

Five of them—red, blue, green, white, black. Small at first, no bigger than dogs, but then growing, swelling, heads soon as big as wheelbarrows, their tails tied together like the flags on a pinwheel, anchored as they are to the Asian woman’s arms. They pull her along like huskies drawing a sled.

He can’t see Aphrodite. But Cason’s sure she’s coming. They’re all coming.

It’s then that it all starts to come crumbling down: his hopes of escaping, of seeing Alison and Barney again, are as tangible as a fog, as real as a dream. He has no means of fighting these monsters. Whether he’s human, part-human, or some secret monster in a man’s costume doesn’t matter. He can’t stop what’s coming.

The car barrels forward.

Thunder crackles. Rain begins to patter the back windshield. Dragons roar as a jet of flame crackles above the roof of the car, brightening the dark, turning rain to steam.

The car gauges begin to spin and flicker. The LCD clock shifts, blinks, and the numbers turn to letters that spell DOOM.

“What the hell do I do?” Tundu asks, panicked.

“I dunno,” Cason says. “Lemme think.”

“Fuck ’em!” Frank hollers. “Just keep driving!”

Then he starts humming
Ride of the Valkyries
. Dun-dudun-dahn-dahn...

“Shut the fuck up, Frank!” Tundu says.

It’s then that Cason knows what to do.

He focuses a thought toward Psyche—he doesn’t know how this works, doesn’t know if she’s still in his head or somewhere else entirely, but he reaches out and finds her reaching back. Her awareness, a snarled ink-scribble at the back of his mind.

He tells her what to do.

His stomach feels like it’s going to drop out of him. Like a rock dropped through a piece of tissue paper.

Cason turns around in his seat. Meets Frank’s lidless eyes. Frank’s grinning like a kid on a roller coaster. Licking his teeth.

“Almost there, Casey Kasem!”

“Is it true?” Cason asks Frank.

“Is what true?”

“Sally. You abandoned her. And now she’s dead.”

A flicker of guilt and recognition across Frank’s face. That’s all Cason needs to know.

“I’m sorry, Frank.”

“Sorry? Sorry for wh—”

But he doesn’t get to finish the question.

His jaw locks. Neck tendons snap tight. His eyes follow Psyche as she leans over him, pops the door handle. Frank starts making a wordless noise: “Nnngh.
Nnngh
!”

Tundu looks back, raising an eyebrow. “Hey, what the hell?”

Psyche shoves Frank out the door.

F
RANK’S HEAD CRACKS
against the driveway—skin scrapes from his scalp as his body tumbles like a discarded crash-test dummy.

It’s not the pain that gets him. It’s the betrayal. It’s the fear that the plan is falling apart.

As control of his body returns to him, he scrambles to his feet, panic at what’s coming shooting through every nook and cranny of his being.

Rain falls upon him as the gods come.

He looks toward the road, sees the cab fishtail, tires screeching. Then taillights, as the car rockets away down the road.

They slow upon seeing him.

Shango, the Thunder God, drifts back to earth—from floating to walking without missing a step. The Dragon Lady, Long Mu, settles in alongside him, the dragons shrinking and yowling and once more returning to bright ink on her pale arms. Then water like a slow tide splashes up, and on it rides Dana, the Mother Goddess.

Behind him drops the Driver. Claws out. Teeth bared. Talons clicking as she paces.

Then: her.

The one he loves. The one he despises. The one he needs. The one he needs gone.

Venus. Cytherea. Aphrodite.

Shango asks her: “Do we go after the others?”

“No.” Aphrodite shakes her head. “Let them go.”

“But,” Dana protests, “Cole is dangerous, and he’s with your daughter-in-law—”

She cuts him short. “We’ll see where they go and it’ll tell us more. Relax. We have the true terrorist in our midst right now. Don’t we?”

Frank’s skin feels hot. Tight. Dried out. “Hey, babe,” he says.

“Hello, Francis.”

“Been a long time.”

“Not that long. I thought my warning was enough to keep you away.”

“What can I say?” He shrugs. “I’m like a dog with a bone. I just keep coming back for a lick.”

Aphrodite steps closer. “I can give you a taste.”

“Not how I want it.”

“Maybe. You still love me, don’t you?”

He pauses. Hands flex in and out of fists. “You don’t own me anymore.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“You’re all going down,” he hisses. “There’s gonna be a reckoning, you know that? You thought the Exile was bad? You have no fucking idea. You’re going to pay for the way you treat people. Like this place is your playground and we’re all your toys.”

“You are our toys,” Shango says, voice booming. He, too, takes a step closer.